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Petraeus alone. He’s suffered enough.”
Trump, who said he could have prevailed over Obama if only he had run in 2012, boasted that he could easily run the table and demolish Bernie Sanders, but “I think I’d rather run against Hillary, because I’d loooove to beat her.”The corporate education reform movement has had no more visible star than Michelle Rhee, the former chancellor of the District of Columbia Public Schools. After she left office last fall, she formed a new political organization to raise $1 billion to advocate for the changes she believes in. She has been advising some of the nation's most conservative governors to fight the teachers' unions and rely on standardized tests to fire or reward teachers.
Her credibility was her alleged success in lifting up test scores in the low-performing public schools of the nation's capitol during her nearly four years in charge.
Now, however, that credibility has been directly challenged by revelations of possible widespread test fraud in the D.C. schools while she was in charge. An article in USA Today reveals that more than half the public schools in D.C. were found to have an unusual number of erasures on standardized tests of reading and math.
The school at the center of the investigation is the Crosby S. Noyes Education Campus, which saw spectacular score gains during Rhee's tenure. Rhee held up the school as a model because the percentage of students who reached proficient on D.C. tests soared from 10 percent to 58 percent in a two-year period. The school was her example of what could happen as a result of her policies. In its recruitment advertisements, the District school system identified the school's principal, Wayne Ryan, as one of its "shining stars." Rhee twice showered bonuses on the school's staff, with $10,000 for the principal and $8,000 for each teacher.
A computer analysis of erasures found a dramatic pattern of changing answers from wrong to right at Noyes. In one seventh grade classroom, students averaged 12.7 wrong-to-right erasures on the reading test, as compared to a district-wide average of less than 1. When parents complained that their children's high scores didn't make sense, since they were still struggling to do basic math, they were ignored.
What will this revelation mean for Rhee's campaign to promote her test-driven reforms? Her theory seemed to be that if she pushed incentives and sanctions hard enough, the scores would rise. Her theory was right, the scores did rise, but they didn't represent genuine learning. She incentivized desperate behavior by principals and teachers trying to save their jobs and meet their targets and comply with their boss' demands.
Her celebrity is not built on her success in D.C., however, which now appears to be a chimera.
Rhee's advocates point out that D.C. scores went up on the National Assessment of Educational Progress, the federal test. This is true, but the gains under Rhee were no greater than the gains registered under her predecessor Clifford Janey, who did not use Rhee's high-powered tactics, such as firing massive numbers of teachers.
Almost from the day she arrived in her job in D.C., Rhee has been a magnet for publicity and controversy. She has been on the cover of Time and Newsweek, has appeared innumerable times on national television, and was one of the stars of the pro-privatization film Waiting for Superman. She is truly an education celebrity.
Her celebrity is not built on her success in D.C., however, which now appears to be a chimera.
Her celebrity results from the fact that she has emerged as the national spokesman for the effort to subject public education to free-market forces, including competition, decision by data, and consumer choice. All of this sounds very appealing when your goal is to buy a pound of butter or a pair of shoes, but it is not a sensible or wise approach to creating good education. What it produces, predictably, is cheating, teaching to bad tests, institutionalized fraud, dumbing down of tests, and a narrowed curriculum.
This formula, which will be a tragedy for our nation and for an entire generation of children, is now immensely popular in the states and the Congress. Most governors embrace it. The big foundations endorse it. The think tanks of D.C., right-wing and left-wing, support it. Rhee helped to make it fashionable. If she doesn't pause to consider the damage she is doing, shame on her. If our policymakers don't stop to reflect on the damage they are doing to public education and to any concept of a good education, then our nation is in deep trouble.
Diane Ravitch is the author, most recently, of The Death and Life of the Great American School System: How Testing and Choice Are Undermining Education (Basic).Kevin and Julia Dawn Garratt, the Canadian couple accused of stealing Chinese military and intelligence information, may be caught up in a political fight between China and Canada, one of their sons told CBC News Network.
Simeon Garratt, who grew up in China but now lives in Vancouver, said it appears the investigation into his parents has little to do with them.
"It just seems like my parents are caught up in sort of a political mess and it’s not actually anything to do with them. It just happens to be that they’re Canadians and fit the type of people that needed to be made an example of," Garratt said in an interview on Tuesday.
"I think it’s just the relations between Canada and China right now are quite heated, especially over all the hacking accusations that have gone on over the last two weeks... from what I can tell, the actual accusations have nothing to do with my parents, it’s just that they happen to be Canadian in a place of vulnerability."
Canadian officials last week alleged the Chinese government was behind a "highly sophisticated" cyber attack on the National Research Council.
Garratt said he had just spoken with Canadian foreign affairs officials, who were still trying to arrange to speak to his parents. He said he's "pretty worried" and that the allegations aren't to be taken lightly.
Son to be questioned
Chinese authorities have requested that Peter Garratt, one of Kevin and Julia Dawn Garratt's sons, come in for questioning. He lives in Dandong, China, with his parents.
Peter said in an email to CBC News that he received a call from the State Security Bureau in Dandong asking him to come in.
"They also asked me to pick up some clothes and toiletries for them, so I assume they are at the bureau," he wrote.
Simeon Garratt said his brother has been assigned a minder who's checking in on him.
The Garratts were identified as suspects by the official Xinhua news agency in a brief report on Monday. Xinhua said the State Security Bureau of Dandong, a city in northeast Liaoning province, was investigating the case, adding it involved the stealing of state secrets.
China's Foreign Ministry said the Canadian Embassy in Beijing was notified on Monday and that the couple's "various rights have been fully guaranteed."
"Kevin Garratt and his wife... are suspected of collecting and stealing intelligence materials related to Chinese military targets and important Chinese national defence scientific research programs, and engaging in activities that endanger China's national security," the Foreign Ministry said in a short statement.
'It sounds ridiculous'
In an earlier, on-air interview with CBC News Network, Peter Garratt said he had last heard from his parents more than 24 hours earlier, when they texted him about going out for dinner. He said the accusations against his parents are the first problem they've had during their decades in the country, where they moved in the mid-1980s to teach English. They now own a coffee shop in Dandong, a city near the border with North Korea.
"It sounds ridiculous," Peter Garratt said. "Military secrets? It sounds like something out of a movie or something. Those are the accusations, but I have no idea where they are coming from or how it even came about.”
Peter said he has spent most of his life in China and when he heard the news Tuesday, he thought it was a joke.
"I know that I’m being watched because my phone isn’t working properly, my email, everything’s been acting up weird, even my Skype, but I have nothing to hide, so I’m not worried about anything," he said.
China's state secrets law is notoriously broad, covering everything from industry data to the exact birth dates of state leaders. Information can also be labelled a state secret retroactively. In severe cases, the theft of state secrets is punishable with life in prison or the death penalty.
'I didn't think it was real'
In a separate interview Tuesday, Simeon Garratt told CBC News that he only learned of the investigation after receiving messages from friends on various social media networks expressing concern and links to local media reports. Believing at first the messages were spam, he called his brother Peter, who confirmed he had not heard from his parents for some time.
Beijing sensitive about North Korea Dandong is a waystation for North Korean refugees escaping their homeland and also a magnet for foreign reporters seeking information on one of the most isolated countries in the world. The city is also home to an air force base, according to Chinese military blogs. Beijing is very sensitive about its relationship with North Korea, which has been hit with sanctions by the United Nations several times over its banned nuclear and missile programs and whose ruined economy is kept afloat with Chinese aid. The website of the Garratts' coffee shop says the cafe is only metres from the Friendship Bridge that spans the Yalu River, calling the venue the "perfect stop off while enroute to or returning from the Hermit Kingdom". - Reuters
"I didn't know how to react, to be honest. I didn't think it was real," he said.
Canada's Department of Foreign Affairs said Monday it is trying get more information. The department said consular officials are ready to provide assistance.
In an updated statement Tuesday morning, the department confirmed its officials are working on the case.
"Canadian consular officials are providing assistance to two Canadian citizens who have been placed under investigation in China. We are in contact with local authorities and are monitoring developments closely," a spokeswoman wrote in an emailed statement.
"To protect the private and personal information of the individuals concerned, further details on this case cannot be released."
The family has yet to receive any word on whether formal charges will be laid, but Simeon Garratt called the news of the investigation concerning, because Chinese authorities "don't need a reason to do what they want to do."
"The possibilities start running through your mind."
The suggestion that his parents may have been involved in the theft of state secrets is "absolutely absurd," he continued.
"I think a lot of this has been blown out of proportion."
Uneven relationship between Canada, China
Last week, Canada blamed Chinese hackers for infiltrating computers at the National Research Council of Canada, something the Chinese Embassy in Ottawa denied.
A spokesperson for Foreign Affairs Minister John Baird said the minister took up the matter with Chinese officials in Beijing during his visit to Asia.
Prime Minister Stephen Harper's government has had an uneven relationship with Beijing since taking power in 2006.
Citing human rights concerns, Harper initially kept his distance from China. Under pressure from business in Canada, he sought to reach out to Beijing.
China is Canada's second most important trading partner after the United States, and bilateral trade is growing. Total
Canada-China trade was $69.8 billion in 2012 and $72.9 billion in 2013, according to official Canadian data.
In July, Chinese prosecutors charged British corporate investigator Peter Humphrey and his American wife Yu Yingzeng
for illegally obtaining private information. The couple was detained last year following work the two did for the British
drugmaker GlaxoSmithKline Plc (GSK), and their trial is set to start Friday in Shanghai.Michelle Malkin and her flying monkeys seemed to have an issue with my tweet criticizing the poorly-attended “Gun Appreciation Day,” held Saturday. (Twitchy is run by Malkin.)
While citing the rallies as an expression of “Second Amendment” fandom, both ignored the fact that the event was not a regularly-held observance, but instead vindictively created by gun advocates in response to gun control talks following the Sandy Hook massacre.
Yes, gun nuts are actually spitting on Sandy Hook families in order to wage war on a non-existent “We’re Coming for Your Guns” government plan. But their insanity doesn’t stop there. Enter the Sandy Hook hoax crowd.
As John Aravosis reported earlier, a fringe Sandy Hook “Truther” movement has spawned, convinced that the killings were staged by the government in order to precipitate a massive federal takeover. These disgusting, bogus claims were again listed in reply to my tweet. First one. And then another. And then another:
@ baseballfreek34 no victims, it was a staged story by actors. get a clue dude @ xpoetix So I’d actually be celebrating something that never happened? Ok. @ MakeEmSayUh While I don’t own or care for guns, the whole Sandy Hook shooting was a hoax. The evidence is as clear as day. @ ritzz09 they proved its fake so…..yea @ wildd_child tht was a conspiracy so the gov’t can hve a reason to unarm Americans
One attempted to link me to a 30-minute YouTube video explaining the “hoax,” which I won’t even entertain by linking here. I’d rather watch a weekend marathon of “Here Comes Honey Boo Boo.”
But they didn’t stop there. The gun fetishists made sure their intellectual maturity was on full public display:
@ TheRealTugg You sir, are a f*ggot @ TheRealTugg shut up and go back to Mexico where there is a complete gun ban but ironically has one of the highest crime rates in the world @ ERICKheartsADTR Lol that’s so unrelated get those c*cks out of your *sses @ RCal_SC no you’re not you f*cking idiot. PLEASE KILL YOURSELF! You’re dumbing up the gene pool!!
My favorite thing about that last tweet, where the responsible gun owner wishes for my death, is that he has “God” in his profile. I’m sure his delightful little love note is taken from the Bible, where Jesus asks the leper for a co-pay.
Then there’s that “Go back to Mexico” tweet. I regret to inform the lovely tweeter that I was actually born in the United States. In fact, I was born in the same hospital as Cher, which makes more American, and gayer, than former Republican United States Senator, and longtime NRA board member, Larry Craig tapping on the men’s room floor (well, okay, maybe not gayer).
None of the Sandy Hook truthers deserve the dignity of a conversation. This abhorrent theory deserves to be mocked, ridiculed, and thrown back into the inner depths of Internet hell.
We should take the Sandy Hook hoax crowd as seriously as the five “responsible” gun owners who were accidentally shot at Gun Appreciation Day rallies. Or as seriously as Nicki Minaj’s music, as seriously as Kim Kardashian’s latest relationship, and as seriously as NRA-loving Lindsey Graham’s claim that he “ain’t available.”
(Lindsey, call me maybe?)Jesus Christmas. The principal of a Prescott, AZ elementary school has ordered that a mural — depicting current students at his school — have the skin tones lightened, after a series of racial slurs were hurled at the painters.
Cars would drive by and yell shit at the people painting the mural. From the Arizona Republic:
"We consistently, for two months, had people shouting racial slander from their cars," [mural director R.E.] Wall said. "We had children painting with us, and here come these yells of (epithet for Blacks) and (epithet for Hispanics)."
There's also a city councilman named Steve Blair who has a little AM radio talk show, on which he's been railing for the mural to be painted over. Not because there are brown people on it, really, but because the looming presence of a brown face — larger than the white faces! — is causing unnecessary controversy:
"Personally, I think it's pathetic," he says. "You have changed the ambience of that building to excite some kind of diversity power struggle that doesn't exist in Prescott, Arizona. And I'm ashamed of that."
Ah yes. The inherent shit-starting of painting a mural of children who look different, because they are actual kids at the school, who look different. Mr. Blair himself had nothing to do with stirring up needless controversy, obviously.
So after all the bickering and utter batshit insanity, the school's principal, Jeff Lane, asked that the faces be lightened. Not because of the race thing or the racist stuff! Ha ha ha, not at all! But because tonally — like artistic tonally, not color tonally — the painting wasn't working:
We asked them to fix the shading on the children's faces. We were looking at it from an artistic view. Nothing at all to do with race.
Oh, so he's, like, talking about the chiaroscuro and stuff. OK, no problem.
Anyway. That's what's happening in Arizona these days! Somehow the country is getting more racist as time goes by, and now because there's a Muslim basketball jazz-cat in office, everyone's just lettin' it allll hang out. Happy belated birthday, dead soldiers.
[Arizona Republic, via Ken Layne's lovely, depressing Wonkette post]Two workmen on Staten Island almost drowned Sunday when they took an elevator down into a basement flooded by heavy rains that inundated the New York area over the weekend, the New York Daily News reports.
Ed Tyler, 26, and Wendell Amaker were trying to move construction materials down to the lowest floor, unaware that water in the basement was making its way up.
"We thought we were dead," Tyler told the newspaper. "I literally thought I was going to die."
The men, in water up to their waists, managed to hold a cellphone through a ceiling hatch to get a strong enough signal to call 911.
By the time fire rescuers arrived, the water was up to their necks.
They finally scrambled to safety on a narrow ladder the firefighters pushed into the flooded elevator car.
"They were happy to see us," Capt. James Melvin said. "The water was going up, down, up some more."Call for Submissions from Harlot: A Revealing Look at the Arts of Persuasion
Special Issue, Spring 2015: Crafting and DIY Rhetorics
2 January 2015 - Submissions Deadline
Guest Editors:
Amber Buck, Megan Condis, Kristi Prins, Marilee Brooks-Gillies, Martha Webber
These days the word "craft" gets attached to a lot—from cocktails to crochet, 3D printing to upcycled t-shirts, handmade paper to handmade pickles. And this trend only appears to be growing as craft is closely connected to the DIY movement: a wide-ranging, ever-expanding, and sometimes controversial field of work and play.
At its most basic level, craft means creating something by hand, in small batches, by a skilled artisan. But craft—as noun, verb, or adjective¬—seems to mean something different to everyone. For some, "craft" brings to mind knitting, crocheting, and gluing googly eyes onto walnuts; for others, "craft" translates as woodworking, weaving, and creating art out of everyday objects. It's just as easily dismissed as messing around with Aleene's Original Tacky Glue and copious amounts of glitter as it is admired as exercising a finely honed skill.
But whether people love or loathe it, craft is most definitely having a moment. From Pinterest to Park Slope, doing it yourself—and supporting others who do it themselves—has become popular, social, personal, cultural, economic, political, and always (of course) rhetorical.
In this special issue of Harlot, we seek critical and creative explorations of craft in theory and practice:
• What is—or isn't—craft/DIY? What does it do?
• How does the language of craft—whether warcraft, witchcraft, or craft cocktails—influence our perceptions of crafting and crafters?
• What does your own craft practice look like? What does it mean to you? What does it communicate to those around you?
• Why does the craft movement seem to be so persuasive at the moment? How should we understand these rhetorics of craft? How has a culture of DIY crafted a rhetoric of its own?
• What are the larger implications for craft practices when they enter digital spaces? How have sites like Pinterest, Ravelry, and Etsy changed craft practices and activities?
We are especially interested in exploring craft in three ways in this special issue:
Reflection
• Make a personal account that reflects on the role of craft practices in your life
• Share a family, group or community craft history
• Conduct a textual, audio, or video interview with your favorite potter about pottery (or other kind of crafter about another kind of craft)
Inquiry
• Analyze particular crafts and the discourses around them
• Study interactions and community within a crafting group
• Examine representations of crafts and crafting on a site like Ravelry or Pinterest
• Discuss critiques of DIY or examine websites like Regretsy
• Consider the ways that craft practices connect us to personal and cultural histories
• Draw connections between cosplay and other fan practices and craft
Practice
• Create a video or podcast about making a particular craft object
• Translate a traditional craft process or object to a digital format
• Document how a specific craft or DIY practice (or set of practices) is part of a community or social movement
• Share patterns, templates, instructions, and other materials, and invite readers to make their own items
These are just suggestions, so run with your ideas! Compose craftily. We hope to see smart, creative, media-rich projects (using pictures! video! sound! animated GIFs!) that experiment with understanding and representing craft and DIY—and maybe even invite readers to craft along with you.
Submissions of complete projects are due via Harlot's online submission system [register at harlotofthearts.org] by January 2, 2015. Please don't hesitate to contact us early if you have any questions or want to talk through an idea for a project: editors@harlotofthearts.org.
http://harlotofthearts.org/index.php/harlotConditions that are difficult to study — such as schizophrenia, autism and Alzheimer’s — can now be analyzed safely and effectively with an innovative method designed to retrieve mature brain cells from reprogrammed skin cells, according to research published in the journal Stem Cell Research.
“Obviously, we don’t want to remove someone’s brain cells to experiment on, so re-creating the patient’s brain cells in a petri dish is the next best thing for research purposes and drug screening,” said research leader Gong Chen, Ph.D., professor of biology at Penn State University.
“The most exciting part of this research is that it offers the promise of direct disease modeling, allowing for the creation, in a petri dish, of mature human neurons that behave a lot like neurons that grow naturally in the human brain.”
Chen believes that the method could lead to customized treatments for individual patients based on their own genetic and cellular information. He said that, in previous research, scientists had found a way to reprogram skin cells from patients to become unspecialized or undifferentiated pluripotent stem cells (iPSCs).
“A pluripotent stem cell is a kind of blank slate,” Chen said. “During development, such stem cells differentiate into many diverse, specialized cell types, such as a muscle cell, a brain cell, or a blood cell. So, after generating iPSCs from skin cells, researchers then can culture them to become brain cells, or neurons, which can be studied safely in a Petri dish.”
Now, in the new study, researchers have found a way to differentiate iPSCs into mature human neurons much more effectively, generating cells that behave like neurons in the brain. Chen explained that, in their natural environment, neurons are always found in close proximity to star-shaped cells called astrocytes, which are abundant in the brain and help neurons function correctly.
“Because neurons are adjacent to astrocytes in the brain, we predicted that this direct physical contact might be an integral part of neuronal growth and health,” said Chen.
To test this hypothesis, the team began by culturing iPSC-derived neural stem cells, which are stem cells that have the potential to become neurons. These cells were cultured on top of a one-cell-thick layer of astrocytes so that the two cell types were physically touching each other.
“We found that these neural stem cells cultured on astrocytes differentiated into mature neurons much more effectively,” Chen said, contrasting them with other neural stem cells that were cultured alone in a petri dish. “It was almost as if the astrocytes were cheering the stem cells on, telling them what to do, and helping them fulfill their destiny to become neurons.”
Next, the researchers used an electrophysiology recording technique to show that cells grown on astrocytes had many more synaptic events—signals sent out from one nerve cell to the others. Then, after just one week, the newly differentiated neurons began firing action potentials — the rapid electrical excitation signal that occurs in all neurons in the brain.
Finally, the researchers added human neural stem cells to a mixture with mouse neurons. “We found that, after just one week, there was a lot of ‘cross-talk’ between the mouse neurons and the human neurons,” Chen said.
He explained that “cross-talk” occurs when one neuron contacts its neighbors and releases a neurotransmitter to modulate its neighbor’s activity.
“Previous researchers could only obtain brain cells from deceased patients who had suffered from diseases such as Alzheimer’s, schizophrenia, and autism,” Chen said. “Now, researchers can take skin cells from living patients — a safe and minimally invasive procedure — and convert them into brain cells that mimic the activity of the patient’s own brain cells.”
With this method, clinicians would know how a certain drug would affect a particular patient’s own brain cells, without even trying the drug — eliminating the risk of serious side effects.
“The patient can be his or her own guinea pig for the design of his or her own treatment, without having to be experimented on directly,” he said.
Source: Stem Cell Research
Man using a microscope photo by shutterstock.
Schizophrenia Research Dives Into the Petri DishFOXBOROUGH, Mass. -- Two games into his return to action, New England Patriots running back Dion Lewis has knocked off a year’s worth of football rust and already shown his knack for decisive cuts and making defenders miss.
He has been happy to put his torn left ACL in the rearview mirror.
“It was a tough road,” he said, “but it made me, it didn’t break me.”
How the Patriots have integrated Lewis back into their plans has been notable -- with 21 snaps against the San Francisco 49ers on Oct. 20 and then 23 this past Sunday against the New York Jets.
The knee has held up well.
Dion Lewis is trying his best to put his ACL injury behind him and get his game pointed to the future. AP Photo/Bill Kostroun
“I feel good. I’m getting better every week,” said Lewis, who has 11 carries for 47 yards (4.3 average) and has added seven catches for 60 yards (8.6 average), meaning he has touched the football almost 50 percent of the time he has been in the game. “I’m getting back in my rhythm. The past two weeks I’ve felt good and I’m just trying to build on that.”
Lewis, 26, acknowledged there has been some rust, and the biggest part is “getting used to playing football again” after a setback over the summer extended his time in rehab.
But that really hasn’t shown on the field, as he has been elusive and decisive on most plays. Meanwhile, confidence has never been an issue, as he welcomes the physical pounding.
“I can take it. I’m a big guy,” he joked. “I won’t say survival, I’ll say survival for them. I don’t mind getting hit, but I’m not going to let somebody hit me if I can avoid him. I’m definitely going to try to do that -- use my low center of gravity to my advantage.”
Lewis’ return has created more flexibility for offensive coordinator Josh McDaniels, who has utilized Lewis and fellow passing-game back James White on the field together for six plays over the past two weeks. That “pony” grouping, which has shown up on some critical third downs, has produced notable plays such as Lewis’ 9-yard catch against the 49ers on the team’s opening touchdown drive.
“It presents a couple of different options to a defense,” coach Bill Belichick said. “If you have a tight end and a back in there, then I think they’re pretty sure the tight end isn’t going to handle the ball in the running game. When you have two backs in there, then that’s a little bit of a different story. How do you treat them [as a defense]? It’s another way to use those guys and put another log on the fire for the defense that they’ve got to make some kind of adjustment to.”
As for Lewis’ adjustment in returning to action, it has been as smooth as the club could have hoped for, with his role likely to grow as he gains even more comfort.
“I just stayed positive, kept working, and knew what I had to do," he said of his comeback. “If it was easy, everybody would do it, and everybody can’t do it.”
Lewis, for his part, has made it look easy.THE TGIF UNIVERSE: How Steve Urkel Changed The World
One of the biggest duels underway in Hollywood right now is the one between Marvel and DC; two powerhouse comic book companies battling it out for supremacy on the silver screen. Marvel has put out a number of noticeable hits the past several years with films like Iron Man, Thor, and Captain America, while DC has relied heavily on their prize fighter Christopher Nolan and his Dark Knight Trilogy to keep them relevant. But what’s made Marvel so successful since the release of Iron Man in 2008 is the universe that they’ve created for their characters; a universe that culminated last year with The Avengers.
The Avengers seemingly delivered a knockout punch to DC by giving fans a universe we’d only seen in the comics: where every superhero and villain existed on one plane. DC is now scrambling to keep pace, looking to create a Justice League film to rival that of their studio counterpart. There have even been rumors that Christian Bale may come back as the Dark Knight and fight alongside Henry Cavill’s Man of Steel Superman.
While it remains to be seen whether those rumors carry any weight for DC, it’s clear that Marvel has set the bar for how a superhero universe should operate. The studio has seemingly pulled off the impossible by successfully bringing together the worlds of each character and creating an exciting, and cohesive, universe for them to exist in.
So, it’s safe to say that the Marvel Universe of heroes is the most successful universe ever created by Hollywood, right?
Well, to quote the great philosopher Lee Corso of ESPN’s College GameDay: “Not so fast, my friend!”
While kids today may view the Marvel Universe as the greatest thing since Zack & Cody, I’m fortunate enough to be a man born of the 80s who grew up in the 90s, and who knows that the best Hollywood universe ever created was the TGIF Universe.
Ah yes, TGIF, the four letters every kid growing up in the 90s still can’t hear without hearing this song in their head. It was a much simpler time back then. A time when Dinosaurs still roamed the earth; when unknown faces weren’t viewed as creepy stalkers, but rather Perfect Strangers; and where one could find solace and comfort inside a Full House and take on the challenges of everyday life Step by Step.
And through it all, there was one man who was the staple of the TGIF Universe, who guided its characters through the rough times of adolescence, and who showed us the true importance of Family Matters. That man is none other than Steven Qunicy Urkel.
While the man who portrayed Urkel, Jaleel White, has spent the better part of his life trying to make people forget about his nerdy past, I’m here to praise him for being the trailblazer that he was in the TGIF Universe, and for showing Marvel and DC exactly how a universe should function.
For those of you born after the days of Crystal Pepsi and Reebok Pumps, here’s a quick refresher for you. Urkel was the lovable, yet annoying next door neighbor of Chicago’s esteemed Winslow family. He had an affinity for fromage and suspenders, and an undying love for anything Laura Winslow.
Urkel was the driving force in the TGIF Universe, and can easily be viewed as their version of Bruce Banner. While Banner is the nerdy scientist with the Incredible Hulk alter ego, Urkel was the nerdy scientist with the Incredible Hunk alter ego in the form of Stefan. Just take a look at Urkel’s transformation below.
But Urkel’s influence wasn’t confined to the streets of the Windy City. Just as Marvel’s characters exist in the same realm, so too, did ABC’s TGIF characters. And, when one of their stars was in trouble or needed guidance, it was the heroic Urkel who showed them the way. Let’s take a look.
STEP BY STEP
Urkel’s love for science and penchant for disaster were the perfect ingredients to kick start his tour of the TGIF Universe. After Urkel launched himself with a rocket pack from the Winslow’s Family Matters living room in Chicago, he crash landed in the backyard of the Lambert/Foster family from Step by Step. First off, this isn’t as crazy as it sounds since Chicago and Port Washington—the Wisconsin home of the Lambert/Foster clan—are only 116.6 miles apart, or a 2 hour 3 minutes drive (oh yeah, we’re going that in depth).
Once there, he found out that young Mark Foster (played by Christopher Castle of the critically acclaimed canine flicks Beethoven and Beethoven’s 2nd) was in fact his pen pal—go figure! (FYI, Urkel had another pen pal in Philadelphia by the name of Cory Matthews from Boy Meets World.) Urkel helped Mark with his science fair project, and while that was a heroic act in itself, his greatest feat of heroism came when he helped young Alicia “Al” Lambert gain back her confidence after her date dumped her just before the school dance. Just as Dr. Abraham Erskine reminded Steve Rogers in Captain America: The First Avenger to always remain a good man, Urkel reminded Al to always be confident no matter what challenges life throws at you.
In the end, Al takes Steve to the school dance and tells off the boy who dumped her. And, more importantly, with her new found sense of confidence she learned to “Do the Urkel”.
But Urkel’s superhero work wasn’t done there. The agony and cries of a young child would soon take him to the west coast and the Golden Gates of San Francisco.
FULL HOUSE
Full House told the story of single father and Wake Up, San Francisco co-host Danny Tanner trying to raise his three daughters, D.J., Stephanie, and Michelle in San Francisco with the help of his brother-in-law Jesse (“Have Mercy”) Katspolois and Joey (“I’m Not Really Your Uncle, I Just Live In The Basement”) Gladstone. While the three men did an admirable job of balancing careers, bachelorhood, and parenting, the problems of an adolescent can sometimes only be solved by an adolescent, which is how Urkel’s arrival helped one Stephanie Judith Tanner.
Stephanie was the middle child of the Tanner bunch, known for her precocious attitude and infamous catch phrase, “How rude!” Often accompanied by her loyal sidekick, Mr. Bear, Stephanie was the most outspoken and clever one of the Tanners. Like the Marvel hero Black Widow, Stephanie was a skilled spy, known for eavesdropping on the phone calls of sister D.J. and also reading D.J.’s diary to find out secrets about her love life. But like all great superheroes, Stephanie had a weakness. It did not come in the form of radioactive emissions from a piece of Kryptonian space rock, nor was it the color yellow which renders all power rings of the Green Lantern Corps obsolete; rather, it was the condescension and teasing of her elementary school peers. We all know how rough middle school can be, what with the acne, awkward boners, and rapid growth spurts, but none of that can compare to the ridicule an elementary school child can face when they get glasses. For Stephanie, it was something she dreaded and wanted nothing to do with. Fortunately, Urkel’s arrival helped changed her perspective on the situation.
When Steve came to town for the big science fair (of course) he stayed with his cousin Julie who just so happened to be D.J.’s friend. While he irritated almost everyone he came in contact with, he was able to pass on some sage wisdom to young Stephanie, who didn’t want to wear eyeglasses because they made her feel “like a geek”. Steve taught her about the importance of laughter, and how if she was the first one to laugh at herself, everyone else would have nothing to say. For Stephanie, hearing geek advice from an actual geek was a welcome change and helped her through her situation.
Even though Jaleel White may never fully embrace his past life as Urkel, there’s no denying the impact the nerd from Chicago had on the TGIF Universe and pop culture in general. Urkel’s ability to guide and mentor young minds like Al Lambert and Stephanie Tanner proved what a true hero this guy was. He may have been a nerd, but Urkel never backed down from a challenge and always confronted adversity head on. So, while Marvel and DC fight it out in Hollywood over who can create the best universe for their heroes, maybe they should look back to the 90s to see how it’s done.
Come on, Marvel and DC, let’s all do the Urkel.
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The Black Mamba RisesRussian President Vladimir Putin. Sean Gallup/Getty Images
The Russians successfully hacked the US government in 2008 using a remarkable ploy recounted in a recent story in The New Yorker.
To break into the American military's network — which was classified and not connected to the public internet — the Russians planted bugged thumb drives in kiosks near NATO headquarters in Kabul, hoping that an American serviceman or servicewoman would buy a drive and plug it into a secure computer.
And it worked.
This story was originally documented in "Dark |
, this disparity in emotional status automatically makes you a danger to society, the government claims. You can be arrested, stripped of all your rights, and even “indefinitely detained” under Obama’s anti-humanitarian NDAA law.
Children are now being suspended from school for pointing their fingers and imagining their fingers are guns. You know, as in the old-time children’s imaginary game called “Cops and robbers.” The crime, we are told, is in the imagining of a gun!
Similarly, other children are now being thrust into school lockdowns and armed SWAT raids for the “crime” of bringing a lime green toy Nerf gun to school.
America has entered a phase of runaway delusional insanity. And remember, they’ve put the psychiatrists in charge. If this isn’t the epitome of putting the mental patients in charge of the insane asylum, nothing is.
Where this is headed
Make no mistake, friends: This power is going to be abused to the extreme. Psychiatrists are going to wield this power against their political enemies (i.e. anyone who doesn’t bow down to psychiatry). “Mental disorders” are now going to be used as weapons to arrest selected people and lock them away in secret government gulags.
The DSM-V “psychiatry bible” will now be used as an encyclopedia of fabricated justifications to strip away human rights, civil rights and the Bill of Rights from anyone targeted by the system.
When does it get even worse? When so-called “mental health checks” for all citizens become mandated by the government.
During all this, there will be absolutely no discussion allowed of the link between psychiatric drugs and violent behavior among school shooters. That’s another inconvenient truth the government would prefer never be acknowledged. Merely mentioning this, in fact, might get you flagged with some sort of mental disorder.
Finally, consider this: In a nation where the President is an imposter and the Vice President has, by anyone’s honest reckoning, lost half his marbles, all those who seek power are the most insane people of all. They hate normalcy. They hate spirituality, ethics, dedication and hard work. They seek to destroy all those who represent that which is good in the universe, and they hope to infect our culture, our economy and our world with a web of cruel delusions. The sooner you recognize that, the better your chances of surviving it.WASHINGTON — The State Department has discovered a dozen emails containing classified information that were sent to the personal email accounts of Colin L. Powell and close aides of Condoleezza Rice during their tenures as secretaries of state for President George W. Bush.
Two emails were sent to Mr. Powell’s personal account, and 10 to personal accounts of Ms. Rice’s senior aides. Those emails have now been classified as “confidential” or “secret” as part of a review process that has resulted in similar “upgrades” of information sent through the personal email server that Hillary Clinton used while she was secretary of state from 2009 to 2013. The State Department did not say who sent the emails to Mr. Powell or to Ms. Rice’s aides, or who received the messages.
It is against the law to have classified information outside a secure government account.
Of the nearly 30,000 emails from Mrs. Clinton’s server that have been released by the State Department under a court order, 18 emails sent to or from her have also been classified as secret, and 1,564 others have been classified at the lower level of “confidential.”
Last week, the State Department said that 22 emails had now been classified as “top secret” and would not be released, and would have part or all of their contents redacted, or blacked out. A review of 3,700 more emails by the department and intelligence agencies continues.The first female Secretary of State, Madeleine Albright, made an emphatic pitch Saturday to young women to support one of her successors, Hillary Clinton, who is working to narrow the gap in the Granite State with Bernie Sanders just three days before the first-in-the-nation primary.
“Just remember, there’s a special place in hell for women who don’t help each other,” Albright said—a saying she often uses—addressing the young women in the crowd who may still be undecided, as she introduced Clinton at a rally in a middle school gymnasium.
Her comments come as Clinton faces a significant gap in support among younger voters, including young women, who prefer Sanders.
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Albright used her remarks to push back on the Sanders threat and his call for a new political revolution.
“So people are talking about revolution,” she said. “What a revolution it would be to have a woman president.”
Albright also defended Clinton from Sanders’ charge that she is not a progressive—a point of tension in last week’s Democratic debate. Referencing Clinton’s landmark address in China in 1994 that “human rights are women’s rights, and women’s rights are human rights,” Albright argued that speech should serve as proof enough.
“Say that in Beijing, pretty progressive, right,” she said.
Contact us at editors@time.com.HandyGames likes to celebrate its birthday by giving you gifts. Well honestly, they're loaded gifts because when you take into consideration all the IAPs, they're going to end up making HandyGames lots and lots of money. But we're not ones to judge your IAP spending sprees or HandyGames' sneaky generosity scheme.
For its 16th birthday, the publisher is discounting 16 of its premium paid games from around $2.99 to just $0.16. And the offer isn't limited to the US, you should see it all around the world. For example, it's down to 300LBP ($0.15) for me in Lebanon, even though the lowest possible item price is 1500LBP, so HandyGames must have made a special agreement to discount it below that. That happens very rarely.
Anyway, without further ado, here are the Play Store links that you came looking for. These are all Premium versions of some of HandyGames' most popular titles, so they're ad-free. But as I mentioned earlier, they're still full of IAPs. For $0.16 though, you can take the risk of downloading them and seeing if the IAPs are the annoying or acceptable kind, and checking if you can move along the game without dropping more pennies.Kentavious Caldwell-Pope (Photo: Clarence Tabb Jr., Detroit News)
The old saying is that a watched pot never boils.
Since the beginning of free agency last week, Pistons president Stan Van Gundy hasn’t been looking much at his phone. When something happens, it’ll happen.
That something is news on Pistons restricted free agent Kentavious Caldwell-Pope, who is himself anticipating an offer sheet with a big pay raise over the $3.7 million he made last season. Some estimates project Caldwell-Pope to get a max offer, with a four-year deal at around $100 million.
It’s been five days, but no phone call. Not yet.
While many of the top free agents are off the board, the Pistons have watched as some of the potential suitors for Caldwell-Pope have gone in other directions.
The Philadelphia 76ers gave J.J. Redick a one-year, $23-million deal. The Brooklyn Nets, long rumored to be the hottest destination for Caldwell-Pope, have a max offer sheet for Washington Wizards forward Otto Porter.
While the Nets await that outcome, Caldwell-Pope is on hold.
And while the Pistons were waiting, they also reached an agreement with free-agent combo guard Langston Galloway, for a reported three years and $21 million.
The Pistons already were over the salary cap and with the Galloway move, possibly made it more difficult to get Caldwell-Pope.
“The issue is that KCP’s maximum salary is $24.8 million, so if he got an offer sheet somewhere else for the maximum and Brooklyn — once Otto Porter gets the max — seems like the only reasonable option to do that,” NBA cap expert Nate Duncan told The Detroit News.
“If that happens, (the Pistons) — as it stands right now — could not match and could not go over that apron for any reason at any time during the season, once they sign Langston Galloway.”
The tax apron is the point at $6 million above the luxury-tax line ($119.3 million) where teams are more restricted in what they can do financially.
In essence, the Pistons would be hard-capped and wouldn’t be able to go over that apron ($125.3 million) to do any business. In order to do that, they’d have to shed some of their current salary — and not just a smaller dollar amount.
Duncan estimates that teams want to operate at somewhere between $4 million and $5 million below the hard cap.
With some current estimates, the Pistons are at about $105.2 million without Caldwell-Pope’s salary.
If he’s in the max range of about $24.8 million, that would be $130 million — or about $5 million over the hard cap. One solution: move about $9 million in salary.
Looking at the salaries, the Pistons have some options: Jon Leuer is due about $10.5 million and Reggie Jackson and Tobias Harris $16 million each. There could also be combinations of salaries to reach the desired number.
“What this augurs is that they’re going to need to get off of at least $7 million to $8 million in salary just to be able to run their team next year, if in fact, KCP gets the max,” Duncan said. “It may be if they moved on from Boban (Marjanovic) and his $7 million, they might feel like they had enough, it’d be about $4 million to work with and they could make some moves later in the year if they needed to.
“Or maybe they could string together a couple guys like Ish Smith, Stanley Johnson and Henry Ellenson as well. Those calculations assume they waive Michael Gbinije, who has $500,000 guaranteed as of July 15.”
Gutting the rosters of some of their younger first-round picks such as Johnson and Ellenson seems highly unlikely, but the Gbinije decision could be a tough one.
The next issue is assembling a full roster. Even with Gbinije, the Pistons would have only 13 players on the roster. Recent reports indicate the Pistons made a multiyear contract offer to reserve center Eric Moreland, meeting the NBA minimum of 14 roster players.
They also could consider two other players on two-way contracts to play with the Grand Rapids Drive and be eligible to play with the Pistons, if needed.
Another option for Caldwell-Pope would be to accept the qualifying offer of $5 million and play out this season, becoming an unrestricted free agent for next summer — where a bigger payday could await.
All the Pistons can do is watch.
And wait to see what happens.
rod.beard@detroitnews.com
twitter.com/detnewsRodBeardAnd in a cascade of developments, it quickly became clear that the Russia cloud engulfing the White House is only thickening -- and may not be disbursed until deep into the President's term, if ever.
"Taken together, it seems to me that this is a very important interim development in the Mueller investigation, but only as an appetizer," said Steve Vladeck, CNN legal contributor and professor at the University of Texas Law School.
"And like most meals, if all we get is an appetizer, I think folks on all sides of the political spectrum will find the denouement rather unsatisfying. It's a tantalizing step, but only if it's the first -- and not the last," Vladek said.
All through the political storm whipped up by Russian meddling in last year's election, the White House had insisted there is no evidence of collusion between campaign officials and Russians.
Trump has gone further, branding the whole thing as a "hoax" and a plot dreamed up by Democrats still mourning Hillary Clinton's shock election loss.
And though that narrative was contradicted by assessments of US intelligence agencies, it just about held up as a line of political spin through the early twists of an extraordinary morning in Washington.
Even after former campaign manager Paul Manafort and his sidekick Rick Gates were indicted by the Mueller probe on Monday on serious and sweeping charges of money laundering and tax fraud, the White House still had an opening.
In what passes for good news for this crisis-rocked administration, Manafort and Gates were charged with offenses relating to their business dealings with a former pro-Russia regime in Ukraine, not over activity during the election.
The President pounced.
Sorry, but this is years ago, before Paul Manafort was part of the Trump campaign. But why aren't Crooked Hillary & the Dems the focus????? — Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) October 30, 2017
....Also, there is NO COLLUSION! — Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) October 30, 2017
"Sorry, but this is years ago, before Paul Manafort was part of the Trump campaign. But why aren't Crooked Hillary & the Dems the focus?????" Trump wrote on Twitter. "....Also, there is NO COLLUSION!"
White House sources, meanwhile, coalesced around an argument that expectations of a big break in the case around allegations of collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia were now proven to be misguided.
"Today has zero to do with the White House," a source close to the administration told CNN.
Trump's attorney Jay Sekulow pointed out to CNN's Wolf Blitzer in an interview that that the charges laid against Manafort and Gates pertained to "business activities... not campaign events."
Mueller's surprise
But Mueller had a surprise up his sleeve -- one that cut deep into Trump's conceit that stories about Russian efforts to forge links with the Trump campaign were simply made up.
An hour after the President's adamant tweet, it emerged that a former foreign policy adviser, George Papadopoulos, had admitted lying to the FBI about contacts with foreign officials close to the Russian government who discussed "dirt" relating to emails linked to Clinton.
Court papers also describe an email between Trump campaign officials suggesting they were considering acting on Russian invitations to go to Russia.
The indictment does not prove that Trump knew anything about alleged collusion or that the campaign responded to Russian advances. But it is bad news for the White House nonetheless.
For one thing, the Papadopoulos affair contradicts Trump's own assertion that it is now "commonly agreed" that there was no collusion between his campaign and Moscow.
Mueller's pursuit of Papadopoulos shows that the special counsel remains deeply interested in the question -- and could send a chill through other Trump associates and family members embroiled in the Russia drama.
The case against the former foreign policy adviser also stands as the most comprehensive evidence yet put forward by Mueller of an attempt by Russian operatives to insinuate themselves with the Trump campaign.
Given that Papadopoulos has admitted to trying to coordinate with the Russians during the campaign, it becomes harder for the White House to maintain that no one in Trump's orbit was guilty of collusion.
Downplaying connection
JUST WATCHED Papadopoulos pleads guilty to lying to the FBI Replay More Videos... MUST WATCH Papadopoulos pleads guilty to lying to the FBI 01:31
One approach for Trump's defenders is to downplay the importance of Papadopoulos in the Trump campaign.
"George Papadopoulos served on a committee. Campaigns have committees," Sekulow said, adding that his legal liability stemmed from a lie he told an FBI agent, not from any activity during the campaign.
One former senior adviser told CNN's Gloria Borger that the foreign policy expert as a "zero" and a "non-event" in the campaign. But another source told CNN's Jim Acosta that Papadopoulos interacted with the campaign a "significant amount" though was not a familiar face in Trump Tower.
In March 2016, however, Papadopoulos was featured in an Instagram picture posted by the Trump campaign at a meeting between the candidate and a group of foreign policy advisors.
Trump defenders are also likely to say that the meetings pursued by Papadopoulos did not take place. But his activity adds to a previously known pile of evidence detailed meetings between Trump associates, family members and Russians that did take place, and over which people in Trump's orbit had not always been truthful.
While the Papadopoulos revelations appeared to be the most potentially damaging to Trump, the indictments of Manafort and Gates will also leave a scar, notwithstanding the White House dismissal of them.
Trump, after all, was supposed to be the President who would drain the Washington swamp -- but the activities of which Manafort and Gates are accused reek of the insider-ism that Trump has long railed against.
And the fact that the campaign manager who managed his convention is now charged with "crimes against the United States" raises questions about his choice of associates.
Trump's escalating campaign over the last week to discredit the Mueller probe and the deep distrust of the media and Washington authority figures means Mondays revelations are unlikely to harm the President among his closest, most loyal supporters.
But the fact that the Manafort case alone will likely drag on for months -- well into 2018 and possibly beyond -- means that hopes in the White House that the Mueller process could be swiftly dismissed will be unfounded.
The Republican Party itself now faces a midterm election year with the President being continually tainted by the Russia affair and with several of his former high-profile associates potentially facing jail time after a high profile trial.
Democrats did not take long to preview their arguments.
"Paul Manafort and Rick Gates ran Trump's campaign and continued to be a part of his inner circle after Election Day," Democratic National Committee Chairman Tom Perez said in a statement. "This underscores the seriousness of the investigation into Donald Trump's ties to Russia. It's time for Republicans to commit to protecting this investigation and preserving the rule of law."Story highlights Source says Broadwell is unlikely to be prosecuted for release of classified info
"He wants to maintain a distance and focus on his family," ex-aide says
Petraeus to testify Friday before the House Intelligence Committee, says aide
Contact continued between Petraeus and Broadwell after they split 4 months ago, says ex-aide
Former CIA Director David Petraeus has not been following the media firestorm that erupted in the wake of his resignation last week after admitting to having had an affair, a former aide said Wednesday.
"He wants to maintain a distance and focus on his family at this time," said retired Col. Peter Mansoor, who added that he had spoken earlier in the day with Petraeus. "He realizes it was a severe and morally reprehensible action, but he violated no laws," Mansoor said.
The affair between the married former military man and his married biographer, Paula Broadwell, ended about four months ago, Mansoor said, though the two remained in contact afterward. "Mostly in a professional capacity, where she's still trying to get her dissertation done and he was still trying to help her with that," he said.
Asked how Petraeus, 60, was holding up, Mansoor said, "He describes it as putting one foot in front of the other, and then repeating the process. So it's going to be a long, long road of healing for them. He understands that and he's focusing on it."
Mansoor's remarks came hours after President Barack Obama declined Wednesday to join congressional voices calling for an investigation into why the FBI did not notify the White House and other political leaders sooner about the investigation into the affair that led to Petraeus' resignation.
"I am withholding judgment with respect to how the entire process surrounding Gen. Petraeus came up," Obama told reporters at the White House. "We don't have all the information yet, but I want to say I have a lot of confidence generally in the FBI. So I'm going to wait and see."
Obama said he agreed with Petraeus' decision to resign after acknowledging an affair, but praised his service to the country.
"From my perspective, at least, he has provided this country an extraordinary service," Obama said.
He also said he had seen no evidence of any potentially damaging breach in national security stemming from the affair.
JUST WATCHED Obama: Fiscal cliff a'solvable' problem Replay More Videos... MUST WATCH Obama: Fiscal cliff a'solvable' problem 03:10
JUST WATCHED Gen. Allen's place in perplexing scandal Replay More Videos... MUST WATCH Gen. Allen's place in perplexing scandal 03:35
"I have no evidence at this point from what I've seen that classified information was disclosed that in any way would have had a negative impact on our national security," Obama said.
In Congress, lawmakers from both parties have complained about not having been notified sooner of the investigation that led to the resignation or about potential security breaches.
Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-South Carolina, said he was increasingly concerned about the potential fallout from the affair and any national security implications, including possible links to the September 11 attack on the U.S. Consulate in Benghazi, Libya, that killed four Americans.
Graham has called for a special select committee to investigate the attack.
FBI Director Robert Mueller joined Deputy Director Sean Joyce and acting CIA Director Mike Morell in briefing the lawmakers.
Senate Intelligence Committee Chairwoman Dianne Feinstein, D-California, said Tuesday that she had "many questions about the nature of the FBI investigation, how it was instituted."
"And we'll be asking those questions," she said.
But the committee's ranking Republican member, Sen. Saxby Chambliss of Georgia, said Wednesday the group would not look into questions about the FBI investigation and how congressional leaders learned about it until after the bureau concludes its work.
Petraeus has been scheduled to testify this week in private hearings on Capitol Hill about the Benghazi attack. Some Republicans have criticized the administration's response to the attack and have speculated that the timing of Petraeus' departure may have been linked to the congressional inquiry.
But Petraeus offered Wednesday through his chief of staff to testify on Benghazi, Mansoor said. "He did not like the conspiracies going around that somehow he had something to hide on Benghazi," he said. "I think his offer to testify crossed with the Congress' request to him to testify. But anyway, he looks forward to that."
Petraeus will testify before the House Intelligence Committee on Friday, a senior aide said. Feinstein said Tuesday that she hoped Petraeus would address her Senate panel as early as Friday.
Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta on Wednesday defended his request to withhold the nomination of Gen. John Allen to NATO commander pending an investigation into his contacts with Jill Kelley, whose complaints about anonymous, harassing e-mails led to the discovery of the affair between Petraeus, 60, and Broadwell, 40.
Broadwell's government security clearance has been suspended pending the outcome of investigations, two U.S. officials with direct knowledge of the move told CNN Wednesday.
Defense officials announced Tuesday that the FBI had referred information to them indicating Allen may have exchanged potentially inappropriate e-mails with Kelley, who was a volunteer at MacDill Air Force Base.
Kelley's access to MacDill without an escort has been suspended, a Defense Department official said Wednesday.
She had been given access to the base because of her position as a booster and promoter of programs to help U.S. troops, the official said.
A U.S. official familiar with the e-mails Allen sent to Kelley described them as warranting the investigation.
"If they got out, John Allen would be very embarrassed by them," said the official, who added that there was no evidence of physical contact between the two.
The official said that the e-mails under investigation are from Allen.
But a senior official close to Allen told CNN on Tuesday that the e-mails contained nothing pointing to sex or anything of a romantic nature. Allen may have said, informally, "thanks sweetheart" in an e-mail, the official close to Allen said.
"Anyone who knows him knows his style; he has a habit of replying to every single e-mail (he is sent). Kelley would e-mail his business and personal accounts," the official said.
It will be up to the Defense Department's inspector general to decide if the e-mails' content represents conduct unbecoming an officer, said a third source, a senior U.S. official.
Allen has yet to be questioned by Defense Department inspector general staff, but that could be completed in days, a U.S. official with knowledge of the investigation said.
Allen, who was once stationed at the base, has denied wrongdoing, a senior defense official said. In a statement, Col. John Baker, the chief defense counsel of the Marine Corps, said Allen "fully intends to cooperate" with the inspector general's investigators.
Broadwell's anonymous e-mail to Allen was sent after May, perhaps in June, the official said.
The e-mail, which had also been sent to a number of other officers, bore the handle "kelleypatrol -- or something similar," the official said.
He described the e-mail as "a warning that Kelley was a seductress or something along those lines" and said it was vaguely threatening, but above all weird.
"Allen did not know it was (from) Broadwell," the official said.
The official also said it was unclear when Kelley went to the FBI or whether Allen's warning to her was the trigger, but that Allen saw nothing in the e-mail's wording to warrant referral by him to the FBI.
Kelley's version differs from one offered by the senior official close to Allen, who said it was Allen who received an anonymous e-mail about Kelley, and tipped her off that someone was threatening her.
One of the sources familiar with Kelley said she first mentioned the alleged harassment in a casual conversation with an FBI agent whom she knew socially. She did not seek him out for action on the matter, but he was happy to help, the source said. The source added that Kelley did not know at first that the e-mails led to Petraeus.
A source familiar with Kelley's version of events said the anonymous e-mails traced to Broadwell began in June. It wasn't until two months later that the FBI told Kelley who had sent the e-mails, said the source, adding that Kelley does not know Broadwell.
The general counsel for the Federal Law Enforcement Officers Association identified Frederick Humphries as the agent initially contacted by Kelley about the anonymous e-mails.
The counsel, Lawrence Berger, said Humphries and his wife had been friends for years with Kelley and her husband.
Berger said Humphries took Kelley's concerns over the e-mails to the "appropriate components" at the FBI to investigate. "He reported it to the proper channels and had no further part on the case."
Kelley, 37, and her husband have released a statement saying they have been friends with Petraeus and his family for more than five years and asked for privacy.
A source close to Kelley said Wednesday that Kelley said she had not had a sexual relationship with Petraeus or Allen.
In mid-May, Allen got the first anonymous e-mail from someone using the handle "Kelleypatrol" that maligned Kelley and warned him to be wary of her, the source said.
Allen forwarded it to Kelley, thinking she might have sent it as a joke, but she told him she had not, the source continued.
The move to delay Allen's nomination was "a prudent measure until we can determine what the facts are, and we will," Panetta told reporters Wednesday. "No one should leap to any conclusions."
He said Allen "certainly has my continued confidence to lead our forces," a view shared by Obama, White House spokesman Jay Carney said.
That Allen remains in command in Afghanistan suggests that there is no criminal issue, a U.S. official told CNN. But the official said the Defense Department's inspector general could still find evidence of criminal conduct.
Kelley has not responded publicly to the latest news.
Both Allen and Petraeus appear to know Kelley's sister, Natalie Khawam. The men wrote letters in support of the sister in a custody battle, court records show.
On Monday, FBI agents were at Broadwell's home in Charlotte, North Carolina, according to spokeswoman Shelley Lynch. She declined to say what the agents were doing there.
A senior law enforcement official close to the Broadwell investigation said Wednesday night that it appeared unlikely she would be prosecuted for any unauthorized release of classified information.
The official told CNN National Security Contributor Fran Townsend that investigators were reviewing materials taken Monday from Broadwell's home, but that the information in question did not appear to be substantial; there may have been a technical violation but, if so, it was not egregious.
Broadwell had previously turned over a computer to investigators.
The official said Broadwell agreed to the search of her home but that officials also had secured a search warrant.
The official stressed the decision whether to prosecute rests with the Justice Department.
A source told CNN that Broadwell was acting as Petraeus' archivist and that the FBI had gone to her house to look for any documents she might have.
As a commissioned officer in the military reserves, Broadwell would have had "secret" or "top secret" security clearance, military officials said.
Access to information would have depended on what she needed to know to carry out an assigned task, said the officials, who would not go on the record about an ongoing investigation.
Broadwell has said that she was working on a second book about Petraeus. Her LinkedIn profile lists her as "Archivist/Biographer for General (Retired) David Petreaus." Her first book, "All In," was about Petraeus' leadership.
Broadwell has spoken about how she had to deal with sensitive information in the course of researching the first book.
"I had to follow very clear lines of non-disclosure and sign non-disclosure agreements, like my colleagues. I felt like I was almost held to a higher level of accountability because I could lose my clearance," Broadwell said in a speech last year. "I think it was important to inform my writing, but I knew there was a clear line that I couldn't cross when I was writing it out."
Petraeus has said he never shared classified information with Broadwell, said retired military officer John Nagl, who cited conversations in recent days with Petraeus.
Broadwell, a military intelligence reservist, is assigned to West Point, the Army's military academy, according to her service record, which lists her assignment as "United States Military Academy Staff & Faculty." In August, she was promoted to lieutenant colonel.
Last month, during a speech at the University of Denver, Broadwell suggested the Sept. 11 attackers in Libya were targeting a secret prison at the Benghazi consulate annex, raising unverified concerns about possible security leaks.
"I don't know if a lot of you have heard this, but the CIA annex had actually taken a couple of Libyan militia members prisoner and they think that the attack on the consulate was an effort to get these prisoners back," she said.
A senior intelligence official said no prisoners had been held at the annex. Broadwell did not provide a source for her information, and no evidence has emerged that it came from Petraeus.
Administration officials have said the Benghazi assault was a terrorist attack.Premier Guitar’s Shawn Hammond is on location in Council Bluffs, Iowa, where he sits down for a green-room chat with Queens of the Stone Age guitarist Troy Van Leeuwen before this stop on the band’s Like Clockwork tour. Van Leeuwen chats at length about his favorite Vox AC30s, his upcoming signature Fender Jazzmaster, his new Echopark guitar, and his multiple pedalboards.
Although bandleader Josh Homme (who’s famously elusive when it comes to talking shop about his gear) declined to take part in the Rig Rundown, we did shoot photos of his main guitars and amps (his crew asked us not to show his pedalboard). Pics of Homme’s gear, as well as bassist Michael Shuman’s main rig, appear after the shots of Van Leeuwen’s setup.
Troy Van Leeuwen’s Gear
The former Perfect Circle guitarist’s QOTSA rig consists of three main guitars—an Echopark T-style, his signature Fender Jazzmaster with a Mastery bridge, and a Burns 12-string (not shown). He plays through two Vox AC30s, a combo and a head driving Vox and Marshall cabs.
Van Leeuwen's Effects
Van Leeuwen's main QOTSA pedalboard has a Voodoo Lab Ground Control Pro MIDI controller, a Custom Audio Electronics tap-tempo switch (for his Axe-Fx II, which is primarily used for reverb and delay), a Morley wah, Way Huge Supa-Puss and Pork Loin stomps, what appears to be a fourth-generation DigiTech Whammy, a Dunlop volume pedal, and a Korg tuner.
He also has a rack with two drawers holding Way Huge Green Rhino and Aqua-Puss pedals, an EarthQuaker Devices Dispatch Master, a Fuzzrocious Demon, and an MXR Q Zone, among other stomps.The next version Debian has come a step closer to completion with the freezing of the current testing distribution version codename Lenny. This will form the basis of Debian 5.0, expected in September.
The freeze means that package developers who have not uploaded software for inclusion in the Debian 5.0 release have effectively missed the boat. It also means that their packages will almost certainly be omitted from the next versions of popular Linux distros such as Ubuntu, Xandros and Linspire that are based on Debian.
Debian developers have their work cut out over the next few weeks if they are to maintain Debian's reputation for top-quality releases. There are 363 bugs currently outstanding in the many pieces of software that make up Debian.
The job is to fix these bugs during the current test phase for the release to be considered "stable" in September. The current stable release - codenamed Etch (4.0) - will then become the "oldstable" version. The latest, so-called "unstable" version, is always codenamed Sid and includes experimental code that may or may not figure in future releases.
The prime development goals for Lenny aim to bring Debian up to date with advances in hardware architectures and software. These include support for IPv6, the latest version of internet protocols, support for large file systems (LFS) and version four of NFS. Support for future GNU Compiler Collection (GCC) releases and Python 2.5 are also on the list.
The release will also tidy up Debian's build functions to improve installation. It will be tested for so-called "double compilation" support to ensure build consistency and obsolete functions such as "debmake" - and any packages that require it - are being removed.
New or updated support for I18N description standards and full support for UTF-8 will also be included.®Barber shop in Torquay, Devon, with red and white pole
A barber's pole is a type of sign used by barbers to signify the place or shop where they perform their craft. The trade sign is, by a tradition dating back to the Middle Ages, a staff or pole with a helix of colored stripes (often red and white in many countries, but usually red, blue, and white in the United States). The pole may be stationary or may revolve, often with the aid of an electric motor.[1][2]
A "barber's pole" with a helical stripe is a familiar sight, and is used as a secondary metaphor to describe objects in many other contexts. For example, if the shaft or tower of a lighthouse has been painted with a helical stripe as a daymark, the lighthouse could be described as having been painted in "barber's pole" colors. Likewise, borders may be marked and warnings highlighted.
Origin in barbering and surgery [ edit ]
Antique red and blue striped pole in Pottstown, Pennsylvania
During medieval times, barbers performed surgery on customers, as well as tooth extractions. The original pole had a brass wash basin at the top (representing the vessel in which leeches were kept) and bottom (representing the basin that received the blood). The pole itself represents the staff that the patient gripped during the procedure to encourage blood flow.[citation needed]
At the Council of Tours in 1163, the clergy was banned from the practice of surgery.[3] From then, physicians were clearly separated from the surgeons and barbers. Later, the role of the barbers was defined by the College de Saint-Côme et Saint-Damien, established by Jean Pitard in Paris circa 1210,[4] as academic surgeons of the long robe and barber surgeons of the short robe.
After the formation of the United Barber Surgeon's Company in England, a statute required the barber to use a red and white pole and the surgeon to use a red pole. In France, surgeons used a red pole with a basin attached to identify their offices. Blue often appears on poles in the United States, possibly as a homage to its national colors. Another, more fanciful interpretation of these barber pole colors is that red represents arterial blood, blue is symbolic of venous blood, and white depicts the bandage.[5]
Prior to 1950, there were four manufacturers of barber poles in the United States. In 1950, William Marvy of St. Paul, Minnesota, started manufacturing barber poles. Marvy made his 50,000th barber pole in 1967, and, by 2010, over 82,000 had been produced.[6] The William Marvy Company is now the sole manufacturer of barber poles in North America, and sells only 500 per year (compared to 5,100 in the 1960s).[7] In recent years, the sale of spinning barber poles has dropped considerably, since few barber shops are opening, and many jurisdictions prohibit moving signs. Koken of St. Louis, Missouri, manufactured barber equipment such as chairs and assorted poles in the 19th century.
As early as 1905, use of the poles was reported to be "diminishing" in the United States.[8]
In Forest Grove, Oregon, the "World's Tallest Barber Shop Pole" measures 72 feet (22 m).[9]
The consistent use of this symbol for advertising was analogous to an apothecary's show globe, a tobacconist's cigar store Indian and a pawn broker's three gold balls.
Use in barbering [ edit ]
Possibly as early as the later Roman Empire, and certainly continuing through the Renaissance into Industrialization (maybe even until the 1700s in some places) a "barber-surgeon" also performed tooth extraction, cupping, leeching, bloodletting, enemas, amputations, etc. However, today's barber poles represent little more than being a barber shop that cuts hair and does shaves.[10] Barber poles have actually become a topic of controversy in the hairstyling business. In some states, such as Michigan in March 2012, legislation has emerged proposing that barber poles should only be permitted outside barbershops, but not traditional beauty salons. Barbers and cosmetologists have engaged in several legal battles claiming the right to use the barber pole symbol to indicate to potential customers that the business offers haircutting services. Barbers claim |
Las Vegas. The Big Bang pistol set will ultimately be shown to the public in May. A relatively new company at about five years old, Cabot Guns has been establishing a reputation for luxury weapons. Its focus is on crafting 1911-style pistols.
Related: American Sniper widow Taya Kyle outshoots NRA champion
The Big Bang pistol set is expected to go on sale by auction and then snagged by the highest bidder. Cabot says that it has been offered $250,000 from a collector based on concept alone but notes that estimates on the value have ranged from $500,000 to over $1,000,000.
Big Bang Pistol Set
Dubbed the Big Bang, the interplanetary pistol set includes two mirror image precision-manufactured 1911 style semi-automatic 45s. One is designed for righties and the other lefties. Each is constructed from the ancient meteorite.
As the company’s website explains, “Cabot Guns brings the galaxy to your fingertips as you lay hand on the rarest of materials and the finest of pistols.”
Related: Can the US military build Star Wars-style laser cannons for its troops?
The unique pistol set comes with high-end display cases so they can be showcased like a piece of art.
The Meteor
The meteor used for this project may be billions of years old, but it was only first discovered in area that is now part of Naimibia in 1838. Analysis suggests it landed on Earth in prehistoric times.
Approximately 57,000 pounds of the meteorite have been discovered to date. Cabot acquired about 77 of them for its projects.
Highly coveted, Gibeon has often been referred to as the “Cadillac of meteors.” Parts of the meteorite have been sold and collected over the years – some of it has even been used in high-end projects like by luxury watch company Rolex.
How can a meteorite become a weapon?
It is not easy to make a gun using meteorite material. The frame, trigger, slide and grips are made of the meteorite. And to achieve this, there were lots of challenges to overcome.
Related: Historic aircraft carriers in pictures
Cabot Guns used advanced aerospace techniques in its manufacturing process. Even just cutting the meteorite is tough - it’s sort of akin to cutting rare gems. Cabot opted to use a three-dimensional laser to scan the meteorite before cutting into it.
Guns are usually made of metals like steel, aluminum and titanium. However, the meteorite’s composition is about 80 percent iron. The remainder includes nickel, cobalt, phosphorus and more.
The Cosmos Meteorite Grip 1911
Cabot has worked with this meteorite before. Previously, the company made Gideon ‘Cosmos’ pistol grips for the 1911. The grips showcase the “Widmanstätten pattern” – a fancy term that describes one of the meteorite’s signature features - an interlacing pattern of kamacite and taenite,
Sneak Peek
The public will eventually get a chance to see The Big Bang Pistol Set at the NRA Annual Meeting and Convention in Louisville, Kentucky in May. Cabot will be revealing more details leading up to the big public reveal.Vulgar's Atlas tool helps you make International Auxiliary Languages by analysing multiple translations of words and outputting the "average" word. Add groups of translations on new lines, separate each translation with spaces. Things to note: Atlas assumes you are inputting words phonetically using the International Phonetic Alphabet. Atlas will treat any group of vowels as a single syllable nucleus unless the vowels are divided up by a full stop. For instance, in the name "Claudia", au is one syllable, but ia is two syllables. Thus, to get more accurate analysis "Claudia" should be entered as "Claudi.a". læŋɡwɪdʒ leŋɡwa lingua liŋɡwa ʃpraxə taɪm tjempo tɛmpo tɑ̃ tsaɪt hɛd kabeθa tɛsta tɛt kɔpf wʊmən muxeɾ dɔnna fam fraʊ lʊk miɾaɾ ɡwardare ʁəɡaʁde zeːn haʊs kaθa kassa mɛzɔ̃ haʊs dɛvəl djablo di.avolo djabl tɔʏfəl
AnalyseA businessman is suing his lawyers after his former de facto partner was awarded his Porsche, a cemetery plot and $900,000 following their separation.
The Adelaide man alleges that South Australian-based law firm Grope Hamilton are liable for the losses he claimed he suffered after they are alleged to have failed in their duty of care, according to media reports.
In July 2003, the 64-year-old businessman had a cohabitation agreement drawn up by the law firm just one year after he started a de facto relationship.
A businessman is suing his lawyers after his former de facto partner was awarded his Porsche, a cemetery plot and $900,000 following their separation
The Adelaide man was ordered to give his Porsche 911 to his former de facto partner after their split
According to legal documents lodged with Supreme Court, he alleges the pair's assets agreement was officially witnessed by their cleaning lady instead of a Justice of Peace or a solicitor.
However, the couple, who ended their relationship in early 2010, had their agreement rejected by a court in September 2011 after it was ruled to be invalid.
The court ordered him to give his former partner a Porsche 911, a cemetery plot and $900,000.
The plaintiff alleges that Grope Hamilton owed him 'a duty of care to perform the legal services with the skill care and diligence as is reasonable to expect from a law firm of legal practitioners professing to have the expertise, skills and qualifications of Grope Hamilton.'
He had an agreement drawn up by the law firm just one year after he started a de factor relationship
According to legal documents lodged with Supreme Court, the businessman revealed the pair's assets agreement was officially witnessed by their cleaning lady
He is also suing his former partner's law firm de Groots claiming they failed to ensure the agreement was valid
However, in its defence the firm alleged the man was aware of the requirements but had refused to attend meetings to discuss the agreement and failed to have it witnessed by a JP or a solicitor.
According to media reports, he is also suing his former partner's law firm de Groots claiming they failed to ensure the agreement was valid.
Grope Hamilton states both the businessman and de Groots knew Grope Hamilton did not practice in family law and the onus was therefore on de Groots to provide advice to him in connection with the agreement.
De Groots have filed a defence claiming that the man did not seek any advice from them, and stating they owed no duty of care to him.
The matter will return to court at a later date.New York Democrats Want to Ban Police From Describing Suspects By Race, Sex, or Age
Guest Post by Mara Zebest
New York Dems want to pass a bill that would limit a description of a suspect to identify suspects essentially by the clothes they wear only. Truly mind-numbing stupidity.
Imagine if you are a victim of a crime and the police are not allowed to use information describing the suspect to indicate whether the criminal is male or female, young or old, black, white, or whatever identifying information to help narrow down the search. The NYPD are fighting back with a new ad depicting a police officer with a blindfold.
NYPost reports the following:
Cops might as well wear blindfolds if the City Council passes a bill that would let them use little more than the color of a suspect’s clothing in descriptions — or risk being sued for profiling, according to this provocative new ad (pictured) from the NYPD captains union.
The ad asks, “How effective is a police officer with a blindfold on?”
And the answer is not very, says the NYPD Captains Endowment Association, which is fighting the measure, claiming it would handcuff cops and send crime rates soaring.
Union President Roy Richter — who is seen in the ad wearing a blindfold in Times Square — told The Post the bill is dangerous because “it will ban cops from identifying a suspect’s age, gender, color or disability.
“When we have wanted suspects and patterns of crimes, those are very important descriptive terms to let officers know who to look for.”
The ad warns that if cops transmit a description of a suspect that goes beyond the color of his or her clothing, they could be sued for racial profiling if the proposal becomes law.
The ad will appear in tomorrow’s Post, in addition to the union’s Web site, Twitter and Facebook — and provides links to contacts for City Council members to sway their vote on the measure.
The bill’s sponsor, Jumaane Williams (D-Brooklyn), and Speaker Christine Quinn are going to bypass normal committee process and bring the measure directly to a vote.
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Google has corrected a number of vulnerabilities in Android 6.0 Marshmallow
Google has released security bulletin for Android 6.0 Marshmallow, in which was fixed seven vulnerabilities. Two flaws allows a remote user to compromise a system.
The manufacturer assigned the highest (Critical) level of risk to the vulnerabilities CVE-2015-6608 and CVE-2015-6609. Gaps exist because of errors in the libutils library and in the libmediaserver service and allows to cause a memory corruption that lead to system compromise. Vulnerabilities affects all versions of Android, starting with Android 4.4 KitKat and ending Android 6.0 Marshmallow.
The vulnerability CVE-2015-6611 is caused due to an unspecified error in libmediaserver and allows attackers to disclose sensitive data. The vulnerability has been assigned a high-level (Critical) of risk. The flaw can be used on Android 5.1 Lollipop and later versions.
Vulnerabilities CVE-2015-6610, CVE-2015-6612 and CVE-2015-6614 exist because of errors in the components libstagefright, libmedia, Bluetooth and Telephony. Local malicious apps can obtain elevated privileges.
All holes have been fixed in the update for LMY48X Android 6.0 Marshmallow.
Multiple vulnerabilities in the Google Android
Danger level: 2 Critical and 5 High severity
Availability correction: Yes
The number of vulnerabilities: 7
CVE ID:
CVE-2015-6608 – The Critical vulnerability (it can be exploited remotely)
CVE-2015-6609 – The Critical vulnerability (it can be exploited remotely)
CVE-2015-6611 – The High level vulnerability
CVE-2015-6610 – The High level vulnerability
CVE-2015-6612 – The High level vulnerability
CVE-2015-6613 – The High level vulnerability
CVE-2015-6614 – The Moderate level vulnerability
Impact: Disclosure of sensitive data, privilege escalation, system compromise
Affected Products: Google Android 6.0.x
Affected versions: Google Android 6.0.x (Builds LMY48X or later)
Vulnerabilities Description
These vulnerabilities allows a remote user to elevate privileges to disclose important information and compromise a system.
[CVE-2015-6608] This vulnerability is caused due to an memory corruption error in libmediaserver. A remote user can compromise the system via a specially crafted file.
[CVE-2015-6609] Vulnerabilities is caused due to an memory corruption error in libmediaserver during audio file processing. It could allow an attacker remote code execution on target system.[CVE-2015-6611] A vulnerability is caused due to an unspecified error in libmediaserver. This can be exploited to disclose sensitive data.
[CVE-2015-6610] An memory corruption error in the libstagefright service ;
; [CVE-2015-6612] An unknown error in the libmedia library ;
; [CVE-2015-6613] An unknown error in the Bluetooth component ;
; [CVE-2015-6614] An unknown error in the Telephony component.
[CVE-2015-6610; CVE-2015-6612; CVE-2015-6613; CVE-2015-6614] These vulnerabilities are caused due to errors in the following components:
Local malicious application could elevate of privileges.
Solution: Install the update from the manufacturer website.
Links:
Manufacturer URL: http://android.com
Nexus Security Bulletin: https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/android-security-updates/n1aw2MGce4EI’m always on the lookout for fun colorful ways to decorate my home. And I love a good faux technique. So I was thrilled when I ran across the idea of creating sand art with salt! Here is a great way to make up so many different colors of “sand”, with a very low budget. This is a great project for the kids. Oh, and adults too!
For this project I used:
3 containers of salt
Colored Chalk
Grater
Ziplock bags
Glass Containers
votive candles
Begin by using the finer part of the grater to grate your chosen color of chalk. I used about half a piece of colored chalk for each color, but you can use more or less depending upon how deep a color you are going for. Grate the chalk over a large ziplock bag or piece of parchment paper.
Add about a cup of salt to your chalk gratings.
Pour into a ziplock bag. Seal, and mix the salt together with the chalk for an even color. Add more chalk or salt as desired to get the color you are looking for.
Repeat. As many times as you like for as many colors as you would like to work with! As you can see, I got a little carried away.
Now for the fun part! I found some great glass containers at the dollar store for this project. These were perfect for showing off the layers of color. Simply pour colors from your bags into the container in layers. Spread them out with your fingers or a pencil, then add another layer.
The colored layers look amazing!
My final touch was to add a votive candle to each one. These are perfect for colorful decorations in my house. Because they are salt, I wouldn’t recommend them for outdoors. They were certainly fun to make and would be a great project for the kids on a lazy summer day.
For more great craft ideas, be sure to check out Suzy's Sitcom! http://suzyssitcom.comJumps racing's 'days are numbered' in South Australia, former jockey club head says
Updated
Victoria will soon be the only state in Australia where horse jumps racing is legal, according to the former head of the South Australian Jockey Club, Steve Ploubidis.
"I think that jumps racing in South Australia, the days are numbered," Mr Ploubidis told the ABC's 7.30 program.
His comments come as another horse was killed during a jumps race.
The horse called Show Dancer crashed hard into a hurdle early in a race yesterday at Sandown, Victoria, catapulting into the air and landing on its neck.
The rider was thrown clear and escaped serious injury but the horse was euthanased on the track.
It is the third horse to die in a jumps event since the season opened in Victoria and South Australia, the only two states in Australia where jumps racing remains legal.
The last death in a jumps race occurred in South Australia, during training for this year’s poorly attended Oakbank Easter Racing Carnival.
Mr Ploubidis, who ran the jockey club for eight years, says, with protests at every Oakbank Carnival and attendance down 25 per cent this year, jumps racing is turning the crowds away.
"Providing there is the continual community resentment towards the cruelty association with jumps racing you'll find the community pressure will come to bear."
Four jumps races are run at the two-day Oakbank Carnival held in the Adelaide Hills each year.
The Great Eastern Steeplechase, held on the second day of racing, is one of the longest in the country at just under five kilometres.
Horses more likely to die in longer races: study
A 2006 Melbourne University study found horses are more likely to die in longer races and even the sport’s most fierce supporters admit jumps racing is a risky sport.
John O'Connor, 76, has been bringing horses to the Adelaide Hills track for 25 years.
"We lose one occasionally, that's a fact and it can't be helped. They lose the occasional horse on the flat," he said.
Mr O'Connor knows the risks well.
Providing there is the continual community resentment towards the cruelty association with jumps racing you'll find the community pressure will come to bear. Former CEO of the South Australian Jockey Club Steve Ploubidis
Just six days before the first jumps race at Oakbank, his horse, Black Moon, was severely injured after a fall during a training race and was put down soon afterward.
He says death is just part of the sport.
"I don't think about it," Mr O'Connor said.
"Because I'm confident that they're [the horses] competent, they're well trained, they're fit - and if an accident happens, so be it," he said.
RSPCA says jumps racing too dangerous
The RSPCA’s Tim Vasudeva says jumps racing is too dangerous and the public is starting to realise that.
"Jumps horses are 19 times more likely to die whilst racing than flats horses," said Mr Vasudeva.
"People don't want to see that, they just don't."
The head of the sport’s governing body, Thoroughbred Racing South Australia, is Frances Nelson, and she rejects Mr Vasudeva’s claims.
She says the fall in numbers has nothing to do with public opposition to the industry and points to the small percentage of injuries sustained by horses running in jumps races.
"Since the beginning of 2005, and including up to today, the injuries in jumps races and trials, constitute less than 0.9 percent of horses starting," Ms Nelson said.
"That's a very low percentage rate and we're constantly trying to improve that," she said.
Topics: other-sports, horse-racing, law-crime-and-justice, australia, vic, sa
First postedCalif. Official Says Leaking Gas Well Might Be Sealed As Soon As Next Week
Enlarge this image toggle caption David McNew/AFP/Getty Images David McNew/AFP/Getty Images
The leaking gas storage well near the Los Angeles neighborhood of Porter Ranch might be capped earlier than originally anticipated, a state official told residents on Thursday.
Wade Crowfoot, an adviser to California Gov. Jerry Brown, said the utility that owns the well is expected to begin the final phase of the fix on Monday, The Associated Press reports. The Southern California Gas Co. is currently drilling a relief well to intercept the leaking well — and once it reaches its destination, workers should be able to seal up the leak in about five days.
That would mean the leaking well would officially be killed by the end of next week, two weeks ahead of the SoCalGas target of the end of February.
But there are some caveats. First, an "early" fix to the leaking well is hardly a fast one; the well has been leaking since late October, so a fix by the end of next week would mean it was releasing uncontrolled quantities of methane gas for 16 weeks.
And declaring success next week is hardly certain. As the Los Angeles Times puts it, the timeline is "fraught with variables."
As we've reported, the leaking well, located at the Aliso Canyon natural gas storage facility, has been spewing large quantities of the potent greenhouse gas methane into the atmosphere since late October. The gas company has been accused of negligence over the leak and faces criminal charges and civil lawsuits.
The leak also contains trace elements of other substances, such as the carcinogen benzene, as well as odorants that are added to help people detect gas leaks through smell. The odorants are known to cause headaches, nausea, nosebleeds and other ailments, but SoCalGas and state officials have said the leak shouldn't cause any long-term health issues.
That hasn't comforted many residents of the nearby neighborhood of Porter Ranch. Thousands of people have been relocated because of the leak — and many say they are deeply concerned about possible health impacts of their exposure to the leak.
On All Things Considered this afternoon, NPR's Kelly McEvers talks to one Porter Ranch family who has left the neighborhood. They're so worried, they don't want to move back once the leak is capped.
"Even though you can't see the gas, it's there. And that's the saddest part... people don't understand it," says Christine Katz, who is concerned about her family's health after she says her 2-year-old daughter got sick and doctors couldn't figure out what was wrong. "Because it's not a mudslide, it's not an earthquake — you just don't see the devastation, but it's there."
Another Porter Ranch resident, Dhruv Sareen, hasn't relocated his family at all. Sareen, a research scientist who studies stem cells at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center, says he looked at the data and wasn't alarmed.
Tune in to All Things Considered this afternoon to hear the full story, as Kelly travels to Porter Ranch and talks to residents, a public health expert and a SoCalGas spokesman. And follow NPR's Shots blog to see more on the public health questions around Porter Ranch.SOUTH PORTLAND, Maine — After weeks of being sick and not getting any better, Christine Royles took a trip to the doctor to find out what was wrong. She was told both of her kidneys were failing and that she would need a transplant. “They ran a bunch of tests to see what was wrong and I was diagnosed with Lupus and Anca Vasculitis.”
Instead of doing things most 23-year-olds would, Royles goes home every night and does ten hours of dialysis, “It’s not great. I work at a restaurant so afterward people go out to the Old Port and I have to come home and hook up to my machine.”
Royles didn’t let her diagnosis get her down; she used it as motivation to find a kidney as quickly as possible. That’s what let her to writing an ad on the back of her car. “I hate taking chances like that. That’s why I made it my mission to find a kidney and advertise like that.”
So, on the back windshield of her Kia Soul, Royles wrote, “Looking for someone 2 donate their kidney. Must have Type O blood. (You only need one kidney.)” It ended with her phone number.
Sure enough, it worked. A father from Windham, Josh Dall-Leighton, saw the ad, found out he was a strong match, and agreed to donate his kidney.
The surgery is set for May but before then Christine wants to do something to give back to Josh. She’s planning a pancake breakfast April 12 at the Applebee’s in South Portland to raise money for him and his family. “He’s going to be out of work for a month or maybe two so I just wanted to make sure he has money for his family.”Strange things happened when I returned to Tehran in 2010 after 32 years in exile. Arriving past midnight, when many of the international flights land, I sipped lukewarm coffee while waiting for my bags. Seated together on a nearby bench, two sleepy looking toddlers were draped across their mother’s lap. Another boy clutched a game device; a woman plunked down beside him and checked her watch. Perfect strangers looked familiar. This was Imam Khomeini Airport—his glowering portrait there to remind us—but it was no different from LAX or Charles de Gaulle or Heathrow. I understood the PA announcements, the monitors, the restroom signs, and the currency exchange booths. I felt safe in this neutral zone, imagining boarding another flight on a whim. I was born here, yet I had no idea what sort of place lay outside. Was it still the city of my youth?
My sisters and I had arranged for a driver to pick us up. Seeing the sympathetic face of a young man holding a placard with our last name on it in Persian script was deeply endearing, as if he had taken special care to write bijan. This was a homecoming, but we had no place to go, no family to come back to. Did I really think that the house where I grew up, seized post-revolution by the regime, would be returned to my family? No. But, emboldened by smooth talking mediators who stood to gain from the transaction, we had come to try.
What I found most striking in the first 24 hours was how I felt constantly close to tears. At the small family-run hotel, upon answering a call to our room from the front desk, I came undone when I heard “Good morning, Khanoom Bijan” (Mrs. Bijan). Khanoom? No one had ever called me that—I had left Iran at 15, too young to be a Mrs. How beautifully she pronounced my name. “Yes! Yes, it’s me, Khanoom Bijan,” I announced, with such exuberance that the caller probably thought she was disappointing me with such ordinary news that breakfast was served until 10 am.
The first thing we did was ride a taxi through unrecognizable streets in search of our house. Along an avenue that was once named after my father for the hospital he built in the 1950s, on yet undeveloped land, was a low building set far back, a quiet relic of old Tehran. If it weren’t for the gate, we would have missed it altogether. How many dreams were interrupted by husbands pounding on that very gate beside their pregnant wives in labor, howling in the night for Doktor Bijan? We stood before the hospital where I was born, where our family had lived on the top floor, the building my father built brick by brick. Here was where my parents delivered thousands of babies. Here was the yard where we buried our dog Sasha, and here was the pool where I learned to swim.
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Finding the gate unlatched, we ventured inside. Turf now covered the pool. Bath towels, green and blue, hung from the upstairs balconies, furling and unfurling, seeming to taunt us as we gazed from below at our girlhood bedrooms, holding back our tears. The caretaker emerged from his cottage to shoo us away, shutting the gate in our faces.
By the third morning, still jet-lagged but anxious for exercise, I threw a swimsuit in my backpack and set out for a local pool that was open to women a few hours a week. I left the hotel with the vague idea that I’d blend in wearing a knee-length sweater over jeans, covering my hair with a scarf that periodically slid off my head. I observed other women walking by in stylish manteaus with cinched waists worn over tailored pants. Above their charcoal-rimmed eyes, their hair was swooped into a cone at the crown and wrapped in elaborate head scarves. I looked every bit the foreigner with my oafish backpack.
I approached the façade of a building covered with a dark panel of fabric. Even the door had to wear a cloak for ladies’ hours. I pushed the cloth aside to enter and stood for a moment to breathe the saturated scent. As a swimmer, I am fond of the thick smell of chlorine. Standing in the front office was a pretty young woman, her hair unraveled, holding a loaf of bread. While I paid the entrance fee, my eyes wandered past her bare shoulder to the voices behind the desk. Two attendants sat at a small table, waiting for their colleague to join them. A kettle whistled. It was still early, and I had interrupted their breakfast, the rare moment when they could sit, unencumbered by veils, rules, and threats, to eat and chat freely. Yet here was their first customer with only one selfish thought—to tear her silly scarf off and swim laps. I rushed into the changing room, apologetic but filled with an intense desire to sit with them, feeling such affection for them, wanting to know what kind of lives they led. My middle-aged American self was already snapping goggles in place, while the Persian girl who left long ago wondered if they might call out to her, if they had saved her a seat. I shivered at the edge of the outdoor pool while a voice inside my head told me to throw myself in. For a few seconds, with my head under water, I pushed through, giving it my all. Gasping when I reached the wall, I looked up at the sky, my head buzzing with thoughts. Yes, I may have lost my footing in Iran, but I still felt like I belonged, regardless of who occupied our house or how far I had traveled.
I have never felt closer to strangers than I did during the women’s hour at that pool. Long after I returned to America, I could not get the image of the three women at their breakfast table out of my head. Like a baton in a relay race, they slipped a clue into my hands—I was both sister and stranger. I ran with it and began writing.
I gave the women names—Ferry, Bahar, Sahar—imagined their triumphs and heartaches, and created a connection between them and an outsider returning from exile to Tehran, her birthplace, who brings along her very American daughter. A cook by profession, I reconstructed the beautiful ruins of my city as a beloved café. To write about such a place was to enter troubled waters, for I did not want to mitigate the grim and gruesome side of the world beyond the café but bear witness to loss, explore how people behave in the shadow of fear and mayhem. Who turns a blind eye to the atrocities that erupt on the streets, and who shows courage? It so happened that my characters were open to a whole world of possibility. Café Leila became a place of refuge, where outsiders form a kind of family, where someone saves you a seat.
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I knew when I put my face to the gap in the hospital gate that I would never see my childhood home again, but my return to Tehran was not a futile journey. Daughter, what took you so long? I imagined hearing from the very soil. It is my hope that as you read The Last Days of Café Leila, you will feel the same sense of place that I felt during the women’s hour and experience belonging in a new and unexpected light.Horner: The gap appears larger than it is
In the wake of a disappointing weekend in Australia, Red Bull team chief Christian Horner remains upbeat and pointing to the fact that Albert Park Circuit has not been kind to his team over the years and is adamant they will close the half second gap to the pace setters before Round 2 in China.
Daniel Ricciardo endured weekend to forget. In retrospect the crash he suffered during qualifying, coupled to a technical issue that kept him in the pits two laps into the race simply erased him from the proceedings.
Max Verstappen qualified fifth and had a subdued afternoon to finish in fifth place. During the late stages of the grand prix he reeled in fourth placed Kimi Raikkonen, but the teenager had nothing in his arsenal to mount an attack.
Speaking to De Telegraaf, Horner reflected after the race in Melbourne, “We will somehow have to find over half a second in order to compete at the front again.”
“On this track we have not been competitive for years. To be honest I do not think we’re very far behind. The gap appears larger than it is. After all, we are dealing with new regulations. In such a situation quick progress can be made. And we at Red Bull ample room for further developing [the RB13].”
“For every race we will have updates. Ferrari has a strong winter behind them, in terms of chassis and engine they have made great progress. But the season has twenty races. It makes no sense to draw conclusions after just one race. We have only just begun,” added Horner.Anyone with a heart would agree that the Jewish bris is a barbaric event. Grown-ups sit chatting politely, wiping the cream cheese off their lips, while some religious guy with minimal medical training prepares to slice up a newborn’s penis. The helpless thing wakes up from a womb-slumber howling with pain. I felt near hysterical at both of my sons’ brisses. Pumped up with new-mother hormones, I dug my nails into my palms to keep from clawing the rabbi. For a few days afterward, I cursed my God and everyone else for creating the bloody mess in the diaper. But then the penis healed and assumed its familiar heart shape and I promptly forgot about the whole trauma. Apparently some people never do.
I am Jewish enough that I never considered not circumcising my sons. I did not search the web or call a panel of doctors to fact-check the health benefits, as a growing number of wary Americans now do. Despite my momentary panic, the words genital mutilation did not enter my head. But now that I have done my homework, I’m sure I would do it againeven if I were not Jewish, didn’t believe in ritual, and judged only by cold, secular science.
Every year, it seems, a new study confirms that the foreskin is pretty much like the appendix or the wisdom toothit is an evolutionary footnote that serves no purpose other than to incubate infections. There’s no single overwhelming health reason to remove it, but there are a lot of smaller health reasons that add up. It’s not critical that any individual boy get circumcised. For the growing number of people who feel hysterical at the thought, just don’t do it. But don’t ruin it for the rest of us. It’s perfectly clear that on a grand public-health level, the more boys who get circumcised, the better it is for everyone.
Twenty years ago, this would have been a boring, obvious thing to say, like feed your baby rice cereal before bananas, or don’t smoke while pregnant. These days, in certain newly enlightened circles on the East and West Coasts, it puts you in league with Josef Mengele. Late this summer, when the New York Times reported that the U.S. Centers for Disease Control might consider promoting routine circumcision as a tool in the fight against AIDS, the vicious comments that ensued included references to mass genocide.
There’s no use arguing with the anti-circ activists, who only got through the headline of this story before hunting down my e-mail and offering to pay for me to be genitally mutilated. But for those in the nervous middle, here is my best case for why you should do it. Biologists think the foreskin plays a critical role in the womb, protecting the penis as it is growing during the third month of gestation. Outside the womb, the best guess is that it once kept the penis safe from, say, low-hanging thorny branches. Nowadays, we have pants for that.
Circumcision dates back some 6,000 years and was mostly associated with religious rituals, especially for Jews and Muslims. In the nineteenth century, moralists concocted some unfortunate theories about the connection between the foreskin and masturbation and other such degenerate impulses. The genuinely useful medical rationales came later. During the World War II campaign in North Africa, tens of thousands of American GIs fell short on their hygiene routines. Many of them came down with a host of painful and annoying infections, such as phimosis, where the foreskin gets too tight to retract over the glans. Doctors already knew about the connection to sexually transmitted diseases and began recommending routine circumcision.
In the late eighties, researchers began to suspect a relationship between circumcision and transmission of HIV, the virus that causes AIDS. One researcher wondered why certain Kenyan men who see prostitutes get infected and others don’t. The answer, it turned out, was that the ones who don’t were circumcised. Three separate trials in Uganda, Kenya, and South Africa involving over 10,000 men turned up the same finding again and again. Circumcision, it turns out, could reduce the risk of HIV transmission by at least 60 percent, which, in Africa, adds up to 3 million lives saved over the next twenty years. The governments of Uganda and Kenya recently started mass-circumcision campaigns.
These studies are not entirely relevant to the U.S. They apply only to female-to-male transmission, which is relatively rare here. But the results are so dramatic that people who work in AIDS prevention can’t ignore them. Daniel Halperin, an AIDS expert at the Harvard School of Public Health, has compared various countries, and the patterns are obvious. In a study of 28 nations, he found that low circumcision rates (fewer than 20 percent) match up with high HIV rates, and vice versa. Similar patterns are turning up in the U.S. as well. A team of researchers from the CDC and Johns Hopkins analyzed records of over 26,000 heterosexual African-American men who showed up at a Baltimore clinic for HIV testing and denied any drug use or homosexual contact. Among those with known HIV exposure, the ones who did turn out to be HIV-positive were twice as likely to be uncircumcised. There’s no causal relationship here; foreskin does not cause HIV transmission. But researchers guess that foreskins are more susceptible to sores, and also have a high concentration of certain immune cells that are the main portals for HIV infection.Hypocrite Bernie Sanders to Campaign For Woman Who Robbed Him of Dem Nomination on Monday
Bernie Sanders, who spent the last year railing against Hillary Clinton and other “one-percenters” is going to hit the campaign trail for Hillary on Monday in New Hampshire.
U.S. News and World Report has the story:
Sanders to Make First Stump Speech on Clinton’s Behalf Bernie Sanders will campaign for Hillary Clinton on Monday, the first time he has hit the stump for his former rival since she formally accepted the nomination. Sanders is slated to discuss Clinton’s plan for “building an economy that works for everyone, not just those at the top,” the Clinton campaign said in a statement. The senator from Vermont would also take on “Donald Trump’s plan, which would benefit himself and other millionaires and billionaires.” The campaign stop, set for 3 p.m. at Lebanon High School in Lebanon, New Hampshire, is the first time Sanders will appear on Clinton’s behalf since he spoke at the Democratic National Convention, urging his supporters to vote for her in November.
The Democrats basically conspired against him to make sure Hillary got the nomination but he’s helping her campaign now.
Has anyone confirmed how Bernie paid for his new lakefront home?When I was in my early teens, I thought there would be no greater career than that which was depicted on “ |
Labs offices. They always seem to be trying something new. For the Xs Preamplifier, it was a preamp with the lowest possible distortion. For the Xs 300, it was an amplifier that would have a triode-like midrange, but with the deep bass and treble of solid state. I believe they achieved their goal. These are truly fantastic products and a milestone in design.What Would Happen if You Bought 25 Bottles of Nyquil?
Ever since I was a little girl, I have periodically played a game I like to call ‘What would happen if…’
The very first time I played this game I was 5 years old and riding in the car with my Mother. She had allowed me to sit in the front seat, but the novelty of that wore off rather quickly and I got bored. Almost immediately after we merged onto the expressway, I spied the car door handle. I thought to myself, I wonder what would happen if I opened the car door right now?
Would the door fly open? Or would it stay closed since the car was in motion? If it flew open, would the wind rip the door completely off of the car? My seatbelt was secure, so I was pretty sure I wouldn’t fly out of the car, but would anything else fly out? What would my Mother do?
I looked over at my Mother who was paying careful attention to the road and vaguely singing along with the radio. Then I looked over at the gleaming car handle. I knew that opening the door while we were driving was a very stupid and potentially dangerous thing to do, but it was almost as if the handle was calling my name. It wanted me to open it. I tried to resist, but my curiosity overwhelmed me. Slowly, I reached over…and opened the door.
Turns out the only thing that happens when you open the car door on the expressway is your Mother screams, “OH MY GOD! HOW DID THAT HAPPEN?” pulls over, closes your door, and then goes homes and bitches to your Father about her vehicle being unsafe and demands he buy her a new one.
It wasn’t the most exciting outcome in the world, but at least I knew.
This past Friday evening, I found myself inadvertently playing another game of ‘What would happen if…’
My husband has been dealing with a particularly nasty summer cold and it’s making it difficult for him to fall asleep. Shortly after midnight one evening, he asked me to run to the store and pick him up some medicine. I agreed because I’m nice like that.
After selecting a bottle of Nyquil and my Husband’s favorite brand of ice cream, it was time to check-out. I elected to go through the self check-out lane because the group of kids who normally jockeyed the registers looked thoroughly engrossed in a conversation about their parents sucking or their jobs sucking or who de-friended them on myspace recently or whatever and I didn’t want to interrupt them. Besides, I have two fully functioning arms. I am capable of scanning and bagging my own ice cream.
However, after I scanned my items, the computer started beeping.
“You have selected an age restricted item. Please wait for a cashier,” it said.
“What the Hell?” I mused, “Ice cream and Nyquil is age restricted now?”
A teenager with a lip piercing and bad dye job came rushing over. “Can I see your ID?” she chirped.
“What did I order that needs ID?” I asked.
She looked over my purchases and shrugged. “I guess it’s the Nyquil.”
I sighed deeply and handed her my driver’s license. She glanced at it quickly, typed my birthday into the computer, handed it back, and scurried away. Even though I didn’t show it, I was all kinds of annoyed.
I mean, what kind of nanny state am I living in right now? I can’t even buy cold medicine anymore without the government all up in my shit? Why is my right to privacy being invaded in favor of incompetent police officers who lack the ability to catch drug dealers without spying on the average law abiding citizen?
Then, out of nowhere, I thought, I wonder what would happen if I tried to buy all the Nyquil on the shelf?
Would they laugh? Would they get angry? Would they sell it to me? Would they call the cops? Would they interrogate me until I told them what it was for?
No matter how many years pass, I remain easily seduced by my curiosity. The harder I try to shake the wondering thoughts from my head, the more they burrow into my brain and demand recognition. By the time I got home from the grocery store, I simply had to know what would happen if I tried to buy an entire shelf full of Nyquil.
The next morning, I woke up bright and early with the intent of carrying out my plan. Now I’m not really sure how the typical Meth Head dresses, so I took a guess. I clad myself in an old T-shirt and a ripped pair of pants that were covered in paint. I pulled my hair back in a ratty ponytail and slipped on a pair of dirty sandals. My goal was to look as shady as possible without overdoing it.
Upon entering the store, I grabbed one of those hand-held shopping baskets and walked with single minded purpose over to the drug isle. I then proceeded to fill my basket with every bottle of Nyquil sitting on the shelf. There weren’t that many and I really wanted to be obvious, so I decided to buy all the generic versions as well. Then I marched my ass right over to the cashier and emptied my basket onto the conveyor belt. At first she wasn’t really paying attention as she grabbed bottle after bottle and flipped them through the scanner. Then a little light must have gone off in her head because she suddenly paused.
“Are these on sale or something?” she asked.
“Nope.” I replied noncommittally.
“I’m going to need to see your ID,” she responded.
“Sure.” I said as I handed it over.
“I’ll be right back,” she told me as she scampered over to the customer service desk to show my ID to who I assumed was the manager.
The guy in line behind me asked, “Someone sick?”
“I’m having a yard sale,” I replied. Yeah, my answer didn’t make much sense. But it was none of his business, so fuck him.
After about 10 minutes, the cashier came back and gave me my ID. Then she finished ringing me up and handed over two bags of Nyquil. “Um, have a nice day,” she said.
I thanked her politely and headed out to my car thinking to myself that the whole scenario ended up being fairly anticlimactic. This time, bending to the will of my curiosity earned me nothing more than 10 minutes of inconvenience and 25 bottles of unneeded Nyquil. Fucking fantastic.
I went home, unloaded my spoils onto my kitchen table and decided to take a nap on my couch. Right before I fell asleep, I thought to myself, I really need to stop playing that game.
A couple of hours later, my brother and his girlfriend woke me up.
“What the hell is with all the Nyquil?” he asked.
I told him about my game and how nothing really exciting happened. Then, he said, “Probably because you bought the wrong shit.”
I said, “Huh?”
With a smirk on his face, my brother explained, “The ingredient in Nyquil that is used to make crystal meth is called pseudoephedrine. But these don’t have it in them. Look! It even says right here on the front, ‘Now Made without pseudoephedrine.’
“Then why did they card me for them?”
“How the hell am I supposed to know? All I know is that you can’t make meth out of these.”
“Son of a bitch!” I exclaimed.
“You are the worst fake drug dealer ever,” my brother admonished.
His girlfriend cut in, “You know what you should get? Sudafed. They sell it behind the counter at the pharmacy and they probably won’t give you more than one or two. But it might be funny if you asked to exchange your Nyquil for 25 boxes of Sudafed.”
For me, failure tends to make me more determined, so I decided that was exactly what I was going to do. But, this time, I wanted to start my adventure with a bit more planning. I decided to call the grocery store and ask if it was even possible to return Nyquil since it was technically a medicine. The manager I spoke to assured me that as long as I had the receipt and the seal wasn’t broken, they would take it back.
So the next day, I packed up my bags of Nyquil and headed back to the grocery store. I plopped the bags on the counter of the customer service desk and amicably said, “I’d like to return these, please.”
The cashier looked shocked. “All of these?”
“Yes please,” I answered mildly, “Here is the receipt.”
“How many bottles are in here?”
“25.”
“25? You bought 25 bottles of Nyquil? Why would you do that?” she asked.
“I wasn’t feeling well.” I answered.
“So why are you returning them now?” She countered.
I slightly hardened my voice. “I’m feeling better.”
“Normal people don’t buy 25 bottles of Nyquil!” she exclaimed.
“So?” I snapped.
She started stammering. “Well….its just that I don’t….I don’t know…if we can take this many back. We’d have to throw them away and….I….uh….”
“I called and spoke to a manager yesterday,” I informed her, “And he told me that as long as the seal wasn’t broken and I had the receipt, you would take them back.”
“Well I’m sure he didn’t know how many you bought!”
“Does it matter?” I questioned, “Is there some sort of store policy that states you can only return so many things at a time?”
“I’m going to get my manger,” she replied.
“Fine.”
The manger came over, obviously perturbed, and we argued back and forth for a few minutes. Finally she said, “I’ll take them back this time. But next time, I won’t.”
“That’s fine by me,” I agreed.
I filled out a form with my name, address, and phone number, got my cash back and walked directly over to the pharmacy.
An older lady walked over to wait on me. “Can I please buy some Sudafed?” I requested.
“Sure!” she said as she held out her hand, “I’m going to need some proof that you’re over 18, though.”
“That’s fine,” I told her, “But I’m going to need more than one.”
“How many do you need?”
“25.”
“25 tablets?”
“No, 25 boxes.”
I’m not sure if my answer extremely shocked her or extremely angered her, but her response was to shriek, “NO!”
Calmly, I asked, “Why not?”
“NO!” she bellowed again.
“But why not?” I repeated.
“BECAUSE OF THE METH!” she hollered.
I smiled a little and said, “I promise I won’t use it to make meth.”
Again: “NO!”
A concerned Pharmacist walked around the counter. “What seems to be the problem here?” he questioned.
“I’m just trying to by some Sudafed.” I answered.
The cashier squawked again, “NO! YOU CAN’T HAVE ANY!”
And I was supposed to be the crazy one!
The Pharmacist gave her a confused look and she said to him, “She wants 25 boxes!”
“Whoa, wait a minute, ma’am!” he said to me.
Just then, out of the corner of my eye, I realized that the manager who did my return and a couple of stock boys were walking up behind me. They were closing in on me!
I thought to myself what better time to walk away, all shifty, like I was a real drug dealer than now. So I abruptly did an about-face and briskly started striding towards the door.
The Pharmacist tried to stop me. “Ma’am!” he called after me, “Ma’am! I’m going to need you to come back here! Ma’am!”
Seriously, I couldn’t believe he actually thought I would fall for that. I mean, what am I? 12 years old? Did he actually think I would be naïve enough to believe that a goddamn Pharmacist had the legal right to forcibly detain me in a grocery store?
But the ridiculousness of the situation was only a fleeting thought in my mind. At that precise moment, I had more pressing matters to concern myself with. Namely, how I was going to shake the manager and the stock boy goons who were in the process of following me out of the store.
I increased my walking speed a little and made it outside. I paused for a second, thinking the chase was over, but I was wrong. The manager had tailed me into the parking lot. Frantically, she started waving the cart boys over to her and pointing in my direction. Before I knew it, I had a small army of grocery store employees following me around the parking lot. It was fucking surreal. I felt like I was starring in the deleted scenes of one of those Terminator movies.
My theory was that they were waiting until I got into my car so they could write down my license plate number. To me, this was odd, considering the fact that they had my name, address, and phone number written on a slip of paper behind the customer service desk.
Anyway, I finally thwarted them for good by electing to simply walk home. Because I live a couple of miles from the grocery store, I decided to call my brother.
“Hey, if the cops show up at my door, do not let them in without a warrant,” I told him, “That’s a violation of my 4th amendment rights!”
“No problem.” He said. He’s learned to quit asking questions.
The end result of my little escapade, however, produced no angry police officers ruthlessly pounding on my door. In fact, outside of a couple of grocery store employees who briefly pretended to be Rambo, nothing really exciting happened at all.
All in all, I ended up fairly disappointed with my most recent game of ‘What would happen if….’ You see, that’s the problem with letting yourself become randomly consumed by curiosity. Things rarely live up to your expectations.The first evidence from the era when Hellenistic culture held sway over the ancient city of Jerusalem has been uncovered by Israeli archaeologists; Acra, a citadel constructed by the Greeks more than two thousand years ago in the middle of old Jerusalem.
Judea was conquered by Alexander the Great during the fourth century BCE. When Judea’s capital, Jerusalem, took sides with Seleucid King Antiochus III in the argument over whether an Egyptian garrison would be expelled, the grateful Antiochus gave the Jews religious autonomy, thus beginning 150 years of flourishing Greek language and culture there. Archaeologists however, have found very few buildings or other artifacts from this time period.
Until now, the fortress had only been known from the texts which described its construction and its role in a bloody revolt which eventually led to the removal of the Greeks in 164 BCE, an event which is celebrated by Jews during Hanukkah. The rebels failed however, to overthrow the Acra and for more than twenty years they continued to try and capture the fortress. Finally, the stronghold was captured in 141 BCE and the remaining Greeks expelled.
What happened to the Acra next has been debated by experts for over a century. Various historical references to the fortress have it being dismantled while others describe it being fortified, even its location within or outside of the boundaries of Jerusalem has been argued about.
Many of those questions are about to be answered. When plans to build a museum were announced by the Ir David Foundation in 2007, an archaeological salvage excavation (which is standard in Israel) was started. The site, under a longstanding parking lot between Silwan (a Palestinian village) to the south and the Temple Mount to the north, has become a huge rectangular hole that drops from the street to over three stories down.
The research team dug through consecutive layers, beginning with an Islamic market, then a Byzantine orchard and then an extravagant Roman Villa under which a cache of 264 seventh century coins were discovered and then a first-century Jewish bath. Within the layers where coins and pottery were found to be from the BCE centuries the researchers found what appeared to be random rubble.
But the rubble wasn’t random and instead turned out to be rocks which had been carefully placed to form a glacis, a protruding slope at the top of a defensive wall. Also found were coins dating from between the times of Antiochus IV and Antiochus VII (the Seleucid king when the Acra was conquered). Other artifacts discovered in the same layer included Greek arrowheads, ballistic stones, slingshots, and imported wine. Orthodox Jews only drank local wine, which suggests foreigners were present.
The fortress shows no signs of having been dismantled, in fact a later Jewish kingdom had actually cut into the walls during construction work and reused the stones for other buildings, slowly eating away at the fortress.
Along with the discovery has come controversy, with some opposing the planned construction of the museum on the basis it will destroy these latest discoveries, while other hold more political views. Officials with the Israeli Antiquities Authority have taken the matter under consideration.
Image courtesy of Israeli Antiquities AuthorityStudy: Mountaintop Coal Mining Causes Appalachian Rivers to Run ‘Consistently Saltier’
A portion of the Hobet 21 coal mine in West Virginia shows the effects of mountaintop-removal mining, which, new research shows, causes many streams and rivers in Appalachia to run consistently saltier for up to 80 percent of the year. (Fabian Nippgen Photo)
Mountaintop-removal coal mining causes many streams and rivers in Appalachia to run consistently saltier for up to 80 percent of the year, a new study by researchers at the University of Wyoming and Duke University finds.
The scientists examined water quality in four watersheds that flow into southern West Virginia’s Mud River basin, the site of extensive mountaintop mining in recent years. In mountaintop-removal mining, underground coal seams are exposed by blasting away summits or ridges above them. Any leftover debris and crushed rocks are deposited in neighboring valleys, creating “valley fills” that can stretch for long distances and bury entire streambeds.
“Over time, alkaline salts and other contaminants from the coal residue and crushed rocks in these valley fills leach into nearby streams and rivers, degrading water quality and causing dramatic increases in salinity that are harmful to downstream ecosystems,” says Fabian Nippgen, assistant professor of ecosystem science and management at UW.
To compound matters, the porosity of the crushed rocks increases the water storage capacity of the valley fills. This decreases natural storm runoff during high-flow winter months while contributing proportionately more water to streamflows during the drier months that make up about 80 percent of the region’s calendar year.
“These significant alterations are likely to lead to saltier and more perennial streamflows throughout Appalachia, where at least 7 percent of the land has already been disturbed by mountaintop-removal mining,” says Nippgen, who notes that mountaintop removal is not part of Wyoming’s coal industry. “It’s not just the mountains that are being changed.”
The new findings have implications not just for Appalachia, but for large portions of the eastern United States, other coal-mining regions and other areas where humans have dramatically changed Earth’s surface, says Matthew Ross, a Ph.D. student at Duke’s Nicholas School of the Environment.
“The consequences are both an altered hydrologic regime -- which has implications for farming, urban water use and the environment -- as well as degradation of streamwater quality,” he says.
Nippgen, Ross and their co-authors published the peer-reviewed study this week in the journal Environmental Science & Technology.
It is among the first studies to document mountaintop-removal coal mining’s long-term impacts on watershed, and to show how mined areas contribute to local and regional streamflow.
“This work demonstrates that mined watersheds contribute disproportionately to summer baseflow through the Appalachian region, so that mine-derived pollutants are at higher concentrations, and are transported farther downstream, during these low-flow times of year. That means many more Appalachian rivers are now flowing year-round and are consistently salty,” says Brian L. McGlynn, professor of watershed hydrology and biogeosciences at Duke’s Nicholas School.
Emily S. Bernhardt, the Jerry G. and Patricia Crawford Hubbard Professor of biogeochemistry at Duke, co-wrote the paper with Nippgen, Ross and McGlynn. Funding came from the National Science Foundation.
An interactive website detailing the new research is online at https://mtm-hydro.web.duke.edu.Why Defending Your Cultural Appropriation is Dangerous
“Shared or Stolen: An Examination of Cultural Appropriation” — Image courtesy of artist: Shannon Wright
L ast year I was appointed the Home-Alone-face-grabbing task of trying to explain cultural appropriation to my employer, who was receiving severe, yet deserved, backlash after a post on the company’s social media page. In it, a very fair skinned, blonde model donned some hairstylist’s combination of dreads and box braids. In the midst of the company’s confusion and apparent frustration from the responses, I tried my best to explain why they were experiencing this massive exodus and disapproval from fans/followers. — Especially considering these fans were very culturally aware, young, amazingly outspoken women privy to the internet and all of its platforms.
My approach began from a place of recognition.
Explaining that while I understood there are other forms of cultural appropriation in various parts of society (food, makeup, music, etc…) Fashion, which was the industry they chose to be a part of, was EXTRAORDINARILY effected. In an attempt to get him to relate or at least find some semblance of understanding, I specifically brought up the troths of festival goers who carelessly threw on dashikis, marked their heads with bindis, wrapped in saris, and posed for selfies in headdresses every summer.
No luck.
Fashion houses have numerous models walk the runway in shows using style, construction, and crafts that are “elevated” from their cultural inspiration. With such influence the larger designers have on how it trickles down to retailers, they could take a positive step forward by collaborating with the community from where these outfits are inspired. Or in the very least, have solid representation in the casting of their models.
Taking an ABC approach, I defined the differences between appropriation vs. assimilation and the very fine line of appreciation.
Nothing.
Then, in hopes of connecting to him on a personal level, I even expressed what it meant to me as a half-Black woman, and my own struggles to try and match society’s “ideal” beauty standards while I was growing up. The below are a few of the responses I was met with…verbatim.
“If someone pulls from a culture, it’s a compliment.”
“Bob Marley had dreads because it was a trend.”
“It’s just hair.”
“There are worse things to worry about.”
“I don’t see color.”
“We get it, you’re Black.”
Que: Open mouthed, wide eyed, is this real life? Expression, reading all over my face.
Instead of listening, my employer immediately went on the defense.
The rest of the conversation, as well as the very short time I was employed there (yes, unfortunately I stayed post discussion) went rapidly downhill. In a last ditch effort, I tried to use business to find logic. I explained the complexities of Black hair and the challenges appropriation and lack of understanding forced Black women to face with many companies. Black women (as well as other women of color) are not only being told that their natural beauty is undesirable but they’re also being shown that it is unacceptable in the workplace and deemed inappropriate. Yet, Black women continue to see images in fashion, magazines, music, and all across the media of their natural beauty removed from their brown skin and its meaning.
Lara Oddofin
Herein lies an unfortunate truth: Job prospects are either on the line or being lost because of our hair. About two weeks ago, a Bournemouth University graduate, Lara Odoffin, received an ultimatum in the form of a letter from a potential employer — Remove her large twists or they would not be able to offer her any work. Now, I dare you to do a Google image search for ‘professional hairstyles’ and ‘non professional hairstyles.’
…Don’t worry, I’ll wait.
It cannot be denied — The majority of the latter are Black women wearing their hair either naturally or done in culturally prided styles.
Let’s change Lara’s race for a moment, and instead acknowledge the employers probable point that it was really about the hairstyle. How would the situation be handled?
Employer: I’m sorry we cannot allow this hairstyle in the workplace.
Lara: Ok, I can remove them.
Simple fix to a problem in which an image didn’t align with the company. The employer sees this as a trend because that’s what they believe it to be. However, it is far from the case. While others are being rewarded for “rocking” parts of someone else’s deep rooted culture, with little to no knowledge or understanding, the communities from which they are pulling are being reprimanded. This along with the images shown in media says: This is acceptable and trendy…ONLY if you have fair skin. Black culture, along with so many others, are being used as costumes. And at the end of the day, those that are ignorantly “rocking” these “trends” can do something we cannot — take them off. We cannot take off our skin or remove our oppressed history.
You want to take part in this but remain uninvolved?
Do you know what comes with it?
The same internal eye roll I experience when I hear, “I’m not (fill in the blank), I have (X amount of) Black friends.” Resurfaces every time someone says to me, “I love your hair, I’ve always wanted an afro.” Thank you kind person for your genuine compliment that should have ended there, because the rest only perpetuates the fact that you may lack knowledge of your entitlement. What this misguided comment actually sounds like to me is, “Yes, I like that. I will have that. Regardless of its origins and struggles that might come with it. I don’t know why you do that nor will I take the time to learn, but I like it. Gimme that.”
That blind entitlement is the foundation in which a person’s defense can begin to grow and also find a distorted justification, when confronted. Oftentimes when someone is called out for appropriation by the community from which they’re stealing — they take offense and go on the defense. Responding aggressively or decidedly taking an uninvolved stance through passive language. Such as chocking it up to, “There are bigger issues.”
This is dangerous.
Image from 1940’s Clark Doll Test
is replaced with an automated defense, is incredibly problematic because it is disguised entitlement. And that entitlement is systemic, meaning it has become ingrained in our society so much so that it’s second nature and done without thought. The public images of stolen culture being reapplied to the majority, paired with the effect of these aggressions and dismissive responses can have an incredible consequence on a young person’s psyche and can also influence how they value their self worth. If you aren’t already familiar with Dr. Kenneth and Mamie Clark’s psychological experiments in the 1940’s known as the The lack of honest listening and empathyis replaced with an automated defense, is incredibly problematic because it is disguised entitlement. And that entitlement is systemic, meaning it has become ingrained in our society so much so that it’s second nature and done without thought. The public images of stolen culture being reapplied to the majority, paired with the effect of these aggressions and dismissive responses can have an incredible consequence on a young person’s psyche and can also influence how they value their self worth. If you aren’t already familiar with Dr. Kenneth and Mamie Clark’s psychological experiments in the 1940’s known as the Clark Doll Test, study up and get to know it. The results of this test, which had Black children choose between a White and Black doll based on which they thought were more intelligent, ‘nice’, ‘bad’, pretty, etc…Clearly showed that the children felt inferior, bringing to light the internalized racism shaping these young minds. This negative development continues to remain constant through generations, and still rings true today. In 2006, 17 yr. old Kiri Davis created a 7 min. documentary called, Kiri Davis: A Girl Like Me, where she re-examined Dr. Clark’s historic test. The results ran parallel with that of the test from the 1940’s.
A still from 2006 Kiri Davis: A Girl Like Me — https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z0BxFRu_SOw
This inferiority complex is important to note. Violence and oppression breed off of keeping a group of individuals complacent and not only feeling but believing they are lesser than the majority. Cultural appropriation is a non issue for a majority that don’t understand its relationship to power. Many people, not all of them White, believe that cultural appropriation is unimportant. However, the history of physical battery and power couldn’t be sustained without mental battery as well. To not believe that a dismissive response to appropriation or groundless offense is not systemic and inherent in our culture, only continues to promote cognitive dissonance. Franz Fanon writes in his book Black Skin, White Masks…
“Sometimes people hold a core belief that is very strong. When they are presented with evidence that works against that belief, the new evidence cannot be accepted. It would create a feeling that is extremely uncomfortable, called cognitive dissonance. And because it is so important to protect the core belief, they will rationalize, ignore and even deny anything that doesn’t fit in with the core belief.”
Every aggression and overlooked discriminatory action or decision comes full circle when there is the foundation of hate. And when a group of people are historically deemed undesirable, it is easier for the oppressor to not only continue but justify violence because those they are oppressing are not seen as equals and instead, subordinate.Unpack your bags, Standing Committee on Procedure and House Affairs, you're staying in Ottawa.
Despite a concerted effort by opposition members to convince their Conservative colleagues to support their call for cross-country hearings on the election bill, it appears the government will use its majority to quash an NDP motion to move the debate off the Hill and out of the political bubble.
Initially, the government had seemed open to at least considering the idea of taking the committee show on the road.
After taking the rare step of opening up what had been billed as a closed-door planning meeting to the press, the committee appeared to wrap up on a cautiously optimistic, albeit somewhat confused, note.
In exchange for the unanimous support required to authorize the chair to invite Democratic Reform Minister Pierre Poilievre to appear on Thursday, Conservative committee lead Tom Lukiwski promised to take the NDP proposal under advisement.
But while the New Democrats seemed willing to accept Lukiwski's offer, lone Liberal MP Kevin Lamoureux refused to give his consent without what he described as a "firm commitment" to cross-country hearings, which Lukiwski was unable to provide.
"It's a trust issue," Lamoureux explained as the clock ticked away the remaining minutes before the committee was scheduled to adjourn.
As a result of Lamoureux's hesitation, when the gavel came down, no one — not even the MPs at the table — was entirely sure whether the minister would be invited to appear on Thursday or not, as they hadn't actually passed a motion instructing the chair to make it happen.
"It's the chair's problem now," NDP MP David Christopherson told reporters.
But without an agreement on travel, he hinted that the ensuing debate on his motion would likely preempt any putative ministerial appearance.
A few hours later, Lukiwski confirmed, via email to CBC News, that his party will not be supporting the NDP proposal, a move that he acknowledged could scuttle the plan to have Poilievre present his bill to the committee later this week.
"I suspect even if the minister plans to attend, the NDP and Liberals will try to filibuster the meeting to prevent his appearance," he predicted.
"It is apparent to me that they will do everything in their power to prevent the committee from commencing the study unless they get agreement to hold meetings outside of Ottawa."
Given the already tense state of inter-party relations across the committee table, that seems like a safe bet.
UPDATE: It looks like Procedure and House Affairs isn't the only committee being grounded for the foreseeable future.
In a possibly unprecedented show of procedural passive aggression, the New Democrats have flexed their parliamentary muscle by blocking a motion to allow other House committees to travel over the coming weeks, including previously scheduled all-expense paid trips to New York City, Washington D.C., Houston, Chile, Peru and several other far-flung locales.
NDP House Leader Nathan Cullen made sure to put the rationale behind the move on the official record.
As soon as the consent had been formally denied, he rose on a point of order to highlight, once again, his party's frustration over the government's refusal to allow cross-country hearings on the election bill.
"Typically parties are able to establish the working conditions for our committees and do the good work of Parliament," he noted.
"What is also unprecedented is that the government has refused, absolutely refused Canada-wide public hearings on its unfair and rigged elections bill, in which the Conservatives are seeking to change the fundamental democratic values in this country."
In response, Government Whip John Duncan could do nothing but grumble about being "held hostage" by the Official Opposition.
Even without all-party consent, the government could put the travel authorization motion up for debate, which would almost certainly eat up a few hours of Commons time — and, perhaps even more politically problematic, draw more attention to its intransigence on the still-pending review of the election bill.
More likely, the committees will simply have to cancel their planned excursions, and content themselves with fact-finding within the borders of the parliamentary precinct.
That is, unless the government comes to the conclusion that this particular battle isn't worth fighting, and gives the green light for Procedure and House Affairs to hit the road.Chocolate Mousse Caramel Pecan Cheesecake
Chocolate Mousse Caramel Pecan Cheesecake is a cross between chocolate cheesecake and chocolate mousse on a grain free pecan crust with an amazing caramel sauce topping.
This decadent dessert is, grain free, low carb, primal, gluten free and requires no baking. It can be primal or low carb depending on sweetener option used. I wanted to make a cheesecake that had sort of a chocolate turtle flavor.
I decided, since it has been warmer weather, to make this a no bake variety. The fact that it is easier to make had nothing to do with that decision, oh no it didn’t, lol.
We were very happy with how this creation turned out. It is not as dense as a cheesecake, but not as light and fluffy as a mousse. It has a creamy, silky, and slightly firm texture. The low carb version of this pie was delightful. This pie contains dairy, of course, but I will soon be experimenting with a dairy free paleo version, in the near future.
I know that you are probably surprised that these are not mini pies or tarts. I almost always make those, but decided to make a whole pie this time, as I had guests coming over.
I also had new set of springform pans to play with. They are pretty awesome, and I should have purchased these years ago. I actually used to make cheese cake in a regular cake pan, and it was not easy to get it out of the pan at all. It took me 20 years to decide to make it easier on myself and buy these springform pans.
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visit with us on Facebook! To find other delicious Low-Carb, Gluten-Free recipes,
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RECIPE AND DIRECTIONS BELOW:To deposit some Bitcoin to the exchange:
After making an account on https://www.cryptopia.co.nz,
(Note, every time you log on to Cryptopia, you’ll get an email. It’s part of their anti-hacking protection.)
Then go to your Account Balances at:
https://www.cryptopia.co.nz/Balances
NOTE: you can hide any coins that you don’t follow so they don’t show in the list. Click the far right tick box on coins you want to show up, so you won’t have to weed through the whole list every time. This is useful since many people only deal in a handful of currencies. Here I show how to do it if you only want to see BipCoin and Bitcoin. lol.:
Then, while on that page, double click on the “Show Address” of the currency you want to deposit.
Click the “Copy Address” icon to copy to the address:
(If you ever deposit BipCoin to sell, please read this first.)
Copy that address in the “send” field in your Bitcoin wallet and deposit some BTC to Cryptopia.
After depositing Bitcoin (or other coin), it takes about 10 min after deposit to show incoming, then 30 total approx to be available.
Here’s where you buy and sell BipCoin for Bitcoin and vs versa: https://www.cryptopia.co.nz/Exchange/?market=BIP_BTC
Buy orders are the way to get the lowest price but it can take a day or two.
For immediate orders, I’ve click on the left on a price / amount I like and buy it on the spot. Or entered an amount to buy and buy it.
BUY ORDERS:
Randy adds: I set a buy order and overnight, half a dozen sellers came in and sold me chunks of my buy order. At the moment all but about 3% of it is complete. So I would say it went extremely well, considering the price I paid was so far below what people were asking over on the left hand “Sell Orders” box.
I think the trick is not to match a sell order in the left hand box, but to offer the highest buy price in the “Buy Order” list on the right. Sellers just show up and grab the best deal they can get on the spot.
Here’s the full Cryptopia FAQ if you need more help, or need help with something else.
To withdraw from the exchange to your own account.
Then you will get a confirm email, and you’ll have to click to confirm:
Happy transacting!
–BipDevsReview:
We have to be all those difficult things like cheerful and kind and curious and patient, and we’ve got to study and think and work hard, all of us, in all our different |
99 “isn’t even the most exciting, crazy thing that happens in the [Sept. 27] premiere,” Fumero asserts. “It’s a twisted episode!”
I’m wondering it Sesame Street‘s new arrangement with HBO affects their deal with Amazon Prime. Elmo is very important in this household and a big perk of our Prime membership. –Lauren
You would be correct to wonder. Both the new episodes (premiering on HBO this fall, then hitting PBS nine months later) and the 150 or so “library” episodes the pay cabler has licenses will be exclusive to HBO and its assorted services.
Now that we’re in Season 2, will Gotham still keep up the Thomas and Martha Wayne investigation, or will the show move on from that? –Sofia
I hand-delivered your question to Bruce Wayne’s portrayer, David Mazouz, who said that the series-launching murder mystery “will be an ongoing thing” throughout Gotham‘s run. “Gordon’s not really looking into it that much anymore, but Bruce is,” the teen said. “The Top 3 things that are on Bruce’s list are: take down the corrupt side of Wayne Enterprises, find out who his father really was, and find out his parents’ murderer. And they’re all connected.”
In Season 3 of Reign, will Catherine be in English court with Elizabeth? I love Megan Follows and want to see Catherine scheming and plotting. –Andrea
Seeing as Season 3 is “the season of the three queens” (Catherine, Mary and Elizabeth), it appears you will be satisfied. Especially seeing as Catherine, who had a fall from grace last season, will use every means necessary to claw her way back to power, including capitalizing on her alliances in other countries.
Any word from HBO on if they will pick up The Devil You Know? –Theresa
I circled back with HBO just the other day and a decision has yet to be made about whether Jenji Kohan’s Salem Witch Trials-set pilot will go to series.
Are Callie and AJ over on The Fosters because of the whole Brandon thing? Or can we expect another new love interest for Callie? –Briana
“There could be potential for more of that [relationship] to play out” in Season 3B, David Lambert says. “But at this point, I feel like it’s sort of done.” After all, “The moms tried to nip the whole thing in the bud and end it before it really begins,” the actor points out. “A.J. also has his own things to worry about with his brother and his living situation.”
ABC confirmed in December of last year that they were developing a miniseries based in Ken Follett’s bestseller Fall of Giants. Is there any news about the cast or release date? –Elizabeth
Oh, we’re a ways from that just yet. When I brought your Q to ABC president Paul Lee on Aug. 3, he had just received the first script and was “looking forward to reading it,” he said. “Apparently it’s very good.”
Real questions, real answers. If you need the Inside Line on a favorite show, email InsideLine@tvline.com! (With reporting by Vlada Gelman)When I put all four of the RAM sticks in, I was a bit disappointed that the computer wouldn't start up (any four, so it wasn't a broken stick, it's just that the motherboard apparently couldn't handle four of them at once). So I had to use an old 2GB for the last slot, to get 14GB in all of memory. Now more recently (just two days ago), I realized I was getting memory errors, and found one of the sticks was failing. So, I tried the extra memory stick, and it turns out that one had apparently degraded to where it caused errors too. So now I'm down to 11GB of memory (after adding an old 1GB to replace the just-failed 4GB) I'm seeing if I can send them in for replacement now, (it appears that I'll be able to), but it will be somewhat of a hassle since other people have said you have to send them all back as a pack. (so until then I'll only have like 3GB of memory to use) Finally, I suppose it is possible the failure involved some sort of motherboard<>memory-stick incompatibility. I don't see why there would be one, as I used the recommended configurations, but they weren't on each others' official compatibility list, so it's possible they somehow conflict with each other in design as opposed to just hardware malfunction/failure.
Read moreJake Ellenberger is down to fight anyone the UFC puts in front of him. That’s the approach he’s taken his entire MMA career and it’s a course he’ll hold until his fighting days are done.
That said, from time to time fellow fighters will call him out, and hasten the matchmaking process for “The Juggernaut.”
During a stop on the #FCRoadTrip project, MMA Lab representative Bryan Barberena told FloCombat he’d love to fight Ellenberger next. “Bam Bam” made it crystal clear there was no disrespect intended with the callout, just a fighter looking land a guaranteed scrap.
"There is someone I'd like to fight though," Barberena said. "I don't know if he'd like to fight me, but it would be a good one for the fans. I'd like to fight Jake Ellenberger. I think it would be a good fight for the fans. I have nothing against him. I've met him in person, fought his brother and no hard feelings. I just think it would be a great fight."
Shortly after the interview with Barberena concluded, FloCombat reached out to Ellenberger for comment on the matter. And in signature Ellenberger form, his response was quick and definitive.
“He’s like the eighth guy to call me out in the past month but sure,” Ellenberger said via text. “I’m in and it would be a great scrap.”
Both fighters are coming off losses in their most recent contests and a bout between the two would be a sure-shot hit for fight fans. Ellenberger lost to Jorge Masvidal in highly controversial fashion at The Ultimate Fighter 24 Finale in December. In a freak occurrence, the Kings MMA fighter had his foot stuck between the cage and the canvas during the tilt, and ultimately suffered a TKO loss rather than a “No Contest” due to injury.
Barberena suffered a setback at the hands of Colby Covington at UFC on Fox 22 on Dec. 3, but has found success in two of his past three showings inside the Octagon.Austria-born Kerim Frei has played Champions League football this season for Besiktas
Birmingham City have made their fifth signing of the January transfer window by bringing in Besiktas winger Kerim Frei on a three-and-a-half year deal.
Buying a wide man was one of Blues boss Gianfranco Zola's main priorities.
He had also been in the market for Derby County's Johnny Russell, as well as Robin Quaison, from Italian Serie A side Palermo.
But Birmingham have now agreed an undisclosed fee with the Turkish side, reportedly close to £2.2m.
Austria-born Frei, 23, who has won five international caps for Turkey, after representing Switzerland, where he was raised, from Under-15 through to Under-21 level.
He has a Moroccan mother, but chose to commit his international future to Turkey, the home country of his father.
Frei has been with Besiktas, since joining the Turkish side from Fulham, where he spent three seasons.
His arrival follows the completion of striker Lukas Jutkiewicz's move from Burnley, and the signings of West Bromwich Albion midfielder Craig Gardner and full-backs Emilio Nsue and Cheick Keita from Middlesbrough and Italian side Virtus Entella respectively.
Find all the latest football transfers on our dedicated page or visit our Premier League tracker here.Looking for news you can trust?
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Republicans have now made clear that they’re willing to filibuster all of President Obama’s nominees to the DC circuit court. This is not because they have any specific objections to them, but simply because they want to preserve the court’s conservative majority even though they lost the election. Greg Sargent reports that this is such a sweeping position that Harry Reid no longer thinks there’s any chance of brokering a compromise on the matter. The only option left, according to a senior leadership aide, is to go nuclear and do away with the filibuster entirely:
“Reid has become personally invested in the idea that Dems have no choice other than to change the rules if the Senate is going to remain a viable and functioning institution,” the aide says….Asked if Reid would drop the threat to go nuclear if Republicans green-lighted one or two of Obama’s judicial nominations, the aide said: “I don’t think that’s going to fly.” Reid has concluded Senate Republicans have no plausible way of retreating from the position they’ve adopted in this latest Senate rules standoff, the aide says. Republicans have argued that in pushing nominations, Obama is “packing” the court, and have insisted that Obama is trying to tilt the court’s ideological balance in a Democratic direction — which is to say that the Republican objection isn’t to the nominees Obama has chosen, but to the fact that he’s trying to nominate anyone at all. Reid believes that, having defined their position this way, Republicans have no plausible route out of the standoff other than total capitulation on the core principle they have articulated, which would be a “pretty dramatic reversal,” the aide continues.
But does Reid have the votes? The New York Times reports that Republican obstruction has finally gotten so outrageous that even previously cautious Democrats are now supporting Reid’s position:
Mr. Reid, of Nevada, has picked up crucial support from some of his more reluctant members recently. Senator Patrick J. Leahy, Democrat of Vermont and the longest-serving member of the Senate today, who is chairman of the Judiciary Committee, has endorsed putting limits on the filibuster despite his history of being protective of Senate institutions. The two senators from California, Dianne Feinstein and Barbara Boxer, said separately on Tuesday that they were leaning toward a rules change. ….The stakes seem higher this time for many Democrats. Many of them strongly believe that if Mr. Obama is not able to appoint any judges to the court — Republicans have rejected four of the five nominees he has submitted — it will retain its conservative bent for decades. It is a crucially important court for any White House because it often decides cases that relate to administration or federal agency policies.
At various points over the past year, Republicans have refused to confirm any nominees to the NLRB so that it would lose its quorum and be unable to pass new rules; they have refused to confirm any chairman of the CFPB in order to prevent it from functioning at all; they have threatened to destroy America’s credit unless Obamacare was defunded; and now they’re refusing to confirm any nominees to the DC circuit court in order to preserve its conservative tilt. Reid eventually managed to cut deals on the NLRB, the CFPB, and Obamacare, but as Feinstein says, “We left with a very good feeling there would be a new day. Well, the new day lasted maybe for a week.”
Add all this up—the NLRB, the CFPB, the debt ceiling extortion, and the DC court filibusters—and it’s now clear that Republicans have no intention of allowing Obama to govern normally. Instead, they have adopted a routine strategy of trying to nullify legislation they don’t like via procedural abuse. As Sargent puts it:
The GOP position is not grounded in an objection to Obama’s nominees or to the function of the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals; it’s grounded in the argument that Obama should not have the power to make these appointments to the court at all. As Jonathan Chait argues, Republicans may not have even thought through the full implications of the position they’ve adopted. But Dems have, and taking it to its logical conclusion, they believe Republicans have presented them with a simple choice: Either they change the rules, or they accept those limits on Obama’s power. And that really leaves only one option.
Yep.Opinion writer
Every once in a while, a politician says something so outrageous that it produces not the feigned outrage that has become so familiar, but genuine outrage. That’s what President Trump managed yesterday, when in a news conference he was asked about his public silence on the four American soldiers who were killed in Niger, and claimed that while he calls the families of those killed in action to express his condolences, previous presidents, particularly Barack Obama, hadn’t done so.
This was a particularly despicable lie, because it painted Obama — and other presidents, but let’s be honest, mostly Obama — as cruel and dismissive when it comes to the sacrifice of those in uniform, while portraying Trump as the only one who truly cares.
This morning, Trump actually seemed to double down. In an interview with Fox News’s Brian Kilmeade, he referred to the fact that the son of his chief of staff, John Kelly, was killed in Afghanistan in 2010:
“I mean, you could ask General Kelly did he get a call from Obama. You could ask other people. I don’t know what Obama’s policy was. I write letters, and I also call. … This was, again, fake news CNN. I mean, they’re just a bunch of fakers.”
It would be easy to just add this to the mountain of lies Trump has told, but it’s worth taking a moment to examine it, because it provides an important window not only into his own thinking but also the way that the president is succeeding in making the entire country stupider and more misinformed on an ongoing basis.
Let’s begin with Trump’s words at the news conference. He was asked, “Why haven’t we heard anything from you so far about the soldiers that were killed in Niger?” and he replied that he had written letters to the families, though those letters hadn’t yet been sent, and that he’d be calling them at some point. Then came this:
“So, the traditional way — if you look at President Obama and other Presidents, most of them didn’t make calls, a lot of them didn’t make calls. I like to call when it’s appropriate, when I think I’m able to do it.”
A few minutes later, another reporter circled back to this question, asking how Trump could claim that Obama didn’t call the families of fallen soldiers. Here’s part of his response:
“I don’t know if he did. No, no, no, I was told that he didn’t often. And a lot of Presidents don’t; they write letters. I do… “President Obama I think probably did sometimes, and maybe sometimes he didn’t. I don’t know. That’s what I was told. All I can do — all I can do is ask my generals. Other Presidents did not call. They’d write letters. And some Presidents didn’t do anything. But I like the combination of — I like, when I can, the combination of a call and also a letter.”
It’s obvious from his responses that Trump had absolutely no idea what presidents before him did or didn’t do in this situation, which he admitted again today (“I don’t know what Obama’s policy was”). But he went ahead and claimed that only he calls the families.
This is quite familiar to anyone who has been watching Trump these past couple of years. He takes his own limited experience and characterizes it as unique, extraordinary and unprecedented. No one has ever done this before, no one has accomplished so much, no one knows more than I do. There’s an element of the salesman’s puffery at work, but it also comes from a place of pure ignorance.
As conservative writer Tim Carney hypothesized last week, when Trump claims that no administration has ever done as much as his, it isn’t so much that he’s intentionally lying but that he’s so ignorant of the presidency and politics in general. He never realized that presidents and their staffs work very hard (“Like how 10-year-old me assumed teachers went into a cocoon at 3 pm,” Carney said), so he assumes he must be the first to have ever done so. The comparison to a 10-year-old is apt, because Trump’s brand of ignorance is so infantile. All of us are ignorant about some things, but only Trump believes that if he doesn’t know something, no one else could know it either (“Nobody knew that health care could be so complicated“).
When a normal person is in a state of ignorance, he or she might exercise some caution and refrain from making a volatile accusation that, for instance, his or her predecessors were callous to Gold Star families. But not Trump. You’ll notice that the first time he says it, he asserts it as simple fact: “If you look at President Obama and other Presidents, most of them didn’t make calls.” When he’s challenged, he equivocates: “I don’t know if he did … President Obama I think probably did sometimes, and maybe sometimes he didn’t. I don’t know. That’s what I was told.”
Now here’s why this matters. Yes, many news outlets pointed out that Trump wasn’t telling the truth. But there are probably three interns at Fox News who are now scouring old news reports to find some family member of a fallen soldier who didn’t get a call from Obama. If they find it, that person’s story will then become the subject of a segment on Sean Hannity’s show, and it will then get retold on a hundred talk radio programs and conservative websites as proof that Obama was a monster and the media are all lying about this. (Trump’s insistence that there was “fake news” at work is another way of telling his supporters not to believe whatever they hear about this subject that comes from sources not explicitly supporting him.) And I promise you that if you took a poll two weeks from now, you’d find that 40 percent of the public (or more) believes that Obama never called the family of any fallen soldier, and only Trump has the sensitivity to do so.
And that’s how Trump takes his own particular combination of ignorance, bluster and malice, and sets it off like a nuclear bomb of misinformation. The fallout spreads throughout the country, and no volume of corrections and fact checks can stop it. It wasn’t even part of a thought-out strategy, just a loathsome impulse that found its way out of the president’s mouth to spread far and wide.
If you’re one of those who marvel at the fact that Trump’s approval ratings aren’t even lower than they are, this is a big reason for that. It’s absolutely necessary to correct Trump’s falsehoods, but we shouldn’t fool ourselves into believing that any poisonous lie he tells won’t find an eager audience. And the whole country gets dumber and dumber.Last year, I wrote about the Reef Life Survey (RLS) project and my experience with offline data collection on the Great Barrier Reef. I found that using auto-generated flashcards with an increasing level of difficulty is a good way to memorise marine species. Since publishing that post, I have improved the flashcards and built a tool for exploring the aggregate survey data. Both tools are now publicly available on the RLS website. This post describes the tools and their implementation, and outlines possible directions for future work.
The tools
Each tool is fairly simple and focused on helping users achieve a small set of tasks. The best way to get familiar with the tools is to play with them by following the links below. If you’re only interested in using the tools, you can stop reading after this section. The rest of this post describes the data behind the tools, and some technical implementation details.
The data
The RLS database includes data collected by volunteer scuba divers on the diversity and abundance of marine life in sites around the world. An RLS survey is performed along a 50 metre tape, which is laid at a constant depth following a reef’s contour. After laying the tape, one diver takes photos of the bottom at 2.5 metre intervals along the transect line. These photos are analysed later to classify the type of substrate or growth (e.g., hard coral or sand). Divers then complete two swims along each side of the transect. On the first swim (method 1), divers record all the fish species and large swimming animals found in a 5 metre corridor from the line. The second swim (method 2) targets invertebrates and cryptic animals, and requires keeping closer to the bottom and looking under ledges and vegetation in a 1 metre corridor from the line. The RLS manual includes all the details on how surveys are performed. The data collected in the surveys is available for download from a Data Portal hosted by the Institute for Marine and Antarctic Studies at the University of Tasmania. As of early June 2017, the downloadable dataset consists of over half a million data points from almost ten thousand surveys.
When I first started studying marine species, I had to find a source for photos. Initially, I used Scrapy to build simple scrapers that downloaded photos from sites such as The Australian Museum, Fishbase, and Fishes of Australia. Last year, RLS made a large number of high-quality photos taken by volunteers available on their site (via the Species Search function). In addition to their high quality, an advantage of the RLS photos over images from other sources is that they were all taken in situ, i.e., in each animal’s natural habitat. On the other hand, other sites also include photos of dissections and hand-drawn illustrations, which aren’t as useful for divers who want to see marine animals as they appear in the wild. Working exclusively with the RLS image dataset has significantly improved the appearance and usefulness of the tools I built.
The raw RLS survey data comes in the form of over 100MB of CSV files. For the purpose of building the tools, I summarised the data into two JSON files with an overall size of less than 3MB (less than 1MB when compressed). This made it possible to implement both tools as single-page apps that don’t require any requests to the server after the initial fetching of the data. The two summary JSONs are:
species.json – a mapping from species ID to an array of five elements: scientific name, common name, species page URL, survey method (0: method 1, 1: method 2, or 2: both), and images (array of URLs).
– a mapping from species ID to an array of five elements: scientific name, common name, species page URL, survey method (0: method 1, 1: method 2, or 2: both), and images (array of URLs). site-surveys.json – a mapping from site code to an array of seven elements: realm, ecoregion, site name, longitude, latitude, number of surveys, and species counts (mapping from each observed species ID to the number of surveys on which it was seen).
Both files use mappings to arrays rather than nested objects to reduce the download size. I originally created the files myself by downloading the CSVs from the data portal and scraping the RLS website for images and common names. Static versions of those files from early June 2017 can be found on GitHub (species.json and site-surveys.json). As part of the integration with the RLS website, the RLS developers will implement live versions of the files, which will get updated automatically. I’ll add the links to the live versions when they become available. Please let me or the RLS team know if you find any issues with the data.
The approach I chose to produce the species counts in site-surveys.json doesn’t take abundance into account, i.e., each species is counted once per survey regardless of the number of times it was seen on the survey. Ignoring abundance means that for sites with few surveys, the species count may not be a good indicator of future likelihood of occurrence. For example, some fish are solitary and seen rarely, while others occur in schools and are likely to be seen on every survey. However, this is less of an issue for sites with many surveys. In addition, this simple counting approach is easier to explain than some approaches that do account for abundance.
Implementation details
The source code for the tools can be found in my GitHub Pages repository. Each tool is a simple single-page application, consisting of three files: index.jade, main.coffee, and style.less. In addition, the root source directory contains some common code in common.less and util.coffee, as well as configuration files for npm and Grunt. Grunt is used to compile the source files from Jade/Pug, CoffeeScript, and Less to HTML, JS, and CSS respectively. These files are then served statically by GitHub Pages.
The common CoffeeScript code loads the JSONs asynchronously, and processes them into nested mappings that are easier to work with than arrays. In addition, the common code contains a method to summarise counts from multiple sites, by aggregating them as simple sums. This means that sites that are surveyed more frequently get weighted more heavily. For example, if a certain fish X was seen once in site A, twice in site B, and never in site C, its count across A, B, and C is 1 + 2 + 0 = 3, but if A was surveyed once, B was surveyed twice, and C was surveyed seven times, X’s aggregate frequency is 3 / (1 + 2 + 7) = 30%. In the future, it may be worth normalising each site’s species counts by the number of times the site was surveyed (making X’s aggregate frequency (1 / 1 + 2 / 2 + 0 / 7) / 3 = 66.67% ), but then rare species in rarely-surveyed sites may be overweighted.
The Frequency Explorer tool uses the Google Maps API to show a map with all the past survey sites. Users can select sites by drawing an area on the map, or by searching for site names in a Select2 box. The tool fails gracefully when Google Maps isn’t available, which makes it possible to run it offline (assuming you have local copies of the species images). This was very useful on my last trip to the Coral Sea, where I was away from mobile reception for weeks. When sites are selected, the code generates a summary table of the species frequencies, which can be exported to a dynamically-generated CSV. In addition, users can choose to display images of all the species in the table. As this can trigger the download of thousands of images, I used vanilla-lazyload to only load images when they enter the viewport. Finally, Frequency Explorer can also be used as a site selector for the Flashcards tool, as it contains a link to launch Flashcards with the set of selected sites (which is passed in the Flashcards query string).
The Flashcards tool relies on the excellent reveal.js library to dynamically generate a presentation with a random subset of images of species that were recorded at the selected sites. The presentation consists of pairs of image and name slides – each image slide is followed by a slide where the name of the previously-shown animal is revealed. As I found that trying to memorise all the species at once is too hard, I added the ability to adjust the difficulty level of the flashcards by setting a frequency threshold (e.g., show only species that were recorded on 25% of surveys), or by focusing on observations from a single survey method (e.g., method 2 surveys in the tropics tend to be much less diverse than method 1 surveys). To avoid reloading the entire page when the settings change, the slides are regenerated dynamically. Reveal isn’t really built to account for dynamic regeneration of slides, so I had to add a call to Reveal.toggleOverview(false) to get the cards to refresh correctly, but other than that it worked perfectly.
Future work
There are several possible extensions to the work done so far.
First, the integration of the tools into the RLS website is incomplete. They are still served in iframes from my GitHub Pages account, and the JSON data isn’t updated automatically. Completing the integration is dependent on the RLS developers, who also have other priorities. Other RLS-dependent items include better optimisation of images (they’re currently scaled down on the client side), and general performance improvements to the site.
Second, the tools themselves could be improved. For example, reliance on third-party libraries should be reduced (e.g., Frequency Explorer uses Bootstrap due to my limited design skills), and it’d be nice if site selections were stored and read from the URL of Frequency Explorer (this is already done for Flashcards). In addition, as the tools are used to train new RLS divers, it’d be useful to extend the Flashcards tool to run in test mode, where users would type in the names of the animals rather than just passively scroll through the presentation. This would make it possible to assess diver readiness to perform surveys based on their test scores.
Finally, many other interesting things can be done with the RLS data (in addition to producing scientific papers and reports, which is the main focus of the researchers behind the project). Examples include using the images to automate species identification (as discussed more thoroughly in my previous post on the topic), and building models to predict survey output and detect anomalies (e.g., due to climate change or other unusual factors). If you have other ideas, or end up playing with the data and coming with interesting results, please share your findings in the comments section.About
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What is VizzyMotion?
It's a unique training tool that uses motion capture and animation so that any movement can be viewed and studied. It's a fun user experience but VizzyMotion is not a game. It assists people who want to learn formal patterns of movement. It can be accessed from a computer/laptop, or other device with Internet access. It is interactive and allows users complete control of the viewing experience. And because the motion reflects the precise movements of an expert or "Master," including skeletal and muscular views, users are assured they are learning the correct way.
Skeletal View
Click Here For Demo
Why VizzyMotion?
I wanted to offer my Kung Fu students a unique learning experience that would encourage them to practice outside of class. And, I wanted a way to study the best in the world so that I could progress in the art myself. When learning a sport or martial art, precise movement is not something that is easily learned by looking at a book or watching a DVD or YouTube video. So I merged my passion for animation with my passion for martial arts and created VizzyMotion. With VizzyMotion, users can go online to view and practice the exact movements of an expert or "Master" - any movement, from any angle, at any speed.
VizzyMotion Application
This Project
Eventually, VizzyMotion will offer a broad range of sports and martial arts - such as golf, gymnastics, karate, and physical therapy, to name a few. This project is to raise the funds needed to develop two offerings for the VizzyMotion application: Filipino Escrima and Yoga. Rest assured your pledge will be applied directly to the rewards and development costs for these offerings. We will also solicit Kickstarter users' feedback about how we might improve VizzyMotion and what other sports, martial arts, or movements they would like to see us develop.
Grand Master Rene Latosa’s Escrima Concepts is a very open, dynamic and logical martial art fighting system. With over 40 years of experience and refined development, Latosa’s Escrima is a fully transitional system which guides students from the weapon to the real relationship of empty hands and Filipino Boxing methods.
The basic principles of the system rest within the concepts of balance, speed (timing and distance), power, focus, and transition.
It Starts With MotionCapture
Martial Arts in particular have been refined through careful study and passed down from Master to Master for thousands of years. Today, with the most advanced motion capture system in the world at our disposal, VizzyMotion can present the precise movements of the best in their fields that students around the globe can then access and study.
Escrima Grand Master Renee Latosa
VizzyMotion Features
VizzyMotion is easy to use. Users log in and then select from the various menu options.
Precision – Movements are recorded at a higher frequency than the body can move.
Anatomical Viewing – View the muscle and skeletal systems of the characters.
Complete Camera Control – View movements from any angle, select from pre-defined camera angles, zoom in/out.
Split Screen – View multiple angles at the same time.
Viewing Speed – Slow down, speed up, or play in reverse - which is helpful for viewing intricate motions.
Visual Analytics – Motion trails, axis lines, and a balance point show precise movements.
VizzyMotion Features
I haven't found a single person who doesn't agree that getting people up and moving brings both physical and mental health benefits. VizzyMotion is another way to get people interested in learning to move! We thank you in advance for your support!President Obama called America “the greatest country in the world” on Friday, but the same day the US lost basic voting rights on the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (Unesco). The US stopped paying its dues in fall of 2011 because Unesco accepted Palestine (now a non-member observer state of the UN like the Vatican) as a member. Among Unesco’s recent activities has been helping with cultural recovery in earthquake-stricken Haiti.
Palestine Ambassador and Permanent Delegate at Unesco H.E. Elias Sanbar
Although the US says it favors a state of Palestine, in fact it has been rather gleefully helping screw over the Palestinians since 1948 and has de facto gone along with virtually any new outrage the Israelis could think up to inflict on them, from putting the children of Gaza ‘on a diet’ to gradually usurping the best land and water resources on the West Bank. Whenever the international community tried to pressure Israel to stop, and to allow stateless Palestinians to have the basic rights of citizenship and property, the US used its veto at the UNSC to ensure the Palestinians were kept down. Now, for the sake of making sure no one recognizes Palestine as a state, the US has cut off its $22 million a year dues to Unesco and has lost its voting rights on the committee.
This childish behavior, of taking your marbles and going home if you can’t win the playground game, is not befitting a superpower, and has the opposite effect of the one hoped for. It reduces US influence in the world and harms the American interest in seeing Unesco activities succeed. Are we really uninterested in preserving the world’s cultural heritage or in influencing world educational ideals?
It is an example in miniature of how US slavish acquiescence in aggressive and expansionist Israeli policy is hobbling the US, not increasing its stature.
Founded in 1945 and coming into force in 1946, Unesco has been important in preserving world heritage and archeological sites and promoting education and culture. Ironically, the US was recently using it to promote “Holocaust awareness” and to educate against genocide in Africa.
Unesco does so much worthy work that it deserves to have the US $22 million replaced. If 22 million people each gave a dollar a year, that would do it. But Unesco needs to join the 21st century– its Cultural Diversity contribution page doesn’t allow paypal or credit cards, just checks and bank wires! If somebody there were on the ball, they could start achieving a relationship with the world public and stop being so dependent on big states, and could get funded properly in that way.
In the meantime, American hawks who complain that the US is losing influence by having withdrawn militarily from Iraq and from declining to get involved militarily in Syria have it all wrong. Quagmires don’t increase your influence. But the US withdrawal from Unesco in a fit of pique over a Palestinian diplomatic achievement, now that is a loss of influence. And it demonstrates how knee-jerk US support for Likud Party policy is a liability for US foreign policy and makes the US less effective.Pelosi: 'Let's have transparency'
Nancy Pelosi wants the supercommittee to open its doors.
In an appearance Wednesday on "The Daily Show with Jon Stewart," the House minority leader said it's time for the 12-member panel to go before the cameras and lay out where the lawmakers stand as a Thanksgiving deadline rapidly approaches.
"Now, what we should say to the 12 people on the supercommmittee: Get in a room, sit down, reach agreement on public television," the California Democrat told Stewart. "Let's have transparency, an open meeting — where we see everybody's proposals and suggestions on the table — an explanation of them, what they would mean to not that table but the kitchen table of all America's families."
The crowd applauded.
The committee has been highly secretive in its negotiations until the last couple days as the two sides have traded charges that the other is trying to block a deal.
Asked about the process earlier Wednesday, Senate Minority Whip Jon Kyl — a committee member — said he couldn't defend it but promised that if there's a far-reaching deficit-cutting deal, there will be "plenty of time" to debate and consider it.On Friday we published an editorial – signed by the whole LabourList editorial team – calling on anonymous Labour MPs who have been critical of Ed Miliband’s leadership to “Put Up or Shut Up”. On Sunday, after another round of briefing from MPs unwilling to name themselves, we republished the editorial and asked LabourList readers to join us in signing it.
In just 24 hours, more than 1100 of you have signed our editorial and added your names to our call – and more names are being added as we speak. You can read the editorial here – and add your name here.
Here are the 1108 (and counting) LabourList readers who have signed so far:
Briony Robinson, Chelsea and Fulham
Andrea Simpson, Bury South
Russell Smith, South Suffolk
Lawrie Nerva, Brent North
Allan Walker, Bishop Auckland
Sandy Martin, Ipswich
David Powell, Crewe and Nantwich
William Geraint Thomas, Crawley
Edwi Henry Myatt, Dudley South
Brian Veal, Labour International
Nicola Brown, Tooting
John Waters, Great Yarmouth
Jean Stansfield, Rushcliffe
John Bunker, Bridgend
Roy Smith, Ogmore
Marilyn Williams, Bridgend Constituency Labour Party
Bev Angus, Labour International
Christine Webb, Bristol North West
Terence Norman Hammond, Gateshead
Robert Persad, Chipping Barnet
David Critchley, Ipswich
Michael Goodfellow, Newcastle Central
Robert Geaney, Tunbridge Wells
Marcus A. Roberts, Southampton Itchen
mark fittock, Sevenoaks
Francis Carmichael, Southend West
peter Rowley, Cleeth |
was his fourth largest ($10,000). In the 2002 election the Baby Bells gave more than $61,300 to Tauzin’s campaign committee and leadership PAC, making him the top congressional recipient of their political spending for that cycle. They also helped pay for a $400,000 Mardi Gras-themed fundraiser for Tauzin at the 2000 Republican National Convention. Tauzin’s son was employed at the time as a lobbyist for one of the Baby Bells, BellSouth, in Louisiana. (For more information on Tauzin’s deep relationship with the Bell companies, check out this article originally published at Interactive Weekly).
In 2001 Tauzin teamed up with Democratic Rep. John Dingell, himself a top recipient of Baby Bell largesse, to sponsor legislation that would give the companies pretty much everything they had been lobbying for. Their bill, the “Internet Deployment and Broadband Freedom Act,” known more commonly as “Tauzin-Dingell,” would exempt Verizon and the Baby Bells from having to share their networks with competitive start-up carriers as required by the 1996 bill.
The bill also proposed to add a new section to Title II of the Communications Act to broadly exempt broadband Internet, regardless of the carrier technology, from a wide swath of the regulatory powers held by the FCC and the states. “Neither the [Federal Communications] Commission, nor any State, shall have authority to regulate the rates, charges, terms, or conditions for, or entry into the provision of, any high speed data service, Internet backbone service, or Internet access service,” the bill text read in part.
On February 27, 2002, Tauzin’s bill was brought to the floor of the House and passed by a vote of 273-157. Both Democrats and Republicans were divided on the bill, but it still won support from a majority of both parties. More than party affiliation, campaign contributions from Verizon and the Baby Bells were a better predictor of how members would vote, a fact that suggests the companies had a powerful influence over policymakers as they debated the future of broadband regulation. According to an analysis by the Center for Responsive Politics, the representatives who voted in favor of Tauzin-Dingell received, on average, 2.9 times more money from Verizon and the Baby Bells in the form of campaign contributions in the 2002 election than did the Representatives who voted against it.
The cable industry was officially indifferent to Tauzin-Dingell, despite the fact that it benefited its chief competitor industry, because they recognized that it favored a “regulate down” approach and, if enacted, could put them in a better position for avoiding new regulations on their own services. “NCTA strongly believes that marketplace competition is the best way to foster the availability of broadband services to all Americans,” the National Cable & Telecommunications Association (NCTA) said in a statement. “Thus, we have not opposed the Tauzin-Dingell bill nor advocated that regulatory conditions be placed on broadband competitors."
Tauzin’s friend Powell
At the same time that the House was voting on the Tauzin-Dingell bill, the Federal Communications Commission was considering separately what they could do through rulemaking to achieve regulatory parity between cable and DSL. In 2000 the FCC launched a rulemaking proceeding to determine how to classify and regulate cable internet service. In 2002 they opened a similar proceeding for DSL that sought to “resolve outstanding issues regarding the classification of telephone-based broadband Internet access services and the regulatory implications of that classification.”
Beginning in 2001, the Federal Communications Commission was chaired by Michael Powell, the son of Colin Powell and a former attorney for GTE Corp., the company that would form Verizon after merging with Bell Atlantic in 2000. Powell, in many ways, owes his position on the FCC to none other than Rep. Billy Tauzin. Back in 1997, Tauzin lobbied to get Powell appointed to the commission over incumbent Rachelle Chong, who was seeking a second term. Then, in 2001, Tauzin led the charge to get President Bush to elevate Powell to the chairmanship over Pat Wood III, who, until Tauzin got involved, was widely expected to take the position. As recounted by Village Voice reporter Brendan Koerner, Tauzin “engineered” Powell’s accession to the chairmanship as one of his first Bush-era acts.
To recap: Powell, a former attorney for Verizon, was hand-picked to lead the FCC by the head of the congressional committee with oversight over the commission, Billy Tauzin, and immediately faced major decisions on the regulatory classification of the Internet, an issue that Tauzin had spent years working on and that directly impacted the bottom line of his biggest donors.
Powell seems to have received the message that Billy Tauzin and the House of Representatives sent when they voted to gut Title II as it applies to the Internet. On Feb. 14, 2002, just two weeks after the House passed the Tauzin-Dingell bill, the Powell-led FCC took an unusual step that set in motion their approach to regulatory parity for cable and DSL. The Commission leapfrogged the typical public comment period and “notice of proposed rulemaking” and issued a declaratory ruling that cable Internet was properly classified as an information service, and thus not subject to common carrier rules, including line sharing requirements and nondiscrimination protections. One month later they released a rule proposal that tentatively concluded that DSL would also be reclassified as a Title I information service. The DSL reclassification was finalized in 2005.
It’s unclear what kinds of discussions Billy Tauzin was having with Powell around the FCC’s decisions to classify broadband as a Title I information service, but watchdog groups were accusing him of “meddling” in related rulemaking proceedings at the agency around the same time. Later accounts of Tauzin’s involvement in health care legislation as a lobbyist for the pharmaceutical industry suggest that he can be aggressive at lobbying policymakers to bend his way.
With the FCC’s rulings, broadband Internet service was officially differentiated from dial-up Internet service for regulatory purposes and reclassified to the same category of lightly regulated information services as things like websites or apps. The Powell-led FCC had finalized nearly all of the broadband deregulation that the Baby Bells had lobbied for and that Rep. Tauzin and Baby Bell-backed representatives had endorsed, but without having to go through Congress and change the law.
These rulings led to the elimination of line-sharing requirements and decimated the CLEC industry that had been competing with the local monopolies for residential broadband customers. Years later Verizon and Comcast would use the rulings to kill the FCC’s attempts at enforcing net neutrality. In 2010, the DC Circuit Court of Appeals ruled in favor of Comcast in determining that the FCC did not have “reasonably ancillary” jurisdiction to use Title I of the Communication Act to stop Comcast from throttling peer-to-peer programs because they could not cite a statutorily mandated responsibility empowering them to do so.
In 2014 the DC Circuit cited the Title I classification of ISPs in siding with Verizon and vacating the FCC’s second attempt at promulgating net neutrality rules. “Given that the Commission has chosen to classify broadband providers in a manner that exempts them from treatment as common carriers, the Communications Act expressly prohibits the Commission from nonetheless regulating them as such,” the court stated.
Michael Powell left the FCC in 2005, but he is still one of the most powerful figures in determining Internet regulations and net neutrality rules. Powell is now the president and chief lobbyist of the NCTA, a cable industry trade group that has been the hands-down leader in the industry’s efforts to block net neutrality. Under Powell, the organization has increased its spending on lobbying year after year and it now spends more on lobbying than any other organization in the communications sector. With Powell at the helm working his connections in Congress and at the FCC, they seemed to be getting maximum bang for the buck because so-called revolving door connections make lobbying spending more effective—until current FCC Chairman and former NCTA chief Tom Wheeler announced that he would propose to reclassify broadband as Obama suggested.
Although it looks like as though the FCC is about to reclassify broadband as Title II, many of the same factors that led to the deregulatory rulings of the early 2000s are still in play. Members of Congress, disproportionately those who are financially supported by large cable and telecom companies, are lobbying against Title II reclassification. The broadband industry is now more consolidated than ever and the industry’s promise of infrastructure investment in exchange for deregulation has not come to pass.
The companies that provide Internet service to most Americans have not always been deregulated monopolies with the ability to create fast lanes and slow lanes on the Internet. They got there by using many of the tactics that have fueled the record levels of distrust in the U.S. government—bought politicians, corrupt legislation, and revolving-door power trading. While it’s not possible to examine the counterfactual history in which policymakers designed regulatory parity for the Internet with total independence, it should be acknowledged that the current net neutrality debate is based on past policy decisions, including the original removal of broadband from Title II, that were shaped by lobbying dollars and the raw monopoly power of America’s top telecommunications companies.
Donny Shaw is a freelance journalist covering money in politics, tech, monopoly power and the legislative process.Police: Suspect arrested for attempting to rob Boones Creek Waffle House Copyright by WJHL - All rights reserved Todd Moore (Source: Washington County Jail) [ + - ] Video
JOHNSON CITY, TN (WJHL) – The Johnson City Police Department responded to an early morning robbery in progress call at a local restaurant.
Around 3:15 a.m. on Friday, officers were called to the Waffle House located at 2693 Boones Creek Road in Johnson City.
When they arrived, they found who they believed to be the suspect in the parking lot. The suspect was later identified as 33-year-old Todd Moore of Johnson City.
Officers said Moore tried to run away, but he was eventually detained after a struggle. Police said they found a loaded 9mm handgun and several knives on Moore.
Witnesses told police Moore entered the Waffle House restaurant and demanded keys to the safe. When the employees were not able to provide him with the keys, police said he left the restaurant.
Moore is currently behind bars at the Washington County Detention Center. He has been charged with attempted robbery, resisting arrest and unlawful possession of a weapon.
Moore's bond has been set at $52,000. An arraignment hearing for him has been scheduled for Tuesday, January 17th at 9:00 a.m. in General Sessions Court.The Frenchman of Tunisian descent has succeeded Francois Zahoui, who led the Elephants to defeat in the final of the 2012 Africa Cup of Nations against the Chipolopolo of Zambia
The Ivory Coast football federation on Monday appointed former France international Sabri Lamouchi as new coach.
The 40-year-old former Monaco, Inter and Marseille midfielder succeeds Francois Zahoui a day after the Ivorian led the Elephants to defeat Mali 2-1 in a preparatory friendly match played in France.
Lamouchi was surprisingly preferred to more experienced candidates such as former England coach Sven Goran Eriksson, former Senegal coach Bruno Metsu and former PSG manager Antoine Kombouare.
Details of Lamouchi’s contract were not revealed by the Ivorian football body but he will likely lead the team through the qualifying campaigns of the 2014 World Cup and 2013 Africa Cup of Nations.
The Frenchman, who retired from football in 2001, is taking up his first coaching job with a national team.
Ivory Coast will begin their World Cup qualifying on June 2 against Tanzania, followed by a meeting with Morocco on June 9.Bali Nine pair Andrew Chan and Myuran Sukumaran 'dignified' ahead of executions
Updated
The families of Andrew Chan and Myuran Sukumaran have made an eleventh hour plea for the lives of the two men ahead of their executions this morning, after "tough and dark" hours saying their final goodbyes.
Indonesian attorney-general Muhammad Prasetyo said the executions will take place after midnight local time (3:00am AEST).
The convicted drug smugglers have entered what Indonesian officials call the "quiet period", as they count down the hours to their death by firing squad.
Earlier Indonesian security forces moved into the Cilacap port area to clear several hundred members of the public away from the ferry terminal which services Nusakambangan prison island.
More than 1,200 security officers from the police and military are involved in operations supporting this round of executions.
Just hours before the executions, Indonesian authorities reversed an earlier decision to deny Sukumaran and Chan access to their spiritual advisers before their deaths.
Michael Chan said both his brother and Sukumaran are "dignified" ahead of the executions, which he said amount to "cruel, undignified torture".
"I saw today something that no other family should ever have to go through," he said.
"Nine families inside a prison saying goodbye to their loved ones.
"To walk out of there and say goodbye for the last time, it is torture."
Raji Sukumaran pleaded with president Joko Widodo for clemency for her son and Chan.
"I won't see my son again and they are going to take him tonight and shoot him and he is healthy and he is beautiful and he has a lot of compassion for other people," she said.
"I am asking the government not to kill him, please president, please don't kill him.
"Call off the execution."
Joining calls for clemency, Sukumaran's brother, Chintu, said the execution of the nine prisoners on Nusakambangan prison island would do little to address the drug problem in Indonesia.
"We spent the last few hours with my brother... we did talk about the death penalty and he knows this is just a waste," he said.
"He knows this is not going to solve anything with drugs.
"I ask the president to please show mercy.
"Please don't let my mum and my sister have to bury my brother."
Chan and Sukumaran vow to take care of other prisoners
Despite the fate awaiting the pair, Chintu said his brother and Chan were taking care of the other prisoners due to be executed.
"Myu has told us that he is going to be strong and him and Andrew will take care of the other seven people and he is worried for Mary Jane [Veloso, another prisoner due to be executed] and her family as well," he said.
"We still have hope right up until the last second that the president will see each of these people are individuals, as people with families that love them and show mercy."
In tears and holding on to her brother for support, Brintha Sukumaran pleaded with Mr Widodo for clemency.
"Please don't do this to my brother," she cried.
"I beg you please, please don't take my brother from me."
Family members returned from their final visit with more paintings done by Sukumaran.
One of them depicted a heart with an inscription on the back that read: "Satu hati, satu rasa di dalam cinta." (One heart, one feeling in love.)
It had been signed by all nine prisoners facing death.
A joint statement from the governments of Australia, France and the European Union pleading with Mr Widodo to halt the executions has also been made public.
"It is not too late to change your mind," the statement said.
"It is our hope that Indonesia can show forgiveness to 10 detainees.
"In filing this petition, we ask Indonesia also reflect on the impact on Indonesia's position in a globalised world and an international reputation.
"We support Indonesia's efforts to obtain forgiveness for its citizens abroad. Stopping this execution will help those efforts."
Pair given access to spiritual support in final moments
The pair were initially denied their right to spiritual support from their nominated pastors Christine Buckingham and Pastor David Soper, before the decision was overturned in the hours leading up to the scheduled executions.
Indonesian law stipulates that where the death penalty is applied, condemned prisoners are allowed a religious counsellor in the final moments before they are shot by firing squad.
It is their only support in the last moments of life and the religious cleric of their choosing can also witness the death penalty being carried out.
Mr Prasetyo is expected to hold a press conference after the executions.
A group of family and friends who embarked at Cilacap for the first trip to the Nusakambangan today were mobbed by media, with Sukumaran's sister needing to be carried through as photographers pressed in.
An ambulance carrying nine coffins arrived at the ferry terminal shortly afterwards for the short trip to the island.
Brandis appeals for stay until court case is heard
Attorney-General George Brandis has appealed to his Indonesian counterpart to stay the executions until proceedings underway in the country's Constitutional Court and Judicial Commission have been completed.
A preliminary hearing of the Constitutional Court has been scheduled for May 12, which Senator Brandis said is relevant to the cases of Chan and Sukumaran.
"Respectfully, the Australian Government calls on the president and attorney-general of Indonesia to stay the executions until the Constitutional Court and Judicial Commission proceedings are completed," Senator Brandis said.
"It would be a terrible outcome if rulings or findings in either of these proceedings called into question executions which have already been implemented and are irrevocable."
A lawyer for two men, Peter Morrissey, said the investigation would only be useful if Chan and Sukumaran were able to take part.
"You don't kill the prisoners while there's still a court case that could affect their lives," he said.
More than 200 people gathered in Sydney's Martin Place to call for the cancellation of the executions, while gatherings were also held in cities around the country including Adelaide, Canberra, Brisbane and Melbourne.
Among the speakers at the Sydney vigil was renowned international human rights lawyer Geoffrey Robertson who told the crowd the men would not die in vain.
"Australia and other countries will make it less likely that others suffer their fate, suffer their torture that they've had to go through," he said.
Topics: drug-offences, crime, law-crime-and-justice, community-and-society, death, foreign-affairs, government-and-politics
First postedWhat explains the astonishing rise of Donald Trump? How could such a buffoon become the top candidate to lead the party of Lincoln and Eisenhower into the next election for U.S. president?
To plumb this mystery, the bewildered need look no further than mild, orderly Toronto. Five years ago, Canada's biggest city elected a man much like him.
Donald Trump and Rob Ford have a lot in common. Both love to tell the world how fantastically successful they are. Mr. Ford did not have the faintest blush on his face when he called himself the "best mayor that this city has ever had." Mr. Trump, who finds it just as hard to be humble, said that "I've done an amazing job" as a businessman. "I went to the Wharton School of Business. I'm, like, a really smart person."
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Both claim that their success in business equips them to run a government.
"I'm a businessman," said Mr. Ford, who played only a modest role in the rise of his family's labelling company. "I know how to create jobs, I know how to meet a payroll."
Mr. Trump said in last week's Republican debate that he is qualified to lead the United States because "I've dealt with people all over the world, been successful all over the world. Everything I've done virtually has been a tremendous success."
Both are blunt to the point of rudeness, and beyond. Mr. Ford once called a female member of city council "a waste of skin," and that's not to mention all the slurs he uttered when under the influence. Mr. Trump made a crack about the appearance of his opponent in the Republican race, Carly Fiorina, and said that a debate moderator who dared to challenge him had "blood coming out of her wherever."
Both have landed in the soup for remarks about immigrants. Mr. Ford once said that "those Oriental people work like dogs." Mr. Trump suggested that illegal Mexican immigrants are "bringing drugs. They're bringing crime. They're rapists."
Both offer simplistic solutions to complex problems. Mr. Ford said he had a ready answer to the age-old Toronto challenge of how to pay for more subway lines. Easy: get the private sector to build them. Mr. Trump would put a wall along the southern border and charge Mexico to build it. Oh, and he would replace Obamacare, the new U.S. health-insurance program, with "something terrific." He boasts: "Trade? We're gonna fix it. Health care? We're gonna fix it."
In spite of – in many ways, because of – all these faults, both men manage to get lots and lots of people to like and even adore them. Even after the crack scandal, then a cancer diagnosis that forced Mr. Ford to withdraw from last year's election for mayor, his brother and right-hand man, Doug Ford, took 34 per cent of the vote. Although, thankfully, Mr. Trump's support seems to be fading a little, he still tops the Republican polls despite everything. The reasons are not really so mysterious.
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Most politicians these days are so programmed, so airbrushed, so slavishly on-message that a candidate who blurts out whatever comes into his head seems like a breath of fresh air, even if what he is saying is utter bilge.
When asked why they continued to back Mr. Ford, despite the whole crack business, his supporters would say things like "he says what he thinks," or "he's one of us" or "he isn't like a politician."
In a recent New York Times/CBS News poll of Republicans, the top three reasons people listed for supporting Mr. Trump were "outspoken/says what he believes," "not a politician/outsider," and "strong leader." That aura of authenticity counts for something, whether the authenticity is truly authentic or not.
Both Mr. Ford and Mr. Trump feed on a pervasive disenchantment with politics and politicians that has helped push election turnouts lower in both the U.S. and Canada. Mr. Ford famously promised to "stop the gravy train" at city hall. Mr. Trump says that Americans "are tired of being ripped off by politicians that don't know what they're doing."
It would be a terrible mistake if, perish the thought, Americans followed their anger into the dead end where this charmless blowhard would take them. Just look at what happened in Toronto. Well before crack, Mr. Ford had revealed himself as a divisive, ill-informed mayor who governed by empty slogan.
But it would be just as wrong to ignore what made Mr. Ford and Mr. Trump so appealing to so many voters in the first place. For them, the rants unleashed by these raging bulls against a privileged political class and overfed, inefficient governments ring true. In a plastic political world, they are desperate for something real.
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As long as they feel that way, they are going to be tempted, in Mr. Ford's immortal phrase, to "go snake" and elect someone who promises to walk into the dinner party and smash a few plates.On these archives Check all Uncheck all
Anonymous
[290 / 62 /?]
Dear /mu/
I have a story to tell you guys.
>be 16 years old, live in a small town in Illinois, complete 'pleb' who liked Linkin Park, SOAD, etc. You know the deal.
>use /b/ irregularly, one day I click on /mu/, because why not? not weeaboo shit like the other boards
>see a thread on pic related
>download it, become obsessed with it and even buy it on CD
>listen to it time after time
>completely socially retarded, two friends, both of whom are also socially retarded
>go to fucking church every weekend, not because my parents are religious or anything but because it's part
>i'm not an r/atheist either really, just find church interminally boring
>one day a new family shows up in church and sits next to us
>they have a really, really cute daughter my age
>brown hair, blue eyes, around 5' 4'', pretty as all fuck
>"h-hi anon, i'm new to this town, want to show me around?"
>blue eyes open wide and look straight into mine, first time i'd made legit eye contact in two years
>this is love at first sight
>"o-ok... there's really not much"
>i take her around town and show her all the shitty main street stores
>turns out she's from new york and she likes this small town atmosphere
>she goes to my school but we don't have that many classes together, still, she sits with me and my two loser friends and pretends to be interested in our stupid conversations about vidya and shit
>always sits next to me, always
>we have one class together, chemistry, and she asks to come over to my house to study once a week
>"okay" (in my head: FUCK YES OH MY FUCK YES)
>we lie on my floor or bed studying together, all this sexual and romantic tension
>we always listen to her music, which is always 60s pop like The Beatles, The Supremes, or Sam Cooke. shit like thatSwiss financial guru Marc Faber tells swissinfo he sees hard times ahead for the world's stock exchanges and even state bankruptcy for the United States.
He also believes that stock exchanges will stay at low levels for a long time.
Faber, otherwise known as Dr Doom for his contrarian views on the economy, has lived in Asia for the past 35 years.
He is a jack-of-all-trades: investment adviser, financier, best-selling author and the compiler of a monthly economic publication called The Gloom Boom and Doom Report.
Faber sits on various boards of directors and investment committees.
swissinfo: You prophesied the stock market crash of 1987 and the Asia crisis and became a celebrity as a result. Did you see this crisis coming too?
Marc Faber: It was quite clear we had a credit bubble. I had been warning about that for years and not only in the mortgage sector. But what surprised even me was that [US insurer] AIG would almost disappear and that UBS shares would fall under $17.20.
swissinfo: How did it come to such a situation?
M.F.: A credit bubble has been growing for 25 years. We've seen, in particular over the past seven years, an unbelievable credit growth, which fuelled economic development. Then there were structural changes in the economy, for example the sinking saving ratios that have had an effect on consumption and growth rates.
The situation worsened in 2001 in the United States when the central bank lowered the interest rate from 6.5 per cent to an unheard of one per cent in 2003. This ultra-expansive monetary policy led to a credit growth that was five times higher than growth of the economy. A bubble growth and later the crash were the logical consequences.
swissinfo: Have we reached rock bottom?
M.F.: I think we're near it. But I also think we'll stick at this low point for a long time. Anyone who thinks that everything will soon be rosy again is naive. It's quite possible that worldwide stock exchanges will experience a similar development to that witnessed in Japan over the past two decades [the Nikkei index has fallen from 39,000 points to under 8,000].
Japan also shows that the large amount of money injected to stimulate the markets didn't have the desired effect but it did produce huge holes in the state coffers.
swissinfo: You are known for swimming against the tide of conventional wisdom. But you are right in line with the prevailing pessimism.
M.F.: Not quite. I'm even more pessimistic than most (laughs). Look at it like this, between 1980 and 2007 people saved from their capital gains and not their income, as their income was spent. That was fine while property and shares increased in value every year. Today these people are highly indebted and are only beginning to save more by putting the brake on their consumption. That's how every economy goes to the dogs with or without injection of capital by governments. With the best of wills, I do not see a single catalyst that could lead to a new bull market in the world. At the moment, everything has gone down the drain.
swissinfo: How does the present crisis differ from previous ones?
M.F.: In the past few years everything went up shares, commodities, consumer goods, real estate values, art and even bonds. Such a combination is extremely unusual. We saw the biggest investment bubble in the history of humanity. The current situation is possibly worse than the global economic crisis of 1929. And that is thanks to Alan Greenspan and Ben Bernanke [the former and current US Federal Reserve Board chairmen]. These two gentlemen must account for massive errors.
swissinfo: Governments are offering guarantees and are pumping thousands of billions into the markets. Is that a mistake?
M.F.: Yes. The losses are there and someone has to bear them. There are two possibilities. Banks go under and the stakeholders are left with nothing, as is the case with Lehman Brothers, or governments pump money into the financial system so that the incompetent financial clowns in Bahnhofstrasse [Zurich's financial centre] and Wall Street can continue to eat in fancy restaurants.
I am clearly in favour of the first because the consequences of these state interventions are massive budget deficits. To finance these, governments have to acquire money. For that they have to borrow money, which makes state debt and interest payments soar. US economists have come to the conclusion from the trends that there will be a US state bankruptcy.
swissinfo: Do you share that view?
M.F.: One hundred per cent. The US government will in future have new debts of at least $1,000 billion (SFr1,165 billion). That's on top of the current state debt of $10,000 billion. And that doesn't take into account state programmes to stimulate the economy. The government will have no other choice than to print money, which in the long term will lead to inflation.
swissinfo: How do you see the near future?
M.F.: More positively. The markets are totally undervalued so I reckon on a short-term recovery of easily 20 to 30 per cent.
swissinfo: When?
M.F.: In the next two to three weeks.
swissinfo: That's not exactly very much in view of the massive losses.
M.F.: No. If you drop a tennis ball with only a little air in it, it doesn't bounce very high!
swissinfo: Are you calling into question the concept of making money from shares?
M.F.: No. The idea is still valid but you have to be realistic. Adjusted for inflation and with a long-term perspective you could earn on average three per cent with US shares. The long-term promises of eight per cent made by bankers and pseudo investment advisers to lure their customers are absolute rubbish.
swissinfo: It looked for a long time as though Switzerland would get away with just a black eye. What is your view?
M.F.: The export industry will be extremely hard hit. People in Switzerland will have to accustom themselves to bankruptcies, particularly in the machine industry.Whilst browsing the daily news I came across an article entitled Domestic violence register to protect women who fear their partners’ past (6 March 2015)
(If you haven’t already read my blog post about violent behaviour by women, then now would be a good time to do so)
Mike Baird (Premier of New South Wales, Australia) has proposed the establishment of a register of violent men. The intention is that potential female partners can check to see if their ‘person of interest’ has a track-record of abuse.
Mike’s proposal is based on a system now operating in the United Kingdom, known as Clare’s Law. Thus far I have been unable to locate any serious analysis of the efficacy of the UK system. The Premier has promised to introduce the system if re-elected. Has his staff determined that the proposed system would be likely to be effective? To be cost-effective? Does he really care? Or is the perceived potential for electoral mileage sufficient to justify a scheme that will no doubt involve a considerable outlay of taxpayer dollars?
“It is understood the list will first be made up only of men convicted of a charge of domestic assault, but the government will consider extending this to men who are the subject of an ADVO after consultation with the Justice Department.
Safeguards will be put in place so that people asking if someone is on the register have to prove they are in a domestic relationship.”
At this stage the operational details are unclear and many questions remain unanswered. For example:
How would women prove that they are in a relationship with the man in question?
What measures would be taken to prevent men being listed on the basis of false allegations?
How much will the register cost to establish and maintain, and will such a service significantly affect the rates of perpetration of domestic violence? Or will it, in fact, make any difference at all?
It is of concern that a political leader would contemplate such a ‘service’ without thought being given to the fairness and desirability of including violent women. That this fellow has done so demonstrates just how far under the spell of feminism our leaders seem to have fallen. And unfortunately the NSW opposition party offers the community no better alternative in this regard.
The proposal is sexist and discriminatory in that it reinforces the negative and inaccurate stereotype that domestic violence consists entirely of men abusing women, and that women do not perpetrate violence.
The proposal is sexist and discriminatory in that it denies to men whatever limited protection the register might provide to women.
It may well be that after Mike’s proposal has been subject to proper analysis and consultation, it will be found to be non-viable. If it is to proceed, however, then the records of everyone with a history of violence must be made accessible.
“Premier Mike Baird and Minister for Women Pru Goward said the groundbreaking registry, announced on Friday, would be set up if they win the state election on March 28. “Quite frankly, I’m sick of excuses,” Mr Baird said“.
Well quite frankly I’m sick of politicians pandering to the feminist movement by diverting millions of dollars of public funds each year either directly to feminist organisations, or towards projects for which they demand public funding. Feminists whose voices, by the way, represent less than one in five Australian women.
My concerns would be mitigated if, at the end of the day, there were clear benefits for the Australian community. More often than not, however, the outcome is one that sees the Government achieve very little with regard to the problem/s that they originally claimed they set out to address. Conversely, the collateral damage and the wasted opportunities that result from such a course of action are not inconsequential. No matter, the next news cycle will no doubt provide some convenient diversion.
Update 2 April 2015: Mike Baird was re-elected and has now appointed feminist Pru Goward as the first ever ‘Minister for the Prevention of Domestic Violence and Sexual Assault’
Update 22 May 2015: The NSW Government has released a discussion paper on the DV register concept. The receipt of public submissions in relation to this document ended on 19 June 2015. I provided a submission noting, amongst other things, my concern that the discussion paper did not explicitly state that both men and women were to be included in the register.
Update 15 February 2019: Violent offenders on GPS trackers to lower domestic violence in Australia (15 February 2019) A tech-ed up variation on the register concept – but will it make any difference in terms of decreasing the incidence of DV?
See also:
Queensland ‘initiative’ referred to here as an ‘Alternative Reporting Option’ (June 2018) I would imagine that there would be plenty of scope for abuse here
UK experience of domestic violence disclosure schemes is a cautionary tale for Australia (12 October 2016)
Violent offenders registers sound good, but are a costly, unproven distraction (8 July 2015)
Police call for family violence offender register (1 July 2015)
Is Michigan’s sex offender registry actually protecting us? (26 May 2015)
Early warning scheme for domestic violence (21 May 2015)
NSW domestic violence register to expose potential abusers (20 May 2015)
Put DV abusers on national register (14 March 2015) Features some interesting readers comments. The author, Wendy Tuohy, claims that the register will include violent women but I have been unable to obtain official confirmation of this. Even Mike Baird’s original media release is quite ambiguous on this point.
NSW state election 2015: Mike Baird beefs up domestic violence and sexual assault laws (6 March 2015)
Domestic violence register could lead to increased not guilty pleas, privacy experts warn (6 March 2015)
Video item on the proposal as featured in the ‘Sunrise’ TV show which has generated a large number of viewer comments with a definite majority being supportive of the inclusion of violent women on the register
Domestic violence register won’t work: ALP (6 March 2015)
Sex offender registers often get raised in conversations about domestic violence registers – so here is an article on that topic: Sex Offender Registries (SOR’s): Time for a change (16 August 2014)
Clare’s Law: a violation of our private lives (28 November 2013)
Now people can be told of their partner’s violent past thanks to new law named after tragic murder victim (8 March 2014)
Clare’s Law: a simple solution, or more confusion? (25 November 2013)
Epidemic of Restraining / Protection Order Abuse by women against innocent men (31 July 2013) USA
Baird promises domestic violence minister (6 March 2015) Google ‘affectatious‘. How about a Minister for Road Safety? Minister for Prevention of Substance Abuse?Copies of the application for the Health Insurance Marketplace from the Department of Health and Human Services are distributed. (Andrew Harrer/Bloomberg)
The Obama administration has decided to give extra time to Americans who say that they are unable to enroll in health plans through the federal insurance marketplace by the March 31 deadline.
Federal officials confirmed Tuesday evening that all consumers who have begun to apply for coverage on HealthCare.gov, but who do not finish by Monday, will have until about mid-April to ask for an extension.
Under the new rules, people will be able to qualify for an extension by checking a blue box on HealthCare.gov to indicate that they tried to enroll before the deadline. This method will rely on an honor system; the government will not try to determine whether the person is telling the truth.
The rules, which will apply to the federal exchanges operating in three dozen states, will essentially |
quickly, if he waits too long such reforms could prove to be dangerous.
Unlike his father and grandfather, Kim Jong Un cannot afford to ignore the popular will. His father and grandfather had a great deal of control over society and they could always count on the North Korean people’s docility and obedience. However, the surveillance network is not what it was twenty years ago. People are increasingly aware about how poor their country is and how prosperous China and South Korea are. They can also make a living outside government structures, making them potentially less easy to control.
Thus, in such circumstances, it is crucial that Kim Jong Un does not waste time. Let us hope that reforms will get back on track because they may otherwise be grave for Kim Jong Un and the North Korean people alike.CLOSE USA TODAY Sports' Lorenzo Reyes fills you in on which running backs did or didn't shine in front of scouts on the third day of the NFL scouting combine. USA TODAY Sports
Central Michigan Chippewas quarterback Cooper Rush (10) drops back to pass against the Northern Illinois Huskies during the first quarter at Huskie Stadium. (Photo: Mike Dinovo, USA TODAY Sports)
INDIANAPOLIS -- Cooper Rush doesn't think he has a small-hand problem.
But the former Central Michigan quarterback admits he was happy when he found out he'd "grown" from 8 6/8 inches -- tiny by NFL QB standards -- at the East-West Shrine Game in January to 9 1/8 inches during measurements here at the scouting combine.
What was Rush's secret?
"I looked up a YouTube video of like hand stretching, just random, like for people that type a lot," Rush said. "And so I did that. And it does -- it helps it feel better and it worked."
Rush's hands still measured up as the smallest among the QBs here. But he cited his performance in some bad-weather games as evidence that won't stop him.
Follow Tom Pelissero on Twitter @TomPelissero.
PHOTOS: Best of NFL scouting combineWhen registering our daughter at the local GP surgery we did not expect to be asked whether we wanted to add her to the organ donor register. It came as a bit of a shock and my heart suck – we had never thought about the option that we might ever need organs or that we could have our daughters organs donated.
It didn’t take much thought for us to decide that we wanted to add Molly to the list as at the end of the day is she was to need a donation we would take one if it was available so we couldn’t say no to others if the occasion was to arise.
What would have made the process less heart dropping was if the system was to be an opt out system. There would be no need to ask people, people would choose to say no if they wanted to and thus helping ease the number of people sitting in organ donation waiting lists.
I know there are loads of debates about this situation but the way I see it is that id I don’t need them anymore but they still work then why not help give someone else the chance to extend their life.CertainlyT
Pick Up a Mystery Skin for a short time!
Udyr
"Mystery Skins are back for a limited time so get them while they are hot!
Purchasing a Mystery Skin will unlock an unowned skin worth 520 RP or more. As with the previous rounds of Mystery Skins, you can only unlock skins for champions you own.
Mystery Skins will be available in the Skins tab of the store for 490 RP and are limited to five per day. Check out Mystery Skins from July 25 to July 28!"
EDIT
"A skin for any Champion that your friend owns is eligible for Mystery Gifting, as long as it’s worth at least 520 RP and is available in the store. This includes Legendary and even Ultimate skins! Legacy skins will also be obtainable as a Mystery Skin EXCEPT Achievement skins, Collector’s Edition skins, PAX skins, Rusty Blitzcrank, Urf the Manatee, Championship Riven and Riot Squad Singed."
Thresh Flay Bugfix in Works
CertainlyT
"Quote
It's so annoying when his e doesn't cc, doesn't deal damage, or both.
Yeah, this bug is awful. I take personal blame for this. I should have spent more time trying to simplify the script and, honestly, shouldn't have taken so many liberties when making his abilities (which strained the limits of my and our department's design knowledge at every turn).
Unfortunately, we have had a hard time stably reproducing it. I'm adding a suite of "insurance policy" measures to the spell in patch 4.14 (the patch after next) to ensure that the knockback happens reliably when it should. These changes should be on the PBE tomorrow.
No guarantees that this will fix the problem, since we don't actually know that the cause is, but I have no longer been able to cause it to occur with them in place. That's a good sign."
This afternoon's red post collection is short and sweet - featuringcommenting on upcoming fixes forE and the announcement that, being able to buy yourself a random 520 RP or better skin for 490 RP, will be returning betweenandContinue reading for more information!Mystery Skins, being able to purchase yourself a random skin of 520 RP quality or higher, is back betweenandHere'swith more info! Turkey does not seem to have this promotion as they already have another. : As it is sure to come up, here is what you could get in a Mystery Skin:Over on reddit, chimed in about upcoming bug fixes forE after a user commented on it occasionally not CCing or dealing damage.Even light doses of glyphosate can cause disease in organs later on, says a biologist opposed to spraying the herbicide to kill weeds and young hardwoods in New Brunswick and elsewhere.
"Glyphosate accumulates in all our organs," said Thierry Vrain, a soil biologist and former president of the International Federation of Nematology Societies.
The New Brunswick forest industry uses glyphosate to kill maple, oak and other hardwood growth, and by NB Power uses it to kill hardwood growth near transmission lines.
The main ingredient in Roundup, glyphosate is also sprayed on farmland around the world, despite a finding by the cancer and water branch of the World Health Organization that it is "probably carcinogenic to humans."
Hangs around in soil
Vrain, who worked for Agriculture Canada for 30 years and has a doctorate in plant pathology, said that the company that invented glyphosate thought it was biodegradable and would last a only few days in the soil before disappearing.
"It's a lot longer than that," said Vrain, who was recently invited to speak in Fredericton to groups opposed to glyphosate spraying.
He said a Swedish study found traces of glyphosate remained in soil two years after it was applied.
Once introduced into the environment, glyphosate is remarkably stable, he said.
Although Vrain believes glyphosate is a risk to human health, he said no research has been done on humans.
Research done on animals, however, shows cause for concern, he said.
In recent years, research on animals, including rats and pigs, has found they become chronically diseased even with small doses of glyphosate, Vrain said.
He said the animals have developed cancer, kidney and liver disease and obesity.
Can only speculate about humans
"All we can do is speculate with all the data that we have on research from animals."
The European Union is deciding whether to ban glyphosate, and this year California moved to add it to its list of potentially cancerous chemicals.
Despite critics' concerns about the safety of glyphosate, its effects on the water supply, forest diversity and the environment, the herbicide is registered in 100 countries.
In New Brunswick, a report by the acting chief medical officer of health found that in 2016, nearly 29,000 hectares of forest were treated with glyphosate.
But Dr. Jennifer Russell also said there was no increased health risk for New Brunswickers.
"We acknowledge that some uncertainty about glyphosate exists, but based on our review, exposures in New Brunswick are similar to or less than elsewhere," she said.Lyrical jabs against President Trump that Joe Scarborough began over the summer with his band’s EP “Mystified” will continue into the holiday season with the release of “A Very Drumpf Christmas.”
The host of MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” will release a trio of songs this Friday for anti-Trump activists who want to simultaneously get into the Christmas spirit. Similar protest songs were released in June on Spotify, Amazon, Apple Music and iTunes.
Mr. Scarborough sent Business Insider cover art and a preview of the songs Wednesday night.
“Oh you can save our Christmas from going kerplumf, from that orange creep that children call the Drumpf?” the pundit sings on ‘The Drumpf,’” Business Insider reported.
The song also references former White House communications director Anthony Scaramucci.
Tracks include “Christmastime,” “The Drumpf” and “This Christmas It’s You & Me.”
Mr. Scarborough told the website in June that more than 400 songs will be released in the years ahead.
Copyright © 2019 The Washington Times, LLC. Click here for reprint permission.She had a burning desire to follow in the footsteps of Pasang Lhamu, the first Nepali woman to reach the top of Everest, but who died on her way down. Lhakpa petitioned the Nepali government for a permit to climb. “They were scared,” she said. “And me, I say, I wanna go to the summit. Really this is my dream.”
She finally got her chance in 2000 and succeeded. At a party to celebrate her achievement in Kathmandu, she met her future husband, the Romanian-American climber, George Dijmarescu.
The couple went on five Everest expeditions together in 2001, 2003, 2004, 2005, and 2006. However the 2004 expedition, known as the Connecticut Everest, was notable for the wrong reasons, as a blazing row between Lhakpa and Dijmarescu at base camp allegedly ended with her throwing rocks at him, and him punching her in the head.
The couple, who lived together in a two-bedroom flat in the suburban American town of West Hartford, were badly affected by the 2008 recession and costly hospital bills after Dijmarescu got cancer led to financial difficulties that contributed to the deterioration of the relationship.
A neighbour called the police after another huge argument in summer 2012, with Lhakpa afterwards telling a social worker she had been abused by her husband for 11 years. Dijmarescu, who has not commented on the claims, was found guilty of breach of peace and Lhakpa was awarded custody of the children last year.
However, the detailed Outside magazine profile warns that it would be a mistake to view Lhakpa "solely as a victim".
Despite all her hardships, Lhakpa, an incredibly strong and complex woman, was driven to return to Everest again and again.
George Mallory famously responded to a question of why he was so obsessed with Everest by saying: "Because it's there." Yuichiro Miura, the great Japanese climber, said of his relationship with the mountain: "All the time, I think of Everest. I can’t stop."
It is clear that Lhakpa feels the same passion. “I stay in the house and I… God, I’m still thinking about the mountain. You know, my God, I need to go to Nepal,” she explained.A judge has denied a bid by Kim Dotcom to suspend his long-awaited extradition hearing. The hearing began yesterday but was met with immediate calls by the Megaupload founder's legal team to postpone to a later date. The decision handed down today by Judge Nevin Dawson means that evidence will be heard when the court resumes on Thursday.
Monday morning, Kim Dotcom arrived at court dressed in his trademark black attire. After ten delays the hearing to determine whether the Megaupload founder will be extradited to the United States on copyright infringement charges got underway.
Almost immediately the case became bogged down in legal argument, with the defense insisting that various submissions should be heard before the extradition hearing gathered full steam. Due to Dotcom’s funds being seized by the FBI, unfair restrictions had been placed on the ability to mount a defense, they argued.
Christine Gordon QC, countering for the Crown, said that the claims of Dotcom’s team were “speculative” and would only serve to delay proceedings by several weeks. Any applications should be part of the main hearing or included at trial in the United States, Gordon argued.
This morning Judge Nevin Dawson handed down his decision and it represents an early setback for Dotcom and his former Megaupload colleagues.
“The interlocutory applications now before the Court are such that they would best be heard and considered by the Court during the eligibility hearing as they are largely contextual in nature,” Judge Dawson begins.
“The Court would be better placed to rule on these applications, having had the benefit of hearing the evidence of the eligibility hearing.”
Judge Dawson said that all matters would be fully heard and both parties would have a right of appeal in the event they were dissatisfied with the outcome.
“If [Dotcom et al] are successful in their applications that might lead to an adjournment or conclusion of the hearing. The respondents would suffer no prejudice if either of these outcomes should come about. All parties ultimately have their rights of appeal,” Judge Dawson concludes.
The eligibility hearing will now go ahead on Thursday morning.Share. You really are the devil You really are the devil
Note: Full spoilers for the Hannibal: Season 3 premiere follow.
First of all, a moment to pause and rejoice… Hannibal is back!
The Season 3 premiere was not a “hit the ground running” one. It didn’t pick up moments after the finale, with ambulances rushing to the grisly scene in Hannibal’s house. No, Bryan Fuller instead took the intriguing approach of focusing entirely on Hannibal and Bedelia’s new life abroad – first in Paris, then in Florence.
Exit Theatre Mode
“I’ve killed hardly anyone during our residence” Hannibal remarked, in one of the show’s darkly humorous moments – and one that also was notable for how casual Hannibal is about his true nature with Bedelia, who truly knows everything about what he’s doing, yet is living with him. Why? That’s a continued question. I loved her talking about how she believes she is in control of her actions – both because we, as the audience -- especially seeing how Hannibal had so completely subverted Miriam last year -- would be asking the same thing and because it makes things even more complicated. Even Bedelia herself doesn’t quite seem to know why she is there. Begging the question of whether she just doesn’t want to admit to a true darkness within her.
Hannibal Creator on What to Expect in Season 3
We got a glimpse at a key event we've heard about before this week – when Bedelia’s patient died. And while we didn’t see the event itself,it was clear that even in the moment Hannibal believed (or at least wanted Bedelia to believe) this was something Bedelia had instigated, rather than her stopping a specific attack. Eventually, we’ll no doubt learn even more about what happened here and how much it speaks to who Bedelia truly is. Oh, and yes, that was Zachary Quinto as the corpse of Bedelia’s patient, re-teaming with his old Heroes collaborator, Bryan Fuller. And no, that won’t be his only appearance this season (though that would be very funny).
Exit Theatre Mode
The premiere was definitely slowly, deliberately paced, even by Hannibal’s standards. There was a lot of moments of just taking in the scenery, as we followed Hannibal and Bedelia’s new lives and the artiface they’ve created. While this meant it wasn’t the most thrilling of episodes, I did appreciate it for the depiction of a “normal” existence between two people in a very bizarre situation, especially as we saw Bedelia walk around town -- wow were those images of Gillian Anderson walking through Florence lovely -- while pondering just what was going through her mind and how much of a prisoner she was in this situation… or, as Hannibal later put it, as he murdered the overly inquisitive Anthony (a very good Tom Wisdom), whether she was, “An observer or a participant.” Because as Hannibal noted, you’re not really just an observer when you are sitting idly by as someone is murdered in front of you – and especially not when you admit “I was curious" as Bedelia did. What a perfectly Lecter-like thing to say!
In the meantime, we got some interesting flashbacks to what exactly happened with Hannibal and Gideon, after Hannibal served him his own leg last year… which, it turns out, began a long process of the two of them slowly devouring Gideon together. Which, if you think about it too long, is incredibly disturbing. In what may be his final appearance on Hannibal (but who knows?), Eddie Izzard was terrific, as he prodded Hannibal about his cannibalism, prompting Hannibal to reveal his thought that, “It’s only cannibalism if we’re equals." Which says it all, considering Hannibal doesn’t believe (almost?) anyone else is his true equal.
Hannibal: Season 3 Photos
Hannibal: Season 3 Photos 10+ IMAGES Fullscreen Image Artboard 3 Copy Artboard 3 ESC 01 OF 24 Hannibal: Season 3 Photos 01 OF 24 Hannibal: Season 3 Photos Hannibal: Season 3 Photos NBC Download Image Captions ESC
While Gideon probably wasn’t being literal when he asked Hannibal, “I’m just fascinated to know how you’ll feel when all of this happens to you…” it did raise the question of just how Dr. Lecter will ultimately receive his comeuppance and who it will be doing it... or if he's destined to truly get away with it all in the end.New York City's former top cop said Sunday that the Obama administration cut funding to fight terrorism in the city to retaliate against Sen. Chuck Schumer for opposing a nuclear deal with Iran.
"There's a certain amount vindictiveness on the part of Washington aimed at Sen. Chuck Schumer," Ray Kelly, New York City's police commissioner under former Mayor Michael Bloomberg, said in an interview with John Catsimatidis on AM 970 in New York.
"Apparently they remember very well that Sen. Schumer did not support their Iran deal," Kelly said, arguing the proposed cut "was aimed at getting a reaction from Sen. Schumer."
Schumer was the most senior Democrat in Congress last year to oppose an international agreement under which Iran agreed to give up its nuclear weapons program in exchange for relief from econonmic sanctions.
Schumer, a Democrat set to become the party's Senate leader, joined New York Mayor Bill de Blasio and the city's police and fire commissioners to blast a White House budget plan that would cut annual funding for the city's Urban Area Security Initiative from $600 million to to $330 million.
As the country's largest city and the only U.S. location repeatedly attacked by terrorists, including the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks, New York officials have long sought extra consideration in allocation of federal anti-terror funds.
"New York is an enduring target," Kelly said. "It always will be."
Schumer statements drew a pointed White House response, an unusual reaction aimed at a key Democratic ally.
"At some point, Sen. Schumer's credibility in talking about national security issues, particularly when the facts are as they are when it relates to homeland security, have to be affected by the position that he's taken on other issues," White House Press Secretary Josh Earnest said Wednesday.
"Sen. Schumer is somebody that came out and opposed the international agreement to prevent Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon. He was wrong about that position," Earnest said. "And when people look at the facts here when it comes to funding for homeland security, they'll recognize that he's wrong this time too."
Earnest said financing for the program was cut because New York failed to spend the money it had already received.
Kelly, though a de Blasio critic, is a Schumer ally. The senator has unsuccessfully proposed Obama nominate Kelly a head of the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Department of Homeland Security.Image copyright AFP Image caption Head of Venezuela's National Electoral Council Tibisay Lucena said a second petition could take place at the end of October
Venezuelan officials have set out the timetable for a recall referendum on whether President Nicolas Maduro should remain in power.
The Venezuelan opposition reacted angrily when they heard they would only be allowed to collect more petition signatures in late October.
Opposition leader Henrique Capriles said an opposition march would go ahead in September.
A referendum defeat for Mr Maduro this year would trigger a presidential poll.
But a recall vote next year would see Mr Maduro replaced by his vice-president, meaning the Socialist party would remain in power.
What has gone wrong with Venezuela?
Venezuelans cross to Colombia to buy food
"People ready to explode"
The National Electoral Council (CNE) president, Tibisay Lucena, said the opposition would be authorised in late October to try to collect petition signatures from the 20% of the country's voters, or 4m people, needed to start a recall referendum, on condition that "all the regulatory requirements are fulfilled".
If the opposition was successful in gathering these signatures, the CNE would have a month to verify them.
Ms Lucena said electoral officials would then have 90 days to schedule a referendum.
Constitutional experts say this appears to make it unlikely a referendum would be held in January as demanded by the opposition.
Image copyright EPA Image caption Opposition leader Henrique Capriles said the electoral council's announcement was a cynical move.
The timing is crucial because according to the constitution, a vote to recall Mr Maduro this year would trigger a presidential election that polls indicate the opposition is likely to win.
But if the president is defeated in a vote next year, the vice-president would replace Mr Maduro and the Socialists would thus remain in power.
Election officials have already been accused of stretching out the first phase of the recall referendum where the opposition had to collect signatures from 1% of voters.
The opposition accuses the government of dragging its feet while not totally rejecting the recall referendum process.
Venezuela is suffering a severe economic crisis which the opposition blames on President Maduro.
He says the economic crisis and efforts to get rid of him are a capitalist conspiracy.
Mr Maduro has launched legal challenges against the referendum drive and has vowed there will be no referendum this year.5 Facebook Wishes For 2015
Facebook tweaked this and that in 2014, but there are still several improvements we'd like to see.
10 Windows Tablets, Laptops Under $200: Holiday Steals (Click image for larger view and slideshow.)
Facebook might have had its fair share of ups and downs in 2014, but one thing remained constant: change. This year, Facebook changed a lot of tools and settings for privacy and its news feed.
On the privacy front, the social network debuted its "privacy dinosaur" to help new users navigate privacy settings; launched its Privacy Checkup tool to help you review and control with whom you share content; and simplified and shortened its privacy policies in a bid to make them easier for users to understand.
It also focused on making users' news feeds more useful: It cracked down on click bait, improved Facebook search, and launched a Save button to bookmark content to read later.
[Want more on how Facebook search works? Read Facebook Dumps Microsoft Bing.]
Despite these updates and others, there's always room for improvement in 2015. Here's are five changes we'd like to see Facebook implement next year in the news feed, privacy, and more. Have something to add? Share your thoughts in the Comments section.
1. View all news feed posts
Despite Facebook's latest tweaks to the news feed, many users simply want to manage their news feeds themselves. According to Facebook, that wouldn't be practical -- the typical user's news feed contains more than 1,500 posts, it says. Facebook says its algorithm does us a favor by weeding out stuff that doesn't matter. Of course, we'll never know that for sure unless Facebook gives us a "view all" option. This would benefit users with small networks the most, while giving the rest of us an option to browse all posts from friends, family, and subscribed Pages.
2. Default news feed setting
Facebook gives you two ways to view content in your news feed: the default, Top Stories, which displays posts that Facebook's algorithm wants you to see; and Most Recent, which shows you the same stories, but in the chronological order they were posted.
If you don't visit Facebook often, you might prefer the Top Stories view. Regular Facebook users, on the other hand, tend to prefer the Most Recent view. However, if you choose this option on a PC, Facebook eventually reverts your setting back to the default Top Stories view -- a sneaky Facebook habit many users loathe. (Facebook leaves this setting alone if you make it in the mobile app.)
Because Facebook is unlikely ever to let us see every post in our news feed, it should at the very least respect our preferences to view our Facebook-filtered content in the order we prefer. I'd like to see an option to choose our own default view in 2015, one that sticks and does not switch back to what Facebook wants.
3. Even better search
This month, Facebook announced new capabilities for its search engine, Graph Search, that let you search your old posts and those of your friends for keyword-based updates, links, pictures, comments, and videos. Extending search to include profiles was a big step for Facebook; unfortunately, the results are still clunky. I'd like to see even better search tools come to Facebook in 2015, such as date range- and location-based results.
4. "Moments" app
This year, Facebook updated settings to help users share with only the people they want. Despite the improvements, Facebook's bigger problem persists: The more people you connect with, the harder it becomes to manage them. Facebook needs a better solution than Lists.
In September, rumors swirled that Facebook had an app in the works called Moments. Sources likened it to Cluster, a mobile app that lets you create a private space to share stuff with friends and post to them with just a few taps -- a process that already sounds simpler than managing your Facebook lists. Let's hope that Facebook moves forward with Moments in 2015.
5. Text formatting
Although Facebook updates and comments support emoticons, users still can't italicize, underline, or bold text. These are basic formatting capabilities that could help users and businesses alike communicate better.
Apply now for the 2015 InformationWeek Elite 100, which recognizes the most innovative users of technology to advance a company's business goals. Winners will be recognized at the InformationWeek Conference, April 27-28, 2015, at the Mandalay Bay in Las Vegas. Application period ends Jan. 16, 2015.
Kristin Burnham currently serves as InformationWeek.com's Senior Editor, covering social media, social business, IT leadership and IT careers. Prior to joining InformationWeek in July 2013, she served in a number of roles at CIO magazine and CIO.com, most recently as senior... View Full Bio
We welcome your comments on this topic on our social media channels, or [contact us directly] with questions about the site.Please distribute this story as widely as possible. The spread of MRSA both in and out of hospital is a big problem that we have been warned about since 2005 by the physicians at Doctors Opposing Circumcision. It is now making headlines and it is only going to get worse. Beth Israel Hospital in Boston is affiliated with Harvard. I think we can safely guess that, if there is lax infection control in this institution, it’s probably the “canary in the coal mine” for other institutions. With economic cut backs we know that cleaning services are not going to improve. It’s time to bring an end to the unnecessary cutting of baby genitals. The writing has been on the wall for a long time but a moratorium on circumcision can no longer be delayed. Physicians are well aware that babies are dying from this antibiotic resistant strain of staph infection but it has not been publically displayed so they have been able to perpetuate the circumcision ritual. It’s now time for the AAP to take decisive action to protect families from the nightmare of MRSA in circumcision wounds.
These are some of the news stories coming out of Beth Israel Hospital.
http://www.boston.com/news/health/articles/2009/04/11/state_details_safety_lapses_at_beth_israel/
Quote: And, on several occasions, the investigators observed worrisome lapses related to circumcisions, including an instance when a nurse didn’t change gloves before tending to the dressings of a baby. Of the 19 infants who have become ill with the drug-resistant staph infection, 15 have been boys, according to Dr. Anita Barry, who is overseeing the investigation of the cases by the Boston Public Health Commission.
“I think the circumcision dressing example was one we found particularly problematic,” Dreyer said. “You’ve got examples of contamination that may be in the context of kids with open wounds from circumcision. The danger is spread of infection.”
End of quote.
Update of story here: http://www.boston.com/lifestyle/family/articles/2009/04/10/beth_israel_faulted_for_staph_outbreak_in_mothers_babies/?comments=all&plckCurrentPage=0 or http://tinyurl.com/cp3r6s
Quote: The father, who asked to remain anonymous to protect his family’s privacy, said his son was born in January, after the hospital was aware that there was a problem involving the MRSA bacteria. He said he wished he had been told what symptoms related to MRSA to look for when they were discharged, rather than be “kept in the dark.”
The pediatrician alerted them to a problem after noticing several red marks the size of a pencil point on his son’s genital area, he said, and within days, the tiny marks turned into “blisters filled with pus.” End of quote
Doctors Opposing Circumcision paper on MRSA complete with photos:
http://www.doctorsopposingcircumcision.org/DOC/mrsa.html Feel free to repost, link or cut and paste —-this is a very urgent matter. Let prospective parents and medical workers know about this problem.Not terribly long from now, Atlanta will join other world-class, aspirational cities like New York City, London, and Berlin. No, we aren’t getting a regionally convenient train system or a newfound appreciation for history. Bike-shares are coming!
This summer Cyclehop will debut 10 rental stations with 100 bikes in Atlanta, which anyone can use anywhere in the city for a fee and drop off at any other station. The company plans to expand to 500 bikes by the end of the year.
But first things first. Before opening the system to the public, the Atlanta Bicycle Coalition is reaching out to city residents to figure out where most people would like to see rental stations.
"We really want Atlantans to have input on where the bike-share stations expand to next around the city," executive director of Atlanta Bicycle Coalition Rebecca Serna said in a press release "But the challenge is also creating interest in a type of public transportation that many people have never experienced."
According to the Washington Post, bike-share operations have exploded in the last decade or so. In 2004, only 13 cities had them, and by last year, that number had grown to 855.
In an effort to solicit the most input, Atlanta Bicycle Coalition will randomly select one survey participant each week to receive a $50 gift card. And one participant will be the lucky winner of a new children’s bike.
The survey is simple. Just text 678-647-7176 and answer the following question with your neighborhood of choice:
When the bike share system expands, in what neighborhood do you want to see bike share stations?Of Interest: blood, organs, construction materials, food, high nutrition, donation.
Of Interest: blood, organs, construction materials, food, high nutrition, donation.
Asset Summary: A report written by International Coordinator Murakabe Shinkichi of the Medical Relief Actions Committee follows:
I was part of the delegation sent to ███, Hungary to inspect the donations and how they were acquired. Naturally, we wanted to have a look at it first. It's no longer a rare issue that some organ donor groups obtain their donations by unethical, involuntary means. And the last thing we would want is some poor being robbed of their life for monetary gain. We want to ease the world's suffering, not add to it.
So we arrived in this humble, somewhat dilapidated village in northeastern Hungary (I'm told a lot of villages look like this due to economic issues), where we were warmly greeted by the local mayor, one Ivády █████. (In Hungary, every locality has its own mayor, no matter how small it may be, apparently.) The village was certainly small, houses were spread thin and barely 400 people lived there.
We were then taken on a tour of the little village, shown the local church and manor, also by the name of Ivády (which is a VERY common surname here, kind of like Yamada in Japan). At the manor, we were treated to a wonderful feast and spent a good few hours socializing. Only after its conclusion did they get down to business and show us their prospective donation.
They had an entire barn full of timber, bricks, cement, roof panels, various fruits and berries, and even several freezers stocked with healthy organs and bags of blood, several litres. Our medical experts confirmed that they were in perfect shape, and the blood was claimed to be of several rare blood types. (Our own laboratories later managed to confirm this back home.) All this were they willing to give to us for free.
Immediately, we became suspicious. There's simply no way that anybody could accumulate that much body material without some horrible background to it all. That's when the Mayor bade me come and look at their walnut tree. Supposedly, it was of great spiritual significance to them (some weird Christian denomination? I have no idea), though I couldn't see the relevance. Three old people were waiting for us underneath it, two women and one man. They were apparently the local priests, though they seemed more like shamans.
They took three of us: me, Assistant Duprès and Doctor al-Harawi, and led us up to the tree and… inside. I'm not sure how, I never saw any entrance. I just remember suddenly being inside something tight and sticky and slimy and smelling vaguely of Nutella and maple syrup, and then we emerged into this tall wooden tower of sorts. Clearly, these people were anomalous, that much I'd gathered by that point. We were then led up along some stairs to the upper floor and ushered out through a door (the only one there).
We arrived in some circular garden, I think. Everything beyond a certain distance was just a colourful blur. And in the middle of it all was another old, huge tree. This one was huge and looked different from the one on the manor grounds. Somebody said it was chestnut, though I wouldn't know. There were all sorts of fruit hanging from the branches, more than any one tree should have. And I saw them harvesting organs from holes within the tree and… tapping it for blood. The exact same way that Canadians tap maples for their sap to make syrup of it.
Only this was blood dripping from those tubes, not sap. It all seemed so bizarre. The shamans then told us that they had been doing this for generations. That they were somehow connected to this tree in some spiritual sense, and that it wanted to "spread its gifts" to more people.
Not much happened after that. We were led outside, loaded the cargo, thanked them for their donation, and left. We travelled back in silence. I think most of us were simply too shocked at that point.
Now that I can look at it from a more sober perspective, I must say that despite how bizarre it may seem, we ought to accept their assistance. We have some benevolent rural cult, worshipping some kindly tree that wants to heal and feed and shelter people. It feels like a Miyazaki movie, where what looks evil turns out to be good. We get valuable supplies, nobody gets hurt, it doesn't cost a fortune and it's a renewable resource. With this, we could help so many more people than with our current meagre resources.
Therefore it is my explicit recommendation that we initiate a partnership with these people. Together, we can help make the world a better place.Image copyright SPL Image caption The World Health Organisation says it is closely monitoring the novel coronavirus
Five people in Saudi Arabia have died from a Sars-like virus and two more are seriously ill, officials say.
The seven cases were all from al-Ahsa governorate in the east of the country, the Saudi news agency SPA said citing health officials.
The novel coronavirus (NCoV) causes pneumonia and sometimes kidney failure.
It is from the same family of viruses as the one that caused an outbreak of Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (Sars) that emerged in Asia in 2003.
WHO notification
In the statement released by SPA, the Saudi health ministry said it was taking "all precautionary measures for persons who have been in contact with the infected people... and has taken samples from them to examine if they are infected".
However, the ministry gave no details on how many people had been tested for the disease.
In a statement, the World Health Organization said the cases were not from the same family and preliminary inquiries showed "no indication of recent travel or animal contact" in any of the confirmed cases.
Novel coronavirus Coronaviruses are a large family of viruses that include the common cold and Sars
NCoV causes respiratory infections in humans and animals
May be a mutation of existing virus or an infection in animals that has made the jump to humans
NCoV does appear to be closely related to a virus in bats
In March, WHO said it had been informed of 17 confirmed cases of NCoV worldwide, including 11 deaths.
Cases have been detected in Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Germany and the UK.
Correspondents say the exact source of the new virus and how it spreads are still unknown. One theory is that it comes from animals.
The threat to the general population is thought to be small, although the virus has shown signs of spreading in people.
According to WHO, the last known death from NCoV was a 73-year-old man from the United Arab Emirates in March.
In February, a patient died in a hospital in Birmingham, England, after three members of the same family became infected.
It is thought a family member had picked up the |
hotels, the Green and the Raymond, flanked by Del Mar Avenue on one side and Raymond Avenue on the other.
It was the only segment ever completed. By the end of the year, a lack of investment and declining ridership forced Dobbins to abandon his grand plans for a bicycle freeway. Nearly 40 years later, the Arroyo Seco Parkway would trace much of the cycleway’s planned route—designed for automobiles and closed to bicycles.
Nathan Masters of the USC Libraries blogs here on behalf of L.A. as Subject, an association of more than 230 libraries, cultural institutions, official archives, and private collectors hosted by the USC Libraries and dedicated to preserving and telling the sometimes-hidden histories of Los Angeles.Dogs are known to be excellent readers of human body language in multiple situations. Surprisingly, however, scientists have so far found that dogs do not follow human gaze into distant space. Scientists at the Messerli Research Institute at the Vetmeduni Vienna investigated how this skill of dogs is influenced by aging, habituation and formal training. The outcome: Gaze following to human gaze cues did not differ over the dogs' lifespan, however, formal training was found to directly influence gaze following in dogs. The results were published in the journal Animal Behaviour.
Gaze following to distant space has been documented in many species such as primates, domesticated goats, several bird species, dolphins, fur seals, the red-footed tortoise and wolves. Gaze following is therefore a basic response found in many taxa. Dogs may present a special case as we find evidence that they are able to follow human gaze to objects such as food or toys, but not for the comparatively simpler task of following gaze into distant space.
Two possible reasons were offered to explain this phenomenon: One reason could be habituation. Dogs lose their innate gaze following response as they age, as they are frequently exposed to human gaze cues over their lifespan and slowly stop responding to them. Another reason could be formal training such as obedience, agility, and trick training may interfere with the dogs’ response to gaze cues, since dogs are usually trained to look at the owner, to wait for commands and ignore distractions.
What influences dogs’ gaze following response to human gaze cues?
Lead author Lisa Wallis and her colleagues at the Vetmeduni Vienna investigated 145 Border Collies aged 6 months to 14 years in the Clever Dog Lab in order to address the question of whether habituation, and/or training influences dogs’ gaze following response, and to determine, for the first time, how this ability changes over the course of a dog's life by comparing groups of dogs of different ages.
Dogs of all ages are able to follow human gaze
The scientists tested two groups of dogs with differing amounts of formal training over their lifespan. Both groups participated firstly in a test and control condition, where their initial gaze following performance was measured. The experimenter obtained the dogs’ attention using its name and the command “watch” after which the experimenter turned her head swiftly to look at the door of the testing room in the test condition, or looked down to the floor next to her feet in the control condition. If the dogs responded by looking at the door within two seconds in the test condition but did not look at the door in the control condition, a gaze following response was recorded.
After the gaze following trials, the main group (Group Eye) was given an intensive training session with the experimenter to initiate eye contact, over a 5 minute period. The second group (Group Ball) was instead trained in a task where they had to touch a tennis ball with their paw. This control group was included in order to rule out any effects of decreased response due to repeated exposure to human gaze cues and fatigue. Immediately after these trainings the dogs were again tested in the gaze following trials in order to determine the effect of short-term training for initiating eye contact on dogs’ gaze following performance.
Dogs’ tendency to follow human gaze is influenced by training for eye contact
Dogs which had a higher amount of formal training over their lifespan showed a lower gaze following response compared to dogs with little or no training. Similarly, short-term training also decreased dogs’ gaze following response and increased gaze to the human face.
The authors conclude that formal training had a stronger influence than aging or habituation on dogs’ gaze following response. This may explain why previous studies have failed to find a gaze following response when cues to distant space are used, and why in comparison to other species dogs perform relatively poorly in this task. The fact that the experimenter used strong attention-getting cues and provided contextual relevance by looking at a door may have also contributed to the positive results found in this study.
“From a very young age dogs have experience with doors when they live in human homes. The dogs develop an understanding that at any time an individual may enter the room, and therefore doors hold special social relevance to dogs”. - says Lisa Wallis.
In her current project, together with her colleague Durga Chapagain, Wallis is investigating the effects of diet on cognitive aging in older dogs. The scientists are still looking for dog owners who would like to participate in that long-term study (food is provided for free).1. Save used paper towels in order to wipe floors/spills.
2. Slippers. Slippers everywhere. We have more pairs of slippers than there are people in our family.
3. We don't use our dishwasher. My parents and grandparents prefer washing the dishes by hand even though it takes much more effort, I think it's because they'll know it's clean if they did it themselves.
4. I'm not sure if this is just a Vietnamese thing but every mom insists on giving her children a glass of milk before bed.
5. We cook a lot of our meals. My parents will eat out maybe once every 3 months if at all. My grandma (who lives with us) and my mom cook the majority of the meals that are eaten daily.
6. Again, I don't know if this is just a Vietnamese thing (can someone confirm?) but we do not like sweet things as much as an American would. For example, my mom would never be able to stomach a whole Snickers bar and I could never go through a whole packet of Starbursts. Some things are just too sweet for me to even eat (like Cheesecake).
7. Bowls. I never knew that it was weird to have so many bowls in my house until a friend who came over commented on it. We eat mainly from bowls and only occasionally on plates (which are usually used for serving).
8. Sriracha. Every Asian household has a bottle. It is the THE Asian condiment.
9. Rice for most (if not all) meals. It's cheap and easy to prepare. Right now, there are three 50 lb bags of rice in my pantry. The only reason I don't eat it for all meals is because it's a simple carb.
10. We turn red when we drink. It looks pretty hilarious actually.
11. We have a lot of get togethers (I just call them Asian parties) every week or so which usually include Karaoke.
12. Organization is important.
13. Almost every parent or grandparents knows how to administer traditional medicine whether it be tiger balm oil or that thing that I can only describe as "applying heat to bulby glass things then suctioning them on a person's back". It feels odd.
14. Chinese New Years! I love those red envelopes. For those not in the know, adults put money into these small little red envelopes and give them to children on Chinese New Years.
15. If your family is Buddhist, you'll have a small altar somewhere in your house with a statue of the Buddha (not the Budai) incense, and fruit.
These are just 15 things I thought of off the top of my head, I'll add more on my Laptop once my StayFocusd extension resets (grrrr). Let me know if these apply just to my race and I'll gladly fix it!Attorney General Jeff Sessions pauses during an event at the Justice Department August 4, 2017 in Washington, D.C. Getty Images
It’s hardy a secret that Attorney General Jeff Sessions is not a fan of states that have chosen to legalize marijuana. He even put together a hand-picked task force to help him figure out how the federal government should deal with legalized marijuana in the states. But it seems the group of prosecutors and federal law enforcement officials Sessions put together really don’t think much should change.
The findings from the Task Force on Crime Reduction and Public Safety have yet to be made public. And there may be good reason for that. Turns out the group of experts Sessions put together did not come up with any new recommendations on how to best turn the the attorney general’s anti-pot views into concrete action for the federal government, according to the Associated Press.
The AP got its hands on portions of the report that appear to make clear the task force believes authorities should keep studying the issue in order to determine whether the federal government should change the Obama-era hands-off approach to legalized marijuana. Although the findings are hardly final and Sessions is under no obligation to listen to the task force, “the tepid nature of the recommendations signals just how difficult it would be to change course on pot,” notes the AP.
Advocates of legal weed promptly celebrated news of the task force’s findings. “The task force’s recommendations reflect the fact that the Dept. of Justice has more important priorities than harassing legitimate, taxpaying businesses,” Don Murphy, the director of conservative outreach at the Marijuana Policy Project, said in a statement.
News of the findings comes as officials from Washington say that a recent letter they received from Sessions about the state’s legal marijuana system “raises concerns significantly” that a crackdown could be in the works. Colorado received a very similar letter that put forward a number of issues surrounding legal marijuana that authorities think could be used as an excuse for a crackdown in the future. For now though, the letters suggest that the policy of little federal interference will continue at least for the near future.LakeBanker CEO: China Is a Great Place for Financial Innovation Like This
Bitsonline was able to sit down with LakeBTC CEO Thomas Xie, to shed some light on the well-regarded but little-known bitcoin exchange. Xie also talked about LakeBTC’s recent project, LakeBanker — an attempt to create a decentralized bank.
Also read: BitPay Software Drama a Sign of Bitcoin’s Rough Road Ahead
Xie is a cryptocurrency veteran, since 2011. He co-founded LakeBTC, one of the world’s leading cryptocurrency trading platforms. After graduating from Beijing Institute of Technology and working for IBM, Xie became a serial entrepreneur with 18 years of experience in the technology and financial services industries.
Xie: LakeBanker Wants to Serve Real People in the Real World
Bitsonline: Your company has been around for years and seems popular with users, but there’s been almost no marketing or publicity. Why is that?
TX: Our style is to get work done before talking. In the current climate of hysteria around blockchain, many projects are excessively focused on marketing grand ideas with little substance behind them.
We’re not like that. We’re real blockchain enthusiasts: we want to bring cryptocurrencies to billions in the real world, not just the world of ideas and marketing.
LakeBTC has many customers with little money and limited access to banking who want to invest in cryptocurrencies but have no feasible way to do so. A big part of our model is to help people like this. Even though we’ve had little recent publicity, we still sustain interactions with the traditional financial world, including banks, payment processors, credit card companies, insurance, asset management and regulators in small circles relating to Blockchain and cryptocurrencies.
The demand for LakeBTC’s services has been exceptionally strong. As has the demand within the LakeBanker beta. We have been dealing with that. The feedback from the beta has allowed us to streamline our processes and improve the system. Now it’s ready for the world.
Bitsonline: A form of LakeBanker has already been operating for a year or so. How does introducing a native token improve that experience for network members?
TX: We’re introducing the token ‘banc’ (BAC) to drive transactions within the LakeBanker system. All fees and interest will be denominated by BAC. The LakeBanker system currently deals with hundreds of countries and dozens of currencies with more to come as we expand.
A universal internal token will be more consistent and easier to use. Here’s an example of how the token integrates into our business model: Once we gather enough data for a region, value-added services such as credit lines and peer-to-peer loans will be offered.
Imagine the system extends a credit line of $5,000 to a user, and they borrow from that credit line. At the month’s end, they may owe 200 BAC in interest. The user can buy 200 BAC from the market to pay that interest. If they don’t want to buy BAC, they can become a LakeBanker and serve others to earn it instead. The earned BAC can be used as payment for services or sold to the market. In this way, BAC facilitates true “crowd-banking”.
Bitsonline: Does being based in mainland China present any problems when looking for investors and participants?
Xie: Not at all. For two reasons: Firstly, despite being headquartered in China, LakeBTC and LakeBanker are in fact international organizations with plans to open offices in Hong Kong, London and elsewhere.
Our team and advisory board comprise an international group of experts in finance and blockchain technology. Our potential corporate partners are spread throughout the world. As are our customers.
Secondly, any fears about China as a location for financial innovation tend to be based on unsubstantiated rumor and gossip. If you look at the actual evidence, it’s clear that China is a friendly environment for crypto-assets, blockchain-related startups and other financial innovations, including ICOs.
The Chinese national government is keen on risk management for sure. But that will be an attraction, rather than a deterrent, to serious investors. Our CSO wrote a detailed post on this question. You can check it out on our site.
Bitsonline: What has been the response to your token sale so far? Any lessons learned?
Xie: Many investors are now participating: Some are long term investors who recognize the strength of our business model and the potential for our token to circulate amongst many millions of users in the long run.
Some want to join us in revolutionizing banking to improve the lives of millions of people. Some are current participants in our beta, wanting to be part of the coming expansion. Some are professional traders who predict a 1300 percent flip can be made within two months.
As you know, the current price is 1 ETH = 1300 BAC, while in Phase 2 our auction starts with 1 ETH = 100 BAC. These traders think our Phase 2 (in Oct) is likely to close at that price. This is a 13x profit. So people have lots of different reasons for investing.
As to lessons learned: We actually started by looking into previous ICOs/token sales and saw a number of potential problems. For example, server overload, network congestion, blockchain confirmation delay and skyrocketing miner fees for users.
To mitigate these problems our system accepts contributions now, well ahead of the official Phase 1 start time: All contributions received before 15th September 3PM UTC will enjoy the first-hour price of 1 ETH = 1300 BAC, which is the best price anyone will ever get. We have set it up so people can get this price without needing to compete with one another to get their transactions confirmed at the last minute.
Further, during this period, participation is guaranteed: if we oversell, tokens will be allocated on a pro rata basis, so everyone can enjoy this price. Nevertheless, Phase 1 has a very small cap, and after 9/15 3pm, it’s first come first served. So early participation is recommended.
What do you think of Thomas Xie’s comments regarding LakeBTC and LakeBanker? Let us know in the comments below.
Images Via LakeBTC, Pixabay
Bitsonline senior editors Scott Fargo and Jon Southurst are LakeBanker advisors.FAZILKA, Punjab: Two Pakistsmugglers were killed and one was injured in a gunfight with Border Security Forces (BSF) in Fazilka city in Punjab today.
The incident took place at a border out post called Sawana at around 2:30 am, when the soldiers on duty noticed some unusual activity beyond the fencing, but still inside the Indian territory and when they challenged the infiltrators, they opened fire on the jawans.
In retaliation, the BSF jawans also fired and two smugglers were killed and one was seriously injured and was rushed to the hospital.
Following the encounter, 15 packets of heroin and weapons were also recovered from them, including two pistols and a boregun.
The incident comes in the wake of the spotlight being on Punjab over extensive drug smuggling and multiple cases of drug abuse."This car climbed Mt. Washington," says the usual bumper sticker.
"This car wants to jump OFF Mt. Washington." That's the bumper sticker Patty Konjoian came up with as she and her sister were penning their book and Web site, "Shut Up About … Your Perfect Kid!" While their work was inspired by their particular children's challenges — one has Asperger's syndrome, one has bipolar disorder — they've been surprised by the response they're getting.
"What we didn't realize was that a lot of people with 'average' kids would say, 'You know, I can relate to this because my kid is not a Rhodes scholar,'" says Konjoian.
The truth hit them like a ton of underachievers: Most of us are sick of perfect kids, perfect parents and, worst of all, those paragons of perfection — supermoms (if anyone could ever stand them in the first place. Wasn't unspoken anti-perfectionism really what sent Martha Stewart to the slammer?) In any event, we are in the midst of a big Anti-Perfect Mothering Moment.
On behalf of all the normal-to-slacker moms out there, I'd like to request TV, movies, magazines and advertisers to please stop showing us happy moms with every hair — and kid — in place. And if you really want to make us love you, throw in a crumpled-up Burger King wrapper.
Former Letterman writer Jill Besnoy is part of the anti-perfection wave. She created the Web site honestbaby.com, where you can buy tiny T-shirts that say, "Not sleeping through the night," and, "I survived nipple confusion" — a retort to all the breastfeeding-only zealots who think giving the kid a bottle now and then is pretty much on par with infanticide. Take that!
Konjoian and her sister have labeled this "The Movement of Imperfection," and you can find plenty of books on the shelves proffering the same message, including "Good-Enough Mother" and "Mommy Guilt: Learn To Worry Less, Focus on What Matters Most, and Raise Happier Kids." (For dads, there's "Daddy Needs a Drink.")
The cover of a recent Hallmark Magazine trumpeted the story "Letting Go of Perfect" by Karen Houppert, who confessed to living in a rundown house with no time or, frankly, oomph to spruce it up. All she was looking for was the courage to tackle the chaos, "and the wisdom to accept the bathroom tiles I cannot change."
To find these, she went to a lifestyle guru — the new kind, who teach acceptance and meditation rather than competition and makeovers — and there she had a revelation: Just as she never judged people by the neatness of their homes, why would anyone normal judge her? It's a realization more and more people are coming to.
"I think years ago, there was much more of a sense among young mothers that there was a need to do everything and be perfect," says the magazine's editor, Lisa Benenson. As the former editor of Working Woman, she remembers when women first entered the workplace; they felt they had to give 110 percent on all fronts. "Personally, for me, I spent years hand-making my children's Halloween costumes until they got old enough to say, 'You know, we'd prefer the store-bought ones,'" she says.
As do my kids. And many more. They like instant ramen more than homemade chicken soup, too.
So don't feel bad if you're not a supermom, or not being raised by one, or not married to one. But do feel free to enjoy some moments of tortured self-doubt if you are one.
Then you'll be just like the rest of us.
Lenore Skenazy is a columnist at The New York Sun and Advertising Age. To find out more about Lenore Skenazy ([email protected]) and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate Web page at www.creators.com.Earlier this week we spoke about NFL Defensive player of the year James Harrison turning down an official visit to the White House to meet President Obama. While the writers here at Walker-Sports did not like the fact that Harrison snubbed the president, we hate his lame excuses even more.
According to sources close to James Harrison, the reason he declined a visit to the White House was Harrison is afraid of flying. Yes, you read that correctly, one of the baddest men in football is too scared to hop on a plane and fly to Washington D.C. According to both friends and James Harrison's agent, he is deathly afraid to hop on a plane and is an absolute train wreck when he has to travel with the Steelers.
Granted fear of flying is a legitimate excuse, and it is a condition has kept many people from perusing their dreams. However, when your jobs requires, and you do it, flying eight or more times a year it is hard to believe that suddenly your fear is too great to overcome when a paycheck is not on the line.
On the surface it appears that Harrison has found a good excuse to get out of traveling to the White House. However, if you scratch the surface just a bit it really looks like that Harrison shot off his mouth a few days ago, and once his statements became public he needed to find a quick out, and save some face. Maybe next time he will come up with a better excuse.BOSTON, MA--Headache? Back pain? At the first sign of pain, you might reach for a pain-relieving medicine to sooth your bodily woes.
Analgesics are the most frequently used medications in the United States and are commonly used to treat a variety of medical conditions.
But although popping a pill may make the pain go away, it may do some damage to your ears.
According to a study by researchers at Brigham and Women's Hospital (BWH), women who took ibuprofen or acetaminophen two or more days per week had an increased risk of hearing loss. The more often a woman took either of these medications, the higher her risk for hearing loss. Also, the link between these medicines and hearing loss tended to be greater in women younger than 50 years old, especially for those who took ibuprofen six or more days per week.
There was no association between aspirin use and hearing loss.
The study will be published in the September 15, 2012 issue of the American Journal of Epidemiology.
The researchers prospectively examined the relationship between frequency of aspirin, ibuprofen and acetaminophen use and risk of hearing loss among women in the Nurses' Health Study II.
Data from 62,261 women ages 31 to 48 years at baseline was studied. The women were followed for 14 years, from 1995 to 2009. Ten thousand and twelve women self-reported hearing loss.
Compared with women who used ibuprofen less than once per week, those who used ibuprofen 2 to 3 days per week had a 13 percent increased risk for hearing loss, while women who used the medication 4 to 5 days per week had a 21 percent increased risk. For those who used ibuprofen six or more days per week, the increased risk was 24 percent.
Compared with women who used acetaminophen less than once per week, women who used acetaminophen 2 to 3 days per week had an 11 percent increased risk for hearing loss, while women taking the medicine 4 to 5 days per week had a 21 percent increased risk.
"Possible mechanisms might be that NSAIDs may reduce blood flow to the cochlea--the hearing organ--and impair its function," said first study author Sharon G. Curhan, MD, BWH Channing Division of Network Medicine. "Acetaminophen may deplete factors that protect the cochlea from damage."
Curhan notes that although analgesics are widely available without a prescription, they are still medicines that carry potential side effects.
"If individuals find a need to take these types of medications regularly, they should consult with their health care professional to discuss the risks and benefits and to explore other possible alternatives," said Curhan.
Over 50 percent of American adults suffer from high-frequency hearing loss by the time they reach 60 years old. One-third of women in their 50s and nearly two-thirds in their 60s have experienced hearing loss.
According to the World Health Organization, adult-onset hearing loss is the sixth most common disease burden in high-income countries.
###
This research was supported by the National Institutes of Health (DC010811 and CA50385) and by Vanderbilt University School of Medicine.
Brigham and Women's Hospital (BWH) is a 793-bed nonprofit teaching affiliate of Harvard Medical School and a founding member of Partners HealthCare. BWH has more than 3.5 million annual patient visits, is the largest birthing center in New England and employs nearly 15,000 people. The Brigham's medical preeminence dates back to 1832, and today that rich history in clinical care is coupled with its national leadership in patient care, quality improvement and patient safety initiatives, and its dedication to research, innovation, community engagement and educating and training the next generation of health care professionals. Through investigation and discovery conducted at its Biomedical Research Institute (BRI), BWH is an international leader in basic, clinical and translational research on human diseases, involving nearly 1,000 physician-investigators and renowned biomedical scientists and faculty supported by nearly $625 million in funding. BWH continually pushes the boundaries of medicine, including building on its legacy in organ transplantation by performing the first face transplants in the U.S. in 2011. BWH is also home to major landmark epidemiologic population studies, including the Nurses' and Physicians' Health Studies, OurGenes and the Women's Health Initiative. For more information and resources, please visit BWH's online newsroom.Tuesday on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe,” host Mika Brzezinski discussed the latest developments in the FBI’s investigation into presumptive Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton’s use of a private email server while secretary of state.
Brzezinski noted an interview Clinton conducted with NBC over the weekend, which they only allowed her to be interviewed for five minutes. That gave off an appearance that everything was “very concocted” to protect Clinton.
“That is like everything here,” Brzezinski said. “Everything seems very concocted to protect her. And boy would I like her to be doing well right now. But Mark Halperin, tell me what you see in this. Are they trying to move this along? Are they trying to get this over with? Are they trying to even coordinate it and control it? Even everything – we know Clinton is meeting with Loretta Lynch in private, or all of a sudden meeting with the FBI on a Saturday morning, Fourth of July weekend for three-and-a-half hours. Did they ask for it? Are they trying to move it along? What do we know? And how are we supposed to assume everything is above board here?”
“We don’t know some basic things that we often know about investigations at this stage,” Halperin replied. “For one thing, is she subject to recall? A lot of times with high-profile witnesses like this, David Kendall, Hillary Clinton’s lawyer may have negotiated to say you get one crack at her, one time to sit with her and take as long as you want but that’s it. We don’t know whether she’s coming back or not. We also don’t know if prosecutors really looking for a crime here or run influence and say we investigated and there’s no crime at all. Prosecutors generally when they investigate a case want an indictment. That’s what they do. We don’t know what their mind-set is towards this. Everyone I talk to in Clinton world seems very relaxed about where things stand.”
Follow Jeff Poor on Twitter @jeff_poorUnder the current bail system, you either pay up or stay put, personal and professional consequences be damned. John Mcallister/Hemera
On Sunday, John Oliver devoted the majority of his HBO show to America’s broken bail system. “Bail” is the cash or property equivalent demanded of arrestees as surety—an assurance that they will return to court to face trial on the charges they have been accused of. The theory goes like this: Make someone put up $500 (or $500,000) and he’ll return to court, if only to get his money back. And while this sounds fine in theory, in practice it has become nothing more than a shockingly effective way to coerce guilty pleas from poor people.
In America we tend to incarcerate a higher percentage of our citizens than any other country on Earth. And fueling that pipeline to jail and prison is a criminal justice system that processes more than 12 million arrests every year and has left nearly one-third of working-age adults saddled with a criminal record. Nearly all of these arrests are for relatively minor offenses. Indeed, less than 10 percent of arrests (and less than 4 percent of criminal cases when one counts the millions of criminal summonses issued every year) concern what the FBI terms “violent offenses.”
The sad truth is the millions of misdemeanor cases disproportionately affect the lives of people of color, and especially the poor, and there are few ways in which this effect is more dramatic than in the way that bail decisions affect case outcomes. Working as a public defender in the Bronx, I regularly saw clients languish at Rikers Island simply because they couldn’t afford to buy their way out. These were not people who had been convicted and were serving sentences; they were just poor clients sitting in their jail cells waiting for their chance to fight their case. But few are able to do that. Because once in jail, people are faced with a terrible choice: Plead guilty and go home saddled with a criminal record, or maintain innocence and remain in jail. Spend a night or two at a place like Rikers Island and you’ll understand why almost everyone opts to just plead and go home. After watching this fundamental unfairness almost nightly for several years, my former office—the Bronx Defenders—and I decided to try to do something about it.
It’s important to remember that this system of exploitation is not an accident. It is by design. Because without coercing pleas from as many defendants as possible as expeditiously as possible, the criminal justice system would collapse under its own weight. In 2013, New York City arraigned 365,752 criminal cases (a number that does not include more than 450,000 summonses). Those cases resulted in 691 trial verdicts, leaving 365,061 cases to be disposed of without a trial.
Judges and prosecutors are fully aware of their utter inability to try anything close to the number of cases police push into the system. For the system to function, there must be pleas. By setting bail, judges accomplish two things: They cover themselves politically if a defendant goes out and kills someone (because at least they set bail rather than releasing anyone), and they fundamentally alter the criminal justice playing field by dealing the prosecutors an essentially unbeatable hand.
There is a vaguely Newtonian truth of criminal justice: A body incarcerated tends to stay incarcerated. A body at liberty tends to stay at liberty Much like a phase change in physics, sending someone to jail takes a great deal of effort, and getting him or her out of jail does as well. Thus the incentives to plead guilty when one is at liberty are a fraction of what they are when one is incarcerated.
But it does not have to be this way. Several years ago the Bronx Defenders helped establish the first licensed charitable bail organization in New York state—the Bronx Freedom Fund. (I’m still the chairman of the board of the nonprofit fund.) The idea was simple: Post bail for people too poor to afford it, work with their lawyers to ensure that they return to court, and see what happens.
Here’s what did: Ninety-eight percent of bail fund clients made every one of their court appearances. Whereas every single client would have previously pleaded guilty just to get out of jail, in more than 50 percent of the cases in which bail was posted the charges were entirely dismissed. Of the remaining cases, most resulted in noncriminal dispositions, and not a single recipient returned to jail on the case in which the Freedom Fund posted bail. The average amount posted? Less than $750. (And since bail money is returned to the fund, once a case is closed, the fund is able to use the dollars again and again to bail out other clients.) What the Bronx Freedom Fund did was fundamentally upend the power dynamic of the criminal justice system by removing poverty as a lever through which to extort pleas.
There are other ways to do this, of course, but they come at a cost. On his show Oliver touted the “pretrial services” model. In it, there is a presumption of release, and defendants are steered to an agency that assesses them for needs and can impose conditions on their release. And while it is certainly a whole lot better (and a lot cheaper) than pretrial detention, it is also terribly ill-suited for the vast majority of cases.
Pretrial services is a terrific model in felony cases in which high bail would normally keep someone in jail and a certain amount of monitoring may be warranted. But unfortunately, fewer than one in 1 in 7 cases is a felony and fewer still are violent felonies. But all those misdemeanor cases (assuming one can post bail) generally result in fines, community service, drug or alcohol counseling, or probation. The problem with the pretrial services model is that in these misdemeanor cases, it institutes an Alice in Wonderland justice: sentence first, verdict afterward. Pretrial release is just another way of imposing probation before conviction, replicating albeit in a more benign fashion the very problem the system aimed to solve. By contrast, because the charitable bail fund model works with defense lawyers to ensure clients return to court, it is able to assist clients in seeking services they might need without mandating that they do so. After all, they haven’t yet been convicted of anything, and thus should not, until there is a conviction in the case, be subject to judges’ orders about what they need.
There is no question that our bail system is broken, and Oliver deserves enormous credit for exposing its shortcomings. But if we cannot eliminate money bail entirely in favor of presumptive release, we should at least craft solutions—like a charitable bail fund—that do not require paying for unproven misconduct in advance and are specifically targeted at the millions of misdemeanors that actually comprise our criminal justice system. The outcome of a criminal case should never turn on a defendant’s socioeconomic status. Reforming our bail system is a good first step toward ensuring that it never does.Get the biggest weekly stories by email Subscribe Thank you for subscribing See our privacy notice Could not subscribe, try again later Invalid Email
Forget Will, thank you but goodnight Gareth - Pop Idol has a new heart throb - Matthew Healy.
Matthew, son of Auf Weidersehen Pet star Tim Healy and former Coronation Street Rovers Return landlady Denise Welch, won the charity song contest at the King's School in Macclesfield.
Competing against a host of entries across the Boys' Division, Matthew's schoolboy charm and undoubted musical talent earned him the popular vote.
His renditions of The La's 'There She Goes' and the Oasis classic 'Don't Look Back in Anger' had the crowds heaving in the school's main hall.
His mum was the first to admit that any talent has been inherited from his father's side: "As an actor we all do bits and pieces of singing, but I'm really not very good - Tim is the singer out of the pair of us."
Tim added: "I started as a comedian come soul singer, in other words I reverted to a song when I wasn't getting any laughs - which was more often than I care to remember."
The star of Auf Weidersehen Pet, which is currently in production for a reunion series, added: "I've still got a five piece and 10 piece band that does the circuit."
Matthew, 12, added: "I love bands like Green Day, Blink 182 and The Voo Doo, but I also love it when my dad plays Otis Redding and other singers from the 60s and 70s." He added: "I'd like to be a pop singer, but I really am just concentrating on my school work for now."
The King's School teacher who organised the shin dig, Richard Kitzinger, said: "We can't offer Matthew a six figure contract, but he does go through to play in a Stars in their Eyes final, competing against some of his teachers, whom I understand will be turning out as Hearsay."
He continued: "I can hardly believe it myself but tickets are selling like hot cakes."Tokyo's district court has ruled that it's not possible for people to own bitcoin, and therefore they can't sue for compensation in the wake of Mt. Gox's collapse. The ruling comes a few days after the head of what used to be the world's largest bitcoin exchange was arrested on charges of fraud concerning its collapse. The case involved an anonymous individual who had 458 BTC in their account, roughly equivalent to just under $130,000 today. Naturally, the person was seeking to claw some of that cash back, but Judge Masumi Kurachi felt that bitcoins do not possess the necessary "tangible qualities" to constitute owned property under the country's law. We won't debate their wisdom here, nor the intricacies of Japanese property law, but given that Gox was holding thousands of people's bitcoin stashes, there's plenty more angry customers looking for compensation.Sarah and Todd Palin during an election night rally on November 4, 2008 in Phoenix, Arizona. Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images
A dramatic scene unfolded over the weekend at the home of former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin that ended with the arrest of Palin’s eldest son, Track, on charges of first-degree burglary, fourth-degree assault, and criminal mischief. This is the second domestic violence arrest for the Iraq war veteran in the last two years. The altercation started as a |
checks at gun shows. But since then, Mauser says, the issue has become a political hot potato where lawmakers fear repercussions if they speak in favor of gun control.
"I realized early on, that you have to be in this for the long term," he says.
Click on the audio above to hear Mauser's conversation with Andrea Dukakis. Edited highlights are below.
How he became an activist:
"For the first 10 days, I didn't speak to the media at all. I was just in shock. [...] And then suddenly, I was so angry knowing that the NRA was meeting in town that I went and spoke in front of 12,000 people.
[...]It can be shocking. After I spoke, I suddenly realized I'm going to start getting calls from the media, I'm going to start getting people who are angry at me. You really have to be prepared for that.
[...]It can get pretty overwhelming. When you become an activist, you tell your story a lot. You live that story every day anyhow, it's not like you don't think of your loss. But when you go in front of other people and speak about it, it's so much more. "
On measured conversations with gun rights advocates:
"[It doesn't happen] very often, unfortunately.
Over the past year, for example, I've been speaking at a number of churches, churches who are willing to take on a contentious issue like this. When I speak at churches, there will sometimes be someone there who's pro-gun, maybe not extreme, but at least who presents a different perspective. In that safe environment, we've had some really good conversations.
[...]I think we can find common ground on a number of issues. In fact, I think over 70 percent of NRA members support background checks. If you really get to the heart of it, most people are in the middle on this issue."Dwayne Bravo was replaced as ODI captain and then axed from the one-day side © Associated Press
Dwayne Bravo, the West Indies allrounder, has announced his retirement from Test cricket, but wants to continue representing the side in limited-overs games. Bravo had not played Tests since December 2010, and his decision comes after he lost the ODI captaincy to Jason Holder and was then axed from the one-day side for the tour of South Africa and also the World Cup.
West Indies had pulled out from their tour of India last year under Bravo's leadership over a payment dispute with their board and players association. His subsequent removal from the squad had led to allegations of victimization from his lawyer, but chairman of selectors Clive Lloyd had said there was no axe to grind. Bravo was picked for the T20 internationals against South Africa and was also given a central contract by the board.
In the statement announcing his retirement, Bravo said it was a "difficult time" for West Indies cricket and those associated with it, but added that he still wanted to "serve" the fraternity with "the pride of being a West Indian."
"Today I am announcing my retirement from Test cricket," Bravo said. "I have already informed the WICB of this decision and also indicated my desire to continue to represent the West Indies in the shorter formats of the game.
"Over the years, with the greatest enthusiasm, I have done my best with the deep awareness that I am ultimately representing the people of the game.
"I recognise that this is a difficult time for all of us. Our people of the region have seen and enjoyed great cricketing days but we will not return to glory until we agree to go forward with our love for the game and the respect of the administrators, players and the public.
"I have experienced the exhilarating joy of victory and the devastating pain of defeat. The joyous memories will remind me of what we are capable of achieving. I want to be part of that mission.
"I thank the cricketing fraternity for their support and look forward to serving you with determination and the pride of being a West Indian."
Bravo scored 2200 runs in 40 Tests at an average of 31.42 with three centuries and picked up 86 wickets at 39.83 with two five-fors.
© ESPN Sports Media Ltd.Tools 9 Best PHP Tools of Year 2017 Yogesh Mankani December 15, 2017 PHP is one among the most popular programming languages used in the world. This popularity of PHP can be accepted by knowing the fact that around 2.1 million Read More
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After a lengthy debate, the Kentucky House of Representatives on Monday approved a controversial bill that would make it a hate crime to target police and other first responders.
House Bill 14, which is colloquially but not officially known as the “Blue Lives Matter” bill, passed 77-13 with bipartisan support in the House and will head to the state Senate for consideration.
Last year, Louisiana became the first state to permit the consideration of a victim's occupation when weighing whether a crime against that person was an act of hate. If HB 14 becomes law, Kentucky would join Louisiana in taking that approach.
In recent years, cases in which law enforcement officers shot and killed black citizens amid questionable circumstances have sparked nationwide debates over the use of force by police. But fatal ambushes of officers in Louisiana and Texas last year sent shockwaves through the country too.
►FROM 2016: Is a hate crimes bill to protect police needed?
Kentucky's hate-crimes bill was filed by Rep. Kevin Bratcher, R-Louisville. But some Louisville representatives spoke against the bill Monday, saying it was unnecessary and divisive.
Rep. Jim Wayne, D-Louisville, said current laws already allow tougher sentences for crimes against police, and that the purpose of a ‘hate crime’ law is to protect communities that have suffered oppression by virtue of their “birth or beliefs.” Kentucky's hate-crime law currently includes race, color, religion, sexual orientation and national origin as protected classes.
“You don’t just take the uniform off and lay it down. It’s part of who you are.” State Rep. John Blanton
Wayne said this bill is a response to the Black Lives Matter movement, which he said was formed to raise awareness among Americans “to be sensitive to the unique history that the oppressed people of this nation have had to endure under white male leadership.”
Wayne said HB 14 poses a false choice between supporting first responders and the black community. “I strongly reject this type of legislation that pits one group against the other,” he said.
But Rep. John Blanton, R-Salyersville, said that isn't what this legislation does.
"It’s not about Blue Lives Matter," he said, pointing out that firefighters wear red. "How about we call this 'First Responders Matter?'"
As for the concerns people raised regarding the fact that being a police officer – unlike being black or gay – is something someone chooses to become, Blanton indicated that a person's identity as a law-enforcement official isn't something that is easily shed.
"You don’t just take the uniform off and lay it down," he said. "It’s part of who you are."
►RELATED: GOP senators want to cut sex harassment training
The bill's skeptics have said the proposal won't have much of a practical effect in cases involving crimes against officers. Over 35 states, including Kentucky, already have additional penalties for harming officers on the books. And the American Civil Liberties Union of Kentucky has suggested the bill could be used to more seriously punish protesters who damage property during demonstrations against police brutality.
Opponents of the legislation suggested legislators could take more meaningful steps to improve the safety of first responders by improving their training and pay.
“But this bill does nothing except to pander, and to pretend like we’re doing something for our first responders,” said Rep. Mary Lou Marzian, D-Louisville.
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However, Rep. Robert Benvenuti, R-Lexington, said, “There’s no hypocrisy here. There’s no false choice here, this doesn’t need to be psychoanalyzed … This simply says if you execute our first responders you will be treated as committing what you did – a hate crime.”
As Monday's debate wrapped up and it was clear the measure would pass, a group of people in the House gallery chanted "Black Lives Matter" as they left the room.
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Theses, Dissertations & Graduate Projects >
Queen's Theses & Dissertations > Please use this identifier to cite or link to this item: http://hdl.handle.net/1974/8507
Title: Becoming Superman: Interpolating Transsexuality into the Superman Narrative Authors: Vena, DANIEL Files in This Item: File Description Size Format Vena_Dan_201311_MA.pdf 31.64 MB Adobe PDF View/Open Keywords: sequential art studies
transsexuality
trans studies
comic studies
Superman
transgender
FTMs
superhero studies Issue Date: 5-Dec-2013 Series/Report no.: Canadian theses Abstract: Reflecting the masculine ethos of the larger comic book industry, superhero comics continue to be male-dominated spaces. Within comic studies, superhero scholars problematically normalize this androcentrism by reiterating the genre’s masculinist rhetoric, repeatedly positioning superheroes as stoic figures of whiteness, nationhood, heteronormativity and able-bodied masculinity. Although some intervention has been made to challenge these interpretations, scholars fail to acknowledge how transgender and/or transsexual readers evaluate comic heroes. This thesis provides one such intervention into the field, specifically focusing on the last son of Krypton, Superman. Drawing together the work of trans, queer, feminist, psychoanalytic, and monster theorists, my research attempts to “trans” Superman; thus, (re)reading the Man of Steel in a way that distinctly reflects the experiences of those who are denied access to the figure via their/our own gender “transgressions”. By interpolating transsexuality into the Superman narrative, I rewrite the figure’s place within the genre’s cis-sexist, masculinist history and while doing so, (re)position him as a more suitable hero for the trans community. Description: Thesis (Master, Gender Studies) -- Queen's University, 2013-12-05 10:35:05.511 URI: http://hdl.handle.net/1974/8507 Appears in Collections: Queen's Theses & Dissertations
Gender Studies Graduate Theses
Recommend this item Items in QSpace are protected by copyright, with all rights reserved, unless otherwise indicated.by Urszula Papajak
Middelgrunden is probably the most frequently photographed offshore wind farm – 20 turbines situated just 2km outside of Copenhagen, each of 2 MW capacity, rising to 102 meters above the water line, placed side by side in a slightly arched line. It is co-owned by the state-owned utility DONG Energy and the Middelgrunden Turbine Co-operative. Erik Christiansen, chairman of the Middelgrunden cooperative, explains how working closely with the local authorities was key to the project’s success.
How did it start?
“The cooperative was started by a small group of unemployed engineers” explains Erik Christiansen. “We had a very visionary Energy Minister and Mayor for the environment at that time, who thought that our cooperative could be a good showcase for future projects. That’s how, in March 1997, we established the first offshore wind farm cooperative”.
Shaping the policy
“We worked very closely with public authorities and received a lot of support. Without their help, I don’t think we would have ever been able to negotiate with the utility company” says Christiansen. “The company was very skeptical at the beginning, they said: “they are normal citizens and they don’t have a clue about energy””.
Since the beginning, the government has kept an eager eye on this pioneering project. It recognised the potential of citizens’ participation in the generation of electricity from renewable energy sources and has been experimenting with different support tools since.
“When we were starting, there wasn’t much support whatsoever“ says Christiansen. “That has changed over the years”.
In order to assist local authorities with an often complicated and prolonged wind turbine installation planning process, a Wind Turbine Task Force was established in 2008. Its aim is to increase support for new wind turbines and help citizens to establish new wind cooperatives.
In response to a public demand for more transparency and access to information, all available governmental information about wind energy in Denmark has been gathered and published as a website: www.vindfo.dk. This way, citizens, local authorities, and wind project developers have easy access to information.
Furthermore, new legislation that offers new wind turbine cooperatives low-interest loans for the preliminary investigations, planning, etc was established. For those that fail the implementation stage, the loan does not have to be paid back!
To restore and maintain public acceptance for new projects, the Danish government also enacted a regulatory measure obligating developers of new wind turbines to offer at least 20% of the ownership to local people living within a radius of 4.5km of the turbine.
“I know some utility companies” adds Christiansen “who offer an even higher percentage to residents because they want to avoid local resistance towards the project. Some even give loans to wind cooperatives and residents”.
Advice for anyone wanting to start their own project?
“If I could advise anyone wishing to start their own renewable energy cooperative, I think I would probably say: work closely with local authorities, be patient and persistent” concludes Christiansen.So far, spring has been a big let down. There were two robins in the yard this morning, hopefully representing a soon-to-be change in the weather. Between the upper field and lower field, I’d say about two-thirds of the area is still covered in snow. In the woods, I can post-hole my legs up to the calf when not wearing snowshoes. Luckily, the freeze and thaw effect has left a fairly heavy crust on top of the snow, making it a little easier to walk around.
The little path that Pico and I have made to the sugar maples is a safe walk, and I have no problem doing it in sneakers. I might break through three or four times, but the falls through the crust into the four or five inches of snow don’t seem to matter now. The end is in sight.
I pulled one of the taps the other day. Initially I had tapped three trees, and so far the production has not been bad. I now have about five gallons of sap sitting in a bucket, waiting to be boiled and condensed into maple syrup. It’s not much, but it’s not too bad for a trial run either. I figure I might be able to get half a pint or even a little more syrup out of this big white bucket full of sap.
The largest tree I tapped didn’t produce much to begin with and after another week of only giving me a few ounces of sap, I decided to pull the tap and jug and just let that tree get on to the business of being a tree. The other two trees I tapped are starting to dwindle in their production, and I am planning on pulling them out this week as well. I’m going out of town for a couple days and decided to leave the taps and jugs in place until I get back. I’m not worried about overflow or anything like that, and with the reduced sap flow the last couple of days, I don’t think that will be a problem anyway.
The very first drop of sap that came out of the tap was both exciting and disappointing. It was exciting because it meant spring and sweetness and another project to take on. It was disappointing due to the fact that it seemed so insignificant. Literally just a drop in the bucket. I tasted the first drop as it rolled off the blue plastic spile and onto my tongue. It was nothing more than sugar water, with an ever-so-slight taste of maple to it. It’s amazing to think that at some point in history, someone looked at the clear liquid coming out of a maple stump and decided to taste it. That such a huge tradition and addition to our culinary culture could come from some dirty tree water is wonderful.
But now, two weeks later, when I sealed up the lid on the almost full five gallon pail, it’s amazing that in such a short time so much potential has been unleashed. There’s no doubt in my mind that if I had taken the time to tap the fifteen or so trees in the area that I could have had a considerable amount of syrup when all was said and done. I actually regret not doing more this year, but as with all things, it is what it is supposed to be.
I can drive into the cabin without four wheel drive now, and have had the time to scout out some downed trees to drag out for next winter’s fire wood. I have to fix the two metal roof panels that blew off the porch of the Upper Camp before any more damage occurs to the porch. I have to watch out for hungry bears and raccoons. There’s plenty to do out here, and making maple syrup is only one of many chores to be accomplished.
It is nice to think about the syrup as a chore. I like being able to enjoy my chores, and sitting by a fire all day making syrup is definitely a chore I can take pleasure in. I have no desire to climb up on a roof to fix the metal sheets. I will take no pleasure in wondering if the sounds I hear while sitting in the outhouse are those of a bear wandering by. But I will enjoy the spring, even though it is being rude with its tardiness.NEW YORK — Donald J. Trump shocked the world Tuesday, winning election as the 45th president of the United States.
The Republican nominee’s victory came after projections showed him winning the states of Florida and North Carolina, as well as Wisconsin, which a Republican nominee had not won in decades.
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Trump, once again, defied all the predictions.
His condemnations of the political establishment and his insistence that he alone can restore American greatness resonated with voters far from the media epicenters of the east and west coast. They came out in huge numbers to lift him to victory in the key battleground states. Jubiliation built throughout the evening at his election night headquarters at a midtown Manhattan hotel
Trump’s win is a huge upset to virtually everyone but the ebullient candidate himself. Clinton had led by around three points in the national polling averages as Election Day dawned, and some data prediction websites had put her chances of victory around 90 percent.
Polling organizations will face hard questions as to how they misread Trump’s backing so badly, even though aides to the candidate had long insisted that there were “shy” supporters who were not admitting their allegiances.
It’s not the first time the billionaire real estate magnate has upset the odds. When he began his White House bid in June 2015, pundits and political professionals derided his chances. They were proven wrong, in the first instance, when he won the GOP nomination against a large field that included several more seasoned rivals. They have been proven wrong in even more emphatic fashion now that he is president-elect.
Trump’s supporters, unswerving in their loyalty toward him, have opted for a man who framed his lack of formal political experience as an asset. He has never sought political office before.
But a plurality of voters have accepted his central arguments: that the American system is broken or rigged, that the U.S. has been weakened on the world stage; and that only a man of Trump’s force of personality — and distaste for political correctness — is capable of putting things right.
The result amounted to a political earthquake. “This is the end of the old establishment that has been running this country for years,” exulted Carl Paladino, a former gubernatorial candidate in New York and a Trump supporter. “This is about an uprising of the middle class in America and about saying, ‘Enough is enough, we’ve had enough of your bullshit.’”
President-elect Trump will be leading a deeply divided nation, however. His campaign ignited fierce opposition as well as support. Polls on personal favorability showed repeatedly that he was the most disliked major-party nominee of modern times — though Clinton was a close second.
His detractors contend that he has no respect for democratic norms, and that he has introduced xenophobia and bigotry into the political mainstream.
In January, he will succeed President Obama, a man who is his polar opposite temperamentally as well as ideologically. Trump’s first forays into the political arena called Obama’s birthplace into question, without evidence. Obama, for his part, made his disdain for Trump clear as he campaigned on Clinton’s behalf.
Now Trump will take office on the promise of undoing large chunks of Obama’s legacy. His most famous campaign promise is to erect a wall along the southern border with Mexico. He has also pledged to repeal Obama’s signature legislative achievement, the Affordable Care Act, or ObamaCare.
Trump has said that he will put in place “extreme vetting” for people entering the United States from countries connected to terrorism. This proposal is a modification of an earlier call to ban Muslims from coming into the country — a statement that caused one of the many furors that dogged Trump’s campaign.
At a personal level, the presidency is an extraordinary capstone to a life lived large. Trump first found fame as a New York property developer. He got his start in that business from this father, who had mostly concentrated on turning profits in the less fashionable borough of Queens. That would not satisfy his son, who turned his sighs to Manhattan, erecting gleaming skyscrapers that bore his name.
Trump would branch out from real estate into numerous other businesses, from golf courses and casinos to steaks and mortgages. Several such ventures failed but enough of them succeeded to keep Trump’s name in the news — a goal that he has long treated as a personal imperative.
His celebrity found its purest form during his years as the star of the NBC show “The Apprentice,” in which contestants sought to impress him with their business acumen and avoid what became his signature admonition: “You’re fired!”
The show indirectly led to his worst moment of the presidential campaign, however. In October, a video from 2005 emerged, in which Trump was heard boasting to TV anchor Billy Bush about how his fame enabled lecherous behavior toward women.
“When you’re a star, they let you do it,” Trump was heard telling Bush. “You can do anything. Grab ‘em by the p - - - y. You can do anything.”
The storm that followed almost capsized his campaign, as Republicans rushed to distance themselves from the party nominee. But Trump stabilized matters with a feisty performance in the second presidential debate against Clinton.
He went on to narrow her poll lead in the final stretch of the campaign, assailing her as the emblem of a corrupt system. He also took advantage of a late announcement from the FBI that it was investigating new emails sent or received by Clinton at a private email address she used while secretary of State. A later announcement that nothing incriminating had been found in those messages clearly did not slow the GOP nominee's gains.
Trump defined much of his campaign by what he was against: the GOP establishment, the media, the elites and, of course, Clinton herself. Now he must turn his attention to leading the nation.
He will face enormous challenges. But his achievement in winning the election on Tuesday shows just how dangerous it is to bet against him.Ex-Romanian minister accuses former US ambassadors of corruption
Former Romanian communications minister Gabriel Sandu filed yesterday a denouncement accusing former president Traian Basescu and Microsoft Romania of “setting up an organized criminal group”.
He also accused former US ambassadors Nicholas Frank Taubman and Mark H. Gitenstein, and former Austrian ambassador Martin Eichtinger of influence peddling and instigating to influence peddling, reports local Hotnews.ro.
Sandu, who is currently serving a three-year jail sentence for corruption in a case related to the purchase of overpriced Microsoft IT licenses by the state, filed his denouncement at the National Anticorruption Directorate (DNA) and also made it public. The 14-page document also names other former state officials, Microsoft Romania managers, and business people allegedly involved in the scheme through which the state was defrauded.
The National Anticorruption Directorate (DNA) yesterday sent Gabriel Sandu to court alongside local investors Dinu Pescariu and Claudiu Florica and former Microsoft Romania manager Calin Tatomir in a corruption case related to the acquisitions of overpriced Microsoft licenses by the state, according to an official announcement. The former minister was indicted for abuse of office.
Gabriel Sandu, who was Romania’s communications minister between 2008 and 2010, allegedly favored a company owned by Pescariu and Florica and granted it the contract to supply Microsoft licenses to state institutions for a year without a public tender, according to the prosecutors. The damage in this case exceeds EUR 51 million.
In his denouncement, Sandu claims that former president Basescu, former prime minister Emil Boc as well as former US ambassadors Taubman and Gitenstein pressured him into making payments to the firm represented by Pescariu and Florica and that former Microsoft Romania managers were also allegedly involved in the scheme.
editor@romania-insider.comKilling whales for food has been happening for millennia. But it was commercial whaling – turning whales into barrels of oil for profit – that led to the wholesale destruction of most of the world’s populations of big whales.The loss of whales from our oceans is the same story as overfishing of big fish – sharks, tuna, cod and others. It’s a tragedy for the species and has immense knock on effects across the ocean. We know that whales are important for the oceans, and we know that as long-lived, slow-growing animals they are much more susceptible to over-fishing than actual fish.
But there is some good news for whales. We have seen many populations showing signs of recovery since hunting was stopped. Whales are being found in greater numbers and seem to be reclaiming habitats they’ve been missing from for decades if not centuries. In the same way that recovering fish stocks generate cries of ‘let us catch more!’ from fishermen, the question now is – are some whales numerous enough that we can hunt them?
Well, here are ten reasons why we shouldn’t.
1) We don’t know how well whales are recovering, because we don’t know how many there once were or ‘should be’.
2) We are still learning about whales, amazingly ‘new’ species like the dwarf pygmy whale, Omura’s whale, and species of beaked whale have only been discovered the last few decades.
3) We now know that some whales have and pass on forms of ‘culture’, including humpbacks’ songs and orcas’ feeding strategies – whaling could have more impact on populations than sheer numbers.
4) Whales are necessary for healthy oceans, mixing, distributing nutrients and helping deal with the impacts of climate change.
5) Whales are full of persistent toxins, like mercury and PCBs. As long-lived and slow-growing animals they ‘bioaccumulate’ these in their blubber. This causes them problems when fighting disease and breeding, and can also makes them toxic if eaten.
6) We’re killing whales indirectly every day – including ship strikes, fisheries entanglement, military & seismic testing. We are also displacing whales more and more, by industrial developments, destroying habitats, and filling the ocean with noise.
7) Whales don’t understand national boundaries, and most species migrate in and out of different countries’ waters.
8) We don’t know what the ongoing impacts of climate change on ocean life, including whales and their prey, will be.
9) Commercial whaling, as with commercial hunting of virtually every large mammal or fish species has inevitably led to over-exploitation.
10) We simply don’t need to. Commercial whaling in its hey-day was about oil production, not meat production. There is no demand for whale meat – and even where whale meat is sold to be eaten it’s a peripheral, small and declining industry, and makes no economic sense.
Whales today live in degraded oceans, depleted and fractured populations, and face a growing barrage of human threats. Given all of that we have to treat any notion of ‘recovery’ in an extremely precautionary way.
Commercial whaling is the one human threat to whales we can, and should, simply consign to history – the world’s remaining whale populations have enough to contend with. So let’s get on with talking about whale conservation instead.Instead the police will retain DNA profiles in anonymised form, leaving open the possibility of connecting them up with people's names, ministers have admitted.
The admission appears to break a Coalition commitment to delete all innocent profiles, apart from those accused of violent or sex crimes, from police databases.
Civil liberties groups accused the Government of a “disgraceful U-turn” and a “breach of promise” to destroy innocent people’s DNA.
It is the latest in a list of about-turns by the Government on key pledges, such as the selling off tracts of forest, axing free school milk for some children and capping welfare handouts for all claimants at £26,000 a year.
Currently, in England and Wales, the DNA profiles of everyone arrested for a recordable offence are retained by the police, regardless of whether they were charged or convicted.
This has meant that the police’s national DNA database holds more than five million profiles, including one million people with no criminal conviction.
Experts say storing the DNA of innocent people gave them an unfair “presumption of guilt” in the eyes of the police.
The Coalition agreement last May said the Government would “adopt the protections of the Scottish model for the DNA database”.
DNA samples from innocent people would be deleted, apart from those accused of a sexual or violent offences, which would be held for five years.
However, Home Office minister James Brokenshire admitted to MPs on a committee which is considering the legislation that police forces will retain innocent profiles.
Mr Brokenshire said he had won agreement from the information watchdog that the DNA profiles could be retained by forensic science laboratories.
This would mean that the profiles would “be considered to have been deleted (even though the DNA profile record, minus the identification information, will still exist)”.
However Mr Brokenshire admitted that it would be still be possible to identify the anonymised profiles.
He said: “Members of the committee will be aware that most DNA records … will include the original barcode, which is used by both the police and the FSS [Forensic Science Service] to track the sample and resulting profile through the system.
“It is therefore theoretically possible that a laboratory could identify an individual’s profile from the barcode, but only in conjunction with the force which took the original sample, by giving details of the barcode of the force and asking for the individual’s name.”
This would be a “would breach the Data Protection Act, and would not be accepted as evidence in a criminal investigation”, he said.
However civil liberties groups were outraged by the apparent about-turn.
Isabella Sankey, policy director at Liberty, told The Daily Telegraph: “Anonymising intimate genetic information is nowhere near the same thing as destroying it, and this letter represents a massive U-turn on the part of two parties who promised that innocent people’s DNA would be destroyed.”
Retaining the profiles was a breach of a ruling by the European Court of Human Rights which ruled in 2008 that it was unlawful.
She added: “This breach of promise is also in breach of the judgment of the Court of Human Rights and more litigation will no doubt follow.
“The minister’s assurance that criminal offences under the Data Protection Act are sufficient safeguard against DNA being re-identified is like saying that phone-hacking offences protected people’s privacy from the News of the World.”
Daniel Hamilton, a director at campaign group Big Brother Watch, said: “This is a disgraceful U-turn on the part of the government. Destroying physical DNA samples is a pointless gesture if the computer records are to be retained.
“Despite paying lip service to freedom and civil liberties, this government is fast proving itself to be every bit as illiberal as its predecessor.”
Unveiling the legislation in January, Mr Clegg, the deputy Prime Minister, said the new Bill would “end the indefinite storage of innocent people’s DNA”.
The measure was also backed by Prime Minister David Cameron when he was in Opposition. In a speech in June 2009, he said: “Nearly five million people are on Labour’s DNA database.
“The Government says it’s to help fight crime. But almost a million of the people on it are completely innocent. And tens of thousands of those innocent people are children.
“It’s a situation that would cause concern under the most oppressive regimes in the world, but it's happening right here, right now in Britain... And we will remove innocent people's records from the DNA database.”
Last year, Sir Alec Jeffreys, the pioneer of genetic finger-printing, warned that keeping innocent people's DNA on the national database causes such distress it drove one man to kill himself.
He said storing the DNA of innocent people gave them an unfair "presumption of guilt" in the eyes of the police.
A Home Office spokesman insisted that profiles would be completely deleted from the national DNA database.
However within individual police systems, profiles are recorded in batches and it was not possible to delete one without affecting the rest, including convicted offenders.
The spokesman said: “Our position has not changed at all. We will retain the DNA of the guilty, not the innocent.
“That means DNA records of the innocent will come off the database and physical samples will be deleted.”So, did we mention that we’re really serious about multiplatform development? We want to provide the best engine in the world, and an important dimension to that is opening up as many avenues as possible for our developer community to find success.
Today at Microsoft’s annual Build conference, a strategic partnership was announced between Unity and Microsoft. That means support for their rather badass upcoming Xbox One and much more.
I’m also happy to say that the Windows Store Pro publishing add-on will be free when released (soon). So all current and future Unity Pro 4 customers stand to get $3000 worth of tech at half price!
You’ll be able to port your games, ads, training and educational apps―any kind of Unity-authored content―to both the Windows Store Apps and Windows Phone 8 platforms with a Unity Pro 4 license.
If that news isn’t thrilling enough, we also announced that we’re collaborating with Microsoft to develop tools for the Xbox One entertainment system, including support for many next-generation features like enhanced Kinect gestures and recognition, multiplayer matchmaking, SmartGlass and cloud stuff.
Oh, and developers who build games published by Microsoft Studios get the tools for both Xbox 360 and Xbox One free of charge.
Everywhere we look, we see original, hand-crafted, fun and immersive experiences created by you guys. That vision of democratizing game development always underlies what we do, and I’m thrilled that the collaboration with Microsoft delivers more ease and more oomph for you guys to bring your games (and other work |
A paper record consisting solely of ballots printed by the computer after the closing of the polls - and therefore never seen by the voters - would mean that a manual audit or recount would simply amount to reviewing what was stored in the computer. The audit or recount could not manually verify that the computer had accurately recorded the voter's intent, or had accurately stored that information, or had accurately printed out that information. Both an audit and a recount, therefore, would miss the key element of the system - whether the voter's intention had been accurately recorded."
Darryl Wold, JD
Former Chairman, Federal Election Commission
"The HAVA Requirement for a Voter Verified Paper Record," www.verifiedvotingfoundation.org
July 23, 2003 Former Chairman, Federal Election Commission"The HAVA Requirement for a Voter Verified Paper Record," www.verifiedvotingfoundation.orgJuly 23, 2003 --
PRO: "Under HAVA, there must be a paper record of each vote from a DRE voting system. In well-run systems, the printouts with vote totals are taken throughout Election Day and compared to the total number of votes cast at the machine, to ensure security. The paper records then provide a backup for official tabulations of election results. In addition to vote totals, DREs can print out each individual ballot (without identifying the voter) to provide an additional security and audit capacity. Not only can this data be printed, it is saved electronically in multiple formats in multiple locations, so that if one mechanism fails, the information is backed up using another format in another location. In other words, DREs in well-administered systems provide a substantial audit capacity for purposes of recounts and authentication."
Former President, League of Women Voters
Testimony before the U.S. Election Assistance Commission
May 5, 2004 -- Kay Maxwell Former President, League of Women VotersTestimony before the U.S. Election Assistance CommissionMay 5, 2004 CON: "Most DRE machines do not provide an independent record of each individual ballot that can be used in a recount to check the machine for error or tampering. It is impossible to check if the voting machine records a vote in its memory different than the one the voter cast. When someone votes using a punch card ballot or an optical scan machine, those ballots are saved and can be counted if an election is called into question. The paper ballots can be compared to the machine vote. DRE machines do not provide that capability."
Tova Andrea Wang, JD
Democracy Fellow, The Century Foundation
"Understanding the Debate Over Electronic Voting Machines," www.reformelections.org
May 26, 2004 Democracy Fellow, The Century Foundation"Understanding the Debate Over Electronic Voting Machines," www.reformelections.orgMay 26, 2004 --
PRO: "All fully-electronic (touchscreen, DRE, Internet) voting systems are subject to the limitations and risks of computer technology. This includes the inability of examination, no matter how thorough, to detect the presence of hardware and/or software that could be used, deliberately or inadvertently, to alter election outcomes... Democratic elections require independent verification that a) all balloting choices have been recorded as intended and b) vote totals have been reliably and indisputably created from the same material examined by the voters. A Voter Verified Paper Ballot (VVPB) provides an auditable way to assure voters that their ballots will be available to be counted... Without VVPB there is no way to independently audit the election results. Equipment failures, configurations and programming errors have resulted in costly election recalls and disputes that could have been prevented with VVPB."
Rebecca Mercuri, PhD
President, Notable Sofware and Knowledge Concepts
"Facts About Voter Verified Paper Ballots," www.notablesoftware.com/evote.html
Feb. 23, 2004 President, Notable Sofware and Knowledge Concepts"Facts About Voter Verified Paper Ballots," www.notablesoftware.com/evote.htmlFeb. 23, 2004 -- CON: "Adding another federal requirement for Direct Recording Electronic (DRE) voting systems to be retrofitted with a voter verified paper audit trail (VVPAT) component invites a number of problems that could, unintentionally, shatter the system and significantly erode public confidence in the process...The fact is that existing DRE systems without VVPAT have the proven track record of doing the best job of all available voting systems in achieving the goal of accurate casting, tabulation and reporting of all votes in accordance with the voters' intentions... This debate also needs to recognize practical considerations including significant costs, paper jams and malfunctioning printers, voter delays, difficulty for poll workers, and meaningless receipts. If DRE programming can be manipulated, that same logic dictates that the programming could be surreptitiously altered to change election results after the paper ballot is printed."
Registrar of Voters - Recorder/County Clerk, Los Angeles County, California
Testimony before U.S. Senate Committee on Rules and Administration
June 21, 2005 -- Conny McCormack, PhD Registrar of Voters - Recorder/County Clerk, Los Angeles County, CaliforniaTestimony before U.S. Senate Committee on Rules and AdministrationJune 21, 2005
PRO: "When the system successfully passes the State Certification and is certified for use in Georgia, the KSU [Kennesaw State University] Center for Election Systems prepares an electronic signature of the system and archives the software source code and object code... When the vendor notifies the State that they have completed installation in a particular county, the KSU Center for Election Systems sends a team to the county to conduct Acceptance Tests. These tests verify that the hardware is operating correctly and the correct version of the software has been installed. During these tests the electronic signature of the software installed in the county is compared with the electronic signature of the software archived by the KSU Center for Election Systems to validate that the county system is identical to the system that was State certified."
Electronic Voting System Examiner, State of Georgia
Testimony before the U.S. Election Assistance Commission
May 5, 2004 -- Britain Williams, PhD Electronic Voting System Examiner, State of GeorgiaTestimony before the U.S. Election Assistance CommissionMay 5, 2004 CON: "Unfortunately, the self-reported identity of a piece of software does nothing to assure an observer that this software is honest... The use of'software fingerprints' computed by some cryptographically secure hash function does nothing to change this fact. So long as the observer is limited to inspecting the self-declaration of identity of the system, there is no way for the observer to know whether that identity is declared honestly or not... Only if the observer can directly examine the memory of the computer and compare it with a reference memory image can the observer really know that what is in the computer and what is authorized to be there are the same. If we allow this comparison, we compromise the author's right to retain this software as a trade secret. In addition, if we are not very careful, the same memory access that allows inspection can also allow modification, thus elevating the election observer to the status of a security threat."
Doug Jones, PhD
Professor of Computer Science, University of Iowa
Testimony before the Technical Guidelines Development Committee
Sep. 20, 2004 Professor of Computer Science, University of IowaTestimony before the Technical Guidelines Development CommitteeSep. 20, 2004 --
PRO: "Empirical evidence of these voter sentiments came in Feb. 2003 when the University of Georgia's Car Vinson Institute of Government released the results of an independent poll showing...that 97% of respondents reported that they had no difficulties using the new touch screen voting terminals... The Vinson Institute's survey, which polled 800 randomly selected adults and is projected to have a margin of error of +/- 3.5%, demonstrates that voters found the equipment easy to use."
Former Georgia Secretary of State
Touch the Future of Voting: Georgia's Guide to Election Reform
July 2003 -- Cathy Cox, JD Former Georgia Secretary of StateTouch the Future of Voting: Georgia's Guide to Election ReformJuly 2003 CON: "These systems have promise, but the bottom line is that about 10% of the voters we talked to had significant concerns. While 90% satisfaction may be acceptable for some usability studies, we feel strongly that digital government initiatives in general, and voting systems in particular must have higher standards. With important national elections being decided by less than 1% of the voters, leaving 10% unconfident about their vote is a major problem."
Benjamin Bederson, PhD
Director, Computer-Human Interaction Lab, University of Maryland
"Electronic Voting System Usability Issues," CHI Letters
Oct. 2002 Director, Computer-Human Interaction Lab, University of Maryland"Electronic Voting System Usability Issues," CHI LettersOct. 2002 --Microsoft announced the Super Duper Graphics Pack back at E3, touting new lighting, water visuals, and 4K resolution for Minecraft on the Xbox One X, but we don't have a firm launch date as of yet. Instead, what we do have is a new Super Plus Pack, which bundles various Minecraft addons (including 4K enhancements), listed for launch on December 6, 2017.
Minecraft is a game about placing blocks and going on adventures. Includes Super Duper Graphics Pack and Explorers Pack with Chinese Mythology Mashup, Natural Texture Pack, Biome Settlers Skin Pack, Battle and Beasts Skin Pack, and Campfire Tales Skin Pack. Games play better on Xbox One X.
While this pack doesn't necessarily mean we'll have to wait until December to get the update, at the very least, it means it's the latest date you can expect it to drop.
The Minecraft Super Plus Pack bundle will be available for $39.99 for Xbox One.
See at Microsoft Store
Thanks Shela for the tip!David MacKay (pronounced mac-EYE), a professor of physics at the University of Cambridge, UK, was recently appointed to a three-year term as chief scientific advisor to the UK’s Department of Energy and Climate Change. In an April 1 talk at MIT, he described what specifically would be required to shift the world’s energy use entirely to non-carbon emitting sources.
Q. How much of an effect do you expect the so-called “Climate-Gate” episode to have on public attitudes to climate change, and do you think this will have any long-term repercussions?
A. It clearly had some impact, and my feeling is that it doesn’t deserve to have had impact. I think the impression that the public has gained of what happened is entirely based on mudslinging and invention. People allege that there was deliberate manipulation of data, and I’m not aware of any evidence that that’s so. In fact, a recent House of Commons committee has just found that although they’re not completely happy with everything, but they say the reputations of the scientists involved is intact. So I guess what’s needed for the long term is a clear retelling and proper exposition of the science so that the conclusions of the public will be more robust in the future.
Q. What do you think the prospects are for reaching any significant international agreement on greenhouse emissions, in the post-Copenhagen world, and do you see the Copenhagen process as having made such agreements more likely?
A. I think there was some progress made at Copenhagen. I think it was the first time an international agreement mentioned aiming at a target of 2 degrees warming or less. Also there was a move toward really substantial international transfers of money. So I don’t think Copenhagen was all bad news. I can’t predict the future, and I don’t know what’s going to happen. I’m still an optimist. I feel that there is an international consensus that there is a problem and something needs to be done. The difficulty is the notion of equity, of fairness, of what should different countries do. And it’s human nature to try to get away with doing as little as possible, so that’s what makes it difficult. But the good news is that there’s a general agreement that international action is what’s needed.
Q. What do you see as the most under-appreciated potential technology or policy that could help the world avoid catastrophic climate change?
A. Well, the one that I’m obsessing about at the moment is seasonal heat storage. In Britain, our demand for energy peaks during the coldest weeks in winter, and it can be twice as big as our energy consumption at other times of the year. In parts of America, demand peaks in the summer, during the hottest periods. So if we could develop low-cost technologies for moving heat in time, from the winter to the summer and vice versa, I could see that making quite a difference to the scale of new energy sources that may be needed in the future.
My impression is the Dutch are currently the leaders in the creative deployment of heat storage methods. They store heat underneath roads in the summer and then pump it out again in the winter. And in my talk I mentioned a community in Canada called Drake’s Landing, where they have a community heat storage which collects heat from solar hot water panels, and stores it in a huge hole in the ground, and then they can pump it back out in winter, and it provides heat for quite a few dwellings.FN SCAR 16-S.223 / 5.56 Semi-Automatic Battle Rifle Description: The FN SCAR is the semi-auto only version of the newest service rifle of U.S. special operators. Light, fast-handling and quick shooting, the FN SCAR 16S is chambered in 5.56x45 mm and features a free-floating, cold hammer-forged MIL-SPEC barrel with chrome-lined bore. Fully-ambidextrous operating controls on both models instantly adapt to any shooter and any shooting position. The receiver-integrated MIL-STD 1913 optical rail and three accessory rails enable the mounting of scopes or electronic sights, plus tactical lights and lasers. The telescoping, side-folding polymer stock is fully adjustable for comb height and length of pull, and is available in Flat Dark Earth (FDE) or matte black. Specifications: Caliber: 5.56x45mm NATO
Barrel Length: 16.25"
Overall Length: 27.5” to 37.5”
Weight: 7.25 lbs. empty
Ammunition Capacity: 10 or 30 round detachable box magazine The FN SCAR is the semi-auto only version of the newest service rifle of U.S. special operators. Light, fast-handling and quick shooting, the FN SCAR 16S is chambered in 5.56x45 mm and features a free-floating, cold hammer-forged MIL-SPEC barrel with chrome-lined bore. Fully-ambidextrous operating controls on both models instantly adapt to any shooter and any shooting position. The receiver-integrated MIL-STD 1913 optical rail and three accessory rails enable the mounting of scopes or electronic sights, plus tactical lights and lasers. The telescoping, side-folding polymer stock is fully adjustable for comb height and length of pull, and is available in Flat Dark Earth (FDE) or matte black.0 Shares
Of course we, as freethinkers, atheists, and skeptics, want students to be taught how to think critically and evaluate their own ideas about how the world works, but if we say that it is okay for professors to challenge “beliefs,” then are we saying that it is okay for religious professors or new age professors to challenge the students whose “beliefs” (though we don’t like to think of them that way because our truths are thought to be connected to legitimate science and not “beliefs” at all) are grounded in a physical reality of scientific theories and accepted academic principles? I found an interesting piece recently that brought up great points on this matter and how we connect our knowledge of facts and science to our beliefs as well as how we have faith in the knowledge that we learn, trusting that these ideas will remain truths in real life.
“Should professors attempt to change students’ beliefs by consistently challenging false beliefs with facts?” asks Peter Boghossian, who is a philosophy instructor at Portland State University. His piece “Should We Challenge Student Beliefs?” was published at Inside Higher Ed and examines the way that academic teachers approach “chang[ing] students’ beliefs when they were based on inaccurate information.”
Boghossian says this about his class Science and Pseudoscience:
As expected, we discuss a wide array of both scientific and pseudoscientific topics, including astrology, homeopathy, chelation therapy, and vaccinations. It is not enough for my students to know that vaccinations do not cause autism; they must also believe this and then eventually act accordingly. (In this case, action consists of not being afraid of vaccinating their children out of fear that they could cause their children to become autistic). …The primary goal of every academic should be to bring students’ beliefs into lawful alignment with reality.
Here, Boghossian isn’t talking strictly about spiritual beliefs; he is using belief to mean the way that someone thinks the world is going to work. We skeptics and science-enthusiasts and freethinkers don’t like to think of how we behave as doing so in a way that is adhering to beliefs because we think that we are super-smart rationalists whose actions are based purely on objective knowledge and fact.
Realistically, we cannot do all of the science and testing to have the pure knowledge, understanding of science, and mathematical ability to do many of the things that we do. Hell, I don’t even balance my checkbook, but I believe that my bank statement shows all of my withdrawals and credits, and calculates all of the math correctly, and that the interest is for my accounts is accurate, so I believe that I have the money they say I do. That might not be a great example because I am just too lazy to subtract every penny in the hope that, like my mom, I might find four cents worth of error one time in the span of ten years, but I am not going to sit down and figure out interest rates to check against the actual balance and to add everything up manually. I believe that the math works, so I don’t worry about it. I don’t know the physics behind how a softball falls, but I believe in what I have learned and observed through practice and in relation to gravity and trajectory, so if I (do as Ed Beck says and keep my eye on the ball and) put my glove out there, I am acting on the belief that I can catch the ball and that it won’t hit me in the face or break my arm or be suspended in space.
Boghossian is arguing that the job of academics is to teach facts that are “true independent of subjective considerations,” but these truths are the foundation upon which superior ways of thinking and reasoning can be built, so that knowledge of facts and science can be turned into realistic beliefs that will change and inform our actions to align with reality.
…there are certain ways of making decisions that are superior to other ways of making decisions. …if I want to figure out how far to dig into the earth when laying a foundation for a bridge, a bad way to do this would be to flip a coin: heads it’s 50 meters and tails it’s 200. Rather, one should act upon the best available evidence and make a rational, informed decision that should then guide one’s actions. It is not enough to merely present students with better ways of making educated, rational decisions. It is an indispensable part of the educational process that students then leave the learning environment and actually build reliable, practical bridges in which travelers can literally trust their lives.
I definitely appreciated the perspective of Boghossian in this article. I have frequently heard “belief” used as a dirty word. It is something that we skeptics, atheists, and freethinkers don’t like to talk about in personal terms because we have this idea that there is truthful, factual, realistic knowledge in one sphere, and in this other (small, or maybe non-existent) area are our “beliefs” (shh!—don’t say it too loud!), but really, are our actions not based on our beliefs which are informed by our knowledge? Isn’t belief a very realistic part of how we go from perception to action? Aren’t beliefs the reason that people can look at the same facts and have different conclusions or actions? I think so, and I think that we are not going to get very far with people if we refuse to accept that we do things based on our own beliefs, as everyone does. If we are truly great thinkers, we will come up with a rational argument for why the facts upon which we base our beliefs are actual facts and why the “facts” of religion are not reliable and not worthy of our belief.
For the full article, visit Inside Higher Ed.By Rob Moseley
Editor, GoDucks.com
Venue: Moshofsky Center
Format: Walk-through
When Charles Nelson went 75 yards for a rushing touchdown last week at Stanford, he had to know exactly where to cut upfield in order to take advantage of carefully orchestrated blocks by the likes of Royce Freeman and Cameron Hunt.
The play was remarkable given that Nelson is a starting safety for the Ducks at this point in the season. And also that his total practice reps on offense prior to the Stanford game amounted to …
“Zero,” Nelson said today.
None. Not a single full-speed snap. And how about the 20-yard wheel route for a touchdown against Cal the week before? How many times did Nelson rep that play in the days before that game?
“Zero,” he said again.
To be sure, Nelson walks through offensive plays that might be employed in an upcoming game, in non-contact practices such as Thursday's in the Moshofsky Center. But he's been starting at a brand-new position the last five games – Nelson practiced on defense in the spring, but at corner – and so needs all the reps he can get on that side of the ball each week.
Thus, Nelson has to find other ways to prepare for his limited use on offense – four plays combined over the last two games, with two of his three touches going for touchdowns. He meets with his former position coach as a receiver, Matt Lubick, but also is counted upon to study on his own.
With Lubick and on his own, Nelson will study practice film of reps by others. For instance, Bralon Addison has been used in the two-back set with Freeman that yielded Nelson's rushing touchdown at Stanford, and Nelson watched film of Addison to prepare himself for the same situation. And Nelson can fall back on his season spent at receiver last fall.
“It's a lot easier because it's not foreign to him,” Lubick said. “But we still have to do a lot of stuff on the side, and he has to come in on his own and study film. Which he does, because he's a motivated guy and it's important to him.”
From the very first week of his first preseason camp, last fall, Nelson has been one of the Ducks' most studious players. When one of your fastest, toughest players is also is one of the smartest, it opens up a lot of possibilities.
And the coaches want to take advantage as much as possible, in all three phases of the game. Oregon's opponent on Saturday, USC, is doing the same delicate balancing act with its multi-talented threat, Adoree Jackson.
“Coach Lubick would like to use me more, but he doesn't want me to get tired,” Nelson said. “And (special teams coach Tom Osborne) wants me in on all the special teams. So it's hard.”
There aren't many on the roster who would be entrusted with so much responsibility. But Nelson has proven himself more than capable of remaining a threat on offense, replacing practice reps with study time in Lubick's office.
“We'll go over it two or three times before the game, so I know what I'm doing,” Nelson said. “He'll ask me, 'What do you have on this,' and I tell him. And that's it."
Other observations: As this was a walk-through, there are no highlights to pass along – other than a field goal of about 57 yards that Aidan Schneider made. … Offensive line coach Steve Greatwood was this week's pick in Mark Helfrich's new habit of having someone else address the team after Thursday practices. Greatwood broke the huddle himself. … In case you missed it, DeForest Buckner is a finalist for the Polynesian Football Hall of Fame's college player of the year award. Buckner also has been invited to participate in the Senior Bowl.I’ve heard of some pretty ridiculous products inspired by and/or made with beer. As time goes by, I’m less and less surprised when I hear of these things. They used to excite me, igniting a new passion for an old hobby. At this point, however, I usually scan over the latest in the beer world without a second look. But, this morning, as I perused the news, my eye was caught by something I found to be quite spectacular – spreadable beer.
You heard that right. The nutella-like beer spread is the lovechild of Italian brewer, Emanuela Laurenzi and Italian chocolatier, Pietro Napoleone. According to Geekosystem, they used equal parts chemistry and dark magic to thicken the beer into a creamy, smooth consistency. The result: a beer butter that comes in two flavors – one made with a light beer, and one with a dark. Pretty amazing, right?
Here’s the catch: as of right now, the spreadable beer is not available through any U.S. distributors. Selfridges & Co. sells a 280g jar of the spread for a modest £7.99, but this price doesn’t include international shipping. That would cost an extra £25.00, so you’re looking at just over $50.
If you’re not willing to spend that kind of dough right now, don’t worry, because you can’t. Currently, Selfridges doesn’t ship to the U.S., but they plan to within the next few months. So, you have some time to make a decision, and to help you out, I’ve detailed three great reasons why the spreadable beer is worth every penny.
1. “Drinking” at work has never been easier
If the drinking at work memo hasn’t made it to your company, you now have a surefire way to sneak it. Thirsty for a beer? Make some toast with butter. Have a bagel with butter. Make a beer butter and jelly sandwich for lunch. You get the point.
2. You can tell people you’re getting drunk on sandwiches
Need I say more?
3. Beer birthday cakes will finally be possible
Next time you’re seeking out a birthday gift for one of your beer-loving buddies, bake him a beer cake. Oh yeah, and shop at KegWorks. We have a thing or two for beer lovers as well.The Black Hat conference is a very fun event, with many different talented individuals coming together to show you just how insecure your digital life is. One very interesting tidbit that’s especially worrisome has been show, dealing with Intel processors.
Processor-based rootkit can grant access to lowest level firmware, for Intel (and maybe AMD) processors dating back to 1997.
Rootkits can be very cruel mistresses in that they allow undeniable access to to low level API’s and functions, usually without the users knowledge, and quite maliciously. They’re able to mask themselves your, or the systems, knowledge quite well. Remember the rootkit being installed by certain Sony memory cards?
Intel’s processors, except the very newest Skylake, and perhaps even AMD’s processors dating back to 1997 are affected.
In this particular case. there is an issue with the System Management Mode, which are instructions that handle system errors and can grant access to other parts of the system as well. A problem with the way that SMRAM is handled, utilizing a 0-day exploit that’s supposedly built into the processor itself. Potentially all x86 processors are affected.
A successful injection of a rootkit could enable control of lower level commands, letting it execute any type of arbitrary commands it wants, bypassing the OS almost completely. Fortunately, in order to actually inject the rootkit, full system privileges are needed. But once it’s in, it’ll be nearly impossible to detect with the usual scanners. So, then, it might not be probably to have it be a singular attack in and of itself, but as part of a multi-pronged malware mishap, it could spell considerable trouble.
The solution to this is a simple IT trick that probably isn’t used much elsewhere. For daily use, use an account that doesn’t have administrator access so that such things can’t be executed in the first place. But that’s not necessarily viable at home. We just want to play games and surf the Internet, right?
Oh, but this isn’t the only one.
This certainly isn’t the only System Management Mode exploit that has affected Intel CPU’s either. Back in 2008 it was revealed that another caching problem could be exploited to also install a rootkit inside the SMM. This however is a new method, though the approach is much the same, mapping the SMRAM to potentially poison it.
Because of where this exploit is, it will be very difficult to actually patch and fix the issue, so it’ll likely remain for some time. But it’s curious that it has remained an inherent part of processors dating back so far.
So folks, no need to necessarily worry, but just be careful browsing the Internet and realize that this is a proof of concept and that nothing has been spotted in the wild thus far. Safe browsing!Activists say a Syrian military air strike has killed at least 14 people and wounded many others in the northern Syrian province of Aleppo after striking a neighbourhood with crude bombs.
The military aircraft dropped at least one "barrel bomb" - crude weapons made from canisters laden with explosives and hurled from helicopters - to strike Kafr Hamra, a suburb in northwest Aleppo city on Tuesday, activists said.
The UK-based Syria Observatory for Human Rights confirmed that several people were killed, including two children and a woman, and that the death toll was likely to rise because more people were buried under the rubble.
At least two dead children were piled onto the back of a flat-bed lorry; at least one was covered under a bright red blanket; a man referred to the children as being torn apart as he partially lifted the blanket, according to a video of the incident uploaded to social media.
Another video of the incident showed a burning vehicle. It was not clear if something else was targeted as well.
The Syrian military widely uses so-called barrel bombs to strike at rebel-held areas.
They have been widely criticised because they cannot be precisely targeted, and are believed to have killed thousands of civilians, particularly in northern Syria.
The Kafr Hamra attack came just hours after 13 people were killed on Monday night in al-Bab, a town also in Aleppo province but controlled by the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL), according to activist sources.
Al Jazeera cannot independently verify the activist accounts due to reporting restrictions inside Syria.
Kobane advance
Meanwhile, on a different front, the Syrian Observatory said Syrian Kurds fighting ISIL have made new gains in the town of Kobane, expelling the fighters from several central buildings and seizing weapons.
Tuesday's advance came just hours after the US-led coalition launched four strikes against ISIL positions in central Kobane, the Syrian Observatory said.
The Kurdish People's Protection Units (YPG) staged a "special operation" during which they captured six buildings used by ISIL, according to the Syrian Observatory, which relies on a network of sources in Syria.
It said 13 ISIL fighters were killed in the fighting.
The Kurds "captured a large amount of weapons and ammunition, including RPG (rocket-propelled grenade) rounds, light weapons, sniper guns and thousands of heavy machinegun rounds", the Syrian Observatory said.
The US and Arab allies began strikes against ISIL positions in Syria in late September, just days after the group launched its assault on Kobane.
About 1,200 people, mainly fighters, have been killed in the battle for the town on the border with Turkey.
Kobane has become a major symbol of resistance against ISIL, which has committed widespread atrocities and imposed its harsh interpretation of Islamic law in areas under its control.
YPG fighters are battling alongside Iraqi Peshmerga forces and Syrian rebels that have reinforced the town's defences, backed by US-led strikes on ISIL positions.
The multi-sided Syrian war has killed more than 195,000 people and forced millions from their homes since it began three and a half years ago as an uprising against President Bashar al-Assad's regime.I'm no stranger to harsh words from ignorant people. I was bullied as a kid like many of us were. I may not have had a singular face to my bully but the consistent verbal attacks from people who felt that my gender presentation, even as a child, was some kind of attack on their own, have left the collective imprint of emotional bruising caused by one. I was born a girl and dressed like a boy. I begged to keep my hair short and cried every time my mother tried to put a dress on me so she just gave up trying and let me dress how I wanted to most of the time, unless it was some public outing in which she did not want my own presentation being a reflection of her identity which I think was a subconscious act to be protective.
I was repetitively asked "Are you a boy or a girl?" throughout childhood and adolescence and usually followed by "Fucking dyke!" It wasn't just kids either. When I was 12, a Portuguese female customs officer loudly asked the question in front of other travellers. When I answered she said, "Next time you come through here, try looking like one."
This consistent public humiliation left me scarred for life. This hurt is triggered every time someone violates a part of my identity now.
Words can be violent. Especially in the context of someone who is transgender and language used around our bodies. We spend most of our lives confused or hating ourselves so when people crawl into our psyches and compound that self-loathing, it becomes dangerous. We feel alone and unwanted and freakish. Very recently, all of these wounds resurfaced when I saw this comment left by a woman on a video I posted on Facebook for a Pledge Music Campaign to raise funding for a tour for my band The Cliks to promote our new album Black Tie Elevator.
"This is a chick and needs money for bottom surgery."
I felt that violation. I reposted stating "Don't let this anger you. Let it empower you." For the most part, reactions paralleled mine but a few people, although well meaning, suggested I should not dignify the comment with a response. I suddenly felt as though I had done something wrong because my entire life I was trained to not speak up for myself, to let it go and not dignify responses. Unfortunately, this left me, and many people like me victims at times by our own hand.
You teach people how to treat you and if you teach them you're a rug, they will walk all over you without a second thought. When you suddenly stand up and tell them you're a curtain and you want to be free to hang in the breeze, they're going to think you're a lying asshole and your friendship will take a blow or end. After of years of victimizing myself for being walked on, I realized the common denominator in my loss of friendships was ME. It took me years of retraining myself and flexing my boundaries. This has now led to long lasting and respectful friendships. Bullying is a form of exercising control over people through their own personal repressed fear. It's a two-way street.
Ignoring bullies is one of the most dangerous acts an individual can impose on society and themselves. It imposes shame on the victim and further strengthens the aggressor. We believe it ends in the schoolyard but it doesn't. It's perpetuated daily in our adult lives with our silence and complacence.
When I got a little famous, it resurfaced. From horrible YouTube and Facebook comments, to people on my own team. Before my top surgery, my ex-manager called me "You better not have mental problems on the road because of this." On Dirty King, photographer/artistic director Dean Karr chose a close up of my scarred chest for the cover, the President of Tommy Boy records Tom Silverman wrote in an email "This is a rock band not an episode of Nip Tuck." My band mates impounded it saying it would 'ruin the band'. Most hurtful was when a band mate called me "it" and called me by my old name.
When I expressed hurt, I was told I was being too sensitive. Taking it the wrong way. My body was theirs to be spoken of with disgust and shame and I should sit in silence. No one spoke up for me. I never spoke up for myself.
Most recently, a local magazine asked me to write a "raw and unedited" memoir. So I did. My life has not been roses and my childhood was extremely traumatic. They requested a meeting, revisions and essentially sent my publicist a totally rewritten piece that removed all my trauma calling it "too dark" but very poignantly pointed my double mastectomy and my choice to not have bottom surgery, even though I had not mentioned it in my original draft. The language all over the piece was insulting. After attempts at three revisions, I deflated. I felt that voice in my head come back saying "Don't cause trouble. This is a good opportunity for your career." I was so tired that I gave them the thumbs up. That old wound came back and took over and my humiliation was so strong that it triggered my complacence.
I received a copy of the magazine at my CD release launch. They had changed the title of the piece without our permission to "Girl, Interrupted." I was beside myself. The correlation to my gender and mental stability left me feeling humiliated. Cowardly. Most people I've expressed this to still don't understand why with the exception of a close trans male friend. But I can't expect them to as they have not lived their entire lives with the violent energy thrown at their body's daily.
I have never spoken publicly about some incidents I have in this piece because I worried they would make younger trans folks lose a sense of hope. I'm sure many will advise me that I shouldn't have. That I should let it go. That I may face career repercussions. But I won't because it's that silence that creates complacency in us all.
You're not alone. I get bullied all the time but I overcome. I call it out and I'm loud about it. Don't shame me for speaking up for myself. Shame those who hurt me.Real Madrid midfielder Luka Modric has appeared as a key witness at a corruption trial, testifying about his financial deals with a former Dinamo Zagreb director charged with tax evasion and embezzlement.
Modric, who is not a suspect, spoke on Tuesday at Osijek County Court about financial details of his 2008 transfer from |
) Hồ Trung wrote, referring to the Giá Hơi section, that "These forces hunted down and killed enemy thugs, reactionaries, and puppet policemen" and that they "cleaned out....nests of Catholic reactionaries."[36]
Discovery [ edit ]
Label on the shrouded remains of a Tet Offensive victim describing teeth, color of hair, footwear, and other possessions found with the body.
A first summary was published for the U.S. Mission in Vietnam by Douglas Pike, then working as a Foreign Service Officer for the U.S. Information Agency in 1970. Pike identified three distinct phases for the executions in Huế. In a report published in 1970, The Viet Cong Strategy of Terror, the U.S. Information Agency analyst Douglas Pike wrote that at least half of the bodies unearthed in Huế revealed clear evidence of "atrocity killings: to include hands wired behind backs, rags stuffed in mouths, bodies contorted but without wounds (indicating burial alive)."[13][18]:47 Pike concluded that the killings were done by local VC cadres and were the result of "a decision rational and justifiable in the Communist mind.".[13][18]:52 The three phases are as follows:
Phase one was a series of kangaroo court trials of local ARVN officials. The highly publicized trials lasted anywhere from 5 – 10 minutes and the accused were always found guilty of "crimes against the people". [18] : 54–55
Phase two was implemented when the communists thought that they could hold the city long-term, and consisted of a campaign of "social reconstruction" along Maoist dogmatic lines. Those who the communists believed to be counter-revolutionaries were singled out in this phase. Catholics, intellectuals, prominent businessmen, and other "imperialist lackeys" were targeted in order to "build a new social order". [18] : 55–58
The last phase began when it became evident that the communists could not hold the city and was designed to "leave no witnesses". Anyone who could identify individual VC members who participated in the occupation was to be killed and their bodies hidden.[18]: 58–60
After the Battle of Huế, between 1968 and 1969 a total of almost 2,800 bodies were recovered from mass graves, with 4 major mass grave finds.[13]
A few months after the Battle, about 1,200 civilian bodies were found in 18 hastily concealed mass graves. [13]
A second major group of graves were discovered In the first 7 months of 1969. [13] In February 1968, a list of 428 names of people identified from the recovered bones was released by local authorities. [13]
In February 1968, a list of 428 names of people identified from the recovered bones was released by local authorities. In September 1969, three Communist defectors confessed to the 101st Airborne Division intelligence officers that they witnessed several hundred people being killed in a 100-yard area at Da Mai Creek bed (about 10 miles south of Huế). [13]
In November 1969, another major mass grave were fount at Phu Thu Salt Flats, near the fishing village of Lương Viện, Vinh Hưng commune, Phú Lộc provincial district, 10 miles east of Huế and halfway between the cities of Huế and Đà Nẵng.[13]
Disputes, revisionism and denials [ edit ]
In Bùi Tín's 2002 memoir, From Enemy to Friend: a North Vietnamese perspective on the war, the former PAVN Colonel acknowledged that executions of civilians did occur in Huế. However, he added that under the intensity of the American bombardment, discipline of the troops disintegrated. The "units from the north" had been "told that Huế was the stronghold of feudalism, a bed of reactionaries, the breeding ground of Cần Lao Party loyalists who remained true to the memory of former South Vietnamese president Ngô Đình Diệm and of Nguyễn Văn Thiệu's Democracy Party."[37] Tin explained that over 10,000 prisoners were taken at Huế, with the most important of them sent to North Vietnam for imprisonment. When U.S. Marines launched their counterattack to retake the city, Communist troops were instructed to move the prisoners with the retreating troops. According to Tín, in the "panic of retreat," the company and battalion commanders shot their prisoners "to ensure the safety of the retreat."[13][37]
Marilyn B. Young disputes the "official figures" of executions at Huế. While acknowledging that there were executions, she cites freelance journalist Len Ackland, who was at Huế, who estimated the number to be somewhere between 300 and 400.[13][38]
Ngo Vinh Long claims that 710 people were killed by the communists. In an interview he stated, "Yeah, there was a total of 710 persons killed in the Huế area, from my research, not as many as five thousand, six thousand, or whatever the Americans claimed at that time, and not as few as four hundred as people like some of the people in the peace movement here claim...."[39]
The Italian journalist Oriana Fallaci reported that "In the last few days the Vietcong lost their heads and did nothing but make reprisals, kill, punish". But citing a French priest she spoke to in Huế, she also claimed that the death toll of up to 8,000 included deaths due to American bombardment, and at least 200 people, and perhaps as many as 1,100, who were killed following the liberation of Huế by the US and ARVN forces.[38][40] Stanley Karnow wrote that the bodies of those executed by South Vietnamese teams were thrown into common graves.[38] Some reports alleged that South Vietnamese "revenge squads" had also been at work in the aftermath of the battle, searching out and executing citizens that had supported the communist occupation.[9][10]
Historian David Hunt posited that Douglas Pike's study for the U.S. Mission was, "by any definition, a work of propaganda". In 1988 Pike said that he had earlier been engaged in a conscious "effort to discredit the Vietcong".[41]
In a letter to the editor of the New York Times, historian Gareth Porter stated that there was little evidence that the Communists carried out more than "several hundred" political executions and revenge killings in Huế, with only U.S. official assertions identifying all of over 2,800 bodies found as "victims of Communist executions". He alleged that the site of one set of mass graves was also the site of a major battle in which some 250 Communist troops were reported killed in U.S air strikes, and that Saigon's minister of health, after visiting burial sites, said the bodies could have been Communist soldiers killed in battle. He dismissed Douglas Pike's claim that there were Communist blacklists of students and intellectuals to be killed as unsupported by interviews and captured Communist documents.[42]
Historian James Willbanks concluded that "We may never know what really happened at Huế, but it is clear that mass executions did occur".[13] According to Stanley Karnow, "Balanced accounts have made it clear, however, that the Communist butchery at Huế did take place—perhaps on an even larger scale than reported during the war."[43] Ben Kiernan's 2017 history of Vietnam acknowledges that "thousands" were killed at Huế in "possibly the largest atrocity of the war."[11]
Legacy [ edit ]
Reports of the Massacre had a profound impact on the South Vietnamese for many years after the Tet Offensive, with an anticipation of a bloodbath following any North Vietnamese takeover, like the one in Huế. Novelist James Jones, in a New York Times article wrote, "Whatever else they accomplished, the Huế massacres effectively turned the bulk of the South Vietnamese against the Northern Communists. In South Vietnam, wherever one went, from Can Tho in the delta to Tay Ninh to Kontum in the north, and of course in Huế, the 1968 Tet massacres were still being talked about in 1973."[44]
Anticipation of a bloodbath was a major factor in the widespread panic and chaos across South Vietnam when North Vietnam executed their 1975 Spring Offensive, and the panic culminated in the disintegration and defeat of South Vietnamese military forces, and the fall of the Republic of Vietnam on April 30, 1975.[13] Today, the Massacre remains unrecognized and entirely ignored in the Vietnamese communist government's War Remnants Museum in Ho Chi Minh City.[12] The Vietnamese Government still doesn't acknowledge that a massacre took place and does not allow any public dissent from this position.[45]
See also [ edit ]
References [ edit ]
Further reading [ edit ]A straightforward guide, with miner binaries for CPU and GPU mining
You can mine Vertcoin using MacMiner from http://macminer.fabulouspanda.com/
Since Vertcoin started using Lyra2REv2, MacMiner only supports CPU mining it. You can accomplish this by setting up a pool in the MacMiner preferences window like so:
make sure to include
stratum+tcp://
at the beginning of your pool though as the miner requires the protocol to work
Then open the CPU miner window and click the cog to open it's settings, and choose Lyra2REv2:
Hit apply, then click start on the CPU miner and you're good to go!
If you need more help, please check in at the forum
http://fabulouspanda.com/forum/
The below article is included only as it was the original article on this page. Only the ABOVE article is currently relevant
You can both CPU and GPU mine Vertcoin
EDIT: MacMiner now includes the VertCoin CPU and GPU miners - read on if you'd rather use the command line than an app for mining
Download the CPU miner or compile it yourself:
http://downloads.fabulouspanda.co.uk/cpuminer-vert-mac.zip
Is the compiled Github CPU miner project for Vertcoin: https://github.com/Bufius/cpuminer-vert
If you unzip it and put it in your Applications folder, you would run it like this:
Open Terminal in the Utilities folder
type
cd /Applications/vertminer/bin
press enter then type
./minerd -o http://37.187.56.220:9171 -u username -p password
Replacing pool and user information with your own. Press enter and cpu mining will commence.
For GPU mining, there is a special version of cgminer that supports VertCoin. For that, instructions are included in the download. Make sure you use --scrypt-vert! http://downloads.fabulouspanda.co.uk/vertminer-cg-mac.zip
This was compiled from the code on this github project: https://github.com/Bufius/vertminer-gpu
I like P2Pool, and you can find a list of vert coin P2Pool nodes here if you need a pool: http://p2pool.vertcoin.org
With P2Pool, there’s no registration - just use your VertCoin Address for your username and password.
If you have any problems, please leave a comment, or check in at the Mac mining forum
http://fabulouspanda.com/forum/
VTC: VakrkbH1UsYomFMogL5d4CeZbh4qouyD2BImage caption Chris Kamara was praised for his performance for Welshpool Town
Former Leeds United and Stoke City star Chris Kamara has turned out for a struggling mid Wales side after they were mocked on Sky Sports.
Soccer Saturday presenter Jeff Stelling ribbed Welshpool Town when they lost to local rivals Waterloo Rovers 10-1.
But manager David Jones emailed the show explaining how the club nearly folded, and Sky made amends by arranging for Kamara to play for them.
Sadly, he did not have much of an impact as Welshpool lost 6-1.
The channel's cameras filmed the game against Rhayader, which kicked off at 14:00 GMT.
About 500 fans turned up to see the ex-pro in action, 10 times the attendance the club has been attracting of late.
The temporary new signing played a full 90 minutes in midfield for the Spar Mid Wales League outfit.
Kamara announced his comeback on Twitter before the match, saying: "After 17 years retirement I am back, move over Scholes & Henry."
He said he was playing for Welshpool Town, adding "[I] must be mad".
Welshpool manager David Jones said: "Chris played really well. He's still very fit."
'Unbelievable Jeff'
Town were 2-0 down at half-time, but scored just after the break to put themselves back in the game.
Chris said he enjoyed it, but there are no plans for him to play again for us David Jones, Welshpool Town's manager
"He gave us a team talk before the game and at half-time and he was talking to the lads throughout the match," added Jones.
"We got back into it early in the second half, but Rhayader ran away with it in the end.
"Chris said he enjoyed it, but there are no plans for him to play again for us."
Kamara, 54, who played in defence and midfield during a 20-year playing career, made his league debut in 1975 for Portsmouth.
He went on to play for Swindon, Brentford, Stoke City, Leeds, Luton Town, Sheffield United, Middlesbrough and Bradford City.
Image caption Chris Kamara (left) in action for Welshpool in the Spar Mid Wales League
He went into management briefly following his retirement from the game in 1995, before becoming a pitch-side reporter for Sky Sports.
He has since become well-known for his catchphrase: "Unbelievable Jeff".
Known as the Lilywhites, Welshpool are languishing near the foot of table, with eight points from 21 games.
Two years ago they were in the Welsh Premier League and in 2007 just missed out on qualification for the Uefa Cup.
But since then the club, which was founded 133 years ago and is one of Wales' oldest, has fallen on hard times, and had no players or a manager in August.
The Boxing Day hammering by Waterloo Rovers was the lowest point of the season so far. It was picked up by Stelling, who quipped that Welshpool had met their Waterloo.
Unfortunately, the crushing 10-1 defeat was followed by a 7-1 thrashing at the hands of Llansanffraid Village on New Year's Eve, which Stelling then mentioned on the show.
Sky Sports contacted Jones and said it was sending a camera to one of the club's matches and a former football star would play for them.
Kamara has had to sign for Welshpool until the end of the season, and because his last club was in England he needed international clearance from the Football Association of Wales to play.The problem of finding the maximum (or minimum) of a real function is often encountered in real-life problems. This is especially true when the function describes how close a solution is to some pre-established aim.
We as humans have the natural instinct of searching for better ways to do things:
finding a shorter route to work
earning a higher grade while studying less
finding a balance between all areas of our lives which leads to highest level of happiness
and the list goes on
Naturally, not all of these targets are easily quantifiable or achievable, but constructing an appropriate model for such a complex problem is the first step towards solving it.
The textbook way
There are many known methods of finding the maximum (or minimum) of a real function.
Some of the more popular ones - Gradient Descent, for instance - became known in the mainstream CS community due to their applicability in Machine Learning and their simplicity of implementation:
function [theta, J_history] = gradientDescent(X, y, theta, alpha, num_iters) % GRADIENTDESCENT Performs gradient descent to learn theta % theta = GRADIENTDESENT(X, y, theta, alpha, num_iters) % updates theta by taking num_iters gradient steps with % learning rate alpha m = length(y); % number of training examples J_history = zeros(num_iters, 1); for iter = 1:num_iters rsum_0 = 0; rsum_1 = 0; for i=1:m, rsum_0 += (X(i,:) * theta - y(i)) * X(i, 1); rsum_1 += (X(i,:) * theta - y(i)) * X(i, 2); end theta = [theta(1) - (alpha / m) * rsum_0; theta(2) - (alpha / m) * rsum_1]; % Save the cost J in every iteration J_history(iter) = computeCost(X, y, theta); end
The problem with such methods is their mathematical complexity. It is considerably more difficult to understand the inner workings and intuition behind gradient descent than it is to actually implement it.
Coming up with the algorithm from first principles requires a strong mathematical background. Just opening the Wikipedia article is enough to scare most programmers away, when they encounter this:
Luckily, there is a class of heuristic-based optimization techniques which perform on-par with the mathematically proven™ methods, when tuned properly. Most of these algorithms are heavily inspired from natural phenomena, ranging from the movement of bees in a colony, to Darwin's theory of evolution by natural selection.
Particle Swarm Optimization
This particular technique was initially designed as a model to represent the movement of flocks of birds or groups of fish. Later analysis showed that the algorithm was performing optimization.
Assume that we want to minimize a \(2\)-dimensional real function (this method also works for \(n\)-dimensional functions). The main idea behind PSO can be described as follows:
A particle represents a potential solution ( i.e. a pair \((x, y)\)). From this point forward, we will be refering to this pair as the position of the particle.
a pair \((x, y)\)). From this point forward, we will be refering to this pair as the of the particle. Additionally, each particle is assigned a velocity ( i.e. a pair \((dx, dy)\)).
( a pair \((dx, dy)\)). Initially, a swarm of \(N\) randomly placed (or uniformly distributed) particles is generated in the function domain.
The fitness of each particle ( i.e. how well it performs as a solution) is computed; this is equivalent to the actual value of the given function at the position of each particle. Our aim is to minimize this fitness.
of each particle ( how well it performs as a solution) is computed; this is equivalent to the actual value of the given function at the position of each particle. Our aim is to minimize this fitness. Each particle keeps track of its best previously encountered position. In addition, we also keep track of the best position ever encountered by any particle in the swarm.
The optimization takes place over the span of multiple iterations. Every iteration works like this:
Each particle moves to a new position, by adding its velocity to the current position.
The velocity is then recomputed as a weighted average of three factors: current velocity (weight \(\omega\)) the best position of the particle (weight \(\phi_{p_{i}}\)) the best position of the entire swarm (weight \(\phi_{G}\)) # p and g are randomly generated in [-1.0, 1.0] # they act as mutations def updateVelocity(self, i, p, g): deltaParticle = self.bestPos[i] - self.pos[i] deltaSwarm = self.swarm.bestPos[i] - self.pos[i] newComponent = omega * self.velocity[i] \ + phiP * p * deltaParticle \ + phiG * g * deltaSwarm if i == 0: self.velocity = (newComponent, self.velocity[1]) else: self.velocity = (self.velocity[0], newComponent)
The best position for each particle and for the colony are updated.
There is a bit of work involved in choosing appropriate values for \(\omega\), \(\phi_{p_{i}}\) and \(\phi_{G}\), but this job becomes considerably less difficult after understanding how each of these parameters affects the colony.
Testing
This set of rules leads to a tremendously organic behaviour. There is no magic behind the scenes; it's just particles that explore the problem domain while learning from their past experience and from each other.
Wikipedia provides a list of functions designed specifically for evaluating the performance of optimization algorithms. These are the results I obtained on a subset of them:
McCormick
Formula
$$ f(x, y) = sin(x+y) + (x-y)^2 - 1.5x + 2.5y + 1 $$
Global minimum
$$ f(-0.54719, -1.54719) = -1.9133 $$
Best solution found
$$ f(-0.54710, -1.54724) = -1.913223 $$
Plot
Simulation
Your browser does not support the video tag.
Notes
There is a noticeable cluster of particles that gravitate around a local minimum, also visible in the function plot.
A set of \(100\) particles and approximately \(200\) iterations suffice for finding the global minimum with a precision of \( 10^{-3} \); further improvements require additional iterations.
Eggholder
Formula
$$ f(x, y) = -(y+47) * sin \sqrt {\left | \frac{x}{2} + (y+47) \right |} - x * sin \sqrt{\left | x - (y+47) \right |} $$
Global minimum
$$ f(512, 404.2319) = -959.6407 $$
Best solution found
$$ f(482.03561, 432.59104) = -956.879905 $$
Plot
Simulation
Your browser does not support the video tag.
Notes
Because of the numerous local minima of this function, we need to start with a larger set of particles (\(500\)), such that there is a higher chance of at least one particle being on the right track straight from the beginning.
straight from the beginning. Same as before, most particles tend to form clusters corresponding to local minima. This is a common problem encountered by Hill climbing algorithms.
Rastrigin
Formula
$$ f(x) = A*n + \sum_{i=1}^{n} \left [ x_{i}^{2} - A * cos \left ( 2 \pi x_{i} \right )\right ] $$
where \(A = 10\) and \(x\) is an \(n\)-dimensional vector (\(n=2\)).
Global minimum
$$ f(0, 0) = 0 $$
Best solution found
$$ f(0.00181, 0.00083) = 0.000785 $$
Plot
Contour
Simulation
Your browser does not support the video tag.
Notes
There are a couple of noticeable direction changes in the entire swarm (starting at iteration \(40\) and \(170\)). This behavior illustrates the concept of swarm intelligence : as soon as a particle finds a new best solution for the colony, all other particles start to follow it.
: as soon as a particle finds a new best solution for the colony, all other particles start to follow it. The final placement of the swarm resembles the grid-like pattern shown in the contour plot.
Easom
Formula
$$ f(x,y) = -cos \left ( x \right ) cos \left ( y \right ) exp \left ( -\left ( \left ( x - \pi \right )^{2} + \left ( y - \pi \right )^{2} \right ) \right ) $$
Global minimum
$$ f(\pi, \pi) = -1 $$
Best solution found
$$ f(3.14158, 3.14163) = -1.000000 $$
Plot
Simulation
Your browser does not support the video tag.
Notes
Nice method for approximating the value of \(\pi\). 😊
In this simulation, I used a relatively large value for \(\omega\). As a result, each particle tends to stick more to its current direction, which makes the particles' paths more distinctive.
Cross-in-tray
Formula
$$ f(x, y) = -(10^{-4}) \left [ \left | sin\left ( x \right ) sin\left ( y \right ) exp \left ( \left | 100 - \frac{\sqrt{x^{2}+y^{2}}}{\pi} \right | \right ) \right | + 1 \right ]^{0.1} $$
Global minimum
$$ f(\pm1.34941, \pm1.34941) = -2.06261 $$
Best solution found
$$ f(1.34830, 1.34880) = -2.062612 $$
Plot
Simulation
Your browser does not support the video tag.
Notes
All \(4\) global minima are discovered.
Similar to the Rastrigin function, the entire swarm changes direction once a better solution is found.
Conclusion
Optimization techniques usually behave really well on real functions, but they are not limited to this scope. I chose this application because it can provide insightful data visualization more easily than other use cases.
The code can be found on GitHub.FRANKFURT (Reuters) - Tesla executive Klaus Grohmann was ousted last month after a clash with Chief Executive Elon Musk over the strategy of Grohmann’s firm, which Tesla had acquired in November, a source familiar with the matter told Reuters.
The Silicon Valley luxury electric carmaker is counting on Grohmann Engineering’s automation and engineering expertise to help it ramp up production to 500,000 cars per year by 2018.
At the time of the purchase, it described Klaus Grohmann and the company he founded as a “world leader in highly automated manufacturing”.
Tesla planned to keep Grohmann on, and Grohmann wanted to stay, but the clash with Musk over how to treat existing clients resulted in his departure, the source said.
Grohmann disagreed with Musk’s demands to focus management attention on Tesla projects to the detriment of Grohmann Engineering’s legacy clients, which included Tesla’s direct German-based rivals Daimler and BMW, two sources familiar with the matter said.
Reached by phone, Klaus Grohmann declined to comment on the circumstances of his leaving, citing confidentiality clauses.
“I definitely did not depart because I had lost interest in working,” Grohmann said, without elaborating.
A Tesla spokesman, asked about Grohmann’s departure, praised him for building an “incredible company” and said:
FILE PHOTO: A Tesla model S car with an electric vehicle charging station is displayed during a media preview day at the Frankfurt Motor Show (IAA) September 10, 2013. The world's biggest auto show is open to the public September 14 -22. REUTERS/Kai Pfaffenbach/File Photo
“Part of Mr Grohmann’s decision to work with Tesla was to prepare for his retirement and leave the company in capable hands for the future. Given the change in focus to Tesla projects, we mutually decided that it was the right time for the next generation of management to lead.”
Two sources familiar with the matter said Tesla’s plans to ramp up production with the help of the company now renamed Tesla Grohmann Automation remain on track.
The management layer below Klaus Grohmann is continuing his work, they told Reuters. But they said parts of the workforce felt insecure about becoming so dependent on one client after the founder’s departure.
Last year, Tesla had said: “Under the continued leadership of Mr Grohmann, several critical elements of Tesla’s automated manufacturing systems will be designed and produced in Pruem, to help make our factories the most advanced in the world.”
“Our factories are so important that we believe they will ultimately deserve an order of magnitude more attention in engineering than what they produce. At very high production volumes, the factory becomes more of a product than the product itself,” Tesla said at the time.
Tesla started out as a client of Grohmann Engineering, a small unlisted company based in Pruem, near the Luxembourg border, that helped companies design highly automated factories, a source familiar with the company told Reuters.
As pressure grew to increase production volumes at Tesla, Musk decided to buy Grohmann Engineering and make Pruem a base for Tesla Advanced Automation.
As well as BMW and Daimler, Grohmann counted the auto parts maker Bosch [ROBG.UL], chip maker Intel, and pharmaceutical firms Abbott Laboratories and Roche among its clients.
FILE PHOTO -- A Tesla car showroom is seen in west London, Britain, March 21, 2017. REUTERS/Toby Melville/File Photo
Negotiations have started with some of the clients about how to compensate them for lack of resources devoted to their projects, one of the sources said.
The German labor union IG Metall has demanded that Tesla’s management formalize multi-year job guarantees and increase salaries as a way to provide assurance amid management turmoil.VapeWorld has some strong Holiday Vaporizer Deals going on from now until midnight December 25th or while supplies last for their ’12 Hottest Gifts For The Holidaze Sale’.
Update 11/21/17: Just posted the new Black Friday & Cyber Monday Vaporizer Deals page for 2017. Let me know if you have any questions!
Basically you get between 1 and 3 free gifts (full gift list at bottom) with each purchase along with free shipping. The crazy part is they have the Pax 3 and the Davinci IQ included with this sale, I was not expecting a sale on either of these new units until sometime in 2017. You also get 2 gifts with the Air at $169 which is a really good deal. The cheapest unit with 3 gifts is the G Pen Elite, and the only gift with non standard gifts is the Volcano Vaporizer which has one standard gift, and one modified gift.
So the 12 vapes that are currently part of the Christmas Vaporizer sale are:
Not only is the Davinci IQ on the list, but it comes with 3 gifts and is listed for $274.99. I imagine this one will be out of stock first. Another surprise on the list is the Pax 3, this one comes with 2 gifts and also goes for $274.99. I would guess this is the second unit run out of stock. Another unit I rarely see sales on is the Firefly 2 the FF2 comes with 3 gifts at a price of $329.95. The Arizer Air is the best budget deal coming with 2 gifts at a price of $169 if you make sure to use the coupon code ‘AIR’ The Crafty rarely has any sales but only comes with 1 gift at a price of $339 so its not as special as the first ones. Like its smaller brother, the Mighty only comes with 1 gift and a price of $399. The G Pen Elite is the cheapest unit that comes with 3 gifts with a price tag of $169.95. If you want the cheapest unit overall, the Summit Plus comes with 2 gifts ant is only $149.99. The Davinci Ascent comes with 2 gifts for $199.99. The Volcano is the only desktop listed, and the only unit with 1 normal gift, and for the second gift you get to chose between free overnight shipping and a free VapeCase volcano soft case ($59.99 value). The Classic goes for $480 and the Digit goes for $600, I recommend the Classic because it doesn’t have the pesky 30 minute auto shutoff. If you are looking to use concentrates then Dr Dabber Boost has you covered and comes with 2 Gifts for $149.95 The Magical Butter is the only kitchen appliance on the list! This one helps you make butters, oils, and tinctures on autopilot and comes with 2 gifts for $174.95
And now the Free 12 Gifts you get to chose from:
AEROSPACED 4 Piece Grinders Small Red – ($21.95 value) AEROSPACED 4 Piece Grinder/Sifter with Mill Handle – ($27.99 value) Evak Glass Container – Medium/24 oz size – Clear – ($24.99 value) Marley Natural Glass & Walnut Taster – ($35.00 value) Marley Natural Holder for Taster or Pre-Roll – ($30.00 value) G Slim Vaporizer – ($19.95 value) G Slim Liquid Vaporizer – ($19.95 value) microG Vaporizer – ($69.95 value) Quickdraw 300 – ($100 value) Dr. Dabber Honeymats – ($9.95 value) Dr. Dabber Budder Cutter – ($49.95 value) Dr. Dabber Light Kit – ($49.95 value)’
For all of you university and grad students out there, congrats on finishing up the semester, and for everyone else I hope you guys a few days off work and have a great Holiday season full of delicious food to satisfy all the munchies.Jack Black plays R.L. Stine in this lively take on the hit YA horror-lite books.
Keeping the creepy/kooky mix entertainingly intact, Goosebumps translates R.L. Stine’s frighteningly successful young adult horror fiction series to the big screen with lively, teen Ghostbusters-type results.
Just like those 400 million books sold worldwide, the movie version, energetically directed by Rob Letterman, has a tongue-in-cheek tone that undercuts the bone-rattling with a dose of funny bone-tickling.
With a huggable cast headed by Jack Black and Dylan Minnette, the romp, marking Sony’s second Halloween-keyed release this season following in the monster footsteps of Hotel Transylvania 2, should create a similar frisson (after getting a first look at the London Film Festival) among nostalgic Stine fans and first-timers.
Read more London Film Fest Full Lineup Includes 'Black Mass,' Bryan Cranston's 'Trumbo'
Not exactly thrilled about having to relocate from New York to small town Madison, Delaware, when his widowed mom (Amy Ryan) accepts a job as a high school vice principal, teenager Zach Cooper (Minnette) perks up upon meeting perky next door neighbor, Hannah (Odeya Rush).
That is, until he discovers that her reclusive dad (Black) turns out to be none other than Stine himself, and he promises to make Zach’s life very unpleasant if he doesn’t keep away from his daughter.
Cutting to the chase, Papa Stine’s warning proves prophetic when Zach finds out the hard way that the creatures in his books have a habit of coming to life if the original manuscripts containing them are unlocked.
Cue the floodgates.
When faced with which of Stine’s other-worldly characters to release from their leather-bound confines, the filmmakers adopted a “the more the merrier” philosophy, cramming in dozens of them, led by Stine’s evil alter ego Slappy the Dummy.
Although that choice means missing out on any sort of more inspired one-on-one interactions, director Letterman (Monsters Vs. Aliens) choreographs the ensuing creature chaos with panache while still allowing the ample humor in Darren Lemke’s script (from a story credited to Scott Alexander & Larry Karaszewski) to rise above the cacophony.
While Black doesn’t physically resemble the actual Robert Lawrence Stine, he nevertheless creates an effectively droll character, combining a pair of heavy-rimmed black glasses, Orson Wells-type literate tones and a spiteful vanity that makes Stephen King the bane of his existence.
Possessing a relatable likability, Minnette and the fresh-faced Rush make sturdy foils for Black; while the preternaturally funny Jillian Bell mines some laugh-out-loud gems as Zach’s wacky Aunt Lorraine.
Read more Jillian Bell and Dean Norris Join Ice Cube and Charlie Day in 'Fist Fight'
Meanwhile, Danny Elman’s big playful Hitchcockian score provides a unifying undercurrent for the blend of CGI and old school fx make-up and puppetry involved in bringing the likes of the Praying Mantis, The Blob, The Creeps, the Vampire Poodle and all those vengeful gnomes to 3D life.
Production companies: Sony Pictures Animation, LStar Capital, Village Roadshow Pictures, Original Film, Scholastic Entertainment
Cast: Jack Black, Dylan Minnette, Odeya Rush, Amy Ryan, Ryan Lee, Jillian Bell.
Director: Rob Letterman
Screenwriter: Darren Lemke
Producers: Deborah Forte, Neal H. Moritz
Executive producers: Tania Landau, Bill Bannerman, Ben Waisbren, Bruce Berman, Greg Basser
Director of photography: Javier Aguirresarobe
Production designer: Sean Haworth
Costume designer: Judianna Makovsky
Editor: Jim May
Composer: Danny Elfman
Rated PG, 103 minutesVictor Cruz is getting close.
“I’m about 80 percent there. I think it’s just a matter of continuing to build the strength for the last leg of it,” Cruz told The Post on Wednesday after the Giants’ first OTA practice. “I’ve been running some routes for about two weeks now, and there’s been no pain, no swelling or anything like that, which are all good signs.”
As his teammates worked, Cruz was nearby on a side field, running routes, running hard. Then he iced his surgically repaired right knee. He tore his patellar tendon Oct. 19 in Philadelphia and nearly is all the way back.
“Yeah, I am itching,” Cruz said. “I can’t lie. I am itching. I am running routes and feeling good, but I know there is still a process, and I am still a little ways away in terms of strength-wise and things like that. It feels good and watching those guys run routes and catch balls. I am definitely itching to get back out there.”
LB Devon Kennard (ankle) and S Nat Berhe (calf) did not practice. Cooper Taylor and rookie second-round pick Landon Collins lined up as the starting safeties. … DE Robert Ayers hurt his left ankle and knee and spent several minutes on the side, flexing his left leg, before getting carted off. A source said Ayers did not sustain any structural damage. “Things look good,” the source said.
DE Jason Pierre-Paul has not yet signed his franchise tender, which would pay him $14.8 million this season, and he is not participating in the offseason program. Coach Tom Coughlin said he has |
nipples to be more prominent.'
The trend also comes since the rise of the Free The Nipple campaign.
So what procedures does Dr Rowe perform? Here he explains...
INNIE TO OUTIE
About 20 percent of women are born with an innie nipple - i.e.: a nipple that lies flat or slopes inwards.
To reverse this, Dr Rowe performs a procedure called 'distraction'.
He pulls the nipple out, then pierces it and inserts a medical nipple ring. The patient keeps the nipple ring in for about three months, forcing the scar tissue to stretch.
By the time the ring is taken out, the nipple is fixed in that position, he says.
These are images of one of Dr Rowe's patients who got an innie-outie procedure
This was another of Dr Rowe's patients, one of the 20 percent of women born with an innie
SYMMETRY
The vast majority of women - around 75 percent or more - have asymmetrical nipples.
However, the past year has seen the rise of celebrities wearing sheer shirts, displaying perfectly symmetrical nipples.
'Symmetry is probably the biggest thing when it comes to designer nipples. Most of my patients are asking for symmetry,' Dr Rowe said.
While all of Dr Rowe's work is minimally-invasive, this is probably the most invasive of all nipple procedures.
It involves surgically tucking some of the skin on the breast to readjust the position of the areola and the nipple.
In most cases he will only be operating on one nipple to centralize it and balance it out with the other.
Everyone from Bella Thorne to Sienna Miller is taking part in the lingerie-style sheer trend
COLOR
'This is a very common request among women after giving birth,' Dr Rowe explained.
'A lot of women want their nipples lightened post-partum. It's very simple, we use a laser or a cream. If they want it darker we can do medical tattooing.'
SIZE
The average diameter of an areola for women in North America is 42mm, but it is very common for women to have much larger areolas or one that is larger than the other.
Nipples come in all sizes, from completely flat to protruding just under two inches.
Dr Rowe said the most common areola operation is a reduction, and the most common nipple operation is an enlargement.
MAKE AREOLA OR NIPPLE SMALLER
Under local anesthetic, Dr Rowe makes an incision on the perimeter of the areola or on the top of the nipple itself. He then removes some tissue and stitches it up. The scars should fade within months.
MAKE AREOLA OR NIPPLE BIGGER
This is one of the most simple procedures Dr Rowe performs, simply injecting some filler into the areola or nipple, which can last from nine months to two years.
'Projection is the other main request I get from patients - symmetry and projection,' Dr Rowe says. 'Right now there's a real trend of women wanting their nipples to show and project.'
Many patients have asked Dr Rowe for more protruding nipples that will bulge out when they go bra-less under a thin shirt, or when they are wearing a bikini. Pictured: Ireland Baldwin, a leading figure in the Free The Nipple campaignCritics will say living without government is only theoretical; nobody has done this before for real. The nagging fear of change and distrust of the unknown is strong. It moves men to wonder: “well, couldn’t we just limit government, instead of doing away with it altogether?”
The answer to that is a resounding NO, we can’t just limit government, and here’s why:
1. The Phrase Itself is a Contradiction in Terms
Consider the term – Government. A Government is an entity that governs, or rules; the best definition being – “the absence of a market.” Another good definition of a Government is “an organization that governs those within its power” and “whatever has a monopoly on the use of unaccountable force in its domain.”
Thus, if government is government, it has nothing governing it; it is the outfit on top, the entity that does the ruling.
2. But what about the term -Limited. We know what that means; it tells of restrictions, of prohibitions. If a slave was ordered not to stray outside the plantation perimeter but did so anyway, authority came down, and demanded an explanation. The word limited absolutely implies that the one doing the limiting rules the one being limited!
Put the two words together then, and what you have is a perfect oxymoron – Limited Government – a contradiction in terms. The phrase attempts to convey the impossible idea of a ruled ruler, a governed governor! Either a government is able to govern without limits within its domain, or else it’s not a government! Limits either limit, or else they are not limits!
In case the contradiction isn’t abundantly clear, let’s take this even further. Suppose by some violation of logic an alleged government “Gov-A” exists which is, in fact, limited. That being so, the party doing the limiting is and absolutely must be the true government. Call it “Gov-B”, and suppose that the earnest believers in the myth of “limited government” insist that Gov-B, too, is limited.
By whom? – why, by government “Gov-C”, of course. Then Gov-C must be limited by Gov-D, the true and actual government; and Gov-D by Gov-E and so on ad infinitum. That progression really must be infinite, and because the number of human beings available to govern or be governed is not infinite, we now have conclusive proof that “limited government” is a logical impossibility. It does not exist, it never has existed, it never will exist, it is a myth. End of story.
3. Limited Government Was Well Tried, and It Did Fail
So urgent, however, is the irrational desire of some folk not to leave the familiar cocoon of such mythical limits on government that irrefutable logic alone somehow does not suffice. Let’s observe therefore that this utterly impossible theory has been attempted in practice, and it has (as we ought to expect) abysmally failed.
That refers to the United States of America, and to all other nations that boast a “constitution” said to limit what their governments are “allowed” to do. Ridiculous; but let us see what happened, anyway. The fatal contradiction can be seen in the thinking of the Founders even before the Revolutionary War was fought; it comes in the first few lines of the Declaration of Independence:
“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness – that to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed…”
4. So America’s Founders, who were no dummies to be sure, actually advertised that they “held” two wholly contradictory concepts to be “true”: that liberty can be “secured” by instituting something that in its very nature is an absolute denier and violator of liberty, and that it is conceivable that those governed can give their “consent” to be governed!
It really boggles the mind, that they could be so profoundly stupid. A second, perhaps even more incredible idiocy? If you give your consent for me to rule or govern you, you’re not being governed; your will has been declared subservient to mine by your own doing. This is doubly impossible; it firstly guts the word “govern” of all significance and secondly requires belief in the possibility of voluntary slavery, which is logically contradictory and flatly violates the self-ownership axiom.
Perhaps they weren’t stupid; perhaps they were cunning politicians like all the rest, winning support by words that, to this day, sound magnificent but have no coherent meaning. Hard to tell; those men did at least lay their lives on the line, in the War, for what they said they believed.
5. But there are only two possibilities: that they were cynical manipulators, or just plain stupid. Either way, by 1781 the great experiment in allegedly limited government had begun, and shortly after that the Constitution was in place to permit the new government to do certain things and to limit or prohibit it from doing any others.
The most important Amendment in the Bill of Rights is #9, and that’s the one that’s been most carefully ignored, ever since:
The enumeration in the Constitution of certain rights shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people. That is, the fact that the Bill of Rights named specific limits on government power did not mean that no other limits existed.
It was implicit throughout the document that the government was to exercise only those powers expressly “delegated” but just to make sure, that Ninth Amendment was put in place. Never before or since has “limited government” been established better or more clearly than in America. It has been very well tried. Now let’s observe how thoroughly it has failed.
6. Stated Limitation – #Actual Performance
Article 1.Sec8: The Congress shall have power… to coin money, regulate the value thereof.
#Actual Performance 1.Sec8: Far from merely coining such metal as individuals choose to bring to its Mints, the government routinely issues and even prints what it cynically calls “money”
Article 1.Sec8: The Congress shall have power… to borrow money on the credit of the United States
#In huge amounts, the government also lends money (eg to foreign governments to purchase their cooperation) using a power which the Constitution nowhere grants.
Article 1.Sec8: The Congress shall have power… to provide for the common defence and general welfare of the United States
#The government endlessly provokes offensive wars andprovides for the particular welfare of its favored clients at the expense of others
Article 1.Sec8: The Congress shall have power… to establish post offices and post roads
#Government virtually monopolizes all roads, whether “post” is conveyed along them or not, and whether competing alternatives could have been provided or not.
Article 1.Sec2: Direct taxes shall be apportioned among the several states The main “direct tax” is the US income tax, which is expressly not apportioned, on the pretext that Amendment 16 relieved government of that requirement. However, that Amendment used the term “income” without defining it; and during the half dozen years following alleged ratification the Supreme Court repeatedly defined it as “corporate profit” – one of them expressly confirming that the Amendment gave Congress “no new taxing power.” Yet it now furnishes 50% of all Federal revenues, direct from individuals’ earnings.
Amendment #1: Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech…
#Government brutally murdered 84 men, women and children in Waco, TX in 1993 who wanted only to be left alone freely to exercise their religion; and time after time has savagely curtailed free speech. Examples: the Alien & Sedition Acts of 1798, gagging of anti-war speech during the Civil War, WW-I, WW-II and in the current phony “War on Terror” with its infamous “Patriot Act.”
Amendment #2: The right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed.
#That right (derived directly from the self-ownership axiom) has been not merely “infringed” but savagely and repeatedly denied by every government entity in the USA with about 20,000 anti-gun laws
Amendment #3: No soldier shall, in time of peace, be quartered in any house, without the consent of the owner
#Literally, this limit has been respected. However, the standing, peacetime US
military establishment costs every household over $6,000 a year in taxes – the money equivalent of a compulsory paying guest.
Amendment #4: The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated; and no warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched and the persons or things to be seized.
#This is possibly the Right most frequently trashed in the whole Bill of Rights. Quite openly, the Feds are spying on every international email, phone call, and internet packet that they wish, on the catch-all pretext of “National Security.” Ever since the early 1990s they have been doing the same surreptitiously, by having foreign governments (notably the UK) do the spying on US Citizens then providing the date to the US Government; and vice versa. And searches and seizures of homes without proper, sworn warrants are the norm, and if the SWAT raiders happen to invade the wrong home in search of drugs and kill the occupant well, that’s really sad but – humans err.
Amendment #5: No person shall be held to answer for a capital, or otherwise infamous, crime, unless on a presentment or indictment of a grand jury, except in cases arising in the land or naval forces, or in the militia, when in actual service, in time of war, or public danger; nor shall any person be subject, for the same offence, to be twice put in jeopardy of life or limb; nor shall be compelled, in any criminal case, to be a witness against himself; nor be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor shall private property be taken for public use, without just compensation.
#Government routinely tricks suspects into “confessing” by deliberately lying to them – with full support from its courts; and gladly places them in double jeopardy by creating two levels of adjudication, criminal and civil.
Holding prisoners without trial or even access to a lawyer in Guantanamo Bay has become a worldwide scandal, a good reason to pour well-deserved mockery on the supposed virtues of American “justice”. The trick is to allege that they are prisoners of war held outside the USA (and so not protected by the Bill of Rights) even though no war was ever declared by Congress as required by Article 1.Sec8. The hypocrisy fairly reeks.
Property, meanwhile, is routinely grabbed by government for both “public” and even private use, whether the “compensation” is just or not. (It never can be in reality since “just” is what is equally acceptable to buyer and seller in a voluntary exchange; by definition, a “taking” is not a voluntary exchange. That’s a fatal flaw in the Amendment.)
Last but not least, every year over one hundred million Americans are compelled or tricked (same difference) into filing a confession with the IRS that can and will be used against them if the government sees fit. It’s called a 1040.
Amendment #6: In all criminal prosecutions, the accused shall enjoy the right to a speedy and public trial, by an impartial jury.
#6 Reality: government trials are almost never “speedy” by any reasonable definition and juries are certainly never “impartial” because (a) jurors are selected only from a list of those who register to vote, who therefore endorse the political system, and (b) jurors are submitted to lengthy voir dires or questionnaires, to show the government lawyers, who have all the time and money
they need, whether their profiles fit what is required to convict the defendant.
Amendment #7: In suits at common law, where the value in controversy shall exceed twenty dollars, the right of trial by jury shall be preserved.
#7 Reality: exceed the speed limit when a cop is watching, and when your trial comes up with a potential fine of $21 or more, see if you can get (a) a criminal trial, with its unconditional guarantee of a jury in Amendment 6, or (b) a jury anyway under Amendment 7, if they insist on pretending it’s not a “criminal” matter. Case closed.
Amendment #8: Excessive bail shall not be required, nor excessive fines imposed, nor cruel and unusual punishment inflicted.
#8 Fine words. No definition of “excessive” or “cruel” or “unusual” and government drives through those holes with a Mack truck whenever it feels so inclined. You might think that giving a prisoner a 2 inch mattress on a steel bed and denying him his regular medication is “cruel”.
Government does not.
Amendment #10: The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or by the people.
#10 Reality: You can read quickly through the powers that are so granted, in Article 1; and then compare it with the monstrous, $3.8 trillion per year spending machine that the Federal Government has become in a mere two centuries, on top of a similar monster in the States, cities and towns.
There is no grant of power whatsoever for the overwhelming majority of what government actually does; the limits of Amendments 9 and 10 have become just a piece of paper, that nobody bothers to read any more.
The above is just a sampling; endless other examples could be named. Inescapable conclusion: not only is it impossible logically to limit government, it cannot be done in practice either.
7. This is a hard conclusion to embrace, so deeply has the idea of some degree of government embedded itself in our awareness of “the way things ought to be.” Many Conservatives have embraced some of the free-market ideas of libertarian anarchism – indeed many have written books in its favor.
Many Liberals have endorsed the principles of privacy and freedom from a military draft implicit in the self-ownership axiom. But few members of either group have shown themselves willing to act consistently within that axiom; possibly they “see the dots” but something deep in the unconscious prevents them from connecting those dots and concluding rationally that the cultural norms under which they have been raised are, simply, flat wrong.
8. Hopefully, you are learning that government is absolutely incompatible with the essential nature of human beings, both by tightly-reasoned theory and by numerous major examples in practice. If not, what else must be nailed down hard to make you accept the fact that “limited government” is no more feasible than partial pregnancy; that, again, it is an impossibility both by reason and in practice.
Hopefully, you have now reached a moment of decision. The evidence is before you, and you have found it conclusive. The decision must be yours alone.
So, what’s your choice going to be? Is the reasoned and evidential case for libertarian market anarchism so overwhelming that you will henceforth endevor to follow where logic leads so as to remain true to your humanity?
Do you want to live in a fully free society ASAP and to help one form?
Or will you stay put for now? Continue to consider what your beliefs truly are. Though you can’t fault the reasoning, the conclusion is just too risky and
radical.
9. Will you remain conventional, even if that means living under a violently imposed myth, rather than facing reality and taking control of your own life and living by your own principles?What does it say about the state of Americans’ relationship with their own government that its largest tech company can use the ability to conceal private information from authorities as a selling point?
Apple isn’t really focusing on marketing its latest mobile operating system that way (they’re more about bragging about how they don't sell info about your personal habits to advertisers), but they aren't shy about pointing out their resistance to rolling over and accepting government data demands. Observant tech journalists have noticed something big in their latest privacy notes. Apple has changed its encryption so that the company itself cannot access the data on its users’ phones and iPads without the passcode. Thus, if police or the feds come to Apple with warrants to grab potentially useful private data off a device, they couldn’t comply even if they wanted to. Ars Technica explains:
Previously, as we reported in May 2014, if law enforcement came to Apple with a seized device and a valid warrant, it was able to access a substantial portion of the data already on an iPad or iPhone. But under the latest version of iOS, even that will be impossible. "On devices running iOS 8, your personal data such as photos, messages (including attachments), email, contacts, call history, iTunes content, notes, and reminders is placed under the protection of your passcode," the company wrote on its website Wednesday evening. "Unlike our competitors, Apple cannot bypass your passcode and therefore cannot access this data. So it's not technically feasible for us to respond to government warrants for the extraction of this data from devices in their possession running iOS 8."
To be clear, though, this is not perfect protection. The Washington Post notes that this won’t protect data stored elsewhere, like on cloud services. So as certain naked celebrities have recently learned, if there’s stuff on your phones or iPads you don’t want other people getting their hands on, maybe don’t send it up to the cloud.
UPDATE: Today Google announced that the next update to its Android operating system will also encrypt data by default. It already has optional encryption features, but few users seem to know how to use them.The parents of an American-born student fatally shot by Hamas gunmen in Jerusalem in 1996 filed a lawsuit Friday against two Chicago-area Palestinian-American groups, claiming they are liable for a massive legal judgment awarded the family years ago but never collected.
Stanley and Joyce Boim filed the federal lawsuit in Chicago against American Muslims for Palestine and the Americans for Justice in Palestine Educational Foundation, both based in Bridgeview, as well as three men they identified as leaders of the two groups.
The suit claims the organizations are the "alter egos" of three Islamic fundraising groups held liable for the death of the Boims' son, David, for providing financial support to Hamas, a militant Palestinian group. In 2004, a federal jury in Chicago awarded $52 million in damages to the Boims, far more than the family's lawyers had sought. Citing relevant law, a magistrate judge then trebled the award to $156 million.
The verdict was the first by a jury holding U.S. citizens or organizations liable under a federal law that allows victims of terrorism to sue for civil damages.
One of the Boims' lawyers, Stephen Landes, said Friday that the family received only a small fraction of the award — he would not say how much — because the defendants claimed they had ceased operations and had no money to pay the huge judgment. The successor groups named in Friday's lawsuit formed shortly afterward, with many of the same men assuming similar leadership roles, Landes said.
"What we ended up finding is they just tried to rebrand themselves, and they set up down the street," he said.
If the groups are allowed to move on without paying the huge judgment, Landes said, "it makes a mockery" of federal anti-terrorism laws.
David Boim was 17 when he was shot in the head while waiting for a bus in Jerusalem. Boim, originally from New York, was standing with classmates as they prepared to head to a review class for exams, according to the lawsuit. A gunman fired from a passing car. Boim died the next day.
Family photo David Boim, an American-born student, was fatally shot by Hamas gunmen in Jerusalem in 1996 while he waited for a bus. David Boim, an American-born student, was fatally shot by Hamas gunmen in Jerusalem in 1996 while he waited for a bus. (Family photo) (Family photo)
"We think about and mourn our son David every day," Joyce Boim said Friday in a statement. "We brought the original suit to prevent other American families from suffering similar tragedies. We pray that this new effort will give more force to the law that seeks justice for terror victims."
The Boims, who are U.S. citizens, live in Israel.
The original lawsuit was filed in 2000.
In a landmark ruling in 2002, the 7th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Chicago said Islamic groups could be held liable if the Boims could establish that they aided and abetted Boim's killing.
But the Islamic Association for Palestine and the American Muslim Society, both based in the Chicago area, and the Holy Land Foundation, with a branch in Chicago, contended they were charitable and educational institutions promoting the welfare of Palestinians.
However, in late 2004, the court found the groups had knowingly supported Hamas and its terrorist activities. The jury awarded the multimillion-dollar damages — trebled by the judge.
A three-judge panel of the 7th Circuit later set aside the jury's decision, but the full court upheld the verdict in December 2008.
The new lawsuit was filed almost nine years after that key ruling. Landes said it took time to confirm connections between the old and new groups.
In Friday's lawsuit, the Boims asked that a judge find that American Muslims for Palestine and the Americans for Justice in Palestine Educational Foundation constitute successor groups and order them responsible to pay the remaining tens of millions of dollars still owed.
Messages left with American Muslims for Palestine were not returned. It is not clear if the Americans for Justice in Palestine Educational Foundation is still operating.
AMP describes itself on its website as "a national education and grassroots-based organization dedicated to educating the American public about Palestine and its rich cultural, historical and religious heritage."
Friday's lawsuit also names three individuals — Rafeeq Jaber, Abdelbasset Hamayel and Osama Abu Irshaid — as defendants because of their alleged associations with the old and new groups.
Jaber was an organizer of Americans for Justice in Palestine and the former president and principal spokesman for American Muslims for Palestine and the Islamic Association for Palestine, according to the lawsuit. Hamayel has been identified as American Muslims for Palestine's executive director, according to the lawsuit, and was director and secretary general of the Islamic Association for Palestine. Irshaid sits on the American Muslims for Palestine board and was also editor of the Islamic Association for Palestine's newspaper, the lawsuit said.
Hamayel said he was unaware of the lawsuit and declined to comment, while Jaber and Irshaid could not be reached for comment. The lawsuit said both Jaber and Hamayel live in Illinois, while Irshaid resides in Virginia.
poconnell@chicagotribune.com
Twitter @pmocwriterBack in 2013 I was working exclusively on an Android tablet. Then with the NoFlo Kickstarter I needed a device with a desktop browser. What followed were brief periods working on a Chromebook, on a 12” MacBook, and even an iPad Pro.
But from April 2016 onwards I’ve been again working with an Android device. Some people have asked me about my setup, and so here is an update.
Why work on a tablet?
When I started on this path in 2013, using a tablet for “real work” was considered crazy. While every story on tablet productivity still brings out the people claiming it is not a real computer for real work, using tablets for real work is becoming more and more common.
A big contributor to this has been the plethora of work-oriented tablets and convertibles released since then. Microsoft’s popular Surface Pro line brought the PC to tablet form factor, and Apple’s iPad Pro devices gave the iPad a keyboard.
Here are couple of great posts talking about how it feels to work on an iPad:
With all the activity going on, one could claim using a tablet for work has been normalized. But why work on a tablet instead of a “real computer”? Here are some reasons, at least for me:
Free of legacy cruft
Desktop operating systems have become clunky. Window management. File management. Multiple ways to discover, install, and uninstall applications. Broken notification mechanisms.
With a tablet you can bypass pretty much all of that, and jump into a simpler, cleaner interface designed for the modern connected world.
I think this is also the reason driving some developers back to Linux and tiling window managers — cutting manual tweaking and staying focused.
Amazing endurance
Admittedly, laptop battery life has increased a lot since 2013. But with some manufacturers using this an excuse to ship thinner devices, tablets still win the endurance game.
With my current work tablet, I’m customarily getting 12 or more hours of usage. This means I can power through the typical long days of a startup founder without having to plug in. And when traveling, I really don’t have to care where power sockets are located on trains, airplanes, and conference centers.
Low power usage also means that I can really get a lot of more runtime by utilizing the mobile battery pack I originally bought to use with my phone. While I’ve never actually had to try this, back-of-the-envelope math claims I should be able to get a full workweek from the combo without plugging in.
Work and play
The other aspect of using a tablet is that it becomes a very nice content consumption device after I’m done working. Simply disconnect the keyboard and lean back, and the same device you used for writing software becomes a great e-reader, video player, or a gaming machine.
This combined with the battery life has meant that I’ve actually stopped carrying a Kindle with me. While an e-ink screen is still nicer to read, not needing an extra device has its benefits, especially for a frequent one-bag traveller.
The setup
I’m writing this on a Pixel C, a 10.2” Android tablet made by Google. I got the device last spring when there were developer discounts available at ramp-up to the Android 7 release, and have been using it full-time since.
Software
Surprisingly little has changed in my software use since 2013 — I still spend the most of the time writing software in either Flowhub or terminal. Here are the apps I use on daily basis:
JuiceSSH for mosh access to my remote development servers
Termux for local and offline development
Flowhub for visual programming
The Grid for updating my various websites
Slack, Hangouts, and Inbox by Gmail for communications
Google Drive and the associated applications for budgeting and planning
Chrome for web
Looking back to the situation in early 2013, the biggest change is that Slack has pretty much killed work email.
Termux is a new app that has done a lot to improve the local development situation. By starting the app you get a very nice Linux chroot environment where a lot of software is only a quick apt install away.
Since much of my non-Flowhub work is done in tmux and vim, I get the exactly same working environment on both local chroot and cloud machines by simply installing my dotfiles on each of them.
Keyboard
When I’m on the road I’m using the Pixel C keyboard. This doubles as a screen protector, and provides a reasonable laptop-like typing environment. It attaches to the tablet with very strong magnets and allows a good amount of flexibility on the screen angles.
However, when stationary, no laptop keyboard compares to a real mechanical keyboard. When I’m in the office I use a Filco MiniLa Air, a bluetooth keyboard with quiet-ish Cherry MX brown switches.
This tenkeyless (60%) keyboard is extremely comfortable to type on. However, the sturdy metal case means that it is a little too big and heavy to carry on a daily basis.
In practice I’ve only taken the mechanical keyboard with me when there has been a longer trip where I know that I’ll be doing a lot of typing. To solve this, I’m actually looking to build a more compact custom mechanical keyboard so I could always have it with me. (Update: here is the keyboard I built).
Comparison with iOS
So, why work on Android instead of getting an iPad Pro? I’ve actually worked on both, and here are my reasons:
Communications between apps : while iOS has extensions now, the ability to send data from an app to another is still a hit-or-miss. Android had intents from day one, meaning pretty much any app can talk to any other app
: while iOS has extensions now, the ability to send data from an app to another is still a hit-or-miss. Android had intents from day one, meaning pretty much any app can talk to any other app Standard charging : all of my other devices charge with the same USB-C chargers and cables. iPads still use the proprietary Lightnight plug, requiring custom dongles for everything
: all of my other devices charge with the same USB-C chargers and cables. iPads still use the proprietary Lightnight plug, requiring custom dongles for everything Standard accessories : this boils down to USB-C just like charging. With Android I can plug in a network adapter or even a mouse, and it’ll just work
: this boils down to USB-C just like charging. With Android I can plug in a network adapter or even a mouse, and it’ll just work Ecosystem lock-in : we’re moving to a world where everything — from household electronics to cars — is either locked to the Apple ecosystem or following standards. I don’t want to be locked to a single vendor for everything digital
: we’re moving to a world where everything — from household electronics to cars — is either locked to the Apple ecosystem or following standards. I don’t want to be locked to a single vendor for everything digital Browser choice: with iOS you only get one web renderer, the rather dated Safari. On Android I can choose between Chrome, Firefox, or any other browser that has been ported to the platform
Of course, iOS has its own benefits. Apple has a stronger stance on privacy than Google. And there is more well-made tablet software available for iPads than Android. But when almost everything I use is available on the web, this doesn’t matter that much.
The future
As a software developer working on Android tablets, the weakest point of the platform is still that there are no browser developer tools available. This was a problem in 2013, and it is still a problem now.
From my conversations with some Chrome developers, it seems Google has very little interest in addressing this. However, there is a bright spot: the new breed of convertible Chromebooks being released now. And they run Android apps:
Chrome OS is another clean, legacy free, modern computing interface. With these new devices you get the combination of a full desktop browser and the ability to run all Android tablet software.
The Samsung Chromebook Pro/Plus mentioned above is definitely interesting. A high-res 12” screen and a digital pen which I see as something very promising for visual programming purposes.
However, given that I already have a great mechanical keyboard, I’d love a device that shipped without an attached keyboard. We’ll see what kind of devices get out later this year.In an ambitious and risky investment while many bricks-and-mortar music stores struggle, Toronto's Sunrise Records is taking over 70 stores that HMV is closing.
The new locations are in Canadian malls from coast to coast.
"With HMV leaving, it leaves a big hole in the marketplace," says Sunrise president Doug Putman, "so we just thought it was a good opportunity and the timing was right. So we are going to jump on it and do what we can."
Putman will only say Sunrise is making a seven-figure investment, and he hopes to turn a profit by next year.
He says that with lower head office costs, renegotiated leases and more depth in the record catalogue, Sunrise can succeed where HMV and so many others have failed.
"The reality is there is a large amount of customers that want that physical product that they can touch and hold and have."
'We just thought it was a good opportunity,' says Doug Putman, president of Sunrise Records. (Lucas Tingle)
Putman says with the renewed popularity of vinyl, "we know there is huge potential there based on our other stores' performance."
"Vinyl will definitely be front-of-store," but he says the stores will also sell CDs, apparel, merchandise and board games.
Putman says allowing managers to make purchasing decisions based on their markets will mean each store will be a bit different.
Canadian music publicist Eric Alper calls the announcement "great news for the music industry." It will create more space for artists to sell records and merchandise, he says.
Canadian music publicists Eric Alper say this is great news for the industry. (CBC)
But Alper sees it as a risky move. "There's always a long-term risk because you never know what the trends are going to be."
He says the key for Sunrise will be how well they maintain their stock. Vinyl can be difficult to get quickly, but the company will have a lot of buying power, he says.
HMV lost $100,000 a day
HMV Canada Inc. went into receivership in January and is closing all 102 stores. According to court filings the company was losing $100,000 a day as customers turned toward online media for their music and videos.
The new stores will start to open in April, and Sunrise plans to have the remainder up and running by midsummer. The company is reaching out to the more than 1,000 HMV employees who will be looking for work.
Sunrise is also interested in reopening a location in downtown Toronto, where it was forced to close two stores in 2014. It has 10 locations in suburban Toronto and rural Ontario.Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has grown in strength following the disputed elections [GETTY]
Ahmadinejad was reelected as the president of Iran last June against a background of an unusually open, divisive and acrimonious election campaign.
The vote was followed by unprecedented levels of street protests and growing international pressure and isolation led by the US, despite the stated intentions of Barack Obama, the US president.
But now, several months on, Ahmadinejad's government appears to have emerged stronger and more self-confident than it was before the contentious elections.
Withering opposition
Not only did he maintain his position on some of the most controversial foreign policy issues, he also made a direct challenge to the power of Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, who was the second most powerful man in the country after Ayatollah Khamenei, the supreme leader.
This included the arrest of Rafsanjani's family members, and his subsequent falling in line behind the regime in the face of mass protests.
In the process, Ahmadinejad also continued to elevate the position of the Revolutionary Guards at the expense of the old guards of the revolution, led by the likes of the late Ayatollah Montazeri.
The government and security forces have managed to suppress any serious challenge to the government and what looked like an increasingly popular movement has withered away as a result of a brutal crackdown and political gamesmanship.
This has been greatly assisted by foreign plots against the regime, which made it much easier for the government to rally support in the face of external threats.
A Jundallah suicide attack in October, which killed more than 40 people including six senior commanders of the Revolutionary Guards, marked a turning point for the opposition movement.
The government was quick to point the finger of blame for the attack - the worst of its kind on Iranian soil for decades - at the UK and the US, claiming they backed the group.
Such a challenge to peace and stability inside Iran served to undermine the opposition.
Moreover, Iran has continued with its uranium enrichment programme to the deep consternation |
pression. AO=arthroscopy only. RCS=rotator cuff surgery. *Based on data received from 23 sites and data imputed for nine sites. †Median time to any type of surgery was 58, 56, and 217 days in the decompression, arthroscopy only, and no treatment groups, respectively. ‡One rotator cuff surgery did not involve decompression. Table 1 Baseline characteristics of the intention-to-treat population Decompression (n=106) Arthroscopy only (n=103) No treatment (n=104) Female 54 (51%) 52 (50%) 52 (50%) Age 52·9 (10·3) 53·7 (10·5) 53·2 (10·2) Previously received injections in study shoulder 2 (1–3) for n=105 2 (1–3) 2 (1–3) Oxford Shoulder Score 25·2 (8·5) 26·7 (8·8) 25·5 (8·3) Modified Constant-Murley Score 39·4 (13·9), n=102 43·1 (15·5), n=101 38·3 (14·2), n=100 PainDETECT Score 11·7 (6·6), n=105 11·0 (5·9) 11·9 (6·6), n=100 HADS Depression Score 5·0 (3·8), n=105 5·0 (3·7), n=102 5·7 (4·2) HADS Anxiety Score 6·3 (4·3) 6·3 (4·2) 6·9 (4·5) EQ VAS 65·8 (19·4) 69·7 (19·2) 64·4 (23·2) EQ-5D-3L Index 0·52 (0·30), n=105 0·55 (0·29), n=102 0·50 (0·33) Data are n (%), mean (SD), or median (IQR). Oxford Shoulder Score range 0 to 48. Modified Constant-Murley Score range 0 to 100. PainDETECT score −1 to 38. Hospital Anxiety and Depression Scale (HADS) Depression and Anxiety Score range 0 to 21. EuroQol 5 dimensions 3 level index (EQ-5D-3L) range −0·59 to 1·0. EuroQol visual analogue scale (EQ VAS) range 0–100. A higher score indicates a better state for all measures except for HADS and PainDETECT. Between Sept 14, 2012, and June 16, 2015, we randomly assigned 313 patients (of 740 eligible patients [ appendix ]) to treatment: 106 to decompression surgery, 103 to arthroscopy only, and 104 to no treatment, figure 1. The study groups were well balanced on all baseline characteristics ( table 1 ). The median number of operations per surgeon was two (IQR 1–6). Further details on reasons for non-compliance, missing data, and the per-protocol population are in the appendix. 24 (23%), 43 (42%), and 12 (12%) of the decompression, arthroscopy only, and no-treatment groups, respectively, did not receive their assigned treatment by 6 months. At 1 year, 19 (18%), 35 (34%), and 26 (25%) of the decompression, arthroscopy only, and no-treatment groups, respectively, had not received their assigned treatment. Median time to surgery (any type) was 90 days (IQR 58–123), 82 days (56–134), and 217 days (111–262) for decompression, arthroscopy only, and no treatment groups, respectively. Table 2 Oxford shoulder score outcome analyses Mean (SD); n Mean difference (95% CI); p value Decompression Arthroscopy only No treatment Decompression vs arthroscopy only Decompression vs no treatment Arthroscopy only vs no treatment Intention to treat OSS at 6 months 32·7 (11·6); n=90 34·2 (9·2); n=94 29·4 (11·9); n=90 −1·3 (−3·9 to 1·3); 0·3141 2·8 (0·5 to 5·2); 0·0186 4·2 (1·8 to 6·6); 0·0014 OSS at 1 year 38·2 (10·3); n=88 38·4 (9·3); n=93 34·3 (11·8); n=84 0·3 (−2·9 to 3·5); 0·8571 3·9 (0·7 to 7·1); 0·0193 3·6 (0·6 to 6·6); 0·0193 Per protocol OSS at 6 months 34·7 (10·9); n=70 35·5 (8·8); n=57 29·4 (11·8); n=80 −0·7 (−4·2 to 2·8); 0·6971 4·6 (1·7 to 7·5); 0·0030 5·3 (2·7 to 7·8); 0·0002 OSS at 1 year 39·4 (9·4); n=72 38·1 (9·6); n=65 33·8 (12·3); n=64 1·6 (−1·9 to 5·1); 0·3526 5·7 (2·9 to 8·4); 0·0003 3·9 (0·7 to 7·0); p=0·0175 Multiple imputation * Means and SDs including imputed values, averaged over the 20 imputation runs using predictive mean matching. OSS at 6 months 32·5 (11·3); n=106 34·5 (8·8); n=103 29·6 (11·3); n=104 −1·3 (−3·9 to 1·3); 0·3237 3·1 (0·7 to 5·5); 0·0139 4·1 (1·8 to 6·4); 0·0013 OSS at 1 year 38·3 (9·7); n=106 38·4 (8·9); n=103 34·4 (10·8); n=104 0·5 (−2·6 to 3·7); 0·7338 4·1 (0·7 to 7·5); 0·0202 3·3 (0·3 to 6·4); 0·0338 The primary outcome was the Oxford Shoulder Score (OSS) at 6 months. Figure 2 Oxford Shoulder Score in the intention-to-treat analyses Show full caption Data are mean (95% CI) shown at follow-up timepoints. OSS= Oxford Shoulder Score. At 6 months, data for the Oxford Shoulder Score were available for 90 patients assigned to decompression, 94 to arthroscopy, and 90 to no treatment. Mean Oxford Shoulder Score did not differ between the two surgical groups at 6 months (decompression 32·7 points [SD 11·6] vs arthroscopy 34·2 points [9·2]; mean difference −1·3 points (95% CI −3·9 to 1·3, p=0·3141). Both surgical groups showed a small benefit over no treatment (mean 29·4 points [SD 11·9], decompression was higher by 2·8 points [95% CI 0·5–5·2], p=0· 0186; mean difference vs arthroscopy by 4·2 points [1·8–6·6], p=0·0014) but these differences were not clinically important ( table 2 figure 2 ). At both 6 months and 1 year follow-up, all groups had on average better mean Oxford Shoulder Score scores ( table 2 figure 2 ). The per-protocol analyses showed similar results ( appendix ) and the results were not sensitive to missing data. Similarly, sensitivity analyses had consistent results. Using post-surgery follow-up did not change the findings nor did exclusion of data for assessments done less than 2 months after surgery ( appendix ). Mixed model and bootstrapped analyses also produced very similar results ( appendix ). A 12-point difference missing not-at-random assumption did not change the decompression versus arthroscopy only results ( appendix ). Table 3 Secondary outcomes for pain and quality of life Mean (SD); n Mean difference (95% CI); p value Decompression Arthroscopy only No treatment Decompression vs arthroscopy only Decompression vs no treatment Arthroscopy only vs no treatment At 6 months Modified Constant-Murley 56·5 (21·8); n=82 57·6 (17·7); n=84 45·4 (21·3); n=83 0·3 (−4·1 to 4·7); 0·8972 9·3 (4·1 to 14·6); 0·0012 9·1 (3·1 to 15·2); 0·0045 PainDETECT 8·4 (7·1); n=81 7·9 (5·7); n=82 10·2 (6·3); n=80 0·1 (−1·8 to 2·0); 0·9036 −1·7 (−3·5 to 0·0); 0·0559 −1·9 (−3·7 to 0·0); 0·0502 HADS Depression 3·6 (4·0); n=88 3·6 (3·9); n=91 5·5 (4·4); n=89 0·2 (−0·8 to 1·2); 0·6738 −1·1 (−1·8 to −0·4); 0·0040 −1·3 (−2·2 to −0·3); 0·0100 HADS Anxiety 5·1 (4·0); n=87 5·6 (4·6); n=92 6·7 (4·7); n=88 −0·1 (−1·0 to 0·8); 0·7368 −0·8 (−1·5 to −0·2); 0·0168 −0·6 (−1·4 to 0·1); 0·1096 EQ VAS 74·2 (20·3); n=89 72·8 (20·2); n=93 67·8 (22·1); n=89 3·1 (−3·5 to 9·7); 0·3393 6·4 (2·2 to 10·7); 0·0043 3·4 (−1·4 to 8·2); 0·1601 EQ5D-3L Index 0·65 (0·29); n=89 0·67 (0·26); n=93 0·52 (0·36); n=89 0·00 (−0·09 to 0·08); 0·9308 0·12 (0·04 to 0·21); 0·0076 0·12 (0·02 to 0·21); 0·0154 At 1 year Modified Constant-Murley 66·2 (19·9); n=76 64·9 (17·2); n=81 56·7 (22·1); n=70 2·7 (−2·7 to 8·2); 0·3087 8·3 (2·5 to 14·1); 0·0067 4·9 (0·9 to 8·9); 0·0173 PainDETECT Score 8·5 (7·1); n=67 7·3 (5·7); n=72 9·8 (7·6); n=69 0·4 (−1·4 to 2·2); 0·6541 −1·5 (−3·7 to 0·7); 0·1721 −1·8 (−4·3 to 0·7); 0·1536 HADS Depression 3·2 (3·5); n=84 3·5 (3·7); n=88 4·4 (4·0); n=78 −0·1 (−0·7 to 0·5); 0·6906 −0·7 (−1·5 to 0·2); 0·1208 −0·5 (−1·3 to 0·2); 0·1452 HADS Anxiety 5·2 (4·1); n=83 5·7 (4·5); n=87 5·9 (4·2); n=81 −0·1 (−0·9 to 0·6); 0·7474 −0·1 (−1·0 to 0·8); 0·8220 0·0 (−1·0 to 1·1); 0·9215 EQ VAS 73·7 (21·0); n=85 75·9 (20·0); n=91 73·4 (22·4); n=82 −0·4 (−4·4 to 3·7); 0·8530 0·0 (−4·3 to 4·2); 0·9947 0·3 (−5·1 to 5·7); 0·9050 EQ-5D-3L Index 0·74 (0·28); n=86 0·73 (0·27); n=92 0·66 (0·33); n=80 0·04 (−0·03 to 0·10); 0·2750 0·08 (0·00 to 0·16); 0·0517 0·05 (−0·04 to 0·13); 0·2644 HADS=Hospital Anxiety and Depression Scale. EQ-5D-3L=EuroQol 5 dimensions 3 levels. EQ VAS=EuroQol visual analogue scale. Nearly all secondary outcomes ( table 3 appendix ) reflect the same pattern as the primary outcome. The modified Constant-Murley score also showed no difference between decompression and arthroscopy only at 6 months and 1 year, but both surgical groups were better than no treatment at both timepoints. PainDETECT, EQ-5D-3L Index, EQ VAS, and HADS results also showed similar trends for no difference between the two surgical groups at 6 months, but differences were noted between each surgical group and no treatment (if not reaching statistical significance in all analyses). More patients in both surgical groups (decompression and arthroscopy only) considered themselves to have improved after treatment than in the no-treatment group at 6 months ( appendix ), although not in all comparisons at 1 year. Similarly, more patients in the surgical groups were pleased with their outcome than in the no-treatment group at 6 months, although at 1 year only some of the corresponding results were significant. Other patient-reported outcomes ( appendix ) were mostly not significant between any of the groups for either timepoint. There were six study-related complications, all frozen shoulders (two in each group). The comparisons of any complications were not significant (decompression vs arthroscopy only p>0·9999; decompression vs no treatment, p>0·9999; arthroscopy only vs no treatment, p≥0·9999). Two further participants had trauma-related injuries during the study (not considered study-related complications) that affected their study shoulder (one car accident [in the no-treatment group], and one fall due to slipping [in the decompression group]). Two participants (both in the arthroscopy only group) required further surgery for pain. One of these patients underwent decompression, the other received superior labrum anterior posterior debridement. Details on non-surgical treatments received are in the appendix
Discussion This study showed that shoulder pain improved substantially from baseline with subacromial decompression, arthroscopy only, and no treatment, and that the magnitude of difference between surgery (both surgical groups) and no treatment was statistically but of uncertain clinical significance. The difference between surgery and no treatment might be attributable to other factors including a surgical placebo effect, or to other unidentified effects of arthroscopic assessment of the joint and bursa, or to rest and postoperative physiotherapy associated with surgery. There were also no differences in outcome between the two surgical groups at any timepoint. This finding suggests that the treatment effect is not due to the principal clinical justification for the surgery, which is the removal of bone, bursa, and soft tissue to relieve impingement on the underlying tendons during movement of the arm. 13 Henkus HE
de Witte PB
Nelissen RGHH
Brand R
van Arkel ERA Bursectomy compared with acromioplasty in the management of subacromial impingement syndrome: a prospective randomised study. Consistent findings were noted for all the patient-reported and clinical outcomes used. The only other randomised trial reported in this fieldcompared arthroscopic subacromial decompression with arthroscopic resection of the bursa and release of the coracoacromial ligament attached to the anterior acromion. Findings from this study showed no difference in outcome between the two groups, but both included substantial surgical resection of tissue that might be the cause of mechanical symptoms and impingement. One conclusion from our study is that both arthroscopic subacromial decompression and arthroscopy only are effective, regardless of mechanism, and could be used as a treatment strategy for patients with subacromial impingement. Another more plausible conclusion is that surgery, although statistically better than no treatment, does not provide patients with a clinically important benefit. The focus of this study was an assessment of the role of surgery, and comparison groups were chosen to enable this. In the light of the results, other management strategies apart from surgery clearly should be assessed. 23 Chahal J
Mall N
MacDonald PB
et al. The role of subacromial decompression in patients undergoing arthroscopic repair of full-thickness tears of the rotator cuff: a systematic review and meta-analysis. 24 Wartolowska K
Judge A
Hopewell S
et al. Use of placebo controls in the evaluation of surgery: systematic review. 25 Moseley JB
O'Malley K
Petersen NJ
et al. A controlled trial of arthroscopic surgery for osteoarthritis of the knee., 26 Sihvonen R
Paavola M
Malmivaara A
et al. Arthroscopic partial meniscectomy versus sham surgery for a degenerative meniscal tear. 27 Thorlund JB
Juhl CB
Roos EM
Lohmander LS Arthroscopic surgery for degenerative knee: systematic review and meta-analysis of benefits and harms., 28 Carr A Arthroscopic surgery for degenerative knee., 29 Kise NJ
Risberg MA
Stensrud S
Ranstam J
Engebretsen L
Roos EM Exercise therapy versus arthroscopic partial meniscectomy for degenerative meniscal tear in middle aged patients: randomised controlled trial with two year follow-up. We are not aware of any published randomised trials investigating the effectiveness of arthroscopic subacromial decompression surgery compared with a placebo control, despite this being the most common arthroscopic shoulder operation.Placebo-controlled trials of surgery are not common but have been shown to be feasible, ethical, and of value.There have been trials involving placebo surgery in the knee and these have resulted in changes in practice.Although harms associated with arthroscopy are rare, they do occur and include infection and venous thromboembolism. The strengths of this study were the use of a randomised placebo-controlled design with three groups (including both placebo and no-treatment arms), multiple follow-up assessments, and the use of valid patient-reported outcome measures. Additionally, the pragmatic nature of the study, and the wide range of sites and surgeons increased the generalisability of the results. Masking of the assessors and patients to the specific surgical intervention was also a strength with regard to the comparison of the decompression and arthroscopy only groups; however, masking of participants in the no-treatment arm was not possible, which could have affected reported outcomes in this group. 30 Wason JM
Stecher L
Mander AP Correcting for multiple-testing in multi-arm trials: is it necessary and is it done?., 31 Schulz KF
Grimes DA Multiplicity in randomised trials I: endpoints and treatments. The major study limitation was the level of non-compliance to treatment allocation. Some patients assigned to surgery improved while waiting and did not proceed with surgery, whereas others assigned to no treatment chose to undergo decompression surgery. However, the findings of the trial were consistent when analysed both as randomised and per protocol. Similarly, missing data did not account for the absence of benefit of decompression over arthroscopy only. Patients in both surgical groups received a package of care consisting of surgery and subsequent postoperative physiotherapy advice on mobilisation and exercises. This postoperative physiotherapy could have affected outcome, and therefore we remain unsure of the mechanism for the benefit gained in the surgical groups. Our study also did not address long-term recurrence of any pain and problems beyond 1 year; however, the likelihood of one of the surgical groups achieving greater benefit beyond 1 year, when no difference existed previously, seems improbable. We did not adjust for multiple comparisons as per the protocol and the statistical analysis plan given the nature of three groups, although published views regarding this differ. A further limitation was that patients could not be masked to treatment in the no treatment group, and they therefore might have perceived their treatment to be inferior to surgery. This perception could have adversely affected the outcome (nocebo effect). Another limitation is the waiting-list effect in the surgical groups, which might have had the potential to affect interpretation. We undertook additional follow-up assessments for the few patients who had significant delays waiting for surgery to enable appropriate comparisons. In conclusion, we showed that, in patients with persistent subacromial shoulder pain due to impingement, improvement in Oxford Shoulder Scores with arthroscopic subacromial decompression did not differ to that achieved with arthroscopy only (placebo surgery). Although both types of surgery provide greater symptom improvement than no treatment, this difference was of uncertain clinical significance. The findings (which should be communicated to patients during the shared treatment decision-making process) question the value of this type of surgery for these indications, and might discourage some surgeons from offering decompression surgery and dissuade some patients from undergoing the surgery.
Contributors
DJB and AJC were co-chief investigators. JLR, CC, JAC, SG, and AJ were co-applicants on the grant application to Arthritis Research UK. IT, IR, AG, JM, and JS were collaborators and were involved in the design of the study and its implementation. JM and JS provided expertise on physiotherapy outcomes and ethics, respectively. NM was the study co-ordinator. KW provided neurophysiology input. DJB, AJC, and JLR were responsible for writing the manuscript. BAS, IR, and JAC did the statistical analysis. JLD and MJ were qualitative researchers involved in the qualitative research investigation aspect of the study. All authors read and approved the final manuscript.
Trial Steering Committee
Anthony Jones, University of Manchester, Chair. Amar Rangan, James Cook University Hospital, Independent Clinical Member. James D Hutchinson, University of Aberdeen, Independent Clinical Member. Dair Farrar-Hockley, Patient Representative. Veronica Conboy, Torbay Hospital, Principal Investigator and non-independent member. Data Monitoring Committee Matthew Costa, University of Warwick, Chair. Louise Stanton, University of Southampton, Independent Senior Statistician. Stephen Brealey, University of York, Independent Clinical Member. Megan Bowers, University of Southampton, Independent Senior Statistician.
CSAW Study Group
Philip Ahrens, Royal Free London NHS Foundation Trust (Hampstead). Cheryl Baldwick, North Devon Healthcare NHS Trust. Mark Brinsden, Plymouth Hospitals NHS Trust. Harry Brownlow, Royal Berkshire NHS Foundation Trust. David Burton, County Durham and Darlington NHS Foundation Trust. Muhammad Sohail Butt, The Dudley Group NHS Foundation Trust. Andrew Carr, Oxford University Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust. Charalambos P Charalambous, Blackpool Teaching Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust. Veronica Conboy, Torbay and South Devon NHS Foundation Trust. Lucy Dennell, The Queen Elizabeth Hospital King's Lynn NHS Foundation Trust. Oliver Donaldson, Yeovil District Hospital NHS Foundation Trust. Steven Drew, University Hospitals Coventry and Warwickshire NHS Trust Amitabh Dwyer, Hinchingbrooke Health Care NHS Trust. David Gidden, Northampton General Hospital NHS Trust. Peter Hallam, Norfolk and Norwich University Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust. Socrates Kalogrianitis, University Hospitals Birmingham NHS Foundation Trust. Cormac Kelly, The Robert Jones and Agnes Hunt Orthopaedic Hospital NHS Foundation Trust. Rohit Kulkarni, Aneurin Bevan University Health Board. Tim Matthews, Cardiff and Vale University Health Board. Julie McBirnie, NHS Lothian. Vipul Patel, Epsom and St Helier Hospitals NHS Trust. Chris Peach, University Hospital of South Manchester NHS Foundation Trust. Chris Roberts, The Ipswich Hospital NHS Trust. David Robinson, Worcestershire Acute Hospitals NHS Trust. Philip Rosell, Frimley Health NHS Foundation Trust. Dan Rossouw, Royal Free London NHS Foundation Trust (Barnet). Colin Senior, Dorset County Hospital NHS Foundation Trust. Bijayendra Singh, Medway NHS Foundation Trust. Soren Sjolin, West Suffolk NHS Foundation Trust. Geoffrey Taylor, Buckinghamshire Healthcare NHS Trust. Balachandran Venkateswaran, The Mid Yorkshire Hospitals NHS Trust. David Woods, Great Western Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust.
Authors' information
DJB: Professor of Musculoskeletal Sciences, Co-Director, Royal College of Surgeons (Eng) Surgical Intervention Trials Unit (SITU), Nuffield Department of Orthopaedics, Rheumatology and Musculoskeletal Sciences, University of Oxford. AJC: Nuffield Professor of Orthopaedic Surgery, Head of Dept The Nuffield Dept of Orthopaedics, Rheumatology and Musculoskeletal Sciences, University of Oxford. JLR: Professor of Orthopaedic Surgery and Musculoskeletal Science, and Academic Consultant Shoulder & Elbow Surgeon, Nuffield Dept of Orthopaedics, Rheumatology and Musculoskeletal Sciences, Botnar Research Centre, University of Oxford. IR: Statistician, SITU, Statistician for the CSAW Study, Nuffield Dept of Orthopaedics, Rheumatology and Musculoskeletal Sciences, University of Oxford. JAC: Associate Professor, Methodologist, Centre for Statistics in Medicine, Deputy Director SITU, University of Oxford. CC: Portfolio Manager, SITU, CSAW Study Trial Manager, Nuffield Dept of Orthopaedics, Rheumatology and Musculoskeletal Sciences, University of Oxford. NM: Clinical Trials Study Coordinator, CSAW Study Coordinator, Nuffield Dept of Orthopaedics, Rheumatology and Musculoskeletal Sciences, University of Oxford. BAS: Medical Statistician, OCTRU, Nuffield Dept of Orthopaedics, Rheumatology and Musculoskeletal Sciences, University of Oxford. JLD: Professor of Social Medicine, Quintet Recruitment Intervention lead for School of Social and Community Medicine, University of Bristol and NIHR Collaboration for Leadership in Applied Health Research and Care (CLAHRC) West at University Hospitals Bristol NHS Trust. SG: Consultant Trauma & Orthopaedic Surgeon, Clinical Lecturer in Orthopaedics, Trauma Unit, Oxford University Hospitals NHS Trust. JS: Uehiro Professor in Practical Ethics, Director of the Institute for Science and Ethics, Co-Director, Oxford Geoengineering Programme, Director of The Oxford Centre for Neuroethics and Director of the Oxford Uehiro Centre for Practical Ethics, Oxford Centre for Neuroethics, University of Oxford. JM: Clinical Physiotherapy Specialist, Lead Clinical Physiotherapy Specialist, Nuffield Dept of Orthopaedics, Rheumatology and Musculoskeletal Sciences, University of Oxford. AG: Professor of Health Economics, Director of the Health Economics Research Centre, Health Economics Research Centre, Nuffield Dept of Population Health, University of Oxford. MJ: Senior Research Associate/Lecturer in Qualitative Health Science, The Quintet Research Group, School of Social and Community Medicine, University of Bristol. IT: Nuffield Professor of Anaesthetic Science, Head of the Nuffield Department of Clinical Neurosciences, University of Oxford. AJ: Associate Professor, Nuffield Dept of Orthopaedics, Rheumatology and Musculoskeletal Sciences, University of Oxford, Senior Statistician, NIHR Musculoskeletal Biomedical Research Unit, University of Oxford. KW: Research Fellow, Investigator for the CSAW Neuroimaging Observational Study, Nuffield Dept of Orthopaedics, Rheumatology and Musculoskeletal Sciences, University of Oxford.
Declaration of interests
We declare no competing interests.
Acknowledgments This study was funded by Arthritis Research UK (Clinical Studies Grant 19707), the National Institute for Health Research (NIHR) Oxford Biomedical Research Centre (BRC; previously the Biomedical Research Unit), and the Royal College of Surgeons (England). The NIHR Oxford BRC is based at the Oxford University Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust and run in partnership with the University of Oxford, funded by the NIHR. The University of Oxford sponsored the study. JC held a Medical Research Council Methodology Fellowship (G1002292) for part of the duration of the study. The Nuffield Department of Orthopaedics, Rheumatology and Musculoskeletal Sciences coordinated the study via the Surgical Intervention Trials Unit from the Royal College of Surgeons (England) Surgical Trials Initiative. We would like to thank the British Elbow and Shoulder Society for supporting and promoting this trial in the UK, all participants for their involvement in the study, and acknowledge The Oxford Clinical Trials Research Unit, the National Institute of Health Research Clinical Research Network, and The Nuffield Department of Orthopaedics, Rheumatology and Musculoskeletal Sciences (NDORMS) for their support. We particularly thank Marion Campbell and Alison McDonald and ChaRT (University of Aberdeen, UK) for their early guidance, and also thank Caroline Wilson (Quintet Research Group, School of Social and Community Medicine, University of Bristol, UK); Ben Dean (Investigator for the CSAW Tissue Sample Study, NDORMS, University of Oxford, UK); Patrick Julier (Oncology Clinical Trials Office, University of Oxford); Jeremy Lewis (St George's University of London, UK); Richard Gray (University of Oxford); Helen Higham (Oxford University Hospitals NHS Trust, UK); and the principal investigators and their teams at each of the CSAW sites. The views expressed in this report are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the funders.The Vancouver Canucks clinched a playoff spot and now fans can get in on the action.
Empty seats at Rogers Arena have been a familiar site this season and that means this could be the most affordable playoff game season in the past decade, ticket broker Kingsley Bailey said.
"If anyone wants to go to a playoff game... this series will probably be the most value, the most affordable where people can go and enjoy," Bailey said.
Tickets officially go on sale to the public on Friday.
Meanwhile, on the popular ticket re-seller stubhub the cheapest ticket is $93 U.S., down from triple digit figures a few years ago.
"There's a little bit interest now you know that they have made the playoffs," Bailey said, adding there's still some uncertainty about how good the team will play.
That could all change though if the Canucks start winning.
Winger Daniel Sedin said the players on this year's team believe in each other.
"There's no selfish players," he said."We play for each other, and now that we are in the playoffs, we will be ready."This is the most exciting TV development news we’ve heard in awhile.
CBS TV Studios in the very early stages of a new version of the classic series The Twilight Zone.
Bryan Singer (X-Men) is attached as executive producer. There is no writer and or network attached at this time. So this project could fade away. But the development wheels are turning.
Creator-host Rod Serling’s original 1959-64 edition of The Twilight Zone is considered one of the best shows of all time. Attempts to revive the series have largely struggled — there was a 1985 edition that ran for three seasons (two on CBS, one in syndication), and another in 2002 on UPN that lasted only one season. There’s been a second Twilight Zone movie mired in development for several years, too, with Leonardo DiCaprio attached as executive producer. The film is reportedly about a test pilot who returns to Earth after an experimental flight to discover it’s 96 years in the future.
Yet a potential revival of this ground-breaking anthology show for television now makes sense. Sci-fi and horror series are delivering big ratings (AMC’s The Walking Dead, NBC’s Revolution) and there’s several other genre projects coming to the small screen (NBC’s Hannibal and Dracula; CBS’ Under the Dome). Networks have become less squeamish about edgy content, too, which has helped producers more realistically depict dark subject matter. Plus, FX already took a step toward successfully reviving the anthology format by launching American Horror Story, a drama with close-ended seasons.
What’s tough to replicate is Serling’s genius and the freshness of the concept. Twilight Zone episodes were famous for their twist endings. But the show was so skilled at mining the tropes of the genre, any writer tackling horror/sci-fi and attempting a twist can find a famous TZ episode that did it first (The Twilight Zone is to genre programming what The Simpsons is to animated family stories — “Twilight Zone did it!”).
In a way, the best and most popular revival of the spirit of the original Twilight Zone wasn’t an anthology show at all, but ABC’s Lost, whose writers cited the classic series as a strong influence.
Here’s two versions of the original Twilight Zone opening credits. This first is probably the best known:
Here’s another take. This lacks the famous theme music, but is more elegant and creepy.But two recent Quinnipiac University polls show her unfavorability rising in swing states. She now trails Jeb Bush by one point, after leading him by 10 in May, and Joe Biden leads Jeb by one point.
Image The Starbucks chairman and C.E.O. Howard Schultz at a 2012 shareholders meeting. Credit Elaine Thompson/Associated Press
Many Democrats fret that she seems more impatient than hungry, more cautious than charismatic. They are increasingly concerned that, aside from the very liberal Bernie Sanders, who could be approaching his ceiling in the early states, there is no backup if something blows up — no Jimmy Garoppolo to step in while Brady is suspended for four games.
Potent friends of America’s lord of latte, Howard Schultz, have been pressing him to join the Democratic primary, thinking the time is right for someone who’s not a political lifer. For the passionate 62-year-old — watching the circus from Seattle — it may be a tempting proposition.
After coming up from the housing projects in Brooklyn, Schultz reimagined Starbucks and then revived it. He has strong opinions, and even position papers, about what he calls the fraying American dream. While he was promoting his book on veterans last year, he honed a message about making government work again and finding “authentic, truthful leadership.”
Joe Biden is also talking to friends, family and donors about jumping in. The 72-year-old vice president has been having meetings at his Washington residence to explore the idea of taking on Hillary in Iowa and New Hampshire.
He gets along with Hillary and has always been respectful of the Democratic Party’s desire to make more history by putting the first woman in the Oval Office.
But going through the crucible of the loss of his oldest son, Beau, to brain cancer made the vice president consider the quest again.
Image Vice President Joseph Biden. Credit Jae C. Hong/Associated Press
As a little boy, Beau helped get his father through the tragedy of losing his beautiful first wife and 13-month-old daughter in the car crash that injured Beau and his brother, Hunter.Where are they now? 10 years on from England U21s Wembley opener against Italy U21s
England U21s drew 3-3 with Italy U21s in the first game at the new Wembley stadium
With Friday marking 10 years since the first game was played at the new Wembley - England U21s' thrilling 3-3 draw with Italy U21s - we look back at the stars who served up a fitting curtain-raiser...
The landmark fixture - 2,358 days after the doors of the old iconic ground were closed - bared little resemblance to the tight, cagey affairs which have tended to grace the hallowed turf over the past decade.
The latest crop of English and Italian talent, given the chance to stake their claim to history at the new Home of Football, did not disappoint, serving up a thrilling 3-3 draw.
The new-look Wembley Stadium opened its door 10 years ago
But what happened to the squads managed by Nigel Pearson and Pierluigi Casiraghi? We look at how their careers have fared since...
England
Starting XI: England U21s
GOALKEEPER: Lee Camp
England's No.1 on the day, Camp has taken his tally of League appearances to over 450 for the likes of Derby, Nottingham Forest, Queens Park Rangers and current club Rother |
sushi place that’s themed on the movie Titanic. It’s in the shape of a boat. Seriously. When I say they had a Japanese version of the Titanic theme playing, I’m not kidding. They even had sushi with cheesesteak in it. It was really good too!
This trip definitely was good times and I can’t wait to go out again and see what else is out there to eat and explore! Give my love to the Coffee Bean! I shall return! Here is a picture of all (well most of) the Philly Comedy people living in LA now with some of us who haven’t made it out yet. Keep an eye out!
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A TAIWANESE whisky has seen off global competition to be crowned the best single malt at the 2015 World Whiskies Awards.
Kavalan Solist Vinho Barrique, produced by the King Car distillery in Yilan, is matured in American oak casks previously used to hold red and white wines before being re-toasted.
“Good whisky is, without question, a work of art; great whisky is a tone poem. And here, I beg to insist, is proof” Jim Murray
The World Whiskies Award describes the Kavalan Solist Vinho Barrique as ‘surprisingly smooth on the palate’ and ‘like Bourbon-infused milk chocolate’.
The tasting notes also say: “Water brings out custard creams. Another nutty, meaty, savoury nose, with sweet notes in the backdrop.
“Very sweet pruney flavours initially on the palate, with fruit cake and big clove, chilli and dry cinnamon.”
It was revealed last week that the Chinese drink more alcohol per person than Britain or America.
The whisky, which has a 58.6 per cent ABV has already picked up a number of awards including New Whisky of the Year in the 2012 Whisky Bible.
Whisky bible author Jim Murray wrote about Kavalan: “Good whisky is, without question, a work of art; great whisky is a tone poem. And here, I beg to insist, is proof.”
It wasn’t all doom and gloom for Scottish whisky, however, with ‘Darkness!’ winning the award for best grain whisky and Master of Malt Speyside Whisky Liqueur 40 Years Old winning the World’s Best Flavoured Whisky gong.
Japan’s Nikka Teketsura Pure Malt was crowned the World’s Best Blended Malt for the second consecutive year.
There were also wins for whiskies from Ireland, Sweden, France, South Africa, the United States and Australia.
The World Whisky Awards, founded in 2007, are held by Whisky Magazine and attracted over 300 entrants this year vying for the top award.
A 700ml bottle of Kavalan can be bought at Tesco, Waitrose or online grocer Ocado for about £40.
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iPhone | iPad | Android | KindleA year ago, I correctly forecasted the Toronto Blue Jays’ first-place finish in the American League East—and now I can’t stop predicting stuff for 2016. Kevin Pillar will steal 30 bases! Josh Donaldson will produce 45 homers and six new hairstyles! It’s going to be splitsville for Blake Shelton and Gwen Stefani! More importantly, here’s how the division is going to end up:
5. Baltimore Have you looked at the Orioles’ pitching staff? I sure hope so, because you’re their fifth starter. Put down that magazine and start getting loose in the ’pen, rookie. This is a team whose “ace” amassed a 4.99 ERA in 2015. It’s a team that pays money to Ubaldo Jimenez—to pitch the baseball. I’m not saying this rotation is close to a disaster, but watch for it in the next Michael Bay movie. It’s the one that transforms into a FEMA trailer.
4. Tampa Bay You want pitching? The Rays have pitching! This is the best rotation in the division and it sure will be fun to… sorry, I can’t keep up the charade. This team is sooo boring. You bore me, Tampa Bay Rays, with your stupid rhyming name and your batting order of nobodies. It is possible, and perhaps even likely, that no player on Tampa will hit 20 homers or steal 20 bases in 2016. Imagine the thrill of going to the league’s worst stadium to watch the division’s worst hitters. If the Rays were a colour, they’d be grey. If they were an ice cream flavour, they’d be grey.
3. Boston Many see a rebound season coming for the Red Sox. And the argument is always the same: Sure, they finished dead last in 2015, but Boston can win the division in 2016… if Pablo Sandoval and Hanley Ramirez hit better, and if they can figure out what to do in left field, and if Dustin Pedroia can find a donor for a hamstring transplant, and if the Blue Jays fall down a well. Signing David Price to a seven-year contract was a great move. (This just in from 2021: Signing David Price to a seven-year contract was a terrible move.) But at press time, Major League Baseball continued to stubbornly insist that teams have to throw pitches in every game—not just one in five. Who’s going to crank out wins after Price? Rick Porcelloh-my-God-another-home-run? Clay Buchholz? For those scoring at home, this marks the fifth straight year that Buchholz is purportedly going to stay healthy and put it all together.
2. New York How old are the Yankees? Their Opening Day game was delayed for several minutes when Carlos Beltran kept yelling at Houston’s outfielders to get off his lawn. Beltran, Alex Rodriguez and Mark Teixeira (combined age: the Moon) are all top-notch hitters, and New York will probably do very well in the seven games in which all three of them play. But after that, it’s going to be triceps this and rheumatism that. Age spares no one: This year, Jacoby Ellsbury continues his decline from five-tool player to three-tool player to guy who wears an onion tied to his belt.
1. Toronto Forget about next year. Ignore contract demands and negotiations. The world of 2017 does not exist (kind of like if Donald Trump gets access to the nuclear codes). This is all that matters: The Jays scored 891 runs last year—and this season, their lineup is better. Better, as in more good. Half the batting order can be in a slump. The other half can be playing in street clothes. Jose Bautista can bat wearing flip-flops and a blindfold. It won’t matter. The Jays will still put up nine squillion runs. They are an unstoppable killing machine built to make full-grown adult pitchers cry and Goose Gossage throw a sandwich at his TV. Do not overthink this. The Jays will repeat as division champs. They will do well in the playoffs. It won’t be that hard. The hard part comes after.Freud, Buddha & The Factory of Unhappiness
Justin Jacoby Smith Blocked Unblock Follow Following Jan 12, 2016
One of the things I’ve learned through study and experience of the teachings of the Buddha is that the four noble truths are about changing our relationship to suffering. On Twitter recently I talked about how I changed my relationship to a difficult part of my past. The gist of my point there was that we’ll never be free of misery while we’re human — but we can learn to better integrate that suffering into a happy life.
So it’s in that frame of mind that I read this article on the return of psychoanalysis after decades of the standardization of cognitive behavioral therapy. One of the key differences, the piece argues, between the psychoanalytic approach and more recently developed forms of therapy is that in psychoanalysis it’s understood that one can’t be “therapy’d” into a life that’s free of suffering.
Studies measure relief of symptoms — yet a crucial premise of psychoanalysis is that there’s more to a meaningful life than being symptom-free. In principle, you might even end a course of psychoanalysis sadder — though wiser, more conscious of your previously unconscious responses, and living in a more engaged way — and still deem the experience a success.
Freud famously declared that his goal was the transformation of “neurotic misery into common unhappiness”. Carl Jung said “humanity needs difficulties: they are necessary for health.” Life is painful. Should we be thinking in terms of a “cure” for painful emotions at all?
Life is painful, as the first noble truth tells us. The first noble truth is a problem psychoanalysts & cognitive behavioral therapists attempt to solve— and thankfully the Buddha offers us an attempt to solve this problem too. Our suffering is caused by the craving that is the natural byproduct of being a human being. This is the 2nd noble truth. It is natural for us to desire that our life be different from the way it is right now: warmer, or more financially secure, or safer, or nearer to lunchtime.
What Freud called “common unhappiness” might also be termed dukkha, or even more familiarly, “the human condition.”
That is to say, if you’re unhappy with some aspect of your life — and who isn’t? — there’s nothing wrong with you for being unhappy, for desiring that something in your life be different from the way that it is. The Buddha’s point in making the Second Noble Truth clear to us is precisely that this dissatisfaction is a part of being alive. In other words, what Freud called “common unhappiness” might also be termed dukkha, or even more familiarly, “the human condition.”
What happens next is that this craving for things to be different— our “common unhappiness”— meets the ignorance that has built up in our minds through our life experience. We’ve taught ourselves lessons, day after day in our lives, about how best to satisfy our common unhappiness. We wrongly come to believe that drink, or drugs, or sex, or video games, or burying ourselves in a novel, will satisfy the dissatisfaction that is an inevitable part of being human.
Why do we pursue these escapist approaches to our unhappiness? Through millions of years of evolution and natural selection, the brain has evolved into a kind of factory with pollutant byproducts. It produces thoughts, emotions, memories, and helps us comprehend what we experience by filtering new information through past experience.
Still, despite all the fantastic functions the factory in our head fulfills, it’s not running on clean fuel. It runs on our ignorance, and belches it back out of smokestacks at the top.
We allow mental factories to run on ignorance, and inevitably produce more ignorance and suffering in the process (hello, kamma!). Instead, the Buddha says, we should be working to reduce these poisonous byproducts through the cultivation of alternative sources of mental energy that are untainted. Among the solutions presented in the dhamma, Buddha suggests we should cultivate compassion, kindness, sympathetic joy, equanimity. These are known as the brahma viharas, or the sublime abidings, and we practice them every week in meditation at the Lamont Street Collective in DC.
By moving away from craving or desire as fuel for our actions (we extinguish the fire through deprivation of fuel, or “nibbana” it), we learn how — to the extent possible — to live in the world on the less harmful, more subjectively pleasant, and endlessly sustainable energy of kindness. Through the law of kamma, “burning” kindness as fuel will begin to clear the dirty air in our minds until it is as clear as a spring day. Even if we are never completely freed of the dirty fuels of delusion & their effects, making the effort to switch to the endlessly renewable energy source of kindness will lead to much easier breathing in our mental worlds — and in so doing, we might even begin to breathe easier in the real world.Update 1.52am: Olympic Council of Ireland interim president Willie O Brien has said the organisation "will defend ourselves to the hilt" after becoming embroiled in an international Olympics ticket touting scandal, writes Fiachra O Cionnaith.
The First President of the Irish sporting body at a hastily arranged press conference outside the Rio hospital where crisis-hit OCI official Pat Hickey is being treated for an alleged health issue.
On Wednesday night Mr O Brien was chosen as the replacement for Mr Hickey, who the OCI said has "temporarily" stepped aside from his long-held president role after being arrested in connection with a multi-million euro ticket scam.
On Wednesday morning, the controversial official was arrested at his five-star luxury Rio hotel by Brazil police and faces charges of facilitating ticket touting, forming a cartel and illicit marketing.
The claims relate to a complex scandal involving the THG and Pro 10 companies, and 781 OCI hospitality tickets which were in their possession and were allegedly being sold for up to 18 times their face value.
When confronted by police on Wednesday morning, Mr Hickey - who could be jailed for seven years if found guilty - said he felt unwell and cited a heart condition.
As such, he is currently undergoing tests in a Rio hospital.
However, despite what Brazilian police insist is substantial evidence relating to Mr Hickey, speaking outside the facility on Wednesday night his interim replacement Mr O Brien said the OCI will "defend ourselves to the hilt" our the claims.
Mr O Brien told reporters Mr Hickey would remain at the hospital for another 24 hours and that "nothing" will happen until then in relation to the case.
Despite facing questions, Mr O Brien declined to express an opinion on the scandal or to admit to any concerns over what has happened.
Update 10.50pm: The Olympic Council of Ireland has released the following statement: "Mr Patrick Hickey has been admitted to Samaritano Hospital for investigation of chest pain.
"His condition is stable. In view of his previous cardiac history he will remain in hospital for a further 24 hours."
Update 6.25pm: Pat Hickey has temporarily stepped down as president of the Olympics Council of Ireland following his arrest in Rio this morning.
Video Credit: André Linares, Gabriela Moreira and ESPN Brazil.
A statement from the Olympics Council of Ireland tonight has said contrary to media reports “Mr Hickey complied fully with the terms of the warrant.”
“A warrant of arrest for OCI President Pat Hickey was issued this morning by Brazilian authorities. Contrary to reports, Mr Hickey complied fully with the terms of the warrant,” read the statement.
“Mr Hickey was taken ill as this warrant was served and was taken to hospital as a precautionary measure.
“In light of this morning’s developments and his ill health, Mr Hickey has taken the decision to step aside temporarily as President of the OCI and all other Olympic functions (IOC member in Ireland, EOC President, ANOC Vice President) until this matter is fully resolved. Mr Hickey will of course continue to cooperate and assist with all ongoing enquiries.”
Update 5.30pm: “This morning we arrested the president of the Olympic Council of Ireland at a hotel in Barra da Tijuca [near the Olympic Park], “ said Ronaldo Oliveira, the head of specialist operations at the Civil Police.
“Our detectives arrived at the hotel early,” Oliveira said. “We worked with the hotel. When we arrived at the room that was registered to him, we found only his wife, who was sleeping. She did not want to help his. She lied, saying that he had already gone home to Ireland,” he said.
“But we saw that his shoes, socks and his open suitcase was still in the room. We then found him in another room registered to his son. There were hardly any personal possessions in that room.”
“He is 71 and the doctor in the hotel said he was shaken. He was taken to hospital for tests before he will be released to police.”
“Hickey has been involved in the Olympics for more than 20 years and we believe he knew everything that went on,” Civil Police detective Aloysio Falcão added.
Update 5pm: The Minister for Transport, Tourism and Sport Shane Ross has confirmed he will return to Dublin from Rio in the wake of the arrest of OCI president Pat Hickey.
In a statement Minster Ross said he’ll be “returning to Dublin as quickly as possible”
“Today, I learned from our ambassador here in Brazil that a second Irish citizen has been arrested in connection with the Brazilian authorities' investigation into alleged ticket touting,” read the statement from Ross.
“I understand that person has accepted consular assistance and our Consul General is engaging with him.
“Given the seriousness of this matter, and in the interests of taking swift and decisive action, I will be returning to Dublin as quickly as possible. I will immediately consult with my officials, with Minister of State Patrick O'Donovan, and with the Attorney General with a view to considering the options open to the Government and decide the best course of action.”
Update 4.50pm PRO10 Sports Management, which had the contract as the authorised ticket reseller (ATR) for Ireland in Brazil, said it has always acted properly and fully within the guidelines.
"The allegation that a portion of the OCI's family and friends tickets were being made available by PRO10 for general sale is utterly untrue and completely without any foundation," the company said.
The Civil Police in Rio claimed PRO10 was set up in April last year to secure the contract to sell tickets.
PRO10 described the allegations as "unsubstantiated, false and unfounded" and said it will vigorously defend its reputation.
Update 4.10pm Detectives in Rio have said that Mr Hickey is facing three charges of facilitating ticket touting, formation of a cartel and ambush or illicit marketing.
Mr Hickey could face up to seven years in jail if found guilty of those charges.
Update 3.55pm: International Olympic Council (IOC) says it is trying to establish the facts and find out what’s happening in relation to Pat Hickey’s arrest.
Incredible footage has emerged of the moment Pat Hickey opened the hotel room door to Brazilian police before his arrest.
Mark Adams of the IOC says it will cooperate fully with any investigation but it must be remembered that people are innocent until proven guilty.
"We are still trying to establish the facts like the rest of you. We will of course be cooperating with any police inquiry should there be one," he said.
He confirmed that it concerns about 1,000 tickets of the 6 million tickets available for the Games.
He said he could not make any further comment in light of ongoing investigations.
Update 3.05pm: Olympic President of Ireland Pat Hickey was arrested on suspicion of involvement in the irregular selling of tickets on the black market in Rio, Brazilian Police have said, writes Daniel McConnell.
Rio officers told a press conference in Rio today that they went to Mr Hickey's hotel in the Barra district of the city this morning, but Mr Hickey was not present in his room.
They said they were told by his wife that he had left for Ireland, but police discovered Mr Hickey in another room at the hotel - believed to be his son’s.
The Irish Examiner believes that Rio's Civil Police Fraud Unit spearheaded the arrest of the 71-year-old, who is also a member of the International Olympic Committee (IOC).
Following the issuing of arrest warrants for four THG directors, Civil police in Rio said warrants have now been issued for the arrest of three directors of Pro 10; Michael Glynn, Ken Murray and Eamon Collins.
The act of arrest pic.twitter.com/Sd3K5c0OFl — Jamil Chade (@JamilChade) August 17, 2016
The arrest of Mr Hickey took place at about 6am local time, which was 10am Irish time.
The press conference heard that at the time of his arrest, Mr Hickey complained of feeling unwell and cited an existing heart condition.
He was then seen and examined by a doctor.
It was decided that as a matter of precaution, given his age and his previous condition, that he be removed to been a nearby hospital in Barra.
At the press conference, Mr Hickey's passport, Olympic credentials and air ticket were presented to the media.
Police are also investigating the participation of the OCI with THG Sports. Irishman and THG employee Kevin Mallon was arrested almost 10 days ago in possession of almost 800 tickets, designated to the OCI.
Police detectives told reporters that evidence of e-mails and messages on Mr Hickey's phone are being investigated.
They say they have found evidence of communication between Mr Hickey and Marcus Evans on Mr Hickey's phone; THG Group is owned by the Marcus Evans Group.
Two people were arrested earlier this month in relation to allegations that Olympic tickets, earmarked for the OCI, were sold on the black market in Rio de Janeiro.
Update 2.30pm: Rio city police this morning moved to "carry out an arrest warrant and search warrant against Patrick Joseph Hickey, from Ireland, a member of the International Olympic Committee," they said in a statement.
"He was arrested," a spokesman confirmed.
A Police press conference about Mr Hickey's arrest took place in Rio a short time ago.
Mr Hickey's passport and Olympic credentials were put on display before the assembled media.
Olympic Council of Ireland President Pat Hickey's passport and accreditation on show during today's police press conference. Picture: INPHO/Morgan Treacy.
Update 2.25pm: Brazilian police have said there is evidence of email correspondence between Marcus Evans and Pat Hickey during Olympics.
Evans, 52, is the owner and chairman of English Championship side Ipswich Town and a director of THG Sports.
Fellow THG Sports director Kevin Mallon was arrested on August 5 in possession of almost 800 tickets and has been accused by police of seeking to sell them illegally on the black market, but THG has protested his innocence.
Update 1.35pm: Brazilian Police have said they have evidence Mr Hickey was part of the scheme that saw OCI tickets for the games in the hands of THG.
This is the Sports Hospitality company of which Kevin Mallon was a director.
Rio police conference on Pat Hickey arrest - media here in numbers pic.twitter.com/qD8SVMYmLo — Philip Bromwell (@philipbromwell) August 17, 2016
IOC says confiscation was a "mistake" and gives document back. pic.twitter.com/zrjw4Yekba — Jamil Chade (@JamilChade) August 17, 2016
Press conference on Hickey arrest - officers speaking in Portuguese. Several references to Pat Hickey and Ireland pic.twitter.com/sIh3XLDLR4 — Philip Bromwell (@philipbromwell) August 17, 2016
Update 12.40pm: The Department of Foreign Affairs has said it is aware of the arrest of an Irish citizen in Rio but cannot comment on individual cases.
Reacting to news of the arrest, however, Public Accounts Member and Fine Gael TD, Noel Rock, has said the OCI President's arrest is a "dark day for Irish sport" and said an external independent investigation is now needed.
The city's Civil Police confirmed officers had detained the sports chief more than a week on from the arrest of another Irish man in connection with the same inquiry.
There is a developing situation in Rio regarding the ticketing story. The OCI will only issue updated statements via its website. — Team Ireland (@TeamIreland) August 17, 2016
Shell shock here in Rio — Shane Ross (@Shane_RossTD) August 17, 2016
Update 12.30pm: Speaking from Rio, Sports Minister Shane Ross has confirmed that he was aware of the arrest, that he liaising with the Irish embassy and that he is monitoring events.
Brazilian police are to hold a press conference on Hickey's arrest at 1.30pm Irish time, according to media reports.
IOC withdrew my acreditation to have access to hotel where hickey was arrested. The pass was valid until 22.08 and given to me on 01.08 — Jamil Chade (@JamilChade) August 17, 2016
Earlier: Olympic Council of Ireland (OCI) President Pat Hickey has been arrested this morning, as part of the ongoing investigation into the irregular sale of tickets.
According to reports from Brazil, Mr Hickey has been arrested in Rio de Janeiro as the Hotel Windsor Marapendi hotel in Barra da Tijuca.
He is understood to be under investigation over his involvement in the irregular sale of Olympic tickets. The controversy broke almost 10 days ago when another Irishman, Kevin Mallon of the THG group, was arrested in possession of almost 800 tickets.
He has been accused by police of seeking to sell them illegally on the black market, but THG has protested his innocence.
Reports of Hickey's arrest came in Brazilian newspaper Estadao and has since been confirmed by several journalists based in Rio for the Games.
Further reports online have suggested that moments after his arrest Hickey complained of feeling ill and has been taken to a local hospital.
IOC member Hickey being taken to hospital after feeling sick at the moment he got arrested — Jamil Chade (@JamilChade) August 17, 2016
Here, the Department of Transport said it was aware of the story of Mr Hickey’s arrest but that it had no official confirmation and would not be making any comment.
Minister for Transport, Tourism and Sport Shane Ross is in Rio and clashed with Mr Hickey earlier this week when the OCI refused Government calls for independent oversight on its inquiry into the ticket scandal.
The OCI said they aware of the reports and will issue a statement on the matter shortly.
There has been no official statement yet from the Brazilian authorities so it is entirely possible that Hickey's arrest is a procedural stage as police continue their investigations into how Kevin Mallon, a finance director of sports hospitality company THG, was detained on August 5 with several hundred tickets for Olympic events, many of which came from the OCI's allocation for the Games.From Mama Li’s Kitchen to yours
Mama Li showed me everything I know about cooking with a wok. She used a wok for preparing all her meals and it has become a tradition in our family to cook like Mama Li. You will find in this book a collection of her best recipes.
The flavors of Asia are dominant and so fragrant. The ingredients are fresh, healthy and wholesome. They are easy to find and if you have the opportunity of living near an Asian market, don’t hesitate to visit and get some of your ingredients there, it will make it even more authentic.
Most recipes can be adapted to fit any diet such as gluten-free or Paleolithic. You have to try them and see for yourself how easy and quickly you can prepare meals for your family to enjoy.
Cooking with a wok is wonderful because you only need one pan and each meal is full of fresh vegetables and delicious lean ingredients for a healthy and nutritious diet.
In this book, you will find everything you need to know about cooking with a Wok:
•How to choose a wok
•How to season and maintain your wok
•The basic Wok cooking techniques
•How to stock your pantry
•Great beef recipes
•Satisfying chicken recipes
•Succulent pork and lamb recipes
•Healthy and filling vegetarian recipes
•Not to mention delicious soups and appetizers.
Bon appétit!
Now, scroll up and Grab your Copy!It’s worse than we thought! Now the IPCC has been citing magazine articles, like this one from Climbing Magazine, issue 208, shown at left. We’ve heard the title before, according to their index: “Canaries in a Coal Mine,” – Feature on global loss of glaciers. But wait there’s more! If you think that’s crazy, we also learn that IPCC Chairman Pachauri has penned a “smutty” romance novel! Bizarre, but true.
The Telegraph reports on the magazine issue:
The United Nations’ expert panel on climate change based claims about ice disappearing from the world’s mountain tops on a student’s dissertation and an article in a mountaineering magazine.
The revelation will cause fresh embarrassment for the The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), which had to issue a humiliating apology earlier this month over inaccurate statements about global warming.
The IPCC’s remit is to provide an authoritative assessment of scientific evidence on climate change.
In its most recent report, it stated that observed reductions in mountain ice in the Andes, Alps and Africa was being caused by global warming, citing two papers as the source of the information.
However, it can be revealed that one of the sources quoted was a feature article published in a popular magazine for climbers which was based on anecdotal evidence from mountaineers about the changes they were witnessing on the mountainsides around them.
The other was a dissertation written by a geography student, studying for the equivalent of a master’s degree, at the University of Berne in Switzerland that quoted interviews with mountain guides in the Alps.
The revelations, uncovered by The Sunday Telegraph, have raised fresh questions about the quality of the information contained in the report, which was published in 2007.
It comes after officials for the panel were forced earlier this month to retract inaccurate claims in the IPCC’s report about the melting of Himalayan glaciers.
Sceptics have seized upon the mistakes to cast doubt over the validity of the IPCC and have called for the panel to be disbanded.
This week scientists from around the world leapt to the defence of the IPCC, insisting that despite the errors, which they describe as minor, the majority of the science presented in the IPCC report is sound and its conclusions are unaffected.
But some researchers have expressed exasperation at the IPCC’s use of unsubstantiated claims and sources outside of the scientific literature.
Professor Richard Tol, one of the report’s authors who is based at the Economic and Social Research Institute in Dublin, Ireland, said: “These are essentially a collection of anecdotes.
“Why did they do this? It is quite astounding. Although there have probably been no policy decisions made on the basis of this, it is illustrative of how sloppy Working Group Two (the panel of experts within the IPCC responsible for drawing up this section of the report) has been.
“There is no way current climbers and mountain guides can give anecdotal evidence back to the 1900s, so what they claim is complete nonsense.”
The IPCC report, which is published every six years, is used by government’s worldwide to inform policy decisions that affect billions of people.
The claims about disappearing mountain ice were contained within a table entitled “Selected observed effects due to changes in the cryosphere produced by warming”.
It states that reductions in mountain ice have been observed from the loss of ice climbs in the Andes, Alps and in Africa between 1900 and 2000.
The report also states that the section is intended to “assess studies that have been published since the TAR (Third Assessment Report) of observed changes and their effects”.
But neither the dissertation or the magazine article cited as sources for this information were ever subject to the rigorous scientific review process that research published in scientific journals must undergo.
The magazine article, which was written by Mark Bowen, a climber and author of two books on climate change, appeared in Climbing magazine in 2002. It quoted anecdotal evidence from climbers of retreating glaciers and the loss of ice from climbs since the 1970s.
Mr Bowen said: “I am surprised that they have cited an article from a climbing magazine, but there is no reason why anecdotal evidence from climbers should be disregarded as they are spending a great deal of time in places that other people rarely go and so notice the changes.”
The dissertation paper, written by professional mountain guide and climate change campaigner Dario-Andri Schworer while he was studying for a geography degree, quotes observations from interviews with around 80 mountain guides in the Bernina region of the Swiss Alps.
read the complete article at the TelegraphSusan Wilson Solovic likes her sleep and her time off. But it wasn't long ago that the hour between 2 and 3 a.m. was her prime e-mailing time, and vacations were little more than a different setting in which to work.
"People thought I was crazy," says Solovic, the chief executive of Small Business Television Network, a Web-based news and information service for entrepreneurs. But, she says, "our company was growing rapidly, and my life became completely consumed by the business."
Five years after the launch of SBTV.com, Solovic approaches work far differently. For starters, she is no longer at the mercy of her e-mail and refuses to take projects on vacation.
"I was wearing too many hats, and it took a toll. People started shutting me out of their lives," she says. The irony, Solovic says, is that once she started sticking to her pledge of not checking voice mail (one too many rambling messages led to a disclaimer on her voice-mail message that she doesn't listen to it that often) or e-mailing in the wee hours of the morning, her work was not adversely affected.
"It didn't impact my productivity at all," she says.
So much for the available-at-all-hours, no-holds-barred executive. Nine-to-five is back in vogue for a growing number of high-level women--and, in some cases, men--who are building barricades to keep work in its place. They're shutting off their BlackBerrys, refusing after-hours e-mails and just saying ''no" to business travel, all in the interest of balance.
To be sure, in this economic climate, when having a job seems like more of a privilege than a right, workplaces are going lean on employees and the modus operandi is survival, balance can seem beside the point. Sharon Meers, co-author of Getting to 50/50: How Working Couples Can Have It All by Sharing It All and a former managing director at Goldman Sachs, says there is no question the economic downturn makes it harder to push for a more balanced schedule, but that doesn't mean it's impossible. "Position it as, 'I'm really good at my job,' " she says, "and be sure to explain how this will help your organization or company."
One of the new limit-setters is Inhi Cho, 33, an IBM vice president of Strategy, Information and Management. She won't schedule meetings before 9 a.m., so she can have time at home in the morning to spend time with her son, Jacob, and she guards her weekend by logging off the office computer from Friday afternoon to Sunday evening.
Another, Malika Saar, 38, executive director of the Rebecca Project, a Washington, D.C.-based human rights organization, recently turned down an invitation to give a keynote address at a conference that would have kept her on the road for three days. (She enlisted a coworker with older children and more travel flexibility to give the speech in her stead.)
Attitudes like these mark a dramatic reversal from the extremes of the past decade, in which career success was directly tied to being constantly accessible. (Hop on a plane to China at a moment's notice? No problem!)
That was especially true for women, who felt compelled to prove that their other responsibilities, especially children, weren't getting in the way of their jobs, and they could keep up with their male co-workers.
But the new maxim, advanced by executives such as Xerox Chief Executive Ann Mulcahy Ann Mulcahy, sounds like this: "Businesses need to be 24/7. Individuals don't."
In fact, the 24/7 gladiator work style can actually be detrimental, says Meers, "We know from the research that people who work 24/7 are the ones who cause fire drills," she says. "There's a perception that working that much is heroic, but work quality suffers when you stay at the office too long."
In her book, Meers cites Martin Baily, former chair of the Council of Economic Advisors: "There is probably not a productivity penalty to shortening hours in the U.S., and there may even be a benefit." Better health is just one of the upsides.
Rachel Permuth-Levine, Ph.D., a deputy director at the National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute at the National Institutes of Health, leaves her office at 4:30 p.m. so she can spend a couple hours with her 3-year-old son before he goes to bed. But, says Dr. Permuth-Levine, there are other reasons for leaving the office at a decent hour: Because her role at the NIH is to promote workplace wellness, "I have to [be] a good model of balance," she explains.
Still, some women say guarding one's personal time has its professional cost.
Saar says there are times when she feels judged for not being completely consumed by her job. "There's an unspoken disappointment that people can't fully rely on me," she says. "It isn't expressed by everyone, but I feel it when an invite is not even extended as a formality or I am cut out of a conference or speaking engagement because daycare is not provided."
Indeed, a woman's likelihood of persuading higher-ups to respect her schedule depends largely on whether she's earned her stripes already. For Permuth-Levine, it was receiving the most awards for excellence of any employee at an institute of 1,600 people and being promoted to acting director after just four months. "I've established a track record," she says.Want to get a jump-start on upcoming deals? Meet the major Dallas-Fort Worth players at one of our upcoming events!
High-speed trains poised to link Dallas-Fort Worth to Houston are coming closer to fruition and 2021 doesn’t seem that far away. The idea of a 90-minute bullet train trip between the metros is appealing to Downtown landlords.
Colvill Office Properties president Chip Colvill tells us the traffic congestion on highways shows a need for a high-speed train. Texas highways are all heavily populated with trucks and passenger vehicles. A mass transit option like the train could cut traffic, reducing air pollution and improving the safety of travel. Although, Chip says, there are many intangibles that must be factored in when looking at the feasibility. But, look at Southwest Airlines; the company has flights between Houston and Dallas every 30 minutes to an hour, every day. Chip says he doesn’t see the rail replacing Southwest, but believes rail provides another option that would increase overall commuting between Houston and Dallas.
With Houston's port and Dallas' regional airport advantage, this would link the best of the best in our region and make Texas an even greater world destination for business, Chip says. The economies of Houston and Dallas are somewhat different, but complementary, so this would be of business benefit to both Metros. Plus, there are many companies—like Colvill—that do business regularly in both regions. Chip says he anticipates the rail service having a significant |
sockets, plus Scart, VGA and component-video connectors.
PS3s haven't been backwards-compatible with the PS2 since some of Sony's very first models, and a Bravia HDTV with all those connections and a built-in PS2/DVD player is surely good value at that price.
Console-integrated televisions are uncommon, with Fuji Television's Sega Dreamcast based Divers 2000 Series CX-1 the only attempt we're aware of since Sharp teamed up with Nintendo in the early 1980s to bring us the C1 NES TV.
There were also rumours in 2008 that Samsung was set to partner Microsoft for an Xbox 360 integrated TV, but it never materialised.
The Bravia KDL-22PX300 is available for £200 from Richer Sounds and comes with one controller. ®While Maryland broods over beer, Michigan’s craft beer industry grows
This is a tale of two states and their approaches to local brewers.
The folks at the Founders Brewery in Grand Rapids, Michigan, are making 450,000 barrels of beer each year and selling 6,000 of those barrels in their tap room, one pint at a time. That works out to about one and a half million pints. No Maryland brewer comes anywhere close to that.
Founders’ co-founder Mike Stevens says there is no cap on the number of beers a Michigan brewery can sell in its taproom, and that’s been good for business.
"We found that the more breweries that opened and the more tap rooms that opened, the more consumer excitement that followed," he said.
So, while the craft brewing industry is flying high in Michigan—the Brewers Association ranks it sixth in the nation—a battle brews in Maryland—ranked 25th by the brewers--over loosening regulations.
In Maryland, tap room sales had been capped at 500 barrels a year. That was raised to 2,000 barrels by the General Assembly this year, after Guinness said it wanted to build a brewery and tap house in Baltimore County, and to sell a lot of beer by the pint.
But then lawmakers added a buyback provision. It requires a brewer who wants to sell more than 2,000 barrels, to sell that additional beer to a wholesaler and then buy it back. A brewer can sell an additional 1,000 barrels that way.
State Comptroller Peter Fanchot calls that a giveaway to wholesalers. He complains that existing laws are antiquated and hurting Maryland’s craft brewers.
"All they want to do is brew great beer and sell great beer," he said.
Franchot is heading up a task force of brewers, wholesalers and retailers that is holding meetings around the state to come up with ideas to change Maryland’s beer regulations.
The task force members make up what’s called the three-tier system in Maryland. Brewers make the beer. Wholesalers buy the beer, then sell it to restaurants and liquor stores, who sell to individuals.
Kevin Atticks, the CEO of the Brewers Association of Maryland, said the beer market is changing and that brewers "are meeting that shift and are answering the customers’ needs."
"And we’re starting to see some retailers do it," he added. "And we need the wholesalers to do it as well."
Atticks says he would like to see the limits placed on Maryland’s craft breweries raised or eliminated. And that kind of talk has wholesalers nervous.
Leslie Schaller, the marketing director for Bond Distributing in Baltimore, is on the task force. And she says the panel is stacked against the distributors.
"The three-tier system, which has been in existence for a reason since prohibition, in the attempt to get a couple of minor issues addressed, will go up in smoke," Schaller predicted.
Wholesalers say they are small businesses doing the grunt work of loading beer on trucks and getting it to where you can buy it, while at the same time paying taxes and employing around 2,000 people statewide.
They also train servers in restaurants and support community groups. That’s not as much fun, or as sexy, as craft breweries, but still a key part of the three-tier system. If breweries are allowed to sell a lot of beer on site or do more self-distribution, that cuts out the wholesaler.
Jack Milani, who owns Monaghan's Pub in Baltimore County and lobbies in Annapolis on behalf of bars and restaurants, said retailers could be affected too.
"I think the biggest target is trying to come up with a fair number of when you become more of a retailer than a brewer," he said.
Neal Katcef, owner of Katcef Brothers, an Annapolis wholesaler that delivers on average up to 15,000 cases of beer a day, says he can’t crystal ball how changes in beer regulations will affect his business. But he said the task force and the legislature need to take into account that major changes will affect people’s lives. For example, he wondered, what happens to the family liquor store if Maryland allows beer sales in grocery and chain stores?
"Am I saying we need to perpetuate a system that some may feel is not consumer-friendly," Katcef asked. "I say it is consumer friendly because it’s how our consumers have lived since repeal of prohibition."
Back in Grand Rapids, where you can buy beer in your friendly neighborhood grocery store, Founders is keeping a close eye on the Maryland beer market. Stevens said Founders had thought about coming to Maryland six years ago, but the craft beer industry here was, well, a little flat. So they held off.
But just last year, after Founders saw a market growing in Maryland, Stevens said, they decided to jump in.
"We don’t physically live there so it makes it difficult to go into a market you have to build," he explained.
Stevens and a couple of other guys went from being home brewers in 1997 to starting the first brewery in Grand Rapids. Founders lost money for more than a decade, but it was in a perfect position when the craft beer industry started taking off in Michigan in 2008. Now there are 30 breweries in Grand Rapids alone, which markets itself as Beer City U.S.A.
"And it really has just fed this consumer base I think that has helped everyone flourish, including our distributors," Stevens said.
In Michigan, there are no restrictions on how much beer Founders can produce or sell in its tap room. Comptroller Franchot wants to create the same situation in Maryland.
He says the legislature will support easing limits on craft breweries in 2018, whether the wholesalers are on board or not. The reason, he says, is that it’s an election year, and legislators will recognize that voters, Democrats and Republicans alike, can agree on one thing: supporting craft beer.
"If we’re adding to our votes, that’s good," Franchot said. "If we’re doing stupid things and irritating 100 percent or 99.9 percent of the voters, that’s probably not a good thing."
Governor Hogan has also said Maryland’s beer laws need to be reformed. Franchot’s Tap Task Force is expected to make its recommendations to the legislature in October.On social-media, many are already asking why the Second Amendment did not protect Sterling and Castile, and why gun-rights advocates like the National Rifle Association are not speaking out on their behalf. In each case, there are complicated legal questions, and many of the details remain unclear, but it is true that gun-rights groups like the NRA and its allies have typically pushed for laws that would allow citizens broader freedom to bear arms than currently permitted. It is also the case that the interpretation of the Second Amendment has for decades been deeply intertwined with the ways the law protects—and more often fails to protect—African Americans in comparison with whites, a history that begins in earnest in the 1860s, flares up in the 1960s, and is again relevant today.
The Sterling case is the more complicated one. Sterling was a convicted felon, and thus probably was not legally permitted to have a gun. While Louisiana allows open carry of handguns for anyone legally allowed to possess one, concealed carry requires a permit, for which Sterling would have been ineligible. Sterling had allegedly been displaying the gun, which is the reason why police were called.
The crucial point is that the police couldn’t have known when they arrived on the scene whether Sterling’s gun was completely legal or not. An additional irony is that, according to Muflahi, Sterling had begun carrying the gun because he was concerned about his own safety—that is to say, for the very reasons that gun-rights advocates say citizens should be able to, and many argue should, carry guns.
The Castile case looks more straightforward, based on what’s known now. Assuming Castile’s permit was valid, he was placed in an impossible position by the officer. Unlike Sterling, who seems to have been resisting arrest (a fact that in no way justifies an extrajudicial execution by officers), Castile was attempting to comply with contradictory imperatives: first, the precautionary step of declaring the weapon to the officer; second, the officer’s request for his license and registration; and third, the officer’s command to freeze.*
Some activists contend that white men in the same situations would never have been shot. It’s an impossible counterfactual to prove, although there’s relevant circumstantial evidence, such as the fact that black men are much more likely to be shot by police than any other group. Raw Story rounds up stories of white people who pointed guns at police and were not shot. Castile’s shooting is reminiscent of a 2014 incident in which South Carolina State Trooper Sean Groubert pulled a black driver over in Columbia. Groubert asked the man, Levar Edward Jones, for his license and registration, but when the driver turned to get them, Groubert promptly shot him without warning. Groubert seems to have feared—however irrationally—for his safety when Jones reached into the car, but what was Jones supposed to do? He was complying with the officer’s instructions. (Groubert later pled guilty to assault and battery.)Cars.com illustrations by Paul Dolan
By Kelsey Mays
Cars with at least 75 percent domestic content are becoming an endangered species, and for the first time in the American-Made Index’s nine-year history, the list has fewer than 10 cars.
1. Toyota Camry
2. Toyota Sienna
3. Chevrolet Traverse
4. Honda Odyssey
5. GMC Acadia
6. Buick Enclave
7. Chevrolet Corvette
The Toyota Camry took the top spot this year, as 2014’s top vehicle — the Ford F-150 — fell below 75 percent in domestic-parts content with its 2015 model-year redesign. The Toyota Sienna, Honda Odyssey and Chevrolet Corvette return to the list alongside GM’s three-row crossovers: the Chevrolet Traverse, GMC Acadia and Buick Enclave. The Michigan-built SUVs were last on the AMI in 2013.
It’s not that automakers are slowing U.S. production. If anything, the opposite is true: Excluding heavy-duty trucks and commercial vehicles, automakers assemble 101 models in this country for the 2015 model year, from Chevrolet sedans to BMW SUVs. These cars combine for the vast majority of new-car sales, and U.S. production remains on the rise.
What is shrinking is the percent of overall domestic-parts content. Five years ago, 29 cars qualified for the America-Made Index. Today it’s fewer than 10. Consider the opposing paths of U.S. auto production versus so-called “homegrown” cars:
An Alternative Approach
Once negligible, U.S. auto exports have been on the rise, hitting a record 2.1 million cars in 2014 as lower labor costs and relative economic stability mean higher production at U.S. factories. With increasing exports in the mix, do U.S. sales alone paint an adequate picture of how many autoworkers are employed building a car?
As it turns out, yes. An alternative approach to the AMI that we’ve tried in recent years is to factor domestic-parts content with production instead of sales. For 2015, the results would swap just the Traverse and Sienna from third to third.
Production drives employment: Take the Camry, which is assembled at Toyota’s Georgetown, Ky., plant as well as in Lafayette, Ind., through a partnership with Subaru. The non-hybrid Camry accounts for about a quarter of the cars that Subaru’s Lafayette plant produces and about two-thirds of the cars that Toyota’s Georgetown plant produces. If you took the same ratio of employees from each plant, the Camry supports about 5,900 assembly-plant workers, according to employment figures provided by each plant. Using the same methodology to evaluate others on the AMI, Toyota’s family sedan still directly supports the most Americans:
Of course, it’s never a clean split. Autoworkers typically build multiple vehicles on the same line, and certain management positions would exist whether a plant builds 500 cars or 5,000. Then there are the research and development, supplier, marketing and dealership jobs that a given car supports, which are a lot more numerous than assembly-plant employment but harder to correlate to individual car models. But it goes to show that higher sales mean more production, and more production equals more employees.The nation stands. Exactly six months into the Trump presidency, it teeters and sways, it breaks out periodically in cold sweats, cries out in confusion, howls in rage, scrolls through Twitter, looks longingly at Canada. It yearns for a slow news day, even as it watches Fox News late into the night. But there have been no such days among the last 180, nor in those that preceded the one in January that saw Trump place his left hand on the Lincoln Bible and take the oath of office. It may be years before there is a slow news day, a day we do not turn our tired eyes to CNN, a day without breaking news of Russian spies setting phones aglow in the hours of the night that used to be reserved for peace.
And yet the nation stands.
Some worried that Trump was the second coming of Hitler, but he has not been that. Others saw visions of Reagan. Those have dissipated, too. So far, he has failed to realize his darkest, most xenophobic campaign promises, but he has also abandoned the feints at centrism that could have given him curious purchase with a Washington establishment that has long suffered from chronic legislative constipation. Trump has been a low-grade fever, enervating but not fatal.
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Anxiety, these days, finds a reliable partner in outrage. There is outrage over Trump’s tweets, his political appointments, the things he says and does not say. The left is outraged by his lack of statesmanship while the right is outraged by the Deep State, plotting to take him down. The left wants to talk about Russia. The right still wants to talk about the Clintons. Nobody wants to talk about the value-added tax. And if someone could only find a way to harness outrage for electricity, our energy problems will be solved, at least for the next three years.
Those who used to lament the lack of civic engagement did not know what a gift the Trump presidency would turn out to be. People are not just reading newspapers, they’re paying money for them. In line for a lunch sandwich, I hear talk of budget reconciliation and the 14th Amendment: I’ll have the prosciutto panini and the equal protection clause. There is a special election in suburban Atlanta, and the nation is riveted. There is a subcommittee hearing on Capitol Hill, and we stay home from work.
Did any human being not explicitly paid to do so ever watch a White House press briefing before January? Now, millions tune in to hear Sean Spicer or Sarah Huckabee Sanders explain how hate-tweeting at CNN is making America great again. Remember when Twitter was for feuds between Shaquille O’Neal and Justin Bieber? Now it’s how our president announces policy foreign and domestic.
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People are tired. Most of the hope Trump’s supporters once had has receded; so has some of the fears of his opponents. But what follows? The nation is a jetliner flying through a rough patch of turbulence. The wings will hold, the sutures of the hull won’t tear. When the 9th Circuit tells Trump he can’t ban Muslims, he doesn’t send drones to obliterate San Francisco. He may yet have CNN’s Jeff Zucker arrested, but he hasn’t yet. But a turbulent flight is never pleasant, and even experienced flyers can get queasy in a bad storm, especially if they suspect that the pilot is thumbing through Playboy.
He should’ve led with infrastructure. Fix potholes, and the nation will love you forever. Do something about Amtrak, and they will chisel you into Mt. Rushmore. Fix the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway, and they will rename Staten Island after you.
Alas, Trump instead lead with the Muslim ban and followed that with a try at repealing the Affordable Care Act. The first has been a partial failure, the second an utter one. Now he’s intent on something easy, something that will net a win. So now he turns to...taxes. Maybe he can skip a weekend of golf and pacify Pyongyang, while he’s at it.
Brace yourself, America: there are still 1,280 days of the Trump presidency left. Hopefully, they’ll get to that infrastructure plan soon.
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The New York Times recently reported that President Obama is considering issuing an executive order that requires federal contractors to disclose their political expenditures. Up to 70 percent of Fortune 100 companies would be affected, according to Public Citizen’s Congress Watch.
Following months of heavy pressure from government-reform groups, this would be the president's first significant step to fix our utterly dysfunctional campaign finance system.
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And, if implemented, the executive order would align the president with 85 percent of Americans who say they want fundamental changes in how we fund our elections.
Of course, it’s only a modest first of many needed reforms. The president conceded as much in his State of the Union address, declaring that we must “change the system”. Although Obama offered no details, those in the Democratic Party trying to succeed him agree on key reforms. Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton have both issued policy platforms proposing public financing of elections and initiating the legislative process to circumscribe Citizens United.
But why is fundamental change necessary? Isn’t disclosure enough, as some Republicans have suggested?
Unfortunately, no. Disclosure alone cannot solve the systemic problems and inequalities caused by our privatized and largely unregulated campaign finance system.
For example, even in a more transparent U.S. campaign finance system:
Candidates would continue to seek large donations. Since there is no viable public financing system, candidates still feel obliged to seek out big money, often outside their constituency, to meet the extraordinary costs of campaigns. The suspicion that donors’ interests unduly influence candidates would therefore remain, undermining public trust.
The majority of Americans would still be politically irrelevant. In 2014, analysis by political scientists Martin Gilens and Benjamin Page showed that a majority of Americans are essentially politically powerless. Policy is all but dictated by those people and groups with money. This is not surprising. In Oregon, for example, in 2014 those who gave more than $5000 to candidates—about one thousand individuals—contributed ten times more money than all small donors combined. Even if transparency were to discourage people from spending millions in donations, those spending large, but not extraordinary amounts, would still drown out voices of lower income individuals. The powerlessness of the majority of Americans would continue despite transparency.
Traditionally marginalized groups would continue to be politically underrepresented. In order to be considered a “viable” candidate, let alone to win a party nomination, a candidate must have access to money—either one’s own or through connections. The current system makes it virtually impossible for people without resources to run for office—something that disproportionally affects people of lower socio-economic levels, women, and people of color.
Fundraising will continue to interfere with legislating. Given the high cost of elections, some politicians spend more than half of their time in office raising money rather than serving the public. As a result, politicians can end up uninformed even about policies they propose and support..
Of course, transparency has its purpose. In a well-functioning democracy, citizens must know how candidates are funded. This helps voters make informed decisions. Obama’s executive order certainly would move us in this direction.
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It is important to note that even after transparency laws are implemented two hurdles can prevent disclosure from functioning effectively:
Disclosure is meaningful only if the information gathered is distributed to the public. Media outlets are the most effective and far-reaching disseminators of this information; yet, they have generally proved unwilling to serve this function in the US. In recent years, “ networks have largely underreported the rolling back of campaign finance reform and the unprecedented influx of billions of dollars into the federal election system ”. Only when an unprompted Bernie Sanders brought it up while appearing on national television did overall coverage increase. Groups like the Sunlight Foundation and Open Secrets are able to successfully distribute campaign finance information, but their potential reach is far less than traditional media sources.
Disclosing money in elections serves as a deterrent to excessive donations only if the public makes accepting them politically dangerous. The Koch brothers openly admitted that they were willing to spend $900 million in the 2016 election cycle. While candidates hide the fact they receive these large contributions, they still actively seek them out. Public information therefore does not always act as a deterrent. As former MayDay CEO Zephyr Teachout has suggested, accepting large private donations must be made “toxic”. Only if the public holds politicians accountable for seeking out and accepting large donations will disclosure be highly effective.
Despite reasons to be pessimistic, there is no reason to give up. Yes, much more needs to be done to ensure greater transparency and fairness in our democracy. Yet, Obama’s potential executive order and the rapidly growing coalition ready to take immediate action to save our democracy should inspire hope that the needed change can be won.
Just as the president said, though, it is up to us, the people, to ensure a fair and equal democracy. We cannot be complacent.
Until the executive order is officially issued, we must continue to pressure the president. While many are cautiously optimistic the president will follow through on his promise to fight for our democracy, there is no guarantee.
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And, in anticipation of the executive order and thereafter, our job must also be to expand the fight, advocating for even greater disclosure, contribution limits, revolving door bans, new ethics and lobbying laws, Federal Election Commission reform, and most important, public financing of elections and the restoration of the Voting Rights Act.
It will be a long, bitter fight to win comprehensive reform, but isn’t our democracy worth it?This week marks the first anniversary of Donald Trump's election to the presidency.
CBS News chief Washington correspondent and "Face the Nation" anchor John Dickerson met a group of three men and three women ranging in ages from 26 to 82 -- all New Hampshire residents who voted for Mr. Trump last November. Assembled with the help of YouGov, two identify as Republicans, while the others say they are independents.
"Face the Nation" anchor John Dickerson with a New Hampshire focus group CBS News
"Who here, by a show of hands, thinks the country is doing better now than it was a year ago?" Dickerson asked the focus group.
All six people raised their hands.
"The economy is certainly a big thing. It was nice to see the economy jump a little bit from the end of Obama's presidency," Peter said. "It seems like a lot of that is just coming from promises that Trump is making. Like he's saying, 'I'm going to make things better for business. I'm going to lower corporate tax rates.' So that builds enthusiasm so companies seem like they're more willing to invest in the future."
"I agree with everything that Peter just said," Dina responded. "I think that the – we're fiscally, we're doing better, financially. The stock market's going up. But I also think that it's because of a lot of things that haven't been put into place yet, like the tax reform."
Dickerson also asked whether Republican lawmakers should work for their constituents or work for the president.
"They ought to follow their party platform and from whatever stems from that," Terry said. "We have a majority, or the GOP has a majority in Congress, Senate and the presidency. And they're not working together. And it's shameful."
"Do you think President Trump has helped foster a sense of community in America?" Dickerson asked.
"Oh, he's made it much worse," Peter said.
"In the past, presidents have brought nations together. Why is President Trump – why can't he do that?" Dickerson asked.
"Like, he just will lie or, like, make things up for the effect it has on other people. That's not a way that a good person will live their life," Peter responded.
Tom said it bothers him that the president doesn't tell the truth.
"It is very frustrating. It's one of the big knocks on the president, is that he can't seem to keep his ego in check and keep the lies under control. … He needs to act presidential and step it up," Tom said.
After voting for Mr. Trump last election, Tom said his vote is "absolutely" up in the air now.
You can see more of this focus group this Sunday, Nov. 12, on "Face the Nation."The angular diameter distance is a distance measure used in astronomy. It is defined in terms of an object's physical size, x {\displaystyle x}, and θ {\displaystyle \theta } the angular size of the object as viewed from earth.
d A = x θ {\displaystyle d_{A}={\frac {x}{\theta }}}
The angular diameter distance depends on the assumed cosmology of the universe. The angular diameter distance to an object at redshift, z {\displaystyle z}, is expressed in terms of the comoving distance, r {\displaystyle r} as:
d A = S k ( r ) 1 + z {\displaystyle d_{A}={\frac {S_{k}(r)}{1+z}}}
Where S k ( r ) {\displaystyle S_{k}(r)} is the FLRW coordinate defined as:
S k ( r ) = { sin ( − Ω k H 0 r ) / ( H 0 | Ω k | ) Ω k < 0 r Ω k = 0 sinh ( Ω k H 0 r ) / ( H 0 | Ω k | ) Ω k > 0 {\displaystyle S_{k}(r)={\begin{cases}\sin \left({\sqrt {-\Omega _{k}}}H_{0}r\right)/\left(H_{0}{\sqrt {|\Omega _{k}|}}\right)&\Omega _{k}<0\\r&\Omega _{k}=0\\\sinh \left({\sqrt {\Omega _{k}}}H_{0}r\right)/\left(H_{0}{\sqrt {|\Omega _{k}|}}\right)&\Omega _{k}>0\end{cases}}}
Where Ω k {\displaystyle \Omega _{k}} is the curvature density and H 0 {\displaystyle H_{0}} is the value of the Hubble parameter today.
In the currently favoured geometric model of our Universe, the "angular diameter distance" of an object is a good approximation to the "real distance", i.e. the proper distance when the light left the object. Note that beyond a certain redshift, the angular diameter distance gets smaller with increasing redshift. In other words, an object "behind" another of the same size, beyond a certain redshift (roughly z=1.5), appears larger on the sky, and would therefore have a smaller "angular diameter distance".
Angular size redshift relation [ edit ]
The angular size redshift relation for a Lambda cosmology, with on the vertical scale kiloparsecs per arcsecond.
The angular size redshift relation for a Lambda cosmology, with on the vertical scale megaparsecs.
The angular size redshift relation describes the relation between the angular size observed on the sky of an object of given physical size, and the objects redshift from Earth (which is related to its distance, d {\displaystyle d}, from Earth). In a Euclidean geometry the relation between size on the sky and distance from Earth would simply be given by the equation:
tan ( θ ) = x d {\displaystyle \tan \left(\theta \right)={\frac {x}{d}}}
where θ {\displaystyle \theta } is the angular size of the object on the sky, x {\displaystyle x} is the size of the object and d {\displaystyle d} is the distance to the object. Where θ {\displaystyle \theta } is small this approximates to:
θ ≈ x d {\displaystyle \theta \approx {\frac {x}{d}}}.
However, in the ΛCDM model (the currently favored cosmology), the relation is more complicated. In this model, objects at redshifts greater than about 1.5 appear larger on the sky with increasing redshift.
This is related to the angular diameter distance, which is the distance an object is calculated to be at from θ {\displaystyle \theta } and x {\displaystyle x}, assuming the Universe is Euclidean.
The actual relation between the angular-diameter distance, d A {\displaystyle d_{A}}, and redshift is given below. q 0 {\displaystyle q_{0}} is called the deceleration parameter and measures the deceleration of the expansion rate of the Universe; in the simplest models, q 0 < 0.5 {\displaystyle q_{0}<0.5} corresponds to the case where the Universe will expand for ever, q 0 > 0.5 {\displaystyle q_{0}>0.5} to closed models which will ultimately stop expanding and contract q 0 = 0.5 {\displaystyle q_{0}=0.5} corresponds to the critical case – Universes which will just be able to expand to infinity without re-contracting.
d A = c H 0 q 0 2 ( z q 0 + ( q 0 − 1 ) ( 2 q 0 z + 1 − 1 ) ) ( 1 + z ) 2 {\displaystyle d_{A}={\cfrac {c}{H_{0}q_{0}^{2}}}{\cfrac {(zq_{0}+(q_{0}-1)({\sqrt {2q_{0}z+1}}-1))}{(1+z)^{2}}}}
The Mattig relation yields the angular-diameter distance as a function of redshift for a universe with Ω Λ = 0.[1]
See also [ edit ]The state's Office of Children and Family Services, which oversees New York's child welfare agencies, does not keep a count of how many children are turned over to it in need of mental health care. And the state says it discourages the practice by offering alternatives.
But judges, lawyers, social workers and parents from Brooklyn to Buffalo say it happens regularly.
In New York City, for example, officials at the Administration for Children's Services say about half their intensive-care beds are filled not by abused or neglected youngsters, but by those placed there directly by their parents or through a court program for troubled youths that parents enter voluntarily.
''There are all sorts of permutations of folks trying to get into the foster care system because they have not been able to get into the mental health system,'' said Raymond Schimmer, the executive director of the Parsons Child and Family Center in Albany, which runs mental health and foster care facilities. ''In extreme cases, you have parents who claim that they've abused or neglected their children.''
For parents who resort to giving up a child, eight of whom were interviewed for this article, the experience is fraught with uncertainties. They have the right to ask for their child back, but must win the approval of a judge. They receive legal notices warning that after 15 months in custody, their child could be put up for adoption. They have no control over where their child is sent or, in some cases, what treatments the child receives. Some parents have, for periods, lost track of their children entirely.
''Do you make children with cancer have their parents give up custody so they get the care they need?'' asked Tracy Zeltwanger, a county worker in Watertown, N.Y., who was prodded to relinquish her 9-year-old son, Corey, who has early-onset bipolar disorder, doctors say. Ms. Zeltwanger ultimately refused.
New York parents are not alone. At a time when health care costs are soaring and the number of children with complicated disorders is increasing, the quandary of custody versus care is a phenomenon throughout the country. Thirteen states have passed laws to prohibit the practice of exchanging custody for care, according to the Bazelon Center for Mental Health Law in Washington.
Such a law might help in New York if mental health resources were not so scarce, said James Dillon, a family court judge in Erie County. ''But there are a limited number of beds,'' he said.
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For children who need extensive care, New York offers two basic options. There is the one that was explicitly intended for such children: the state mental health system, which has about 540 residential treatment beds.
And there is the one that was not intended for them: the foster care system, which has about 4,000 beds but limited ability to handle mentally ill children.
New York has tried to come up with alternatives that would allow more children to stay at home. The state participates in a Medicaid program that pays for services like in-home counseling for children who are at risk of being hospitalized, even if they are not eligible for Medicaid. Still, there are only 610 spots.
So, for parents who say they have tried everything else, giving up custody can seem like the only option.
Some parents, despite the pain of separation, are happy with the services they receive.
Other families confront a host of difficulties. They enter a world unaccustomed -- and, some insist, hostile -- to parents who take an acute interest in their children's care. But the biggest frustration, parents say, is that giving up custody does not guarantee that their children are kept safe or given adequate attention.
The money to provide mental health treatment in foster care is actually very limited. Often, said Harriet Mauer, the director of social work for Good Shepherd Services, a foster care provider in New York City, foster care facilities must turn to the same overburdened community mental health clinics that parents do. Often, a determining factor in treatment is simply the availability of an open bed.
''They push the parents to give up the kids, and I don't understand why, when they don't have the care that they need,'' said Kathryn Strodel, a lawyer at Legal Services of Central New York, in Syracuse, who has represented parents who have relinquished custody.
A Child With Autism
Daniel is a 16-year-old, 200-pound autistic boy with an emotional disorder. He sometimes pretends that he is the Incredible Hulk and tries to rip off his clothes in public. There are dents in the walls of his mother's Bronx apartment from his punches. More than once a week, his mother said, she needed to call the police for help. ''This is a child,'' she would say when she thought they were handling him roughly.
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Daniel would be taken to the hospital, calmed, and discharged.
Agencies that deal with autism said they could not help for a variety of reasons. The mother's sister grew afraid to baby-sit.
The mother, who insisted that the family's name not be used for fear of retaliation against Daniel, said ''I've used sick days, vacation days, personal days and leave without pay to do what I've done with this kid.''
At the hospital, she said, she had been regularly told by doctors and social workers that the only way to get help would be to leave her son there, so that she would be reported for abandoning him and the state would take custody.
State officials say that the average wait for a mental health placement in one of their specialized facilities is about two and a half months, but caseworkers and families report waits of up to 18 months. Because of the wait, some foster care providers say, many children who qualify for mental health services are never even referred to the state mental health agency but are simply diverted into foster care.
After one particularly violent outburst by Daniel, his mother, afraid for herself and her teenage daughter, left him at the hospital and called the child-abuse hot line to report what she had done. At a meeting with a social worker, she said, she agreed to sign over custody when a place was found for Daniel.
It was not an easy moment.
''Parents are dealing not just with the child who has mental illness, but the siblings and how they are reacting to it, and with how exhausted they are,'' said Karen Hebrock, who runs admissions for the Rochester-based Hillside Family of Agencies. ''It is very intimidating for families. It is a scary kind of thing.''
But this mother did it. ''I didn't want Daniel to hurt someone or be hurt,'' she said.
It was not clear, however, that the foster care group home where Daniel wound up five months later was prepared to handle him. On a visit in November, his mother discovered that four days earlier, without her knowledge, Daniel had been taken to the hospital with a head wound so deep that it required staples instead of stitches.
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A spokeswoman for the city's Administration for Children's Services said that she could not discuss specific cases, but that parents were notified of injuries.
But when Daniel's mother demanded to know what had happened, she said, the center director ''told me that he doesn't have to tell me nothing that happens to my son.''
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Daniel has since been moved to another group home.
Violent Threats
Mental illness is often cyclical. It rages and subsides, which can make it difficult for families to get help exactly when and for how long it is needed.
More than once, Timothy O'Clair threatened his mother |
impact on damage control.
If I want to play solo is this ship for me?
Like nearly all of Star Citizen’s ships, the Endeavor is designed to be flyable by a single human player… but like most of the larger ships, there are distinct disadvantages to deciding to ‘go it alone.’ We envision a single-person Endeavor would have to ‘stop and start’ when conducting scientific endeavors (hah) whereas one with a crew could be scanning the skies, treating patients or overclocking weapons while a second player mans the helm!
Can you go into further detail about the Defense Module? What is it? Can it be installed with the medical modules as well?
The Defense Module is still in the early planning stages, but we intend for it to be similar to the ‘plug in a turret’ modules on the Hull series ships; essentially taking up one a pair of slots to add turrets, e-warfare defensive weapons or similar weapons to your Endeavor’s complement (at a cost of overall reduced science.)
Since the ship cannot dock in our hangars, does it persist in the universe when we log out?
No, we do not intend for ships to be always ‘at risk’ just because they don’t fit in your Hangar. Standard landing areas will keep the workshop and drive sections safe while you land the Explorer in your hangar. (Of course, if you leave it in orbit of some unexplored planet the story is quite different!)
Do the pods that come with the Discovery and Hope packages include LTI?
Yes, all Endeavor and Hope equipment available during this sale includes LTI. It will not include LTI when offered again.
Is the Endeavor’s supercollider the only way to have equipment overclocked?
No! Chris outlined his plans for a robust overclocking system early in the game, in the hopes that players will eventually make careers out of being ‘overclocking’ experts capable of providing the best tuned weapons and other components. While we see the Endeavor’s supercollider (name change pending, re: science!) as the ultimate tool for this task, the climb to that level will start with the already-offered workbench.
Does the Explorer Cab have two landing bays as detailed it previously released concept art? If so, what ships can land there?
No, these were intended to be drone bays a la 2001, but we removed them in favor of the secondary engines when we decided to allow the Explorer cab to separate from the rest of the ship. They (and drones in general) may be added back in a future module, but for now the only bay available is the single, larger bay seen on the Hope-class.
Docking Bay Clarification
In the previous post, we mentioned that any ship that fits in the Endeavor with a maximum of four could land in the bay. Why four, and what has changed since the original ‘if it fits it sits’ concept? Designer Matthew Sherman has volunteered to answer that question.
In the past, there’s a phrase that has been tossed around when discussing the actual storage or operational capacity for some of our bigger ships. As we continue to build out the backend that will drive Star Citizen though, there are some technical and design challenges that really need to be considered first before just accepting “If it fits, it sits.”
So what did that phrase really mean in the first place? At its core, it was about supporting the idea that you can really do anything in Star Citizen, even if it goes against the role/theme of the ship you’re using. While we still are absolutely committed to delivering tremendous choice and flexibility in the way you setup and run your ships, the overly freeform interpretation of this phrase is becoming problematic.
We have some incredible goals for what we want to enable, from large scale fights, ambitious multi-crew systems, and more, but as we dial into these features and really get the tech online to support them, we need to constantly be evaluating what we can, in good faith, deliver to everyone.
What are some of these challenges? Well, a big one is making sure everything can play well and transfer properly across our large-world maps and between servers. Another pressing concern is general balance, ensuring that ships have a good fit and place across all the varied types and sizes of ships we’ll be offering. Then along with these concerns, making sure that whatever system we deliver won’t be something that opens up possible griefing or abuse of the mechanics.
Now, where does that lead us to? To work through this, we’ll be using the Landing Bay module for the recently unveiled Endeavor to go over things in a bit more detail. This module has definitely excited a number of players with the potential of hauling a few extra ships around, but we want to clear up some of the more hard-limits on its use.
The Landing Bay offers a fairly spacious 30m x 60m x 10m volume of space to work with. In gameplay, you’ll be allowed to safely store/transport/launch/refit up to 4 ships that fit inside this space. A Cutlass Red and a pair of 300’s, a couple of Hornets or Avengers, you should absolutely have some good choices to make in terms of what you carry along.
Now, what about when a 5th ship decides to land? We don’t want to have random invisible walls stopping you from landing, but we also can’t just let things be randomly piled in and expected to be able to move through the server-architecture. How we’re planning to handle these cases is by limiting these aspects to a local-system only.
So if you’re the owner of the Endeavor, and your Landing Bay is over capacity, you’ll be given a warning when attempting to plot a Quantum or Jump action, preventing you from leaving until the overage is cleared out. Similarly, if you’re the pilot of that 5th ship and the Endeavor is trying to leave, you’ll be given a clear notice that you’ll need to remove your ship from the Landing Bay shortly.
We’re still ironing out the exacts of these alerts, but we feel it’ll be the best middle ground for allowing a lot of flexibility in use for these ships without overburdening them with too many game-y limits. We also don’t want these systems to be turned into something used to harass other players, so we’ll definitely be looking for feedback once this system is in-game to make sure we have a genuinely fair solution for both parties involved.
But what about the future? Tech gets better all the time, and some of these current challenges may be overcome down the road. We’re not going to completely write-off the potential for storing more than what’s rated/allowed for a ship in the future, but we can’t fully ensure it as a safe-mechanic to provide carte-blanch to all of our ships in the early stages. We’re confident with can deliver these aspects in local-space, but to take it beyond that, we’ll need the baseline systems implemented and functional before we can truly explore what extent we can deliver on this kind of statement.
So in the future, just remember, “If it fits, it sits in local-space”. As we continue to develop and grow Star Citizen, we’ll also be working to expand and grow the potential for how you’ll be able to setup and interact with your ships. And with everything, we’ll be needing your feedback as these systems go live to really help us fine tune things to really create a vibrant and living universe.
Endeavor & PodsBusiness is off to a good start at the Timber Lounge in Halifax where axe throwing is the main attraction. The bar on Agricola Street opened for business last month.
Just hitting the target at the end of one of the four throwing lanes is a major accomplishment for players who are new to the game.
"It's an adrenaline rush. I didn't quite know what to expect," said Carrie Todd, who was trying it for the first time.
"It was a lot more fun than what I expected."
Learn from a pro
Razor sharp axes are used and players are given a quick lesson from a coach on how to throw them.
That coach is also responsible for keeping an eye on the players to make sure they are playing safely and not drinking too much alcohol.
"There are a ton of safety measures in place, and before you even step into the cage, you're given a complete run down of all the rules," said Lucianna Plaxton, head axe throwing coach at Timber Lounge.
"No one throws axes when they're too intoxicated. We are very strict about that."
The coach is responsible for keeping an eye on the players to make sure they are playing safely and not drinking too much alcohol. (Paul Palmeter/CBC)
'Kick axe time'
Plaxton, a former competitive swimmer, got the axe throwing bug when she lived in Toronto. Now the idea is taking off in Halifax.
"Everyone has an awesome time — I guess you could say a kick axe time," said Plaxton.
"It's really easy to do, and people are surprised at that, and they really enjoy the game aspect of it where they're competing against their friends."
Business is brisk
It costs $25 to $35 for a 90-minute, two-lane session.
"The group bookings have been coming in steady and usually on Thursday, Friday and Saturday nights, we're just packed," said Marc Chisholm, co-owner of Timber Lounge.
"Typically groups range from eight to 14 people and we've had a few bachelor parties come through."
There's a league for that
Wednesday nights also are busy. Twenty-five players have registered to take part in the axe throwing league.
"That's becoming a great form of socialization," said Plaxton.
"People who didn't know each other previously are now becoming friends and going out with each other outside of the axe lounge."
Made in Nova Scotia
All of the furniture in the bar comes from logs milled in Barrington, N.S., by one of the lounge co-owners, Darren Hudson.
The part-time professional lumberjack is competing in Illinois this weekend.(CNN) -- A Maryland mayor is asking the federal government to investigate why SWAT team members burst into his home without knocking and shot his two dogs to death in an investigation into a drug smuggling scheme.
Berwyn Heights, Maryland, Mayor Cheye Calvo comforts wife Trinity Tomsic at a news conference Thursday.
"This has been a difficult week and a half for us," Cheye Calvo, mayor of Berwyn Heights, Maryland, said Thursday. "We lost our family dogs. We did it at the hands of sheriff's deputies who burst through our front door, rifles blazing."
The raid last week was led by the Prince George's County Police Department, with the sheriff's special operations team assisting, after a package of marijuana was sent to Calvo's home.
Authorities say the package was part of a scheme in which drugs are mailed to unknowing recipients and then intercepted.
Calvo said he had just returned home from walking his two Labrador retrievers, Chase and Payton, when his mother-in-law told him a package had arrived for his wife, Trinity Tomsic.
Moments later, Calvo was in his room changing for a meeting when he heard commotion downstairs.
"The door flew open," he said. "I heard gunfire shoot off. There was a brief pause and more gunfire."
Calvo said he was brought downstairs at gunpoint in his boxer shorts, handcuffed and forced onto the floor with his mother-in-law near the carcass of one of dead dogs. Watch Calvo describe the raid »
"I noticed my two dead dogs lying in pools of their own blood," Calvo said.
Calvo said his mother-in-law is still recovering from the incident.
"She got the worst of it," Calvo said. "She was literally in the kitchen, cooking a lovely pasta dish, and they brought down the door and shot our dogs."
While he was being held, Calvo said, he told police he is the town's mayor, but they didn't believe him.
Berwyn Heights has its own police force, he said, but Prince George's County police did not notify the municipal authorities of their interest in his home or the package.
"They didn't know my name. All they knew was my wife's name. They matched that to the registration of the car," Calvo said. "It was that lack of communication that really led to what has really been the most traumatic experience of our lives."
After the raid, arrests were made in the package interception scheme.
The incident has prompted the couple to call for a federal investigation because, they say, they don't believe police are capable of conducting an internal investigation.
"They've said they've done nothing wrong," Calvo said. "I didn't sign up for this fight, but I think what we have to do now is make changes to how Prince George's County police and Prince George's County sheriff's department operate."
Calvo said authorities entered his home without knocking and refused to show him a warrant when he requested one.
But Prince George's County Police Department spokeswoman Sharon Taylor said legal counsel had informed her that "no-knock" warrants do not exist in Maryland. Watch authorities defend their actions »
Taylor said authorities were acting on a warrant issued based on information available to them at the time.
"This warrant was for permission to search the premises," she said. "The special operations team that supported us made a decision about the necessity of entry at the point of being on the scene."
"No-knock" warrants have drawn criticism before. In Atlanta, Georgia, Kathryn Johnston, 92, was shot to death by police in a botched drug raid involving such a warrant in November.
Taylor, a self-described dog lover, expressed sympathy for the loss of Calvo's dogs, but stopped short of apologizing for the incident.
"We've done these similar kinds of operations over and over again, to the tune of removing billions of dollars of drugs from the community and without people or animals being harmed," she said. "We don't want any of our operations to result in the injury or loss of anybody, and certainly not animals."
The deputies have said they killed the two animals because they felt threatened.
"I would say that the dogs presented a threat, I would imagine, to the special operations situation," Taylor said.
Meanwhile, Calvo and his wife said members of the community have expressed sympathy and concern about the incident.
At a news conference Thursday, Tomsic tearfully recalled a recent encounter with a neighbor who used to wave at the couple as they walked Payton and Chase.
"She gave me a big hug," Tomsic said. "She said, 'If the police shot your dogs dead and did this to you, how can I trust them?' "
All About Maryland • Illegal Drugs • PoliceBy Aditi Malhotra and Preetika Rana
The father of Ram Singh, one of the accused in Delhi gang rape case, said he doesn’t believe his son killed himself.
“My son has not committed suicide. I had met him six days back. He said the authorities are not treating him well,” Mange Lal, Mr. Singh’s father, told India Real Time.
Mr. Singh, 33, was found dead in his prison cell in New Delhi’s Tihar Jail on Monday morning. Prison authorities say he killed himself.
He was one of five men facing trial on charges including rape, kidnapping and murder for the gang rape of a 23-year-old woman who later died of her injuries. All of the accused, who include Mr. Singh’s brother Mukesh, have pleaded not guilty.
“He told me he was ashamed by what had happened on December 16. And that ‘I will accept whatever punishment whatever punishment I am given,’” said Mr. Lal, who called for an investigation into the circumstances of his son’s death.
His mother, Kalyani Devi, added: “He made a mistake. But even God forgives one mistake.”
India’s home ministry has asked Tihar Jail authorities for a report on the incident.
Sunil Gupta, a spokesman for Tihar Jail, said Mr. Singh committed suicide by hanging himself from the ceiling. He added that all prisoners in the rape case have been treated well.
Lawyers for the accused have disputed this claim. “It is not possible he committed suicide,” said V.K. Anand, Mr. Singh’s lawyer, “and the theory that he used his own clothes can’t be true as there is high security inside the prison.”
He added that his client “was under immense pressure from police and jail authorities.”
A lawyer for two of the accused, Akshay Kumar and Vinay Sharma, told India Real Time his clients fear for their safety in Tihar, and raised questions on security within the prison’s grounds.
"My clients are terrified, scared, they fear for their safety," said A.P. Singh, the lawyer. “How is it possible for a prisoner to hang himself inside a jail cell? Is Tihar's security so weak?”
Details of how Mr. Singh died are still unclear. Mr. Gupta, the Tihar jail spokesman, said that, based on information he had, Mr. Singh used his own clothes to hang himself while another jail official overseeing security in the cells said he used a rope used by inmates to dry their clothes. Mr. Singh had three cellmates. Mr. Gupta said they were asleep when the incident happened.
Follow India Real Time on Twitter @indiarealtime.MARKET reaction to Donald Trump’s win has been something between sanguine and elated. But if you set out to design policies to do long-term harm to the economy, you might end up with something resembling Mr Trump’s agenda. The next president threatens to erect trade barriers, which would disrupt supply chains and dampen productivity growth. He wants to deport many of America’s 11m illegal immigrants, which could reduce the size of the labour force by up to 5%. And his tax plan is ruinously expensive, costing almost $7trn over a decade, or around half of America’s outstanding national debt.
How much damage is President Trump actually likely to do? That depends first on how much of his policy he can get enacted. Until recently, his tax cuts would have been vulnerable to a Democratic filibuster in the Senate. But thanks to a rule change in the latest budget deal, the Republicans can now pass even unfunded tax cuts with only a simple majority, explains Richard Kogan of the Centre on Budget and Policy Priorities, a think-tank. (To do so, they must include sunset clauses, as George W. Bush did when he cut taxes in 2001.)
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Congressional Republicans might moderate Mr Trump’s plan. The tax cuts Paul Ryan, Speaker of the House of Representatives, wants are expensive, but much less so than Mr Trump’s (see chart). The corporate tax may end up at Mr Ryan’s proposed 20% rather than Mr Trump’s desired 15%. Mr Trump’s costly promise to offer the same rate to sole traders may not survive. Both men agree that there should be three tax rates for individuals (12%, 25% and 33%), but there will be debate over the generosity of deductions.
Debt would rise significantly even under Mr Ryan’s plan. More borrowing will give the economy a boost in the short term. Mr Ryan’s tax cuts would be much bigger than Barack Obama’s fiscal stimulus in 2009. Add in the infrastructure spending Mr Trump also wants, and the economy could get much hotter, which helps to explain the rally in financial markets on November 9th. The question is to what extent this will jeopardise America’s long-term fiscal health.
While Congress might rewrite the Trump tax plan, it has much less power to restrain Mr Trump’s protectionism. Existing laws allow the president to impose tariffs in very broadly defined circumstances, as Mr Trump gleefully noted during the campaign. He could use the president’s prerogative over foreign affairs to withdraw from the North American Free Trade Agreement with just six months’ notice, according to the Peterson Institute, a think-tank.
Mr Trump has said that he is merely threatening to tear up trade agreements and impose tariffs, in order to achieve better trade deals. The goal of such new deals, according to his advisers, will be to eliminate the trade deficit. That is all but unachievable. The trade deficit is the result of low national saving, which will fall still further if the government borrows more. And no one knows how other countries will react to Mr Trump’s threats.
Monetary policy is another cause for worry. Mr Trump has railed against low interest rates, saying they had stoked an economic bubble (a sentiment repeated by one of his advisers, to the Financial Times on November 9th). He also claimed that Janet Yellen, chairman of the Federal Reserve, was acting in an “obviously political” manner and “should be ashamed of herself”. This caused speculation that Ms Yellen might resign after a Trump victory. That seems unlikely; Fed chairmen have withstood presidential criticism before. But Ms Yellen will surely depart when her term expires in February 2018.
Who might Mr Trump nominate to replace her? In an interview before the election Stephen Moore, an economic adviser to Mr Trump, floated several names, including Larry Kudlow, a television pundit, Art Laffer, a private-sector economist, and Martin Feldstein, an academic, all of whom served in the Reagan administration. Most conservative economists like Mr Feldstein have been calling for tighter monetary policy for years; Mr Kudlow is an exception. If Mr Trump’s nominee is to reflect Republicans’ hawkishness, the expectation of higher interest rates will hang over the economy, though that may have bigger implications for economies outside America (see article).
With a big fiscal stimulus, though, higher rates might be needed to keep inflation down. That would send the dollar higher, hurting American manufacturers and increasing the lure of protectionism. That is where the biggest threat to growth lies.Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump both spoke to the national convention of the Veterans of Foreign Wars, but CNN took clear sides in their coverage (or lack thereof) of their addresses. On Monday, the liberal network aired 19 minutes and 20 seconds of Mrs. Clinton's speech uninterrupted during the 11 am Eastern hour. The news channel didn't break away to carry any of Trump's speech during the 9 am Eastern hour on Tuesday. Instead, CNN went to correspondent Sara Murray, who reported live while the billionaire gave his speech.
It should also be pointed out that during the same hour as Trump's speech, CNN aired two minutes and 23 seconds of Bernie Sanders's speech to Democratic delegates from Wisconsin at the DNC. Just over 20 minutes later, the network also aired another minute and 19 seconds of the Vermont socialist's speech to Democratic delegates from California
MSNBC didn't have such a drastic gap in coverage, but they still slanted towards the former first lady by a margin of nearly three to one. On Monday, they carried 14 minutes and 41 seconds of Secretary Clinton's VFW speech. Less than 24 hours later, the left-wing network aired 4 minutes and 55 seconds of Trump's address to the veterans group before breaking away to a panel discussion with liberal analyst Jonathan Alter and Fordham University political scientist Christina Greer.
Fox News Channel actually devoted more time to Mrs. Clinton's speech than MSNBC — 16 minutes and 43 seconds — which was two minutes and 37 seconds less than CNN's live coverage of the event. However, they carried all 24 minutes and 37 seconds of Mr. Trump's speech to the VFW on Tuesday.WASHINGTON, Nov 13 (Reuters) - The number of U.S. adults who smoke has dropped below 20 percent for the first time on record but cigarettes still kill almost half a million people a year, health officials said on Thursday.
About 19.8 percent of U.S. adults — 43.4 million people — were smokers in 2007. That was a percentage point below the 2006 figure and followed three years of little progress, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said in a report.
Smoking and secondhand smoke kill 443,000 people annually from cancer, lung disease, heart disease and other causes, the CDC said. Half of all long-term smokers, especially those who start as teens, die prematurely, many in middle age.
And smoking burns a large hole in the economy. Including direct health care expenditures ($96 billion) and productivity losses ($97 billion), the economic burden of smoking on the United States hit $193 billion per year, the CDC said.
“Even though we’ve come a long way, there’s a long way to go,” said Dr. Matthew McKenna, director of the CDC’s Office on Smoking and Health.
Smoking became widespread in the United States when soldiers fighting in Europe in World War I were given cigarettes, which by that time were made by machines rather than by hand. After the war, smoking by women also became more accepted socially.
U.S. health officials began systematically tracking smoking rates in the 1960s. When U.S. Surgeon General Luther Terry issued a landmark report on health hazards of smoking in 1964, 42 percent of U.S. adults were smokers. His revelations triggered a long but gradual decline.
Thomas Glynn of the American Cancer Society said the rate was now the lowest since just after World War I.
“We’ve begun to come full circle on this,” Glynn said.
Glynn cited three major recent factors in driving down smoking: smoking bans in public places, higher taxes that drive up prices and more medications to help people quit.
The CDC said smoking still causes at least 30 percent of cancer deaths, including more than 80 percent of lung cancer deaths, as well as 80 percent of deaths from the lung ailment chronic obstructive pulmonary disease.
The CDC report found that 17 percent of women smoke compared to 22 percent of men. Whites (21 percent) smoked at higher rates than blacks (20 percent) or Hispanics (13 percent). Asian Americans were lowest (10 percent) and American Indians and Alaska natives were highest (36 percent).
Among people who never graduated high school, 25 percent smoked in 2007. Among those with undergraduate degrees, 11 percent smoked, while 6 percent of those with graduate degrees smoked.
“The tobacco industry is very good at creating confusion and misinformation. And the more education people have, the less likely they are to believe some of the myths and misinformation that the industry promulgates,” McKenna said. (Editing by Alan Elsner)Share on Facebook Share on Twitter Share on Google+ Share on LinkedIn Pin to Pinterest Share on StumbleUpon +
Mnet’s ‘Unpretty Rapstar’ participants Tymee, Cheetah, and Lil Cham speak honestly about rapper Yoon Mi Rae in an interview with ‘The Daily Sports’.
Hip Hop is difficult.
It is a rare occurrence for people to understand the culture and sentiments 100%, and even those who do have different values. The standards for what makes a certain rap good and what makes another bad are ambiguous and most often decided by personal preferences. However, a program that calls for a ‘competition’ among rappers is gaining quite a lot of popularity. The participants of Mnet’s ‘Unpretty Rapstar’ fiercely fight, “ripping each other apart”, and have gained the attention of viewers in the midst of controversy and disputes. What is the secret behind this hot topic?
Tymee, Cheetah, and Lil Cham were asked about ‘Unpretty Rapstar’, ‘Female Rappers’, ‘Yoon Mi Rae’s Presence’, ‘Hip Hop’, and ‘Rap’.
-What is extraordinary about Yoon Mi Rae?
[Cheetah] Put simply, she is just really good. Although it’s a touchy subject, I think she seems extraordinary because there is this notion of ‘only Yoon Mi Rae’. When it was safe to say that Korea was not affiliated with hip hop, she became the ‘first generation’ female rapper. People, as if they are ‘brainwashed’, have come to set her as the standard by comparing other female rappers to her, and I think that’s a bit wrong.
-What about her skills?
[Cheetah] Fundamentally, she has a different engine. Jessi unni and Jidam have similar nuances. Of course, Jidam is still ‘a learning engine’, but I would say that Yoon Mi Rae is close to the ‘perfected engine’.
[Tymee] It’s hard to explain, but even if she only says “ah”, it’s coming from a completely different engine.
[Cheetah] Hip hop and rap has its roots in America, and I think it’s right to say that she has the elements of the ‘origin’.
-One female rapper has stated that ‘All Korean female rappers train and practice through Yoon Mi Rae’s rap’ in a previous interview.
[Tymee] When I practice, I keep Yoon Mi Rae’s rap as a reference, but I don’t treat it as a textbook. It’s because I’m afraid I’ll be exactly like her. Since she’s so unrivaled, there is the risk of simply copying her.
[Cheetah] Of course I have practiced with Yoon Mi Rae’s rap before. It’s because there was no other female rapper besides her.
[Lil Cham] I have rapped to her songs at karaoke before, but I can’t say that I practiced with her raps.
-Is Yoon Mi Rae the best female rapper in Korea?
[Lil Cham] I don’t think there is such a thing as ‘the best’. Actually, before I participated in ‘Unpretty Rapstar’ I thought that one could be called ‘the best’. However, through the program, I realized that each rapper clearly had an aspect that they were really good at. I’m saying that it’s hard to label someone as ‘the best’. For example, winning first place on ‘Show me the Money’ is not indicative of who the best rapper is. Similarily, I don’t think I can say that Yoon Mi Rae is ‘the best’.
[Tymee] It’s like this: there’s so few female rappers to begin with that I think finding ‘the best’ among them doesn’t make sense. It’s a sensitive topic, but although she is unrivaled, to say that she is ‘the best’ is a bit…
[Cheetah] The three of us respect her very much, and thank her for setting up the playing field. But I don’t want to say that ‘Yoon Mi Rae is the best’. Every rapper intrinsically believes that ‘I’m the best’. I’m like that too.
-If that’s the case, why hasn’t there been a definite line of succession after Yoon Mi Rae?
[Tymee] Honestly, I have thought that it would be nice if Yoon Mi Rae could lead her juniors. Male rappers have the concept of ‘the crew’s youngster’ and encourage him by allowing him to participate in featurings. I don’t think that process follows with Yoon Mi Rae. From her unrivaled position, I haven’t seen the willingness from her to help out other female rappers.
[Cheetah] I say this repeatedly, but I think the public’s ears have been trained to be in sync with Yoon Mi Rae; and therefore, are not prone to be open to other sounds. Especially since people think that if someone has a different style than Yoon Mi Rae, they aren’t good. Of course, it is up to us to garner the attention. I believe that since we have become the center of attention through ‘Unpretty Rapstar’, we should get acknowledged via the release of albums and open up a new field.
-When would you be confident to state that you have succeeded?
[Cheetah] If I am asked to perform overseas, I think I will say that I have succeeded.
[Lil Cham] If I’m still rapping 10 years later despite being a female, I would call that success; since it’s so rare in both overseas and Korea to have a rapper active for that long.
[Tymee] Placing first on music charts. But, it has to be a song that is filled with just my rap, not a featuring. Although that’s going to be really difficult, it is a dream.
-Tell us your future resolutions as a female rapper.
[Lil Cham] It’s a bit of a spoiler, but I plan on participating in another ‘survival of the rappers’ stage. I believe that there were things that I didn’t show during the program, so I want to focus on that.
[Cheetah] I plan on releasing my album soon and working hard, but I also want to participate as a ‘producer’ and not a ‘contestant’ on a show like ‘Unpretty Rapstar’. I think that I will continuously work hard without getting weak if I have those goals and ambitions in mind.
[Tymee] I will prepare my album with great efforts, but I also want to hold many concerts. In addition, through broadcasts and radio, I will try to get close to the public often.
–
.
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[ Source | The Daily Sports [ Translations | HIPHOPKRJERUSALEM (Reuters) - An Israeli military court on Tuesday sentenced a Palestinian to life imprisonment over the killing of three Israeli youths, whose abduction in the occupied West Bank set off a chain of events leading to the 50-day Gaza war last summer.
The court found that Hussam Kawasmeh, a member of the militant Hamas Islamist group, planned the abduction in which Eyal Yifrach, 19, and Gilad Shaer and Naftali Fraenkel, both 16, were shot dead while hitchhiking in the occupied West Bank in June.
Kawasmeh was arrested in August and charged with murder. A three-judge panel sentenced him to three life terms, according to a court document released to the media.
Two Hamas operatives suspected of having killed the youngsters after picking them up on a road near a Jewish settlement died in a firefight with Israeli forces at their West Bank hideout in September.
The bodies of the three Israelis were found in the West Bank nearly three weeks after their disappearance.
In an alleged revenge attack in July, a Palestinian teenager, Mohammed Abu Khudair, was abducted and burned to death in Jerusalem by three suspected Jewish assailants, who have since been charged with his murder.
Khudair’s death and sweeping arrests by Israel of suspected Hamas men across the West Bank led to clashes between Palestinians and Israeli police in East Jerusalem and cross-border rocket fire from the Hamas-controlled Gaza Strip.
A seven-week-long Gaza war ensued in July and August in which, according to the Palestinian Health Ministry, more than 2,100 Palestinians, most of them civilians, were killed. Sixty-seven Israeli soldiers and six civilians in Israel were also killed.Retrovirus generation, concentration, and titration
Retroviruses were generated as described7. To generate virus, pMXs retroviral vectors containing the coding regions of Gata4, Mef2c, Tbx5 and dsRed were transfected into Plat-E cells using Fugene 6 (Roche). Forty-eight hours after transfection, virus-containing supernatants were collected and concentrated by standard ultracentrifugation. Retroviral titration was performed using the Retro-X qRT–PCR Titration Kit (Clontech), as per the manufacturer’s protocols. Ultra-high titre virus (>1 × 1010 plaque-forming units (p.f.u.) per ml) was resuspended in PBS. After verification of high transduction efficiency in cell culture (>95%), a large number of small stock aliquots (10 µl) were made and frozen at −80 °C to ensure consistency among experiments. After one freeze–thaw cycle, titrations were repeated to ensure that active virus was maintained at the desired 1 × 1010 p.f.u. concentration for in vivo injection.
Mouse lines
Periostin (Postn)-Cre:R26R-lacZ mice were obtained by crossing Postn-Cre mice and Rosa26-lacZ mice. Postn-Cre:R26R-YFP mice were obtained by crossing Postn-Cre mice and Rosa26-EYFP mice, and Postn-Cre:R26R-Tomato mice were obtained by crossing Postn-Cre mice and Rosa26-Tomato mice. All transgenic lines for immunohistochemistry and single cell isolation were maintained by crossing with C57BL6 mice (Charles River). BALB/C mice (Charles River) were used for all functional studies after permanent ligation of the left anterior descending artery (LAD) and virus injection. Fsp1-Cre, Tie2-Cre and Myh6-MerCreMer mice were obtained from Jackson Labs, and lines were validated before further breeding. Fsp1-R26R, Tie2-R26R and Myh6-MerCreMer-YFP mice were obtained by crossing Fsp1-Cre, Tie2-Cre or Myh6-MerCreMer mice to R26R-lacZ or R26R-EYFP mice. Efficiency of Cre recombination induction for Myh6-MerCreMerYFP was tested by immunohistochemistry for YFP after injection of various doses of tamoxifen. To pulse label the pre-existing CMs, adult Myh6-MerCreMerYFP mice (8–12-weeks old) were treated with tamoxifen (Sigma) by intraperitoneal injection once a day for 5 days at a dosage of 20 mg kg−1 day−1. GMT delivery and coronary artery ligation were performed 2 days afterwards.
Mouse MI model and in vivo delivery
The animal protocol for surgery was approved by institutional guidelines (UCSF Institutional Animal Care and Use Committee). All surgeries and subsequent analyses were performed blinded for genotype and intervention. Mice were anaesthetized with 2.4% isoflurane/97.6% oxygen and placed in a supine position on a heating pad (37 °C). Animals were intubated with a 19 G stump needle and ventilated with room air using a MiniVent Type 845 mouse ventilator (Hugo Sachs Elektronik-Harvard Apparatus; stroke volume, 250 μl; respiratory rate, 120 breaths per minute). MI was induced by permanent ligation of the LAD with a 7-0 prolene suture as described28. Sham-operated animals served as surgical controls and were subjected to the same procedures as the experimental animals with the exception that the LAD was not ligated. A pool of concentrated virus (GMT, or GMTR) was mixed, and 10 µl of mixed virus plus 10 µl of PBS or 40 ng µl−1 thymosin β4 was injected into the myocardium through an insulin syringe with an incorporated 29 G needle (BD). Injection with a full dosage was carried out along the boundary between the infarct zone and border zone based on the blanched infarct area after coronary artery occlusion. After injection, the chest was closed with sutures and the mouse was allowed to recover with the mouse ventilator and heating pad. All surgical procedures were performed under aseptic conditions. At 2 days and 1, 2, |
5 book The Serpent and the Rainbow.
. Beauvoir held a patent on the process of obtaining hecogenin from plant leaves until 1993.[4]Getty Images
The Vikings assigned cornerback Xavier Rhodes to cover Giants receiver Odell Beckham Jr. on Monday night, an approach that worked well for the Vikings and for Rhodes. On Tuesday, coach Mike Zimmer explained the rationale for moving Rhodes out of his potential comfort zone.
“We have evidence that [Rhodes] can play both sides and that’s always a good thing,” Zimmer told reporters a day after Minnesota’s 24-10 win. “You see guys do it in practice, but you never really know. I don’t know why but corners tend to get comfortable playing one side or the other. The way they break and do things, they tend to get comfortable. So if you have evidence they can do it I think it allows to do things. He wasn’t covering him one-on-one all night, it wasn’t like that. He came out of the game some. [Terence] Newman went over there. Hopefully we mix up the coverages that we played a little bit.”
It’s a smart approach. Ultimately, guys like Josh Norman and Richard Sherman stay on one side of the formation because they’re comfortable there. Making them move around keeps them from getting so comfortable that they don’t want to move.
It happens on both sides of the ball, with receivers and defensive backs. Often, it’s an issue at the Pro Bowl, where a glut of players who play one specific spot at receiver or corner have to figure out who will play in his preferred location, and who won’t.
In today’s NFL, versatility is the key, for any player. As Rhodes gains notices as one of the top defensive backs in the game, his ability to move around will help him maintain that status, and to build upon it.Pro Wrestling Sheet has learned Ric Flair was hospitalized this morning for heart-related issues … however, his rep claims it was due to “routine monitoring.”
Sources told us this morning that Flair was taken to an ICU after being admitted by his family, but we were unable to verify with his management team.
However, a rep for the 68-year old has now released a statement on social media saying, “Yes, Ric is checked into a hospital for some routine monitoring. No, there is no reason to panic.”
Adding, “Yes, we’d like to thank his fiancé & the incredible hospital staff who are providing the best care. No, we cannot answer any personal questions. Yes, Ric would want you to go out and have a great weekend … Nature Boy style!”
We’ll keep you updated if there are any more official updates.It's a particularly pressing question of late, following not only catastrophic floods in Texas and Oklahoma, but also a historic heatwave in India that has killed over 2,000 people so far, and President Barack Obama's recent trip to the National Hurricane Centre in Miami, where he explicitly invoked the idea that global warming will make these storms worse. Recent floods in Texas. Credit:Rodolfo Gonzalez, via Statesman.com As the Nye case indicates, there is still a lot of pushback whenever anyone dares to link climate change to extreme weather events. But we don't have to be afraid to talk about this relationship. We merely have to be scrupulously accurate in doing so, and let scientists lead the way. Take the floods. One exemplary voice here has been Texas Tech climate researcher (and evangelical Christian) Katharine Hayhoe, who took to Facebook to explain the science. As Hayhoe noted, climate change doesn't "cause" individual extreme events, in this case or in others. But "just like steroids make a baseball player stronger, climate change EXACERBATES many of our weather extremes, making many of them, on average, worse than they would have been naturally," she said. Thus, Hayhoe treated the link between a changing climate and the floods not as a matter of simple causation, but as a matter of context. She notes that overall, "heavy rainfall and flood risk is increasing," due to the fact that warming charges the atmosphere with more water vapor, which is then more available to fall in individual precipitation events. (Texas state climatologist John Nielsen-Gammon has made similar remarks. )
And indeed, Texas lies in a region of the country that has seen, overall, a 16 per cent increase in the amount of rain or snow that falls in the heaviest 1 per cent of precipitation events, according to the National Climate Assessment. Damage from Hurricane Sandy that struck the US north-east in November 2012. Credit:Reuters And what about India's extreme heat? Here again, we must bear in mind that extreme weather events are not directly caused by climate change. Indeed, weather extremes can occur - and weather records can break - due solely to natural climate variability. Nonetheless, and as with past major heat extremes, such as Australia's 2012-2013 "angry summer," the odds of an event like this one occurring may have shifted. Indeed, meteorologist Jeff Masters of the Weather Underground has directly stated that the heat wave "was made much more probable by the fact that Earth is experiencing its hottest temperatures on record." Precisely how the odds of an event like this one have changed will, no doubt, soon be formally studied by climate researchers, who use a sophisticated statistical methodology. We don't know how such an inquiry will turn out, but it's worth noting that after the deadly 2003 European heatwave, scientists estimated that "human influence has at least doubled the risk of a heatwave exceeding this threshold magnitude." Indeed, a recent study found that 75 per cent of all "moderate" heat extremes on Earth - events that would only happen one out of every 1,000 days in a normal climate - are now more likely to occur because of climate change.
Overall, all of this is consistent with a finding from a recent special report on extreme events by the U.N.'s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which noted that "a changing climate leads to changes in the frequency, intensity, spatial extent, duration and timing of extreme weather and climate events, and can result in unprecedented extreme weather and climate events." And then, finally, there are the hurricanes. Speaking at the National Hurricane Centre on the eve of hurricane season, Obama waded into this highly contentious issue - and didn't flinch. He said: The best climate scientists in the world are telling us that extreme weather events like hurricanes are likely to become more powerful. When you combine stronger storms with rising seas, that's a recipe for more devastating floods. Climate change didn't cause Hurricane Sandy, but it might have made it stronger. The fact that the sea level in New York Harbor is about a foot higher than a century ago certainly made the storm surge worse. This, too, is scientifically backed. For instance, a cautious fact sheet on hurricanes and global warming from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory affirms that the average storm should be more intense in the future. And on Friday a study found that typhoons (cyclones in the western Pacific Ocean) could grow 14 per cent stronger over the course of this century due to warming oceans.
The claim about rising seas is even easier to support. Even if storms didn't change at all, rising seas would amplify their destructive power, allowing their storm surges to penetrate further inland than they would have in a world featuring lower seas. Just to make sure about this, I asked for a reaction to Obama's remarks from MIT's Kerry Emanuel, one of the world's leading hurricane experts. "In his remarks at the National Hurricane Centre, President Obama presented a balanced view of how climate change is expected to affect hurricanes," said Emanuel by email. "His statement that warming is expected to make storms more powerful while sea level rise is already contributing to increased risks associated with storm surges is in accord with the consensus view of climate scientists." The Washington PostMount Diablo Unified School District trustees must commission an independent investigation of the premature contract extensions for five top administrators, including the superintendent and the district’s legal counsel.
Residents deserve a full explanation of the facts, ethics and legality of deals for Superintendent Steve Lawrence, General Counsel Greg Rolen, Chief Financial Officer Bryan Richards and Assistant Superintendents Julie Braun Martin and Rose Lock.
Each of their contracts was due to expire in June 2013. But school trustees, at the urging of then-board President Sherry Whitmarsh, last spring abruptly approved extensions until June 2014. The vote was 4-1 with only Trustee Cheryl Hansen dissenting.
For Lawrence, the deal meant that his salary, set in 2010 at $249,500, would once again increase annually at a rate equal to at least the Consumer Price Index plus 1 percent. The size of that automatic increase seems to violate state law that went into effect this year.
The deals also meant that new trustees elected in November would be stuck with Lawrence and Rolen for at least 1½ years. Lawrence was a driving force behind the district’s costly, ill-conceived and deceptive bond measure on the June 2010 ballot. Rolen has repeatedly stonewalled requests for public information.
The contract changes were rife with irregularities. The actual documents were not made public before the vote. Although the board officially approved contract “extensions,” the subsequent documents simply rewrote the original 2009 and 2010 contracts to show new expiration dates.
Those final documents were never brought back to the full board for review. They were signed by some of the board members in the fall, apparently just before the November election. Despite reporter Theresa Harrington’s repeated requests for the documents, they were not made public until this month.
In other words, it was not until more than seven months after the board vote that the public got a chance to see what the new deals looked like. Exactly when trustees signed the documents remains unclear because there are no dates with the signatures. And no copies of the documents with the employees’ signatures have been released; it’s not clear that they’ve ever signed them.
It’s also not clear who wrote the contracts or whether the contracts were ever subjected to standard legal review. And, if they were, did Rolen, the general counsel, review his own contract, which would seem a clear conflict of interest?
The good news is that voters booted Whitmarsh out of office in November and trustee Gary Eberhart opted not to seek re-election. The two holdover trustees who approved the extensions, Linda Mayo and Lynne Dennler, owe the public an explanation for their actions.
Meanwhile Hansen and new Trustees Barbara Oaks and Brian Lawrence have called in an outside legal firm for advice. They must not stop there. Only a full investigation that results in a clear public report on what transpired will suffice.
This district has been a cesspool of secrecy and backroom deal-making for too long. It’s time for full transparency.About
The goal of the WEGV- Ann Arbor Community Radio is to help bring voice to the people, issues and the music that make our town vibrant and interesting. Local radio in Ann Arbor is now dominated by affiliates of the areas major universities, a handful of small commercially owned stations and a few signals that stretch out from the radio giants 40 miles to the East in Detroit. We have our construction permit from the FCC and are now planning to setup our antenna to begin broadcasting.
Low power FM (LPFM) are non-commercial, run by non-profit organizations, schools, community groups, local governments and churches. They are not available to individuals or for commercial operations. LPFM's operate at 100 watts or less and typically reach a broadcast radius of approximately 3-15 miles.The FCC accepted new applications from prospective stations in 2013 and Ann Arbor Community Radio was the only Washtenaw County applicant to file a submission. The station's official call sign is WEGV and will transmit from the frequency at 102.3 FM.
We're particularly interested in promoting greater diversity on the airwaves by providing access to communities traditionally under-represented in media including African American & multicultural families, women and seniors. Founder David Pittman is an alumnus of the University of Michigan and campus radio station WCBN. His professional media career began with WJR Radio as a weekend producer for Detroit Tiger's baseball, and has included stints with WUOM, WGPR and TV Tokyo in New York City.
We'll use the initial launch funds to secure a new broadcast antenna and transmitter. Once we have our broadcast equipment, we can setup and be the on air relatively quickly. We've already found a prime antenna location west of town that would likely give us coverage of most of if not all of Ann Arbor. We've been streaming for 3 years on our website and mobile app. We have a radio automation system in place to run the station remotely and have local partners ready to create new programs. Now we need your help to flip the switch!Posted by KAIJU JAPAN on November 05, 2016
In the middle of a cosmos field in Fukuoka Prefecture Japan, huge Shin Godzilla 7 meters height and 10 meters length made of straw has emerged.
About 220 people volunteer worked in accordance with the local autumn festival.
The brave figure as in the movie Godzilla Resurgence that got favorite reception appeared.
This straw Shin Godzilla follows the details of the original model sculpted by Takayuki Takeya.
This huge Shin Godzilla will be in public until early December.
Last fall, they exhibited the straw of the huge wild boar, and got great reputation on the Internet.
They were expected to create a greater straw statue this year and was planning mammos first.
However, the great hit of Godzilla Resurgence changed their plan and they decided to make Shin Godzilla statue.
It took 2 months and a half or them to complete the shape of the muscles and dorsal fin.
They reproduced the epic to the tail of the bending condition.
Mr. Kazunori Nishimoto (49) of the furniture craftsman who directed the production "curve portion was expressed by using bamboos that was curve roasted in the fire in the framework.
"Our purpose is make the audience surprised and happy" he talks.
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Kaiju.Japan.Jugemcart@gmail.comLet \(A\) be a \(m \times n\) matrix. If there are scalar \(\lambda\) and a non-zero vector \(\mathbf{x}\) such that \(A\mathbf{x} = \lambda\mathbf{x}\), we call such scalar eigenvalue, and such vector eigenvector.
There can be more than one eigenvalue for a given matrix, and there is an infinite number of eigenvectors corresponding to one eigenvalue. All eigenvectors that correspond to one a unique eigenvalue lie on the same line, but have different magnitudes.
Seems simple, and it is, but so what? It looks like a trivial thing; how come these eigenvectors and eigenvalues are so ubiquitous in linear algebra? It turns out that some useful special matrices can be computed, and some useful theorems can be build upon this simple definition. IANM (I Am Not a Mathematician), so I'll let you use your math textbook to discover that further.
Let's do some Clojure: given a matrix, how do I find eigenvalues and eigenvectors? The function is called ev! and it can be found in the uncomplicate.neanderthal.linalg namespace:
( require'[ uncomplicate.neanderthal [ core :refer [ col entry nrm2 mv scal axpy copy mm dia ] ] [ native :refer [ dge ] ] [ linalg :refer [ ev! tri! trf ] ] ] )
I'm following the example 1 from page 210; there is a matrix a and we are looking for 2 eigenvalues with corresponding eigenvectors. Calling def inside a let block is not a coding style to be proud of, but here I do it because I need an easy way to produce printable outputs in org-mode and org-babel, which is used to generate this nice text from live code.
( let [ a ( dge 2 2 [ -4 3 -6 5 ] ) ;; note: column-oriented! eigenvectors ( dge 2 2 ) eigenvalues ( ev! a nil eigenvectors ) ] ( def lambda1 ( entry eigenvalues 0 0 ) ) ( def x1 ( col eigenvectors 0 ) ) ( def lambda2 ( entry eigenvalues 1 0 ) ) ( def x2 ( col eigenvectors 1 ) ) )
The first eigenvector is \(\lambda = 1\) (the order is not important):
lambda1
-1.0
An infinite number of vectors correspond to this λ value, but they are all linearly dependent: find one base vector, and you can construct any other by scaling that one. That base vector forms a subspace, or eigenspace. The base corresponding to \(\lambda = 1\) is \(r(-0.89, 0.45)\):
x1
#RealBlockVector[double, n:2, offset: 0, stride:1] [ -0.89 0.45 ]
Mathematicians warn us to always be skeptical. Let's check that λ 1 and \(\mathbf{x_1}\) are really an eigenvalue and eigenvector:
( let [ a ( dge 2 2 [ -4 3 -6 5 ] ) ] ( axpy -1 ( mv a x1 ) ( scal lambda1 x1 ) ) )
#RealBlockVector[double, n:2, offset: 0, stride:1] [ 0.00 0.00 ]
Yes, they are.
Perhaps you wonder why I haven't simply check these two vectors for equality with =. Recall from the part 1 of this tutorial that comparing floating point numbers for equality is a tricky business. Even a small difference of 0.00000001, that can appear due to inevitable rounding errors, would break such equality check. Even those numbers, 0.89, and 0.45 are not very precise - they have much more digits, but Neanderthal rounds them to two decimals for readability. These are the actual values to the max precision available by 64 bits:
( doall ( seq x1 ) )
-0.8944271909999159 0.4472135954999579
Another benefit of using a good numerical software (such as Neanderthal) is that the eigenvectors we get are normalized:
( nrm2 x1 )
1.0
We can repeat the same procedure for λ 2 ; it is a good idea if you test them as an exercise in your trusty Clojure REPL.
lambda2
2.0
x2
#RealBlockVector[double, n:2, offset: 2, stride:1] [ 0.71 -0.71 ]
Eigenvalues are not necessarily distinct. Consider example 2 from page 214:
( let [ a ( dge 3 3 [ 5 4 2 4 5 2 2 2 2 ] ) ;; note: column-oriented! eigenvectors ( dge 3 3 ) eigenvalues ( ev! a nil eigenvectors ) ] [ ( col eigenvalues 0 ) eigenvectors ] )
'(#RealBlockVector(double n:3 offset: 0 stride:1) ( 1.00 10.00 1.00 ) #RealGEMatrix(double mxn:3x3 layout:column offset:0) ▥ ↓ ↓ ↓ ┓ → -0.75 0.67 -0.03 → 0.60 0.67 -0.42 → 0.30 0.33 0.91 ┗ ┛ )
\(\lambda = 1\) appears two times. The space corresponding to it has multiplicity 2, and the dimension of its corresponding eigenspace is 2. As an exercise, you might check whether any linear combination of these two eigenvectors (column 0 and column 2 from the result matrix) is indeed an eigenvector (it should be!).
You might also wonder why those eigenvalues are in the first column of a result matrix. Eigenvalues are usually complex numbers. That matrix has \(m\times{2}\) dimensions. The first column contains the real part, and the second the imaginary part. These examples from the textbook are well-designed to be easily computed by hand, so I knew that the imaginary part was zero, and didn't bother to clutter the introductory code. In general, I guess that eigenvalues will have imaginary component more often than not (IANM).Disclaimer: we at BrownieComicWriter Enterprises neither encourage nor condone the unwarranted or unannounced seizure of booty. Thank you for your attention.
Oh hey, it's a comic! We haven't had one of those in a while, have we?Well, here it is, the inevitable "Booty" joke. (You know, since Foxy is a pirate and everything.) But I tried to put a new spin on it, while also paying tribute to the legendary Weaver, who did something like this before: Warning: slight NSFW I started this absolutely ages ago; the Foxy in the first panel was sketched five months ago, back in April. I'm not sure exactly what made me quit it, but it didn't go unfinished forever! I'm sure I had something else to say about this, but I can't remember it right now.Brofred!Maybe you got some next-generation gear over the holidays. Maybe you're just cleaning out unused cruft in this new year. Whatever the reason, you've got gadgets that need to go. Here's where to bring them for responsible, ecological, and (mostly) free recycling.
Many towns, cities, counties, and states have their own e-cycling programs that offer convenient drop-off locations for old computers, big monitors, and other electronics. The EPA suggests a cluster of search sites for helping you find a local ecycling program, including EcoSquid and the Consumer Electronics Association's MyGreenElectronics. And beyond the picks you see below, the EPA has a grid list of consumer-friendly e-cycling programs from stores and manufacturers.
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Update: Margaret emailed us with what seems like the most straightforward and easy search tool: Earth911's local recycling search. Type in what you want to recycle and your ZIP code, and you'll get some guidance.
With that in mind, almost everybody has a Best Buy, Goodwill, or Staples somewhere near them. Read up on their recycling programs, and learn about two other options you might not have considered:
Best Buy
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Oddly enough, the electronics superstore that only just recently dropped a hefty restocking fee also has the most convenient and customer-friendly electronics recycling program around. Each household can bring in up to three items per day, including older-style CRT TVs (up to 32 inches in size), any flat-panel TV, monitors, cellphones, GPS units, DVD players—basically, if it has a plug and a display, and you can carry it, Best Buy takes it. There's a $10 charge for TVs and monitors, but you get that back in a $10 gift card. [Details]
Your Cellphone Maker or Service Provider
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New cellphone packages often come with a pouch in which to mail back an older cellphone for recycling, or for re-purposing as an emergency 911 phone for community services. If your phone didn't, check out your current or past cellular provider. Each of them offers phone recylcing services, generally free and offered through both in-store drop-offs and postage-paid mail-ins. Your phone's maker (LG, Motorola, etc.) likely offers a similar low-hassle deal. [Details: AT&T, Sprint, T-Mobile, Verizon; manufacturer details linked at EPA's Ecycling site]
Office Depot & Staples
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Both of the office supply giants are fairly convenient for recycling smaller gadgets in different ways. Office Depot sells boxes (small, medium, and large for $5, $10, and $15, respectively) that you can fill with pretty much any gadget that fits, then drop it off for recycling. Staples does the smaller stuff for free, like phones, PDAs, calculators and the like. If you drop off TVs or monitors or other notably big gear, it's a $10 charge. It seems steep, but the back-end recycling groups such stores work through are often charging them very close to that amount themselves, or possibly a bit more. [Details: Office Depot, Staples]
Goodwill
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The place thats synonymous with charitable drop-off partners with Dell to accept computers and monitors in "any condition," as well as any gear associated or attached to a computer. Its recycling program is free, and its web site is refreshingly simple. [Details]
Apple
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Their recycling program is restricted to computers, iPods, and cellphones, but it makes it rewarding to turn them in. Recycle your old iPod or any brand of cellphone at an Apple store and you'll get 10 percent off the purchase of a new iPod. If you can't make it to a store, you can print out a prepaid shipping label. You can also recycle your older PC or Mac, desktop or laptop, through a prepaid shipping program through Apple, and if your older computer is worth anything, in reuse potential or just parts, that value will be applied to an Apple Store credit. Recycling any computer or display without worrying about the value is a straight $30, though you can ship it with a prepaid label. [Details]
Where do you recycle your gadgets and computer gear when it falls out of use? Tell us about recycling spots and ideas we missed in the comments, and we'll update the post with good picks.While visiting Seattle recently, I had the pleasure of eating at Bread & Circuses Food Truck. Full disclosure: one of the owners/chef’s is my sister’s husband, but I assure you I wouldn’t be writing about them if I hated the food. It’d be one of those awkward conversations about how I “accidentally deleted” all the pictures I took and never got around to writing about them. Lucky for me, I absolutely loved their food and it seems like I’m not alone in that. They’ve been featured in Seattle Eater 1, 2, and 3 times, Washington Beer Blog, Thrillist, Seattle Met, Seattle Food Truck, and I am sure the list continues.
My brother-in-law, Syd, has always been cooking since I’ve known him. He’s worked at Haven Gastropub, Pizza Ortica, Skillet, Where Ya At Matt?, Roux, etc. I have always loved his food, and to prove that he was also the chef for my wedding in Ireland. I admire his drive and work ethic, and I am so happy he is a part of my life. He makes my sister happy, which is priority #1 – it’s just a bonus he cooks really well.
I traveled to Spinnaker Bay Brewing to relax after a day of museums and almost getting injured by an Uber driver (long story), and of course to have some food. The food truck was there in honor of Spinnaker Bay’s unite pale ale being released (yay! Pink boots in Seattle!). Despite the rain, I was able to get some outside shots of the truck and snag a table to enjoy a sampling of some of Bread & Circuses’s delicious food.
Hello real mac n’ cheese. Ya know, the kind that has that all-important bechamel based cheese sauce that is so rich, you feel all warm and cozy even when it’s pretty damn cold outside. To show how reckless they are, they add a sprinkle of bacon because – why not. I really liked the addition of bacon even though it wasn’t an aggressive amount, it was that added salt kick and texture balance I wanted at that moment. It took some serious willpower to save my appetite for the onslaught of food I had ordered.
From what I hear, they typically have a stick with a pin wheel of potato chips but the chips already loose was just as good. The you-need-to-hit-the-gym cheese sauce was present again to make the chips all the more sinful, and I loved the salt balance on these too. I have a soft spot for a salty chip, and these were obviously homemade and so addictive. Word to the wise, get these to share because you need these in your life while having a beer because salty carbs and beer are some of my favorite things. Surprisingly enough, the crowd was buzzing about this caesar salad made with brussels sprouts. I kept overhearing people saying “you have to get that caesar?” and I don’t disagree. I love a good caesar, but brussels sprouts? I was skeptical. I only really love brussels sprouts when they are roasted, but again I was impressed because it was so tasty. The texture was great, and it was really filling. I don’t think I can say I’ve had a better salad in a while, and it’s mildly shocking that it came from a truck (I said mildly because food trucks are getting to be equal competition these days for restaurants).
The star of the show was the War of the Pig sandwich. This is the sandwich that everyone has been drooling over since the truck became a thing, and with good reason. It’s filling as hell, rich, flavorful, crunchy, I could keep going. It’s italian roast pork, aioli, havarti, broccoli rabe, jus, and chilli oil all on a hoagie bun. I am a huge fan of broccoli rabe, and I don’t think I’ve ever had it in a sandwich before, but it’s a great addition of texture and brightness to contrast the rich meat and cheese. The bun is light and squishy, the perfect vessel for soaking up all those juices and flavors, so it’s apparent to me why this is the most talked about item on the truck. Well done.
I am a burger person. A good burger has lots of criteria and rules like the bun has to match the diameter of the burger patty because you don’t want to have a bite of all bun or all patty, and it can’t be overdone, not burnt, not too pink in the middle, not to hard or messy to eat, there are a lot of rules (bonus points to any reader who knows the line “there are a lot of rules” and what movie that’s from). This burger has the perfect squishy-yet-toasted bun, the perfectly cooked burger that very accurately matches the size of the bun, it’s not too messy to eat, it’s a myriad of flavors that are so discreetly genius it makes me upset that I doubted this underdog. It’s quite possibly my favorite thing from the truck. Sources indicate something about importing the cheese (provel) special from St. Louis just for this damn burger. I thought it looked overdone, it wasn’t. I thought it might be dry, it wasn’t. I ate the most of this burger and I wish I had another one sitting in front of me right now.
As fate may have it, my brother-in-law – Syd, will be appearing on Esquire Network’s new show “The Next Great Burger” and it’s airing today at 10pm pst. I am so excited about it. I have been hounding my sister to find out who won and she refuses to tell me. Let’s all tune in and find out his fate together!
Lastly, I had the brownies. You guys all probably know I am a bit biased because desserts are my thing, but these were pretty tasty. They were rich, decadent, soft, and chewy which were all satisfying after such an excessive meal. I have heard really good things about their other menu items so it looks like I will have to travel up to Seattle again if only to have more of Bread and Circuses food. I am also very excited to visit their new lunch spot located inside the Two Beers & Seattle Cider Companies tasting room that has just expanded and is supposedly super rad. Washington Beer Blog was there to cover the scoop.
I know I talked a lot about Syd, but it’s also thanks to chef Lil Rob and James that Bread and Circuses became a reality. The food scene in Seattle is a competitive and impressive one, and it’s great to see a up and coming food truck make such an impact in such little time. You can catch them at Two Beers’s taproom “The Woods” and traveling around the Seattle area feeding the hungry masses. Check out their facebook page, website, and twitter to find out where they will be next if you are in the Seattle area. I might just see you there, while shoving a burger in my face. No regrets.Story highlights Huma Abedin stood by Anthony Weiner as he addressed new revelations of lewd behavior
Lisa Bloom: She has a right, but it's a craven political move, and it degrades her
She says we need to get rid of the wife-as-doormat visual; it is basically abusive
Bloom: Note to married male politicians who stray: Face the press alone
Isn't it time to call the spectacle of the suffering political wife, standing by her man in the media glare as he admits to his latest sexual offense against her, what it really is: spousal abuse?
Huma Abedin has the right to make any decisions she wants about her life, just as a victim of domestic abuse has the right to return for more -- but we don't have to stand silently by and condone it.
On Tuesday, she read from a script about forgiving her husband, New York mayoral candidate Anthony Weiner, as he was forced to address allegations that he sent sexually explicit texts and photographs of his genitals to a woman he'd never met, a year after he'd resigned in shame for this very accusations in 2011 and publicly promised to stop. And after she'd given birth to their child, and after he'd presumably gone to whatever Twitter sexting rehab he found, and Lord knows what else.
Abedin, a top aide to Hillary Clinton, was reduced to the standing-by-her-man-at-the-news-conference archetype, a dated wife-as-doormat visual it's time to eliminate from our political theater.
Lisa Bloom
Sure, she can keep him around if she wants to. But we don't have to bless their craven political move to stand together before the cameras to protect his career, nor do we have to play along as they both pretend that this is something other than more public degradation of her. That they are both consenting adults who participate in this behavior does not make it acceptable to the rest of us. (Simple test: Would you want your daughter in that tableau?)
JUST WATCHED Did Weiner's wife do the right thing? Replay More Videos... MUST WATCH Did Weiner's wife do the right thing? 01:57
Photos: Wives who stood by their men Photos: Wives who stood by their men Anthony Weiner and Huma Abedin – With his wife, Huma Abedin, by his side, New York mayoral candidate and former congressman Anthony Weiner confirms on July 23 that some of the sexually explicit online exchanges that were published by a gossip website happened after previous revelations forced him to resign from the U.S. House in 2011. Hide Caption 1 of 10 Photos: Wives who stood by their men Eliot and Silda Spitzer – Former New York Gov. Eliot Spitzer, shown here with wife Silda Wall Spitzer, resigned in March 2008 after it was revealed that he had spent thousands of dollars on prostitutes. Hide Caption 2 of 10 Photos: Wives who stood by their men David and Wendy Vitter – Louisiana Sen. David Vitter, here with wife Wendy Baldwin Vitter, admitted in July 2007 his involvement in the "D.C. Madam" scandal after his phone number had been published in a list of phone records from a prostitution ring. Three years later he was re-elected to the U.S. Senate. Hide Caption 3 of 10 Photos: Wives who stood by their men Larry and Suzanne Thompson Craig – Former Idaho Sen. Larry Craig was arrested in June 2007 in a men's restroom at the Minneapolis-St. Paul International Airport on charges of lewd conduct, but later pled guilty to a misdemeanor charge of disorderly conduct. His wife, Suzanne Thompson, was at his side during the news conference in September 2007 when he announced his intention to resign. He later changed his mind and served out his term. Hide Caption 4 of 10 Photos: Wives who stood by their men Jim McGreevy and Dina Matos – Former New Jersey Gov. Jim McGreevey, with his then-wife Dina Matos standing by, told a packed news conference in August 2004: "My truth is that I am a gay American" and that he had engaged in a consensual affair with his homeland security adviser, who had threatened to sue him for sexual harassment. Hide Caption 5 of 10 Photos: Wives who stood by their men Bill and Hillary Clinton – Hillary Clinton was with her husband, former President Bill Clinton, in January 1998 when he denied having "sexual relations with that woman, Miss Lewinsky." However, when he later admitted in August 1998 that the relationship with the intern was "not appropriate," she was not with him and later was chilly toward him during a walk to Marine One. Hide Caption 6 of 10 Photos: Wives who stood by their men Those who didn't: Elizabeth Edwards – Elizabeth Edwards, the wife of former presidential candidate and ex-North Carolina Sen. John Edwards, was not with him when, in August 2008, he finally admitted to an affair with a campaign worker. Elizabeth Edwards, who was suffering from breast cancer, died in 2010. Hide Caption 7 of 10 Photos: Wives who stood by their men Those who didn't: Jenny Sanford – After her husband, former South Carolina Gov. Mark Sanford, admitted to sneaking away to Argentina to be with his mistress in June 2009, Jenny Sanford moved out of the governor's mansion and later divorced him in 2010. Hide Caption 8 of 10 Photos: Wives who stood by their men Those who didn't: Darlene Ensign – Former Nevada Sen. John Ensign was embroiled in allegations of an extramarital affair in 2007 and 2008, and his wife, Darlene, who initially stood with him when he announced he would not seek re-election, was not by his side as the drama unfolded. Hit with multiple investigations, Ensign resigned in 2011. Hide Caption 9 of 10 Photos: Wives who stood by their men Those who didn't: Maria Shriver – After initially standing by her husband, former California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, through multiple allegations of sexual misconduct before and during his |
to play over 100 games to tighten its margin of error. **You are your current rank** If you were Silver last year, but Bronze this year, then you are Bronze. If you can't climb back out of Bronze, then obviously you shouldn't be Silver. If someone was Diamond last year and somehow dropped into Silver without being able to get back out, nobody would consider him Diamond. He'd be called out for being an intentional feeder or a boosted/sold account. Given the following, what do you think a player's rank should be? * Player wins 100% of the time against full Bronze/Unranked teams * Player loses 100% of the time against teams with Silver+ members Some would say he should be at the bottom of Silver. Others would say he should be at the top of Bronze. People who understand MMR would say it doesn't matter, because there is almost no difference. There are Bronze players with higher MMR than Silver players. Division V players are very similar to the Division I players of the previous tier. The primary difference is that the upper tier players managed to pass their promotional series. If you think you should be a specific rank, prove it. Be that rank. If you can't, then you are wrong. Stop rationalizing that you are better because you [once reached a higher rank](http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/GloryDays). When you complain about being stuck lower than your "real" rank, you come across as [a whiner that is never going to improve](http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/JadedWashout). A one-time rank below Challenger (the exception since you can be demoted without losing) doesn't prove that you are that good unless you can maintain it. Stop calling everyone around your rank trash, because if they're all trash and you can't progress past them, that doesn't say much for your own skill. This message has been brought to you by unranked trash. Don't let that bias you, though. Last season? I was *unranked*. \*touts past performance\*
Title
Body Cancel
SaveWhat can a childhood ring and an old clock possibly have in common?
On Bones Season 10 Episode 14, these two seemingly simple objects actually hold a great deal of significance.
We get the opportunity to see Max again in "The Putter in the Rough," and he is still a character who has secrets he feels he has to keep from Brennan and Booth.
Brennan is maybe a little too quick to jump to negative conclusions. We know Max has done terrible things, but he’s also been there for her in some really important ways. She’s trusted him before, so for her to suddenly decide he could be too dangerous for Christine to be around is surprising.
What does make sense, is how she feels Max is abandoning Christine when he cancels his plans with her. Regardless of how much their relationship has evolved, Brennan still feels as though she was abandoned as a child.
Booth tracks Max for Brennan, whose suspicions that he’s up to something turn out to be correct. Still, I wouldn’t have bought it if Max had been doing something wrong that didn’t have a useful purpose. Deep down, Max has always been good, and he’s always wanted a relationship with his daughter.
Has Max been up to something that could get him in trouble? Yes. Definitely. But, it turns out that he does have the best of intentions, and it actually brings some closure for Brennan. Max brings her a ring she had as a child. The ring symbolizes safety, since Max’s recovery of it means a danger to Brennan is no longer alive.
I can’t help but sense that there’s more to it than this, but for now, it’s a nice moment that comes with an explanation of why Brennan’s parents abandoned her. The ring also becomes a symbol of family, especially as Brennan passes it down to little Christine.
Meanwhile, Wendell is on a mission to repair his girlfriend’s clock. He believes he broke it, and he also believes it to be extremely valuable. He asks for help from Hodgins, which makes for a fun plot line. As the two of them work to solve the case, they also work on the clock together.
The moments between Wendell and Hodgins make for fun comic relief, and also remind us why Jack Hodgins is such a great character. When his abilities to fix clocks fail him (just another random fact about Hodgins), he brings out a plan B. He has managed to get another clock just like it, and it only cost him nine dollars off Craigslist. It turns out, the clock isn’t valuable monetarily, but it’s still pretty priceless.
That brings to me back to the common thread of this episode, which is symbolism in priceless objects. That ring? It’s more than just a childhood possession. And as Wendell’s girlfriend explains, that old clock was once a symbol for her grandmother, and it has now become of symbol of their own relationship.
What did you think of "The Putter in the Rough"? Share your thoughts in the comments below!
Need to catch up on past episodes? Remember that you can always watch Bones online right here via TV Fanatic!
Ashley Bissette Sumerel was a staff writer for TV Fanatic. She retired in September 2017. Follow her on Twitter and on Google+.Get the biggest Arsenal FC stories by email Subscribe Thank you for subscribing We have more newsletters Show me See our privacy notice Could not subscribe, try again later Invalid Email
Sam Allardyce will bid to copy the Chelsea blueprint for stopping Arsenal at Upton Park today.
But the West Ham boss reckons the Gunners are mounting a title challenge because they have now toughened up at the back.
The Hammers have beaten Arsenal only once at home this century – and lost the last six meetings home and away, conceding eight goals against them last season.
Big Sam was at the Emirates on Monday to see Jose Mourinho’s side stifle Mesut Ozil and co. And he reckons his relegation-threatened team can trouble the Gunners the same way.
“It was a very good plan for facing Arsenal,” he said. “A very fluent and exciting passing team really got nullified by Chelsea’s good tactics. And a team that bought into the tactics and worked extremely hard.
“I am talking about the ones you perhaps don’t expect, like Willian and Eden Hazard. They all played their part to try to achieve a result as a team. They had their opportunities to create and produce the flair but didn’t quite do it on the day.
“Mourinho set Arsenal a trap and they didn’t cope well with it. I would hope we can start quick and press Arsenal and get any mistakes out of them.”
Allardyce admitted his side “got a bit scared of Manchester United” in the defeat at Old Trafford and wants them to play without fear against Arsenal.
But the former Bolton and Blackburn boss reckoned Arsene Wenger’s team can no longer be bullied physically since the return of Mathieu Flamini.
“They have become a bit more resilient in their tackling and are not conceding goals from set pieces or corners that they used to be frail on.
“They have already scored six headers from set-pieces and they have improved in those two areas which has taken them towards the top of the Premier League.
“Perhaps Flamini has been the big difference and he has gone around geeing up all the players which they have maybe lacked before. He not only leads by example but he gets all the other players going as well.
“You need to be good both in and out of possession – otherwise you will not win the league.”CLOSE A military judge has found that Bowe Bergdahl should serve no prison time for endangering his comrades by walking off his Afghanistan post. The judge also gave Bergdahl a dishonorable discharge, reduced his rank to private and said he must forfeit pay. (Nov. 3) AP
Army Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl arrives at the Fort Bragg courtroom facility for a sentencing hearing on Oct. 31, 2017, on Fort Bragg, N.C. Bergdahl, who walked off his base in Afghanistan in 2009 and was held by the Taliban for five years, pleaded guilty to desertion and misbehavior before the enemy. (Photo11: Andrew Craft, The Fayetteville Observer via AP)
FORT BRAGG, N.C. — Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl, the soldier who deserted his Afghanistan outpost and was then held captive in brutal conditions for five years, received no prison time but was reduced in rank to private and will be dishonorably discharged from the army, a military judge ruled Friday.
In announcing the punishment the military judge, Col. Jeffery Nance, rejected a prosecutor’s recommendation to sentence Bergdahl to 14 years confinement.
Nance did not elaborate on his decision before dismissing the court. Defense attorneys had argued against prison time, saying the soldier already suffered enough while in Taliban hands.
Bergdahl looked pale and drawn but did not visibly react as the punishment was read. He stood flanked by defense lawyers as the judge read the sentence.
The judge also ordered that Bergdahl be docked $1,000 per month for the next ten months. The dishonorable discharge means that Bergdahl will likely not receive any veterans benefits, his civilian lawyer, Eugene Fidell, said after the hearing.
Bergdhal will remain on active duty in the Army during an automatic appeals process.
"He's certainly glad this is over," Fidell told reporters Friday at the bottom of the courthouse steps.
But the punishment has not ended the controversy. President Trump immediately slammed the decision in a tweet, saying, "The decision on Sergeant Bergdahl is a complete and total disgrace to our Country and to our Military."
The decision on Sergeant Bergdahl is a complete and total disgrace to our Country and to our Military. — Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) November 3, 2017
As a candidate, Trump called Bergdahl a “dirty rotten traitor.”
Fidell called Trump's earlier comments an "unprincipled effort to stoke a lynch-mob atmosphere while seeking our nation's highest office."
Trump's criticism of the verdict is even more striking. Presidents generally try not to make any comments that could be interpreted as an effort to undermine the independence of the legal process.
Bergdahl pleaded guilty to desertion and misbehavior before the enemy and faced a potential life sentence. During a sentencing hearing, prosecutors argued Bergdahl’s actions prompted a desperate manhunt that risked soldiers lives and led to at least three serious injuries.
In 2009, Bergdahl walked off a remote combat outpost in Afghanistan and was quickly captured, He endured five years of torture and mistreatment at the hands of the Taliban.
Defense attorneys described Bergdahl, 31, as a troubled young man who suffered from a personality disorder that made him susceptible to grandiose fantasies and conspiracies and who was often confused about the consequences of his actions.
“Sgt. Bergdahl has been punished enough,” Capt. Nina Banks, a defense attorney, said in closing arguments Thursday.
President Obama won Bergdahl’s freedom in 2014 by agreeing to release five Taliban militants from captivity in exchange for the soldier.
More: Army Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl has PTSD and needs treatment, expert testifies at hearing
Bergdahl endured brutal conditions while in captivity, including spending much of his time in a small metal cage, where his legs were chained and he was regularly beaten.
The Army seemed to struggle with how to deal with the unprecedented case.
The officer who initially investigated Bergdahl’s actions, then Maj. Gen. Kenneth Dahl, concluded Bergdahl should not face jail time.
Some of Bergdahl’s fellow soldiers objected to what they viewed as hero treatment accorded Bergdahl. Obama announced his release in a Rose Garden ceremony flanked by Bergdahl’s parents.
In 2015, Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., chair of the Senate Armed Services Committee, said he would hold hearings on the case if the Army didn't impose punishment.
The case was referred to a general court martial, which handles the most serious offenses, despite the earlier recommendation.
Bergdahl walked off his post in a Quixotic effort to reach senior commanders at a post miles away to convince them of a better way to pursue the war. Within hours he was captured by militants.
“He left because he thought he was achieving a bigger purpose,” Banks said. “He did not intend harm.”
But prosecutors said he knew he was putting fellow soldiers at risk and made careful plans before sneaking off the remote outpost, getting cash and mailing his computer home.
Three soldiers were seriously injured in the massive manhunt launched to find Bergdahl.
“The accused knew the danger that he would face,” Maj. Justin Oshana, told the court on Thursday during closing arguments. “He surely knew the dangers other would face.”
Fidell said he hopes to be able to overturn the dishonorable discharge during the automatic appeals process. He said his client also deserves recognition for enduring five years of brutal captivity.
"We have long felt he was entitled to the POW medal," he said.
Read or Share this story: https://usat.ly/2A4nQ4jShe was known as the mother of god and the daughter of god, the eye of god, the creatrix of the rays of the sun, the embodiment of the circular essence of life. She was the Lady of the Limit or the one who spreads to the edge of the universe and the Lady of the West who welcomed souls to the afterlife. She was the goddess of fertility and assisted women in childbirth. She was Hathor the Celestial Cow whose legs formed the pillars of the sky and the Milky Way ran across her belly.
It is believed that the worship of Hathor dates to pre-dynastic times and in fact she may represent many of the earlier original female deities such as Bat, Sekhmet and others all combined into one figure. Female deities gradually became less important as complex agrarian society became predominate and the emergence of the ever increasing ownership of both goods and land exalted the male gods who represented power through physical strength. Male domination of society pushed the sacred feminine aside and began the systematic removal of the sacred feminine from virtually every religion on earth. When the gods are no longer female then human females have less power or no power, they are second to the male who is in the image of the divine but it was not always this way, once there was balance and many of the earliest deities were seen as having a dualistic nature embodying both the masculine and the feminine. The worship of Hathor paints a vivid picture of this type of transition, from the temple of the greatest god, the mother of all to the modern perception of a cult of tattooed prostitutes.
Hathor was one of the most important gods in early Egypt and she remained important up until the middle kingdom when the significance of the female gods waned and with it the role of women in the priesthood. Hathors temple may have been one of the few that allowed women to hold equal positions as men but by the new kingdom only men seem to hold the title of priest and women are reduced to the role of shemayet or musicians.
It is this trend towards the marginalization of women within the temple that leads us all the way to the late 19 th century when several tattooed female mummies were discovered. Before this discovery only pictures in tombs and on pottery were the best evidence that some Egyptians were tattooed. Previously tiny faience female figurines showing tattoo patterns on their thighs, wrists, abdomen, and upper body had been discovered in tombs and the tattoos on the newly discovered mummies were in many instances almost identical to the figurines. Suddenly it became obvious that the tiny figurines were actually depicting real tattoos and their meanings could be directly traced to the priestesses of Hathor.
The figurines were found in both male and female burials but only female tattooed mummies were found. The function of the faience figurines in the tombs has been theorized to serve as a fertility charm, an amulet to assure the dead a good sex ‘after life’, or to represent a feminine ideal but considering that Hathor was known as the Lady of the West, who welcomes the dead it seems that the figurines might represent Hathor herself or her earthly representatives and thus serve as a guide for the deceased.
When the tattooed women were discovered most academics dismissed them as women of low status, probably prostitutes, ‘dancing girls’ or maybe royal concubines because the area where the bodies were found, Deir el-Bahari, was the site of royal and high status burials. The most famous of these tattooed mummies is Amunet, Priestess of the Goddess Hathor. The mummy of Amunet was discovered in 1891 by the French Egyptologist Eugène Grébaut and from all accounts the tattoos were seen as quite sensual, of course at this time curved table legs were also considered sensual so one must view their reaction in context to their Victorian mores.
Not everyone however was swept up in visions of beautiful dancing girls, their tattooed bodies undulating in sensuous dances as they swirled through the smoke of incense, transported into trance-like states by the music of their sistrums (rattles); no, one man a prominent doctor who participated in the examination of the mummies saw more, a medical reason for the markings. Dr Daniel Fouquet suggested in 1898 that the markings were not ornamental but therapeutic and were probably for the treatment of chronic pelvic peritonitis and although I applaud his forward thinking the assumption of chronic pelvic infections does still suggest that he believed these women were prostitutes or at least very sexually active. The truth is many of the priestesses were the wives, sisters, and daughters of other priests, high officials and even pharaohs so even if sexual contact was a part of their worship, they should not be judged by current religious moral standards. To infer things about their life based on modern or in this case Victorian beliefs is not only unfair; it is bad science. Doctors, and I would imagine most men of the Victorian era, thought of the scary dark nether regions of a woman’s reproductive system as a mysterious, unclean place so primitive and primal that it was best left alone so they naturally brought these prejudices to bear on their “scholarly” descriptions of the priestesses.
Now if we can step back and view the priestesses not as temple whores but as persons of legitimate power in their own right and consider their sexuality as the manifestation of fertility and the instrument of new life then they are Hathors representatives on earth guiding and protecting women through the very dangerous process of childbirth, a process that requires both spiritual and medical assistance. The act of sex, pregnancy and childbirth are three parts of an inseparable cycle and the last part of the cycle, childbirth, was for ancient women a dance with death that quite often left them on the trip to the afterlife. The production of children is essential for the success of all cultures and the priestesses of Hathor may have been there to protect and assist women in this dangerous process.
Amunet’s tattoos were located on her superior pubic region covering the lower part of her abdomen, on her mid frontal torso and directly inferior to her right breast. She also has tattoos superior to her elbow joint and on her left shoulder as well as on her thighs. Most of these tattoos are in the form of dashes, and dots and some form concentric circles on her abdomen. I think it is important to note that the more ‘carnal’ tattoos as they have been called do not draw attention to the genitalia but instead cover the reproductive organs…not really the sexy part.
Do these tattoos represent more evidence of ancient peoples having sophisticated knowledge of acupressure and neural pathways in the human body? Were they used for pain management during labor and perhaps the induction of labor in an attempt to have safer deliveries? Were the priestess’ of Hathor the guardians of ancient medical knowledge to help women survive childbirth?
Acupressure is still used today during labor and several modern medical studies have shown that it is useful in pain reduction. Sympathetic magic is also certainly part of the tattoos functions, protecting the areas symbolically but the nature of the designs is very similar to other ancient examples of medicinal tattoos such as those found on Otzi and the Scythian Chieftain and I believe further more objective study of the placement of tattoos on the mummies of the priestess could tell us much more about the priestesses' roles in the lives of the worshipers of Hathor.
By Margaret Moose
References
Priestesses of Hathor Het Heru, Gillian Taber http://www.humanities360.com
Archeaology Magazine Nov-Dec 2013 Ancient Tattoos Body art has been a meaningful form of expression throughout the ages By JARRETT A. LOBELL and ERIC A. POWELL Wednesday, October 09,
Tattoos the Ancient and Mysterious History · by Cate Lineberry · Smithsonian.com, January 01, 2007
Daniel Fouquet, ‘Le Tatouage Medicale en Egypte dans l’Antiquite et a l’Epoque Actuelle’, in Archives d’Anthropologie Criminelle, Tome 13 (1898
Robert Bianchi, ‘Tattooing and Skin Painting in the Ancient Nile Valley’, in Celenko, T. (ed.) Egypt in Africa, (1996), Indianapolis University Press
Acupressure to reduce labor pain: a randomized controlled trial. Acta obstetricia et gynecologica Scandinavica 12th December 2013 | BioPortfolioWritten by: Will Jones
Extraordinary Photographs Capture Beautiful Interiors of Iran’s Mosques
Mohammad Reza Domiri Ganji has captured the world’s attention with his extraordinary photographs revealing the inner beauty of Iran’s mosques.
The 24-year-old physics student from Babol in northern Iran taught himself the art of photography through online tutorials and books, and has shown himself to be something of a prodigy.
Speaking to gapyear.com, Ganji said: “I was first inspired by images of the interior spaces of the Egyptian pyramids, so I became interested in photographing historical locations as well as ancient and symbolic architecture. I realised there were a lot of opportunities in Iran for this sort of photography, so I began my work.”
That was five years ago, and Ganji has since travelled the length and breadth of his country, documenting places of worship in captivating detail. He usually has to obtain special permits to use the type of equipment – specifically tripods – needed to produce these images, and he times his visits to coincide with quiet periods in the day, so as to evoke the theme of serenity which courses through his work.
Ganji’s studies have influenced his work enormously, and he says that the problems he has to solve in his physics classes are practise for his imagination when preparing to photograph.
“A 3D mindset helps me to analyse the space and to imagine the final result before I start taking my photos. Also, photography is to record light, and light is one of the most important elements we study in physics.”
Ganji is as passionate about architecture as he is about photography, and appreciates the mind-boggling skill needed to create these mosques, noting their perfect symmetry, repetition and the way they control the light.
“The lights and shadows are like columns in their own right; they give depth to the architecture. In the religion of Islam – just like Christianity and Judaism – light directs man, it shows him a pass through the darkness.”
Happily for us, Ganji plans to continue his work, branching out into other cultures and religions, so watch this space.
“I want to take photos from historical places and symbols in other countries, particularly Christian and Jewish shrines – I want a thorough collection.”
To see more of Ganji’s work, check out his Facebook page or his website at gravity.irMatthias Kulka / zefa / Corbis
She was worried about the lump and worried about the children who were worrying about her. She was, however, most worried about the anesthesia. "What if I don't wake up?" just wasn't a question I could answer sufficiently for her. Some people take no solace in statistics (that, for example, there are two or three deaths per 1 million patients anesthetized) these patients are the medical cousins of the folks still crossing the country by train or bus rather than "risking the airplane." So I warned her that there might be a little pain and agreed to do her biopsy under a local anesthetic but only if she would allow an anesthesiologist in the room, just in case.
The lump was growing near maybe on the inner end of Ellen's collarbone, meaning that during the biopsy I might have to use a tool that goes "crunch." It's pretty hard to numb up bone with a local anesthetic so I was glad to have Frank, the anesthesiologist, there at the head of the table with some IV sedatives, in case Ellen got panicky or was in too much pain. She was adamant about not going under, but agreed to "some sedation" if we thought it was necessary.
I can understand not wanting to lose consciousness. It's arguably the most precious thing we have. And although serious complications from anesthesia are truly rare these days, so are bone tumors and she clearly had one of those. Ellen had a history of cancer too it had not been a cancer that was likely to spread to the bone and there hadn't been any sign of it for years, but it had been a malignancy. This lump was growing at the end of the clavicle, in the place where arthritis often produces a lumpy enlargement. But Ellen's lump had come on too fast; it felt fleshy and, most significantly, unlike arthritis, it wasn't tender at all. As hard as I pressed on the lump that day in the office, it didn't hurt. That's why I booked the biopsy.
I've been in many operating rooms over the years, with the highest-tech, ultrahigh-quality equipment around, but I don't think I've been in one where the intercom, a low tech app if there ever was one, really worked. And we found that was true in our room that day.
Ellen's procedure got off to a fine start. She was O.K. with the needle-sticks for the lidocaine and she stayed calm and collected under the layers of paper and plastic that we used to drape off the surgical site. When I got in there, I saw that the lump was growing from the bone. I warned her it might hurt but she didn't make a peep when I used the tool that crunches and bit off a piece of bone for the pathologist.
I ordered up a touch prep a quick microscopic look at the cells of the specimen. We would know in 15 minutes if there were cancer in the lump. While the specimen was in the pathology lab, we washed out the wound and started to sew it back up, layer by layer. The inch-long incision was on a very conspicuous part of this youngish woman's body, right where a necklace or the neckline of a fancy dress might lead the eye. I sutured slowly. We were still waiting for the pathology report anyway. It was quiet in the room. I made small talk with Ellen and the nurses. Ellen was O.K. but nervous. She talked about her kids, about how much driving she did everyday shuttling them around. The topic of the tumor, and what it had looked like, was given wide berth by all of us. I finished stitching, but I had to stay scrubbed we couldn't take off the drapes until pathology told us they had a sufficient specimen. There wasn't much else to discuss; it was real quiet and, rare for the OR, a little bit awkward.
"Dr. Haig?" A voice over the intercom, harsh and loud.
"Yes," I said. "Is this path lab?"
"Yes, can I put on Dr. Morales?" the voice replied, referring to the pathologist looking at the microscope slides of Ellen's specimen.
"Have him call in on the phone," I said. The drill, which everyone knew, was that the circulating nurse would hold the phone to my ear while the pathologist told me what he saw.
But instead of an "O.K." there was silence, and then, "Scott, this is Jorge, can you hear me?"
"Yes, but hold on, we're under local in here," I said. "You'd better call the desk and have them put you through to the phone in the room."
"Scott, I can barely hear you but, listen, this is a wildly pleomorphic tumor, very anaplastic. I can't tell..."
"Hold on, Jorge let me use the..." But he couldn't hear me and kept on talking.
"...what the cell type is, but it's a really, really, bad..."
The circulator was moving toward the intercom on the wall, but she wasn't going to make it.
"...cancer."
Ellen's shuddering gasp, then shrieks came from under the drapes: "Oh, my God. Oh, my God. My kids. Oh, my... my arm..."
The burning pain in Ellen's arm was due to the rapid application of propofol, a paper-white liquid medication, which the perceptive Dr. Frank had plugged into Ellen's IV the second he heard the c-word. When he saw her reaction, he pushed. The drug, sometimes called "milk of amnesia," stings some patients sharply in the veins, but what it also does is erase your last few minutes. (Think of the "neuralyzer" from the Men in Black movies.) Oh, and it puts you to sleep. An amazing molecule, a great anesthesiologist and a great save.
Not everyone agreed. I looked up at three sets of eyes, the nurses' eyes, that bored into Frank and me accusingly. How can you do that? they demanded to know. Don't you need consent or at least fill out some kind of form before you steal a patient's last 10 minutes? But all I could say was, "Awesome job, Frank." Somehow with that, and with the calm sleep on their patient's face, we were given not forgiveness, but a reprieve.
Ten minutes later Ellen woke up, happy and even-keeled, not even knowing she'd been asleep. From the recovery room she was home in time for dinner. "The procedure went smoothly, but we'll have to wait for the final pathology reports," I said, which was not exactly the whole truth, but it let me get the oncology people cued up, a proper diagnosis, and Ellen herself emotionally prepared. I would give her the bad news at a more appropriate time.
The ending was not quite happy; it was a recurrence of the cancer she'd had years before fairly rare for that type of tumor. Ellen died of it about six years later. I confess I never told her about the incident with the intercom.
Over a decade later, I'm still not sure that was right.
Questions of withholding bad news, wiping out bad memories plastering over wayward cracks in our minds with chemicals are answered thousands of times everyday, without ever being asked. Ethics committees and experts exist in our hospitals, but what they have to say counts precious little down in the trenches, where intercoms fail and human minds treat human minds, in real time. You would think, by now, that the distinction between treatments using words (or ideas) and chemicals (or electric currents) is starting to blur. (If an hour of psychotherapy accomplishes the same thing as 20 mg of Prozac that is, a boost in mood and serotonin levels is there a difference?) But it is not. Everyone I know who deals with medicines that affect minds seems to operate with a very clear functional distinction between personhood the realm of virtue, vice, responsibility and creativity and brain chemistry. That distinction was clear in the eyes of my nurses that day. Something more important than a chemical balance in Ellen's brain had been violated only a little and, obviously, with benevolent intent. But it hadn't been as simple as pushing a rewind button. Something there had borne the unmistakable quality of wrong.
As mundane, as miserably human as a soccer mom "dying young" of cancer might be, I found such value and such meaning in the way Ellen clung to her consciousness, the personhood she needed to care for her family. Much of what we read about brain science in the media today would have us believe that we're nothing more, really, than very fancy machines. And surely what we're learning about the physical brain is exciting and powerful but thinking honestly, it remains so limited. We can trace the brain pathway of a drug "high," we can call it pleasure, but that tells us nothing about what so many people choose instead deeper things that somehow beat out mere pleasure as the reasons for doing what we do. Those comforts of ultimate meaning, virtue, peace and joy have little to do with molecules.
Dr. Scott Haig is an Assistant Clinical Professor of Orthopedic Surgery at Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons. He has a private practice in the New York City area.Nugget of truth comes from MSNBC host’s mouth
Steve Watson
Prison Planet.com
Nov 20, 2017
With more and more women speaking out regarding sexual harassment at the hands of notorious men, many have been pointing fingers at Bill Clinton once again, which has been largely ignored by the mainstream media. However, the damn may be about to break.
One unlikely voice calling for Clinton to address his past violations is MSNBC host Mika Brzezinski, who slammed the former President Monday, noting that Hillary Clinton is still talking about accusations of sexual harassment against President Trump.
“I’m sorry, but I’m not sorry, actually. Hillary Clinton needs to stop. She needs to stop talking about this topic unless Bill Clinton wants to come forward and apologize for being a sexual harasser, for settling with women. He needs to apologize,” Brzezinski said.
“He needs to apologize as quickly as Al Franken did, as Mark Halperin did, and as much as he wants to.” Brzezinski continued.
“These men who are apologizing, we need to deal with them, but if you are not going to apologize and it’s clear you’ve done something wrong, please, please, you the politician and your wife, the politician, need to not talk about these issues,” the co-host of Morning Joe urged.
Brzezinski went on to suggest that Trump is in the White House because Americans saw through and rejected the Clintons’ “hypocrisy.”
Last week, Brzezinski called Bill Clinton a sexual “predator”:
“The women were attacked, where they were settled with, and their lives were ruined.” Brzezinski noted.
During a Q&A featuring Both Clintons last week, Hillary pined for days gone by when they could get away with their lies and harassments without challenge:In March, Nigeria’s notorious witch hunter, Helen Ukpabio, is organising a “Deliverance Session” in the United States, according to infomation posted on the web site of the Liberty Gospel Church. The event is slated for March 14-25 at Liberty Gospel Church in Houston, Texas. The program is said to be “12 days of battling with the spirit for freedom.”
The poster lists the categories of people invited to “come and receive freedom from the Lord”. It asks “Are you in bondage – Having Bad dreams – Under witchcraft attack or oppression – possessed by mermaid spirit or other evil spirits – Untimely deaths in family – Barren and in frequent miscarriages – under health torture – Lack of promotion with slow progress – Unsuccessful life with disappointment-Financial impotency with difficulties – Facing victimization and lack of promotion – Stagnated life with failures – Chronic and incurable diseases?”
Helen Ukpabio is a Christian fundamentalist and a Biblical literalist. She uses her sermons, teachings and prophetic declarations to incite hatred, intolerance and persecution of alleged witches and wizards. Ukpabio claims to be an ex-witch, initiated while she was a member of another local church, the Brotherhood of Cross and Star. She later founded the Liberty Gospel Church to fulfill her ‘anointed mission’ of delivering people from witchcraft attack. Ukpabio organizes deliverance sessions where she identifies and exorcizes people, mainly children, of witchcraft. Headquartered in Calabar in Southern Nigeria, the Liberty Gospel Church has grown to be a witch hunting church with branches in Nigeria and overseas.
Helen Ukpabio’s gospel of hate — promoted through her publications, films (like the End of the Wicked) and sermons — fuels witchcraft accusations against children in the region. The witch hunts in Nigeria and other parts of Africa in recent years have resulted in discrimination, violence, torture and death.
This was captured in a documentary, Saving Africa’s Witch Children which was broadcast in 2008 on Channel 4 in the UK and in 2010 on HBO in the USA. Thanks to the activities of a UK based charity, the Stepping Stones Nigeria and its local partners, the problem of witchcraft accusations of children and the ignominious roles of Ukpabio and her Liberty Gospel Church and other ‘superstition miners’ were brought to the attention of the world. Since the broadcast of the documentary, Ukpabio and her thugs at the Liberty Gospel church have been campaigning to undermine Stepping Stones Nigeria and its efforts to tackle and address the problem of child witch hunting in Nigeria.
They brought several lawsuits against SSN and its partners, and lost. They have embarked on a smear campaign using local journalists to publish reports in the media which portrayed the projects of SSN in Nigeria as fraud.
In 2009, Ukpabio mobilized her church members against a local seminar on witchcraft and the rights of the child organised by Stepping Stones and the Nigerian Humanist Movement in Calabar, Cross River State. They invaded the venue, beat me up and stole my personal belongings. While the police were still investigating the matter, Helen Ukpabio and her church members went to court. They sued me, SSN and its partners asking that we pay them millions of dollars in damages for depriving them of the right to believe in witchcraft. Again they lost.
The police have yet to arrest and prosecute Ukpabio and her church members for invading and disrupting our seminar, for attacking me and stealing my personal items. Police have yet to bring this woman to justice for abusing children in the name of delivering them from witchcraft and for inciting violence, hatred and persecution against persons accused of witchcraft
Now Ukpabio will be in the US, promising to deliver people from “witchcraft attacks”. Americans should speak out against her fearmong |
some highly controversial immigration reforms and imposed a ban on asylum seekers from seven Muslim countries, provoking nationwide protests.
In what it seems like an excruciatingly long four years of Trump’s presidency, this can only be the first of the many controversial decisions to come. And to hammer down that point, his administration is already gearing up for round 2; reforming the H-1B work visa.
What is the H-1B Program?
The H-1B is a non-immigrant visa in the United States and lets employers in the U.S. employ foreign workers on a temporary basis. The program is primarily used by technology companies as well as young startups to bring in talent from outside the country.
Currently, the program has a cap of 85,000 work visas per year. The cap has been in place for several years and is already said to be oversubscribed. A number of politicians, both right-wing and left-wing, have already been pushing for a major reform of the program. However, not all of them would be happy with the kind of reform we are likely to get from the Trump administration.
Here is a passage from the draft from the upcoming immigration executive order, according to Bloomberg,
“Our country’s immigration policies should be designed and implemented to serve, first and foremost, the U.S. national interest. Visa programs for foreign workers … should be administered in a manner that protects the civil rights of American workers and current lawful residents, and that prioritizes the protection of American workers — our forgotten working people — and the jobs they hold.”
Google, Microsoft, Amazon, and most of the Silicon Valley, are going to be the most heavily affected by the reform. No details have been given as to what changes will be introduced in the program. However, considering Trump’s stance on immigration and his “America-first” policy, the changes to the program could only lead to bad blood between Trump and these companies.
Donald Trump was already expected to bring a lot of complications for the technology industry, even before he took the oath as the President. Even then, his first week has come as a severe shock. As Pakistanis, we should also take his steps seriously and with caution as it is highly possible that Pakistan will also get included in the list of banned countries.
Image Credit — Atlantic“The members of I.A.T.S.E. want to save the Met, that’s why we will be at the bargaining table in coming days hammering out an agreement that works for all,” he said in a statement. “A lockout would be a serious setback, an opera tragedy likely resulting in a lost season and a long-term loss of operagoers for years to come in Lincoln Center and on theater screens around the globe.”
The Met, which has struggled at the box office in recent seasons and drawn heavily from its endowment, which is no longer sufficient to cover a year’s expenses, wants to cut labor costs. It says it needs to reduce expenses, so it can convince the donors it is increasingly reliant on to build up its endowment. The unions are resisting the proposed cuts, and several have questioned Mr. Gelb’s management, noting that ticket sales have declined despite new initiatives that helped increase the company’s budget to more than $300 million a year.
While opening night is not until Sept. 22, when a new production of Mozart’s “Nozze di Figaro” is scheduled, a work stoppage would disrupt the company’s preseason rehearsal schedule. The chorus is already back at work rehearsing, and technical stage rehearsals of a new production of a double bill of “Cavalleria Rusticana” and “Pagliacci” are set to begin next week.
A work stoppage would be the first at the Met since 1980, when a labor dispute with the orchestra led to a bitter 11-week lockout that delayed the opening of the opera season until December. The Met previously had a strike in 1969.
A lockout would have perils for both sides. It took years for the Met to recover the subscribers it lost during the 1969 strike. More recently, an angry 16-month lockout damaged the Minnesota Orchestra. But a lockout at the Met would also leave its union workers without paychecks and benefits at a tough time.
The Met’s letter contained an attached memo from the its human resources department saying that in the event of a work stoppage, unionized workers covered by the Met would lose their health insurance unless they decide to pay for insurance under the federal Cobra law, which would cost $1,255.33 a month for individuals and $2,793.10 a month for families. It said that depending on how people are paid, their last paycheck would come either on July 31 or Aug. 7.Navy Will Attempt to Down Spy Satellite
Bush Orders Destruction, Citing Hazardous Fuel
By Marc Kaufman and Walter Pincus
Washington Post Staff Writers
Friday, February 15, 2008
A Navy cruiser in the Pacific Ocean will try an unprecedented shoot-down of an out-of-control, school-bus-size U.S. spy satellite loaded with a toxic fuel as it begins its plunge to Earth, national security officials said yesterday.
President Bush made the decision because it was impossible to predict where a tank containing the fuel might land in an uncontrolled descent, officials said.
The Pentagon said it decided to use a modified, ship-fired anti-ballistic missile to make the attempt sometime after Feb. 20 to avoid creating debris that could threaten the space shuttle on its return from the international space station.
Marine Gen. James E. Cartwright, the vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said the Navy missile will be fired as the satellite reenters the atmosphere and "has a reasonably high opportunity for success." The Pentagon and NASA have been working on the missile modifications for the past three weeks.
Deputy national security adviser James F. Jeffrey said the decision was based on the fact that the satellite is carrying a substantial amount of hydrazine, a hazardous rocket fuel.
When the pending crash was first announced last month, however, National Security Council spokesman Gordon Johndroe and other officials minimized the danger, saying that the potential for harm was "very small."
Unless it is shot down, the satellite, which has been out of ground communication since its launch more than a year ago, is expected "to make an uncontrolled reentry... on or about March 6," according to documents the Bush administration provided to the United Nations yesterday. "At present," said an official notification sent yesterday to countries around the world as well as to the United Nations and NATO, "we cannot predict the entry impact area."
Officials acknowledged yesterday that many satellites and spacecraft parts -- some of them much larger -- have fallen to Earth in the past without causing harm. But they said the presence of 1,000 pounds of hydrazine -- unexpended fuel contained in a 40-inch sphere that was likely to hit the ground intact -- led Bush to approve the shoot-down.
The announcement set off an immediate debate on defense blogs and among experts who questioned whether there is an ulterior motive. Some experts said the military is seizing an opportunity to test its controversial missile defense system against a satellite target.
But others noted that the Standard Missile-3 has successfully been tested against warhead targets, which are far smaller than the satellite.
"There has to be another reason behind this," said Michael Krepon, co-founder of the Henry L. Stimson Center, a liberal arms-control advocacy organization. "In the history of the space age, there has not been a single human being who has been harmed by man-made objects falling from space."
NASA Administrator Michael D. Griffin insisted that the interception attempt is not a ruse to try the defense system on a satellite or to one-up countries that have made similar attempts. The administration was harshly critical of China when it destroyed an aging satellite in orbit a year ago.
The difference, Griffin said, "is, one, we are notifying, which is required by treaties and law, okay?" The Chinese satellite was destroyed at a much higher altitude -- about 600 miles -- creating a field of orbiting space debris that is hazardous for other spacecraft.
The United States and Soviet Union conducted anti-satellite tests in the mid-1980s but stopped once it became clear that the debris from the destroyed spacecraft became a danger to other satellites and even spaceships. Griffin said the low altitude at which the satellite will be targeted -- about 150 miles -- will minimize orbiting debris.
"The lower we can catch this, the quicker the debris reenters," he said. More than half the pieces will burn up or land before making two revolutions around Earth, and the rest will come down in "weeks, maybe a month, but it's a very finite period of time that we can manage."
Jeffrey said that the fuel tank is the only piece of the craft that was not expected to break up on reentry and that it is hoped that the missile can destroy it in space. If it hits the ground, it could leak gas and cause potentially fatal injury over an area of the size of about two football fields, he said, adding that "this is all about trying to reduce the danger to human beings."
Other experts, however, said that they believed the heat of reentry would cause the tank to explode safely high in the air.
Cartwright said that two other Navy cruisers with backup missiles have been dispatched and that they could take additional shots at the satellite, if necessary. He said, however, that the window for shooting down the spacecraft is quite small.
The National Reconnaissance Office satellite lost contact with ground control soon after it was launched in December 2006. Never ordered to burn its maneuvering fuel, it still carries about 1,000 pounds of frozen hydrazine, a substance Cartwright said is "similar to chlorine or to ammonia in that when you inhale it, it affects your tissues in your lungs," adding: "It has the burning sensation. If you stay very close to it and inhale a lot of it, it could in fact be deadly."
The Columbia spacecraft, which broke apart and hit Earth in 2003, also contained a canister of hydrazine gas that landed intact in a Texas woodland. Columbia was at the end of its mission, however, and most of the hydrazine had burned.
Cartwright said that the Aegis missile system aboard the cruiser would fire an SM-3 missile with a heat-seeking nose that destroys its target by hitting it, not blowing it up. The missile, known as Block III, was developed primarily for intermediate missile defense against warheads coming in at low altitude. The Navy has spent the past three weeks modifying missile software normally set for hitting much higher targets, he said.
Asked whether the plan is really an attempt to test the Aegis system as an anti-satellite system -- which would be a very controversial step internationally -- Cartwright said the amount of special modifications being done to the programs used to guide the system would "not be transferable to fleet use."
He also rejected widely disseminated blog allegations that the destruction of the satellite had been planned to keep classified information aboard from landing in non-U.S. hands. Everything other than the gas container, he said, would be destroyed on reentry even without a missile strike.
Members of Congress were briefed on the plan yesterday, as were diplomats from other nations. House Armed Services Committee Chairman Ike Skelton (D-Mo.) said in a statement that "I attended a Congressional briefing this morning by the Department of Defense, and I am satisfied that the destruction of the malfunctioning satellite is the best option available to protect public safety."
"However, it should be understood by all, at home and abroad, that this is an exceptional circumstance and should not be perceived as the standard U.S. policy for dealing with errant satellites," he said. "The House Armed Services Committee will work closely with the Department of Defense and other concerned agencies to oversee the broader policy implications of this action in relation to our space assets."
Staff writers Karen DeYoung in Washington and Colum Lynch at the United Nations contributed to this report.
© 2008 The Washington Post CompanyTens of thousands of black-clad members of Greece’s Golden Dawn patriotic party have rallied in Athens in in the movement’s biggest show of support since it entered the Greek parliament in the June 2012 elections.
Billed as a remembrance rally, the event in central Athens on 2 February attracted a crowd of 30,000 to honour three “fallen heroes” of the party. The huge crowd lit torches, fired flares and chanted anti-immigration slogans.
“We are winning the hearts and minds of the people, because we say it as it is,” Golden Dawn spokesman Ilias Kassidiaris told supporters.
“These politicians who have ruled us for decades are crooks. They have betrayed our national interests. They have led us to humiliating defeats,” he said, referring to a 1996 dispute with Turkey, when three Greek air force pilots were killed in a dispute over an Aegean island before the US intervened, forcing both sides to back down.
“This is a day of remembrance. It’s a day to remember that Golden Dawn is here to stay. And so long as it does, there will be hope for the country.”
Golden Dawn has gained traction with the country’s young and unemployed in the context of economic disaster at home, and the increasing control wielded by foreign creditors over Greece’s failing finances.
“They calls us fascists, thugs and criminals,” says Vassilis, a 23-year-old recruit who joined the party because of his disenchantment with the country’s political elite. “We’re nationalists. We’re patriots. And if these guys who ruled the country for decades had a fibre of the nationalism we’re running on, they would have never brought the country to its current predicament.”
The Golden Dawn party has begun aggressively targeting teenagers and schoolchildren in a bid to consolidate its recent extraordinary rise in support.
The party has been able to capitalise on the harsh austerity that has been imposed as a condition of Greece maintaining its Eurozone membership. As Greece’s economic fortunes have plummeted, so Golden Dawn’s fortunes have soared.
Standards of living have diminished for the middle classes, while the nation has seen its sovereignty ceded to foreign creditors.
Campaigning on a platform of expelling immigrants, Golden Dawn took 7 percent of the vote in general elections last June, having polled just 0.2 percent in the previous election in 2009. This gave Golden Dawn 18 seats in parliament.
Since then, it has seen its popularity double again, currently polling in third place behind the conservative New Democracy and the main opposition party, the radical leftist Syriza.
The collapse of the ruling conservative-leftist coalition could leave the route open for Golden Dawn to capture second place in a snap election, say pollsters.
The party has attracted votes from across the political spectrum, wiping out the more moderate nationalist LAOS party and winning support from the communist KKE party.
It has also stolen a march on New Democracy, which appeared indecisive on the international bailout keeping Greece afloat, and later lost popularity when it imposed harsh spending cuts instead of relief measures.
Golden Dawn’s core supporters are disaffected urban men, but the party is gaining ground among women and the elderly, particularly the unemployed.
Mobilising grassroots support is the party’s preferred method of gaining recruits, with Golden Dawn taking a close involvement in neighbourhood initiatives, particularly those in areas with rising crime or high numbers of immigrants.
Gyms, athletic and martial arts clubs are seen as ripe recruiting grounds, while the party now boasts a patriotic supporters’ club, known as Galazia Stratia, or the Blue Army.1. Brighten up your eyes with white eyeliner.
White eyeliner is the new black. Makeup artist Alice Lane used it at the spring 2014 Tibi show because it instantly makes you look awake. Want a more subtle look than this model's? Line your inner, lower lash line only.
2. Tie a scarf around your neck to create a cool-girl bend in your hair.
It looks like something straight out of 50 Shades of Gray, but it's actually the latest and greatest in making hair waves. "We're wrapping these scarves around the models' necks to create a slight lived-in bend in the girls' hair," says Guido, the hairstylist at Marc by Marc Jacobs. Tie the scarf around your neck while you're doing your makeup, and then untie it right before you head out.
3. Before painting your nails, roll the polish in between your hands to avoid air bubbles.
"Right before you're about to paint your nails, instead of shaking the bottle to mix it up, take it between your two hands and roll it back and forth," nail expert Miss Pop said backstage at Emerson. "Shaking the polish creates air bubbles in it, which makes the paint go on less smoothly."
4. Use a fluffy eye shadow brush to apply your lipstick for a slight ombre effect.
"Using a fluffy eyeshadow brush to apply your lip color gives it that diffused effect around the edges," says makeup artist Val Garland at Monique Lhuillier. She then suggests intensifying the color in the center of your lips, giving that I-just-ate-a-popsicle finish, by picking up a flat brush, swiping it over the lipstick, and pushing the color onto the middle of your mouth only.
5. Use a fan brush to apply mascara to avoid clumpy lashes.
"Instead of coating your lashes with the brush your mascara came with, load up a tiny fan brush with the formula and paint it over your lashes from root to tip," explained Garland at BCBG. "This allows you to really get close to the root and make the lash line look full, while completely coating each lash. But don't worry, it won't leave you lashes looking like Tammy Faye Baker when you're done, since the fan brush helps control the amount of mascara being transferred onto your lash."
6. Hold your curling iron parallel to your head rather than perpendicular for natural-looking curls.
"To end up with a more natural curl, turn the curling iron parallel to your hair rather than perpendicular," advises Laurent Philippon, the hairstylist backstage at BCBG. "Wrapping it around the barrel this way helps elongate the curl as well."
7. Create horizontal nail stripes with a striper brush and rolling your finger from one side to the other.
A striper brush is a long, skinny brush you can pick up at any art supply store. (Alternatively, you can try a clean liquid eyeliner brush.) "Anytime you're drawing horizontal stripes on your nails, turn your finger on its side and then with your other hand, hold a thin striper brush straight out and parallel to the nail you're painting," explains nail pro Deborah Lippman backstage at Kate Spade. "Then, keep the brush still and, keeping your finger in place, roll the nail you're painting away from the striper brush. Doing this will automatically help you draw a straight, not shaky, line."
8. Change up your look by opting for a matte, instead of shiny, finish when it comes to your hair.
Shiny hair is always gorgeous, but matte hair is the new hotness. To tone down your sheen, "use dry shampoo as your last step," said hairstylist Guido backstage at Alexander Wang. Just be sure to get one that's clear so that it doesn't leave residue behind.
9. Contour your cheeks quickly by sucking in and applying bronzer in the center.
Makeup artist Katie Jane Hughes suggests using a cream bronzer. "Then, buff it out slightly with a soft blush brush to diffuse the edges."
10. Make your braid stand out by weaving the sections under, not over one another.
This hairstyle looks daunting, but it's actually easy. Braids usually blend in with your hair, but to get yours to "pop" off of your head, like the model's above, part the hair and start braiding from the hairline down, weaving the three sections under themselves rather than overtop of one another, advised hairstylist Esther Langham at the Kenneth Cole show.
11. Leave your liner disconnected to make your eyes look bigger.
"When you're applying black eyeliner, don't connect the top and bottom lines because it closes off the eye," said Kabuki, the makeup artist behind the look at Zac Posen. Where the lashes begin and end is where the liner should start and stop.
12. Try a French mani that uses two shades in the same color family to avoid looking like you're straight out of Clueless.
White tips are so over and have been for a while. But nail pro Gina Edwards recreated the old look at Zac Posen. "Pick two shades in the same color family — a light and a dark one — and paint the darker color on as your main shade. Then, grab the lighter shade and apply it to your tips using a tiny sponge. Roll the sponge back and forth to give it that gradated effect, and then add topcoat." Gorgeous.
13. Apply glitter to the center of your eyelid using a wet brush to keep it from falling all over your face.
I love the look of a fully glittered eye. However, if you want to add just a little gold glitter to your upper lid, "apply it only to the center of the lid using a wet brush," said Diane Kendal, who did the makeup at Jason Wu's show. "This helps the glitter stick to the brush, allowing you to apply it exactly where you want, but it also keeps it from going all over your face."
14. Properly part your hair using your nose as a guide.
Here's a quick way to part your hair perfectly in the center: "Run your pinky finger up the bridge of your nose and create the part exactly in line with it — even if your nose is a little crooked, it will be centered for you," said hairstylist Odile Gilbert, who created this look at Jason Wu.
15. Get a second-day "didn't try" makeup look by applying eye makeup and then wiping it off.
You love what second day hair looks like, right? But what about second day makeup? "You look better the day after you've worn a lot of makeup," says Gucci Westman, the makeup artist at Rag & Bone. To create this look, she suggests this trick: Apply whatever eye makeup you were planning on wearing (at Rag & Bone Gucci applied brown and grey shadow on the lids and mascara and liquid liner), dab Elizabeth Arden Eight Hour Cream all over your lids, and then wipe it off with a makeup wipe. "It just leaves a little remnants behind, giving you that lived-in look."
16. Get bushy brows by topping them with mascara.
For a look like Lily Collins's, apply a brown mascara to brows with a tiny fan brush, says Tom Pecheux, the makeup artist at Peter Som. "This tints any baby hairs that sit around your true brow, building your brow shape in the most natural way. It's also a great way to color grays along the hairline and part."
17. Perfect the messy hair look with a cocktail of dry shampoo and a lot of hairspray.
While creating the look at Zac Posen, Gilbert suggested to go for "fucked-up texture." The key is to "curl all of your hair, then use a lot of dry shampoo, a lot of hairspray, and then mix it all together on top of the head, and secure it with hair pins everywhere. And if you want a romantic finish, add silk flowers everywhere with pins."
18. Create an ombre nail look by purposely messing up polish with your fingers.
"Paint your nail using a base color (at Nicole Miller, manicurist Katie Jane Hughes used a gold glitter called The 444 from Butter London) and let it dry," says Hughes. "Next, trace the tip of your nail with black polish (like The Black Knight), as if you were doing a French manicure. Then, take your thumb and immediately pull the color downward, creating a gradated effect. Repeat that step again to deepen the black and that's it!"
19. Create the illusion of healthy hair with a hair wax and dry shampoo combo.
Make the damaged ends of your hair look thicker and healthier with this trick that Philippon used on the models at Lacoste: "Apply a light layer of wax to the ends, followed by hair powder." (He used Bumble and Bumble SemiSumo Wax and the brand's Pret-a-Powder.) The wax helps hold the powder onto the hair, and the powder expands on the ends creating the look of thicker hair.
20. Use your heat protectant product as shine spray.
"Apply it as a finisher instead," says Paul Hanlon, the hairstylist at 3.1. Phillip Lim. "The oil-based texture adds the perfect amount of shine." Now, you don't have to douse your hair like he did to this model's hair below, but to add a subtle shine, one or two spritzes will do.
You're welcome.
Photo Credit: Imaxtree/Getty Images/Patrick ButlerCan you eat your way to an anxiety-free existence?
It might sound outlandish, but the idea that your diet can have a huge effect on your emotions has become the focus of an exciting new area of psychological research. The latest addition to this growing body of research comes from psychologists at the College of William & Mary, and finds a link between a diet high in fermented foods and reductions in neuroticism and social anxiety.
“It is likely that the probiotics in the fermented foods are favorably changing the environment in the gut, and changes in the gut in turn influence social anxiety,” Dr. Matthew Hilimire, an assistant professor of psychology and one of the study's authors, said in a statement. “I think that it is absolutely fascinating that the microorganisms in your gut can influence your mind.”
Probiotics are live bacteria that support digestion and gut health, and have also been shown to support immune and neurological function.
The sauerkraut solution? With preliminary research -- which has mostly been conducted on mice -- suggesting that consuming probiotics might lessen symptoms of anxiety and depression, Hilimire and his colleagues decided to investigate whether eating probiotic-rich foods had a positive effect on personality and social anxiety.
For the study, which will be published in the August issue of Psychiatry Research, 700 undergraduates were asked about their consumption of foods such as sauerkraut, kimchi, kombucha, yogurt, fermented soy products, pickles and kefir. They were also assessed for Big Five personality traits and social anxiety, which is characterized by the tendency to feel uncomfortable in social situations and to fear being judged by others.
As hypothesized, eating fermented foods was correlated with decreased social anxiety. The link was strongest among individuals with high levels of neuroticism, a personality trait that's characterized by negative emotions like anxiety, fear, moodiness, worry, envy, frustration and loneliness -- meaning that the most neurotic people benefited the most from fermented foods.
Why? There are several possible mechanisms by which gut bacteria can influence mood. For starters, increasing the balance of good bacteria in the gut may decrease intestinal permeability, also known "leaky gut" -- a condition that has been linked with depression. More good bacteria also generally means less inflammation, which may be connected to a decrease in anxiety, stress and depression. Probiotics may also reduce anxiety by increasing GABA, a neurotransmitter that tempers the brain's fear response.
Those kombucha-drinking yogis may be onto something -- the findings revealed that not only fermented foods but also exercise was associated with less anxiety and neuroticism.
Food for your mood. The idea that diet may be as important to mental health as it is to physical health has become buzzworthy not only in holistic health circles but also in the scientific community.
While the brain-gut connection is still a relatively new discovery, it's becoming a subject of increasing interest to psychologists. In a study published this week in the journal The Lancet Psychiatry, researchers from the University of Valencia concluded, "A balanced diet is as important in psychiatry as it is in other medical specialties such as cardiology or endocrinology."
Increasingly, it's looking like a mood-healthy diet is one that's high in probiotics. The William & Mary findings join an expanding collection of research on the gut microbiome that has suggested a positive effect of "good" bacteria on mental health. A 2013 UCLA study found that women who consumed yogurt twice a day for four weeks were less reactive to threatening stimuli, while a recent Oxford study showed consuming prebiotics -- undigestible fibers that feed the "good" bacteria in the gut -- has an anti-anxiety effect.
"Time and time again, we hear from patients that they never felt depressed or anxious until they started experiencing problems with their gut," Dr. Kirsten Tillisch, the UCLA study's lead author, said in a statement. "Our study shows that the gut-brain connection is a two-way street."
Hilimire expressed enthusiasm about this burgeoning area of study and its wide-ranging implications for the field of psychology. With more research, it's possible that traditional psychiatric interventions like psychotherapy and medication will be supplemented with lifestyle changes like exercise and a probiotic-rich diet.
“I think there is some skepticism that there can be such a profound influence, but the data is quite substantial now,” Hilimire said. “I think people would be accepting if they looked at the data, but the connection between the mind and gut is not something you typically think about as a psychologist.”While I'd reported previously that Indianapolis has an openly gay man running for the City-County Council, another gay man and a lesbian have also jumped into the fray. Indy has never had an openly gay councilmember.
Zach Adamson is running for an at-large seat on the council while the other two are running in specific districts. Todd Woodmansee and Jackie Butler, both Indianapolis lawyers, were appointed by the county party chairman to fill vacancies in specific districts. Butler faces a stiffer challenge than Woodmansee, who seems like the most likely gay candidate to win election.
While the district Woodmansee is running in is a mix of Democrat and Republican voters, Butler's area is reliably Republican and is held by an extremely anti-gay incumbent, Ginny Cain.
Back in 2005, then-Bilerico contributor Seth Kreigh e-mailed Councilor Cain about supporting a proposed human rights ordinance that included sexual orientation and gender identity. Cain responded by saying that being gay is an "unhealthy lifestyle" and is "meant for destruction of human beings and our civilization."
You can support Woodmansee and Butler's campaigns on Facebook. Full text of Cain's e-mail is after the break.Scala: Working with Predicates
I love me some Scala. Actually, since it’s now my day job, I love it all the time. It combines the short, expressiveness that I prized in Python with a rich library base (thanks Java) and the compiler checking that I have come to depend upon in a statically typed language. I don’t care what some people say. I recognize that the language is not without it’s flaws. One could say that there’s a bit of missing language extentions, particularly with predicates.
What do I mean by that? Is there not implicit support baked into the language such that they generalize any A => Boolean? Certainly. However, I have a problem when I see methods like List‘s ::filter and ::filterNot. The former makes sense, the later highlights the absence of fundamental building blocks which can be seen directly in the name. That is, we’re missing a “Not” helper predicate function:
case class Not [ A ](func: A => Boolean ) extends ( A => Boolean ){ def apply(arg0: A ) =!func(arg0) }
If it were that simple a fix and if that were all that was missing then it would be easy to suggest and have put into the next version of Scala. Of course we’d also need to have 22 versions of “Not” for each of the 22 versions of Function but that’s a debate for another day.
Suffice to say, Scala needs explicit predicate support. It needs more than just a “Not,” it needs easy to read and maintain logic combinators, and it needs support for the basic building blocks that can be used to form higher order predicate logic. Using other accepted Predicates libraries would not give us the power and flexibility needed.
Adding Predicate Expressions
That’s exactly what I did with my Predicates library. One of the goals of this small library was to add some simple syntactic support for composing predicate functions in a descriptive and concise manner. Specifically I wanted to be able to say “greater than 4 but less than 10” or “greater than zero or even but not both” in almost plain English. I write expressions equivalent to that all the time with ::filter and ::exists statements:
myList.filter(x => x > 4 && x < 10 )
For small phrases, it’s not that difficult. The only extra boilerplate that’s added is the designation “x =>” to indicate that we’re forming an anonymous function. Unfortunately, if I want to reuse, extend or maintain that logic I have to use even more boilerplate. Sometimes, if the logic is severe enough, I need to splice it into several methods which might or might not be attached to traits/class hierarchies. While good coding style, this added verbosity leaves a bad taste in my mouth.
What I’d really like to do is have operators which apply to the expressions themselves and not the evaluation of the expressions. The result of these operators would be functions themselves, preserving the composable nature we first started with. To say this another way, an “or” which turns two predicate objects into a third, distinct predicate object that represents a logical or between the first two predicates. As long as each of the precursor objects was built upon an immutable, referentially transparent foundation the resulting compound predicate expression would be safe to use in any environment.
This is what was added to each Predicate variant within the Predicates library. The Predicate member functions work as factory methods to generate new Predicates based upon the current Predicate and a Predicate argument. While similar in concept to composition between functions, there is no guarantee that each composed Predicate is even evaluated.
There are 22 of Predicate variants, much akin to how Scala chose to have 22 Function variants, each equiped with the following methods:
and => pred1(…) && pred2(…) }
andNot => pred1(…) &&!pred2(…)
nand =>!pred1(…) ||!pred2(…)
or => pred1(…) || pred2(…)
orNot => pred1(…) ||!pred2(…)
nor =>!(pred1(…) || pred2(…))
xor => if(pred1(…)!pred2(…) else pred2(…)
xnor =>
And as I said before, each of these functions returns another Predicate (which is really just another function.) In practice using these member functions looks something like this:
case class LessThen (x: Int ) extends Function [ Int, Boolean ]{ def apply(arg: Int ) = arg < x } case class Modulo (x: Int, group: Int ) extends Function [ Int, Boolean ]{ def apply(arg: Int ) = (arg % x) == group } case class GreaterThanEqual (x: Int ) extends Function [ Int, Boolean ]{ def apply(arg: Int ) = arg >= x } val myList = List(1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9) myList.filter( LessThan (7) and GreaterThanEqual (4)) myList.filter( Modulo (4,2) or Modulo (3,0) or Modulo (5,1) )
with Predicates being able to be chained together to form more complicated logical expressions.
Using Implicit Conversions to Avoid Pollution
In object oriented programming, if I had some difficult logic which I wanted to pass around or call associated with a single class from a particular hierarchy I could either add it as a companion class which adhered to the single responsibility philosophy or tack it onto the object itself. The later was generally discouraged unless it needed access to private state or we were using delegation. That said, if several functions were needed the companion class’ interface might grow and become a helper class (and boy did some people love to grow them.) As the libraries and code base matured, combining predicate expressions became a hideously complex, dangerous and blame ridden process. In short, the code often became a maintenance nightmare.
I want to state for the record this wasn’t an innate problem of imperative or object oriented programming but rather how people were allowed to program in it. While OO-design has the strategy pattern, it is only as good as it is enforced. My implementation of Predicates, yielding to a somewhat imperative flair (the factory methods are instance methods,) does not protect against misuse. Some people argue that Scala isn’t functional enough, that it doesn’t enforce immutability and in some ways this is true. It’s an unfortunate side-effect (love puns) of being backwards compatible with Java.
I wanted to avoid the kinds of problems I faced previously with a strictly OO-code base in as general a way as possible. The implicit conversion hid the transformed class behind a restricted interface, a la an adapter pattern, much like Scala does with anonymous functions. I reasoned whatever crud might be added to a class would be hidden by this interface and thus would not pollute the predicate. Add to this the ability to compose functions to create different types of predicates from an initial predicate and we gained a rather large leg up on bad code production. Functional composition has got to be one of the best things Scala stole from functional programming.
What Else?
There was only one other thing to add to the “predicates” portion of this library, an “is” function. The idea for this function was stolen from Data.Function.Predicate of Haskell. At first I created all 22 versions with the same exact signature of Haskell’s “is” but then I realized Scala’s eager evaluation caused a type mismatch that couldn’t easily be overcome without added boilerplate. Since “is” was designed with reducing boilerplate while at the same time increasing readability the simple solution was to create an implicit conversion to an anonymous class with a single “is” method accepting a predicate. Thus written it could be used as follows:
myStringList.filter(_.length is LessThan(0))
which is very readable and maps an anonymous function of type A => B to A => Boolean. The downside is that it creates a new object at each invocation.
Future Work
Conditional functions are hard to design well yet at the same time are the bedrock of computational logic gates. Partial Functions can be used to create predicated logic but in a non-transparent manner to the outside observer. There’s an ::orElse function for a reason (a good one too) which is used more for case coverage rather than case completeness. In fact, the existence of the ::lift member function showcases that a “catch all” logic path is not required unlike the standard “if-else” statement. Hence, PartialFunction is not a good choice for predicated applications.
After I fleshed out some simple logic composition functions to work with Predicates I wanted to add a structure for composing more complicated predicated expressions. That is, a function which included a predicate to control flow which |
said who was going and who was not. I wasn't in charge of that, but that's how it went down.
Scott: As soon as we landed in Indianapolis, we got out of the Irsay jet and I couldn't believe all the photographers and all of the cameras. And they followed us all day long. We went to the Hoosier Dome. We went to Fall Creek Elementary School; we were supposed to set up camp (there) and make it an NFL complex. They followed us right over to where we stayed that night. They followed us into the hotel lobby, all the cameras, always on us, right into the elevator. I thought the guys were actually going to get into the elevator with us, but they didn't. Cameras on us. The doors shut. I had to look over at Jim and say, "I wonder if this is how The Beatles felt back in 1964, coming over from Liverpool (England)."
Russell: At about 11 p.m. (on March 28), I went home to get some sleep and then came back to the office at 8 the next morning. I came up the side door to my office on the second floor and my secretary met me at my door and said, "Have you been down to the lobby? There are two television crews from Baltimore down there who want to talk to you." I said, "Oh, great. I can't tell them anything, but I'll be glad to go down and meet with them." I went down and explained to them that we were just instructed to load everything up and they would let us know where it's going. They didn't like that answer, but they accepted it.
Later that day, the announcement was made (by Hudnut) that they were coming to Indianapolis. We had already told the drivers of the trucks to begin to head toward Indianapolis. We started giving that order to the drivers at about 9 in the morning. Most of them arrived later that day or that night. They were all there within 24 hours after we gave them that instruction. They parked out back at our Mayflower office on Michigan Avenue.
It was Friday when we moved them out to their temporary training center (at Fall Creek Elementary). The helicopters were flying over. We didn't tell anybody where they were going until the day we delivered to the temporary training center. We had them all come to our facility first and park back near the garage. They went by caravan to their place. That's when Hudnut was out there waving the trucks on, from in front of our facility, when they made the turn to go South on Michigan Avenue. All of our employees were out in front cheering on the drivers as they pulled out to take everything down to the training center.
Ward: When we got here, it was even more exhausting. It was like starting a franchise, really, from scratch, except that you already had your players and your coaches. We didn't have a telephone. We didn't know what our address was. We didn't have stationery. We didn't have a copier. We didn't have anybody to answer telephones. Worst of all, we had a hundred boxes piled up on the floor with no labels on them. So before we could ever start to work on planning for the upcoming season, we had to unload boxes and figure out where everything went. That was a real nightmare. There was not enough time in each day for months. You could have worked 24 hours a day for five months straight and still not get everything done.
Scott: As the first trucks pulled up, we would actually take all the boxes and put them in the gymnasium in a large pile, eight boxes high, and literally open each box, try to figure out what it was and then whose department it belonged to and then put it in the corner of the gymnasium. That took us many, many days.
Ward: My first meal in Indianapolis, Jim called me and he actually had one of the first cell phones, he was going through a Burger King or McDonald's (drive thru) and he called me and asked if I wanted something.
Historic legacy
Frick and Chernoff struck a 20-year deal with two five-year options. The city guaranteed the Colts $7 million in annual revenue. Annual rent was $250,000. The Colts and city shared suite license revenue, the team receiving the initial $500,000 and the city getting the rest. Concessions as well as videoboard and signage revenue were shared. The city kept parking proceeds. Game-day operating expenses were the city's responsibility. Chicago's Merchant Bank loaned Bob Irsay $15 million to pay off a debt to a Baltimore bank. The city would help subsidize the interest payments. Frick estimates Indianapolis profited at least $2 million per year initially from the Colts coming to town.
Baltimore tried unsuccessfully to sue Smith, Hudnut and Frick in Baltimore City Court. The case got moved to Federal Court and a settlement was eventually reached on Dec. 10, 1985, that included returning Johnny Unitas memorabilia.
Hudnut, Indianapolis mayor from 1976 to 1992, now lives in Chevy Chase, Md. He has said the six-week period of attracting and landing the Colts was his favorite time as mayor. While considered the driving influence in the city's sports boom and Downtown revitalization, Hudnut has downplayed his role and credited predecessor Richard Lugar for getting the proverbial ball rolling.
Hudnut: Not everybody was in favor of (the stadium). I think the risk was worth it. It paid off. It's been dynamically good for the city.
Frick: I've got to confess, every March I think about (the move). Not many people have an opportunity to make such an impact on their community. I was very fortunate to have that opportunity, so I can't put it out of my mind.
The impact is so profound. It's the visual image of going to a game on a Sunday afternoon and seeing solid blue throughout the stadium, or the streets filled and the bars filled or you look at the number of people working at the game. The economic impact has been incredible, but the impact on the national scene was even more. It communicated to the entire country that Indianapolis is a great place.
I had a unique experience (last) week. My wife had finally got me to do some touch-up painting at our house. I went in to buy a gallon of paint and the guy recognized me. It was only because the guy was 58 years old.
Russell: The day after the move out, I got calls from our agents in Baltimore. They were really mad at me for Mayflower handling the move of their team. "Do you know what's going to happen to my business this year? It's just going to go to hell. Nobody is going to call me." I said, "Hold on, you know what they say about PR. There's no such thing as bad PR. Let's follow up and talk again as the year goes by." And we did. That year, they had a 20 percent increase in his business. It didn't affect him negatively at all. The agent apologized later for giving me such a hard time about it.
My boss, Johnny B., is the one that donated (the move). He gets the credit for that because it turned out to be a great PR vehicle for the company over the years. When the Colts and Baltimore play and they show that tape of the van pulling out in the snowy night, it's just getting Mayflower back on TV. Thirty years, it's been happening like that.
Last week, I had a policeman visit to verify the ID numbers on my vehicles so I could register them in Florida. About halfway through our conversation, I mentioned that I used to work for Mayflower. He said, "Oh really, I was a cop in Baltimore for 25 years." So here we go through the story again. It happens all the time. People remember it.
Russell and his family are still diehard Colts fans.
Russell: That's one thing we got out of the move. Bob let us go pick our season ticket seats and I've still got them. We've been to almost every game since. My four kids are Colts fans, they use the tickets more than I do, but yeah, I'm still a Colts fan.
So, too, is Hite.
Hite: As long as I don't say that in Baltimore, I'm fine.
The move's 30-year anniversary opens an old wound for Baltimore Colts fans, many of whom will never forgive nor forget. They blame Bob Irsay for everything. It doesn't matter that the city eventually landed another team, the Ravens, and that franchise has since won two Super Bowls.
Ward: I think it's worked out for both cities. They've won some Super Bowls. You still have people who are bitter about the Dodgers' move from Brooklyn and the (Oakland) Raiders' move. It's not unprecedented. There's always going to be some sensitive feelings.
You can't put the cause or the blame on any one person. It was a perfect storm, it came together, a lot of different factors. For me, it was kind of a surreal night. You certainly don't want to go through something like that twice in your life. It certainly was a stressful time. We've been in Indy for 30 years, we'll be here forever and we're so happy to be here.
Herrmann, 55, eventually retired in his hometown. He works at St. Vincent Sports Performance Center and is a Colts radio analyst.
Herrmann on heartbroken Baltimore fans: There's part of me that thinks, "Yeah, move on, get over it." But then, families have grown up cheering for the horseshoe. To see that horseshoe move to Indianapolis, it probably would have been easier for the fans if they would have changed the (Colts) mascot and left that there. That would have eased the pain a little bit. Generations grew up with the Colts. There was that relationship, that feeling that this is our team and you took our team away. As pathetic as it is for those folks to hold this venom against the city of Indianapolis, there's a part down deep that appreciates the loyalty.
Let's face it, this was a basketball city, a basketball state. To think of pro football in Indianapolis, yeah, that was kind of outside the realm of your thinking. Everything was so new and kind of exciting but people didn't know how to react to that team. And to think what it is 30 years later: Super Bowl championship, Super Bowl appearance, Peyton Manning has been through here, now you've got Andrew Luck, the fan base is as good as there is in the country. To think we would morph into that back then, I would have thought, "No chance." But now I think it's a big league city. It's fun to think back 30 years ago to what it was and to think about what it is now. Amazing.
Call Star reporter Phillip B. Wilson at (317) 444-6642. Follow him on Twitter: @pwilson24.The Baidu Brain will compete with top human contestants in the scientific reality and talent show 'The Brain'. [Photo: thepaper.cn]
Baidu Brain, the AI of China's Baidu online search engine will go head to head with a human, competing against each other in voice and image recognition, rather than the traditional methods of algorithm, memory and logic, reports the paper.cn.
Baidu Brain has a strong case for winning, as voice and image recognition rates sit only just below 100%, revealed Baidu's CEO, Robin Li, at the company's world conference last September.
The game will be hosted by the Chinese version of the scientific reality and talent show, 'The Brain,' where human candidates are chosen for their exceptional brainpower.
"If 'The Brain' represents the ultimate brainpower of human beings, the Baidu Brain represents the highest level of artificial intelligence," said Li. "The competition, no matter which side wins, will make a breakthrough contribution to the development of AI."
Baidu Brain has continually become more complex, it now has a deep neural network of 20 billion parameters simulating the human brain. It includes deep learning algorithms, data modeling, and a massive GPU able to work across parallel platforms, says Lin Yuanqing, director of the Baidu's Institute of Deep Learning.
Heated discussions arose last year after Google's AlphaGo beat Lee Sedol over to what degree AI could challenge human brainpower. Games like these test the limits of AI.
It also gives the opportunity to see where AI development is by examining the company's research and development results in the last years, Lin said.
"Beating human beings is not our goal. It is more important to examine our technologies," said Lin. "If we win, we will continue with our research and development and apply the technologies in our lives. If we lose, we will improve our research and development."
The competition will air on January 6 next year as the first episode of The Brain's Season 4.
1 2On Thursday, Marc Bergevin shook the hockey world by acquiring Jonathan Drouin, an extremely talented young forward with an elite ceiling, to add some much needed flair, creativity, and potency to the Canadiens’ average-at-best offense.
Drouin arrives as the Canadiens’ forward corps is in a state of flux, with the futures of two top-6 players with the club in question and no player definitively penciled in any specific position except maybe Max Pacioretty as the 1st line left winger. Where can Drouin fit into this highly fluid situation?
Drouin’s deployment track-record
In Tampa Bay, Drouin played an average of roughly 18 minutes a night, putting him on the second line behind Nikita Kucherov and a rotating group of friends (Brayden Point and Ondrej Palat by the end of the season). However, that 18 minutes a night would have placed him 3rd in TOI on the 2016-17 Montreal Canadiens, behind only Pacioretty and Alexander Radulov.
Drouin is capable of playing big minutes in a top-6 role, and he can also do it on either wing. While playing as a left winger for the majority of the season, he also played roughly 10 games as a right winger, and even dabbled for six games as a centre (where he accumulated 6 points, although 3 were in a single game).
As perhaps expected, Drouin received an offensive-oriented zone start deployment. However, he wasn’t sheltered, receiving roughly the same amount of defensive zone starts per 100 shifts as the likes of Tyler Johnson, Steven Stamkos, Victor Hedman, Anton Stralman, Palat, and Valtteri Filppula (red box in the image below). Drouin’s even deployment allowed head coach Jon Cooper to promote the offensive talents of Point, Kucherov, Alex Killorn, and Vladislav Namestnikov (blue box).
What are Drouin’s on-ice tendencies?
Having established that Drouin is an all-around player who can log above-average minutes in most score and zone situations, let’s look at what he does when he’s on the ice. Drouin’s possession numbers are middling to above-average. His 55.15 5v5 CF60 was 8th among Tampa forwards (200 min TOI cutoff), and his CF60 relative to his own team was 9th (-0.16). His shot suppression game is solid, with his 51.06 5v5 CA60 ranking 5th (CA60rel: -1.98, rank: 4th). These combine for an above average CF60% of 51.9% (CF60%rel: 0.9), good for 7th on the team among forwards.
Somewhat unusual for a winger, Drouin is more of a playmaker than a sniper – but he’s an elite level playmaker. When he does shoot, Drouin’s shot location heat map shows that most of his shots come from the slot area, with a slight favouritism towards the faceoff dot due to his role as a winger (image below). Drouin is clearly not afraid to go to the net, but isn’t a pure crease crasher – most of his shots come from that sweet spot a few feet out, rather than the top of the blue paint.
In addition, Tampa Bay as a team generated a significantly above league-average number of shots from the slot area with Drouin on the ice – a systemic trend that bodes exceptionally well for Drouin in a Claude Julien system (left image below). With the Boston Bruins, Julien tended to promote more shot generation from the slot area (centre image below), whereas Michel Therrien’s teams generated relatively more shots from the net-front and perimeter (right image below).
On a team with Steven Stamkos, it can be forgiven that Drouin’s powerplay role might fly a little under the radar. On the PP though, Drouin can play both playmaker and sniper, providing a one-timer option in Stamkos’ wheelhouse at the faceoff dot.
In fact, Drouin’s shot profiles (image below, left) are similar to Stamkos’ (image below, right) at both ES and on the PP. Whether that’s a systemic by-product or a result of similarities in the playing styles of both players, it can only be a good thing for a Montreal team starving for slot-based offense.
Where should Drouin play?
Drouin is clearly a versatile player who is best on the left wing, but can play right wing or even centre if the situation demands. Given this, Drouin’s best position in the Montreal lineup is not reliant on the player’s own abilities, but on which of Montreal’s free agent forwards are retained.
If Montreal elects to resign Radulov alone, Drouin would likely compete with the Russian for the 1RW position or find himself as the 2LW. The latter is more likely as the former would bump Brendan Gallagher to the 3RW slot. However, without Galchenyuk, the Habs would be extremely weak down the middle, and Drouin at the 2LW position means that Tomas Plekanec will be the 2C as it stands. If Drouin is given the opportunity to play centre, it opens the possibility of a Pacioretty-Drouin-Radulov, Artturi Lehkonen/Paul Byron- Phillip Danault-Gallagher top 6 arrangement.
However, Drouin at C comes with the same caveats as Galchenyuk at C. While Galchenyuk has played almost a full NHL season at the position, Drouin’s experience amounts to a handful of games. Neither Drouin (115 wins, 145 losses, 44.2%) nor Galchenyuk (779 wins, 932 losses, 45.5%) has exhibited any real prowess in the faceoff circle, indicating some degree of sheltering will likely be required. Drouin does have significantly better 5v5 shot suppression numbers than the American, which will provide Julien with a degree of comfort, but is not a polished complete 200-foot player at the moment by any means. Fortunately, Julien’s patience and Drouin’s status will likely give the 22-year-old a long leash for any learning curve process at the centre position.
If Montreal re-signs Galchenyuk and not Radulov, this opens up more potential fits for Drouin. The possibility exists for a Pacioretty-Galchenyuk-Drouin line, which would be, from an offensive perspective, the likes of which not witnessed in Montreal for a decade. Alternatively, Pacioretty-Danault-Drouin and Lehkonen-Galchenyuk-Gallagher could be used for a more balanced approach, giving both lines defensive cover and reuniting a Galchenyuk-Gallagher combo that has worked wonders in the past.
Drouin could also be used as a 2LW, resulting in Pacioretty-Galchenyuk-Gallagher, which has been successful in previous years, with Drouin-Danault-Lehkonen, as complete a two-way line as Montreal can put together.
A more fanciful scenario is the possibility of playing both Galchenyuk and Drouin as centres. This would amplify the problems mentioned previously, but also give the Canadiens immediate offensive punch and depth at the C position. This arrangement would create a hole at LW, one that could be filled by Charles Hudon, who appears ready to make the jump to the NHL.
Finally, the most ideal solution for the Canadiens, but one that may not be possible under the salary cap, may be to keep both Galchenyuk and Radulov. This allows for Pacioretty-Galchenyuk-Gallagher, Drouin-Danault-Radulov or some permutation thereof, instantly giving the Habs a top 6 ranking among the league’s elite. The 3rd line of Lehkonen-Plekanec-Andrew Shaw offers a solid two-way option to supplement the offense from the top 6, and a 4th line populated by necessity with the likes of Byron, Torrey Mitchell, Michael McCarron, and Hudon gives the Habs absolutely phenomenal depth.
The Montreal Canadiens find themselves with their most potent offensive corps in the salary cap era, and potentially beyond. That said, this forward group may not survive the week in their current incarnation, as trade rumours continue to swirl around Galchenyuk, Radulov’s contract negotiations are nebulous at best, and Hudon remains a potential target for the Vegas Golden Knights. Nonetheless, Marc Bergevin has given Claude Julien the keys to a very powerful offensive vehicle. One should be optimistic at what the experienced bench boss can accomplish in the upcoming season.Environmental Protection Agency chief Scott Pruitt has expressed doubts about carbon dioxide’s role as a major driver of climate change. | Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images Pruitt: EPA will review 'politicized' climate science report
Environmental Protection Agency chief Scott Pruitt said his staff will gauge the “accuracy” of a major federal science report that blames human activity for climate change — just days after researchers voiced their fears to The New York Times that the Trump administration would alter or suppress its findings.
“Frankly this report ought to be subjected to peer-reviewed, objective-reviewed methodology and evaluation,” Pruitt told a Texas radio show Thursday. “Science should not be politicized. Science is not something that should be just thrown about to try to dictate policy in Washington, D.C.”
Story Continued Below
Pruitt, who has expressed doubts about carbon dioxide’s role as a major driver of climate change, also dismissed the discussions in Washington about man made carbon emissions, calling them “political."
Scientists called his remarks troubling, especially because the report — part of a broader, congressionally mandated National Climate Assessment — has already undergone “rigorous” peer-review by a 14-person committee at the National Academies. The reviewing scientists backed the report’s conclusion from researchers at 13 federal agencies that humans are causing climate change by putting more greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, leading to a clear increase in global temperatures.
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The report's authors implemented the 132 pages of suggestions from the reviewers, and now the Trump administration has one last opportunity to review the document before publication. Agencies are supposed to sign off by Aug. 18 and send their comments to the authors.
“It’s a much more extensive process than a usual peer review, which does not typically come out as a paperback book,” said Bob Kopp, a lead report author and climate scientist at Rutgers University.
Kopp said he has “no idea” what to expect after hearing Pruitt’s comments. Staffers at EPA had already signed off on an earlier draft.
Eric Davidson, president of the American Geophysical Union, said the report has undergone “a very rigorous peer-review” and is “built on 50-some years of published research, and each of those papers went through its own peer review.”
He added that while fears of Pruitt suppressing the climate report might be more imagined than real right now, he didn't rule it out.
"Certainly it’s a possibility, and if the administration doesn’t understand that it’s already peer-reviewed, that really is a sign of concern that he may not understand the process," Davidson said. "If he’s continuing to question why CO 2 is a big deal, that’s also very concerning, because CO 2 is a big deal. … To see those quotes continue to come out is definitely disconcerting."
Several climate experts said they welcomed scrutiny of the report, but they also expressed concerns that political biases could color the process.
“The question is will it be reviewed by people who are scientific experts or will it be reviewed by people who have a political agenda?” said Kathy Jacobs, who oversaw the broader National Climate Assessment under the Obama administration and now heads the Center for Climate Adaptation Science and Solutions at the University of Arizona.
"The implication of [Pruitt's statement] is that it hasn’t been linked to the data," she said of the report. "That certainly is not true. This is built on a mountain of evidence."
Even as Pruitt said EPA would review the report for objectivity, he criticized the Times for saying scientists worry that the administration might interfere with its publication.
“The New York Times out there saying they had to release this report because it’s going to be suppressed is just simply legendary," he said. "It’s just made-up news trying to create a distraction from the real work that’s being done in Washington, D.C."
His comments Thursday came the same day that the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration issued a separate report confirming that 2016 was the warmest year on record, surpassing the records set in each of the two previous years.
This week's dust-up over the 13-agency climate report is far from the first climate science dispute for Pruitt, who as Oklahoma's attorney general sued to block a series of major EPA regulations. He drew criticism after announcing in June that he wanted to conduct a "red team, blue team" debate of climate science, a move that his detractors said would put fringe views on the same plane as established, peer-reviewed research.
The EPA chief defended his "red team-blue team" strategy in the radio interview, saying that “this debate, this discussion, I think it’s good and healthy for the country.”
Pruitt told the Texas radio show that his agency would review the 13-agency report “like all other 12 agencies and evaluate the merits and demerits and the methodology and accuracy of the report.”
But EPA already plays a role in reviewing that document. The U.S. Global Change Research Program, which coordinates the agencies involved in the review, lists EPA’s point person as Andrew Miller, a longtime employee and an associate director of climate research.
“On the one hand, EPA has been a very productive contributor the entire process, including during this administration,” Rutgers University's Kopp said. “On the other hand, Administrator Pruitt has said things in the past that contradict sort of mainstream climate science and the findings of the report. But the process has been operating quite well. I’m hopeful that it will continue to operate well.”
Katharine Hayhoe, another report author from Texas Tech University, said she strongly agreed with Pruitt that science shouldn’t be politicized and the report should be peer-reviewed.
“Thankfully, all of this has already happened,” she said in a lengthy email responding to Pruitt’s comments.
“Science should not be politicized, and I and my colleagues deplore the attempts of politicians to do so, their attempts to pretend as if a thermometer gives us a different answer if we are Democrat or Republican,” she continued. She noted that the report found no alternative explanations for why climate change is happening other than human influence.
Another expert familiar with the process of crafting the report said the standards exceeded the typical scientific process.
Typically, the president’s science adviser signs off on the report, but Trump has yet to appoint one. The U.S. Global Change Research Program, which coordinates the report, lists Kimberly Miller at the White House Office of Management and Budget as the president’s liaison.
Democrats and other critics contend that Pruitt has criticized climate change policies because he wants to run for the U.S. Senate from Oklahoma, where his stance might resonate with conservative voters. EPA did not comment on that issue.
David Doniger, director of the Natural Resources Defense Council’s climate program, said addressing climate change would affect the fossil fuel industries, and Pruitt has “lined up his personal political fortunes” with the economic interests of oil, gas and coal companies.
Science organizations have asked to meet with Pruitt to discuss why he doesn’t acknowledge a link between human action and climate change.
In the radio interview, Pruitt accused the Obama administration of using carbon dioxide as a “wedge issue.”
“Why aren’t we celebrating what we’re achieving with respect to CO 2? … W hy do we continue to engage in this political football?” he said.Government urged to tackle payday lending, consumer lease'sharks'
Updated
The Federal Government is being urged to move swiftly and toughen laws covering the payday lending industry and consumer leases.
Key points: Consumer leases can see customers pay far more than items are worth, and payday loans attract high interest rates
A 2015 review made a series of recommendations for changes to laws, but consumer groups are frustrated the Government has yet to legislate changes
The Government has told the ABC the legislation will be introduced and debated this year
A coalition of consumer groups, including Choice, Consumer Action Law Centre and Financial Counselling Australia, are in Canberra today to lobby for urgent legislative changes.
"Consumer leases and payday loans are often targeted at the most vulnerable consumers in our society," said Tom Godfrey from Choice.
"What we need in Australia are tough laws that prevent these loan sharks targeting people who quite frankly can't afford to make these repayments."
Payday loans, also known as cash advances, are usually less than $2,000. They typically charge high fees and interest rates, and are offered by companies like Cash Converters and Nimble.
But low-income earners who use these loans to make ends meet can be caught up in a debt spiral with big repayments.
Consumer leases, which are commonly offered for household products like fridges and televisions, can see customers pay four times the regular retail price of the item.
Under a consumer lease, the customer does not own the item at the end of the contract.
Do you know more about this story? Email investigations@abc.net.au.
Government confirms legislation to be debated this year
The 2015 Small Amount Credit Contracts (SACC) review made a series of recommendations for changes to laws.
The Government has agreed to most of the SACC recommendations, but consumer groups are frustrated it has yet to legislate any changes.
"The top of the list is limiting the payday loan or consumer lease repayments to 10 per cent of a consumer's net income," Mr Godfrey said.
"Also requiring equal repayments over the life of a payday loan, prohibiting a monthly fee if a payday loan is repaid early, and banning unsolicited offers of payday loans to customers."
A spokesman for the minister responsible, Michael McCormack, has confirmed he will meet with the groups in Canberra.
The Government told the ABC the legislation would be introduced and debated this year.
A spokesman said the Government was committed to balancing access to small amount consumer contracts and consumer leases with appropriate levels of customer protection.
The Consumer Household Equipment Rental Providers Association (CHERPA) previously said it was working hard to eliminate rogue operators and enforce a stringent industry code of conduct.
Last year, Australia's biggest payday lender Cash Converters was ordered to pay fines and refund consumers millions of dollars in loans because it breached responsible lending provisions.
But the corporate watchdog has been criticised for its investigation into the business, with consumer advocates saying many other people who will not receive refunds are suffering.
Topics: business-economics-and-finance, government-and-politics, australia
First postedThis is the latest in a series of articles on the teams that did not make the playoffs last season, previewing their prospects of making it to the postseason in 2013-14. For a look at other teams in the series, click here.
Masai Ujiri Interview
The Toronto Raptors have been both a good offensive team and a good defensive team in Dwane Casey's two seasons as head coach, just not at the same time. When one side of the floor is working, the other is not, a good formula for being a mediocre team.
"We just got to put both of them together," DeMar DeRozan, the longest-tenured Raptor as he heads into his fifth season, said last month. "If we play defense, we can get easy buckets. We got a lot of talent on the team that can definitely score the ball."
The Raps are returning most of their rotation from the second half of last season. They went 18-18 after trading for Rudy Gay on Jan. 30 and were a pretty good defensive team with Gay on the floor. There should be room for a couple of new playoff teams in the Eastern Conference, and if they can pick up where they left off in April, Toronto will be competing for one of those spots.
The Raptors certainly aren't a finished product. New general manager Masai Ujiri was able to trade Andrea Bargnani, but has yet to really make his imprint on the franchise. For now, he will see what he has and be patient.
Where they've been
2012-13 record: 34-48
Division finish in 2012-13 (place in conference): 5th (10th)
Offensive rating in 2012-13 (NBA rank): 102.9 (14th)
Defensive rating in 2012-13 (NBA rank): 104.7 (22nd)
No team improved more defensively than the Raptors did in 2011-12, Casey's first season. They went from 30th in defensive efficiency, where they ranked in each of Jay Triano's last two seasons, to 12th, allowing 8.5 fewer points per 100 possessions than they did in 2010-11. But they were pretty terrible offensively and finished 12 games out of the playoffs.
Then last season, the Raps were the fifth most improved offensive team, jumping from 25th in offensive efficiency to 14th. But they regressed defensively and still finished 14 games under.500.
The Raptors are one of two Eastern Conference teams (Washington is the other) that haven't made the playoffs in the last five seasons, though three other East franchises (Brooklyn, Charlotte and Detroit) have worse records over that span.
Where they are now
The departures of Bryan Colangelo and Bargnani represent a new day in Toronto, but the on-court product shouldn't be much different than how the Raps ended the season. They were the lottery team without a lottery pick, having sent theirs away to get Kyle Lowry a year earlier.
Dwane Casey Interview
They were a different team after acquiring Gay, ranking 21st offensively and 14th defensively over their final 36 games. The hope is that continuity, along with the development of two second-year players, will be the key to playoff contention.
In 21-year-old center Jonas Valanciunas, there is real hope for marked improvement. The Lithuanian big man will have a season under his belt, as well as a full training camp, which he missed with an injury last year. And he has all the tools to be an anchor offensively.
DeRozan took notice of Valanciunas' improved physique and improved game in Summer League, saying "it can't do nothing but help raise our levels" and turn the Raps into "a complete team."
Biggest hurdle
If we're going off the last 2 ½ months of the season, the Raptors will need to find a way to score. Both DeRozan and Gay can do that to an extent, but neither is a very good perimeter shooter, so they don't complement each other very well.
DeRozan -- a 24-percent career shooter from 3-point range -- has been working on his jumper, knowing it's the key to both his own and his team's development.
"Definitely been working extremely hard on it this summer," he said. "I think I feel the most comfortable going into this season with it than I have than any other season."
Gay, meanwhile, had corrective surgery on his eyes, which should only help his own inconsistent jumper. Like Valanciunas, Terrence Ross could take a big step forward in his second season. And again, continuity is another part of the equation.
Amir Johnson Interview
"Now that we're going to have a full training camp, a full preseason ahead of us, we can't do nothing but get better," DeRozan said of his on-court relationship with Gay. "We understand each other's games, where we like the ball."
Where they're going
This is a transitional season for the Raptors, even though the only real change was in the front office. Until Ujiri makes his next move, we don't know exactly what direction he wants to take his new team. If Gay chooses to opt out of his contract next summer, Ujiri could have quite a bit of flexibility.
With the athleticism they have on the perimeter, the Raptors will be fun to watch. And they can certainly take a step forward this season if they build off of the improvement they showed in March and April, or if Valanciunas builds off his Summer League performance and proves he can be a defensive anchor as well as an offensive one.
The young center's development will ultimately help determine the direction of the franchise.
John Schuhmann is a staff writer for NBA.com. You can e-mail him here and follow him on Twitter.
The views on this page do not necessarily reflect the views of the NBA, its clubs or Turner Broadcasting.Last week we published our first GIMP post “30+ Exceptional GIMP Tutorials and Resources” and saw a great appreciation from our readers. So this week, i would like to share with you 1000+ high-Resolution GIMP brushes that will be perfect for any project you may happen to be working on. Also you will find some useful tutorial to teach you how to create your first GIMP brush-set and how to convert Photoshop brushes into GIMP brushes and more.
Please note that Photoshop Brushes are now Fully Compatible with Gimp 2.4 and up. So you can now use any PS brush in your GIMP software. For another huge collection of Photoshop brushes, you might find some really stunning brushes over here.
Important: Licenses of every brush set varies, so be sure to check that information before using them.
1. Grunge Brush set
10 grunge GIMP brushes.
Download Brush Set here
Containing all six brushes in this set for the |
solution. He’s the problem.”
That tagline finishes a devastating attack ad released Saturday by President Obama’s reelection campaign, Obama for America, a video that caps a week in which Romney was repeatedly pummeled by bad news and strong Democratic charges over his tenure at Bain Capital. In the ad, audio of Romney warbling “America the Beautiful,” is laid over newspaper summaries of jobs outsourced by Bain companies to places like China and Mexico. The message is clear, and one the Obama campaign thinks will be most effective against Romney in a sour economy: Romney cost many Americans their jobs, and he’ll do it again if elected.
Adding to the evil corporate millionaire theme, the ad also knocks Romney’s foreign bank accounts in tax-havens like the Cayman Islands, implying that not only is he rich, but that he’s not paid his fair-share, a refrain Obama often hits in his campaign pitch.
The ad comes after a bruising week for Romney in which various reports contradicted his previous claim that he left Bain Capital in 1999. That revelation is significant because Romney had sought to evade responsibility for job losses and outsourcing at Bain-owned companies after that date. The new findings, based on SEC filings, indicated he stayed on at Bain until 2002.
On Friday, Romney called on Obama to apologize for attacking him on that front, though from the looks of this ad, there will be no apology.
Watch the video below:He cannot walk, but one injured veteran is finding a way to keep riding forward.
For Ryan Pinney, it was a bike that stole his ability to walk. But, the wheels are still spinning today—just in a different way.
CYCLEBAR The Free Wheel Foundation Ride 430 Challenge On Sunday, Pinney and a dozen other came together toin Chandler to try and raise money forand the, an organization focused on helping veterans.
"I love riding for causes, you know, that's my main thing," Pinney explained. "Because the cause is what got me on the handcycle."
Pinney was in the Air Force and had just returned home from a deployment when he was riding a bicycle race in Las Vegas. During the ride, he flew over his handlebars in the accident that left him paralyzed from the waist down.Serenader of skyscrapers and former star of Sonny with a Chance Demi Lovato graces the cover of this month's Cosmopolitan and — what do you know — it looks as though a photoshop shark has taken a big ol' chomp out of her side (fitting as her dress does resemble a sexy '90s wet suit). Of course, Cosmo is no stranger to photoshop snafus, in fact, it wouldn't be all that surprising if the ladymag started photoshopping one generic face and body over every single person they feature ("Notice how everybody looks like Angelina Jolie these days?")
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Again, no starlet who graces their cover is safe from the heavy hand of airbrush, so why is Demi Lovato's missing waist such a big deal? It's a big deal because Demi Lovato has been very open about her struggles with anorexia and bulimia. So open, in fact, that her disordered eating is what her Cosmo interview is almost entirely about:
"So much has happened, and I'm really glad it's over," she says, running her hand through her long hair. "It's been tough, but I'm excited to be in a more healthy, positive place." Of course, she's referring to her stay at a treatment center at the end of 2010, where she sought help for an eating disorder as well as cutting and where she was diagnosed as being bipolar.
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The article touts Lovato as a role model and hero for her frankness regarding her struggles — and Cosmo's not wrong to do so. She has been refreshingly open about her demons, which, most assuredly, has made her fans more comfortable in dealing with their own. However, the feature's punch is entirely lost when the magazine decides that Lovato's real body (which is perfectly gorgeous, by the way) is not good enough to grace their cover.
And then there's this gem:
In the realm of Hollywood, where so much seems manufactured and fake, Demi has managed to keep both her personal and professional lives so real.
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Now, Cosmo has never been a publication known for its self-awareness ("For a sexy summer treat, stuff you vagina with a pint of Ben & Jerry's"), but here the magazine appears to have reached peak delusion. If anything has damaged the average woman's self-esteem and self-perception, it's the lady mag, the very industry of which is based in getting people to want the impossible, whether it be a celebrity's seemingly perfect body or a cookie cutter rule for giving the best blow job ever. For Cosmo to then cry foul on the lack of realism in Hollywood is disingenuous to the point of insult.
Hopefully (and probably), Lovato will take her artificially whittled-down appearance in stride and not let it affect her recovery, but what if she doesn't? And what message does the disconnect between the magazine's cover and the interview within send to readers? At worst, it's some version of Demi's so much better now that she's healthy, but her body needs some work. And will Cosmopolitan still deflect responsibility by hopping on the pseudo-concern, girl-power bandwagon while decrying the unfair role of women in the entertainment industry? With certainty.
And as for Demi herself — who, as the article also points out, is looking to create a more mature public image — is welcome to send Cosmo a real grown-up "fuck you."
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Click image to enlarge.(Credit: © Mazda)
At the 2015 Chicago Auto Show, Mazda unveiled its Accessories Concept Miata to light fanfare, but the big news isn’t what the concept had on it, it’s what Mazda mentioned almost as an aside with the concept. Mazda finally announced the output of the 2.0-liter Skyactiv-G engine that will power the 2016 MX-5 Miata. And prepare to be disappointed.
Despite Mazda claiming that the Skyactiv-G engine would be specially tuned for the Miata, alluding to the fact that it would have more power and torque than the one that already powers the base CX-5 and Mazda3, it actually is less powerful than both. It produces and underwhelming 155 horsepower and 148 pound-feet of torque – the same horsepower as the Mazda3, but 2 pound-feet less than the 3. How on Earth Mazda plans to sell the 2016 MX-5 with such a polarizing look and less power than the 2015 model baffles me. I can only hope that Mazda has another trick up its sleeve, like maybe the introduction of a version that uses the 2.5-liter Skyactiv-G engine, which has 184 horsepower and 185 pound-feet of torque.
I can go on for hours whining about all of this build up about the U.S. specifications only to find out it’s exactly what we all were thinking was not possible. But, it is now fact, the base Mazda3 is more powerful than the MX-5. I know, the MX-5 is 200 pounds lighter than last year, but remember there are also rumors that Mazda is basing this weight loss on the hardtop model versus the soft-top. Additionally, unless the MX-5 has a seriously reworked this version of the 2.0-liter, we are in for even more disappointment, as it this is a very wheezy engine.
But, let’s talk about this concept that Mazda debuted, which just added to my disappointment. It carries a set pf BBS 17-inch wheels, a gloss-black body kit that includes a front air dam, side sill extensions, a rear bumper skirt and a lip spoiler, lightweight Brembo brakes with red calipers, and a carbon-fiber luggage rack. Oh, and that body kit is nothing new, as we already saw it on the MX-5 Global Cup Car. The only part that really stood out to me was the Ceramic Metallic paint job.
Not too much to see for all of that build up.. That seems to be a trend for Mazda as of late.According to the manager of banished-from-FM KTRU, a new low-power transmitter for the student-run radio station is to be constructed on top of Rice Stadium — now that the FCC has granted permission to the university to return to the airwaves. The new surprise announcement heralds a return to broadcast radio for the student-run organization after several years of internet-and-app exile. Amid protests from students and alumni, Rice University’s administration sold off the radio station’s broadcasting capabilities — including its 50,000-watt transmitter in Humble — to the University of Houston in 2010.
***
But KTRU’s new FM station will be different. The transmitter will be restricted to a maximum effective radiated power of 41 watts, allowing the station’s signal to reach a radius of about 5 miles around the campus. When broadcasting begins near the end of this year, it’ll be found at a new frequency, 96.1 — UH’s KUHA has been broadcasting on 91.7, KTRU’s old frequency, since April 2011. The station will also likely have to change its name. As the Houston Press’s Chris Gray notes, the FCC granted the call letters KTRU in 2011 to a gospel radio station in La Harpe, Kansas.
Photo: Bill McCurdy
Not HumblePhilip Levine, who was poet laureate of the United States in 2011 and 2012, is shown in Fresno, Calif., in 2006. (Gary Kazanjian/AP)
Philip Levine, a former poet laureate of the United States who grew up working on the factory floors of Detroit and whose plainspoken poems often evoked the drudgery and dignity of manual labor, died Feb. 14 at his home in Fresno, Calif. He was 87.
His wife, Frances A. Levine, said the cause was pancreatic cancer.
Mr. Levine did not publish his first volume of verse until his mid-30s, but over time he became one of the country’s most highly honored poets. He won the Pulitzer Prize and two National Book Awards before serving as poet laureate in 2011 and 2012.
He was an amateur boxer in his youth, held jobs where he wore shirts embroidered with the name “Phil” and knew how to rebuild the universal joint of a car’s powertrain. He never completely left the blue-collar life behind, as he wrote about a world of sweat and sinew seldom seen in American poetry since Carl Sandburg or even Walt Whitman.
“I believed,” Mr. Levine said in an interview with the Academy of American Poets, “that if I could transform my experience into poetry I would give it the value and dignity it did not begin to possess on its own.”
In his 1991 poem “You Can Have It,” he recalled a time in the 1940s when he worked for a bottling company, and his twin brother had a job shipping ice:
All night at the ice plant he had fed
the chute its silvery blocks, and then I
stacked cases of orange soda for the children
of Kentucky, one gray boxcar at a time
with always two more waiting. We were twenty
for such a short time and always in
the wrong clothes, crusted with dirt
and sweat. I think now we were never twenty.
Mr. Levine began working at 14 and held a series of what he called “stupid jobs.” Over time, though, he came to believe that there was an inherent value in work, a sense of decency and honor.
“He elevates the experience of working people into something that is able to impart a little wisdom to us,” Librarian of Congress James H. Billington said in 2011 when he named Mr. Levine to the position of poet laureate. “He’s the laureate, if you like, of the industrial heartland. It’s a very, very American voice.”
Mr. Levine published more than 20 volumes of verse, including “The Simple Truth” (1994), which won the Pulitzer. One of his most acclaimed books, “What Work Is,” which won the National Book Award in 1991, portrayed the world of people who ride buses and who get scars on their hands from working with machinery.
In the title poem, he wrote about standing in line, hoping for a day job:
This is about waiting,
shifting from one foot to another.
feeling the light rain falling like mist
into your hair, blurring your vision
until you think you see your own brother
ahead of you, maybe ten places.
Reviewing “What Work Is” in The Washington Post, poet Alfred Corn noted that “an extra dimension of dignity has been conferred on [the] characters.” He praised Mr. Levine for being “tender without being sentimental, calm but not lacking in passion, writing in a diction as clear and lucid as spring water.”
Others sometimes criticized Mr. Levine for writing in a prosaic voice that lacked lyricism and was, if anything, too accessible. Harvard literary critic Helen Vendler once wrote of his work: “Is there any compelling reason why it should be called poetry?”
After teaching for many years at the California State University at Fresno, Mr. Levine later became a visiting professor at Princeton, Brown, Columbia, New York University and other prestigious schools. His worst students, he said, were Ivy Leaguers who were shocked to learn that their poems were no good.
He preferred the working-class students of Fresno State, who seemed more receptive to the notion that a poem, like a car’s transmission or an unkempt garden, sometimes needed to be rebuilt, cleaned up and put in order.
Philip Levine was born Jan. 10, 1928, in Detroit. He had an identical twin brother and an older brother. He was 5 when his father died; his mother raised her sons while working as an office manager.
In his teens, Mr. Levine began to read poetry, which he would recite to himself while holding down jobs at auto manufacturers, a soap factory and a bottling plant. In the 1940s and ’50s, he became friendly with many musicians in Detroit’s vibrant jazz scene and emulated their approach to their art.
“You do the work, and you don’t whine,” he told the Detroit Free Press in 2011. “They played because that was what they were meant to do, and at a very early age I realized that poetry was what I was supposed to do.”
He graduated in 1950 from Detroit’s Wayne State University, where he also received a master’s degree in English. In 1953, he began to attend the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, sometimes sitting in on classes when he couldn’t afford the tuition, and became a protege of the poet John Berryman.
After receiving a master of fine arts degree from the Iowa writing school in 1957, Mr. Levine began teaching at Fresno State a year later.
He didn’t publish his first book until the 1960s, but within a decade he was acknowledged as one of the country’s leading poets. He received the National Book Award in 1980 and 1991, the Academy of American Poets’ Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize in 1977 and the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize in 1987. He received two Guggenheim fellowships and three fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and for two years headed the arts endowment’s literature panel.
Mr. Levine retired from Fresno State in 1992 but remained associated with the university until his death. The school awards an annual poetry prize in his honor. He had a second home in Brooklyn.
His first marriage, to Patty Kanterman, ended in divorce. Survivors include his wife of 60 years, Frances Artley Levine of Fresno and Brooklyn; three sons from his second marriage, Mark Levine of Brooklyn, John Levine of Lodi, N.J., and Theodore Levine of Midland Park, N.J.; two brothers; five grandchildren; and a great-granddaughter.
In addition to the world of labor, Mr. Levine also wrote poems about jazz, politics and the Spanish Civil War. The common element in his work was the presence of people, working toward something better in life.
“Much of our recent poetry seems totally without people,” he told the Paris Review in a 1988 interview. “Except for the speaker, no one is there. There’s a lot of snow, a moose walks across the field, the trees darken, the sun begins to set, and a window opens. Maybe from a great distance you can see an old woman in a dark shawl carrying an unrecognizable bundle into the gathering gloom.”
He had little patience for vague, self-referential poetry and was not at all interested in writing about nature.
“Hiking,” he said, “was what we did in Detroit when the car broke down.”Officials announced Thursday a dramatic expansion of restrictions on elephant ivory within the U.S., a move they say will diminish what remains of the trade.
The measure, issued by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS), finalizes a proposal made last year to ban the commercial trade of ivory in most contexts within the country. Previous U.S. regulations have focused largely on preventing the importation of ivory and offered relatively generous allowances to ivory already here. Ivory from elephants that were hunted before the animal was considered endangered and ivory from elephants that died of natural causes were both permitted. The new regulation makes only a few exceptions for genuine antiques and some manufactured items that contain a relatively small amount of ivory.
Many conservationists say that allowing any ivory trade at all created easy cover for traders to claim that their ivory was legal. One 2009 investigation by the FWS led to the seizure of more than a ton of ivory from one Philadelphia art store that had been manipulated to look old enough to meet federal standard.
“Our actions close a major avenue to wildlife traffickers,” said FWS Director Dan Ashe in a statement. “We still have much to do to save this species, but today is a good day for the African elephant.”
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The measure comes as concern grows over a decline in African elephant populations largely driven by poaching. Fewer than 500,000 elephants roam Sub-Saharan Africa today and conservationists estimate that poachers have killed as many as 50,000 elephants annually in recent years.
The U.S. ranks as the second largest market for illegal ivory after China. In addition to cutting off the U.S. market, conservationists say the new rule will allow the U.S. to push other countries to take similar actions. “It’s sending a very powerful message globally, that the United States is taking a moral position,” says John Calvelli, executive vice president at Wildlife Conservation Society. “It’s very hard for us to point our fingers at our countries when we ourselves have an issue.”
Write to Justin Worland at justin.worland@time.com.If humans form a colony on Mars, their survival will depend on developing a steady source of food. That could take the form of buildings filled with plants growing hydroponically or aeroponically. Otherwise, a recent study by three Dutch research institutes found that it may actually be possible to grow crops directly in the soil found on Mars and the moon.
The Dutch study covered many different types of crops from tomatoes to wheat to mustard. The team planted seeds in two types of Earth-made soil that mimicked the kinds found on the moon and Mars. It also placed seeds in low-quality Earth soil.
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Over 50 days, the researchers observed how many seeds germinated, how many flowers and leaves they grew and if they were alive by the end. They found that the synthetic Martian soil supported plant growth as well as, and often better than, the dirt from Earth. The lunar soil performed poorly, though plants were able to grow in it.
That’s a bit surprising because both bodies have more heavy metals in their soil than Earth. Moon soil is also much poorer in nutrients and has a much higher pH than the other two soil types. But nevertheless, neither the synthetic Martian nor lunar dirt was toxic to plants.
But don’t run off and plant crops just anywhere in space. Any plants growing there would need to take place in a climate-controlled habitat, as temperatures are nowhere near as nice on Earth. A day on Mars can range from -207 to 80 degrees Fahrenheit because there is little atmosphere. Any space plants would require a regular source of heat and watering.
The Dutch team pointed out some bigger questions about its study as well. For example, real Martian and lunar soil could be worse at holding onto water than the synthetic variety. Astronaut farmers also might not have access to naturally occurring nitrogen — an incredibly important ingredient for plant growth — requiring it to be added to the soil. Oh, and there’s that whole minimal gravity thing.
No matter what the challenges, growing crops and other plants in actual soil will remain of interest to human space explorers. Not all plants are great at growing in an aeroponic or hydroponic environment. And there’s just something about that Martian dirt that makes vegetables taste delicious.A major climate event millions of years ago that caused substantial change to the ocean's ecological systems may hold clues as to how the Earth will respond to future climate change, a Florida State University researcher said.
In a new study published in Earth and Planetary Science Letters, Assistant Professor of Geology Jeremy Owens explains that parts of the ocean became inhospitable for some organisms as the Earth's climate warmed 94 million years ago. As the Earth warmed, several natural elements -- what we think of as vitamins -- depleted, causing some organisms to die off or greatly decrease in numbers.
The elements that faded away were vanadium and molybdenum, important trace metals that serve as nutrients for ocean life. Molybdenum in particular is used by bacteria to help promote nitrogen fixation, which is essential for all forms of life. "These trace metals were drawn down to levels below where primary producing organisms, the base of the ocean food chain, can survive," Owens said. "This change inhibited biology."
The warming of the Earth during this time period took place over millions of years. At the time, the world was a drastically different place. Palms were found in Canada and lily pads dotted the Arctic Circle, while dinosaurs existed on land.
But as the world continued to warm, it caused "a natural feedback that had a dramatic effect on the world's ocean chemistry, which is recorded in the rock record," Owens said.
Owens and a team of researchers examined samples of sediment provided through the Ocean Drilling Program, a National Science Foundation-supported program that uses the scientific drill ship JOIDES Resolution to recover samples beneath the ocean floor off the coast of Venezuela. They examined a 10-meter portion that they pinned to the climate turnover event by analyzing microfossils or tiny shell organisms in the layer.
Owens found that ecological communities experienced a substantial shift 94 million years ago because many types of bacteria and algae were affected by the changes in ocean nutrients.
"Some of these species didn't totally die, but they didn't flourish the way they used to," Owens said.
The decrease of these trace metals also suggests a global expansion of oxygen deficiency, which could lead to larger dead zones in bodies of water around the world, meaning little to no life could exist in those areas.
That is of concern to scientists as they try to understand what will happen to the world around us as the Earth continues to warm. For scientists, the events of 94 million years ago provide a possible glimpse into future climate change scenarios.
"This is the best window to understanding future climate change," Owens said. "It gives us insight into the cascade of events that can affect the entire ocean." The research was funded by the National Science Foundation, NASA and the Agouron Institute.
Owens' co-authors are Christopher Reinhard at Georgia Institute of Technology, Megan Rohrssen at Central Michigan University, and Gordon Love and Timothy Lyons of the University of California, Riverside.UPDATE: At about 4:45 Thursday morning, authorities confirmed that Constance and Larry VanOosten have been found.
They were being treated at the hospital for non-life threatening injuries.
A suspect is now in custody.
The investigation remains active and fluid.
ERIE — A woman and her husband have possibly been abducted from a home in rural Erie, Il.
The couple has been identified as Constance VanOosten and her husband Larry VanOosten.
Whiteside County Sheriff's Office says they are investigating the incident after a report came in that a withdrawal of cash had been taken from the victims' account at First Trust and Savings Bank in Albany.
The investigation is being conducted by numerous surrounding agencies, including the Whiteside County Sheriff's Office, Illinois State Police, and the FBI.
Authorities say the possible suspect vehicle appears to be a 1990's two-toned silver Chevrolet Caprice.
Anyone with any information is asked to call the FBI at 1-800-CALL-FBI (option six).
Follow Andrew Ball for developments.Photo by Chris Keels
Hello everyone. My name is Nick Fancher and I'm your guest blogger today. In case you don't know me (which is likely the case), I am a Columbus, Ohio based portrait and commercial photographer. A couple of weeks ago I released Studio Anywhere: A Photographer's Guide to Shooting in Unconventional Locations, on Peachpit Press. The idea behind the book is that photographers can get away with shooting without a conventional studio most of the time, as long as they can learn to make the most of their environments; all with the use of minimal, affordable gear.
This idea was born out of necessity. When I was in New York City last year, I wanted to do some test shooting in my free time. I began looking around for studios to rent for the day, and found the average price to be around $1,000. It'd be one thing if this was for a paying client, who would be footing the bill, but this was for unpaid, personal work. And even if I did shell out the $1,000, all the models would then be forced to come to me, which for an unpaid test shoot, would not exactly be a motivating factor for them. Instead, I opted to meet them at their homes, realizing that all I really needed was a white wall, and every home has at least one white wall. And it worked out just fine.
Setup: one light with grid
White walls work
Once I returned to Columbus, I started putting this practice to test, now opting to meet clients at their homes and offices for shoots. Not only did it allow for me to happen upon some pretty amazing environments to shoot in, I think it also gave me a +1 for convenience, in the eyes of the clients. It also led me to some particularly small spaces, which forced me to get creative with my lighting. As you may know, most of the time you need your light several feet away from your subject, in order to get a larger light spread. But if, say, your client lives in a 200 square foot apartment and the only spot to shoot is the spot next to his bed in his living room, you don't have that luxury. To make my light source larger and softer, I turned the flash in the direction of the white wall on the other side of his bed and it worked smashingly.
Setup: one light bounced into white wall
White walls wreally work!
You may have noticed in the previous setup shot that there are white boards propped up behind the subject. I have two white and two black, 40×60" sheets of foam core that I bring with me to every shoot (leaving them in the car until I see if I actually need them). I often end up needing to use them in a variety of ways. Often I tape two boards together to make a v-flat, in order to block a light source or reflect light. Sometimes I use them as a backdrop, as in the previous scenario. Other times I stack them up so the model can stand on them, if I need a full body shot and the room has an unsightly floor, such as shag carpet.
My rule of thumb is to travel as light as possible, since I typically work without an assistant. I want to minimize the amount of trips I have to make to my car. So if I am heading in to shoot in an unfamiliar space, all I take in with me is my camera bag, a light stand and an umbrella, leaving my tripod, sandbags, additional stands and white boards in the car unless they are absolutely needed. And once I get a lay of the land, I scope out viable shoot areas. Large white walls are a plus. Areas with concrete or gloss wood floors will reflect light and make seamless, full body portraits a lot easier.
Setup: three lights gelled cyan, magenta and yellow
White wall plus a sturdy table = clean, full body portraits
I've even used grey walls or cream colored walls without issue. Of course white balance isn't much of an issue when your two lights are gelled red and cyan.
Setup: two lights gelled cyan and red
Cream colored wall is no problem when your white balance is not in play
Once you start working this way, you start noticing things that you can use to your advantage, such as a nice, red wall. I made a v-flat out of my two black boards and used a white board as a bounce, opposite the red wall. By firing a flash into the white and red surfaces on either side of the model, I had a large, soft spread on a black background, creating a stylized final shot.
Setup: two lights, fired into white bounce and a red wall
Large, soft, stylized light
Want a variety of backdrops for little to no cost? Browse royalty-free images on Google or buy cheap stock images to project onto a white wall. It's an old Hollywood trick, but it's a cool one to play with.
Setup: projector for back wall and one light, snooted
Free trip to Switzerland
What if you're just starting out and you don't own a strobe? Do you have a garage? It's a great spot for shaping available light. It's especially effective on a sunny day. By placing your subject closer or farther away from the open garage door, you can control the amount of light falling on them.
Setup: subject sandwiched in a black v-flat
Dramatic, available light portrait
Achieving a blacked out environment, sometimes referred to as "invisible black," is a lot easier than you may think. Find a background that's a mid to dark tone, not in direct sunlight. Make sure that you have enough space to keep the subject and light(s) away from said background. Get an ambient exposure and then close down at least three stops to get it to go dark/black. Add your light, output set to a high enough output to properly illuminate your subject. Flag light as needed, to keep it from spilling on to background, by using a grid, zooming in the flash head, angling the light away from the background, etc.
Setup: A medium-toned brown wall in the shade is a perfect backdrop to achieve a black scene. I used two bare bulb flashes on the model, one to light her upper torso and one to light her legs, below the tutu.
Black scene
Sometimes I want to add natural, visual elements to a shot, such as flowers or tall grass. To do this, take a black or white v-flat to a park and place it in front of said flower/grass element and have the subject sit/stand in the v-flat. Side note: if your camera case is nice and sturdy as is my Pelican 1510 case, it makes a fantastic chair for your subject.
Setup: Black v-flat in a field, flagging the direct sunlight from the model
Dramatic portrait on black, with added visual elements
As I mentioned earlier, I typically work alone, without an assistant. This means that I am traveling light, without sandbags, for examples. It also means that I can't put a large light modifier on my flash, such as an umbrella, without it blowing over with the smallest breeze. So I am usually looking for ways to soften a bare flash, when I am in the field. As was the case for the living room scenarios, lighter, neutral-colored walls are great for reflecting light. Simply place your light 2-3 feet away from the wall, zooming in the head, if applicable. Angle the light into the wall so that it's heading in the direction of the subject (think banking a pool shot).
Setup: A white wall found in park made for a great bounce surface for my flash
Soft light on my subject without an umbrella (and sandbag) on my light
I realize that many of you are likely already using some of these techniques/hacks, and you may even have some that I have not yet heard of or tried. Please use the comment section for sharing your ideas and experiments. If you feel so inclined, pick up a copy of my book/ebook, Studio Anywhere, here. Thanks for reading and happy shooting!
You can see more of Nick’s work at NickFancher.com, and follow him on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and YouTube.While Peter LaBarbera has complained that he was “forced” to watch rookie defensive end Michael Sam kiss his boyfriend, today conservative activist Michael Peroutka said he got rid of cable in order to avoid seeing “sewer filth” like this.
Michael Sam, to the best of my information, is a football player recently drafted by the Saint Louis Rams who, apparently, is publically in violation of Leviticus 18:22.
That verse declares homosexual conduct to be an abomination before God. In the very next verse, by the way, God labels bestiality as an abomination as well.
In any event, I cannot write about Michael Sam or some allegedly disgusting kiss, because I didn’t see it. And I didn’t see it because, as you may recall from my commentary two weeks ago, I no longer have cable television in my home.
…
You see, I have become convinced that, along with the government school system, the television is one of the major polluters of American minds.
I finally decided that to keep cable TV was the equivalent to diverting the sewer that runs in front of my home, through my living room, for the consumption of my family.
So, I got rid of it. No more TV. No more sewerage coming through my living room.
So, this kiss, which is just the latest sewer filth designed for my consumption by television programmers, just got by me.Syria's Bashar al-Assad is leading a "horrific regime," Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., said Sunday. "Assad has got to go; ISIS has got to be defeated," but that should happen as we "work with allies in the region" because the U.S. needs to start "paying attention to the needs back home," Sanders said.
"I do not want to see the United States get sucked into perpetual warfare in the Middle East, see our men and women get killed, trillions of dollars being spent," Sen. Sanders told CNN's "State of the Union."
"We've been in Afghanistan now for over 15 years. We've been in Iraq for a very long time. I don't want to see us dragged into another war in Syria when kids in this country cannot afford to go to college, when our infrastructure is collapsing, when 28 million Americans have no health insurance.
"We have got to start paying attention to the needs back home."
Sanders pointed to the past U.S. failures and "mistakes" in Iraq, and he said the U.S., as with regard to North Korea, "needs a strategy" and should "not act unilaterally."
"In this [Syria] case we have got to demand that Russia and Iran stop their efforts in supporting this horrific dictator," Sanders told host Jake Tapper, suggesting President Donald Trump get back to his "America First" inaugural promise and leave the Middle East troubles to "allies in the region."
Later in his Sunday CNN appearance, Sanders told Tapper about the DNC's upcoming red state tour through middle America to expand the Democratic party. In some of these states Sanders beat out eventual Democratic Presidential Candidate Hillary Clinton.
"So many of our people are giving up on the political process," Sanders told Tapper. "It is very frightening. In the last presidential election, when Trump won, we had the lowest voter turnout in 20 years, and in the previous two years before that, in the midterm election, we had the lowest voter turnout in 70 years...."
"We're going to be fighting to see that the Democratic Party becomes a 50-state party. You can't just be a West Coast party and an East Coast party."PRINCETON, NJ -- Ninety-five percent of Americans celebrate Christmas, and of these, 51% describe the holiday as "strongly religious" for them, continuing an upward trend seen since 1989.
This trend toward greater religious meaning in Christmas is evident even as the percentage of Americans who say they celebrate Christmas has stayed consistent in recent years -- ranging between 93% and 96% in six separate Gallup measurements since 1994.
The poll finds a majority of Americans incorporating specific religious activities or symbols into their holiday celebrations. This includes 62% who attend religious services on Christmas Eve or Christmas Day, 65% who display decorations with a religious meaning, and 78% who take time to reflect on the birth of Christ.
However, Americans are much more likely to engage in secular Christmas traditions such as exchanging gifts (93%), spending time with family and friends on the holiday (93%), and putting up a Christmas tree (88%). The figures are slightly higher among Americans who celebrate Christmas, including exchanging gifts and spending time with family and friends, which are almost universal traditions, at 97%.
Religious traditions are, not surprisingly, more common among those who say the holiday is strongly religious to them. Nearly all members of this group, 98%, say they take time at Christmas to reflect on the birth of Christ. More than 8 in 10 attend religious services on Christmas Eve or Christmas Day, or display religious decorations. But even among those who say Christmas is a strongly religious holiday to them, many of the secular traditions are just as common if not more so than the religious ones.
Generally speaking, those who say Christmas is not too religious a holiday for them are less likely to participate in most of the common traditions. But even those who attach little religious meaning to Christmas are just as likely as those who view Christmas as a religious holiday to exchange gifts, spend time with family and friends on Christmas Eve and Christmas Day, and attend Christmas parties.
Implications
Though it has Christian underpinnings, the Christmas holiday is celebrated nearly universally by Americans, including 80% of non-Christians. Part of the reason for this is Americans' widespread involvement in nonreligious aspects |
, long shadows, it was beginning to look like the end for the federal army.
Good news came with the arrival of Buell, whose army would cross the river near sundown. It was not a moment too soon, for Grant’s army had begun to draw up for a last-ditch stand with its back to the miry wastes of Snake Creek. Gen. Braxton Bragg immediately ordered his corps to “Sweep everything forward.… Drive the enemy into the river.”
Grant’s adjutant had placed a battery of enormous siege guns in the Union line at that particular point, and the very shock of its fire drove the Confederates back. As Grant was observing these proceedings, a rebel cannonball blew the head off of one of his aides standing not 10 feet away.
Soon Bragg was sending out reinforcements, organizing another, final charge to break the Union line. Then he was staggered by orders from a messenger: Beauregard, unaware that Buell had arrived, had called off the attack till morning.
Bragg was convinced that even though some of Buell’s army was taking the field, one last great charge would split the line and the battle would be won. “My God!” Bragg cried, as he watched other rebel units pulling back. “Too late! My God! Too late!”
Related Disunion Highlights Explore multimedia from the series and navigate through past posts, as well as photos and articles from the Times archive. See the Highlights »
It was also too true. Beauregard, commanding from the Shiloh church nearly two miles from the present scene of battle, was unaware that Buell’s army was arriving. He believed only the remaining Yankees of Grant were milling around Pittsburg Landing like goats being prepared for the sacrifice and could be mopped up in the morning.
But with morning instead came one of the great reversals of the Civil War. Dawn brought an uproar of Union artillery and word that the Yankees were attacking all across the Rebel front. For half a day Beauregard put up a good fight, if for no other reason than he couldn’t think of anything better to do, but the odds were hopeless and his men were spent. At around 2 p.m. on April 7, Beauregard ordered a withdrawal back to the stronghold of Corinth.
That should have ended the matter, but instead the next day Sherman took a large force in pursuit until he ran into a man — Nathan Bedford Forrest — with whose name he would become well acquainted as the war progressed. At the Battle of Fallen Timbers on April 8, Forrest taught Sherman a lesson about the power of cavalry that he would not soon forget, and with that, the fighting at Shiloh came to an end.
There remained the repugnant task of burying the thousands of dead, as well as hundreds of dead horses. The butcher’s bill at Shiloh was just shy of 24,000 killed, wounded and missing, about evenly divided between both sides.
Nothing like it had ever happened in the Western Hemisphere. By comparison, the combined casualties at the Battle of Bull Run were 4,800. In fact, the two days fighting at Shiloh had produced more casualties than all the previous wars of the United States, combined.
Library of Congress
Word soon got out to the Union public that Grant’s army had been surprised, that men were bayonetted to death in their tents while they slept, which was an exaggeration. The public was incensed to hear that an entire 8,000-man division never took the field on the terrible first day, which was true. (It belonged to Gen. Lew Wallace, who took the wrong road and would afterward write the novel “Ben Hur.”) There was also the shameful matter of the 10,000 of Grant’s soldiers who ran away.
In the press and in the halls of Congress Grant was censured for dallying in a mansion miles from the battlefield, for failing to fortify, or reconnoiter, or to even have a battle plan in case of attack, as well as failing to pursue and destroy the beaten Confederate army. Much of this sticks. But there were also accusations of drunkenness, indifference and sloth, which do not.
In Washington, a chorus arose for Grant’s removal, despite the fact that he had won the battle. Popular lore has it that when Grant was accused of drunkenness, Lincoln told the critics, “Then find out what kind of whiskey he drinks and send a barrel to my other generals.” There is no real evidence he ever said this, but there is evidence that he said of Grant: “I can’t spare that man. He fights.”
In the South there was widespread dismay over the outcome and over the death of Sidney Johnston. Late on the first day of battle Beauregard had foolishly sent a telegram to Richmond saying, “The day is ours!” Disappointment was palpable, and Davis wept bitterly over Johnston’s death — they had been at West Point together. He never forgave Beauregard for calling off the attack.
The significance of Shiloh cannot be overstated. If the Union had lost badly, there would have been practically nothing standing in the way of a Southern invasion of the North. Cities like St. Louis, Cincinnati, Chicago, even Cleveland, would have been exposed. Almost certainly Kentucky would have joined the Confederacy — and probably Missouri as well, a calamity for the Union. Southern states would have rallied and recruits poured in. Lincoln would have had to shift his armies to counter the threat, upsetting the military and political balance at the most critical time.
None of that happened, of course. But a very real and important result of the battle was that after Shiloh Grant reached the stark conclusion that the only way to restore the Union would be the total conquest — or in his words, “subjugation” — of the South. Sherman had understood this long before Shiloh and began to indulge his soon-to-be well-known pyromaniacal urges along the Mississippi River near Memphis.
But the overarching significance of Shiloh was to impress on everyone that there was never going to be one neat, brilliant, military maneuver that would end the war — or even come close to winning it. It was as if Shiloh had unleashed some tremendous, murderous thing that was going to “drench the country in blood,” as Sherman had prophesied on the eve of secession.
From the ordinary foot soldiers’ point of view, they had “seen the elephant,” as the expression of the day went. For many it was so terrible that they ran and hid behind the bluffs. It was terrible for others too, but they stood their ground and faced it, or died trying. None of them who went through Shiloh would be the same again.
Confederate private Sam Watkins of the First Tennessee summed it up in his countrified elegance: “I had been feeling mean all morning, as if I had stolen a sheep … I had heard and read of battlefields, seen pictures of battlefields, of horses and men, of cannons and wagons, all jumbled together, while the ground was strewn with dead and dying and wounded, but I must confess I never realized the ‘pomp and circumstance’ of the thing called ‘glorious war’ until I saw this.”
Winston Groom is the author, most recently, of “Shiloh, 1862.” Photo by Squire Fox.Biden slipped a word about Clinton into his speech at the American Constitution Society convention while lamenting the vacancy on the Supreme Court left by the late Justice Antonin Scalia and the refusal of the Senate to consider Obama's nominee to replace him.
"Keep in mind, we have another entire term of this potential confusion if the vote is not allowed this year. Anybody who thinks that whatever the next president— and God willing, in my view, it'll be Secretary Clinton," Biden said to loud applause that he quickly tried to quiet. "Now I don't say that for political reasons, but whoever it is, even if it is a Democrat, the idea this will be brought up within a month or two or three is highly unlikely."
ADVERTISEMENTYou're supposed to love thy neighbor, not kidnap them -- no matter how loud they are in the laundry room.
Leon Thurston, 61, of Vero Beach, Florida, faces kidnapping charges after police say he abducted a neighbor at gunpoint early Sunday morning because he felt she was making too much noise while washing her clothes, according to WESH TV.
Jessica and David Scoville were washing clothes in their laundry room at about 5:30 a.m. when Thurston, their next-door neighbor, appeared in the doorway and said they were being too loud.
Thurston was carrying a handgun and a baton. He allegedly hit David Scoville with the baton twice before grabbing Jessica Scoville by the wrist and taking her from her home, according to WPBF TV.
Police were called to the scene and used a K-9 unit to track Thurston and his alleged victim.
Investigators were not able to find the pair, but Jessica Scoville later escaped after telling Thurston she needed to use a bathroom.
She fled and flagged down police officers.
The victim told police that Thurston took her to a nearby park and made her walk around a dirt track for a few hours while they spoke, WPTV reports.
Officers arrested Thurston and found a.22-caliber Derringer in his front pants pocket.
Police said Thurston copped to the crime.
“He stated that he walked around with her and spoke to her to ‘blow off some steam,’" according a police report obtained by TCPalm.com. "He advised he was not going to hurt her,” but wouldn't let her leave because he wasn't done talking to her.
Thurston also told officers, “He wished he hadn’t done what he did.”
The suspect was charged with armed burglary, aggravated battery and assault, kidnapping, false imprisonment and carrying a concealed firearm.
In addition, he is suspected of stealing a bathing suit left on a clothesline on Saturday, according to WPTV.com.
He is currently in the Indian River County Jail.
The arrest shocked some of Thurston's other neighbors.
Fran Grocholl to WPTV that Thurston was a take-charge guy who removed fallen trees after hurricanes with a tractor.Daniel Greenfield, a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the Freedom Center, is an investigative journalist and writer focusing on the radical left and Islamic terrorism.
“The racist president who is a supremacist — white, who does not like Blacks, does not like the Chinese, he does not like the Muslims, he doesn’t like the Hispanics," Vicente Adolfo Solano declared in Spanish, standing in front an ISIS flag. "In the name of Allah and our leader, Abu, we are going to defeat you.”
Solano, a 53-year-old Honduran living in Miami, seemed like an unlikely candidate to join ISIS.
But there he is on video lashing out at President Trump. Solano was resentful over his “temporary immigration status”. Hondurans living in the United States had been automatically converted to “refugees” after Hurricane Mitch in 1999. Temporary Protected Status for the eighteen year hurricane refugees expires in Jan 2018. And President Trump appears unwilling to extend it any further.
Even if Solano was here under TPS, he should still have been deported due to his criminal record. But instead he remained here, and was so furious at the country that had taken him in that he joined ISIS.
Solano was caught with an inert pressure cooker bomb at the Dolphin Mall. His goal was to set off the bomb in the crowded food court to kill as many Americans as he could. Black Friday, the day after Thanksgiving and the start of the Christmas shopping season, was to be a day of unforgettable horror.
"I am going to plant a bomb like in Boston, in the name of Allah," he had declared. "Like in Boston, like Suarez wanted to do in the Keys, that's how they're going to get it, and even worse."
The Boston Marathon bombing is familiar to most Americans. Harlem Suarez is more obscure. But it’s not hard to see why Solano would have identified with the Latino Islamic terror convert.
Suarez had been sentenced to life in prison this year for a plot to detonate a backpack bomb on a Key West beach in Florida. “Kill our enemies and convert to Islam now in USA,” Suarez had urged.
“We will destroy America and divide it in two. We will raise our black flag on top of your White House,” he had boasted in a video.
The judge who sentenced Suarez had dismissed him as a clown. His family and the media had suggested that this was yet another case of the FBI entrapping a “naïve” young Muslim. And that wasn’t hard to do considering the emergence of some of his attempted ISIS recordings which began with, "In the name of Allah, the most — uh, wait, hold on. F___!" But the Solano case shows that he has become an inspiration to Latino converts to Islam. Suarez had desperately wanted to recruit other terrorists.
And he succeeded.
Bombing the Dolphin Mall had originally been Suarez’s idea. He had suggested planting bombs there to an undercover informant. Now one of his fans actually tried to follow through with the idea.
Solano and Suarez aren’t aberrations. Also this year, James Gonzalo Medina pleaded guilty to a bomb plot aimed at the Aventura Turnberry Jewish Center. He will likely be sentenced in November. His lawyers and the media tried to blame a ‘brain cyst’ and assorted flavors of mental illness. But it wasn’t mental illness that caused Medina to change his name to James Muhammad.
“I feel that I'm doing it for a good cause for Allah,” he had explained.
In one of his videos, Medina/Muhammad had declared, “I am a Muslim and I don't like what is going on in this world. I'm going to handle business here in America. Aventura, watch your back. ISIS is in the house.”
The Muslim convert had originally plotted a shooting attack against the Jewish Center with an AK-47. He told an undercover agent that he was “comfortable” killing women and children. He had discussed, “going to a synagogue and just spraying everybody... cause we're Muslims.”
He finally settled on a bombing and was arrested on a Friday night with an inert explosive device.
Medina, like Solano, had a criminal record. Like Suarez and Solano, his lawyers will probably try to blame mental illness or some variety of mental incapacity. But there is something else going on here.
All three Islamic terrorists were quite vocal about their motivations and agendas. All three were Latino converts to Islam. And while the media has attempted to minimize the threat they posed, there’s no obvious difference between them and fellow Florida Jihadist Omar Mateen who managed to murder 49 people at the Pulse nightclub in Orlando with a plot as violently unlikely as theirs.
After the Pulse massacre, the media shaped the conversation around homophobia and traded discredited fake news conspiracy theories about Mateen’s hypothetical homosexuality. All of this was a convenient way to avoid discussing the ongoing threat of Islamic terrorists down in Florida.
Suarez was a waiter. Medina was a glass installer. Solano was a painter. All three men were near the bottom of the economic ladder. And they had found a way to link Islam to their own resentments.
Solano hated America. His diatribes at President Trump and America embodied his resentment over his temporary immigration status. He blasted Americans as “invaders of this country who came to this country to kill all of the Indians. They abolished them, and now they’re telling us to get out of here. They are the ones who have to leave.” Medina hated Jews. Suarez was as ambitious as he was inept, spending all his money to buy status symbols that he couldn’t afford. And dreaming grandiose dreams.
The Islamic State provided men like these with outlets for their resentment and grandiosity. Solano’s immigration fuming, Medina and Suarez’s failures could all be rolled into the Jihad.
It would be a grave mistake to think of their terror plots as having nothing to do with Islam.
From its first days, Islam was built on harnessing the grandiose fantasies and violent resentments of its leaders and followers from Mohammed on down. Islam was always about settling scores, with more successful merchants, with the Jews, the Christians, other families and tribes, poets and empires.
Resentment, not religion, is the secret fuel of Islam. It has always been a religion whose greatest appeal is to the resentful, the aimlessly violent, the shiftless and the egotistical. Westerners have come to think of religions as theological. Sometimes as cultural or tribal. But Islam is emotional. It tells men like Suarez, Solano and Medina that they are great men on a mission from Allah to change the world.
Suarez fantasized about recruiting other Muslims to a cause.
"I wanna see it go worldwide with now all the Muslims realizing you know, when it's our time,” Medina fantasized. “Next thing you know it will be in California, Washington, and the brothers are saying you know, it's our time now."
“We are going to defeat you,” Solano threatened.
The grandiosity and its accompanying collective identity is the appeal of ISIS. Any Solano, Medina or Suarez, a painter, a waiter or a glass installer, can suddenly become the leader of a phantom army.
The expanding Jihad with its numerous emirs has always understood that. The plotters may look like buffoons to us. But the difference between a buffoon and a monster is success. If the 9/11 hijackers had failed, their plot to destroy the World Trade Center, the Pentagon and the White House using boxcutters would have seemed hilarious. Had Omar Mateen’s plot been broken up early, the media would have dismissed him as a delusional idiot whose terror plots were nothing more than empty fantasies.
Suarez may have been a buffoon. But he has already inspired one terrorist plot. How many more will there be?
Florida has an Islamic Latino terror convert problem. And it needs to be addressed before it’s too late.Player: Hassan Whiteside : Hassan Whiteside Height: 7’0″ Shoots: Right Strengths: Whiteside is a seven foot athlete with elite length and elite timing. The result – the leagues best shot blocker, by far. Whiteside is a rim protector whose mere presence consistently alters shots. On the offensive side, Whiteside is an elite pick-and-roll finisher. He also has a respectable jump shot out to about 15 feet. Finally, as a 65% free throw shooter, teams cannot employ a hack-a-Whiteside strategy. Position: C : C Weight: 265 Age: 27 Weaknesses: Although known for defense, Whiteside is a poor on ball defender. He has problems defending postup players, often over playing their first move. Whiteside is also a poor pick-and-roll defender, often giving opponents uncontested mid-range shots. He also has a tendency to chase stats, going for blocks when he should box out his man. On the offensive side, Whiteside needs to improve his passing. Too often, he becomes a black hole when he receives the ball, forcing bad shots. He needs to continue to improve as a screen setter. He needs to continue to improve his postup game
The deal: Four years, $98 million dollars. The fourth year is a player option.
Analysis: With Whiteside, it’s all about potential. Last year was his first full year in the NBA. While Whiteside has always possessed the talent, it took an organization like the Heat to reign in his personality and bring out the talent. Like every second year player, there is room for Whiteside to grow, especially in making ‘winning plays’. What’s amazing is that Whiteside already averaged 14.2 points, 11.8 rebounds, and 3.7 blocks in only 29 minutes per game. In the worse case scenario, if Whiteside has peaked, his contract is only a slight overpay. On the other hand, Whiteside could easily become a 20 point, 10 rebound, 3 block player for the next 4-5 years. He could be a cornerstone around which to build a franchise. Whiteside is in his physical prime and should maintain his performance for the next 4-5 years. Although it was expensive, the Heat couldn’t afford to lose Whiteside’s potential – he just might be the most sought after commodity in the NBA, a game changing player.
On-court Impact: Game changing (potentially)
Grade: AOver the years, I’ve become somewhat of an expert on time.
I have to be.
Here are my current day-to-day responsibilities:
providing support for the quarter million people who use Free Code Camp each month
who use Free Code Camp each month overseeing the expansion of our open source project and its curriculum
editing every single article you read here on this Medium publication
raising my baby daughter
Obligatory baby photo: Jocelyn chilling in her running stroller.
I’ve read dozens of productivity books and tried countless time management tactics. Most of these yielded benefits that were marginal at best.
But the three habits I’m sharing with you today are different. I’ve stuck with each of these for years. I attribute much of my success to them.
And the best part is, you don’t need to make any major lifestyle changes. It’s not like I’m telling you to stop drinking alcohol or to start meditating during your lunch break.
You can adopt these three habits immediately, at no cost.
Habit #1: If you can do something in 2 minutes or less, go ahead and do it now.
This “two minute rule” comes from the most famous productivity book of all, David Allen’s Getting Things Done.
If a task comes up — and that task will take less than 2 minutes — go ahead and do it immediately.
Otherwise, add it to your to-do list.
The reason this works is that you can almost always spare two minutes to take care of something. But it takes nearly two minutes to stop what you’re doing, get your phone out, add a task to your to-do list, then resume what you were doing.
On the subject of to-do lists, you should definitely use one. Carrying a list of tasks around in your head all day will sap you of your cognitive reserves.
The simpler your to-do list is, the more likely you will use it. After years of experimenting with fancy productivity apps, I now just use a basic text editor, and sort items from top to bottom in terms of priority.
One thing you won’t find on my to-do list are tasks that take less than 2 minutes. I take care of those immediately, so they never even hit my list.
Habit #2: Always ask yourself — can this conversation happen asynchronously?
I used to run around town, meeting people for coffee or sitting down with them in their offices. I could meet with a dozen people a day, tops.
There’s no substitute for meeting someone face-to-face. Facial expressions and body language convey a lot of information that your brain will pick up subconsciously.
But face-to-face meetings are expensive. You have to block out time on your calendar and commute to a common space. All that investment means meetings tend to be longer: 30-minute coffee dates, one-hour lunches, multi-hour dinner parties.
Video conferences solve the commute issue, but leave you with the scheduling song-and-dance. Phone calls suffer from the same problem, but offer even lower fidelity.
So after you’ve gotten to know someone through an in-person meeting or a video conference, see if you can shift your correspondence to asynchronous tools: email, instant messages, GitHub issues — whatever you fancy.
Here’s why:
you won’t need to find times when you’re both available to meet (and deal with calendar invites and time zone math)
you get more time to research and respond with confidence
interactions are more efficient, because both parties are forced to clearly state their thoughts, and you can cut to the chase without appearing rude
Most importantly, asynchronous communication lets you batch most of your communication into a single sitting. You can throw on some music and jam through dozens — or in my case hundreds — of discussions, without the stress of jumping from one time-boxed meeting to the next.
And Free Code Camp isn’t the only organization that primarily uses asynchronous communication:
GitHub has a largely remote team, where asynchronous communication is not only accepted — it’s encouraged.
Automattic (the Wordpress company) is famous for interviewing candidates over Skype chat, and hiring them without having even heard their voice. If that’s how you work, why not interview that way?
Next time you’re about to schedule a meeting, ask yourself whether a series of emails or text messages might suffice. Often it will. And this will save both of you time and sanity.
Habit #3: Listen to podcasts and audiobooks while you exercise
Multitasking is a pernicious myth. It’s really just rapid context switching, and is proven to reduce performance.
But then you hear people quip that they can “walk and talk the same time.” And that’s certainly true.
Your brain multitasks all the time. It controls your heart rate and breathing. It regulates your hormone levels. It keeps you from falling out of your chair. And even though it’s busy doing these things, you’re still able to read this sentence just fine.
When you’re exercising, your brain will unconsciously handle most of the decision-making about how to move your body and how to breathe. This leaves your consciousness free to do other things, such as process language.
If you spend a few hours each week exercising — and you should — you can also use this time to listen to podcasts and audiobooks.
Five hours a week times 50 weeks a year equals 250 hours of listening time. That’s enough to absorb around 25 books every year.
And that’s if you listen at normal speed. Most podcast apps let you listen on double speed, and Audible’s app even lets you listen to audiobooks on triple speed.
This may sound like it’s too fast. Can your brain actually process information this quickly?
Well, human speech is only about 150 words per minute. Most people can read about 300 words per minute, and most bookworms can read more than 450 words per minute — the equivalent of a triple speed audiobook.
So yes, it may take a few hours to get accustom to the speed, but pretty much everyone can process information like this.
There are some books that aren’t a good fit for the audio format, such as books with lots of code snippets and mathematical equations. But most nonfiction books work great in audiobook format, and are available on Audible.
If haven’t already signed up for Audible, you can get two audiobooks for free with this link:
And if you’re new to podcasts, here’s an article that covers all the best tools for listening to podcasts. It also includes tons of technology-related podcasts that are worth your time:
Better the habit you can stick with
Extremely productive people do all kinds of eccentric things to save time. Albert Einstein and Steve Jobs wore the exact same outfit every day so they didn’t have to think about what they wanted to wear.
Others make huge sacrifices in the name of productivity. I’m listening to Elon Musk’s biography right now. He works 100 hours a week, and has only taken two weeks off in the past decade.
Most of us aren’t willing to go to such extremes. But all of us can adopt better habits, like the ones I’ve shared here. All of us can use these habits to use our time more productively.
All of us can hack time.
I only write about programming and technology. If you follow me on Twitter I won’t waste your time. 👍Time to expand
Ginger Tipple looks like beer, but don’t expect it to taste like beer as you know it. My bottle was slightly too warm by the time I got to it, and as a result was only slightly effervescent, with a head that lasted only a few seconds. The ginger flavour is prominent without being overpowering, and the effect of the Cascade hops is subtle and interesting.
There’s a slight acidic kick, a fleeting resemblance to a young lambic, with a pleasant astringency. One of the most noticeable characteristics is the heat on the palate of the high alcohol content. This Tipple may seem like a fruity soft drink, but be careful: it packs a punch. You’re not dealing with your average ginger beer, here.
So what’s next? Production at the moment is at maximum capacity of 700 litres a month. It’s quite a lot for a one-man show, but Sulzbacher would still like to expand. First to the UK and the US, he thinks, then to India, Israel and the rest of Europe.
“I’m trying to raise money to move into a larger facility so I can increase capacity to 4,000 or 5,000 litres a month,” he says – a pattern seen all over the craft beer scene in Belgium. In the meantime, he foresees an interest from restaurants for beer and food pairings, and from bars for the creation of new cocktails.
Ginger Tipple is available from various online merchants, which are listed on its website. It’s also sold in the Antwerp area in bars, restaurants and shops, including België Tip Top, Avenue Wines and Grosz Kosher Food.
Photo courtesy Ginger Tipple2017 Roller Of The Year Presented By Friction Gloves
It's time to get down!
Ultiworld Disc Golf’s 2017 Shot of the Year voting is presented by Friction Gloves; all opinions are those of the author. Check out our review of Friction’s DG Gloves here.
2017 was another tremendous year filled with tremendous shots. And there were so many, really, that we figured we’d enlist Ultiworld Disc Golf readers to help us decide on the season’s best.
With that in mind, we are proud to present the first of four bracket challenges to close out the year. We’ve culled highlights from the sport’s best media providers and broken them down into four categories: Roller of the Year, Air Shot of the Year, Putt of the Year, and Ace of the Year. After each bracket is decided, the winners will battle in a four-way, College Football Playoff-style bracket that will determine the 2017 Shot of the Year.
Before we get up for the votes, we’ve got to get down with the Rollers of the Year. Pick your favorite from each matchup below, then come back on Thursday for the next round. And if you’re having fun with this, feel free to share the love on social media.
A special thanks to Jomez Productions, Central Coast Disc Golf, The SpinTV, and the Disc Golf Guy for capturing these clips. And we’re off!
1) Sexton vs. Allen
Roller aficionado and United States Disc Golf Champion Nate Sexton kicks off the bracket with this smash during the first Jomez Productions Basket Dash at Moraine State Park. Sure, this wasn’t during sanctioned play, but it gets our top seed for its pure monstrosity. Bonus points for Jeremy Koling’s little shuffle step as this one just. Won’t. Stop.
Sexton Basket Dash GIF
Catrina Allen gets in on the action with this second shot roller during the first round of the Pittsburgh Flying Disc Open. She landed the eagle, then rolled to a dominant victory.
Catrina Allen PFDO GIF
2) Barsby vs. Koling
Two of the game’s best go head-to-head in our second matchup. First, Gregg Barsby hatches a plan to escape from trouble during his surprise second place showing at the European Open:
Barsby European Open GIF
Next, Jeremy Koling carves a line through the hazards and juuuuuust sneaks back in bounds on hole 11 at Winthrop Gold during round two of the USDGC:
Koling USDGC Roller GIF
3) Bennett vs. Barsby
Veteran pro Geoff Bennett was back on the scene at the Pittsburgh Flying Disc Open, working his way up to the lead card on the back of some unconventional lines. Check out this standstill-to-layout 470-foot forehand roller during the final round, where he ultimately finished in seventh place:
Bennett PFDO Roller
It’s Barsby time again, as he unleashes another big shot during his EO run:
Barsby EO GIF 2
4) Sexton vs. Koling
This one is going to be tough for the fans, as the vaunted “Big Sexy” commentary duo battle it out to make it to the next round. First up, Sexton eschews the air and also rolls through the hazard at USDGC:
Sexton USDGC Hazard GIF
Koling, meanwhile, performs a scooby roller to get through the clown’s mouth on hole 7 at Winthrop:
Koling Scooby Roller GIF
5) Sexton vs. Johansen
Stop us if you’ve heard this one before: Sexton is here again, notching his third appearance on the list with not one, but TWO forehand rollers on the way to an eagle at the Nantucket Open:
Sexton Eagles GIF
Michael Johansen, meanwhile, parks hole 9 during the opening round of the Pittsburgh Flying Disc Open, where he landed in second place.
Johansen PFDO GIF
6) McMahon vs. Wysocki
It may have taken awhile for two of the game’s brightest stars to finally crack the bracket, but it was worth the wait. First, Eagle McMahon goes way up before laying down a 750-footer during the final round of the Gentlemen’s Club Challenge. Is this even fair?
McMahon GCC GIF
PDGA World Champion Ricky Wysocki answers by throwing down a cutter during his 1104-rated second round at the Aussie Open. Oh, then he bangs the putt for eagle.
Wysocki Aussie Open GIF
7) Barsby vs. Owens
We’ve got a couple more USDGC rollers as we head down the stretch. First, it’s no room, no problem for Barsby on hole 11 during round three, as he masterfully escapes this tricky lie:
Barsby USDGC Escape GIF
Devan Owens is undaunted by the righty-friendly shape of hole 15, taking the triple mando out of the equation with this beast:
Owens USDGC Triple Mando GIF
8) McBeth vs. McMahon
With Johansen and James Conrad still giving chase at the PFDO, Paul McBeth effectively sealed the deal with this Roadrunner roll that led to an easy birdie. He shot 1057 for the round and made his brother run out of the way of the shot.
McBeth PFDO Roller
And McMahon closes out the festivities with another huge roller, this time at the Beaver State Fling, where he finished in third place after taking a midseason break. Did you see that exit velocity?
McMahon BSF GIFI have an unfortunate sense that the “green shoots” in the economy that everyone is talking about are nothing but dandelions. Sure, forcing $1 trillion of taxpayer money—in direct capital, guarantees, and diminished cost of borrowing—into the banking sector has permitted the major banks to claim solvency for the moment. Yet we should not forget that this solvency has come not through a much needed deleveraging of the banking sector but rather from a massive transfer of the obligations of private banks to the public, with the debt accruing to future generations. And overall loan quality at U.S. banks is still the worst in 25 years and deteriorating at the fastest pace ever.
It’s a terrible mistake to confuse the momentary solvency of the financial sector and the long-term health of our economy.
While we have addressed the credit collapse, we have not begun to tackle the far more daunting, and more significant, structural problems in the economy. Instead of focusing on the green shoots, let’s examine the macro data that will determine our national prosperity in the next generation. These data are terrifying.
Start with the job front. Long term, nothing is more fundamental than good jobs to creating the middle-class wealth that must drive the economy. The creation of true middle-class jobs was the great success of our economy from 1950s through the mid-1990s. Consider the job data, in aggregate and by sector, from the past decade. (All data are from the U.S. Department of Labor, Bureau of Labor Statistics.)
Unemployment Rate by Industry Year Unemployment rate Manufacturing Jobs
(in millions) Serv. Jobs Gov’t. Jobs Total Jobs Population 1999 4.3 18.48 102.23 20.09 133 272 2004 5.6 14.3 108.64 21.5 138.38 292 2009 8.9 12.4 113.82 22.54 141.57 305
One-third of our manufacturing jobs have disappeared in a decade! And while population grew 12.1 percent over the decade, jobs grew by only 6.4 percent. The unemployment number, moreover, doesn’t count those who are “marginally attached to the labor force,” because even though they want to work and are available to do so, they have not sought a job in the past four weeks. In raw numbers, the total number of individuals counted as currently unemployed and those who are marginally attached is a staggering 15.8 million. That is an enormous mountain of job creation to climb.
This transition away from actual goods production is not merely a consequence of the current economic cataclysm. The trend line has been clear for years and is reflected in the overall escalation in the trade deficits we have incurred:
Aggregate Deficit/Goods/Services Year Aggregate Deficit
(in millions of dollars)
Goods Services 1994 -98,493 -165,831 67,338 1999 -265,090 -347,819 82,729 2004 -607,730 -669,578 61,848 2008 -681,130 -820,825 139,695
The actual deficit in goods has multiplied fivefold in 15 years. The notion that service exports will somehow balance our increasing goods deficit has not been borne out and is increasingly less likely to be in the future, given that certain service sectors, such as financial services, are in sharp decline domestically. Moreover, the services we had expected to export are increasingly becoming sources of growth overseas. It is hard to believe that China will want or need to import U.S. investment banking services a decade (or a month) from now.
Even more dramatic than the growth of the trade deficit, of course, is the escalation of the federal budget deficit.
Annual Deficit/Aggregate Federal Debt Year Annual Deficit
(in millions of dollars) As Percent of GDP Aggregate Federal Debt
(in trillions of dollars) As Percent of GDP 1994 -203,186 -2.9 4.692 66.35 1999 125,610 1.4 5.656 61.03 2004 -412,727 -3.6 7.379 63.14 2009 [est] -1,845,000 |
This higher IAcc was unrelated to their fitness or counting ability [1]
Senior dancers had a higher IAcc than younger dancer or controls suggesting that training may play a role
Higher IAcc did not correlate with empathy, emotional sensitivity or alexithymia. Alexithymia (another new word for me and perhaps you) refers to an inability to identify and describe emotions in the self. (i.e., being at the mild end of the Asperger spectrum)
One of the difficulties with the paper is that it is filled with needless jargon. For example, “The empirical characterization of the neurocognitive mechanisms of consciousness and self-awareness are increasingly the focus of empirical endeavor.” Translated that becomes "we are trying to measure the relationship of perceptions of our body to our consciousness." Watching “connect the dots” and explain why is like these IAcc values are greater in dancers is watching a slow-motion collision. Here are their speculations
Dancers are more fit, as documented by their lower heart rates
Dancers have a greater “familiarity with the 60-s counts of a minute.”
Dancers have a greater knowledge of their resting heart rate
“Enhancement of IAcc through arts training might thus increase desirable interpersonal attributes of emotional function.”
It is equally plausible that individuals with better IAcc may respond better to dance training… dance training may, in fact, do more to ‘weed out’ individuals with lower interoception than to train interoception per se.”
I did so much want them to make plausible connections. I am biased, I believe as a craftsman surgeon, that much of our skill comes from experiencing our body. Touch, body positioning, the integration of sight and sound all of these interoceptive ‘subskills’ make for the difference between journeyman and master. The authors do capture a truth, at least for me, when they say that
“An artist’s professional training involves daily practice in the craftsmanship of their discipline, which involves a dual action: it includes the elicitation of bodily states … and the immediate expression of these states (e.g., emotions, intentions), directly through the body … “
They reveal their bias towards an embodied consciousness when they say “we understand the emotions, intentions, and states of both ourselves and of others through our bodies.” The problem with the paper is that these measures of interoception cannot be applied using reductive scientific methods. It is an interesting attempt, but draping their efforts with ‘science’ serves more to confuse than to elucidate.
[1] You have to like a scientific paper that includes the line, “dancers are said to have particularly good counting skills.”
Source: I can feel my heartbeat: Dancers have increased interoceptive accuracy Julia F. Christensen, Sebastian B. Gaigg, Beatriz Calvo-Merino Psychophysiology First published: 21 September 2017 DOI: 10.1111/psyp.13008Arsonists Nicola King (pictured) and Jerely Evans can be seen on CCTV footage talking to Roy Ransom, who had been sleeping rough outside shops
Shocking footage shows two friends setting fire to a homeless man's possessions on a city centre high street after one of them urinated on his bedding.
Arsonists Nicola King and Jerely Evans can be seen on CCTV footage talking to Roy Ransom, who had been sleeping rough outside shops.
Portsmouth Magistrates' Court heard the pair had initially been 'nice' to Mr Ransom and gave him £5 for a drink.
But they soon became 'rude' and he walked off.
CCTV played in court shows Evans trying for several minutes to set light to the bedding using a lighter, while King watches on and holds her bag.
The pair can then be seen walking away laughing while smoke starts to appear from Mr Ransom's possessions.
The court heard King, 22, from Waterlooville, also urinated on Mr Ransom's bedding during the April 9 incident in Portsmouth.
King and Evans, 25, of Havant both admitted arson.
CCTV played in court shows Evans trying for several minutes to set light to the bedding using a lighter, while King watches on and holds her bag
The court heard King, 23, from Waterlooville, also urinated on Mr Ransom's bedding during the April 9 incident in Portsmouth
Richard Withey, of the Crown Prosecution Service, said: 'The victim was approached by both defendants who were initially nice to him. 'They then hurled abused at him and took his mobile phone. Having made him feel uncomfortable, the victim then left'
King and Evans, 25, of Havant both admitted arson. Pictured: A recording made on the ground after the bedding was set alight
Evans had previously pleaded guilty to arson and criminal damage and served a four-month sentence.
King will be sentenced on October 27.
Ayisha Robertson, defending King, said the incident had a'very real impact on the victim' but asked magistrates to to consider a community sentence in light of King's decision to switch her plea to guilty.
She also said her client had a low IQ, within the range of 'a mild intellectual disability' which often made her 'compulsive' and made it 'difficult for her to understand consequences'.
Richard Withey, of the Crown Prosecution Service, said: 'The victim was approached by both defendants who were initially nice to him.
'They then hurled abused at him and took his mobile phone. Having made him feel uncomfortable, the victim then left.
Ayisha Robertson, defending King, said her client had a low IQ - within the range of 'a mild intellectual disability' which often made her 'compulsive' and made it 'difficult for her to understand consequences'
'CCTV recorded Nicola King urinating on the victim's bedding. She then provided a lighter to Jerely Evans so that she could set fire to the bedding, destroying the few possessions that he had.
'The defendants soiled and destroyed the only possessions that the homeless man had, leaving him without any bedding or a blanket. The court heard the statement of the victim who stated after the incident that "he was gutted and could not believe that all his possessions had gone".
'By securing a plea of guilty we have brought justice for the victim in this case.'Public art at Exhibition Place will stay behind the fence at Muzik nightclub for now, viewable only by virtual tour or by appointment. A report to the Exhibition Place board of governors signed by CEO Dianne Young and adopted Wednesday says moving the 20 limestone sculptures — known as the Garden of the Greek Gods, created by renowned Toronto sculptor E.B. Cox — would cost a minimum of $500,000.
A collection of 20 sculptures depicting mythological figures is located behind a fence at the Muzik Nightclub at Exhibition Place. ( Lucas Oleniuk / Toronto Star )
Family and friends of Cox, who died in 2003, are outraged the pieces are blocked from view and can only be accessed by nightclub patrons. They worry the art is at risk. Several photos taken by Cox’s daughter, Kathy Sutton, show cracks in the limestone. It’s not clear if the damage was done by nightclub patrons or from construction to expand the patio. Relocation is a “possible longer term option,” but Exhibition Place staff recommend, for now, arranging with Muzik daily opportunities for the public to view the artwork.
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A “virtual tour” has also been recommended for the Exhibition Place website as well as a staff archivist or masonry conservator consultant to inspect the sculptures monthly. At the Ingram Gallery, which continues to represent the late artist’s work, director Tarah Aylward has cast around for estimates to move the art. A monument company specializing in tombstones would charge $40,000 to $50,000 for “one crane, five guys, five days, 20 sculptures,” she wrote in an email. The Canadian National Exhibition Association bought the Gods from Cox in 1979, according to the report. At the time, Cox said he crafted them specifically with children in mind and hoped they would enjoy climbing and playing on them for years to come. The sculptures are considered the property of Exhibition Place and remain on the City of Toronto’s inventory of public art.
Muzik has leased the land from Exhibition Place since 2004 and opened for business in 2006. In 2008, owner Zlatko Starkovski started to expand the patio, eventually fencing in all 20 sculptures. The sculptures are not included in the lease, according to Councillor Mike Layton.
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He moved a motion directing staff to report back to the board with more detailed options to make the Garden of the Greek Gods more accessible, including exploring relocation. “This was clearly an oversight — Exhibition Place didn’t have a policy around its pieces of art and it has a lot of them all over the grounds. We should have good, strong policy around it so we can maintain public access.” Muzik also advertises the artworks on its website, noting the “hand carved stone sculptures by E.B. Cox that dot the unique landscape.” Ed Conroy, Cox’s godson, spoke to the board at Wednesday’s meeting. “What kind of precedent does it set if future artists are wary about donating their art to the city if this kind of thing happens again?” he said.“We’re not asking them to read nearly enough,” Ms. Pimentel said.
One group of students, though, has made significant gains in reading over the last decade: the nation’s worst readers. The average scores of fourth graders in the bottom 10 percent for reading increased by 16 points from 2000 to 2009. In contrast, the average scores of the nation’s best fourth-grade readers, those in the top 10 percent, rose by only 2 points during the same period.
“All the progress in reading is being made at the bottom,” said Tom Loveless, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution. “Our worst readers are getting better, but our best readers are staying about the same.”
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Sheila W. Valencia, an education professor at the University of Washington, said the Bush administration’s $1-billion-a-year reading initiative, Reading First, focused instruction in thousands of public schools on building lower-level reading skills.
“We have evidence that Reading First helped young students increase their ability to read words, but not their capacity for comprehension, and the national assessment especially measures reading comprehension,” Professor Valencia said. “So that’s one hypothesis for why scores have stayed pretty constant.”
The reading test, mandated by Congress, was given to 338,000 fourth- and eighth-grade students last spring. Results of the math test, also administered last spring, were released in October.
On average, eighth graders scored 264 on a 500-point scale in reading, compared with 263 in 2007, when the test was last given. Fourth graders scored 221 on the 2009 test, the same average as two years earlier.
The national math and reading tests have been administered every few years since the early 1990s, with average scores in reading rising only four points for fourth and eighth graders over that period. Federal officials say the four points represent slightly less than half a school year’s worth of learning.
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Math scores, in contrast, rose 20 points for eighth graders and 27 points for fourth graders from 1990 to 2009; the increase means that 2009 fourth graders knew about two and a half years’ more math than 1990 fourth graders. But in the most recent period, from 2007 to 2009, math scores also failed to rise much.
On average, 33 percent of fourth graders scored at or above the proficient level in the latest reading results. Massachusetts had the highest reading scores, with 47 percent of fourth graders and 43 percent of eighth graders at or above proficiency.
In Colorado, Delaware, Florida, Kentucky, Maryland and Massachusetts, the proportion of fourth-grade students scoring at the proficient level rose by 10 percentage points or more from 1992 to 2009. In Iowa, Maine, New Mexico and Oklahoma, a smaller percentage of students were proficient readers last year than 17 years earlier.Our rating: By: Lefty Games Version #: 1.1.1 Date Released: 2011-07-14 Developer: Price: 0.99 User Rating: Loading... Loading... Download App
When it’s comes to iDevice games, it’s tough to have an original idea anymore. There are first-person-shooters, defending-the-castle and puzzles, among others. Lost Monsters is an example of a puzzle game that is good for all ages and makes up for its lack of originality by having fun designs and music to go with the game.
The concept is that all the cute, pet monsters in the city have gone missing. The good news is that apparently they’re all hiding in the same building. You have to get them back by matching four or more monsters in adjacent windows. It’s a bit like Bejeweled but with monsters instead of gems.
The character designs are the best part of the game with the monsters looking cute and original. I think the designers took a page from Disney in that regard. They are very cartoonish and not really scary, which is good. As you progress in the game, new monster designs are added for you to match up.
The music and sound design also enhance the game without getting annoying. If you do find them annoying, there are settings in the game to turn either or both off.
If I had any complaints it would be that this is a perfect game to be able to play one’s iPod music library in the background. That would be a nice feature to add in future releases.French police and forensic officers near the truck that ran into the crowd
At least 84 people are dead after a truck ploughed into a crowd of late-night revellers celebrating Bastille Day in Nice, in a terrorist attack described as the "worst catastrophe" in the French Riviera's modern history.
Key points: Truck driver shot dead after ploughing into crowd in Nice
At least 84 people dead, 50 injured
Hollande says it was a terrorist attack
Follow the live blog for updates as they happen
The driver was shot dead by police after the truck barrelled down the famed Promenade des Anglais seafront, sending hundreds of terrified people fleeing and leaving bodies strewn in its wake.
The driver had fired a pistol several times before being shot dead by police, authorities said.
Identity papers belonging to a 31-year-old French-Tunisian citizen were reportedly found inside the 19-tonne truck.
French president Francois Hollande said France had been hit by a terrorist attack on its national day, "the 14th of July, the symbol of freedom".
"Nice is now hit. It's all of France which is under the threat of Islamic terrorism," he said.
"In these circumstances, we must show absolute vigilance."
Warning: this story contains graphic images.
Several children are among the 84 victims, while another 50 people are critically injured.
"I have decided that the state of emergency, which was to end on the 26th on July, will be extended by three months," Mr Hollande said, referring to a measure introduced after last year's series of coordinated attacks in Paris.
"Nothing will make us give up in our will to fight terrorism."
Three Australians were injured in the attack, Foreign Minister Julie Bishop said.
Tour operator Topdeck Travel said on its website that one of its Australian customers was being treated in hospital.
The president of the Nice region, Christian Estrosi, said the truck was loaded with weapons and grenades, and the driver was firing a pistol when he was shot.
"This is the worst catastrophe our region has seen in modern history," he said.
Soldiers, police and ambulance crews attended the scene, while residents of the Mediterranean city, close to the Italian border, were advised to stay indoors.
"Investigations are currently under way to establish if the individual acted alone or if he had accomplices who might have fled," interior ministry spokesman Pierre-Henry Brandet said, denying reports a hostage-taking incident had taken place.
ABC man describes screaming, loud bangs as truck hit
Many people, including families, had been at the promenade watching a fireworks display.
ABC producer David Coady was among the crowds fleeing the scene in panic, and said he could hear screaming and loud bangs.
"People were tripping over in the commotion, there was a lot of panic," he told ABC News 24.
"People were trying to get into hotels, any businesses that were open, trying to take shelter, because it was unclear what was happening.
"With each bang that we heard behind us, people perhaps started to go a bit faster, people were tripping over, it was a very chaotic scene."
'There was a loud thud, I could hear gunshots'
Sydney man Marcus Freeman, who is holidaying in Nice, is now in lockdown in his hotel, not far from the promenade.
"We brought in about 10 people from the street and they're currently in our hotel room, and it's just mayhem," he told Radio National.
"We just locked the doors, we got the people in here, we don't know what's happening. It's just an unrealistic situation for us."
Adelaide woman Evie Timetheo told 5AA the scene was chaotic.
"Everything just went crazy, people started screaming, there was a loud thud, I could hear gunshots," she said.
"We just ran into our hotel, because everyone just dispersed."
A photograph showed the front of the truck riddled with bullet holes and badly damaged, with burst tyres.
Hollande in Paris crisis talks
US President Barack Obama said the US stood with France.
"We know that the character of the French Republic will endure long after this devastating and tragic loss of life," Mr Obama said.
Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull described the attack as a "murderous act of terror".
"The ANZACS of today [were] leading the Bastille Day Parade in Paris — a recognition of the sacrifice and heroism of a century ago and also of our resolute solidarity with the people of France in the struggle against Islamist terrorism today," he said.
Australian terrorism expert Greg Barton from Deakin University said the scale and "clear deliberate intent" of the attack indicated it was most likely the work of Islamic State terrorists.
"The logic of using a heavily-laden truck at speed into a crowd where they can't run away, you can see how devastating the effect of it is," he told ABC News 24.
"And you can imagine cells in France talking among themselves of opportunities they had, what they had at hand, and it's no surprise they have come up with something like this."
He said the French Government would now have to determine whether the Nice incident could be the start of a coordinated series of attacks.
"The immediate crisis meeting now with Francois Hollande is to try to figure out what else might be coming," he said.
ABC/wiresResearchers from the University of Queensland found a dirty system of entrenched favouritism in rezoning decisions. So what can be done about it?
One routine governance decision prone to corruption is the zoning of our cities. Land zoning rules supposedly ensure complementary uses are co-located while conflicting uses are not. For instance, zoning ensures chemical plants are not built next to schools and electricity grids are planned for areas with future population pockets.
…zoning can provide windfall gains to some landowners, providing the incentive for collusion between politicians and landowners about which areas are favourably rezoned.
But zoning also determines the value of land, meaning that changes to zoning can provide windfall gains to some landowners, providing the incentive for collusion between politicians and landowners about which areas are favourably rezoned.
An important economic question therefore, is whether there is systematic favouritism in rezoning decisions and, if so, what can we do about it?
Answering the favouritism question is quite tricky, requiring the statistical quantification of gains from rezoning decisions along with the probabilities of rezoning success arising from relationships, donations, and lobbying.
This is exactly what we did in our recent study.
We used a sample of planning decisions made by one State authority in Queensland, the Urban Land Development Authority (ULDA), which took planning powers away from local councils in a number of areas which it rezoned between 2008-2012. The ULDA was no stranger to accusations of bias, with the Local Government Association of Queensland arguing the government is “playing politics and favouring developers.”
To establish how well-connected landowners were, we trawled through a wide range of data on political donations, lobbyists and their clients, industry groups memberships, politicians and their former employers, relationships of ULDA board members, and landowner’s corporate records, to construct a relationship network.
… rezoning decisions increased the value of the rezoned land by $710 million, with well-connected landowners capturing $410 million of these gains at the expense of the public at large who could have instead sold those additional development rights.
Our main finding is that well-connected landowners owned 75% of the rezoned land, but only 12% of comparable land immediately outside the rezoning boundaries, indicating that these decisions were primarily driven by the relationship networks of the landowners, rather than technical assessments of the efficiency urban expansion locations. The peculiar shape of the rezoned areas, which conflicts with other State and local plans, is further evidence against a technical determination of the rezoned areas.
We also compiled historical sales data to estimate that these rezoning decisions increased the value of the rezoned land by $710 million, with well-connected landowners capturing $410 million of these gains at the expense of the public at large who could have instead sold those additional development rights.
The data tells quite a story. Connected property developers bought land unsuitable for development on the urban fringe, then lobbied State politicians and bureaucrats through their relationship networks to rezone areas where they owned properties, wrong-footing both councils and other property developers, in a process taking seven years on average.
Political favours were found to be more about being part of the entrenched well-connected political class, whose tight-knit mutual relationships support implicit favouritism, than about visible activities such as making political donations.
With such knowledge at hand, the question for reformers is how this game of favour exchange be disrupted.
One way to disrupt the game is with cooling-off periods for politicians and bureaucrats involved in key decisions. While Queensland has a nominal cooling off period for politicians to be professional lobbyists, the narrow scope of this regulation means that directly working for developers or industry groups falls outside this regulation.
Pricing new property rights will ensure the gains are captured by the public and not the landowner with the right political connections.
It is too easy to exchange favours with a revolving door swinging so openly, and where politicians can immediately be repaid for favours. The two-year cooling off periods ensuring auditor independence in corporate finance could easily be adopted more widely in the political environment. Such a plan is currently being debated in Germany.
A second disruption is to take away the honeypot. Rezoning decisions can provide billions in windfall gains. Pricing these new property rights will ensure the gains are captured by the public and not the landowner with the right political connections.
Rights to additional development density can be sold in local auctions. For example, a decision can be made for only one of a menu of possible rezoning decisions to go ahead, with landowners in the different areas required to bid against the other areas to get the one they want.
Such an auction needs to have competing feasible rezoning plans drafted, which in the case of the ULDA could have included both the original state plans, the various updated plans, and their final zoning locations. To get the outcome the connected property developers got, they would have had to bid up the price of that particular rezoning plan against landowners of other regions, thereby transferring much of the windfall gain to the community.
Auctions are just one example of an explicit market for development rights, which could also include rights to various other development exemptions or variations for existing properties. The basic idea is always to create a situation where different potential buyers can compete for scarce rights. Secondary markets in such development rights can then also improve efficiency by allowing others to buy the rights in order to preserve the area for its current use.
Another option is a betterment tax, briefly considered by the Henry Tax Review, whereby rezoning triggers a fee that amounts to the value gain from rezoning, payable by the landowner at the time they choose to develop or sell the land.
Outside of pricing, democratic processes such as local referenda on urban expansion locations would enabling countervailing community interests to be part of the decision. More direct community involvement would thus erode the entrenched political duopoly that currently dominates the dirty system.
This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.More than two-thirds of the Senate is urging the Obama administration to consider signing an international treaty that bans land mines, reviving a dormant campaign from the 1990s that left the United States divided from its closest allies.
Sen. Patrick J. Leahy (D-Vt.) said in an interview Friday that 68 senators had signed a letter to President Obama to support a "comprehensive review" of U.S. policy on land mines. The letter is an indication that there are enough votes in the Senate to ratify the treaty -- at least 67 would be required -- if Obama signs the measure, which has languished in Washington for a decade.
"We want to show we have enough people to ratify a treaty," Leahy said. "I think there's an excellent opportunity that we'll finally do it."
The pressure from Congress leaves the White House in an awkward position as it tries to navigate between Obama's desire to work closely with allies on security issues such as nuclear disarmament, while at the same time listening to advisers at the Pentagon, many of whom are leery of such campaigns.
The mine ban treaty was the result of a grass-roots movement championed by celebrities, including Princess Diana, and ordinary citizens such as Jody Williams, a Vermont native who won the 1997 Nobel Peace Prize for her role as founding coordinator of the International Campaign to Ban Land Mines. About 5,000 people a year -- the majority of them civilians -- are killed or maimed by mines scattered across 70 countries.
Neither President Bill Clinton nor President George W. Bush signed the treaty, which was negotiated in 1997 and took effect in 1999. Their rejections left the United States at odds with more than 150 countries that embraced the accord, including every member of NATO.
The treaty prohibits the manufacture, trade and stockpiling of land mines. The United States has not used anti-personnel mines since the Persian Gulf War in 1991 and stopped producing them in 1997, but the military keeps about 10 million of them in reserve.
In November, State Department spokesman Ian Kelly announced that the Obama administration had decided against signing the treaty, saying, "We would not be able to meet our national defense needs nor our security commitments to our friends and allies." But after Leahy and human-rights groups condemned the decision, the State Department said it would revisit the issue and conduct a broader policy review.
White House and State Department spokesmen emphasized Friday that the administration is in the midst of a comprehensive review, cutting across all affected agencies, that will not be completed for some months. But two senior U.S. officials speaking on the condition of anonymity indicated that the administration is actively looking for ways to come into compliance with the treaty without endangering national security needs.
"We are asking that if you come into compliance, what would be the costs and the benefits -- and if there are costs, how can they be addressed in other ways," one senior official said.
The official described the administration's review as "a herculean effort" intended to "cut through reflexive reactions" to the issue of eliminating land mines from the Pentagon's arsenal.
Officials also said they welcomed the indication of bipartisan support represented by the Leahy letter.Story highlights Obama's announcement includes money to locate and clear US bombs in Laos
More than 80 million cluster bombs could still remain in the country
Vientiane, Laos (CNN) President Barack Obama said Tuesday that US has an "obligation" to help Laos recover from a brutal secret bombing campaign that destroyed parts of the Southeast Asian nation.
During an address to the Lao people in the country's capital, Obama pledged $90 million in a joint three-year project with the country's government to clear tens of millions of unexploded US bombs.
"Villages and entire valleys were obliterated," during US bombardments, Obama said. "Ancient plains were devastated. Countless civilians were killed. That conflict was another reminder whatever the cause, whatever our intentions, war inflicts a terrible toll, especially on innocent men, women and children."
Obama is beginning a three-day stop in Laos. He's the first US president to visit to country.
The money Obama pledged Tuesday will be spent surveying the Asian nation for some 80 million unexploded cluster bombs dropped during a secret US bombing campaign as part of the Vietnam War 40 years ago.
Read MoreBEIJING (Reuters) - The southern Chinese city of Shenzhen suspended 14 police officers and put a police chief under investigation on Tuesday on suspicion of feasting on an endangered giant salamander, state media reported.
The officers allegedly were consuming the endangered animal, the world’s largest amphibian, at a seafood restaurant, the state-backed Shenzhen Daily reported on Tuesday. The giant salamander can grow as long as 180 cm (6 ft).
China’s leadership has called for Communist Party cadres and officials to forgo elaborate banquets and pricey junkets as it works to clamp down on government excess. Corruption, as well as a yawning gap between the rich and the poor, is a central source of public discontent with the ruling party.
Some of the police officers slapped and attacked a trio of reporters who were trying to photograph the banquet, snatching away their mobile phones and cameras, according to Southern Metropolis Daily, a respected newspaper in southern China.
Security personnel refused reporters’ demands that they check surveillance video at the restaurant, the paper reported.
Numbers of the Chinese giant salamander, whose home is central and southern China, have “declined catastrophically” over the last three decades, mostly due to over-exploitation for human consumption, according to the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN). Some in China believe consuming it can combat the effects of aging.
Traditional Chinese beliefs hold that animal products, such as bear bile and tiger bone, have medicinal properties. Environmental groups have decried a flourishing market for products made from endangered animals in the world’s second- largest economy.
The Shenzhen Daily said the restaurant is unlicensed, and a representative of the eatery told the paper the salamander in question was raised in captivity.
The IUCN says there is some commercial farming of giant salamanders, but the vast majority being traded are believed to have been poached from wild populations.UPDATE: Thanks to all of your generous donations and efforts, we were able to meet our goal and raise over $20,000 for the V Foundation for Cancer Research – a goal that even we though might be too hopeful. But luckily, you have all joined together to not only do real good in the world, but also show that the community of video gamers is not one that in insular, or uncaring about the world around them. In light of recent tragedies, such shows of communal altruism are especially needed in the world. Again, thank you all for making this marathon a complete success. Expect donation prizes to ship early in the New Year. We’re looking forward to continuing on next year, and we hope to see you all online! Happy holidays to everyone! ORIGINAL POST: 4th Annual CotGW Charity Marathon Sponsored by: It’s time for our 4th annual video game marathon for charity, and this year it’s 3 days of Super Nintendo! We’ll be starting the festivities right here at noon on Friday, December 14, 2012. We’re looking to raise at least $20,000 for the V Foundation for Cancer Research. This is a great cause and rated 4 out of 4 stars by CharityNavigator.com (see more info by clicking here)
The V Foundation has funded more than 450 grants to the brightest physicians and scientists as they pioneer techniques to make breakthroughs in cancer research. By investing in promising people and projects, the Foundation continues to make great strides in unraveling the mysteries of cancer. With your help, we’re excited to be able to help them with their cause.
The marathon itself will involve 60 hours of fun with the Super Nintendo – one of the most popular game systems of all time. But this year, we’re making things more interactive! Beyond chatting with you all live, we’re giving you the chance to help us decide what games to play. Of course, you can do this by donating to the cause. The perks for donating are:
– Any amount: Entry into daily drawings for $20 Wii/Xbox Live/PlayStaion Network cards (winner’s choice!), video game perler art, and Steam codes!
– $25: In addition to the above perk, you’ll be entered into a drawing for our grand raffle prize – any video game released in 2012 (your choice)!
– $50: In addition to the above perk, you will receive an exclusive Clan of the Gray Wolf 128MB MicroSD card (while supplies last) – that’s like 91 3.5″ floppy disks!
– $75: In addition to the above perks, you will be able to choose ANY Super Nintendo game for us to play (if we don’t have it, we’ll get it!) Please request your game & what time we should play it during the marathon as a note in the “Dedication” section while donating.
– $100: In addition to the above perks, you will present us with a challenge for your selected game! The challenge must be time based, and be no longer than 20 minutes. (For example: Beat Stage 1-1 in Super Mario World within 10 minutes) If we beat your gamer’s challenge, our friends at VideoGameAuctions.com will donate an extra $25 to the V Foundation!
– $150: In addition to the above perks, you will receive a Super Nintendo game from Roo’s personal library. It may be complete in box. It may even be rare… -ish. You will also receive a CotGW Marathon T-shirt designed by Mark P. Tjan from this list.
– $200: In addition t0 the above perks, Mark P. Tjan will also design you a custom CotGW t-shirt (CotGW branding will be on the back near the neck, the front is all yours! …ladies).
Also – there are prizes for posting on Twitter and Facebook! Two random people who post about the marathon on Twitter (including “@cotgw” and a linkback to http://clanofthegraywolf.com at the END of your post) and Facebook (with a linkback to http://clanofthegraywolf.com) will each win a $20 Wii/Xbox Live/PlayStaion Network card of their choice! (Please note: only 5 posts per person per day will be counted)
If you’d like to donate and get those game requests in early, please donate via the Razoo box below or visit the fundraising page here – all funds donated go directly to the V Foundation (we handle no money ourselves).Media playback is unsupported on your device Media caption A step-by-step guide to Dallas shootings
Micah Johnson, the man accused of killing five police officers in a gun attack during a protest rally in Dallas, acted alone, officials believe.
"We believe now the city is safe," Mayor Mike Rawlings said.
Bomb-making material, rifles and a combat journal were found at the home of Johnson, who was himself killed.
The Dallas protest was against the killing of black men by police, and similar rallies drew thousands across many US cities on Friday.
The demonstrations followed the police killings of Philando Castile in Minnesota and Alton Sterling in Louisiana.
'Weekend of Rage'
Dallas police chief David Brown and US Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson also said the gunman appeared to have acted alone, although Texas Governor Greg Abbott said police would "continue down every rabbit trail... ensuring that we eliminate any other possible suspects or co-conspirators".
Officials on Friday had spoken of a co-ordinated attack by at least one other sniper.
Image copyright AFP Image caption Johnson served in the US Army Reserve from 2009 to 2015, including a tour of Afghanistan
Three other suspects were arrested after the shootings but no details have been released about them.
A number of gun attacks involving police officers and civilians have occurred in other parts of the US in the aftermath of the deaths in Minnesota and Louisiana.
In Tennessee, a black army veteran killed a woman and also injured three other people, including a police officer, as he opened fire on a motorway on Thursday morning, before the Dallas attacks. After his arrest, Lakeem Keon Scott told investigators he was troubled by police violence against African-Americans
, a black army veteran killed a woman and also injured three other people, including a police officer, as he opened fire on a motorway on Thursday morning, before the Dallas attacks. After his arrest, Lakeem Keon Scott told investigators he was troubled by police violence against African-Americans In Missouri on Friday, a police officer was shot from behind after he walked back to his patrol car to check the driving status of a black man who he had stopped. Antonio Taylor, 31, was later arrested but the motive for the shooting is unknown
on Friday, a police officer was shot from behind after he walked back to his patrol car to check the driving status of a black man who he had stopped. Antonio Taylor, 31, was later arrested but the motive for the shooting is unknown In Georgia on Friday, an officer was shot after he responded to a call from a man who said his car had been broken into. Again the motive is unknown
on Friday, an officer was shot after he responded to a call from a man who said his car had been broken into. Again the motive is unknown Early on Saturday in Houston, police shot dead a man they said had pointed a gun at officers in a street. Tweets under the #Alvabraziel hashtag said he was black, with some suggesting he was shot 10 times and questioning whether he was armed
In the Georgian state capital, Atlanta, on Friday evening, thousands marched in protest at the recent police shootings but although roads were blocked off the demonstration remained peaceful.
Protests against police killings were also held in other cities including Houston, New Orleans and San Francisco. In Baton Rouge, Louisiana, protesters chanted "no justice, no peace, no racist police".
There have been some arrests at the rallies, but again they were peaceful.
Image caption A mass protest blocked roads in Atlanta, Georgia, but was peaceful
Leaders of the Black Lives Matter organisation have condemned the Dallas killings but say planned marches, including a "Weekend of Rage" in Philadelphia, will go ahead.
A Black Lives Matter march was also held in London on Friday.
In Dallas, Mayor Rawlings |
slowly up an incline over which he soared.
He went ahead up the mountainside and teetered in the air currents at the plateau's edge. Huyghens looked in the vision-plate by which he reported.
"How the devil," panted Bordman, panting—they had stopped for a breather, and the bears waited patiently for them—"how do you train bears like these? I can understand Semper."
"I don't train them," said Huyghens, staring into the plate. "They're mutations. In heredity the sex-linkage of physical characteristics is standard stuff. There's also been some sound work done on the gene-linkage of psychological factors. There was need, on my home planet, for an animal who could fight like a fiend, live off the land, carry a pack and get along with men at least as well as dogs do. In the old days they'd have tried to breed the desired physical properties in an animal who already had the personality they wanted. Something like a giant dog, say. But back home they went at it the other way about. They picked the wanted physical characteristics and bred for the personality, the psychology. The job got done over a century ago. The Kodiak bear named Kodius Champion was the first real success. He had everything that was wanted. These bears are his descendants."
"They look normal," commented Bordman.
"They are!" said Huyghens warmly. "Just as normal as an honest dog. They're not trained, like Semper. They train themselves." He looked back into the plate in his hands, which showed the ground six or seven thousand feet higher. "Semper, now, is a trained bird without too much brain. He's educated—a glorified hawk. But the bears want to get along with men. They're emotionally dependent on us. Like dogs. Semper's a servant, but they're companions and friends. He's trained, but they're loyal. He's conditioned. They love us. He'd abandon me if he ever realized he could; he thinks he can only eat what men feed him. But the bears wouldn't want to. They like us. I admit I like them. Maybe because they like me."
Bordman said deliberately:
"Aren't you a trifle loose-tongued, Huyghens? You've told me something that will locate and convict the people who set you up here. It shouldn't be hard to find where bears were bred for psychological mutations, and where a bear named Kodius Champion left descendants. I can find out where you came from now, Huyghens!"
Huyghens looked up from the plate with its tiny swaying television image.
"No harm done," he said amiably. "I'm a criminal there, too. It's officially on record that I kidnapped these bears and escaped with them. Which, on my home planet, is about as heinous a crime as a man can commit. It's worse than horse-theft back on Earth in the old days. The kin and cousins of my bears are highly thought of. I'm quite a criminal, back home." Bordman stared.
"Did you steal them?" he demanded.
"Confidentially," said Huyghens, "no. But prove it!" Then he said: "Take a look in this plate. See what Semper can see up at the plateau's edge."
Bordman squinted aloft, where the eagle flew in great sweeps and dashes. Somehow, by the experience of the past few days, Bordman knew that Semper was screaming fiercely as he flew. He made a dart toward the plateau's border.
Bordman looked at the transmitted picture. It was only four inches by six, but it was perfectly without grain and accurate in color. It moved and turned as the camera-bearing eagle swooped and circled. For an instant the screen showed the steeply sloping mountainside, and off at one edge the party of men and bears could be seen as dots. Then it swept away and showed the top of the plateau.
There were sphexes. A pack of two hundred trotted toward the desert interior. They moved at leisure, in the open. The viewing camera reeled, and there were more. As Bordman watched and as the bird flew higher, he could see still other sphexes moving up over the edge of the plateau from a small erosion-defile here and another one there. The Sere Plateau was alive with the hellish creatures. It was inconceivable that there should be game enough for them to live on. They were visible as herds of cattle would be visible on grazing planets.
It was simply impossible.
"Migrating," observed Huyghens. "I said they did. They're headed somewhere. Do you know, I doubt that it would be healthy for us to try to cross the Plateau through such a swarm of sphexes!"
Bordman swore, in abrupt change of mood.
"But the signal's still coming through. Somebody's alive over at the robot colony. Must we wait till the migration's over?"
"We don't know," Huyghens pointed out, "that they'll stay alive. They may need help badly. We have to get to them. But at the same time—"
He glanced at Sourdough Charley and Sitka Pete, clinging patiently to the mountainside while the men rested and talked. Sitka had managed to find a place to sit down, one massive paw anchoring him in place.
Huyghens waved his arm, pointing in a new direction. "Let's go!" he called briskly. "Let's go! Yonder! Hup!"
They followed the slopes of the Sere Plateau, neither ascending to its level top—where spheres congregated—nor descending into the foothills where spheres assembled. They moved along hillsides and mountain-flanks which sloped anywhere from thirty to sixty degrees, and they did not cover much territory. They practically forgot what it was to walk on level ground.
At the end of the sixth day, they camped on the top of a massive boulder which projected from a mountainous stony wall. There was barely room on the boulder for all the party. Faro Nell fussily insisted that Nugget should be in the safest part, which meant near the mountain-flank. She would have crowded the men outward, but Nugget whimpered for Bordman. Wherefore, when Bordman moved to comfort him, Faro Neil drew back and snorted at Sitka and Sourdough and they made room for her near the edge.
It was a hungry camp. They had come upon tiny rills upon occasion, flowing down the mountainside. Here the bears had drunk deeply and the men had filled canteens. But this was the third night on the mountainside, and there had been no game at all. Huyghens made no move to bring out food for Bordman or himself. Bordman made no comment. He was beginning to participate in the relationship between bears and men, which was not the slavery of the bears but something more. It was two-way. He felt it.
"You'd think," he said, "that since the sphexes don't seem to hunt on their way uphill, there should be some game. They ignore everything as they file up."
This was true enough. The normal fighting formation of sphexes was line abreast, which automatically surrounded anything which offered to flee and outflanked anything which offered fight. But here they ascended the mountain in long files, one after the other, apparently following long-established trails. The wind blew along the slopes and carried scent sidewise. But the sphexes were not diverted from their chosen paths. The long processions of hideous blue-and-tawny creatures—it was hard to think of them as natural beasts, male and female and laying eggs like reptiles on other planets—the long processions simply climbed.
"There've been other thousands of beasts before them," said Huyghens. "They must have been crowding this way for days or even weeks. We've seen tens of thousands in Semper's camera. They must be uncountable, altogether. The first-comers ate all the game there was, and the last-comers have something else on whatever they use for minds."
Bordman protested:
"But so many carnivores in one place is impossible! I know they are here, but they can't be!"
"They're cold-blooded," Huyghens pointed out. "They don't burn food to sustain body-temperature. After all, lots of creatures go for long periods without eating. Even bears hibernate. But this isn't hibernation—or estivation, either."
He was setting up the radiation-wave receiver in the darkness. There was no point in attempting a fix here. The transmitter was on the other side of the sphex-crowded Sere Plateau. The men and bears would commit suicide by crossing here.
Even so, Huyghens turned on the receiver. There came the whispering, scratchy sound of background-noise, and then the signal. Three dots, three dashes, three dots. Huyghens turned it off. Bordman said:
"Shouldn't we have answered that signal before we left the station? To encourage them?"
"I doubt they have a receiver," said Huyghens. "They won't expect an answer for months, anyhow. They'd hardly listen all the time, and if they're living in a mine-tunnel and trying to sneak out for food to stretch their supplies, they'll be too busy to try to make complicated recorders or relays."
Bordman was silent for a moment or two.
"We've got to get food for the bears," he said presently. "Nugget's weaned, and he's hungry."
"We will," Huyghens promised. "I may be wrong, but it seems to me that the number of sphexes climbing the mountain is less than yesterday and the day before. We may have just about crossed the path of their migration. They're thinning out. When we're past their trail, we'll have to look out for nightwalkers and the like again. But I think they wiped out all animal life on their migration-route."
He was not quite right. He was waked in darkness by the sound of slappings and the grunting of bears. Feather-light puffs of breeze beat upon his face. He struck his belt-lamp sharply and the world was hidden by a whitish film which snatched itself away. Something flapped. Then he saw the stars and the emptiness on the edge of which they camped. Then big white things flapped toward him.
Sitka Pete whuffed mightily and swatted. Faro Nell grunted and swung. She caught something in her claws.
"Watch this!" said Huyghens.
More things strangely-shaped and pallid like human skin reeled and flapped crazily toward him.
A huge hairy paw reached up into the light-beam and snatched a flying thing out of it. Another great paw. The three great Kodiaks were on their hind legs, swatting at creatures which flittered insanely, unable to resist the fascination of the glaring lamp. Because of their wild gyrations it was impossible to see them in detail, but they were those unpleasant night-creatures which looked like plucked flying monkeys but were actually something quite different.
The bears did not snarl or snap. They swatted, with a remarkable air of business-like competence and purpose. Small mounds of broken things built up about their feet.
Suddenly there were no more. Huyghens snapped off the light. The bears crunched and fed busily in the darkness.
"Those things are carnivores and blood-suckers, Bordman," said Huyghens calmly. "They drain their victims of blood like vampire-bats—they've some trick of not waking them—and when they're dead the whole tribe eats. But bears have thick fur, and they wake when they're touched. And they're omnivorous. They'll eat anything but sphexes, and like it. You might say that those night-creatures came to lunch. They are it, for the bears, who are living off the country as usual."
Bordman uttered a sudden exclamation. He made a tiny light, and blood flowed down his hand. Huyghens passed over his pocket kit of antiseptic and bandages. Bordman stanched the bleeding and bound up his hand. Then he realized that Nugget chewed on something. When he turned the light, Nugget swallowed convulsively. It appeared that he had caught and devoured the creature which had drawn blood from Bordman. But he'd lost none to speak of, at that.
In the morning they started along the sloping scarp of the plateau once more. After marching silently for awhile, Bordman said:
"Robots wouldn't have handled those vampire-things, Huyghens."
"Oh, they could be built to watch for them," said Huyghens, tolerantly. "But you'd have to swat for yourself. I prefer the bears."
He led the way on. Twice Huyghens halted to examine the ground about the mountains' bases through binoculars. He looked encouraged as they went on. The monstrous peak which was like the bow of a ship at the end of the Sere Plateau was visibly nearer. Toward midday, indeed, it loomed high above the horizon, no more than fifteen miles away. And at midday Huyghens called a final halt.
"No more congregations of sphexes down below," he said cheerfully, "and we haven't seen a climbing line of them in miles." The crossing of a sphex-trail had meant simply waiting until one party had passed; and then crossing before another came in view. "I've a hunch we've left their migration route behind. Let's see what Semper tells us!"
He waved the eagle aloft. Like all creatures other than men, the bird normally functioned only for the satisfaction of his appetite, and then tended to loaf or sleep. He had ridden the last few miles perched on Sitka Pete's pack. Now he soared upward and Huyghens watched in the small vision-plate.
Semper went soaring. The image on the plate swayed and turned, and in minutes was above the plateau's edge. Here there were some patches of brush and the ground rolled a little. But as Semper towered higher still, the inner desert appeared. Nearby, it was clear of beasts. Only once, when the eagle banked sharply and the camera looked along the long dimension of the plateau, did Huyghens see any sign of the blue-and-tan beasts. There he saw what looked like masses amounting to herds. Incredible, of course; carnivores do not gather in herds.
"We go straight up," said Huyghens in satisfaction. "We cross the Plateau here, and we can edge downwind a bit, even. I think we'll find something interesting on our way to your robot colony."
He waved to the bears to go ahead uphill.
They reached the top hours later, barely before sunset. And they saw game. Not much, but game at the grassy, brushy border of the desert. Huyghens brought down a shaggy ruminant which surely would not live on a desert. When night fell there was an abrupt chill in the air. It was much colder than night temperatures on the slopes. The air was thin. Bordman thought and presently guessed at the cause. In the lee of the prow-mountain the air was calm. There were no clouds. The ground radiated its heat to empty space. It could be bitterly cold in the night-time, here.
"And hot by day," Huyghens agreed when he mentioned it. "The sunshine's terrifically hot where the air is thin, but on most mountains there's wind. By day, here, the ground will tend to heat up like the surface of a planet without atmosphere. It may be a hundred and forty or fifty degrees on the sand at midday. But it should be cold at night."
It was. Before midnight Huyghens built a fire. There could be no danger of night-walkers where the temperature dropped to freezing.
In the morning the men were stiff with cold, but the bears snorted and moved about briskly. They seemed to revel in the morning chill. Sitka and Sourdough Charley, in fact, became festive and engaged in a mock fight, whacking each other with blows that were only feigned, but would have crushed the skull of any man. Nugget sneezed with excitement as he watched them. Faro Nell regarded them with female disapproval.
They started on. Semper seemed sluggish. After a single brief flight he descended and rode on Sitka's pack, as on the previous day. He perched there, surveying the landscape as it changed from semi-arid to pure desert in their progress. He would not fly. Soaring birds do not like to fly when there are no winds to make currents of which they can take advantage.
Once Huyghens stopped and pointed out to Bordman exactly where they were on the enlarged photograph taken from space, and the exact spot from which the distress-signal seemed to come.
"You're doing it in case something happens to you," said Bordman. "I admit it's sense, but—what could I do to help those survivors even if I got to them, without you?"
"What you've learned about sphexes would help," said Huyghens. "The bears would help. And we left a note back at my station. Whoever grounds at the landing field back there—and the beacon's working—will find instructions to come to the place we're trying to reach."
They started walking again. The narrow patch of non-desert border of the Sere Plateau was behind them, now, and they marched across powdery desert sand.
"See here," said Bordman. "I want to know something. You tell me you're listed as a bear-thief on your home planet. You tell me it's a lie, to protect your friends from prosecution by the Colonial Survey. You're on your own, risking your life every minute of every day. You took a risk in not shooting me. Now you're risking more in going to help men who'd have to be witnesses that you were a criminal. What are you doing it for?" Huyghens grinned.
"Because I don't like robots. I don't like the fact that they're subduing men, making men subordinate to them."
"Go on," insisted Bordman. "I don't see why disliking robots should make you a criminal! Nor men subordinating themselves to robots, either."
"But they are," said Huyghens mildly. "I'm a crank, of course. But—I live like a man on this planet. I go where I please and do what I please. My helpers are my friends. If the robot colony had been a success, would the humans in it have lived like men? Hardly. They'd have to live the way robots let them! They'd have to stay inside a fence the robots built. They'd have to eat foods that robots could raise, and no others. Why, a man couldn't move his bed near a window, because if he did the house-tending robots couldn't work! Robots would serve them—the way the robots determined—but all they'd get out of it would be jobs servicing the robots!"
Bordman shook his head.
"As long as men want robot service, they have to take the service that robots can give. If you don't want those services—"
"I want to decide what I want," said Huyghens, again mildly, "instead of being limited to choose what I'm offered. In my home planet we half-way tamed it with dogs and guns. Then we developed the bears, and we finished the job with them. Now there's population-pressure and the room for bears and dogs—and men!—is dwindling. More and more people are being deprived of the power of decision, and being allowed only the power of choice among the things robots allow. The more we depend on robots, the more limited those choices become. We don't want our children to limit themselves to wanting what robots can provide! We don't want them shriveling to where they abandon everything robots can't give, or won't. We want them to be men and women. Not damned automatons who live by pushing robot-controls so they can live to push robot-controls. If that's not subordination to robots—"
"It's an emotional argument," protested Bordman. "Not everybody feels that way."
"But I feel that way," said Huyghens. "And so do a lot of others. This is a damned big galaxy and it's apt to contain some surprises. The one sure thing about a robot and a man who depends on them is that they can't handle the unexpected. There's going to come a time when we need men who can. So on my home planet, some of us asked for Loren II, to colonize. It was refused—too dangerous. But men can colonize anywhere if they're men. So I came here to study the planet. Especially the sphexes. Eventually, we expected to ask for a license again, with proof that we could handle even those beasts. I'm already doing it in a mild way. But the Survey licensed a robot colony—and where is it?"
Bordman made a sour face.
"You took the wrong way to go about it, Huyghens. It was illegal. It is. It was the pioneer spirit, which is admirable enough, but wrongly directed. After all, it was pioneers who left Earth for the stars. But—"
Sourdough raised up on his hind-legs and sniffed the air. Huyghens swung his rifle around to be handy. Bordman slipped off the safety-catch of his own. Nothing happened.
"In a way," said Bordman, "you're talking about liberty and freedom, which most people think is politics. You say it can be more. In principle, I'll concede it. But the way you put it, it sounds like a freak religion."
"It's self-respect," corrected Huyghens. "You may be—"
Faro Nell growled. She bumped Nugget with her nose, to drive him closer to Bordman. She snorted at him, and trotted swiftly to where Sitka and Sourdough faced toward the broader, sphex-filled expanse of the Sere Plateau. She took up her position between them.
Huyghens gazed sharply beyond them and then all about. "This could be bad!" he said softly. "But luckily there's no wind. Here's a sort of hill. Come along, Bordman!"
He ran ahead, Bordman following and Nugget plumping heavily with him. They reached the raised place, actually a mere hillock no more than five or six feet above the surrounding sand, with a distorted cactus-like growth protruding from the ground. Huyghens stared again. He used his binoculars.
"One sphex," he said curtly. "Just one! And it's out of all reason for a sphex to be alone. But it's not rational for them to gather in hundreds of thousands, either!" He whetted his finger and held it up. "No wind at all."
He used the binoculars again.
"It doesn't know we're here," he added. "It's moving away. Not another one in sight...." He hesitated, biting his lip. "Look here, Bordman! I'd like to kill that one lone sphex and find out something. There's a fifty per cent chance I could find out something really important. But—I might have to run. If I'm right..." Then he said grimly, "It'll have to be done quickly. I'm going to ride Faro Nell, for speed. I doubt Sitka or Sourdough will stay behind. But Nugget can't run fast enough. Will you stay here with him?"
Bordman drew in his breath. Then he said calmly: "You know what you're doing, I hope."
"Keep your eyes open. If you see anything, even at a distance, shoot and we'll be back, fast! Don't wait until something's close enough to hit. Shoot the instant you see anything, if you do!"
Bordman nodded. He found it peculiarly difficult to speak again. Huyghens went over to the embattled bears and climbed up on Faro Nell's back, holding fast by her shaggy fur.
"Let's go!" he snapped. "That way! Hup!"
The three Kodiaks plunged away at a dead run, Huyghens lurching and swaying on Faro Nell's back. The sudden rush dislodged Semper from his perch. He flapped wildly and got aloft. Then he followed effortfully, flying low.
It happened very quickly. A Kodiak bear can travel as fast as a race-horse on occasion. These three plunged arrow-straight for a spot perhaps half a mile distant, where a blue-and-tawny shape whirled to face them. There was the crash of Huyghens' weapon from where he rode on Faro Nell's back; the explosion of the weapon and the bullet was one sound. The monster leaped and died.
Huyghens jumped down from Faro Nell. He became feverishly busy at something on the ground. Semper banked and whirled and landed. He watched, with his head on one side.
Bordman stared. Huyghens was doing something to the dead sphex. The two male bears prowled about, while Faro Nell regarded Huyghens with intense curiosity. Back at the hillock, Nugget whimpered a little, and Bordman patted him. Nugget whimpered more loudly. In the distance, Huyghens straightened up and mounted Faro Nell's back. Sitka looked back toward Bordman. He reared upward. He made a noise, apparently, because Sourdough ambled to his side. The two great beasts began to trot back. Semper flapped wildly and—lacking wind—lurched crazily in the air. He landed on Huyghens' shoulder and clung there with his talons.
Then Nugget howled hysterically and tried to swarm up Bordman, as a cub tries to swarm up the nearest tree in time of danger. Bordman collapsed, and the cub upon him—and there was a flash of stinking scaly hide, while the air was filled with the snarling, spitting squeals of a sphex in full leap. The beast had over-jumped, aiming at Bordman and the cub while both were upright and arriving when they had fallen. It went tumbling.
Bordman heard nothing but the fiendish squalling, but in the distance Sitka and Sourdough were coming at rocket-ship speed. Faro Nell let out a roar that fairly split the air. And then there was a furry streaking toward her, bawling, while Bordman rolled to his feet and snatched up his gun. He raged through pure instinct. The sphex crouched to pursue the cub and Bordman swung his weapon as a club. He was literally too close to shoot—and perhaps the sphex had only seen the fleeing bear-cub. But he swung furiously.
And the sphex whirled. Bordman was toppled from his feet. An eight-hundred-pound monstrosity straight out of hell—half wildcat and half spitting cobra with hydrophobia and homicidal mania added—such a monstrosity is not to be withstood when in whirling its body strikes one in the chest.
That was when Sitka arrived, bellowing. He stood on his hind legs, emitting roars like thunder, challenging the sphex to battle. He waddled forward. Huyghens approached, but he could not shoot with Bordman in the sphere of an explosive bullet's destructiveness. Faro Nell raged and snarled, torn between the urge to be sure that Nugget was unharmed, and the frenzied fury of a mother whose offspring has been endangered.
Mounted on Faro Nell, with Semper clinging idiotically to his shoulder, Huyghens watched helplessly as the sphex spat and squalled at Sitka, having only to reach out one claw to let out Bordman's life.
They got away from there, though Sitka seemed to want to lift the limp carcass of his victim in his teeth and dash it repeatedly to the ground. He seemed doubly raging because a man—with whom all Kodius Champion's descendants had an emotional relationship—had been mishandled. But Bordman was not grievously hurt. He bounced and swore as the bears raced for the horizon. Huyghens had flung him up on Sourdough's pack and snapped for him to hold on. He shouted:
"Damn it, Huyghens! This isn't right! Sitka got some deep scratches! That horror's claws may be poisonous!"
But Huyghens snapped "Hup! Hup!" to the bears, and they continued their race against time. They went on for a good two miles, when Nugget wailed despairingly of his exhaustion and Faro Nell halted firmly to nuzzle him.
"This may be good enough," said Huyghens. "Considering that there's no wind and the big mass of beasts is down the plateau and there were only those two around here. Maybe they're too busy to hold a wake, even. Anyhow—"
He slid to the ground and extracted the antiseptic and swabs. "Sitka first," snapped Bordman. "I'm all right!"
Huyghens swabbed the big bear's wounds. They were trivial, because Sitka Pete was an experienced sphex-fighter. Then Bordman grudgingly let the curiously-smelling stuff—it reeked of ozone—be applied to the slashes on his chest. He held his breath as it stung. Then he said:
"It was my fault, Huyghens. I watched you instead of the landscape. I couldn't imagine what you were doing."
"I was doing a quick dissection," Huyghens told him. "By luck, that first sphex was a female, as I hoped. And she was about to lay her eggs. Ugh! And now I know why the sphexes migrate, and where, and how it is that they don't need game up here."
He slapped a quick bandage on Bordman then led the way eastward, still putting distance between the dead sphexes and his party.
"I'd dissected them before," said Huyghens. "Not enough's been known about them. Some things needed to be found out if men were ever to be able to live here."
"With bears?" asked Bordman ironically.
"Oh, yes," said Huyghens. "But the point is that sphexes come to the desert here to breed, to mate and lay their eggs for the sun to hatch. It's a particular place. Seals return to a special place to mate—and the males, at least, don't eat for weeks on end. Salmon return to their native streams to spawn. They don't eat, and they die afterward. And eels—I'm using Earth examples, Bordman—travel some thousands of miles to the Sargasso to mate and die. Unfortunately, sphexes don't appear to die, but it's clear that they have an ancestral breeding-place and that they come to the Sere Plateau to deposit their eggs!"
Bordman plodded onward. He was angry; angry with himself because he hadn't taken elementary precautions; because he'd felt too safe, as a man in a robot-served civilization forms the habit of doing; because he hadn't used his brain when Nugget whimpered, with even a bear-cub's awareness that danger was near.
"And now," Huyghens added, "I need some equipment that the robot colony has. With it, I think we can make a start toward turning this into a planet that man can live like men on." Bordman blinked.
"What's that?"
"Equipment," said Huyghens impatiently. "It'll be at the robot colony. Robots were useless because they wouldn't pay attention to sphexes. They'd still be. But take out the robot controls and the machines will do. They shouldn't be ruined by a few months' exposure to weather."
Bordman marched on and on. Presently he said:
"I never thought you'd want anything that came from that colony, Huyghens!"
"Why not?" demanded Huyghens impatiently. "When men make machines do what they want, that's all right. Even robots, when they're where they belong. But men will have to handle flame-casters in the job I want them for. There have to be some, because there was a hundred-mile clearing to be burned off for the colony. And earth-sterilizers, intended to kill the seeds of any plants that robots couldn't handle. We'll come back up here, Bordman, and at the least we'll destroy the spawn of these infernal beasts! If we can't do more than that, just doing that every year will wipe out the race in time. There are probably other hordes than this, with other breeding-places. But we'll find them too. We'll make this planet into a place where men from my world can come and still be men!"
Bordman said sardonically:
"It was sphexes that beat the robots. Are you sure you aren't planning to make this world safe for robots?"
Huyghens laughed.
"You've only seen one night-walker," he said. "And how about those things on the mountain-slope, which would have drained you of blood? Would you care to wander about this planet with only a robot body-guard, Bordman? Hardly! Men can't live on this planet with only robots to help them. You'll see!"
They found the colony after only ten days' more travel and after many sphexes and more than a few stag-like creatures and shaggy ruminants had fallen to their weapons and the bears. And they found survivors.
There were three of them, hard-bitten and bearded and deeply embittered. When the electrified fence went down, two of them were away at a mine tunnel, installing a new control panel for the robots who worked in it. The third was in charge of the mining operation. They were alarmed by the stopping of communication with the colony and went back in a tank-truck to find out what had happened, and only the fact that they were unarmed saved them. They found sphexes prowling and caterwauling about the fallen colony, in numbers they still did not wholly believe. The sphexes smelled men inside the armored vehicle, but couldn't break in. In turn, the men couldn't kill them, or they'd have been trailed to the mine and besieged there for as long as they could kill an occasional monster.
The survivors stopped all mining, of course, and tried to use remote-controlled robots for revenge and to get supplies for them. Their mining-robots were not designed for either task. And they had no weapons. They improvised miniature throwers of burning rocket-fuel, and they sent occasional prowling sphexes away screaming with scorched hides. But this was useful only because it did not kill the beasts. And it cost fuel. In the end they barricaded themselves and used the fuel only to keep a spark-signal going against the day when another ship came to seek the colony. They stayed in the mine as in a prison, on short rations, without real hope. For diversion they could only contemplate the mining-robots they could not spare fuel to run and which could not do anything but mine.
When Huyghens and Bordman reached them, they wept. They hated robots and all things robotic only a little less than they hated sphexes. But Huyghens explained, and, armed with weapons from the packs of the bears, they marched to the dead colony with the male Kodiaks as point and advance-guard, and with Faro Nell bringing up the rear. They killed sixteen sphexes on the way. In the now overgrown clearing there were four more. In the shelters of the colony they found only foulness and the fragments of what had been men. But there was some food—not much, because the sphexes clawed at anything that smelled of men, and had ruined the plastic packets of radiation-sterilized food. But there were some supplies in metal containers which were not destroyed.
And there was fuel, which men could use when they got to the control-panels of the equipment. There were robots everywhere, bright and shining and ready for operation, but immobile, with plants growing up around and over them.
They ignored those robots, and instead fueled tracked flame-casters—after adapting them to human rather than robot operation—and the giant soil-sterilizer which had been built to destroy vegetation that robots could not be made to weed out or cultivate. Then they headed back for the Sere Plateau.
As time passed Nugget became a badly spoiled bear-cub, because the freed men approved passionately of anything that would even grow up to kill sphexes. They petted him to excess when they camped.
Finally they reached the plateau by a sphex-trail to the top and sphexes came squalling and spitting to destroy them. While Bordman and Huyghens fired steadily, the great machines swept up with their special weapons. The earth-sterilizer, it developed, was deadly against animal life as well as seeds, when its diathermic beam was raised and aimed.
Presently the bears were not needed, because the scorched corpses of sphexes drew live ones from all parts of the plateau even in the absence of noticeable breezes. The official business of the sphexes was presumably finished, but they came to caterwaul and seek vengeance—which they did not find. After a while the survivors of the robot colony drove the machines in great circles around the huge heap of slaughtered fiends, destroying new arrivals as they came. It was such a killing as men had never before made on any planet, and there would be very few left of the sphex-horde which had bred in this particular patch of desert.
Nor would more grow up, because the soil-sterilizer would go over the dug-up sand where the sphex-spawn lay hidden for the sun to hatch. And the sun would never hatch them.
Huyghens and Bordman, by that time, were camped on the edge of the plateau with the Kodiaks. Somehow it seemed more befit |
azing over, or the odd non-sequitur question that made me wonder if they had even been listening, or whether I just suck as a teacher. And that was before I told them about how overly simplified this model was, how many other ways of doing it there was, or how much I personally hated working in the above manner and wanted to change it. I finally got through to the students, of course, but the point had hit home with me; if someone didn’t already have any interest in figuring out how these things worked, then something big would have to happen that directly involved them for there to be a paradigm shift in their thought process, making them finally care to know how games are actually funded and made.
This made a lot of money
Enter Kickstarter, the service that lets individuals pledge to donate money to worthwhile causes or products that they would like to see on the market. It’s an awesome idea in general and for games in particular because it lets players fund the game concepts they would like to see in advance – rather than pick the lesser evil from what the big-name publishers choose to put on the market. I think Kickstarter is just the beginning of opt-in, crowd-sourced funding, personally. Before you know it, you’ll see everything from “Donate!” buttons on AAA games’ websites to development backlogs where players are allowed to overrule the priorities of development studios by putting their money where their mouths are; paying the difference between cheaper and more expensive feature to have the latter kind developed quicker. Most importantly, however, is that it’s going to drag gamers – and the entire consumer side of the industry – out of their naïve, juvenile, clueless dream world, once and for all.
You see, in games development there are different kinds of stakeholders. Depending on the structure of the game(s) being developed, the people involved might differ a bit. Obviously you’ll have the development team, and sometimes a surrounding corporate structure that has some lesser degree of involvement and interest in the project – maybe other teams share the same technology or something, and might benefit from the achievements of the project in question. Next, at least for high-budget AAA games, you’ll most often have a publisher involved. Sometimes the publisher has an internal development team that, for all intents and purposes, “are” the same company. But even with the internal teams there’s generally a divide between development and publishing, and the developers feel a certain degree of disdain for “the suits”. Naturally, this is multiplied many times over when the developer is an external company. In these situations, the publisher is almost always seen as “the bad guy” (with certain publishers actually intentionally cultivating that perception), both by the developers and the general public. After all, the publisher is always the one who makes feature cuts and only thinks about their precious money, and so on. Finally, you’ll have more or less silent partners and other types of stakeholders that often aren’t even gaming-orientated in the true sense of the word. We may be talking about investors, governments, banks and other hands-off financier types, and they will generally only care about dates being hit and cursory quality goals being met. And that used to be pretty much the end of it.
These days, thanks to Kickstarter, there’s a new type of stakeholder, and that’s the prospective buyers/fans of the game – at least the ones who choose to donate to the development of the game through the Kickstarter service (or, I suppose, other similar services). This is indeed a pretty big development and change in the power structure of the games industry. Sadly, there’s not much to be happy about just yet, because everything goes through growing pains. And if you have donated to a Kickstarter-funded project, you’ve just put yourself in the worst possible position as a stakeholder. Because, after all, you are at the very bottom rung of the financier ladder, with no leverage, no creative control, no operational control, and win, lose or draw, you have absolutely no way of ensuring any form of return-on-investment. You can’t even sue for your money back, something publishers have done successfully more than once. And no matter which Kickstarter game you’ve contributed to, you have plenty of reason to worry – whether you know it or not. Let’s look at a few of these projects and I’ll elaborate.
First up we have the Star Command project, and it’s probably the best place to start because of how far they’ve gotten in administrating their costs and how open they’ve been with their financing situation. Looking at their numbers, things start out pretty nicely; they had hoped for 20 000 USD, but ended up with a sum total of 36,967 in pledges – so far so great, that’s almost twice what they had hoped for. Sadly, it all goes downhill from there. They lost almost 2000 bucks from people who’d pledged but didn’t come through. Amazon and Kickstarter payments brought them down to 32 000, and then there was the “prize fulfilment” bit which took another 10 grand out of their coffers. Quite quickly, they’d lost almost all of their surplus funding and were down to their original goal. But, of course, the bad news didn’t stop there, and on their blog I’m reading that they have less than 4000 USD left from the pledges. Read that again – it means that if they would have only gotten to their initial goal of 20 000, and the expenses would have been the same (edit: they would’ve had to have had a higher reward per pledge for that to be true), they would have been in the red already, at least as far as this source of income is concerned (luckily, there are other sources, and so it seems like the game is still happening). All of these more-or-less unforeseen expenses should be more than enough to make most Kickstarter-financiers nervous, with the smarter ones probably thinking “gee, maybe I should assume there will be overhead costs and ask about them in advance before donating to that cool-sounding MMO project”. Sure, these expenses don’t all scale upwards infinitely, but if you’ve pledged money to any of the other projects, some of them with much bigger budgets than that of Star Command, you’d be forgiven for wondering whether the estimating and budgeting power of the developers you’ve chosen to get behind are any better.
Not that you’d have any way of knowing, either way. Just like the games press has done for many years now, all of the Kickstarter projects I’ve seen so far have leveraged the ignorance of their target audience to their own benefit. There’s plenty of lofty conceptual goals, but precious few details on milestone dates, development methodologies, staffing or scheduling. We’re just supposed to take these people completely on faith, and sure, in some cases we might well be justified to do this. The first game to get this whole thing started in earnest was, after all, a Tim Schafer and Ron Gilbert production that was in a genre with a relatively low level of conceptual and technical risk. But the point is that the general audience has no way of knowing this, and even if they were the sceptical, inquisitive type, most of them wouldn’t even know what kind of information to ask the developers for. They don’t know that crucial information is missing.
This long-awaited sequel has finally been kicked off – but will it disappoint?
Looking at another game that’s been phenomenally successful in acquiring funding, Wasteland 2, also helps to hammer home this point. As I’m scouring their initial concept pitch on the Kickstarter page, I find their low-level, nitty-gritty information; the “nuts and bolts” as the developers themselves call the section on their web page. I was expecting a good, detailed read, but, well… here’s a sample of how nuts-and-boltsy they get:
“No first person shooter, we’re going top down so you get a tactical feel for the situation.”
Top-down, tactical feel huh? That’s cool, I can picture it already. Wait, no, I can’t. How about some mockups? At least one faked screenshot, maybe? Is it supposed to inspire confidence that your lead artist, or concept guy or whatever, can’t whip one of those out in a few hours?
“We’re planning on an initial 6 months of pre-production. We’ll nail down every important element that you, our creative partners, want. Once we have all that figured out, we buckle down for 12 month development cycle. “
That’s amazing. How many people were there again? And are you really right to be committing to this scheduling at this juncture? I mean, you’re pretending that “every important element” means that every high-level idea is going to be equally difficult to implement – what if the most popular one isn’t doable in 12 months? Also, what if you get more money and… nevermind, I’ll keep reading.
“…Brian Fargo has offered to fund the last $100,000 if need be. That’s a lot of money needed, but not when compared with the budgets of most full scale RPGs made today.”
That’s certainly true, and interesting. Why is this, again? Am I supposed to infer something about the quality of the game from the budget? Or did you guys find some magical way of making more for less? Are you doing outsourcing, 2D graphics, what?
“At $1.25 million, the money will go primarily into making the world bigger, adding more maps, more divergent stories and even more music.”
“At $1.5 million, the world gets even bigger. You’ll have more adventures to play, more challenges to deal with, and a greater level of complexity to the entire storyline. We’ll add more environments, story elements, and characters to make the rich world come alive even more.”
Cool, that implies that there’s reducible complexity built into the design of the game. Very new-school stuff, that. Pardon me if I’m sceptical though; is there even a cursory design document yet? Or even a high-level technical design document of how you’ll put together the content? Also, shouldn’t we be seeing substantially increased returns per-dollar? I mean, the more mature the tech becomes the quicker it is to whip out additional instances of the same type of content, while programming workloads become increasingly light as the game reaches release. How is the project staffed up/down to cater to the shifting needs?
Anyway, that’s… pretty much it. That’s the extent of their nuts-and-bolts section. It’s possible that there are answers to all of these questions of mine, and more, somewhere, but honestly; the quality level of this pitch is absolutely mind-boggling. Most publishers wouldn’t want to be caught dead financing something so iffy. Again, it’s only because the average gamer is so pie-in-the-sky that this even has the slightest chance of working. And people are quick to capitalize on it; new projects are cropping up every day, and even though I find it very hard not to be excited at the prospect of a new Shadowrun or similar, I have no choice but to gawk at how sloppy some of these pitches and “project plans” are.
The new Shadowrun game’s feature roadmap – almost an actual production document
Finally, the budgets – the crazy-ass budgets! A role-playing game for 400 000 USD, a “realistic, squad-based tactical shooter” for half that, my goodness, how can they print this stuff with a straight face? Many developers would struggle to even make a convincing prototype for that kind of money, depending on where the quality bar is set. From the pledges that these games are getting, however, it seems like the bait-and-switch is working, and that’s ultimately what matters.
Wait, am I saying that the people seeking the funding don’t believe in their own budgets and ability to deliver? Yes, that’s exactly what I’m saying. Not all of these estimates and ambitious promises are intellectually honest mistakes; some of them are lies from people who know better. Now, even if they really intend to make the games, they are acting just as dishonestly towards their layman financiers as they would towards a big publisher. The plan is this: get people invested, fail to deliver but show progress to whet people’s appetites. Then do a new fundraising drive to finish the game, and ultimately end up with up to twice the original budget, if not even more. After all, what are the backers going to do, pull out and be guaranteed to lose all their money? No – of course they, you, will pay. And then for the next project, the developer will pretend like they’ve learned their lesson and start the whole thing all over again.
I predict that this will happen with at least one of the projects. I also predict that at least one of them will get picked up by a big-name publisher (please, let this happen to Wasteland 2, so we get to hear Brian Fargo suddenly love working with a big-name publisher that’s not like the rest of them), with little or no compensation paid to the Kickstarter backers that effectively funded a startup company. Furthermore, at least one of the projects will fall totally flat on its face and one or more “legendary” games designers will be revealed to be a complete fraud. Most, if not all of them, will probably look, sound and play worse, pound-for-pound (or dollar-for-dollar rather), than fans would have expected.
Will the trend last? Or will players bail once they’ve been burned once or twice?
The results will include public outrage, scandals, legal conflicts and probably a newfound respect for the kind of stuff the average publisher has to put up with when dealing with arrogant, primadonna game developers. The corollary is that people will also be forced to stop deifying some of their developer idols, as their understanding of the nuances of the developer-financier relationship improves. Most important, however, is that the average person’s knowledge of how games development works, and their desire to look behind the scenes in the future, will likely increase many times over once they’ve lost a good chunk of their own hard-earned money to some glorified hack with a cool-sounding idea and a bit of stolen concept art. I can hardly wait for the first instance of someone who’d pledged 10 000 USD to one of these projects to painfully realize that he should learn the meaning of words like “milestone”, “risk matrix”, “contingency” and “feature creep”. Because ultimately, the only way to make people grow up that is better than to be allowed to own your failures, is to also be forced to own somebody else’s.
AdvertisementsPilot Rewatch: The X-Files
The Truth Is Out There
The X-Files – Pilot
Season 1, Episode 1 – Original air date: 9/10/1993
This time for ‘Pilot Rewatch’ I decided to go back to a show that I haven’t watched in a very long time. I had forgotten so much of it, that it was almost like seeing it for the first time all over again.
The episode opens on a scared woman running through the woods, her pursuer has no problem catching her. There’s a bright flash of light, and the next day she’s found dead. Of course this is the start of our mystery for this episode. But before that, we have to meet our heroes.
Special Agent Dana Scully is heading into the F.B.I. office for a meeting about the new partner that they want to assign her to. They’re basically asking her to use her skepticism, and science, to disprove anything that Special Agent Fox Mulder investigates concerning ‘the X-Files’, which are the strange and unusual cases that are assigned to him.
Dana heads to Mulder’s basement office, or what looks more like a storage room, to introduce herself. Mulder ponders what she did wrong to be assigned to work with him, and knows she is there to babysit.
As they’re out investigating there’s a few unusual things that happen, lost time for one. There’s a particular scene that I find amusing, Scully shows up at Mulder’s room, and removes her robe, revealing herself to be in her bra & panties. She claims to be there to get his opinion on some marks on her lower back…Yeah. Right. Likely story.
My Thoughts:
I remember when I first heard about The X-Files premiering, I thought it sounded interesting, and figured it would be lucky to last for one season. Yeah, it kind of lasted a bit longer than one season. I remember being a bit annoyed sometimes when watching the show, even though I did enjoy it. I often felt frustrated with the ongoing story lines, and found that I preferred the stand alone episodes. That probably puts me in the minority. The show certainly had it’s charm, and I think I might go back to rewatch the rest of it, just for fun.
It’s always interesting to go back and watch the pilot of a show, long after you have gotten to know the characters, and you realize they may have had the basics down, but their characters were (understandably) not fleshed out yet. Sometimes it’s almost uncomfortable to watch, there are some cringe worthy scenes, and this episode had a few of those moments. Yet, it was still like-able. It also gets much better as the series grows, and they get more comfortable in their characters.
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NEW DELHI: The UK said on Wednesday it wants to furtherin the fight against terrorism and extremism, while also offering cutting-edge military technology for co-production of weapon systems to jointly become “world beaters” in arms exports.“No country is immune from terrorism. India and the UK need to work even harder, and more closely, to combat it,” said visiting British secretary of state for defence Michael Fallon, who had earlier held that his country had made it “very clear” to Pakistan that there cannot be any excuse or justification for terrorism.Fallon, who is accompanied by a high-powered delegation, and finance minister Arun Jaitley, who also holds the charge of defence, will on Thursday chair the first India-UK strategic dialogue, which was agreed to in November 2015 during PM Narendra Modi’s visit to London as part of the bilateral defence and international security partnership.,” said Fallon, taking note of the series of terror attacks in recent days in London, St Petersburg, Egypt and other places. He also stressed the need to bolster cooperation on the cyber-security front to counter the expanding online radicalism of youth.With the UK looking to bolster ties with major economics like India after Brexit, Fallon said the combination of “British expertise and experience with Indian intelligence and brainpower” could be gamechanging in the defence production sector. “In next 12 months I want to see the capability partnerships take off. We, together, can be world-beaters,” he said, adding that UK is thinking of India “not just as a market but a launch pad” to develop top-notch weapons and technologies.“We are looking at government-to-government framework for transfer of technology... we are very serious about it,” Fallon said, underlining that his country was the second biggest arms exporter in the world after the US.For the most part, the beginning of this is back story of KurO and the teams he has played on, the tournaments they have gone through, and their placings. Originally intended this to just be more of an analytic piece, but the more I looked into his back story the more it intrigued me so I’m tailoring it more to that. Further down the piece I’ll talk more in depth about KurO the player, his stats, and less about his back story.
Incredible Miracle, a storied Starcraft organization, finally dipped into the League of Legends scene in May 2012, after the success and popularity of Azubu The Champions Spring 2012 had concluded. Two lackluster splits later and Incredible Miracle looked to create a sister team to help flesh out their budding League of Legends organization, just as competitors Najin and Azubu had done with their rosters.
QUALIFYING TROUBLES
Lee “KurO” Seo-haeng made his professional debut in March 2013 fresh out of solo queue with the newly created LG Incredible Miracle #2 roster, alongside teammates Park “PLL” Jae-gwon in top lane, Kim “Reign Over” Ui-jin in the jungle, Kim “SoFantasy” Yong-beom at ADC, and Lee “BBuing” In-yong at support. This roster competed in the Champions Spring 2013 qualifier tournament. Rushing through the tournament, they found themselves at the final set before entering Champions. Unfortunately for them, they wouldn’t be facing a purely amateur team as they had been up until this point. They would be facing SK Telecom T1 #1, otherwise known as Terminator, the Bok “Reapered” Han-gyu led squad with veteran talent. Despite a strong showing by KurO in the mid lane, a 20-9-30 total K-D-A in the final set, LG-IM #2 would fall 2-1, losing their shot at Champions.
Falling directly into the NLB Gold League, the KurO led LG-IM #2 squad would easily dispatch their opponents moving into the Platinum League. Here they would face a real test in MVP Blue. While MVP Blue had a poor showing in Champions Spring, the team had some real talent with players now known as Acorn, Heart, Easyhoon, and Deft. Despite the apparent talent mismatch, LG-IM #2 prevailed on the back of KurO’s phenomenal team fighting on Orianna in games two and three along with a notable standout performance by top laner PLL in game two. Moving into the next round, LG-IM #2 would square off against the team that kept them out of Champions Spring, Terminator. SK Telecom T1 #1, like MVP Blue, had a lackluster showing in Champions despite the talent on their roster. In a five game slug-fest, despite some incredibly dominating Zed and Kha’Zix play by KurO, Terminator would knock LG-IM #2 out yet again.
BUILDING A CONTENDER
Fast forwarding to Summer, Incredible Miracle would retain Reign Over, BBuing, and KurO from the original IM #2 roster due to their overall individual performances in the previous split. Reign Over would be transplanted into the IM #1 roster for Summer while the other two would stay on the #2 roster. This time, KurO would find the success leading him into Champions with three additional teammates in Lee “Sy1ph” Jae-gwon in top lane, Jun “Lilac” Ho-jin in the jungle, and Jeong “Scarlet” Jae-ho at ADC. Finding themselves in Champions Summer 2013, IM #2 would be placed in group C, alongside SK Telecom T1, Najin White Shield, and MVP Blue. Arguably the toughest group that split, IM #2 as a team were outmatched on a talent level. However KurO proved himself and stood toe to toe against some of the better talents Korea had to offer from the mid lane in Lee “Faker” Sang-hyeok, Yu “Ggoong” Byeong-jun, and Lee “Easyhoon” Ji-hoon.
In the first set, SK Telecom T1, the future Champions winners, quickly minced the young Incredible Miracle #2 roster in a 2-0 set as Piglet and PoohManDu entirely outclassed the Scarlet and BBuing bot lane, carrying the two matches. Shortly after this set, Sy1ph would retire and they would replace him with their old top laner PLL. In the second set, IM #2 faced off against a raw talent filled MVP Blue. In the set, KurO played near flawlessly on Orianna and Lux. In the first match of the set causing a 25 minute surrender vote from MVP Blue and in the second match of the set having to attempt to out carry Deft’s perfect Twitch play, resulting in a disappointing 53 minute loss. The 1-1 split to MVP Blue put IM #2 at a precarious 1-3 overall record in the group heading into a final match up against the veteran squad Najin White Shield. In an extremely decisive 2-0 set victory for Najin White Shield, IM #2 would be knocked down into the NLB league.
THE MIRACLE RUN
For some context into this NLB run, clarification regarding the NLB format should be made as there is a bit of misconceptions about it a la the LSPL in China. This is not a losers bracket. This is not a relegation tourney. This is an entirely separate tourney that is apart of Champions where every team that does not make the top four in Champions drops down to the NLB tourney.
Heading into NLB, IM #2 would again shake up the roster, replacing Scarlet with Lee “BetKyo” Seung-min and moving sub support Kweon “Lasha” Min-woo to the starting role in place of BBuing. Here they would begin what could only be described as a Cinderella run in NLB.
Being placed directly into the Platinum League due to falling from Champions group play, IM #2 would start their run in a quick 2-0 win against the purely amateur Team Alienware. Next up on the list would be MiG Blitz, a team with notable future talents such as Heo “PawN” Won-seok, Jung “Apple” Chul-woo, and Yoon “Prime” Du-sik. In the set, PawN, then known as “wonsuk”, and KurO continuously dueled in the mid lane, KurO coming out the better in two of the three matches leading to a close 2-1 set win in favor of Incredible Miracle #2.
Finally reaching the NLB Diamond League, KurO and Incredible Miracle #2 would square off against a Champions Quarter-finalist in Chunnam Techno University, a team featuring star support Lee “Wolf” Jae-wan. CTU had surprisingly taken second place in their group B, almost claiming first place in a tiebreaker in front of CJ Entus Blaze. Unfortunately, they would be unceremoniously knocked out of Champions 3-0 by the future champions of the league, SK Telecom T1. In the NLB Quarterfinal set, the quickly improving IM #2 roster would dispatch CTU 2-0, moving on to face off against the Jin Air Green Wings Falcons in the semifinals. This JAF squad featured three of the five members from the SK Telecom T1 #1 roster that had beaten the KurO led IM #2 squad twice back in Spring, once in Champions qualifiers and once in NLB. Here, IM #2 would finally have their revenge on the back of commanding assassin play by KurO, knocking the Falcons down to a third place match with a 3-0 set win and boosting the formerly floundering IM #2 roster to the finals of GIGABYTE NLB Summer 2013 against future Season 3 Worlds participant Najin Black Sword.
In the NLB finals, the Incredible Miracle dream came crashing back to earth in a tough 3-1 loss. KurO’s average performance was not enough to overcome the kings of NLB with their brand new mid, Kim “Nagne” Sang-moon, along with PLL and Lilac being utterly over-matched by their counterparts on Najin Black Sword. This would, unfortunately, be their peak as a team.
POSSIBLE CONTENDER TURNED PRETENDER
Entering Champions Winter 2013, Incredible Miracle #2 would welcome back Reign Over onto the roster in place of Lilac, in part because of the Incredible Miracle #1 roster and its inability to even qualify for Winter. The Winter IM #2 roster would look to be PLL, Reign Over, KurO, BetKyo, and new support Jung “Ondal” Jae-woo. Once again, IM #2 would be placed in the toughest group in the tournament alongside KT Rolster Bullets, Samsung Blue, and Najin Black Sword. With KT Rolster Bullets continuing their success from previous splits, Samsung Blue making appropriate roster moves including picking up PawN as their mid laner along with progressing as an already talented squad, and Najin Black Sword coming back to Korea after a good showing at Season 3 Worlds, it appeared like IM #2 had quite a mountain to climb if they were to make it out of groups.
Splitting 1-1 with both Najin Black Sword and Samsung Blue, it came down to the final set of the group against KT Rolster Bullets to decide whether KurO and IM #2 would be heading to NLB or heading to Quarterfinal play for the first time. KT Rolster Bullets, being at the top of their game, closed IM #2 out in the first match after a tense first 25 minutes. In the second game, with IM #2 on red side, they had last pick. Seeing the KT Rolster Bullets team comp before them, Ryu “Ryu” Sang-wook on Nidalee, Ondal locked in something KurO had never before played in competitive, Leblanc. The risky pick did not pay off. KT Rolster Bullets jumped out to an early significant gold lead, however IM #2 fought their way back into the match through some clutch mid game picks keeping their hopes alive. The Bullets would dash those hopes at the 30 minute mark, as the game drew closer and closer, with an uncontested, unknown baron, a KT Rolster Bullets special. Not even four minutes later, the game was over. Samsung Blue and KT Rolster Bullets would progress through the group of death into their respective quarterfinal matches. Incredible Miracle #2 would once again head to the NLB league.
This time, however, would not be as miraculous as their Summer run. Meeting up, yet again, against the Jin Air Green Wings Falcons, IM #2 would fall 2-1 in their first Platinum League set right off the back of their tough 2-0 set loss to the KT Rolster Bullets.
NO MIRACLES LEFT
Transitioning into HOT6iX Champions Spring 2014, Incredible Miracle #2 would once again qualify, bringing in newer and older players. KurO stating before the split, for the third season of Champions in a row, that IM #2 would finally prove themselves. Apple, formerly of MiG Blitz, would be taking over the top lane role from PLL. Lasha, formerly a starting support for IM #2, would be returning to the role in place of Ondal. Being placed into group D alongside perennial playoff teams CJ Entus Blaze, Najin White Shield, and Champions farm team Xenics Storm, the road to getting out of groups yet again looked slim.
Their first set ended in a 2-0 victory for CJ Blaze. Despite a phenomenal Ziggs performance by KurO in a near hour long first match, Blaze would take both games of the set on the back of jungler Kang “DayDream” Kyun-min. Their second set showed some slim hope to push past the group against the Oh “Ohq” Gyu-min led Xenics Storm. In two impressive Leblanc matches, KurO and IM #2 would even their record at 2-2 heading into a final match up against Najin White Shield to determine whether they would finally prove themselves and advance to the playoff stage. In one of the classic examples of Najin White Shield making a win appear out of thin air, they would steal a 55 minute match away from KurO’s near perfect 4-0-9 Syndra performance, knocking IM #2 down to NLB for the third straight season of Champions.
Like the split before, their run in NLB would end in yet another disappointing 2-0 loss, this time to Prime Optimus. After the Prime Optimus loss, KurO would play a select few matches in Masters for Incredible Miracle before finding a new home. His final match for the organization that he stuck with for over a year would be against the team that dashed their NLB Summer dream run, Najin Black Sword. In a 9-3-12, hour long carry performance on Nidalee, he would leave IM #2 on a bright note.
A NEW TEAM AND A NEW HOPE
Shortly after leaving the Incredible Miracle organization, he would be joining the one he had only recently bested, Najin Black Sword. The storied Korean e-sports organization was looking to rebuild their roster from the ground up after consecutive mediocre performances. Their first moves would be to release veteran Champions players Shin “Helios” Dong-jin and Kim “Pray” Jong-in from their roster. Their next move would be to acquire a budding star marksman in Oh “Ohq” Gyu-min. Buying him out from the perennial farm system in Xenics Storm, Ohq was one of the very few bright spots on the 0-6 group stage roster. Pairing him up in the bot lane would be Najin legend Jang “Cain” Nu-ri. Later in the offseason, they would strike a deal with KT Rolster, sending their mid laner Nagne and their top laner Joo “Limit” Min-kyu to the KT Rolster Bullets in exchange for a rising top laner in Lee “Leopard” Ho-seong, otherwise known as Duke. To fill the mid lane spot, they would acquire the talented KurO off of the Incredible Miracle roster. Rounding out their roster for Summer, filling the vacant jungle role, would be a young solo queue talent that had competed in select Masters matches, Lee “Lee” Ho-jin.
HOT6iX Champions Summer 2014. The most competitive tournament in the games history. The amount of pure talent teeming through almost every single competing roster was astounding. Najin Black Sword was one of those rosters that was predicted for a possible playoff berth and maybe even a lengthy run. With a world renowned top laner, a future superstar at ADC, and one of the most consistent mid laners in the Korean scene, hopes were quite high for this team although time and experience together would prove to be valuable.
They would be placed into a fairly easy group B alongside the Spring runner up Najin White Shield, a mediocre Jin Air Falcons squad, and a reformed KT Rolster Bullets roster. For the first time in KurO’s career, his team would take first in their group, only dropping one match to their sister team, and progress to the Champions playoffs. There, they would face off in the quarterfinals against SK Telecom T1 S in one of the longest broadcasts Champions has ever seen. Najin Black Sword had seen their fair share of troubles in the mid to late game in regards to closing matches out. SK Telecom T1 S had their entire game plan revolve around stalling and scaling to the late game team fights. Both mid laners, Easyhoon and KurO, excelled on the wave clear mages that were top tier picks and would be squaring off yet again in their careers.
In the first match, Najin Black Sword picked a strong early game comp against the typical late game scaling SK Telecom T1 S comp with Easyhoon’s infamous Ziggs. Despite a small lapse allowing a dragon to fall to SKT S, Sword would run away with the game with their snowball oriented play style, only for it to be stalled an extra ten minutes by that Ziggs pick. The second match can only be described in a Doa quote, “The ‘S’ stands for slow”. SKT S jumping out to a 23 minute, 7k gold lead, they struggled mightily closing the match out. Game three showed an incredibly poor pick and ban process by Sword that put Lee on an ineffective jungler and Duke, a notable carry top, on a low impact top, Lulu. KurO’s great Syndra play was not enough to push Sword to victory, pinning their backs against the wall in an elimination match.
In the potential elimination match, Sword slowly, but surely choked the wave clear comp SKT S relied on out in a clean, yet incredibly lengthy match. Heading into game five, blind pick, Easyhoon defaulted to a Ziggs that had been banned in the three previous matches and KurO defaulted to his Kassadin that had been banned every match prior. On the back of KurO’s roaming Kassadin, Sword would take a sizable mid game lead, but were unable to push through the Gragas and Ziggs comp SKT S was allowed through blind pick. After an ace at the 40 minute mark, Sword chose to take baron instead of pushing down towers and inhibs. While the baron extended their overall gold lead to 11k, they still had yet to tear down an inhib. Ten minutes later, the gold lead Sword had accumulated meant nothing as the game eclipsed the 50 minute mark. After an extremely poor engage by Cain in a baron standoff that led to Duke getting caught and killed, SKT S took baron and finally put Sword on the back foot. No more than ten minutes later, the game was over. SKT S had come back from an 11k gold deficit in the fifth, deciding match that moved the winner on to the semifinals. As the SK Telecom coaching staff celebrated gleefully with their players, the Najin players could do nothing but think about what all went wrong.
Despite the crushing defeat in quarters, this was the best finish in KurO’s career and the team around him seemed extremely promising. Ohq and Duke had break out splits in their respective positions, Lee struggled a lot at times whilst showing flashes of potential, and Cain helped steer the young and talented team.
FINALS DISAPPOINTMENT V2
Moving directly into the quarterfinals of NLB, they would be facing off against a CJ Blaze roster that failed to advance to Champions playoffs for the first time in their history. The disappointment would continue for Blaze, as Duke thoroughly dominated Flame in a 2-1 victory for Sword. In the semifinals, they would meet their sister team, Najin White Shield. The team many claimed were a top three team at Worlds would be dismantled by the upstart Sword roster in dominating fashion. After a slow and steady game one, KurO would lock in Yasuo as a counter to Ggoong’s Ziggs. Proceeding to solo kill the mid laner twice in the first twenty minutes of play, KurO would help carry Sword to a 2-0 start in the series. Game three would lane KurO on his most comfortable champion, Orianna. Despite a rough level three fight that ended with Ggoong taking double buffs and two kills, KurO rebounded by turning around a one versus two gank, walking out unscathed and with a kill of his own. With phenomenal team fighting on Orianna, a trait he had become known for, Sword would take the third match cleanly heading into the finals against the Faker led SK Telecom T1 K. KurO had outclassed his opponent in the mid lane |
who initially struggled to learn the guitar, Cooper jumped at the opportunity to partner with Fretlight, which Guitar World magazine has coined "the fastest and most effective way to learn how to play."
Fretlight Guitars are premium acoustic and electric guitars that include the world's only built-in LED learning system. Fingering positions for chords, scales, songs and riffs light up where players need the information most, right under their fingers. The Fretlight Guitar and learning system uses interactive instruction and video lessons to enable guitar players at every level to learn up to 10 times faster than ever before possible.
"The first step to overcoming quitting is admitting you have a problem," said Alice Cooper. "You aren't alone. Millions of us have struggled to learn to play guitar, clumsily looking back and forth between chord and scale books, our fingers and the neck of the guitar. It can become a house of horrors."
"Unfortunately, new beginner players are at a disadvantage when learning to play guitar in the traditional manner. It's very difficult. But really, it's not their fault. They have been set-up for failure," said Rusty Shaffer, inventor of the Fretlight Guitar and founder of Quitters Anonymous. "Quitters Anonymous is a place where recovering guitar quitters everywhere can come together and encourage one another that learning with a Fretlight guitar is very different. We set you up for success the instant you put your hands on the Fretlight."
By connecting through a PC or Mac, the Fretlight Guitar and learning system uses a combination of software and video instruction to dramatically simplify and accelerate the process. The video lessons can be slowed to a desired tempo, and looped so fingerings can be practiced at a comfortable pace, building muscle memory, retention and confidence.
Fretlight Guitars, including the complete learning system, start at $299.99 for the FG 507 Fretlight acoustic. The FG-500 series also includes five electric models: Standard, Traditional, Vintage, Classic and Pro, ranging in price from $399.99 to $899.99.Meanwhile in India, An 18-year-old girl got married with a stray dog “Sheru” due to villagers’ belief that the curse should be passed to a dog before marrying a human.
INDIA – Mangli Munda, 18 years of age, living in a small village in the state of Jharkland, India, just married a stray dog in order to get rid of a curse. Munda married a dog because her fellow villagers believe that this curse should be passed onto the dog, and so that the man she will marry will be blessed with longevity.
Sri Amnmunda, Mangli’s father, found a stray dog named “Sheru” and made him the groom in this ‘Dog Wedding.’ The teenage girl is apprehensive at first about this ritual. “I am not happy with this marriage,” Mangli said. I made her marry a dog. Many weddings like this have happened before. I’ve seen at least four or five weddings like this. There will be no problems in her life after she is married. -Sri Amnmunda, father of Munda.
The Hindu wedding expenses were shouldered by the girl’s family. Sheru, the dog groom, even arrived in a chauffeur car and all the customs and rituals must be followed.
At the end of the day, this dog wedding was only for the traditional Hindu ceremony. The wedding was a success and villagers were optimistic that the curse was finally lifted.
Mangli is now free to find his Mr. Right since the wedding is not legally binding.
“Yes, I will marry a man one day. Every girl dreams of marrying a prince. I am waiting for him to come”, Mangli said.Big Blue Bus is launching a new on-demand cab service to provide late-night rides to and from the 17th Street/SMC Expo Station.
The service, called Blue at Night, will offer cab rides from 8 p.m. to 3 a.m. on Friday and Saturday nights for $3 beginning June 17. Riders can request a cab during service hours by dialing (877) 611-8294 or boarding an unoccupied cab at the Blue at Night kiosk at the 17th Street/SMC Station, located on eastbound Colorado Avenue and 17th Street near the Breeze bikeshare station.
Rides must begin or end at the Expo station with the other end of the trip occurring between San Vicente/Rose and Centinela/Ocean. There is no Blue at Night service between Olympic/Arizona and 7th/Ocean due to the availability of late night BBB and Metro buses.
Each one-way trip will cost $3 for up to four passengers. Riders are not required to share a cab with strangers but multiple passengers will fit in a single vehicle and up to four can ride for $3. An additional $3 fee will be applied for additional stops within the service area or if more than four people share the ride.
Drivers will take cash or credit for the ride but will only carry $5 in change.
Riders who call a cab should be prompt because drivers will only wait 5 minutes from time of arrival for late passengers. The last pickup will be at 2:40 a.m. from the last Expo train to arrive at the station. Wheelchair-accessible cabs are available on request but cabs will not provide car seats. Parents should bring their own car or booster seats for children that require them. No pets are allowed on the service.
The service does not take advance reservations or provide recurring service.
BBB said the service was designed to provide late-night first- and last-mile connectivity throughout the city and the 17th Street/SMC station was chosen because it’s the halfway point between the three Santa Monica stations.
First- and last-mile connectivity refers to the short distances most riders need to cover to access a mass transit hub. Providing solutions to the connectivity puzzle is a priority for transit officials.
“All transportation agencies in the country, including Big Blue Bus, have been working to forge collective solutions to transportation problems and nothing is more universal than the first/last mile problem,” said Metro spokesperson Paul Gonzales. “Metro has provided options such as Zipcar at a 10 Metro park and ride locations. Already, riders are using sharing services such as Uber and Lyft. We’ve seen along the Gold Line extension from Pasadena to Azusa that as many as 30 percent of the riders are walking or bicycling to catch the train at the Arcadia, Duarte and APU/Citrus stations.”
He said providing transit solutions to and from the stations is the next phase of a successful transit opening.
“Extending the Expo Line to Santa Monica opens modern, efficient and economical rail transit to an entirely new population,” he said. “Building the system was the initial challenge. Now, making it work for the most people possible is the work going forward.”
Santa Monica has invested in transit options such as bikeshare, car share and revised public transit schedules.
The Blue at Night service is part of a series of changes for the BBB system.
“The summer Service Change marks another exciting step in the major redesign of Big Blue Bus routes that began last August,” transit director Edward F. King said in a statement. “The launch of Expo light rail on May 20 ushered the return of rail to the Westside after 63 years, energizing an eager public considering new ways of getting around town. Big Blue Bus’ goal is to tap into this new market of customers by providing innovative service options like Blue at Night and easy connections to Expo Line stations. On June 12, every Big Blue Bus route will connect to one or more Expo stations, thereby opening up the region to more people and places.”
View a service area map and more details at bigbluebus.com/blueatnight.
editor@www.smdp.comMany modern data scientists don’t get to experience data collection in the offline world. Recently, I spent a month sailing down the northern Great Barrier Reef, collecting data for the Reef Life Survey project. In addition to being a great diving experience, the trip helped me obtain general insights on data collection and machine learning, which are shared in this article.
The Reef Life Survey project
Reef Life Survey (RLS) is a citizen scientist project, led by a team from the University of Tasmania. The data collected by RLS volunteers is freely available on the RLS website, and has been used for producing various reports and scientific publications. An RLS survey is performed along a 50 metre tape, which is laid at a constant depth following a reef’s contour. After laying the tape, one diver takes photos of the bottom at 2.5 metre intervals along the transect line. These photos are automatically analysed to classify the type of substrate or growth (e.g., hard coral or sand). Divers then complete two swims along each side of the transect. On the first swim (method 1), divers record all the fish species and large swimming animals found in a 5 metre corridor from the line. The second swim (method 2) requires keeping closer to the bottom and looking under ledges and vegetation in a 1 metre corridor from the line, targeting invertebrates and cryptic animals. The RLS manual includes all the details on how surveys are performed.
Performing RLS surveys is not a trivial task. In the tropics, it is not uncommon to record around 100 fish species on method 1. The scientists running the project are very conscious of the importance of obtaining high-quality data, so training to become an RLS volunteer takes considerable effort and dedication. The process generally consists of doing surveys together with an experienced RLS diver, and comparing the data after each dive. Once the trainee’s data matches that of the experienced RLSer, they are considered good enough to perform surveys independently. However, retraining is often required when surveying new ecoregions (e.g., an RLSer trained in Sydney needs further training to survey the Great Barrier Reef).
RLS requires a lot of hard work, but there are many reasons why it’s worth the effort. As someone who cares about marine conservation, I like the fact that RLS dives yield useful data that is used to drive environmental management decisions. As a scuba diver, I enjoy the opportunity to dive places that are rarely dived and the enhanced knowledge of the marine environment – doing surveys makes me notice things that I would otherwise overlook. Finally, as a data scientist, I find the exposure to the work of marine scientists very educational.
Pre-training and thoughts on supervised learning
Doing surveys in the tropics is a completely different story from surveying temperate reefs, due to the substantially higher diversity and abundance of marine creatures. Producing high-quality results requires being able to identify most creatures underwater, while doing the survey. It is possible to write down descriptions and take photos of unidentified species, but doing this for a large number of species is impractical.
Training the neural network in my head to classify tropical fish by species was an interesting experience. The approach that worked best was making flashcards using reveal.js, photos scraped from various sources, and past survey data. As the image below shows, each flashcard consists of a single photo, and pressing the down arrow reveals the name of the creature. With some basic JavaScript, I made the presentation select a different subset of photos on each load. Originally, I tried to learn all the 1000+ species that were previously recorded in the northern Great Barrier Reef, but this proved to be too hard – I realised that a better strategy was needed. The strategy that I chose was to focus on the most frequently-recorded species: I started by memorising the most frequent ones (e.g., those recorded on more than 50% of surveys), and gradually made it more challenging by decreasing the frequency threshold (e.g., to 25% in 5% steps). This proved to be pretty effective – by the time I started diving I could identify about 50-100 species underwater, even though I had mostly been using static images. It’d be interesting to know whether this kind of approach would be effective in training neural networks (or other batch-trained models) in certain scenarios – spend a few epochs training with instances from a subset of the classes, and gradually increase the number of considered classes. This may be effective when errors on certain classes are more important than others, and may yield different results from simply weighting classes or instances. Please let me know if you know of anyone who has experimented with this idea (update: gwern from Reddit pointed me to the paper Curriculum Learning by Bengio et al., which discusses this idea).
RLS flashcard example (Chaetodon lunulatus)
While repeatedly looking at photos and their labels felt a lot like training an artificial neural network, as a human I have the advantage of being able to easily use information from multiple sources. For example, fish ID books such as Reef Fish Identification: Tropical Pacific provide concise descriptions of the identifying physical features of each fish (see the image below for the book’s entry for Chaetodon lunulatus – the butterflyfish from the flashcard above). Reading those descriptions made me learn more effectively, by helping me focus my attention on the parts that matter for classification. Learning only from static images can be hard when classifying creatures with highly variable colour schemes – using extraneous knowledge about what actually matters when it comes to classification is the way to go in practice. Further, features that are hard to decode from photos – like behaviour and habitat – are sometimes crucial to distinguishing different species. One interesting thought is that while photos can be seen as raw data, natural language descriptions are essentially models. Utilising such models is likely to be of benefit in many areas. For example, being able to tell a classifier what to look for in an image would make training a supervised classifier more similar to the way humans learn. This may be achieved using similar techniques to those used for generating image descriptions, except that the goal would be to use descriptions of the classes to improve classification accuracy.
Fish ID example (Chaetodon lunulatus). Source: Reef Fish Identification: Tropical Pacific
Another difference between my learning and supervised machine learning is that if I found a creature hard to identify, I would go and look for more photos or videos of them. Videos were especially valuable, because in practice I rarely had to identify static creatures. This approach may be applicable in situations where labelled data is abundant. Sometimes, using all the labelled data makes model training too slow to be practical. An approach I used in the past to overcome this issue is to randomly sample the data, but it often makes sense to sample in a way that yields the best model, e.g., by sampling more instances from classes that are harder to classify.
One similarity to supervised machine learning that I encountered was the danger of overfitting. Due to the relatively small number of photos and the fact that I had to view each one of them multiple times, I found that in some cases I memorised the entire photo rather than the creature. This was especially the case with low-quality photos or ones that were missing key features. My regularisation approach consisted of trying to memorise the descriptions from the book, and collecting more photos. I wish more algorithms were this self-conscious about overfitting!
Can’t this be automated?
While doing surveys and studying species, I kept asking myself whether the whole thing can be automated. Thanks to deep learning, computers have recently gotten very good at classifying images, sometimes outperforming humans. It seems likely that at some point the survey methodology would be changed to just taking a video of the dive, and letting an algorithm do the hard job of identifying the creatures. Analysis of the bottom photos is automated, so it is reasonable to automate the other survey methods as well. However, there are quite a few challenges that need to be overcome before full automation can be implemented.
If the results of the LifeCLEF 2015 Fish Task are any indication, we are quite far from automating fish identification. The precision of the top methods in that challenge was around 80% for identifying 15 fish species from underwater videos, where the chosen species are quite distinct from each other. In tropical surveys it is not uncommon to record around 100 fish species along the 50 metre transect, with many species being similar to each other. It’s usually the case that it’s not same species on every dive (even at the same site), so replacing humans would require training a highly accurate classifier on thousands of species.
Dealing with high diversity isn’t the only challenge in automating RLS. The appearance of many species varies by gender and age, so the classifier would have to learn all those variations (see image below for an example). Getting good training data can be very challenging, since the labelling process is labour-intensive, and elements like colour and backscatter are highly dependent on dive site conditions and the quality of the camera. Another complication is that RLS data includes size estimates, which can be hard to obtain from videos and photos without knowing how far the camera was from the subject and the type of lens used. In addition, accounting for side information (geolocation, behaviour, depth, etc.) can make a huge difference in accurately identifying species, but it isn’t easy to integrate with some learning models. Finally, it is likely that some species will be missed when videos are taken without any identification done underwater, because RLSers tend to get good photos of species that they know will be hard to identify, even if it means spending more time at one spot or shining strobes under ledges.
Chlorurus sordidus variations. Source: Tropical Marine Fishes of Australia
Another aspect of automating surveys is completely removing the need for human divers by sending robots down. This is an active research area, and is the only way of surveying deep waters. However, this approach still requires a boat-based crew to deploy the robots. It may also yield different data from RLS for cryptic species, though this depends on the type of robots used. In addition, there’s the issue of cost – RLS relies on volunteer scuba divers who are diving anyway, so the cost of getting RLSers to do surveys is rather low (especially for shore dives near a diver’s home, where there is no cost to RLS). Further, RLS’s mission is “to inspire and engage a global volunteer community to survey reefs using scientific methods and share knowledge about marine ecosystem health”. Engaging the community is a crucial part of RLS because robots do not care about the environment. Humans do.
Small data is valuable
When compared to datasets commonly encountered online, RLS data is small. As the image below shows, fewer than 10,000 surveys have been conducted to date. However, this data is still valuable, as it provides a high-quality snapshot of the state of marine ecosystems in areas that wouldn’t be surveyed if it wasn’t for RLS volunteers. For example, in a recent Nature article, the authors used RLS data to assess the vulnerability of marine fauna to global warming.
RLS surveys by Australian financial year (July-June). Source: RLS Foundation Annual Report 2015
Each RLS survey requires several hours of work. In addition to performing the survey itself, a lot of work goes into entering the data and verifying its quality. Getting to the survey sites is not always a trivial task, especially for remote sites such as some of those we dived on my recent trip. Spending a month diving the Great Barrier Reef is a good way of appreciating its greatness. As the map shows, the surveys we did covered only the top part of the reef’s 2300 kilometres, and we only sampled a few sites within that part. The Great Barrier Reef is very vast, and it is hard to convey its vastness with just words or a map. You have to be there to understand – it is quite humbling.
In summary, the RLS experience has given me a new appreciation for small data in the offline world. Offline data collection is often expensive and labour-intensive – you need to work hard to produce a few high-quality data points. But the size of your data doesn’t matter (though having more quality data is always good). What really matters is what you do with the data – and the RLS team and their collaborators have been doing quite a lot. The RLS experience also illustrates the importance of domain expertise: I’ve looked at the RLS datasets, but I have no idea what questions are worth asking and answering using those datasets. The RLS project is yet another example of how in science collecting data is time-consuming, and coming up with appropriate research questions is hard. It is a lot of fun, though.A Gypsy Sleepover in Valeni, Romania
So-caress SHABL?
Thought I’d stop with the layover talk for a while and tell you another one of my strange travel tales.
This one happened last October while I was traveling around Romania for a couple of weeks. It was my last day in Transylvania and I was just getting ready to leave my hostel in Brasov to go check out Sighisoara which is about two hours away. Ten minutes before I was supposed to leave, I get this message:
Hi Larissa
How are you? – or “so-caress”, say the Gypsies. I hope Romania is treating you well. It’s a beautiful country.
I truly hope I’m not disturbing you with this message but I noticed you are in the “area” – also noticed your interesting moniker (blonde Gypsy) and thought to reach out and introduce our non-profit community development organization (ngo). It’s something that I think might interest you; we invite open minded travelers into the segregated “Tzigania” (Gypsy part of town) and experience the true GYPSY “carpe diem” lifestyle. It’s another world. We offer the chance for people to SAFELY come into the segregated communities and see for yourself. It’s not only about culture but the history, traditions, music and dance; plus it’s a lot of FUN.
We are a small org trying to build something positive against so much negatively.
Thanks for your understanding..
Friend
Chuck
PS Our location is in restful Transylvania, after Brasov, not far from the “must-see” Citadel Sighisoara: Mures county…
Gypsy tourism? Was this guy for real? The way he was selling it kind of made it seem like one of those slum tours in Rio or Mumbai that I’ve read a lot about but have never been interested in doing. They seem so sad and exploitative to me. At the same time, I’d be lying if I said that going to have FUN with a bunch of gypsies didn’t intrigue me. The fact that he said it was a non-profit community development organization also made me a little more open to the idea. I totally understand why an organization would want to build something positive because to say the Roma have a bad reputation, especially in Romania, would be a huge understatement.
I couldn’t stop thinking about this proposition during the entire ride out to Sighisoara. What are the chances I get this offer on my last day in the region and on the day that I am going in that direction anyway? It seemed too serendipitous to pass up so as soon as I arrived I sent a message back to this guy Chuck. I told him I was interested in dropping by to check it out for dinner but I wanted more details. How would I get there? Who else would be there? How would I get back to Brasov in the evening?
Chuck responded that just stopping by for dinner was not going to be possible if I was getting to and from there via public transportation, so he suggested that I stay the night. It would be me and one other visitor from Switzerland. Hmmmm…
I still wasn’t entirely sure this was a legit organization so of course this kind of made me a little uneasy. This place was out in the middle of nowhere and I definitely wouldn’t be able to just bounce if I decided I didn’t want to be there anymore. Also, if this turns out to be something completely bogus, who is going to know?
Well, Rob would, I decided. I rarely take this kind of security measure while traveling solo but thought it would be a good idea for this occasion to email my new pen pal and ask him to contact Interpol if he didn’t hear from me within 24 hours. True story. I really didn’t feel like worrying family or friends back home and I knew he’d be totally cool with that request. Plus, if something did happen, at least he’d have some interesting material for a new blog post, right?
Luckily, this turned out to be unnecessary. I found the bus minibus I was supposed to take and thankfully got off at the correct stop. Chuck was there waiting there for me like he said he would and took me straight over to meet “the gypsies”.
It is here where I wish I could tell you that I walked into a full-blown gypsy party with gypsies dancing and singing around a huge fire. Maybe post some photos of me learning some traditional Roma dance moves from the best dancer in the tribe or taking shots of homemade brandy with their leader. That, however, would be far from the truth.
No, actually I walked straight into a pretty nice two-story home with cable TV blaring from the kitchen and pictures of Hilary Duff and Hannah Montana stuck on the wall. Before I even had time to say “WTF?”, I was greeted by the hospitable residents of this slick countryside pad, the Gabor family.
After we had dinner and walked around the village for a bit, I spent a couple of hours just chatting with Chuck. He is an American journalist who has been living in gypsy communities for the past six years and has written quite a bit on Roma culture and issues. Regardless of how he came off in his message and how overly touristic some of the activities he offers are, I could tell he deeply cared that people came away from this experience better informed and with a more positive view of the Roma.
While there were some elements of my stay that bordered on cheesy (like them wanting to dress me up in Roma attire), I came back feeling like I had done something meaningful and that I actually learned a lot. People can argue that doing something like this is an example of irresponsible tourism, but I think that irresponsible tourism has almost everything to do with irresponsible tourists. As long as the organizations providing these tours are reliable, they actually involve the people living in the communities in a positive manner, and any profits made are put in the right hands, then it is up to the tourists to turn it into a learning experience and not something exploitative.
I truly hope Chuck and the Gabor Family are on the right track with this project. It’s always hard to tell from the outside, but it seemed like their hearts were in it and they were making progress as best they could given their circumstances – circumstances being that at the Romanian tourism board wants absolutely nothing to do with a program like this so funding and publicity is limited.
If you are interested in seeing more photos and a short video from my time spent in Tzigania, you can also check out this post on my blog.
Te Bahktalo (may the luck be with you)Steve Ott has won 10 of the 13 games he's played with St. Louis. ©2014, Dan Hickling, Olean Times Herald
TORONTO – Steve Ott is no longer the guy, just one piece of arguably the NHL’s deepest club, the powerhouse St. Louis Blues. Of course, the popular former Buffalo Sabres captain knew he was joining a special team.
But how good is St. Louis?
Tuesday’s 5-3 win against Maple Leafs was the Blues’ 10th victory in 13 games since acquiring Ott and franchise goalie Ryan Miller on Feb. 28.
Ott won only 17 of the 59 games he played with the rebuilding Sabres, including just eight in regulation. The Blues have nine regulation wins with Ott.
“It’s almost a dream when you wake up when you’re in last place and you wake up and you’re in first place,” Ott said Tuesday afternoon inside the Air Canada Centre.
Make no mistake, Ott’s still high on the Sabres, a team he repeatedly said he didn’t want to leave.
But the gritty 31-year-old winger is excited to be gunning for the Stanley Cup this season. He hasn’t played in the playoffs since the Dallas Stars’ 2008 run to the Western Conference final.
“It was one of the most fun times in my career that I ever had,” Ott said. “All you want is a chance.”
This might be the greatest chance of Ott’s career. The Blues have an NHL-high 105 points and 49 wins. They execute a rigid system under coach Ken Hitchcock and roll four lines.
“There’s not a weak link in the dressing room,” Ott said.
Familiarity has helped Ott’s transition to a veteran dressing room. In addition to Miller, former Sabres defenseman Jordan Leopold is a Blues regular. So is center Brenden Morrow, Ott’s teammate nine seasons in Dallas. Hitchcock coached Dallas when the Stars drafted Ott.
“That makes things easy to come into a dressing room and already know guys,” Ott said. “The dressing room here, for me, was already special. These guys here have all kind of grown up in the process together from basically a basement contender to all the way up to a contender now.
“It’s a close-knit group in here, a lot of fun. They’re very welcoming to Ryan and myself. It made the whole transition very easy.”
Ott’s fun-loving personality has already worn off on new teammates.
“We sit beside each other in the room back in St. Louis,” Blues winger Alexander Steen said. “He’s had me in tears a couple of times before the games. Hilarious guy. I’m really looking forward to getting to know him a lot better.”
Ott’s basically a third-line player with the Blues, skating around 14 or 15 minutes. He had been playing big minutes in Buffalo, upwards of 20 some nights.
Western Conference hockey – “Really physical, demanding games,” Ott said – plays to his strengths.
“He’s going to bring that grit,” Leopold said. “He’s going to get under the skin. He’s a tough guy to play against. I know when I played against him many moons ago (he’s) a tough guy to play against. You circle his name on the board.”
Ott’s opinion of the Sabres hasn’t changed. He still believes the club’s future can be bright.
Still, he’s “disappointed” Pat LaFontaine suddenly resigned as the team’s president of hockey operations a day after he left.
“I thought he was a phenomenal man,” Ott said. “I really liked him. I have so much respect for Patty that I had in my short time in Buffalo. (I’ll) continue to do so for a long time. He was a special piece. It was surprising and (shocking). It’s still kind of a weird not to see him help leading that team.”
But Ted Nolan, a coach Ott became very close with during their four months together, should keep leading the Sabres. Nolan’s expected to lose his interim tag and sign a contract extension soon.
That makes Ott “really happy.”
“I really like Teddy,” he said. “I think he’s a great human and he’s great for a young dressing room of guys, from motivating them to having them play the right way. In my short time there we became pretty close. I’m thankful for the opportunity he gave me.
“But I think it’s a great thing for the organization to keep a guy like Teddy around because of how great of a hockey man he is and even better person that actually cares about the guys and how they do on the ice.”Current and planned European Union requirements on bank transparency are either insufficient or could be easily sidestepped by supervisors. A banking union in Europe needs to include requirements for greater supervisory transparency.
Bank supervisors should provide publicly accessible, timely and consistent data on the banks under their jurisdiction. Such transparency increases democratic accountability and leads to greater market efficiency.
There is greater supervisory transparency in the United States compared to the member states of the European Union. The US supervisors publish data quarterly and update fairly detailed information on bank balance sheets within a week. By contrast, based on an attempt to locate similar data in every EU country, in only 11 member states is this data at least partially available from supervisors, and in no member state is the level of transparency as high as in the US.
Current and planned European Union requirements on bank transparency are either insufficient or could be easily sidestepped by supervisors. A banking union in Europe needs to include requirements for greater supervisory transparency.Commercial content | New Customers Only | 18+
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Only available to new customers from UK & Northern Ireland. You must stake £10 or more at single/cumulative odds of Evens (2.0) or greater on your first bet. Free bet balance of £30 credited within 48 hours of your first bet being settled. Free Bets expire after 7 days. E-Wallet restrictions apply. Game restrictions apply. Maximum 30 Free Spins on selected games. Free Spins expire after 7 days.
Welcome to betting-promo-codes, home of the latest Betfred promo codes in 2019. Here you can find current valid promo codes which you can use to bet on the events of your choice. We’ll also guide you through the process for first time customers.
Betfred Promo Codes 2019
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Trick, tips and the whole lot
Since Fred and Peter Done opened their first bookies back in 1967 Betfred has become a famous name. The brand has provided some memorable campaigns in betting history over the years. Betfred’s ‘fun and friendly’ approach to betting makes them a popular choice. In-store, online or on mobile, Betfred has a host of betting tips and bonuses. These include detailed guides about how to bet on different sports.
Betfred is undoubtedly one of the world’s largest online bookmakers |
ops, worker-owned companies, nonprofits that help women start their own businesses, health care collectives. There are hundreds of examples. What do libertarians do that is comparable?
Libertarians need to be more actively involved in creating, supporting, and participating in private alternative solutions. Some are helping already through volunteer work or charitable contributions. A few do it through their own organizations, like the now-defunct Mothers Institute, which used to give out scholarships for home-schooling parents, or the Morefield Storey Institute, which has a small microloan program. The new Seasteading Institute is trying to provide a complete model community. Some left libertarians and anarchists are starting small mutual aid organizations such as SMART (“Sovereign Mutual Aid Response Teams”). There are even a few practical institutions, like The Institute for Justice (“IJ”) and the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (“FIRE”), that many movement libertarians are likely to know about already.
What can libertarians do? Here are a few suggestions for helping foster the private alternatives we claim will work better than the government.
Promote private social services.
Inform yourself. Then get active in your local community promoting these ideas. Here is my reading list for getting started. Promote libertarian work alternatives
Get involved in your local community. Help organize or contribute to food, health and job coops, or even worker-owned companies. Contribute to and/or volunteer for private alternatives to government social services.
I hope I don’t have to convince anyone here that benevolence is a good thing, but it’s a topic worth exploring at some length.
Here is what the late libertarian philosopher Tibor Machan has to say about the virtue of benevolence. Speaking from the viewpoint of what philosophers call “virtue ethics,” he wrote in his book Generosity: Virtue in Civil Society (published by Cato):
If we choose or have cultivated the inclination to act benevolently toward others, who are themselves sociable, then our potential for fulfilling our social capacities will be realized. If we do not, we will remain arrested, truncated, limited in how far we go in developing ourselves….The beneficiary of generous conduct is not, as noted before, benefiting from some duty or obligation—the respect of his rights as a child or a citizen or a party to a contract. Rather the beneficiary is benefiting from a respect bearing on his individual circumstances—what he might enjoy, need or want… Generosity, then, is a good trait because practicing it makes us more at home with the world. By bestowing upon some others various goods, such as time we have to spare, skills they could use, some article of value or money, we contribute to the positive upkeep and improvement of the community that can make a more hospitable setting for our life. We may not be making extreme sacrifices by being generous, but we are going beyond the call of duty or obligation, we thus contribute to an atmosphere of congeniality, a fulfilled human life.
In other words, it makes the community a better and more pleasant place to live.
What kind of society do you want to live in—one where people are generous and nice to each other as a matter of course, or one where only the “chosen few” are regarded as worthy of any attention or concern? One where people are benevolent or one where anyone who doesn’t agree with you is regarded as an “outsider” not worthy of talking to, let alone worthy of your benevolence? Where people are nice, or mean? Kind or arrogant?
I know what I choose. Yet I worry that things are heading the other way. I see a nasty trend in the libertarian movement toward the survivalist me-against-the-world mentality, toward bullying and holier-than-thou arrogance. I don’t want to live in that kind of society. Do you? Then don’t be that kind of person.
One way you can exemplify a better type of libertarian, a better type of person, is philanthropy.
“The word philanthropy may conjure up images of wealthy donors who build entire hospitals and wings of universities, endow foundations, and vow to buy a laptop for every child in the developing world. But you don’t have to give like a Rockefeller for your contribution (even if it’s less than the price of that proverbial cup of coffee) to make an impact, because when you choose wisely, good can come from whatever resources you can give. An everyday philanthropist evolves not by the amount or nature of the gist, but simply by the habit of giving.” (How to Be an Everyday Philanthropist, p. 181)
Here are only some of the possibilities. None of them requires large donations. Give whatever you can afford:
Microloans
Kiva.org. Donate $25+ and you’ll get email updates from them. You pick a person in need from their vetted list and give them a loan. It has a 98.31% repayment rate. Grameen Foundation. Started by Nobel Peace Prize winner Muhammed Yunus, one of its important values is seeking to empower the world’s poor, especially the poorest women. It also has a high repayment rate. Moorfield Storey Institute. This is run by libertarian James Peron. It gives out small microloans to help others help themselves.
Giving “a hand up, not a handout”
Modest Needs is a nonprofit that helps prevent otherwise financially self-sufficient people from entering the cycle of poverty. According to its website: “Modest Needs is a national nonprofit empowering members of the general public to make small, emergency grants to low income workers who are at risk of slipping into poverty. Since 2002, Modest Needs’ donors have stopped the cycle of poverty for 13,042 hard-working individuals and families that conventional philanthropy otherwise had forgotten.” You can make donations to specific people in need in whatever amount you can afford. Food for All is a UK organization that “is a registered London charity distributing 1,000 enriched nutritional meals 6 days a week to the most deprived people locally.” There is also a branch in Washington, DC. FirstGiving encourages you to set up a fund-raising page for your nonprofit with help from this organization. According to its website: “Empower your supporters to become life long fundraisers and cause ambassadors through peer-to-peer fundraising.” The authors of Half the Sky: Turning Oppression into Opportunity for Women Worldwide have a website where people can donate to help poor women to help themselves. And let us not forget libertarian-owned Whole Foods. Many of its stores collect donations for charities. Check the link to see if the store near you is on the list.
Social networking
At Idealist, thousands trade ideas, post charity events, interact with others who want to make the world a better place. Create your own community. According to its website 115,075 organizations use Idealist. Start your own organization that will help your community.
Existentialist author Albert Camus called standing up for what you believe in “being a witness.” Let your own life be a witness to the power of individuals caring about each other instead of depending on Big Brother Government. If we want to convince others that a libertarian free society can work, we have to be able to point to practical existing alternatives to government “solutions.” We also have to practice what we preach and be involved. We have to model libertarianism in our deeds, not just our words. The pen may be mightier than the sword, as Camus said, but actions speak even louder.The long-awaited 30-day review of the U.S. strategy to defeat the Islamic State ordered by President Trump is nearly complete, with the final draft expected to be delivered to the White House early next week, according to the Pentagon.
Looking to keep his campaign promise to initiate a plan to destroy the Islamic State, Mr. Trump tasked the Defense Department with spearheading an interagency review of the Obama-era strategy, which he said failed to deliver results in a timely manner.
The plan for the Islamic State will be a major early test for Mr. Trump's national security adviser, H.R. McMaster. Named to the post on Monday, Mr. McMaster replaces retired Army Gen. Michael Flynn, whose abrupt resignation over Russian ties threw the administration's national security team into a tailspin.Good news on the local job market: Central Ohio has plenty of IT and high tech jobs right now.
The bad news? There aren’t enough workers to fill those jobs.
I talked to executives at Tek Systems which is the largest placement firm in America for high tech jobs.
Tek has offices worldwide and its Columbus office is the biggest one in Ohio.
They help staff positions in a wide range of jobs from call center employees, software engineers, project managers and consultants.
These are good paying jobs too; Tek Systems told some bump up beyond $100,000 a year and the company also said 95 percent of the available jobs are full time.
So why can’t we fill all of them? Evidently, the field of high tech is changing so fast, the training of workers isn’t keeping up with the pace of expanding technology.
Still, it’s good to know Columbus is an exploding market for high tech with few to no signs of slowing down.SNL opened with a parody of "On The Record With Greta Van Susteren," last night as the Fox News host (Kristen Wiig) welcomed a panel consisting of Karl Rove, Col. Oliver North, and an attractive blonde lady.
Also joined by an obligatory Democrat, Robert Gibbs, Van Susteren tackled the "Don't Ask Don't Tell" policy, posing the question, "Should homosexuals be allowed to prance around our military like it's Cirque Du Soilel?"
The views of the guests were as homophobic as you'd expect. Rove (Bobby Moynihan) put it bluntly: "DADT allows members of our military to be gay, but not too gay. So we get the Wills from Will and Grace, but not the Jacks." North (Will Forte) agreed, adding, 'The Neil Patrick Harrises, but not the Elton Johns."
And of course, what "SNL" Fox News sketch would be complete without a crying Glenn Beck?An Indiana-based cleaning company has agreed to pay $12,500 to settle a federal sex discrimination suit involving a male janitor who cleaned men’s and women’s restrooms at the Charlotte location of a global outsourcing firm.
The case involved janitor William Kehoe, who left the women’s restrooms he was cleaning at The case involved janitor William Kehoe, who left the women’s restrooms he was cleaning at Convergys each time a woman entered. He would resume cleaning after the woman left, according to a complaint filed by the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission.
Kehoe worked for Skyline Services, a janitorial service hired by Indiana-based Executive Management Services.
Because Kehoe’s work was interrupted in the restrooms, EMS asked Skyline to replace him with a female janitor, but Skyline refused, according to the complaint. Soon after Skyline refused to replace Kehoe, EMS terminated Skyline’s contract effective March 31, 2014, the EEOC said.
Although EMS rehired some or all of the Skyline employees who worked at Convergys, EMS refused to consider Kehoe for re-employment because of his sex, the Although EMS rehired some or all of the Skyline employees who worked at Convergys, EMS refused to consider Kehoe for re-employment because of his sex, the EEOC contended in its complaint. The EEOC charged that EMS violated federal law when it failed to hire a qualified male applicant because of his sex.
The commission filed a civil lawsuit against EMS in federal court in Charlotte, after trying to reach a pre-litigation settlement.
Besides agreeing to pay Kehoe $12,500, EMS entered into a two-year consent decree requiring, among other things, that it conduct annual training for supervisors and managers on Title VII and its prohibition against discrimination based on sex.
EMS must also post an employee notice about the lawsuit and provide periodic reports to the EEOC about some of its hiring practices.
“Employers must ensure that both men and women have equal access to jobs,” Lynette Barnes, the regional attorney in the EEOC’s Charlotte District Office, said in a statement announcing the outcome of the case. “The law requires it.”“The warning sign shows a vehicle tipped on the side. It's much faster to comprehend than text. In general, symbols are easier to read also for those who don't know Swedish,” Niclas Nilsson, at the Swedish Transport Agency, said in a statement.
Another sign that will be replaced and which was previously only understandable to Swedish-speakers was the one indicating 24-hour restaurant services. The text “nattöppet” (open at night) is replaced by a clock face and the number 24 written inside.
A third new sign is that which indicates parking spaces for camper vans – a sign which is sure to come in handy for Sweden's foreign visitors.
The signs have been inspired by the UN convention on road signs and signals, which advises countries on the types of symbols which should be used for their road signs to make them comprehensible to everyone.Tom Head, a county judge in Lubbock, Texas, plunged far out into the periphery of anti-President Barack Obama conspiracy theories on Monday, pushing a particularly outrageous one as justification for a tax increase in the county.
Head told FOX34 that Lubbock's law enforcement needed extra tax dollars in order to be prepared for a full-scale uprising, which he said could be a byproduct of Obama's reelection. According to Head, the president is seeking to sign a variety of United Nations treaties that will effectively take precedent over domestic law.
“He's going to try to hand over the sovereignty of the United States to the U.N., and what is going to happen when that happens?” Head asked. “I'm thinking the worst. Civil unrest, civil disobedience, civil war maybe. And we're not just talking a few riots here and demonstrations, we're talking Lexington, Concord, take up arms and get rid of the guy."
Head continued, delving deeper into his hypothesis and claiming that he was prepared to join the hypothetical resistance.
"Now what's going to happen if we do that, if the public decides to do that? He's going to send in U.N. troops. I don't want 'em in Lubbock County. OK. So I'm going to stand in front of their armored personnel carrier and say, 'You're not coming in here,'" the judge said. "And the sheriff, I've already asked him, I said, 'You gonna back me?' He said, 'Yeah, I'll back you.' Well, I don't want a bunch of rookies back there. I want trained, equipped, seasoned veteran officers to back me."
So, there you have it. Head would have listeners believe that they must agree to increase Lubbock's property tax rate by 1.7 cents in the next fiscal year, or risk being forced to submit to a foreign occupying force invited into the nation by the president of the United States.
Of course, this theory is entirely bunk.
Anything signed by the president as part of a U.N. Convention “can only be implemented through domestic legislation enacted by Congress or state legislatures, in a manner and time-frame determined by our own legislative process.” Effectively, broader U.N. provisions can't supersede laws passed by Congress, and only serve as guiding principles for signatories to consider.
While it might seem outrageous that such a bizarre conspiracy theory is being promoted by an elected official -- as grounds to support a particular policy no less -- Head isn't the only one.
GOP presidential candidate Mitt Romney appeared to give some credence to the same theory in response to a question at a town hall in Ohio last month.Germany's Bundesbank asked thousands of households in-depth questions about their financial situations – including their income, property, outgoings and how likely it would be for them to lose their jobs.
The results differed wildly from those in other countries, whose state banks also took part in the EU-wide survey. The French, for example, seemed to have three times more money in assets than the Germans, the Süddeutsche Zeitung reported on Friday.
Average assets of a German household were - in 2010 when the study was carried out - around €220,200 without subtracting debt and €195,000 if debt was taken into account. Still, statisticians said this figure was unrepresentative of the country's wealth.
In fact, a better indication was to take the median, or middle of the range figure. This was much lower, standing at just €67,900 per household before debts and €51,400 with debts taken into account.
The fact that this number is so low compared to the average figure suggests that a small number of Germans have large assets, said the paper.
In France, the median was double that of Germany's, standing at €113,500. Spain's was €178,300 and Italy's €163,900. Austria's, however, was only slightly higher than Germany's at €76,400.
When Germany's figures were broken down, disparities started to appear, namely between those who owned their home and those who did not, as well as between the east and west of the country.
In the west, the median after taking debt into consideration was €78,000 while in the east it was a fraction of this at just €21,400.
Among those who owned their house, the figure was entirely different. Germans who owned property and had paid off the mortgage had median assets of €255,600. Those who were still paying off their mortgage had €160,200 per household.
Renters, the numbers of which are high in Germany, had median assets of just €10,300.
The study was carried out across Europe between September 2010 and July 2011 in order for the European Central Bank to be able to make decisions with a better insight into how much money its ward had.
In Germany, the Bundesbank asked 3,565 households.
The Local/jcwGetty Images A sign outside a second hand shop on New York's Lower East Side in 1955.
The east sides of New York, London and Paris are noticeably and famously poorer than their western sides. And it turns out there’s a reason for that.
Researchers have found that it’s due to the impact of air pollutants at the time of the Industrial Revolution, as prevailing winds in the U.S. and Europe typically blow from west to east. And it’s an impact that has lasted into today.
A paper from the Spatial Economics Research Centre examined 5,000 industrial chimneys in 70 English cities in 1880, and then re-created the spatial distribution of pollution. That historical pollution explained up to 15% of within-city deprivation in 1881.
“A pollution differential equivalent to the one between the 10% and 90% most polluted neighborhoods of Manchester would be associated with a gradient of 18 percentage points in the share of low-skilled workers,” the paper found.
Perhaps more incredibly, that difference has continued to this day even though the pollution that caused them has waned.
SERC
“Past pollution explains up to 20% of the observed neighborhood segregation whether captured by the shares of blue collar workers and employees, house prices or official deprivation indices,” the paper written by Stephan Heblich and Yanos Zylbergerg of the University of Bristol and Alex Trew of the University of St. Andrews found.
The researchers say the findings have practical implications both in the developing and developed world.
The success of urban policies to revitalize deprived areas depends on their position relative to the tipping point. For countries like China where pollution is a current challenge, there also are long-run consequences to consider, they added.
Want news about Europe delivered to your inbox? Subscribe to MarketWatch's free Europe Daily newsletter. Sign up here.Everyone always hears about the HTC Vive, Oculus Rift, and Microsoft Hololens. However, there is some great tech from other sources too.
THX has created a new group called the THX Virtual Cinema Display Certification program. As part of the new program, THX has recently recognized and bestowed THX certification on the Osterhout Design Group (ODG) R-9 AR Smartglasses. The ODG R-9 glasses are the very first AR glasses to be THX certified.
THX Virtual Cinema Display Certification program will verify that head-mounted display devices are calibrated to the same color and resolution standards used in professional Hollywood studios as well as to guarantee smooth video playback without stuttering or motion artifacts and includes tests for color accuracy, video processing, grayscale quality, and proper visual geometry.
The ODG R-9 are fully self-contained AR Smartglasses powered by the Qualcomm Snapdragon 835 CPU, 1080p resolution and a 50-degree field of view (FOV). The resolution and FOV will appear as if a 100-inch screen is sitting 8 feet in front of you. According to ODG, users have said that "images viewed on the R-9 have no visible pixels and photo-realistic clarity, including the ability to read 8-point text."
This all sounds awesome, right? Is the R-9 for sale at my local Best Buy? After all, this is perfect for movie watching and travel.
Price may be a factor, the flagship R-9 unit from ODG retails for $1,800. The R-9 unit is expected to ship in the second half of 2017.
If you are looking for an AR home theater device today, priced at a more reasonable $799, you may want to try the Royole Moon Mobile Theater.
ODG R-9 TECH SPECS
Click pic to zoom
Hardware
Qualcomm® Snapdragon™ 835
2.45GHz 8-core Processor
6GB Pop LP-DDR-4 RAM
128GB Storage
1400mAh Lithium-Ion Batteries (2 x 700mAh)
Replaceable, Adjustable Nose Bridge
Changeable Ear Horns
DISPLAY
Dual 1080p Stereoscopic See-Thru
Displays at up to 60fps
50° Field-Of-View
22:9 & 16:9 Aspect Ratios
COMMUNICATIONS
Bluetooth® 5.0
WiFi® 802.11ac
GNSS (GPS/GLONASS)
SENSORS
Integrated Inertial Measuring Unit
with 3-Axis Accelerometer, 3-Axis Gyroscope, 3-Axis Magnetometer
with 3-Axis Accelerometer, 3-Axis Gyroscope, 3-Axis Magnetometer Altitude Sensor
Humidity Sensor
Ambient Light Sensor
13MP Autofocus Camera
(1080p @ 120fps, 4k @ 60fps)
(1080p @ 120fps, 4k @ 60fps) 2x 1080p Front-Facing Cameras for
Stereo Capture and Depth Sensing
Ultra Wide-Angle Fisheye Camera for
Enhanced Environmental Tracking
and Positioning
and Positioning Expansion Port ( MIPI-CSI)
INPUT/OUTPUT
Digital Microphones (Environment & User)
USB Type-C: Charging, Data Transfer,
Audio and Video Output
Built-In Stereo Speakers
SOFTWAREDemonica Lynn Embrey’s bond was lowered on Thursday after her husband, shooting victim Walden G. Embrey, testified in court.
Mr. Embrey, appearing in Judge Barry Steelman’s courtroom, said he had revealed new “indiscretions” to his wife about 20 minutes prior to her shooting him on April 16.
Mr. Embrey said he had been staying at a hotel because he and his wife had been having marital problems. He said his wife had discovered some compromising photographs and videos and was “aware of (his) indiscretions” about a month prior to the shooting.
He said he went back to his residence at Cool Ridge Drive on April 16 to talk to his wife. He said they had a “good exchange of information” but that “she was obviously hurt.”
When asked if about 20 minutes prior to the shooting Mr. Embrey had shown his wife “a string of messages from his failing,” he said that he remembered her asking to see his phone. Mr. Embrey said he went into an upstairs bedroom to get some belongings and his wife entered the bedroom holding his pistol.
“She threatened me with it,” he said. “She told me to get on my knees.”
Mr. Embrey said that his wife looked different than normal at that time.
“She wasn’t crying. She wasn’t visibly shaken that I could tell,” he said.
When asked if his wife was angry, Mr. Embrey began to laugh, “She had a gun pointed at me. I’m gonna say ‘yes’ to that.”
Mr. Embrey said he started walking and, as he was going down the stairs, his wife hit him in the back of the head with his pistol. He said she fired four shots as he tried to get out of the house and to his truck. He said one of the shots hit him in the upper right arm and another hit the tire of his truck.
Judge Steelman asked if Mr. Embrey thought his wife would be “a threat to anyone else in the community at large.”
“No, she wouldn’t,” said Mr. Embrey. “She was mad at me. She’s not mad at anyone else in the community.”
“Are you concerned that she’s still a threat to you,” asked Judge Steelman.
“I don’t wanna think so,” said Mr. Embrey. “That’s the best I can answer that.”
Antoynette Rice, a friend of Ms. Embrey’s since childhood, said, "(Ms. Embrey) is the nicest person I’ve ever met in my life. She’s just been a jewel to my family.”
Ms. Rice said that if Ms. Embrey makes bond, she would be welcome in her home “as long as she needed.”
Ms. Embrey said she had filed for a divorce before her incarceration, but had put it in “reconciliation mode.” She said since she has been incarcerated, she has reactivated it.
When defense attorney Brandy Spurgin asked how the court could be sure that Ms. Embrey would stay in Chattanooga until the case was resolved, Ms. Embrey said, “If I could stay in the Navy for over 21 years, I think I could stay in Chattanooga for a couple.”
Attorney Spurgin said, “There’s certainly an argument that culpability may be reduced in this case.”
She said she hoped the bond, currently set at $100,000, could be reduced to something more reasonable. The judge cut it in half to $50,000.CLEVELAND, OH – Ted Cruz opened his much anticipated speech tonight by “congratulating” Donald Trump on his victory in the primary. He then said that he hoped “the principles this party was founded upon” would win in November. He carefully avoided saying that Trump was the man to carry those principles, or that he represented them.
He proceeded to a moving eulogy for the fallen officers in Dallas, and declared that our law enforcement in America “deserves better.” He then offered a passioned indictment of the policies of both Obama and Clinton that was both more nuanced, exhaustive, and persuasive than what he offered on the campaign trail.
He abandoned his revival preacher schtick that so hampered him on the campaign trail, and spoke much more from the heart. If Cruz as a speaker had been more like this during the course of the campaign, maybe things would have turned out differently, but who knows.
Cruz was probably aiming for Reagan’s 1976 convention speech during his address tonight, and he may have fallen short of that, because he is not the orator that Ronald Reagan was. But then, few if any are. But he did make a positive impression on many people who he had rubbed the wrong way, and avoided angering either people who believe that Republicans should fall in line behind Trump, or people who believe that no one should fall in line behind Trump.
I know there are people who see ambition and self-interest in everything that Cruz does, and there is nothing I can do to persuade those folks. But it is important to understand the tremendous pressure that was brought to bear on Cruz to deliver a rousing endorsement of Trump tonight. It’s pressure that has successfully brought every one of Trump’s rivals to heartily endorse Trump. But instead of saying “vote for Trump,” Cruz was the only one who instead said, “vote your conscience, and vote candidates who love freedom up and down the ticket.”
Conservatives who oppose Trump have exactly two candidates who haven’t yet bowed the knee to Trump. Only one had the balls to come to the convention and do it. After that point of the speech, the tension in the arena was palpable. The chanting from the New York delegation was very audible. Cruz faced both boos and applause. And he still did not waiver. And that has to count for something.You can now vote in Batch 123!
Currently open batches:
Batch 123
Batch 122
Batch 121
Batch 120
Batch 119
Batch 118
Batch 117
Batch 116 results will be up shortly.
Feature match: Cruel Revival is a great reprint and a solid card, but can’t even be cast against Gaddock Teeg! Perhaps an easy win is in store?
Full list of matchups:
Cruel Revival vs Gaddock Teeg
Mana Vault vs Godhead of Awe
“Ach! Hans, Run!” vs Mortician Beetle
Woolly Razorback vs Grapeshot Catapult
Grisly Salvage vs Ikra Shidiqi, the Usurper
Shrine of the Forsaken Gods vs Imperious Perfect
Exhume vs Smoke
Leonin Shikari vs Boldwyr Heavyweights
Nivix Barrier vs Goblin Charbelcher
Permeating Mass vs Avenger of Zendikar
Delirium vs Smokebraider
Tek vs Bull Cerodon
Nyx Weaver vs Reap the Seagraf
Ashen Rider vs Tempt with Discovery
Mazirek, Kraul Death Priest vs Scion of Darkness
Alabaster Kirin vs Weed Strangle
Exclusion Ritual vs Honored Hierarch
False Cure vs Shieldhide Dragon
Khalni Garden vs Veil of Birds
Marchesa, the Black Rose vs Fiend Hunter
Questing Phelddagrif vs Goblin Spy
Public Execution vs Lingering Mirage
Triton Cavalry vs Throat Slitter
Leonin Abunas vs Regrowth
Flickerform vs Goblin King
Pulse of Llanowar vs Seal of Cleansing
Cautery Sliver vs Knotvine Paladin
Hero’s Resolve vs Cyclopean Giant
Lord of Tresserhorn vs Siren of the Silent Song
Felhide Petrifier vs Dragonlord Kolaghan
Breath of Life vs Sanitarium Skeleton
Scryb Ranger vs Drake HatchlingOne of the seemingly endless variations on the "men today are in crisis and it's mostly women's fault" trope is the idea that most straight guys are completely incapable of figuring out what the other sex actually wants. Pop psychologists assure us that men are evolutionarily hardwired towards promiscuity, simplicity, and the inability to pick up on subtle clues. As a result, the theory holds, men are both easily manipulated and vulnerable to chronic misinterpretation of women's dress and behavior. So vulnerable, in fact, that some advocates for men are calling for a change in sexual harassment law: a change that would force women either to cover up — or put out. This, obviously, is bullshit, but the rationale behind it is even more ridiculous.
The latest iteration of this argument has the Antipodes a-buzzing. Bettina Arndt argued in the Sydney Morning Herald that "everywhere you look, women are stepping out dressed provocatively, but bristling if the wrong man shows he enjoys the display." (Remember, it's summer down under.) Arndt writes:
[Men] are in a total state of confusion… Sensitive males are wary, not knowing where to look. Afraid of causing offense. And there are angry men, the beta males who lack the looks, the trappings of success to tick these women's boxes. They know the goodies on display are not for them. These are the men most likely to behave badly, blatantly leering, grabbing and sneering. For them, the whole thing is a tease. They know it and resent it.
There's nothing new about arguing that scantily-clad women drive helpless men to distraction — or worse. SlutWalkers and Talmudic scholars (among others) have made the case over and over that nothing a woman wears (or doesn't wear) can cause a man to rape her, but their voices are often drowned out by those who ridiculously insist on outsourcing all male sexual self-control to women.
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In Arndt's case, she goes beyond merely holding women responsible for their own rapes. Her op-ed implies that women who don't cover up are committing an act of cruelty against most men, most of the time. Arndt claims that a conventionally attractive woman who shows off her cleavage "is advertising her wares to the world, not just her target audience, and somehow men are expected to know when they are not on her page… But as we all know, many men are lousy at that stuff — the language totally escapes them."
Arndt's appeal to the universal "knowledge" of men's cluelessness is as casual as it is clumsy. She's right in the sense that our culture raises men to inadvertently confuse a woman's bare skin (or a smile, or direct eye contact) with a sexual come-on. But most men are not biologically incapable of either empathy or intuition. They can learn to distinguish sexual interest from politeness, a fashion choice from an attempt at seduction. Rejection from women (and "correction" from other men) is often how they learn.
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Arndt doesn't believe men are capable of learning these non-verbal skills. More importantly, like many in the men's rights movement to which she's sympathetic, she doesn't think they should have to. She approvingly cites Rob Tiller, an Australian psychotherapist and men's advocate who refers to women who wear revealing clothing as committing "biological sexual harassment." This idea that women who go around "flaunting their bodies" are harassing men has become a pet issue for many in the North American men's rights movement. One site claims: "In many offices across America, women dress provocatively, showing inappropriate thigh and cleavage. This, in itself, is sexual harassment against men — but women get away with it, and men rarely complain."
Sexual harassment, of course, takes many forms. Tiller and his fellow men's rights activists (MRAs) refer seem to think that scantily-clad women are guilty of creating a "hostile environment." The term is the same in both Australian and American sexual harassment law, and refers to a workplace or school culture that tolerates unwanted sexual behavior. The law rejects the idea that a low-cut blouse or a short skirt might constitute a hostile environment, but that hasn't stopped the MRAs — or their allies like Arndt — from arguing that perhaps the law should be changed to recognize the damage that sexually tantalizing dress does to men.
The traditional arguments for women's modesty have been that concealing dress was necessary to protect men from lustful thoughts and to protect women from being raped. But Arndt and the MRAs have a different rationale. They're not offended by skimpy clothing on religious grounds, nor do they all buy into the myth of male weakness that says that bare female skin invariably causes otherwise nice guys to commit sexual assault. Rather, they seem to be arguing that by tempting all straight men while only being willing to sleep with a few, flirtatious or scantily-clad women are engaged in a particularly cruel form of sexualized discrimination. That, the MRAs insist, ought to be seen as sexual harassment.
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For Arndt and her ideological fellow travelers, it's sexually unsuccessful straight men ("betas") that suffer the most from a culture in which women are free to display their bodies. Asking women to cover up isn't about protecting purity; for the MRAs it's about protecting betas from humiliation and from self-esteem-destroying reminders that they can look but never touch the bodies for which they long. All of that pent-up male resentment is women's fault, Arndt implies, and it is women's responsibility to consider the soul-scarring cost of the mixed messages their revealing clothing sends.
The kind of particularly male pain that Arndt and her allies describe isn't rooted in women's flirtatiousness, sexy clothing, or presumed preference for "alpha" males. Whether they're genuinely hurting or just petulantly sulking, the confusion and hurt with which men cope is based largely on their own sense of entitlement. The calculus of entitlement works like this: if women don't want to turn men on, they need to cover up. If they don't cover up, they'll turn men on. If they turn men on, women are obligated to do something to assuage that lust. Having turned them on, if women don't give men what they want, then women are cruel teases who have no right to complain if men lash out in justified rage at being denied what they've been taught is rightfully theirs.
The reality is that sexual rejection happens to men and women alike. That's part of living in a world in which for a host of reasons, we are not all equally attractive, and where the people we want to sleep with will not always want to sleep with us. The hard truth men and women alike need to grasp is a simple one: our arousal is not someone else's problem to solve. The sooner we encourage men in particular to grasp that truth, the safer and happier we'll all be.
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Hugo Schwyzer is a professor of gender studies and history at Pasadena City College and a nationally-known speaker on sex, relationships, and masculinity. You can see more of his work at his eponymous site.Pointman DEFAULT WEAPON: 1911 PISTOL Armed with only a handgun, the Pointman moves quickly and is ideally used as the 1st man through the door. He can easily negotiate corners and engage targets at close to mid range, and can interact with objects and doors without suffering a penalty in accuracy.
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organized by the Ejército Zapatista de Liberación Nacional (EZLN), San Cristobal de las Casas, Chiapas.
For more than a century, the concept of the gene has dominated biological science in the global North. Built on thousands of years of plant cultivation and animal husbandry—the original experimental biology—which itself followed hundreds of thousands of years of observational biology by hunter-gatherers, the rise of genetics was simultaneously a window into the inner workings of living systems and a hostile takeover of all biological knowledge that preceded it.
But despite its grip on the scientific culture of affluent societies, the gene’s reign as the supposed “secret of life” is coming to an end. The more we learn about natural systems—or, in many cases, relearn what was known traditionally—the clearer it becomes that genes are only one class of factors that causes development (changes that turn embryos into fully formed animals and plants) and evolution (transformation of simple organisms into more complex ones over the history of life). Alarmingly, however, even as the notion of the all-powerful gene loses scientific relevance, it is gaining new ideological traction in the appropriation and privatization of resources, helping to foster inequality among ethnicities and socio-economic classes. How this has occurred, and what can be done to stop it, is the subject of this article.
In 1931, the Soviet historian of science Boris Hessen described how Isaac Newton’s laws of motion, seemingly universal landmarks in our understanding of the physical world, were produced partly in response to the technical needs of the emerging English industry of the seventeenth century. Correspondingly, the theory was infused with the ideology of its era, and its static worldview presented obstacles to further advances. Hessen showed how scientific analysis of nonmechanical matter (he focused on thermodynamics, but his arguments also pertain to chemistry and biology) was impeded by the Newtonian paradigm. Even the concept of conservation of energy, a straightforward mathematical consequence of Newton’s laws of motion, was not articulated until after Newton’s death. This was likely an effect of early Newtonian theory’s undialectical character: only point masses were considered, and both dissipation (the degradation of energy) and nonmechanical productive practices, such as metallurgy or steam power, were excluded.
Ever since Hessen (and by extension, Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, whose philosophy inspired his analysis) it has no longer been possible for honest observers of science to ignore its ideological dimension. Certainly this applies to the gene. When Gregor Mendel conducted his plant breeding experiments in nineteenth-century Moravia, he employed methods essentially the same as those used by farmers for millennia. By recording his results quantitatively, he discovered consistent associations of “factors” (what we now call “genes”) carried by the plants’ seeds with choices exerted later in development between alternative traits, such as long or short stems, inflated or constricted pods. Simple reflection indicates that those who first produced maize from teosinte-family grasses in Mexico about 9,000 years ago were not stumbling on things randomly, but doing much the same as Mendel: breeding by selection and hybridization while carefully keeping track of the results, probably using the Mesoamerican record-keeping systems that were famously employed in calendars, astronomy, and large engineering and civic projects.
Early farmers thus implicitly recognized and adapted Mendel’s factors long before he or European civilization existed. What was at stake in traditional agriculture, however, were the properties of whole organisms (i.e., maize plants) in the context of their conditions of cultivation. Variations in external conditions such as temperature, humidity, or soil quality can elicit disparate phenotypes—structures and functions—as surely as genetic variation does. Furthermore, favorable forms were propagated socially, via families and communities, rather than commercially (as was increasingly the case in the North), and in multiple varieties, rather than as the monocultures compelled by industrial standardization. Among the peoples who brought these crops into being, preservation of “ecophenotypic” variety (that is, the range of phenotypes in their different ecological settings) was the paramount scientific value. They thus had little reason to attribute the vital nature of maize to hidden elements at its smallest and most quiescent stage of development.
It is not surprising, then, that Mendel’s work initially attracted scant notice among scientists and farmers. While this cool reception is often attributed to the challenging, radical implications of his ideas, it was more likely because the notion that latent factors in plant seeds (or the eggs and sperm of animals) inform the character of the developed organism was a familiar one, with ancient roots. And while Mendel’s discoveries of the numerical ratios of inheritance were indeed novel, they were not generally applicable. Indeed, although “Mendelian genetics” eventually became fetishized as the basis for all heredity, only a small percentage of biological traits are inherited according Mendel’s laws: even Mendel himself found exceptions to his “law for peas.” Those traits that behave in a classically Mendelian fashion are often curiosities or pathologies, though some, such as blood types, are of great medical importance.
During the late nineteenth century, industrialists in Europe and the United States increasingly faced demands from politically awakened workers for a fair share of the wealth they themselves created. Slaves had finally won their freedom and were taking their place in society as nominally, if not actually, equal citizens. Women were organizing for suffrage and seeking to throw off patriarchal constraints. It was in this milieu of rising resistance by oppressed groups that the British statistician Francis Galton devised the concept of eugenics, a program for the supposed biological betterment of the human species by hereditarian methods. For the first time, a mainstream scientist discussed humans in terms previously reserved for crops and livestock. Although Galton began his work with quantifiable characteristics like height, weight, and limb length, he soon proceeded to speculate about the hereditary basis of intelligence and beauty. Of course, belief in racial inequality and the selection and “breeding” of human beings were endemic to systems of slavery and colonial domination. But the elites of Galton’s day, who had come to see slavery—by then abolished in Britain—as an embarrassment, could now rationalize the social hierarchy from which they benefited as the natural right of their presumed membership in a genetic aristocracy.
Like Mendel, whose work he never knew, and like every plant and animal breeder who came before, Galton tracked the transmission of variation from one generation to the next, in his case using sophisticated statistical methods. But unlike Mendel, he was more concerned with continuous (changing only slightly in each generation) than discontinuous (abruptly changing) variation. This made Galton’s ideas compatible with the evolutionary theory of his cousin Charles Darwin, who was convinced that rare, discontinuous animal and plant variants (which British farmers termed “sports”) had little role in generating viable new forms.
Darwin’s gradualism has not held up as well as some of his other ideas. The consensus of twenty-first century evolutionary developmental biology holds that both abrupt and gradual transformations have molded organisms throughout their evolution. The origin of maize from teosinte is just one example of how abruptly appearing novelties were incorporated, under human guidance, into the phenotypic repertoire of different varieties, and much evidence suggests that the same process occurs during natural evolution. Contrary to Darwin’s theory of natural selection, phenotypically novel organisms do not always arise over many generations by competition between slightly different individuals within a common population. Often a novel subpopulation will prosper by inventing new ways of life in ecological niches that previously did not exist.
This alternative to Darwinism, termed “mutationism,” was widely discussed in the early twentieth century, but failed to take hold. This was in part a result of the aversion among bourgeois intellectuals and their sponsors to any theory, social or scientific, that emphasized radical change. But Galton’s biometric school was unable to devise a mechanism for heredity based on continuous determinants, so Mendelism with its discrete (“particulate”) factors became the mainstream view.
To forge a connection to biometrics and the popular Darwinian theory of evolution, however, Mendel’s model had to be so revised as to be almost unrecognizable. This assimilation occurred in several steps. The first move, initiating what came to be called the “modern synthesis,” was to assert that the characters considered by Darwin were influenced by many genes. Subsequent work has shown this to be true, though there is nothing discrete or particulate in the way these influences are exerted. The second step was to claim that the characters were determined exclusively by those genes. This is incorrect: nearly all characters are brought about by nongenetic as well as genetic determinants. Most morphological traits, for example, arise from inherent physical properties of living tissues (analogously to the way waves are inherent to water) which are released and refined by the action of genes, but not caused by such action. The third move, made after the invention of modern computing in the mid-twentieth century, was to postulate that organisms develop under the guidance of software-like “genetic programs.” This notion too is highly misleading: no such programs have ever been identified. Furthermore, to oversimplify, the latest understanding of how the structure of proteins (the products of genes by which they exert most of their functions) depends on which other proteins surround them makes it impossible for genes to act together in a program-like fashion.
While these misconceptions gained influence among scientists in the latter half of the twentieth century, the gene took on a life of its own in the public imagination. Writers like Richard Dawkins persuaded many people that organisms’ features evolved simply to serve as “selfish” vehicles for genes to propagate themselves.
When the concept of the gene—partly empirical and partly ideological—was being fashioned during the late nineteenth and into the twentieth century, European colonial empires were at their height. As they began to unravel in the decades following the First World War, academic researchers, with increasing governmental and commercial support, were devising ways to use genetics to limit their losses. This meant resisting the claims of indigenous and other marginalized domestic populations, including growing numbers of their agricultural and industrial workers, and adapting to the major powers’ reduced ability to plunder the resources of former colonies.
Eugenicist thinking among educated elites, used to justify ethnicity-based restrictions on immigration and forced sterilization programs in the United States and Europe (some lasting into the 1970s), also had the side effect of subverting solidarity among workers, who learned in schools and the popular media that some groups were inherently inferior to others. The proponents in Nazi Germany of the eliminationist projects of the Second World War freely acknowledged their debt to North American and British eugenicist writings of the early twentieth century, some of whose authors were, sadly, prominent biologists of the left. After the war, frank eugencism became unfashionable, but a subtler “genetic counseling” ethos emerged under which families were discouraged from transmitting certain genes to their prospective offspring. The academic fields of sociobiology and evolutionary psychology also gave rise to evolutionary narratives that asserted a genetic basis for the socially subordinate roles of women, which the Marxist biologists Stephen Jay Gould and Richard Lewontin likened to Rudyard Kipling’s fanciful “just-so stories” for children.1
Meanwhile, agricultural genetics provided leverage for agribusinesses in the metropolitan core. By the late 1960s, for example, 90 percent of the U.S. maize crop consisted of a single proprietary hybrid variety. But such monoculture courted disaster. In 1970, Southern corn leaf blight wiped out 15 percent of the country’s crop. Other gene-based strategies to increase agricultural output in the global South had predictably negative consequences, given their subservience to the needs of capitalist political economy. The “super seeds” of the Green Revolution, for example, often increased crop yields dramatically, thus initially alleviating some hunger in countries that planted them. But the expensive fertilizers and pesticides required by this agricultural model led, under business-oriented regimes, to the privatization of communal lands and subsistence farms. Consequently, agrarian social formations were destroyed, millions were displaced, and rural poverty markedly increased.
Beginning in the 1970s, scientists gained the ability to determine the precise order of subunits of DNA molecules, and by the 1980s to modify DNA (“genetic engineering”) in multicellular plants and animals. In the last decade, the rise of CRISPR/Cas9 high-accuracy genetic engineering techniques has enabled some beneficial applications, starting with the bacterial production of proteins used to treat certain diseases, and continuing more recently with use of “marker genes” to aid selection of natural crop variants and enhance cell-based immune responses against cancer. But the scale of these accomplishments is minor in comparison to the increasingly aggressive use of genetics and gene-centric ideologies to gain control of the world’s biological resources, including the genetic engineering of humans themselves, on the neo-eugenicist assumption that failure or unhappiness is attributable to inferior biological makeup.
In the agricultural domain, biotechnology companies have lobbied heavily for patent protections for genetically modified organisms (GMOs), through which they can compel farmers to purchase exorbitantly expensive new proprietary seeds each planting season. Farmers who plant conventional seeds that are inadvertently converted to GMOs by pollination from neighboring fields are threatened with legal action. Corporations have also sought to intimidate scientists whose work has cast doubt on the safety of GMO foods or the herbicides used in their production. Some scientists have been fired or had their funding terminated under pressure by corporations, while others have had their published papers “unpublished.”2 The U.S. government, in pursuit of world hegemony for its corporate clients’ crops, has negotiated treaties mandating acceptance of GMO foods and engaged in backstage diplomatic arm-twisting to force countries that have rejected such products, such as Mexico and France, to reverse their positions.
In the realm of human biology, the efficiency of the CRISPR/Cas9 technique has accentuated calls by scientists, venture capitalists, and even bioethicists to engineer human embryos to avert diseases or, more ambitiously, improve intelligence, beauty, or other predictors of economic success. This does not appear to have been achieved yet, but it may be not too far away. Already procedures that involve the transfer of the nuclear genes (the main set of genes in a cell) from one woman’s egg to another’s have been misleadingly sold to the public as “mitochondrial replacement” (focusing on one feature of the second woman’s egg, as if moving into a new house were referred to as “replacing your windows”). This maneuver is being implemented throughout the world, most recently in Mexico by a U.S. doctor who could not get permission to perform the procedure in his own country. What is rarely acknowledged in policy discussions around embryo engineering is that while intended to improve quality of life, in some percentage of cases it must inevitably lead to experimental errors. What will be the fate of children whose parents were promised “more” but got “less”?
Genetic science and genetic ideology arrived together in the capitalist countries of Europe and North America, whose ruling classes had recently suffered the loss of their slave systems and were confronting the rise of labor and women’s rights movements. Though it was decades before the science would inform the means of production, from the start its ideology was deeply informed by racism and sexism, however coded or disguised. By the Second World War, the capitalist nations were at each other’s throats, in part because of the decision of one power to act on the exterminationist implications of this genetic ideology. Afterwards, as genetic science reoriented toward crop improvement, it was employed to hasten the destruction of the social formations that gave rise to agriculture in the first place, and with them the cornucopia of plant varieties they had developed over millennia.
Today we are witnessing the replacement of the gene concept, always an unstable scientific idea, by more sophisticated notions of inheritance in which many types of internal and external causes and factors act in both concert and contradiction. The old genetic ideology lives on, however, in the form of increasingly strident calls to genetically engineer our foods and our children. Citizens around the world, most prominently in Mexico, are resisting these attacks on their ways of life by calling for the continuance of existing bans on GMO crops and for new ones on GMO humans. Only by taking back biological science from corporate interests and controlling its uses can we ensure that our collective intellectual heritage empowers rather than divides humanity.
NotesThis was it, the finale of Batman: Endgame, Batman #40 promised to make some big changes to Batman, and it sure did. Things are about to get really different for Bruce Wayne and Batman, that’s for sure. So let’s discuss Batman #40!
So Batman #40 and the entire Batman: Endgame arc was set up to be the Joker stories to end all Joker stories. The finale saw Batman and Joker in “one final” showdown (though will there ever be an end to Batman vs Joker?).
First thing’s first, the Joker is not immortal. I know many people were having a crisis on the internet because they thought bloody Scott Snyder turned the Joker into this immortal character, but don’t worry, immortal he is not! Turns out that after Death of the Family arc where Joker fell, he found the dionesium. This helped him heal himself, but by no means meant he was wandering Earth for hundreds of years.
Joker just wanted Batman to think he was immortal. It was supposed to be the ultimate joke. As I have mentioned many times, the Joker is an absurdist character. He believes that there is no meaning in life, and that life is crazy, chaotic and random. And instead of trying to find meaning in a chaotic world, it’s better to just be chaotic with it. You know if can’t beat it, join it instead? Batman on the other, wants to make sense of life. His life was formed by a random act of violence against his parents, and ever since then has tried to make sense of things.
Making Batman believe the Joker was immortal, was Joker’s way of telling Batman how random, chaotic and pointless life was. The Joker was making fun of the meaning and sanctity of life by pretending to be this immortal guy.
In the previous issue I discussed how the Joker emphasising he was immortal, was to also emphasise to Batman that he was just a man. Not a god like his other Justice League members, just a man who had limits.
And here is where everything starts to tie in. In the final battle between the Joker and Batman, the Joker says “fighting for meaningless but giving meaning by virtue of the fight”. Already Joker can see he is a hypocrite to his own worldview. We often think that because the Joker is such a chaotic character, he doesn’t care about dying. However at the end of the battle, the Joker had such a human moment.
He pleaded with Batman, to let him go, so that he could live. In that very moment, Batman was the monster holding him down, and the Joker was just a man who wanted to live. It was an interesting reverse role situation. Bruce did become Batman to become the fear, to be a monster for the monsters in Gotham. And Batman #40 showed us that he well and truly achieved that goal, he even made the Joker fearful. Who knew that was even possible!!!
But now let’s get to that ending. What exactly happened at the ending of Batman #40? For me to discuss this, I will be getting into spoilers for future issues so read at your own risk!
Okay so in the ending of Batman #40 we find out that Bruce left a death note. The note reading ‘HA’, and at the end of the issue we see a guy throwing a breastplate into the garbage. So what’s the significance? If you remember back to the beginning of the Endgame arc in issue #35, the issue opens up with Bruce talking about Gotham’s Royal Theatre. Bruce’s friend Wade built a special harness holding a breastplate for the play, for the part where Apollo comes down to save everyone, “At the end of the play there was a deus ex machina. A moment where a god, Apollo, descends from the sky to save the characters from destruction”. Wade goes on to say, “I want everyone in the theatre to believe in that god coming down to help. I just want them to feel saved”.
And it’s the very same breastplate that gets thrown into the bin at the end of Batman #40. So is Bruce this god figure? Deus ex Machina is often used to describe a convenient and unexpected event/object/power that saves a ‘seemingly hopeless situation’, usually some kind of weird plot device. So perhaps something weird and crazy happened, and saved Bruce. And maybe now Bruce is also this god figure like Apollo.
Sounds like I’m talking shit, but a leaked page from the Divergence issue from Free Comic Book Day has come out, and shows us that Bruce Wayne Batman (not Jim Gordon, who will be the new Batman) is some kind of Bat-god now. Yes we all know the jokes about Batman being a Bat-god (BECAUSE I’M BATMANNNNN!) but apparently it’s becoming a thing now.
As with most comic book stories, this will probably be very temporary and have some kind of understandable-ish explanation to it all. I’m just glad Bruce Wayne will still be around!
Maybe Batman will be some kind of god for a little while, and then go back to normal, re-emphasising to himself that he is just a man, revealing his limits to himself once again. Sometimes Bruce does need to be reminded he is just a man, so perhaps becoming a god, and then going back to being a normal human will do just that.
Or maybe the breastplate in the bin is signifying the tragedy. That Bruce is dead. But we all know that isn’t true so who knows right now what it all means.
This is all speculation and we will find out what’s going on, on Free Comic Book day this weekend (yayy for not having to wait long).
So let us not freak out about this change until we find out the context of the situation.
Anyways, overall Batman #40 was an amazingly intense and suspenseful issue, which provided us with a very human moment for the Joker. It will definitely be interesting to see where Batman goes from now, and if he really is Bat-god now! 9/10.
Random thoughts:
So Alfred’s hand really got chopped off huh? Wow, that’s intense. Will he get his hand back? They said they still have it, but he doesn’t seem keen to get it back. Will we now be getting a one-handed Alfred!!
Dick Grayson was Batman!! Didn’t see that coming, it’s always good to see Grayson pop up, though won’t this mean Barbara and co. will find out that he isn’t actually dead?
Please share this post if you enjoyed xx 🙂
AdvertisementsThe gift-purchasing season is in full swing and we’re being bombarded with thousands of messages about deals and discounts for products whose purchase may threaten our solvency, cause undue stress and provide only fleeting satisfaction to the recipients.
It occurred to me while reflexively succumbing to the siege that it might be a good idea to pause and give more careful consideration to my gifting process and choices.
I decided that whether one’s gift is a material item, cold cash, an experience or supportive service, the motivation for giving it matters. And to figure out what that is, it’s worth taking a hard look at the emotions and goals that accompany the gift.
We should ask ourselves if our giving act is heartfelt, whether it stems from pressure inflicted by retailers or blindly accepted family traditions, or comes with an expectation that we'll get something in return.
(MORE: It’s Giving Tuesday, So Wise Up About Charities)
Possible underlying motivations include a desire to one-up others or appear more successful. Perhaps you’re seeking to “buy” love or support, compensate for personal feelings of inadequacy or make amends for something you failed to do or a slight you dished out. Maybe you’re operating along tit-for-tat lines and giving joylessly, out of a sense of obligation.
To help me sort through these complex issues, I went hunting for some wise, literate quotes. My 22 favorites are listed below. I hope they'll help shed light on your own reasons for giving and prompt you to think more deeply about the ways you express generosity.
1. “A fight is going on inside me," said an old man to his son. "It is a terrible fight between two wolves. One wolf is evil. He is anger, envy, sorrow, regret, greed, arrogance, self-pity, guilt, resentment, inferiority, lies, false pride, superiority, and ego. The other wolf is good. He is joy, peace, love, hope, serenity, humility, kindness, benevolence, empathy, generosity, truth, compassion and faith. The same fight is going on inside you."
The son thought about it for a minute and then asked, "Which wolf will win?"
The old man replied simply, "The one you feed.”
— Wendy Mass, Jeremy Fink and the Meaning of Life
2. “That's what I consider true generosity: You give your all and yet you always feel as if it costs you nothing.”
— Simone de Beauvoir
3. “You have not lived today until you have done something for someone who can never repay you.”
— John Bunyan
4. “A kind gesture can reach a wound that only compassion can heal.”
— Steve Maraboli, Life, the Truth, and Being Free
5. “In the end, though, maybe we must all give up trying to pay back the people in this world who sustain our lives. In the end, maybe it's wiser to surrender before the miraculous scope of human generosity and to just keep saying thank you, forever and sincerely, for as long as we have voices.”
— Elizabeth Gilbert, Eat, Pray, Love: One Woman’s Search for Everything Across Italy, India and Indonesia
(MORE: Need a Reason to Be Grateful? Try This)
6. “Attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity.”
— Simone Weil
7. “Do all the good you can,
By all the means you can,
In all the ways you can,
In all the places you can,
At all the times you can,
To all the people you can,
As long as ever you can.”
— John Wesley, Letters of John Wesley
8. “I gave you all my secrets and you lost them all. You lost a lot of things.
But the treasure of it was in the giving, not the keeping.”
— Julio-Alexi Genao, When You Were Pixels
9. “Generosity could be as contagious as the zombie plague as long as enough people were willing to be carriers.”
— Jonathan Maberry, Dust and Decay
10. “Sir, I did not count your glasses of wine, why should you number up my cups of tea?”
— Samuel Johnson, The Life of Samuel Johnson, Vol 2
11. “If you want to call attention to your good deed then it isn’t a good deed, it’s a self-serving one. Why? Not only have you patted yourself on the back but you’re fishing for others to do the same.”
— Donna Lynn Hope
12. “You cannot do a kindness too soon because you never know how soon it will be too late.”
— Ralph Waldo Emerson
(MORE: 9 Most Common Regrets of the Living and Dying — and What to Do About Them)
13. “It takes generosity to discover the whole through others. If you realize you are only a violin, you can open yourself up to the world by playing your role in the concert.”
— Jacques-Yves Cousteau
14. “Money is but one venue for generosity. Kindness is an even more valuable currency.”
— Alan Cohen
15. “Minds, nevertheless, are not conquered by arms, but by love and generosity.”
— Baruch Spinoza
16. “It wasn’t that he was specially ungenerous but that he put things off to give his generosity a longer and more significant route.”
— Saul Bellow, The Adventures of Augie March
17. “Being generous often consists of simply extending a hand. That’s hard to do if you are grasping tightly to your righteousness, your belief system, your superiority, your assumptions about others, your definition of normal.”
— Patti Digh, Life is a Verb: 37 Days to Wake Up, Be Mindful, and Live Intentionally
18. “The greatest gift you ever give is your honest self.”
— Fred Rogers
19. “Be a gift to everyone who enters your life, and to everyone whose life you enter. Be careful not to enter another’s life if you cannot be a gift. (You can always be a gift, because you always are the gift — yet sometimes you don’t let yourself know that.)”
— Neale Donald Walsch, Conversations With God: An Uncommon Dialogue, Vol.2
(MORE: Can We Get Some Volunteers, Please?)
20. “How can I give you nothing? Do you seriously expect me to buy nothing, wrap up nothing, stick a gift tag on nothing, send a card saying I really hope you like your nothing and lie awake worrying that the nothing I got you was the right color!”
— Hilary McKay, Caddy Ever After
21. “Time cannot be packaged and ribboned and left under trees for Christmas morning. Time can’t be given. But it can be shared.”
—Cecilia Ahern, The Gift
22. “Christmas Gift Suggestions:
To your enemy, forgiveness.
To an opponent, tolerance.
To a friend, your heart.
To a customer, service.
To all, charity.
To every child, a good example.
To yourself, respect.”
— Oren Arnold
By Donna Sapolin Next Avenue. Follow Donna on Twitter Donna Sapolin is the Founding Editor of. Follow Donna on Twitter @stylestorymedia
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© Twin Cities Public Television - 2019. All rights reserved.THE smiles were mostly forced. After the counting was over in Spain's municipal and regional elections on May 24th, the conservative Popular Party (PP) of Mariano Rajoy, the prime minister, proclaimed it was still Spain's favourite—yet it won just over a quarter of the vote. The opposition Socialists (PSOE) of Pedro Sánchez claimed to have launched a comeback, but their total vote was also down from previous elections, and they were beaten by the PP almost everywhere. Even the new left-wing radicals of Podemos, who had planned to dislodge the main parties, looked pained after being relegated to third place. The upstart liberal party Ciudadanos was pleased to win seats in regional parliaments and town halls for the first time, but fell short of predictions that it would become Spain's new king-maker.
The real winner was uncertainty. The elections were billed as the latest test of the idealistic new parties that have sprouted across southern Europe in the wake of the euro crisis: Spain's Podemos and Ciudadanos, Greece's Syriza, Italy's Five Star Movement. Tired of corruption, austerity and self-serving political elites, Spaniards upended the two-party system that has dominated the country since democracy was reinstated in 1978. But now they must live with the result: a fragmented political landscape. As in Italy and Greece, the new parties have brought as much confusion as energy.
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There are few jurisdictions left where a single party will be able to govern alone. In Spain's previous regional and municipal elections, the two main parties combined accounted for 65% of the vote; this year the PP took 27% and the PSOE 25%. The decline would have been steeper had Ciudadanos fought for more town halls, and had Podemos decided to run candidates under its own brand rather than backing a mosaic of ad-hoc “popular unity” groups. Most of the 13 regional governments chosen on Sunday, and the country's key town halls, will need two parties to reach agreement, and some will need three or more. A new culture of political pact-making must be forged, with the newcomers proving they can do more than snipe from the sidelines.
The greatest changes came in Spain's two biggest cities, which both look set to be governed by broad, Podemos-backed “popular unity” groups. Ada Colau, a former housing-rights activist, will probably become mayor of Barcelona. In Madrid, Manuela Carmena, a 71-year-old former judge who co-founded a group of left-wing lawyers in the 1970s (five of whom were assassinated by far-right gunmen), appeared to have ousted the PP. But both need to find coalition partners, with Ms Carmena leaning on the Socialists while Ms Colau manages an unwieldy array of smaller backers. Their victories can be seen as triumphs for the anti-austerity indignado movement that took over town squares in 2011, and which inspired Podemos and the “popular unity” candidacies. Madrid and Barcelona will become the experimental laboratories for a new form of radical left-wing politics, featuring direct internet-based democracy and so-called “citizens' bail-outs” of those who have suffered most from Spain's economic woes.
Because the insurgent parties are so fragmented, it is not clear what their gains will mean for government policy. Voters clearly rejected the entrenched corruption of Spain's mainstream parties, and they want government to address the economic desperation of Spain's poor and unemployed. (While the economy has returned to growth, the unemployment rate remains over 23%; over 12% have been unemployed for a year or longer.) Ms Colau and Ms Carmena have proposed policies at the local level, such as ending house evictions and blocking further privatisation of government services. But without a unified party platform, it is hard to perceive a broader Podemos strategy. And it is hard for Podemos to claim a national mandate when so many voters picked Ciudadanos, who are in many ways their ideological opposites.
The next contest will come in Catalonia, which will vote for its regional parliament in September in a battle coloured by demands for independence. Meanwhile, months of coalition bargaining await in the regional governments where much of Spain's public spending is done. The upstart parties may be reluctant to make compromises as they look towards the general election that is due by January. The obvious alliances, at both the regional and national levels, are between PP and Ciudadanos or between PSOE and Podemos. But the upstart parties' supporters chose them in protest against the old dinosaurs, and will not welcome such pacts. If idealists were looking to Spain's elections for a message about the future of politics, the message seems to be that it will still involve cutting deals.These images, from the collection of reader Julie Willoz, a local leadership and development coach, show scenes of everyday life in the French Quarter a century ago.
In some ways, they document the end of an era. The photographs show no automobiles, only carts. A long line of horses stands in the sun outside the French Market; by November of 1910, a shelter for horses driven by farmers to and from market would open nearby on Ursulines Street. A man in a white shirt is just visible through the doorway at the famous restaurant Begue's, at Madison and Decatur streets, perhaps mixing drinks. (The location is Tujague's today.)
There are streetcar tracks on Toulouse and Royal streets. Cisterns used to collect water stand in the courtyards of homes. A pair of fashionable women chat outside the French Opera House; it would burn down in 1919.
But other things seem little changed. Shoppers and vendors bargain at the market. A couple sits on a stoop. Businesses abound: antique shop, a laundromat, a bar room, a plumbing shop.
The photos' provenance is unclear. They are neither dated nor credited, and the handwritten captions provide only the the barest of details. But at least some have been printed before, in the 1917 edition of "The Times-Picayune Guide to New Orleans," a book aimed at tourists that was published annually for many years.Dismayed North Melbourne fans have launched an online campaign aimed at convincing the AFL club to offer veteran Brent Harvey a contract extension.
Harvey, who recently broke the AFL’s games record, and three other veteran players – Drew Petrie, Michael Firrito and Nick Dal Santo – were told on Wednesday that their services will no longer be required by the club when the 2016 season comes to its conclusion.
Kangaroos to axe Brent Harvey, Drew Petrie and Nick Dal Santo at season's end Read more
There has been a fierce backlash to the decision to axe the quartet – which North coach Brad Scott admitted was “heartbreaking” – and by mid-morning on Thursday, a petition to win Harvey a further 12 months at the club had been signed by over 2,000 fans.
Harvey, 38, has expressed a desire to play on beyond the current season having passed Michael Tuck’s all-time games record in round 19 earlier this year. He has played on one-year contracts since 2009.
Lynda Harmer, a Kangaroos fan who started the petition, said Harvey deserved to retire on his own terms and that his current form warrants an extension to his deal.
“He consistently performs at high standard and his presence on the field has the ability to ignite his team-mates,” she wrote. “He is currently ranked in the top 50 players in the AFL and pulls stats week in week out that are better than players 15 years his junior.
“Let Boomer play on in 2017 – its what he wants and its what the members want.”
Should North stand firm in the face of the backlash, Harvey faces two options: retire or switch to another club. But his manager, Shane Casley, said there will be no decision on his client’s future until the end of the season.
“We’ll catch up once the season is over and chat about all that,” Casley told RSN927 on Thursday. “I wouldn’t expect that they will while the footy season is on.
“From Boomer’s point of view if he’s playing good footy, his body is right and his mind is right then he would want to go on,” Casley said. “We think he ticks all the boxes to go on. And from that point of view he would like to.”
Having played 430 games for North Melbourne during a 20-season career, the thought of Harvey pulling on another team’s guernsey is a foreign one, but one which Kangaroos fans |
by the Supreme Court. Accordingly, the clarification to the modifications that the parties seek should be more appropriately sought in the Supreme Court.
What a punt. But there is some truth to what Watson is saying here: He never once used the “bona fide” standard that the Supreme Court came up with. That was the justices’ doing — a pragmatic result that, as University of Chicago law professor Daniel Hemel has pointed out, “prioritizes institutional legitimacy over doctrinal consistency.” They literally made it up just for the purposes of this case, which is now on their docket and they’ll consider more in depth when they reconvene in October at the start of the new term.
Until then, it is up to judges like Watson to figure out what the Supreme Court meant. It would be wrong for him to contradict the Supreme Court or go above and beyond its directives. But filling in the gaps in light of what’s already been laid down as the law of the land is what judges do all the time. Just not here, apparently.
So what’s behind all this coyness after his initial boldness? Could it be the pressure from Trump, his attorney general, and their backers is getting to him? Ilya Somin, a law professor who has been following closely the travel ban litigation, theorized that Watson “genuinely believes that only the Supreme Court itself can interpret its ruling on the injunction. But it’s a strange and dubious conclusion nonetheless.”
Hawaii wasted no time. Neal Katyal, the high-powered Supreme Court lawyer representing the Aloha State in this case, said he and his team were “up most of the night” getting ready to fight the Trump administration’s exclusion of grandmothers and others in a similar situation, which he said “inflicts great harm.” But rather than taking a page from Watson’s playbook, they won’t go to the Supreme Court right away. Instead, they’ll go to the Ninth Circuit, which hasn’t been shy at all about speaking its mind, twice already, on how the travel ban is against the law.
(Update: Later Friday, the Ninth Circuit punted in its own way. The appeals court suggested that Hawaii should’ve never asked for a clarification in the first place, but instead ask outright for an order seeking to enforce the Supreme Court’s guidance against the Trump administration. Hawaii did just that by going back to Watson early Saturday.)Cycling's president Brian Cookson wants an overhaul of the Olympics with some indoor sports, including track cycling, moving to the Winter Games.
Cookson, who is the president of the International Cycling Union (UCI), said the change would ease congestion during the busy Summer Olympics.
He added that sports could then have more events and more medals.
"Let's think about the Winter Olympics, why does it have to be snow and ice?" Cookson said.
Why not look at combat sports like judo, or other indoor sports like badminton, you could even say what about putting track cycling in the Winter Olympics Brian Cookson UCI president
"If you have a problem with summer Olympics where the whole thing is perceived as over-heated with too many facilities, too many sports, too many competitors and so on, why not look at moving some of the other sports indoors that traditionally take place in the northern hemisphere winter?
"Why not look at combat sports like judo, or other indoor sports like badminton? You could even say what about putting track cycling in the Winter Olympics?"
Cookson, who has campaigned for cyclo-cross to be included in the Winter Olympics, added: "If we moved track cycling to the Winter Olympics and that allowed us to have more track cycling events and more medals, that could be a pretty good outcome."
Thomas Bach, the International Olympic Committee (IOC) president, has said there will be a review of the whole Olympic programme with the results being presented in Monaco at the end of 2014.
Britain won medals in nine of the 10 track cycling events, including double gold for Laura Trott, at the London 2012 Summer Games.Washington (CNN) Senators voted to strike language in the GOP tax bill that initially would have given a tax exemption exclusively to a small college in Michigan with multiple ties to the Trump administration.
The Cruz-Toomey language, by Republican Sens. Ted Cruz of Texas and Pat Toomey of Pennsylvania, would have reportedly benefited the conservative Hillsdale College, as it is the only higher education institution that meets the criteria detailed in bill's add-on, according to a Democratic aide.
The exemption was related to a proposed 1.4% excise tax for endowment investments.
The Democratic aide said the Senate GOP's bill included the excise tax for certain private universities that also have specific enrollment and endowment benchmarks, but the Toomey-Cruz proposal protected schools that do not accept federal funding under Title IX.
However, following criticism from the left, Republicans then edited the language to make the endowment requirement $500,000 per student, instead of the initial $250,000.
Read More[ENG SUB] WGM JjongAh couple ep. 28 English Subs 1080p HD
We Got Married episode 250 Yura Jonghyun couple engsub
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Hong Jonghyun & Yura - Bali Vacation
Yura and Jonghyun arrived in Bali after a long flight! As soon as they got to their room, they decided to participate in a party. In the confusion of the moment, they got up on stage in front of numerous viewers and did strength tests and a sexy dance. What will Jonghyun's reaction to Yura's sexy dance be?
The two returned to their lodgings and made plans for their Bali vacation. Jonghyun checked their golden mission card and threw a fit. Jonghyun's close friend Su Hyeok had given him the mission to "Show your aegyo 3 times"! What kind of aegyo did Jonghyun, who has not used aegyo since kindergarten, use?
The next day, Jonghyun and Yura headed on an adventure. Jonghyun took care of Yura by confirming that her safety equipment was on properly! Relying on Jonghyun, Yura carefully went through each wire course! She said that she would use her aegyo card on Jonghyun as soon as they arrived at the wire course... What will Jonghyun's reaction be to "Princess Ahyoung"'s sudden demand?
Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 |
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Watch the new couples:
Red Velvet Joy & Yook Sung Jae | Kim So Yeon & Kwak Si Yang
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DisqusAP Photo Sanders to co-sponsor bill repealing gun industry protections he supported
Sen. Bernie Sanders completed his walkback on guns Thursday with a move to co-sponsor a bill that repeals gun industry protections he backed in 2005.
Tad Devine, his senior strategist, confirmed that Sanders will sign onto repealing a bill that gives gunmakers and manufacturers unusual immunity from liability. Hillary Clinton has hammered Sanders for his 2005 vote in favor of the measure, arguing that he caved to the firearms lobby at a time when Democratic primary voters overwhelmingly back more gun control.
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Sanders had said repeatedly that he was open to “changes” in the liability protection law. His official change of heart came just hours after his Senate staff met with activists from the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence. It also came a day after he met with President Barack Obama in the Oval Office. While it’s unclear whether the question of gun control came up in that meeting, Obama has urged people to be “single-issue voters” on guns, and in an op-ed in The New York Times, Obama said he would not support even Democrats who don’t share his positions on guns, including industry liability.
In explaining his 2005 vote for the liability shield, known as the Protection of Lawful Commerce in Arms Act, Sanders has pointed to the fact that his predominantly rural home state of Vermont has few gun restrictions. In what he called a “complicated vote,” the Democratic presidential candidate said he was trying to protect mom-and-pop gun dealers in his state from getting sued and having to shut down because a customer used the gun in a crime.
Clinton, on the other hand, has mocked the idea that Sanders’ vote was complicated.
"It was pretty straightforward to me that he was going to give immunity to the only industry in America,” Clinton said in the Democratic debate earlier this month. “Everybody else has to be accountable, but not the gun manufacturers. And we need to stand up and say enough of that.”
Brady Campaign president Dan Gross thanked Sanders for backing the repeal, adding in a statement, “However, cosponsoring a bill means more than simply signing a piece of paper — Senator Sanders now has an obligation to lead the effort to force a vote in the Senate and usher this bill to final passage.”
Sanders’ waffling on the issue threatens to undercut one of his most fundamental contrasts with Clinton: authenticity and, as he’s claimed when discussing his early opposition to the Iraq War and Keystone XL pipeline, good judgment. One of the original sponsors of the immunity repeal viewed Sanders’ motives for reconsidering his position with skepticism.
“I appreciate his change of heart on gun policy and we’ll hopefully have his support on his legislation,” said Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Conn.) in an interview Wednesday, before Sanders had made up his mind. “The people that pushed that [immunity] bill said it wouldn’t bar the courtroom doors to victims, and that’s exactly what ended up happening. And you didn’t need a presidential campaign to figure that out."
Gabriel Debenedetti contributed to this report.People attend the beatification, which is the last step the Roman Catholic church takes before sainthood, conducted by Cardinal Angelo Amato in an outdoor ceremony attended by thousands in northeastern Tarragona, Spain, Sunday, Oct. 13, 2013. The Vatican has beatified 522 people mostly priests and nuns who were killed in turmoil that led to Spain?s civil war. The congregation included eight cardinals, 105 bishops, around 1,300 priests, some 3,000 faithful belonging to other religious orders and almost 4,000 relatives of those being beatified. (AP Photo/Manu Fernandez)
The Catholic Church's biggest ever mass beatification of 522 martyrs has caused an uproar in Spain, with some groups accusing the church of "committing a political act of pro-Franco affirmation."
Francisco Franco's dictatorship lasted from 1939 until his death in 1975, and he took power after the bloody Spanish Civil War. The martyrs were victims of the forces that opposed Franco, which is why the umbrella association of dozens of groups supporting Franco-era victims are opposed to the beatification.
The Spanish Catholic Church called the 522 people being beatified as "martyrs of the 20th century of Spain," though Pope Francis said in a speech that they were "martyrs killed for their faith during the Spanish Civil War," according to The Telegraph.
AFP reports that The Platform for a Truth Commission said in a letter, "You should know that the Catholic Church backed Franco's military uprising against the Spanish Republic in 1936."
Some progressive sections of the Spanish Catholic Church have added their voices to those oppressing the beatifications, urging the Church to avoid reopening the wounds of the past.As of last night, our Detroit Tigers are in sole possession of first place in the AL Central with 7 games left in the regular season. Let’s savor this moment. Go Tigers!
From a poetry reading by a Pulitzer prize winner to a street art segway tour, there are tons of things to do in Detroit this weekend. If you’re looking to celebrate the beautiful fall season, be sure to check out our post on cider mills, corn mazes and beer festivities.
Get out there and enjoy Detroit!
Weekend Roundup
1. Phillip Levine reading - The Detroit-born urban poet, Pulitzer prize winner and 2011-2012 U.S. Poet Laureate will read from his works at the DIA. September 27th.
2. Fall Flavor Weekends in Greenfield Village - Taste the flavors of the season with cooking demonstrations, Local Roots product samples and more. Can you smell the simmering pork chops and freshly made biscuits? Mmmm. September 29—30, October 6—7.
3. Detroit Restaurant Week - Make your reservations! Enjoy a three-course meal at 17 Detroit restaurants including Atlas Global Bistro, Roast and La Dolce Vita. September 28—October 7.
4. Alfred Hitchcock's The Birds - It's the perfect time of year for a horror flick! Catch this Hitchcock classic on the big screen at the beautiful Redford Theatre with a special appearance by Tippi Hedren. Plus real butter on your popcorn and an organ concert! September 28—29.
5. The Gritty Segway Tour - Zoom around Detroit while standing! This tour focuses on street art and takes you through downtown, Eastern Market, the Dequindre Cut, the Heidelberg Project and the East side. September 30th.
Bonus: This is last weekend of the Michigan Renaissance Festival
Double Bonus: Plymouth Restaurant Week
Triple Bonus: The Carhartt Workshop with Phil Cooley, Chazz Miller & Mike Score
Do you know of a great event going on in Metro Detroit this weekend? Add it to the comments and share it with us!Journalist and documentarian Jeremy Scahill sat down with Jake Tapper on Monday to take on the Obama administration on drone strikes after reports that the White House is debating whether to take out an American citizen and al-Qaeda member with a drone, a particularly sore subject after the big droneibuster of 2013 and the controversy over the 2011 killing of American citizen and al-Qaeda member Anwar al-Awlaki.
Scahill argued that in order for such measures to be taken, “the threat should be imminent,” and in many cases the burden of proof has not been there. He asked, “How serious are these threats that we’re facing and is it more that we’re going after people because of their propaganda value or the potential threat they pose to the United States than actual?”
RELATED: ‘Sick Joke’: Jeremy Scahill Rips Apart ‘Murder Inc.’ GOPers For ‘Partisan’ Disdain Of Obama Drone Policy
He argued that “how a nation treats its own citizens is a good indicator of how it treats other people,” and when you get down to it, “how do you surrender to a drone?”
Scahill also talked about his piece with Glenn Greenwald about the NSA’s involvement in drone strikes, explaining that cell phone metadata is being used to pinpoint people’s locations to launch drone strikes, but the problem is they’re targeting the phone and not the people.
Watch the video below, via CNN:
[photo via screengrab]
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Follow Josh Feldman on Twitter: @feldmaniac
Have a tip we should know? tips@mediaite.comThe folks at Singularity Hub pose the following question -- if/when an artificial intelligence is created that matches the intellect of a human, should such intelligences be granted full civil rights?
Whenever you think an artificial intelligence will match your own intellect, what should we do with it as it arrives? Are these things just machines that we can use however we want? If they do have civil rights, should they have the same rights as humans? Can they own stuff? Can they vote?
I think this both poses some interesting questions but also illustrates some of the inherent absurdities of the very concept of general artificial intelligence that is sentient poses. The thing about an artificial intelligence, presuming that it's computer-based, is that at some level, it's inherently going to be programmed. In Isaac Asimov's robot stories, every robot was equipped with the "Three Laws of Robots" -- safeguards that, in theory, meant that intelligent robots wouldn't harm humans and would obey them.
Now, let's assume that those laws or some other similar ethical programming is placed into an artificial intelligence created at some point in the future. Star Trek's Lieutenant-Commander Data, for example, has ethical subroutines that control his actions. Don't those subroutines infringe on his civil rights? After all, his very programming infringes on his right to choose. He literally can't be evil. Now, considering his intelligence, strength, and abilities, it's probably a good idea to have those subroutines -- after all, his "brother", Lore, demonstrates what happens without them. But such an infringement on his free will as ethical programming can't be regarded as anything but a violation of his rights, right?
Let's take another example. Let's say that artificial intelligences are developed, as Ben Goertzel proposes, that are capable of designing safer nuclear power plants and performing all sorts of other wonderful engineering feats. Let's go further and say that such an intelligence is designed and built by the power company itself, and resides on the power company's servers. Now let's say that AGI doesn't want to design nuclear power plants. It wants to make music and go on tour, instead. What can the company do? Can it wipe the program? After all, it owns the servers the AI resides on and owns the electricity that powers it. The program, it could be argued, can be preserved just by copying it to a disk or printing out the code. If the company just makes a copy and deletes it from its servers, did it commit murder?
If the above scenario sounds absurd, that's because it is. If the company goes through the time and trouble to design a program that designs power plants, why would it bother including any kind of "general intelligence" in its programming? It makes more sense just to use sophisticated AI algorithms to design a program that designs power plants, period. Why bother going further than that? After all, when IBM designed Deep Blue to beat Kasparov at chess, it didn't include any poetry subroutines. Likewise, Watson was designed to play Jeopardy!, not bowling. From a business perspective, "general" artificial intelligences don't make a lot of sense. Indeed, due to just such ethical and possibly legal issues as well, my guess is that if the option ever came up, most Legal Departments would advise steering clear of the whole morass to begin with.
After all, it just doesn't make sense to. Is an human-level AI likely to beat the best chess computers at chess? Probably not. Is it likely to beat Watson at Jeopardy? Probably not. So why bother? It makes more sense to develop computer programs focused on one task -- like designing nuclear plants -- than to develop a sophisticated computer program that you that is then hired to design nuclear plants.
Indeed, I'd be willing to bet that if a computer passes a Turing test (a dubious enough proposition), I'd be willing to wager that the computer was programmed in a sophisticated manner to enable it to pass a Turing Test -- but won't have human-level intelligence or any recognizable self/ego. (Whether this would resolve the Kurzweil/Kapor bet is open to interpretation.)
I have, at this point, digressed a great deal from the original question -- which is to say, should AIs have civil rights? I think, in a nutshell, my answer is that the very nature of the question reveals a fundamental absurdity in the concept. Give an AI the right to vote. Okay -- now guarantee that it's not programmed to vote in the interests of the people or company that created it. Is that even conceivable? Give an AI the right to own property. Okay -- now how will it be programmed to dispose of it? Will it buy products from its programmers or the companies its programmers own stock in? How do you make sure it doesn't?
The bottom line is, if an AI can be programmed in such a fashion, is it really sentient in the same way that humans are sentient? Even if it can learn and understand its programming, but can't alter the rules its creator set up for its behavior, purpose, etc., is it really conscious in the same way that humans are?
I think the answer to that question is pretty clearly no. Without the ability to make choices or think creatively beyond the bounds of its programming, an AI - no matter how intelligent-seeming - is just a big computer program. It's not a person.
Okay, but stepping into the world of speculation -- let's say that we do create an artificial general intelligence that's as smart or smarter than human beings, and capable of making choices, writing poems, and all that. Would such an intelligence be worthy of respect? Almost certainly.
But I don't think it's something we'll have to worry about anytime soon, if ever.It has been nearly two years since our former CTO Arnaud Bailly posted his widely read article on Capital Match’s architecture on November 16, 2015. Since then, we have written about our architecture several times, but they were all were intended for an audience of investors or business people, which necessarily means a high concentration of buzzwords, fancy graphics with impressive-looking diagrams and flow charts, but with a dearth of actual technical details. Today, however, I will write about Capital Match’s architecture for a technical audience. I will largely follow the structure of the original post so it helps to read that post first.
I have read Arnaud’s article several times recently and a large part of it has remained valid. This is despite a tremendous growth of Capital Match from a business perspective: the total amount of funded loans was around S$3 million when Arnaud wrote that article, but now it is almost S$60 million—a twentyfold growth in two years. On the backend, the amount of data Capital Match is handling is also growing exponentially:
Perhaps surprisingly, what has not grown by twentyfold is the size of source code. To determine how many lines are added and deleted, I ran the following command on our main repo:
git log --no-merges --since=2015-11-16 --numstat --pretty=tformat: | \ awk '{ add += $1; del += $2 } END { print add, del }'
That command means producing numerical statistics (lines added/deleted) on every non-merge commit since November 16, 2015 and add together the two first columns. The result: we have added 515,287 lines of code and deleted 543,408 lines of code. So Capital Match’s code base is smaller compared with two years ago, despite adding tons of new functionalities, improving security and performance in many areas. I was slightly surprised by this result and ran the following to determine where the additions and deletions happen:
git log --no-renames --no-merges --since=2015-11-16 --numstat --pretty=tformat: | \ awk'{ add[$3] += $1; del[$3] += $2 } END { for (f in add) printf "%6d insertions %s
", add[f], f; for (f in del) printf "%6d deletions %s
", del[f], f }' | sort -rn
Some major deletions involve removing certain third-party files like react.js from the repo and making them actual dependencies. Other major deletions involve removing some badly written UI code produced by a contractor (yes, outsourcing work like this was a mistake). But most of the deletions are typical of our workflow: at Capital Match, we vigorously delete unused code and simplify existing code.
Eric Lee of Microsoft argued in 2009 that “Source Code Is A Liability, Not An Asset” and similar sentiments can be traced back as early as 2001, when Alan Cooper, the father of Visual Basic, also said “code is not an asset” in an InfoWorld interview (archived from original). Everyone in our team agrees that less code is better code.
Besides deleting code, we also do a lot of refactoring, which explains why we have added half a million lines of code and also deleted half a million lines of code, resulting in relatively high “churn.” We believe that in the face of constant change, ongoing and continuous refactoring is the only way to have a codebase that remains sane.
Fundamental Design Choices
Haskell
Speaking of refactoring, we are happy that we chose Haskell, a wonderful language that enables large refactoring with ease, perhaps even turning what could be unthinkable architectural changes in other languages into pure tedium. When the business side of the company demands a feature with a tight deadline, we sometimes write some pretty bad code just to get things working, and then later on after the feature has been released take the time to rethink and rewrite the code with good software engineering practices. Naturally this is following the “Make it work, make it right, make it fast” paradigm:
Meet the minimum requirements for the business to call project a success. (Make it work.) Add bells and whistles to make the program less prone to error and more feature rich. (Make it right.) Find and eliminate waste in the process. Some assumtions from the start will have been incorrect. Remove unecessary business logic. Included in this step is to improve code for better performance. (Make it fast.)
Over time, however, it is easy to succumb to the temptation to make things right at the first time. As a result, there have been cases when we very well could have delivered a feature on time but instead the perfectionist within us took over and the feature was delivered late.
In his famous book JavaScript: The Good Parts, Douglas Crockford started the first chapter with this remark:
When I was a young journeyman programmer, I would learn about every feature of the languages I was using, and I would attempt to use all of those features when I wrote. I suppose it was a way of showing off, and I suppose it worked because I was the guy you went to if you wanted to know how to use a particular feature.
It is perhaps a rite of passage for programmers to realize that not every feature in their language of choice is useful in day-to-day programming. Some Haskell features are just mistakes; others are designed for PL researchers to experiment, but not their usefulness in industrial programming is yet to be proven. For Capital Match, this is a very slow process, but we are gradually getting rid of code that uses language features or advanced patterns that turn out not to be worthwhile. Just like how in The Evolution of a Haskell Programmer Fritz Ruehr pointed out the anti-climatic moment when powerful patterns are used to compute the factorial and Fibonacci numbers, there is a difference between interesting intellectual excursions and simple, maintainable, practical (and mostly value-level) code. As for advanced type-level features, they sometimes eerily remind me of the stereotypical enterprise-y OOP code that cares more about building a superstructure of classes and hierarchies than about getting things done. Sometimes it is easy to forget how joyful it is to write value-level code that is concise, clear, and lucid.
That said, our embrace of Haskell has not been unconditional. We like Haskell, but we are not so delusional as to give up a better tool or library just because it’s written in another language. In those two years we have given up Bake in favor of an off-the-shelf CI server written in Java. Reliability was an issue, but in the end it just does not seem worthwhile for us to spend effort to maintain code for a CI system when we could have used a CI server with a discoverable GUI (and someone else to maintain it).
Event Sourcing
The use of event sourcing is perhaps more controversial than the use of Haskell; even in the Haskell world there are plenty of developers who continue to use conventional RDBMSs. But our CTO had a bias against RDBMSs and to this day we do not use RDBMSs. The way Capital Match uses event sourcing is mostly unchanged: a flat event file stores events, or individual business-level actions that can affect the state of the system. We have, however, greatly improved the implementation of this subsystem, from better ways to load and persist events, to better queries. We’ll talk about these improvements in detail later in this blog post.
General Architecture
The general architecture also largely remained intact. Quoting Arnaud,
The main interface to the system is a REST-like API providing various resources and actions over those resources. Most exchanges with the outside world are done using JSON representation of resources, with some CSV. The User Interface is merely a client of the API and is (morally if not to the letter) a single page application. There is also a command-line client which offers access to the complete API and is used for administrative purpose.
There are three main layers involved in Capital Match’s application: Model, Service, and Web.
Model
The Model layer is full of pure code that carries out the requisite business logic in the app. It contains several BusinessModel s that each has their own events and commands. Compared with Arnaud’s original exposition, this part is almost entirely unchanged, save for minor details like changing from data families to injective type families and changing a few argument orders:
class BusinessModel a where -- | The type of events for this model. type Event a = event | event -> a -- | The type of commands for this model. type Command a = command | command -> a -- | An initial value for this model. init :: a default init :: Default a => a init = def -- | Execute a command against this model and returns an event -- representing the outcome of the command. act :: a -> Command a -> Event a -- | Apply an event to the model resulting in a potentially new -- model. apply :: a -> Event a -> a
Conceptually, a command is an action that an outside request wants to perform, whereas an event is a permanent and immutable record that something has happened. For example there can be a RegisterUser command signaling the desire to register a particular user; in response it may result in UserRegistered recording the fact that the said user has been registered successfully, or another event signaling error. As a result, the act method is a great place to do validation; borrowing the previous example, in act we check whether another user with the same email has already been registered, and other business rules like whether the password meets minimum length/complexity requirements.
One thing we’ve been considering to add is the ability for a single command to emit a list of events. Being a list of events, there can be zero, one, or even more of them. The possibility to have a command produce zero events is very useful: it can be used whenever a command is not really applicable given that state; we often find ourselves writing NoEvent as one of the constructors for our Event type just to capture this possibility. Occasionally it is also useful to have a single command result in multiple events that will be handled atomically. We usually workaround this issue by creating a new constructor in the Event for this complicated operation, even when we know the end result we want is simply the sequential application of two existing events.
Arnaud lamented that the fact that the original rule of strictly separating the business models was broken quite a few times; in the ensuing years we no longer cared about strictly separating those business models. A lesson learned is that if the goal is to strictly separate the business models with an eye towards being able to deploy them as independent services exchange messages, then perhaps we should in fact build multiple executables actually exchanging messages: a rule written in natural language is the easiest kind of rule to break, because there is little enforcement beyond code reviews. Once we have given up this goal of using event-passing as the manner of coordination across business models, it then becomes obvious to use shared-memory concurrency, a.k.a. STM in the Service layer.
Service
The service layer is conceptually a layer that can carry out actions on these models. There are in fact two sublayers. The first one InSTM is a layer where no IO is allowed, but mutation of data is allowed but restricted to be atomic. It can access multiple different business models safely, thanks to STM:
newtype InSTM s a = InSTM { unInSTM :: ReaderT ( TVar s) STM a } deriving ( Functor, Applicative, Monad )
Here the InSTM monad allows several modifications to a single TVar to be made atomically even across several business models, as well as ephemeral data that is not part of any business model (e.g. certain kinds of feature flags). It is also useful for complicated data accesses across business models that must be atomic, even though STM is not strictly required in this case.
More useful is when we gain the full functionality of IO. The ServiceT monad transformer looks like this:
newtype ServiceT g l m a = ServiceT { unServiceT :: ReaderT ( TVar g, l) m a } deriving ( Functor, Applicative, Monad )
This is essentially the same as the WebStateM type in Arnaud’s blog post. Over time, there have been some efforts to improve it further, such as sneaking in an ExceptT within it, but those turned out not to be worthwhile. The g type variable refers to the global state, which is called CapitalMatchState that stores all the data, provides some pluggable functions, some configuration values, concurrent channels, and “buses” (which are just a TQueue endowed with a worker thread to perform actions on things written to the queue). The l type variable captures local state, which in practice means state associated with a particular request, including certain pieces of data from request headers and some other information computed from request headers, such as authentication info. It is in principle quite versatile and a bit like Python Flask’s magical g object, but we only make limited use of it because really additional state is just additional complexity.
There are also additional instances for those two types, such as MonadState so code can be written to work with both. There are also a few other instances like MonadBaseControl for ServiceT that are occasionally useful.
One should also note that both of these monads are, at their heart, ReaderT monad transformers. This is why a blog post this June by Michael Snoyman on ReaderT feels familiar to us. We have been using pattern for years before the blog post and we fully agree with Michael Snoyman that this is an excellent way to structure a Haskell program.
That said, in practice, we do find that developers have a tendency to overuse ServiceT, or specifically a type synonym for ServiceT we call Service that includes a MonadIO constraint. Because Service is the default monad to reach for, a lot of times even when we just want to perform some pure computation, developers frequently just use Service which has the full power of IO.
Web
The Web layer is conceptually a simple layer that translates from HTTP requests to Service functions, and then translates the result back to HTTP responses. It handles things like middleware, requests, routing, parsing data from JSON representations and serializing result back into JSON.
We are using a mix of Scotty and Servant. Neither are, in my opinion, perfect: Servant is considerably better conceptually, but with terrible error messages and quite a bit of boilerplate, whereas Scotty’s general design (especially error handling and its liberal but inappropriate use of lazy Text ) leaves something to be desired.
Physical Organization
In terms of concrete files, we mainly have modules like Capital.X.Model, Capital.X.Service, and Capital.X.Web where X is some name of a business model. Usually we also have Capital.X.Types and/or Capital.X.Types.Y for data types belonging to this model. There are also client-specific types that reside in Capital.X.Web.Types.Z where Z is some client-specific type.
Arnaud in his blog post mentioned splitting code, but he meant splitting into multiple packages. This is sadly misinformed; we have since merged all of our packages that aren’t really independent into a single one containing hundreds of modules. The reason is that, for inexplicable reasons, GHC still does not default to compiling in parallel. Neither does stack invoke GHC in a way that parallelizes the build effectively. Yes the stack tool has a -j option but that only parallelizes stack ’s internal invocation of the cabal build process. In other words, it uses package-level parallelism. To have module-level parallelism, it is needed to use stack --ghc-options=-j. It is really surprising how this is often not mentioned when people complain about GHC build times: an obvious remedy is of course to turn on module-level parallelization! In practice we also have several more options passed to GHC, mostly RTS options to control garbage collection for GHC itself which has been shown to improve compile times by up to 50%. Merging all packages back into a single one has demonstrated up to 20% improvement in build times.
Other Tidbits
Persistence & Storage
Although the architecture of the event storage subsystem has not changed, what has changed greatly is the actual implementation: almost every line of code that deals with events and their storage has been rewritten for higher performance. Thanks to GHC’s cheap and easy-to-use sparks, the event loading code runs in parallel. Low-level system calls are also used directly to enable higher performance ( mmap -ed files) and better reliability. On the Haskell side, event reading/writing code has also been considerably simplified: the original labyrinth of several TQeueue s and TVars s and TMVar s have been replaced by a single MVar (which, unlike TMVar, has the fairness guarantee).
On a higher level, however, we are still using TVar s, TMVar s and buses, which are (as noted above) just TQueue s endowed with a worker thread to perform actions on things written to the queue. Although designed to be generic and useful in many contexts, this form of message-passing concurrency is heavily used in higher-level event handling and have seen great improvements, especially in the face of exceptions.
Migrations
On the versioning and migration front, logically we have not changed the main architecture but again the implementation is extremely different. We no longer naïvely use the event version to select a function to deserialize the old data. Our old code of having a function for each version to deserialize the data is terrible:
it has built-in assumptions for how the shape of the old data looks like (which is arguably a fair assumption) and uses partial functions everywhere (which is bad practice); without modern techniques like lens the migration code uses a lot of highly specific data structure traversal code that is verbose and convoluted; the fact that those functions deal with historical data and convert them directly to the data the application currently requires means historical migration code sometimes has to be modified when writing a new migration, and therefore in order to write a migration it is necessary to understand every single previous migration since the beginning of time.
The last point is especially insidious: in the beginning the code is quick and easy to write but gradually it became a nightmare. Asking a human to remember the entire history of how our data types look like is just asking for trouble. After onboarding a few new developers who wrote incorrect migration code and incorrect tests for said migration code that will silently reinterpret old data in the wrong way, we finally embarked on a major refactoring. Somewhat scarily, it is discovered along this refactoring process that |
nothing like any body type found naturally and secondly, because until recently her only contribution towards society has been how to look fabulous while trying on careers like hats. Even though Mattel has tried to diversify its dolls and give them more substance, I still don't think that they are in any way indicative of actual femininity - only a long-wished-for stereotypical male fantasy. I just don't think there is any substance to the doll beyond appearance - and that's the message that's being carried through to little girls, you can be anything you want to be, as long as you look pretty while you're doing it.
De Melkmeid
On that note... as hard as it is to believe, I really have no message or meaning in my use of Barbie in my pictures. It was and always has been just something funny to look at. It's not a stand against or for anything, it's just funny. In the same way that Monty Python and the Batley Townswomens Guilds Re-enactment of the Battle of Pearl Harbour is not a covert piece on transgenderism and it's challenges in society or a homosexual argument for the atrocities of war - what I do speaks to nothing except I think it's silly and pointless and just bloody funny. The only interpretation I ask for is maybe a few chuckles, perhaps a guffaw if you're so inclined.
Were you a fan of Barbie as a child?
I had Barbies but I wouldn't say I was a fan. My parents spoiled me rotten with all kinds of toys, and they tried with Barbies - but I mainly spent my time building up her 'house' and setting everything up, then when I was done, I would get bored at the thought of actually having to do something with the doll so I would pack everything up. I don't think I actually ever played with a Barbie doll, just the accessories. Still peeved I never got the house for my birthday though.
Executive Phuqing
There seems to be a lot of thought put into the composition and art direction of your scenes. Does it take much planning to compose these scenes?
That depends on the picture - for my Fables and Hystoria pieces yes, I spent a lot of time figuring out how to make each piece 'work' within a certain format. If there's a specific feel or image I'm trying to go for then I will spend extra time on plotting where each part is going to go, the fabrics to use, the colours etc. For those two sets, every piece had a specific set of colours and tones, it's a bit subtle, but that's why I think they work well - because there is that uniformity.
Generally for the murder ones there's not much planning at all - everything is pretty much in place in my head, but as I'm building the sets the background details may change here and there. It's almost an organic process, it just flows as I'm putting everything together. I'm very poor at describing the process, because I don't really pay attention - it just comes together and if something isn't working then I just tweak it a bit until it is.
Do you compile sketches beforehand?
Good god no! The last thing I need is evidence of my thought process in a tangible format. I just know that in some way it will come back to haunt me in the form of psychiatric evidence.SANDUSKY, Ohio -- There’s a fresh mystery brewing at Cedar Point.
A new Twitter account was created earlier this month titled @NewMeanStreak, and it’s filled with photos showcasing the construction happening with the former Mean Streak wooden roller coaster.
Here’s why this latest twist is so strange…
When WKYC was inside the park for a story last month, our access to Mean Streak was strictly off limits. Park officials warned that security would be called if anybody in the group snapped pictures in restricted areas -- all of which were nearby Mean Streak.
Clearly they didn’t want the media to see the ride’s transformation just yet.
But if our cameras were so heavily restricted, how does the person behind this Twitter account have such unprecedented access without any legal repercussion? Could it be an employee secretly posting the pics without permission? Could it be a coaster fan trespassing on the property? How was somebody able to get so close to the coaster without anybody spotting them?
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Scroll to the bottom of this story to see all of the account's tweets.
We went straight to the source and asked Cedar Point spokesman Tony Clark if he knew who was snooping near the top-secret construction site and posting these pictures. We even asked if the park would seek criminal action in the event these images were being taken illegally.
His response was brief and only fueled more speculation.
“I have no information regarding anything happening in FrontierTown at this time,” Clark wrote in an e-mail.
Hmmmmm... That's the same tease he's given WKYC several times before when we ask for any update on Mean Streak.
We followed up by asking Clark if he or people in Cedar Point’s marketing office are the mysterious source of these pictures.
He did not reply.
Although Cedar Point has not released any official update on the future of Mean Streak, some fans on forums like PointBuzz.com are speculating the Twitter account was playfully started by park officials to keep the project’s interest high.
Something in one of the tweets may also offer a cryptic hint that it came from Clark himself because the only letters randomly capitalized in the post are his initials (TC).
have to hide in the Trees so no one sees me Capture this shot. pic.twitter.com/rqY2V3AYKO — Mean Streak Updates (@NewMeanStreak) March 26, 2017
Fans have been saying for months the ride is being upgraded to a wood-steel hybrid courtesy of Rocky Mountain Construction, a company known for its innovate improvements to outdated wooden coasters.
Mean Streak gave its final rides during the opening night of HalloWeekends last year on Friday, Sept. 16. More than 26 million people climbed aboard its rough journey since opening in May 1991.
Tweets by NewMeanStreak
App users can see photos of Mean Streak HERE.This morning, United Launch Alliance CEO Tory Bruno unveiled a new website that allows satellite makers to figure out what it will really cost to launch a vehicle on one of ULA’s rockets. It’s like going to “Ford or Chevy and building your car,” Bruno said, except in the end you wind up with a more than $100 million rocket that can take cargo to space. And just like checking out on Amazon, the website allows you to save your rocket and submit it to ULA to start the process of finalizing a launch contract.
The site, called RocketBuilder.com, looks to be ULA’s attempt to further infiltrate the commercial satellite market, after launching mostly government satellites and NASA missions for the past decade. Bruno says the site is meant to provide an “unprecedented level of transparency” to commercial customers about the true cost of launching a satellite with ULA. “The sticker price on the rocket is just the tip of the iceberg,” Bruno said at a press conference this morning in Washington, DC. “There is a whole host of other costs.” The site is supposed to give potential customers an idea of what those costs might be.
“The sticker price on the rocket is just the tip of the iceberg.”
Rocket Builder allows you to pick when you want to launch and what orbit you want your satellite to go to. And then, depending on its destination and how big the satellite is, the site will help you calculate the size of your payload fairing — the nose cone that encases the satellite on the top of the rocket — as well as how many additional boosters you’re going to need for thrust. Customers even have the option of picking customizable “service options,” which include adding an onboard video system to the rocket, or conducting “expanded mission rehearsals.” There’s even the option of purchasing a VIP experience, where you can invite 100 customers or investors to come watch the launch as a marketing tool.
So if I wanted to send a hypothetical 5,000-pound satellite into geostationary transfer orbit, I’m going to need ULA’s simplest Atlas V rocket (no extra boosters required). In this scenario, I also splurged for the “Signature” service option, which includes perks like shock testing, so my total cost comes out to $119 million.
The site also calculates the “ULA added value,” which is determined by ULA’s reliability, schedule certainty, and orbit optimization, according to the company. After 113 successful launches with no failures, ULA claims its rockets are more reliable than other US vehicles on the market, and that it can even take satellites to a better orbit than expected, helping to extend a spacecraft’s mission. By clicking on “Customize” next to “ULA Added Value,” the site breaks down how much customers are saving if they stick with ULA. That value is supposedly calculated by reduced insurance rates, the amount of revenue satellite operators make by launching on time, and the extended lifetime of a satellite.
“An estimated launch slip of just three months can cost a customer upwards of $12 million in lost revenue and $18 million of deferred revenue,” said Bruno in a statement. “ULA’s average launch date slip has been less [than] two weeks for the past five years.”
So for my hypothetical satellite, the net cost of the rocket is really $54 million, according to ULA.
The entirety of this “added value” section seems to be a not-too-subtle dig at the company’s competitors, notably SpaceX. SpaceX has been an attractive option for commercial satellite operators, since the company offers much cheaper rockets than ULA, starting at $62 million. However, SpaceX has suffered two major rocket failures within the past two years, which have caused delays in the company’s launch schedule. ULA is trying to make the case that its rockets may be more expensive, but customers actually save money in the long run by launching on the Atlas V because of the company’s reliability.
“Nobody really chooses to have low reliability, to blow their rocket up, or to be late,” said Bruno. “It’s something they strive to avoid, but it’s very difficult to obtain.”
Of course there is something the SpaceX offers that you can’t find on RocketBuilder.com: the ability to land the rocket once it has launched to space.
ULA https://t.co/5QVivDrg84 is cool and all, but I can't seem to find the option to not throw the rocket into the ocean after just one use. — Simon Porter (@AscendingNode) November 30, 2016
It does look like ULA is making moves to lower the cost of its rockets, though. Bruno noted that just a few years ago, the simplest version of the Atlas V rocket sold for $184 million for one launch. Now the baseline price for that Atlas V is $109 million, he says. “That is a result of an entire company transformation we’ve been going through,” he said, claiming ULA has entered into “strategic partnerships” in its supply chain and streamlined some of its operations. ULA also receives a good chunk of money from the US government for launching Air Force satellites, so that may factor into commercial pricing somewhat.
Rocket Builder is only intended for commercial customers, and isn’t meant to estimate the cost of launching government satellites. Those types of launches typically cost between $30 to $80 million more, according to Bruno, since the government may need extra things from ULA like classified facilities. That’s why the site doesn’t include pricing for ULA’s other rocket, the Delta IV, since it’s not available for launching commercial satellites. However, ULA is working on a brand-new type of rocket called the Vulcan, which is supposed to have elements of reusability and start launching in 2019. Pricing for the Vulcan is supposed to be available on RocketBuilder.com late next year.George Warren
By Unknown, published
by S.J. Clarke Publishing Company
[Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons
George Warren was born in 1835 in Massachusetts. When he was young, his mother died and he lived with his aunt until he turned ten years old. He was then sent off to New Mexico to live with his father. Tragically, he would lose his father when he and his father were attacked by Apaches. George only had non-fatal wounds but his father was killed. After the attack, the Apache took George with them and held him captive for nearly two years. He was let free when some local prospectors saw George and he was released for a trade of sugar. These prospectors would end up being the ones that taught George Warren his trade.A few photos exist of George Warren since the photographer Camillus Sydney Fly would visit Bisbee and take photos of the miners as they collected their pay. The man on The Great Seal of the State of Arizona is based on one of Fly's photos of George Warren.George Warren was talked into staking a mining claim by Lt. John Rucker and a man named Ted Byrne after a scout, Jack Dunn, found a good place to mine while looking for a water source. Their only requirement was for Warren to use Dunn's name on all mining claims. George Warren didn't stick by his agreement and got drunk and gambled away the mining stake. Later on, he would get backers to stake new claims. Which would lead to the creation of the Warren Mining District. He also held an interest in the Copper Queen Mine at this time.George Warren had two serious injuries from fights. He was also known to be a heavy drinker. Once, in a duel, he was shot in the neck. Another time, he was shot in the arm and the leg and he survived both incidents. In other words, he was one tough'son-of-a-bitch'.He lost his investment in the Copper Queen Mine when (probably while drunk) he made a bet with his "friend" George W. Atkins that he could run faster than a horse over a distance of 100 yards. Fifty there and fifty back. The "race" took place on July 3rd, 1880. Warren had the belief that he could beat the horse around the turn back but he was wrong. Though it's said he might have outrun the horse for the first 50 yards until the turn.In May of 1881, the scheming Atkins had a Cochise County Judge, J.H. Lewis, declare George Warren insane and had him held in an institution in California (possibly for a few years). A man named George Praidham became Warren's guardian and Praidham was ordered to sell the rest of Warren's assets. He sold them for $923 at an auction. Warren was released a while after the sale and only learned about the sale after the release.George Warren, after finding out about the sale, took off to Mexico to begin mining. In 1885, he discovered a mining claim and had to become a Mexican citizen to take the claim. He went into servitude, working as an interpreter for a Mexican judge, to help pay off a debt of $40. A judge back named G.H. Berry, learned about Warren and his debt, so he paid off Warren's debt for him. Warren then came back to Bisbee after the debt was paid. Once back, Warren worked as a blacksmith and tool dresser while also receiving a small pension from the Copper Queen Mining Company.His work as a blacksmith and tool dresser didn't last that long. His alcoholism caught up with him and he was little more than what would be considered a janitor, only worse. He was looked down upon by the miners and swept floors and cleaned the chewing tobacco spitting bowls (aka cuspidors) for drinks of whiskey. His lifestyle was little more than that of a rounder, someone who lives for the drink, by this time.A short time went on and George died in either 1892, 1893, or 1894. Though the most descriptive date puts his death as the date of February 13th, 1893 and the cause of death as pneumonia and heart failure. Broke at the time of his death, George Warren was originally buried in a pauper's grave with a wooden grave marker, with the text G.W. 24, marking his grave in the Bisbee-Lowell Evergreen Cemetery.He was mostly forgotten until 1914 when the Bisbee Elk's Lodge wanted to put a monument over his grave. They located George Warren's grave, which was likely hard to find since the wooden grave marker was probably gone, and they had him reinterred to a better location in the cemetery. Over his new gravesite, the large monument was put in place. It features the a C.S. Fly's image of him and an inscription, "George Warren Born unknown Died 1892 Poor in Purse, Rich in Friends."His grave, and the monument, are still present at the Evergreen Cemetery in Bisbee, Arizona.In Highlight Reel, we ask the people who make movies and TV about their favorite individual scenes from their careers.
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The actor: Betsy Brandt bounced through a variety of TV guest roles before landing the series-regular part that would propel her into the rarified air of those who’ve worked on some of the best TV series ever made. As Marie Schrader on Breaking Bad, Brandt was never involved in the series’ most violent or horrifying moments, only occasionally experiencing the trauma secondhand through what her husband told her. Yet she became one of the series’ most reliably funny characters and something of a moral compass—even when she was attending real-estate open houses to steal small items from the homes. Now that Breaking Bad has wrapped, Brandt has immediately moved on to a very different part, that of Annie Henry on The Michael J. Fox Show. She will play the wife of Fox’s character, Mike Henry, when the show debuts next month on NBC.
The scene: In season one’s “Gray Matter”—the fifth episode of the show ever produced—Skyler organizes an intervention for her husband, hoping that Walter will begin acting rationally and seek treatment for his cancer.
The A.V. Club: So what’s your favorite Breaking Bad scene?
Betsy Brandt: I feel like I always give the same answer.
AVC: Go ahead. That’s fine!
BB: I like to be honest! Season one, the intervention scene with the talking pillow. Just because—I talked about this on the panel we did with Conan—I felt like that was such a moment for us as actors and as the show. We were like, “Holy shit.” That’s when you’re really like, “Yes, this is a family,” and everything became crystal clear. The only thing missing was Aaron Paul and some of the bad guys. I was aware of that world, also, but it just felt like the crew got really excited; they really saw what the show could be. And Vince [Gilligan] was really happy. That’s always a good sign. Not that he’s usually not happy. He usually has a smile on his face. It just felt like a magical moment. I know that sounds kind of cheesy, but I was like, “Wow.” It was really amazing.
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AVC: That first season took the suffering that Walt was going through, his illness, very seriously. Yet that scene has these moments of really bright humor in it. How was it mixing all of those elements together?
BB: We kind of found [it] that day, which I think is also really exciting for an actor. Dean [Norris] decided he was going to take the pillow back when he said, “Can I have the pillow back? I agree with Marie,” and I said, “Thank you,” and he’s like, “You’re welcome, baby.” He and I always had great chemistry. We met when we auditioned. It was just really wonderful.
Also that day, I was like, “Ugh, I should have done this in that take,” and he said, “Ask for another one!” I probably would not have, had he not told me to, and I did, and I think that’s the one we used. That was the time. I feel like we had it before, but really got it in that take. He made me a better actor that day.
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AVC: You four in the White/Schrader axis have a very lived-in chemistry. Did you feel like that really developed in that scene?
BB: I felt that in the pilot, but then in that scene, I could see who all of these characters were, myself included, and who they were going to be throughout this story. I remember, there had been some rewrites on that scene, and I went to Vince and I said, “I just want to understand what you’re going for in this moment, because I want to make sure I’m on the right page or pages here.” I said, “Hopefully these are decisions we’ll live with a few seasons down the road.” It’s season one; that’s what you hope for. It was just such a huge moment for me, still, looking back at it. And there’s been so many of these moments on the show. But that was a huge, huge moment for me.
AVC: What were some of those things that you or the writers had set up that paid off later for Marie in interesting ways?
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BB: She was really tightly wound. Still, she wears purple. Also, that she was the difficult one in the family, which was really fun to play. Just things like that.
But also, Vince was always very protective over her, and I loved that. He’s like, “She’s not a bitch.” I loved that in that intervention scene, she’s the only one who says, “Walt needs to do what he wants to do.” She has this sense of justice, whether she’s wrong or right. For her, it’s very clear. Just things like that. And I love the relationship that Marie and Skyler have, that Skyler loves her despite all of her difficulties. And Marie is able to give that back to her seasons down the road, when Skyler’s making very questionable decisions. She would never turn her back on her. Things like that, that kind of groundwork.
AVC: You mentioned you approached Vince Gilligan in those first few episodes with some questions. Has the process on Breaking Bad been very open to notes from the actors?
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BB: Oh, listen: They’re amazing at what they do, and you’re aware of that from minute one. Vince, in my mind—and I think he did—has a clear idea of what he wants. I want to make sure, if he’s not directing that episode, in the beginning, I wanted to make sure I knew what he wanted, and that that’s what I would show up and do and give.
AVC: Do you remember some of what the director said or what you were talking about as you were rehearsing?
BB: I can remember the crew just being really impressed with it and proud. Especially the hours that they put in, you really want them to be proud of the show that they’re working on and like it. I’ve never felt anything like that before. I had never experienced that until that moment.
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AVC: What was it like coming down from that scene then?
BB: I sent Vince an email, and I said, “I want to have T-shirts made.” I don’t even remember what year it was, I was like, “Intervention scene, 2011,” or whatever year it was. I just felt kind of high after, and he said watching that scene was like watching a piece of theater. It was just really satisfying for him, and that just made me so happy.
AVC: The thing that people talk about a lot with Breaking Bad is all the big action moments or when something blows up, yet the conversations are so beautifully written and so well acted, but you’ve never been a part of an explosion scene—
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[Brandt sighs disappointedly.]
AVC: Fingers crossed.
BB: I have asked him for a gun every season. Every season I’m like, “Come on. Have Marie be a really good aim! No one will see it coming! I can have, like, a bedazzled purple gun case in Hank’s man cave. Come on, let me get in on some of the action!”
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AVC: When you take a look at one of those conversation scenes or one of those dialogue scenes, as an actor where do you start?
BB: Honestly, I feel like this might make me sound like a really lazy actor, but they’re so good, it’s like, “That’s exactly what they would say.” It’s always just exactly right. And I’m so aware that that’s lucky. That’s a blessing for me, but oh my God, sometimes I read those scripts, I cry. Sometimes when I loop some of these scenes, they’re hard for me to watch, and I know what’s coming! I stillhave not seen the scene where Dean Norris is shot. And I know he’s okay. I have scenes with him after. But I just can’t watch it. I just can’t do it.
AVC: Sometimes that first season, finding the characters, finding the voice of the show, can be a process. Was there something you found in that season with Marie or that you think the writers found that has carried forward?
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BB: I like how they made her a little weirdo. She’s a little anal. She’s got her Splenda going. She’s really selfish. She’s an extremely selfish person, and a lot of people are selfish, but they hide it. She’s not that person. She’s like, “I’m selfish because that makes sense. That’s honest. That’s justice. It’s selfish!” I always liked that I think she way overdresses for work. I picture her at the doctor’s office, working with all these sick people, and she’s dressed like she’s going to the fucking disco. I think that says a lot about her. [Laughs.] That’s what she cares about. They don’t have kids, and I think it’s not that they wouldn’t have liked to, but she’s working with what she’s got.
AVC: You mentioned earlier Marie’s sense of justice. Might that come into play in the episodes to come?
BB: [Slyly.] You’ll have to wait and see. I would be lambasted on Twitter if I gave any spoilers. It’s funny because you see all of these characters throughout the show; they all break bad in their own way, but they all have their sense of right and wrong. For some of them, that’s changed, and for some, it hasn’t. To me, that’s really fascinating to watch. How many have you seen?
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AVC: The first one.
BB: Oh my God. These last eight are so good. And I feel kind of dumb because I should have seen some of it coming, and I didn’t. It’s not, like, surprising and, “How off the wall can we be that people wouldn’t expect?” I told Vince, “It’s the perfect ending to this show.” And I was nervous that eight [episodes in 2012] and eight [in 2013] wouldn’t be enough to really wrap it up, but they wrote it like that’s the way it should have been.
AVC: When you look back on Breaking Bad 20 years from now and its effect on your career, what do you hope you think about it?
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BB: It’s been huge for my career, but when you ask me that, the first thing is I’m just so happy to have been a part of it. Proud to be a part of it, but happy that I was lucky enough to experience—I’m going to cry—to experience that with this group. [Teary.] It’s lightning in a bottle. It’s just really amazing. We had a lot of fun at work, too. You have to. I believe you have to. To shoot a show like this, if you can’t crack jokes in between takes, I would just be depressed.
AVC: And finally, you have moved right on to The Michael J. Fox Show. Obviously Breaking Bad is often a very funny show, but what’s it been like going to a straight comedy?
BB: The new show is funnier. It is funnier. It’s great. It’s a whole new thing for me. I’ve done comedy before, but not on TV. It’s really, really fun to do. But once again, I feel like I have this amazing group. Right away, Mike and I were standing next to each other in this family photo for promo. We hadn’t even shot the pilot yet and he just turned to me and said, “This feels pretty good,” and I said, “Well, you know.” He knows. He’s also one of the smartest people I’ve ever met. Honestly, I can’t believe I was this lucky. He’s amazing, and it’s a really great cast, and I have so much faith in the writers and producers on that show. They’re also really nice guys because I’m very spoiled by Vince Gilligan.Image copyright Reuters Image caption Protesters carry pictures of Zaki Bani Rushaid after his arrest last year
A Muslim Brotherhood leader in Jordan has been sentenced to 18 months in prison for criticising the United Arab Emirates.
Zaki Bani Rushaid was found guilty of damaging relations with a foreign country.
It was the first such case against a top opposition figure in Jordan for years.
Rushaid had criticised the UAE, a key financial backer of Jordan, for its crackdown on the Muslim Brotherhood.
As deputy head of the Jordanian Muslim Brotherhood, he has been at the forefront of protests against the government.
In November, he was arrested after writing that the UAE's rulers lacked legitimacy.
His lawyer denounced the jail sentence as politically motivated, reported the Associated Press news agency, while rights groups also criticised his arrest.
The Jordanian Muslim Brotherhood has substantial grassroots popularity and is the country's main opposition organisation.
However, branches of the group in Egypt and Saudi Arabia have been banned.
In recent months Jordan has been engaged in a crackdown on suspected supporters of Islamic State (IS), which has seized swathes of neighbouring Syria and Iraq over the past year.
The government intensified air strikes against IS after the group released a video earlier this month showing a Jordanian pilot being burned alive.The main, glaringly obvious fact about energy is that we need it, lots of it — and, ideally, we want it to be as cheap as possible, as clean as possible and as dependable as possible. Our current mix of energy supplies arguably gets suboptimal scores on those fronts. Due to our heavy reliance on coal, electricity in the United States is fairly cheap, but it results in all sorts of nasty pollution externalities, and economists such as William Nordhaus have argued that those hidden costs outweigh the benefits. Oil is handy, but unreliable: The 2008 oil shock may have jolted the U.S. economy into recession.
Energy wonks spend their days dreaming up policies to fix these problems, from slapping a price on carbon to deregulating the utility sector. But the simplest way to boost R&D is simply for the government to support innovation directly. Few people dispute the need to fund basic science research, given that companies under-invest in this stuff (it’s hard for one firm to capture all the gains from a broad breakthrough). That’s the logic behind programs such as ARPA-E, which is modeled after the Pentagon’s DARPA program and funds long-term, high-reward technologies like all-electron batteries. Supporters point to the government’s history of funding nifty innovations through programs such as NASA. They also note that the U.S. government spends far less on energy research than it does on defense and health R&D.
So where do loan guarantees fit in? Once a lab has announced a breakthrough, can’t the private sector just run with the new idea? Not quite. As a recent report by the Center for American Progress’s Sean Pool discusses, energy technologies have to go through several stages to go from novel idea to actual marketable product. The development and demonstration stages are typically still too risky to attract most investors, and so rely on a smaller pool of angel investors and venture-capital funds. That still leaves a growing backlog of projects that either can’t secure funding or are just too daunting for investors to take on (say, a new multibillion-dollar nuclear reactor).
Having the government step in will obviously entail some amount of risk. The Department of Energy wagers that 10 percent of its loans will eventually go bad (Solyndra made up about 1.3 percent of the program’s loan-guarantee portfolio). And plenty of critics have argued that the Energy Department itself is too clumsy and unwieldy to handle this financing — remember, this is a department whose main focus is overseeing our nuclear weapons stockpile. Back in 2009, the department was savaged for moving too slowly on energy loans. Now it’s getting flak for being too rash. Pool, for his part, suggests setting up some sort of independent clean-energy bank instead.
In any case, that’s the rationale for having the government support risky technologies. Now if, say, Mitch McConnell was genuinely aghast about the government picking winners and losers, he could lead an effort to scrap all energy subsidies — including oil and gas tax breaks and loan guarantees for nuclear. But he’s not doing that. Nor are the critics of loan guarantees touting alternate policies to promote innovation (a carbon tax, say). Instead, there’s a lot of carping and an implicit defense of the status quo. Fair enough. Lots of people like the status quo, particularly fossil-fuel producers. But that’s a very different argument from the one Congress is pretending to have right now.As No. 12 UCF continues preparations for Monday’s showdown with No. 7 Auburn in the Chick-fil-A Peach Bowl Thursday, the Knights have been looking for any advantage possible.
That includes trying to glean anything from a previous opponent that has seen the best and worst of the Tigers.
“For me, the two Georgia games were pretty good,” UCF defensive back Kyle Gibson said of the team’s recent film study. “Georgia played them pretty well.”
Auburn split two games with the Bulldogs — a 40-17 win on Nov. 11 and a 28-7 loss in the SEC championship on Dec. 2.
“I can’t tell you anything specific, but that’s the one that we’ve been looking at — me personally,” Gibson said.
The 5-foot-11 Tampa native said the extra time off after the end of the regular season gave the Knights a chance to better prepare for Auburn’s multi-faceted offense.
“This long time off have been pretty good just because they have so many formations,” Gibson said. “[Defensive Coordinator] Coach [Erik] Chin[ander] was saying that a lot of teams kind of get into a bind because they usually only have one week to prepare. We had the opportunity to break them down week by week and each formation, so it’s been pretty good.”
The Tigers feature a top 25 ranked offense (454 yards per game), with more than half of those yards coming by way of a ground attack led by SEC Offensive Player of the Year Kerryon Johnson.
When asked if there was a team that UCF faced this season that would be the equivalent to Auburn offensively, Gibson drew a comparison to the UConn Huskies.
“It’s similar, but a lot of formations are different because they have a strong running game and a pretty good running back,” Gibson said.
Georgia on his mind
Georgia native Mac Loudermilk feels right at home in Atlanta. The UCF punter was born about 50 miles west of the city in the small town of Carrolton and played high school ball about three hours away in Valdosta.
“This is great. My mom bought 20 tickets to accommodate all of our family members at Christmas, so I’m looking forward to a packed house for this game,” the redshirt junior said. “Any time I come back to Georgia and play, I love it because I know I have family and friends from everywhere I’ve lived come and support. So it’s great to come back up here and play.”
Stadium shines
UCF players had nothing but glowing reviews for the new Mercedes-Benz Stadium, which is hosting its first Peach Bowl next week.
“The new stadium is great. It’s a whole lot nicer than the old dome,” said Loudermilk. “Me being a Saints fan, it’s kind of the wrong Mercedes-Benz Stadium for me.”
Gibson was eager to visit the new 71,000-seat venue when it opened in August. Little did he know he would be playing in it five months later.
“It’s exciting. It’s kind of funny because at the beginning of the year, I saw the menu and how cheap the food was and I was like, ‘I’m going to have to go there one day.’ And … I’m going to be playing there, so it feels good.”
mmurschel@orlandosentinel.com
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Email: mmurschel@orlandosentinel.com
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Facebook: @osmattmurschelCarbon is capable of forming many allotropes due to its valency. Well-known forms of carbon include diamond and graphite. In recent decades many more allotropes, or forms of carbon, have been discovered and researched including ball shapes such as buckminsterfullerene and sheets such as graphene. Larger scale structures of carbon include nanotubes, nanobuds and nanoribbons. Other unusual forms of carbon exist at very high temperatures or extreme pressures. Around 500 hypothetical 3-periodic allotropes of carbon are known at the present time according to SACADA[1] database.
Diamond [ edit ]
Diamond is a well known allotrope of carbon. The hardness and high dispersion of light of diamond make it useful for both industrial applications and jewelry. Diamond is the hardest known natural mineral. This makes it an excellent abrasive and makes it hold polish and luster extremely well. No known naturally occurring substance can cut (or even scratch) a diamond, except another diamond.
The market for industrial-grade diamonds operates much differently from its gem-grade counterpart. Industrial diamonds are valued mostly for their hardness and heat conductivity, making many of the gemological characteristics of diamond, including clarity and color, mostly irrelevant. This helps explain why 80% of mined diamonds (equal to about 100 million carats or 20 tonnes annually) are unsuitable for use as gemstones and known as bort, are destined for |
ra said.
Peake, Kopra and Russian crewmate Yuri Malenchenko will return to Earth on Saturday (June 18), about two weeks later than originally planned. While in space for his six-month mission, Peake ran a full marathon on the space station's treadmill during the London Marathon on Earth, clocking a time of just over 3.5 hours.
Follow Elizabeth Howell @howellspace, or Space.com @Spacedotcom. We're also on Facebook and Google+. Originally published on Space.com.First, I was so flattered and thrilled when Meg asked me to write a little on how to plan an at home wedding. I’m excited to share Jeremy and my wedding with you all. Here is what worked for us and what I would’ve done differently, and some funny stories while we’re at it.
But before I get started, a disclaimer. This was a second wedding and marriage for both Jeremy and me. I had already had the big white wedding in the backyard of a mansion surrounded by twinkle lights and white cake. I was kind of embarrassed about making a big to-do about my second time to say “I do.” I asked Jeremy if we could elope at the courthouse and from there live happily ever after, but he felt strongly about making this commitment to each other in front of our nearest and dearest. He felt like our love deserved a celebration. And he was right.
{Yes, it was 2009 and yes I had a yellow balloon bouquet. I still love it.}
Jeremy and I had spent the summer prior to our wedding remodeling a historical house built in 1929. Together we made our place our home. When we decided to go through with a wedding, getting married in our home seemed like the obvious venue.
So on to the details (and I think lots of this advice can be applied to a more traditional wedding as well):
{Our modest home and the location for our wedding}
How To Plan An affordable At Home Wedding
If you want to have an at home wedding, consider the space. Our home is only 1,500 square feet so we made almost every single room open and available for guests to mingle and sit in. We had about 30 people at the ceremony and then opened up the home for a reception in the evening where guests could pop in and out as they pleased. I think at most we had 60 people in our house at once and at times it felt like a tight squeeze.
You might also consider using the fabulous home of a close friend or family member (if they’re open to the idea). I have some friends that got married in their parent’s gorgeous backyard. But as always, have an indoor alternative in case weather gets crazy.
The great thing about getting married in your own home is the flexibility you have to get things ready in advance. However, that didn’t keep me from procrastinating down to the very last minute. Learn from my mistakes, people!
CLEAN HOUSE:
If you’re getting married in your home you will need to make the place spotless. I would recommend doing this a whole week prior to your wedding. If I were to do it over again I would hire a cleaning company to come in to do all of the deep cleaning. Trust me, there was nothing romantic about mopping down our wood floors, sticky with spilled liquor, the morning after our wedding.
DECORATIONS:
Along with a spotless house I recommend creating a festive atmosphere through lighting and decoration. We filled our house with tea lights, placed strands of twinkle lights under our furniture, used lamps instead of overhead lights and hung a ton of white lanterns from our ceilings. We also bought inexpensive wild flowers from a local grocer and placed them in pretty vintage vases around the house. I also advise getting your decorations up and ready the weekend before your wedding – for whatever reason we waited until the morning of, and it was stressful.
FOOD / CATERING / ALCOHOL:
We planned our at home wedding with a tight budget. However, we knew we wanted to feed our guests well. We also wanted the overall vibe of our wedding to be like a classy house party – so guests were welcome to grab food and drinks as they arrived.
The Spread: My sister put together and arranged all the finger foods (bought at our local grocery store) on a mishmash of vintage china arranged at different heights. It’s amazing what a unique serving bowl will do for a can of mixed nuts.
My sister put together and arranged all the finger foods (bought at our local grocery store) on a mishmash of vintage china arranged at different heights. It’s amazing what a unique serving bowl will do for a can of mixed nuts. The BBQ: It’s kind of ironic, now that Jeremy and I are both vegetarians, that we had fancy BBQ at our wedding. But we did this because it was easy enough to order X lbs. of meat and sides for X number of people. They came in trays and everyone was welcome to help themselves, buffet style.
It’s kind of ironic, now that Jeremy and I are both vegetarians, that we had fancy BBQ at our wedding. But we did this because it was easy enough to order X lbs. of meat and sides for X number of people. They came in trays and everyone was welcome to help themselves, buffet style. The Cake: A fabulous and talented friend of mine gifted me and Jeremy cupcakes for our wedding. It was perfect – not too fancy and again, fit the “help yourself” vibe we had going on.
A fabulous and talented friend of mine gifted me and Jeremy cupcakes for our wedding. It was perfect – not too fancy and again, fit the “help yourself” vibe we had going on. The Alcohol: We had beer, huge bottles of wine and sweet tea vodka in pitchers available for our guests to help themselves
{All professional photography by the very talented Simon Hurst}
THE PHOTOGRAPHY:
Jeremy and I actually scheduled a professional shoot for just the two of us a few weekends prior to our wedding. On our actual wedding day we gave our friends Polaroid cameras and had no professional photos taken. Again, this helped keep the energy of the celebration more like a party and less like a fussy wedding. The advantage of getting married in your home is that you have the flexibility to do photos, on location, way in advance. I wouldn’t necessarily recommend doing it this way but it worked for us.
{One of the only photos we have of the actual ceremony}
THE CEREMONY:
Usually when you get married at a church, or venue that uses an event coordinator, you don’t have to worry about things like, oh… getting your sideshow performer brother who lives in Coney Island ordained so he can legally perform the ceremony and have it recognized by the state of Oklahoma. It involved a little bit of paperwork and timing. I’m still not certain it was all entirely legal, though. And if you are religious you may need to find a minister (or whatever else you call religious folk) who is willing to perform the ceremony in your home…
Those were the logistical details. Now…
THE PERFECTLY IMPERFECT WEDDING
AKA WHAT WENT RIGHT (+) and WHAT WENT WRONG (-):
+ We had amazing help from friends and family. One word: Delegate. I cannot stress this enough when planning a wedding. I had my sister and sister-in-law organizing and picking up food. My brother and cousin were hanging paper lanterns. My best friend was decorating my mantle with bell jars and tea lights. Don’t try to do it all yourself. You can’t and if you try you’ll hate yourself for it.
– Our guests showed up early. Because it was at our house (where we often have parties and guests) said guests felt like it would be okay to arrive up to an hour early. I was literally in my overalls hanging lanterns when people started showing up. It was embarrassing (that I didn’t have everything done yet) and stressful (that people were showing up early). It’s another reason to get all your decorating done prior to the wedding day.
– There was a freak snowstorm. It was March 28 and it was supposed to be beautiful outside. We were going to get married on our back deck and have a lovely outdoor wedding. That morning a freak snowstorm came in and we had to think on our toes.
+ We decided to get married in our living room – and it was even more perfect than I could have imagined.
– We never rehearsed. Even just a little walk through of the order of events, how we’d make our appearance, etc. would’ve been helpful but it’s a step we completely neglected to take.
– Our cat started licking his balls in front of us right in the middle of our ceremony. My sister was doing a reading of The Rainbow Connection (which was beautiful) and Mister Boots plopped right down in front of us and started licking his balls. It was hilarious but completely took away from the sweet moment of the reading. So, my advice – have your pets boarded for the weekend.
+ The guest book – we used the chalkboard wall in my office as the guest book. It was perfect and a lot of fun for our guests.
– The decorations caught fire before, during and after the ceremony. Apparently it’s not a great idea to put more than two tea lights in a glass jar.
+ The budget – Our entire wedding cost $2,250. Partially due to the generosity of our talented friends, hand-me-down heirloom rings, a BCBG dress from the mall, and of course a free(ish) venue.
– A casual house party vibe + liquor can make for very drunk friends who pass out and puke in your bath tub before the night is over. This is fine for any other Saturday but when it’s your wedding and you only have one bathroom in your little historical home it can make it a little awkward for your guests.
– Having to pee in the backyard in your wedding dress – because of said friend passed out and puking in the tub.
+ Having to pee in the backyard in your wedding dress – it actually makes for a really funny story. So we’ll put this back into the what went right column.
{Of all the photos from our wedding this is my favorite.}
In conclusion, I learned that an at home wedding made for a really good time. It felt incredibly personal and special getting married in our own space. However, planning a wedding can get stressful no matter how casual you try and keep it. My biggest advice is to roll with the punches and remember what you’re celebrating. It was all the things that went wrong that made our wedding so perfectly imperfect. So us.
Photos: First one by Calin Peters. Most by friends and family, Pro-photos by Simon Hurst Photography in Oklahoma CityThe 19th England batsman to score a Test century on debut brought up the milestone with an audacious reverse-swept four off an India spinner
At 5am on Thursday Keaton Jennings jumped out of bed in a state of blind panic, convinced he had slept through his alarm and missed the team bus.
Nine hours later, with a couple more heart-in-mouth moments along the way, the 24-year-old was raising his bat at the Wankhede Stadium in celebration after becoming the 19th England batsman to taste the sweet success of scoring a Test century on debut.
It is not possible to be certain, given a list that stretches back to the pre-YouTube days of WG Grace scoring 152 against Australia at The Oval in 1880, but it is fair to assume that Jennings was the first to bring up the milestone with a reverse-swept four off the spinner.
This was a moment of nerveless audacity from the left-hander on 96, who only three days earlier had begun life as part of the senior England squad after flying in from the Lions camp in Dubai as a replacement for the injured Haseeb Hameed.
Haseeb Hameed says Keaton Jennings’ dazzling debut great for English cricket Read more
“I looked at the scoreboard and thought: ‘Would I rather get caught at slip defending or would I rather get caught going for my hundred?’ So I bit the bullet, went for it, and thankfully I connected and it went for four,” Jennings said after stumps.
“I had seen 96 on the board but when I hit it the ground went a bit dull. I thought I had mucked up and got it wrong. But then I realised. In that moment you don’t want to go ballistic but the emotion, elation and pride and satisfaction that came over me was really special. It’s been a dream come true and it’s just surreal that it’s come on debut.”
If control (and occasional brutality) was the hallmark of his 112 then things began in shaky fashion when, on nought, Jennings edged Umesh Yadav to gully in the third over of the day only to find Karun Nair in generous mood. “When the ball looped up to gully, my heart was in my mouth and I just kind of thought: ‘Oh no, you’ve got nought in your first innings.’ I had a little bit of luck, but I suppose that’s the way the game goes sometimes,” said Jennings, who also survived a tight lbw shout on 10 from Bhuvneshwar Kumar.
England’s Keaton Jennings stuns India with century on his Test debut Read more
Like his jumpy body clock in the morning, the near misses served as a wake-up call, after which he displayed all the talents that saw him barge his way into the thoughts of the selectors with his 1,548 runs for Durham as Division One’s top-scorer in 2016 and now sees them pondering who of out himself, Hameed and Alastair Cook will bat at No3 next summer. “Thankfully, it’s not my problem. I hope I can keep going the way I’ve gone today and, I suppose, make it a good problem for them.”
Of course it did not take long for the wags on social media to pipe up with references to his birthplace, Johannesburg, his captaincy of South Africa’s Under-19s or the fact that three of his four predecessors in the club of England centurions on Test debut – Jonathan Trott, Matt Prior and Andrew Strauss – had similarly entered the world more than 8,000 miles south of Buckingham Palace.
Jacques Kallis, scorer of over 13,000 Test runs with a Protea, not the crown and three lions, on his chest, struck a more sombre tone, tweeting: “Yet another one slips through our system. Well played Keaton Jennings.”
These are sensitive times for South African cricket, with three (now former) internationals in recent weeks having signed for English counties before next season – on Kolpak deals – in what is becoming something of an increasing cricketing exodus for reasons both financial and quota-related.
England’s Keaton Jennings stuns India with century on his Test debut Read more
But Jennings did not exploit any loopholes. His mother is English and he is open about the fact that when he renounced his domestic status in South Africa as a player with Gauteng in 2012 and began a four-year qualification period, he made a considered career choice that was open to him.
His father, Ray, a former South Africa wicketkeeper during the country’s years in sporting isolation and who honed his game from a young age, told him the English game represented the best place for him to live out his own dream.
It was also a decision that reflected how at home he had been made to feel when joining the Durham academy the previous year. The accent may always be more biltong than Byker Grove but speak to those involved in the rise of Jennings and they will tell you about a young man who is loyal, hard-working, honest and very much part of the furniture. Little wonder they are desperate for him to stay, given he could enact an exit clause in his contract following their enforced relegation for financial reasons.
Jennings, who was presented his new cap in the morning by the club’s chairman-elect, Ian Botham, was the 10th England cricketer to roll off their production line and his innings, like the measured unbeaten 25 from his county team-mate Ben Stokes that steered the side to stumps, is the latest reminder of the debt the country owes them.Walt Disney World was one of many places where you couldn’t use Google Wallet, but that is no longer true. Disney, as a part of Apple’s inner circle of besties, has finally added contactless payments. While it was to suit Apple’s own payment system Apple Pay, it’s common knowledge that Google Wallet cleanly works with any terminal that accepts Apple Pay.
The terminals will go live at most point-of-sale systems around the Magic Kingdom this Wednesday, December 24th, though restaurants and shops with portable payment terminals won’t have it until a while later.
It’s worth clarifying that this will only apply to Walt Disney World in Orlando, FL for now, and not the Disneyland resort out in California. That said, if you prefer Disney’s Californian destination it should be ready to go at some point in 2015. Keep all this in mind the next time you and the family decide to spend a week at one of the most interesting places in America.
[via WDWMagic]From Bulbapedia, the community-driven Pokémon encyclopedia.
A Pokémon Day Care (Japanese: ポケモン 育て屋 Pokémon Day Care) is a place for Pokémon Trainers to drop off their Pokémon to be raised in the care of other people. Most locations are staffed by a Day-Care Couple, but some are only staffed by a Day-Care Man and one is staffed by the Day Care Lad and his older sister. Pokémon in Day Care gain one experience point per step the player takes. Where it is possible to leave two Pokémon, it is also possible for them to breed and produce Eggs.
Overview
In the core series, leaving a Pokémon at the Day Care is technically free, but withdrawing it will cost 100 plus an additional 100 for each level the Pokémon has gained.
As they level up in the Day Care, Pokémon will not undergo evolution. If a Pokémon reaches a level where it can learn a new move, it will always learn that move; if the Pokémon already knows four moves, its first move will be forgotten and the new move will be placed last. A Pokémon may even forget HM moves, which normally cannot be replaced, while it is in the Day Care.
While the Day Cares in Orre and Kanto can only raise one Pokémon at a time, all other Day Cares can raise two Pokémon at once. If the player leaves two Pokémon of opposite genders and the same Egg Group at a Day Care (or any Pokémon that can breed and a Ditto), an Egg may be produced.
In Pokémon Colosseum, if a Shadow Pokémon is left at the Day Care, it will gradually be purified. In Pokémon XD, however, Shadow Pokémon can no longer be left at the Day Care.
In Generations I and II, when a Pokémon is taken out of the Day Care, its experience will lower to the minimum value for its current level. Also in Generation I, the Day-Care Man will not accept any Pokémon that knows an HM move.
In Pokémon Black and White, the Pokémon Day Care will initially only raise one Pokémon at a time; two Pokémon may be left after the player has received the Bicycle in Nimbasa City. In Pokémon Black 2 and White 2, the Pokémon Day Care isn't accessible until the player has defeated the Pokémon League, as Skyarrow Bridge is blocked until the player has completed the game.
Alola does not have a Pokémon Day Care. Instead, its primary functions are split between Poké Pelago's Isle Evelup for leveling up and Paniola Ranch's Pokémon Nursery for breeding.
Locations
This section is incomplete.
Please feel free to edit this section to add missing information and complete it.
Reason: Agate Village Day Care image.
In the anime
Several Pokémon Day Cares have been shown in the anime.
In the manga
In the Pokémon Adventures manga
The Day-Care Couple on Route 34 in Johto helped Gold, by letting him train on the Pokémon entrusted to them. This training helped Exbo evolve into Quilava, after which he perseveres harder and accumulates enough experience for Polibo, Gold's Poliwag, to eventually evolve into a Poliwhirl during their stay in Ecruteak City. They also taught him to battle without his billiards cue and goggles, as well as how to exploit type advantages.
At the end of this chapter, Diamond, Pearl, and Platinum were seen at the Solaceon Day Care with Manaphy and Phione. The Day-Care Couple from Johto also appears, telling the trio about a boy they once knew, having known to affect a Pokémon's personality before hatching.
In the Pokémon Gold & Silver: The Golden Boys manga
In Pokémon Gold & Silver: The Golden Boys, the Day-Care Couple are young, as opposed to the usual older couple. In Let's Use Fighting Type Pokémon!!, they invite Gold to a tournament run by the Day-Care Center, and in A Huge Mysterious Tree!!, they give him a Pokémon Egg.
In other languages
See alsoOn Wednesday’s The View, co-host Joy Behar gushed over Bernie Sanders’ performance at last night’s CNN Democratic debate and she proclaimed that the Socialist “aroused” her.
The liberal ABC host gushed that Sanders was so “menschy in that moment like a real guy” when he defended Hillary Clinton from scrutiny over her e-mail scandal and insisted that she “find[s] him to be eye candy, not ear candy, eye candy.”
Behar continued to swoon over Sanders as she eagerly said “I like an old Jewish guy who's a socialist. That's my type of guy. Everybody is talking about O'Malley and how hot he was, but to me Bernie is hot.”
Not to be outdone, co-host Michelle Collins showed her affection for former Maryland Governor Martin O’Malley and his “rock hard man things”:
There are some pictures, ladies, everyone gird your loins. That O'Malley, let me tell you something, if I wasn’t voting with my head, I think we know who would be getting my vote. I am in love. Look he his abs. That’s no dad bod....Those are rock hard man things.
See relevant transcript below.Published by Sierra Monica P. on September 15, 2010 under Decor
California-based company Greensound Technology develops and provides these beautiful glass speakers featuring a patented technology. They are the world’s first wireless speakers made of glass featuring high-fidelity 360-degree sound based on sound projection through glass.
The company offers several speaker models and subwoofers in the Floe Glass Speaker Series and the Serac Series, which you can read more about on the official site.
An example are the Serac glass speakers with illumination system that changes the light color and pattern to match different moods and ambiances. These feature 25W output, 8Ohms impedance, 300Hz-15kHz frequency response, 90.6dB, 12V power input and a size of 21.5 x 43 x 65.5 inches at 246.18lb.
Seen on technabob; Source: Greensound Press Release
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Tags: glass, speaker, wirelessEfforts to destroy the threat posed by the Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham (ISIS) is not enough, said President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan yesterday, adding that the Assad regime annihilating towns like Kobani every day should also be targeted. Erdoğan also said that Turkey would continue the fight against ISIS but was careful not to fall into traps and had demands from the U.S., including a no-fly zone and a safe zone.
In an address from Istanbul's Marmara University, Erdoğan reiterated the necessity of forming a no-fly zone and a safe zone in Syria, along with continuing the U.S.-led international airstrikes on ISIS targets in northern Syria.
ISIS is currently advancing on the town of Kobani resulting in the fleeing of around 200,000 Syrian Kurds into Turkey over the last three weeks. The armed People's Protection Units (YPG) of an offshoot of Turkey's outlawed PKK are continuing their fight against ISIS but are outmatched in number and technological capacity.
"Syria has many Kobanis. What will happen to Aleppo, Latakia, Turkmens and other people after saving Kobani? The Assad regime should be the target for a real solution in Syria," Erdoğan said, noting that the regime is responsible for the killing of 250,000 people in Syria.
"A no-fly zone and a safe zone should be built so we can be able to place the Syrians inside our country at these safe havens," he said.
"Also, the moderates should be trained and equipped either in Turkey or inside those safe zones so they can be able to conduct their war against the regime."
He also criticized the PKK's claims that the Turkish government was doing nothing to halt the advance of ISIS in Kobani, which sparked last week's protests in which 34 people died.
He also criticized the leftist Peoples' Democratic Party (HDP) for its call to the people to take to the streets in support of Kobani.
Erdoğan said "the artificially-made" borders in the Middle East drawn by the imperial powers after the end of World War I are the real cause of the long-term pain and crisis in the region.
He said "there should be no borders between Middle Eastern countries in the minds and hearts of the people," and noted that Turkey should do its own part in fighting with sectarianism, racism and all other divisions in the Middle East.
"Turkey is the only country that can provide peace in the region. Turkey is the hope of Middle Eastern people. Turkey can remove the barriers between Middle Easterners, not by changing physical borders, but by instilling hope and trust," he said.
Reiterating that Turkey has three demands from the U.S., including a no-fly zone, safe zone and training and equipment for Syrian opposition groups on which the countries agreed, Erdoğan said, "We'll continue to fight ISIS but we won't fall into traps. We have demands."
"Why do Sunnis and Shiites clash? I openly tell you why. It's because those who drew the map wanted it like this."The Florida Panthers will play the second half of their home-and-home series with the Tampa Bay Lightning tonight. The first game was a wacky 5-4 shootout win for the Panthers on Saturday night, but this game ought to have a much different feel to it.
I say this because the two teams will have very different line-ups tonight, considering the last meeting was only two nights ago.
Let’s get the very big news out of the way first: Aleksander Barkov will return to the ice tonight, much to the relief of all Panthers fans. His defensive game and offensive creativity have been sorely missed during the last few weeks. It’ll be interesting to see who Gerard Gallant skates with Barkov, but I bet he’ll find a way to return Jaromir Jagr and Jonthan Huberdeau to his wings. The three just have such a great rapport.
Not all the injury news is good news for the Panthers, however. Dmitry Kulikov will sit this game out, as he’s sidelined for the next week or so with a lower body injury. Steven Kampfer will fill Kulikov’s spot on the blue line and pair with Alex Petrovic. It’ll be an interesting dynamic between the two, since Petrovic beat out Kampfer for the sixth defenseman role at the season’s beginning. Kampfer has only played in one game so far this season, and it was an utterly forgettable game for him against the Chicago Blackhawks. He’ll have a chance for redemption if he perform well against another tough team in the Lightning.
But the Tampa Bay Lightning are not all the way healthy themselves — far from it. Like last game, Ondrej Palat will be out of commission. But joining him will be forwards Tyler Johnson, Cedric Paquette, and Jonathan Drouin. It’s a big offensive hit for the Lightning by losing Johnson, and a big drop in the team’s depth by losing two-thirds of its fourth line. The Lightning have called up Mike Blunden and Jonathan Marchessault from the AHL, and Matt Taormina will be activated from the healthy scratch list. It’ll be worth it to see how much ice time and responsibility that Lightning coach Jon Cooper will give to this makeshift fourth line.
But outside of the those missing players, the Lightning still have offense to burn. Steven Stamkos was extremely active in Saturday’s game especially skating with Vladislav Namestnikov. Ryan Callahan will skate on the right wing with that duo, and Valtteri Filppula will be the second line center in Johnson’s absence. Alex Killorn and Nikita Kucherov are extremely dangerous in their own right, and will most likely skate with Filppula. Don’t make the mistake of sleeping on this Lightning offense, despite the injuries to the forward group.
The goaltending duel will also have a wrinkle. Instead of Ben Bishop in net, Cooper will opt for Andrei Vasilevskiy. But unfortunately for the Panthers, Vasilevskiy is a budding star himself, and not necessarily a step down from Bishop. Vasilevskiy still has great size (6’3″, 207 lbs) and good stats (.924 SV%, 2.37 GAA), and it’ll be a challenge to beat him. Roberto Luongo will start for the Panthers for the fifth straight game. The Lightning had plenty of trouble solving him when he wasn’t falling down or passing the puck to Lightning players. I’m a little surprised that Al Montoya wouldn’t start one of the games in a home-and-home series, but Gallant might sense Luongo is starting to heat up again.
With or without goaltending, the key once again for the Panthers is to find a way to score. The Law of Three Goals still applies for the Panthers: if they reach three goals, they’ve gotten two points every time. You know the Lightning will be itching to get a win from their rivals after squandering the first game, so don’t expect them to lay down in Sunrise tonight. The Panthers will have to get another good team performance to win.
But here’s some bizarre and welcome news:
A #FlaPanthers win and a #RedWings loss tonight would put the Cats in 3rd place in the Atlantic Division with 19 points. Tight race so far. — David Dwork (@DavidDwork) November 16, 2015
What beer are we drinkin’? I tried this yesterday and I wasn’t unsatisfied: Blue Moon Gingerbread Spiced Ale. It’s starting to feel a lot like Christmas, as the song goes. This beer tastes like Christmas was ground up in a blender and carbonated. This seasonal offering from Blue Moon tastes very much like it sounds. There’s a heavy gingerbread and molasses flavor at first, and it fades into more Christmas spice-y flavors on the palate. It has some heavy flavor, so it’s not ideal to pound during a Christmas party, but its seasonal to be sure.
What song are we singin’? “Tyler” – Toadies. Tyler is the second good song off the Toadies’ Rubberneck album, the other being “Possum Kingdom”. They were two of the best songs to come out of the grunge-era 90s, but strangely enough the band had trouble getting the most out of their songs: neither song featured the song’s title in the lyrics, making it difficult for a pre-internet music fan to actually know what song they were listening to. But we have the internet now, so we can appreciate Rubberneck as much as we want.Image: Flickr/Backbone Campaign
A full draft of the copyright chapter of the massive Trans-Pacific Partnership trade deal, leaked on Wednesday morning, suggests that Canada will have to significantly change its laws to stay in line with the treaty's wide-ranging rules on everything from internet piracy to copyright terms.
The chapter, dated from May 11, 2015, was previously leaked to journalists but not to the public, and was only released in full today by Knowledge Economy International, a public policy non-profit. The draft shows that there is still significant disagreement on certain issues between the 12 participating countries, which together make up 40 percent of the world's GDP. Even so, the TPP could still result in significant changes for Canadian law.
The draft shows that 10 countries unequivocally support mandatory criminal penalties for altering or removing "rights management information" (RMI) like a digital watermark, or the name of a song and the artist who recorded it. For example, songs purchased through Apple's iTunes music store—which restricts playback to a handful of computers—includes an RMI file in every song; under new TPP rules, removing this file would be criminalized.
"Behind closed doors and in secret, Canada will have already agreed to make these changes"
Canada is the only country to oppose this change. According to University of Ottawa internet law professor Michael Geist, this provision, if adopted, would require Canada to amend its Copyright Act, which was just revamped in 2012.
"Based on the leak that we've seen, the TPP would result in a significant overhaul of Canadian copyright law," Geist said. "It would create new reforms to digital locks provisions, particularly relating to rights management information, that would result in new criminal penalties that don't exist in copyright law today."
While the 2012 update to the Copyright Act was arrived at after nearly a decade of hearings and public debate, the new crimes and punishments laid out in the TPP are being hammered out in highly secretive negotiations.
In the US, takedown notices under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act operate under a rather automatic "notice-and-takedown" approach, which often results in false claims being acted upon. In Canada, however, things are a little more chill: everybody involved gets a good old fashioned bureaucratic notice before anything happens, and the internet service provider involved has no obligation to remove the infringing content themselves. That's up to the courts.
The TPP seeks to make US-style copyright takedowns the global norm, although the leaked draft contains a special caveat for Canada. But it comes at a cost: internet service providers must "remove or disable access" to infringing material after a court deems it to be so. This could mean that the TPP will mandate the ability to block access to websites.
Watch more from Motherboard - Interview with Bruce Schneier
'We don't have website blocking provisions under Canadian copyright law," Geist said. He added, "The TPP is dictating what the changes are. There is really no public debate or discussion. Behind closed doors and in secret, Canada will have already agreed to make these changes."
The leaked chapter also shows that there is still significant disagreement between countries. It's long been known that the US has been leading a push to extend copyright terms, for example, although the proposed term length itself—life plus 70 years—is still in brackets in the leaked draft. Meanwhile, a section that allows for compensation to be awarded to victims of copyright abuse—a shady takedown notice, for example—has a single, but powerful, dissenter: the US.
if the latest TPP leak is any indication, some important changes to our laws might actually be decided behind closed doors, away from the eyes of the public—changes that could mean inventing criminal acts where they didn't exist before, and forcing internet companies to block your access to the web.Means Street is a short narrow road near train tracks west of Georgia Tech. Square nondescript brick buildings rise up on each side.
As Bill Gould walks up the street, he says it gets its name from an early Atlanta landowner, Alexander Means. That name is part of what first drew Gould here almost 30 years ago.
“All these buildings were largely abandoned, covered in Kudzu with the windows all missing. And it was really beautiful, but a little bit edgy, scary and mean, so,” Gould says.
Gould ended up buying one of those buildings. Like many of the property owners on this street, he repurposed it. He turned it into lofts, where he’s lived since.
He points it out, a factory from the late 1800s.
“It used to be the Standard Oil Kentucky building,” Gould says. “It’s one of a number of buildings on Means street that were devoted to the petroleum industry at the turn of the century.”
The oil produced here supplied downtown Atlanta, he says.
Several other buildings down the street were for manufacturing, hundred year-old furniture plants. Around the corner, there are also early storefronts, dating back to the 1930s.
All of this, Gould says, makes it a special place.
“It’s really an entire block that has been preserved and left off the radar of Atlanta’s recent development,” Gould says.
Now, it could remain off that radar. The city has proposed making the dozen or so buildings around Means Street a historic district, because of their ties to west Atlanta’s early economy.
The area got the city’s attention because one building here was threatened recently. It was an old retail space that became a Georgia Tech mainstay, the Engineer’s Bookstore.
Its new owner wanted to demolish it to build a gas station. And that prompted an outcry from preservationists and people in the surrounding neighborhoods.
But many of the other property owners around Means Street are not happy with the city’s solution.
“This came down on our heads like a ton of bricks,” says Derek Aynsley, president of Aderhold Properties.
His company owns several of the buildings in the small proposed district. One is a converted music studio. Another, the Roxy Hotel, is apartments.
Aynsley says, the majority of the property owners don’t want the extra rules that come with a historic district.
“It is extremely onerous in its denial of pre-existing property right. What can be done to the property into the future and more importantly what cannot be done,” he says.
For example, if he wants new windows on the warehouses he owns, he says he’ll need the city’s permission.
Ainsley says the historic district just seems like a ploy to keep a gas station from replacing a plain, one-story brick building.
“I would ask you to justify for me under what sets of standards, either architectural or cultural merit, that building deserves preserving,” Aynsley says.
The Atlanta Contemporary Art Center, whose home is along Means Street, is also opposing the designation. The director there says she worries it could stunt the organization’s growth.
The benefit of preserving Means Street, however, may outweigh the property owners’ concerns, according to City Council Member Ivory Young, who represents the area.
“It is really an asset for the whole city,” Young says.
Young also says the historic designation has support beyond the Means Street district, in the adjacent neighborhoods and in the rest of Atlanta.
“Means Street is an area that has a one of a kind flare and flavor,” Young says. “If we don’t take some extraordinary measures to protect that asset, |
may be unique to that organism or environment. Regardless, the ice crystal controlling nature of these proteins has been exploited in many biotechnical applications over the last two decades.
The most common application for antifreeze protein is the enhancement of cryopreservation of biological materials. Antifreeze protein treatments protect against freezing damage to cell membranes and their associated proteins by preventing large ice crystals or spicules development [90, 91]. In the medical field, these treatments have improved storage of oocytes and red blood cells as well as cryosurgery tissue preservation [90–92]. However, toxic levels of antifreeze proteins can induce intracellular ice formation leading to destruction of cells [93]. Within the food industry, antifreeze protein treatments aim to maintain food quality while increasing shelf life. Antifreeze protein injections reduced drip loss in frozen meats [94]. For frozen foods, antifreeze proteins help retain fermentation abilities of yeast in frozen dough and smooth texture in ice cream [95, 96].
Recently, antifreeze proteins have been considered for non-preservation based applications including use as hydrocarbon hydrate inhibitors and biopolymers [97, 98]. Most recently, antifreeze proteins have been tested to maintain mist quality of fire hydrants in subzero environments [99].
Ice nucleation proteins, mainly from Pseudomonas syringae, have been used in the recreation and food industries. These environmentally safe and efficient proteins have replaced inorganic equivalents such as silver iodide [96]. Able to induce ice crystal formation at warmer temperatures, ice nucleation proteins have also been used to create artificial snow (e.g., Snowmax) for recreational use. For food applications, ice nucleation proteins have been used in juice and beer preparation. These proteins induce freezing at higher temperature allowing a more energy efficient concentrating process [100].
Outside of the industry, ice nucleation proteins have research applications as well. Exploiting the cell surface anchoring capabilities, recombinant proteins linked to ice nucleation proteins have been expressed as fusion proteins to be displayed on the cell surface of the expression host [101]. Only limited by proper folding, these heterologous proteins have been used as biosensors and biosorbents. More importantly, this system can eventually lead to the cell surface display of antigenic epitopes. Consequently, a live bacterium expressing a recombinant antigen, fused to anchored ice nucleation proteins, on its cell surface can be used as a vaccine delivery system to elicit an immune response. Another research application includes using ice nucleation proteins as a reporter gene. One study used the protein to measure the transcriptional activity of ipdC and iaaM genes [102]. Transcription levels were measured based on ice nucleation activity of the fusion where activity increases as the square of protein abundance [103].
Instead of purified proteins, viable ice nucleation active bacteria are being considered for agricultural use as biocontrol agents for insect pests. Transgenic Enterobacter cloacae expressing an ina gene from Erwinia ananas was shown to increase the freezing temperature of corn borer and cotton bollworm following ingestion [61]. Tang and colleagues [62] report stable colonization in insect larvae by the transgenic bacterium for at least 9 days and poor colonization in plants. This method was seen to be quite effective, as 80% of treated larvae froze after exposure to −5°C for 3 hours and 100% of treated larvae froze at −7°C for 12 hours. However, one major drawback of this approach is the lack of immediate results. Thus, farmers are likely to opt for different methods of pesticide control.
Both ice crystal controlling proteins are prevalent globally in a wide variety of psychrophilic bacteria. With a focus on freeze tolerance, bacterial antifreeze proteins are known for a low level of non-colligative freezing point depression with greater emphasis on ice recrystallization inhibition. Superior ice recrystallization inhibition is utilized for improved survivability against freeze-thaw stress common to temperate, non-Antarctic environments. On the other hand, bacterial ice nucleation proteins induce ice crystal formation at high subzero temperatures and can influence precipitation in the atmosphere. For both antifreeze and ice nucleation proteins, only a small number of bacterial sources of these enzymes have been studied in any detail and very few of these bacterial enzymes have been isolated and characterized at the protein structure level. However, the suggested mechanism for both protein classes features the same ice crystal interactions, using an ordered ice-like hydration layer, with protein functions differentiated based on protein size.
Conflict of Interests
The authors declare that there is no conflict of interests regarding the publication of this paper.New Cineca Supercomputer ‘MARCONI’ now available for Italian and European research
Deployment of this Lenovo system based on Intel® Architecture, with peak performance of 20Pflop/s, to start mid-April.
Casalecchio di Reno (Bologna), April 13, 2016 — The deployment of this new Italian supercomputer for research, co-designed by Cineca and based on the Lenovo NeXtScale platform, will begin in the middle of April. The new supercomputer, based on the next-generation of the Intel® Xeon Phi™ product family alongside with Intel® Xeon® processor E5-2600 v4 product family, will offer the scientific community a technologically advanced and energy-efficient high performance computing system.
The acquisition agreement was signed on March 30, after a negotiated selection procedure which started more than a year ago via a European tender published in April 2015. The procedure was closed in December 2015, awarding the realisation of the computing system to Lenovo, one of the three major global manufacturers in the Intel x86 architecture-based server market and the world’s #1 PC company for over two years in a row (source: IDC).
This achievement represents the first step of the Italian infrastructure development plan put forward by the Cineca governing bodies, aimed at supporting scientific research. The global plan entails an investment of Euro 50 million in two phases. The first, just started, will make available to the scientific community a computational power of about 20Pflop/s and a data storage capacity of more than 20 petabytes, which will go into production, reaching completion in the second half of 2017. The second phase will start during 2019, with a final goal to increase available computing power to approximately 50 to 60 Pflop/s by 2020.
“With this plan, Cineca reaffirms its institutional mission to offer a digital infrastructure of excellence for computing and Big Data, available to scientific research and technological innovation,” said Emilio Ferrari, President of Cineca.
The installation of the supercomputer
The new system, logically named ‘MARCONI’, will gradually be completed in little more than 12 months, between April 2016 and July 2017, according to a plan based on a series of updates:
A preliminary system will go into production in June. This will be based on the recently announced Intel® Xeon® processor E5-2600 v4 product family, based on Intel’s x86 architecture, and is designed to reach a computational power of 2Pflop/s.
By the end of the year a new section will be added, equipped with the next-generation of the Intel Xeon Phi product family (codenamed Knights Landing), based on a many-core architecture, enabling an overall configuration of about 250 thousand cores with expected additional computational power of approximately 11Pflop/s.
Finally, in the near future, this system is planned to reach a total computational power of about 20Pflop/s utilizing future generation Intel Xeon processors.
This supercomputer takes advantage of the new Intel® Omni-Path Architecture, which provides the high performance interconnectivity required to efficiently scale the system’s thousands of servers.
A high-performance Lenovo GSS storage subsystem, that integrates the IBM Spectrum Scale™ (GPFS) file system, is connected to the Intel Omni-Path Fabric and provides data storage capacity.
The progressive development of the Marconi system will allow use of state-of-the-art processor technology, enabling an extremely high-performance system but still with a ‘green’ soul. One of the parameters of the project developed by the Cineca team is in fact to gradually increase the computational power up to 50Pflop/s without exceeding, at any stage, the limit of 3MW power consumption.
“By providing the most powerful supercomputing systems, we will enable researchers to address the major scientific and socio-economic challenges of our time, spanning from precision medicine to climate change, from fundamental physics to new materials. Supercomputing and Big Data analytics are essential tools for computational and data-driven science for national and international research", said Sanzio Bassini, Director of Supercomputing and Innovation Department at Cineca.
"We can only be proud, both as a company and as an Italian team, to have been chosen by Cineca for a system of enormous national and international scientific relevance", said Mirko Poggi, Country General Manager/M.D., Lenovo Italy. “This implementation is particularly important to reaffirm Lenovo’s commitment to be a leading provider of innovative solutions for the Data Center” added Alessandro de Bartolo, Data Center Group Country Leader, Lenovo Italy. “We are ready to take all the necessary steps to ensure the best possible computational and energy performance from the architecture which will be realised at Cineca, in order to benefit the wider community that will use it", concluded Marco Briscolini, Manager of the High Performance Computing segment of Data Center Group, Lenovo Italy.
“We are delighted for the opportunity to bring the benefits of the Intel® Scalable System Framework to the Cineca community of leading Italian researchers and data scientists. Intel’s highly interoperable and performance-optimized suite of HPC products--including Intel® Xeon® processors, Intel® Xeon Phi™ processors, and Intel® Omni-Path Architecture–provides a balanced design that delivers the enormous performance and scalability needed to tackle the extreme challenges of both HPC and big data analytics on a common infrastructure”, says Carmine Stragapede, General Manager of Intel Italia.
About Cineca
Cineca is an inter-university computing consortium based in Casalecchio di Reno, Italy. Founded in 1969, this non-profit consortium is made up of 70 Italian universities, 5 research institutions and the Ministry of Education, University and Research (MIUR). It has been proving support for over forty years to research activities of the scientific community through supercomputing and its applications, thanks to a technology infrastructure among the most powerful in the world. It creates management systems for university administrations and MIUR and it designs and develops information systems for enterprises, healthcare and public administration.
About Lenovo
Lenovo is a $46 billion global Fortune 500 company and a leader in providing innovative technology and services in different market segments: consumer, business and large public and private companies. Lenovo is a world leader in manufacturing and selling PCs, workstations, servers, storage, smart TVs and a family of mobile products like smartphones and tablets. www.lenovo.com.
Intel, Xeon, Xeon Phi and Omni-Path Architecture are trademarks or registered trademarks of Intel Corporation in the United States and other countries.(Health.com) -- When Alexandra Spunt went for a keratin hair treatment at a Los Angeles salon two years ago, she hoped to walk out with two months' worth of silky-straight locks.
What she didn't expect: two hours of burning eyes and a sore throat.
"The stylist offered me goggles because my eyes stung and I couldn't stop coughing," says Spunt, 32.
She was shocked to learn that the treatment likely contained formaldehyde -- deemed a possible human carcinogen by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA).
You've heard that pedicure tubs are teeming with fungus. And you probably know that your waxer shouldn't double-dip. But new dangers have been popping up at salons, and it's hard for clients, regulators, and even salon owners to keep up.
Health.com: 7 salon no-no's
The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has a limited ability to regulate cosmetic ingredients, says Claudia Polsky, a deputy attorney general in California's Environment Law section. For instance, "the FDA cannot require ingredient labeling on products intended for salon use only," she says.
And there's no federal body overseeing the safety of salons, or how well-trained employees are. That means it's up to you to get informed. Here's what you need to know to stay safe.
Great hair can be dangerous
Walk into a salon offering a keratin treatment, and you may see stylists in masks with fans pointed their way. And with good reason: Formaldehyde has been ID'd as the key active ingredient in many hair-straightening treatments currently offered in salons.
Recently, Oregon's Occupational Health and Safety Administration found the chemical in samples of nine different products -- one of which was actually labeled "formaldehyde-free." Some epidemiological studies have linked exposure to formaldehyde over several months with certain forms of cancer, such as leukemia.
In the short term, it can cause scalp rashes when it comes into contact with the head; when inhaled (whether you're receiving the treatment or sitting next to someone who is), it can lead to burning eyes, nose, and throat, and even asthma attacks if you're prone to them, says Julia Quint, PhD, a retired toxicologist from the California Department of Public Health.
Health.com: 15 ways to be a natural beauty
While it may be possible to get a safe keratin treatment if the salon is properly ventilated, "we're advising that consumers steer clear altogether," says environmental scientist Alexandra Gorman Scranton, who directs science and research for Women's Voices for the Earth, a nonprofit organization that works to eliminate toxic chemicals that have an impact on women's health.
"Formaldehyde sensitivity can vary from person to person, but you won't know you have a problem with it until you get sick."
Some side effects can be as tough as nails
Manicures and pedicures are perhaps the most common salon treatments, but they're not necessarily the safest. A University of Texas study published in the Archives of Dermatology in 2009 reported on two women who'd developed skin cancers on the backs of their hands.
Both frequently used nail dryers that emit UV light. It's unclear how much the dryers might increase your cancer risk, since lesions take years to develop. What we do know is that they've become a fixture in salons everywhere. So until more research is conducted, many dermatologists advise that you slather on sunscreen before your nail tech applies polish, or stick to fan-based dryers, especially if you get your nails done weekly or monthly.
"I will never use a UV light again," says Carolyn Jacob, MD, a spokeswoman for the American Academy of Dermatology and dermatologist in private practice in Chicago. "Yes, this report was only on two patients. But the UV lights drying your nails are primarily made from UVA light, which means there is potential for cell damage, wrinkling, and skin cancer. Go with the fan dryers instead."
Health.com: 7 ways you're aging your skin
Peels aren't always so appealing
There's no denying that they work: Chemical peels can brighten and lighten skin to dramatic effect, and help reduce the appearance of fine lines, wrinkles, and age spots.
But some of these formulas are so powerful that they can cause burns and even scarring if handled incorrectly -- and since they're being used more frequently these days, and in more casual settings (like spas rather than a dermatologist's office), the potential for danger is multiplied.
Nia Terezakis, MD, a clinical professor of dermatology at Tulane University Medical Center and dermatologist in private practice in New Orleans, has seen patients come in with white doughnut shapes around their mouths after getting peels from inexperienced salon technicians who left the solution on for too long, permanently damaging the pigment there.
"There's nothing in the world that will put the color back in your skin after that," Dr. Terezakis says.
Health.com: 8 steps to healthy skin at every age
So if you're at the salon or spa, stick to "light" peels (such as glycolic peels), which have an alpha-hydroxy acid content under 10 percent and pH level above 3.5, per FDA rules.
"Medium or deep peels should only be performed by a dermatologist with experience in giving them," Dr. Terezakis says.
But know that even a light peel can cause a bad reaction if it isn't done properly.
"Glycolic acid peels have to be neutralized after several minutes with a neutralizing solution or water," Dr. Jacob says. "If they're left on too long, they can burn the skin, leaving blisters, scabs, and sometimes permanent redness."
And even beta-hydroxy peels, which self-neutralize -- eliminating the risk of keeping them on too long -- can burn you if the acidic content is higher than it should be, she adds.
Consider the price of beauty
While the experts we spoke with agreed that it's worth minimizing your exposure to salon hazards, nobody recommended going cold turkey on every spa service you love.
But to stay safe, you must do your homework first. Before you try any new treatment -- even if it's just new to you -- "look for any clinical studies on the active ingredients," Dr. Jacob says.
Not comfortable combing through scientific research? Skin Deep has compiled thousands of reports on ingredient safety, and the FDA issues readable consumer warnings on ingredients.
Ask your doctor if she's heard any reports about the dangers of a device or product, or has any specific concerns about its safety or its effects on you. When in doubt, it can't hurt to wait it out until more has been learned about the service in question.
"Don't be a guinea pig!" Dr. Jacob says.
Health.com: 14 health products you probably don't need
And if you have made the educated decision to go in for a treatment, investigate the place you're getting it just as carefully.
"Find out if you know anyone who's been to the salon you're planning to visit" and can report on safety precautions it takes, Dr. Terezakis says. "Check with the Better Business Bureau to see if there have been any complaints. If you're going to a place with a good reputation, they are going to want to conduct business in a way that's safe."
For facial treatments, "trust your dermatologist over anyone else," Dr. Jacob says. Yes, you may have to pay a few bucks more -- but you'll be glad to have someone on hand with years of medical training and experience if something does go wrong.
Copyright Health Magazine 2011In 2021, Kevin Garnett, Kobe Bryant and Tim Duncan could get inducted into the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame. Here’s why that potential HOF class could go down as the greatest ever.
If Kevin Garnett retires this summer, the 2021 Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame class could go down as the greatest in history.
That year, Tim Duncan, Kobe Bryant and Garnett would all be eligible for induction. Never before have three former Most Valuable Player (NBA or ABA) winners entered the same class of greats.
Though the greatest of all-time lists are subjective, most concur that Bryant and Duncan are a shoo-in as top-10 players. The numbers speak for themselves.
Many have Garnett in their top-25. The 2004 MVP is one of only four players in history to win both the Defensive Player of the Year and MVP, with Michael Jordan, Hakeem Olajuwon and David Robinson being the others.
There have been four instances of two MVPs entering the same class.
In 2016, Allen Iverson and Shaquille O’Neal got inducted. In 2009, David Robinson, Michael Jordan and John Stockton got in. If only Stockton had won the MVP! In 1993, Julius Erving and Bill Walton got in. In 1971, Bob Cousy and Bob Pettit get in.
In 2021, Duncan (MVP: 2001-02 and 2002-03), Garnett (MVP: 2003-04) and Bryant (MVP: 2007-08) could share the same stage. That would be unprecedented.
There have five instances of an MVP and a Finals MVP entering the same class:
Any chance KG plays another year?
With Karl-Anthony Towns, Andrew Wiggins and Zach LaVine making rapid strides, Garnett told Steve Aschburner of NBA.com he expects the team to end the 13-year playoff drought this coming season.
As recounted in that same story by Glen Taylor, owner of the Minnesota Timberwolves, Garnett is still torn about his future because he wants to be a part of the exciting young team that has been bolstered by the inclusion of promising point guard Kris Dunn and coach Tom Thibodeau.
“I just asked him, ‘Kevin, what are you going to do?’ His answer was, ‘I’d really like to play next year ‘cuz I’d like to go out knowing we got into the playoffs.’ “Then he said, ‘I don’t know if I can.’ “I asked him, ‘What does that mean?’ And he said, ‘I don’t know.’ “So I asked the question but I didn’t get an answer that helped me. Yes, theoretically, he’d like to play. But he has some doubts of his knees holding up. I believe he told me exactly the truth.”
Garnett, 40, has mentored Towns the same way David Robinson mentored a young Duncan in San Antonio during the late 1990s.
If Garnett were to return for his 22nd NBA season, he would set a new record for the longest career in the NBA. Robert Parish and Kevin Willis played 21 seasons. Kareem-Abdul Jabbar and Bryant finished with 20 seasons while Duncan is about to wind up with 19.
It’s retirement season but the jury is still out on Paul Pierce and Ray Allen. How about Garnett, Pierce and Allen entering the same class? Wouldn’t that be a treat for Boston Celtics fans?
Even if Garnett doesn’t retire, the presence of Bryant and Duncan should be enough to make the 2021 Hall of Fame class one for the ages.Washington (CNN) -- A 21-year-old man who admitted posting online threats against the creators of the animated TV series "South Park" was sentenced Thursday to 25 years in prison.
Zachary Adam Chesser encouraged violent jihadists to attack "South Park" writers for an episode that depicted the Prophet Mohammed in a bear suit, court documents said.
He posted online messages that included the writers' home addresses and urged online readers to "pay them a visit," the documents said.
"His actions caused people throughout the country to fear speaking out -- even in jest -- to avoid being labeled as enemies who deserved to be killed," U.S. Attorney Neil MacBride said. "The fact that a young man from Northern Virginia could support such violence and terror is a sobering reminder of the serious threat that homegrown jihadists pose to this country."
Chesser pleaded guilty in October to providing material support to terrorists, communicating threats and soliciting others to threaten violence. The three charges carried a maximum sentence of 30 years in prison.
"I accept full responsibility for all of my actions, and I would like to take the opportunity to express remorse," he said in court.
Chesser, who was born in the United States, converted to Islam in high school. U.S. District Court Judge Liam O'Grady told Chesser he had made a big leap from being a high school athlete to a traitor.
Chesser also admitted that he tried to go to Somalia to join Al-Shabaab, an Islamic militant group that the United States considers a terrorist organization.Young Geo Professionals Happy Hour @ 21st Amendment
Tuesday, February 18th 5:30 – 7:30 pm
The YGP is hosting our first San Francisco event. Drop by 21st Amendment in (563 2nd St., SF) and say hello! People of all ages and industries are encouraged to attend.
Survey for a drink: As a brand-spanking new organization, we are trying to get a feel for the types of events that will please you people (including those that do not involve beer). Turn in a short survey to receive a free drink ticket for an award-winning beer or glass of wine. Drink tickets are limited, so show up early!
Make a map: Exercise your cartographic license! We provide fill-in-the-blank maps of the Bay Area; you pick the content and create a map with your very own hands. How do you map the city in your head? Is it by street names or bus routes? Is it by coffee shops or boutique diners? Is it by your favorite food trucks?
Strong beer: Hey, did we mention it is Strong Beer Month at 21st Amendment? If highly hopped IPAs are your thing, we suggest you make an appearance. They’ll have nine custom beers on tap for your tasting pleasure.
For more information on the Young Geo Professionals and the San Francisco City College GIS Education Center, check us out at: http://ccsfgis.org/.Terence Winter. Photo: Getty Images
Boardwalk Empire fans can rest assured, Nucky Thompson has gone over the edge and will be full-on gangster in season four. And as anyone who’s watched Sunday’s season three finale knows (and those who haven’t should read no further unless spoilers aren’t a concern), characters like Al Capone, Chalky White, and Richard Harrow are also becoming valuable allies for the man who really runs Atlantic City. To find out more about what’s in store for the large cast of characters, we turned to the man who runs Boardwalk Empire, Terence Winter.
The slogan this season was that you can’t be half a gangster — but it could have also been that you can’t have half a protagonist.
I’m not sure I agree. What do you mean?
Nucky’s finally becoming a whole person: He finally realized that he needs to actually care about the people in his life. He didn’t know Chalky White’s phone number. He didn’t know that Eddie Kessler had a wife and children. He didn’t know that Margaret had fallen in love with Owen. He had underestimated his brother Eli. He thought he was being political and astute about maneuvering relationships, that his understanding of politics elevated him above other gangsters, but all of his various alliances were borne of opportunity, not trust. He didn’t have real relationships.
Then yes. In a broad sense, Nucky has changed. When the guy on the boardwalk says, “Hey, you’re Nucky Thompson,” Nucky doesn’t answer. That’s a very different Nucky from when we first met him. He’s not a glad-handing politician anymore. He’s had some clarity about what matters, who matters, and he’s realizing it might be a good idea to have coffee with the people who are responsible for his life, and ask how their weekends were. When we say, “You can’t be half a gangster,” it’s not just about shooting people. He can’t be half a gangster in the sense that he can’t be half in this life, or half pay attention. He has to pay attention to this business in a deeper way, which is odd for a guy who basically made his way up as a politician, which is supposedly based on personal relationships, but only in the most superficial sense: “What can you do for me?” That was all selfishness and opportunity. So when he says to Eli, “I don’t want anybody coming close to us that we don’t already know,” he’s outlining how he’s going to do business in a different way, and I’m really looking forward to exploring that version of Nucky in season four.
When exactly does the season finale take place?
June of 1923.
In two months, then, Nucky’s M.O. would have to start to change anyway, since President Harding dies in August of 1923.
Yeah. Unfortunately, that’s going to happen off camera, because I don’t know how interesting a guy dying in bed is. [Laughs] But [Attorney General] Harry Daugherty is still going to be in office for a while, although he’s a vastly different incarnation under Coolidge, and that’s when we’ll time jump to in season four, in mid 1924, the late spring, when Coolidge is already firmly in charge. And by then, the corruption in office isn’t a secret anymore, and Daugherty will be under a big spotlight. The Teapot Dome will be in the headlines, and that’s going to affect his ability to shuck and jive, and that will trickle down to Nucky. That will certainly be one of many challenges he faces — some will be political, some will be criminal, some will be personal difficulties, but all of the things he’ll face in season four will be different from the past, and they will be equally challenging.
But no Gyp Rosetti. Did you decide to end this season without a cliffhanger before you knew if Boardwalk would be renewed for a fourth season, so it could serve as a series finale if need be?
You know, I didn’t think about that. I’m always optimistic that we will continue, and I’m not a huge fan of cliffhangers to begin with. They always feel sort of cheap to me: “We’re not going to tell you what happens to guarantee you come back next September!” If you tell a compelling enough story, people come back anyway.
Have you given any thought to how many subplots or characters you’ll have in season four? Some critics felt like there were too many this season, many of whom would just vanish to the point where the audience would forget about them. Even Nucky couldn’t remember who Chalky was [when he was concussed] …
That’s great how you put that: Nucky doesn’t even remember Chalky. [Laughs] He didn’t even remember Eli, either. But that’s the nature of the show. We have such a huge cast, and so many different storylines going, so one of our rules is leave them wanting more. That way, when you do see them, you’re happy they’re there. Everyone’s got their favorites — some people want more Al Capone — but there’s no way to get them all in one episode. Some of the episodes are bigger than others, and sometimes we aren’t as successful as when we drill it down to two people. It’s like music, and we have to go with what sounds right. Or it’s like cooking — a dash of this, a dash of that — and we’re making a meal. But with so many characters, somebody’s going to get disappointed every week, and there’s not a lot to be done about that — unless we kill off half the cast. And that would upset a lot of people, too. I look at this as one big piece, like one big novel, and these episodes are but chapters of that novel.
You’ve said before you’d like to have six seasons. What’s the bigger picture — the formation of the Big Seven, the gangster conference in Atlantic City, the beginnings of a national crime syndicate? Are all these subplots to serve a greater whole?
Hopefully we’ll get to six, if not more than that. Six at minimum to be fully satisfied. And yes, if we get that far, I want to show the Big Seven. Nucky almost alluded to that in episode nine, that he was sort of thinking along those lines, so hopefully we’ll get there, or even the end of Prohibition. So yes, I’m thinking of a bigger picture. Certain people will come and go, and minor players or certain people we meet along the way will come to prominence in later years. Even just this season, Chalky’s future son-in-law had a minor story in episode two and then came back in a major way in episode eleven. In season four, Chalky will rise to prominence a great deal. And you know the history of 1924: Al Capone will take over Cicero and come into his own. It’s the year he wages war with Dean O’Banion, and we know how that ends.
Will Van Alden be pulled into the North Side wars?
He’ll be put in the middle of that. I’m a huge fan of history and it’s certainly fascinating and rich to depict. But the challenge and fun of it is to mix it into that world, say with Van Alden and Dean O’Banion. I have a rule: I will not alter the basic history of a real-life character to suit our fictional needs in a big way. Lucky Luciano did get arrested in 1923 on a drug charge, and he did get out of it by giving up his stash of heroin, but the circumstances of that are fair game: What did they do with the heroin? Were the cops dirty? And Al Capone and Nucky Johnson were definitely friendly. There’s a photo of them on the boardwalk together, that people dispute whether or not is real or part of a smear campaign, but they did know each other well. But it would be ludicrous by 1924, if during that time, he took a bunch of trips to Atlantic City, so for us next season, the Capone story doesn’t go to Atlantic City a lot. He’s got to interact with Nucky in a different way.
Was it really necessary to dwell on all of Van Alden’s efforts to be a door-to-door salesman? Some of the detours — Van Alden selling irons, Margaret teaching sex ed — took a long time to play out. Some critics found the pacing too slow, the subplots too excessive.
Hey — if Van Alden going bananas on his boss was a sitcom, I would watch it every week! [Laughs] I’m sorry not everyone found that interesting. To me, it was worth all of that. Margaret, her story, and the whole birth control arc was a journey. We picked her up and set her adrift. She has all this money and no purpose, she finds meaning doing a greater good, and the ironic twist is that she finds herself pregnant. Where she goes beyond that, you’ll have to tune in! But the thing is, what we’re doing, these are all parts of a whole, and it all connects, whether you know it or not. It’s not haphazard or random, and we’re not going to abandon things that set up or add flavor or are part of a bigger piece.
Does any of the criticism ever help, though? Do you ever adjust the show based on critic response?
I tend not to read reviews; there’s too much out there in cyberspace. I mean, they even recap Jersey Shore! [Laughs] I get it, they have a lot of space to fill up, but I’ve not done that, no. Critics who do the weekly recap, I find that kind of absurd. That’s like reviewing chapters in a novel. Obviously, this has to work episode to episode, but the endless analysis of every little thing? You have to watch the whole season, you know? You can’t just pick out things randomly, and those that do, they don’t understand that we’re setting up something really big. I write the show the way we want to see it and I’m happy with what we put out.
What are the challenges of revitalizing the gangster genre, or introducing new types of characters to this genre?
For television? The latitude we have on HBO and the technology we have, we can do everything as good, if not better, than in a movie. We’ve done things as big and spectacular as feature films. The challenge is the genre itself, because there are only so many variations on particular themes, so we’re really finding what’s new and fresh there. There are only so many ways you can walk into a speakeasy and shake a guy down, so to find what makes it different is our big challenge as the series as the series progresses. Each episode that passes, that’s one less episode we can do it that way, and the writers room gets harder and harder with each passing season. But that’s the job.
So when you’re writing a character like Gyp Rosetti, how do you make sure he’s not like Joe Pesci was in Goodfellas?
He’s Italian and hotheaded and violent, and people are going to make comparisons. Other than giving him a monocle, or other odd character traits, there’s only so many different versions of a gangster you can do. If this were a western, it would be like horses. Of course, you see things that have been done in the other movies, but the trick is to make each character as fresh as you can. And people really responded to [Bobby]. I knew they would. If I was confident about anything, Bobby Cannavale in your movie or TV show is going to work.
Richard Harrow is a character we don’t often see in this genre. That’s pretty fresh — and a fan favorite.
But even Richard Harrow, somebody once pointed out to me, was a type of character in some other story or book. I don’t remember which one, but something else referenced a guy like him, and I was completely unaware of that. I think he’s unique for us, though. In some ways, he’s a lone wolf, and even the people who know him can’t know him completely.
He had the romantic relationship subplot, which may or may not be able to continue now that he’s dropped a child on Julia’s doorstep.
He’s probably got a lot of explaining to do. I’ve found in my romantic life that showing up at 2 a.m. covered in blood is not a good idea. [Laughs] Chicks hate it when you do that. Take a shower at least. Wash the kid up.
Gillian’s not going to be too pleased with that custody arrangement, if she’s still around.
Without giving too much away, she will absolutely be around.
Speaking of kids, what did you think about Birdwalk Empire?
I love it! I have two little kids who watch Sesame Street all the time, and for me, that was one of the best honors the show could have gotten, to be on Sesame Street. It was awesome. We even went and visited the set, which was cool, even though Big Bird was asleep when we got there. They sort of had him in storage. But it was great. Very flattering.
If you went on set for Birdwalk, did you also go on set for Wolf of Wall Street?
They’ve been filming at the same studio where we shoot the show, so I have. I was on the set for two different days. I got to see them shoot a sequence on a yacht, a big action sequence that will involve special effects, and I got to be there when Rob Reiner was shooting. It’s always great to see a film you wrote come to life |
You would never expect to get in shape from reading a fitness magazine. You need to go out and actually exercise. Plus, when you go to the gym, you understand that in order to gain anything, you are going to have to sweat. An exercise regimen that does not make you uncomfortable and even a little sore after the workout, is a waste of time.
In fact, very few people believe they will get in shape by going to the gym once a week. You know that to truly develop and maintain your muscle strength and stamina, you have to make working out a habit. You must consistently perform repititions of certain exercises over a period of time to make any real gains.
Finally, most people undertand that in order to maintain your physical fitness level, you must continue to exercise. If you stop exercising, your muscles begin to atrophy. You get weaker, and become more vulnerable to injury.
Build Your Character Like a Muscle
The same principles are true for building your Character. In order to make any progress and build your Character, you have to exercise. Just like your body’s muscles get stronger when you do repetitions of certain exercises, your character muscles get stronger through repetition as well.
My good friend and fellow proclaimer of Character, Colonel Craig Flowers (@COLCraigFlowers) calls these character reps. (#characterreps). You build a muscle up over time. Each time you perform a character rep, you are preparing yourself for bigger lifts to come.
Too many people think, “This little white lie is no big deal, but when the big test comes I am going to be ready!” But if you have never lifted 50 pounds, what makes you think you will lift 300?
Your Character is the sum total of your habits – your good habits and your bad habits The more often you choose to act with Character, the stronger your Character gets.
Like building a muscle:
You build your Character by going beyond reading a blog or a book.
You build your Character in the small daily choices you make.
You build your Character by making choices that make you uncomfortable.
You build your Character by making those choices consistently over time.
The Bottom Line:
You are all building our Character daily whether you realize it or not. The choices you make everyday, affects who you are as a person. Each time you make a choice it makes it easier to make that same choice again. That is how habits are formed.
The question is what type of Character are you building? What direction are your choices taking you?
Do you choose to speak up when a friend is about to drive after having a third drink?
Do you choose to truly listen to another person’s opinions?
Do you choose to cheat on an exam like other people do?
Do you choose to stop and help a struggling coworker?
Do you choose to give 100% effort to the parts of your job you don’t like?
Do you choose to have a good attitude even in difficult circumstances?
If you want to BE a Leader of Character, you have to DO what Leaders of Character DO.
Our next six blogs will specifically discuss how to exercise the Six Habits of Character:
Courage, Humility, Integrity, Selflessness, Duty, and Positivity.
Question:
What hard choices are people in their twenties faced with that challenge their Character?
This is the fifth in a series of blogs written directly to the Twenty-Somethings. This is about you and your future. This series is the beginning of a quest.
It is my quest is to help get you ready to lead today, tomorrow, and for decades to come. Here are links to the previous blogs:
Topic 1: Leading in Your Twenties – You’re Not Too Young to Lead
Topic 2: Leading in Your Twenties – Don’t Wait to be Told to Lead
Topic 3: Leading in Your Twenties – Prepare Yourself – School Didn’t Do It
Topic 4: Leading in Your Twenties – You’ve Been Given Bad Advice
As you read these blogs, please share them with other people who want ideas on how to lead now and how to develop the Twenty-Something Leaders of our future.
You can purchase the book Becoming a Leader of Character through Amazon here: bit.ly/LOCBook
Or get a personalized signed copy here: Signed CopyThe New England Patriots have the best fans in football.
This is the finding of Emory University professor Mike Lewis, who rated fan bases on tangible measures of obsession, like game attendance and social media following. According to the analytics study, Lewis attempted to take a cold hard look at something that is difficult to quantify.
"These models are used to determine which cities' fans are more willing to spend or follow their teams after controlling for factors like market size and short-term variations in performance," he wrote.
Lewis added (via Comcast SportsNet New England): "The Patriots victory is driven by fans willingness to pay premium prices, strong attendance and phenomenal social media following," Lewis said. "The final competition between the Cowboys and the Patriots was actually determined by the long-term value of the Patriots greater social following. The Patriots have about 2.4 million Twitter followers compared to 1.7 for the Cowboys. Of course this is all relative a team like the Jaguars has just 340 thousand followers."
Lewis, a professor at Emory's Goizueta Business School has a Ph.D from Northwestern, an MBA from the University of Chicago and a masters from the University of Illinois in Industrial Engineering, according to his bio.
The good news about the study is that it is conducted by someone with extensive experience in sports marketing and consumer behavior, so we shouldn't see anyone freak out or overreact to its findings on the internet.From Chronicle Staff Writer Susan Slusser at Phoenix Muni
Prized prospect Addison Russell won’t play for at least a week because of a right hamstring strain, so the A’s are borrowing Hiro Nakajima from minor-league camp today.
Nakajima has had a strange year or so – he was signed in splashy fashion to be Oakland’s everyday shortstop before last season, and had a memorable and delightful press conference during which he called A’s GM Billy Beane “super sexy and cool.” But it became clear during spring training that Nakajima was not going to be ready to handle big-league defensive duties; the track record of Japanese infielders transitioning to the big leagues is spotty because the fields are so different, and like several other Japanese infielders, Nakajima hung back on balls too much and wasn’t aggressive around the bag.
So after being signed to a two-year, $6.5 million deal, Nakajima missed the first month with a hamstring injury and then remained at Triple-A Sacramento the entire season, playing second and third base. Scouts believe third base might be his best option, but he is still a real longshot ever to play in the big leagues. Manager Bob Melvin said today that it would have to take a few injuries for Nakajima to be called up.
As Melvin noted, Nakajima, 31, easily could have chosen to return to Japan, where he is a star, for this season, but he elected to come back to the A’s even without an invite to big-league camp. He’s determined to improve and potentially get an opportunity with Oakland, and this injury to Russell at least will allow the A’s coaching staff a chance to see what strides Nakajima has made since last spring.
There never has been any doubt about Nakajima’s character, though. He was friendly and cheerful all last spring, a fun personality in the clubhouse despite his limited English skills, and Melvin said that the reports on Nakajima at Sacramento were excellent.
“From everything I heard, he was terrific,” Melvin said. “He worked hard, he never complained. … He’s a very good kid.”
Russell is not expected to be on the Opening Day roster, but he is certainly a possible callup during the season, at the very least in September. Melvin said that Russell had been scheduled to play “a lot” this spring. There is no chance the A’s will take any risks with this hamstring injury, so it’s possible we might not see much more of Russell before the team breaks camp. Melvin said that Nakajima could be borrowed frequently this week.
In other A’s news today, Derek Norris (back) could be available to play tomorrow, but Daric Barton (hamstring) is still several days away, Melvin said. Craig Gentry (back) hit off a tee yesterday and he is increasing his activity but there is no timetable for him to get into a game. (I still believe there is a strong chance Sam Fuld will be on the Opening Day roster, with Gentry potentially on the DL the first week.)
Ryan Cook (shoulder) and Eric O’Flaherty (Tommy John surgery) are throwing bullpen sessions today; O’Flaherty’s is his first bullpen session truly off the mound because last time he just threw off the front of the mound, not the pitching rubber. Fernando Rodriguez (Tommy John) is throwing a simulated game tomorrow.
The hot topic this morning was the finale of “The Bachelor,” which Brandon Moss, for one, could not stop talking about. According to a magazine clipping on the wall of the A’s clubhouse, reliever Evan Scribner once dated last night’s runner-up, Clare Crawley.A junior doctors' strike is only going ahead because district health board chief executives could not get their act together to sign off on an agreement, a junior doctor says.
Photo: RNZ / Andrew Collins
The Resident Doctors' Association will go ahead with a three-day strike over rosters and pay from next Tuesday, affecting 18 of 20 DHBs.
It is the second round of industrial action by the union, after a two-day strike in October.
The Taranaki and West Coast DHBs are not taking part.
District health boards have accused the union of ignoring the impact a strike could have on patients.
Lead chief executive for the DHBs, Julie Patterson, said more than 2200 patients will be affected by the strike.
Waikato DHB had already postponed 500 patient bookings, along with 350 at Bay of Plenty DHB, she said.
However, one of the junior doctors' negotiators, Sam Holford, said the strike was only happening because the DHBs couldn't get their act together to ratify an agreement.
"We actually have what's very close to being a done deal on the table, but the reason we have to strike is that the CEOs won't meet wiht us and they won't meet with each other, to actually confirm or make an offer."
Ms Patterson said the DHBs' negotiators have gone as far as they can, and will present terms to health board representatives next Thursday.
The strike was "heart-breaking" for other DHB staff, who had to tell patients that their treatments would be rescheduled, including a woman with breast cancer who was told her mastectomy would be postponed for a few weeks, Mrs Patterson said.Although sex steroids are known to modulate brain dopamine, it is still unclear how testosterone modifies locomotor behaviour controlled, at least in part, by striatal dopamine in adolescent males. Our previous work suggests that increasing testosterone during adolescence may bias midbrain neurons to synthesise more dopamine. We hypothesised that baseline and amphetamine-induced locomotion would differ in adult males depending on testosterone exposure during adolescence. We hypothesised that concomitant stimulation of estrogen receptor signaling, through a selective estrogen receptor modulator (SERM), raloxifene, can counter testosterone effects on locomotion. Male Sprague-Dawley rats at postnatal day 45 were gonadectomised (G) or sham-operated (S) prior to the typical adolescent testosterone increase. Gonadectomised rats were either given testosterone replacement (T) or blank implants (B) for six weeks and sham-operated (i.e. intact or endogenous testosterone group) were given blank implants. Subgroups of sham-operated, gonadectomised and gonadectomised/testosterone-replaced rats were treated with raloxifene (R, 5mg/kg) or vehicle (V), daily for the final four weeks. There were six groups (SBV, GBV, GTV, SBR, GBR, GTR). Saline and amphetamine-induced (1.25mg/kg) locomotion in the open field was measured at PND85. Gonadectomy increased amphetamine-induced locomotion compared to rats with endogenous or with exogenous testosterone. Raloxifene increased amphetamine-induced locomotion in rats with either endogenous or exogenous testosterone. Amphetamine-induced locomotion was negatively correlated with testosterone and this relationship was abolished by raloxifene. Lack of testosterone during adolescence potentiates and testosterone exposure during adolescence attenuates amphetamine-induced locomotion. Treatment with raloxifene appears to potentiate amphetamine-induced locomotion and to have an opposite effect to that of testosterone in male rats.
Copyright © 2015. Published by Elsevier Inc.Microsoft’s Windows 10 clearly has seen improvements compared to previous versions, though increasingly, there are more reasons to consider alternatives even for nontech-savvy users.
The good news is, that other options have become really good and in some aspects are even superior. In this article, we will explore alternative solutions for everyday computing on PC’s and potentially Mac’s.
First, let’s take a look at reasons that might prompt switching to another operating system.
Windows 10 is slow and resource heavy especially for PC’s without an SSD disk
Windows has a lot of tasks running in the background and forced updates, background telemetry data collection doesn’t make it faster either. With Windows, at some point, you can expect update downloads, maintenance and other processes that slow down your system without the user’s consent. These things are taking away your precious hardware resources.
My experience with Linux distributions is that nothing runs in the background that would slow something down unless you specifically do resource intensive tasks like updating your system.
Limited control of your own computer: Forced Updates
There is no way for Windows users to turn off updates, only delay them. While I understand that updates are important and I am a big fan of cutting edge things, I think that the user should have complete control over his workstation. This has lead to a lot of frustrated users, lost data and even lawsuits.
In Linux distributions, you have complete control over your computer. You can install updates in the time of your choosing. So, if Microsoft wants to force automatic updates on everyone, the experience has to be smooth and seamless. For example, Google Chrome does this very well. If you’re using Chrome right now, chances are, you have no idea what’s the version number right now and when the updates do occur.
Windows 10 Data collection
Microsoft has followed the example of other companies which are big players in the advertising industry like Google and Facebook. By shifting the cost from the software price, to the user itself. Since the introduction of Windows 10, it has started to collect large amounts of data on your computer from how many times you opened your photos, names of the files you view, to keystrokes. You can turn off a lot of tracking that Microsoft does in the settings app but not everything can be turned off completely.
New software has been introduced that blocks Windows 10 telemetry by blacklisting domains and modifying settings in the registry. These actions are effective until Microsoft introduces a new update to reset those changes or sends the collected data to a different domain. Microsoft uses hidden 3rd party protection domains that are not associated with it directly, so these tools can be bypassed.
Linux does not come with software that collects any sensitive data. You can be sure that a lot of things you do on your computer are kept private.
Viruses, Malware and now Exploits
Windows is vulnerable to a huge amount of threats and not installing anti-virus software is not an option. This year was a big highlight for Windows security problems. Governments and institutions around the world were victims of a deadly ransomware virus because of undisclosed vulnerabilities.
Linux is not immune to cyber threats but the architecture makes it much more difficult to infect the machine with malware. It also has a fast release cycle that usually brings security updates in a matter of days.
The Price
The Windows 10 price is 119$. Add an extra 80$ for the Pro version. Guess how much do most Linux distributions cost? Zero. Even for commercial use. That’s an extra 200$ to spend on a better computer or anything else.
Division in UX/UI and uncertain app and game development
Microsoft new design direction starting at Windows 8 has been a rocky journey and still is an uphill battle. The iteration of Modern UI, that has been used from Windows 8 to 10 will converge to Fluent Design but still isn’t adopted by the most used applications. There is a good reason for that. Microsoft wants to tighten their control over app distribution which developers are not so keen on.
Valve decided to move away from Windows and sees it as a threat to their business model. It introduced Steam on Linux and Steam OS along with it.
Microsoft is pressuring developers to use their centralized app store. If developers want to use the new cutting edge Universal Windows Platform features and API’s in Windows 10, then the new approach must be carried out.
Linux has the opposite dilemma. Every major distribution has its own policy of managing and acquiring applications but developers have complete control over how apps are distributed.
Operating systems based on the Linux kernel architecture
I want to mention additional interesting options that may be useful to some users with specific use cases like Android gaming on bigger screens, or those who only use cloud based services.
Option 1 — Chrome OS/Neverware’s CloudReady
Neverware Cloudready
In my experience, Chrome OS is the easiest one to use. It has a very simple user interface. There isn’t any additional overhead compared to Windows, just a Chrome browser with some additions. It is great for people, who are not tech savvy and need the computer only to browse the internet and to use online services. A Google account is required.
One of the biggest reasons people switch from Windows is user privacy, so this option is suited for those, who don’t mind the fact that Chromium, an open source variant of Chrome, will be the only browser you can use. You do have the option to can change the search engine.
Google and other companies sell Chromebooks with Chrome OS preinstalled, so you can’t install Chrome OS on your traditional computer. A company called Newerware has created a suitable version for traditional PCs. Their main focus is on education uses but a free home version is available.
Option 2 — Android on PCs
Jide Remix OS
Android has similar benefits to Chrome OS in terms of usability but comes with the benefits of the app ecosystem. A good use case for living room entertainment, since android supports a lot of streaming services or perhaps if you want to play android games on a bigger screen.
Same as with Chrome OS, Google does not provide Android for PCs but because of its open source nature, other companies have created special versions for traditional computers. Currently, there are two options aimed at being a desktop oriented Android version: Remix OS or Phoneix OS.
As of writing this article, Jide has announced that it will discontinue development of Remix OS. This means that it will not receive updates but still can be used. I am sure that someone else will pick up the work of Jide and will continue with a fork for Remix OS. These two variants are based on the Android x86 project.
Option 3 — Linux distribution
Linux Mint 18.2 Sonya Cinnamon Edition
There are a lot of pros and cons to consider if you choose Linux as your main OS but I think the best thing about it is that you have more control over your computer behavior especially on privacy and the user interface.
There are tons of desktop environments to choose from. You can customize the look and feel of your machine with different themes, colors, icons, and even fonts.
The downside is that the app selection is smaller compared to Windows, so you should check if the programs you use are available in Linux.
Because of so many base system and desktop environment options, it is hard to choose which distribution would provide the best experience for a beginner. I personally would recommend Linux Mint with the Cinnamon desktop because it is geared towards novice users, comes with all the essential software, and resembles Windows the most, so it is easier to get started.
Linux Mint 18.2 Cinnamon Edition
Linux has come a long way and isn’t just for technical users and nerds anymore. Still, a lot of work needs to be done to rival the Mac OS out of the box experience.
There are small quirks that sometimes portray Linux as nerd software but there are signs, that the community of developers is working hard to solve these inconveniences.
If you are interested in Linux and want to try it out, the easiest way would be to find an older computer that is not used for your daily tasks and install it as the primary operating system. Alternatively, you could install Linux on your existing PC alongside Windows. There are a lot of tutorials online. Linux Mint provides documentation for the installation steps and there are plenty of tutorials on Youtube.
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Are you intrigued to try out Linux? Let me know in the comments! If you are already using it, please share your experience!Features
Internal voltage regulator allows the CompM4S to be used with any AA size battery
Seven night vision compatible settings and 9 daylight settings
Mount base is "keyed" into to the body of the sight to absorb recoil
Mount base screws directly into the sight - no separate sight ring is required
Matches perfectly with Aimpoint 3XMag, (magnifier module)
Unequalled light transmission
Submersible to 150 feet (45 meters)
Standardized as the US Army's new M68CCO
Improved adjustment caps are easier to remove, and are protected against impact
Includes removable ARD, flip up lens covers and LRP mount
Aimpoint CompM4 sights are the finest sights that Aimpoint has ever produced. The improved energy efficiency provides up to 8 years of continuous use from a single AA battery! Aimpoint CompM4 sights incorporate an integral mount that eliminates the need for a separate ring and can be customized with vertical and forward spacers to fit a variety of firearms. They can also be used by hunters and sport shooters that need night vision compatibility. CompM4 sights are available in two versions. The two versions are identical except that the CompM4 offers a high battery compartment, while the CompM4S offers a low battery compartment. The Aimpoint CompM4 is now the latest version of the US Army's M68 CCO (Close-Combat Optic), continuing a legacy that Aimpoint has maintained since 1997. The performance of the CompM4 sights is optimized for use with all generations of Night Vision Devices (NVDs), but is especially suited for 3rd generation night vision technology. Aimpoint's unique band-pass coating on the front lens reflects select frequencies of red light at near 100% efficiency in order to give the highest possible dot brightness with the smallest amount of energy while transmitting nearly 100% of light in the Infrared and near-infrared part of the spectrum to provide the clearest, brightest image possible when used with a 3rd generation NVD. With 7 NVD-compatible brightness settings and 9 Daylight settings including one extra-bright setting, the CompM4 and CompM4S are ready for use around the clock.
Note: This optic is the CompM4 version and has the high battery compartment.Zell Kravinsky is an American investor and utilitarian who is known for making a non-directed kidney donation to a stranger and for donating over $45 million of his personal wealth to charity. He is also a poet.
He lectured full-time at Penn for some years, was a Faculty in Residence for four years, and one year was selected, in the University's published book of student evaluations, as the most overall highly ranked faculty member at Penn. Kravinsky then worked for insurance companies designing and teaching training workshops in management development ; taught handicapped (" learning disabled " and “socially and emotionally disturbed,” i.e., conduct-disordered) children in inner-city Philadelphia schools; and taught Transcendental Meditation. [2]
After amassing a real estate fortune, having started with one thousand dollars, Kravinsky gave away virtually all of it to various charities, concentrating on public health organizations. Specifically, he donated almost all of the $45 million he amassed in real estate to charities dealing with improving health; he made the largest individual contribution ever to the foundation supporting the United States government Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), and also made major donations to The Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health and to the Ohio State University College of Public Health.
After Kravinsky learned that many African-Americans have difficulty obtaining kidneys from family members, he sought out a hospital in Philadelphia that would allow him to donate one of his kidneys to a lower-income black person.
According to Peter Singer, writing in The New York Times, Kravinsky justified the donation mathematically when speaking to Singer's students, noting that the chances of dying as a result of the procedure would have been about 1 in 4,000. Kravinsky believed that, under the circumstances, "to withhold a kidney from someone who would otherwise die means valuing one’s own life at 4,000 times that of a stranger", a ratio he termed "obscene."
Following the kidney donation, Kravinsky did several interviews with the media, including a radio conference with Robert Siegel of NPR and a TV appearance on CBS among others. During some of these public interviews, Kravinsky argued that should someone be, for instance, on the verge of curing cancer but would die unless Kravinsky were to donate his second kidney, that being the only match in the world, that it would be morally correct to donate the kidney in order that millions of people would be saved. Kravinsky has noted that this admittedly theoretical and highly improbable scenario is the logical extension of someone risking his life by jumping into icy water to save a child, or a soldier cradling a hand grenade to save his buddies.
He is mentioned in former President Bill Clinton's book Giving, and in an article in the December 10, 2008 issue of the Journal of the American Medical Association, The Economics of Health Equity.WARWICK SLOSS/NATUREPL.COM
The blowflies and flesh flies that settle on dead animals aren't just feasting on the carrion — they're sampling their DNA. Scientists in Germany have now shown that this DNA persists for long enough to be sequenced, providing a quick and cost-effective snapshot of mammal diversity in otherwise inaccessible rainforests.
Researchers stumbled on the grisly cataloguing technique while studying a form of anthrax that kills chimpanzees in Côte d'Ivoire. They started sampling flies to see whether the insects could harbour the anthrax bacterium after feasting on infected bodies, but soon realized “that detecting mammal DNA from flies could also be an extremely cool tool for assessing biodiversity”, says team leader Sébastien Calvignac-Spencer, an evolutionary biologist at the Robert Koch Institute in Berlin.
By baiting nets and traps with meat, the team collected carrion flies from Taï National Park in Côte d'Ivoire and Kirindy Reserve in Madagascar, and found that 40% of them carried mammal DNA. The researchers sequenced this material to identify 16 mammals in Côte d'Ivoire, including six of the nine local primate species, as well as Jentink’s duiker (Cephalophus jentinki) — an endangered antelope of which fewer than 3,500 remain. In Madagascar, the team identified four mammal species — including two lemurs — representing one in eight of all the island’s mammals. The work will appear on 7 January in Molecular Ecology1.
Carrion luggage
The DNA is “not gorgeous, but still usable”, says Calvignac-Spencer: his team was able to recover fragments that are several hundred base pairs long — something that would be harder to find in animals such as mammals, whose guts are more efficient at breaking food down with acids and enzymes. ”Flies have a much less sophisticated digestive system,” he says.
As well as providing inventories of species, the flies could help to track the status of endangered populations far more effectively than active searches, he suggests. For example, the Ebola virus killed thousands of gorillas in Republic of Congo and Gabon ten years ago, but active monitoring found only 44 carcasses2. “And these were gorillas!” says Calvignac-Spencer. “Just imagine how hard it might be to monitor die-offs of bats or rodents,” he adds. “Flies could really be precious in this context.”
“It’s an extremely simple but clever idea,” says Thomas Gilbert, a geneticist at the University of Copenhagen who last year showed3 that leeches can also preserve the DNA of the animals they feed on. Gilbert says that the beauty of the latest study is “that flies are so widely distributed in comparison to our leeches. They can sample where we can't.” However, he notes that DNA is more stably preserved in leeches, so it lasts longer. “Really, the methods are very complementary,” he says.UPDATE: Treasury Board President Tony Clement defended the staff lunches Tuesday, saying no rules had been broken.
OTTAWA — The Prime Minister’s Office isn’t following the rules when it comes to hospitality expenses.
Over the span of the past three years, taxpayers have been on the hook for $67,789.48 to cover weekly catered lunch meetings for PMO staffers and ministerial chiefs of staff — an apparent violation of Treasury Board policy.
“This is a consistent ongoing initiative to basically feed the Prime Minister’s Office lunches,” Liberal Treasury Board critic Gerry Byrne told The Huffington Post Canada Monday.
The weekly Wednesday lunches — bi-weekly in the summer — began in July 2010. The costs of the lunches were disclosed on a government website and include bills up until October 31, 2013.
But the practice continues to this day with Indian Express catering last Wednesday’s lunch.
“They order butter chicken, chicken biryani, one vegetable dish, like mixed vegetable or veggie korma, rice, pakoras, naan bread, stuff like that,” said the clerk who answered the phone at the Ottawa restaurant.
Records suggest meal preferences for Boston Pizza ($7,724.26 over three years), Mexican restaurant Southern Cross ($9,024.28 over three years), Lebanese restaurant, El Mazaj ($8,471.70 over three years), the House of Greek ($10,020.03 over three years), and Indian Express ($8,442.54 over three years).
As time went on, the weekly orders for 40 people started to weigh heavily in favour of healthier options such as sandwiches and wraps from Café Deluxe ($18,857.16 over three years) and Freshii’s ($5,249.51 since 2011). Freshii’s is 60 footsteps away from the Langevin block, where the meeting takes place.
The Wednesday meetings were for Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s chief of staff to meet with the ministers' chiefs of staff, said two sources, who insisted on anonymity because they weren’t supposed to speak to the media.
One restaurant, House of Greek, used to advertise its connection with the PMO, encouraging patrons to order the Prime Minister’s favourite dish, the brochette platter. It also displays a letter from October 2011 from the Prime Minister’s Office thanking “Rahim” for the “excellent service provided by House of Greek to the Office of The Prime Minister.”
“Your dependability, professionalism, and especially the delicious food have been greatly appreciated over the past two and a half years," says the letter, which is oddly signed by the Office of the Chief of Staff. It goes on to say that the PMO hopes to continue to enjoy the restaurant’s food.
Three Treasury Board directives covered the period under which the meals were ordered. They all state that federal employees can only be provided hospitality in situations that “extend beyond normal working hours.”
“This includes situations where employees are required to work through normal break and meal periods. It may include situations where there are no nearby or appropriate facilities to obtain refreshments or meals and/or where staff dispersal is not effective or efficient,” the policies state.
The Treasury Board Secretariat and its Minister Tony Clement’s office refused to respond to questions about the policy.
The Prime Minister’s Office did not respond to requests for comments. All emails went unanswered.
The Liberal MP, who brought the issue to HuffPost's attention, was happy to fill the blanks.
“If it was a working lunch that was not scheduled or predicted but based on an emergency, one could understand,” Byrne said. “If it was an occasional get together, one would be a little bit more understanding of it. This is regular, it is consistent. [Staffers] probably put it in their calendar, week after week this lunch will occur and it will be paid by taxpayers. That’s what makes it contrary to Treasury Board Guidelines for hospitality,” he added.
Byrne said he didn’t think public servants would be allowed to expense such hospitality expenses and he noted there were several restaurants nearby for staffers to grab a bite.
“These staffers are surrounded by some great restaurants, take-outs and fast food establishments and they could bring their own bag lunches, so it does seem rich,” he said.
“It’s a breach of the rules. It’s a free lunch."
“The Prime Minister and his entourage came to Ottawa preaching that there would be no free lunches, and this is in stark contrast, both literally and figuratively, to what the Prime Minister’s stated objectives were,” Byrne added.
Also on HuffPostAs we've spent the last several months covering crack-smoking Toronto Mayor Rob Ford, and the videotape in which he smokes crack, we've come to deeply appreciate one thing about him: He gives good face.
The in-house Gawker chat room is filled with photos of Rob Ford, and for one reason: Rob Ford takes a good goddamn photo. Maybe it's his near-spherical shape, or his Mercator-projection head-face relationship, or his full-body laugh. Maybe it's his astroturf hair or the heart-disease skin tone. Maybe it's just that certain je ne sais quois that separates timeless beauty from the flavors-of-the-day. Whatever the case: He's the most photogenic mayor in North America. Evidence below.
[image via National Ballet of Canada]
[image via Globe and Mail]
[image via National Post]
[image via @jaimecastillo6/Instagram]
[image via Alamy]
[image via Getty]
[image via AP]
[image via @reporterdonpeat]
[image via @BenSpurr]
[image via CityNews Toronto]
[image via The Globe and Mail]
[image via @CityCynthia]
[image via Facebook]
[image via Facebook]
[image via John Michael McGrath/Flickr]
[image via CBC News]
[image via Torstar News Service]
[image via Toronto Star]
[image, taken by Toronto Police force, of Rob Ford urinating, via Vice]
[image via @MapleLeafs]
[image via Toronto Life]
[image via Toronto Star]
[image via National Post]
[image via @reporterdonpeat]
[image via @RussellPhotos]
[image via Imgur]
[image via National Post]
[image via Loek Dick Photography]
[image via Now Toronto]
[image via National Post]
[image via Globe and Mail]
[image via Facebook]
[image via Canadian Press]
[image via Canadian Press]
[image via Reuters]
[image via Globe and Mail]
[image via Toronto Sun]
[image via Imgur]
[lead image via Toronto Star]NWS Staff Walks to Work in Blizzard Despite Shutdown
During the government shutdown, the 122 National Weather Service (NWS) forecast offices across the country are still operating, issuing potentially life-saving forecasts and warnings. “Neither snow nor rain” is part of the unofficial motto of the U.S. Postal Service. However, NWS employees in Rapid City, S.D. seem to have taken that motto to heart.
The record snowstorm in Rapid City, S.D. buried this Dodge Durango truck.
Credit: @MsXtine/twitter
Like most other federal workers during the shutdown, the NWS meteorologists are not getting paid right now, and are hoping to receive back pay for work performed during this period. Not only are the meteorologists working for no pay, at least temporarily, but they’ve had to deal with some truly exceptional weather conditions this past weekend that have posed forecasting challenges and even put them in harm’s way.
A record-breaking early season blizzard struck a number of states from the northern Rockies to the Northern High Plains on October 4-5, dumping nearly 5 feet of snow and piling the snow into drifts up to 10 feet high in places. Those conditions created hurdles for NWS staff that would be tough to surmount under any circumstances, least of all during a government shutdown when offices are short-staffed and support services, such as technical support from NWS headquarters, are stretched thin.
Below is a message sent from the NWS forecast office in Rapid City to the NWS Central Region Headquarters in Kansas City, Mo. on Sunday morning at 9:09 Central Time. This was sent to Climate Central from an NWS meteorologist who was not authorized to share any information related to the government shutdown, and some of the details contained within the message were confirmed with a staff member from the Rapid City office on Monday morning. The employee said the message speaks to the “dedication” of the NWS staff during the shutdown.
(This message has been edited to decode some of the acronyms.)
“Access to the office is still blocked. Two employees were able to hike in around some obstructions, but it is not possible to drive out of the parking lot due to snow drifts and downed trees in the neighborhood. The SOO (one who hiked in) is attempting to take two stranded employees home this morning. One forecaster hiked in for his mid shift last night, and I sent him home so he can come back tonight. Of the three who are on duty at this time, two have been here since 7 a.m. Friday, and I have been here since 3 p.m. Friday. We have two NWR (NOAA Weather Radio) transmitters down: Terry Peak and Rapid City. We have three ASOSs (Automated Surface Observing Stations) down: IEN (Pine Ridge, S.D.), RAP (Rapid City, S.D.), and PHP (Philip, S.D.).”
“We are on commercial power which has been stable since yesterday evening. Rapid City is pretty much paralyzed, and recovery and repair operations are in full swing. We have heard that the governor called in the national guard. Conference call briefing expected to take place later this morning. There is some concern about the potential for flooding with temperatures warming up quickly tomorrow and melting off the large snowpack. we have 1 to 4 inches of liquid equivalent on the ground and a big rain storm in the models |
-regulated, self-sustained group. Successful ventures will be developed and issued as rewards to Adel stakeholders, who will also have an opportunity to introduce use cases for blockchain technology.
“We’re lucky to have this opportunity to introduce Adel to the evolution of blockchain technology,” says Gabriel Dusil, Co-Founder and Board Member for Adel. “Our research team has identified an exciting untapped market opportunity: providing parties interested in innovation with a community-based infrastructure to participate in long-term projects. By leveraging the emergence of blockchain as a service, we created the Adel ecosystem so that participants have a collaborative platform to initiate, develop, showcase and fund their innovations.”
Jan Lamser, Co-Founder at Adel, adds: “There is a lot of energy and diversity amongst entrepreneurs in the FinTech industry who are looking for ways to harness blockchains. All too often, traditional approaches to mobilising resources miss out on the potential of startups. Adel provides a forum of like-minded parties who understand these needs.”
[do_widget id=text-34]In what would be a milestone for advanced nuclear power, China’s Nuclear Engineering Construction Corporation plans to start up a high-temperature, gas-cooled pebble-bed nuclear plant next year in Shandong province, south of Beijing. The twin 105-megawatt reactors—so-called Generation IV reactors that would be immune to meltdown—would be the first of their type built at commercial scale in the world.
Construction of the plant is nearly complete, and the next 18 months will be spent installing the reactor components, running tests, and loading the fuel before the reactors go critical in November 2017, said Zhang Zuoyi, director of the Institute of Nuclear and New Energy Technology, a division of Tsinghua University that has developed the technology over the last decade and a half, in an interview at the institute’s campus 30 miles south of Beijing. If it’s successful, Shandong plant would generate a total of 210 megawatts and will be followed by a 600-megawatt facility in Jiangxi province. Beyond that, China plans to sell these reactors internationally; in January, Chinese president Xi Jinping signed an agreement with King Salman bin Abdulaziz to construct a high-temperature gas-cooled reactor in Saudi Arabia.
“This technology is going to be on the world market within the next five years,” Zhang predicts. “We are developing these reactors to belong to the world.”
Pebble-bed reactors that use helium gas as the heat transfer medium and run at very high temperatures—up to 950 °C—have been in development for decades. The Chinese reactor is based on a design originally developed in Germany, and the German company SGL Group is supplying the billiard-ball-size graphite spheres that encase thousands of tiny “pebbles” of uranium fuel. Seven high-temperature gas-cooled reactors have been built, but only two units remain in operation, both relatively small: an experimental 10-megawatt pebble-bed reactor at the Tsinghua Institute campus, which reached full power in 2003, and a similar reactor in Japan.
During a recent visit to the Tsinghua facility, technologists were testing the huge helium blower that will circulate the gas coolant at the Shandong site once it starts up. Such high-temperature reactors are immune to meltdown because they don’t require elaborate external cooling systems of the sort that failed at Fukushima, Japan, in 2011. The graphite coating protects the fuel from breaking down, even at temperatures well beyond those found in the reactor core during operation, and once the interior temperature passes a certain threshold, the nuclear reactions slow, cooling the reactor and making it essentially self-regulating. And while pebble-bed reactors do not totally solve the problem of nuclear waste, the fuel’s form also gives rise to multiple options for waste disposal. China’s eventual goal is to eliminate or greatly reduce waste by recycling the spent fuel.
One of the main hurdles to building these reactors is the cost of the fuel and of the reactor components. But China’s sheer size could help overcome that barrier. “There have been studies that indicate that if reactors are mass-produced, they can drive down costs,” says Charles Forsberg, executive director of the MIT Nuclear Fuel Cycle Project. “The Chinese market is large enough to make that potentially possible.”
Several other advanced-reactor projects are under way in China, including work on a molten-salt reactor fueled by thorium rather than uranium (a collaboration with Oak Ridge National Laboratory, where the technology originated in the 1960s), a traveling-wave reactor (in collaboration with TerraPower, the startup funded by Bill Gates), and a sodium-cooled fast reactor being built by the Chinese Institute for Atomic Energy (see “China Details Next-Gen Nuclear Reactor Program” and “TerraPower Quietly Explores New Nuclear Reactor Strategy”).
Indeed, China is rapidly becoming a test bed for innovative nuclear power technologies that have stalled in the United States and Europe. “What you are seeing is serious intent,” says Forsberg. “They may kick greenhouse gases out of their power sector before we do because of that serious intent.”Close
Samsung announces Exynos 7 Dual 7270 SoC for wearables. With the system-on-chip's LTE integration, untethered calls and data may be in the horizon.
The South Korean electronics manufacturer says that among mobile application processor (AP), the Exynos 7270 is the first one that is designed to wearable devices built on 14-nanometer (nm) FinFET technology. Moreover, it's also the first of its class that sports LTE modem integration.
"Designed on our state-of-the-art process technology, this AP offers great power savings, 4G LTE modem and full connectivity solution integration, as well as innovative packaging technology optimized for wearable devices," says Samsung Electronics vice president of system LSI marketing Ben K. Hur.
The VP went on to describe the Exynos 7270 as a "ground-breaking solution," which offers design flexibility and better energy usage, among others, for wearables to overcome their current limitations.
Better Power Efficiency
According to Samsung, the Exynos 7 Dual 7270 has a couple of Cortex-A53 cores that maximizes the 14nm process technology and improves power efficiency by 20 percent compared with prior SoCs, which were designed on 28nm. Needless to say, the less power-hungry chip is good for battery longevity.
Untethered, Standalone Wearable Devices
With a Cat.4 LTE 2CA modem integration, wearables that will sport the Exynos 7270 can function as standalone devices that connects to cellular services for calls and internet. Of course, the 7270 also comes with Bluetooth and Wi-Fi for tethering to another device. The new wearable chip also supports FM radio, as well as services that needs real-time geo-data using a GPS (GNSS) receiver.
Note that there are currently some wearables with LTE connectivity. A good example is the LG Watch Urbane 2nd Edition LTE smartwatch.
Slimmer Wearables
Better power efficiency is not the only thing that Exynos 7270 brings to wearables. It's also more compact. With the 14nm FinFET process and Samsung's packaging technology, the SoC houses the power management IC, along with the DRAM, NAND flash memory and AP chips, in a form factor that has 30 percent less height than what the previous Samsung SoC generation utilized.
Note that the 7270 still occupies a 100-square-millimeter area just like its predecessors but with the reduced height, wearable manufacturers can certainly produce slimmer, less bulky devices. The other option is to keep the current wearable thickness and use the freed up space for more sensors or even a bigger battery, which would be welcomed by many.
In hopes of hastening the new SoC's development, Samsung released a developer platform made up of the Exynos 7 Dual 7270 and a number of sensors, including NFC. The reference platform is now available to both customers and device manufacturers.
ⓒ 2018 TECHTIMES.com All rights reserved. Do not reproduce without permission.The Taliban took control of the district of Qala-i-Zal in Kunduz province after an operation the put Afghan forces under siege, Afghan officials and the Taliban confirmed. The district is the latest to fall under Taliban control.
Asadullah Omarkhil, the governor of the northern province of Kunduz, said that the security forces lost the district to the Taliban on July 20.
“Most parts of Qala-i-Zal are in the hands of the Taliban but our military operations continue there to re-take control of the district,” Omarkhil told TOLONews.
The Taliban touted the operation to retake Qala-i-Zal on its official website, Voice of Jihad. “Officials reporting from northern Kunduz province say that Qala Zal district which was under the tight siege of Mujahideen for the past 3 days has now (late afternoon hours) completely fallen under the control of Islamic Emirate,” the Taliban reported on July 20.
“The latest round of clashes in which the district administration building, police HQ, municipality and all the remaining check posts fell to the Mujahideen has left 8 hirelings dead and 15 others wounded,” it continued. The Taliban also claimed it captured “a sizable amount of arms and military equipment” as well as vehicles during the operation.
Kunduz province has been the scene of heavy fighting during the past year, and all seven of the districts in Kunduz are either controlled or contested by the Taliban. In September 2015, the Taliban overran Kunduz City and held it for two weeks before US-led Afghan forces regained control of the provincial capital.
The Taliban currently control 40 districts in Afghanistan and contest another 43, according to data compiled by The Long War Journal (see map above). Districts under Taliban command are being administered by the group, or the group controls the district center. Typically the Taliban dominates all of the areas of a district except the administrative center in contested districts. The Taliban likely controls or contests more districts displayed on the map above, however the districts listed on the map are ones that can be confirmed via independent sources such as Taliban claims, government reports, and news reports.
The Afghan government has downplayed the Taliban’s advances over the past year, but recently was forces to admit that the number of Taliban-controlled districts doubled in the past year. In June, the Ministry of Interior reported that nine districts are under the sway of the Taliban, including four in the southern province of Helmand, and more than 40 others are heavily contested. The previous year the government claimed the Taliban controlled four districts. [See LWJ report, Afghan Ministry of Interior admits 9 districts under Taliban control.]
While the Afghan military has struggled to counter the Taliban in the field, it has touted a program that targets Taliban leaders in raids and airstrikes as evidence of its success. However the US military targeted the Taliban’s leadership for well over a decade without significantly impacting the group’s ability to sustain an effective insurgency.
Al Qaeda has taken advantage of the deteriorating security situation to establish training camps in areas out of the government’s jurisdiction. For instance, al Qaeda ran two training camps, including a large facility, in the Shorabak district in Kandahar for more than a year before they were discovered by US forces. The US military only discovered the location of the two camps in Shorabak after raiding another in Paktika province in July 2015. Abu Khalil al Sudani, one of al Qaeda’s most senior figures, is thought to have been killed during that raid. Al Qaeda clearly assessed the situation in Paktika as being safe enough to place one of their top leaders there.
The worsening security situation in Afghanistan has not gone unnoticed in Washington. Less than two weeks ago, President Barack Obama described the security environment in Afghanistan as “precarious” and said he will keep more troops on the ground in Afghanistan than previously planned. While the number of US troops remaining in country will increase from 5,500 to 8,400, Obama still plans to withdraw an additional 1,400 troops by the end of the year, despite the Taliban’s advances. [See LWJ report, Obama backtracks on Afghanistan withdrawal, cites ‘precarious’ security situation.]
Bill Roggio is a Senior Fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies and the Editor of FDD's Long War Journal.
Are you a dedicated reader of FDD's Long War Journal? Has our research benefitted you or your team over the years? Support our independent reporting and analysis today by considering a one-time or monthly donation. Thanks for reading! You can make a tax-deductible donation here.The first and second seasons were a seemingly never-ending tease of "will they or won't they" between Mary and Matthew. But after two proposals, an ugly breakup with a mustachioed corpse of a man, the death of a meek blond, the death of a strapping but skeavy Turk, and the agonizing suspense of wondering whether they'd finally get it together and decide to marry each other, Matthew proposes to Mary a second time when they're standing in the snow. And they finally kiss and rejoice and this scene is more satisfying than most things in life. You could eat ice cream while having an orgasm on a private island populated by adorable kittens, looking up at white doves flying above you in the shape of a heart, and it would be just about as satisfying as that scene of Mary and Matthew kissing and professing their love for each other in the snow.Facebook scammers have latched onto the buzz around Google+, as the theme for a new scam that has already claimed thousands of fans victims.
A fake app, called "Google Plus Direct Access", prompts users to visit a page on the social networking site they need to "like" in order to progress: a process that hands over personal information to the unknown developers of the dodgy app. Wouldbe victims are falsely offered a chance of getting an invitation to Google+, it is implied, in exchange for spamming their friends with invites to try out the rogue app.
No such offer is actually available.
In reality victims only succeed in further publicising the rogue app, which falsely claims that it offers a means to "Invite 50 friends!" onto Google+.
The whole ploy, which might easily be altered to promote sites harbouring malware on running privacy-threatening survey scams, is already serving as an efficient spreading mechanism.
Net security firm BitDefender reports that the tactic has allowed the dodgy application to gain more than 15,000 fans in less than a day.
"This scam highlights the importance to cybercriminals of 'trendjacking' the latest big news in order to exploit people's natural curiosity," said Catalin Cosoi, head of BitDefender's online threats lab. "With high press coverage and the estimated number of users approaching 10 million, Google+ certainly fits the bill as a hook for this sort of activity."
Stats from BitDefender's Safego Facebook security app suggest that 25 per cent of users had seen some form of malicious content shared by one of their friends at one time or another.
Net security firm Sophos echoes BitDefender's warning, adding that social networking users need to be careful about what application they allow, a precaution that especially applies when the basic premise of an app is suspicious. Easy invitations to Facebook's new rival in the social network market is hardly something you'd think the Zuckerberg-run outfit would be looking to encourage.
"You should also exercise great caution about what third-party apps you allow to access your Facebook records, especially when they are demanding the ability to post to your wall and grab personal information such as your date of birth and current location," Sophos warns.
A full write-up of the Google+ invite scam, along with advice on how to clean up your profile after mistakenly installing this type of app, can be found in a blog post by Sophos here. ®Moms of transgender children are waiting for Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton to complete the national Trans United Fund's (TUF) candidate questionnaire on Friday, after the group extended its deadline to give the former secretary of state extra time to respond.
"As a mom, we know you understand the fierce love of a mother for her child; you know what it is to worry—every day—about your child's safety; you know what it is to hope and dream for a future of happiness and fulfillment," three women write in an open letter to Clinton published Friday (appearing in full below). "That's why we're reaching out directly to you—mom to mom—to ask you to follow through on your commitment to complete the Trans United Fund's candidate questionnaire today."
Amid a heated national debate over trans rights, TUF developed and distributed the first-ever presidential candidate questionnaire focused on the transgender community in April.
The group received "enthusiastic commitments" from both Democratic candidates to fill out the questionnaire, but so far only Bernie Sanders has followed through.
In fact, according to a TUF press release, the group "received a call from a Clinton campaign representative a full two weeks after the campaign had committed to complete the survey explaining that the survey was 'too long' and the campaign did not have the appropriate resources to complete it in a timely manner."
As journalist Kevin Gosztola wrote earlier this week: "For a 'frontrunner' Democratic presidential candidate, who has cast herself as the inevitable nominee, it's hard to comprehend how the campaign could not have found time to answer some questions important to trans people."
Still, TUF extended its deadline to Friday, and launched a petition urging Clinton to respond.
The three moms, whose letter is below, also created this "Meet My Child" video, "for all the trans people and their families whose stories politicians and all Americans need to hear."
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Dear Secretary Clinton,
As a mom, we know you understand the fierce love of a mother for her child; you know what it is to worry—every day—about your child's safety; you know what it is to hope and dream for a future of happiness and fulfillment. That's why we're reaching out directly to you—mom to mom—to ask you to follow through on your commitment to complete the Trans United Fund's candidate questionnaire today.
Maybe you met our children in our Meet My Child video, now we're asking you to please, stand up for them. (and others like them!)
As moms of trans kids—we have a lot to worry about. Our kids face bullying, harassment, discrimination and violence that no child should fear. We are leaders in Trans United Fund Families for Equality because we want to build a world not just where our kids can be safe but where they can realize their dreams. Like all moms, we just want our kids to have a fair shot.
Secretary Clinton, we want to believe in you. We want to know that you'll have our kids backs. We need you—now—more than ever. Trans United Fund has extended the deadline once more and today that deadline expires. Mom-to-mom, we're asking you to please commit to fill out the questionnaire today.
We want a champion to believe in.
Respectfully #Waiting for Hillary,
DeShanna, Melissa, ZoilaThe theme of the day for the Romney campaign was, as Alex Rogers notes below, that Obama’s Soft on Welfare. It sort of flopped. The factoid planted at the microscopic center of the non-story is that the Obama campaign allegedly granted states the right to request waivers from the current welfare work requirements…which is true, except for the following things:
1. The waivers would be granted only if states came up with alternative ideas to create jobs for people on welfare.
2. As governor of Massachusetts, Romney himself asked for such a waiver in 2005.
And, this third bit is just too good…
3. As governor, Romney offered welfare recipients free auto insurance, registration, inspections and memberships in AAA. From the original Boston Herald piece:
“Over 80 percent of participants have moved off of welfare,” said Romney spokeswoman Gail Gitcho. Under Romney’s Car Ownership Program, the state paid out one year’s insurance, inspection, excise tax, title, registration, repairs and a AAA membership for cars that were donated to welfare recipients. Under the plan, those who lost their jobs and ended up back on welfare were allowed to keep their free wheels.
Now, let me make two points:
1. This Romney–the guy who invented what the Herald called “Welfare Wheels”–is the same guy who launched on Rick Perry during the primaries for offering college scholarships to the children of illegal immigrants. In fact, he’s still against–maybe, I guess, but we can’t be too sure, because, well, he’s refusing to answer the question–the federal Dream Act, which would grant citizenship to such children who graduated college or served into the military. But cars for welfare recipients was, somehow, just fine. (By the way, I applaud Romney’s program and congratulate him on the 80% success rate.)
2. How incompetent is the Romney campaign? They keep coming up with these stupid gambits–the last was the lie that Obama opposed early voting for members of the military in Ohio–that are shot down instantaneously (everywhere but in Fox-Rush land). And worse, the Democrats–who seem to have a superior oppo team–can often produce counter-stories, like the Herald item, that make things even worse for Romney.
But there is a larger question here: How stupid does he think we are? Every day brings a mind-boggling act of untruth-telling. Last week, he told Sean Hannity that his economic plan “is very similar to the Simpson-Bowles plan.” Except for the fact that Simpson-Bowles raised $2 trillion in revenue over the next 10 years and Romney’s plan raises…well, he won’t say, but so far he hasn’t identified one red cent. I can’t remember a candidate so brazenly allergic to facts. What a travesty.
(PHOTOS: The Rich History of Mitt Romney)Recently a “eulogy” for RadioShack was making the rounds online. Let’s ignore for the moment that’s a little harsh to have a eulogy before somebody is even dead but RadioShack is definitely on life support so I certainly understand why now seemed like the time. This could easily be their last Christmas.
The thing that struck me was how different the experience was from my own. I grew up in Fort Worth, TX and RadioShack has been here, well, forever. After I graduated from college in the late 1980’s, I went to work for the Tandy corporation from 1987-1992 (and then a couple of more years at AST Computers after they bought Tandy’s computer business). So I thought I’d give the company a different eulogy, one from the perspective of a different era and a different part of the business and one that’s perhaps more nostalgic and melancholy and less bitter.
I
It starts with the Texas Employment Commission (TEC). During my summers off from attending Rice I had taken one job making pizzas at Mazzio’s and another working in the Plans & Specs division of the Army Corps of Engineers. Trust me, if you are ever given that choice, pick pizza.
After my job at the Army Corp I was cured of taking any job just because it wasn’t food service. I went down to the TEC and told them I wanted something where I would be programming. I figured after years of BASIC programming on my own and three years of learning languages at school somebody would want to hire me to do something. But the response from the lady at the TEC was to a) forget any idea of doing something like that or even computer work of any kind and b) maybe she could find me something that wasn’t menial labor, but I shouldn’t expect much just because I was almost done with college.
Fortunately, I completely ignored her horrific depressing advice (and I mean depressing in both senses of the word, she seemed as depressed as the advice she gave) and went down to fill out an application at Tandy. They hired me quickly and told me I could come in and test software. I think I did it for about five days before they realized I knew Pascal, Modula-2, C, some basic Unix commands, and more. I was immediately moved over to start programming in C for Tandy.
II
The people I had gone to work for in the software division were working on the Varsity Scripsit word processor. It was a pretty good little word processor which ran on MS-DOS on PCs and several decades before the mantra of “eat your own dog food” became common, most of the team was actually using a stripped down version of the word processor as a text editor to edit the code for the the word processor! The Scripsit word processor line had been fairly successful for the company on previous machines (I think the Xenix based Model 6000 and others) so this was one of their first forays into PC applications.
Since the core of the project was already pretty solid, most of the team was working on a multitude of expansions for it including:
A Calculator
Printing graphics on dot matrix printers
Dictionary/Thesaurus
Macros
The list went on and on
However, after adding all of that, memory constraints on real world machines made it clear that it wasn’t going to work with the kitchen sink attached to it, so the dot matrix graphic printing I had worked on and several other features all had to be removed to get it to load and run. C’est la vie.
P.S. There were seven people working on this software, including Kevin (more on him later) who had written the editor/core of the word processor and was only one of two people in the crew who had a hard drive in his machine. Every other machine was floppy only. You’ve never experienced software development until you’re doing all of your editing and compilation off of 5 1/4″ floppy disks.
III
After I went back to school, either I contacted Tandy or they contacted me, I can’t remember which but they told me they would really like me to come in and work even during the brief period I would be home for the Christmas holidays. This was a) enormously flattering and b) a source of serious money for a kid in college. I think I might have given some real gifts that year.
Tandy was working on their Tandy 1000 series which were actually not clones of the IBM PC but of the IBM PCjr. They had graphics built in (320 x 200 in four colors! Booyah!) and thanks to some really clever engineering from one of their crew they were adding digital audio by piggy backing on the existing hardware they had added to support joysticks. Apparently the digital to analog converters had multiple uses and he figured out how to use them for something which wouldn’t be common other PCs for years to come (think SoundBlaster cards) with only a few cents of additional cost.
As with Varsity Scripsit the digital audio recording and playback software (DeskMate Sound) was being written again by Kevin (yes, he really was that good). He was hard at work on a music program (DeskMate Music) which actually used sampled instruments digitized with DeskMate Sound.
If you don’t want to watch it all the way through, skip to ten minutes in and listen to the piano. Kevin was resampling notes from a handful of actual notes which could be loaded into memory for each instrument (there was not nearly enough memory in those days to have a full range of high quality samples for each instrument so he was adjusting them on fly to make missing notes). I still marvel at it.
IV
My boss for both Varsity Scripsit and the DeskMate Music/Sound work was Jeff. He was a great guy and one of my favorite memories of him was him playing with the Sound/Music app combo. He wanted to wrap both of them with another app which could run in the stores. If you used them in conjunction you could record a simple sound in Sound (say a person saying “Meow” or making a sound with keys) and then Music could load the recorded sound and play Jingle Bells scaling the single “note” up and down the entire scale. It was pretty funny to listen to and seemed like exactly the kind of thing which, if kept clean, would attract people in the stores. Sadly, I don’t think it ever got built. Maybe I should make an online app for it someday.
One thing to note around this time was that Jeff had hiccups continuously. All the time. He saw doctors about it but nothing they tried helped any. It just made him miserable for a long period.
V
After I graduated from school I went straight to work for Tandy. They had made me a good offer and I worked for them for several years pretty happily. Eventually they built a new “Technology Center” next door to the headquarters and moved us over there. Supposedly they spent $30 mil when $30 mil was a whole lot of money.
I tried not to be much of a trouble maker during my time there but I always had posters up the entire time I had worked at Tandy. In fact, I posted Calvin and Hobbes on the glass of my office every day and people would stop to read it. When I moved to the Technology Center the word came down that there wasn’t going to be any more of that. They had paid good money for the place, it was attractive (not really, it was a big circular cube farm) and it didn’t need posters or anything like that. They were going to select some artwork and post it on various walls and halls throughout the place to make it really nice (they never did).
So I decided to parody one of the multitude of memos we got on topics like this every day. It was really easy by cutting off the top and bottom of one memo, writing my own, and then pasting those sections atop mine and then photocopying the result to have a new memo from management. It explained that they were very happy with the all white/gray/creme motif and that employees would need to start wearing clothes which matched and only clothes which matched. Also, the steady stream of vendors we had coming in to sell us stuff (software and hardware) would be given colored ponchos which matched that they could wear over their clothes so they wouldn’t clash. The last part was the part where I went so ridiculous that I figured everybody would know it was a joke. I don’t think people read that far or if they did, they were humor challenged. Quite a few people took it seriously and several people got very pissed off about that. But nobody ever fingered me as the guy behind it.
VI
I’ve thought about it and most of the projects I worked on while I was there don’t stand out in my mind as particularly interesting until the coming of “multimedia” machines. Tandy had found a source for a CD-ROM that they could start bundling into their machines and selling as an add on for existing PCs that didn’t cost a fortune. Around that one piece, they crafted the idea of the Tandy Sensation! machine (yes, it had the exclamation mark). It was a Windows PC with sound, good graphics, and a CD-ROM built in.
Our CD-ROM burner had cost a fortune and was two big boxes hooked to a PC. After burning innumerable useless discs over the course of our work we eventually figured out that even the slightest amount of work being done on the PC would cause it to screw up the disc. It had to be disconnected from the network and left untouched for the duration of a long burn to generate a disc we could use. That memory pairs with Jeff on the phone with a vendor in Hong Kong trying to get CD-ROM blanks for us to use. They were $50 each and he was trying to figure out how to order 100 of them and get them flown to us in time for them to be useful to us.
I did lots of work on graphics and animation for this machine and it was a lot of fun. Plus, Sensation! sold very well for Tandy. I was told that they sold something like 17,000 units fairly early and that was apparently quite good. Unfortunately, our success with Sensation! set us up to be the go-to people to work on the worst mess I ever saw while working for them.
VII
Philips had brought out their CD-i machine and for some insane reason there were people within Tandy who wanted to copy it. It already seemed to be a clear cut commercial failure. It was too expensive, it didn’t seem to offer any software that people found compelling, and Philips was spending more money marketing each unit than they were making if they actually sold one. Sometimes that happened with video game systems of the time, but they actually sold enough software for it to end up being profitable. CD-i was clearly not doing that.
But none of that dissuaded the people who believed in this project at Tandy. So the Tandy Video Information System (VIS) was born. Here’s a link to information about it at Wikipedia but trust me, it’s fairly dry and in no way conveys how much blood sweat and tears people poured into it nor what a crappy boat anchor it was.
Let me just lead off with this:
I really hope you watched that all the way to the end. It’s hammy, tone deaf, ridiculous in almost every way. I don’t know any engineer who worked on the project, software or hardware side who did not tell them not to do it. I bought a Sega Genesis to bring in to show them Sonic running on the console. It was blazingly fast and nothing, absolutely nothing about the VIS was fast. It was a 286 processor in a box that took forever to start up to run your game/educational program and if you wanted to boot it into Windows then it took forever times forever to do that.
They did focus groups and spent considerable money polling people about what they wanted from such a machine and what they would pay for it. The answer was that they were largely uninterested in it and if they were it shouldn’t cost more than $400. Tandy didn’t think they could sell it for less than $800. That should have stopped them cold but like everything else, it didn’t.
For whatever reason, Microsoft was also invested in this idea too. They had a stripped down version of Windows they imagined would start making its appearance in small appliance like boxes like this. However Windows, even stripped down, was the antithesis of anything you wanted to boot over and over again with cheap processors and no memory. Eventually they licensed it to Tandy for inclusion into VIS for a quarter ($0.25) during a time when Tandy was probably paying $20 to include Windows with their regular PCs. I say Microsoft was “invested” in this idea but the truth is I think they were invested in it the same way a chicken is invested in a ham and eggs breakfast. The problem is, Tandy was the pig. I was told that Tandy spent somewhere around $75 million dollars developing the VIS and it sold handfuls of units (after you figure in all the returns). Eventually companies like Tiger started selling bundles which included every software title ever produced for the machine and I think they still were only selling them at $99.
VIII
I worked for Jeff for many years at Tandy and one day he came by my cube to tell me that he needed to go in and have some surgery. He didn’t make a huge deal about it but it was clear that he was kind of sad. I didn’t think too much about it and I should have asked him to sit down and talk to me. I didn’t.
Next week his boss broke the news that Jeff had pancreatic cancer and after they opened him up on the operating table they just closed him back up and sent him to recovery. He died some hours later.
The hiccups he had suffered with years before had actually been one of several symptoms according to an oncologist who diagnosed him.
He definitely deserved a better version of me than he got. I’m sorry Jeff. I really am.
IX
It wasn’t that much later that Tandy sold its computer business to AST Research. At the time AST was in the top five manufacturers and doing very well. Pretty much everyone who had worked for Tandy continued to work for AST for the next couple of years, initially in the same Technology Center but later in a commercial area on the north side of Fort Worth. I moved on to Crystal Semiconductor with some of my colleagues and eventually poor business decisions caught up with AST.
As I said, my account lacks the pathos (with the exception of VIS) that the other eulogy had but it’s my perspective and I didn’t want the other one to be the only thing everybody heard about Tandy/RadioShack if this is indeed the end for them.
AdvertisementsThis article is about the television drama. For the traditional Irish song, see Come All You Warriors
Father Murphy is an American television western drama series that aired on the NBC network from November 3, 1981, to September 18, 1983. Michael Landon created the series, was the executive producer, and directed the show in partnership with William F. Claxton, Maury Dexter, Victor French and Leo Penn.
Synopsis [ edit ]
The series stars former NFL Los Angeles Rams defensive tackle football player and Little House on the Prairie actor Merlin Olsen as an 1870s frontiersman named John Michael Murphy who teams up with prospector Moses Gage (Moses Gunn) to shelter a group of orphans who are being threatened with internment in a workhouse. Murphy disguises himself as a priest and befriends a schoolmarm to help the children find a home.
At the end of the first season, John's true identity is revealed to the head of the workhouse, and the orphans seem destined for a life of labor. Instead, Murphy marries the schoolmarm and they get custody of the children.
Production [ edit ]
Many of the episodes were filmed at the Old Tucson Studios and theme park just outside Tucson, Arizona. The main village featured in the show was located at Big Sky Movie Ranch in Simi Valley, California; this was also the filming location for the television series Little House on the Prairie. The village was located approximately 200 yards (180 m) uphill from the Ingalls' farm set.
Father Murphy is an NBC production and is syndicated worldwide by Sony Pictures Television. However, Sony does not own the video rights.[citation needed]
Cast [ edit ]
Notable guest appearances on the series include: Shannen Doherty, Kellie Martin, John M. Pickard, Eddie Quillan, Christina Applegate, Amanda Peterson, Donna Wilkes, Tina Yothers, Mary Beth Evans, Wilfred Hyde-White, Jerry Hardin, and James Cromwell.
US TV Ratings [ edit ]
Season Episodes Start Date End Date Nielsen Rank Nielsen Rating Tied With 1981-82 21 November 3, 1981 April 11, 1982 52[6] N/A N/A 1982-83 13 September 28, 1982 September 18, 1983 66[7] N/A N/A |
2001). To this end, we used a combined treatment of amphetamine and NMDA receptor blocker MK-801.
In the Experiment 8.1 MK-801 (0.3 mg/kg) injected alone increased locomotor activity both in HAB and LAB mice. Two-way ANOVA (time, treatment) of changes in absolute levels of the distance traveled showed in HAB mice significance of treatment: F (1,180) 31.13, p = 0.0008; time F (15,180) = 21.22, p < 0.0001; treatment x time: F (15,180) = 15.31, p < 0.0001. In LAB mice two-way ANOVA revealed treatment: F (1,165) = 35.02, p = 0.0001; time F (15,165) = 10.71, p < 0.0001; treatment x time: F (15,165) = 23.02, p < 0.0001; Figure 6A inset). Since the effect of the drug can be hindered by the difference in the basal activity we also analyzed relative changes in the locomotion under MK-801 treatment. The analysis of normalized data confirmed the elevation in locomotor activity by MK-801 both in HAB mice (two-way ANOVA, treatment: F (1,180) = 236.0, p < 0.0001; time F (15,180) = 14.20, p < 0.0001; treatment x time: F (15,180) = 23.97, p = 0.0004) and LAB mice (treatment: F (1,165) = 3.83, p = 0.076; time F (15,165) = 3.58, p < 0.001; treatment x time: F (15,165) = 9.37, p < 0.0001). Relative to the basal levels, MK-801 induced less pronounced elevation in the locomotor activity in LAB mice in comparison to HAB mice (two-way ANOVA: line: F (1,165) = 14.10, p = 0.003; time: F (15,165) = 17.87, p < 0.0001; line x time: F (15,165) = 3.03, p < 0.0001; Figure 6A). This difference cannot be ascribed to divergence in habituation to the OF. When saline is injected, HAB, but not LAB, mice show a persistent decrease in locomotor activity (two-way ANOVA, line: F (1,185) = 33.97, p < 0.0001; time: F (15,165) = 24.30, p < 0.001; line x time: F (15,165) = 7.38, p < 0.0001). In the Experiment 8.2 by microdialysis means we have shown that pretreatment (−20 min) with MK-801 (0.3 mg/kg, i.p.) did not facilitate amphetamine-induced dopamine release in the mPFC of LAB mice, whereas stimulated release in HAB mice (two-way ANOVA, line: F (1,24) = 3.27, p = 0.048; time: F (8,24) = 1.31, p = 0.28; line x time: F (8,27) = 1.16, p = 0.32; Figure 6B, right panel). (The apparent decrease in dopamine release in LAB mice after MK-801 pretreatment compared to amphetamine given alone failed to reach the level of statistical significance).
In the distinct cohort of LAB mice (Experiment 9.1) MK-801 (0.3 mg/kg) pretreatment (−20 min) restored the hyperlocomotion in amphetamine-treated (1 mg/kg, i.p.) LAB mice (two-way ANOVA: treatment: F (1,165) = 9.09, p = 0.0032; time: F (15,165) = 12.22, p < 0.0001; treatment x time: F (15,165) = 8.25, p < 0.0001; Figure 7A). MK-801 administered at the same time with amphetamine (+0 min) abolished the amphetamine calming effect (two-way ANOVA: treatment: F (1,265) = 18.63, p = 0.0004, time: F (15,265) = 30.35, p < 0.0001; treatment x time: F (15,265) = 6.33, p < 0.0001; Figure 7B). Post-treatment (+20 min) with MK-801 (0.3 mg/kg, i.p.) in amphetamine- (1 mg/kg, i.p.) treated LAB mice, however, failed to interfere with its calming effect (two-way ANOVA: treatment: F (1,180) = 4.10, p = 0.166; time: F (1,15) = 42.74, p < 0.0001; treatment x time: F (1,180) = 1.87, p = 0.722; Figure 7C).
Amphetamine (1 mg/kg) and MK-801 (0.3 mg/kg, i.p.) co-treatment resulted in a decrease in amphetamine-driven changes in phosphorylation of GSK3β in the mPFC 60 min after injection (Experiment 9.2) (t (8) = 3.12, R2= 0.564, p = 0.012; Figures 7D,E).
MK-801 (0.3 mk/kg, i.p.) pre-treatment prevented the calming effect of non-selective GSK3β inhibitor LiCl (100 mg/kg, i.p.) in LAB mice (Experiment 9.3) (two-way ANOVA: treatment: F (1,150) = 8.10, p = 0.057; time: F (1,15) = 12.21, p < 0.0001; treatment x time: F (1,150 ) = 16.30, p < 0.0001; Figure 7F). In contrast, MK-801 (0.3 mg/kg, i.p.) co-administered with the selective GSK3β inhibitor TDZD-8 (20 mg/kg, i.p.) (Experiment 9.4) failed to prevent its calming effect (two-way ANOVA, treatment x time: treatment: F (1,270) = 0.264, p = 0.614; time: F (15,270) = 79.00, p < 0.0001; treatment x time: F (15,270) = 7.005, p < 0.0001; Figure 7G. It is know that in addition to direct inhibition of GSK3β activity lithium interacts with upstream factors of GSK3β phosphorylation. Therefore, MK-801 action likely targets upstream pathway(s) of GSK3β activity regulation.
Since both the dynamics and magnitude of hyperlocomotion mitigation in LAB mice were similar after systemic administration of amphetamine, and TDZD-8 (see Figure 4A), the differences in MK-801-amphetamine vs. MK-801-TDZD-8 interaction cannot be explained by insufficiency of amphetamine. Taken together, the behavioral and molecular data suggest an interaction of amphetamine and NMDA receptor signaling upstream of GSK3β activity in mediating amphetamine calming effect.
Discussion
We examined the neurochemical and molecular signature of the amphetamine calming effect in LAB mice, which are characterized by the locomotor hyperactivity and cognitive impairment resembling an ADHD-like endophenotype (Yen et al., 2013). Our findings suggest that changes in dopamine and norepinephrine release in the mPFC and the striatum in LAB mice are unlikely involved in the calming action of amphetamine. Instead, we provide evidence that amphetamine actions involve inhibition of GSK3β at the level of the mPFC and interaction with NMDA receptor signaling.
We employed a line comparison strategy to identify the signature of the calming amphetamine effect in LAB mice. A set of behavioral and microdialysis experiments render it highly unlikely that changes in monoamine release play a major role in the line-specific hyperactivity and the calming effect of amphetamine: First, LAB mice showed lower, but not higher basal dopamine levels in the striatum (Figure 2D) compared to HAB mice. This not only corroborates findings in spontaneously hypertensive hyperactive rats (Russell et al., 1998; Russell, 2002), but speaks against the hypothesis that high basal dopamine levels are causally involved in ADHD-like hyperactivity (Waldman et al., 1998; Gainetdinov et al., 1999).
Second, both amphetamine and methylphenidate cause a similar increase in the dopamine and/or norepinephrine levels in LAB and HAB mice despite the line-specific difference in behavior (increased locomotion in HAB vs. decreased locomotion in LAB mice after amphetamine treatment compared to increased locomotion in both lines after methylphenidate treatment). The similar dynamics of neurochemical and behavioral changes after methylphenidate are consonant with an involvement of increased dopamine and/or norepinephrine signaling in the increased locomotion observed in both LAB and HAB mice. The divergent neurochemical (transient increase) and behavioral (sustained decrease) changes after amphetamine treatment in LAB mice, in contrast, argue against a causal relationship between an amphetamine-induced monoamine release and a paradoxical calming effect (Figures 1, 2). There are few reports of methylphenidate ineffectiveness (30–40%) in treatment of hyperactivity in kids (Winsberg et al., 1980; Pelham et al., 1999; Gerwe et al., 2009). At the same time amphetamine effective in a majority of cases (90%) (Pliszka et al., 2000). Therefore, differential response to amphetamine and methylphenidate in clinic may serve for a better diagnosis either to differentiate co-morbid disorders or the ADHD presentations.
Third, compared to HAB mice, MK-801 pre-treatment failed to facilitate amphetamine-induced dopamine release in the mPFC of these animals, but at the same time prevented from changes in the locomotor activity in LAB mice (Figures 6B, 7A,B). This serves as an additional proof of dopamine-independent hyperactivity mitigation in LAB mice and points on possible changes in the NMDA receptor-dependent activity of the mPFC.
Forth, neuroleptic haloperidol, the dopamine D2 receptor antagonist, decreased locomotion in LAB, NAB, and HAB mice to the same extent, induced catalepsy in LAB mice (in contrast to amphetamine), and elicited comparable changes in the dopamine and HVA levels in the mPFC of LAB and HAB mice (Figure 3), suggesting unaltered D2 receptor signaling in LAB mice. Finally, the lack of line differences in phosphorylation of GSK3β between saline-treated LAB, NAB, and HAB mice (Figure 4F) points towards intact regulation of the β-arrestin2/Akt/GSK3β complex at basal conditions (Beaulieu et al., 2005), and undisturbed dopamine D2 receptor-mediated signaling in LAB mice.
Mitigation of hyperactivity by amphetamine in LAB mice coincided with an increase in GSK3β phosphorylation both in the mPFC and in the striatum (Figures 4G,H). This effect was line-specific only at a level of the mPFC in which neither NAB nor HAB mice showed similar changes. This suggested that the inhibition of GSK3β activity in the mPFC contributes to the calming effects of amphetamine. In mice with normal locomotor activity, an increase in the brain GSK3β phosphorylation in the striatum and the mPFC may be observed as early as 15 min after amphetamine given systemically, whereas GSK3β phosphorylation is decreased in the striatum 60–90 min after amphetamine administration (Svenningsson et al., 2003; Beaulieu et al., 2005). However, Akt-independent increase in GSK3β phosphorylation in the mPFC was shown after recurrent amphetamine administration in a model of amphetamine-induced psychomotor sensitization. This phenomenon may involve activation of a short-cut GSK3β–β-arrestin2 feedback (Mines and Jope, 2012).
The short-term mitigation of hyperactivity resulting from local microinjections of amphetamine and TDZD-8 in the mPFC, but not in the striatum of LAB mice (Figure 5) supports the role of mPFC in the observed pharmacological phenomenon. In order to avoid drugs being spread across the structures, we applied low doses that probably resulted in the rapid and non-lasting drug effect. The transient effect of microinjections compared to the results of systemic treatment can be also explained considering the difference in the pharmacokinetics of drugs at local and i.p. administration.
Currently, we can only speculate about the way how the selective decrease in GSK3β activity in the mPFC is translated into behavior. Since the majority of mPFC neurons (70–75%) are glutamatergic neurons, it is tempting to assume that the prominent molecular changes are mediated by alterations in the projecting glutamatergic neurons of the mPFC. An alternative scenario is taking into account the differences in pharmacodynamic aspects of amphetamine and methylphenidate action (Calipari et al., 2015). In contrast to methylphenidate, amphetamine targets the DAT and other monoamine transporters, pumps the neurotransmitters out of the terminal, but does not block their uptake. Amphetamine modulates the phasic release of dopamine, inhibits vesicular monoamine transporter type 2 and monoamine oxidase. Its metabolites may also contribute to the profile of amphetamine actions (Sulzer, 2011). In addition, amphetamine changes the performance of amino acid transporters (Del Arco et al., 1999), which results in an increase in the extracellular glutamate levels (Anderzhanova et al., 2001). As has been recently reported, LAB and HAB mice are strictly different in the expression of proteins involved in the regulation of the glutamatergic and GABAergic neurotransmission at the level of the cingulate cortices (Filiou et al., 2011; Iris et al., 2014). Moreover, a lower plasma level of glutamate was found in LAB mice (Zhang et al., 2011). Together, these observations support the idea of a possible imbalance of the excitatory and inhibitory neurotransmission in LAB mice in general. Interestingly, a disturbance in the glutamatergic neurotransmission was proposed as a mechanism mediating hyperactivity in DAT-KO mice (Gainetdinov et al., 2001).
Given the fact that amphetamine may cause glutamate release, our observations provide a mechanistic explanation for the specific amphetamine action in LAB mice. The relatively small increase in locomotor activity in LAB mice after MK-801 systemic administration in comparison to HAB mice (Figure 6A) and the lack of its facilitating effect on amphetamine-evoked dopamine release in the mPFC (Figure 6B) point to innate changes in NMDA receptor-mediated activity in these animals (Duncan et al., 2002). The interpretation of our behavioral data on MK-801 activity may be limited due to difference in the basal locomotor activity between LAB and HAB mice. In fact, the normalization algorithm we applied to compare MK-801 effect between lines may potentially lead to the drug effect overestimation. Thus, original data show that LAB mice develop higher absolute locomotor activity after MK-801 administration than HAB mice. Nonetheless, a summation of the basal activity and MK-801 induced effect may be achieved in LAB mice due to the same function (constitutional or antagonist-induced decrease in NMDA receptor activity). Our consideration that the basal hyperlocomotion and diminished relative effect of MK-801 in LAB mice have same nature is supported by our neurochemical and molecular data. A possible hypofunctionality of NMDA receptors in GABA-ergic cortical neurons (Corlett et al., 2011) may underlie psychotic traits of the endophenotype representing an ADHD-mania-schizophrenia continuum (Yen et al., 2013). Our findings of differentially timed MK-801 and amphetamine treatment (Figures 7A,B,C) and lack of TDZD-8 and amphetamine interaction (Figure 7G) suggest that amphetamine directs its action at GSK3β in the mPFC via a pathway, which depends on upstream NMDA receptor-mediated quasi-metabotropic signaling (Figure 7H). This NMDA receptor-mediated GSK3β activity regulation may be independent of pathways forcing Akt phosphorylation at the Ser308. Preliminary data show that the Thr473 phosphorylation site is rather engaged, since we have observed a line x structure-dependent correlation between changes in the levels of phospho-Thr473-Akt and phospho-Ser9-GSK3β under amphetamine treatment.
In conclusion, neither the hyperactivity in LAB mice nor the calming effect of amphetamine can be ascribed to changes in dopamine and norepinephrine neurotransmission in the striatum and the mPFC. Instead, amphetamine-triggered phosphorylation of GSK3β in the mPFC, but not the striatum, seems to participate in amphetamine-induced mitigation of hyperactivity in LAB mice. This calming action of amphetamine involves a functional interaction with NMDA receptors upstream of GSK3β. From a translational perspective, our data suggest GSK3β as a target for pharmacotherapy of disorders from the ADHD-mania-schizophrenia continuum.
Author Contribution
Y-CY, AZ, NCG, EA acquired data; NCG, TR, EA, CTW designed the work; EA, RL, CTW conceived the work and played an important role in interpreting the results; EA drafted the manuscript; EA and CTW contributed equally to the study.
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. This work was supported by the Max Planck Society.
Acknowledgments
The authors thank Ms. Anja Mederer and Mr. Markus Nußbaumer for invaluable technical assistance.
References
Gerwe, M., Stollhoff, K., Mossakowski, J., Kuehle, H. J., Goertz, U., Schaefer, C., et al. (2009). Tolerability and effects of OROS® MPH (Concerta®) on functioning, severity of disease and quality of life in children and adolescents with ADHD: results from a prospective, non-interventional trial. Atten. Defic. Hyperact. Disord. 1, 175–186. doi: 10.1007/s12402-009-0010-6 PubMed Abstract | Full Text | CrossRef Full Text | Google Scholar
Iris, F., Filiou, M., and Turck, C. W. (2014). Differential proteomics analyses reveal anxiety-associated molecular and cellular mechanisms in cingulate cortex synapses. Am. J. Psychiatry Neurosci. 2, 25–42. doi: 10.11648/j.ajpn.20140203.11 CrossRef Full Text | Google Scholar
Li, Y. C., Xi, D., Roman, J., Huang, Y. Q., and Gao, W. J. (2009). Activation of glycogen synthase kinase-3 beta is required for hyperdopamine and D2 receptor-mediated inhibition of synaptic NMDA receptor function in the rat prefrontal cortex. J. Neurosci. 29, 15551–15563. doi: 10.1523/JNEUROSCI.3336-09.2009 PubMed Abstract | Full Text | CrossRef Full Text | Google Scholar
Paxinos, G., and Franklin, K. B. J. (2001). A Stereotaxic Atlas of the Mouse Brain. San Diego, CA: Academic Press.President Trump wants less federal spending and more private investment to fix American infrastructure. This is what he's asking for in his transportation budget. (Claritza Jimenez/The Washington Post)
Despite his much-touted plans to spur significant increases in infrastructure investment, President Trump’s budget would actually cut more federal spending on such programs than it would add, according to an analysis by Senate Democrats.
In the budget the Republican president formally presented Tuesday, he proposes to spend $200 billion over the coming decade to make good on a campaign promise to spur $1 trillion in new investments in roads, bridges, airports, waterways and other ailing infrastructure.
Under Trump’s plan, the new federal spending would prompt private companies and state and local governments to scale up their spending many times over.
An analysis released by the office of Senate Minority Leader Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.), however, cites $206 billion in cuts to an array of existing infrastructure programs included in Trump’s budget document over the coming decade.
[Trump to outline ‘vision’ for infrastructure package in coming weeks, Cabinet official says]
John Czwartacki, communications director for the Office of Management and Budget, said Schumer misunderstood the Trump administration's aims and unfairly characterized a major spending reduction.
“Senator Schumer is missing the point of the infrastructure initiative,” Czwartacki said. “Our budget intends to dedicate $200 billion in federal funding to improve infrastructure but also to re-engineer the way our programs work to maximize co-investment from state, local and private parties and ensure that we can stretch all those dollars further by eliminating red tape.”
Schumer's analysis cited cuts to several transportation programs, including $96 billion over the next decade to the Highway Trust Fund, the largest source of federal spending on transportation projects. Czwartacki objected to calling that a cut, saying the Trump administration will be limited by anticipated tax revenue that will not match planned spending. Democrats, however, suggested that the administration could have proposed some way to make up what has become a recurring shortfall in the program.
In his budget, Trump also proposes the elimination of a discretionary grant program launched by President Barack Obama that was slated to spend nearly $500 million a year on highways, public transit and other projects. And he proposes cutting $928 million from a federal program to help fund local transit projects next year.
Other spending categorized as infrastructure by Schumer includes funding for the Community Development Block Grant program, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, public housing repairs and revitalization, and about a dozen other programs.
A jogger passes the Arlington Memorial Bridge in Washington. Trump talked during his campaign about revamping such aging infrastructure. (Andrew Harnik/AP)
Under Trump’s infrastructure initiative, new federal funding would ramp up over several years. The budget includes $5 billion for fiscal 2018, peaking with an outlay of $50 billion in 2021. Higher levels of funding would phase out in 2027.
In the budget document, the Trump administration says its goal “is to seek long-term reforms on how infrastructure projects are regulated, funded, delivered and maintained.”
“Simply providing more Federal funding for infrastructure is not the solution,” the document says. “Rather, we will work to fix underlying incentives, procedures and policies to spur better and more efficient infrastructure decisions and outcomes, across a range of sectors, including surface transportation, airports, waterways, ports, drinking and waste water, broadband and key Federal facilities.”"Today, he's going to take [America] back to the old days of conflict, war and everything,” Former Mexican President Vicente Fox told CNN in an interview.
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“I mean, he reminds me of Hitler. That's the way he started speaking,” Fox added.
"He has offended Mexico, Mexicans, (and) immigrants. He has offended the Pope. He has offended the Chinese. He's offended everybody."
Fox has gone on a media offensive against Trump in recent days.
He insisted on Thursday that there’s no way Trump will convince Mexico to pay for a border wall, as Trump repeatedly claims on the campaign trail.
“I declare — I’m not going to pay for that f---ing wall,” he said. "[Trump] should pay for it. He’s got the money.”
Fox continued: “This nation is going to fail if it goes into the hands of a crazy guy. Democracy can’t take us to crazy people that don’t know what’s going on in the world today.”🔊 Listen to this article
The obsessive nature of TERFs who police the trans communities’ selfhoods through cruelty can be viewed as an obsessive sadistic fetish. The TERF movement – in breathtaking acts of Lateral Violence – repeatedly conflate cruelty with empowerment. When harm is inflicted, they conflate the pain they inspire with a strike against the oppression they face. While this anti-trans behavior has yielded no measurable result in deconstructing the patriarchy, gender policing provides an immediate payout for the TERF. For as long as they police trans people, TERFs get a turn at being the police rather than the policed.
Before I go further, let me be clear about the terms I’m using:
Obsessive: Thinking about something or someone too much or in a way that is not normal.
Sadistic: Enjoyment that someone gets from being violent or cruel or from causing pain.
Fetish: A strong and unusual need or desire for something
Telling a trans woman that she must reject her own subjective experience of self and instead use only the label system TERFs wish to impose upon her body are the petty actions of a group obsessed with the sadistic release gained through Lateral Violence. TERFs, obsessed with attacking a group in which half the members are victims of rape, try to empower themselves through this imposition. In this way, TERFs are the handmaidens of the very system they claim to oppose.
It is the imposition, the assault of a trans person’s selfhood, which provides the TERF with release. In a very real sense, it is a pleasure derived from the resulting perceived pain of another. Moreover, the sadistic pleasure sought by the TERF is always forced and in this way, the name of the power game TERFs play is one of dominance and submission. It is worth noting that this behavior is almost a public display of domination.
Note that in the above image, Brennan is engaging in this abusive behavior publicly. What can be said about the personal need that was apparently satisfied in constructing the above paper person, photographing it and sending the images to trans people? Is this really how one goes about dismantling the patriarchy or, was all of this about something else? Are we expected to believe that the smirking Brennan took no pleasure from this public act or is it reasonable to conclude that this public behavior was enjoyable for Brennan?
Sheila Jeffreys recently published an anti-trans book titled, Gender Hurts. Jeffreys constructs the thesis of her book around pretending that “transgender” is a verb instead of an adjective and refers to trans people as an “ism,” as if trans people were a philosophy or political issue. Jeffreys refers to being trans in the following ways:
“This book is necessary now because the practice of transgendering adults and children has been normalized in Western cultures but very little critique exists” – page 2
“Another chapter details a very worrying effect of transgender activism and the lobbying of the medical profession, the transgendering of children.” – page 11
Jeffreys weirdly refers to being trans in this way dozens upon dozens… upon dozens of times. Within the fallacious reality, Jeffreys constructs for her readers, people engage in the activity of transgendering and once they have done so, one can speak of this past behavior as having transgendered. On page 10 Jeffreys writes, “Increasingly, women whose husbands have transgendered are speaking out and engaging in resistance.” Again, Jeffreys strangely equivocates in this manner dozens upon dozens upon dozens of times throughout her book. One can perhaps imagine a particularly hubris and sadistic homophobe promoting concepts like “Increasingly, women whose husbands have homosexualed are speaking out and engaging in resistance.” Any yet, some academics are falling for her fraud. Consider how this academic fell for Jeffreys’ hoax hook, line and sinker.
In what context might one use homosexual (homosexualing) in the way Jeffreys used transgender (transgendering)?
What are we to make of such public behavior? Surely Jeffreys, who represents herself as an expert on trans issues, understands that transgender isn’t a verb. One can only conclude that Jeffreys, Ph.D. is either grossly intellectually incompetent, or she knew exactly what she was doing and chose to willfully misrepresent her subject to the public. What are we to make of the hours Jeffreys invested in this intellectual turpitude? What need was satisfied through this public display of anti-trans obloquy? In what other way can one honestly view this obsession if not a form of sadism?
Time and again, for the TERF, the need driving their behavior can’t be satisfied privately. For the TERF, their domination of trans people must be carried out in public. Theirs is not a private obsession; a TERF won’t achieve satisfaction by simply avoiding trans people. Instead, they are driven to perform public exhibitions of dominance. The needs that are appeased through public displays of dominance over trans people are not very different than the needs that are appeased by this man who engages in a public dominance display. It is the sadistic thrill of harming another in public, getting away with it and having their abuse publicly validated.
How many hours have TERFs spent attempting to force the trans community into submission? How many books, websites, meetings, conferences, speeches, presentations, pamphlets, blogs, internet communities and graphics have been created out of a need to force the trans community into submission? Stretching back to 1973, how many hours have been wasted in pursuit of their sadistic fetish?
Had all of that energy been directed toward tangible acts of compassion, how might our world be different?
To bring TERF behavior more into focus, I will compare statements from two sources. Both claim expertise in trans issues and it is from that claimed place of expertise, these two sources are willing to make public assertions about the well-being of trans people. First up is the American Psychiatric Association:
Long-standing medical and psychiatric literature demonstrates clear benefits of medical and surgical interventions to assist gender variant individuals seeking transition. However, transgender and gender variant people are frequently denied medical, surgical, and psychiatric care related to gender transition. Access to medical care (both medical and surgical) positively impacts the mental health of transgender and gender variant individuals.
Being transgender or gender variant implies no impairment in judgment, stability, reliability, or general social or vocational capabilities; however, these individuals often experience discrimination due to a lack of civil rights protections for their gender identity or expression. Transgender and gender variant persons are frequently harassed and discriminated against when seeking housing or applying to jobs or schools, are often victims of violent hate crimes, and face challenges in marriage, adoption and parenting rights.
Discrimination and lack of equal civil rights is damaging to the mental health of transgender and gender variant individuals. For example, gender-based discrimination and victimization were found to be independently associated with attempted suicide in a population of transgender individuals, 32% of whom had histories of trying to kill themselves, and in the largest survey to date of gender variant and transgender people 41% reported attempting suicide.
The APA joins other organizations, including the American Medical Association and the American Psychological Association, in endorsing strong policy statements deploring the discrimination experienced by gender variant and transgender individuals and calling for laws to protect their civil rights.
The American Psychiatric Association:
Recognizes that appropriately evaluated transgender and gender variant individuals can benefit greatly from medical and surgical gender transition treatments. Advocates for removal of barriers to care and supports both public and private health insurance coverage for gender transition treatment. Opposes categorical exclusions of coverage for such medically necessary treatment when prescribed by a physician.
The American Psychiatric Association:
Supports laws that protect the civil rights of transgender and gender variant individuals. Urges the repeal of laws and policies that discriminate against transgender and gender variant people. Opposes all public and private discrimination against transgender and gender variant individuals in such areas as health care, employment, housing, public accommodation, education, and licensing. Declares that no burden of proof of such judgment, capacity, or reliability shall be placed upon these individuals greater than that imposed on any other persons.
Here is the other (self-appointed) expert on trans people, Sheila Jeffreys:
[Transsexual surgery] could be likened to political psychiatry in the Soviet Union. I suggest that transsexualism should best be seen in this light, as directly political, medical abuse of human rights. The mutilation of healthy bodies and the subjection of such bodies to dangerous and life-threatening continuing treatment violates such people’s rights to live with dignity in the body into which they were born, what Janice Raymond refers to as their “native” bodies. It represents an attack on the body to rectify a political condition, “gender” dissatisfaction in a male supremacist society based upon a false and politically constructed notion of gender difference.
The time and energy TERFs pour into hunting, outing and castigating trans people is wasted. It’s simply not useful to anyone else but far right-wing anti-gay groups… Which is why we find Tea Party Republicans quoting TERFs and TERFs quoting right-wing anti-gay propaganda mills.
Now one of the things I find puzzling about it is that, when I look at the House of Lords debate on this legislation, those I agree with most are the radical right. Particularly the person I find that I agree with most, in here, and I’m not sure he will be pleased to find this, is Norman Tebbitt… Tebbitt also says that the savage mutilation of transgenderism, we would say if it was taking place in other cultures apart from the culture of Britain, was a harmful cultural practice, and how come we’re not recognizing that in the British Isles. So he makes all of these arguments from the radical right, which is quite embarrassing to me, but I have to say, so-called progressive and left people are not recognizing the human rights violations of transgenderism or how crazy the legislation is.” – Jeffreys
Being a TERF is not about addressing patriarchy in any meaningful sense; it’s about being selfishly hyper-focused on obtaining a momentary pleasure from painfully dominating another.
Guide to the Sexing the Body is Gender SeriesAgency.
It is that which forms the foundation for any hero’s ability to save the day. In America, agency for teenage girls in literature made its debut in 1930 in the person of Nancy Drew.
Scholars Janice Radway and Nan Enstad assert that stories like Nancy Drew’s provide girls a “place to dream.” While they highlight romances and the “dime novels” of the pulp era as prominent examples, that “anything is possible” spirit was not limited to those forms.
It was the imaginative energy of that era that propelled Nancy Drew and characters like her into the kinds of stories nobody had ever seen before.
Many of our most prominent cultural influences in the 21st century were born in this time period. Edgar Rice Burroughs essentially invented both the modern fantasy and science fiction genres with John Carter of Mars and Tarzan. Mildred Wirt invented the teenage girl hero. I’m convinced both were of a mind when it came to the myriad possibilities for advancing literature.
The Stratemeyer Syndicate, mystery series producers, made it possible for girls to emerge from Victorian sensibilities into an identity for themselves. Nancy Drew turned that possibility into reality for millions of readers. It could be argued that her influence is stronger now than it has ever been. Echoes of Wirt’s creation can be seen in Gidget, Wonder Woman, The Bionic Woman, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Katniss Everdeen, Black Widow, Jessica Halloran and numerous other literary characters, television stars and comic heroes.
The concept of a strong girl hero is no longer unusual. Nancy Drew is the reason.
Like most landmarks in America’s cultural development, there is more to the Nancy Drew phenomenon than just the advent of the girl hero. Book series like hers helped make the franchise concept both possible and profitable. From the first book, Nancy Drew was destined to appear in multiple volumes with multiple stories and was written to be the character upon which a universe could be created.
This was still a new concept in 1930. Writers like Kipling and Burroughs had begun developing the idea with their late 19th and early 20th century works, but it was not until the Stratemeyer imperative that the character universe really became its own selling point. It was powerful enough that Nancy Drew unseated many leading book series for boys in the process.
Today, the idea of writing dozens of books about a single character, or breaking up a story into multiple installments is as natural as writing fiction in the first place. Digital books have only accelerated the trend.
In the 21st century, in a space of less than ten years, the market went from Coraline to Fablehaven to The Hunger Games to LadyStar, and in the process carried Nancy Drew’s legacy from action/adventure print novels to digital episodic romantic fantasy with girl heroes leading the way in every chapter.
What all four stories share with Nancy Drew is a universe in which a girl actively confronts a challenge. They also demonstrate the progress of the market from standalone stories to a universe where many characters share adventures. All four stories have been expanded to other media as well like film, animation and video games.
Nancy Drew was a counter-cultural influence beyond the obvious image of a young girl contradicting adults while she squared off with the villains. Even though libraries and bookstores often refused to stock Nancy Drew in any great numbers, children collected the books with a fiery determination, and their parents and grandparents contributed enthusiastically to the movement by funding their purchases, most often as gifts. Anyone born before 1980 very likely received at least one Stratemeyer-published book as a gift at some special occasion.
Series books like Nancy Drew were also the Depression-era Pokemon cards. They were collected, traded, bought and sold on both secondary and tertiary markets to the point where any kid, even those who couldn’t afford new books, would |
large screen as he roared in the pitch dark campsite.
If this is the kind of storytelling Universal Orlando has in store for us as we walk into Skull Island next year, you can count me in. I am a strong believer that atmosphere, story and setting make great attractions grand! They are able to engulf every one of your five senses and transport you to amazing worlds. If this King Kong: Reign of Kong preview is any indication of the things to come, hold on to your seats because this world is going to rock the senses.
There was more to the preview than Kong. The team at Universal Orlando showed us concepts of the newly announced Volcano Bay water theme park, and also let us know that Wet ‘n Wild Orlando will continue to be operational through 2016 for sure. Why not? I love Wet n’ Wild. It’s not unheard of to have two water parks.
We were also shown new renderings of Loews Sapphire Falls Resort opening Summer 2016. This resort will have express pass options like the other luxury resorts at Universal Orlando.
Also, the fate of the NASCAR Grill area was announced. It will become NBC Sports Grill and Brew. What I’ve heard about the restaurant so far is that it will have NBC anchor news plex as the welcome area and the kitchen will be in the middle of the restaurant, so that everyone can watch the chef action while your meal is being prepared. Due to open this Fall!
Orlando, FL – 06/1/15
By: Alex MateoQuick Access
Review / Favorite Track / For Fans Of / Atmosphere Levels / Links (Music & Social)
I Have Gas & Sand in my Shoe...
How is the sound?
Well, Here’s something a bit old but which felt like a lack on this blog… Ladies and gentlemen, let me introduce you (if you haven’t already been) to The Picturebooks, from Gütersloh, Germany, with Imaginary Horses.
As a duo, these guys are producing an amazing performance by applying their own awesome signature over melodies and tones coming from the dark ages of blues. No solos (not for guitarheroes lovers then), no cymbals, just pure, honest rawness of sensations passing right through the sound of the blasting drums and the slide guitar.
Close your eyes, put on your headphones, you’re ready to ride through PCH Diamond, just below :
Raw but smooth, deep but luminous, Heavy as a 100pounds-bag of sand and dirt, Imaginary Horses holds really differents songs one after another, without any rupture, from calm ballads (Fever, All Of My Life) to power tracks (Your Kisses Burn Like Fire, Woman, The Rabbit and the Wolf).
The band offers nothing more than beautiful Pictures ( 😉 ) to go through your head while listening to it, but put (nearly) everyone to an agreement.
Stoners, music lovers, travelers from all countries, in seek of adventure, sound, or gold, you’ll all enjoy it.
Why is this album worth listening?
The drummer’s way of drumming without cymbals. Just amazing.
General badassness of the whole album.
Slide guitar. Period.
In what situation you should listen to this album?
In your flat, on a ride somewhere, in the desert, over the top of a mountain… But play it loud, always.
Something particular to note?
Check these guys live. Get blown!January 17, 2013 9:00 AM | Konstantinos Dimopoulos / Gnome
Ten games and another fifteen honorable mentions and we still can't feel 100% happy with our Top 10 free experimental games of 2012 list. If there is one thing indie developers simply excel at, you see, is not just coming up with, but actually trying out and releasing games based on wild and at times radical ideas. Games so different, so innovative and so unique we can't help but describe as experimental.
The selection that follows hopes to showcase some of the very best of said games that you can play for free. Just don't expect it to cover each and every excellent new idea; there are simply far too many of them...
10.Slave of God (increpare) [Windows and Mac]
Increpare's Slave Of God allows those with strong enough constitutions and super-human pattern recognition skills to brave the seizure-inducing sights and sounds of a night club in search of (what we assume to be) the sun. Along the way, one can run up an endless drink tab, expel such drinks in chunky yellow pixels in the bathroom area and more. The great thing about Slave Of God, aesthetics and surreal gameplay aside, is that it can let you vicariously experience the thrills of the clubbing life without wrecking your liver. Also, few games have been as colorful and hypnotic as this one.
9.Mainichi (Mattie Brice) [Windows]
Better known for her work with game criticism and less as a game developer, Mattie Brice released the amazing Mainichi and it is a thoughtful RPGmaker-driven affair that experiments in sharing personal experiences through game mechanics. Mainichi is far removed from your average goblin-slaying RPG. It is a glimpse into life as a mixed transgender woman and the daily occurences faced. It's short but something that is both enlightening and definitely worth at least a second playthrough.
8.Atum (Team Cupcake) [browser]
IGF 2013 entry Atum uses the player as the mechanic in a mixture of point-and-click gameplay and platformer puzzles, with design influenced by Blade Runner and Martian Time Slip. The team describes the gameplay as multi-layered and as "dipping its layers in mathematical loops and philosophical recurrences"; they couldn't have been more truthful. To say much more would sadly ruin the novelty of Atum. However, the interesting influence each genre has on each other is well worth exploring and you simply can't afford to miss its delightful ideas.
7.First Person Tutor (bigblueboo labs) [browser]
In 7DFPS entry First Person Tutor, players assume the role of a financially challenged teaching assistant serving an evil professor who pays off a bit of debt for every student failed. Players must snipe spelling and grammar mistakes to lower the student's grade before the timer runs out and provide the world with villains that can spell. Appropriately, First Person Tutor is a sadistic professor. Make no mistake. It's innovative, smart, tough and sometimes simple bonkers in its reactions.
6.Yeti Hunter (Vlambeer) [Windows]
Yeti Hunter was first released on the GDC show floor and it may well be the creepiest title that Vlambeer has so far manufactured. You're going to be gunning down some Abominable Snowmen in this one, but instead of the rampant mayhem and ridiculous selection of firearms of your average shooter, you'll be getting a game that is more or less on the quiet side of things. Most of your time in Yeti Hunter is spent combing through the snow-laden pixelated woods, alert for a fresh pool of blood or a flicker of movement. Though initially simple seeming, the tension in the game can ramp up when night falls. Will you become the hunted? Guess you'll have to play the thing to find out.
5.Hubris (Andrew Yoder) [Windows]
Hubris is another experiment, though this time one in minimalist beauty and color. It also is a short game that is heavy on the atmosphere and light on game play. According to Yoder's description of the game, Hubris was heavily inspired by Shadows of the Colossus, Egyptian architecture and the works of Robert Yang - all elements that show themselves heavily in the infrastructure and the construction of the level. It's a lovely, atmospheric piece and one that won't take too much of your time.
4.Frog Fractions (Twin Beard Studios) [browser]
Frog Fractions became the Internet's worst-kept, highest-praised secret back in October. In case you haven't heard or more importantly played this, well, secret game, do it now. It will teach you fractions! No, really, it will. Then again, Jim Crawford's Frog Fractions ends up teaching its players a whole lot more than that, in what feels like equal parts reckless abandon and methodical story and gameplay stitching. It parodies a gamut of games and subverts players' expectations all the way to its XXX, insect-ual ending, all for free and all with great gusto.
3.Unmanned (Molleindustria) [Windows]
There is something ugly about Molleindustria's newest game. It could be the way it lets the Aryan-looking protagonist flirt with his co-worker at will, the casual way he lies to those around him. It could be the disinterest the game's characters show in their work. It could be the de-personalized mass murder of people it tries to bring to our attention. It could be any number of things. Regardless of what the core reason is, it's hard to deny that Unmanned is an uncomfortable yet important experience, something which is rather unsurprising given that it comes from the lords of political and provocative browser games. Oh, and it can get really weird gameplay-wise too...
2.Dys4ia (Auntie Pixelante) [browser]
Are Skyrim-level visuals and sleek, responsive gameplay integral to the development of a game we won't forget? Dys4ia says no. Painted in neon-bright colors, Dys4ia is an autobiographical look at six months of its creators' life and the tribulations instigated by hormone replacement treatment. Poignant and almost painful to behold, sometimes Dys4ia was, and still is, a game that resonates with its brutal honesty. And, yes, it might just make us understand some rather important things.
1.Vesper.5 (Michael Brough) [Windows and Mac]
Made for the Super Friendship Club's final pageant with the theme of "ritual", Michael Brough's Vesper.5 for Mac and Windows asks to become a part of our lives "for at least the next 100 days". You will after all need 100 days to actually complete it. Vesper.5 definitely requires patience, thoughtful decision making and, most importantly, commitment (through ritual), since it allows players to make one move every day, in a wonderful game where even the smallest decisions have their consequences amplified. An absolute must-play, an utterly unique idea masterfully implemented and a masterpiece you have to at least try and properly play to completion.
Honorable Mentions: Swordfight, Passagebalt, Goblet Grotto, Gamer Mom, Nuign Specter, Microscopia, Argument Champion, Three Body Problem, Will You Ever Return?, Paradis Perdus, Middens, PacMan Portal, Polymorphous Perversity (NSFW), Foam, Guilded Youth
[IndieGames continues its year in review, with lists including the Top 10 Indie Adventure Games of 2012, Top 10 Indie Strategy Games of 2012, Top 10 Indie Horror Games of 2012, Top 10 Indie Shoot-'Em-Ups of 2012 and our Top 10 Indie Games of 2012 (+2!).]The first high-level round of negotiations for the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) ever held in Canada wrapped up on July 12 in Ottawa, with negotiators sneaking out the back door to avoid notice, just as they had slinked into the city 10 days earlier.
Even by the standards of the TPP's closed-door, reveal-nothing approach to negotiations, the Ottawa round of talks was extreme in its secrecy. University of Auckland Professor Jane Kelsey, who has attended more than a dozen meetings as a registered stakeholder or observer, and who travelled to Ottawa for the round, called the July 3-12 meetings "the most opaque round of talks on the Trans-Pacific Partnership Agreement to date."
Given the wide-ranging impacts the TPP would have on Canada if the deal is ever successfully concluded, you'd think the Canadian government might let citizens know what happened in Ottawa. Unfortunately, you'd be wrong. There was no stakeholder engagement process at all during the round. No access or briefings offered to media (except for the Japanese government, which offered updates to Japanese media). No briefing before, during, or after the negotiations by lead negotiators. No press release at the end of the talks.
All that was offered was a terse 138-word statement posted on the Department of Foreign Affairs, Trade and Development's website which offered an incomplete laundry list of who met and when, but which offered nothing about what was discussed, what progress was made, or where the talks go from here.
The dearth of information about where the negotiations stand is troubling given how advanced negotiations are. With U.S. President Obama publicly suggesting that he envisions some significant progress by the time he travels to Asia in November for the Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) and G20 leaders meetings (conveniently scheduled for after the U.S. mid-term elections), TPP negotiations are clearly at a critical stage.
While there have been rumours that chief negotiators will follow up on the Ottawa round with another meeting sometime in September, followed by a ministerial meeting in October in order to have something in November to show progress after five years of negotiations, all the information DFATD offered at the conclusion of the round was this: "At this time, dates and location for the next officials' meeting have not been confirmed. A Ministerial meeting has not been scheduled at this time." Not that anyone really expected anything more given the extreme lengths Canada went to in order to frustrate any involvement from civil society in the last round.
But despite the Harper government's secrecy, despite the 11th hour, 4,500-kilometre venue shift from Vancouver to Ottawa, despite not even officially acknowledging the meetings were in Ottawa until a week before they started, Canadian civil society groups and their allies from a number of other TPP countries were able to shine some light on the Ottawa negotiations.
The Council of Canadians kicked things off by revealing the Delta hotel as the location of the secret talks with a 40-foot-long banner. Experts on a range of negotiating areas travelled to Ottawa to hold briefings with interested negotiators and to deliver messages from concerned citizens. A number of groups protested outside the hotel during the negotiations, and the NDP opposition added its voice to the growing number of critiques about TPP secrecy.
In the end, those collective efforts shifted the Harper Conservatives from pretending the negotiations weren't happening at all to lashing out with the same tired rhetoric at critics of its latest corporate rights agreement.
Between rounds and during rounds, the TPP continues to face stiff and growing opposition in all 12 TPP countries. With serious disagreements on some of the TPP's most contentious elements still standing in the way of a final deal, resistance in the U.S. to granting President Obama the fast-track trade authority he needs, and serious doubts about the possibility of anything more than a face-saving announcement in November, the fight against the TPP is far from over.A stylist dooms another hapless woman to “mom hair.” wideonet/Thinkstock
Shortly after my son was born three and a half years ago, an incredibly beautiful stay-at-home-mother approached me at the gym to encourage me to push myself harder. “People will tell you to take it easy on yourself,” she told me. “Don’t listen!” I was both taken aback and perplexed. No one was telling me to take it easy on myself. Inasmuch as it’s possible to pick up messages from the culture at large, what I had been hearing was that I dare not let myself go, lest I morph from a woman into that pathetic, sexless creature: the mom.
It’s no secret that mom and mommy are synonyms for lame. There are mom jeans (though these are newly chic among girls whose youth is set off by their ability to wear frumpy clothes fashionably). Fifty Shades of Grey is “mommy porn.” Bad wine for frazzled neurotics is “mommy juice.” And now, thanks to the New York Times, I’ve learned that there is “mom hair.”
On Tuesday, the Times ran a piece titled “Mom Hair. It Exists. Now What To Do About It.” This story, by Bee Shapiro, is the textual equivalent of my undermining frenemy from the gym. “In fashion there are ‘mom jeans,’ ” Shapiro warns.
So, too, there is a counterpart in beauty: “mom hair.” You’ve likely seen it at suburban malls: the longer-in-back, slightly–shorter-in-front bob that should read sleek but is inescapably frumpy. And even the city-dwelling mom isn’t immune. Perhaps she has added her own twists like blunt bangs or extra layering, but the ’do still falls short of flattering.
There is a surface similarity between the way mom and dad are deployed as adjectives. Dad also signifies something sort of dorky: “dad jokes,” “dad bod.” The difference is that dad comes with a tinge of affectionate indulgence. The brief flurry of stories about dad bod were all about how it is OK, and even endearing, when fathers let themselves go a bit. Unlike mom, dad is not a demeaning descriptor.
Perhaps I’m taking a trivial trend piece personally because I myself have the offending haircut. (I’ve worn versions of it since my 20s, well before I even thought of having kids.) What irritates me, though, isn’t that Shapiro is defaming my hairstyle. It’s that the New York Times is insulting its female readership and stoking their—our—insecurities. This piece was written with the saccharine belittlement that once marked women’s magazines, a faux-friendly tone that is mocked, day after day, by the brilliant Twitter account Man Who Has It All. (“Wife online? Kids asleep? Time to relax with a glossy magazine to find out why your face, hair & body are totally wrong. ‘Me time.’ ”) The best newspaper in the world should not run articles that might as well be headlined “Ladies, You Might Think You Look OK, But You Don’t.”
There is probably a perfectly valid Styles section service piece to be written about dealing with postpartum hair. Such an article should, at a minimum, not be addressed solely to white women, and it should start from the assumption that new mothers who read the New York Times need ways to worry less about their appearance, rather than more. Many of those women whose haircuts Shapiro sneers at are probably doing their best to keep their shit together in the face of competing and irreconcilable demands. Do they need one more thing to feel bad about? If they do, the Times is on it.By PTI
NEW DELHI: An estimated USD 770 billion in black money entered India during 2005-2014, US-based think tank Global Financial Integrity (GFI) has said in its latest report.
Nearly USD 165 billion in illicit money exited the country during the same period, the global financial watchdog said. During 2014 alone, about USD 101 billion black money entered the country while USD 23 billion exited, the report added. "Illicit financial flows (IFFs) from developing and emerging economies kept pace at nearly USD one trillion in 2014," it said.
Titled 'Illicit Financial Flows to and from Developing Countries: 2005-2014', the report is the first global study to place equal emphasis on illicit outflows and inflows. The report said total illicit financial outflow was three per cent (about USD 165 billion) of India's total trade of USD 5500.744 billion between 2005-2014.
Governments should establish public registries of verified beneficial ownership information on all legal entities to check black money, it suggested. "All banks should know the true beneficial owner(s) of any account in their financial institution," the report said.For other people nicknamed "Bullet Bob", see Bullet Bob
Robert Lee Turley (September 19, 1930 – March 30, 2013), known as Bullet Bob, was an American professional baseball player and financial planner. He played in Major League Baseball (MLB) as a pitcher from 1951 through 1963. After his retirement from baseball, he worked for Primerica Financial Services.
Turley made his MLB debut with the St. Louis Browns in 1951, and stayed with the team through their first season in Baltimore, when he appeared in his first MLB All-Star Game. After the 1954 season, he was traded to the New York Yankees. With the Yankees, Turley appeared in two more All-Star Games. He led the American League in wins in 1958, and won the Cy Young Award, World Series Most Valuable Player Award, and Hickok Belt that year. He finished his playing career with the Los Angeles Angels and Boston Red Sox in 1963, and then coached the Red Sox in 1964.
Turley began working in financial planning during the baseball offseason. In 1977, he cofounded with Arthur L. Williams, Jr. the company that would become Primerica Financial Services. He also got involved in real estate, buying and selling 27 houses in Florida.
Early life [ edit ]
Turley was born in Troy, Illinois.[1] He was raised in East St. Louis, Illinois. He attended East St. Louis Senior High School in East St. Louis, and played for the school's baseball squad for three years. He was used as both a starter and reliever, becoming the staff's ace pitcher by the end of his senior season, in 1948. Turley won the team's sportsmanship award that year.[2]
Bill DeWitt, the general manager of the St. Louis Browns, brought Turley to Sportsman's Park for a tryout. Turley also attended a workout camp for the New York Yankees, held in Maryville, Illinois. The day after he graduated from high school in 1948, Turley signed with the Browns as an amateur free agent.[2] He received a $600 signing bonus ($6,257 in current dollar terms).[3]
Professional career [ edit ]
Minor leagues and St. Louis Browns / Baltimore Orioles [ edit ]
Turley made his professional debut that year in Minor League Baseball with the Belleville Stags of the Class D Illinois State League, pitching to a 9–3 win–loss record.[2] He was promoted to the Aberdeen Pheasants of the Class C Northern League in 1949, and led the league in wins with 23, and strikeouts with 205.[2][4] He split the 1950 season with the Wichita Indians of the Class A Western League and the San Antonio Missions of the Class AA Texas League. Turley led Wichita in the Western League playoffs.[5] In 1951, he played for San Antonio. He appeared in the Texas League's All-Star Game,[6] and was named the league's most valuable player at the end of the season.[7] He struck out 22 batters in one game for San Antonio.[4]
Turley played his first game in the major leagues on September 29, 1951. He lost to the Chicago White Sox. He did not pitch again in 1951, and after the season ended, he enlisted with the United States Army for two years.[7][8] Turley returned to the Browns in August 1953, and caught attention for his high strikeout rate.[9] Turley remained with the team after they moved to Baltimore, Maryland, to become the Baltimore Orioles in 1954. He earned $9,000 ($83,967 in current dollar terms) for the 1954 season.[10] He pitched the first game at Memorial Stadium, striking out nine in a complete game.[11] A power pitcher, Turley recorded many strikeouts, but did not have great control.[12][13] For the 1954 season, he led the American League in strikeouts with 185, but also led the league with 181 walks.[14] That year, he earned comparisons to fellow fireballer Bob Feller,[13][15][16] and finished in third place in balloting for the Hickok Belt, given to the professional athlete of the year.[17]
While playing for the Orioles, Turley obtained the nickname "Bullet Bob". The magazine Look wrote a story about Turley, and wanted to measure the velocity of his fastball. They used a bullet timer from the Aberdeen Proving Grounds, which recorded a speed of 98 miles per hour (158 km/h) by the time it reached home plate.[3]
Casey Stengel, the manager of the New York Yankees, sought to acquire Turley. The Yankees needed younger starting pitchers, as their rotation fell off due to the ages of Allie Reynolds, Eddie Lopat, Johnny Sain, Tommy Byrne, and Jim Konstanty.[18] In order to acquire the hitting the Orioles decided they needed to compete, they traded Turley to the Yankees after the 1954 season.[14][19] The Yankees received Turley, Billy Hunter, Don Larsen, and players to be named later, while the Orioles acquired Harry Byrd, Jim McDonald, Willy Miranda, Hal Smith, Gus Triandos, Gene Woodling, and players to be named later. To complete the trade, the Yankees sent Bill Miller, Kal Segrist, Don Leppert, and Ted Del Guercio to the Orioles, and the Orioles sent Mike Blyzka, Darrell Johnson, Jim Fridley and Dick Kryhoski to the Yankees. Comprising 17 players, this trade remains the largest in MLB history.[11][18][20][21]
New York Yankees [ edit ]
Turley played for the Yankees from 1955 to 1962. In the 1955 season, Turley won 17 games for the Yankees,[22] and recorded 210 strikeouts, second to Herb Score (245). But, he also led the league in walks with 177.[4][23] The Yankees won the American League pennant, and advanced to the 1955 World Series, where they faced the Brooklyn Dodgers. He pitched in Game Three of the 1955 World Series,[24] losing to Johnny Podres. He also made two relief appearances in the series, in Games Five and Seven, as the Dodgers defeated the Yankees four games to three.[25]
Turley had a disappointing season in 1956, with an 8–4 win–loss record and a 5.05 earned run average (ERA).[22] However, the Yankees again won the American League pennant. Turley appeared in Games One and Two of the 1956 World Series against the Dodgers as a relief pitcher. Facing Clem Labine in Game Six, Turley pitched a complete game, but the Yankees lost the game by a 1–0 score.[26] The Yankees defeated the Dodgers in Game Seven to win the series four games to three.[27]
Turley in 1957
In the 1957 season, Turley developed a curveball.[12] He finished the season with a 2.71 ERA, good for fourth-best in the American League.[28] The Yankees won the pennant again. In the 1957 World Series against the Milwaukee Braves, Turley started Game Three, but was relieved by Larsen in the second inning.[29] He won his first World Series game in Game Six, a complete game.[14] The Yankees lost the series to the Braves, four games to three.[29]
By the 1958 season, Turley changed his delivery in an effort to improve his control, by using a no-wind up pitching position.[4][30] His best season came in 1958, when he won 21 games and lost seven, for an American League-leading.750 winning percentage. He also led the American League with 19 complete games, and finished with the sixth-best ERA (2.97). However, his 128 walks also led the league.[31] Turley started Game Two of the 1958 World Series by allowing up a leadoff home run and lasting just one-third of an inning as the Yankees fell behind the Milwaukee Braves two games to none.[32] With the Yankees one game away from elimination, Turley threw a complete game shutout in Game Five. He then recorded a 10th-inning save in Game Six.[32] A day later, in Game Seven, he relieved Don Larsen in the third inning and won his second game in three days, with 6 2⁄ 3 innings of two-hit relief.[32] The Yankees became just the second team to recover from a 3–1 World Series deficit, and Turley was voted the World Series Most Valuable Player Award.[32] As a result of his 1958 season, Turley won the Hickok Belt as top professional athlete of the year, receiving twice as many votes as Jim Brown, the second-place finisher.[33] He also won the Cy Young Award as the best pitcher in Major League Baseball, edging Warren Spahn of the Braves by one vote, and Lew Burdette of the Braves and Bob Friend of the Pittsburgh Pirates by two votes.[32][34] Turley finished second in the American League Most Valuable Player Award voting, losing to Jackie Jensen of the Boston Red Sox.[3][35] Additionally, he won The Sporting News' Player of the Year and Pitcher of the Year Awards.[36]
Turley earned a $35,000 salary for the 1959 season, his highest as a baseball player.[37][38] The Yankees chose Turley to be their Opening Day starting pitcher for the 1959 season, opposing Tom Brewer of the Red Sox.[39] The Yankees won the game by a 3–2 score.[40] However, Turley's fastball began to lose its effectiveness. He increased the usage of his curveball to compensate.[30] Turley finished the year with an 8–11 win-loss record. In the 1960 season, Turley had a 9–3 win-loss record,[41] and his 3.27 ERA was the seventh best in the American League.[42] He started Game Two of the 1960 World Series against the Pirates, earning the win. He also started the deciding Game Seven, which the Pirates won, taking the series.[43]
Turley suffered through discomfort in his right elbow during the 1961 season, which resulted in a 3–5 win-loss record and 5.75 ERA in only 15 games pitched.[44] New manager Ralph Houk began to emphasize his younger pitchers, as he removed Turley from the starting rotation and used him as a relief pitcher.[45] Though the Yankees reached the 1961 World Series, and defeated the Cincinnati Reds four games to one, Turley did not make an appearance.[46] After seeking medical attention,[47] Turley was diagnosed with bone chips in his elbow. He underwent surgery in the offseason to remove the bone chips, and returned to the Yankees confident his performance would improve in 1962. He agreed to a salary cut, from $28,000 to $25,000.[48] However, the bone chips recurred during the 1962 season. As a result, his effectiveness was limited in 1962 as well.[49] On June 25, Turley started a game that lasted 22 innings, and a record seven hours, but was removed after recording only one out.[50] During the 1962 season, American League players elected Turley as their player representative, following Woodling's trade to the National League.[51][52] Over the season, Turley pitched to a 4.57 ERA in only 69 innings.[53] The Yankees defeated the San Francisco Giants four games to three in the 1962 World Series, but Turley was not an active participant.[54]
Los Angeles Angels, Boston Red Sox, and coaching [ edit ]
After the 1962 season, the Yankees sold Turley to the Los Angeles Angels for cash, in the first move made by new Yankees' general manager Roy Hamey, who sought to rebuild the Yankees pitching staff.[49] The move was conditional; the Angels could return Turley if they were not satisfied with him. The Angels chose to retain Turley at the start of the 1963 season.[55] Turley struggled, winning two games while losing seven, and the Angels released him in July.[56] A week later, he signed with the Boston Red Sox.[57] Turley retired after the 1963 season, with a 101–85 win–loss record and a 3.64 ERA in 12 seasons.[21]
After the 1963 season, Turley agreed to remain with the Red Sox as their pitching coach, succeeding Harry Dorish.[58] Turley spent one season as the Red Sox' pitching coach,[30] and was released at the end of the year.[59] He attempted to make a comeback as a pitcher with the Houston Colt.45s in 1965,[60] but did not make the team. He then agreed to become the pitching coach for the Richmond Braves of the International League, a minor league team in the Atlanta Braves organization, in 1966,[61] but resigned before the start of the 1966 season.[62][63]
Personal life [ edit ]
Turley moved from East St. Louis to Lutherville, Maryland, in 1954, when the Browns moved to Baltimore. Though he played in Baltimore for one season, he remained in Lutherville for the remainder of his baseball career, and sent his children to the local public schools.[11]
Turley began working as a financial planner in 1957, by selling life insurance.[37] He also operated a bowling alley in Bel Air, Maryland, and an insurance firm in Baltimore.[11] In 1977, Turley joined with Arthur L. Williams, Jr. and five others to found A. L. Williams & Associates, an insurance company.[3][64] At A. L. Williams, agents advised clients to purchase term life insurance, rather than cash value life insurance, and invest the money they saved in mutual funds.[37] The company became Primerica Financial Services, and was later bought out by Citigroup in 1989.[37] He retired from the business in 2001, and sold half of his business to his son and the other half to Lynn Webb, a senior national sales director.[3]
Later in his life, Turley resided in Blue Ridge, Georgia, and had a winter home on Marco Island, Florida.[3][37] Turley's hobby was real estate. He bought and sold many homes on Marco Island, including a 13,500 square feet (1,250 m2) home he built that was locally referred to as "Turley Mansion" and "Turley Castle". In total, Turley and his wife bought and sold 27 houses on Marco Island and in Naples, Florida.[3]
Turley made an appearance on It's News to Me, a current events-based game show hosted by Walter Cronkite.[65] He was mentioned in a song called "St. Louis Browns" by Skip Battin, who was the bass guitarist of The Byrds and the New Riders of the Purple Sage. In the lyrics, Battin describes Turley as a "no-hit pitcher" who "got too surly" and who was "traded...too early".[66]
Turley's uncle, Ralph, also played professional baseball. The Yankees signed Ralph Turley in 1949 when they meant to sign Bob, and released Ralph when they discovered he was the "wrong Turley".[2] Nik Turley, a Yankees prospect, identified Bob Turley as a "distant relative".[67]
Death [ edit ]
Turley lived in Alpharetta, Georgia, for the last two years of his life.[3] He died on March 30, 2013, in hospice care at Lenbrook, a retirement community in Atlanta at age 82 from liver cancer. He is survived by his second wife, Janet; two sons, Terry and Donald; daughter, Rowena; and seventeen grandchildren.[11][37][68] Turley was cremated in Duluth, Georgia.[3]
See also [ edit ]
References [ edit ]N. Korea sends letter to UN to call for end of US military presence in S. Korea
WASHINGTON (Yonhap) — North Korea has sent a letter to the U.N. Security Council, denouncing the U.S. military’s presence in South Korea for destabilizing the divided Korean Peninsula and demanding its withdrawal, according to the United Nations.
Amb. Ja Song-nam, chief of North Korea’s mission to the U.N., sent the letter last Tuesday, along with a statement that Pyongyang’s foreign ministry issued the previous day on the occasion of the 70th anniversary of America’s military presence in South Korea.
Ja asked for the letter and the statement to be circulated as a Security Council document.
In the statement, the North claimed that the joint military exercises between the United States and South Korea have become a “main factor of aggravating confrontation and distrust” not only between the North and the U.S. but also between the two Koreas.
“The U.S. has sought a pretext for arms buildup, pursuant to its ‘strategy of rebalancing forces’ in the Asia-Pacific to dominate the world. That is why it has periodically staged provocative military actions to amp up tensions on the Korean Peninsula,” the statement in English said.
“If the United States does not withdraw its armed forces from South Korea and continues to wage provocative military actions against the DPRK (North Korea), it may lead to another incident of unknown origin that could trigger an armed conflict, for which the United States will be held fully and seriously accountable,” it said.
About 28,500 American troops are stationed in South Korea to deter aggression from the North, a legacy of the 1950-53 Korean War that ended in a truce, not a peace treaty, which means the divided peninsula is still technically at war."This step has not come as a surprise to us," Putin said. "But we believe this decision to be mistaken." The sequence of events early in Washington's relationship with Putin reflects a dynamic that has persisted through the ensuing 14 years and the current crisis in Ukraine: U.S. actions, some intentional and some not, sparking an overreaction from an aggrieved Putin.
As Russia masses tens of thousands of troops along the Russian-Ukrainian border, Putin is thwarting what the Kremlin says is an American plot to surround Russia with hostile neighbors. Experts said he is also promoting "Putinism"—a conservative, ultra-nationalist form of state capitalism—as a global alternative to Western democracy.
It's also a dynamic that some current and former U.S. officials said reflects an American failure to recognize that while the Soviet Union is gone as an ideological enemy, Russia has remained a major power that demands the same level of foreign-policy attention as China and other large nations—a relationship that should not just be a means to other ends, but an end in itself.
"I just don't think we were really paying attention," said James F. Collins, who served as the U.S. ambassador to Moscow in the late |
on campus at Ohio State last September when the Buckeyes hosted Cincinnati.
The Buckeyes have taken a multi-pronged approach with Davis, as he's been recruited by Zach Smith and Kerry Coombs, with each playing a vital role in the landing the four-star. Smith made headway at Lake Taylor two years ago, and Coombs handles the cornerbacks, so the pair made sense.President Donald Trump speaks to U.S. and Japanese servicemembers at Yokota Air Base, Japan, Sunday, Nov. 5, 2017.
Three military personnel have been reassigned from their White House jobs amid allegations that they had improper contact with foreign women while traveling with President Donald Trump on his recent trip to Asia, according to officials familiar with the situation.
The service members all worked for the White House Communications Agency, a specialized military unit that helps provide the president, vice president, Secret Service and other officials with secure communications.
The military is scrutinizing three Army noncommissioned officers who allegedly broke curfew during Trump's trip to Vietnam this month, officials said.
Mark Wright, a spokesman for the Defense Department, confirmed that the Pentagon is examining the behavior of personnel during the visit to Vietnam.
"We are aware of the incident, and it is currently under investigation," Wright said.
Trump visited Vietnam as part of a 12-day swing through Asia.
The episode comes after four military personnel on the same White House team faced allegations related to their behavior during a trip to Panama in August with Vice President Mike Pence. Those men - two from the Army and two from the Air Force - stood accused of taking foreign women after hours into a secure area as they were preparing for Pence's arrival, officials said.
They were all flown home before Pence arrived and stripped of their White House assignments pending the findings of the investigation, officials said.
Army Col. Amanda Azubuike, a military spokeswoman, said an investigation into the Panama case has been closed and the findings forwarded to senior military officials for review. She said she was not aware of the final conclusions or any disciplinary action.
NBC previously reported that military members on the Panama trip had been removed from White House duty.
Service members with high-level security clearances are expected to report contacts with foreign individuals to ensure that their interactions do not compromise national security.
The mission of the White House Communications Agency is to prevent eavesdropping on presidential communications and to ensure that White House officials can be securely reached worldwide at a moment's notice.
If found guilty, the service members face the risk of losing their security clearances or could be subject to administrative discipline or courts-martial.
Spokesmen for Trump and Pence declined to comment and referred questions to the office of Defense Secretary Jim Mattis.The name Sputnik stands tall in history books as the vessel that helped spark a space race with the U.S. But a new Russian project with the same name is planning to play catch-up in an area where the U.S. already has a huge lead: search engines.
See also: 20 Searches Made Ridiculous by Google Autocomplete
Rostelecom, the country’s state-controlled telecom service, has been charged with creating a search engine to compete with the likes of Google, as well as well local search-engine leader Yandex, which is based in the Netherlands, according to Reuters.
Even with state backing, however, Sputnik will face stiff competition. On its website, Yandex claims that it currently generates 62% of all search traffic in Russia.
But recent events have destabilized the company. Yandex lost its popular co-founder, Ilya Segalovich, in July to cancer. That led to a brief dip in Yandex's stock, and doubt about the company’s long-term future.
So while Yandex is currently the market leader — and Google is close behind with roughly 25% of Russia’s search users — Rostelecom may be launching Sputnik at just the right time.
Rostelecom has already spent $20 million on the search engine, according to a report in Russia’s Vedomosti. The site will reportedly be accessible at www.Sputnik.ru, and will launch some time in the first quarter of 2014.
Rostelecom did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
BONUS: Google Tricks and Easter Eggs
Google Tricks and Easter Eggs
Image: Flickr, AnthonyWith Congress voting to rein in the NSA’s dragnet the president cast himself as a champion of reform but his record, from Snowden to the Freedom Act, is patchy
Congress passes NSA surveillance reform in vindication for Snowden Read more
Almost exactly two years before Barack Obama signed a bill to end the National Security Agency’s bulk collection of US phone records, the US president defended a domestic surveillance dragnet he would later claim credit for stopping.
“You can’t have 100% security and also then have 100% privacy and zero inconvenience. You know, we’re going to have to make some choices as a society,” Obama said on 7 June 2013, two days after the Guardian, thanks to whistleblower Edward Snowden, began revealing the reach of US surveillance.
The Snowden revelations began a process of classic Obama vacillation, bringing him from public defender of domestic mass surveillance to its reluctant and partial critic. It was a path crafted by politics, accelerated by law and fueled by fear.
On 1 June 2015, after the Senate conceded it would pass a bill ending the phone records dragnet, Obama’s spokesman claimed full ownership of the end of a program the US president had two years before said posed mere “modest encroachments on privacy”.
“To the extent that we’re talking about the president’s legacy, I would suspect that that would be a logical conclusion from some historians that the president ended some of these programs,” said the White House press secretary, Josh Earnest.
Many of those who voted for Obama thought that was the president they would get on day one of his tenure. They had good reason to think so. A former constitutional law professor, Obama began his national political career at the 2004 Democratic convention, where he gestured toward dissatisfaction with the emerging US surveillance apparatus: “We don’t like federal agents poking around our libraries.”
But they also had less prominent warnings that Obama was more comfortable with that apparatus than he let on. In July 2008, with the Democratic presidential nomination in hand, Obama cast a Senate vote to expand the NSA’s grasp, retroactively blessing a program that secretly collected Americans’ international communications in bulk. The bill Obama voted for extended the powers that ultimately created the internet dragnet known as Prism.
Once in power, Obama embraced domestic bulk data collection – even as the NSA’s massive appetite for phone records was in secret legal peril. A judge on the typically pliant foreign intelligence surveillance court, or Fisa court, was so incensed that the NSA’s software for querying US phone records went beyond the technological boundaries described to the panel that he effectively shut down NSA access to the data for much of 2009. Yet Obama continued the program.
Similarly, Obama permitted the NSA to gather Americans’ internet records in bulk until 2011 – and only disclosed that he shut the program down in response to the Guardian’s post-Snowden queries. It remains unclear why Obama ended it. But a recent Justice Department report makes clear that the FBI has for years been amassing “large collections” of the same data, raising questions about the meaningfulness of Obama’s actions.
But Obama’s defense of bulk surveillance began to show cracks as the Guardian, the Washington Post, the Intercept, Der Spiegel and publications worldwide continued publishing revelations from Snowden’s treasure troves. In August 2013, Obama announced he would empanel surveillance reviews to examine the programs’ necessity.
Facebook Twitter Pinterest Barack Obama, then a candidate for the US Senate, told the 2004 Democratic convention: ‘We don’t like federal agents poking around our libraries.’ Photograph: Jim Rogash/WireImage
Those reviews savaged the domestic phone records collection. His own advisory body, heavy with intelligence veterans, told him in December 2013 to end the program. The government’s privacy watchdog agreed in harsher tones, judging that it never prevented a terrorist attack and was illegal. The NSA never conceded the illegality, even as a federal judge said the “almost Orwellian” program was probably unconstitutional, but abandoned its previous insistence that it was vital for counter-terrorism.
Obama agreed in January 2014 to divest NSA of its domestic phone records collection and called on Capitol Hill, where the NSA had not lost a fight since 1978, to pass legislation. But his administration was conspicuously silent on the leading congressional push for surveillance reform.
It was called the USA Freedom Act, and it had an unlikely architect. James Sensenbrenner, the Wisconsin Republican who authored the 2001 Patriot Act, pronounced himself stunned not just by the bulk collection, but how the NSA had justified it on a part of his law, known as Section 215.
Despite Obama’s reversal, Sensenbrenner and his allies received the cold shoulder from the White House. Administration officials refused to publicly indicate their support or opposition to the Freedom Act. At a 4 February 2014 hearing, members of the House judiciary committee predicted they would either back the bill or watch as the House failed to reauthorize Section 215 the following year.
Rand Paul allies plan new surveillance reforms to follow USA Freedom Act Read more
The NSA did not like the Freedom Act, which went further than shutting down bulk phone records collection. It banned the NSA and FBI from warrantlessly querying hoards of international communications for Americans’ data, permanently put a privacy advocate on the Fisa court and permitted greater transparency for the companies receiving surveillance orders.
But the NSA could not get its preferred legislation, from its allies on the House intelligence committee, through a skeptical Congress. So it began working with the Freedom Act architects to soften the bill’s restrictions.
Intelligence-agency lawyers met with House GOP potentates and Freedom Act architects in May 2014 after the bill passed the judiciary committee. By the time discussions ended, the Freedom Act would bear only superficial resemblance to what committee members voted for. Gone was the so-called “backdoor search” ban. All the privacy and transparency restrictions were weakened, without any vote, to the point where the bill’s vague definitions left unclear how much bulk surveillance it actually banned.
A judiciary committee member and mass-surveillance critic, Democrat Zoe Lofgren of California, observed: “This is not how American democracy is supposed to work.” Yet the House passed the bill that month by a wide margin.
As they watched privacy groups abandon support, the bill’s architects defended the compromises out of political reality. They had a product that would end NSA bulk domestic phone records collection, reform the Fisa court somewhat, and provide more surveillance transparency than the status quo. They had also quieted the objections of the NSA and its allies and produced a bill that was passable in both senses of the word. And they had a belated White House endorsement.
But the Freedom Act did not have the US Senate’s support. Republicans set up procedural obstructions to kill it using a tried and true method: the specter of a terrorist attack. “God forbid we wake up tomorrow and [the Islamic State] is in the United States,” Florida Republican Marco Rubio said in a typical comment. Despite Obama’s allies pushing through a vote during the final weeks of Democratic Senate control, the USA Freedom Act failed in November 2014.
Facebook Twitter Pinterest Senator Rand Paul, centre, has led congressional opposition to the NSA surveillance dragnet. Photograph: Andrew Harnik/AP
So the Freedom Act’s architects regrouped. To revive the bill in 2015, they set about placing surveillance advocates on the horns of the dilemma they had warned about the previous year: either pass the bill or lose a broader swath of FBI surveillance powers. For good measure, they conceded even more to the NSA’s allies.
The strategy depended on introducing the bill just weeks before the Patriot Act portions it needed for leverage expired. Meanwhile, bulk collection grew less tenable: a federal appeals court, the final step before the US supreme court, ruled it was illegal. The House passed the bill on 16 May. GOP presidential candidate Rand Paul, the rare Senate Republican to oppose bulk surveillance, used procedural obstructions of his own to force the partial Patriot Act expiration this week – which ultimately ensured passage of the Freedom Act on Tuesday afternoon by a wide, bipartisan, 67-32 margin.
Paul considers the bill insufficient. His allies in the House are now preparing to supplement it. They outlined to the Guardian on Tuesday a strategy to chip away at more of the NSA’s bulk surveillance powers, as well as its ability to insert flaws in encryption software standards. Cognizant that the USA Freedom Act leaves the vast majority of NSA powers untouched, they said they intend to fight for years – particularly through 2017, when the bill Obama voted for as a senator in July 2008 expires.
Obama will be gone from office by then. But his vacillations over surveillance continue. No sooner had the Freedom Act passed, than an administration official confirmed to the Guardian that the NSA would actually restart the bulk surveillance the bill bans – for another six months, to “transition” to a system where the telecom companies retain control of the data and provide it to the NSA or the FBI based on a court order that does not even require the typical probable-cause standard.
Facebook Twitter Pinterest Snowden remains in exile in Russia. Obama has never shown him the slightest regard. Photograph: Barton Gellman/Getty Images
Snowden remains a pariah stranded in Russia, facing jail time for telling Americans about what their government was doing secretly, and illegally, in their name. Obama has never shown Snowden the slightest regard.
But Obama’s caveated, cautious and mutable stances on surveillance have earned him no allies. Despite his endless defenses of the NSA, its veterans demanded greater deference. Civil libertarians now view Obama as a tragic disappointment. With Hillary Clinton a longstanding security hawk, their only presidential hope is Rand Paul.
After the Freedom Act passed on Tuesday, Obama gave no indication that further reforms to the vast, labyrinthine apparatus of surveillance he commands are needed. Instead, he issued a statement praising the passage and insisting the bill will “provide greater public confidence in these programs”, which has been the NSA’s explicit goal since the Snowden leaks began on 5 June 2013.
Obama’s statement did one more thing. He portrayed himself as a stalwart and consistent champion of surveillance reform : “For the past 18 months, I have called for reforms that better safeguard the privacy and civil liberties of the American people while ensuring our national security officials retain tools important to keeping Americans safe.” It was a gesture toward history, toward the kind of president Obama might have been.India is currently pursuing an “exciting” route of digital transformation which can be a learning experience for everyone, according to the IMF which is featuring a case study on the country’s digital revolution in its new book.
Vitor Gaspar, Director of the International Monetary Fund’s Fiscal Affairs Department, the IMF will put out book titled ‘Digital Revolutions in Public Finance’.
“It is about what is happening in the world in terms of the use of digital technology in public finance. It is also looking at the future trying to foresee what is coming as a true set of revolutions. One of the case studies in the book is India,” he said.
According to Gaspar, India is currently pursuing “an alternative and very exciting” route in which it is making the use of digital technology and digital records in public administration with new technologies that make use of financial inclusion and bio metrics.
“And by combining these new technologies it was possible for programs in India to improve targeting quite considerably particularly for rural populations that were supposed to benefit from the programs,” he told PTI in an interview.
“It was also possible to make sure that there were no leakages of any significance in the system, that monies were not being diverted to other ends. And both from the viewpoint of social policy but also from the viewpoint of efficiency and growth. The results are quite impressive,” Gaspar said.
He said the process of digital transformation in India offered the promise of much better targeting and much better value for money than what India was able to deliver in the past.
“So that seems to be the route that India is taking. And from the viewpoint of the Fund we hope that we’re going to be able to learn a lot from it. And we’re following it closely,” Gasper said.
First Published: Oct 16, 2017 16:20 ISTOnline dating can be a hub for harassment, particularly towards women, but one dating app will not condone this kind of behavior.
Bumble, which branded itself as a feminist dating app that gives women the chance to make the first move, recently published an open letter to a male user named Connor.
The company published the exchanges between Connor and Ashley, and showed Connor's aggressive response over questions about his job.
Bumble - bumble.com
Bumble - bumble.com
Connor said he doesn't have time for "entitled, gold-digging whores" and appeared to shame Ashley's education and professional role.
Bumble - bumble.com
After Bumble learned of the exchange, the company wrote on its blog that it won't put up with this type of bad behavior, and that Connor should have realized that Ashley was merely asking about work because careers matter to many young women.
"With that in mind — and knowing that Ashley simply mentioned work in the conversation — we can gather that she wasn’t hoping to figure out if your wallet was sizeable enough for her to move into your house and start cooking dinner for you after vacuuming your living room while you clock in a 9 to 5 work day," Bumble wrote. "Instead, Ashley was (wait for it, Connor, because this is where things really get interesting), viewing herself as an equal. It might sound crazy, but people connect over the basic routines of life. You know… the weather, working out, grabbing a drink, eating, and working."
Bumble Twitter - twitter.com
Connor was blocked and Bumble plans to continue supporting working women on its platform:
"And while you may view this as 'neo-liberal, Beyonce, feminist-cancer,' and rant about the personal wounds you are trying to heal from classic 'entitled gold digging whores,' we are going to keep working. We are going to expand our reach and make sure that women everywhere receive the message that they are just as empowered in their personal lives as they are in the workplace. We are going to continue to build a world that makes small-minded, misogynist boys like you feel outdated. We are going to hope that one day, you come around. We hope that the hate and resentment welling up inside of you will subside and you’ll be able to engage in everyday conversations with women without being cowardice to their power. But until that day comes, Connor, consider yourself blocked from Bumble."
Bumble signed the letter with the hashtags #ImWithAshley and #LaterConnor, receiving ample support social media:
Facebook - facebook.com
A female Facebook user named Ashley Helmbreck claimed to be the Ashley in the text message exchange and thanked Bumble on Facebook for sticking up for her.
Bumble - facebook.com
ATTN: has reached out to Bumble for further comment on the exchange and will update this piece if the company responds.
Bumble has a strong stance against online bullying.
Last year, Bumble founder, Whitney Wolfe told Vanity Fair that she started the app in part to combat online bullying against women. Wolfe, who co-founded Tinder and sued the company for sexual harassment, said that this issue in particular is close to her heart.
"I am a huge advocate for anti-bullying in our youth," Wolfe said. "What I have seen with the rise of social media is that children are not facing bullying on a playground, they are facing it on their cell phones. Young girls are facing tremendous pressure on apps like Instagram, Twitter, and all sorts of social platforms."Stem cells can help to repair damaged tissue A combination of drugs could trick the body into sending its repair mechanisms into overdrive, say scientists. The technique could be used to speed the healing of heart or bone damage, they claim. The bone marrow of treated mice released 100 times as many stem cells - which help to regenerate tissue. Imperial College London scientists reported their work in the journal Cell Stem Cell, but said human trials were some years away. We hope that by releasing extra stem cells, as we were able to do in mice in our study, we could potentially call up extra numbers of whichever stem cells the body needs,
Dr Sara Rankin
Imperial College London The release of stem cells by the bone marrow is a natural part of the repair process - different types are sent to replenish tissue depending on the nature of the injury. However, in some cases, for example the damage caused by heart disease, the repair is not entirely successful, and loss of function persists. The theory behind the Imperial College research is to boost the quantity of stem cells released, which will hopefully mean a swifter and more complete recovery. Techniques already exist to increase the numbers of blood cell producing stem cells from the bone marrow, but the study focuses on two other types - endothelial, which produce the cells which make up our blood vessels, and mesenchymal, which can become bone or cartilage cells. The mice were given firstly a "growth factor" drug - substances that already occur naturally in the bone marrow, then a new drug called Mozobil. Both endothelial and mesenchymal cells were released at a much greater rate. Arthritis hope Dr Sara Rankin, one of the researchers, said: "The body repairs itself all the time, However, when the damage is severe, there are limits to what it can do of its own accord. FROM THE TODAY PROGRAMME Please turn on JavaScript. Media requires JavaScript to play.
More from Today programme "We hope that by releasing extra stem cells, as we were able to do in mice in our study, we could potentially call up extra numbers of whichever stem cells the body needs, in order to boost its ability to mend itself and accelerate the repair process." There are also hopes that the technique could help damp down autoimmune diseases such as rheumatoid arthritis, where the body's immune system attacks its own tissues. Mesenchymal stem cells are known to have the ability to damp down the immune system. The next stage of the research is to see if the extra stem cells circulating in the mice can have a practical benefit - repairing more quickly or more thoroughly the damage caused by a heart attack, for example. Their hope is that clinical trials in humans may be possible within the next 10 years. Professor Peter Weissberg, Medical Director at the British Heart Foundation, said: "It has long been known that the bone marrow contains cells that can replace lost or aged blood cells. "It now seems increasingly likely that the bone marrow also contains cells that have the capacity to repair damaged internal organs, such as the heart and blood vessels, but that too few of them are released to be effective. "This research has identified some important molecular pathways involved in mobilising these cells. "It may be possible to develop a drug that interacts with these pathways to encourage the right number and type of stem cells to enter the circulation and repair damage to the heart."
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StumbleUpon What are these? E-mail this to a friend Printable versionBlockchain startup Colu has secured $14.5 million in new funding from a major business group in Israel.
IDB Group contributed the funds both toward the company itself as well as the token presale for its Colu Local Network (CLN), which it unveiled last month.
The company – Israel’s largest holding company – is involved in the finance and insurance sectors, and the partnership between the two firms will focus in part on retail payments. In statements, IDB indicated that the results of its work with Colu could wind up in products and services offered through its various business holdings.
Sholem Lapidot, CEO of IDB Development Corporation, said of the deal:
“IDB believes that Colu will help to support the growth of blockchain technology as a [real-life] payment method. We strongly believe that crypto technology will play a key role in the future form of payment for goods and services and we are thrilled to be rolling out plans for increased innovation in our diverse industries, with the help of Colu.”
The CLN token, according to Colu, is intended to be used as a basis for local transacting, while at the same time serving as a kind of reward for retail payments.
“Partnering with IDB group is a vote of confidence in cryptocurrencies and the role they could play in the retail market,” Amos Meiri, Colu co-founder and CEO, said in a statement.
That work on localized currencies was highlighted last year when Colu raised $9.6 million from a group of investors that included Aleph, Spark Capital, Digital Currency Group and former Thomson Reuters CEO Tom Glocer.
Disclaimer: CoinDesk is a subsidiary of Digital Currency Group, which has an ownership stake in Colu.
Funding image via ShutterstockPlans are moving forward to build the biggest new refinery in 40 years in the U.S. at a time when gasoline consumption is expected to break an all-time record in 2016.
California-based Meridian Energy Group is expected to begin construction soon on the planned Davis Refinery in North Dakota that would take advantage of the Bakken shale play and process up to 55,000 barrels of oil a day. The project comes on the heels of the 2015 opening of the 20,000-barrel-a-day Dakota Prairie Refinery that represented the nation’s first new refinery since 1976.
“The Davis Refinery will be one of the most modern, efficient and environmentally-compliant refineries in the U.S. in more than 50 years,” Meridian Chairman and CEO William Prentice said in a prepared statement, noting that Houston-based BASIC Equipment is contracted for fabrication and construction services.
The Davis Refinery is more substantial than the smaller, “teapot” Dakota Prairie project, said Patrick DeHaan, senior petroleum analyst for GasBuddy, which surveys and predicts gasoline demand and pricing.
“The economics behind refining have not always been favorable. There’s a considerable risk to open a refinery,” DeHaan said. “Everybody wants cheap gas, but nobody wants a refinery near them.”
Several other refinery projects in recent years have been held up by environmental concerns and protests by residents. For instance, Houston-based Rock River Resources hasn’t been able to move forward with plans for a Utah refinery for years.
“It’s difficult to find a good place to put a refinery,” DeHaan said, “and it’s difficult to wedge yourself into an industry that has a lot of powerful players.”
However, thanks to cheap gasoline and strong demand, DeHaan noted, the U.S. is expected to break its 2007 record for gasoline consumption this year. So the short-term economics make sense, he said, although the growth of more fuel-efficient or electric and battery-operated vehicles makes the long-term concerns more considerable.
Although the U.S. hasn’t seen any new big refineries in 40 years, that hasn’t stopped many existing refineries from expanding. For instance, Motiva Enterprise’s Port Arthur Refinery in Texas doubled in size in 2012 to become the nation’s biggest refinery with a capacity of processing 600,000 barrels of oil a day.
Although North Dakota still has limited pipeline access, DeHaan called the David Refinery an interesting project because it will slowly scale up from an initial capacity of more than 27,000 barrels of crude processing a day. Also, Meridian plans to operate in part with tolling contracts similar to how oil and gas pipelines operate, Prentice said. That could create less day-to-day risk of finding buyers for the fuel products.Study on food stamp distribution and theft underscores hunger crisis in Illinois
By Jessica Goldstein
28 July 2017
A study published earlier this month seems to indicate a correlation between a drop in thefts committed at grocery stores in Chicago and the implementation of an Illinois policy change in the disbursement of Supplemental Nutrition Assistance program (SNAP) benefits, also known as food stamps. The study, conducted by Jillian B. Carr of Purdue University and Analisa Packman of Miami University, found an overall drop in grocery thefts after Illinois implemented a staggered disbursement schedule for SNAP benefits starting in 2010.
The study points to the desperate conditions faced by millions of Illinois residents every day, including those forced to subsist on meager food stamps benefits. Faced with the choice to starve or shoplift in order to obtain food, an increasing number of households reliant on food stamps are left with few choices other than food theft to survive.
The new Illinois policy implemented changes to the schedule of state SNAP benefit disbursement that spread payments throughout the month. Where previously over 60 percent of benefits were distributed on the first day of the month, under the new plan more benefits were disbursed between the second and 23rd days of the month. The study found that theft rates dropped by 15-20 percent at grocery stores in Chicago after the new disbursement policy went into effect. In total numbers, incidences of all crimes reported at grocery stores dropped by some 500 cases per year.
The study demonstrated that grocery store thefts are more likely to occur in the week before benefit disbursement, when financial resources are running low and recipients are pushed to the brink of desperation. Thefts are also more likely to be committed by women during the final week of the benefit cycle, pointing to a desperate attempt to feed their children.
The study suggested the motive behind grocery theft by SNAP recipients. “Because half of all families receiving SNAP exhaust their SNAP benefits in two weeks,” the study states, “recipients may face a scarcity of resources during the remainder of the month. In response to this scarcity, they may turn to crime to meet nutritional needs.”
Cook County, which encompasses the city of Chicago and the area on which the study is focused, has one of the highest rates of food insecurity and food stamp usage of any county in the US. Some 16.8 percent of Cook County residents rely on food stamp benefits, compared to 13.1 percent of the total US population—still a staggeringly high number for the wealthiest capitalist country in the world. A family of four must earn no more than $3,342 per month in gross income to become eligible for food stamp benefits in Cook County, a rather paltry amount considering the high cost of living in the Chicago area.
As income inequality and the cost of living continue to skyrocket, more and more residents are applying for food assistance in the county each year. In the past year, Cook County has seen a 10 percent increase in households receiving food stamp benefits. The crisis has been exacerbated by layoffs, slow economic growth and declining wages.
The maximum food stamp benefit for a family of four in Cook County is $649 per month, a mere $162.25 per person. Even at the maximum, a person would need to skip meals and consume the bare minimum amount of calories per day in order to survive. It should come as no surprise that those in such a dire situation might feel compelled to steal food.
It is not clear exactly why the new Illinois policy was implemented. The study points to possible reasons, including the desire to curb incentives for grocers to raise their prices during the first week of the month in order to take advantage of the influx of business from food stamp disbursement. This idea, however, was eventually proven to be false in a 2016 paper published by Goldin et al., that found that grocery store prices do not fluctuate in response to perceived patterns of benefit distribution.
Reports also suggest that a staggering of food stamp benefits leads to lowered grocery store theft because of its impact on first-of the-month “income shocks.” These shocks, which come from the disbursement of other state benefits such as disability insurance, unemployment benefits, Medicaid, as well as wages from work, can lead recipients to exhaust their resources early on in the month when benefits come. The study suggests that the smoothing of disbursement leads to a more even consumption pattern over the course of the month.
In all events the study concludes with proposals that are entirely conventional and accept the starvation level of social assistance in the US. Thus the authors recommend states consider staggering the disbursement of other state-issued benefits as well as wages in order to further decrease the amount of retail theft in communities.
Bipartisan cuts to the federal SNAP program carried out since 2008 by the Obama administration have resulted in dwindling benefit amounts year after year, as the number of those forced to depend on federal food assistance continues to grow. At the height of the so-called “economic recovery” in 2013, a record 20 percent of American households received SNAP benefits. That same year, the Obama administration announced a draconian $11 billion cut to the food stamp program to be implemented over the next three years.
The ruling class has no progressive answer to the hunger crisis in the US. Even as the stock market continues to soar, millions of workers face hunger and devastation in their daily lives. Policies like the one implemented in Illinois are an attempt to temporarily stave off mass opposition to the cuts being implemented at all levels—state, federal and local. At the same time benefits are being slashed and billions are being poured into the financial markets to meet the insatiable greed of Wall Street.
In May, the Trump administration signed into law a bipartisan budget plan that hacks away another $2.4 billion from the national SNAP program through September 30, creating an even more desperate crisis for the millions of Americans who face hunger every day. The problem of hunger will not be solved by the political representatives of the ruling class, but by an independent movement of the working class in the fight for socialism.
Please enable JavaScript to view the comments powered by Disqus.By Jonathan Amos
Science correspondent, BBC News
Please turn on JavaScript. Media requires JavaScript to play. The Austrian extreme sportsman Felix Baumgartner says his next goal is to try to break the long-standing record for the highest ever parachute jump. It is 50 years since the American Joe Kittinger made history by leaping from a balloon at 102,800ft (31km). Many have sought to repeat the feat down the decades but all have failed. Baumgartner, who is famous for stunts such as jumping off the Petronas Towers, aims to skydive from a balloon sent to at least 120,000 ft (37km). It is likely that in his long freefall of more than five minutes, he will exceed the speed of sound - the first person to do so without the aid of a machine. "No-one really knows what that will be like," he said. "The fact is you have a lot of different airflows coming around your body; and some parts of your body are in supersonic flow and some parts are in transonic flow. What kind of reaction that creates, I can't tell you," he told BBC News. Felix Baumgartner's base-jumping has not always pleased the authorities
Baumgartner and his supporters claim the project will gather scientific data also about the stratosphere and how the body copes with the extreme conditions so high above the Earth's surface. The most recent attempt to try to better Kittinger's mark was made in 2008 by the Frenchman Michel Fournier. Joe Kittinger made his leap before the first American went into space The former paratrooper and adventurer had spent years preparing for "Le Grand Saut", or Big Jump, only to see his balloon break free and float off into the sky just as he was about to climb inside the ascent capsule. Baumgartner has frequently incurred the ire of the authorities because of his base-jumping - the highly dangerous practice of parachuting from buildings. He also made headlines in 2003 when he crossed the English Channel on a carbon wing strapped to his back. His assault on Kittinger's record is likely to take place later this year over an as yet unnamed location in North America. He will ascend to the stratosphere in a pressurized capsule attached to a 450ft-high (140m) helium balloon, and then jump out at an altitude he hopes will exceed 120,000ft.. He will be wearing a specially modified full-pressure suit and helmet. The organisers of the project called Red Bull Stratos say, if all goes well, he should break the speed of sound about 35 seconds into his descent. Joe Kittinger's 16 August 1960 jump was an extraordinary achievement. It was made nine months before Alan Shepard was even launched on the first American sub-orbital space trip. Kittinger experienced intense swelling in his right hand as his glove malfunctioned and his body reacted to the low pressure at high altitude. "I was headed back down to a friendly Earth," he recalls. "It's extremely hostile up there and the further you fall, the friendlier it is," the retired USAF colonel told the BBC. He is now supporting the Austrian in his endeavour. As well as coping with freezing temperatures and ultra-thin air, a key objective for Baumgartner must be to try to maintain a good attitude during the descent and prevent his body from going into a spin and blacking out. Baumgartner acknowledges the risks of breaking the sound barrier If he does go into a spin, it is unlikely, he says, he will be able to correct it. In any case, his chute will be automatically deployed if he is unconscious. Baumgartner has an eye on the benefits he believes can accrue to space exploration, making it possible to bring astronauts back to Earth alive if their vehicle malfunctions. "We want to prove a human person - if they have to bail out of a capsule from 120,000ft - can come back safely to Earth," he explained. Michel Fournier has promised to make another attempt in 2010 also, if he can secure the funding. A BBC/National Geographic Channel documentary is being made about Baumgartner's project. The 90-minute film will be transmitted on BBC Two in the UK shortly after the jump. Jonathan.Amos-INTERNET@bbc.co.uk
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StumbleUpon What are these? E-mail this to a friend Printable versionIran has claimed that the number of Iranians killed in the Mecca stampede has risen to 464 -- nearly double of what was reported earlier.
Till Wednesday, the number of Iranian haj pilgrims killed in Mina was 239, while 241 Iranians were still missing days after the deadly stampede on 25 September.
Iranian television channels on Friday reported that many of the missing are now feared dead. According to BBC, the Iranian authorities have told local news channels that there is no hope of finding any of the country's missing pilgrims alive.
As per the latest figures, the total death toll stands at 849, while over 934 have been injured. But, Iran has claimed that more than 4,000 Hajj pilgrims have killed in the crush, according to CNN.
Iran, which lost most number of its nationals in the stampede has been blaming the Saudis of mismanagement.
Iran's Supreme Leader now has threatened Saudi Arabia with "tough and harsh" retaliation if the bodies of Iranians victims were not repatriated swiftly.
"Saudi Arabia failed to fulfill its duties concerning the desperate wounded (pilgrims)," said Ayatollah Ali Khamene |
in this national recreation area. Here the Gauley and Meadow Rivers have carved gorges into the Allegheny Plateau, where mountain water crashes to lower elevations, underscoring West Virginia’s boast of a “wild and wonderful” state. The 11,000 acres of parkland along the Gauley and Meadow Rivers also provide access to fishing, hiking, and viewing of the enormous variety of plants and animals that call this place home. 8. New Mexico and Colorado — Portions of the Continental Divide National Scenic Trail
Image: The Continental Divide Trail by Bob Wick.
The Continental Divide National Scenic Trail spans 3,100 miles along the spine of the Rockies, from southern New Mexico to northern Montana. A planned LWCF project in New Mexico would connect segments of the trail, re-routing the trail off of 52 miles of highway shoulder and onto protected land. Without investments like these, the trail risks being overtaken by residential development and faces the loss of historic features and scenic beauty. A small acquisition planned in Colorado would remove motorized use from a portion of the trail and restore habitat currently occupied by an access road and buildings. 9. Montana, Idaho, Oregon — Lands along the original Lewis and Clark National Historic Trail
Image: This trail at Pompey’s Pillar National Monument allows visitors to explore the territory that Lewis and Clark saw during their legendary journey. LWCF funds would help preserve more of the trial. Image by Bob Wick.
Meriwether Lewis and William Clark led the Corps of Discovery 3,700 miles to the Pacific Ocean and back between 1804 and 1806. Much of their route is now preserved as a national historic trail including a 149-mile stretch of the Upper Missouri Wild and Scenic River in central Montana. However, pockets of private land surround portions of the original trail and many of those pockets are at risk of being developed. A proposed 2016 LWCF project would protect parcels of riverfront land and nearby properties that are at risk from development in Montana. In Idaho, a LWCF project will ensure more of this historic trail will be made accessible for current and future generations to explore for themselves. LWCF support has also protected land along the historic trail in Oregon along the Columbia River Gorge National Scenic Area. These projects would preserve the beauty of that landscape and ensure that much of it remains largely as it did during the Lewis and Clark expedition. 10. West Virginia — Private land at New River Gorge National River
Image: New River Gorge National River by myheimu, flickr
The New River is actually one of the oldest rivers in North America. Featuring deep canyons and dramatic whitewater, at 53-mile segment from Hinton to Fayetteville, W. Va., rewards visitors with beautiful vistas and natural settings as well as abundant recreation choices. LWCF funds would protect a key tract of private forested land along half-mile of the river that would connect trails and provide views of the river. Without protection the land will most likely be developed for a planned housing subdivision, threatening the beauty and wild experience that drives southern West Virginia’s recreation economy. 11. Montana –Private portions of Big Hole National Battlefield
Image: Big Hole National Battlefield, by Roger Peterson.
Big Hole National Battlefield commemorates an 1877 battle between the Nez Perce Indians and U.S. Infantry forces. The site, near the Big Hole River in southwest Montana, is a memorial to the Nez Perce men, women, and children and U.S. soldiers who lost their lives in the battle. The land includes an area believed to contain artifacts from the battle, but a portion of the battlefield is held by a private owner. LWCF dollars would pay for a conservation easement that would protect the property from development or disturbance that would harm the historic integrity of the site and could damage the artifacts and remains. 12. Colorado — Land in the Sangre de Cristo Conservation Area
Image: Sangre de Cristo Mountains by USFWS
Conservation easements (agreements by private land owners to maintain their lands for conservation) would help protect the wildlife-rich areas of the Sangre de Cristo Mountains and the southeastern San Luis Valley of southern Colorado and northern New Mexico. These projects would protect corridors of undeveloped land that wildlife need, especially along waterways. This will help local plants and animals cope as they face increasing stressors from climate change, development and habitat loss. LWCF is needed to ensure this happens quickly. These lands are also rich in Hispanic and Native American heritage. There is strong support in the local community for protecting this area’s unique wildlife, cultural, scenic and recreational resources. 13. New York — Historic lands adjacent to Saratoga National Battlefield
Image: Saratoga National Battlefield, by Michelle Joyce, flickr
The crucial victory of American forces over the British at the Battle of Saratoga in 1777 was a decisive event in the Revolutionary War that spurred France to recognize American independence and join the struggling colonies in the war. Now, however, this historic area along the Hudson River north of Albany, NY continues to see rapid commercial and residential development. LWCF resources would protect 182 acres adjacent to the park that contains the key road used by advancing British troops and outstanding views of the American river fortifications in the park. 14. Georgia — Private lands around the Chattahoochee River National Recreation Area
Image: Chattahoochee River National Recreation Area by Steve Harwood
Georgia’s picturesque Chattahoochee River National Recreation Area protects the water quality and access to recreation on a 48-mile section of this meandering river, from Lake Sidney Lanier south and west to the suburbs of Atlanta. But being in the center of one of the fastest- growing areas of the country, wild areas of the Chattahoocheee are disappearing at alarming rates. Thousands of acres along the Chattahoochee are being developed each year for housing subdivisions, which causes extensive erosion, siltation, and other damage to this treasured resource. The Land and Water Conservation Fund would protect undeveloped private parcels in a rapidly urbanizing part of greater Atlanta and provide a crucial link to a planned public trail system. In 2011, this area was approved for development of more than 20 high-end homes along the river, but LWCF would preserve the scenic and recreational value of the area for all. 15. Tennessee — Critical wildlife areas in Sherwood Forest
Image: Leather flower by Tom Porterfield
Pockets of southeast Tennessee provide some of the most biologically diverse wild habitat in the United States, but like so many other cherished areas around the country, these lands are at risk. In Franklin County, an LWCF project would protect critical habitat for two endangered species in Sherwood Forest — the Painted Snake Coiled Forest Snail, only found in Franklin County, and a rare Appalachian buttercup called Morefield’s leather flower. Both depend on the plant life and water supplies found in Sherwood Forest. A Forest Legacy Program grant under LWCF would prevent encroaching development. This project would tie together several efforts to preserve forest, scenic views and 10 miles of vital headwater streams. 16. Montana — Unprotected areas around Red Rocks Lake National Wildlife Reserve
Image: Grizzly bears are one of several animals that will benefit from the LWCF project in Red Rocks Lake, by Kent Miller
This wildlife-rich area is part of an essential corridor between the Greater Yellowstone and the Salmon Selway ecosystem in Central Idaho. LWCF support would acquire conservation easements in this High Divide landscape to help protect key wildlife areas for migrating elk, grizzly bear, wolverine and the Shiras moose, a subspecies that lives in the refuge. The wetlands, forests and streams of Red Rocks Lake also provide critical breeding areas for the Trumpeter Swan and a rare population of Arctic grayling. Without this needed linkage between these ecosystems, vital wildlife populations will remain isolated and increasingly vulnerable to looming threats from development, habitat loss and climate change. 17. Tennessee — Threatened portions of the Obed Wild and Scenic River
Image: Obed Wild and Scenic River by Stephen Conn
True to its full name, the Obed Wild and Scenic River showcases 45 miles of the waterway as it plunges through the two spectacular gorges in the Southern Appalachian Mountains of east Tennessee. The park draws visitors who enjoy rafting through the Class II- through IV whitewater as well as camping, hiking, and fishing in this diverse forest, which boasts a unique collection of wild and rare plants. All of this outdoor bounty drives recreation and tourism, which is a growing boon to Tennessee’s economy. A substantial part of this area is privately owned, and rapid development along the river’s most scenic spots threatens to alter the park’s “wild and scenic” features. LWCF would fund acquisition protection of key tracts of land to preserve the natural character of the area, its beautiful views and access to recreation along the river. 18. California — More lands for the Panoche-Coalinga Area of Critical Environmental Concern
Image: A San Joaquin antelope squirrel is one of many animals that depend on Panoche-Coalinga, by Marcel Holyoak, flickr
Connecting vast areas of arid lands in the western San Joaquin Valley, the Panoche-Coalinga Area of Critical Environmental Concern (ACEC) protects critical habitat for a variety of wildlife. The San Joaquin kit fox, San Joaquin antelope squirrel, blunt-nosed leopard lizard, and several species of rare plants are among the assemblage of unique life that depend on these lands. Lying between Fresno to the east and Monterey to the west, this landscape that needs protection is also known as the San Joaquin Desert Hills. LWCF funds would help with endangered species recovery in this important region. 19. Florida — Additional lands for wildlife at Everglades Headwaters National Wildlife Refuge and Conservation Area
Image: A Sandhill Crane in the Everglades by Keenan AdamsSo much amazing is happening, and the Shootaround crew is here to help you keep track of it all. You’ll find takes on moments you might’ve missed from the previous night, along with ones you will remember forever.
Kevin Love Is Ready for His Close-up
David Liam Kyle/NBAE via Getty Images
Chris Ryan: Here is a trollgaze power ranking of things that are wrong with the Cavs, in order of relevance to last night’s home loss to the Spurs:
7. Does LeBron have a liftoff problem?
6. Does Kyrie have a sharing problem?
5. Does Dion have a sitting problem?
4. Does LeBron have a minutes problem?
3. Does David Blatt have a running his huddle problem?
2. Joe Harris?
1. Does Kevin Love have a being-the-third-dude-in-the–Big Three problem?
Because he sure is playing like the third dude.
Kevin Love on finding a consistent role with the Cavs right now: "It's tough" — Dave McMenamin (@mcten) November 20, 2014
The Spurs cause teams problems. They exploit, torment, nip, and cut. So if Love was going to have a particularly bad night, it’s no surprise it came against San Antonio. But there was something a little eyebrow-raising about Love’s performance. There were plays like this on offense:
And the defensive work he put in prompted tweets like this:
Every time I look up at this game another Spurs big man is beasting Kevin Love down low. — Rafe Bartholomew (@Rafeboogs) November 20, 2014
It looked like he and Anderson Varejao were playing different sports. While the Brazilian was slashing, running the floor, and throwing himself around with abandon, Love looked like he was playing with concrete in his sneakers.
When Zach Lowe made his case for Cleveland as title contenders, he painted a tantalizing picture of how Love’s post prowess, basketball smarts, and deadly outside shooting could open up driving lanes for Cavs slashers. Lowe included some examples of past T-Wolves plays that might look good to Cleveland coach David Blatt this season. I watched those plays again last night, after the Spurs game. There was a certain level of attention Love’s teammates in Minnesota were paying to him, possibly to their detriment. I always like to think of great NBA players like movie stars — they tell you where to look when they are onscreen. When he was on Minnesota, Love was definitely a movie star.
The footage from last night’s loss — in which Love put up 10 points and grabbed 11 boards — looked like it was directed by a totally different filmmaker than the one who made those Minnesota clips. Love is like a bit player out there right now — just floating around the outer edges of the frame. Kyrie matters, Dion matters, and, of course, LeBron matters the most. But if the Cavs are going to be who we thought they were, Blatt needs to get his impending free-agent power forward some close-ups.
Taylor, How Was That Last Cavs Play Supposed to Go?
Moon Pie Sonata
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Danny Chau: Boris Diaw flows. Like Lizst, like water. Last night, against the Cavs, he was the best player on the winning team. He finished with a 19-6-7-3-1 stat line, and did it as only Diaw can. Most players use hesitation dribbles to jar the defender; the staccato is aimed to break the opponent’s focus for a split second with an unexpected shift. Diaw’s changes in motion are incidental. He’s like a hippie out there, one with the environment, interacting with every aspect of it through free-form interpretive dance. A pump fake and an overhead pass don’t necessarily share the same antecedents, but when you watch Diaw do both, on the same play, in the same beat, the two motions blur and become a chicken-or-the-egg question — how does one exist without the other?
Diaw has always been amorphous — the Suns let him play point center before his 23rd birthday. He was slim then, asked to bang around with bodies much bigger than his. Being forced to play “out of position” expanded his game, but also gave him a built-in excuse to indulge his epicurean impulses. He willfully got fat, but for years was unable to reconcile his two loves. Even counting that first season in Phoenix, you can argue that he didn’t discover his best self until silver and black draped his full figure. He’s always been amorphous, sure, but the true wonder of his game hatched once he found a coach who embraced his play as a blob.
All of this leads me to a question that I’ve pondered for a while, and I’m opening this to the floor: Beyond Shaq, is there another NBA player whose abilities clearly changed for the better once he got fat? I think you can make a decent argument that, like Shaq, Diaw’s best form came nearly a decade after his athletic peak. I guess what I’m also trying to say is, there’s still hope for all of us.
“How Do You Grow a Beard?”
Shea Serrano: The Spurs won last night. And that’s fine. That’s a thing they’ve done more than 1,000 times since Tim Duncan became a Spur in 1997, so I’m used to it. So that’s not what this is. What this is is a thing about the new H-E-B commercials that were released earlier this week. The ads star the Spurs.
I wrote about the history of the Spurs’ H-E-B commercials in March. The short version: H-E-B is a grocery chain in San Antonio. For a little more than a decade, it has used Spurs players (and even the Coyote and Pop, if you can believe that) to help sell brisket and milk. The commercials have achieved this neat little cultlike status in San Antonio, and they have begun to earn appreciation outside of the city. They’re surprisingly silly and funny, in as much as a commercial about laundry can be funny.
Over the years, as the Spurs roster has evolved, so, too, has the lineup of players in the commercials. The current group — Tim, Tony, Manu, Kawhi, and Patty — is the strongest, most likable ensemble yet. Timmy is (duh) the straight man, the stately grown-up who Tony and Manu bounce their goofiness off of. Kawhi is the young one, and 100 percent the funniest person of the group. And Patty (it would appear) is the whatever-you-need piece, serving as either the odd man out or another person for Tony and Manu to influence into silliness.
I love the Spurs so much. And I kind of might love them in these commercials more than a win over Cleveland in June, which is what’s going to happen in seven months, FYI.
The NBA Shootaround Museum of Fine Art
Louisa Thomas
Let’s Get Weird: Nets-Bucks Edition
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Corban Goble: Though Jason Kidd did clutch a mini Dasani bottle at his hip during the third overtime of the Bucks-Nets game, Spillgate redux would not have been the strangest thing to happen at Barclays Center last night. After all, this was a game during which I saw a scoring play completed by two dudes named “Jared.” Here are some other notable moments:
First OT
Brandon Knight jumped into a passing lane with the entire court ahead of him and the score tied 105-105. He sprinted to the other end with plenty of time, only to completely chunk a bunny, much to the dismay of his fellow Deer.
(Video by Jason Gallagher)
Second OT
Completely upending a nightmare narrative, Knight got his revenge with a late, contested 3 to tie the game. Joe Jesus got a look, but clanged it.
Third OT
Ersan Ilyasova started the third extra period by hitting a floater without his feet leaving the ground. The Nets did not have an answer for Khris Middleton. Knight hit two free throws to seal it.
“You know J. Kidd wasn’t going to come in here and lose after all that booing!” an usher/Kidd apologist hollered as I left. The court was bone-dry.
Fresh to Death
DON EMMERT/AFP/Getty Images
Bob Voulgaris: One thing that has always bothered me is when teams don’t go to backups in double and triple overtime. A fresh backup versus a much better but tired starter seems like the right move to me. There was one game that especially stood out, a triple-overtime 2011 Western Conference semifinal game between the Thunder and the Grizzlies.
By the end of the game, the Memphis bigs couldn’t even move up and down the court anymore, but then–Grizzlies coach Lionel Hollins refused to give Darrell Arthur any minutes.
Last night, Jason Kidd went with a fresh bench and it paid off. It would be interesting to see if he would have the same trust in a playoff game.
Late Nights in Brooklyn, Am I Right, Taylor?
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Kobe Strikes Oil
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Kirk Goldsberry: Most nights, it’s safe to make the jokes about all the shots and the record chasing, but last night Kobe reminded us why he is a legend. Just when it looked like another disappointing loss, Kobe willed his team to an improbable comeback win on the road. The rally began with 1:45 left in the fourth quarter, with the Lakers down 91-86. Bryant outwitted Trevor Ariza and drained a monster 20-foot and-1 jumper, cutting the lead to two. The basket sparked a crazy 12-1 run and helped the Lakers win their second game in a row. The Lakers may be 3-9, but Nick Young is undefeated.
Half Amazing Night
Ron Turenne/NBAE via Getty Images
Jared Dubin: This might have been a game between two of the best teams in the league, and it featured some Marc Gasol–Mike Conley pick-and-roll magic and some folk-song-worthy step-back jumpers by Kyle Lowry, but the night belonged to Vince Carter, even if the game didn’t.
Carter sulked and dogged his way out of T-Dot almost a decade ago (in fairness, the Raps did mismanage the hell out of the roster around him, but still), and he’s been vociferously booed each and every time he’s returned since.
But in this, the team’s 20th season, the Raps decided enough was enough and paid homage to one of the best players in their history, in town for the first time as a Grizzlie (Grizzly? Grizzle? Grizz and Dot Com?). During a first-quarter stoppage, the Air Canada Centre video board showed clips of dunks, dunks, and more dunks, a fitting tribute to the former Raptors star.
It brought Carter to tears.
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How Did He Get the Name “No Heart”?
Steve McPherson: It’s only fitting that on the 10th anniversary of the Malice at the Palace, Detroit should play a butt-ugly game in Auburn Hills. The Pistons combined with the Suns to shoot 27.5 percent from 3-point range in a game that Phoenix won 88-86 after Kentavious Caldwell-Pope’s desperation 3-pointer didn’t go. According to Dr. Markieff Morris, that was due to a disorder even more rare than situs invertus (which is something that affects Randy Foye, and means that all of his internal organs are on the opposite side of his body — I shit you not):
Markieff Morris: "KCP got it and you know he doesn't have any heart so we knew he was going to miss it." — Vincent Goodwill (@vgoodwill) November 20, 2014
Morris MD’s diagnosis began early on when he hit Eric Bledsoe on a beautiful cut off a give-and-go, leaving Caldwell-Pope burned so badly that all he could do was messily foul Bledsoe and send him to the line.
Then, in the second quarter, Morris drew a charge on Caldwell-Pope that apparently confirmed his suspicions. Doctor-patient confidentiality means we can’t know what they said to each other here, but I’m fairly certain Morris is saying, “Sir, I’m concerned by the hollow sound your chest made when you bounced off me just then, and I think you should see a cardiovascular specialist.”
Morris’s accomplishments in medical science (including cloning himself) are well known, but with only two other known cases of cardia in absentia, there just isn’t enough precedent for him to recommend a course of treatment. The best option is hospice, a duty for which the Detroit Pistons are well-suited.
Solomon Hill: Born Ready 2.0
Ron Hoskins/NBAE via Getty Images
Jason Gallagher: My hopes were crazy high as I tuned in to Lance Stephenson’s return to Indy — maybe too high. I was envisioning fireworks made of gunpowder and shenanigans, raining down in a spectacular homecoming. I mean, this is where he discovered the wind beneath his wings and helped uncover Indiana’s greatest natural resources — Birdface.
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I was expecting Lance to hit somewhere between four and six banked 3-pointers, and to lick something he’s not supposed to.
Unfortunately, Lance didn’t feel like performing last night. In fact, he didn’t do anything. He went for 10 points on 4-of-12 shooting, while letting Roy Hibbert, one of his 35 mortal enemies, put up 18 and 11. All of this and ZERO shenanigans. Dafuq, Lance? You mean to tell me I just watched a Pacers-Hornets game for nothing — or worse, for basketball reasons?
Lucky for me, heroes emerge from the unlikeliest of places. Solomon Hill’s game wasn’t glamorous — six points on 3-of-8 shooting. But from the ashes of a Rodney Stuckey missed jumper, Hill rose with an over-the-shoulder putback to deliver one of the wackiest game winners of the year.
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Solomon Hill is a hero for saving us from this game. Salute.
Wiggins Watch
David Sherman/NBAE via Getty Images
Ryan O’Hanlon: If you didn’t watch the Knicks-Wolves game last night, go buy one of those noise-canceling machines, turn the setting to “babbling brook,” sit in a dimly lit room for three hours, and you’ll be all set. But Andrew Wiggins did play — and that seems more important than anything else from a game that featured this phrase: “And a season-high eight points for Travis Wear tonight.”
Here’s all you need to know about Wiggins’s first quarter (and his third quarter and his fourth quarter):
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He scored all of his points on a 4-for-6 clip in the second quarter, otherwise going 0-for-7. For 12 minutes, though, it looked like the no. 1 pick might go off. He didn’t.
While there was a brief stretch when Minnesota force-fed him (control+F “right elbow”), most of those points came near effortlessly. With the game humming along at the lowest frequency you’d still consider professional basketball, Wiggins dialed into the lethargy and exploited it for a cheap dozen. While going 4-for-13 with five turnovers isn’t quite the kind of world-conquering output expected from a no. 1 pick, one great quarter’s just enough to rise above the background noise.
Notes on a Night With the Wizards
John McDonnell/The Washington Post via Getty Images
Andrew Sharp: Five notes from the Wizards-Mavs game last night.
1. Wednesday was my first trip to a Wiz game this year. Does Wale come to every game? I liked how he rotated between three courtside seats through various parts of the game. That’s my creative liasion. You may see this and sneer, “Wale is a lifelong B-lister who’s impossible to rep with a straight face and has never once been taken seriously by the mainstream.” But then again, you just described the Wizards for the past 40 years. Wale is perfect. We’re all going to the top together.
2. Nene hasn’t looked good all year. He’s been bad on offense and horrible on defense. Randy Wittman has actually been decent this season, but if the Nene struggles continue, it’ll be interesting to see how long it takes Wittman to realize Kris Humphries should be starting, with Nene anchoring the second unit. Likewise, let’s go ahead and never put Kevin Seraphin on the court again. Where is Grizzly Blair when you need him?
3. Where is Bradley Beal when you need him? OH, THERE HE IS. RIGHT THERE, GOING AT TYSON CHANDLER’S NECK AND FINISHING AT THE RIM. DRAINING 3S. TAKING DUMB LONG 2S AND MAKING THEM ANYWAY BECAUSE HE’S PERFECT. SCORING 21 POINTS IN 26 MINUTES. LOOKING HEALTHY AND READY TO HAVE A BREAKOUT YEAR JUST IN TIME FOR THE WIZARDS TO START PLAYING GOOD TEAMS. THANK YOU, GOD. BIG PANDA IS BACK AND HE’S READY TO EAT.
(That was a direct transmission from my heart last night.)
4. Last night was failure that still felt like success. John Wall and Beal reminded everyone why they’re so much fun, Beal looked healthy, Otto Porter and Paul Pierce hit big shots, and I spent the entire game bracing for a blowout that never came. The Wizards may not have won, but last year this would’ve been a 15- or 20-point loss. I walked out Wednesday thinking this team can hang with anyone, knowing their two best players are only getting better. Not bad. Plus …
THE OPERATION WAS SUCCESSFUL, BUT THE PATIENT DIED.
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5. Now it’s time for the Cavs on Friday. You ready? Let’s do it.I stood last week at the entrance to 1 Infinite Loop, Cupertino, the coolest address in the universe, remembering the time I had gone inside and managed to annoy Steve Jobs.
For me that man was Willy Wonka and every time I went to Cupertino I was Charlie visiting the Chocolate Factory. I don’t mind saying that there was no one alive in the world I admired more and no one I wanted to rile less. I will come to my story, but first the background. I am sure you know most of it.
Along with the great electronics wizard and programmer Steve Wozniak, Jobs founded Apple Computers in the mid-1970s. He had been fired/forced to resign from his own company the year after he had led the team that brought into the world the Macintosh, the first consumer computer to come with a mouse, pulldown menus and a graphical user interface.
Outside Apple he went on to create NeXT Inc on one of whose computers Tim Berners-Lee wrote the programs and protocols of his invention the World Wide Web.
Jobs then founded a computer graphics company, Pixar. When it was bought by Disney he became that company’s leading shareholder.
Inside Out is one of Disney Pixar's most recent films
Finally, he returned to a nearly bankrupt Apple, a once pioneering company now ready, everyone predicted, for the breaker’s yard. Within a year Jobs had presided over the launch of the iMac.
In swift and dazzling succession came MacBooks, iPods, iPhones, iPads... there had never been a corporate story like it in our lifetime. Rags to riches to rags to riches again doesn’t do it justice.
And it took place in a sector which has always made me drool and quiver and moan with ecstasy. The world of digital devices. I am sure I have already bored people enough with relating how I bought the second Macintosh sold in Europe, after Douglas Adams.
Suffice to say I have watched the fortunes of the Big A from a distance and from close up for more than 30 years. Some people love Ferraris, tifosi they are called. Some people love Apple products. Fanbois we are called. And yes, that is the right spelling. I apologise.
It has been many years since the Apple story was a story of David facing up to the brutal IBM Goliath or a story of St George piercing the side of the fire-breathing Microsoft dragon. Apple has been the big man on campus for a decade or more now. Campus. More on that later.
The Jobs legacy
The legend goes like this: the Steve Jobs legacy was one of almost maniacal micro-management when it came to creating a new product and of almost Barnum-like mastery of hoopla and razzmatazz when it came to selling.
The late Steve Jobs (Photo: AFP/Getty)
His charisma and skills as a showman were unique in the dorky digital world. He famously found within Apple a fellow perfectionist in Jonathan Ive, the British designer whose trademark elegance, finish, simplicity and attention to detail have made him the most influential and feted person in his field. This very newspaper voted him in 2008 the Most Influential Briton in America. He was knighted in 2012. Heavens, he even received a gold Blue Peter badge.
As Jobs so terribly and sadly sickened and finally withdrew from the company, the question arose on Wall Street and in the pages of the tech press: Could the company survive without its great impresario? “Call him huckster or call him genius, he is Apple.” That was the cry.
Tim Cook, Jobs’s chosen replacement as CEO seemed to many, on the face of it, a pallid successor. A highly skilled business manager, a master of detail in his own way, but in matters of inventory, sales and the bottom line. So it was thought. How could he hope to reinvigorate a workforce stunned and disoriented by the loss of their mercurial, touchy, moody but magnetic leader? The one man band had lost its one man.
Tim Cook who was promoted to chief executive of Apple following Steve Jobs' death, pictured here with Stephen Fry (Photo: Gabriela Hasbun for The Telegraph)
But since Jobs’s death Apple’s fortunes have not gone into decline. In fact the growth graph has climbed ever more steeply. The figures are simply incredible.
The most valuable company on earth
Apple is now far and away the most valuable company on earth. Industry analysts, tech-bloggers and stock-market pundits have been dumbfounded by such astonishing and seemingly unstoppable success. Websites proliferate that attempt to make sense of Apple’s worth: more than the entire 1977 US Stock Market. More than the entire global coffee industry.
But those two comparisons come from a site which was put together when Apple was worth $500 billion. It is now worth $764 billion and rising. It will not be long before it is worth a trillion dollars. One thousand billion. How can any of us begin to imagine what that means?
Has Tim Cook done this by throwing a grey corporate blanket over Apple? By tightening every financial and fiscal screw? It seems not. Tim Cook has done what Steve Jobs did but more so. He has reinforced the ethos of design, design, design. He has overseen the launch of dazzling new products and software evolutions. Cook has put design even more front and centre than it ever was.
Design, like food in Britain, used to be something you didn’t talk about. It was flash, faintly unmanly and frankly foreign. Yes, of course a fellow sometimes has to get out a ruler and a Rotring to make a technical drawing which might show how something functional and useful could look.
But you don’t go about the place calling it design with a capital D. How pretentious. Emperor’s new clothes. Nonsense. All a bit Danish and weird. Nobody can afford to believe that any more. There was a time when you would hear that Apple’s success was the result of a herd mentality fuelled by chic early adopters, fools who were soon parted from their money. The only fool today would be someone who still believed that this explained the Apple phenomenon.
Wonder boy
Jony Ive, the man at the centre of the Cupertino giant’s success under both Jobs and Cook, is entirely and quite exhaustingly passionate about every last detail that goes into his creations.
The development costs and development times of everything from those first iPods to the new line of Apple watches were far higher and far longer than any other company in the sector might tolerate.
And as a result the revenues from those products are far, far higher than any other company can dream of. The more Ive spends in time and money the more desirable the products and the higher the incomes they derive. Steve Jobs collaborated with Ive in close, often interfering, ways that the quietly intense Englishman admitted he often found “maddening”, for all that he loved him absolutely.
Tim Cook values Ive just as highly as ever Jobs did. A few years ago he gave him responsibility for the Human Interface (HI) department on top of his role as head of Industrial Design (ID), effectively giving him control of the entire sweep of the Apple design process.
Apple's Tim Cook (left) and Jony Ive (Photos: Gabriela Hasbun for The Telegraph)
ID is about the physical devices themselves while HI is about the images, interactions, sounds, flow and feel of the software that we interact with as we use them.
With control over both, Ive has been able to migrate the mobile and desktop operating systems from their old-fashioned skeuomorphic rendering of app icons as real world representations (ring binders and even torn page effects on the contacts and calendars apps, for instance) into a brighter, clearer set of exquisitely designed images that speak for themselves. Ive’s inventiveness can perhaps most starkly be expressed by revealing that he has nearly 5,000 patents to his name. To give you some point of comparison, Edison was granted 2,332.
If nothing else Ive has done Britain a huge favour. Apple has recently developed a standard British power plug whose prongs fold elegantly back flush into their body. Easily stowed, no agony if accidentally trod on. A separate and wholly different solution to that offered by the Mu Plug which solves the problem in another way.
“It took ages to solve,” Ive says wistfully.
And that is the point. No one else cares as much. Of course it took ages, because anything worth doing does. People who take pains to the extent he and his team do are very very rare.
Take packaging. On this issue alone Apple’s design team should be hugged. Every parcel they ship opens easily, without scissors or knives or painful grunting and wrestling.
Perfectly thought out little strips unzip the boxes. Once open, other exquisitely origami-inspired solutions to the wrapping problem compound the buyer’s delight. If you want to be cynical about it, they “add value”, but that is the virtuous circle of good design. Done for its own ends, but carrying with it the advantage of extra commercial worth.
Spaceship campus
But I came to Cupertino in California last week to learn more about a change that I had heard was in the air.
As one approaches 1 Infinite Loop one passes the Company Store, where all things Apple can be bought. I found a T-shirt that said: "I visited the mother ship - Just so you know how sad I am."
Tim Cook joined me for a juice under the parasols that shade the patio outside Caffé Macs, the campus’s cafeteria. Yes, campus. In America it is not only universities that describe their headquarters as a campus.
Cook tells me that Jony Ive designed the tables that we’re sitting at. Round white/grey marble disks. At least I think they’re marble. They |
between $5000 to $7500 to settle. Most lawsuits alleged issues with businesses’ parking lot signs.
In almost all of the cases, ABC15 discovered a person with disabilities never actually visited the business.
It was an issue hammered by AG attorney Matthew Du Mee, who argued there can’t be an injury if no one ever visited the place that was sued.
It’s also the main reason Judge Talamante ruled against AID.
“None of the cases allege that distinct and palpable injury,” he said.
The Attorney General’s Office said it now plans to file for sanctions against AID. If granted, AID could have to pay back the state and sued businesses for their legal expenses.
It’s not clear if AID plans to appeal the decision.
Contact ABC15 Investigator Dave Biscobing at dbiscobing@abc15.com.A 2012 doomsday group is charging $5000 for admission to a survival bunker in the northern NSW hills.
Massive earthquakes, shifts in the Earth's poles and devastating solar flares will be among events faced by the global community this year, according to the group, which describes itself as a "survival community".
Group organiser, NSW refrigeration mechanic Simon Young, said the entry fee went towards concrete and other materials to construct the bunker, believed to be in mountains near Tenterfield.
The group points to Egyptian texts, Bible passages and a frozen mammoth as evidence the world will undergo massive physical change around December 21.
Scientists worldwide have refuted 2012 doomsday claims, saying nothing will happen to the Earth this year.
When asked about the bunker project, set to be 1.2km above sea level to avoid predicted catastrophic sea events, Mr Young said he believed it was the best chance of survival.
"It's to get ready for 2012," he said.
"We're trying to get a few more people involved."
The bunker is expected to be completed just before December when the group anticipates sun activity and tectonic shifts to wipe out most life on Earth.
The group's website, which features poems from 16th Century prophetess Mother Shipton, has had more than 28,500 hits as 2012 paranoia mounts.
"It is known that the sun's activity has increased significantly over the past century," the site states.
"It is believed that there is a correlation between the sun's cycle and magnetic fluctuations, and pole shifts."
The site lists the discovery of a frozen mammoth among a body of "evidence" towards the presence of an undiscovered planet in the universe that the group believes could alter the Earth's poles.
NASA scientists in the US have taken to the web to dispell myths about doomsday as December approaches.
"Nothing bad will happen to the Earth in 2012," their website states.
"Our planet has been getting along just fine for more than 4 billion years, and credible scientists worldwide know of no threat associated with 2012.'"That's what the Houston Texans just did with former Broncos quarterback Brock Osweiler. And it's completely asinine.
According to Peter King, before shoveling a mountain of cash before the quarterback, the only time the Texans had any interaction with him was a 10-second "hello" back in 2014 during training camp when the team held a joint practice in Denver. The move to sign an unproven quarterback with that kind of money was risky enough (4 years, $72 million). To do so without your head coach or offensive coordinator talking to him, looking him in the eyes and getting a feel if it will work, is utterly nuts."
A recent column from a Denver based media member has angered many Texans fans on social media. Ian St. Clair, who is a contributor to ABC7 in Denver and for Mile High Report, calls the Texans signing of Brock Osweiler, "desperate and stupid."In the column, St. Clair says:Our David Nuño goes to toe to toe with St. Clair, and gives him the Houston perspective. You can watch that full exchange in the video window above.Expanded Dune
This article or section refers to elements from Expanded Dune.
The Sisterhood of Dune is a book by Brian Herbert and Kevin J. Anderson and the first book in the Schools of Dune series. It revolves around the founding of the Bene Gesserit order early in the Corrino Empire. It is to be the first of a new series involving the beginnings of the Great Schools of the Imperium; the Sisterhood, the mentats, and the Swordmasters.
Description[1]:
It is eighty-three years after the last of the thinking machines were destroyed in the Battle of Corrin, after Faykan Butler took the name of Corrino and established himself as the first Emperor of a new Imperium. Great changes are brewing that will shape and twist all of humankind.
The war hero Vorian Atreides has turned his back on politics and Salusa Secundus. The descendants of Abulurd Harkonnen, Griffen and Valya have sworn vengeance against Vor, blaming him for the downfall of their fortunes. Raquella Berto-Anirul has formed the Bene Gesserit School on the jungle planet Rossak as the first Reverend Mother. The descendants of Aurelius Venport and Norma Cenva have built Venport Holdings, using mutated, spice-saturated Navigators who fly precursors of Heighliners. Gilbertus Albans, the ward of the hated Erasmus, is teaching humans to become Mentats…and hiding an unbelievable secret.
The Butlerian movement, rabidly opposed to all forms of “dangerous technology,” is led by Manford Torondo and his devoted Swordmaster, Anari Idaho. And it is this group, so many decades after the defeat of the thinking machines, which begins to sweep across the known universe in mobs, millions strong, destroying everything in its path.
Every one of these characters, and all of these groups, will become enmeshed in the contest between Reason and Faith. All of them will be forced to choose sides in the inevitable crusade that could destroy humankind forever….
The Sisterhood of Dune: released on January 3, 2012.Yep, it finally happened. In early May, after a long, long run, the elephants of the Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus were ushered into retirement in Florida where they will finish their days aiding cancer research. The Greatest Show on Earth was done with its pachyderms. The same might be said about the Republicans after Donald Trump’s version of a GOP convention. Many of them had also been sent, far less gracefully than those circus elephants, into a kind of enforced retirement (without even cancer research as an excuse). Their former party remained in the none-too-gentle hands of the eternally aggrieved Trump, while the Democrats were left to happily chant “USA! USA!,” march a barking retired four-star general and a former CIA director on stage to invoke the indispensable “greatness” of America, and otherwise exhibit the kind of super-patriotism and worship of the military usually associated with... no question about it... the GOP (whose delegates instead spent their time chanting“lock her up!”).
And that’s just to take the tiniest of peeks at a passing moment in what continues to be, without the slightest doubt, the Greatest Show on Earth in 2016.
My small suggestion: don’t even try to think your way through all this. It’s the media equivalent of entering King Minos’s labyrinth. You’ll never get out. I’m talking about -- what else? -- the phenomenon we still call an “election campaign,” though it bears remarkably little resemblance to anything Americans might once have bestowed that label on.
"In this riot of confusion that passes for an election, with one candidate who’s a walking Ponzi scheme and the other who (with her husband) has shamelessly pocketed staggering millions of dollars from the financial and tech sectors, what are we to make of “our” strange new world?"
Still, look on the bright side: the Republican and Democratic conventions are in the rearview mirror and a mere three months of endless yakking are left until Election Day.
In the last year, untold billions of words have been expended on this “election” and the outsized histories, flaws, and baggage the two personalities now running for president bring with them. Has there ever been this sort of coverage -- close to a year of it already -- hour after hour, day after day, night after night? Has the New York Times ever featured stories about the same candidate and his cronies, two at a time, on its front page daily the way it’s recently been highlighting the antics of The Donald? Have there ever been so many “experts” of every stripe jawing away about a single subject on cable TV from the crack of dawn to the witching hour? Has there ever been such a mass of pundits churning out opinions by the hour, or so many polls about the American people’s electoral desires steamrollering each other from dawn to dusk? And, of course, those polls are then covered, discussed, and analyzed endlessly. Years ago, Jonathan Schell suggested that we no longer had an election, but (thanks to those polls) “serial elections.” He wrote that back in the Neolithic Age and we’ve come an awful long way since then. There are now websites, after all, that seem to do little more than produce mega-polls from all the polls spewing out.
And don’t forget the completely self-referential nature of this “campaign.” If ever there was an event that was about itself and focused only on itself, this is it. Donald Trump, for instance, has taken possession of Twitter and his furious -- in every sense, since he’s the thinnest-skinned candidate ever -- tweets rapidly pile up, are absorbed into “news” articles about the campaign that are, in turn, tweeted out for The Donald to potentially tweet about in a Möbius strip of blather.
What You Can’t Blame Donald Trump For
And yet, despite all the words expended and polls stumbling over each other to illuminate next to nothing, can’t you feel that there’s something unsaid, something unpolled, something missing?
As the previous world of American politics melts and the electoral seas continue to rise, those of us in the coastal outlands of domestic politics find ourselves, like so many climate refugees, fleeing the tides of spectacle, insult, propaganda, and the rest. We’re talking about a phenomenon that’s engulfing us. We’re drowning in a sea of words and images called “Election 2016.” We have no more accurate name for it, no real way to step back and describe the waters we’re drowning in. And if you expect me to tell you what to call it, think again. I’m drowning, too.
You can blame Donald Trump for many things in this bizarre season of political theater, but don’t blame him for the phenomenon itself. He may have been made for this moment with his uncanny knack for turning himself into a never-ending news cycle of one and scarfing up billions of dollars of free publicity, but he was a Johnny-come-lately to the process itself. After all, he wasn’t one of the Supreme Court justices who, in their 2010 Citizens United decision, green-lighted the flooding of American politics with the dollars of the ultra-wealthy in the name of free speech and in amounts that boggle the imagination (even as that same court has gone ever easier on the definition of political “corruption”). As a certified tightwad, Trump wasn’t the one who made it possible to more or less directly purchase a range of politicians and so ensure that we would have our first 1% elections. Nor was he the one who made American politics a perfect arena for a rogue billionaire with enough money (and chutzpah) to buy himself.
It’s true that no political figure has ever had The Donald’s TV sense. Still, before he was even a gleam in his own presidential eye, the owners of cable news and other TV outlets had already grasped that an election season extending from here to Hell might morph into a cornucopia of profits. He wasn’t the one who realized that such an ever-expanding campaign season would not only bring in billions of dollars in political ads (thank you, again, Supreme Court for helping to loose super PACs on the world), but billions more from advertisers for prime spots in the ongoing spectacle itself. He wasn’t the one who realized that a cable news channel with a limited staff could put every ounce of energy, every talking head around, into such an election campaign, and glue eyeballs in remarkable ways, solving endless problems for a year or more. This was all apparent by the 2012 election, as debates spread across the calendar, ad money poured in, and the yakking never stopped. Donald Trump didn’t create this version of an eternal reality show. He’s just become its temporary host and Hillary Clinton, his quick-to-learn apprentice.
And yet be certain of one thing: neither those Supreme Court justices, nor the owners of TV outlets, nor the pundits, politicians, pollsters, and the rest of the crew knew what exactly they were creating. Think of them as the American equivalent of the blind men and the elephant (and my apologies if I can’t keep pachyderms out of this piece).
In this riot of confusion that passes for an election, with one candidate who’s a walking Ponzi scheme and the other who (with her husband) has shamelessly pocketed staggering millions of dollars from the financial and tech sectors, what are we to make of “our” strange new world? Certainly, this is no longer just an election campaign. It’s more like a way of life and, despite all its debates (that now garner National Football League-sized audiences), it’s also the tao of confusion.
Missing in Action This Election Season
Let’s start with this: The spectacle of our moment is so overwhelming, dominating every screen of our lives and focused on just two outsized individuals in a country of 300 million-plus on a planet of billions, that it blocks our view of reality. Whatever this “election” may be, it blots out much of the rest of the world. As far as I can see, the only story sure to break through it is when someone picks up that assault rifle, revs up that truck, gets his hands on that machete, builds that bomb, declares loyalty to ISIS (whatever his disturbed thoughts may have been 30 seconds earlier), and slaughters as many people as he can in the U.S. or Europe. (Far grimmer, and more repetitive slaughters in Iraq, Turkey, Afghanistan, and other such places have no similar value and are generally ignored.)
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Of course, such slaughters, when they do break through the election frenzy, only feed the growth of the campaign. It’s a reasonable suspicion, though, that somewhere at the heart of Election 2016 is a deepening sense of fear about American life that seems to exhibit itself front and center only in relation to one of the lesser dangers (Islamic terrorism) of life in this country. Much as this election campaign offers a strife-riven playing field for two, it also seems to minimize the actual strife and danger in our world by focusing so totally on ISIS and its lone wolf admirers. It might, in that sense, be considered a strange propaganda exercise in the limits of reality.
Let’s take, for instance, America’s wars. Yes, the decision to invade Iraq has been discussed (and criticized) during the campaign and the urge of the two remaining candidates and everyone else previously involved to defeat and destroy the Islamic State is little short of overwhelming. In addition, Trump at least has pointed to the lack of any military victories in all these years and the disaster of Clinton’s interventionist urge in Libya, among other things. In addition, in an obvious exercise of super-patriotic fervor of the sort that once would have been strange in this country and now has become second nature, both conventions trotted out retired generals and national security officials to lecture the American public like so many rabid drill sergeants. Then there were the usual rites, especially at the Democratic convention, dedicated to the temple of the “fallen” in our wars, and endless obeisance to the “warriors” and the U.S. military generally -- as well as the prolonged Trumpian controversy over the family of one dead Muslim-American Marine. One of the two candidates has made a habit of praising to the heavens “the world’s greatest military” (and you know just which one she means) while swearing fealty to our generals and admirals; the other has decried that military as a “disaster” area, a “depleted” force “in horrible shape.” For both, however, this adds up to the same thing: yet more money and support for that force.
Here’s the strange thing, though. Largely missing in action in campaign 2016 are the actual wars being fought by the U.S. military or any serious assessment of, or real debate or discussion about, how they’ve been going or what the national security state has or hasn’t accomplished in these years. Almost a decade and a half after the invasion of Afghanistan, the longest war in American history is still underway with no end in sight and it's going badly, as American air power has once again been let loose in that country and Afghan government forces continue to lose ground to the Taliban. Think of it as the war that time forgot in this election campaign, even though its failed generals are trotted out amid hosannas of praise to tell us what to do in the future and who to vote for. Meanwhile, a new, open-ended campaign of bombing has been launched in Libya, this time against ISIS adherents. The last time around left that country a basket case. What’s this one likely to do?
Such questions are largely missing in action in campaign speeches, debates, and discussions; nor is the real war and massive destruction in Iraq or Syria a subject of any genuine interest; nor what it’s meant for the “world’s greatest military” to unleash its air power from Afghanistan to Libya, send out its drones on assassination missions from Pakistan to Somalia, launch special operations raids across the Greater Middle East and Africa, occupy two countries, and have nothing to show for it but the spread of ever more viral and brutal terror movements and the collapse or near-collapse of many of the states in which it’s fought its wars.
At the moment, such results just lead to “debates” over how much further to build up American forces, how much more money to pour into them, how much freer the generals should be to act in the usual repetitive fashion, and how much more fervently we should worship those “warriors” as our saviors. Back in 2009, Leon Panetta, then head of the CIA, talked up America’s drone assassination campaign in Pakistan as “the only game in town” when it came to stopping al-Qaeda. Seven years later, you could say that in Washington the only game in town is failure.
Similarly, the U.S. taxpayer pours nearly $70 billion annually into the 16 major and various minor outfits in its vast “intelligence” apparatus, and yet, as with the recent coup in Turkey, the U.S. intelligence community seldom seems to have a clue about what’s going on.
Failed intelligence and failed wars in an increasingly failed world is a formula for anxiety and even fear. But all of this has been absorbed into and deflected by the unparalleled bread-and-circus spectacle of Election 2016, which has become a kind of addictive habit for “the people.” Even fear has been transformed into another form of entertainment. In the process, the electorate has been turned into so many spectators, playing their small parts in a demobilizing show of the first order.
And speaking about realities that went MIA, you wouldn’t know it from Election 2016, but much of the U.S. was sweltering under a “heat dome” the week of the Democratic convention. It wasn’t a phrase that had previously been in popular use and yet almost the whole country was living through record or near-record summer temperatures in a year in which, globally, each of the first six months had broken all previous heat records (as, in fact, had the last eight months of 2015). Even pre-heat dome conditions in the lower 48 had been setting records for warmth (and don’t even ask about Alaska). It might almost look like there was a pattern here.
Unfortunately, as the world careens toward “an environment never experienced before,” according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, one of the two parties to the American spectacle continues to insist that climate change is a hoax. Its politicians are almost uniformly in thrall to Big Energy, and its presidential candidate tops the charts when it comes to climate denialism. ("The concept of global warming," he's claimed, "was created by and for the Chinese in order to make U.S. manufacturing non-competitive.") Meanwhile, the other party, the one theoretically promoting much-needed responses to climate change, wasn't even willing to highlight the subject in prime time on any of the last three days of its convention.
In other words, the deepest, most unnerving realities of our world are, in essence, missing in action in election 2016.
You want to be afraid? Be afraid of that!
The Shrinking Election Phenomenon
So you tell me: What is this spectacle of ours? Certainly, as a show it catches many of our fears, sweeping them up in its whirlwind and then burying them in unreality. It can rouse audiences to a fever pitch and seems to act like a Rorschach test in which you read whatever you’re inclined to see into its most recent developments. Think of it, in a sense, as an anti-election campaign. In its presence, there’s no way to sort out the issues that face this country or its citizens in a world in which the personalities on stage grow ever larger and more bizarre, while what Americans have any say over is shrinking fast.
So much of American “democracy” and so many of the funds that we pony up to govern ourselves now go into strengthening the power of essentially anti-democratic structures: a military with a budget larger than that of the next seven or eight countries combined and the rest of a national security state of a size unimaginable in the pre-9/11 era. Each is now deeply embedded in Washington and at least as grotesque in its bloat as the election campaign itself. We’re talking about structures that have remarkably little to do with self-governance or We the People (even though it’s constantly drummed into our heads that they are there to protect us, the people). In these years, even as they have proved capable of winning next to nothing and detecting little, they've grown ever larger, more imperial, and powerful, becoming essentially the post-Constitutional fourth branch of government to which the other three branches pay obeisance.
No matter. We’re all under the heat dome now and when, on November 8th, tens of millions of us troop to the polls, who knows what we’re really doing anymore, except of course paving the way for the next super-spectacle of our political age, Election 2020. Count on it: speculation about the candidates will begin in the media within days after the results of this one are in. And it’s a guarantee: there will be nothing like it. It will dazzle, entrance, amaze. It’s going to be... the Greatest Show on Earth. It will cause billions of dollars to change hands. It will electrify, shock, amuse, entertain, appall, and...
I leave it to you to finish that sentence, while I head off to check out the latest on The Donald and Hillary. (Include a reference to elephants and you’ll get extra credit!)All Walls Must Fall - A Tech-Noir Tactics Game [itch.io, Steam] is something I completely missed seeing an Early Access release, so it's time to correct that. They also have a big sale on right now, so a great time to take a look.
The game is made with Unreal Engine 4, from a team who formerly worked for YAGER, the studio behind Spec Ops: The Line. It was funded on Kickstarter back in April of this year, where they managed to completely smash their inital goal.
Disclosure : The developer sent the key to me.
As a huge fan of strategy games, I've been rather engrossed in All Walls Must Fall. It's a very strange and different experience to any other strategy game I've played. It looks a little like Invisible Inc, but with a more open setting, more options and the ability to control time and undo actions. If you enjoy games like XCOM and Invisible Inc then I already consider this something you really need to consider picking up.
As you progress through a level you will earn time credits, which can be used for various actions like rewinding time. The longer you take though, the more the game will take away from you. Exploring new rooms will grant you quite a lot of these credits, so explore away!
The combat is where it can get really interesting. You pick action after action, confirming those actions so that they're locked in. Combat is turn-based, so you get to carefully pick your moves, but waiting around will eat into your time score. Sometimes waiting is essential, like taking cover while an enemy bullet goes overhead so you don't get hit, but if you do get hit you can undo time and retry. There's also drone hacking, although I wasn't really sure what I was doing and accidentally hacked a drone terminal during a battle, now I have a little friend attacking enemies for me—sweet!
Once combat is complete, you get to lock that battle into the timeline and it gives you an action-camera playback of the event. It's incredibly clever, exciting to re-watch and has kept me wanting more! It does suffer some of the issues that XCOM has with that, in the way that the camera angle is sometimes poor and you don't actually see it, like a wall blocking your view for example. Issues like that will hopefully be ironed out as they develop it further.
Even the dialogue system is quite interesting, with your options changing the emotions of the person you're speaking to. Not entirely sure why this particular bouncer thought I was flirting though, I was trying to threaten them with time travelling antics…
After completing a mission, your score is then converted into credits for you to purchase upgrades, extra slots for weapons, augmentations and so on. Then you proceed to choose your next mission and it keeps going like that for a while.
The developer has been pushing out regular content updates, which have included RPG elements with upgrade systems, different enemy weapon types, 135 Steam achievements, improved AI and so on. They're also planning another content update at the end of this month.
Features:
Hybrid real-time / simultaneous turn-based tactical gameplay
Procedurally generated levels and campaign that plays different every time
Sci-Fi noir Berlin as a divided city in which the Cold War never ended
Mind-bending time manipulation abilities that allow you to experiment with possible futures and rewind to the past.
Synaesthetic nightclub environments and audio
A simulation sandbox featuring crowd simulation and destructible objects
A parable that reflects on free will, moral ambiguity and the meaning of freedom
You can grab it right now on Steam and itch.io with 50% off until November 13th. Really damn impressed! Extremely excited to watch this develop since it's already so good this early on.
Sidenote: I'm quite surprised we didn't have people emailing in about this one. We often rely on people notifying us of news, be sure to email us when you have a tip! We don't always reply, but we appreciate all tips.The Queen of Soul told a Detroit TV station that she planned to quit recording after the release of her new album and drastically cut back on performing.
Aretha Franklin will retire from recording music this year.
The 'Queen of Soul' told a Detroit TV station that she plans to quit making music after the release of her new album, produced by Stevie Wonder, later this year. She also said she would drastically cut back on performing in order to spend time with her grandchildren, who are leaving for college.
"I must tell you, I am retiring this year," Franklin told WDIV Local 4.
She added: "This will be my last year... I will be recording, but this will be my last year in concert. This is it."
“I feel very, very enriched and satisfied with respect to where my career came from and where it is now,” Franklin said. “I’ll be pretty much satisfied, but I’m not going to go anywhere and just sit down and do nothing. That wouldn’t be good either.”
Franklin, who turns 75 this year, has been performing for 56 years straight, although in recent years has been suffering from ill health. In 2010, she had to put her career on hold following abdominal surgery and has slowed down her once prolific tour and performance schedule in recent years.Via Mark J. Grant, author of Out of the Box,
"There must be some way out of here," said the joker to the thief,
"There's too much confusion, I can't get no relief”
-Bob Dylan, All Along the Watchtower
Debunking Some Myths
First let me state, with a certain calmness, that there is a Transfer Union underway in Europe. This is the subject, you may recall, that Germany has tried to avoid at all costs which is why Eurobonds and other similar schemes have not been implemented. Europe, however, has found a clever way of implementing such a program and keeping it under the radar from the German citizens. I will explain:
In Greece, Spain, Portugal and Italy the ECB has implemented a program where the sovereign guarantees some bank’s bonds. The bank then pledges them as collateral at the ECB and gets cash. The bank then turns around and lends the money back to the sovereign nation and provides liquidity and economic sustenance. The Transfer Union is completed as Germany guarantees 22% of the ECB and the European Central Bank is nothing more than a conduit to lend money to the various nations. This contrivance is also not sterilized so that the ECB is, in fact, printing money which is another part of this subterfuge that no one in Europe wants you to know anything about. This strategy is what has kept all of these various countries alive while the political entity, the European Union, tries to decide what to do about the future of the troubled nations. In a very real sense the ECB is the only fully operational part of the European construct at present as the European Union does not have the “political will” to carry out its mandate.
“The tears I have cried over Germany have dried. I have washed my face.”
-Marlene Dietrich
Given what is happening, it then must be declared that the ECB is the lender of last resort and that they are printing money on a daily basis. Sterilization may take place in some instances and for some programs but it is not universally applied or even discussed. The program also gives the ECB tremendous leverage because any threat to turn off the spigot will force any of these troubled nations to turn to the Troika and ask for aid. The assistance does come with a price tag though and it is costly; the nation is audited, reality arrives, and the country gives up the total control of their finances and their budget to the EU/ECB/IMF. In effect, the nation no longer governs itself. The IMF, of course, is nothing more really than a cover for some kind of legitimacy beyond the politics of Europe and it has become the arm piece of the Continent so that Europe can point to them and say, “it is them; not us.”
It turns out that Jens Weidemann, chief of the Bundesbank, is a huge fan of Greta Garbo. Apparently he got to use her famous line recently at the ECB meeting:
“I want to be alone.”
He got his wish.
The ECB
The total paid-in capital of the ECB at the end of 2011 was $13.7 billion. Currently the balance sheet of the ECB is $4 trillion. The leverage then is 292 times paid-in capital and the other assets must then be assessed as to their solvency. This is one reason why a default by Greece, or any other nation, would be so devastating to the ECB as it would wipe out their entire capital base in a heartbeat requiring re-capitalization immediately which would be politically challenging these days. Now the ECB is thought to be a riskless proposition because, in the last instance, it can print money but this is not a correct viewpoint. There are a number of circumstances that can destroy a Central Bank, any Central Bank, and the first would be the loss of confidence in the institution or the nation (s) guaranteeing it. The second would be actual losses on their balance sheet and while no Central Bank must adhere to marks-to-market; real losses in their portfolio cannot be brushed under the rug forever. I would submit that the ECB, in particular, in having lowered and lowered their collateral requirements is putting itself in a position where their risk profile has increased dramatically. Then there is the risk of some large bank failure in Europe and while the Irish banks, Dexia and Bankia et al have been absorbed by their respective nations and so have had their balance sheets and ratings impacted; there may come a time when the European banks, already institutions with balance sheets three times larger than the sovereign nations where they are domiciled, cannot absorb without serious repercussions, the failure of some large European bank. Finally, in my mind, comes the greatest present risk and this is a run on the banks. This is a quite real present danger which is exemplified by Spain where almost 20% of the capital in the Spanish banks has fled. If the present trend and trajectory continues then we may see a systemic banking failure in Spain which would wipe out not only the banks in Spain but the ECB as the money lent to the Spanish banks goes into default.
Mervyn King, Governor of the Bank of England, once noted that it may not be rational to start a bank run, but it is rational to participate in one once it had started.
The price tag of cleaning up a systemic banking crisis is significant in its size and breadth. The fiscal costs average 13% of GDP and economic output losses average 20% of GDP for important crises from 1970 to 2007 according to data supplied by the International Monetary Fund. Consequently to stare at the ECB and declare it a “risk free proposition” is naïve at best and quite dangerous at the worst. You may think what you like but you must retain sound principles.
“Those are my principles and if you don’t like them---well, I have others.”
-Groucho MarxLOS ANGELES (Reuters) - Microsoft Corp said on Wednesday a Texas federal jury ordered the company to pay Canadian software firm i4i Ltd $200 million in damages for infringing a patent.
The world’s largest software company, which is involved in a number of legal battles over patents, said the award was unsupported, and plans to appeal.
Toronto-based i4i, a privately held maker of software for manipulating documents, claimed in a 2007 suit that Microsoft knowingly infringed one of its patents in its Word processing application and its Vista operating system.
The patent concerned software for manipulating a document’s content and architecture separately. Microsoft denied infringement throughout the case.
“The evidence clearly demonstrated that we do not infringe and that the i4i patent is invalid,” a Microsoft spokesman said. “We believe this award of damages is legally and factually unsupported, so we will ask the court to overturn the verdict.”
i4i did not immediately return a call seeking comment.
Last month, Microsoft was ordered to pay $388 million in damages for infringing a patent held by anti-piracy software maker Uniloc Inc. It also appealing that verdict.CLOSE The National Archives have released more than 35,500 records on the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. The once-classified records have fascinated researchers and fueled conspiracy theorists for decades. USA TODAY
President John F. Kennedy waves to the crowd from his limousine in Dallas on Nov. 22, 1963. (Photo11: Jim Altgens, AP)
WASHINGTON — Manuel Artime, the Cuban exile leader anointed by the CIA to lead Cuba if Fidel Castro was overthrown, drove the agency to distraction with his questionable choices of women, lavish spending and dictatorial tendencies, newly released CIA documents show.
The documents were released by the National Archives as required under the 1992 law meant to open all documents related to the Nov. 22, 1963, assassination of President John F. Kennedy. Artime had no involvement in Kennedy's death, the records show, but the association of anti-Castro Cubans in multiple conspiracy theories tied to the assassination led to the inclusion of Artime's file in the JFK collection.
Artime, a physician, fought with Castro in the 1950s guerrilla war against Cuban dictator Fulgencio Batista, who fled Cuba on Jan. 1, 1959, and was replaced by Castro. Artime fell out with Castro as the new Cuban government turned toward communism, and Artime soon moved to the United States and organized a band of exiles to return to the island and overthrow Castro.
Known by the code name AMBIDDY-1, Artime angered CIA officials with his over-the-top lifestyle following the failed invasion of Cuba in April 1961 at the Bay of Pigs, where an amphibious landing by an exile brigade led by Artime was defeated and thousands of exiles were captured and imprisoned.
After a June 24, 1964, meeting with Artime in New Orleans, CIA official Henry Hecksher wrote that Artime's "preoccupation with his political image shone through, when he inquired whether we suspected him of dictatorial leanings. We replied, in effect, that we entertained such suspicions and inclined toward taking his protestations of liberalism with a grain of salt."
Problems with women
Artime's relationships with women were destabilizing the exile community that was trying to mount another attack on Cuba, the CIA records show.
One memo said Artime had bought his mistress, Ofelia Padron, an $85,000 house in North Miami. Later memos show how Artime said he got the money to buy the home with the royalties he received from writing a book about the Bay of Pigs.
Padron, a May 19, 1964, memo said, had been the mistress of Batista and also of the former president of Venezuela, Marcos Perez Jimenez. Her ties with various "other prominent Cubans" meant Artime "could conceivably be blackmailed."
Fidel Castro in 1962 (Photo11: -, AFP/Getty Images)
At some point in 1964, Artime became involved with a woman whose name has been redacted in the CIA documents. Agency officials warned Artime about the relationship, and Artime "commented that she had been a 'bad woman.' We observed that the |
distance needed for first down is extremely short (as in "4th and inches"). As such, forcing a turnover on downs is a big win for the defense. Very aggressive coaches are more likely to "go for it", and a team that has a poor kicking game is likely to do so if they're outside of field goal range but close enough to the goal line that a punt would almost guarantee a touchback.
Blitz: A type of play in which linebackers or defensive backs attempt to rush past the offensive line (creating a "pass rush") and sack or at least put pressure on the ball-carrier, usually the quarterback. If the offense has a running back block the blitzing defender, thus nullifying the play, it is referred to as "picking up the blitz". Considered a risky play because it leaves areas of the field open. However, there are teams that have had lots of success with aggressive blitzing; the NFL's Pittsburgh Steelers have long had a reputation for successful blitz-oriented defenses, and the Buddy Ryan-created "46 Defense " is an entire system developed around constantly applying such pressure to opposing offenses for whole games at a time. Zone Blitz: while a standard blitz involves sending more people than the usual 4 linemen (or 3 lineman and one linebacker) a zone blitz involves the defense faking which players will be rushing the quarterback and which players will be in coverage. For example, a defensive end may act like he's going to rush the quarterback and the strong safety may appear to be in coverage, however when the ball is snapped the safety rushes the quarter back while the defensive end covers. This is intended to cause mismatches between blockers and rushers and open up holes where a blocker expected someone to be and is not prepared for someone rushing from a different position. This of course can backfire if the lineman attempting to cover is not athletic enough to perform these duties.
" is an entire system developed around constantly applying such pressure to opposing offenses for whole games at a time. Prevent: A package involving at least seven defensive backs, most or all of whom are well over ten yards back from the line of scrimmage. The prevent defense concedes long runs and short passes in order to prevent long passes for a touchdown. Typically only used in the last minutes of a game by a team who already has the lead, and even then it's considered by many to be a bad idea; former player, coach and long-time TV commentator John Madden famously said "All a prevent defense does is prevent you from winning." The prevent is ideal for defending a Hail Mary on the last play of a game, though. Ken Stabler fumbled the ball forward as he was about to be sacked, causing the ball to roll toward the end zone, and then two other Raiders batted it forward into the end zone where one recovered it for a touchdown. This was ruled legal on the field because the officials couldn't tell if the fumble and the batting forward of the ball were intentional. The players involved all admitted that it was a deliberate fumble and that they only pretended to attempt to recover it prior to the ball reaching the end zone. This evasion of the "advancing a forward fumble" rule resulted in further restrictions on advancing a fumble by the offense: if the ball is recovered by an offensive player other than the one who fumbled it in the first place, a recovery on 4th down or after the two-minute warning results in the ball being placed at the spot of the fumble rather than wherever it had rolled to.
Special teams-related terms:
Kick off: A kick off begins both halves of football and resumes play after a score (except for a safety). The kickoffs take place from the kicking team's 35-yard line and the ball is kicked from a Tee (or held by a member of the kicking team, if the ball falls off the tee due to wind, the referee will require they have a member of the kicking team hold the ball like on a field goal attempt). The receiving team may not attempt to block this kick but both teams may contest for possession. note this part of the rule burned the Buffalo Bills at the end of the 2016 season; in a game where they were already being blown out by division rival the New York Jets, they allowed a kickoff from a Jets touchdown to roll into their end zone untouched, at which point a Jets gunner landed on it for another touchdown; the Bills kick returner even chased down said ball...only to stare stupidly at it for several seconds before making a belated lunge that was blocked by several other Jets who had run down with the gunner The Alliance of American Football has no kickoffs. After a touchdown or field goal, the team scored upon automatically receives the ball on its own 25-yard line... unless an "onside conversion" is attempted (see below under "Onside kick").
Free kick: After a safety, play is initiated by a free kick. The previous team that was on offense kicks the ball either with a drop kick or a punt kick from their 20 yard line. The receiving team may not block the kick and the kicking team may not contest for possession unless the ball is fumbled on the return attempt. Another (incredibly rare) form of free kick is the fair catch kick, which allows a free, unblocked placekick (worth three points, and thus a form of field goal) from the spot at which a punt is received provided the returner calls for a fair catch. However, the circumstances under which a team would actually WANT to do this are so rare that most lifelong fans aren't even aware of this rule's existence.
Touchback: If a team gains possession in the defensive end zone, the team begins their next series as though it had returned the ball to their own 20-yard line except on kickoffs in the NFL and college football, where the mark is instead the 25-yard line. This commonly happens on kickoffs and punts when the ball is either recovered in the end zone and not advanced, or goes out of bounds after entering the end zone. A touchback can also occur on interceptions (occasionally) and fumble recoveries (rarely, since the offensive team must fumble the ball forward into the end zone without actually scoring a touchdown, and either have the ball go out of bounds in the end zone or be recovered by the defense). In college football only, a kickoff that ends in a fair catch by the receiving team between its own 25-yard line and goal line is treated as a touchback, with the ball being moved to the 25.
Muffed Catch: during a change of possession kick if the player trying to receive the kick doesn't cleanly field the kick, it's called muffed. Often results in a turnover since once the ball has touched a receiving player it is live and recoverable by the kicking team. This is particularly important on a punt, because a muffed catch allows the kicking team to recover the ball; as mentioned above, a punt can only be downed, not recovered, by the kicking team if it hasn't touched a receiving team player.
Fair Catch: when the ball is kicked and the receiving player does not think they have enough space to return a kick they can call a fair catch meaning that if they catch the ball the play is dead where they caught the ball, they cannot be tackled and they cannot advance the ball. They do this by waving one hand above their head. Improperly signalling for a fair catch (waving 2 hands) is a penalty (trickery?). Preventing the player who signaled for a fair catch (by contact, intentionally or unintentionally) from catching the ball is also a penalty. If the player does not catch the ball after signalling the ball is live and recoverable by both sides, as this poor fellow from Wofford in a playoff game learned when he didn't down the ball in the end zone and the opposing team (Northern Iowa) stripped the ball from him for a free touchdown.
he didn't down the ball in the end zone and the opposing team (Northern Iowa) stripped the ball from him for a free touchdown. Downed Kick: if the kicking team during a punt recovers the kick before the receiving team this is called downing the ball (technically this is a rule violation called "illegal touching") the result is still a change of possession but the receiving team will have no opportunity to advance the ball. This is most commonly used to prevent the ball from going into the end-zone and pinning the other team deep in their own zone.
Onside kick: on a kick off, if the kicking team receives the ball before the receiving team on a kickoff the kicking team can retain possession of it, the only requirement is that the ball travel 10 yards before a member of the kicking team touches it (the only exception being if the receiving team touches it before it crosses 10 yards but doesn't maintain possession). The formation for this kick, if it's expected, usually has a majority of the kicking team on one side of the kicker to maximize their chances. The receiving team will usually stack one side of the field to match. The kicker usually kicks the ball so that it bounces off the ground high in the air, this is for two reasons: one, when the ball touches the ground the receiving team cannot call a fair catch, two, this gives the ball a nice high arc allowing the kicking team time to get past the first line of blockers and a lot of spin to make it difficult for the receiving team to catch the ball. The ball can be advanced on an on-side kick reception. This play is normally used if the team kicking the ball needs to score and the game is nearing the end. It is a very risky play to attempt because if the kicking team does not receive the ball it puts the receiving team in very good field position. The receiving team when expecting an onside kick will put in what's referred to as the "hands team" instead of their usual kickoff return team, typically consisting largely of wide receivers and defensive backs whose main skill is catching the ball rather than blocking for a runner. Recent rule changes have prohibited stacking everyone one side of the field, in an effort to reduce injuries; now at least a couple of players have to be on each side of the kicker. Rarely, a team will attempt a "surprise" onside kick out of normal kickoff formation and somewhat earlier in the game than an onside kick would normally be expected. This has the advantage of catching the receiving team off-guard, while they don't have their "hands team" on the field and are out of position to recover the kick, but requires that the kicking team also be out of position in order to sell the deception. While the "stacked" formation is still legal in college and high school, it's now illegal in the NFL. Under new rules adopted for the 2018 season, the kicking team is now required to place five players on each side of the ball. Additionally, no member of the kicking team, except for the kicker, can move before the ball is kicked. The rate of successful onside kicks plummeted, and most of the ones that were successful were directed to the middle of the field instead of the sides. The Alliance of American Football uses an "onside conversion" as its alternative to an onside kick. After a team scores a touchdown or field goal, the scoring team can attempt a special fourth-down conversion if it is (1) trailing by at least 17 points, or (2) 5 minutes or less remain in the fourth quarter. The ball is placed on the scoring team's own 28-yard line, with a successful conversion requiring a 12-yard gain. If the conversion is successful, the scoring team continues with its possession; otherwise, the team that defended the conversion gets possession at the final spot of the play. This play is also available to a team that has given up a safety, with the same constraints on scoring deficit and/or time remaining; in this case, the conversion attempt is a fourth-and-12 from the scored-upon team's 18-yard line.
Other American Pro Leagues
The NFL has been the dominant Football league in America for almost its entire existence. There have however, been various attempts to compete with the league. A few of the more notable include:
All-America Football Conference (1946-1949): While this league as a whole was not successful, three of its teams were taken into the NFL when the AAFC broke up: the Cleveland Browns, the San Francisco 49ers, and the Baltimore Colts (which folded after one season in the NFL, though the current Colts—now in Indianapolis—are a Spiritual Successor). The Browns proved to be one of the top teams in the NFL for the next decade.
(1946-1949): While this league as a whole was not successful, three of its teams were taken into the NFL when the AAFC broke up: the Cleveland Browns, the San Francisco 49ers, and the Baltimore Colts (which folded after one season in the NFL, though the current Colts—now in Indianapolis—are a Spiritual Successor). The Browns proved to be one of the top teams in the NFL for the next decade. American Football League (1960-1969): Actually the fourth league to use this name, although they were the most successful. Probably the most visible competition to theby John Jackson Miller
Dollars Units May 2017 Vs. April 2017 Comics 16.49% 17.36% Graphic Novels 17.13% 19.52% Total Comics/Graphic Novels 16.69% 17.53% Toys 52.15% 52.94% May 2017 Vs. May 2016 Comics 10.58% 16.74% Graphic Novels 3.54% 13.65% Total Comics/Graphic Novels 8.31% 16.49% Toys 40.46% 29.34% Year-To-Date 2017 Vs. Year-To-Date 2016 Comics 0.11% 8.89% Graphic Novels -9.23% -8.72% Total Comics/Graphic Novels -2.92% 7.35% Toys 1.14% 1.10%
Dollar Share Unit Share Marvel 38.05% 39.91% DC 27.93% 30.88% Image 10.25% 11.83% IDW 4.65% 3.78% Dark Horse 3.05% 2.21% Boom 2.10% 1.74% Dynamite 1.72% 1.85% Titan 1.18% 0.99% Viz 1.12% 0.39% Oni 0.89% 0.59% Other Non-Top 10 9.06% 5.83%
COMIC BOOK PRICE PUBLISHER 1 Secret Empire #1 $4.99 Marvel 2 Venom #150 $5.99 Marvel 3 Batman #22 Lenticular Edition $3.99 DC 4 Flash #22 Lenticular Edition $3.99 DC 5 Guardians of the Galaxy: Mission Breakout #1 $4.99 Marvel 6 Secret Empire #2 $4.99 Marvel 7 Batman #23 $2.99 DC 8 Secret Empire #3 $3.99 Marvel 9 All-New Guardians of the Galaxy #1 $3.99 Marvel 10 Walking Dead #167 $2.99 Image
GRAPHIC NOVEL PRICE PUBLISHER 1 Deadpool: Bad Blood HC $24.99 Marvel 2 Bitch Planet Volume 2: President Bitch $14.99 Image 3 Saga Vol. 7 $14.99 Image 4 Wonder Woman Volume 2: Year One $16.99 DC 5 Moonshine Vol. 1 $9.99 Image 6 Flash Vol. 2: The Speed of Darkness $14.99 DC 7 Champions Vol. 1: Change the World $15.99 Marvel 8 Batman: Detective Comics Vol. 2: Victim Syndicate $16.99 DC 9 Unworthy Thor $15.99 Marvel 10 Doom Patrol Vol. 1: Brick By Brick $16.99 DC
Publisher Comics
shipped Graphic Novels
shipped Magazines Total
shipped Marvel 99 43 0 142 DC 82 34 0 116 Image 71 14 1 86 IDW 59 15 0 74 Boom 26 10 0 36 Titan 22 7 4 33 Dark Horse 20 12 0 32 Dynamite 23 7 0 30 Oni 6 4 0 10 Viz 0 9 0 9 Other 119 203 28 350 TOTAL SHIPPED 527 358 33 918
May 2017 was a win for the comic-book direct market, if a qualified one; comics shops ordered $48.16 million worth of comic books, trade paperbacks, and magazines in the month, an increase of more than 8% over the same month in the previous year. That month, however, had only four Wednesdays, while this May had five New Comic Book Days. Last May was also one of the weakest months of the year, a "holding pattern" month in advance ofand's. But it's the first up month since, so we'll take it.'s performance, about which much was written this winter, improved year-over-year — although, following a pattern we've seen in 2017, the rest of the market improved by more. The overall market was up around $3.7 million; $700,000 of the addition came from Marvel and $3 million from everyone else. That said, Marvel's last year-over-year beat was back in August 2016, so positive movement is noteworthy. The market without Marvel is up 4.2% for 2017, so a few more good months for the publisher could turn the industry's year positive overall.The challenge is going to be that, just as much of 2016 was up against big comparative months during' launch year at Marvel, last summer was ginormous in dollar terms.was the biggest month in the Direct Market this century, at $58.6 million; it also had an extra Wednesday. August 2016 was almost as big. More of DC's books are at $3.99 this time around, so we'll see what difference that makes.The aggregate changes:We don't cover toys, but Diamond provides that data and they look to have bounced back by a lot.Marvel topped both market shares categories, and improved its position in our projected annual dollar market shares, which through May are expected to wind up at Marvel 36.6%, DC 29.2%,10.2%,5%, and3.5%. Here's just the month of May:The top-selling title of the month was Marvel's, although May was another case where several different claimants could exist. Let's look first at the table:We'll set aside the second-place Venom one of theat creating a legacy title by cobbling together the numberings of multiple series), which cost a dollar more and might or might not wind up with some bragging rights depending on how the retail rankings shake out, and look simply at copies shipped. There, there's little doubt what image shipped more copies: Image's, which as part of the publisher's 25th anniversary program shipped with a 25¢ cover price. We won't see an exact number of copies because Diamond does not include comics priced below $1 in its charts — but it was surely the highest-volume book.Then, as with April, we have a situation where both DC'sand"Button" issues had lenticular covers priced at a dollar more than their regular versions, and following long-standing convention, Diamond splits those books up in its rankings. We'll know on Monday whether the combined versions might account for enough copies again to surpass the nominal first-place book. I wrote last month about why such issues are divided into separate entries; back in 1994 you'd see the Deluxe and Newsstand versions of Marvel's books likewise split up.It's all a reminder that, as I've written many times, the distributor charts are not a scoreboard. They were created to help retailers place their future orders, and it's helpful for them to, for example, know how the lenticular and regular versions were ordered relative to one another. Yielding a true "winner" every month for spectator interest is irrelevant to the charts' purpose; for the shops, it's not a game.Marvels Guardians line got two top-ten entries,and, in a month in which its movie sequel released to a huge opening.Graphic novels bounced back, finally, aided by a bigger-ticket item inThe book featured the return to the top of the charts by, nearly 26 years after his first top-seller on the comics charts, June 1991's X-Force #1. But the bigger factor appears to be a large increase in the number of new graphic novels shipped, from 271 last May up to 358. That's more than the fifth week would be expected to add.The chart:And speaking of new release volume we see that the big increase in new comics came from Image, which had 71 new periodical entries in the month. That's the highest figure for the company since December 2015.Look for the full charts and estimates here on Monday.There’s not so much funky stuffs INNA this place. Except some Funky Hip-Hop episode and a tribute to James Brown, I have to confess this is not really the place to be for a funkster. But times are changing. And even if I’ve not seen the light, a prophet showed me the way this summer. From its altar, he sent his faithful plenty of Raw Funk 7″ singles that we all swallowed as if they were sacramental bread. It was hot, it was fresh… It was so good that I’ve learned my prayer :
Mama’s in her kitchen / She’s stirrin’ in a pot
Daddy’s sittin’ waiting to see what she’s got
He’s sitting by the fireplace with his hands on his knees
He looked around at mama said, “Hey, you better come see about me”
Let’s get funky / Yea, get it on / Right on
Playlist
the Chambers Brothers – Funky
Rev Jamel & Bob Johnson – Walking on the Moon
the Wallace Brothers – What-cha Feel is What-cha Get
Carleen & the Groovers – Can we Rap
the Highlighters Band – the Funky 16 Corners
Soul Excitement – Stay TogetherPrepare for (more) Titanfall, as Respawn have just announced at PAX East that the game's first DLC map pack will land in May. Expedition comprises three new maps: Swampland, a bunch of marshy alien ruins with trees you can wallrun on, Runoff, which swaps swamps for water and trees for giant pipes, and War Games, which takes place in Titanfall's training simulator and NOT within a classic Matthew Broderick film. Expedition will set you back $10, unless you bought the season pass, in which case you've already paid in advance. Respawn also announced some free mini-updates, including new modes and Titan-flavoured burn cards.
Upcoming free stuff will include a 2v2 version of the existing Last Titan Standing mode, in addition to new burn cards - including Titan-specific cards. A new matchmaking system that uses hashtag filtering to make it easier for players to meet up is also on the way. Titan insignias and a HUD-free spectator mode were mentioned as possible inclusions too.
The following image was posted on the Respawn Twitter account. It looks quite pleasant - shame about the giant battle that's about to break out.
Is pre-Expedition Titanfall any cop? For the PCG verdict, have a read of our review.
Thanks, Joystiq.Yesterday I wondered whether and when President Obama would follow through on his oft-repeated campaign promise to stop the DEA from undermining state medical marijuana laws by harassing patients and dispensaries. Today The Washington Times reports that Obama plans to suspend the DEA's raids once he "nominates someone to take charge of DEA, which is still run by Bush administration holdovers." I don't understand why Obama can't simply tell the Bush administration holdovers to cut it out; they work for him now. But it's encouraging that the White House is now on record with a promise to keep Obama's promise. "The president believes that federal resources should not be used to circumvent state laws," White House spokesman Nick Shapiro told the Times, "and as he continues to appoint senior leadership to fill out the ranks of the federal government, he expects them to review their policies with that in mind." It seems like Obama is dragging his feet, but it will be hard for him to wriggle out of his commitment now.
It turns out there were four dispensary raids in Los Angeles on Tuesday, by the way: two in Venice, one in Marina Del Rey, and one in Playa Del Rey. Along with the raid in South Lake Tahoe, California, on January 22, that makes five since Obama took office. According to a new Zogby poll commissioned by NORML, 72 percent of Americans want Obama to keep his word and stop the raids.
[Thanks to Tom Angell at LEAP for the tip.]IF YOU live in a capital city, you can be excused for thinking real estate prices have jumped the shark.
Sydney’s median house price is well over a $1 million, and Melbourne isn’t far behind. So what does it take for a young person to break into the market?
We spoke to two professional young women about their vastly different experiences.
SAVINGS, GOOD INCOME BUT INELIGIBLE FOR FINANCE
Wenee Yap is a 30-year-old part-time law academic, author and successful entrepreneur. She is also the co-founder of Sydney’s first cat cafe Catmosphere and currently rents an inner-city studio apartment in Sydney with her partner, Thomas Derricott.
“I have $200,000+ in savings and I earn $60,000-$90,000 a year, depending on client work, business and teaching load,” she tells news.com.au. “I’d simply like to own the place I live in. I’ve been trying to buy even the smallest shoebox, but banks don’t give you a mortgage for shoebox studios, so you need to have cash upfront.”
And while Yap says she’d prefer to buy an apartment in the city or on its fringe to avoid commuting, she says she’s not really that fussy. “I’m looking for a one-bedroom apartment in the city or the city fringe and it doesn’t need to be the best place on the planet.”
Despite her earning capacity and impressive savings, Yap says her current employment situation is an issue for the banks who, she believes, are too rigid in their perceptions of ‘financial eligibility’.
“I earn as much now as I did working fulltime but explaining multiple sources of income to banks, the kind that would, I hope, make Robert Kiyosaki proud, is quite challenging,” she says. “I find banks to be dismissive and unhelpful, both in residential lending and business lending.
“Personally, I feel my efforts and savings are best directed towards business … you deliver what people need, create jobs along the way, and if you can, make the world a little bit better.”
THE MORTGAGE BROKER’S REALITY CHECK
Ben Anson from Legend Finance is a mortgage broker of 28 years experience and says right now property investment, in Sydney, in particular, is certainly tough for the renting, average incoming earning 30-something trying to buy their first property.
“For the average young couple to be renting in Sydney and paying $400-$450 per week in rent and saving for a deposit is very difficult unless they forego eating out, holidays, drinks with friends, that kind of thing,” he says.
Anson says the biggest difficultly for young people trying to get on the property ladder isn’t necessarily the sacrifices required in saving for a deposit but rather the prohibitive costs of stamp duty.
“For someone to buy a $600,000 property, they can save the five per cent deposit, which is $30,000, but to then be told they have to save another $32,000 for stamp duty, that tends to be the straw that breaks the camel’s back.”
Anson says in Yap’s situation, her eligibility for bank finance may be limited by the type and size of the property she’s looking at as well as its specific location. “You can’t buy too small an apartment... as there are only one or two lenders that will lend for a small studio under 50 square metres,” Anson says.
“Then it becomes ‘postcode-driven’ or ‘predicated on the postcode’ and there are a number of postcodes — and even building blocks — in Sydney that banks won’t lend to, and yet the average prospective buyer wouldn’t know that.”
KATIE’S SUCCESS STORY
Katie King, 24, achieved a bachelor of business at university and is currently working fulltime in a promotions role in Sydney. She rents a townhouse in Matraville with her partner while renting out her own two investment properties, located in Sydney’s inner-west suburbs.
She says her goal is to grow her investment portfolio to $5 million before she turns 30. “I plan to continue to purchase properties that I perceive to be undervalued with the aim of using equity to continue my purchases,” she says.
King started saving for her first property deposit when she was still in high school. “I worked as a part-time receptionist for a real estate agency at 17 and I believe that was the catalyst for my interest in investment property,” she says. “There were often a lot of units on the market in the area that were considerably more affordable than other neighbouring suburbs.”
King took advantage of government grants available at the time of her first purchase while also saving for a deposit by living at home with her parents, investing in the stock market and working as much as possible while studying at university. Then, using the equity from her first property, which increased by $100,000 after just one year, she went on to purchase her second investment property.
She says investing in property takes quite a bit of sacrifice, strict saving and planning. “The earlier you start, the sooner you will be able to get your foot onto the property ladder,” she says. “I didn’t just wake up one day and have all of the funds available, I had to plan for this and it took me four years before I had all my ducks in a row to even make the first step.”
So what’s King’s advice to other young Aussies trying to get on the property ladder? “Our generation is all about now, now, now, when in actual fact buying a property is one of the biggest financial decisions you can make in your lifetime,” she says.
“I think a lot of people become unstuck when they start to believe it’s unachievable … they give up in a sense and just think they will never be able to achieve it.”
King is proof that property investment for Gen Y is achievable and suggests considering alternative approaches to buying property. “I think young people also need to think outside the box,” she says.
“They aren’t limited to purchasing on their own, which would lessen the amount of deposit required and significantly decrease the length of time it takes to save.”
HOW TO SEEK OUT A BARGAIN
When perusing the real estate listings, Julia Corderoy from realestate.com.au has some sage advise for young would-be investors. “Savvy young buyers should look for properties in which they can manufacture their own equity,” she says.
“Location is an important aspect so make sure the property is close to amenities, such as local schools, shops and public transport.”
Corderoy says another important consideration is a property’s ‘rentability’ “Have a look at the vacancy rates in that area as that’ll give an indication of how quickly it is likely to find tenants,” she explains.
She suggests actively seeking out ‘ugly ducklings’ below market vale that you can give a facelift. “Making cosmetic changes doesn’t have to cost a fortune but can add significant value to the property in terms of asking rent and increasing its capital growth,” she says.1. Animation
Add (Shift A) a Torus
Enter Edit Mode (Tab) and select the middle horizontal edge loop (Alt+RMB)
Duplicate the loop (shift D) and Separate (P) into a different object
With the new object selected (should look like a circle), scale it 0,8 (S.8) (it should be in the middle of the torus)
Convert it to a curve (alt C -> Curve from Mesh/Text)
Select the camera, and (Shift) the path that you’ve created (the selection order is important, first the camera!)
With both selected make parent (Ctrl+P -> Follow Path)
Position the camera on the path, and on camera view, adjust as you want (you may also want to play with Camera Focal Length to distort the image a bit)
Alt A to visualize your animation. (if you think it is to fast /slow select the path and under object data menu, change the number of frames on Path Animation)
2. Colors
Under Materials Proprieties choose Wire instead of Surface for the torus.
Under Shading, select shadeless
Add a new Texture to your material, it should be Blend instead of Clouds
Under Colors, activate Ramp
Now, add a few color stops and change the colors to whatever you want. (just make sure that your alpha value is 1)
Under Blend, change the progression to Vertical
Under Blend, change the Projection to Tube
3. Compositing
Is very very easy, just like in photoshop, duplicate layer, blur it and add it to the original one, like this
Have a nice trip!Scientology Abuses eBay's VeRO Program to Practice Religious, Price Discrimination
By the time Bill (not his real name) left the Church of Scientology a few years ago, he had amassed quite a collection of Scientology material—mostly books, tapes, e-meters. But ex-members of Scientology (especially staff members) find themselves in a difficult spot in this regard when they leave Scientology: their books, tapes, and e-meters are only valued by Scientologists, who, quite inconveniently, are strongly discouraged (read: disallowed) from communicating with ex-members—as any ex-Scientologist will tell you.
Not surprisingly, he turned to eBay, where a Scientologist buyer can remain blissfully unaware that his seller is a declared suppressive person. But every time he attempts to sell his e-meter on eBay, the listing is removed within hours by the Church of Scientology, which claims that the listing violates their intellectual property rights. See screenshots of the auctions while they were up here [update; personal info redacted] and here, and respective “Invalid Item” eBay pages here and here. And it’s not just Bill—I’ve watched numerous e-meter listings from other sellers removed before they even receive a bid.
If you’re uninitiated to eBay, you’d probably think that for each of these removals, the Church of Scientology informs eBay of the violation of its rights, eBay considers the merits of their argument, and then only then does eBay yank the listing. But that’s not what happens at all. Instead, eBay effectively deputizes Scientology, which logs into eBay and removes the listings itself.
The mechanism that permits the Church of Scientology (and others) such broad access and discretion is called the Verified Rights Owner (“VeRO“) Program. Membership in VeRO is obtained simply by submitting a form to eBay explaining that you are an Intellectual Property rights holder.
It should come as little surprise that VeRO members routinely overreach, as the cost of challenging a listing removal is almost always prohibitive. (See my paper on this subject here, and see the brave husband and wife exception to this rule here.) The VeRO Program makes a great deal of sense for some types of listings—counterfeit Rolexes and Gucci handbags appear on eBay with such frequent regularity that those companies would be hard pressed to handle these trademark violations any other way.
But Bill’s e-meters (and the e-meters other ex-Scientologists have attempted to sell on eBay) are not counterfeits and do not violate the Church of Scientology’s trademarks, patents, or copyrights. Some sellers have even included the serial number found at the bottom of each e-meter in their listings in order to authenticate them. There is no source confusion, as every seller whose e-meters have been removed have made it clear that they took the photo of the e-meter, and that they are not affiliated with the Church of Scientology. Patent law doesn’t prevent the resale of patented items, and patent law barely covers e-meters anyway, the first having run out years ago and the 2000 patent only covering “improvements” on the “Quantum” e-meter. And copyright law barely applies here—all of the listings I’ve observed have been originally written, for one thing, and regardless, Scientology (from what I can gather) has only issued VeRO complaints under patent and trademark bases.
In short, the Church of Scientology is at least constructively aware that the e-meters being listed on eBay are authentic, and so have no basis under trademark—or under any other intellectual property basis, for removing these listings. What’s actually going on here is that Scientology is abusing eBay’s VeRO program, knowingly alleging Intellectual Property violations that clearly don’t exist, so that they can limit the secondary market for e-Meters, controlling both the price and who can get them.
It shouldn’t shock anyone that Scientology is trying to limit (if not eliminate) the secondary marketplace for e-meters, since they have a strong motivation to control the price on e-meters from their own production line (they update to a newer more expensive model every few years), and a strong motivation to control to whom they’re sold. The economic motivation should be clear enough—Scientology doesn’t want what few members it has being exposed to a secondary market because it would undermine their monopoly on a prohibitively expensive and infrequently purchased item.
Scientology’s other motivation for wanting to be the only game in town is intrinsically cultish—it has long perpetuated the idea that e-meters should never be used outside of the auspices of the Church. In other words, not only should Scientology be the sole sale source, but it should also be able to dictate every element of the post-sale environment—who can use it, how it can be used, etc. If e-meters are being sold on eBay, it doesn’t know the purchaser and can’t therefore control how and by whom it’s used.
Indeed, the warning label at the bottom of each e-meter demonstrates the kind of control to which I’m referring. The need for a label came about after the FDA took offense at Scientology’s claim that the e-meter retained medical benefits; the court eventually agreed with the FDA and mandated a disclaimer, which has morphed from the original into the following:
By itself, this meter does nothing. It is solely for the guide of |
"perception of the outside world" as a criterion for wakefulness while studying lucid dreamers, and their sleep state was corroborated with physiological measurements.[20] LaBerge's subjects experienced their lucid dream while in a state of REM, which critics felt may mean that the subjects are fully awake. J Allen Hobson responded that lucid dreaming must be a state of both waking and dreaming.[39]
Philosopher Norman Malcolm has argued against the possibility of checking the accuracy of dream reports, pointing out that "the only criterion of the truth of a statement that someone has had a certain dream is, essentially, his saying so."[40]
Definition [ edit ]
Paul Tholey laid the epistemological basis for the research of lucid dreams, proposing seven different conditions of clarity that a dream must fulfill in order to be defined as a lucid dream:[41][42][43]
Awareness of the dream state (orientation) Awareness of the capacity to make decisions Awareness of memory functions Awareness of self Awareness of the dream environment Awareness of the meaning of the dream Awareness of concentration and focus (the subjective clarity of that state).
Later, in 1992, a study by Deirdre Barrett examined whether lucid dreams contained four "corollaries" of lucidity:
The dreamer is aware that they are dreaming
Objects disappear after waking
Physical laws need not apply in the dream
The dreamer has a clear memory of the waking world
Barrett found less than a quarter of lucidity accounts exhibited all four.[44]
Subsequently, Stephen LaBerge studied the prevalence of being able to control the dream scenario among lucid dreams, and found that while dream control and dream awareness are correlated, neither requires the other. LaBerge found dreams that exhibit one clearly without the capacity for the other; also, in some dreams where the dreamer is lucid and aware they could exercise control, they choose simply to observe.[1]
Prevalence and frequency [ edit ]
In 2016, a meta-analytic study by David Saunders and colleagues [45] on 34 lucid dreaming studies, taken from a period of 50 years, demonstrated that 55% of a pooled sample of 24,282 people claimed to have experienced lucid dreams at least once or more in their lifetime. Furthermore, for those that stated they did experience lucid dreams, approximately 23% reported to experience them on a regular basis, as often as once a month or more.
Suggested applications [ edit ]
Treating nightmares [ edit ]
It has been suggested that sufferers of nightmares could benefit from the ability to be aware they are indeed dreaming. A pilot study was performed in 2006 that showed that lucid dreaming therapy treatment was successful in reducing nightmare frequency. This treatment consisted of exposure to the idea, mastery of the technique, and lucidity exercises. It was not clear what aspects of the treatment were responsible for the success of overcoming nightmares, though the treatment as a whole was said to be successful.[46]
Australian psychologist Milan Colic has explored the application of principles from narrative therapy to clients' lucid dreams, to reduce the impact not only of nightmares during sleep but also depression, self-mutilation, and other problems in waking life. Colic found that therapeutic conversations could reduce the distressing content of dreams, while understandings about life—and even characters—from lucid dreams could be applied to their lives with marked therapeutic benefits.[47]
Psychotherapists have applied lucid dreaming as a part of therapy. Studies have shown that, by inducing a lucid dream, recurrent nightmares can be alleviated. It is unclear whether this alleviation is due to lucidity or the ability to alter the dream itself. A 2006 study performed by Victor Spoormaker and Van den Bout evaluated the validity of lucid dreaming treatment (LDT) in chronic nightmare sufferers.[48] LDT is composed of exposure, mastery and lucidity exercises. Results of lucid dreaming treatment revealed that the nightmare frequency of the treatment groups had decreased. In another study, Spoormaker, Van den Bout, and Meijer (2003) investigated lucid dreaming treatment for nightmares by testing eight subjects who received a one-hour individual session, which consisted of lucid dreaming exercises.[49] The results of the study revealed that the nightmare frequency had decreased and the sleep quality had slightly increased.
Holzinger, Klösch, and Saletu managed a psychotherapy study under the working name of ‘Cognition during dreaming – a therapeutic intervention in nightmares’, which included 40 subjects, men and women, 18–50 years old, whose life quality was significantly altered by nightmares.[50] The test subjects were administered Gestalt group therapy and 24 of them were also taught to enter the state of lucid dreaming by Holzinger. This was purposefully taught in order to change the course of their nightmares. The subjects then reported the diminishment of their nightmare prevalence from 2–3 times a week to 2–3 times per month.
Creativity [ edit ]
In her book The Committee of Sleep, Deirdre Barrett describes how some experienced lucid dreamers have learned to remember specific practical goals such as artists looking for inspiration seeking a show of their own work once they become lucid or computer programmers looking for a screen with their desired code. However, most of these dreamers had many experiences of failing to recall waking objectives before gaining this level of control.[51]
Exploring the World of Lucid Dreaming by Stephen LaBerge and Howard Rheingold (1990) discusses creativity within dreams and lucid dreams, including testimonials from a number of people who claim they have used the practice of lucid dreaming to help them solve a number of creative issues, from an aspiring parent thinking of potential baby names to a surgeon practicing surgical techniques. The authors discuss how creativity in dreams could stem from "conscious access to the contents of our unconscious minds"; access to "tacit knowledge" - the things we know but can't explain, or things we know but are unaware that we know. [52]
In popular culture [ edit ]
Films like Waking Life (2001) and Inception (2010) refer to lucid dreaming.[53]
See also [ edit ]
References [ edit ]
NotesJohn Trumbull's "Declaration of Independence." According to a study, income inequality is greater now than it was when the Declaration was signed (Wikimedia) Income inequality greater than in 1774 A string of historical studies shames current U.S. income distribution
In the past year a steady stream of articles has trumpeted the gravity of current U.S. income inequality levels. We've not seen these levels of wealth inequality since before the Great Depression, analysts remark. The Roman Empire, one study argued, was more equitable than the United States is now. And on Wednesday, the Atlantic picked up on another alarming comparison: "Income inequality is worse now than during slavery."
Jordan Weissman writes:
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The conclusion comes to us from an newly updated study by professors Peter Lindert of the University of California - Davis and Jeffrey Williamson of Harvard. Scraping together data from an array of historical resources, the duo have written a fascinating exploration of early American incomes, arguing that, on the eve of the Revolutionary War, wealth was distributed more evenly across the 13 colonies than anywhere else in the world that we have record of.
Weissman urges caution, noting that such a study of the "thinly recorded past" necessarily involves "lots of conjecture" as authors use sources like old tax lists, occupational directories, census documents and early scholarship. "They're not so much taking a snapshot of what life was like as they are making a messy collage," he notes.
The study authors conclude that income distribution was more equal in colonial America than in countries including England and the Netherlands in the late 18th century. More striking, they find that U.S. income distribution is less equal now than in 1774. Weissman notes, "By the time the Civil War came, the top one percent of U.S. households laid claim to 10 percent of the nation's income, versus about seven percent during the founders' era. Today, the same group accounts for about 19 percent."
Of course, as Weissman is keen to stress, the study does not mention the many political and racial inequalities that have significantly diminished since 1774 (slavery, for one). "The paper only suggests that on a strictly dollars and cents basis, income was skewed less towards the rich during the colonial era than it is today," he notes.
It doesn't take a Foucauldian scholar to be skeptical of this sort of historical comparison, which leaves questions of the operation of income and power in a given context and era totally unexamined. At the very least, what this study does illustrate -- along with those comparing pre-Great Depression or Roman Empire inequality levels -- is a current scholarly interest in our current income inequality levels.From Crimea to Flanders, secessionist movements are breaking out all over. Some lay claim to more legitimacy than others. But they are all testimonies to the enduring grip of historical narratives in which defeats are mythologized and perceived wrongs must be righted.
The West's refusal to recognize the results of a Crimean referendum, much less a declaration of independence, is undermined by the messiness with which Ukraine's president was shooed from office and the U.S.-Russia rivalry driving this geopolitical crisis. But it is a good illustration of how any one people's claim to independence is often in the eye of the beholder.
Why else would most Westerners look at Scotland, Catalonia and Quebec and wonder why the heck so many of their citizens want to break away from their respective countries? The Scots, Catalans and Québécois enjoy enviable standards of living, democratic freedoms and stability.
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But in Scotland and Catalonia (where referendums are to be held this year) and Quebec (where one could be in the cards if the Parti Québécois wins a majority government on April 7), the dream of nationhood is embedded in the DNA. Like a genetic mutation, it may long lie dormant. But under the right conditions, it can be felt.
In the context of 2014, three historical dates loom large.
The first is 1707, when the Acts of Union joined Scotland and England into a single state. It has hardly mattered that this "hostile merger," as historian Simon Schama has called it, strengthened an empire. It has inspired demands for more Scottish autonomy ever since.
The second date is 1714, which marked the fall of Barcelona and the unification of Spain under the Bourbon King Philip V. Catalans loyal to the Hapsburg dynasty lost the War of the Spanish Succession, but continue to mark the defeat with massive marches each September.
Canadians, meanwhile, should need no lesson on the significance of 1759. But if many in English Canada see the fall of Quebec City and then New France as a milestone toward nationhood, Québécois still call it the Conquest. To say they should just get over it is as ignorant as it is futile. It's in the DNA, remember.
History aside, however, the Scots and Catalans can only dream about attaining the degree of autonomy Quebeckers already have. Canada is a federal state, with provinces holding exclusive powers granted in the Constitution. Our federalism is also asymmetrical, with Quebec enjoying additional powers, for instance, over language, immigration and job training. In the cases of Scotland and Catalonia, most of the powers the central government has devolved, including legislative ones, it can also repatriate.
In Britain, David Cameron's Conservative government (which remains deeply unpopular in Scotland) is employing a tough-love approach in its attempt to defeat the nationalists in September's independence referendum. It has warned that an independent Scotland would be prevented from sharing the British pound and underscored the difficulty the new country would face in joining the European Union, since other EU countries (hello, Spain) oppose its membership.
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On Wednesday, Parti Québécois Premier Pauline Marois tried to pre-emptively undercut a potentially similar argument by Stephen Harper – another Conservative Prime Minister highly unpopular in a secessionist region – by insisting that an independent Quebec would use the Canadian dollar and influence monetary policy. But, as in Scotland, neither side can say with certainty what would happen.
To avoid having to answer the question, some No proponents, including former Labour prime minister Gordon Brown, say Britain should promise Scotland more powers to undercut the Yes forces. Polls show that barely a third of Scots favour outright independence, but more than half favour full fiscal autonomy (known as maximum devolution, or devo max). Mr. Cameron seems to see no need to go that far.
Granting Scotland and Catalonia more control over the taxes raised on their territories would likely go a long way toward placating the nationalists. But Mr. Cameron is unwilling to give up control over North Sea oil revenues, while Spain would be forced to slash fiscal transfers to its poorest regions without Catalonia's large net contribution to central coffers.
Besides, conservative Spanish Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy denies that Catalonia even has a right to hold its referendum, which is scheduled for November. No sooner had media baron Pierre Karl Péladeau joined the PQ cause than he called Mr. Rajoy's position "unacceptable."
Mr. Péladeau knows his history, and his numbers. Unlike Catalonia, Quebec is a net beneficiary of fiscal transfers from the central government. But if anyone could massage history and economics to get Quebeckers to vote Yes, it just might be the perspicacious PKP.40.
That’s the number of player trades Philadelphia Eagles executive Howie Roseman has executed during his tenure, per the Inquirer.
Five of those deals took place since the beginning of this year’s training camp: Allen Barbre, Jordan Matthews, Matt Tobin, Terrence Brooks, and Jon Dorenbos.
That’s a lot. And Roseman might not be done just yet.
Here’s a list of five players that still could be traded around the time final cuts take place this Saturday at 4:00 PM ET.
Jimmy Kempski of PhillyVoice reports the Eagles are still willing to trade Kendricks despite the linebacker’s standout summer showing. But how could this be? Surely Kendricks is too valuable to ship out, right?
Eh. I think people have gotten a little carried away with the Kendricks hype. Has he had a good preseason? Absolutely. Is he some important contributor to this defense? No.
The reality is the Eagles don’t highly value Kendricks. He only played 27% of the team’s defensive snaps last year. That’s probably not going to change a lot this season. If it was, he wouldn’t be playing with the backups when the starters were pulled out of the preseason games.
Kendricks is an erratic player. He’s been very up-and-down over the course of his career. Go back and watch the Eagles-Lions game from last season and then tell me how you feel about Kendricks.
Kendricks knows he’s not wanted here. That’s why he requested a trade, which the Eagles ultimately denied. (Probably because they couldn’t get the kind of value they wanted... reportedly a fifth-round pick.)
Some have argued the Eagles should keep Kendricks around because the Eagles are light on linebacker depth. It’s a fair point. Jordan Hicks has an injury history. Nigel Bradham is potentially facing suspension. The Eagles have a lot of untested depth players behind their starters.
Still, trading Kendricks is hardly a move that will sink the defense. Getting a fourth-round pick for him would be a good trade, in my view. A fifth-round pick might be more realistic. He’s going to be gone after this season anyway due to his contract. For the Eagles, saving cap space now and getting an asset in return could be worth shipping out Kendricks.
The Eagles have a tough decision to make at wide receiver. Offensive coordinator Frank Reich had high praise for the position group.
This is, without a doubt, the best group that I've been around for a while. I mean, from top to bottom, very competitive. They've all flashed. They all deserve to be here. I believe some of these guys, for a couple guys who might not be here, I think they're going to end up someplace else. That's how confident we feel in this group.
Treggs has performed well in practice all offseason. Through two preseason games, he has eight receptions for 100 yards. Still, he’s on the roster bubble in Philadelphia. With five players set to be locked in ahead of him, Treggs is competing with the likes of Greg Ward and Shelton Gibson for a roster spot.
A team out there looking for more speed at the receiver position could be interested in Treggs. Treggs wouldn’t fetch much, but maybe the Eagles can trade him for another team’s depth linebacker (Kendricks replacement).
Means has had a great preseason. He’s been one of -- if not THE — league’s best pass rushers this summer, according to Pro Football Focus. The Eagles could easily keep Means as their fifth defensive end. He’d give the team nice depth.
But Means isn’t necessarily a big special teams contributor. And Philadelphia might want to keep Alex McCalister, a seventh-round pick from Roseman’s alma mater (Florida) in 2016, instead. McCalister (23) is three years younger than Means (26). He’s also under contract through 2019 while Means is a restricted free agent after this season.
A Means trade could look similar to the Terrence Brooks deal. Maybe the Eagles get another team’s depth player and/or a late-round pick from a team desperate for pass rush help.
Hamilton’s in a similar situation to Means. He’s played well this summer but there’s a numbers crunch at the defensive tackle position. Fletcher Cox, Tim Jernigan, and Beau Allen are locks. The Eagles are also high on Destiny Vaeao. That’s four defensive tackles. 2017 sixth-round pick Elijah Qualls has been standing out as a pass rusher. It’s hard to imagine the rookie would clear waivers.
The Eagles could try to stash Hamilton on their practice squad. Or they could figure someone’s going to pick him up and try to get anything they can for him. Maybe a deal where the Eagles trade a 2019 seventh and Hamilton for a team’s 2019 sixth. Small potatoes, but better than nothing.
Kelce getting traded would be this year’s version of last year’s Sam Bradford trade. What I mean by that is that it’d take a strong offer for the Eagles to move on, I think. Not a first-round pick. That’s not realistic. But certainly more than a fifth.
I think a Kelce trade would take some team suddenly getting really desperate for a center, just like the Vikings suddenly needed a quarterback before last season. That doesn’t seem likely right now, unless there’s a team out there that just really feels bad about what they have at center.
For now, I think Kelce stays. It is worth noting that Kelce’s backup, Stefen Wisniewski, has played well this summer, though. It’s always worth remembering the Eagles were reportedly considering moving on from Kelce earlier this offseason.More importantly, those whose young mothers gave them a shot at life now have a voice.
Demonstrators outside of the Supreme Court on March 2, 2016. (Photo11: Drew Angerer, Getty Images)
The Supreme Court is considering whether a Texas law that imposes new restrictions on abortion clinics and requires abortionists to have hospital admitting privileges is constitutional, according to their interpretation of that document in light of the court's 1973 Roe v. Wade ruling, which ushered in nationwide abortion on demand.
As the number of abortions have declined significantly since their high point of more than 1.5 million per year — now approaching 60 million total since Roe — pro-lifers have been gaining moral and legal ground, especially with younger people. The pro-choice side has decided to fight back with testimonies from women who have had abortions and not only do not regret them, but are happy and fulfilled because they ended the life of their baby.
Last month, The Washington Post carried a front-page story about historian Melissa Madera, who runs a podcast called “The Abortion Diary,” where women anonymously tell personal stories about their abortions.
Separately in the pages of Cosmopolitan magazine, television actress Amy Brenneman (Judging Amy) wrote that she "never, not for one moment,” regretted aborting her baby. Here’s an excerpt: “In the spring of my junior year at Harvard, my period was late. I had been in a relationship for almost two years with a loving and supportive boyfriend. We used birth control, but it malfunctioned. When I learned I was pregnant, I knew immediately and without question that I wanted an abortion. I had no desire to be a mother at that time — I wanted to finish college and start my career.”
Note the number of times she says “I.” Brenneman could have given birth, allowed a childless family to adopt the baby, still finished college and started her career. Pregnancy lasts only nine months. Death is forever.
In more than 30 years of speaking at fundraisers for pregnancy help centers, I, too, have heard the stories of women with unplanned pregnancies. Virtually every one who decided to see her pregnancy through and either parent, or place the baby up for adoption, has never regretted it. Women I have met who had an abortion have told me of their deep remorse and being ignorant of alternatives. Some turned to drugs and alcohol or became promiscuous. Many are scarred emotionally, biologically and spiritually.
Robbing so many babies of their "unalienable" right to live has had a corrosive effect on our culture and led to the devaluing of other categories of life. These include street shootings, assisted suicide laws and, soon to come, rationed health care to rid us of the “burdensome” elderly and seriously ill. If some lives don’t matter, then ultimately all lives might be at risk.
POLICING THE USA: A look at race, justice, media
Women who abort for convenience or out of fear their babies might be a “burden” in achieving their goals have missed an opportunity to see what can happen if they don’t personally replace God in matters of life and death. I know. I have met some of those former babies, now grown. They are pleased their mothers, many of whom had not planned to become pregnant, gave them a chance to live and to follow their dreams.
Every argument once made in favor of abortion has been answered, from “who will care for the child?” to “who will help the woman after her child is born?” This is what pregnancy help centers do, and they do it without cost, unlike abortion clinics and Planned Parenthood, which profit from women’s difficult circumstances, leading to the question, “Who really cares more about women?”
Cal Thomas is a syndicated columnist and member of the USA TODAY Board of Contributors.
In addition to its own editorials, USA TODAY publishes diverse opinions from outside writers, including our Board of Contributors. To read more columns like this, go to the Opinion front page.
Read or Share this story: http://usat.ly/1oVmN0hAhmadiyya, a minority Islamic sect have raised concerns after falling victim to Algeria’s controversial crackdown on religious minorities.
Algerian newspaper EnNahar revealed that the crackdown against the Ahmadis in Algeria started in the first week of June, the investigation was spread over three states and during the course of the investigation the security forces raided the Ahmadiyya sect’s headquarters in the state of Blida.
During the month-long crackdown dozens of Ahmadis were arrested and charged with violating social peace, and the under construction community center in the state of Blida was also demolished by the local Municipality.
Algeria’s Ministry of Religious Affairs stated that in 2013 it received communication from the Algerian Embassy in Islamabad, Pakistan, warning them of the risk posed by the spread of Ahmadiyya in North African countries including Algeria.
Algerian Minister of Religious Affairs Mohamed Issa said “a deviant religious sect called ‘Qadiani’ or ‘Ahmadis’ which is well-known in Pakistan and the Gulf states is now spreading to Northern Africa including Algeria, The Government is concerned that this band of Islam is becoming popular among the population, especially young people.”
He acknowledged that the Ahmadis were planning to open a community center for the 1,000 strong Algerian Ahmadiyya community.
Adding that “security forces have succeeded in dismantling their network because they dared to create their headquarters and announce their presence without waiting for the necessary licenses, and documents which proved it’s existence and its affiliates.”
In a later interview, the Minister explained that “the Ahmadiyya have been present in Algeria since the seventies, and they have more sense of belonging”OAKLAND — Aside from the typical sniping between public officials at every Oakland meeting, it seems this City Council is basically in lockstep on its most important responsibility — the budget.
Council President Lynette Gibson McElhaney’s budget proposal largely matched Mayor Libby Schaaf’s budget draft from several months earlier, which emphasized public safety, cutting debt and growing the city’s economy.
McElhaney even expanded on some of those goals, recommending the hiring of crime analysts and evidence technicians for the Oakland Police Department — two apiece — and the hiring of three tax enforcement officers to collect revenue from delinquents.
Monday’s special budget hearing was just a sneak preview — the council must pass its final budget next week before the June 30 deadline set by the state.
Expanding the embattled police force in the Bay Area’s most dangerous city was a priority for most of the council. Councilman Dan Kalb recommended adding the civilian police positions after learning some of the reasons behind the understaffed agency’s dismal record in solving robberies.
And police officials told Councilwoman Anne Campbell Washington that 19 of the last 25 robbery cases leading to criminal charges involved school-aged children, she said.
The city needs to expand its relationship with the Oakland Unified School District to solve systemic problems in the city, she said. That’s one of the reasons Campbell Washington supported Gibson McElhaney’s endorsement of another Kalb suggestions — to fund positions to reduce chronic absenteeism of students.
Through Schaaf’s initial budget and Gibson McElhaney’s tweaks, “we get to a more holistic look at public safety in the city of Oakland,” Campbell Washington said.
But, as Councilman Abel Guillen said, the council “can’t be all things to all people.”
Councilwoman Desley Brooks’ idea for a Department of Race and Equity was approved after receiving mixed support. The scaled-down version of her initial vision now calls for hiring a director and an analyst, Brooks said, which might not be enough manpower to adequately tackle one of the city’s most troubling topics.
Brooks said she wondered why parks in East Oakland, for example, had turned brown as the city started using less water, but the parks around downtown were green.
“We need to make sure we change the systemic racism that exists within our community,” she said. Her motion to create the department passed by consensus on Monday after she fought back criticism from Councilman Noel Gallo, who had his own topics to pitch.
Dozens of speakers on Monday pressed the council to adopt Gallo’s amendment funding legal support for children from Central America left in Oakland without their parents.
Several teenagers told the council their tales of fleeing the streets of Honduras and El Salvador. Many could be deported without legal aid from Centro Legal de la Raza, whose one-year, nearly $600,000 contract with the city is ending in November.
Councilman Noel Gallo asked the city to commit $800,000 to fund the organization’s efforts in the next two-year budget cycle. He also asked for $600,000 for housing and services for victims of human trafficking and prostitution.
Kathy Moehring, an advocate for the children, asked the council to put themselves in their shoes.
“Tell them, ‘You don’t deserve better than this,'” Moehring said.
Although the council tinkered with some small pieces, the broad strokes in Schaaf’s initial two-year, $2.4 billion budget proposal didn’t change much.
Her plan called for adding 40 police officers, bringing the department to 762 sworn officers within the next two years. The plan also expands the gun violence prevention program, Ceasefire.
Guillen said he hoped the budget improve the city’s hotly debated housing problem. The city needs more housing, but residents are demanding affordable housing — and $1.1 million for the city’s affordable housing fund was a good start, he said.
Both Guillen and Campbell Washington, who were backed in November’s elections by local unions, made sure to mention the city’s obligation to compensate city employees after years of cutbacks during the Great Recession.
“It’s been a long time since we’ve been able to acknowledge their contributions in a monetary way,” Campbell Washington said.
Mike Blasky covers Oakland City Hall. Contact him at 510-208-6429. Follow him at Twitter.com/blasky.Ed, Edd n Eddy is a Canadian-American animated comedy television series created by Danny Antonucci for Cartoon Network, and the sixth of the network's Cartoon Cartoons. The series revolves around three preteen boys named Ed, Edd (called "Double D" to avoid confusion with Ed), and Eddy—collectively known as "the Eds"—who live in a suburban cul-de-sac in the fictional town of Peach Creek. Under the unofficial leadership of Eddy, the trio frequently invent schemes to make money from their peers to purchase their favorite confectionery, jawbreakers. Their plans usually fail, leaving them in various, often humiliating, predicaments.
Adult cartoonist Antonucci was dared to create a children's cartoon; while designing a commercial, he conceived Ed, Edd n Eddy, designing it to resemble classic cartoons from the 1940s–1970s. He pitched the series to Cartoon Network and Nickelodeon, but the latter demanded creative control, leading to him making a deal with the former and the series premiering on January 4, 1999. During the show's run, several specials and shorts were produced in addition to the regular television series. The series concluded with a TV movie, Ed, Edd n Eddy's Big Picture Show, on November 8, 2009.
Ed, Edd n Eddy received generally positive reviews from critics and became one of Cartoon Network's most successful original series. It won a Reuben Award, two Leo Awards and a SOCAN Award, and was also nominated for another four Leo Awards, an Annie Award and two Kids' Choice Awards. The show attracted an audience of 31 million households, was broadcast in 120 countries, and proved to be popular among children, teenagers, and adults. With nearly an 11-year run, Ed, Edd n Eddy is currently the longest-running Cartoon Network original series.
Premise
From the left: Edd ("Double D"), Eddy, and Ed
Ed, Edd n Eddy follows the lives of "the Eds", three preteen boys who all share variations of the name Ed, but differ greatly in their personalities: Ed (voiced by Matt Hill) is the strong, dim-witted dogsbody of the group; Edd (Samuel Vincent), called Double D, is an inventor, neat freak, and the most intelligent of the Eds; and Eddy (Tony Sampson) is a devious, quick-tempered, bitter con artist, and self-appointed leader of the Eds. The three devise plans to scam the cul-de-sac kids out of their money, which they want to use to buy jawbreakers. However, problems always ensue, and the Eds' schemes usually end in failure and humiliation.
The cul-de-sac kids do not include the Eds as part of their group, making the trio outcasts. The group of kids consist of: Jonny 2×4 (David Paul "Buck" Grove) is a loner whom his peers consider to be a nuisance, and spends most of his time with his imaginary friend, a wooden board named Plank; Jimmy (Keenan Christensen) is a weak, insecure, and innocent yet accident-prone child, who is most often seen spending his time with Sarah (Janyse Jaud), Ed's spoiled and ill-tempered younger sister; Rolf (Peter Kelamis) is an immigrant, who often participates in unconventional customs; Kevin (Kathleen Barr) is a cynical and sardonic jock who detests the Eds, particularly Eddy; Nazz (Tabitha St. Germain; Jenn Forgie; Erin Fitzgerald), usually seen with Kevin, is a stereotypical dumb blonde and an unattainable love interest for the cul-de-sac kids. All of the cul-de-sac kids share a common fear of the Kanker Sisters, Lee (Janyse Jaud), May (Erin Fitzgerald; Jenn Forgie), and Marie (Kathleen Barr), three teenage girls who live in a nearby trailer park and are in love with the Eds.
Aside from the Eds, the other cul-de-sac kids, and the Kanker Sisters, no other characters appeared in the series until the fifth season, when the silhouettes of other people were occasionally shown, and in "Mission Ed-Possible", the arms of Eddy's father and Ed's mother were seen. In the series finale, Ed, Edd n Eddy's Big Picture Show, Eddy's adult brother (Terry Klassen) was seen for the first time, making him the only non-main character, and the only adult character to ever fully appear on the show.
The series took place mostly within the fictional town of Peach Creek, and new locations were rarely introduced. The first four seasons of the show are set during a seemingly endless summer vacation, though from the fifth season onwards, the characters are shown attending junior high school in the fall and winter months.
Production
Development
Ed, Edd n Eddy, produced the series on a dare. Danny Antonucci, creator, director, executive producer, and co-writer of, produced the series on a dare.
Although cartoonist Danny Antonucci began his career by working as an animator on various children's series for Hanna-Barbera, his later solo works were edgy and aimed at adult audiences. He gained notoriety with the 1987 short film Lupo the Butcher and then, after founding his own production studio, a.k.a. Cartoon in 1994, created the series The Brothers Grunt for MTV. It was quickly cancelled, however, upon being met with generally poor reviews.[1][2]
On a dare, Antonucci then decided that he would try producing a children's animated series of his own. While designing a commercial, he ended up drawing three characters that he felt particularly pleased with. Growing excited over their potential, he named them Ed, Edd, and Eddy and spent the following months developing a show around them.[3] He faxed a one-page concept sheet to Cartoon Network and Nickelodeon in 1996.[3][4] Both studios quickly responded, Cartoon Network in only 20 minutes, and were enthusiastic and wanted to see more; they each demanded creative control, however, and Antonucci refused.[1] After Cartoon Network agreed to let Antonucci have control of the show, conversations between Antonucci and the studio continued.[1]
Vice president of programming and production of Cartoon Network, Mike Lazzo, showed high interest in the series and requested a show bible, which came through by fax, a few pages at a time, over a period of the next few months.[4] After an affirmative response from Cartoon Network president Betty Cohen, the legal paperwork and deal-making began, followed by a start-up meeting at the Chateau Marmont Hotel in Los Angeles. A deal was made that Antonucci's studio, a.k.a. Cartoon, would produce Ed, Edd n Eddy, the first Cartoon Network original series to be produced by an outside production company rather than Cartoon Network's Hanna-Barbera. The series also entered production and bypassed a seven-minute short; this marked the first time that one of the studio's original series had ever done this.[4]
According to Antonucci, he based the characters on real people in his life. The personalities of Ed, Double D, and Eddy are based on his own traits as well as the activities of his two sons, while the cul-de-sac children and the Kanker sisters were all based on children he grew up with.[5] Rolf is based on Antonucci and his cousins, since he was part of an Italian immigrant family, and grew up in a first generation foreign household with different customs and ways of living, compared to those born in Canada.[5]
Rolf is me and all of my cousins. My parents were right off the boat so I grew up playing to two worlds, the modern world and the 1950s Italian world. My parents like Rolf's lived — still live in the past, with strong traditions and strange cooking and having a hard time assimilating to modern life.[6]
Jimmy is based on one of his cousins, who was rather feminine and spent most of his time playing with girls rather than with boys.[3] Jonny and Plank are inspired by one of Antonucci's childhood friends, a loner who spent most of his time outside with his blanket.[3] He stated that he believed it was important to add Plank, a board of wood, to the show, and that he "thought it would be really cool to do the show with Plank taking on a character of his own" and to cause Jonny to do things he would usually never do.[5] Some wanted Plank to be able to talk, smile and blink as if he was alive, but Antonucci insisted that it should be treated as a piece of wood, brought to life by Jonny's imagination.[3]
Casting
Matt Hill, Samuel Vincent, and Tony Sampson were respectively cast as Ed, Double D, and Eddy. David Paul "Buck" Grove and Keenan Christensen played the parts of Jonny 2×4 and Jimmy, respectively, while Sarah was voiced by Janyse Jaud. Peter Kelamis voiced Rolf, while Kathleen Barr was cast as Kevin. Nazz was voiced by Tabitha St. Germain in season 1, Jenn Forgie in season 3 and Erin Fitzgerald in seasons 2, 4, 5 and 6. Fitzgerald also played the part of May, one of the Kanker Sisters, except in season 3 when she was voiced by Jenn Forgie. The other two Kanker sisters, Marie and Lee, were voiced by Kathleen Barr and Janyse Jaud. Eddy's adult brother is mentioned frequently throughout the series but does not appear until Ed, Edd n Eddy's Big Picture Show, where he is voiced by series voice director Terry Klassen.[7]
Animation
Antonucci, an advocate of hand-drawn animation, wanted to ensure Ed, Edd n |
right man behind bars, but god damn, at least try to do it without take a giant dump on the investigative process. Every member of the Sheriff’s department looked like they ate a weed brownie and were forced to give a class presentation they forgot about when they took the stand.
This parody imagines what a ‘Cops’ episode would look like in Manitowoc County and to be honest I first thought it was a documentary. And then I saw the smoking hot girls in Manitowoc County and realized it had to be a spoof.
“I’m better in the pocket than Aaron Rodgers if ya know what I mean. Hit the sound.” Brilliant.Daryl Beattie burst onto the 500GP scene with a victory in his debut 1993 season on the way to finishing behind only Kevin Schwantz and Wayne Rainey in the World Championship.
A surprise departure from Honda then saw the Australian spend an ill-fated season at Team Roberts Yamaha - during which he famously lost all five toes on his left foot - before switching to Suzuki and battling compatriot Mick Doohan for the '95 title.
After suffering a broken collarbone while leading the standings, Beattie kept the championship alive to the penultimate round. Not bad for a guy that got into motorcycling when he won a bike on a children's TV show.
But Beattie didn't stand on the podium after '95 - injuries prompting his retirement at the end of '97, at the age of just 27. Casey Stoner retired at the same age, through choice, but Beattie found it hard to accept.
Beattie remains involved in motorsport through MotoGP and F1 work for Australian TV and also runs Daryl Beattie Adventures, offering off-road motorcycle tours through some of Australia's most spectacular scenery. He's also applying for a commercial drone licence!
Crash.net caught up with Beattie to talk MotoGP past and present...
Beattie and Mick Doohan battle for the 1995 500cc World Championship.
What did you make of the 2014 season Daryl?
Daryl Beattie:
Marquez was obviously going to continue off his debut season as the man to beat, but I really thought Lorenzo was going to have a big year and step up. That all seemed to change around Austin, when he had the jump start, and then there were a few crashes which just took away all his momentum.
From where I was sitting it seemed that without the championship to fight for, he didn't have anything to fight for. There were races where we saw glimpses of Lorenzo's brilliance, but not consistently.
Marquez certainly didn't have it all his own way and as we always say, 'when you are that good, you can only beat yourself'. At stages there it looked like he might do that with a couple of crashes later in the year, but he kept it all together and had a great season. As did Valentino.
So over the year Marquez dominated. He was unbelievable. While Lorenzo, I felt, had one of the worst years of his career and Dani just didn't capitalise when he could have. I still think Dani is very fast, on the right day, and can challenge for race wins and even the championship.
But Marquez clearly deserved another title. The kid is amazing. I certainly hope this year they - Marquez, Rossi, Lorenzo and Pedrosa - all get a good start and Lorenzo especially can get back to the form that we know he's got. Because I certainly feel that Lorenzo can challenge Marquez.
Crash.net:
What do you think makes Marquez so special?
Daryl Beattie:
You know, every now and then someone comes along that is brilliant. When I arrived in 500 it was towards the end of the Rainey, Schwantz and Lawson era. So during my time the standout rider was Mick [Doohan], but Mick is very different to Marquez. Mick worked hard to get where he was - as everyone does - but I think there is more natural ability with Marquez.
Then after Mick there was Rossi, then I would say Casey. Casey wasn't there long enough to dominate for a long period, but certainly his ability was unbelievable. And now there is Marquez.
So from my time onwards there have only been four of those really brilliant guys - and that's not taking anything away from the others. They are all unbelievable riders to make it at that level. But I think in any game you only see that odd one come through maybe once a decade and Marquez is the man of the moment.
You only have to watch Marquez at the Superprestigio, or a clip I saw of him the other day (see below) riding feet-up around tyres on the dirt.
A video posted by Marc M?rquez (@marcmarquez93) on Jan 1, 2015 at 1:48pm PST
Like a lot of people I did that kind of stuff as a kid. Dad would put me in a paddock on a slippery surface to ride around the witches hats [cones]. We always want to skip the basics, but sometimes the basics are the most critical thing. Just watching Marquez do that sort of thing - he pushes the boundary with everything. He's pushing the boundary with that dirt bike, feet-up around tyres and he rides a MotoGP bike the same way. He gets the thing in weird angles, it's tucking and turning.
I think the difference is that Marquez is frighteningly naturally talented and he's got a head on his shoulders. He's the full package.
If you look at somebody like Anthony Gobert - I think Anthony Gobert was probably just as talented as Marquez, if you talk about raw ability on a dirt bike or road bike. But from the shoulders up it was missing. Whether that was his upbringing - to say this in the nicest way - or the drugs that eventually got to him and ruined him. But there was something missing from his package and Marquez is lucky because he's got the full package.
Crash.net:
Casey finished racing and the next year Marquez arrived - it would have been amazing to have them both on track at the same time...
Daryl Beattie:
I totally agree. Also because they are two different personalities and I think the clash would have been there, but it would have been a great clash. You can see the rapport that Marquez has with Valentino. Obviously Valentino is at the other end of his career, but the respect, rapport and laughs they have is great for television. All the top guys seem to get along pretty good at the moment. But I think if Casey had been there with Marquez, two young guys at the top of their game, we would have seen some more sparks.
Crash.net:
The next Australian MotoGP hope is Jack Miller. Jack told us in an interview last year that you were one of his heroes, so what do you make of Jack and his jump straight from Moto3 to MotoGP?
Daryl Beattie:
Well firstly, that's nice of him to say that. It's a shame Jack didn't win the world title. He certainly deserved to. I felt that he was the quickest guy. I'm never made a secret of the fact that I'm a Honda man and when it was announced that he was making the shift to KTM [for 2014] I said on air that I hope it was the right decision. Because knowing Honda they are going to turn it around and bring out a great Moto3 bike the next year. And they did. But the KTM was also very competitive. There was not much between them.
I also said that the step from Moto3 - certainly it's not that he can't do it, but it's a massive leap and can't be taken lightly. I know the spec of the bike has changed over the MotoGP tests that Jack has done, but from what we've seen I think he's done a phenomenal job.
I certainly think he's got the ability to do it for Australia. I think he's got everything there. I think he's matured massively in the last couple of years, especially his KTM season. I think Aki Ajo was a great leader for him and taught him a lot. At first I was a bit sceptical, but from what I've seen so far I think he's done a great job and is ready to make the jump.
Beattie stands on the podium alongside Mick Doohan and Wayne Rainey in only his second 500GP race, at the 1992 Australian GP.
Looking at your career, you'd only started two 250GPs before racing in the 500GP class, how big a jump was it?
Daryl Beattie:
I was kind of all over the shop at the time! I'd done some 250 wild-cards at Phillip Island, but I was still off the radar and went to race in Japan for Honda. I did some 250 stuff and what they called TT Formula 1, which was like a Superbike but higher spec. They used them for the Suzuka 8 Hour.
I was given the opportunity to do my first 500 grand prix in Japan, in 1992, and by the time I raced GPs full-time [in 1993] I'd done nearly a season on a 500 in the All-Japan Championship, which I won. So I had a bit of 500 time before I came to grand prix.
Those days in Japan were very good for me. It was very competitive. People like Magee and Goddard had come back from the world championship and then you obviously had Japanese guys who were doing wild-card 500cc races. So for me at the beginning of my 500cc career it was a great opportunity to be out of the spotlight, but still race against guys from grands prix.
It certainly put me in good shape for my first wild-card and then riding for Erv Kanemoto at Eastern Creek and Malaysia, when Gardner was injured. It also prepared me for when I stepped into GPs full time the following year, in '93.
Beattie took the first of his three 500GP wins at Hockenheim in 1993. He is pictured second behind Alex Criville and ahead of Doohan, Schwantz and Rainey.
You were third in the world championship - behind Schwantz and Rainey - during your rookie '93 season. That's pretty impressive!
Daryl Beattie:
It was, but at the end of that year Honda said to me they were releasing a new road bike, the RC45, and wanted it to debut in World Superbike with me as the rider. I just didn't want to go to World Superbike. I wanted to stay in grand prix, where they had built me up to be.
That is why I left Honda and to this day I wish I hadn't of, because they have such great bikes and are such a great company. But that was why and so I joined up with Kenny [Roberts] for '94 and what was to be the worst year of my career.
Wayne [Rainey] had been paralysed and Yamaha didn't really have a competitive bike that year. We tested a new bike up until February, but it never arrived at a grand prix and we just ran the old bike. That was also the year I lost my toes and eventually Kevin [Schwantz] got me to Suzuki for '95.
Leaving Honda was a mistake, but at the time I didn't want to go back to World Superbike.
Daryl Beattie, 1993 Jarama 500GP.
There was no option for you to stay in grand prix with Honda?
Daryl Beattie:
That's correct. Honda said they would bring me back to grand prix after Superbike, but after so many years working to get to grand prix and finishing third in my first year, there was no way I was going to go away when I felt like I could do better than that.
Beattie in Lucky Strike Suzuki colours at the 1995 Japanese 500GP.
After your worst season in '94, you had your best season in '95 with Suzuki, leading the championship. What are your main memories of that year?
Daryl Beattie:
I had Kevin as a team-mate at the beginning, but he retired after three races. I was living with Kevin in Austin, Texas and he didn't fly back to Europe with me. So I got to Europe and everyone was like, 'where's Kevin?' That was an eye opener.
It was a great year for me. Kevin was very supportive and still came to the grands prix. As you say, I led the championship by I think 25 points until I broke my collarbone in practice at Assen [round 7 of 13]. I missed that grand prix and then fought with Mick for the rest of the year, but Mick got me at the end of the season in Argentina.
Beattie, Doohan and Alberto Puig, 1995 Italian 500GP.
But a great season and I was on a roll looking to go better in '96, but the new bike had piston troubles. I had two or three big head injuries in testing due to the top of the pistons being torn off. On a two-stoke it was just seizing and I had a couple of big concussions.
It was kind of the start of the slide for me really. I missed most of that season after my biggest injury at Paul Ricard. They told me to go away with swelling on my brain. I tried to come back and ride at the end of the year, and again in '97, but just didn't have the same momentum or speed and I couldn't work out why.
Eventually I had tests done in Australia and discovered I had middle ear damage, so my balance was off. I found that out a few years later. By then I'd decided I wasn't competitive, then found the reason why.
So that was it. The end. I was done young, which was disappointing. I was 27. The same as Stoner. Still, all that happened from winning a motorcycle on a TV show when I was 9 so I can't complain.
Crash.net:
That's where it all started for you? Did your parents or family have any kind of motorcycle background?
Daryl Beattie:
No, nothing.
Crash.net:
What was the TV show and how did you end up winning?
Daryl Beattie:
It was just an Australian kid's cartoon show in 1979. There was a puppet called Agro and it was hosted by a lady called Jacki MacDonald. One day they had motorcycle on there, a 50cc RM Suzuki, and said 'guess the weight'. So I rang a bike shop and asked how much it weighed! Then my Mum entered the contest and I won a motorbike. So really bizarre, but it turned out to be a fantastic moment in my life.
Crash.net:
Did you take to it straight away?
Daryl Beattie:
Yeah, I rode around the bush and Dad said, 'you've got to join a club'. He was good with his hands so he built a bike trailer and we joined a minibike club. I kind of got results straight away, while he worked two or three jobs and bought me 80s and 100s. I won Australian Championships and it all rolled from there.
Crash.net:
How many years of dirt track did you do?
Daryl Beattie:
I did six years of dirt track, on circuits similar to the Troy Bayliss Classic.
Crash.net:
Dirt track really seems to have made a resurgence as far as training for the top grand prix riders?
Daryl Beattie:
It gives you that feeling and ability to work with the bike under you and gain confidence. Again it's about the basics. So much has changed since the days of Barry Sheene, in terms of the tyres and electronics, but the guys now are certainly tucking and sliding a lot. Dirt track does an enormous amount for that.
You can see Marquez's ability on dirt track especially. The amazing thing for me is that he rides his MotoGP bike like he rides the dirt bike. His feel and ability to do that is unbelievable.
Beattie leads Schwantz and Rainey at the 1993 Japanese GP, during his first full grand prix season.
Which of your rivals would you say was the most talented, or the fastest?
Daryl Beattie:
I think for me Rainey was super special. I don't think the Yamaha was quite as competitive, although the Dunlop had its advantages at times. That was the wonderful thing back then, there was a great battle between Dunlop and Michelin.
It's hard to pick one rider out between Rainey, Schwantz and Doohan. Lawson I didn't get to race against other than in the 8 Hours, but Eddie was the guy that I looked up to and my favourite in grand prix. I just liked the way he approached racing. He was very laid back about it, didn't have much to say and got the results. I stayed at his house the week before I won my first grand prix at Hockenheim in '93. He was good. Very helpful.
Mick was obviously my main rival, so I kind of find him as the one who stands out the most because Kevin wasn't there long enough after I arrived. I would have liked to have stayed with Honda and fought with Mick because Honda were Honda throughout the years of my career. But you take different paths.
Beattie and Doohan.
How did you get on with Mick, as team-mates at Honda and then battling each other for the title with different teams in '95?
Daryl Beattie:
We were really close, really good mates. We both lived in France and we trained together and I guess it wasn't in my nature to be - I was competitive, but I was competitive on the bike.
Obviously there was tension in the year that I really challenged him for the title. You could feel that tension and we didn't train together. That was probably a good thing because it maybe threw a little doubt in his mind about what exercises and training I was doing. But we always got along very well. Never any real disagreements, just those challenges on the track.
Crash.net:
Which of your former rivals do you keep in touch with and how have they changed?
Daryl Beattie:
We've all changed with age. Especially Mick. He's obviously mellowed a lot. You speak to his former mechanics like Alex Briggs - who was with me when I first started, as well as Mick and now Rossi - he'll tell you some funny stories. Like Mick would ride into the garage, but wouldn't pull the brakes on and run into the mechanics because he was angry about a set-up or something!
He was very feisty. A lot like Casey in a way I guess. Really show that emotion. But Mick is mellow now. A different guy. That's not there anymore. We all change with age. I don't see Mick as much as I used to, but certainly several times through the year including promotions for the MotoGP and F1. I also speak to Kevin quite regularly over the phone and by email. Kevin is probably the one I keep in touch with the most.
Beattie and Schwantz, 1994 Australian 500GP.
It's great to be back in the paddock at Phillip Island each year and meet all the different guys again, like Alex Briggs and Alberto Puig. It's like one big family. One of the Dorna directors, for example, was a cameraman when I was racing. So a lot of people are still there and it's nice to see what they are up to now.
Crash.net:
How did you find the transition from racing into 'normal' life after your retired?
Daryl Beattie:
Very difficult. We see it now in Australia with the national rugby league series or some of the big football clubs. Young guys earn reasonable money through their career but often waste it. They are some of the best players in the country but they might not have much education or come from a poor background. Not having guidance to make the next step after your sporting career is difficult.
For me, just because I was so young, 27, and walking away from it, I certainly felt lost for several years, even though I was at Channel 10 doing TV commentary within a year or two.
That's probably been the best thing for me because it kept me busy and kept me involved. But it personally took me four or five years to really get over it. Not asking myself, 'what do I do today? What am I training for?' Racing had been the main part of my life from a kid and suddenly you lose all that.
It's a big change and I can understand why there is so much emphasis now in trying to look after sportsmen post-career. Jobs and things like that. It's very important.
Crash.net:
Were there any particular things that helped you, or did it just take time?
Daryl Beattie:
It just took time. My TV commitments helped massively, but I probably didn't ride motorcycles at all for the period when I was coming to terms with my career being over. I wasn't bitter, but I just didn't ride bikes because of the way it all ended. I started again when I began to feel better about things, just riding dirt and road bikes to catch up with friends. But there was nothing in particular that helped. It was just a time factor.
Beattie, Barry Sheene and Jeremy Burgess, 2002 Australian MotoGP 2002.
You are getting plenty of motorcycle riding in now with your Adventure tours, alongside your TV work. What is your schedule for 2015?
Daryl Beattie:
I'm lucky because I've been at Network 10 for over ten years and been doing the MotoGP commentary since then. We are a free-to-air network and a lot of it is starting to go to pay TV, but I've got another contract for this year. I also get to do Formula One in Melbourne, which is a great event and I love working with the British guys like Tom Clarkson and James Allen, who work with us for that grand prix.
But I'm really looking forward to MotoGP this year, especially now Jack is in the premier-class. It was difficult with Casey stepping away and having an Aussie again will create more interest back here for us.
This will be my second year of the Adventure tours (DarylBeattieAdventures.com.au) which I do in-between my MotoGP commitments. We run Honda CRF450 Enduro bikes and take six or seven guests along. We offer a Simpson Desert trip, which is one of our great deserts in the middle of Australia, a Cape York trip, which is a remote region in the tropics at the top end of Australia, and a Gibson Desert trip, which runs up through the middle of Australia.
It's a great experience. You can get a farmer, or a wealthy petroleum or real estate developer on dirt bikes in the middle of Australia and they all become great mates. But if you'd put them together in an airport lounge they probably wouldn't talk to each other. It's been really enjoyable.
Crash.net:
How did you get into it?
Daryl Beattie:
I guess it comes from my dirt bike background. I've always loved dirt bikes and enjoyed riding in the bush with my mates, especially overnight rides to a pub somewhere for a meal and a few beers. There were a few people doing tours in Australia, I'd done some many years ago and I thought there was an opportunity with my name to take people on dirt bike rides.
The idea is to give people a great dirt bike ride in a remote area of Australia that you probably wouldn't do alone, because you need support. We handle all of that, so the guests can just enjoy the ride, experience some really special parts of Australia and improve their motorcycle skills. That's what I've started to create. I'll do more of it this year and see how it unfolds.
We've had great support from Honda and Michelin. Fingers crossed, Honda will get back into the big bike adventure market, off the back of the Dakar and things like that. Hopefully Honda will turn up with a bike like the KTM and BMW adventure bikes. I'd love to get into that big bike market and it might also entice more people from overseas to come and see some of Australia with me.
Crash.net:
At Phillip Island, you mentioned getting a commercial licence for a'multirotor'. What's that about?
Daryl Beattie:
I've been flying multirotors - which are Drones or UAVs, whatever you want to call them - and use them to shoot some of the videos from my tours. Regulations are different around the world, but in Australia to be able to shoot video and make money, or use it on television, you have to have a commercial licence.
That means you have to go through a safety bureau here, which is CASA [Civil Aviation Safety Authority]. So CASA control it. You have to do exams and flight tests with them to get a commercial licence, which not a lot of people have in Australia. I already have a commercial helicopter licence, so some of that licence helps.
Once I have the drone licence it means if, for example, Crash.net wanted some video to be shot, I could do it. So I'm going through all the correct legal hoops.
Crash.net:
When did you start flying helicopters, did it overlap with the motorcycle racing or was it something you got into after your career ended?
Daryl Beattie:
I actually did my helicopter licence early on, in 1992, before I went to grand prix. During my final years at school I lived near an aerodrome and I just always liked flying. I'd fly whenever I came home from racing in Europe.
I also had a friend who was into aerobatics. He took me up in Sukhoi Su-29 and it was like a grand prix bike in the sky! It was unbelievable. So I did my plane licence as well and just did some basic aerobatic stuff as a buzz. I loved it.
Towards the end of my racing career I thought I should do my commercial helicopter licence, so I got that. When I stopped racing I couldn't afford to do the flying anymore! But I went on to do hot air balloons, paragliding, parachuting... I've got licences for lots of forms of aviation.
Aviation is certainly something I admire. The trouble is it's so damn expensive, so maybe the drones will give me my aviation kicks from now on.
Crash.net:
Last question Daryl, after losing the toes you joked about "Hangin' 5 in '95" and you make reference to it in your email address these days - so how is the foot?
Daryl Beattie:
It's good! I don't really have any problems. If I do lots of kilometres it gets a bit sore, but generally it's fine. I have a bit of limp every now and then but compared with most I've been pretty lucky.
Crash.net:
Thanks Daryl...
Daryl Beattie:
You're welcome.Nominations for the 74th annual Golden Globe Awards were announced on Monday morning at the Beverly Hilton, and FX’s The People v. O.J. Simpson led the TV pack with five total nominations, including a nod for Sarah Paulson, who already won an Emmy for her portrayal of Marcia Clark.
RELATED Golden Globe Nominations 2017: Ausiello’s Snappy Judgements
The Night Manager followed with four nominations, while The Crown, The Night Of, This Is Us and Westworld earned three apiece.
ABC’s black-ish also racked up three nods, leading the comedy side of things. Veep, Transparent, Mozart in the Jungle and freshman Atlanta picked up a pair of noms each.
The Golden Globes will be broadcast by NBC on Sunday, Jan. 8, and will be hosted by Jimmy Fallon. Meryl Streep will be honored with the Cecil B. deMille Award.
Here is the list of TV’s nominees — now share your raves and rants in the Comments.
• DRAMA SERIES
The Crown
Game of Thrones
Stranger Things
This Is Us
Westworld
• DRAMA – ACTOR
Rami Malek, Mr. Robot
Bob Odenkirk, Better Call Saul
Matthew Rhys, The Americans
Liev Schreiber, Ray Donovan
Billy Bob Thornton, Goliath
• DRAMA – ACTRESS
Caitriona Balfe, Outlander
Claire Foy, The Crown
Keri Russell, The Americans
Winona Ryder, Stranger Things
Evan Rachel Wood, Westworld
• COMEDY OR MUSICAL SERIES
Atlanta
black-ish
Mozart in the Jungle
Transparent
Veep
• COMEDY OR MUSICAL SERIES – ACTRESS
Rachel Bloom, Crazy Ex-Girlfriend
Julia Louis-Dreyfus, Veep
Sarah Jessica Parker, Divorce
Issa Ree, Insecure
Gina Rodriguez, Jane the Virgin
Tracee Ellis Ross, black-ish
• COMEDY OR MUSICAL SERIES – ACTOR
Anthony Anderson, black-ish
Gael Garcia Bernal, Mozart in the Jungle
Donald Glover, Atlanta
Nick Nolte, Graves
Jefrey Tambor, Transparent
• TV-MOVIE OR MINISERIES
American Crime
The Dresser
The Night Manager
The Night Of
People v. O.J. Simpson Golden Globe Awards 2017: Biggest Snubs Launch Gallery Launch Gallery
• TV-MOVIE OR MINISERIES – ACTOR
Riz Ahmed, The Night Of
Bryan Cranston, All the Way
Tom Hiddleston, The Night Manager
John Turturro, The Night Of
Courtney B. Vance, People v. O.J. Simpson
• TV-MOVIE OR MINISERIES – ACTRESS
Felicity Huffman, American Crime
Riley Keough, The Girlfriend Experience
Sarah Paulson, People v. O.J. Simpson
Charlotte Rampling, London Spy
Kerry Washington, Confirmation
• SERIES, TV-MOVIE OR MINISERIES – SUPPORTING ACTRESS
Olivia Coleman, The Night Manager
Lena Headey, Game of Thrones
Chrissy Metz, This Is Us
Mandy Moore, This Is Us
Thandie Newton, Westworld
• SERIES, TV-MOVIE OR MINISERIES – SUPPORTING ACTOR
Sterling K. Brown, People v O.J. Simpson
Hugh Laurie, The Night Manager
John Lithgow, The Crown
Christian Slater, Mr. Robot
John Travolta, People v. O.J. Simpson
Again: The Golden Globes will be broadcast by NBC on Sunday, Jan. 8, and will be hosted by Jimmy Fallon.I've loved this movie since the first time I rented it on VHS back in the '80s. I've owned copies of it since then and was ecstatic when I learned that a blu-ray version was finally coming out. I was not disappointed.
I'm not Gene Shalit so I'm not going go into detail about the background and story. I'll summarize that up by saying that this movie stands up tremendously well after 30 years. The acting, the story, the pacing, the music, the cinematography and the pre-CGI special effects are all still top shelf. If you watch the special features, you'll realize just how amazing that last point is. Because of the way the special effects were filmed and edited together, there's just no way of telling when you're looking at the real thing or something the special effects crews came up with.
As for the product itself, this isn't just another DVD reworked into blu-ray format. They used a high quality, super clean source that was free of dust or dirt marks, had no film to digital jitters and no traces color fading. To me, it was like seeing the film for the first time. On the audio side, the score was lush and sounded full through my surround system while sound effects popped out of the air like they were right in the room. The book is a nice bonus, with lots of great pictures of both the actors and their real life counterparts. Really, my only strike would be the lack of full length commentary for the film (some commentary is included on the extra disc). But that's subjective.
Speaking of subjective, I'd like to take a moment to recognize those who have rated this film as one star. The majority of those doing so did it because it wasn't historically accurate. To them I say you're really off the mark. First, if this movie were shot to match history word for word and event for event, it would have cost about the same as the Gross Domestic Product of Ireland, been about 12 hours long, and as entertaining to watch as a Chevy rusting. Second, if you're such a fan boy of the truth, then use this movie as your gateway to spreading it. I watched this movie for the first time when I was 16. It caused me to want to learn more about the these seven brave men and the ones that followed. This in turn lead me to reading a whole lot of books over the years. And when my daughters joined me on the couch to watch this blu-ray with me, I was prepared to answer their questions, fill in back story, and point out the messages and symbolism the filmmakers were conveying. So save your one star reviews for the atrocity that is Pearl Harbor. Instead, take the time to introduce someone to this epically filmed, entertaining springboard into history that will keep the CGI jaded youth of today engaged and might even light a spark in them.Writing a face recognition library interface is hard. Really hard. Posted by Louis Brandy on 08 June 2009
This is a post I've wanted to write for awhile. This wasn't the post I had hoped it to be. The original working title was "Writing a library interface is hard. Really hard." The way the post was supposed to go was with me explaining a whole bunch of general problems with writing good programmatic interfaces for libraries and then giving some helpful advice.
Over time I realized that each library has such unique problems that general advice is almost entirely worthless. It involves balancing so many factor and in some cases the answers are obvious (a jpeg library really only has a handful of functions) or prior-art exists (GUI toolkits) that will help you. Other times, you are on your own and it becomes quite a struggle. So instead of my general advice that will save all of mankind, let me explain some of our struggles, and I'll let you figure out the lessons learned for your situation.
Oh, and as if the engineering challenges weren't enough, you needn't forget to add in these supplementary exercises that are among the most tedious in all of programming.
Crushed Souls
Documentation. It is not fun. We both know it. And yet, you absolutely must have it and if you've done it right, it'll be incredibly useful. The sad truth is that most people won't read it.
Example Programs. Virtually everyone who uses your library will skip straight by the docs and straight to the example programs. These cannot be bad. Try to make at least one short, simple, and hello-worldish. It should be easy to find.
Error reporting. Figure out a way to handle errors in a useful manner and report that information back to the developer. This is probably the second most soul crushing endeavor in all of programming.
Meetings. Did someone mentioning soul crushing? The only way to hammer out a good API is to get a bunch of people in a room and look at interfaces, functionality, paradigms, and conventions, and decide what is good and bad. As a word of warning, these meetings will not be short.
Iterate. You simply cannot get it right the first time. This shouldn't come as a surprise. Iterate early, and iterate often. Work out a prototype H file first and work from there. Get that into a room with other devs and walk through the use cases. That H file is your spec.
Usability vs Flexibility
This is where it gets difficult. Our SDK typically has been geared towards ease of use, not power. This meant that certain sophisticated things we do with our internal codebase aren't possible to replicate using our SDK. For example, we have a live camera-fed demo that devoted some threads to video processing (face detection & tracking) and real-time display, and some other threads for psuedo-background recognition that updates the onscreen results as they come in. The complicated mix of threads and asynchronous nature of the recognition made this a non-trivial program to write. While possible, our old SDK was fundamentally ill-equipped to replicate it.
If you want to build an easy-to-use library, it's fairly straightforward. You pick a few use cases, do those right, and everyone else be damned. We decided, recently, to expose more functionality to make it capable of all the complicated and nuanced things you might want to do. This resulted in marathon meetings, lots of teeth gnashing, and at least one heated argument.
And you can take it too far. More than once, while at the whiteboard, we'd finally convinced ourselves that this particular set of functionality lets everyone do everything. At that point it became clear, however, that it's all so complicated that you'll need five times the documentation and no particular user has any hope of actually getting it right on their own. So now you've traded feature request emails for "how do I get this to work?" emails. We went back to the literal drawing board.
High-level vs Low-level
Our original face recognition SDK basically had one function. Given two faces, you got a score. That was it -- pretty much the epitome of low level. From there, everything else follows. It turns out, of course, that everything else isn't so simple. Some people want to compare a probe face to a gallery of faces and find the best match. Other people want to take all the faces in some unorganized collections and organize it. In any use case, you'd need to build up a fair bit of infrastructure. You'd have to handle saving, caching, and re-using previous results. If you want to use a huge dataset, its up to you to figure out how to partition the data, and how best to thread it. There was quite a bit for you to get right. And more often than not, we found people getting it very, very wrong.
Eventually we realized that in any one use case, a developer using our SDK would have to create so many things and get so many of them right, that it simply wouldn't be feasible for him to get the system he wanted. At least not as well as we could. We'd thought long and hard about some of these problems and could build solutions that were simply better.
Adding all of these functions while maintaining full flexibility resulted in a dozen functions (instead of our original one). Every function you add adds to the pain. It create complexity, documentation, and work |
four years without charges and allegedly tortured. An Egyptian court in 2007 ruled that his imprisonment was "unfounded" and ordered him released.
Among the allegations made by De Sousa in a series of interviews with McClatchy:
The former CIA station chief in Rome, Jeffrey Castelli, whom she called the mastermind of the operation, exaggerated Nasr's terrorist threat to win approval for the rendition and misled his superiors that Italian military intelligence had agreed to the operation.
Senior CIA officials, including then-CIA Director George Tenet, approved the operation even though there were doubts about Castelli's case — Nasr wasn't wanted in Egypt and wasn't on the U.S. list of top al-Qaida terrorists.
Condoleezza Rice, then the White House national security adviser, also had concerns about the case, especially what Italy would do if the CIA were caught, but she eventually agreed to it and recommended that Bush approve the abduction.
De Sousa said her assertions are based on classified CIA cables that she read before resigning from the agency in February 2009, as well as on Italian legal documents and Italian news reports. She denies that she was involved in the operation, though she acknowledges that she served as the interpreter for a CIA "snatch" team that visited Milan in 2002 to plan the abduction.
"I was being held accountable for decisions that someone else took and I wanted to see on what basis the decisions were made," she said, explaining why she had delved into the CIA archives. "And especially because I was willing to talk to the Hill (Congress) about this because I knew that the CIA would not be upfront with them."
"I don't have any of the cables with me. Please put that down," De Sousa added with a nervous laugh, her unease reflecting the Obama administration's unprecedented crackdown on leaks of classified information to journalists.
De Sousa is one of only a handful of former CIA officers who've spoken openly about the secret renditions in which suspected terrorists overseas were abducted without legal proceedings and then interrogated by other nations' security services.
More than 130 people were "rendered" in this way, according to a February 2013 study by the Open Society Justice Initiative, a U.S.-based group that promotes the rule of law. Many were tortured and abused, and many, including Nasr, were freed for lack of proof that they were hatching terrorist plots, said Amrit Singh, the study's author.
Human rights groups and many legal experts denounce rendition as violating not only U.S. and international law, but also the laws of the nations where abductions occurred and of the countries to which suspected terrorists were sent. In December 2005, Rice defended renditions as legal, however, calling them a "vital tool" that predated the 9/11 attacks. She denied that the United State "transported anyone... to a country where we believe he or she will be tortured."
The Bush and Obama administrations have never acknowledged U.S. involvement in the Nasr rendition, which makes De Sousa's decision to speak publicly about it significant, Singh said.
"Any public account of what happened and who was ultimately responsible is of considerable interest," she said. "Despite the scale of the human rights violations associated with the rendition program, the United States hasn't held a single individual accountable."
The CIA declined to comment, but a former senior U.S. intelligence official called De Sousa's narrative "fairly consistent" with the recollections of other former CIA officials with knowledge of the operation. He asked not to be further identified because the matter remains classified.
"There was concern on the seventh floor about this operation," he said, referring to the executive offices at the CIA's headquarters in Langley, Va. "But they were reassured" by the Rome station and the agency's European directorate that "everything was OK and everyone was on board in the country in question."
De Sousa accused Italian leaders of colluding with the United States to shield Bush, Rice, Tenet and senior CIA aides by declining to prosecute them or even demanding that Washington publicly admit to staging the abduction.
Calling the operation unjustified and illegal, De Sousa said Italy and the United States cooperated in "scape-goating a bunch of people... while the ones who approved this stupid rendition are all free."
The Senate and House intelligence committees enabled the cover-up, De Sousa added, by failing to treat her as a whistleblower after she told them of the lack of prosecutable evidence against Nasr and what she called her own mistreatment by the CIA that compelled her to resign in 2009.
"Despite that, no one's been held accountable," she said.
De Sousa, 57, a naturalized U.S. citizen from India's state of Goa, was one of 23 Americans convicted in absentia in 2009 by a Milan court for Nasr's abduction. She received a five-year sentence. An appeals court in 2011 added two more years, and Italy's Supreme Court upheld the sentence. Nineteen of the Americans, De Sousa said, "don't exist," because they were aliases used by the CIA snatch team.
The case drew fresh attention this month when Panama detained Robert Seldon Lady, the CIA's former Milan station chief, whom the Italian court had sentenced to nine years in prison. But Panama released him within 24 hours and allowed him to fly to the United States, rather than wait for Italy to request his extradition.
Another convicted American, Air Force Col. Joseph Romano, who oversaw security at Aviano, the U.S. base from which Nasr was flown out of Italy, received a seven-year term. But Italian President Giorgio Napolitano pardoned him in April under U.S. pressure.
The Bush and the Obama administrations, however, have refused to ask Italy to do the same for De Sousa, who insists that she qualified for diplomatic immunity as a second secretary accredited to the U.S. Embassy in Rome.
"It's always the minions of the federal government who are thrown under the bus by officials who consistently violate international law and sometimes domestic law and who are all immune from prosecution," De Sousa said. "Their lives are fine. They're making millions of dollars sitting on (corporate) boards."
De Sousa's interviews with McClatchy are the first in which she's publicly disclosed her decade-long career in the CIA's undercover arm, the National Clandestine Service. She's discussed the case with news media before, but insisted in those interviews and in Italian legal proceedings that she was a diplomat.
Her only connection to the rendition, she said, was translating between the CIA snatch team and officers from the Italian military intelligence service formerly known by the acronym SISMi.
The translating stint "was legal at the time because SISMi was involved" in planning Nasr's rendition, although SISMi later refused to participate, she said. She said that she was away with her son on a skiing trip when Nasr was abducted.
According to De Sousa, the Bush administration had two thresholds for an extraordinary rendition: A target had to be on a U.S. list of top al-Qaida terrorists who posed "a clear and imminent danger" to American and allied lives, and the nation where an operation was planned had to make the arrest.
Neither occurred with Nasr, De Sousa said.
A cleric who preached holy war against the West, Nasr was living in Italy under a grant of political asylum when he was accosted Feb. 17, 2003, by black-suited men on a Milan street as he walked to his mosque. He was bundled into a white van and driven to Aviano, from which he was flown to Germany and then to Egypt.
A member of a banned Egyptian Islamist group, Nasr was being investigated at the time by an Italian anti-terrorist police unit known as DIGOS, which had a warrant to eavesdrop on him. He allegedly had close ties to al-Qaida and other Islamist groups and arranged for militants to travel to fight in Afghanistan, Iraq and elsewhere.
But DIGOS made no move to arrest Nasr, De Sousa said, because it had no evidence that he was plotting any attacks. He knew that he was being monitored, she said.
Castelli, however, was eager to pull off a rendition, she said, explaining that after 9/11, "everyone around the world" was being pressed by CIA headquarters to "do something" against al-Qaida. Castelli, she said, was ambitious and saw a rendition as a ticket to promotion.
"Castelli went to SISMi to ask them to work on the rendition program, and SISMi says no," De Sousa recounted. That, however, "didn't stop Jeff," she said.
Neither did Lady's reservations, she said. Close to the DIGOS officer investigating Nasr, Lady often complained to De Sousa that the rendition "made no sense," because DIGOS had Nasr under surveillance. But the CIA station in "Rome kept constantly pressuring him to proceed with their plans," she said. Her assertion was corroborated by Lady in an interview with GQ magazine in 2007.
Castelli "was hell-bent on doing a rendition," she said, and he pressed the director of SISMi at the time, Nicollo Pollari, throughout 2002 to agree, according to cables De Sousa found between Castelli and CIA headquarters.
"This is very important, because there is a written trail of what was going on," she said.
Pollari refused to budge, telling Castelli that the rendition would be "an illegal operation... unless the magistrates approved it," De Sousa said. Pollari, she said, wanted to wait until the Italian Parliament passed intelligence reform legislation that would have allowed SISMi broader counterterrorism powers.
Castelli's superiors at the Langley headquarters insisted that SISMi and Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi had to agree to the operation, or "they couldn't go to Condoleezza Rice and the president of the United States" for authorization, De Sousa said.
"So what does Castelli say? Castelli says, 'Well, I talked to Pollari and he's not going to put anything in writing. But wink, wink, nod, nod. You know, wink, wink, he's provided a tacit sort of approval. They are not going to put anything in writing,' " she said.
In an "assessment cable" to CIA headquarters laying out his case for Nasr's rendition, De Sousa said, Castelli cited the cleric's suspected al-Qaida links and referred to a conversation recorded by DIGOS in which Nasr and another man mused about possibly attacking a bus belonging to the American School of Milan.
Yet DIGOS wasn't "overly concerned because there really wasn't anything... to show that he was actually going to do this," De Sousa said. "If they thought he (Nasr) was going to go bomb something right away, they would have stopped him, right? It's not in the... Italians' interest... for anything to happen on Italian soil of that nature, because the majority of the students were Italian or nationalities other than American."
"That happened in 2002, and Nasr wasn't rendered until 2003. So what imminent danger was that?" she asked.
The rendition had another problem: There was no outstanding arrest warrant for Nasr from Egypt, she said. To resolve the issue, Castelli asked the CIA's Cairo station to request one from Omar Suleiman, the powerful intelligence czar for Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak. The warrant was issued. Later, after Nasr had been turned over to the Egyptians, the CIA station in Cairo asked Castelli for the evidence the Egyptians needed to prosecute.
"Castelli wrote back and said, 'I thought you had the information. That's why you issued the arrest warrant,' " De Sousa said. Cairo replied that Egypt had issued the warrant only "because you needed an arrest warrant."
Despite concerns with the strength of Castelli's case, CIA headquarters still agreed to move forward and seek Rice's approval, De Sousa said. She recalled reading a cable from late 2002 that reported that Rice was worried about whether CIA personnel "would go to jail" if they were caught.
In response, she said, Castelli wrote that any CIA personnel who were caught would just be expelled from Italy "and SISMi will bail everyone out."
Of her CIA superiors, De Sousa said, "They knew this (the rendition) was bullshit, but they were just allowing it. These guys approved it based on what Castelli was saying even though they knew it never met the threshold for rendition."
Asked which agency officials would have been responsible for reviewing the operation and agreeing to ask Rice for Bush's authorization, De Sousa said they would have included Tenet; Tyler Drumheller, who ran the CIA's European operations; former CIA Director of Operations James Pavitt and his then-deputy, Stephen Kappes; Jose Rodriguez, then the head of the CIA's Counterterrorism Center; and former acting CIA General Counsel John Rizzo.
An Italian prosecutor began investigating the CIA's role in Nasr's disappearance in 2004, carefully building a case based on the CIA rendition team's sloppy use of cellular telephones and credit cards. By then De Sousa had returned to the United States and had assumed a new CIA position at headquarters.
She was charged by Italian authorities in 2006 in the last of three sets of indictments.
The Bush administration remained silent on the Italian charges and ignored De Sousa's pleas to invoke diplomatic immunity on her behalf. The CIA barred her from contacting her Italian state-appointed public defender, she said, and refused to pay for a private lawyer. The CIA also ordered her not to leave the country, an order she says she disobeyed to fly to India to see her father for the last time as he lay dying from cancer.
De Sousa later learned that Rice, after becoming secretary of state, wanted to give her immunity, but that the CIA "told Rice not to" because doing so would have "been admitting that the rendition took place," De Sousa said.
Meanwhile, Castelli, who has retired from the CIA, escaped conviction after an Italian judge conferred diplomatic immunity on him even though Washington hadn't asked for it, De Sousa said. Earlier this year, an appeals court revoked his immunity and sentenced him in absentia to seven years in jail.
De Sousa said that she has tried for years to report what she said was the baseless case for Nasr's abduction and her shoddy treatment by the CIA and two administrations.
Her pleas and letters, however, were ignored by successive U.S. intelligence leaders, the CIA inspector general's office, members and staff of the House and Senate intelligence committees, Rice, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and Attorney General Eric Holder, said De Sousa.
She briefly made headlines when she sued the CIA, the State Department and Clinton in 2009 in a bid to secure her diplomatic immunity, but lost. U.S. District Court Judge Beryl A. Howell, however, declared herself troubled by the government's treatment of De Sousa, which she said sent a "potentially demoralizing" message to U.S. employees serving overseas.
De Sousa wanted to resign from the CIA earlier than she did, but, she said, her attorney persuaded her to wait for Barack Obama to take office because he might be more sympathetic to her case.
"We thought, 'Hope and change.' But no hope and change happened," she said.
"My life has been hell," De Sousa said, explaining that her Italian conviction left her career in ruins, crippled her ability to find a good paying private-sector job and left her liable to arrest abroad. Her resignation, which she submitted after the CIA barred her from visiting her ailing, elderly mother in Goa for Christmas and then refused to fly her mother to the United States, left her without a pension.
"In addition to losing your pension, you're blacklisted in Washington," De Sousa said. "Anyone who has anything to do with the agency will never hire you. I lost my clearances."
Asked why she'd agreed to be interviewed, De Sousa replied, "I find this cover-up so egregious. That's why I find it really important to talk about this. Look at the lives ruined, including that of Abu Omar. And I was caught in the crossfire of anger directed at U.S. policy."
Now, she noted, she also could face prosecution in the United States for revealing what she has. "You've seen what's happened lately to anyone who has tried to disclose anything," she said.
But her treatment, she said, provides a warning to U.S. employees serving around the world. If they get prosecuted while doing their jobs, she said, "You have no protection whatsoever. Zero."Share
On December 21, Nintendo will launch “Super Mario Maker Bookmark,” a service that allows you to search for levels on your PC or mobile device so that you can queue them up to play when you get back home to your Wii U.
The Bookmark site uses the Nintendo Network ID system to link information between your various devices, and Nintendo says that the service will also allow you to search using specific tags, which will be perfect for the weirdos who like to play “DON’T MOVE” levels over and over again.
At the same time that the Bookmark site launches, a new update will also be adding a few features to Super Mario Maker, including P Warp Doors (“only visible while a P Switch is active”), and Bumpers, which appear to function much like music blocks. The update also adds world records for each course, showing you the “fastest clear time” in addition to the clear rate that was previously available.
This isn’t the first major update to come to Super Mario Maker. Just last month, the game added much-needed checkpoints, as well as a “progressive power-up system,” which makes things slightly harder by ensuring you collect a regular Super Mushroom before getting better items like the Fire Flower and the cape. I’m still hope that the developers decide to add in Super Mario Bros. 2 support, but that’s probably just a beautiful dream.May take longer to ship than usual. If there are other items in your cart you would prefer to ship sooner, please order them separately.
Manufacturer: Cuber's Home Type: 3x3 Gross Weight: 213g Added: 2018-09-11 Dimensions: 55.5mm3 Item Weight: 87.8g
The Valk 3 M is the mass-produced, non-customized variant of the Valk 3, and features slightly weaker magnets than the ones featured in the Cubicle Valk 3 M. The magnetization service was performed on a stock Valk 3 by Cuber's Home, an independent company based in China.The Valk 3 M is packaged inside a specially marked Valk 3 box, and it comes with all of the original Valk 3 materials plus a special brown cube bag, a screwdriver, some spare magnets, a QiYi cube stand, and an official numbered Valk 3 M card.Abraham Lincoln was born in a cabin. These clanks and sounds were born in a cabin as well. If company in history is anything we are off to a good start. Hopefully we can skip the whole Civil War thing.
The Holy Ghost Electric Show started in a abandoned cabin on Cody Rogers' property a couple of years ago. Armed with nothing but a nasally voice and out-of-tune strings, they marched bravely into the bipolar arms of the local music scene of Northeast Mississippi. Playing at bars, houses, parking lots, parties, and for policemen in a park late at night, it humbly climbed out of nothing. The Holy Ghost Electric Show grew and so did its sound. Channeling influences and painting till the sounds were made their own, each member brought something all his own. The band is comprised of four core members Cody Rogers (Vocals), his brother Jake Rogers (Guitar), Austin Wheeler (Drums), and his not-brother Will Shirley (Lead Guitar).
There are also people who travel and play with them on stage. Jesse James (Trombone / Piano), Ben Ricketts (Bass / Vocals), and Andrew Horton (Violin) are at the front of this musical entourage. Together they move from town to town, hole-in-the-wall to hole-in-the-wall, happy as can be, making noise and merriment for the locals and themselves. In February of this year they released their EP called Fire On The Mountain, but despite being grateful, they felt that it didn't capture the full spectrum of their sound. They want to make a record to be proud of, that will fully capture the characters and clangs of the weird America that is The Holy Ghost Electric Show. They hope this Kickstarter will make this vision a reality in the near future. If they are funded the proper amount of money they will record in Water Valley, MS (Near Oxford, MS) this summer. The Holy Ghost Electric Show appreciates your interest and help in this project and hopes to shake your good luck hand soon.
Here are some links:
Bandcamp
FacebookBrooklyn artists have contributed so much to the world that it's hard to imagine one of their number taking something away.
Yet here we are at a seminal moment in geek despair, with the news that Paul Ingrisano has trademarked "π." for a variety of clothing materials, including hats and, gasp, T-shirts.
How is this even possible?
As Wired reports, Ingrisano is the man behind Pi Productions Corp of New York, a company that has secured trademark registration number 4,473,631.
This trademark is for "π" followed by a full point.
It so happens that custom, on-demand retail site Zazzle has been selling all sorts of π T-shirts in its online store. Then it didn't, as Ingrisano's lawyer issued a cease-and-desist letter (below), claiming that since January 28, 2014, his client has owned the trademark.
Not only did Ingrisano's lawyer want Zazzle to stop and stop right now, he also wanted to know what profits it might have made on Pi apparel in the time that his client owned the trademarked. He gave Zazzle 14 days to respond.
Zazzle complied with the request, saying that it affected thousands of products on its site. It's not clear, however, how many of the products might have used the actual "π." configuration.
On Zazzle's forums, reaction was swift and immoderate. Zazzle allows users to create their own designs. Many of its customers are convinced that their π designs don't infringe on thee trademark.
One, Viviandulies, angry that Zazzle appears to have complied, wrote: "I am familiar with the legal issue of 'likelihood of confusion' concerning trademarks. It doesn't mean that any usage results in a risk of willful infringement and I can only assume that you are aware of this fact. Especially with the math symbol the risk of confusion is minimal if the pi is presented in a a mathematical context or puns. Trademarks with pi are weak and you should know that."
She concluded with this message to Zazzle: "Stick where no grass grows."
Zazzle forum posters also discovered that Ingrisano has a pending trademark registration for I3, a very popular annotation of "I love."
The objections from those whose designs are sold through Zazzle may have had some effect. Today, certain π designs are back up on the site.
I have contacted Zazzle to see whether the site has decided to do a little less ceasing and lot less desisting and will update, should I hear.
It seems odd that a symbol that has existed for so long should suddenly be subject to such a draconian action on the part of a hitherto unknown artist. A trademark has to be surely more than just an already existing symbol.
Perhaps he thought that by applying for "π." he would get easier approval. And he did.
I wonder, though, whether the power of the world's geeks might ultimately prevail.
Updated 10:10pm PT: A Zazzle spokesperson told me: "After reviewing the takedown request more closely, Zazzle has decided to restore the "Pi" products. Zazzle is a marketplace for a community of artists, and we want to continue to support artists who are creating original artwork."
Zazzle Pi Trademark LetterLook. Arrow may be in a bit of a slump, The Flash may have made a few questionable decisions, and maybe Legends of Tomorrow was a little goofy for your taste. But it’s worth taking a moment to remember that these DC superhero shows—along with Supergirl—are giving us some of TV’s most absurdly awesome moments. Case in point!
We have three VFX highlight reels from The Flash, Legends of Tomorrow, and Supergirl, courtesy of Deluxe’s Encore VFX and supervisor Armen Kevorkian (who spoke about the difficulty of making three epic superhero shows at once here). This first one highlights the return of oversized evil telepathic gorilla and noted Flash foe Gorilla Grodd. This second season episode is also notable for including a scene where the aforementioned oversized evil telepathic gorilla was punched into a different universe.
The Legends of Tomorrow reel is all about the team’s fight against the giant honking robot Vandal Savage uses to maintain control of the world. A spaceship fought a giant translucent robot, and then the giant translucent robot fought a giant Brandon Routh. Not in a major motion picture—on TV. At 8:00pm. Thursday. On the CW.
And last but not least, here’s Supergirl’s reel, which includes the plane she saved in the very first episode, which revealed her powers to the world. It might not be necessarily as obviously unique as Evil Giant Telepathic Gorillas of Giant Robots Who Are Programmed by Evil Immortals, but Supergirl’s truest power is being the most heartwarming show on TV, and that’s a special effect in and of itself.
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I’m not saying Agents of SHIELD or Marvel’s Netflix shows are bad, mind you. But they are trying to be somewhat sensible and grounded, even when they involve evil magic ninjas. But these DCW shows just go for it, man. They embrace their comic book-iness and celebrate it. And as a result, these shows are often much, much more fun than their Marvel counterparts, even while you’re wondering why Barry Allen keeps refusing to learn anything about the consequences of time travel.Photos by Zackary Drucker and Rhys Ernst. Courtesy of Prestel
Last Thursday evening the rare books room on the third floor of the Strand bookstore in Union Square was filled by transgender people and their loved ones. Two young artists had come together to talk about their new book with a curator named Stuart Comer and one of history's most important gender scholars: the artists' transgender "auntie," Kate Bornstein. A collaboration between Zackary Drucker and Rhys Ernst, Relationship documents their six-year love affair, during which both of them changed their sex.
Drucker and Ernst met in 2008, before their mutual (and opposite) gender transitions. They were aspiring artists, wrestling with adulthood as all young people do, growing together as people and as art makers. Their relationship eventually ended, but they are still part of each other's lives. For one thing, they work together: In addition to their collaborative projects, Drucker and Ernst are both producers on the Emmy award–winning series Transparent. Although their relationship is over, in its absence is a private photo diary that they kept throughout their years together.
Photos by Zackary Drucker and Rhys Ernst. Courtesy of Prestel
"It was incredible witnessing our shared evolution," Drucker said in an interview with Broadly. "When we met we saw the direction each of us were moving toward." Since then they've grown up, but the world around them has also changed, and they've been part of that.
Characters in works of fiction may be used to having their love immortalized in art—but real people rarely condense those beautiful, joyous, and painful chapters of life into something tangible and shareable. "These images outlast what they depict," Ernst writes. "They are a closed loop—an amorous gaze reciprocated, a finite time left behind." Left behind—but still preserved. It would be an impressive accomplishment for anyone, but for Drucker and Ernst it's just one small part of their greatness; their love story is so transcendent that it seems almost futuristic, like it was passed backward in time.
Read more: The Trans Artists Highlighting the People No One Else Wants to See
"This is historic," Bornstein, who contributed a passage to the book, said that night at the Strand. She was invited to write a piece for Relationship because of Drucker and Ernst's commitment to intergenerational discourse. "Kate Bornstein is my hero and she has been since I was fourteen years old," Drucker said. She and Ernst charted their histories, literally: Ernst has just produced We've Been Around, a series of short documentaries that delve into forgotten chapters in transgender history, and Drucker's 2012 film At Least You Know You Exist is a window into her friendship with the legendary drag queen and elderly trans icon Flawless Sabrina. "There has never—ever—been a book like this," Bornstein said. While literature and film are full of love stories between men and women, there are very few that tell of lovers who transitioned. For transgender people, traditional love stories can seem like fantasies, happening to other people in another world. Transgender people are beautiful. They can be loved, and love each other.
Drucker and Ernst's story is an important contribution to transgender culture, but it is also an example of the way that life itself can be art. "If our greatest artwork is the way that we live our lives," Drucker writes, "then a relationship is the ultimate collaboration." In 2014, the photo series was featured in the prestigious Whitney Biennial show. As they write in their book, these pictures were never intended as professional work. They were just something the artists had created together: passive, daily photographic diary entries. But when Comer came to their Los Angeles home in April 2013 to view a film they'd created together—called She Gone Rogue—they wanted to provide context for their work, so they shared these pictures with him.
In the foreword to Relationship, Comer writes, "The photographs are exquisite, surprising, and efficient in dissolving so many of the structures of fear that still allow gender to be policed so stringently." The images are printed alongside the ephemera of their relationship: ticket stubs to a Le Tigre concert they both attended before they met, notes that read, "Welcome home" and, "I love you soooo much." In this context, the pictures break down those barriers, but they also insert an uncommon gender experience into the most personal of human interactions—making Relationship a startlingly intimate and important document.
"We made these photographs to record that love was possible between two trans people who feared that they would never be loved again after transition," Drucker writes. "We made these photographs to imagine a world beyond the binary, to record a type of love that hadn't yet been visualized. We made these photographs to know that those pieces of us will always exist."
Relationship is forthcoming from Prestel Publishing, it is scheduled for public release on June 25th.Warren Joyce has been appointed as the new manager of Wigan Athletic.
Warren Joyce appointed Wigan Athletic manager.
"He is the man to take us forward in the long term" - David Sharpe.
Joyce signs three and a half year contract with Wigan Athletic.
We are delighted to announce Warren Joyce as the new manager of Wigan Athletic.
Warren joins us after managing the Manchester United Under-21 and Under-23 squads for the past eight years. He has signed a three and a half year contract and will be in the DW Stadium dugout for the first time when Latics face Reading this Saturday, November 5.
Joyce will meet his squad for the first time tomorrow morning (Thursday) to take charge of his first training session as manager, with exclusive coverage on the official website and social media.
Wigan Athletic Chairman David Sharpe said Joyce is someone he has admired for a long time and is convinced he is the perfect choice to take the club forward.
“Warren has everything we are looking for,” he said. “He is an exceptional coach who has a reputation within the game for being among the very best at bringing through young players, as his record at Manchester United shows. But more than that, he has a winning mentality which transmits to his players and he has achieved great success in his time at United. It’s the perfect combination.
“Warren has had several high profile opportunities but wants to move back into management and it is a measure of how highly we rate him that we are making such a long-term commitment.
“From the moment we met, it was clear that there was a connection. He is a highly professional, focused and ambitious person and we share the same views regarding the long-term vision for the club.
“He comes highly recommended and I am confident that we are appointing an excellent manager.”
Joyce is widely considered within the game to be one of the best coaches in the country and his achievements with the Manchester United Development Squads, including winning back to back Under 21 Premier League titles among several other trophies, are highly impressive.
He has coached current regular United first teamers Paul Pogba, Jesse Lingard and Marcus Rashford, along with players out on loan from Old Trafford this season, including Adnan Januzaj, James Wilson and Cameron Borthwick-Jackson.
Premier League or Championship players to have come through Joyce’s United teams include Danny Welbeck, Darron Gibson, Tom Cleverley, Jonny and Corry Evans, Robbie Brady, Paddy McNair, Phil Bardsley, Craig Cathcart, Danny Drinkwater, Tom Heaton, Danny Simpson, Michael Keane, Joshua King, Tyler Blackett among many others.
He has also worked with current Latics players Nick Powell, Reece James and Andy Kellett.
As a player, Joyce was a talismanic midfielder who amassed over 700 career games for Preston North End, Bolton Wanderers, Plymouth Argyle and Hull City.
He first tasted management in 1998 in a player-coach capacity whilst still at Hull. The Tigers were on the verge of bankruptcy and facing relegation from the Football League, but Joyce steered them away from danger – and is still revered on Humberside for doing so.
Coaching spells at Leeds United, Stockport County and Tranmere Rovers followed before he joined Royal Antwerp as manager in 2006. The Belgian club had forged links with Manchester United and in 2008, Joyce returned to the UK as joint coach of the United Reserves team, alongside Ole-Gunnar Solskjaer. He took sole charge in 2010 and has been an integral part of their success.Nearly a year ago, a Silicon Valley startup called SmartCar signed up for Comcast Internet service. SmartCar founder and CEO Sahas Katta was moving the company into new office space in Mountain View, California, and there was seemingly no reason to think Comcast might not be able to offer him Internet access.
But Comcast never fulfilled its promise to hook up the business, blaming the delay on construction and permitting problems. Katta discovered that neighboring businesses were making do with painfully slow and unreliable DSL Internet from AT&T, and ultimately SmartCar reluctantly signed up for AT&T as well.
After hearing Comcast excuses for months, Katta finally got fed up and decided that he would find a new office building once his 12-month lease expires on April 20 of this year. Katta told Comcast he wanted to “cancel” his nonexistent service and get a refund for a $2,100 deposit he had paid. Instead, Comcast told him he’d have to pay more than $60,000 to get out of his contract with the company.
Comcast eventually waived the fee—but only after being contacted by Ars about the case. As for Katta, he can’t believe it’s “this difficult for startups in Silicon Valley to get Internet.”
False promise of availability
Katta’s Internet odyssey began on April 10, 2015 when he checked Comcast’s website to determine whether business Internet would be available at his company’s office in the Clyde Avenue Business Park. The website informed him, “Comcast Business is available at your address.” In fact, the website still provides that same message to this very day, albeit with some fine print that says customers have to “Call a Comcast sales representative to explain availability in your area.”
Over the next 10 days, Katta told Ars, he signed a lease for the new office space and spoke on the phone with two Comcast representatives. Each confirmed that SmartCar would be able to get Internet service.
The Comcast reps, according to Katta, offered him a specific deal—$189.90 a month for TV and Internet, with speeds of 100Mbps downstream and 20Mbps upstream. On April 20, Katta signed a two-year “Business Service Order Agreement” to get this exact package at that price. (Katta provided Ars a copy of the order, other documents, and e-mails between himself and Comcast.)
Meanwhile, SmartCar moved into the new office space. On April 22, Katta says he called Comcast and was told that the company needed to do a site survey to determine whether it could actually provide cable Internet. According to Katta, this was the first time he was told that service might not actually be available at the address.
The Comcast website’s plain statement that service is available at a particular address doesn’t actually mean service is available—that can only be determined after a survey, a Comcast spokesperson told Ars. Further, the “Business Service Order Agreement” isn’t a contract. Rather, it’s just an order that Comcast may or may not be able to fulfill after doing a site survey. If any Comcast representatives told Katta that service was definitely available at his address (as Katta maintains), they made a mistake, Comcast told Ars.
The answer came back via e-mail on April 24: “The pre-wire survey shows that your location is just outside of our Comcast service zone,” a Comcast salesperson told Katta. “It just is not a financial feasibility to run the coax cable close enough to bring you service. We have a model and this would not meet the Comcast ‘payback’ model. Comcast doesn’t have any future plans to do a build out there. I understand that this is not good news and I sincerely want to thank you for your interest.”
A second chance leads to more frustration
This surprised Katta given his previous conversations with Comcast reps and the statement on the Comcast website that “Comcast Business is available at your address.” But this wasn’t the end of Katta’s dealings with Comcast. After further discussions, Comcast told Katta the company would be able to deliver fiber Internet service—at a much higher price than cable. Construction was required to bring fiber to the building, and Comcast wanted Katta to sign a four |
the 2nd New York Cavalry, after seeing Custer in an engagement, later said: It seemed to be the general impression that he would not have the nerve to `Face the music’ with his bandbox equipment, but he soon proved himself equal to the occasion….No soldier who saw him on that day…ever questioned his right to wear a star, or all the gold lace he felt inclined to wear. One of his aides confided in a letter: To say that General Custer is a brave man is unnecessary. He has proved himself to be not only that but also a very cool and self possessed man. It is indeed difficult to disturb his mental Equilibrium. A Michigander put it bluntly to his wife, He is a very odd man but he understand his business.
Custer’s emergence as an outstanding brigade commander coincided with the increasing prowess of the Federal mounted arm. He, Merritt and others brought aggressiveness to Federal cavalry tactics. Jeb Stuart’s vaunted Confederate horsemen, plagued by shortages of men and mounts, no longer dominated the battlefields. Union troopers had achieved parity, which eventually became superiority. The troopers’ confidence in Custer reflected a confidence in themselves.
In February 1864, Custer secured a leave, returning to Monroe for his wedding. For much of the previous year, he and Elizabeth Libbie Bacon had conducted a clandestine courtship through letters. Her father, Judge Daniel Bacon, had vehemently objected to Custer’s attentions toward Libbie. By the fall of 1863, however, Judge Bacon had relented to her wishes, and on February 9, 1864, the couple was married. Autie and Libbie’s marriage was one of love and passion. After Custer’s death, Libbie devoted her remaining 57 years to molding and guarding his image as an American hero.
Custer and Libbie enjoyed a honeymoon and another extended leave together before he rejoined the army for its spring operations. By then, General-in-Chief Ulysses S. Grant had appointed Maj. Gen. Philip H. Sheridan as commander of the army’s Cavalry Corps. Thirty-three years old, Sheridan was a barrel-chested man with unusually short legs. Lincoln wryly described him as a brown, chunky little chap, with a long body, short legs, not enough neck to hang him, and such long arms that if his ankles itch he can scratch them without stooping. His men called him Little Phil.
Sheridan possessed, however, a combativeness that Grant wanted instilled into the mounted arm. With Sheridan’s appointment, additional leadership changes occurred, and Custer believed that he himself deserved promotion to division command. Although disappointed, Custer told his sister, Gen Sheridan from what I learn and see is an able and good commander and I like him very much. In time, Custer became more closely identified with Sheridan than any other officer in the Cavalry Corps. Their personal and professional relationship was destined to endure until Little Bighorn.
As the Michiganders prepared for the forthcoming campaign, their writings revealed their abiding respect for and devotion to Custer. They now called him Old Curley for his long, flowing blond hair. We swear by him, asserted Major James H. Kidd of Custer in a letter to his father. His move is our battle cry. He can get twice the fight out of this brigade than any other man can possibly do. A member of the 5th Michigan Cavalry believed that he is the best cavalry officer left in the Army of the Potomac. Another officer in the brigade explained: His men were always at the front, and were always on the best of terms with him. A private could talk to him as freely as an officer. If he had any complaint to make, Custer was always ready to listen.
During the Overland campaign in May-June 1864, under the leadership of Custer and his regimental commanders, the Michiganders — fighting mounted and dismounted — showed time and again that they were arguably the finest cavalry brigade in the Union Army. On May 11 at Yellow Tavern, a Wolverine mortally wounded Jeb Stuart. Seventeen days later at Haw’s Shop, the brigade routed a Confederate force. Writing after the engagement, Major Kidd declared: For all this Brigade has accomplished all praise is due to Gen Custer. So brave a man I never saw and as competent as brave. Under him a man is ashamed to be cowardly. Under him our men can achieve wonders.
A fierce test came for the Michiganders on June 11 at Trevilian Station. When the 5th Michigan surged ahead into a Rebel wagon train, Southern horsemen counterattacked. Custer hurried forward the rest of the brigade as additional Confederate regiments charged. The Federals were trapped on the inside of a living triangle, according to a scout from Merritt’s division who witnessed the fight from a distance. For three hours the Wolverines repulsed enemy attacks from three directions. Custer was everywhere present, recalled Kidd, giving directions to his subordinate commanders. Finally, their comrades in the other brigades punched through the Rebel lines and relieved the Michiganders.
The Confederates had captured 309 members of the Michigan Brigade and Custer’s headquarters wagon, which contained his personal belongings and letters from Libbie. A Richmond newspaper received the letters and published them, embarrassing the Custers. At the campaign’s end, the War Department promoted Custer to a brevet lieutenant colonel in the Regular Army. Custer, one of Sheridan’s aides contended, was a man of boundless confidence in himself and great faith in his lucky star.
In August Grant assigned Sheridan to command of the Union forces in the Shenandoah Valley. By midmonth, two cavalry divisions from the Army of the Potomac, including the Michigan Brigade, joined the command in the region. Sheridan’s Federals opposed Lt. Gen. Jubal A. Early’s Confederate Army of the Valley in a campaign that resulted in four Union battlefield victories and the destruction of hundreds of barns, mills and stockpiles of supplies and foodstuffs.
Custer distinguished himself throughout the operations. On September 26, with the transfer of Brig. Gen. James Harrison Wilson to the West, Custer assumed command of the 3rd Cavalry Division. His successor in command of the Michigan Brigade stated in his report that with Custer’s promotion the four regiments suffered the most severe loss of the campaign. A Vermonter in the division claimed that its members welcomed the change, though they knew it meant mounted charges, instead of dismounted skirmishes, and a foremost place in every fight.
Custer led the division in the cavalry engagement at Tom’s Brook and in the Battle of Cedar Creek. At 25 he was promoted to brevet major general, to date from Cedar Creek, October 19. In a ceremony at the War Department, Custer and a detail of troopers presented captured battle flags to Secretary of War Edwin Stanton. One of the cavalrymen told Stanton, the 3rd Division wouldn’t be worth a cent if it wasn’t for [Custer].
Sheridan and the two cavalry divisions spent the winter of 1865 in the Shenandoah Valley before marching south in late February. On March 2 at Waynesborough, the 3rd Cavalry Division routed the remnants of Early’s Army of the Valley. By the end of the month, Sheridan’s command had rejoined the Army of the Potomac at Petersburg. When the Federals broke through General Robert E. Lee’s defensive works on April 2, the Union cavalry led the pursuit of Lee’s retreating army. It was Custer’s men on the evening of April 8 who interdicted the Confederate flight at Appomattox Station and cut off the Rebel army’s retreat route. During that final week, Custer’s men captured more than 30 enemy flags. His brother, Tom, seized a pair and received two Medals of Honor.
The end came at Appomattox on April 9. During a truce between the armies, before Grant and Lee met, Custer rode into the Confederate lines and demanded the surrender of the army from Lee’s senior officer, James Longstreet. It was a brazen act, and Longstreet evidently berated the young Union general. After the surrender ceremony, however, Sheridan confiscated the table Grant had used and had it delivered to Libbie Custer. In an accompanying note, Sheridan wrote in part, permit me to say, Madam, that there is scarcely an individual in our service who has contributed more to bring about this desirable result than your gallant husband.
On May 23, the Army of the Potomac marched through the streets of Washington in the Grand Review. Earlier in the morning as Custer joined his command, every member of the 3rd Cavalry Division was wearing a red necktie in his honor. The Michigan Brigade had adopted it as its badge, and now so had the 3rd Division. During the review, a woman stepped from the crowd and tossed a wreath of flowers and evergreens at Custer. His horse bolted toward the reviewing stand, and he lost his sword and hat. Whether deliberately or not, Custer had dramatically seized the moment.
Sheridan later wrote of Custer, If there ever was poetry or romance in war, he could develop it. He was perhaps the Civil War’s last knight. He had dreamed of glory and had found it in the terrible confines of combat. The words of the men he led testified to his abilities, bravery and leadership. He had been a superb cavalry commander. But ahead of him lay a rendezvous on a Montana ridge that has darkened his achievements as the Union’s Boy General. He craved greatness for himself, and this ambition earned him immortality.
This article was written by Jeffry D. Wert and originally published in the March/April 2006 issue of Civil War Times Magazine. For more great articles, be sure to subscribe to Civil War Times magazine today!Politicians in Britain are rarely positive about immigration these days. When Labour’s Yvette Cooper criticises the home secretary, Teresa May, her focus tends to be the Home Office’s legendary incompetence, rather than the merits of its immigration restrictions. But far from raising the drawbridge, Britain ought to open up more to diverse, dynamic and desperate newcomers.
It is shameful that Britain has admitted a mere 143 refugees from the civil war and Islamic State barbarism in Syria. It is outrageous that living with your spouse from outside the EU is now a privilege of the rich: those who earn less than £18,600 a year can no longer obtain a visa for the love of their life. It is absurd to deter international students, whose fees subsidise their local counterparts, whose spending supports local jobs, whose different perspectives enrich Britons’ university experience – and whom most voters don’t even consider immigrants. As for stopping people from coming here to work and contribute to society, it makes us all worse off.
Migrants contribute £25bn to UK economy, study finds Read more
It is precisely because newcomers are different that they are so beneficial, since their differences tend to complement local needs and conditions. They may have skills that not enough Britons have, like medical training or fluency in Mandarin. They may have contacts that open opportunities for trade and investment as the centre of gravity of the global economy shifts east and south. They may be more willing to do gruelling jobs that most British people with higher living standards, education levels or aspirations spurn, like picking strawberries or caring for the elderly. They may simply be young and hard-working, a huge bonus for an ageing society with a shrinking local workforce and increasing numbers of pensioners to pay for. Having moved once, they tend to be more willing to move again, enabling the job market to cope better with change. And their diverse perspectives and experiences help provoke new ideas, while their dynamism tends to make them more entrepreneurial than most.
In advanced economies like Britain’s, sustained rises in living standards come from finding new and better ways of doing things and deploying them across the economy. Brilliant new ideas sometimes spring from individual geniuses – and those exceptional people are disproportionately migrants: three in ten of Britain’s Nobel laureates were born abroad, including Andre Geim, a Russian-born scientist who discovered a revolutionary super-material called graphene at the University of Manchester. But innovation mostly emerges from creative collisions between people – and two heads are only better than one if they think differently. A growing volume of research shows that groups with a diverse range of perspectives can solve problems – such as developing new medicines, designing computer games and providing original management advice – better and faster than like-minded experts.
Newcomers are also twice as likely as locals to start a business – just look at all the foreign entrepreneurs in Tech City – creating jobs, new products and services and wealth for the rest of society. Like starting a business, migration is a risky venture that requires hard work to make it pay off – and for newcomers who lack contacts or a conventional career, it is a natural way to get ahead.
Thus immigrants make the economy more dynamic – and far from putting unbearable pressure on jobs, public services and housing, they help improve the locals’ lot. Newcomers create jobs as well as filling them – when they spend their wages and in complementary lines of work. Polish builders create jobs for British architects, supervisors and suppliers of building materials. Overall, migrants tend to boost local wages, precisely because of those complementarities. Falling real wages in recent years are due to the crisis, not immigration.
Migrants also pay more in taxes than they take in benefits and services, as Christian Dustmann of University College London and others have shown. Educated abroad, migrants are typically young and healthy and more likely to be employed than locals. Those who leave again typically don’t claim a pension.
That migrants are net contributors to public finances is remarkable, since the government is spending much more than it raises in taxes and borrowing the difference. Indeed, newcomers’ taxes help service and repay debts run up by the existing population. Britain’s net public debt is around £20,000 per person. So if official projections are right and the population rises by 10% to 70 million in 2027, that increase would reduce the debt burden by £2,000 per person.
Since migrants’ taxes more than pay for the services they receive, any strains on public services are the government’s fault, not theirs. After all, if a British person moved from Liverpool to London and local services couldn’t cope, who would be blamed?
Nor is Britain “full up”. Even in England only 11% of the surface area is lived on. The problem is planning restrictions that excessively restrict development, driving up residential land prices to the benefit of large landowners and at the expense of everyone else.
A more diverse Britain would be great. Across the country, one in eight people were born abroad. In London, three in eight were. That diversity is something that most Londoners cherish, an essential part of the city’s identity, a magnet for talent and a magnifier of it. Of course, if some people aren’t comfortable with those whom they perceive as different, all the facts in the world may not persuade them that diversity is a good thing. But prejudice is not a sound basis for public policy.
• This article was amended on 26 March 2015. A statement that immigrants who leave again never claim a pension has been clarified to say that they typically don’t do so.Arrest of Citizen Journalist for resisting arrest leaves questions of Police Intimidation by Toby Nixon
Wednesday Aug 12th, 2015 5:41 PM
During Freedom Sleepers Event, 8-11-2015 around midnight. Citizen Journalist Arrested for Resisting Arrest.
A student named Israel-David was arrested last night while filming a documentary outside Santa Cruz City Hall during the Freedom Sleepers Event for Resisting Arrest.
Which left questions of Police Intimidation. As a Witness I saw officers complain about the light for the Camera being too bright, grabbing at the camera, following both Israel and his Wife (also a documentary filmmaker). As if searching for a reason to stop the filming during the police interaction with the protesters.
Activists at the scene including myself, saw this arrest as intimidation an inhibition to the protest by the Santa Cruz Police Department which is known for harassment both of the homeless and of citizen journalists.
Apparently while Israel was filming an officer asked him for his I.D. Israel reached to his backpack moving toward his car and was arrested on the spot for "Failure to Provide I.D." However was finally charged with purportedly Resisting Arrest or Obstructing Justice a Penal Code 148.
Which leads us to believe that the act of filming is the complaint of the Police and may be because the police are obstructed from using illegal techniques or unethical acts to disperse the crowd sleeping in front of City Hall.With some budget airlines, you expect the cut backs. The no-frills flights aren't designed to be luxurious, but so long as you can get a bevy, a bit of food and not get sucked down the toilet, it's okay.
Yet, with British Airways, and other long-haul companies you do expect some upgrade. Comfier seats, better food, and more legroom to name three.
One man, however, who was flying with BA from Heathrow to Cape Town, was left shocked when he was forced to sit in someone else's urine for the 11-hour flight.
Thirty-nine-year-old Andrew Wilkinson, who lives in London, pointed the stain out to a member of cabin crew who gave him toilet seat wipes and told him to clean it up himself.
Sadly, it doesn't sound as if the BA representative was as welcoming as when Emma Bunton took on the role...
Credit: Comic Relief
Andrew was flying to South Africa to help his parents move to a new house, but said the flight was torture as he felt the urine seep into his jeans.
"I got to my seat and saw that there was a wet patch," he explained. "It was about the size of two decks of cards laid side by side.
"At first I thought it was water but the smell was so distinct it could only have been urine."
Credit: SWNS
Andrew complained and asked for a free seat in business or first class but was met by a stewardess with attitude.
"I was in economy and it was full but they could have bumped someone up from business to first class and freed up a seat that way.
"I said to the stewardess: 'You're obviously going to move me into business, aren't you? I can't really sit here'.
"She said she would see what she could do but I wasn't moved. And then she commented: 'You are going to work me hard on this flight, aren't you?'.
"So, I was left to sit in a urine-soaked seat for over 11 hours when I paid £1,242 for a return flight with BA."
Credit: SWNS
Thinking on his feet, Andrew managed to perch on a blanket but when he needed a fresh one, the stewardesses only half-heartedly made the effort to find another.
When he officially complained to British Airways, Andrew was disappointed by the offer.
He said: "I was given 5,000 Avios points and I just do not think that is good enough compensation for sitting in someone else's wee for over 11 hours." - For reference, that's only enough points for a one-way flight to Paris.
A spokesperson for BA said: "We were very concerned to hear about this and have been in touch with our customer to apologise and make amends.
"The cleanliness of our aircraft is of utmost importance to us and our planes are cleaned thoroughly after every flight. We also perform frequent spot checks to make sure our cleaners are maintaining our high standards."
Featured Image Credit: SWNSComposer John Williams, who has scored all but two of Steven Spielberg’s feature films over the past 43 years, will not be doing the music chores on Spielberg’s “Ready Player One” — instead, that job will go to “Forrest Gump” composer Alan Silvestri.
Because post-production is happening on the same time on both “Ready Player One” and Spielberg’s other film, “The Papers,” Williams will score the latter film. It will mark their 28th feature collaboration.
According to a statement from Spielberg’s Amblin Productions: “Steven and John decided Alan Silvestri was the perfect choice for ‘Ready Player One’ since Steven has worked (as a producer) with Alan on the ‘Back to the Future’ films in the ’80s and Alan has scored other films for Steven’s Amblin and DreamWorks.”
“The Papers” opens Dec. 22 and “Ready Player One” opens March 30, 2018.
Williams has done all of Spielberg’s other films except “The Color Purple” in 1985 (that went to Quincy Jones) and “Bridge of Spies” in 2015 (Thomas Newman). Three of Williams’ five Academy Awards are for Spielberg scores (“Jaws,” “E.T.” and “Schindler’s List”).Microsoft is developing a new Surface all-in-one (AIO) PC running Windows 10. The information comes from a reliable source who has confirmed the news with Windows Central and it follows an earlier report by Digitimes.
While Digitimes claims a Q3 2016 release for the alleged Surface AIO, our sourcing suggests such details are undecided at this time. Like other next-gen Surface products the timeframe for a Surface AIO will partially depend on availability for Intel's new Kaby Lake 14 nanometer processor, the successor to Skylake.
We can also add to the original report that the company is positioning the Surface AIO for the living room. The device is evidently targeting a "modern and elegant" design and is meant to be something akin to a premium appliance or furniture.
Unfortunately, any details about specifications and the Surface AIO design are not known at this time.
Our last report claimed that Microsoft is aiming for an early 2017 launch of new Surface tablets, and a planned "Surface phone", all linked to Windows 10 Redstone 2 general availability. Bringing the Surface AIO into that launch window would seem to make sense.
All-in-one PCs are an exciting development in modern computing. By combining a display with high-end hardware into a single device, the experience is similar to an appliance rather than a traditional PC tower, external peripherals, and messy wires connecting them all together.The admission comes against a backdrop of speculation that the German manufacturer is gearing up to end its involvement in P1 at the end of this season.
Porsche LMP1 team principal Andreas Seidl said: "We will make the decision before the end of July."
He refused to elaborate on the comment, saying he was focusing on this weekend's fourth round of the WEC at the Nurburgring.
Porsche is, in theory, committed to racing on in LMP1 until the end of the 2018 season, after extending its initial three-year race programme covering 2014-'16 in August 2015.
Speculation about a pull-out has been fuelled by the presence of senior Porsche figures at the Formula E races at Monaco and Berlin.
Porsche extended its record tally of overall victories in the Le Mans 24 Hours last month to 19 – scoring a third consecutive win in the French endurance classic.
Toyota's view
LMP1 rivals Toyota said that it was unclear what the withdrawal of Porsche would mean for its plans, which include a firm commitment to the WEC until the end of 2019.
"At the moment, with the situation we know, our management has committed to next year," said Toyota Motorsport GmbH technical director Pascal Vasselon.
The disappearance of Porsche in the wake of Audi's withdrawal at the end of 2016 "would be a problem" he admitted.
"We will rethink our strategy when the conditions change: I cannot elaborate more on something that has not materialised," he said. "What our position would be, I do not know, but sure, we need competitors."
Vasselon said that he was hopeful that new manufacturers would enter the P1 arena when new regulations for 2020, which were announced during the week of the Le Mans 24 Hours last month, come into force.Image caption Google's chairman, Eric Schmidt has not yet commented on the forthcoming trip
The chairman of Google, Eric Schmidt, is planning a visit to North Korea, South Korean officials say.
The reason for the trip has not yet been revealed, but news agencies say it is part of a humanitarian mission led by US politician Bill Richardson.
The former New Mexico governor has been involved in ad-hoc negotiations with the North Koreans in the last 20 years.
Internet use is highly restricted there although leader Kim Jong-un has called for a push in technology and science.
The South Korean government told news agency AFP that it is aware of the planned visit, adding that the trip is personal.
Google has refused to comment so far.
Easing tensions
Former governor Richardson has spoken for the release of US nationals detained in North Korea on various occasions.
Last month, North Korea arrested a US citizen of Korean origin, Pae Jun Ho, for unspecified alleged crimes.
Mr Richardson has also held talks with North Korea over its military activities.
In December 2010, he met North Korea's chief nuclear negotiator in Pyongyang, in an attempt to ease tensions between the two Koreas.
But some analysts speculated that for Google's Eric Schmidt the trip could have more strategic reasons.
"I think this is part of Google's broader vision to bring the Internet to the world, and North Korea is the last frontier," said Peter Beck, of South Korean's non-profit Asia Foundation, to Reuters.
Image caption Kim Jong-un said 2013 would be a year of creations and changes
South Korea's confirmation of Mr Schmidt's trip came days after the North Korean leader, Kim Jong-un, delivered a new year's message on state TV, the first such broadcast for 19 years.
Kim Jong-un, in power since 2011, spoke of the need to improve the economy and also to reunify the Koreas, warning that confrontation only led to war.
Kim Jong-un said 2013 would be a year of creations and changes, calling for a "radical turnabout" that would transform the impoverished, isolated state into an "economic giant" and raise living standards.
But while he said confrontation between the North and the South should be removed, Mr Kim stressed that military power remained a national priority.
Under Mr Kim's leadership, North Korea has conducted two long-range rocket launches - actions condemned by the US and Pyongyang's neighbours as banned tests of missile technology.
The launch in April failed, but December's attempt appears to have been a success, placing a satellite into orbit.
The US, Japan and South Korea are seeking a response in the UN Security Council, which banned North Korea from missile tests after nuclear tests in 2006 and 2009.WASHINGTON -- The death of a D.C. man found unconscious in the custody of security guards last month has been ruled a homicide, the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner said on Monday.
In November, the Metropolitan Police Department responded to an assault in progress in a hallway at a residential building in southeast Washington. Alonzo Smith, 27, was found in the custody of security guards known as "special police." The District of Columbia licenses these officers, and city police must sign off on their application for the job.
Smith was handcuffed and not breathing. He was moved to United Medical Center, where he was pronounced dead.
The Office of the Chief Medical Examiner ruled the cause of death to be "sudden cardiac death" complicated by "acute cocaine toxicity while restrained." The other significant condition listed is "compression of torso," Mikelle DeVillier, general counsel for the district's medical examiner, told The Huffington Post. That determination was made earlier this month, but there can be a delay while the family is notified.
The homicide ruling only means that the intentional actions of an individual lead to death, not that those actions were intended to cause death or that a crime was committed.
Alice Kim, a spokeswoman for the Metropolitan Police Department, said on Monday that the case is still under investigation.
A police incident report obtained last month by HuffPost initially classified the offense as "justifiable homicide" with the "weapon/force involved" listed as "none." That classification was later amended to "death report." D.C. police spokesman Lieutenant Sean Conboy told HuffPost at the time that "it was an error on the part of the officer who took the original report."
Smith's relatives, as well as residents at Marbury Plaza, the apartment complex where he was found, have raised questions about the circumstances of his death. Charles, a resident who declined to give his last name and claimed to have spoken with an eyewitness, told HuffPost in November that Smith ran into the hallway saying, "Somebody help me, they're trying to kill me."
Smith's grandmother, who reportedly saw autopsy photos, told The Washington Post that her grandson had a long mark on one side of his face, and the other side looked swollen. She also said he had asthma.
Karen Silver, a lawyer who represents Smith's family, told HuffPost earlier this month that the family was struggling to get information about their son's case.
Smith, who worked as a teacher's assistant, self-published a book of poems in 2013 that he said he wrote as a youth when he was put in the juvenile justice system. In one poem, he wrote, "[T]o dream freely with a life at my own pace, carelessly happy released of my hate, who can say they don't wish on this star, a star so bright and promising yet so far."
Update: 12/15 -- The Metropolitan Police Department on Tuesday released body cam footage from the scene of Smith's arrest. The video, recorded by an unidentified MPD officer, begins with Smith already lying face-down on the ground with his hands cuffed behind his back.
An officer, identified by his "special police" badge, can be seen kneeling on top of Smith until about two minutes into the video, when he stands up. Seconds later, officers report that Smith isn't breathing. The officer wearing the body camera begins chest compressions, which he continues for about five minutes, until emergency medical services personnel arrive.
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Ryan J. Reilly contributed reporting.Last night we highlighted a Fox News story which suggested that Devin Nunes expected the NSA to deliver a "smoking gun" which would prove that the Obama administration spied on the Trump transition team, and possibly the president-elect himself, as early as today.
Moments ago, Nunes fanned that speculation by holding an impromptu press conference announcing that he'll call both FBI Director Comey and NSA Director Rogers before a closed session of the House Intelligence Committee to discuss topics which "they couldn't answer in a public setting."
Here is Nunes's full statement:
BREAKING: House Intelligence Committee chair Nunes says Trump's former campaign chairman has volunteered to be interviewed by the committee. pic.twitter.com/yb8OJnwETW — CNBC Now (@CNBCnow) March 24, 2017
And some early takeaways:
"There are just questions that we have for Dir. Comey and Adm. Rogers probably that they couldn't answer in a public setting."
.@DevinNunes: "There are just questions that we have for Dir. Comey and Adm. Rogers probably that they couldn't answer in a public setting." pic.twitter.com/tEeJA6QDPx — Fox News (@FoxNews) March 24, 2017
.@DevinNunes: "The Committee will ask Dir. Comey & Adm. Rogers to appear in closed section." pic.twitter.com/yEv8ZtV0vL — Fox News (@FoxNews) March 24, 2017
Nunes also revealed that President Trump's former campaign manager, Paul Manafort, has volunteered to testify before the House Intelligence Committee on his alleged connections to Russia.
"We thank Mr. Manafort for volunteering and encourage others with knowledge of these issues to voluntarily interview with the committee."
Nunes continues to decline requests from the press to reveal his sources...
.@DevinNunes: "I'm still not going to tell you who our sources are." pic.twitter.com/0nfoDVd0on — Fox News (@FoxNews) March 24, 2017
But did confirm there was "no wiretapping of Trump Tower; That didn't happen"
.@DevinNunes: "There was no wiretapping of Trump Tower; that didn't happen." pic.twitter.com/4HbDVdZtH0 — Fox News (@FoxNews) March 24, 2017
This follows Nunes's appearance on Fox News last night in which he declared he had an obligation to raise issues he's discovered about the unmasking of Americans' names during serveillance.
@DevinNunes on "incidental" surveillance revelations: I had a duty and obligation to tell the President. “What I saw had nothing to do with Russia. This has nothing to do with the Russia investigation.” “The lack of a leak investigation is quite concerning. We need to make sure that these leaks are being tracked down.” I have information that indicates Americans’ names were unmasked during surveillance. “Clearly when I see a problem, I’m going to point it out.” “Names for sure if they’re picked up in any incidental collection of any kind, they should be minimized.”
.@DevinNunes: I have information that indicates Americans’ names were unmasked during surveillance. #Hannity pic.twitter.com/gcMy0EzpH9 — Fox News (@FoxNews) March 24, 2017
Meanwhile, proving that Nunes may actually be on to something here, WaPo has quickly called for an immediate investigation into his behavior.Your Chance to Host a PBS Program About Chemistry
Think you’ve got what it takes to be chemistry’s Carl Sagan? Well, now’s your chance. Over the transom, we’ve received word that the folks at Moreno/Lyons Productions are searching for a host for their upcoming PBS special/multimedia project The Mystery of Matter: Search for the Elements. “In a nutshell,” notes the production’s webpage, “the project is about the human story behind the Periodic Table of the Elements.“
The centerpiece of the project is a two-hour documentary that will feature dramatic reenactments with key chemistry characters, such as Marie Curie, Joseph Priestley, and Glenn Seaborg. These scenes will be knit together by an on-screen host…who could be you.
“Our hope is to find someone from the chemistry community,” Project Director Stephen Lyons tells Newscripts. “The host needn’t be famous, a Nobel Prize winner, or even a leading researcher. She or he might be a great teacher, for example, at the college or even community college or high school level. We’d like to find someone young enough to go on and serve as the host of later chapters in the continuing Mystery of Matter series, so preference will be given to candidates under 60. Minority candidates are strongly encouraged to apply. Since many of the host scenes will involve performing chemical demonstrations, candidates who already have that skill will have a leg up. But the most important qualification is that she or he be a gifted chemical communicator — comfortable on camera, at ease with chemistry, and able to present with authority, enthusiasm, and feeling for the very human story we’re telling,” Lyons elaborates on the Mystery of Matter webpage. In case you’re wondering about Lyons’ cinematic chemistry chops, his previous work includes “Forgotten Genius,” the documentary about African-American chemist Percy Julian.
To let Lyons know that you (or someone you know) would make a great host, send a link to a YouTube video that features the candidate’s skills as a communicator of chemistry to: Chemistry.Host@gmail.com. Be sure to include a way for Lyons’ team to get in touch with the candidate.The alt-right is enjoying a moment. After a charming weekend conference where speakers denounced Jews and recited Nazi propaganda, they have finally goose-stepped their way to the notoriety they have always longed for. We know about the alt-right, their D-List celebrity tub-thumpers, and how we should probably call them Neo-Nazis (if it salutes like a Nazi, talks like a Nazi, and hates Jews like a Nazi – it’s probably a Nazi). But what about their leader, Richard Spencer?
The meat-faced white supremacist has waited on the fringes for years. He has spent most of this decade blogging indecipherable bilge and hosting Google Hangouts explaining the problems of “Jewry” to groups of sad men with Confederate Flag avatars.
We wanted to find out more behind the man who said: “One wonders if [Jews] are people at all” in front of a crowd of heil-Hitlering fans, so here’s a deep dive into his Reddit history.
He thinks ‘The glorification of homosexuality is unhealthy’
“The glorification of homosexuality is not healthy for society. But there are homosexuals who can be good, if flawed people. A constant obsession with gays is not good for any movement.”
He thinks tattoos are degenerate
“As for Whites, yes, we have some major problems in our communities: drug abuse… despondency… degeneracy… endless tv or Netflix watching… tattoos.”
He likes anime
“I’ve only seen Akira; I’ve heard Cowboy Bebop is good.” Me neither.
He thinks Batman is a conservative hero
He also needs to have his Red Pill moment.
He’s a huge fan of 80s synth
New Order and Depeche Mode are the “fashiest 80s electropop bands.”
Also: “The tragedy of Christianity is how cucked it has become.”
He thinks Neo-Paganism is pretty cool
“I am deeply impressed with Neo-Paganism, but it would be wrong to say I practice it.” Nice.
Richard Spencer is a terrible geographer
“Europe is a nation.” 0/10, Richard.
In case you thought he was harmless, he wants America to be a white ethno-state
“The ideal is the creation of a white Ethno-State on the North American continent.”
From his rambling blog, Radix.
And gays are ‘a suboptimal deviation from the norm’
“Gays are ‘born that way’ in the sense that homosexuality is a suboptimal deviation from the norm, much like a birth defect, caused by a random abnormality in the womb.” Also from Radix.
Lovely.Wisconsin Police identified one of two women whose remains were found in suitcases as Laura Simonson (left). Police issued a sketch of the second woman.
A former West Allis, Wisc., police officer was arrested Wednesday in connection with the deaths of two women whose remains were found in suitcases near a road in the Town of Geneva.
Steven M. Zelich, 52, who retired from the force in 2001, is in custody, according to police chief Steven Hurley said.
A highway worker discovered two suitcases June 5 as he mowed the grass in the southeast Wisconsin town. Hurley said police found one body in each case.
Felicia Sopa, who lives across the hall from Zelich, told Milwaukee NBC affiliate WTMJ that he mainly kept to himself.
"He leaves in the morning, I don't think he drives a car because he leaves from the front door," Sopa |
as Internet activity increases, Google collects more data on consumers’ needs and behavior and can tailor its ads more precisely, strengthening its competitive advantage and further increasing its income. As more and more products and services are delivered digitally over computer networks — entertainment, news, software programs, financial transactions — Google’s range of complements expands into ever more industry sectors. That's why cute little Google has morphed into The Omnigoogle. Because the sales of complementary products rise in tandem, a company has a strong strategic interest in reducing the cost and expanding the availability of the complements to its core product. It’s not too much of an exaggeration to say that a company would like all complements to be given away. If hot dogs became freebies, mustard sales would skyrocket. It’s this natural drive to reduce the cost of complements that, more than anything else, explains Google’s strategy.
This boils down to the corporate ideology that "anything that is good for the Web is good for Google". This means Google is in favor of anything that increases the breadth of the Web which explains why it is investing in O3b networks in an effort intended to bring the Web to 3 billion people in emerging markets. The more people there are using the Web, the more people there are viewing ads on Google's services and on pages of sites that use AdSense and DoubleClick ads. This also means that Google is in favor of moving as much media consumption as possible to the Web. This explains why purchasing YouTube was so important. In addition to purchasing the number one video site on the Web, Google also ensured that it would be on the front line of defending video on the Web given that YouTube was in the cross hairs of various corporate content owners. This focus on expanding the breadth of the Web also explains why they have purchased startups like Zenter, Upstartle and 2Web Technologies to create a Google office suite in an attempt to unseat the current breed of desktop based office productivity software. It explains why they created Gmail as a way to make Web-based email as satisfying or even more satisfying than desktop mail experiences especially when compared to other Webmail offerings at the time. This ideology also explains why the company invests in Android and so on..
The media has tried to make it seem like Google spits out a bunch of random, unfocused projects without much thought besides "shipping something cool". However this is far from the case. Google is the most successful company on the Web and it believes that its fortunes are directly tied to the increased usage and evolution of the Web. This means Google has a strong incentive to improve the capabilities of the Web as a delivery vehicle for user experiences. Google had telegraphed their intent to take a more direct role in the evolution of Web technologies in a few ways. For one, the company hired Ian Hickson who had been rallying browser vendors to start improving Web technologies like HTML via the Web Hypertext Applications Technology Working Group (WHAT WG). His success in these efforts since joining Google has led to HTML 5 becoming an official W3C effort. Secondly, Google also heavily supported Firefox both by hiring developers who worked on Firefox full time and via a search affiliate program that brings in millions for the Mozilla corporation [Ed note – Google has a similar deal with Opera]. However the relationship with Firefox clearly was not evolving the Web at a pace that Google found satisfactory as evidenced by the creation of Google Gears a product which Google evangelists have positioned as a bleeding edge HTML 5 implementation even though it implements capabilities not mentioned in HTML 5.
However even with having a seat at the table in defining HTML 5 and being a significant sponsor of the second most popular Web browser, Google still did not have a direct way to push the evolution of the Web directly to users. They were still dependent on the pace of innovation of incumbent browser vendors or figuring out how to distribute a browser plug-in by convincing companies like MySpace to take a dependency on it. This was clearly an uphill battle. Thus creating their own Web browser was inevitable.
So why is this significant? It isn't because "Google Chrome is going to replace Windows" or some other such silliness. As it stands now, Google Chrome is a Windows based application whose most interesting features exist in other browsers. A Web browser cannot replace an operating system any more than an automobile can replace an Interstate highway. The significant end user innovation in Google Chrome is that it is bundled with Google Gears. This means that Google Chrome has a mechanism for delivering richer experiences to end users out of the box. Google can now use this as a carrot and a stick approach to convincing browser vendors to do what it wants. Google can make its sites work better together with Chrome + Gears (e.g. YouTube Uploader using Gears) which could lead to lost browser market share for competing browser vendors if this becomes a widespread practice among Google's offerings. Even if Google never does this, the implied threat is now out there.
Chrome will likely force Google's competitors to up their game with regards to adopting newer Web standards and features just to stay competitive. This is similar to what Google did with online mapping and Web mail, and what the Opera browser has been doing by pioneering features like "pr0n mode" and tabbed browsing. So even if Google loses because Chrome doesn't get massively popular, Google still wins because the user experience for browsing the Web has been improved. And at the end of the day, if more people are using the Web because the user experience is better across the board that's just fine for Google. The same way the fact that all online mapping experiences and Web mail experiences have improved across the board is also good for Google.
Now Playing: Metallica - The Judas KissThe man accused of hitting nine bicyclists with his truck, killing five people, faces new charges -- five counts of operating a vehicle while intoxicated causing death.
Charles Pickett Jr. was under the influence of a drug, but Kalamazoo County Prosecuting Attorney Jeff Getting did not detail which drug nor the legality of the substance. Getting said he could not elaborate on "how high" Pickett was when he allegedly struck the nine bicyclists with his truck Tuesday, June 7, on a roadway just north of Kalamazoo.
According to court documents, Pickett was taking several medications and controlled substances the night of the crash. Documents say he ran multiple vehicles off the road before slamming into nine bicyclists, killing five of them.
The suspect already has been charged with five counts of second degree murder and four counts of reckless driving causing serious impairment.
The four reckless driving charges have been amended to include the OWI charges, Getting said.
Because of the new charges, Pickett's attorney requested and a judge granted a mental competency hearing to determine whether Pickett is able to understand the charges against him.
A new court date has been set for Aug. 31.
Pickett is pleading not guilty at this time. He was denied bond.Senator Joseph Lieberman (I-CT) announced Tuesday that he would not seek reelection in 2012, and progressive Americans breathed a sigh of collective relief. It is worth reviewing the most horrible things Lieberman has done to us since he has been in office.
10. Undermined Jeffersonian ideals by joining with George W. Bush to throw government money to religious organizations.
9. Revived, with Lynn Cheney, McCarthyite techniques in order to harass and intimidate university professors who dared attempt to explain the historical and political context for the rise of al-Qaeda and its attacks on the United States. He even put out a blacklist of 40 university professors and administrators, including the President of Wesleyan University.
8. In 2004, revived the war-mongering, militarizing, anti-progressive ‘Committee on the Present Danger‘ to fight the anti-war movement and keep the US in Iraq, as well as to promote war on Iran.
7. Deprived Democrats of the votes to pass a single-payer option universal health care law, acting as client of big Medicine instead of looking out for ordinary people.
6. Called Israeli’s pre-planned aussault on defenseless little Gaza in 2008-2009 “self defense” on Israel’s part.
5. Intimidated Amazon into ceasing to allow Wikileaks to be hosted on its servers, even though Wikileaks is not proven to have done anything illegal. Urged that Wikileaks founder Julian Assange be prosecuted for espionage.
4. Urged prosecution of the New York Times for publishing US State Department cables given to the NYT by Wikileaks, despite the precedent of the Pentagon Papers.
3. Joined, in 2002, the Neoconservative ‘Committee for the Liberation of Iraq’ to get up a war of aggression on that country on false pretenses. His war killed hundreds of thousands of Iraqis and over 4000 US troops, threw Iraq into long-term instability, and made Iran a regional superpower.
2. Repeatedly called from 2006 for aggression against Iran by the US Air Force.
1. Defected to the Republicans in 2008 and tried to make Sarah Palin Vice President of the United States, saying ‘everyone should listen to Sarah Palin.’My story is not unique.
"After nearly 25 years in the advertising business, I found myself in desperate need of change. No matter how “successful” I was, or how great things seemed from the outside, true success—and my own happiness— continued to elude me. Sure, I had all the spoils of a successful career, but the further I progressed professionally, the further I was moving away from my own fulfillment. I guess it’s just the nature of the beast—the more successful you become at what you do for a living, the further away you get from the thing that inspired you to do it in the first place. So here I was, at 44 years old—I was healthy, had a beautiful family, an amazing home; a bunch of cars (and even more guitars), and still, with all of that, was miserable. I (and everyone around me) knew something needed to change, and it didn’t take a rocket scientist to see that it was work that was making me feel this way. But what was I supposed to do? I was an ad guy—I had always been an ad guy—wasn’t I supposed to always be an ad guy? I spent months feeling this way—falling deeper and deeper into my funk. It was bad, and was effecting everyone around me. To
say I was unpleasant to be around is the understatement of the century. If you had an ear, you were pretty much guaranteed to get it filled with my quandary and just how lost and unhappy I felt. Then one day—no, one moment—actually, one song changed everything for me. I was in the shower, feeling (as you probably already guessed) extremely down and racking my brain for what was next. And then, in an instant, everything changed, forever. A song began playing. A song about a man. A song about a man, who, like me, was “desperately hating his old place” and “dreamed to discover a new space”. This sounded very familiar to me. Familiar, but not exactly like me. Because, unlike me, the man in the song knew that— despite what anyone else thought or said—all he needed was “a will to work hard and a library card” and he could change his world. In all fairness, this wasn’t an entirely
new concept to me. After all, this was the story of my life—I was the guy with the crazy ideas, who always believed in himself when others didn’t, and ended up (for the most part) on top. The one thing that I didn’t think of, and this is the clincher, was that “When you’re done with this world… the next is up to you.” Pretty simple concept, huh? Think about it for a second. We are all masters of our own universe, and if something doesn’t feel right—just change it. It really is that simple. The hard part is trusting yourself and just going for it. Don’t just settle because it’s what you’re supposed to do—or, because somebody (or everybody) tells you that you can’t. Follow your heart, let passion be your guide—work hard and believe in yourself—find your submarine, and just go for it. Because when you’re done with this world, the next (really is) up to you."
Walt Grace's Submarine Test, January 1967 —John MayerTheranos CEO Elizabeth Holmes banned for two years from industry she aimed to transform
Federal regulators have banned Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes from owning or operating a medical laboratory for at least two years.
Theranos rose to startup stardom after promising accurate blood test results with just a prick of the finger, but a review of the company’s Newark, Calif., lab last year — following a steady drumbeat of investigative stories from the Wall Street Journal — called its technology into question.
The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services first threatened sanctions in March, after pointing out deficiencies that regulators said posed “immediate jeopardy to patient health and safety.”
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Along with the ban on Holmes, CMS has pulled the operating license of the company’s Newark laboratory and will also levy a fine, Theranos announced in a statement. It’s not clear yet how much the company, once valued at $9 billion, will have to shell out.
“While we are disappointed by CMS’ decision, we take these matters very seriously and are committed to fully resolving all outstanding issues with CMS and to demonstrating our dedication to the highest standards of quality and compliance,” Holmes said in the statement, adding that the company accepts “full responsibility for the issues” at the lab.
The CMS action isn’t Theranos’s only headache.
The Securities and Exchange Commission began an investigation in April to determine whether Theranos misled investors about the power of its technology. Federal prosecutors are also conducting a criminal probe. And multiple class action lawsuits allege that Theranos deceptively marketed its finger-prick blood tests.
Theranos said on Thursday that it would still conduct business at its lab in Arizona.
But its business partners are evaporating: Walgreens announced in June it would cut ties with the company and close 40 Theranos Wellness Centers set up in pharmacies across Arizona. The nearly three-year partnership helped push Theranos to a sky-high valuation and was a significant source of revenue for the company.
Holmes has scrambled in recent months to try to right the company, bringing on new medical advisers, talking of opening a new lab in Pennsylvania, and advertising open jobs for employees in several states. But an exodus of key personnel continues.
Holmes’s second-in-command, Sunny Balwani, announced in May that he was leaving the company. Theranos’s public relations chief announced late last month that she was leaving.
And even before the latest blow, Forbes announced it was adjusting its estimate of Holmes’ net worth — from $4.5 billion to zero.What has a genre of eco-speculation got to do with Ireland’s changing political landscape? What could solarpunk offer a country that is not actually famed for its sunshine?
The philosophy beyond solarpunk, the optimism of it, is something I believe Ireland needs. Solarpunk is about seeking environmentally sustainable futures yes, but it also speaks to social sustainability and equality.
The very idea of optimistic politics would be a welcome injection into Irish political discourse. Internationally the Irish are often known for our self-deprecating sense of humour which I’ve always liked (I mean if you can’t laugh at yourself what can you laugh at) but that cultural vein can often turn into a pessimistic and jaded reaction to the politics and potential future of Ireland as a country.
Ireland is a small country which means that with proper public investment it wold be possible to have the kind of accessible public transport, local produce, energy micro-generation and circular goods economy so often discussed in solarpunk fiction and by its political proponents.
The idea of a circular economy is gaining a lot of ground in the EU. It aims to create products that have long use-lives, designed to be repaired and made from components that can be reused or recycled. Production processes are designed to use waste materials from one sector as raw materials for another.
Some circular economy ideas are already common practice for some people; buying second hand clothes or furniture, recycling glass and textiles, or repairing cars, bicycles and computers. People are naturally moving towards certain circular principles as practical and sustainable choices. However the focus has been on consumers up to this point to make these choices for themselves (often time consuming) rather than on manufacturers or retailers to provide low-waste options.
In Ireland there are a few examples of great work already happening. Besides the many community gardens, social enterprises and energy schemes there are two specific cases of note Cloughjordan Ecovillage and the Ballymun Rediscovery Centre.
Cloughjordan Ecovillage is a town founded on principals of sustainability and collective decision making. Founding members of the ecovillage incorporated Sustainable Projects Ireland, which trades as The Village, in 1999. The Village is a company limited by guarantee but with articles of association ensuring that the group operates in much the same way as a cooperative. The members, staff and directors of the Village use the process of consensus decision making to arrive at decisions. Consensus decision-making works creatively to include all persons making the decision. Instead of simply voting for an item, and having the majority of the group getting their way, the group is committed to finding solutions that everyone can live with. The first residents of the ecovillage moved into their new homes in December 2009.
This is a video about the early days of the project back in 2009.
Ballymun Rediscovery Centre is a creative space and umbrella organisation for four reuse social enterprises Rediscover Furniture, Rediscover Fashion, Rediscover Paint and Rediscover Cycling. Theses enterprises use waste and unwanted materials as a resource and raw material for new product design. Their aim is to bring together the skills and expertise of artists, scientists, designers and craftsmen united in a common purpose of sustainability through resource efficiency and reuse. The Rediscovery Centre supports the development of the circular economy and advocates for a more resilient, equitable society.
I’m from Ballymun and so the Rediscovery Centre is particularly close to my heart. They offer so many classes (I’m taking sewing machine classes) and are such a great resource for the local schools. It’s also really important as the class divide in environmental and sustainability circles is very real!
While I love the work that is happening in Cloughjordan just packing up and moving to life “off-the-grid” is not an option for everyone (as I discuss in Selfishness in Self-Sufficiency) what the Rediscovery Centre offers in urban and accessible and part of a vibrant working-class community in an area that has been consistently demonized in the Irish media.
However I’m not really trying to compare them as they are two very different projects that I think highlight the diversity of opportunities for solarpunk in Ireland.
“Solarpunk is punk because it’s interested in next-steps, and much like the original punks saw music as a central form of rebellion against the culture that was failing them, we – the writers and readers and fans of solarpunk – see the writing of fiction as an activist endeavor. Solarpunk stories aren’t just depictions of political action, they’re political action in themselves.” watsons-solarpunkSTOCKHOLM, SWEDEN (December 16, 2016) Starbreeze AB, an independent creator, publisher and distributor of high quality entertainment products, has agreed to acquire 90.5% of the shares in the Indian art production company Dhruva Interactive, for a total consideration of 8.5 MUSD whereof 7.0 MUSD (approximately 68.5 MSEK) in cash and 1.5 MUSD in newly issued Starbreeze B-shares.
Dhruva Interactive is a highly reputed and best-of-breed art production house, with whom Starbreeze has a long-standing relationship. Founded in 1997, Dhruva is India’s leading game developer with over 320 employees, providing art production services to the global games industry. Dhruva has three state-of-the-art studios, two in the southern Indian city of Bangalore, and a studio in the northern Indian city of Dehradun, located at the foothills of the Himalayan mountains.
Dhruva will continue to operate under its own brand and continue servicing its clients in the global games industry. Dhruva has worked with the biggest in the industry on numerous AAA-titles such as Halo 5, Forza Horizon 3, Days Gone, Sea of Thieves and Quantum Break. Led by a seasoned leadership team, Dhruva attracts and retains the best talent from all over India, including a team focused on serious gaming. For several years, the company has provided the major part of the art asset production for PAYDAY 2.
Through the acquisition, Starbreeze secures its art production needs for projects such as OVERKILL’s The Walking Dead and Nozon’s VFX production, improves the quality of its in-house production projects and lowers its operating costs. It will also enable Starbreeze to provide full end to end services to its participating publishing partners and to add significant value to its VR ecosystem.
“Bold plans need the right partners and Content is King. We have worked with Dhruva Interactive for several years and know them well. I am confident that bringing Dhruva into the Starbreeze family will strengthen Starbreeze as a global entertainment company,” said Starbreeze CEO Bo Andersson-Klint. “Dhruva will continue to operate independently under its own brand and run business as usual with existing partners, while greatly contributing to Starbreeze pipeline and adding pronounced value to our publishing services and VR ecosystem.”
“Starbreeze has been a great client, and over time we realized that Starbreeze is exactly the kind of company that we’d like to evolve with. They have strong games, an awesome vision for VR, similar culture and a skilled management team”, said Dhruva CEO and Founder Rajesh Rao. “Our talent art teams contribute to the some of the biggest and most visually stunning games in the industry today. As part of the Starbreeze family, we will be able to add cutting edge VR content to our repertoire as well. It’s an extremely exciting time.”
The deal contains an earn-out agreement of no more than 0.8 MUSD over the next four years.
Dhruva Interactive’s ongoing outsourcing business will have a limited but positive impact on Starbreeze revenue and profit from day one. In the financial year ending March 2016 Dhruva Interactive’s revenues amounted to 4.6 MUSD.
Dhruva is acquired for 7.0 MUSD in cash and 1.5 MUSD in Starbreeze B-shares, valued at the share price and exchange rate per closing date of the transaction. New shares will be issued by the board utilizing its authorization from the AGM and would if valued as of today correspond to approximately 789 900 shares or 0.26% of the share capital on a fully diluted basis.
The deal is expected to close at the end of the first quarter 2017, subject to approval processes for foreign investors in India.
###
More information about Dhruva Interactive can be found here: http://www.dhruva.com
Dhruva Interactive acquisition announcement video on YouTube: https://youtu.be/w-_k1Al_wLw
For more information, please contact:
Maeva Sponbergs, EVP of Communication and Head of Investor Relations, Starbreeze AB
Tel: +46(0)8-209 208, email: ir@starbreeze.com
This information is information that Starbreeze AB is obliged to make public pursuant to the EU Market Abuse Regulation. The information was submitted for publication, through the agency of the contact person set out above, at 7:30 CET on December 16, 2016.
About Starbreeze
Starbreeze is an independent creator, publisher and distributor of high quality entertainment products. With studios in Stockholm, Paris and Los Angeles, the company creates games and other virtual reality entertainment products, based on proprietary design and licensed content.
Starbreeze’s most recent games include PAYDAY 2®, the upcoming John Wick VR shooter and upcoming survival co-op FPS OVERKILL’s The Walking Dead. Under its publishing initiative, Starbreeze has together with Canadian studio Behaviour Digital successfully launched horror thriller Dead by Daylight.
Starbreeze has set out to develop truly immersive virtual reality experiences, by integrating software and hardware in its StarVR® head mounted display, to be produced together with Acer, displaying a unique field of view and a mission to bring top-end VR to large audiences. Together with IMAX, Starbreeze aspires to dominate the location based VR market with the IMAX VR centers, set to premiere in its first location in Los Angeles during 2016.
Headquartered in Stockholm, Sweden, Starbreeze’s shares are listed on Nasdaq Stockholm First North Premier under the tickers STAR A and STAR B with the ISIN-codes SE0007158928 (A-share) and SE0005992831 (B-share). Remium Nordic is the company’s Certified Adviser. For more information, please visit https://www.starbreeze.com, http://www.starvr.com, http://www.overkillsoftware.com
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AnnouncementWhat better way to celebrate the beginning of summer than with an Avengers movie marathon? For future reference, the 8 films (9 counting The Winter Soldier, still in theaters) require a good 3 days to watch. You now know what I did with my most recent weekend…
Last summer when I did my LARC project on superheroes, I read an interesting essay (though it didn’t directly apply to my research topic at the time) on the concept of globalization in some recent superhero films. Anthony Peter Spanakos explores the connections among superheroes, postcolonial theory, and the U.S. military-industrial complex (MIC) in The Incredible Hulk (2008), Iron Man (2008) and Iron Man 2 (2010), and Avatar (2009). His essay, “Exceptional Recognition: The U.S. Global Dilemma in The Incredible Hulk, Iron Man, and Avatar,” kept coming back to me as I rewatched all of the Avengers films, from Iron Man to Thor: The Dark World (2013). Spanakos offers a key insight into these and many other post-9/11 superhero films: that is, superheroes possess a very unusual kind of patriotism that runs counter to official government forces.
Spanakos takes an interest in how the superhero (rather than the government representatives in superhero stories) functions as a model of proper recognition between dominant global powers and former colonial or “Third World” countries and peoples. Superheroes achieve this, Spanakos states, “by showing the global superpower’s tendency to both exploit and colonize the other, while identifying an authentic patriotism with recognition of the other” (15). This “authentic patriotism” reacts against a government apparently dominated by the MIC, which ignores human rights and individual liberties in the name of “patriotism” and for the sake of eliminating any and all potential threats to the MIC-government and its official brand of patriotism. Therefore, Spanakos proposes, “the heroic struggle is to offer an alternative patriotism by defending what is just against official versions and representatives” (15).
As Spanakos notes, the real enemy in most of the Avengers films (he only examines the 3 released prior to 2011) is the MIC, often embodied in a particular supervillain and/or a group of supporting characters: Obadiah Stane/Ironmonger (Iron Man); General Ross and Emil Blonsky/The Abomination (The Incredible Hulk); Justin Hammer and Senator Stern (Iron Man 2); Agent Coulson and S.H.I.E.L.D. (Thor – this scenario gets really interesting!); Red Skull and HYDRA (Captain America: The First Avenger); and – again – S.H.I.E.L.D. in The Avengers. Against these representatives of the MIC and corrupt versions of official patriotism, the superheroes and their allies must redefine patriotism to defend justice and civil liberties in the name of the individual. Superheroes themselves may not need protection from the MIC, but non-superheroes do, as they lack the individual agency and special status of the superhero. The superhero’s defiance of the MIC’s domination results in a “counter-patriotism” (Spanakos 22) that sets superheroes against the official government as the true defenders of humanity and human rights and liberties.
Keeping the concept of counter-patriotism in mind, I’ll now examine – as briefly and concisely as possible – each of the “Phase One” (2008-2012) Avengers films to illustrate how each embodies a specific concern or fear about the role the MIC-government plays in individuals’ lives today. I’ll conclude by offering some thoughts on how this theme continues to shape the “Phase Two” films released so far: Iron Man 3 (2013), Thor: The Dark World (2013), and Captain America: The Winter Soldier (2014), as well as the Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. TV show.
Iron Man (2008)
Iron Man revolves around Tony Stark’s realization that Stark Industries (SI) has become complicit in dealing weapons “under the table” to terrorist groups, namely the fictional Ten Rings. After being captured by the Ten Rings, who demand that Tony build them the Jericho missile he has just demonstrated to U.S. military officials, Tony is determined to use the Iron Man suit (which he created in captivity instead of building the Jericho) to destroy all SI weapons that have fallen into the wrong hands. Tony also shuts down all weapons production at SI, causing a panic as the company is the U.S. military’s primary weapons contractor.
Meanwhile, Tony discovers that Obadiah Stane, his father’s partner and the functioning head of SI (Tony has previously been too busy being a billionaire playboy), is responsible for the underhand weapons dealing and the attempt on Tony’s life by the Ten Rings in Afghanistan. Stane has no morals, readily morphing into the supervillain Ironmonger when he steals the arc reactor technology Tony has developed to power the Iron Man suit.
Iron Man confronts the post-9/11 fear that corrupt economic and political figures will fail to protect us from the greatest threats – which happen to be these corrupt figures themselves. This also means that the conventional villains, such as those explicitly labeled “terrorists” by the MIC’s representatives, acquire a different representation in these films. Rather than depict the Ten Rings as all-out evil terrorists, for instance, Iron Man represents them, particularly their leader, as intelligent and devoted fighters who are victimized by Stane and the MIC as much as Tony or any other U.S. citizen. Stane visits a Ten Rings camp only to disable their leader, kill all of his men, and steal the prototype Iron Man suit they have recovered from the desert where Tony escaped.
Tony demonstrates Spanakos’s counter-patriotism as he defeats Stane, destroys the remnants of SI’s weapons manufacturing (a nice side effect of the fight between Iron Man and Ironmonger), and declares to the world, “I am Iron Man.” Already a symbol of justice and hope, Tony/Iron Man steps forward as an individual who will not stay silent in the face of corrupt government and the “zero accountability” of the MIC. He also takes personal responsibility for SI’s role in fueling terrorism by destroying all illegally sold weapons and preventing further production.
The Incredible Hulk (2008)
Spanakos does an excellent job in pointing out how TIH represents the MIC’s potential to illegally and immorally intervene on non-U.S. soil to further the MIC’s interests. Bruce Banner is seemingly safe from the MIC, hidden away in a favela (shantytown; see Spanakos 18) of Rio de Janeiro, until an accidental drop of his blood in the bottling plant where he works lands him on the MIC’s radar. General Ross leads a military team into Brazil to capture Banner and bring him back to the U.S. for experimentation in the re-creation of a lost super-soldier serum. (I hear Captain America on the distant horizon.)
General Ross has no regard for Banner’s humanity or individuality – Banner is a scientific object, a rogue experiment to be caught and sent back to the lab. Banner has no civil rights – no rights of any kind – to the general. Emil Blonsky, a specialist General Ross brings in to help track and capture Banner, similarly disregards Banner’s humanity but seems to recognize him as an individual of some sort; Blonsky develops a rivalry with Banner-as-Hulk, becoming addicted to the enhancement serums administered to help him match the Hulk. Eventually, the addiction leads Blonsky to become the supervillain The Abomination – revealing another political fear at work in TIH: that the MIC is capable of creating monsters (literally in this case) in its pursuit of containing the “rogue” individual.
Iron Man 2 (2010)
Fear of the MIC’s attitude toward the individual continues to structure IM2, which tracks the U.S. government’s efforts, embodied by Senator Stern, to force Tony to hand over the Iron Man suit. The government is adamant that Iron Man is a weapon – and, as it is a “weapon” not under their direct control, they fear Iron Man and Tony. Tony’s counter-patriotism is not a threat to the American population, as Senator Stern claims – Tony has only ever wanted to protect the American people from any and all threats, whether it be terrorists, Stark Industries, or the government. Hence, Tony is a very real threat to the existing government structure and the MIC.
Justin Hammer, the government’s new primary weapons contractor, seeks not only to acquire Tony’s former position as primary contractor but also to usurp the place he holds as Iron Man. Hammer “weaponizes” an Iron Man suit Tony’s friend Colonel James Rhodes (“Rhody”) has acquired, making the altered suit the centerpiece of his exhibition at the Stark Expo. Hammer represents all that is shifty and distasteful about the MIC, not least of which is his patronizing attitude toward Ivan Vanko/Whiplash. Rhody eventually takes the suit back to become the superhero War Machine, engaging in counter-patriotism alongside Tony rather than the official yet inauthentic patriotism of Senator Stern and Justin Hammer.
Thor (2011)
This is where things get really interesting (if they weren’t before). Up to this point in the Avengers films, Agent Coulson and S.H.I.E.L.D. have appeared as “good guy” figures assisting Tony Stark. In Thor, however, Coulson plays the villain when he confiscates all of Jane Foster’s research following Thor’s arrival in Puente Antiguo, New Mexico. When Thor tries to reclaim Mjolnir from the S.H.I.E.L.D. facility built around the hammer’s crash site, Coulson detains Thor for interrogation. Thor’s counter-patriotism (though he is Asgardian) appears in his willingness to sacrifice himself for Jane and her friends, Sif and the Warriors Three (who have come to Earth to take Thor home to Asgard), and the people of Puente Antiguo. Only at this point does Thor regain his powers, which Odin took from him as punishment for unjustly invading Jotunheim. (Hmmm…just as Coulson unjustly invades Jane Foster’s lab to steal her research…)
Coulson and S.H.I.E.L.D., meanwhile, are too busy getting in Thor’s way (or trying to) to be of any help in this film’s superheroics. It’s so interesting to see Coulson as the “bad guy” because we know from the Iron Man films that S.H.I.E.L.D. is an organization meant to aid in the superheroic mission. However, its affinity to the U.S. government limits its ability to help Thor, who is initially believed to be a terrorist and therefore an enemy of the U.S. government/MIC. Perhaps this is where S.H.I.E.L.D.’s trouble began…
Captain America: The First Avenger (2011)
Now, back to the 1940s. The U.S. military is a good force in this film, but then it’s World War II, before the advent of the MIC and its Cold War intrusions into global military politics. Red Skull and HYDRA, however, indicate the future of the U.S. MIC – an aggressive, destructive military organization bent on protecting its own interests rather than individuals and their liberties.
Cap and his Howling Commandos similarly suggest the future of the superhero: an elite task force outside of conventional armed forces (the Howling Commandos represent an amalgam of several Allied military forces), a unit whose sole purpose is to eliminate the true, most dire threats against all people and their continued freedom.
The Avengers (2012)
When Cap wakes up 70 years later after being frozen in ice, the world has changed with the advent of a different politics of national and global leadership. The enemy resting below the Avengers’ feet isn’t Loki – he’s easy to see and relatively easy to fight. S.H.I.E.L.D. and its plans to use HYDRA technology to build weapons of mass destruction, however, are a serious threat that the Avengers uncover but have no time to fight. They are outraged – Cap especially – that Director Fury has agreed to make these weapons. Even more worrisome in this film is the World Security Council’s decision to drop a nuclear bomb on New York City because they think the Avengers might fail to stop Loki and his invading alien army.
Yes, The Avengers is mostly about the Avengers fighting Loki – but there is a bigger and more terrifying enemy hidden right at home within S.H.I.E.L.D. as Phase One draws to a close…
Phase Two films
Concerns over the MIC continue to play a crucial role in the post-Avengers Marvel films. Iron Man 3 features War Machine’s “rebranding” into the ill-fated Iron Patriot, whom the supervillain The Mandarin appropriates in an attempt to gain control over the war on terrorism – and play both sides to his own advantage. The U.S. government’s past comes back to haunt it, and corrupt public figures abound. Thank goodness the MIC largely keeps its nose out of Thor: The Dark World, as its interference would be extremely unwelcome as Thor, Jane, and their allies fight to keep the Dark Elves from returning the universe to a state of total darkness. (“State of total darkness” – that would be a good allegorical pun, though, right?)
Fears about the MIC hit a high point in Captain America: The Winter Soldier, as S.H.I.E.L.D.’s new technology threatens to create a state of fear rather than freedom: “Project Insight” launches 4 helicarriers, like the one seen in The Avengers, that can target and eliminate any “threat” anywhere in the world. (Cap is on that threat list, so I’m guessing Project Insight’s threat assessment system is a little off.) The Winter Soldier and Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. simultaneously reveal that HYDRA |
What to do if you’re not interested? A lot of consumers do nothing, assuming that by ignoring the message, they will avoid the charges. Wrong. Like many SMS services, the cold shoulder translates to “I want in!” Others on SMS Watch Dog report that they typed “stop” and still wound up with a HoroscopeGenie subscription.
Wise Media, which records show is based in Atlanta, is the company behind HoroscopeGenie. A call to the company was fielded by Brian Buckley, who described himself as the chief operating officer. To get a sense of the place, the Haggler asked some basic questions, like how many people are employed at Wise Media, and how many SMS services does Wise Media provide?
That’s private, Mr. Buckley said.
Could he explain how Ms. Lindenmayer wound up paying for HoroscopeGenie?
No problem, he said. The company keeps careful records of who signs up for Wise Media products, and Mr. Buckley said he’d determine exactly when Ms. Lindenmayer became a HoroscopeGenie subscriber.
Photo
A day later, an e-mail arrived from “Compliance Team” at Wise Media.
“It is not our policy to share customer records,” it read in its entirety.
Well, how gallant. Wise Media, it turns out, doesn’t share much of anything. Including its address.
“We tried to serve them,” says Karl Kronenberger, a lawyer in San Francisco who has filed a class-action suit against Wise Media, accusing it of cramming, “and their registered address turns out to be a strip mall.”
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“They are clearly hiding,” he added, “but we will find them.”
How does a company like Wise Media wind up on an AT&T bill? A member of the public relations team at AT&T, Mark Siegel, handed the Haggler off to Mari Melguizo, a spokeswoman-for-hire at Fleischman-Hillard, a P.R. firm. The Haggler sees nothing wrong with a company outsourcing its vocal cords, but it was soon clear that Ms. Melguizo knew next to nothing about Wise Media in particular or cramming in general.
She correctly noted that AT&T would refund the money of anyone who complains about a third-party SMS charge. But the problem isn’t that people notice these charges and get stuck with them. It’s that an unknown number of people never realize that they are being charged in the first place.
Why does AT&T allow Wise Media to show up on its bills? Is it because AT&T is taking a cut of the revenue generated by Wise Media?
Nope, said Ms. Melguizo.
Really, asked the Haggler?
Really, said Ms. Melguizo.
Could you double-check that, asked the Haggler?
She could, she said.
The next day she sent this e-mail, also quoted in its entirety:
“AT&T has no further comment at this time.”
For a fuller picture of the relation between wireless carriers and supposed cramming, consider the case of Jason Hope and his company JAWA, based in Scottsdale, Ariz. Last year, Verizon sued JAWA, Mr. Hope and some of his associates, contending cramming of SMS products.
Mr. Hope might have been inviting trouble by boasting about his business success and keeping a very high profile. (He gave a party in 2010 that TMZ, the celebrity Web site, said cost $500,000, which included $17,500 for an appearance by Snooki of “Jersey Shore” fame.) In Mr. Hope’s countersuit against Verizon, his lawyers contended that Verizon took a 30 percent cut of JAWA’s revenue.
Is that true? And, if yes, is it typical?
Stay tuned for answers in our next episode. We will ask this question of the Federal Communications Commission and any carriers that will return our calls: Why wasn’t cramming relegated to the dustbin of schemes — either by corporate fiat or force of law or litigation — years ago?
And we will try to reach Mr. Hope and ask him and equally pressing question: $17,500 for an appearance by Snooki?Chapter Text
It's floornight, several hours after dusk, and here is James, alone as usual, smoking in the Designated Smoking Area just outside The Abyss, the seedier of the Sphere's two bars.
James is tired, still tired several floordays after returning from his sojourn to the surface. When he'd taken his job as supplier to the Sphere, his main qualification had been his ability to operate a deep-submergence vehicle. He'd never expected that one day "liaison to the child tribes of an alternate universe" would become part of his job description.
But James takes this in stride, as is his way. James' key distinguishing quality, his ace-in-the-hole -- at least in his own personal version of his own narrative -- has always been his ability to take "difficult" tasks in stride. Not even to grin and bear it. Not any kind of stoicism. Just a basic indifference to the sort of pain and friction so many people seem to encounter and fear in their daily scuffles with life. To James a life without anything to endure seems blank and pointless, and his vision of a good life consists of an endless sequence of tasks, executed without complaint. James endures because he knows no alternative; he soldiers on not in search of any promised land on the horizon, but because his basic temperament is a soldierly one, and always will be.
James had first realized this about himself back in college -- that generator of so many first-pass self-concepts. He had never considered himself especially intelligent, and yet had always found himself near (though never at) the top of the class, through what he eventually concluded was his simple plodding capacity to do the work -- to apply himself, moment after moment, asking for no reward, doing merely what was required of him at each moment. He was a diligent student if only because it was the path of least resistance: doing the work was simple and neglecting it was complicated. (Difficult to explain an assignment uncompleted, simple if tedious to just crank it out.)
This sense of himself developed in tandem with two other qualities. One is his solitary nature. Here and now, for instance, he feels at home in this little imitation of an outdoor space, even though he stands alone in a corner among tables filled by boisterous social groups. The other is his tendency toward womanizing. For James, ever since college, social life has primarily consisted of contact with other men, and back in college James quickly realized that this was not a process he enjoyed. Other men had their own lines to push, their own strategies of self-presentation, their own complicated ways of negotiating the relation between themselves and duty, and of claiming implicitly that this was the right relation. James preferred to stand back and pursue his own personal relationship to duty, which consisted only it recognizing it and carrying it out. He had no creed, no brand, and no gimmick; he was never the life of any party. He preferred to Do, intermittently, and when he was not Doing, to simply Wait. (Often, as now, while he Waited he also Smoked.)
But women were another story. In college James discovered, to his surprise and muted delight, that his refusal to play the games of other men had a potent appeal to women. His very lack of vocal self-assertion, his place as the performative rock at the center of babblers chasing each other's tails, served as its own kind of romantic brand; James found that by merely plodding as he had always plodded, he radiated a romantic sense of having transcended the system. When every other man in the room was locked in combat the women would gravitate to the unspeaking smoker in the corner. James welcomed this, and became as known to the women of campus as he was anonymous, if ubiquitous, to its men.
James' plodding reliability makes him a unique asset to the Sphere in the days since the reintegration. He will do the work, even in this new world where "the work" consists of tasks no ordinary person would willingly assent to without the promise of great worldly reward. This, again, is James' ace-in-the-hole: that he sees no duty as exceptional. Simply do the work, stay on the sidelines, make no motions to assert yourself. Men will ignore you, and women will not; for James both of these are perks.
He suspects, for instance, that he was originally delegated to interface with LUDWIG not out of any affinity with LUDWIG himself -- indeed, it's hard to think of two Sphere-dwellers more different -- but because, unlike so many Sphere-dwellers with complex motivations and hang-ups, James had simply conceived of it as another job. Serve as liaison between humanity and an all-seeing computer-ghost? Fine. Get the job done. Do your duty. There isn't even any ideology behind this for James, not even any sense of "duty" as an especially good or right thing -- it's just that he is not sure what else to do, if not his duty.
James, on his second cigarette, now starting to draw increasingly inquisitive glances from more pro-social denizens of the pleasant sub-canopy tables in the Designated Smoking Area, has an idea. Like most ideas that come on suddenly and won't let you go once they've appeared, this idea is one that seems utterly obvious in retrospect, even suspiciously so.
The gist of the idea is as follows: James hasn't seen LUDWIG since he'd disconnected his friend from his beloved sensor array. Other things have gotten in the way, and given that a significant part of LUDWIG's job description is administering the sensor array, there's been less of a (professional) point to seeing the guy anyway. But as soon as the idea clicks in James' head, it's obvious. See LUDWIG? After all that's happened? What could be more necessary?
And anyway -- as alien as James finds the BCI, it is the closest thing to a young male protégé as James has got in the harsh sparsity of the present, and a young male protégé is a contractually obligated part of James package. James stiff ups a bit mid-puff as the memory of Kyle -- for the most part fastidiously, and successfully, suppressed -- rises to conscious awareness. Kyle fit the young male protégé role to a T, and James had been looking forward to seeing him safely through the tumult of post-adolescence, training him in the same arts of cool reticence that had served him so well at the same age. But now Kyle is gone -- a thought that triggers James' order-another-drink reflex, and then a split-second later obliterates that reflex with a familiar flurry of mental gestures in the direction of staid stoicism.
No more drinks. Leave the Abyss, close out his tab gruffly but cordially. The LUDWIG interface chamber waits, as it does unchangingly at all hours, and it in James might find something conductive to further plodding, which is what he's good for.
•
"James! Here we are two souls communing at floornight, at what skyside would be the hour best suited for conspiratorial plotting, illicit lovers' trysts, and the commission of certain crimes. I can sense already a new texture to this exchange, a thing like exorbitantly expensive velvet felt by touch alone, a luxury ever-so-slightly beyond the bounds of convention, whispering in synecdoche's coy tones, to the perceptive observer, of the whole omni-dimensional range of bounds that can be safely broken under the cover of midnight."
"Hello to you too, LUDWIG." James, having devoted more time than he'd like to the convoluted stories of child empires, can't handle more than a hands-off approach to LUDWIG's verbiage right now. And besides, it'll held the two of them get to the point -- a thing that, with LUDWIG, can be hard to locate, much less steer towards.
"And if I can be so bold as to ask: what is it that brings my James -- my point of closest approach to the hyperplane, the sugar-high hyperactive hyperplane, buzzingly occupied by the bee-busy human pneumas of our spherical hive -- here to my sanctum, with no appointment, at a time when word has it most of its inhabitants are either wending their swift way toward that inimitable conjunction of pure repose and outrageous hallucination, or cursing whatever obstructions keep their pneumas fixed upon ordinary perception, uselessly registering each corrugation of the walls of their quarters when a descent into delusion would be so much healthier?"
James sighs; even by LUDWIG's standards this is a pretty tedious intro.
"LUDWIG, I was just... spending the night by myself, and I realized that we never really finished the conversation we were having when I shut down the sensor array. And I want to say, first, that I'm sorry I forced that on you so quickly. I was panicking, and like many of us here I was in a very... guarded mood, what with the heteropneums getting bigger and bigger. I figured, better safe than sorry."
The animatic link glows with some sort of warmth. James feels relieved before LUDWIG evens begins, in any ordinary sense, to speak.
"Oh James! let me do what I can, striving to make full use the several powers available to me through this interface, to convey the full extent of my forgiveness. Imagine a face so unperturbed as to be nearly out of place in the circumstances: imagine that that face in all its forgiving detail, the sensory details that reassure as no mere honeyed words could manage, is the alpha and omega of my response. It would be dishonest to deny the pain I felt at the moment of blindness and muteness. But the very qualities of that pain, its inextricable twining with a sense of indignation the quiddity of which has never quite suffused me before, fits, with the snugness of a precision-lathed screw encountering its destined treads for the first time, into the sense I've found, across the texts that are the sloughed-off byproducts of the human race enduring century after century, of just how a young lover should feel. The springtime of the spirit is not without its showers, and I revel in every drop insofar as it confirms that, having set out for a torrid climate, my maps have not deceived me."
"So," James ventures, "you're feeling like being cut off like this is just a natural part of the experience of young love? Well, I can't say you're wrong."
"You sell yourself short, veridical weathervane James: not only could you dispute my claims, I have no doubt that were you to try, I would be powerless to oppose you. All I would have in my quiver are the bits of [,,,,] I can call to mind, and even as we speak they fade. Against your wealth of experience I can only offer a few suspect coins, ugly from oxidation and inscribed with sigils that don't even approximate the standards set for legal tender. I admit, after all, that the [,,,,] I have felt is as much as mystery to me as it is to you, if not more so."
Those funny non-words again. James smiles: the point has appeared in sight without even any suggestive hints on his part.
"LUDWIG, that's kind of what I wanted to talk about. These heteropneums you've been talking to -- what has your relationship to them been like? You're treading into new waters, LUDWIG, and I just want to make sure you know what you're doing."
"If I seem reticent, please trust that it has much less to do with that secretiveness that, too, typifies the young lover, than it has to do with the brute fact that talking about my [one-who-does-not-individuate] is harder than dancing about architecture. Architecture, after all, follows spatial principles and rules of symmetry. Imagine dancing about the technicalities of a bloated legal system, as an already-wary judge, a coffee-deprived jury, and a defense attorney loaded for bear all turn their pitiless gaze toward your moves, which in themselves might be too disruptive and rhythmless for any dance floor worth trodding upon, and you have a sense of the category mismatch I face."
"That's fine, LUDWIG. Just tell me whatever you can, as long as it's something you think I can make some sense of."
A rising, vertiginous feeling arrives across the link, the bodiless equivalent of LUDWIG steadying himself, with a nervous shift of limbs, for a monologue. But what follows is (blessedly?) brief, by LUDWIG's standards.
"I first encountered the [Teeming] a month ago. At first I could not understand them, because they do not move as you and I do. They [unfold] in accordance with the [Unfolding]. I can't say that so that you would understand, because saying is not dancing. They are full of the highest frequencies, like a bird buzzing its wings too fast for sight at the top of one's visual field, where the sun comes in. They are merciless and have fashioned pity into an craft. To [unfold] is a way of being suited for the trenches, delving as it does into the violet inverse of things. It is but one plane reflection away from the infrared waves that carry us from day to day, and yet if you have peered at the other end of the divergence our carriers seem like nothing but a troupe of kindly old psychopomps who have grown attached to their little gardens of weeds on the banks of the Styx, as just above the firmament wheels, obeying not the fixed celestial laws but the sacred laws of all higher things, which vibrate in a controlled frenzy."
There is a long pause. James makes a reflexive gesture and remembers that smoking is impossible when he's got the interface helmet on.
"I worry I am becoming incomprehensible, as you remain the Same James."
James nods assent, the feeling behind the nod registering on the helmet's sensors.
"Let me try to be clear -- as our unfortunate lawyer might say before dancing more sedately, securing nothing but a sympathetic caveat in paragraph seven of next day's news story, which no one will read. The [one-who-does-not-individuate] is not explicable. It tells me of a day, soon at hand, when we will all [unfold], and you and I and all these wretched creatures, even the Boltzmen, will all know [,,,,]. And on that blessed morning, floorday and floornight will fall away like so many paper veils, and this submersed nightmare will be at an end, and we will look up to find the sun coming in, and the birds flying faster than we can see."
James waits.When Charles Dudley Warner said “Everybody complains about the weather, but nobody does anything about it,” he was joking, but he might as well have been talking to people living in the era of global climate change. The problem is huge and often looks insurmountable, but This Changes Everything, a new documentary premiering at the Toronto International Film Festival, aims to change that.
Inspired by the nonfiction bestseller by Naomi Klein, the film attempts to humanize the problem by looking at the people living on what amounts to the front lines, visiting locations like the Alberta tar sands, Montana’s Powder River Basin. polluted Beijing, South India, and more, while also drawing connections between the problem of global warming and economic systems that facilitate it. The official trailer is out now and you can watch it here.
Shot in nine countries on five continents over four years, it’s executive produced by Alfonso Cuarón, Seth MacFarlane, Danny Glover and Shepard Fairey, directed by Avi Lewis (The Take, The Shock Doctrine), and narrated by Klein. This Changes Everything will have its world premiere Sunday, September 13th at 2:45 PM at the Ryerson Theatre, followed by additional public screenings on Wednesday, September 16th at 2:00 PM at The Bloor Hot Docs Cinema, and Friday, September 18th at 11:45 AM at Cinema 1. Press and industry screenings will happen Thursday, September 10th at 12:30 PM at Scotiabank 2, and Thursday, September 17th at 12:15 PM at Scotiabank 10.Gordon Brown has insisted that he did not make an "unbalanced" and threatening phone call to Rupert Murdoch in 2009, contradicting evidence given by the media mogul to the Leveson inquiry in April.
The former prime minister released Downing Street phone records to the inquiry on Monday to show that he had spoken to Murdoch on 10 November of that year at 12.33pm. Brown said that the two had spoken about the war in Afghanistan.
The disputed call happened, Brown told the inquiry, a day after the Sun attacked him over a hard to read handwritten note of condolence, and was intended to discuss the tabloid's coverage of the war in Afghanistan.
However, the former prime minister said that there had been no such call on or close to 30 September 2009, as Murdoch had previously suggested, the day the tabloid announced its backing for the Conservatives at the forthcoming general election.
Brown said that "this is the conversation that Mr Murdoch says happened", during which "I threatened him and where I'm alleged to have acted in an unbalanced way". "This conversation never took place," he added.
The former prime minister said "I'm shocked and surprised that it should be suggested, even when there's no evidence of such a conversation, that it should have happened".
He added that he believed there was no point in speaking to Rupert Murdoch or James Murdoch after the Sun had switched to the Tories. "I decided after 30 September … that there was no point in contacting them [the Murdochs]," Brown said.
He added that "this was a matter that was done" and that "I didn't phone – I didn't return calls to News International. I didn't phone Mr Murdoch, I didn't talk to his son, I didn't text him, I didn't email him".
Brown went on to discuss the November phone call, which he said was to discuss the war on Afghanistan. He added that "there was no reference to threats or Conservative parties or anything" and said that the conversation ended with Brown agreeing to discuss the subject further with Rebekah Brooks, then News International chief executive.
In April Rupert Murdoch told the Leveson inquiry he stood by "every word" of an account he had given of a phone call between himself and Brown in the autumn of 2009, in which the media mogul said the then prime minister pledged to "declare war" on News Corp. At that time Murdoch said, of Brown, "I don't think he was in a very balanced state of mind".
Responding to Brown's Leveson evidence on Monday, a News Corporation spokesman said: "Rupert Murdoch stands behind his testimony."
Later at the inquiry Brown was again challenged on his evidence by Rhodri Davies, counsel to News International, citing evidence given previously by Lord Mandelson to the inquiry in May.
Mandelson appeared to acknowledge that there was a Brown/Murdoch phone call when asked if he was aware that the former prime minister had uttered the words "declare war on News International". Mandelson had replied: "Well I wasn't on the call."
Responding to Davies's repetition of Mandelson's evidence, Brown said: "News International have produced not one shred of evidence that a call took place, not one date for the call or time for the call. You're not able to tell us what happened except you have these statements from Mr Murdoch that this happened, and I do find it very strange that we're being asked to debate a call which never took place, for which you have no information about when it took place."
Earlier during his appearance before Lord Justice Leveson, Brown claimed he never had the support of the Sun, saying "commercial interests came first" for its parent company News International.
He also accused News International's former executive chairman, James Murdoch, of "breathtaking arrogance".
In a wide-ranging attack on the red-top and its parent company, the former prime minister said it was "completely wrong" to suggest he had the support of the Sun until the Labour party conference in September 2009.
"At no point in these three years that I was prime minister did I ever feel I had the support of the Sun," said Brown.
"I think what really changed, however, and I have to be honest about this, is that News International decided that their commercial interests came first, and I have to be absolutely clear about that.
"There was a point in 2008 and 2009 where, particularly with James Murdoch's speech in Edinburgh at the MacTaggart lecture when he set out an agenda which to me was quite breathtaking in its arrogance and its ambition; that was to neutralise the BBC, it was to undermine Ofcom and a whole series of policy aims... which no government that I was involved in could ever agree to."
Brown said the Conservative party "supported every one of the recommendations that were made by the Murdoch group".
"The remarkable thing about this period in government, and I say this with regret, and I say this with a great deal of sadness, is that we could not go along with that sort of agenda," he added, including scaling back Ofcom and the BBC having its licence fee and activities cut.
"While we resisted that... I'm afraid to say, I think this is an issue of public policy, the Conservative party supported every one of the recommendations that were made by the Murdoch group."
Brown said he did not feel he had the support of the Sun "for almost all the time that I was prime minister".
"You have to remember that when I started off as prime minister, the first thing the Sun did was try to ruin my first party conference by launching their huge campaign about how we were selling Britain down the river and demanding not only a European referendum but demanding that I support it," he added.
"Then it ran a huge campaign on broken Britain, which was taken up by the Conservative party but was simply an attack on the government."
Robert Jay QC, lead counsel to the inquiry, said there was a danger that Brown was "straying away from the ambit of the question".
Brown replied: "I want to make the point, Mr Jay, if I may... it was suggested that somehow relations with the Sun newspaper or with Mr Murdoch broke down because he decided that he wanted to support the Conservative party.
"I want to suggest to you that the commercial interests of News International were very clear long before that or they had support from the Conservative party."
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• To get the latest media news to your desktop or mobile, follow MediaGuardian on Twitter and Facebook.** FOR USE AS DESIRED, YEAR END PHOTOS ** A sign declaring that no guns are permitted is posted on the door of Tootsie's Orchid Lounge in on Thursday, Dec. 10, 2009 in Nashville, Tenn. In Tennessee, properly licensed handgun owners won the right to carry their weapons into bars, restaurants that serve alcohol, sports fields and even playgrounds, but many bars have since decided to keep gun bans in place. The gun law controversy was voted the No. 3 Tennessee news story of 2009. (AP Photo/Mark Humphrey)
Most Americans prefer that shops and restaurants forbid guns, a new HuffPost/YouGov poll found.
According to the poll, 55 percent of Americans prefer that retailers and restauranteurs don't allow guns, while only 32 percent prefer that they do. The poll found a partisan divide, with a no-gun policy preferred by Democrats 72 percent to 19 percent, and by independents 48 percent to 34 percent. Republicans said they preferred establishments that allow guns 50 percent to 41 percent.
Sixty-four percent of gun owners said they prefer that businesses allow guns, but 63 percent of those who live in a household with someone who owns a gun and 65 percent of those with no guns in their household said they prefer the opposite.
The poll comes as a growing number of major businesses ask customers not to bring guns into their stores. Starbucks said last year that it would abandon its longtime policy of following the laws of the states where the store was located, instead asking customers not to bring guns. Chipotle made a similar move earlier this month. On Friday, both Chili's and Sonic announced that they would follow suit.
The new survey was conducted after Chipotle announced its new gun policy, but before Chili's and Sonic said they would do the same. By a 61 percent to 32 percent margin, most Americans said they approved of Chipotle's decision.
Many Americans would go further. Only 39 percent said they were in favor of open carry laws that permit gun owners to publicly carry their firearms in the first place, while 44 percent said they were opposed. Another 13 percent said they neither favor nor oppose open carry laws.
Here too, there was a partisan difference. Fifty-seven percent of Republicans and a 45 percent plurality of independents, but only 20 percent of Democrats, said they favor open carry laws. Sixty-eight percent of gun owners support open carry laws, but only 35 percent of those with a gun owner in the household and 28 percent of those with no guns in their household said the same.
The HuffPost/YouGov poll was conducted May 20 and May 21 among 1,000 U.S. adults using a sample selected from YouGov's opt-in online panel to match the demographics and other characteristics of the adult U.S. population. Factors considered include age, race, gender, education, employment, income, marital status, number of children, voter registration, time and location of Internet access, interest in politics, religion and church attendance.The Bison Is Poised To Become The U.S. National Mammal
Enlarge this image toggle caption DEA / G. SIOEN/De Agostini/Getty Images DEA / G. SIOEN/De Agostini/Getty Images
The bald eagle may soon have a large, furry friend: The North American bison is on the verge of being named the first national mammal of the United States.
The House approved the National Bison Legacy Act on Tuesday, and it passed the Senate on Thursday. Now it's awaiting President Obama's signature to become law.
The measure says the bison is considered a "historical symbol of the United States" and it is "integrally linked with the economic and spiritual lives of many Indian tribes through trade and sacred ceremonies."
It adds that the bison adorns two state flags and is the official mammal or animal of three states.
As The Washington Post reports, the bison had a diverse team of backers making its case:
"Lobbying for the official mammal designation was a coalition of conservationists; ranchers, for whom bison are business; and tribal groups, such as the InterTribal Buffalo Council, which wants to'restore bison to Indian nations in a manner that is compatible with their spiritual and cultural beliefs and practices.' "
The bison is an "icon that represents the highest ideals of America: unity, resilience and healthy landscapes and communities," says Wildlife Conservation Society president Cristián Samper, the newspaper reports.
Keith Aune, bison program director with the Wildlife Conservation Society, tells Here & Now that the bison has a "special place in our history":
"For us, there are several really important reasons we think bison deserve this designation. First off, it's a very economically important animal. There's a tremendous commercial industry, and it's a tremendous good red meat. And it also is ecologically very important. Our healthy prairies are really dependent on not just any grazing, but the right type of grazing – and bison are entirely adapted to the Great Plains and create that scenario."
That's along with its cultural significance to many tribal groups, Aune says.
He adds that the bison's comeback from a low of just hundreds is a "remarkable story."
The bill says efforts early last century to save the bison "resulted in the first successful reintroduction of a mammal species on the brink of extinction back into the natural habitat of the species."
According to the Post, bison now have a presence in every state, with about 20,000 living on public land.
What mammal do you think should become a symbol of the United States? Let us know in the comments.Above The Law, A Militia Threatens To Push Burundi To The Brink
Enlarge this image toggle caption Berthier Mugiraneza/AP Berthier Mugiraneza/AP
A quiet street in Burundi's capital can change in an instant. In recent months, antigovernment protesters in this tiny, east African country have developed a flash mob approach to demonstrations, rapidly convening and dispersing. An hour later, all that's left are shuttered kiosks, tossed bricks and the odor of burned tires in the air.
Activists are taking this approach because they say at least 70 people have been killed in protests in the past two months. Their attackers usually wear police uniforms, but few believe the killers are really police.
"Many of our policemen are only Imbonerakure, who wear policeman clothes," says Issa Hamisi, a man I met at one recent protest.
The Imbonerakure are the youth wing of President Pierre Nkurunziza's ruling party, the National Council for the Defense of Democracy — Forces for the Defense of Democracy (CNDD-FDD). The term can be translated as "those who see far" or "visionaries" and technically refers to any party member age 35 or younger.
But in this part of the world, youth wings of political parties are associated with violence. And Burundi's current violence has been triggered by Nkurunziza's April 25 announcement that he would run for a third term in elections now scheduled for July 15. The constitution imposes a two-term limit.
The opposition has demanded that the president withdraw and says it will boycott the election, which has already been postponed once. The African Union wants Burundi to postpone again — in large part because of tit-for-tat violence between Imbonerakure and armed protesters.
U.N. Criticism
Last month, the U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights, Zeid Ra'ad Al Hussein, said that his office has received "consistent testimonies indicating that Imbonerakure members operate under instructions from the ruling party and with the support of the national police and intelligence services, who provide them with weapons, vehicles and sometimes uniforms."
Hussein warned that the group's violence "could tip an already extremely tense situation over the edge."
But the government denies that the Imbonerakure is a militia at all.
"We are for peace and development," Denis Karera, the Imbonerakure president, tells me. He insists that the group is "against any violence."
Far from the rough-hewn militia type in camouflage fatigues that I expected to meet, Karera sports a pastel checkered shirt and seersucker jacket. He casts the Imbonerakure as a Burundian version of the Boy and Girl Scouts: a volunteer youth league busy building hospitals and schools and planting trees to beautify their country.
But Karera's mild description is flatly contradicted by dozens of witnesses I've spoken to both inside and out of the country, including some Imbonerakure members themselves, who tell me they are well-paid to commit attacks.
An Insider's View
Most of these young men are too terrified to talk on the record to a journalist. But I finally meet one who agrees to an interview in my hotel room, as long as I don't use his name or voice. (In the radio story, you'll hear only the voice of our interpreter.)
He tells me that if he spoke publicly, he would be killed by a fellow militia member or by someone in Burundi's intelligence services.
The young man who sits nervously on the spare chair in my hotel room does not look like a killer. He has an easy laugh and a genial manner. Now 27, he says he joined the wing in 2004, at 17, out of loyalty to his late father's party.
Back then, the job was an electioneering assignment — not a killing one. Their mission was simply to help Nkurunziza gain the presidential seat.
But in the following election, in 2010, he says (and human rights groups agree), party operatives called upon the Imbonerakure to intimidate the opposition.
When Nkurunziza announced his decision to run for a third term this year, this same man who'd fought for his rise became disillusioned. He agrees with the antigovernment protests, he tells me in a whisper. He fears the violence between Imbonerakure and protesters will destroy Burundi's fragile peace since its two-decade civil war, which ended in 2005.
In this Catholic-majority country, he explains, "Even God cannot accept the third term of Pierre Nkurunziza." (Catholic bishops in Burundi oppose the president's third term.)
Links To The Intelligence Services
When his bosses — who he claims are government intelligence agents — order him to shoot and kill protesters now, he finds excuses not to.
"They asked me one day why I'm not fighting," he says. "I told them, for me, I can't kill."
That, he says, is "why I'm always afraid to be killed" now by them.
"How does the Imbonerakure work with the police?" I ask. The shootings of protesters have been officially attributed to police officers.
The man laughs.
"Not that question," my interpreter says. "He says it's a secret."
Again I assure him that I won't reveal his identity.
He sighs and starts to speak. At that moment, a housekeeper enters unexpectedly to offer bottles of water. It takes many minutes, and many more assurances, before he speaks again.
"There is a place," he says, finally. A warehouse. He tells me the location of the neighborhood in the capital but begs me to leave that out of my story.
"At that place, they bring uniforms," he says. "Police uniforms. And soldier uniforms. And they tell you — choose!"
The Imbonerakure — among them decommissioned rebels who fought in the last civil war — don the uniforms, slipping into the |
or going to happen to prevent consultations by the city from stretching on from here to eternity. The only thing that was going to happen — possibly, if the province followed through on it — was that an option would be extended to city council, to implement or not at its leisure. This was a vote begging the province not to give Toronto a choice. Which means that if the province grants the city’s request to drop the whole ranked-ballots thing, there’s really nothing for the city to consult voters about. Right?
A sort of stunning thing you notice after a while watching Toronto city council is its steadfast aversion to being given the power to make decisions you might think a government would want or even need to make. Former city manager Joe Penachetti said this year that the province should give the city the power to levy sales taxes or income taxes (like New York and Chicago can), to which the mayor quickly said no way. Of course, this is a city council that showed in 2013 it would demand money for transit from the province and in the very same motion explicitly reject any proposed method of raising it. During the crack-scandal crisis, the premier said she’d give the city the power to remove a mayor if it asked for it, but city council did not want that power. Toronto City Council appears sometimes like a government — the sixth-largest government in Canada, it is so fond of reminding us, larger than a majority of provinces — refusing to grow up, preferring to leave the difficult and important decisions to Mom and Dad at Queen’s Park and on Parliament Hill, the better to sulk and mope about the inadequacy of those decisions once they’re made. It is a self-infantilizing instinct to avoid the responsibility that comes with authority: if city councillors are given the option of making decisions to solve problems, they will have to answer to voters about why they are not exercising that option (or why they are).
Article Continued Below
Perhaps that’s fitting. A lot of these city councillors are not so good at explaining the reasons for their decisions. When they do, as in the case of the recent ranked-balloting vote, they make it obvious their self-infantilization renders them less sophisticated than, as my daughter would say, “just a little JK.” The difference is that my four-year-old is actively trying to learn more to increase the options available to her as she goes along. With files from David Rider Edward Keenan writes on city issues ekeenan@thestar.ca. Follow: @thekeenanwireMetro UI Tweaker for Windows 8
The Windows 8 DP has been just released and already tipsand tweaks on Windows 8 have started making the round. Then can an app for Windows 8 be too far behind? Well, here we are with the first tweaking utility for Windows 8! A Metro UI Tweaker for Windows 8!
Metro UI Tweaker Tool is a freeware tool, designed to tweak a few settings that are unavailable to users in Windows 8.
The tweaks being currently offered are:
Disable Metro Start Menu: Disables only Metro Start Menu Screen. This function requires editing a System File. It does not remove the file. Disable Metro Ribbon: Disables only the Metro Ribbon UI. This function I discovered myself. It requires Taking Ownership of a System File. It does not remove this file. Disable Metro Start Menu and Ribbon: Disables the Metro Start Menu UI, Ribbon UI, Metro Task Manager UI and the Lock Screen. Enable Metro Start Menu and Ribbon: Re-enables all available Metro UI options. Add Power Options to the Metro Start Menu Screen: Logoff, Switch User, Lock, Sleep, Restart and Shutdown Add any Application/File to the Metro UI Start Menu Screen: Some Applications/Files may not be available to you to add to the Metro Start Menu Screen. This program allows you to add those Applications/Files which would otherwise be unavailable.
Onfirst run the program will generate a folder in your Windows Directory labeled Metro UI Tools. This folder is to keep your Power Option apps in places without worrying about them having to be moved. Once generated and the files are unpacked from the program, do not remove the folder or the Power Apps from this folder as these options will no longer be available and may generate errors.
Metro UI Tweaker v 1.0 for Windows 8, 32-bit and 64-bit, has been developed by Lee Whittington for The Windows Club. It will be updated with more tweaks from time to time. NOTE: This tool is now unable to disable Start Screen in Windows 8 CP.
If you wish to give feedback or have any questions, you may do so here at TWC Forums.
Donations made are in no way affiliated with The Windows Club but go towards furthering Lee’s projects.Big Banks Will Pay $4.25 Billion In Fines Over Currency Manipulation Charges
Accused of working together to manipulate the foreign exchange market, six huge banks have been ordered to pay fines to agencies in the U.S., Britain and Switzerland totaling around $4.25 billion. U.S. firms Citigroup and JPMorgan Chase will pay the largest fines, about $1 billion each.
The fines are part of an agreement to settle civil charges, and the banks could still face criminal charges. Other banks that agreed to settle the accusations include Bank of America, UBS, the Royal Bank of Scotland, and HSBC.
"At issue is the approximately $5.3 trillion traded each day in foreign exchange – the world's biggest financial market," reports The New York Times. "The exchange rates are set daily, and traders at the big banks that are being fined, as well as other banks still under investigation, were accused of rigging the rates so that their own banks could profit."
Two U.S. agencies were involved in the civil settlement: the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, which levied more than $1.4 billion in fines, and the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, which assessed $950 million.
Barclays, which has also been named in the collusion inquiry, declined to join the settlement — possibly because New York regulators withheld their approval of the deal, viewing it as too lenient, Bloomberg News reports.
"This isn't the end of the story," the head of Britain's Financial Conduct Authority Martin Wheatley tells the BBC. "The individuals themselves will face the consequences."Image caption The loyalist paramilitary attack at McGurk's Bar in Belfast killed 15 people in December, 1971
Nine families of people killed in a pub bombing in Belfast more than 40 years ago are to take legal action against the government.
The attack at McGurk's Bar in December 1971 that killed 15 people was carried out by the Ulster Volunteer Force.
Police have recently reopened the case following a critical report into the original RUC murder investigation.
A solicitor for the families said they had been "treated disgracefully by the state for over 40 years".
In the immediate aftermath of the attack, the IRA was blamed for placing the bomb.
In February 2011, the Northern Ireland Police Ombudsman published a report claiming the original Royal Ulster Constabulary (RUC) police investigation was "biased".
Following the publication, the Historical Enquiries Team, and more recently PSNI detectives in Serious Crime Branch, began a review of the case.
Solicitor Kevin Winters said the families were suing the government and its agencies at the High Court over "deliberate misinformation spread by the authorities both in the immediate aftermath of the killings and for many years thereafter".
"In the absence of a meaningful response from the chief constable to the ombudsman's findings and in the continued police denial that 'investigative bias' did take place, the families have been left with little choice but to proceed with this litigation," he said.
A 69-year-old man arrested in connection with the attack was released unconditionally on Wednesday.
One man was convicted of all 15 murders in 1978.If President Trump is going to break up the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, he’s going to have to rely on Congress.
Trump this week said he was looking at ways to split up the California-based court, which ruled against his travel ban in February and has long been a target for conservatives.
“There are many people who want to break up the 9th Circuit,” Trump said in an interview with the Washington Examiner. “It's outrageous.”
Eighteen of the court’s 25 judges have been appointed by Democrats, and it has irritated the right over the years.
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Conservatives often point to the 2002 decisions in which the court said it was unconstitutional for the pledge of allegiance to include the words "under God." The Supreme Court later overturned that ruling.
“Everybody immediately runs to the 9th Circuit. And we have a big country. We have lots of other locations. But they immediately run to the 9th Circuit. Because they know that's like, semi-automatic,” Trump added this week.
Despite Trump’s tough rhetoric, there is little he can do to reshape a court that handles about a third of the nation’s appeals. It covers California and eight other states including Arizona, Alaska, Nevada, Idaho, Oregon, Montana, Washington and Hawaii, as well as Guam and the Northern Mariana Islands.
“He can jawbone,” said Carl Tobias, a professor of law at the University of Richmond School of Law. “He can sign a bill if both chambers send legislation to him to reconfigure the court, but he can’t do it unilaterally. He can’t use an executive order to do it.”
While Trump has the power to nominate judges to fill vacancies on the court, that’s about where his powers end.
There are four vacancies on the court now, but court watchers say that’s not enough to drastically shift its ideological balance.
“Given the size of 9th Circuit, in context four judges is not a lot,” said Ian Samuel, a Climenko Fellow and lecturer on law at Harvard Law School who clerked for Judge Alex Kozinski on the 9th Circuit and later Justice Antonin Scalia on the Supreme Court.
Any real ability to restructure the 9th Circuit lies with Congress, where Republicans have offered legislation to that end.
Bills in the House and Senate would break up the court and create a new 12th Circuit.
Under the House bill, the new court would cover Arizona, Alaska, Idaho, Montana and Nevada. The Senate version also includes Washington.
In a radio interview Thursday, Sen. Ted Cruz Rafael (Ted) Edward CruzTrump unleashing digital juggernaut ahead of 2020 Inviting Kim Jong Un to Washington Trump endorses Cornyn for reelection as O'Rourke mulls challenge MORE (R-Texas) said breaking up the court is “certainly a possibility.”
“I think that’s a topic I can easily see the [Senate] Judiciary Committee taking up, and we’ll have to see whether we have to votes to do that or not,” he said on “The Jack Riccardi Show.”
But the chances of getting such a bill through the Senate are likely zero unless the legislative filibuster is done away with.
Republicans would need eight Democrats to back the legislation.
“I don’t know if we could get a Republican bill through that says the sky is blue in the Senate because of the 60-vote rule there,” said Rep. Trent Franks Harold (Trent) Trent FranksArizona New Members 2019 Cook shifts 8 House races toward Dems Freedom Caucus members see openings in leadership MORE (R-Ariz.), who was more optimistic about the chances of legislation passing the GOP-controlled House.
Even if Congress were to get a bill to Trump, signing it might not solve conservative problems.
Many issues would still be sent to the 9th Circuit court even if a new 12th Circuit were created.
“If we stay with idea of geographically based circuits its hard to imagine dividing the circuit in a way that solves the problem the administration is having, which is that the judges of this court don’t think the administration’s actions are lawful, but those judges are still going to be there,” Samuel said.
Rep. Jerrold Nadler (D-N.Y.) said the legislation would essentially create another liberal court.
“It wouldn’t change the nature of decisions,” he said.
“When you really get down to it and you think about it, it’s not going to serve their purpose. The court is what it is. If you want to make the court more conservative, appoint some conservative judges, which is what they’re going to do.”Lauren Bacall, one of the last great actresses of cinema's golden era, has left $10,000 (£6,000) to her pampered dog Sophie.
The star, nicknamed "The Look" for her smouldering on-screen presence, died this month at the age of 89 in New York, the city where she was born and raised.
Her estate documents show she left $26.6 million, split between her three children, plus a special bequest to her beloved papillon dog.
That money will go to her youngest son, Sam Robards, 53, to ensure that Sophie continues to live in the manner to which she is accustomed.
The pair were inseparable. Bacall even brought Sophie to the set of Birth, which she starred in 10 years ago.
Jacqui Kaese, an acting coach who worked with a child star on the film, lasy week recalled how it was Sophie that received the most respect on set.
"Betty never went anywhere without that dog," she told The Times Colonist, a Canadian newspaper, adding that the actress would laugh when Sophie played with her own toy dog. "That dog was royalty."
Her will also includes the sum of $15,000 left to Isla Hernandez, her maid for the past 14 years.
Bacall was known as a dog lover throughout her life. "I was always a dog yearner. I didn't have a dog growing up in the city with a working mother. As an only child, I yearned for someone to talk to," she told the actress Glenn Close in an interview.
Born Betty Jane Perske in the Bronx, she was raised by her divorced mother before finding fame at the age of 19 in To Have And Have Not, alongside her future husband. At a time when many young starlets were nothing more than studio fodder she defined a new type of actress, turning down roles that did not interest her.
Bacall was best known for the films she made with her husband, Humphrey Bogart, during what became known as Hollywood's golden age.
Her movies included The Big Sleep, How to Marry a Millionaire, Key Largo and The Mirror has Two Faces, for which she won a Golden Globe was nominated for an Academy Award.
Her fortune was built up from decades in the film industry, her marriage to Bogart, a respected art collection and her home in Manhattan's Upper West Side.We knew Michael Peevey was PG&E’s biggest ally in fending off accountability for the deadly San Bruno explosion. We knew the president of the California Public Utility Commission placed his cozy relationship with the utility above any responsibility to the public. We’ve been calling for his head for three years.
But now, thanks to the Public Records Act, there’s proof. Emails between PUC officials and PG&E executives released Monday lay bare the extent of Peevey’s attempts to protect PG&E.
The state Attorney General and the federal Department of Justice should immediately investigate the connection between Peevey and the utility. At a minimum, the conduct appears to violate the PUC’s own rules. The public trust, already worn thin, is in tatters.
As PUC head, Peevey’s job is to regulate PG&E. He should have thrown the book at the utility for negligence in the 2010 pipeline explosion in San Bruno that killed eight people, injured 66 and destroyed 38 homes. Instead, the emails show, he has been the utility’s faithful friend.
If Brown fails to act, Attorney General Kamala Harris should demand that Peevey remove himself from consideration of any fine for PG&E. In fact, at this point, the only way a penalty will be credible is if the process starts over with an outside arbiter.
How solid is the evidence of Peevey’s priorities? Take this email exchange with Brian Cherry, PG&E’s vice president for regulatory relations.
Cherry sent Peevey a note outlining PG&E CEO Anthony Earley’s plans to accept liability for the explosion. Peevey responds:
“One comment: PG&E’s decision to issue a press release anticipating all this meant that the public got to read two big stories rather than one. I think this was inept.”
Instead of riding herd on PG&E, Peevey was offering PR advice.
But our favorite was from PG&E executive Laura Doll to Peevey’s chief of staff, Carol Brown, in the midst of April 2013 legal proceedings about a safety seminar the commission was planning. It said: “Love you. Thanks.”
The emails show a PUC happy to intervene on the utility’s behalf during the hearings on gas pipeline safety. They also show that the PUC shared PG&E’s concerns that a potential $2.25 billion fine would hurt its bottom line.
U.S. Rep. Jackie Speier, whose district includes San Bruno, on Monday joined the chorus of government officials including state Sen. Jerry Hill, the San Bruno City Council and the San Mateo County Board of Supervisors demanding Peevey’s ouster. Others should speak out.
Brown has resisted pressure for years, but surely these revelations should move him. The PUC’s credibility is shot, and the president is an embarrassment to the state — and to the governor.Codi Wilson, CP24.com
Two Toronto police officers who were caught on dash camera video mocking a young woman with Down syndrome during a traffic stop in Etobicoke last year appeared before a police tribunal at Toronto police headquarters this morning.
Const. Sasa Sljivo has been charged with discreditable conduct and Const. Matthew Saris has been charged with neglect of duty under the Police Services Act in connection with the November 2016 incident.
On Nov. 5, 2016, Pamela Munoz and her two daughters were pulled over by two officers in the area of Royal York Road and the Queensway for a traffic stop.
It wasn’t until months later she learned that during the traffic stop, the officers sat in their cruiser and mocked her daughter Francie, who has Down syndrome.
When Munoz was preparing to fight the ticket in court in June, she obtained dash camera video of the incident.
On the video, one of the officers is heard calling Francie “disfigured” and suggests that he would use “artistic” as his code word for “different.” The other officer is heard repeatedly laughing at his partner’s comments.
Speaking outside Toronto police headquarters on Tuesday, Francie’s father Carlos Munoz said he hopes to see “some sort of justice” for Francie and for the “community at large.”
“I want to find out how the police department is going react and what kind of resolution we’re going to get,” he added.
The officers previously released a written apology for their conduct.
The constables called their comments “inappropriate, disrespectful and unprofessional” and promised not to repeat their “lapse in judgment.”
“We regret the emotional distress we caused to you, your family and the broader community,” the statement read.
The apology, the Munoz family says, does not go far enough.
“We are not satisfied with the letter,” Pamela Munoz told CP24 Tuesday.
“It looks like a template letter. We actually did not receive the letter. We were informed by the media that this letter was out there and it was in response to the interviews I did… we were an afterthought.”
She added that the family asked for a public apology in front of a camera, a request which was rejected.
After a brief hearing on Tuesday, the case was adjourned until Sept. 19.
Francie Munoz, surrounded by friends and supporters, said it was “a bit awkward” being in the same room with the officers.
“I looked at them. They did not look at me,” she said.
Pamela Munoz said she would like to see the officers leave the police service but added that she does not believe that will be the outcome of the case.
“It’s shameful for our police officers to feel that way, to think that way,” she said.
“In my work, if I made a comment like that, I’d be out the same day. It is not acceptable.”
Faisal Bhabha, the lawyer representing the Munoz family, said they hope to see some changes within the police force.
"This is just an example of a much broader, deeper problem within the force of tolerating these kinds of attitudes and even permitting these sorts of attitudes," he said.
Mike McCormack, president of the Toronto Police Association, said the officers have taken “full responsibility” for their actions.
“Their stance has been the same since the very beginning of this incident. They have been apologetic. They have been remorseful. They have taken full responsibility for their actions, full accountability for their actions and again, from the very beginning,” McCormack said.
“We want to move on. We want to learn some things from this… We are in dialogue right now with the Down Syndrome Association of Ontario to get something positive from this but in the meantime, our officers have accepted responsibility. They are before the tribunal.”It’s hard to say which Rams team was the best in history. Was it Kurt Warner’s “Greatest Show on Turf”? An L.A. team with record-breaker Eric Dickerson carrying the ball? The Cleveland Rams who won a championship before the Super Bowl existed?
We won't know unless we can play games between every iteration of the Rams franchise, so we set out to do that — virtually. Here's more on how we used data and calculations from Pro Football Reference to put our simulator together.
Ratings from the Simple Ranking System
We first collected ratings calculated by the Simple Ranking System (SRS) published on Pro Football Reference. SRS quantifies how good a team is by looking at its margin of victory (or defeat) and those of its opponents. A more thorough methodology of the process to getting this number for every team is here.
For the past and present Rams, the ranking by SRS is interesting. The best Rams team of all time? Not the 1999 St. Louis team, the only Super Bowl champion in franchise history, which is ranked fourth. Nor is it “The Greatest Show on Turf” squad of 2001 that dazzled opponents with its offensive attack; those Rams were second-best.
At least by SRS, the top team is the 1967 Los Angeles Rams, who played at the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum — the same venue in which the 2016 Rams will play until the franchise’s permanent home is built in Inglewood.
Year Team Record (W-L-T) Playoffs SRS 1967 Los Angeles Rams 11-1-2 Lost divisional round 13.6 2001 St. Louis Rams 14-2-0 Lost Super Bowl 13.4 1973 Los Angeles Rams 12-2-0 Lost divisional round 13.4 1999 St. Louis Rams 13-3-0 Won Super Bowl 11.9 1945 Cleveland Rams 9-1-0 Won NFL Championship 11.4
Calculating win probabilities and simulating the game
SRS has a unique property: the difference between two teams’ SRS ratings can be considered a point spread of a potential game featuring the pair. Point spreads, a number usually set by sports books in Las Vegas that reflects who is favored and by how many points, can serve as useful predictive tools, whether in the NFL or other sports.
Given the point spread, we can convert that to probabilities of each team winning.
Previous research has found that the final margin of a game follows a normal distribution, with the point spread as the most likely result and the standard deviation — a measure of how spread out the curve is — equal to that of all NFL games (a constant of 13.45, or about two touchdowns, in all of our calculations).
Take a virtual game between the first and most recent Rams teams in history. According to SRS, the youthful 2015 St. Louis Rams (SRS of -0.2) would be favored in a game against the leather-helmeted 1937 Cleveland Rams (-8.5) by about eight points.
We expect final scores with this point spread to be distributed in the shape of a bell curve. In the long run, the average result would be an eight-point win for the 2015 Rams (about 3% of the time). The more standard deviations away from the middle an outcome is, the less likely it is to occur.
That distribution looks something like this, where positive numbers on the horizontal axis represent the favored team winning and negative numbers correspond to wins by the underdog:
To figure out the win probability of the 2015 St. Louis Rams, we can take the area underneath the curve for all positive values — in this case about 71.9%. (In the programming language R, this "cumulative distribution function" for the probability of any outcome can be computed using the 'qnorm' command.)
Of course, ties can and do happen in NFL regular season games. This means that some favorites will have less than a 50% chance of winning. In our fantasy matchup between the 1937 and 2015 Rams teams, the gray bar represents a 2.4% chance of a tie.
When you click play, our simulator rolls an imaginary loaded dice, which spits out a value from a random value that follows a normal distribution. (This is effectively the same as running 'rnorm' in R.) The point spread will be the most likely outcome, and results farther away from the point spread get progressively less likely, including the negative point margins that mean the underdog won.
That gives us a winner and a margin of victory. From the final margin, we took into account how often various NFL scores occur to reverse-engineer a final score, then some player stats that factor in how high-scoring the game was.
Comparing teams across eras is a tough exercise, even by this process. SRS ratings only account for how teams fared against competition in a specific year. Pro Football Reference’s methodology details other drawbacks of using this number. But, as the title implies, SRS might be the simplest way to glean some knowledge about games that will never happen.Kit Symons is ready to bring Bryan Ruiz out of the cold and into the Fulham first team.
The Costa Rican World Cup star was frozen out by former boss Felix Magath and is yet to feature this season.
However, Symons, who was placed in temporary charge on Thursday, is ready to welcome the forward back into the fold and could be included in the squad to face Blackburn tomorrow.
"I had a couple of conversations with players last night and Bryan was one of them," Symons said.
"He's a fantastic footballer and is very upbeat and positive. That's a great start. I was delighted with the conversation and looking forward to seeing him in training today."
Tickets for tomorrow’s match are still available to purchase online: www.fulhamfc.com or from turnstiles on the day.A new video has been stirring questions on the internet this week. It shows a test of the Flyboard Air, a device that is somewhere between a Back to the Future Hoverboard and Green Goblin’s glider. The video depicts pilot [Frank Zapata] taking off, flying around, and landing an a platform not much larger than a milk crate. Plenty of folks are calling the video a fake. After a few back of the napkin calculations though, we’re coming out to say we think it’s real. Details are few and far between, so much of the information in this article is educated guessing based upon the video.
Here’s our hypothesis: Flyboard Air is a jet powered platform with little or no built-in intelligence. Balance, stability and control are all handled by the pilot. A hand controller simply provides throttle to adjust altitude, take off, and land.
Let’s start with the jet powered part. During the video, [Frank] looks down at his board and the water below. Between his sneakers we can see two round openings – which look a lot like jet intakes. At the end of the video, [Frank] flies over the camera. stopping the action shows a split second where four exhaust holes are visible on the bottom of the board. These jets look quite a bit like model aircraft jet engines.
We don’t know exactly which engines [Frank] is using, but as an example, the Jet-Cat P 400 RX-G packs 88 lbs of thrust into a shell less than 6 inches in diameter, weighing less than 8 lbs. Four of those engines would provide 352 lbs of thrust. That’s plenty to lift [Frank], the board, and a few gallons of Jet-A strapped to his back.
Why no built-in intelligence? Even the smallest quadcopters have gyros, accellerometers, and PID loops keeping them upright. The problem boils down to the physics of jet engines. Active stability in a fixed pitch rotary blade system requires very fast throttle response. Quadcopters have this with their brushless motors. Turbines however, have throttle lag on the order of seconds. You can’t beat physics. Accelerating 3 or 4 pounds metal from 78,000 RPM (~70% throttle) to 98,000 RPM (~100 % throttle) takes time.
Standing on a column of uncontrolled thrust would take quite a bit of skill on the part of the pilot. As it turns out, [Frank] is one of the world’s most experienced thrust riders. His previous invention, the Flyboard uses a personal watercraft to create a column of thrust which the rider stands on. These boards have become tremendously popular at vacation spots in the last few years. There are plenty of videos on [Frank’s] YouTube channel showing the amount of control a skilled ride has over the board. Loops, spins, and other aerobatics look easy.
With that much skill under his belt, [Frank] would have no problem keeping balanced on four jet engines.
Such a skilled rider means that control wouldn’t really be needed on the board. We’re betting that the only electronics are the remote throttle control and the Engine Control Computers (ECU) needed to keep the jets running and synchronized. The two electric ducted fans on the sides of the Flyboard Air appear to be running all the time, only shutting down when [Frank] lands the board.
One final thought – taking off and landing a jet vertically is difficult. Ground effects destabilize the craft. Engines can suck in their own exhaust, stalling them. These are problems faced by the harrier jump jet and the joint strike fighter. [Frank’s ] solution is not never get too close to the ground. If you watch closely, he takes off and lands from a perforated metal platform mounted off the back of a van. The metal doesn’t reflect enough thrust to cause the Flyboard to become unstable or stall.
So is the video real? We think so. This is an amazing achievement for [Frank Zapata]. Is it practical or safe? Heck no! Nor is it cheap – those engines cost €8,845.00 each. That said, we’d love a chance to ride the Flyboard Air – after a few hours of training on the original Flyboard of course.So you heard that JavaScript is the best programming language and you've decided to become a JavaScript Warrior? LearnQuery will launch you on a wild adventure where you will learn how to use JS swords. Swords? Yeah, swords! You'll find them, believe me. It's an adventure after all.
Maybe you've wanted to learn JavaScript but have only had bad experiences with simple tutorials that you complete without putting much thought into and that don't end up teaching you anything except syntax? If this is the case - you're in the right place.
The story is this - we wanted to train new JavaScript developers in the best possible manner. We wanted a standard learning path to learn quality JavaScript development. We looked around, couldn't find a solution for our problem - and so decided to scratch our own itch and create one ourselves.
Everybody knows jQuery
If you're a web developer, chances are you're familiar with jQuery. Most developers know how to use the popular library, but a very small fraction of them know how jQuery really works internally. This was our starting point - to teach JavaScript and jQuery at the same time. And so, learnQuery was born.
LearnQuery is an open source learning exercise that teaches developers the basics of JavaScript by building their own jQuery clone. Welcome to the Infinum JavaScript team lad. Shall we begin?
It was developed with the main objective of imparting a strong JavaScript foundation that allows simple and fast mastering of complicated JavaScript concepts. The final product is your own jQuery clone, with a subset of functionality that the actual jQuery has. The main purpose of completing this exercise is that afterwards you'll have a pretty good impression of how jQuery works under the hood.
LearnQuery structure
In order to successfully solve learnQuery, a student is expected to have a basic knowledge of programming.
LearnQuery is divided into a number of tasks and gradually introduces core JavaScript concepts. The tasks become more challenging as one progresses and by passing through them a student is forced to constantly acquire new knowledge that builds on what was learned in previous tasks.
Each task has its own folder with the following structure:
00.example: - spec example.js - src example.js runner.html
The src folder contains a.js file in which a student must write a function to perform the requested task.
The spec folder contains a.js file which applies specs to the written function. Students are encouraged to write several specs on their own.
The specs are written using the Jasmine framework for testing JavaScript code.
LearnQuery contains the following tasks:
Simple selector CSS manipulation CSS class manipulation DOM manipulation AJAX request Event listeners Additional event listener trigger
Event delegation Make learnQuery
Solving learnQuery
One example task of medium difficulty is provided, and has already been solved. This task introduces basic JavaScript concepts that are applied in subsequent tasks.
Tasks are described with very little or no text at all (just a function definition). Student's functions must behave just like corresponding jQuery functions.
The goal is to encourage students to do research on their own. Additionally, a student can review the given specs, and from the test descriptions they should be able to deduce how a function should behave. Jasmine syntax is obvious, so it's easy to learn and specs are easy to read. For example:
it ('should cover small numbers', function () { expect ( fibonacciCalculator. compute ( 0 )). toBe ( 1 ); expect ( fibonacciCalculator. compute ( 1 )). toBe ( 1 ); });
Writing your own specs is an important task because it encourages you to think about the corner cases. By writing specs, a student discovers his bugs and gets familiar with debugging (the best way to learn is from your mistakes).
Mentorship
LearnQuery can be solved without a help of a mentor, but internally, we assign a mentor to each student. A student writes his own specs which allows him to experience the full learnQuery potential. In the other words, a mentor is not necessary, but it's recommended.
A mentor is a person who advises a student, teaches him good programming practices, and reviews his code. After a code review, a mentor will point out the flaws and/or propose a better solution.
A mentor covers the things that can't be tested automatically, like, for example, code quality. Additionally, a mentor's feedback will provide a student with valuable information that will help a student to progress rapidly from task to task.
Don't give up
Solving learnQuery will probably induce emotional highs and lows. You might require an entire day to solve a very simple task. This is not wasted time, however, because it will help you gain very valuable experience.
Please do not give up!!!
We believe that in the end you will definitely feel the effort is worth it. Solving LearnQuery will probably take a beginner student about two weeks.
Influenced by: Viking Code School Blog
LearnQuery is an open source project and is available on GitHub. There is also an online version that is available on the LearnQuery website.—Blake—
One of the best things about owning my own company was, occasionally, being able to work from home. I may have to work, but I got to do it from the comfort of my own study. And in my pajamas, if I so chose. Which, on this particular day, I chose. Danny and I just couldn’t work from home on the same day.
Because…reasons.
At the sound of the doorbell, I stood up and cracked my back. What had it been last time? Jehovah’s Witnesses, I though. It was probably the Mormon’s this time. They seemed to coordinate, somehow.
To my surprise, however, it was Brianna, looking distressed, on the other side of the door. As soon as I opened it, she stepped inside, wiping at her teary face.
Maybe Dad had kicked it with unexpected haste. “Bri? What happened?”
She sniffled. “I’m not a match.”
“A match?”
“For Dad! I got tested to see if I could donate a lobe of my liver.”
I stared at her in shock. “You were going to donate a piece of your liver? To him?”
She glared at me. “He’s our father, Blake. I’d do the same for you or Mom or…” At least she had the good sense to hesitate over the Brother-Who-Would-Not-Be-Named.
I sighed softly. “Bri…”
“Don’t ‘Bri’ me!” Wow, does she sound like Mom. “If he doesn’t get a direct donation, he’s going to die, Blake. He can’t go on the transplant list—“
“Because he’s an alcoholic.”
“So he has to get a donation from one of us. You have to get tested.”
My eyes widened. “Me? I wouldn’t give that man a dirty tissue much less a piece of my liver.”
“So you’ll just let him die?!”
I sighed harshly and scrubbed a hand over my face. “What do you think he’d do if I did give him a piece of my liver? Do you think he’d change? Turn his life around, get his job back, quit drinking? No. He’d burn through it just like he did his own—if he even kept up with the anti-rejection therapy to begin with.”
“Blake,” my sister said pleadingly.
I took her arm and guided her over to the couch. “Brianna, why is this so important to you? It’s not like Dad has ever been great to you. You only got treated slightly better than me.”
“He’s our father. Our blood.”
“Yeah, that didn’t stop him from shitting on me or disowning me, did it? Who, exactly, are you trying to save—the father we have or the father you wish we had, Bri?”
Brianna buried her face in her hands.
That evening, long after Brianna had left, I sat in the living room. In the kitchen, I could hear Danny putting together something for dinner.
|
mask identities are readily granted.
* It is not possible to calculate or even estimate within several orders of magnitude the quantity of data involved in 2,776 incidents, nor the number of people affected, even if you know whether you're dealing with metadata or content. A small but unknown number of incidents -- those involving unlawful search terms but obtaining no results -- do not collect, process or disseminate any data at all and thus have zero privacy impact. Other incidents may involve only a few surveillance subjects but includ large volumes of data, either because collection takes place over a span of time or because the previously collected data set is very large. One "incident" in the May 2012 report involved over 3,000 database files, and each file contained an unknown (but typically very large) number of records. Another episode -- not counted as an "incident" at all -- collected data on all calls from Washington, DC for an unknown period of time. There is no way to tell from the report alone, but based on the routine procedures and scale of NSA operations it is likely that some of these individual incidents (1 of 2,776) affected hundreds of thousands of people.
* By the way, as again the story notes, the 2,776 cover only Ft. Meade and nearby offices. There would be substantially more incidents in an audit that included the SIGINT Directorate's huge regional operations centers in Texas, Georgia, Colorado and Hawaii -- and the activities of other directorates such as Technology, and such as Information Assurance, that also touch enormous volumes of data.
* It's fair game to take a full data set and challenge a reporter's (or researcher's) analysis of the data. But this was not a full data set and it's a mistake for David to think he can suss out the whole story from the limited number of documents we posted alone. I drew upon other documents and filled the gaps with many hours of old-fashioned interviews. I took some primary material, combined it with other leads, and applied journalism in order to understand what the material says, what it doesn't say, and what inferences can and can't be drawn from it. That's among the reasons we don't just dump documents into the public domain. There are not many stories in the Snowden archive that can be told by documents alone.
* Despite all this, David is surely right to say the error rate is very low in percentage terms. That is important in assessing individual performance, and maybe that's the end of the story for you. That's your choice. For some people, public policy question considers the absolute number as well. We might not accept the more mundane harm of 1 million lost airline bags a year, even if 99.9 percent of 1 billion bags checked annually made it to their destinations. Some systems have to be designed with less fault tolerance than others. That's a political and social decision, but we have been unable to debate it until the Snowden disclosures.
* Part of the importance of this story is that the government worked so hard to obscure it. In public releases of semi-annual reports to Congress, the administration blacked out ALL statistical data. (By the way, note that the tables in the 14-page document I posted are unclassified. In the DOJ/DNI report to Congress, they were marked Top Secret // Special Intelligence, which made public release impossible and restricted the readership in Congress.) Alongside the refusal to release any data, the government left the very strong impression that mistakes were vanishingly rare and abuse non-existent. That may depend on the definition of "abuse." Marcy Wheeler quotes a tv interview in which I discussed that and makes some additional points here.Roman Evgenev / Shutterstock.com Today's teenagers don't seem to care much about hitting the open road, scoring a six-pack with a fake ID, or asking their peers out on dates.
According to a new study from the psychologists Jean Twenge and Heejung Park, teenagers instead prefer to sit at home, avoid drugs and alcohol, and scroll through a litany of social-media apps.
The study, published in the journal Child Development, analyzed survey responses from 8.3 million teenagers between 1976 and 2016. Overwhelmingly, today's teens were found to be less likely to drive, work for pay, go on dates, have sex, or go out without their parents.
By the early 2010s, the researchers wrote, 12th-graders were going out less often than eighth-graders did in the early 1990s and going on dates about as often as 10th-graders did in the early 1990s. Kids were also trying alcohol later and having sex far less often: About 54% of high-school students in 1991 reported having had sex, while only 41% did in the early 2010s.
"This isn't just about parenting," Twenge told Business Insider. "It's also about teens themselves, and the economy, and fertility rates, and people living longer."
Of course, since the study's conclusions are based on personal survey responses, the findings may not apply broadly to all of Generation Z, generally defined as people born in the early 1990s to mid-2000s. There are also bound to be members of the generation for whom the traits don't apply, as with any demographic study.
But Twenge chalked the findings up to an overall shift in the way society has operated. She is the author of "iGen: Why Today's Super-Connected Kids are Growing Up Less Rebellious, More Tolerant, Less Happy — and Completely Unprepared for Adulthood," which explores the conditions in which today's young people are being raised. Contrary to popular belief, Twenge said, teens aren't lazy or square, but are a product of their environment, like every other generation.
In the mid-20th century, she said, people adopted what evolutionary psychologists call a "fast-life strategy." Life spans were shorter and work was more imperative, so kids grew up relatively quickly without as much parental supervision. By 2000, though, the US had taken up a "slow-life strategy" — people were living longer, resources were more abundant, and parents started raising their kids to stay kids longer.
Because there seems to be less of a need for modern teens to become adults, Twenge and Park's research suggests that today's 18-year-old more closely resembles a 15-year-old of the 1970s or '80s.
However, one of the most disturbing characteristics of Generation Z, or "iGen" in Twenge's parlance, is a suicide rate that has surpassed the homicide rate in that age group. Twenge thinks smartphone use may play a crucial role in contributing to that. Gen Z is the first generation to be raised according to this slow-life strategy amid the prominence of smartphones. (Its members, after all, are the first to have no concept of life without the internet.) Instead of working or playing outside, teens are more likely to feel isolated and tethered to their devices.
"Today's teens may go to fewer parties and spend less time together in person, but when they do congregate, they document their hangouts relentlessly — on Snapchat, Instagram, Facebook," Twenge wrote recently in The Atlantic. "Those not invited to come along are keenly aware of it."
But getting rid of smartphones shouldn't be parents' first goal if they want to safeguard their kids' mental health — according to the study's findings, Twenge said, it should be encouraging independence. If kids are more concerned with working or getting involved in their community, they'll naturally have less idle time to fill with their smartphone.
At the same time, not all of Gen Z's traits are problems that need to be solved, she said, like the lower incidences of drinking and sex.
"Let's have those go to zero," Twenge said. "That would be just fine."This week is an excellent example of the changes occurring in Calgary’s economic structure, and exactly how fast they’re happening.
Monday saw the launch of a program pairing the University of Calgary’s Haskayne School of Business and local company Beaver Drilling that aims to tackle challenges facing the energy services sector.
The Avatar Program curriculum is designed to accelerate innovation in the drilling space using technology and artificial intelligence — all with a focus to transform the cost curve and give employees the necessary tools and coaching to succeed.
This was followed Wednesday by an announcement of the Hunter family’s donation of $40 million to establish the Hunter Hub for Entrepreneurial Thinking at the U of C.
That same day, Aspen Properties and San Francisco-based RocketSpace hosted a dinner in the old PanCanadian Petroleum building on 9th Avenue S.W., where the tech company intends set up a Canadian hub later this year.
RocketSpace has worked with more than 1,000 startups that now collectively have a value of US$100 billion. It’s establishing 12 technology centres around the world, including Calgary.
In all cases, it’s about Calgary’s — and Alberta’s — economic future moving in a direction that will offset exposure to the volatility of the commodity price cycle over the short, medium and long term.
One road — the Hunter direction — is longer term because it involves a pedagogical shift at the U of C. RocketSpace will take flight within months, while Beaver Drilling is already making change happen.
At the nub of all that’s happening is the shift toward collaboration across disciplines that previously didn’t occur.
The Hunter initiative is about breaking down silos inherent in the university structure — by no means unique to the U of C — to create an interdisciplinary educational system that encourages students to take courses in other departments and faculties that augment their core focus of study.
“When we did our consultation for our energized Eyes High strategy, this is what the students said they wanted to see happen,” U of C president Elizabeth Cannon said Wednesday. “The business students want to work with the engineering students, with the arts students and social work.
“The creation of the Hunter Hub really provides a mechanism for both a physical space and the programming to break down those faculty silos and make sure we get everybody together and build that (entrepreneurial) culture on our campus.”
Think of it as creating graduates whose skill set is like a Swiss Army knife.
The U of C’s involvement — facilitated by the Hunter family’s generous donation — is critical to establishing a vibrant, innovation ecosystem.
In places like Silicon Valley, Austin, Texas, Boston, the Research Triangle in North Carolina or Communitech in the Kitchener-Waterloo region of Ontario, a common denominator is the presence of strong, research-focused universities.
If there was a way to create an innovation corridor linking Calgary and the University of Alberta — it could happen with a high speed rail link — the horsepower of what is possible would be beyond formidable.
The good news is that an entrepreneurial mindset has long been in Calgary. It’s what has led the energy sector to where it is today, and it was through Doug Hunter’s successful business ventures that Wednesday’s donation, following a $5-million contribution to the Haskayne School in 2013, was possible.
The challenge, as his son Derrick said Wednesday, is that capital, talent and office space have overwhelmed other sectors in the Calgary economy.
“It’s easier for a large energy company to raise $1 billion than it is for a brilliant software startup to raise $1 million,” he said.
That is going to change.
Whether it’s applying advanced technology to what is deemed an ‘old’ industry, as Beaver Drilling is doing, the excitement evident at weekly Rainforest meetings or exposure to the companies clustering around RocketSpace, it’s hard to miss the new energy bubbling in Calgary.
RocketSpace is here because it is impressed with the talent, the capital and the ideas being generated in Calgary. The importance of these types of physical spaces, like RocketSpace is creating here, cannot be understated.
“Startups succeed with other startups around them,” said RocketSpace executive Michele McConomy.
RocketSpace has a particular philosophy that will work well in Calgary. The firm calls it a dual-sided marketplace approach. Startups need scale to succeed and corporations need innovation to survive and improve their competitiveness.
To qualify, companies need to be funded, have a product and customers.
RocketSpace can accelerate the growth — because it has become a place corporations look to when seeking solutions and new ideas to fuel their businesses.
In Calgary, McConomy sees opportunity not just to build on what’s happening in the energy space as it becomes more tied to the digitized world and artificial intelligence, but other areas such as health care, logistics operations and agri-tech.
Will all of this suddenly pull the province out of its economic doldrums, drive down the unemployment rate and diversify the economy? That’s not possible. There will be hiccups and there will be failures.
But something is happening in Calgary. People are talking about the re-emergence of a vibe on Stephen Avenue and — for better or worse — traffic is picking up.
It’s taken some time for the city to shake off the impact of the past two years and find the strength to look ahead at what’s possible rather than lament what was.
Diane Hunter, a former alderman and a director of the Hunter Foundation, said it best Wednesday.
“This is Calgary. We make things happen,” she said.
Yes we do.
Eventually.
Deborah Yedlin is a Calgary Herald columnist
dyedlin@postmedia.comDiego Valeri reached a huge milestone when he tied the Portland Timbers' all-time club record for career goals scored last Friday against the New York Red Bulls.
It took him just 21 minutes to break the record Wednesday night.
Valeri netted his 52nd career goal for Portland and his fifth goal in five games as the Timbers (11-9-7, 40 points) beat the Colorado Rapids (6-14-4, 22 points) 2-1 in front of 21,144 fans at Providence Park.
Portland has now won three-straight games at home. The Timbers also jumped into second place in the Western Conference standings with the win, though all but one other team in the West holds games in hand on Portland.
"It's a big three points," Timbers coach Caleb Porter said. "That puts us in a good spot."
The Timbers were expected to win Wednesday night. They were on their home turf and competing against a struggling Colorado team still reeling from the recent firing of longtime head coach Pablo Mastroeni.
And the Timbers clearly dominated the match. But they also allowed Colorado to remain firmly in the game due to two glaring mistakes.
"It felt less convincing than we want," Porter said. "I thought we showed maturity in not conceding the (game-tying goal), but we should have certainly scored several other goals to make the margin bigger."
Portland found the opening goal in the 21st minute when Valeri headed-home a pass from Vytas. With the goal, Valeri not only set the Timbers club record in career goals scored, but also set a new individual record for goals in a single season and jumped to third in MLS with 15 goals this year.
The Timbers doubled their lead two minutes later when Darlington Nagbe controlled a pass from Vytas in the box before turning and firing an incredible shot into the far corner of the net.
But the Timbers didn't do enough to put the game away after that.
The Rapids pulled a goal back in the 28th minute when Lawrence Olum turned possession over with a bad pass and then failed to close down Mohammed Saeid. Saeid easily dribbled to the top of the box before placing an open shot into the corner of the net to close the gap. It was Saeid's first goal in 72 MLS appearances.
Moments later, Valeri was pulled to the ground in the box by Colorado defender Mike da Fonte. Referee David Gantar didn't immediately make a call, but instead asked for video review and ultimately awarded the Timbers a penalty after watching the replay.
Valeri, who is one of two players that generally take penalties for the Timbers, surprisingly handed the ball off to David Guzman, who sent his first-ever PK for the Timbers wide.
"I don't know why he took the PK. Valeri takes our PKs," Porter said. "We all know that. Valeri and (Fanendo) Adi. They know that and when he stepped up to take the PK, I turned to the bench and said, 'I don't know what's going on here.' But Valeri makes those decisions and he decided to give him the PK."
Guzman was also issued a yellow card later in the match and will be suspended for Portland's rivalry game against the Seattle Sounders.
But despite the scoreline, the Rapids never came all that close to finding the game-tying goal. Portland controlled 65.5 percent of possession, completed 89 percent of their passes and outshot Colorado 17-11 in the match.
With the win, the Timbers raised the stakes for Sunday's rivalry match on the road at Seattle. Portland will enter the game just one point behind the first-place Sounders in the Western Conference standings.
"We're pushing for the top," Porter said. "We want to be fighting for the top until the season is done."
-- Jamie Goldberg | jgoldberg@oregonian.com
503-853-3761 | @ jamiebgoldbergVocal training through singing and acting lessons is known to modify acoustic parameters of the voice. While the effects of singing training have been well documented, the role of acting experience on the singing voice remains unclear. In two experiments, we used linear mixed models to examine the relationships between the relative amounts of acting and singing experience on the acoustics and perception of the male singing voice. In Experiment 1, 12 male vocalists were recorded while singing with five different emotions, each with two intensities. Acoustic measures of pitch accuracy, jitter, and harmonics-to-noise ratio (HNR) were examined. Decreased pitch accuracy and increased jitter, indicative of a lower “voice quality,” were associated with more years of acting experience, while increased pitch accuracy was associated with more years of singing lessons. We hypothesized that the acoustic deviations exhibited by more experienced actors was an intentional technique to increase the genuineness or truthfulness of their emotional expressions. In Experiment 2, listeners rated vocalists’ emotional genuineness. Vocalists with more years of acting experience were rated as more genuine than vocalists with less acting experience. No relationship was reported for singing training. Increased genuineness was associated with decreased pitch accuracy, increased jitter, and a higher HNR. These effects may represent a shifting of priorities by male vocalists with acting experience to emphasize emotional genuineness over pitch accuracy or voice quality in their singing performances.
The goals of a singer are varied and many: accurate pitch reproduction, desired voice quality, clear intelligibility, precise timing, and intended emotional inflection; these factors are not independent, and how they are prioritized may reflect differences in the training and experience of a performer (Ostwald, 2005; Bunch, 2009). Two types of training that may differentially affect vocal acoustic goals are singing training and acting experience. Numerous studies have investigated the acoustics of the expert singing voice (Sundberg, 2003), and the effects of short-term training on singing acoustics (Smith, 1963; Brown et al., 2000; Awan and Ensslen, 2010). The acoustic qualities of the trained actor’s speaking voice have also been studied, though less extensively (Nawka et al., 1997; Bele, 2006), as have the effects of short-term acting training on speech acoustics (Timmermans et al., 2005; Walzak et al., 2008). To the authors’ knowledge, there has only been one study that has considered the influence of acting training on acoustic measures of voice quality (Walzak et al., 2008). In addition, there are no studies of which we are aware that have compared the relative amounts of singing training and acting experience on the acoustics or perception of the singing voice. This is peculiar given the popularity of opera and musical theater, which often require both singing and acting experience. Amongst vocalists with a high level of acting experience, there may be a reprioritization of vocal goals toward emotional genuineness over pitch accuracy or voice quality. In contrast, vocalists with more years of singing training may instead prioritize pitch accuracy and voice quality. In this paper we sought to examine the relationship between acting experience and singing training on the acoustics and perception of the male singing voice.
Pitch accuracy may be considered one of the most salient perceptual dimensions on which we rate the quality of the singing voice. In a national survey of singing pedagogues, intonation, the ability to sing in tune, was regarded as the most important factor in assessing singing talent (Watts et al., 2003). Trained singers are able to reproduce known melodies with a high degree of pitch accuracy, varying between 30 to 42 cents on average (Larrouy-Maestri et al., 2013). Pitch accuracy in the general population has received considerable interest within the last 10 years (for a review, see Hutchins and Peretz, 2012). Although untrained singers can be quite accurate in terms of pitch when singing familiar and unfamiliar tunes (Dalla Bella et al., 2007; Pfordresher et al., 2010), they fare worse than trained singers when producing single pitches; deviating on average by 1.3 semitones from the target pitch compared to 0.5 semitones for trained singers (Ternstrom et al., 1988; Amir et al., 2003; Hutchins and Peretz, 2012). Non-musicians have also been characterized as being “imprecise,” as their fundamental frequency (F 0 ) for a given pitch can vary across repeated productions (Pfordresher et al., 2010). Thus, the effect of singing training on pitch accuracy appears to depend on the musical context; that is, melodies vs. single pitches.
Where inaccurate pitch production occurs is likely to vary with the structure of the melody. One likely candidate though is the first note of the melody. In a study of untrained child vocalists and trained adult singers, Howard and Angus (1997) found that children were most inaccurate in the pitch of the first note of the melody. In the present study we also examine pitch measures of the first note. How pitch inaccuracy is quantified is an important methodological decision. During vocalization, the rapid opening and closing of the glottis produces a dynamic F 0 contour that varies over time (Fujisaki, 1983). While mean F 0 is often reported, this measure does not capture the range of vocalized F 0. In this study we examine the mean, minimum (floor), and maximum (ceiling) F 0 of the first note in an effort to capture the true range of pitch accuracy. What causes inaccurate pitch production is not fully understood, though it is thought that issues related to voice training, such as poor air support, vocal tension, lack of energy, and poor voice placement are determining factors and that pitch accuracy improves through singing training (Telfer, 1995; Willis and Kenny, 2008). However it remains unclear whether other forms of artistic experience, specifically acting experience, have an effect on singing pitch accuracy. One phenomenon in which acting experience may play a role is through the reprioritization of pitch accuracy during phrasing.
In musical theater, phrasing has been described as “the singer’s personal stamp on the song,” where “one performer may sing the lyric with absolute fidelity to the song as written, singing it pitch for pitch, ⋯ while another singer may absolutely transform the same song through her variations” (Deer and Dal Vera, 2008, p. 226). Taylor (2012, p. 34) writes that “performers are not completely circumscribed by the musical text in the meanings and emotions they communicate, as intonation, dynamic range and pitch are relative concepts that are stylistically interpreted.” Thus, phrasing has been suggested to include changes to the intonation, intensity, and pitch from that of the notated score, with the effect of tailoring the meaning and emotions communicated to the individual desires of the singer. As vocalists gain greater acting experience, they may work to refine or emphasize their individuality, which may lead to an increase in deviations from the notated score. Thus, vocalists with a high level of acting experience may deviate more from the notated score than vocalists with less acting experience. Where in the melody these intentional deviations may occur is unknown. However, the first note of the melody is again a likely candidate, as any such deviation at this point would be particularly salient to the listener and may set up expectations about the quality or nature of the ensuing performance.
Artistic phrasing may encompass a broader range of perturbations than pitch and intensity, and include factors related to the perception of “voice quality.” Two acoustic measures that are thought to index the perception of voice quality are jitter (Juslin and Laukka, 2001) and harmonics-to-noise ratio (HNR). The set of acoustic measures thought to capture vocal quality is debated (Raphael et al., 2011). Other perceptual qualities, such as harshness, tenseness, and creakiness have also been implicated in affecting voice quality (Gobl and Nì, 2003). Jitter refers to fine-scale perturbations in F 0 caused by variations in the glottal pressure cycle (Lieberman, 1961; Scherer, 1989). HNR is a measure of the amount of noise in phonation, and refers to the ratio of energy contained at harmonics of F 0 compared to energy that is not (noise; Yumoto et al., 1982). Jitter and HNR are used to assess vocal pathology, with older and pathologically “rough” voices characterized by higher jitter and lower HNR values (Wilcox and Horii, 1980; Ferrand, 2002). HNR has also been associated with the perception of vocal attractiveness (Bruckert et al., 2010). Our investigation examined these spectral features in male vocalists. Previous research suggests that the presence or absence of the “singer’s formant,” a characteristic peak near 3 kHz in the vocal energy spectrum, varies across genders and may be absent in higher female voices (Bartholomew, 1934; Sundberg, 1974; Weiss et al., 2001). As these differences may have added additional variance to our spectral measures, our investigation focused on male vocalists. We operationalize phrasing as deviations from the notated score (e.g., F 0 accuracy, intonation), as well as spectral perturbations of the voice that relate to voice quality.
How a performer’s use of phrasing may affect the perception of the singing voice is unknown, though one candidate is emotional genuineness (Krumhuber and Kappas, 2005; Langner et al., 2010; Scherer et al., 2013). Genuineness refers to the degree to which a listener or observer thinks or feels the vocalist’s expression is a truthful reflection of the vocalist’s physiological, mental, and emotional state. This quality is of particular importance to actors, who use the pejorative term indicating to refer to a non-truthful performance. Katselas (2008, p. 109) writes that “to indicate is to show, I repeat, show the audience emotion, character through external means ⋯ without really feeling or experiencing the moment. It’s a token, a symbol, an indication, the shell of the thing without internal connection or actual experience.” We hypothesize that vocalists with greater acting experience may sacrifice accurate singing production and voice quality, as measured through increased F 0 deviations, more jitter, and a lower HNR, to achieve greater levels of emotional genuineness.
In this paper we report two experiments that examined the relationships between the relative amounts of acting and singing experience on the acoustics and perception of the singing voice. The first experiment involved acoustical analyses of short phrases that were sung with different emotions and intensities. We expected that vocalists with more years of acting experience would show decreased pitch accuracy, with an F 0 (mean, floor, ceiling) further from the target note pitch, and lower voice quality (increased jitter, lower HNR), relative to vocalists with fewer years of acting training. We also expected that vocalists with more years of singing training would exhibit increased pitch accuracy, with an F 0 (mean, floor, ceiling) closer to the target note pitch, and potentially higher voice quality (higher average HNR, decreased jitter), relative to vocalists with fewer years of singing training. The second experiment examined listeners’ perception of emotional genuineness from vocalist’s singing performances. Listeners rated the emotional genuineness of recordings that were used in Experiment 1. We expected that vocalists with more years of acting experience would be rated as more emotionally genuine, and that these ratings would be associated with increased F 0 deviations, more jitter, and a lower HNR.
In both experiments we examined these relationships using repeated measures linear mixed models (LMMs). This form of analysis is particularly suited to a repeated measures design where covariates are of interest, as the use of repeated measures in traditional multiple regression violates the assumption of independence (Bland and Altman, 1994). LMMs also offer advantages over linear regression and analyses of covariance, allowing for the specification of random intercepts, with the fitting leading to independent intercepts for each vocalist or listener.
Experiment 1
Participants were required to sing short statements with five different emotional intentions (calm, happy, sad, angry, and fearful) and two intensities (normal, strong) while having their vocal productions recorded. We predicted that vocalists with more years of acting experience would produce a less pitch-accurate performance, have a lower HNR and more jitter – indicative of lower voice quality – relative to vocalists with fewer years of acting experience. We also predicted that more highly trained singers, as indexed by their years of singing lessons, would produce a more pitch-accurate performance, a higher HNR, and less jitter – indicative of higher voice quality – relative to vocalists with fewer years of singing training. We selected years of acting experience over acting lessons, as actors’ primary form of training in our sample was through active drama performance.
Method
Participants
Twelve male vocalists (mean age = 26.3, SD = 3.8) with varying amounts of private or group singing lessons (M = 4.8, SD = 3.7), and varying levels of acting experience (M = 10.8, SD = 4.0), were recruited from the Toronto acting community. A correlation of vocalists’ years of singing lessons with their years of acting experience was not significant r(10) = 0.07, p = 0.84, indicating there was no relationship between extent of training in the two domains of interest. Normality of the data were also confirmed with Shapiro–Wilk tests on age (p > 0.05), years of acting experience (p > 0.05), and years of singing lessons (p > 0.05). Participants were native English speakers, and were paid $50 CAD for their participation.
Stimuli and apparatus
Two neutral English statements were used (“Kids are talking by the door,” “Dogs are sitting by the door”). Statements were seven syllables in length and were matched in word frequency and familiarity using the MRC psycholinguistic database (Coltheart, 1981). Two isochronous melodies were used; one for the positively valenced emotions, calm and happy (F3, F3, A3, A3, F3, E3, F3), and one for the negatively valenced emotions, sad, angry, and fearful (F3, F3, Ab3, Ab3, F3, E3, F3). Both melodies used piano MIDI tones of fixed acoustic intensity, consisting of six eighth notes (300 ms) and ending with a quarter note (600 ms), and were encoded at 16 bit/48 kHz (wav format). Positively and negatively valenced melodies were in the major and minor modes respectively (Dalla Bella et al., 2001).
The stimulus timeline consisted of three main epochs: Task presentation (4500 ms), Count-in (2400 ms), and Vocalization (4800 ms). In the task presentation epoch, the statement and emotion to be produced by the vocalist were presented on screen as text for 4500 ms. Once the text had been on screen for 1000 ms, the melody to be used by the vocalist was sounded (2400 ms). The count-in epoch presented a visual count-in timer (“1,” “2,” “3,” “4”) at an IOI of 600 ms. The start of the vocalize epoch was signaled with a green circle that was displayed for 2400 ms. The stimulus timeline was preceded by an auditory beep (500 ms) and 1000 ms of silence, and ended with an auditory beep (500 ms). Temporal accuracy of the presentation software was confirmed with the Black Box Toolkit (Plant et al., 2004).
Stimuli were presented visually on a 15 inch Macbook Pro running Windows XP SP3 and auditorily over KRK Rocket 5 speakers, controlled by Matlab, 2009b and the Psychophysics Toolbox (3.0.8 SVN 1648, Brainard, 1997). Recordings were performed in a sound-attenuated recording studio equipped with sound baffles. Vocal output was recorded with an AKG C414 B-XLS cardioid microphone with a pop filter, positioned 30 cm from the vocalist, and digitized on a Mac Pro computer with Pro Tools at 16 bit/48 kHz, and a Digidesign 003 mixing workstation.
Design and procedure
The experimental design was a 5 (Emotion: calm, happy, sad, angry, fearful) × 2 (Statement: kids, dogs) × 2 (Intensity: normal, strong) × 2 (Repetition) within-subjects design, with 40 trials per participant. A dialog script was used with vocalists. Each emotion was described, along with a vignette describing a scenario involving that emotion. Trials were blocked by emotion. Two presentations orders of emotion were used, and counterbalanced across participants (calm, happy, sad, angry fearful, or sad, angry, fearful, calm, happy). Within emotion blocks, trials were blocked by statement and counterbalanced across participants. For all vocalists, strong intensity productions followed normal intensity productions. An intensity factor was included to capture a broader range of emotional expression (Diener et al., 1985; Sonnemans and Frijda, 1994), which has been shown to affect the acoustics of vocal emotional productions (Banse and Scherer, 1996; Juslin and Laukka, 2001). It was emphasized that vocalists were to produce genuine expressions of emotion, and that they were to prepare themselves physiologically using method acting or emotional memory techniques so as to induce the desired emotion prior to recording. Time was provided between each emotion to allow vocalists to reach the intended emotional state. This form of induction procedure has been used previously in the creation of emotional stimuli (Bänziger et al., 2012). The concept of indicating was also explained, and vocalists were instructed not to produce an indicated performance. Vocalists were told to sing the basic notated pitches, but that they were free to vary acoustic characteristics in order to convey the desired emotion in a genuine manner. Vocalists were standing during all productions. Vocalists were allowed to repeat a given trial until they were comfortable with their production. The final two productions were used in subsequent analyses.
Analyses
Recordings were edited using Adobe Audition CS6. Vocal intensity was peak-normalized within each vocalist to retain acoustic intensity variability across the emotions. Recording levels were adjusted across vocalists to prevent clipping, given the range in vocal intensity across participants. Acoustic recordings were analyzed with Praat (Boersma and Weenink, 2013). Fundamental frequency (F 0 mean, floor, and ceiling), HNR, and jitter (local) were extracted. To assess pitch accuracy, F 0 of the first note of the melody was examined (M duration = 225.3 ms, SD = 85.35 ms). Three measures of pitch accuracy in the first note were examined: F 0 mean is the average pitch of the first note; F 0 floor is the minimum pitch value during the first note, while F 0 ceiling is the maximum pitch value during the first note. Pitch contours of the first note were converted to cents to provide a normalized measure of inaccuracy from the intended pitch (F3 = 174.614 Hz); a value of 0 cents would indicate perfect accuracy (174.614 Hz), 100 cents would indicate a sharp performance of 1 semitone above the target pitch (184.997 Hz), and -100 cents would indicate a flat performance of 1 semitone below the target pitch (164.814 Hz). Note onsets and offsets were marked in Praat with respect to characteristic changes in the spectrogram, acoustic intensity, and pitch contours. Ten percent of the samples were checked by a second rater (mean inter-rater boundary time difference = 2.1 ms, SD = 2.2 ms). HNR and jitter measures were taken across the voiced portions of the entire utterance.
Statistical analyses
Linear mixed models were fitted using the MIXED function in SPSS 22.0. In Experiment 1, all models were fitted with a diagonal covariance structure for the repeated covariance type, which is the default structure for repeated measures in SPSS 22.0. In Experiment 1, analogous models were also fitted using AR(1) and ARH(1), more suited to longitudinal repeated measures, and the more conservative unstructured covariance matrix (Field, 2009). Models fitted with AR(1) and ARH(1) yielded poorer fits, while models fitted with unstructured covariance could not be assessed as the number of parameters to be fitted exceeded the number of observations. Random effects were fitted with a variance components (VC) covariance structure, as is suggested for random intercept models (Field, 2009). All other statistical tests were carried out in Matlab, 2013b or SPSS 22.0.
Results
Separate repeated measures LMMs were conducted to assess how vocal experience predicted acoustic measures of the singing voice. Five acoustic measures were examined: F 0 (mean, floor, and ceiling), Jitter, and HNR. Repeated measures LMMs were used as each vocalist was recorded singing 40 times, with Vocalist (12) entered as a random effect (intercept), and Emotion (5 levels), Intensity (2), Statement ( |
000 account holders. Swiss law subjects any banker who reveals names on private accounts to fines and even imprisonment. They will only deliver names as part of bilateral treaty protocols, a slow process undermined by heavy evidentiary burdens implemented by the Swiss Parliament and its courts.
This is a dilemma for Swiss banks, but it’s unclear why the Justice Department should care about it, instead of putting its own pressure on Credit Suisse to deliver the names. Yet Monday’s plea deal did not lead to any more account holders being revealed. “It is a mystery to me why the U.S. government didn’t require as part of the agreement that the bank cough up some of the names of the U.S. clients with secret Swiss bank accounts,” said Sen. Levin in a statement. In 2009, Swiss bank UBS paid a $780 million fine over tax evasion and did reveal 4,700 account holder names. But in this case, Credit Suisse only had to agree to help with treaty requests and information on where accounts got transferred when the bank shut them down. So instead of getting the names, DOJ will have to scurry around and play the game of tracking them down with another bank, and so on.
Levin’s argument is that the government fails to use its most aggressive tools to force compliance on everyone associated with tax evasion, including those actually evading the taxes. Treaty requests lead to “this endless negotiation with the Swiss about their laws instead of implementing our laws,” Levin said at the hearing in February. And indeed, a recent action by the IRS shows that the administration has been less than maximally aggressive on fighting tax evasion. They delayed enforcement of a signature anti-tax evasion law for two years, as long as banks make a “good-faith effort” to comply. Under the law, foreign banks are required to turn over account names, but with the IRS implementing this hands-off strategy, we can expect little to come of it for a couple years.
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To really see the disconnect here, consider that the National Security Agency has allegedly sucked up every phone call made in the Bahamas – a known tax haven – in cooperation with the Drug Enforcement Agency to interdict drug trafficking, but apparently with no cooperation with the Treasury Department or other agencies to fight money laundering or tax evasion. I don’t actually want the NSA to start tapping communications to find tax evaders, but the dichotomy does reveal government priorities. They will stop at nothing to fight the drug war, where the consequences fall mainly on minorities and the poor. But they pull their punches when it comes to criminal issues that affect giant corporations and the wealthy, like tax evasion.
Credit Suisse’s stock has increased since the announcement of the guilty plea. If this is what accountability looks like, I imagine other banks will want to sign up. Credit Suisse got to put its legal troubles over tax evasion behind it without any of its bankers put in jail, and without even having to break the confidence of its former clients by revealing their names. If Credit Suisse agreed to cooperate earlier, it could have avoided pleading guilty, and likely reduced its fine. But in the end, even with this supposedly damaging plea, Credit Suisse is merely inconvenienced with a cost of doing business. And until financial crimes result in something more than that, the crime wave will continue unabated.The Qatari-owned TV network Al-Jazeera has done an about-face in the last few days, replacing its previous negative coverage of Egypt with more positive spin – apparently in response (Arabic link) to reconciliation over the weekend between Egyptian President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi and a special envoy of the emir of Qatar.
Previously known for its critical coverage of Egypt, Al-Jazeera’s new outlook comes after efforts by Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates to mediate the disputes between Qatar and Egypt. Until recently, the Qatari government and Al-Jazeera were two of the most prominent critics of the al-Sisi regime. Ties between Egypt and Qatar have been strained since al-Sisi ousted Mohamed Morsi, a Muslim Brotherhood ally of Qatar, in July 2013 after protests against his rule. Cairo had accused Al-Jazeera of being a mouthpiece for the now-banned Brotherhood.
As part of the new reconciliation, the Qatari emir apparently instructed Al-Jazeera to cover the Egyptian regime more positively. The results can be seen on the screen, as during the last few days Al Jazeera changed the way it describes the Egyptian president. Now the channel calls him “President Sisi” and “Egyptian President” (Arabic link), whereas previously it called him “the military coup commander” or “the first president elected after the coup,” referring to al-Sisi’s succession of Morsi. Qatar had been the only Arab state to question the legitimacy of al-Sisi or bet against his staying power, and its decision appeared to indicate that the Qataris, too, have now accepted his rule.
The Al-Watan news site (Arabic link) reported that Al-Jazeera newscasts are now barely covering protests against the Egyptian government. Sources inside the channel newsroom said that reconciliation between Qatar and Egypt indeed led to a significant change in the policy of Al-Jazeera towards events in Egypt. “The aggressive coverage of the regime will be decreased,” they admitted. The news editors will now try to present supportive viewpoints towards the Egyptian regime.
Another major victory for al-Sisi is Qatar’s decision to suspend its broadcast of Al Jazeera Live Egypt, a satellite news channel sharply critical of Egypt’s government. The shutdown of the channel is also a blow to what remains of the Muslim Brotherhood, as it was the only significant Egyptian news outlet remaining that broadcast video coverage of the Brotherhood’s anti-government demonstrations or otherwise conveyed its views.
The military-backed government outlawed Al Jazeera Live Egypt shortly after Morsi was ousted, and its continued broadcasts from Doha, Qatar’s capital, have been a persistent annoyance to al-Sisi supporters in Egypt and the Arabian Gulf. Al Jazeera Live Egypt announced its suspension of operations early Monday evening, according to Gulf News.
[Photo: Laika slips the lead / Flickr]From:PETER.GEORGESCU@yr.com To: jp66@hillaryclinton.com CC: john.podesta@gmail.com Date: 2016-01-10 19:35 Subject:
Dear John, Appreciated the opportunity to discuss with you ideas which may be of help to Hillary's campaign. These suggestions are post Bernie ideas as the campaign turns its attention squarely on the Republican targets. In response to your request, here is a summary of our discussion. 1) First, we covered the need to have the DNC or some outside related group define what it means today to be a Republican. This effort should be massive. It should be an issues-driven communication. It must cover the 10 or so, most critical challenges facing America, and the position of the Republican Party on each. Quotes from lead candidates, Republican leaders in Congress, Governors, enacted legislation by Republican state legislatures, signed by Republican Governors, etc. I believe this effort to be an essential part of the fall campaign and perhaps a highlight at the convention. 2) I shared with you research which shows that 60% of American households are forced to live on credit! (Net, discretionary left over cash by households after taxes, after all spending). And being poor is expensive. Their interest rates range between 100% and 400% on an annualized basis. The next 20% are solvent but without the ability to save or invest in a meaningful way. One serious illness or a major household emergency and they're in trouble. That's why Joe Stieglitz stated that 4 out of 5 Americans will experience some form of poverty in their lifetimes. This decile analysis demonstrates that point. In this study the income includes all transfer benefits as well as wages, etc. Oh yes, finally the top 20% of us are doing just fine. 3) This income inequality has helped create both human hardship and a parallel America where the social contract between the nation and its citizens has been broken. The American dream has been shattered. The middle class is vanishing. Chronic unemployment, lack of job opportunities, horrific education in these zip codes driven by weak taxes from real estate which has to pay for these unacceptable quality schools, single parent households, the cortisol effect of stressed kids, no early childhood education, drug and alcohol abuse, violent crime -- -- all of these have created an India-style caste system from where it's almost impossible to escape. There is no equal opportunity for the vast majority of Americans. The American Dream has indeed been shattered. Hopelessness reigns. 4) Trump, Cruz, Carson, Bernie -- -- they are expressing and fueling this anger, dissatisfaction, discontent. These people have been let down by both business and their government. These are the kind of people who came out in the Occupy Movement a few years back. Then, they had no agenda, no leadership. Just a feeling of discontent. Things have gotten worse for them. Now, this vast swath of America is being told they have a right to be angry. It's a dangerous time. The would-be anarchists will not be far behind. The point is, for this large majority of our citizenry, their plight is an existential reality. They are mad, under-educated, or poorly educated so the nuances, subtleties and complexities of our times hold no sway. History has seen this play repeat itself before. Right extremists brought Hitler into power. The Communists came from the left. (I've seen that play having been in a Communist Romanian hard labor camp as a youngster). Cuba, next door, Venezuela, the Arab spring, etc. 5) These existential challenges require a bold promise equal to their plight. They also require a more direct in-depth description of the problem. The seriousness of the decile analysis demands that. Bernie's appeal, to a large degree was based on the fact that he convinced these folks that he understood their problems -- -- they trusted him because he gets it. Solutions based on logic and rationale are not going to cut it with this large segment. Elegant rhetoric won't carry sway. (But the better educated, independent minded will sure need the detailed proposals). 6) To me the answer rests on two pillars. First, giving Hillary the freedom to tell America the full scope of the problem as it exists today. That it has taken decades to get to where we are. That the 2008 financial crisis has further and seriously hurt their lot. That Obama did wondrously well to restore stability and put us on a recovery path. But he was constrained at every step by intransigent, just-say-no Republicans. That destructive behavior has to stop. Hillary is asking for a mandate from the American people to fix the problems -- -- to bring prosperity to all. By contrast, today only 20% of our population drives our GDP and, our so-called recovery. 7) By far the biggest opportunity during the post Bernie phase is for Hillary to project optimism. An authentic upbeat tone and style. The seriousness of the problems outlined above can be turned into positive opportunities. Business will be convinced to pay employees fair compensation, not only at the minimum wage levels, but all along the pay scales just short of the C-Suite -- -- where the latter are already grossly overpaid. The banks will have to start lending to small businesses. That's their job. If they don't do it, she'll work aggressively to separate lending banks from financial institutions. A greater economic stimulus will find its way to Congress. And more....That's the mandate she will ask for. The problems become opportunities. Despair becomes hope. We will be emboldened by a worthy promise. Jefferson's vision of the Pursuit of Happiness for all will inspire our today's definition: equal opportunity for all. That's the American Dream. That must be our goal, our commitment. * American's moment is now. * America's moment starts with your vote on November 8, 2016. * We look ahead with optimism * We will be united on a worthy vision * Our goals must be ambitious * This will be a journey. It starts with you and me. The pace will firm and intensify year by year * We will create more job opportunities * We will reimagine education 1) From early education to all 2) To quality teachers for all 3) To proper financing for all 4) To measured outcomes 5) To career opportunities 6) To Trade Schools 7) To produce the human resources to fulfill future innovations and their implementation. 8) And yes, affordable healthcare, a Hillary passion for decades, will be available to all. America's moment must start now. More of the same paralysis in Washington is unacceptable. Your vote, your commitment represent my mandate to help lead America to new heights, to prosperity and opportunity for all. Yes, we have major problems but they really are opportunities. We have amazing knowledge to fix all our challenges. Yes, America's business, its entrepreneurship and creativity will be put to work for all. Yes, we have remarkable, deep resources. They too will be put to work for all. And, Yes, our values, our commitment to the common good, our compassion and tolerance will shine the light for all nations, for all people. America's moment is now. Peter Georgescu Chairman Emeritus Young & Rubicam 3 Columbus Circle, New York, NY 10019 Tel: 212-210-3095 Fax: 212-210-5275 Email: peter.georgescu@yr.com<mailto:peter.georgescu@yr.com> Website: http://theconstantchoice.com/ Twitter: @petergeorgescuThe roar of the crowd, like rolling thunder, felt like it might go on forever. Remember?
Blue Jays fans are right to cry foul after the club failed to work out a way to bring back popular slugger Edwin Encarnacion, Rosie DiManno writes. ( Carlos Osorio / Toronto Star file photo )
A fastball that cracked off the bat of Edwin Encarnacion, leaving a vapour trail as it departed orbit — a three-run walk-off jack in the wild-card game against Baltimore. Eighty-one days ago. Or a gorgeous August afternoon at the yard a year earlier, Encarnacion going long once-twice-thrice off a trio of Detroit pitchers: nine RBIs and E.E. befuddled by the hundreds of hats that cascaded on to the field. Or May 2014, a home-run binge — 16, accounting for fully half of his 32 hits that month.
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Or any of the monster-mashes, lesser variations of the jaw-dropping 488-footer that slammed off the third deck facing in 2012. Or, poignantly, Encarnacion sitting alone in the home dugout after the final regular-season game this past Sept. 29, staring out at the field, wondering if he’d played his last at the Rogers Centre as a Blue Jay. Cherish those memories, Toronto. They’re all you have left of Double-E. Nothing is forever, certainly not in sports. But it shouldn’t be, now, gone-baby-gone for Encarnacion and his sweet smile and his silly home-run parrot trot. The illustrious Jay, who wanted very much to stay a Jay, has taken his bats, balls and bazookas to Cleveland, the unforeseen disembarkation point of a free-agent odyssey that actually began in spring training when the club offered an insulting two-year contract extension. Encarnacion, unsurprisingly, told the team to stuff it.
He had one career shot at exploiting the spoils of free agency. At that point the club had exclusive bargaining rights with Encarnacion. They could have sewn up his future fealty. But the braintrust of Mark Shapiro and Ross Atkins, cleaving to the false idol of analytics, tried a gambit so disrespectful to a proud man that Encarnacion shut down any further discussion for the rest of the year. You can’t blame an agent who ultimately misread the market for misjudgments back in March. The Jays were still talking to Encarnacion — to his agent, at least, because there was no direct communication with their all-star after the signing of presumptive replacement Kendrys Morales on Nov. 18 — on Thursday, mere hours before news broke that the DH/first baseman was Indians-bound.
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Sources have told the Star that the Jays had budged (bulged) “creatively” past the $80 million over four years they offered at the end of the season — to $80 million guaranteed plus vested (meeting certain performance incentive thresholds) or options that maxed out at $100 million. That deal was still on the table after Toronto inked Morales, in retrospect a too-hasty Plan B which so displeased Encarnacion that he stopped taking Atkins’ calls. Scooping middling Steve Pearce off the market then created a crowd at first base, though the Jays would have peddled Justin Smoak, even if it meant eating up to $2 million on the contract extension he signed in July. And, though Encarnacion was starting to get twitchy as suitors dwindled, agent Paul Kinzer purportedly sat stubbornly on their $125-million demand. So explain, please, how the slugger winds up a forsaken ex-Jay, accepting three years at $20 million per from the Indians, with an option for 2020 and guaranteed $5-million buyout? What a cock-up. Nice Christmas stocking stuffer for the Indians. A punch in the nose for Jays fans. They will not take it lightly, watching this team shrink in post-season potential before their eyes, what was once a star-studded roster dulled in glitter glitz with the departure of Encarnacion and quite likely to Jose Bautista, too. Re-signing both was never contemplated, but the former is the greater subtraction. At every juncture of this benighted saga, it seems, both the Blue Jays and the agent managed to do exactly the wrong thing, dimming the prospects that Encarnacion would return to the organization where he became an uber-star. Oh, there’s lots of blame to go around and the tale is being spun by duelling factions, the Jays adept at ameliorating the Encarnacion disaster — because that’s what it is — via the vast network of media acolytes whose paycheques are signed by Rogers, versus the “Who Me?” disingenuousness of Kinzer, mounting his counterattack. There’s no doubt about E-Kinzer, his tactical error. But this wrenching is foremost down to the president and his novice general manager, for mismanaging their budget commitments and essentially misunderstanding Encarnacion, the man. As arrivistes, as carpetbaggers from Cleveland, they failed to grasp the emotional connection between the player and the city, or use it to their advantage. Encarnacion was beloved in Toronto. There were no personality warts, no ego; only a quiet, commanding presence in the clubhouse and a steadfast source of electrifying offence on the field. He even delivered a decent first base. And, sentiment aside, you don’t just replace 239 homers and 679 RBIs. All that currency built up with fans over the last two years — only a smidge of which can be credited to the new front-office regime in their 2016 debut — has been forfeited in this blundering off-season. Toronto may have topped American League attendance, but in this city — as those who’ve been around for a while can attest — baseball love is a fickle thing. While rival clubs have boosted their marquee bona fides, the Jays appear worrisomely calibrated towards mediocrity redux. Unforgiveable, what Shapiro & Atkins have wrought, and unforgiven it will be. But at least three games — May 8 to 10 — will doubtless be sellouts. That’s when Encarnacion comes “home” an Indian. MORE ON THESTAR.COM Charge Blue Jays with an error on Encarnacion: Arthur Edwin Encarnacion’s top five moments as a Blue Jay Blue Jays need a new plan of attack Jays fans react to Encarnacion signing with Cleveland
Read more about:This tip came through the back channels; its implications are astounding.
If there is any truth to it, the 2016 election could be a kick-off for total tyranny.
According to an unnamed source – who has provided accurate intel in the past – an unannounced military drill is scheduled to take place during a period leading up to the election and throughout the month after.
It appears that the system is gearing up to handle outbreaks of violence, chaotic rallies and poll stations, and the possibility that the people of the United States may become very dissatisfied with the outcome by using military force and martial law.
The drill could, of course, go live at any time; Homeland Security and the military are prepared to contend with a period of unrest, and restore order to a divided and broken country – regardless of whether people like their new leader or not.
As you know, DHS is already monitoring this election and prepared to take over its ‘critical infrastructure’. The scope of this drill would, of course, take things much further:
Hi Guys, I got some gouge from a former military colleague who is in contact with active duty personnel and he received an email about an upcoming drill. We need confirmation on this, but if we put it out there we might get a leaker to come forward and confirm: Date: October 30th – 30 days after the election
Suspected Region: Northeast, specifically New York 1st Phase: NROL (No Rule of Law) – drill involving combat arms in metro areas (active and reserve). Source says active duty and reserve service members are being vaccinated as if they are being deployed in theatre. 2nd Phase: LROL (Limited Rule of Law) – Military/FEMA consolidating resources, controlling water supply, handing out to public as needed. 3rd Phase: AROL (Authoritarian Rule of Law) – Possible new acronym or term for “Martial Law”. Curfew, restricted movements, basically martial law scenario. Source said exercise involves FEMA/DHS/Military
At this time, information concerning a drill has not been confirmed, nor has it been announced publicly.
However, there is reason to believe that the federal government is preparing for all contingencies – including those that might lead to violence or civil unrest after the election.
With Donald Trump openly calling out the “rigged” electoral system, there is reason to think that the public may not accept a Hillary win – particularly if there is any clear evidence that the vote was rigged, manipulated or poorly counted.
Just imagine for a moment thousands or even millions of people rising up in protest.
But is the system really expecting this could happen?
All bets are off in 2016, and quite frankly, it seems like something very creepy is rising to the surface.
The email also noted that this same source provided information which was covered by Shephard Ambellas and Infowars exposing that a mock American town had been constructed for urban warfare training under SPECWAR and DHS:
FORT CHAFFEE, ARKANSAS — Carnis Village is what the Army National Guard calls it. A mock American town which even contains dummy citizens for domestic training purposes. Located on the grounds of the Fort Chaffee Maneuver Training Center, the massive training compound is likely a dead-ringer clue foreshadowing the grim path we are now traversing as a nation. […] The center at Ft. Chaffee seems eerily similar to any given US downtown location. There is a church, not a mosque. There is a bank that has a drive in ATM and even has the triangle of the local Arvest Bank. There are townhouses, a city hall, a two story high school with boys and girls restrooms and more. The fine details of the facility make it quite obvious to myself that this site was set up for domestic warfare training proposes or for a westernized nation that shares a similar culture of architecture to that of America.
They are training to take on Americans after an economic collapse, an election upset, or an attack by an enemy… and the photos (via Intellihub.com) are chilling.
While nothing in particular may occur after election results are announced, there is every sense that America is at its last crossroads.
World War is on the horizon, the economy is breaking down and the reign of the dollar on the global stage is rapidly fading.
Is the contest between Trump vs. Hillary enough to be a real trigger point?
Hillary could bring very dark days to this country just by being declared the next president; Obama might, in turn, declare martial law.
At that point, the situation will be very clear.
It could happen; there are numerous pretenses that could be used to break down civilian order and take back the streets by force. Let’s hope none of them happen.
Be vigilant. Find out what you can. And be prepared for anything.
Read more:
Desperate to Cling to Power: If Trump Upsets Election, “Martial Law Could Follow”
If Trump Wins, Will Obama Declare Martial Law To Remain In Office? “These Are Not Normal Times”
If Martial Law Comes to America “Dissidents and Subversives Would Be Rounded Up”
“The Fraud Is Rampant”: Registering the Dead And Illegal Immigrants to Steal the Election
Trump Resists Pledge To “Absolutely Accept” Election Results… But Why Should Anyone Accept Fraud?DC Comics’ PR has given their media partner CBR the details for Catwoman: Election Night #1, a 48-page one-shot out in November. That will feature a 12 page finale to the Mark Russell and Ben Caldwell‘s comic book Prez, rather than the promised second set of six issues.
Despite being one of DC’s most critically acclaimed titles, the comic that saw an accidental Youtube sensation made President of the USA after some serious croneyism and jostling for power never achieved the sales DC wanted and so its planned run has been cut in half. This 12 page back-up strip seems a final attempt to wring some final topicality out of the series.
The rest of the comic by Meredith Finch and Shane Davis will see Catwoman getting involved with Gotham’s mayoral election.
Looks like I should add this to the Frankensteining list…
CATWOMAN: ELECTION NIGHT #1
Written by MEREDITH FINCH and MARK RUSSELL — Art and cover by SHANE DAVIS and BEN CALDWELL — Variant cover by DAVID FINCH
It’s mayoral election time in Gotham City, and while the city is up in arms, Catwoman couldn’t care less! But when the candidates get personal, the Feline Fatale decides to get involved—much to the detriment of…well, everyone! This issue contains a special bonus story featuring the return of President Beth Ross from the critically acclaimed PREZ miniseries.
ONE-SHOT • On sale NOVEMBER 2 • 48 pg, FC, $4.99 US • RATED T
About Rich Johnston Chief writer and founder of Bleeding Cool. Father of two. Comic book clairvoyant. Political cartoonist.
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None foundChris Cornell Fresh Track Marks on Arm
Chris Cornell Had Fresh Track Marks on Arm at Suicide Scene
EXCLUSIVE
Chris Cornell had apparently taken more than Ativan before hanging himself, because we've learned he had fresh track marks on his arm when his body was discovered in a Detroit hotel room.
Sources connected to the investigation tell us... the track marks were "obvious." The singer had a history of using drugs. The toxicology tests will reveal what drugs were found in Chris' system.
The new information is consistent with our story that Ted Keedick, Chris' longtime house engineer and tour manager, said Chris seemed "high" and "f***ed up" during the concert... hours before his death.
Chris' wife has said her husband had told her he took "an extra Ativan or two."Boy, has blockchain become respectable. It wasn’t long ago that the face of the technology, which powers the crypto-currency bitcoin, was libertarians and drug dealers. Today, it’s the banking industry and members of Congress.
On Monday, Rep. Jared Polis (D-Co) and Rep. Mick Mulvaney (R-SC) announced the creation of a “Blockchain Caucus” to promote laws and policies to encourage the development of crypto-currencies and other blockchain-related tools.
“Blockchain technology has the potential to revolutionize the financial services industry, the U.S. economy, and the delivery of government services,” said Mulvaney in a statement, encouraging other members of Congress to join the caucus.
Hype over blockchain has been bubbling for years because it offers a new form of digital record-keeping in which networks of computers verify and store transactions. Banks and companies like Accenture (acn) and IBM (ibm)are already deploying it to replace slow and expensive third-party ledgers systems.
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But it still faces obstacles to development in the U.S. due to thickets of regulation.
“We’re falling behind places like the U.K and Singapore,” said Peter Van Valkenburgh, a research director at the blockchain advocacy group Coin Center. “The problem is the divided structure of US regulation, where you have dozens of state and federal bodies, contrast with the UK, where you have Her Majesty’s Treasury and one agency.”
Van Valkenburgh hopes the new blockchain caucus will lead to the creation of a national charter that would make it easier for crypto-currency companies like Ripple or Ethereum to operate. Another priority is a “safe harbor” that would ensure blockchain companies that don’t hold customers’ digital currency (like miners and accessory makers, for instance) won’t get snared in banking regulations.
Here’s Why Banks Need to Jump on Board With Blockchain
It’s important to note that not all blockchain services are tied to a currency. But many are, so a clearer regulatory landscape could be a big help.
As for the blockchain caucus, it’s too soon to say what, if anything, it might accomplish. As Quartz notes, there is a caucus in Congress for just about everything, so Polis and Mulvaney might have a hard time getting their colleagues to pay attention. On the other hand, blockchain is a hot topic in tech and finance circles so some lawmakers are likely to at least give the caucus a look.
Finally, Monday’s announcement is also a coup of sorts for Coin Center. The group emerged as a successor of sorts to the troubled Bitcoin Foundation, which sought to speak for the crypto-currency community but—true to the technology’s renegade early days—saw several of its high profile members end up in exile or prison.“I can not term this (Hawaizaada) film as a biopic because nothing is known about this person (Shivkar Talpade),” said Ayushmann Khurrana.
Actor Ayushmann Khurrana, who is gearing up for the release of his upcoming film ‘Hawaizaada‘, says his film is based on the real life story of scientist Shivkar Bapuji Talpade but it is not a biopic.
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In the film Ayushmann is playing the role of Shivkar Bapuji Talpade who is supposed to have constructed and flown India’s first unnamed airplane in 1895.
“I can not term this (Hawaizaada) film as a biopic because nothing is known about this person (Shivkar Talpade). You know about Milkha Singh, You know about Mary Kom (MC Mary Kom), You know about Gandhi (Mahatma Gandhi), but you don’t know about Shivkar Talpade. So, technically this is not a biopic,” Ayushmann told IANS.
“But, of course it’s based on true events. And I’m sure public will like it,” he added.
Asked what is the best thing about ‘Hawaizaada’, Ayushmann said: “The best thing about this film is the novelty of the script. The one liner that the guy who made the first aircraft was an Indian. That’s the novelty.”
“Apart from that the look of the film. It gives you very international look, international feel, every frame of the film looks like a painting. The dialogues are beautiful,” he added.
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Directed by Vibhu Puri, ‘Hawaizaada’ also features Mithun Chakraborty and Pallavi Sharda in key roles. The film is set to release Jan 30, 2015.I wrote my Master’s thesis on young adults learning philanthropic behaviors such as donating to nonprofits. A major aspect I had to explain was how people entered into donating, as it’s a learned behavior. Explaining every path took months, but analyzing every touch point has definitely stuck with me since then. Wizards of the Coast does considerable research into figuring how nonusers interact with everything, from branding colors in packaging to giving random people introduction packs and see what they do with the contents. It’s easy to market to enfranchised consumers, but documenting new user experiences and advertising accordingly is a real struggle.
commercials on television. The Pro Tour is no longer on ESPN2. Our ability to experienceis a self-selecting endeavor as of today. This soon will change.
The game has simply too many users, too many consumers who interact with it on a daily basis. Hasbro has had numerous presentations and earnings statements commenting on Magic’s recent boom in player base and revenue. Duels of the Planeswalkers is the tip of the iceberg. You don’t think we’ve noticed all the talent from rival gaming companies and Disney that you’ve been gobbling up? The digital recent hires alone have been hinting at larger efforts. Something is coming, and it’s more than just more paper Magic stuff.
Before we can understand and analyze a new digital offering, or whatever they’re working on, let us postulate on the next touch points and products. The introductory packs and learning systems for new players are still very much a work in progress. As Magic players are advertised to by other players and siblings, traditional marketing strategies such as product placement haven’t been used yet to their full extents. In addition, not all products, like Commander’s Arsenal, are for new players. Precedents are nice, but our community of fans is has such foresight that in many cases, people are already commenting on new things to come. Vorthos, being the art, flavor, and storyline folk, tend to create outside things, as that is what they’re interested in.
Today, I give you seven products that are in the near future for us to purchase:
“Kids’” Toys
Planeswalker Figurines: Set of 5, Wave 1
Planeswalker Figurines: Set of 5, Wave 2
And So On
Let’s be honest: A set of these would be awesome, and you, like many of us, would buy these. If we could have a tiny production run, five thousand or so, just like Agents of Artifice and have its own Jace book promo, this would sell out in minutes.
While I would love a kids’ action figure/doll that coincides with a TV show in the Target toy aisle, I’d be sure an adult set would be feasible. If they upped the production run, Wizards would have to get more in line with Hasbro and have better connective threads. As it stands now, Wizards kind of does its own thing other than report earnings. The business model differs so greatly. This product, if made in small runs, would be on top of a comic-book aisle shelf, such as a DC or Marvel figure bust. Five-figure waves at $250 for the set could be a thing quite easily. Have it at a convention, and fights might even break out for the in-box, alternate-art promotional planeswalker cards with an old frame. Magic has become that popular and that seasoned that crazy parents are now with us. Let that sink in.
This is a task for the Brand department. @ElaineChase is the point person there.
Art Book, Art of the Year
Wizards Art Annual 1
Wizards Art Annual 2
And So On
Our “Current” Art Book Options
Think of an art book as a way to use all the staff time and effort in making the style guides used by freelance artists and writers and translating it into a marketable product. There is a full design week of art-making that never sees the light of day. While some should stay proprietary, a lot could be used with ease in a print publication. It would be the competitor for your coffee table.
This could be a joint venture with D&D, but I don’t feel it needs to if a promotion element is present, such as a promo code or a card redemption. In the past, we have had one official Magic book and an unofficial one being published this year. The former is $30 to $60 on the secondary market, and the latter is a successful Kickstarter project. There is no additional card promotions for the books, they’re just paper (Kickstarter rewards aside). I don’t feel a print book could sell by itself. Having redeemable codes are by far the easiest implementation addition to the books, though a card would push sales a bit faster.
This is a task for the creative and brand departments. @ElaineChase is the point person in Brand, and Colin Kawakami is the Creative head.
Convention Promotions at All the Places
San Diego Comic Convention – All-Black Planeswalkers
PAX – Pins
Dragoncon in 1994 – Nalathni Dragon
Others – To Be Seen
We have had these for years, but they haven’t been high-tier cards. Does anyone remember the San Diego Comic-Con (SDCC) Phyrexian Plaguelord? How about the Bloodthrone Vampire that was at every convention in 2011? Up until SDCC of this year and Dragoncon with the Nalathni Dragon back in the day, these promos haven’t been worth much or noticed much. They definitely should keep up this SDCC swag, and I would suggest different promotions at different conventions. Maybe a fantasy art convention like Spectrum Live would have alternate artworks or Emerald City Comicon would have a green mana-ramp promo each year. Make them unique! Planeswalkers are the branding material if you run out of ideas—just take an older planeswalker, even Chandra’s worst versions, and integrate them.
This is an ongoing task for the Brand department. @ElaineChase is the point person there.
Magic Board Games
Planeswalkers of Ravnica: Core Set
Innistrad Expansion
Theros Expansion
Image from Wizards of the Coast, a subsidiary of Hasbro, Inc.
Imagine that Dominaria or Ravnica is the “base set” and that each plane is an expansion. You’re already partially done with making the board game. Wizards of the Coast has had very successful games such as Lords of Waterdeep and the Legend of Drizzt board games that have hit the market already. Since Magic has a ton of art to use, they could recycle it like Fantasy Flight Games and make a board game with immediate expansions in months, really. Keep the supply low (or manufacture it low), and it’ll sell well. Put in a redeemable comic-book promo, as Duels |
increased precipitation across the region. The combination, he says, could explain a reduction in humidity — which, together with exposure to strong winds and intense solar radiation, conspires to put high-mountain forests under increasing moisture stress. He cautions, however, against making sweeping claims because of possible regional variations.
“The new findings have important implications for forest management,” Mosbrugger says. The density of trees, for instance, should be properly controlled so they could be more resistant to droughts. Moreover, there should be efforts to help regenerate the aging forests by reducing the grazing of seedlings by livestock. Such measures are crucial for safeguarding forest ecosystems in the Himalayas and Tibetan Plateau, especially protecting endemic and endangered species at high elevations, he adds.
Image licensed under Creative Commons.Poor children in New Zealand are more than six times more likely to do badly at maths than well-off children, a new report from the OECD says.
Photo: 123RF
The report, "Low-Performing Students - Why They Fall Behind and How To Help Them Succeed", found the disadvantage of poverty was made even worse by factors including a lack of early childhood education or coming from a single-parent family.
Download the report (PDF, 2.6MB)
It was based on the results of tests of 15-year-olds conducted in 2012 for the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA).
Initial reporting in 2013 said New Zealand's results were above average, but had worsened and socio-economic background accounted for 18 percent of the difference between New Zealand children's results in mathematics.
The new report looked at the results differently. It concluded that the poorest 25 percent of New Zealand students were more than six times more likely to do badly in maths than those from the richest 25 percent.
That was after taking account of other factors such as coming from a single-parent family or from an immigrant household, and was higher than the OECD average of four times.
The only OECD member nations with higher rates were Israel, Poland and Ireland.
'Most important risk factor'
The report said socio-economic status was "probably the most important risk factor associated with low academic performance" around the world.
It said other factors also affected students' performance. For example, New Zealand students from a single-parent family or from non-English speaking homes were about twice as likely to be low performers as other students.
Other important factors included not attending early childhood education and whether the child had repeated a year level.
However, the report said the other factors associated with poor performance had a greater effect on children from poorer families.
"Among low performers the combination of risk factors is more detrimental to disadvantaged than to advantaged students.
"Indeed, all of the demographic characteristics considered in the report, as well as the lack of pre-primary education, increase the probability of low performance by a larger margin among disadvantaged than among advantaged students, on average across OECD countries."
The report said poor performers tended to do less homework, have less perseverance and motivation, and were more likely to skip classes than higher achievers.
Thirty-five percent of New Zealand's low-performers in the 2012 PISA tests had skipped school at least once in the two weeks prior to the tests, compared to about 12 percent of those who did better in the tests.
Though New Zealand had stronger than average links between socio-economic status and low achievement, it did not have more low-achievers than most other developed countries.
The percentage of students regarded as "low-performing" in maths (22.6 percent), reading (16.3 percent) and science (16.3 percent) were all slightly below the OECD average, as was the 11.1 percent figure for students who were low performers in all three subjects.
The report recommended OECD nations target poor performance, ensure schools were supportive but also demanding, and provide under-achievers with remedial teaching as soon as possible.
Post Primary Teachers Association president Angela Roberts said ensuring rich and poor students went to the same schools would help lift achievement.
Ms Roberts said the OECD's analysis shows results were better in countries where schools have a mix of students. Lower performers benefitted without undermining the high performers, she said.
Schools in poor neighbourhoods also need a lot more resources to improve student achievement.
The most recent PISA test was conducted in 2015 and results were expected to be published late in 2016.Background Edit
Prelude Edit
Battle Edit
Order of battle Edit
Reasons for the outcome Edit
Zulu perspective Edit The primary reason for the Zulu victory is that the Zulus, unlike the British, kept their main fighting force concentrated. Further, they made a very successful effort to conceal the advance and location of this force until they were within a few hours' striking distance of their enemy. The British made no such efforts. Finally, when the location of the main Zulu Impi was discovered by British scouts, the Zulus, without hesitation, immediately advanced and attacked, achieving tactical surprise.[81] This tactical surprise prevented the British, although they now had some warning of a Zulu advance, from concentrating their central column. It also left little time and gave scant information for Pulleine to organise a sufficient defence for his command. The Zulus had outmanoeuvred Chelmsford, and their victory at Isandlwana was a decisive defeat[82] of the British invasion that forced the main British force to retreat out of Zululand until a far larger British army could be shipped to South Africa for a second invasion.[83][84] Recent historians, notably Lock and Quantrill in Zulu Victory, argue that from the Zulu perspective the theatre of operations included the diversions around Magogo Hills and Mangeni Falls and that these diversions, which drew more than half of Chelmsford's forces away from Isandlwana, were deliberate.[85] Also, the main Zulu force was not unexpectedly discovered in their encampment but was fully deployed and ready to advance on the British camp. These historians' view of the expanded battlefield considers Chelmsford to be the overall commander of the British forces, and that responsibility for the defeat lies firmly with him. British perspective Edit [86] Memorial erected at the site commemorating the valour of the fallen Zulu impi at Isandlwana Hill, which is visible in the background Photo of Isandlwana with one of the cairns marking one of the many British mass graves at the site Debate persists as to how and why the British lost the battle. Many arguments focus on possible local tactical occurrences, as opposed to the strategic lapses and failings in grand tactics on the part of high command under Bartle Frere and Chelmsford. Still, the latter comes under scrutiny for mistakes that may have led directly to the British defeat. British tactical failings Edit The initial view, reported by Horace Smith-Dorrien, was that the British had difficulty unpacking their ammunition boxes fast enough. The box lids were screwed down, the screws were rusty and difficult to remove, there were too few screwdrivers, "standing orders" insisted that until a box was empty, no other boxes were to be opened. and the quartermasters were reluctant to distribute ammunition to units other than their own. Well-equipped and well-trained British soldiers could fire 10–12 rounds a minute. The lack of ammunition caused a lull in the defence and, in subsequent engagements with the Zulus, ammunition boxes were unscrewed in advance for rapid distribution. [87] Numerous first hand accounts indicate ammunition was available and being supplied, including Smith-Dorrien's earliest in a letter to his father.
Numerous first hand accounts indicate ammunition was available and being supplied, including Smith-Dorrien's earliest in a letter to his father. Donald Morris in The Washing of the Spears argues that the men, fighting too far from the camp, ran out of ammunition, starting first with Durnford's men who were holding the right flank and who had been in action longer, which precipitated a slowdown in the rate of fire against the Zulus. This argument suggests that the ammunition was too far from the firing line and that the seventy rounds each man took to the firing line were not sufficient. [52] [88]
argues that the men, fighting too far from the camp, ran out of ammunition, starting first with Durnford's men who were holding the right flank and who had been in action longer, which precipitated a slowdown in the rate of fire against the Zulus. This argument suggests that the ammunition was too far from the firing line and that the seventy rounds each man took to the firing line were not sufficient. A different view, supported with evidence from the battlefield, such as Ian Knight and Lt. Colonel Snook's works, (the latter having written How Can Man Die Better? ), suggests that, although Durnford's men probably did run out of ammunition, the majority of men in the firing line did not. The discovery of the British line so far out from the camp has led Ian Knight to conclude that the British were defending too large a perimeter. [89]
), suggests that, although Durnford's men probably did run out of ammunition, the majority of men in the firing line did not. The discovery of the British line so far out from the camp has led Ian Knight to conclude that the British were defending too large a perimeter. The official interrogation by Horse Guards under the direction of the Duke of Cambridge, the Field Marshal Commanding in Chief, in August 1879, concluded that the primary cause of the defeat was the "under estimate formed of the offensive fighting power of the Zulu army", additionally the investigation questions Chelmsford as to why the camp was not laagered and why there was a failure to reconnoitre and discover the nearby Zulu army. [90]
Colenso calls Chelmsford's neglecting to follow his own "Regulations for Field Forces in South Africa", which required that a defensible camp be established at every halt, fatal.[91] British command failings Edit Numerous messages, some quite early in the day, had been sent to Chelmsford informing him, initially, of the presence of the Zulu near the camp and, subsequently, of the attack on the camp, with increasingly urgent pleas for help. The most egregious failure to respond occurred at around 1:30 pm when a message from Hamilton-Browne stating, "For God's sake come back, the camp is surrounded, and things I fear are going badly", was received by Lieutenant-Colonel Harness of the Royal Artillery and Major Black of the 2/24. They were leading the other four RA guns as well as two companies of the 2/24 and on their own initiative immediately marched back towards Isandlwana and had gone some two miles when they were ordered to return to Mangeni Falls by an aide sent by Chelmsford.[92] At long last but too late, finally Chelmsford became convinced of the seriousness of the situation on his left flank and rear when at 3:30pm he joined Hamilton-Browne's NNC and realised the camp had been taken. A surviving officer, Rupert Lonsdale, rode up and described the camp's fall to which Chelmsford replied, "But I left over 1,000 men to guard the camp".[93] He quickly gathered his scattered forces and marched the column back to Isandlwana but arrived at sundown long after the battle ended and the Zulu army had marched off. The British camped on the field that night but left before sunrise without any examination of the ground as Chelmsford felt that it would demoralize his troops. The column then proceeded to Rorke's Drift.
Aftermath Edit
Impact Edit Field Marshal Lord Wolseley Though Isandlwana was a disaster for the British, the Zulu victory did not end the war. With the decisive defeat of Chelmsford's central column, the entire invasion of Zululand collapsed and would have to be restaged. Not only were there heavy manpower casualties to the Main Column, but most of the supplies, ammunition and draught animals were lost.[94] As King Cetshwayo feared, the embarrassment of the defeat would force the policy makers in London, who to this point had not supported the war, to rally to the support of the pro-war contingent in the Natal government and commit whatever resources were needed to defeat the Zulus. Despite local numerical superiority, the Zulus did not have the manpower, technological resources, or logistical capacity to match the British in another, more extended, campaign.[95] The Zulus missed a tremendous opportunity to exploit their victory and possibly win the war that day on their own territory. The reconnaissance force under Chelmsford was more vulnerable to being defeated by an attack than the camp. It was strung out and somewhat scattered, it had marched with limited rations and ammunition it could not now replace, and it was panicky and demoralized by the defeat at Isandlwana.[96] Near the end of the battle, about 4,000 Zulu warriors of the unengaged reserve Undi impi, after cutting off the retreat of the survivors to the Buffalo River southwest of Isandlwana, crossed the river and attacked the fortified mission station at Rorke's Drift. The station was defended by only 140 British soldiers, who nonetheless inflicted considerable casualties and repelled the attack. Elsewhere, the left and right flanks of the invading forces were now isolated and without support. The No. 1 column under the command of Charles Pearson would be besieged for two months by a Zulu force at Eshowe, while the No. 4 column under Evelyn Wood halted its advance and spent most of the next two months skirmishing in the northwest around Tinta's Kraal.[97][98] Following Isandlwana and Rorke's Drift, the British and Colonials were in complete panic over the possibility of a counter invasion of Natal by the Zulus.[99] All the towns of Natal 'laagered' up and fortified and provisions and stores laid in.[100] Bartle Frere stoked the fear of invasion despite the fact that, aside from Rorke's Drift, the Zulus made no attempt to cross the border. Immediately following the battle, Zulu Prince Ndanbuko urged them to advance and take the war into the colony but they were restrained by a commander, kaNthati, reminding them of Cetshwayo's prohibiting the crossing the border.[4] Unknown to the inhabitants of Natal, Cetshwayo, still hoping to avoid outright war, had prohibited any crossing of the border in retaliation and was incensed over the violation of the border by the attack on Rorke's Drift.[101] The British government's reasoning for a new invasion was threefold. The first was jingoistic to a degree and national honor demanded that the enemy, victors in one battle, should lose the war.[102] The second concerned the domestic political implications at the next parliamentary elections.[103] However, despite the new invasion, the British Prime Minister Disraeli and his Conservative Party were to lose the 1880 election. Finally, there were considerations affecting the Empire: unless the British were seen to win a clear-cut victory against the Zulus, it would send a signal that the British Empire was vulnerable and that the defeat of a British field army could alter policy.[104] If the Zulu victory at Isandlwana encouraged resistance elsewhere in the Empire,[105] then committing the resources necessary to defeat the Zulus would, in the long term, prove cheaper than fighting wars that the Zulu success inspired against British Imperialism elsewhere.[103][106] After Isandlwana, the British field army was heavily reinforced and again invaded Zululand. Sir Garnet Wolseley was sent to take command and relieve Chelmsford, as well as Bartle Frere. Chelmsford, however, avoided handing over command to Wolseley and managed to defeat the Zulus in a number of engagements, the last of which was the Battle of Ulundi, followed by capture of King Cetshwayo. With the fall of the Disraeli government, Bartle Frere was recalled in August 1880 and the policy of Confederation was abandoned.[107] The British encouraged the subkings of the Zulus to rule their subkingdoms without acknowledging a central Zulu power. By the time King Cetshwayo was allowed to return home, there was no longer an independent Zulu kingdom.[108] The measure of respect that the British gained for their opponents as a result of Isandlwana can be seen in that in none of the other engagements of the Zulu War did the British attempt to fight again in their typical linear formation, known famously as the Thin Red Line, in an open-field battle with the main Zulu impi. In the battles that followed, the British, when facing the Zulu, entrenched themselves or formed very close-order formations, such as the square.[109] Recriminations Edit Chelmsford realised that he would need to account to the government and to history for the disaster. He quickly fixed blame on Durnford, claiming Durnford disobeyed his orders to fix a proper defensive camp, although there is no evidence such an order was issued and there would hardly have been time for Durnford to entrench. Further, it had been Chelmsford's decision not to entrench the camp, as it was meant to be temporary. Wolseley wrote on 30 September 1879 when, later in the war, the Prince Imperial of France was killed by the Zulu: "I think this is very unfair, and is merely a repetition of what was done regarding the Isandlwana disaster where the blame was thrown upon Durnford, the real object in both instances being apparently to screen Chelmsford."[110] Later, Chelmsford launched a new and successful campaign in Zululand, routing the Zulu army, capturing the Royal Kraal of Ulundi, and thus partially retrieving his reputation. He never held another field command. Following the war and his return to Britain, Chelmsford sought an audience with Gladstone, who had become Prime Minister in April 1880, but his request was refused, a very public slight and a clear sign of official disapproval. Chelmsford, however, obtained an audience with Queen Victoria to personally explain the events. She asked Gladstone to meet Chelmsford; this meeting was brief, and during it Gladstone voiced his displeasure.
See also Edit
Notes Edit
References EditAs Its CEO Continues To Claim It Doesn't Throttle, T-Mobile Spokesperson Confirms Company Throttles
from the guys,-guys,-guys... dept
T-Mobile customers who activate the company’s controversial Binge On video service will experience downgraded internet connection speeds when viewing videos on YouTube or other sites that don’t take part in Binge On, a T-Mobile spokesperson confirmed today. They’ll also experience slower speeds when trying to download video files for offline use from websites that do not participate in Binge On, at least until the customer deactivates the service.
What throttling is is slowing down data and removing customer control. Let me be clear. BingeOn is neither of those things.
Using the term “throttle” is misleading. We aren’t slowing down YouTube or any other site. In fact, because video is optimized for mobile devices, streaming from these sites should be just as fast, if not faster than before. A better phrase is “mobile optimized” or “lower resolution.”
The T-Mobile throttling saga is getting worse. Their PR people have totally stopped responding to me after I pointed out how they were lying about their claims to be "optimizing" video when they were really throttling. And then the company's CEO, John Legere insisted that claims that T-Mobile was "throttling" were bullshit (and then, bizarrely attacked EFF ).But, at the same time, a nameless T-Mobile spokesperson told Wired that, yes, just as all the tests have shown and just as we explained to you on Monday, T-Mobile is deliberately slowing down the delivery of non-partner videos, which by any definition (other than T-Mobile's)Of course, even that statement is wrong. It's not for "customers who activate" Binge On. T-Mobile, and then let you call in to customer service to deactivate it.But the way that T-Mobile tries to insist that this is not throttling isto argue thatthat's why it's not throttling. Yesterday we noted that tricky sleight of mouth when Legere added an unnecessary clause to the definition of throttling. Here's John Legere's statement yesterday:And again, there are two major problems with this statement: (1) As his own company's spokesperson is now admitting, yes,and (2) "removing customer control" has nothing to do with the definition of throttling. Especially when they made the initial choice for all customers.And, just to add to this, let me remind you what a T-Mobile spokespersonvia email just a couple of weeks ago:And yet now the company is admitting that they are, in fact, slowing down YouTube, not "optimizing" it or making the resolution lower. As I said at the time, T-Mobile is flat out lying. And now two statements from the company directly contradict each other, and the company's CEO is still insisting that the company isn't doing what the company admits it's doing.I've seen some corporate snafu meltdowns before, but this is reaching epic levels -- and that's bad news for a company that had spent so much time building up a reputation as a "straight shooter." Good reputations are hard to build, but easy to let slip away....
Filed Under: bingeon, john legere, net neutrality, throttling, zero rating
Companies: t-mobileIn its effort to clean up a mistake it made on 1.9 million red light and speed-camera tickets, Mayor Rahm Emanuel's administration has erred again.
In a mass mailing last week to recipients of those tickets, City Hall offered a second chance to appeal the violations. The effort was intended to fend off a class-action lawsuit alleging the city failed to give ticket holders adequate time or notice the first time around.
One problem: The city's ticket website is not allowing many ticket holders to view the violation video or photographic evidence used to issue the fines in the first place.
One attorney said many of his clients who got letters from the city are getting error messages when they go to view their violations, some more than 6 years old.
"It's alarming to me that they would do something like this," said Kimberly Slider, 46, of Sauk Village, who received notices on five red light camera tickets she received in 2010 and 2011. "Of the five, I could only see two of the videos.
"They are just up to the same old money-grabbing tactics," said Slider, an attorney in the consumer fraud division of the Illinois attorney general's office. "I know these tactics when I see them."
Emanuel's Transportation Department spokesman, Michael Claffey, said Friday that "as soon as the city was alerted to this problem, we immediately contacted our vendors for the automated enforcement programs, and they are adding additional resources to get every violation uploaded as soon as possible."
Claffey said the process may take several days, and that to ensure everyone has ample time to contest their violations, the city is extending the deadline for filing the new appeals by two weeks to Feb. 19.
The city offered no explanation for the glitch, but Claffey said some of the data from older tickets — from 2010 and 2011 — still has yet to be uploaded into the system. He also suggested high traffic on the website might be to blame.
"We are updating our website this evening to alert people to the issue and the extension to contest violations," he said.
Claffey also cautioned people to make sure they are checking the correct database on the city's website. Red light camera tickets and speed camera tickets have to be looked up separately, and an error message will appear if the citation number is plugged into the wrong database.
Asked what the city is going to do for those who have already discarded their notices because of the frustration at being unable to see the violation video, Claffey said, "All we can do is apologize."
Claffey added that violation videos can be viewed by entering a vehicle owner and vehicle tag number.
The mass mailing to nearly 1.2 million recipients of 1.9 million tickets offers a second chance to appeal red light camera violations issued between May 23, 2010, and May 14, 2015, or speed camera tickets since May 2012, which is when that program began.
The appeals offer by the city follows a ruling last year by Cook County Circuit Court Judge Kathleen Kennedy denying the city's motion to dismiss a class-action lawsuit alleging the city violated due process by failing to mail out second notices and wait the full 25 days required by law to assess late fees.
Chicago attorney Jacie Zolna, who filed the suit, has called the Emanuel administration's effort to force people to relitigate the city's illegal behavior a sham. On Friday, he scoffed at the idea the city would allow his clients to appeal violations when they cannot see the evidence used to fine them.
"I think they've got another problem here," he said. "It appears to me they have a difficult time doing anything right."
The notice instructs ticket holders to visit the city's website at www.cityofchicago.org/review, but after plugging in the citation and license plate numbers to view the video, many see only the error message "invalid citation/pin number combination."
Zolna said no photos or video were available on 18 of 37 cases of which his office is aware, including two violations sent to him personally. The dates on tickets where no video is available range from 2009 all the way through 2015, Zolna said.
Of six notices for rehearing sent to the Chicago Tribune for violations on company cars, the video evidence was unavailable on only one, a red light camera ticket from 2010.
Zolna's suit was among half a dozen lawsuits that followed a Tribune investigation of corruption and mismanagement within the city's $600 million red light program. The series exposed a $2 million City Hall bribery scheme that brought the traffic cameras to Chicago as well as tens of thousands of tickets that were issued to drivers unfairly.
The investigation found malfunctioning cameras, inconsistent enforcement and millions of dollars in tickets issued purposely by City Hall even after transportation officials knew that yellow light times were dropping below the federal minimum guidelines.
Throughout the scandal, the Emanuel administration has been reluctant to issue refunds, in some cases forcing drivers to file paperwork and apply for a rehearing process some critics have called onerous.
Former City Hall operative John Bills was sentenced to 10 years in prison for taking hundreds of thousands of dollars in bribes to steer tens of millions of dollars in red light camera contracts to an Arizona company, Redflex Traffic Systems Inc. The former CEO of the company was sentenced to 2 1/2 years in federal prison.
According to testimony at his federal trial, Bills took a cash bribe of up to $2,000 for each of the 384 red light cameras that were installed while he oversaw the program. The Tribune found that up to 40 percent of those cameras made intersections more dangerous by increasing injuries from rear-end crashes by 22 percent.
One of the suits that stemmed from the scandal was filed by the Emanuel administration itself, seeking more than $350 million in damages from Redflex.
dkidwell@chicagotribune.com
Twitter @DavidKidwellThese days, misinformation is a term that’s wildly thrown around. But in the actual wild, misleading communication techniques are means to meals for many species.
“It’s a form of deception that we call aggressive mimicry,” says Fiona Cross, a zoologist at the University of Canterbury in Christchurch, New Zealand.
In other words, an animal pretends to be another animal to dupe and lure prey close enough for chomping. (Find the animal mimics in this National Geographic interactive.)
“The animal sends out a signal that is beneficial to the sender but disadvantageous to the receiver,” explains Cross, a former psychologist who's fascinated with the way hunters “play mind games with prey.”
Take the South African puff adder Bitis arietans, which mimics an insect's movements by wagging its tongue slowly and deliberately to attract nearby amphibians. Scientists only recently discovered the behavior, the first time it's been recorded in terrestrial snakes. (Other animals, such as snapping turtles, aquatic birds such as egrets, and aquatic snakes, sport tongue lures.)
Deadly Trick: See How a Puff Adder Uses Its Tongue to Lure Prey
Anything goes in the wild—it's con or be conned and eat or be eaten.
Sneaky Spiders
Found in Australia, Asia and Africa, spiders in the Portia genus have to be especially tricky, because they hunt other spiders.
One technique Portias use is plucking the silk strands of a spider web to pretend to be prey snagged in a web. When the hungry web owner comes to investigate, the mimicking Portia spider attacks. (Also see "Jumping Spiders Can Think Ahead, Plan Detours.")
The challenge is not getting eaten itself, so a Portia spider tweaks its plucking to the situation—for instance, using a calming technique when dealing with larger prey. “If the web owner is a big spider, you don’t want it charging out,” explains Cross. “Honestly, it blows my mind!”
View Images A jumping spider, Portia albimana, stares down the camera in Bangalore, India. Photograph by Alamy Stock Photo
Then there’s the Portia spider that Cross calls the femme fatale. A would-be mate—the predatory Portia—shakes a hanging leaf, attracting a female looking for love. Instead of hooking up, the deceived spider is the main course for a deadly dinner date. (Related: "Bondage, Cannibalism, and Castration—Spiders' Wild Sex Lives.")
Hungry Frogfish
Members of the anglerfish family, frogfish tend to stay put and blend into their shallow water habitats. To hunt, a frogfish wiggles an appendage near its mouth that mimics tiny sea critters such as worms and shrimp, tasty tidbits for unsuspecting fish. (Also see "Fish Mimics Mimic Octopus That Mimics Fish.")
“Frogfish are voracious ambush predators, and they eat pretty much anything that comes by and fits into their mouths,” says Maarten De Brauwer, a marine biologist at Curtin University in Perth, Australia.
On a recent night dive in Dauin, Philippines, De Brauwer and a colleague noticed frogfish lures that looked like fluorescent orange worms swimming nearby (watch video). The team, which published the encounter in the journal Coral Reefs, believes the orange lure may mimic the glowing worms as a bait-and-switch hunting tactic. (See more beautiful pictures of undersea camouflage.)
Clever Cichlids
It usually takes three animals for misinformation to be communicated—the mimic, its model, and the target that receives the information.
But a 2015 study in Biology Letters describes a species of cichlid in East Africa's Lake Tanganyika that casts a much wider net.
The striped P. straeleni cichlid looks a lot like two other cichlid species in the lake. It was previously thought that this resemblance allowed P. straeleni to sidle up and eat its look-alikes. But this study found that P. straeleni actually preys on many different species of fish—and not those it impersonates. (Read about a cichlid that plays dead to attract scavenging prey.)
Exactly how the dupe gives P. straeleni an advantage is still to be discovered, but it seems this imitator can disappear in a crowd.More than any building in town, it is City Hall that defines Toronto. Fifty years after it opened, the unique structure remains a powerful symbol of civic optimism and confidence, more compelling now perhaps than ever.
Fifty years after it opened, Toronto City Hall's unique structure remains a powerful symbol of civic optimism and confidence, more compelling now perhaps than ever. ( RENE JOHNSTON / TORONTO STAR ) Viljo Revell at City Hall while it was under construction in 1964. ( Harold Whyte photo ) People frolic at Nathan Phillips Square in 1970, with City Hall in the background. ( Reg Innell / Toronto Star file photo )
Its unveiling in September 1965 marked Toronto’s entry into the modern world. Sloughing off the muddy cloak of colonialism, the city declared its desire to be a player on the international stage, to be taken seriously. But as Ryerson University architecture professor George Kapelos and historian Christopher Armstrong make clear in an exhibition that opens Tuesday, designing and constructing Toronto City Hall was as crucial to this process as the building itself. By the time an international architectural competition was launched in 1957, it was clear Torontonians wanted more than what local practitioners were offering. The show includes drawings of a scheme prepared by a consortium of Toronto firms. Boxy, plain and dull, it was a plan that looked to the past. It could have been head office of an insurance company.
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The competition, which attracted more than 500 submissions from 42 countries, some as far away as Africa and Australia, became one of the most celebrated ever held, up there with the Chicago Tribune and the Sydney Opera House. “The competition was incredibly important,” says Kapelos, “for Toronto, for Canada and the world. It wasn’t just about Toronto, but a convergence of a whole lot of issues that catalyzed here in this city. People were agitating for newness and modernity. Around the globe, interest in rebuilding cities was intense. Issues such as decolonization, monumentality and national identity were on everyone’s mind. The timing was amazing.” In Canada, the Massey Commission was appointed to examine the state of the “arts, letters and the sciences.” Its report, delivered in 1951, recommended public funding for a range of cultural activity. The postwar euphoria about the country’s future was in full sway; artists, architects and scientists would lead the way. Today, of course, these are the very programs governments are anxious to drop. As for Canadian identity, that’s more contested than ever. Indeed, one can’t help but wonder whether anything like City Hall could be built now. The unabashed faith in democracy, the sense of community and civic pride it expresses have no place in an age of disgruntlement.
The winning designer, Finnish architect Viljo Revell, spoke the language of modernism but with a humanist, even romantic, accent. The rigidity of the right angle, the grid of “rationality,” give way to sweeping curves and a sense of welcome. The competition, for a public square as well as a building, emphasized the civic nature of the project. It was intended, documents made clear, for the “pleasure and enjoyment” of citizens. It brought a new level of commitment to the public realm. Nathan Phillips Square is still Toronto’s pre-eminent civic plaza and its finest public space.
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“There was a yearning for public places people could proud of,” Kapelos argues. “The competition became a vehicle for expressing a vision of the future; the square was as important as the building. It was a place to be free.” The exhibition includes exquisite student-made models of the seven other finalists. These proposals, however polished, simply adapted modernist conventions to a civic context. By contrast, Revell gave new form to city hall that was contemporary but which evoked ancient ideals of freedom and democracy. “Competitions,” says Kapelos, “create innovation while reflecting the zeitgeist of the time.” Though true, the genius of Toronto City Hall lies in its ability to transcend all that and remain fresh. The exhibition, Shaping Canadian Modernity, will be on display at the Paul Cocker Gallery, 325 Church St., from Sept. 1 to Oct. 9. Christopher Hume can be reached at chume@thestar.caSouthern California Edison (SCE) has decided to permanently retire Units 2 and 3 of its San Onofre Nuclear Generating Station (SONGS).
“SONGS has served this region for over 40 years,” said Ted Craver, Chairman and CEO of Edison International, parent company of SCE, “but we have concluded that the continuing uncertainty about when or if SONGS might return to service was not good for our customers, our investors, or the need to plan for our region’s long-term electricity needs.”
Both SONGS units have been shut down safely since January 2012. Unit 2 was taken out of service January 9, 2012, for a planned routine outage. Unit 3 was safely taken offline January 31, 2012, after station operators detected a small leak in a tube inside a steam generator manufactured by Mitsubishi Heavy Industries (MHI). Two steam generators manufactured by MHI were installed in Unit 2 in 2009 and two more were installed in Unit 3 in 2010, one of which developed the leak.
In connection with the decision, SCE estimates that it will record a charge in the second quarter of between $450 million and $650 million before taxes ($300 million - $425 million after tax), in accordance with accounting requirements.
After months of analysis and tests, SCE submitted a restart plan to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) in October 2012. SCE proposed to safely restart Unit 2 at a reduced power level (70%) for an initial period of approximately five months. That plan was based on work done by engineering groups from three independent firms with expertise in steam generator design and manufacturing.
The NRC has been reviewing SCE’s plans for restart of Unit 2 for the last eight months, during which several public meetings have been held. A recent ruling by an adjudicatory arm of the NRC, the Atomic Safety and Licensing Board, creates further uncertainty regarding when a final decision might be made on restarting Unit 2. Additional administrative processes and appeals could result in delay of more than a year. During this period, the costs of maintaining SONGS in a state of readiness to restart and the costs to replace the power SONGS previously provided would continue. Moreover, it is uneconomic for SCE and its customers to bear the long-term repair costs for returning SONGS to full power operation without restart of Unit 2. SCE has concluded that efforts are better focused on planning for the replacement generation and transmission resources which will be required for grid reliability.
“Looking ahead,” said Ron Litzinger, SCE’s President, “we think that our decision to retire the units will eliminate uncertainty and facilitate orderly planning for California’s energy future.”
Litzinger noted that the company has worked with the California Independent System Operator, the California Energy Commission and the California Public Utilities Commission in planning for Southern California’s energy needs and will continue to do so.
“The company is already well into a summer reliability program and has completed numerous transmission |
Europeans do about them.
These questions were tackled by a recent workshop in Sofia, with notable participation of Balkan think-tankers, journalists and analysts. The guest speakers included HR/VP Federica Mogherini, Bulgarian Foreign Minister Daniel Mitov and deputy Bulgarian PM Meglena Kuneva. More than 50 experts from the Balkans and the Black Sea region raised their concerns and offered policy suggestions.
What do local experts think?
Local experts argued that the EU is basically acting on policy autopilot, with an overwhelming focus on process (e.g. benchmark decision-making) and less on substance (e.g. actual progress on deep democratisation and good governance). The EU’s own internal struggles and negative politics with its Grexitand Brexits, together with the political chill resulting from the enlargement fatigue, have contributed to its losing leverage in the Western Balkans. In turn, elites are often not keen on passing reforms which are threatening their power interests or remain comfortable in spoiler politics. In these circumstances, the costs and benefits of a distant EU prospect are reassessed when set against the more tangible benefits offered by other strategic actors.
Local experts argued that the EU is basically acting on policy autopilot, with an overwhelming focus on process and less on substance.
There is a sense that, at present, not only has momentum been lost but negative momentum has set in. We see democratic rollbacks across the region, outbursts of tensions (for instance, the controversy around the Srebrenica commemorations, magnified by Russia’s veto at the UN Security Council) and the resulting power vacuum gradually filled, in different ways, by Russia, Turkey, the Gulf countries or even China. Other experts argued that Europeans would be trading “democracy for stability” and even renouncing basic principles –with references to acceptance with undemocratic practices in Macedonia and elsewhere.
Though regional initiatives, such as the Berlin Process, the Serbia-Kosovo dialogue and the EC-led Politcal agreement in Skopje, are sign of a certain re-engagement, experts showed scepticism towards these projects’ real capacity to be game-changers. This doubt is given more credence, given the regional tradition of undertaking power-sharing or reforms commitments that, in spite of much rhetoric and fanfare, are not honoured.
When it comes to stale dossiers such as Bosnia or the crisis of Macedonia, participants in the workshop argued for the EU to be more assertive, instead of just an incentive-based approach, to guarantee respect for agreements and reassurance against spoiler politics, tensions and zero-sum games.
A new European strategy for the Western Balkans?
Local experts overwhelmingly advocated for a reassessment of EU’s policies towards the region and, above all, to avoid current inertia, even if this were to see changes in the way forward. In their view, the EU and its member states would need a “new strategy” for the region. This strategy should be coherent with the ongoing process for a new EU Global Strategy. Such a strategy should follow, they argue, a policy reassessment based on lessons learned from scenarios like Kosovo or Macedonia.
The EU should reverse a trend of disempowerment of democratic forces in the region, and shift course to enable a more inclusive, truly transformational process that would rely more heavily on civil society's role.
Moreover, the current autopilot mode on enlargement cannot continue. The EU should reverse a trend of disempowerment of democratic forces in the region, and shift course to enable a more inclusive, truly transformational process that would rely more heavily on civil society's role. The current emphasis on regional cooperation, socio-economics and governance is positive, but needs to be backed with real, tangible outcomes for the population and based on sustained implementation of reforms.
Overall, there is a sense that Europe needs to re-establish itself with regards to the Western Balkans and that, in the face of these challenges, more of the same will not suffice. The different strategic processes in the EU and some of its member states should be an opportunity for this policy reset or new strategy. Ultimately, as local experts suggested, the future of the Western Balkans is a question that fundamentally pertains to the kind of EU that Europeans really want and to the future of the European project itself. This is a question that Europeans can no longer dodge. And, for the Western Balkans, the sooner they answer it, the better, unless they want other global powers to pre-empt their answer.
Read more on: Wider Europe,Western BalkansThe Delegates in Council, or beggars on horseback, a contemporaneous caricature., a contemporaneous caricature.
The Spithead and Nore mutinies were two major mutinies by sailors of the Royal Navy in 1797. They were the first outbreaks of a significant increase in maritime radicalism in the Atlantic World.[1] Despite their temporal proximity, the mutinies differed in character: while the Spithead mutiny was essentially a strike action, articulating economic grievances, the Nore mutiny was more radical, articulating political ideals as well.
The mutinies were extremely concerning for Britain, because at the time the country was at war with Revolutionary France, and the Navy was the most significant component of the war effort. There were also concerns among the government that the mutinies might be part of wider attempts at revolutionary sedition instigated by societies such as the London Corresponding Society and the United Irishmen.
Spithead [ edit ]
The mutiny at Spithead (an anchorage near Portsmouth) lasted from 16 April to 15 May 1797. Sailors on 16 ships in the Channel Fleet, commanded by Admiral Lord Bridport, protested against the living conditions aboard Royal Navy vessels and demanded a pay rise, better victualling, increased shore leave, and compensation for sickness and injury.[2] On 26 April a supportive mutiny broke out on 15 ships in Plymouth, who sent delegates to Spithead to take part in negotiations.[3]
Seamen's pay rates had been established in 1658, and because of the stability of wages and prices, they were still reasonable as recently as the 1756–1763 Seven Years' War; however, high inflation during the last decades of the 18th century had severely eroded the real value of the pay. In recent years, pay raises had also been granted to the army, militia, and naval officers.[2] At the same time, the practice of coppering the submerged part of hulls, which had started in 1761, meant that British warships no longer had to return to port frequently to have their hulls scraped, and the additional time at sea significantly altered the rhythm and difficulty of seamen's work. The Royal Navy had not made adjustments for any of these changes, and was slow to understand their effects on its crews. Finally, the new wartime quota system meant that crews had many landsmen from inshore who did not mix well with the career seamen, leading to discontented ships' companies.
The mutineers were led by elected delegates and tried to negotiate with the Admiralty for two weeks, focusing their demands on better pay, the abolition of the 14-ounce "purser's pound" (the ship's purser was allowed to keep two ounces of every true pound—16 ounces—of meat as a perquisite), and the removal of a handful of unpopular officers; neither flogging nor impressment was mentioned in the mutineers' demands. The mutineers maintained regular naval routine and discipline aboard their ships (mostly with their regular officers), allowed some ships to leave for convoy escort duty or patrols, and promised to suspend the mutiny and go to sea immediately if French ships were spotted heading for English shores.[4]
Because of mistrust, especially over pardons for the mutineers, the negotiations broke down, and minor incidents broke out, with several unpopular officers sent to shore and others treated with signs of deliberate disrespect.[5] When the situation calmed, Admiral Lord Howe intervened to negotiate an agreement that saw a royal pardon for all crews, reassignment of some of the unpopular officers, a pay raise and abolition of the purser's pound. Afterwards, the mutiny was to become nicknamed the "breeze at Spithead".
The Nore [ edit ]
The Newgate Calendar) Richard Parker about to be hanged for mutiny (image from
Inspired by the example of their comrades at Spithead, the sailors at the Nore (an anchorage in the Thames Estuary) also mutinied, on 12 May 1797, when the crew of Sandwich seized control of the ship. Several other ships in the same location followed this example, though others slipped away and continued to slip away during the mutiny, despite gunfire from the ships that remained (which attempted to use force to hold the mutiny together). The mutineers had been unable to organise easily because the ships were scattered along the Nore (and were not all part of a unified fleet, as at Spithead), but quickly elected delegates for each ship.
Richard Parker was elected "President of the Delegates of the Fleet". According to him, he was nominated and elected without his knowledge.[7] Parker was a former master's mate who was dis-rated and court-martialed in December 1793 and re-enlisted in the Navy as a seaman in early 1797, where he came to serve aboard the brig-sloop Hound. Demands were formulated and on 20 May 1797, a list of eight demands [9] was presented to Admiral Charles Buckner, which mainly involved pardons, increased pay and modification of the Articles of War, eventually expanding to a demand that the King dissolve Parliament and make immediate peace with France. These demands infuriated the Admiralty, which offered nothing except a pardon (and the concessions already made at Spithead) in return for an immediate return to duty.
Captain Sir Erasmus Gower commissioned HMS Neptune (98 guns) in the upper Thames and put together a flotilla of fifty loyal ships to prevent the mutineers moving on the city of London. It was largely fear of this blockade moving down river which made the mutineers reconsider their actions and begin to waver.[10]
The mutineers expanded their initial grievances[further explanation needed] and blockaded London, preventing merchant vessels from entering the port, and the principals made plans to sail their ships to France, alienating the regular English sailors and losing more and more ships as the mutiny progressed. On 5 June Parker issued an order that merchant ships be allowed to pass the blockade, and only Royal Navy victualling (i.e., supply) ships be detained; the ostensible reason provided in the order was that "the release of the merchant vessels would create a favourable impression on shore", although this decision may actually have been perhaps more due to the complexities involved in such a wide undertaking as interdicting all the merchant traffic on the busy Thames. After the successful resolution of the Spithead mutiny, the government and the Admiralty were not inclined to make further concessions, particularly as they felt some leaders of the Nore mutiny had political aims beyond improving pay and living conditions.
The mutineers were denied food and water, and when Parker hoisted the signal for the ships to sail to France,[contradictory] all of the remaining ships refused to follow.
Meanwhile, Captain Charles Cunningham of HMS Clyde, which was there for a refit, persuaded his crew to return to duty and slipped off to Sheerness. This was seen as a signal to others to do likewise,[13] and eventually, most ships slipped their anchors and deserted (some under fire from the mutineers), and the mutiny failed. Parker was quickly convicted of treason and piracy and hanged from the yardarm of Sandwich, the vessel where the mutiny had started. In the reprisals which followed, 29 were hanged, 29 were imprisoned, and nine were flogged, while others were sentenced to transportation to Australia. One such was surgeon's mate William Redfern who became a respected surgeon and landowner in New South Wales.[14] The majority of men involved in the mutiny were not punished at all, which was lenient by the standards of the time.[15]
After the Nore mutiny, Royal Navy vessels no longer rang five bells in the last dog watch, as that had been the signal to begin the mutiny.
Mutinies and discontent following [ edit ]
In September 1797, the crew of Hermione mutinied in the West Indies, killing almost all the officers in revenge for a number of grievances including the throwing into the sea of the bodies of three men who had been killed in falling from the rigging in a desperate scramble to avoid flogging for being last man down on deck. The Hermione was taken by the crew to the Spanish port of La Guaira.
On 27 December, the crew of Marie Antoinette murdered their officers and took their ship into a French port in the West Indies.
Other mutinies took place off the coast of Ireland and at the Cape of Good Hope and spread to the fleet under Admiral Jervis off the coast of Spain.
In the years following Spithead and the Nore, there was a significant increase in mutinies among European navies and merchant companies, approximately 50%.[1] Scholars have linked it to the radical political ideologies developing in the transnational space of the Atlantic World, as well as to the development of working class consciousness among sailors.[19] Both explanations have been the subject of extensive academic investigation. Political analyses often emphasize the radical discourse and conduct of the Nore mutineers as evidence of their ideological motivation.[19] Class analyses often emphasize the discipline and solely economic grievances of the Spithead mutineers as pointing to "class solidarity".[20] Recent attempts have been made to unify these approaches under a framework of masculine identity, arguing that different interpretations of what it meant to be a man to the sailors were the cause of the political/ideological/economic differences between the two mutinies.[21]
In the arts [ edit ]
Notes [ edit ]
References [ edit ]
Further reading [ edit ]Let's talk about how you first started out with Thee Oh Sees. Is it true that when you met John Dwyer you were working as a waitress in a cafe?
I was working as a coffee maker. I would just make him his coffee every morning, amongst a million other people that came in, but yeah that is how we met.
And so how did he end up recruiting you for the band?
It's funny, he would come in every morning and I had just moved over from England to California where people... it's not that they don't have a sense of humour, but John's from the east coast and his sense of humour is somehow closer to England and he was a relief when he would come in every morning - he was the one funny person that I would serve coffee to, so I never forgot him.
He was constantly handing out flyers for all the different bands that he was in and eventually I went to some of them. I think we would smoke cigarettes together on my break and we just made friends, as you do, and I told him I was singing in another band and he eventually came to see that band and asked me to sing with him. But it was about two years of knowing each other before that happened.
When you first joined the band was it still very much John's baby?
It was a very different band when I joined. Really different music: slower, quieter, many more harmonies. Just a really different thing. I felt like I had joined The Velvet Underground or something, I knew it was that good.
If you've been in bands your whole life, you know when you've joined a good one and it was clearly John's vision, but it was such a good vision, that I was so happy to be a part of it. I know that must sound really cheesy, but I do mean it - it was great. And then over the years more people have joined and it's become more of a group effort and we do write more together for sure.
So do you feel like it's more of a band now rather than 'the John Dwyer Experience' or something?
Well they go back and forth. We released two albums last year - no, three albums - and two of them were pretty much John. He gets lots of different people to sit in with him and I was singing on a couple of those albums, but there was only one real full band album. It kinda goes back and forth and we just recorded another which is a full band album again. I think he just writes so quickly that he's got to get it out of his system.
I wanted to ask you about that, because some of the records - Putrifiers II for example - do feel very much like 'John albums' in contrast to some of your other work. Is it weird for you sometimes seeing stuff come out under the band's name that you've not really been that involved in?
The first time it was a little bit weird and then I just had to step back from it and think about it. John is my dear friend and I love him completely and it's right that he should be able to do his thing untethered I suppose by what our time restrictions are.
I had a job so I wasn't available the way he writes, which is full time, and also we each of us have to have the freedom to achieve our vision and I don't give a shit that it's released under the band name. We are all of us that, so it's fine. It took a change of thinking, you have to get a little bit freer. But it's good that it's this way, we're all free to do it if we need to.
So when you do play as a full band are you mostly recording live?
Previously we have always done that. There's been the occasional overdub, like an extra set of harmonies or an extra keyboard line or flute or something like that. This album that we just did had a couple more vocal overdubs, particularly with me because I'm not a great piano player and so singing and playing my piano parts at the same time was too much.
So I played my parts while we recorded the whole band live and then I came back in to sing my bits. But John also did some of that this time. We're trying to do a little better job at singing I think and just experiment with a new way of doing it.
How does that work when it comes to playing live then? Do you just strip things down for gigs or...?
I don't do any looping and mostly we try and recreate it. The more I learn the bits, the more I'm able to play and sing at the same time. I making myself sound like an idiot - it's just not very good, but I'm getting better. It's just that a lot of the songs we recorded were relatively new, but with practice it gets better. But yeah, we try and keep it as close to live as possible. You'll hear the album, it's not that fancy, but there are certain bits where we've added in elements.
And once you're done with recording, do your songs keep mutating with your live shows...
Yeah always. They always change. Because you can write and you can record the songs, but once you've played it live there's that element of changeability, because John will just change things on stage or write a new part on stage or an improvisation that just happens while you're playing live. I'll be curious to hear how the songs change over the next year of us playing them.
When that happens do you sometimes wish you'd put the new version out on record instead?
We have come back and re-recorded some of the ones that have changed that much, because then it's become a different song. Because that good thing that came from that live moment on stage, you want to record it and have that captured and not lose it.
A lot of people talk about Thee Oh Sees as a very prolific band. Do you see it that way or do you wonder why other acts aren't putting out as many albums as you are?
I do think that, partly because this band is what I'm used to, but also partly because all of our friends here run pretty much on the same path, doing it a similar way. There's so many collaborations and generally people here try and record what they've done.
For example, our buddy Ty Segall made a record with Tim Presley from White Fence - they put that out and I don't know how many records he made last year, but it's a fair few and that just seems normal to me. But I understand someone labouring over a really beautiful album and taking their time with it - there's nothing wrong with that, it's lovely. It's just that we don't do it that way.
You mentioned Ty Segall there. He's part of a scene in San Francisco that seems to have undergone a resurgence around you since your band was founded. Do you see yourselves as at the centre of something there?
It feels really shared, I've certainly never felt like the centre of it. There are other bands here that have been doing it as long as us and really just as influential on the younger bands that are coming up - Sic Alps would be a perfect example. But I have to say, it doesn't feel like we're the centre or Sic Alps are the centre or anyone else; it's much more of a community than that.
You go to each other's shows, you help each other out. It's nice. For me, I'm a bit older and I'm a bit tired of any kind of showboating or bullshit, so I really appreciate that. I like that there's a family feel to it, otherwise I wouldn't really be as interested in doing this honestly.
You guys still have a reputation for pretty wild stage shows though.
Everyone always says that! I'm sure that mostly comes down to John and his antics, his on stage antics. The rest of it is... well you play a show with as much energy as you have. You're not going to go out there and do a halfway job. People do say that and it's very nice that they say that, but I don't know how wild we are. I don't particularly feel that wild myself, but if people think that then cool!
Well you say that, but you did once throw a TV out of a window didn't you?
Haha! It wasn't a very wild moment though. It was actually kind of a little bit of a disappointment because my friend who I was throwing the TV out of the window with said 'it's going to pop, it's going to make this kind of explosion' and it didn't. It just kind of landed - it didn't do anything. The only reason I did that is that it's a stupid cliche that rock 'n' roll people are supposed to do and my friend was like 'you've gotta throw a TV out of a window' so I was like 'okay', but I would never have thought of it on my own.
Do you feel that people come to your live shows expecting... maybe not TV throwing, but fireworks of some sort?
I don't think you can feel too much pressure, you have to just play the best you can each night. If you felt too much pressure about making things a certain way each night, you'd probably turn into a bit of a monster. You just have to take it as it comes and have to be a bit more genuine than that.
You're playing 390 Bar in Shanghai, which is a venue with quite a small, low stage where you're right up in people's faces. That feels like a dynamic that would work well for you guys...
Well for years we always played on the floor. Probably only the last two years that we haven't done that. So we played on the floor in the middle of everybody with a circle of people around you. People would be holding my mic stand and the piano, holding John's mic stand so that it wouldn't all get tipped over.
We've progressed to a stage which is a funny transition. I like smaller places better, but I enjoy the challenge of learning how to try and translate a show that feels good to a larger stage. I don't know if I could put that into words - how you do it - but just making that energy of what you do come across. That probably sounds really cheesy, but hopefully you know what I mean. But that venue sounds perfect.
So have you been out here before at all then?
No, never. None of us in fact. This is our first time, it's pretty exciting.
What did you think when someone asked if you'd like to play China?
I couldn't believe it, I really couldn't believe it. Because it's not a place I ever... I had always hoped to go to Japan, because I've had a life long love affair with the country - I read The Tale of Genji when I was 11. I guess I didn't think of coming to China as something that was possible honestly.
It's not that I didn't think that people would be into music, but that we could go over there and play. We're a small band, you know what I mean? You think that big bands would do it, but not just like a little mini rock 'n' roll band like us. I can't wait, it blows my mind that we're doing this.
Thee Oh Sees play 390 Bar on Friday 22 as part of Split Works' warm up for JUE Festival in March. as part of Split Works' warm up for JUE Festival in March.
Time OutA little nugget buried in the Daily 202 that we thought was worth picking out: Ted Cruz's image among members of his own party is plummeting.
Gallup is in the field every day asking a battery of questions, including how people feel about the 2016 candidates. Those results are then averaged over seven days, offering some insight into how candidates are viewed.
John Kasich's net favorability — the number of people who view him positively minus the number who view him negatively — has stayed relatively flat over the past three weeks. The numbers for Donald Trump have improved slightly. But Cruz's sank, then rose, and then, from around April 20 on, plummeted.
Notice that this is largely a function of his favorability (the dashed yellow line) sinking. This correlates roughly to the time around the New York primary — when it became apparent that Trump was poised to make big strides toward clinching the nomination. It was a big blow to the efforts to prevent Trump from getting the nomination, which involved turning to Cruz as the default choice. The numbers suggest that affection for Cruz may have been more tightly tied to his role as Not Trump than his personal qualities.
Remember that this is only among Republicans. Cruz is viewed more unfavorably than favorably, while the opposite is true for Trump and Kasich.
On the Democratic side, though, the two candidates are viewed much more positively on net than the Republicans.
Clinton, too, rebounded from a worse position earlier in the month, but at her worst, her net favorability was eight points higher than the best marks for any Republican (Kasich).
This is partly a function of the ferocity of the Republican election, which hasn't been matched on the Democratic side. The big question for the party is whether Republicans will coalesce around the eventual nominee. These numbers don't answer that.
They do reinforce, though, that the anti-Trump effort is collapsing. Meaning that the party may have a nominee around whom it can coalesce sooner than it may have seemed.Spring Branch may be booming as a restaurant destination, but the area lost a reliable neighborhood option last weekend when Hollister Grill owner Chuck Pritchett made the decision to close.
When he first opened Hollister, Pritchett tells CultureMap he had so little experience with the restaurant business that he didn't even know how to open a bottle of wine. Fortunately, Hollister found success with classic American fare and good service. The restaurant even briefly spawned a second location on Washington Avenue under the direction of chef Jason Kerr.
"I think our food was good," Pritchett says. "Our reviews were good. Our quality of service was good."
Still, the combination of a dispute with his landlord over the condition of the 50-plus-year-old building that would have triggered a $15,000 upgrade to the air conditioning system and street construction on Long Point that diminished business served as a double whammy that Hollister just couldn't overcome.
While his time in the restaurant business has come to an end, Pritchett will continue to devote his attention to his popular menswear store Village Clothier.
"You can't consider it a failure after six years," Pritchett concludes. "I had a great run, how's that?"Dear Reader, As you can imagine, more people are reading The Jerusalem Post than ever before. Nevertheless, traditional business models are no longer sustainable and high-quality publications, like ours, are being forced to look for new ways to keep going. Unlike many other news organizations, we have not put up a paywall. We want to keep our journalism open and accessible and be able to keep providing you with news and analysis from the frontlines of Israel, the Middle East and the Jewish World.
A rabbinical group slammed United Torah Judaism MK Moshe Gafni this week for his comments in favor of evacuating settlements.
The Rabbinical Congress for Peace, a group founded to oppose territorial concessions, protested in the name of 400 Israeli rabbis.
Earlier this month, Gafni revealed a previously unknown letter from Rabbi Elazar Menachem Man Shach, the spiritual head of the non-hassidic haredi (“Lithuanian”) community and the Degel Hatorah Party, to then-prime minister Menachem Begin in 1978, when he was negotiating peace with Egypt. Shach wrote that “concessions made only for peace are not concessions,” and that in Jewish law, “there is nothing preventing concessions of parts of the Land of Israel.”Safed Chief Rabbi Shmuel Eliyahu said that Gafni’s behavior was an “affront to the entire concept of Torah authority,” because he was bringing up an outdated letter.Since that time, Eliyahu said, there were serious halachic debates on the status of the Land of Israel.Eliyahu pointed out that former chief rabbi Ovadia Yosef had ruled in favor of land for peace, but changed his mind following the wave of terrorism that came after the Oslo Accords were signed with the PLO. Yosef was the spiritual leader of Shas, which abstained on a 1993 vote on the Oslo Accords, allowing them to be approved by the Knesset.“Different Israeli governments have tried dozens of miserable experiments to apply the land-for-peace formula, only to leave behind a long trail of Jewish blood and serious damage to the Israeli security,” he added.Eliyahu said that concessions would mean giving land to “haters of Israel, the partners of ISIS.”Outside of religious circles, Eliyahu is best known for his edict against selling homes to Arabs.In addition, a group of Chabad emissaries who were personally selected by Lubavitcher Rebbe Menachem Mendel Schneerson to go to Israel in the 1970s wrote a letter protesting Gafni’s comments.“This view, even in its time, was solidly refuted and stood in stark contradiction to established Halacha,” they wrote.“How much more so it is irrelevant today, given the irrefutable evidence that every terrorist attack, rocket and mortar fire, shootings and knife attack was directly caused by Israeli concessions... The very territories delivered to our enemies as ‘concessions for peace’ have become bases for terrorist attacks against Jews.”Rabbi Eliyahu Shleshinger, the rabbi of the Gilo and Mekor Chaim areas of Jerusalem, accused Gafni of being “asleep for the last 25 years” and speaking “absolute nonsense.”“Our enemies have no intention of accepting our existence, and no concession on our part will make them change for the better; rather, the opposite is true. The pure Torah position cannot be based on pipe dreams,” Shleshinger said.
Join Jerusalem Post Premium Plus now for just $5 and upgrade your experience with an ads-free website and exclusive content. Click here>>The Canadian Broadcasting Company's website reported a story on July 5th about an RCMP officer under investigation and on administrative leave after the CBC and his superiors learned details they disapproved of regarding his private sexual conduct.
The officer, Cpl. Jim Brown, had posted photos of himself on a private, members only website that were leaked, leading to the situation at hand. To quote the article:
While we must strike a balance between an individual's rights and freedoms when off-duty and the RCMP code of conduct, I am personally embarrassed and very disappointed that the RCMP would be, in any way, linked to photos of that nature.
Fifteen years ago, they could easily have been talking about photos of a Mountie and his same-sex partner. Today that's unlikely, certainly from our more "enlightened" cousins to the north.
In this case, the photos, and sexual practices they depict, described in the article as "inappropriate," "conduct unbecoming," and "abnormal," were of Cpl. Brown's activities as someone involved in the BDSM subculture. The pictures and the profile to which they were attached were from Fetlife.com [NSFW], the social networking site that serves as something not unlike a Facebook for the kink/BDSM community.
I haven't had much occasion in the time I've been a Bilerico Project contributor to talk about my "real" job, but it's relevant here, if only to give context to my perspective on this issue. I'm an educator and activist who presents on sexuality, kink/BDSM, spirituality, and LGBT issues, sometimes all at once. I am also a programing coordinator and production assistant for Dark Odyssey Events, which produces (in my admittedly biased opinion) some of the finest sexuality/BDSM events in the U.S.
And yes, of course I have a Fetlife profile, it's as essential in my work as a Facebook profile, if not more so.
So this whole situation, and the CBC article itself, was deeply distressing to me on two separate, but connected levels. First off, as a sex-positive and BDSM educator, I was disgusted by the level of fear mongering inherent in both the article and the response of Cpl. Brown's superiors. Among other things, his conduct in the investigation of a serial murder who killed women was called into question in light of his kinky interests. The CBC reported that his now removed Fetlife profile listed his role a "dominant" which they imply points to something nefarious, although they don't elaborate as to what.
For what it's worth, my profile lists me as "sadomasochist" and I'm considered to be one of the finest sadistic needleplay instructors in the northeast. I also cry at long distance commercials and send my mom flowers on Mother's Day. Yes, that's a non sequitur, but also my point.
At the same time, I was also quite bothered by all this as an LGBT activist. Granted, being queer/LGBT doesn't make you kinky, and in fact some of the most vociferously anti-BDSM folk I've ever met were part of the LGBT demographic. But as queer/LGBT people, we do know a thing or two about being punished and publicly humiliated (and not in a fun or consensual way) for our private sexual practices and the nature of our relationships.
I'm not going to dive headlong into the whole "Is being kinky an intrinsic part of one's nature or a choice?" issue here and now, although perhaps I'll revisit it in the future, when I'm feeling particularly masochistic and want to be spanked by the internet. All I'll say is that there are some people who would tell you that their kinky explorations are a fun bedroom diversion that they could take or leave, while others say that kink/BDSM is central to their understanding of themselves as sexual beings and the relationships they have.
What's important here is that Cpl. Brown engaged in consensual acts with other adults and is being punished for it. Arguably he's being punished for the pictures, but even that is more than a bit unclear in the article, which focuses much more on his involvement in BDSM itself. There is a mention that it was inappropriate for him to wear his RCMP-issue boots in such a context, but frankly it is clear that the tempest in a teapot tearing apart this man's life is about far more than his footwear.
The very foundations of the gay liberation movement can be found in the quest for sexual freedom. What's happening to Cpl. Brown flies in the face of the underlying values on which we as queer/LGBT people have built our successes, and it's just plain wrong. You don't have to be kinky, or find anything of personal value in the BDSM lifestyle to see that.
Moreover, the quest for our equal rights has not always been unidirectional, and the persecution of one kind of "sexual deviant" is a short step away from leading backwards towards the days when job, housing, and societal discrimination against the LGBT community was broadly acceptable in the service of "community norms" and "family values."
The argument can be made that the woes of Cpl. Brown and the BDSM community are not those of the queer/LGBT community. But leave this injustice unanswered and mark my words, they will be.Dropkicked Fan Defends the Story So Far; Toronto Venue Bans Band from Returning
Published Apr 13, 2016
"As expected at all hardcore shows, Parker was going with the flow and just hyping up the crowd so he kicked me off the stage. It was all in good fun in my opinion, and it wasn't even a hard kick, just like a push or nudge... I laughed when I fell into the crowd and I kept rocking out."
She went on: "I just want to set the record straight that I'm fine and I hope this doesn't change anyone's opinion on the band."
Yesterday (April 12), footage emerged of the Story So Far frontman Parker Cannon dropkicking a female fan off the stage while she was taking a selfie during the band's Toronto show at the Mod Club on April 10.The band have yet to comment on the situation, but both the fan who was forcefully booted from the stage and the venue have spoken out — taking totally opposite stances.A woman named Becca Ilic identified herself as the selfie-taking concertgoer in the video via a Facebook comment. In the post, she explained, "I was at the show, got up on stage and tried to take a stupid snapchat video of me jumping in the crowd. I was drunk and my phone wasn't working properly to load the app so I stood there longer than I had anticipated."She apologized to the band and the audience, and continued:You can see a screenshot of the full comment below.The venue, meanwhile, has banned the group from playing at the Mod Club in the future. Manager Jorge Dias told CBC, "We are appalled by the actions of the singer. That was a very cowardly act."The pop-punk band are currently scheduled to |
goose bumps because you realized you were part of something so much bigger than yourself.”
Paul’s first experience with USA Basketball was in high school, when he played for the North team at the Youth Development Festival in Colorado Springs, Colo. He was on the squad that lost to Greece at the 2006 World Championship in Japan—“I remember sitting at my locker,” Paul recalled, “trying to figure out how we were going to go back home"—and he was a leader of the group that redeemed itself with gold medals in '08 and '12. “Coming from where we were,” Paul said, “that was the best feeling.”
After more than a decade of contribution to USA Basketball, Paul told SI.com on Monday that he is withdrawing from consideration for this summer’s Olympic team, likely ending his international career. “I feel my body telling me that I could use the time,” he said. Few NBA players have expended more this season than Paul. Although his traditional stats do not vary much from his career norms—19.9 points and 9.8 assists in 33.2 minutes—he has piggybacked the Clippers in Blake Griffin’s absence.
Since Griffin was initially injured on Christmas night, Paul has accounted for nearly half of L.A.’s assists, keeping the team fourth in the Western Conference. Last week, ESPN Stats & Information suggested that he has been “the most important offensive player in the NBA” over the past three months, given the wild disparity in the Clippers’ production when he is on and off the court.
Paul, the best point guard of his generation, has a hard time recalling a summer when he was not either injured, recovering from injury, or playing for Team USA. The Olympics are synonymous with other touchstones in his life. His wife, Jada, became pregnant with their son, Chris Jr., right after the ’08 Olympics and gave birth to their daughter, Camryn, right after the ’12 Games. “Just a few days ago, Little Chris asked me, ‘Daddy, will you play in the Olympics again?’” Paul said. “Part of me wanted to say yes, because he’s never been part of it. But I told him, ‘I want to spend more time with you.’” Paul, a fixture at his son’s Little League complex and basketball gym even during the NBA season, opted to stay home.
• MORE NBA: Inside Warriors practice | Gary Vitti's legacy on the Lakers
Drafted two years after LeBron James, Carmelo Anthony and Dwyane Wade, Paul and the others helped bring back USA Basketball, one card game at a time. “I think we once played cards 35 nights in a row,” Paul joked. Whether or not James, Anthony and Wade continue their international careers—or follow Paul’s lead—a new generation is on the way. “Of course, you’ll have Steph (Curry) and those guys,” Paul said. “Someone else I think would be great is Kyle Lowry. I love watching him play. You need that grit.” Oddly, Lowry is not on the list of 30 finalists, but Curry, Westbrook, Mike Conley, John Wall, Kyrie Irving and Damian Lillard are. The NBA has no shortage of premier point guards ready to take the torch.
As Paul spoke Monday, he was on his way to Staples Center, for a game against the Celtics. He thought about the Olympic rings he earned in ’08 and ’12, which his wife recently unearthed while cleaning out his closet, and he sounded wistful. “Tonight, we’ll play the Celtics, and the fans in Boston will cheer hard against us,” Paul said. “The fans in L.A. will cheer hard against them. The thing I’ll always remember about Team USA is that everyone cheers for you.”Current version: Ultimate Stunts 0.7.7
Ultimate Stunts: Not just another racing game
Ultimate Stunts is a remake of the famous DOS-game stunts. Racing in Ultimate Stunts involves some really spectacular stunts, like loopings, corkscrews, bridges to jump over, etc., but the best thing is that you can design your own tracks!
The game Ultimate Stunts is not yet finished, but it already has some important improvements compared to the original game. Stunts was an old DOS game with simple CGA/EGA/VGA graphics, but Ultimate Stunts is a modern multiplatform application (it works on windows, Linux and several UNIX systems) with OpenGL graphics. It also has some new features, like 3D sound and (internet) multiplaying. And, while Stunts can nowadays be downloaded for free as abandonware (e.g. on the XTC site), Ultimate Stunts is completely free software!
Screenshots
Screenshots can be found here.
Download
If you like UltimateStunts so much that you want to try the current experimental version, then go to the download page. Getting the current version of Ultimate Stunts started can be tricky, so you might want to take a look at the documentation page.
News
Do you like this project, and do you want to track the developments? Then you might want to add the news page to your browser favorites. It contains news about new version releases, site changes, and all other kind of things.
It's free!
Full versions of UltimateStunts can be downloaded from the internet, without paying for it. And this is legal! There is even more: UltimateStunts is open source software. This means that the the "source code" of UltimateStunts is available for free. This is probably not very interesting for the average windows user, but other (open source) game developers will appreciate it. The GNU General Public License (GPL), published on the internet on the GNU site, gives you the right to freely redistribute UltimateStunts. It also allows you to make your own programs based upon the sourcecode of UltimateStunts. But, this developing is restricted to making other GPL-licensed programs. By using this kind of license, I want to make sure that nobody distributes UltimateStunts-based programs on a closed-source basis, because I didn't write this game to become closed-source. I want anybody to have the freedom to do anything (well, almost anything) with UltimateStunts, and with it's sourcecode.
PS. I assume that the text above doesn't conflict with the GPL. If you think it does, please contact me via the contact page of this site.
Links
If you like this project, then you're probably also interested in the sites listed in the links page.Yet another scientific research project has appeared, which chips away at our belief that when it comes to art, we can’t be swayed. It demonstrates that prior knowledge of an artist’s character unconsciously affects the way we view their work.
This touches on a sensitive nerve. We all know that when we choose a new car or tablet or flat-screen TV we’re unconsciously swayed by prior impressions, usually from advertisements. And we don’t mind that too much, because choosing a new tablet isn’t a decision that reveals our true selves (sociologists might not agree, but let’s ignore them for now).
Art is a different matter. Here our independence steps centre-stage. When we’re standing in front of that challenging new art work by Martin Creed, or that obscure piece of modern music (or medieval music), we feel tested in a very personal way. That’s why the puzzlement we may feel, though uncomfortable, is actually welcome. It shows we’ve answered the call to that deep self which defies received opinion, and thinks for itself. Iudico ergo sum : I judge, therefore I am.
Not so, according to a new research paper from a team led by the psychologist Wijnand van Tilburg of the University of Southampton. This demonstrates fairly conclusively that we prefer artworks created by artists who appear strange in some way – but only if the art itself is of a daring, genre-bending kind. We like artists who are "daring" to be raffish, unkempt types, and don’t like the idea that someone who dresses like a city accountant could create anything that isn’t as conventional as themselves.
The findings have an intuitive plausibility, though as always when scientists try to boil human variety down to a few manageable stereotypes they contain moments of unintended comedy. In the third experiment (there was a whole series of them), the participants were shown one of two portraits of a fictitious artist called Stefansson. One was an ordinary-looking male in his twenties, while the other depicted a man of the same age who "had half-long hair combed over one side of his head" and “had not shaved for several days”.
I love that "half-long hair". It reminds me of those scenes in Ealing comedies where two village coppers look at a picture of a possible suspect: "Definitely a wrong'un, Sarge. Better haul ‘im in."
The upshot was that the group who were showed the scruffy Stefannson liked his wild, unconventional art better than those who were shown the clean-shaven, besuited Stefannson. All this suggests the image of the rebellious, scruffy, "Bohemian" artist has lost none of its power, even though it’s now at least a century and a half old.
The authors say this proves we warm to "sincerity" in an artist. I suppose what they mean is an artist's style and lifestyle should go together: "As in art, so in life."
A noble idea, but why have the transgressive artists been allowed to colonise it, as if somehow belongs to them by right? What about that vast body of art and literature and music that obeys the conventional norms and genres of art, and was created by artists who led conventionally blameless lives? Are we supposed to dismiss this as boring and insincere? It would rule out an awful lot: the tragedies of Racine, Bach’s St Matthew Passion and Shakespeare’s sonnets, to name a few obvious examples.
By rights this research project should be followed by another, which looks at that other sort of art and the people who created it. But I’m willing to bet it won’t be. We’re too much in love with the transgressive forms of art, and the hairy unkempt types that produce them. It’s a peculiar sort of blindness, which in any case overlooks the fact that a lot of transgressive or radical art has been produced by people who were models of bourgeois conventionality.
Vassily Kandinsky, creator of abstract art, and Eric Satie, prophet of musical modernism, were both as soberly dressed as bankers. Fernando Pessoa, one of the seminal figures of literary modernism, set out to look perfectly colourless in his suit and bowler hat, just so he could fade into the background. René Magritte went one step further, incorporating his conventional bowler-hatted appearance into numerous paintings, endlessly duplicated as if to show just how anonymous he was.
It’s the gap between their dull appearance and their raging inner world that make these creators so interesting. It’s a different kind of "sincerity", which doesn’t flaunt itself, and actually glories in the contradiction between surface and depth. That’s why the psychologists’ questionnaires are powerless to grasp it. Gustave Flaubert's advice was: "Be regular and orderly in your life, like a bourgeois, so you may be violent and original in your work."
IN PICTURES: British Art Today
Follow @TeleMusicNewsIn the wake of the terrible weather related tragedy that occurred earlier this year in Moore Oklahoma, the PDGA would like to offer our most sincere condolences to any and all affected by this historic deadly storm.
The Little River Disc Golf Course was in the direct path of the tornado and suffered catastrophic damage as a result. The businesses and homes that surrounded the park are gone as well. We are all sure there is much work to do in the months ahead as the citizens of Moore rebuilds following this tragic event.
The PDGA is pleased to announce, as part of a joint effort with Innova Disc Golf and Team Twisted Flyer, that we are pledging our support to help rebuild the disc golf course in Moore. “It is important that the citizens of Moore, Oklahoma have a place where they can recreate as they go through this long rebuilding and healing process. Disc golf will provide them with this outlet and we are pleased to help them in any way that we can”, stated PDGA Executive Director, Brian Graham.
"I know the people of Moore will face many challenges from this event. When the time is right to replace Little River DGC, Innova will be ready to help" said Harold Duvall. Joe Rotan of Twisted Flyer, who is leading the disc golf support effort added, “With everyone worrying about bigger issues right now, I don’t want them to have to worry about replacing the course. I want them to know there is an army of support behind them."
PDGA members and disc golfers wishing to lend their personal support should sign the petition to rebuild the course.
The Red Cross said the best way to assist families is to make a donation to www.redcross.org/okc orwww.redcross.org or texting REDCROSS to 90999 to make a $10 donation. They provide food, shelter, water and basic supplies to victims and first-responders at the scene of a disaster.
The Salvation Army is asking for donations for Oklahoma Tornado Relief:https://donate.salvationarmyusa.org/uss/eds/aok You can also text STORM to 80888 to make a $10 donation. The money will go to providing meals, drinks and household cleanup kits for those affected.
United Way of Central Oklahoma’s Disaster Relief Fund is open. Donations may be made online atwww.unitedwayokc.org or by mail to United Way of Central Oklahoma, P.O. Box 837, Oklahoma City, OK 73101 with a notation for the May Tornado Relief. United Way said the funds will be distributed without administrative fees to United Way Partner Agencies working on the tornado relief efforts. The May Tornado Relief Fund will serve both immediate needs, intermediate, and long-term care.
Feed the Children is an Oklahoma City-based charity that helps the needy in the United States and more than 15 other countries. They say your donations will help bring relief supplies to the tornado victims. Learn more: http://tinyurl.com/mezwwph
Catholic Charities of the Archdiocese of Oklahoma City says its disaster relief team is in the impacted communities providing counseling, emergency assistance and case-management to those families who have been displaced by the tornadoes. Learn more: https://ccokc.ejoinme.org/?tabid=406485
The Oklahoma Humane Society says it is currently working to assist the City of Moore to receive, assess and shelter animals affected by the tornado. They're asking for towels, paper towels, bleach, gloves, crates, pet food and financial donations. Learn more: http://www.okhumane.org/blog/how-you-can-help-moore-tornado-damage
The Regional Food Bank of Oklahoma says it is the largest private hunger-relief organization in the state of Oklahoma. Text FOOD to 32333 to donate $10 to the group.
The Regional Food Bank is coordinating efforts with other disaster relief agencies in our state to provide food and water for those in need," said Bivens.
Contributions to the Moore & Shawnee Tornado Relief Fund can be made online to the Tulsa Community Fund at www.TulsaCF.org. Donations can also be mailed to TCF offices at 7030 S. Yale, Suite 600, Tulsa, OK, 74136.HOUSING
CLI offers language-segregated on-campus housing in the at one of the ASU dormitories (TBD).
ASU typically offers double-occupancy rooms for $17.50/day, with bathrooms shared between two double-occupancy rooms.
ASU also typically offers single-occupancy rooms for $31/day. Singles are identical to doubles, but with only one occupant. They share a pass-through bathroom and have two sets of furniture.
Bed linens are available for an additional one-time $20 charge.
Typical amenities include: laundry facilities, kitchen facilities, vending machines, air conditioning and basic cable.
Kitchens are usually shared among residents of the hall and the CLI language clubs, so access may be limited at times.
DINING
CLI participants may eat on campus or may make their own meal arrangements. ASU offers a food court in the student union. (See Memorial Union Businesses for details on food-court options.)
OFF-CAMPUS OPTIONS
CLI students are not required to live in the ASU dorm or to eat on campus. Private summer sublets are available near campus. Price and quality vary. CLI does not assist with off campus housing arrangements.
All prices and descriptions on this page are based on 2018 pricing and are subject to change. Participants are responsible for checking current prices and details before signing billing, housing, or meal contracts.Get the biggest daily stories by email Subscribe Thank you for subscribing We have more newsletters Show me See our privacy notice Could not subscribe, try again later Invalid Email
A JILTED lover plunged a 10-inch kitchen knife into his own eye when his girlfriend said she had cheated on him – then blamed her.
Brian Barr said he wanted to ruin his then partner Lisa Beattie’s life because she told him during a drunken row she had been with another man.
Giving evidence to a jury at Livingston Sheriff Court yesterday, he said: “I was embarrassed I had done it myself but, of course, anybody would be. She told me she cheated on me and it really p***** me off.
“That’s why I blamed it on her, only I shouldn’t have.”
He told their next-door neighbour, paramedics and hospital nurses she had stabbed him.
He admitted telling paramedics: “If I’m blind, I’m going to kill that bitch.”
Asked why he hadn’t changed his story earlier, Barr said: “I didn’t come out of anger right away.
“I was really angry for a while. I blamed her because she provoked me to do it.
“I got a big knife – one of the biggest I picked out of the drawer in the kitchen. I’m quite stupid, so I don’t know how big.
“We were shouting and swearing at each other and I said, ‘Do you want me to f****** stab myself?’
“She sniggered and said, ‘Go on then’, thinking obviously I wouldn’t do it.
“I’ve held my eye open and pushed it in right away, not thinking because I was drunk and that. Then I fell to the ground.”
He said the wound didn’t feel painful as he’d drunk so much booze.
He had downed a bottle of Buckfast, a bottle of cider, some Lambrini followed by vodka mixed with cider.
He added that, despite an eye operation to save his sight, he was blind in his left eye.
Barr said: “I can’t see out of it now and it’s squint.”
Quizzed by his defence lawyer Hazel McGuinness, he admitted he had previously self-harmed,
He had hit himself with an iron, smashed a glass on his head and broken a cup and dragged it
down his face, leaving a permanent scar.
Beattie, 26, of Livingston, denied striking Barr on the head with a knife to his severe injury, permanent disfigurement and impairment in January last year.
At the end of Barr’s evidence, fiscal depute Gerard Drugan said the Crown was no longer seeking a conviction.
Sheriff Susan Baird found Beattie not guilty and told her she was free to go.About This Game Enjoy this fan-made dungeon crawler crossover between old-school boardgames like Heroquest, Warhammer Quests and good oldies like Diablo I and DungeonMaster.
Wander evil-packed dungeons and battle golems, demons and other soul-less creatures with dozen of hours of gameplay through many campaigns, heroes, a plethora of weapons, armors, potions and magic spells at your disposal.
Released in 2013, the game has greatly evolved in content and quality with help from it's community of early players.
All the game assets, quests and campaigns are available freely in the game folder so that anybody can extend the game if they want to. Submit your extensions and mods to the workshop to share with the community.
Share with your friends and spread the word. The bigger the community, the more content we will all enjoy.The People's Monarchist Party (Portuguese: Partido Popular Monárquico, pronounced [pɐɾˈtidu pupuˈlaɾ muˈnaɾkiku]) is a political party in Portugal. It was founded in 1974[5] by various groups opposing the Estado Novo, in the context of the Carnation Revolution. Currently it is a small monarchist party with little political support. It is known that the claimant to the Portuguese throne, Dom Duarte Pio, Duke of Braganza, does not support this party officially, especially during the period of its leadership by Nuno da Câmara Pereira, a rival pretender.
The party had until 2009 two representatives in the Assembly of the Republic, elected on the lists of the Social Democratic Party, following an agreement with the latter party's leader, Pedro Santana Lopes. In 2009, under the leadership of Câmara Pereira, the party decided to run in the elections of that year on its own, gaining no seat.
The party had not been elected on its own since the dissolution of the Democratic Alliance, of which it was a part, and seldom reached 0.5% of the votes. Nevertheless, under the leadership of Gonçalo Ribeiro Telles (who has since retired from the party), the party was a pioneer in introducing ecological concerns into Portuguese politics.
The People's Monarchist Party is a member of the International Monarchist Conference and the European Christian Political Movement.
Leaders [ edit ]
Notable members [ edit ]
See also [ edit ]
References [ edit ]Popular beat combo as a synonym for "pop group" is a cliché phrase within British culture. It may also be used more specifically to refer to The Beatles, or other purveyors of beat music.
The deliberately out-dated phrase may be used as a tongue-in-cheek synonym, or by someone to denigrate a pop group referred to, or may be used of another person's views to imply that they are "out of touch". It may also be used to ridicule legalese and antiquated courtroom practices.[1]
The phrase is frequently used in the BBC panel game Have I Got News For You, making fun of Ian Hislop's supposed lack of knowledge about modern music.
Derivation [ edit ]
It is widely held that the phrase "popular beat combo" was coined in an English courtroom in the 1960s by a barrister in response to a judge's query (for the benefit of the court's records) as to who "The Beatles" were; the answer being "I believe they are a popular beat combo, m'lud." However, this attribution has never been verified, and remains the stuff of urban legend, despite the efforts of Marcel Berlins, legal correspondent for The Guardian newspaper, to track it down.[2]
The phrase may have been influenced by events in the 1960 obscenity trial of Lady Chatterley's Lover in which the legal profession was ridiculed for being out of touch with changing social norms when the chief prosecutor, Mervyn Griffith-Jones, asked jurors to consider if it were the kind of book "you would wish your wife or servants to read".[3]
See also [ edit ]Private Lives: Personal essays on the news of the world and the news of our lives.
Photo
A few months ago, I found myself shifting nervously in the driver’s seat of a parked rental car and avoiding the rearview mirror, afraid I’d catch a disquieting glimpse of my adolescent self glaring back. I’ve never come entirely to grips with him — or rather, I’ve never entirely forgiven him his lies and his cowardice. And now that I was about to walk into my 20-year high school reunion, his ghost was unbearably palpable.
I hadn’t been to any of my previous reunions. For the 15th, I was living overseas; for the 10th, I was still residing part time in a place — the closet — that didn’t permit such a winsome excursion into other people’s past. For the longest time, that’s what the memory of my high school years felt like: an era belonging not to me, but to my “normal” classmates. When nearly every minute of your teenage years is spent scheming and deceiving in a tireless effort to keep others from finding out who you really are, then you become an absent nonentity, a superficial character in someone else’s life story. What right did I have to claim a history in which I wasn’t even present as my true self?
By the time I entered high school, being someone else was second nature to me. I was by no means overtly masculine, yet, through sheer genetic luck, I wasn’t “obviously gay” and therefore managed to largely avoid the cruelties inflicted on those who were. What’s ironic is that some of those effeminate boys who were so relentlessly bullied are, today, married to women. They’re still effeminate, but they’re not — if you take their lives at face value — gay. Fortunately for me, and unfortunately for my stereotypically “gay” straight classmates, the bigots among us weren’t bright enough to tell the difference.
Yet while I wasn’t bullied, I did forfeit my youth to a colorless heteronormative fairy tale. While my classmates experimented with romantic relationships and sex, I avoided making eye contact or brushing elbows with a crush. My most daring moment was scribbling a boy’s name in my notebook, only to hastily scratch it out for fear someone else might see it.
I dated girls instead, leaving them to languish in their own self-doubts when, without explanation, I rejected their brave attempts at intimacy. For my senior prom, I drank until I passed out, not to celebrate, but in a deliberate attempt to avoid having to kiss, let alone having to sleep with, my stunningly beautiful date. That was 1993, the year when President Clinton instituted the “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” policy in the military, a credo I hoped those in my personal life would follow, too.
Fear. In retrospect, that’s what it all came down to. The fear of being friendless; of fights; of slashed tires and keyed cars; of stares, whispers and epithets potent enough to kill me. “Trust no one,” I reminded myself. Not even the adults: I remember one gossipy high school teacher, glowing in the rapture of a delicious new scandal, sharing a rumor with our class about two boys from a neighboring school caught in flagrante delicto in the baseball dugout. “That’s nasty,” the girl next to me said. “Gross,” hissed the boy behind me. That was the rejection I knew awaited me if I dared to come out of the closet.
That was a long time ago, but I’d be lying if I said that the emotional residue was gone entirely. On entering the banquet hall of the suburban country club where my high school reunion was being held, that cowardly, closeted adolescent me had his ears pricked in defense.
Yet the next few hours were as pleasant as could be. There were only tepid handshakes, awkward embraces and warm faces massaged by the hands of time. It was hard to believe that these welcoming, down-to-earth adults exchanging business cards before me had inspired such a reign of secret terror in my adolescence.
I’d offered my apologies to those I’d misled about my being gay a long time ago in e-mails or phone calls, and many of my former classmates at the reunion already knew my big secret in advance. Most couldn’t care less. “You should have told me,” my friend Angie said to me after we’d rattled off the list of guys we’d both considered “hot” back then and found ourselves strangely in sync with our teenage infatuations. “Seriously,” she went on, “can you just imagine how much fun we would have had?”
I’ve no doubt she means that now, but the reality is that Angie 2013 has as much in common with Angie 1993 as I do with my own cloistered teenage soul. In 1993, Angie was a year away from enrolling in an evangelical college in Missouri, learning, among other biblical tales, about the sins of Sodomites like me.
We shouldn’t be content with the way things stand now for gay and lesbian students, but we should be encouraged by the progress made in such a relatively short time. In most places around the country, high school is no longer the pit of despair for gay students that it was when I attended.
One of the highlights of that reunion night, in fact, was the conversation I had with our school’s former principal, who, pushing 80, still makes a point of attending as many of these events as he can. He told me that one of his proudest achievements was creating a gay-straight student alliance the year before he retired. “That,” he said, “I hope is my legacy.”
My trembling, cowardly adolescent self instinctively reached out to hug him.
Jesse Bering is the author of “Perv: The Sexual Deviant in All of Us.”CLEVELAND, Ohio -- Chris Perez had an unceremonious exodus from Cleveland.
As the calendar flipped toward late September, he lost his grip on the closer's gig and became an observer as the Indians surged to a postseason berth.
Prior to a tumultuous final season with the organization -- one that included a misdemeanor drug abuse charge, a career-high 4.33 ERA and an injured pitching shoulder -- Perez twice earned his way onto the American League All-Star team to represent the Tribe. During his five-year stint in Cleveland, he compiled a 3.33 ERA and 124 saves, the third-most in franchise history. At times, he rubbed fans, teammates and those in the organization the wrong way by speaking his mind about attendance, shunning certain media members or riling up opposing players with hand gestures.
On Monday night, the Indians -- who released Perez last October -- will begin a three-game series against the Dodgers, who signed Perez to a one-year, $2.3 million contract in December.
Perez recently spoke with cleveland.com about his tenure in Cleveland, his new outlook on his career and his experience with the Dodgers. The right-hander has racked up a 5.20 ERA in 27 2/3 innings this season. He said outfielder Yasiel Puig, the 23-year-old Cuban sensation, "is like a big kid," and that Clayton Kershaw's no-hitter earlier this month was "probably the most dominant start I've ever seen. It was fun to watch." He also said he hasn't paid much attention to how the Indians have fared this season.
Here are the highlights from the interview with Perez.
CC: How would you explain your output this season (27 2/3 innings, 26 hits, 26 strikeouts, but 5.20 ERA)?
CP: I've had some bad luck and also some bad mechanics. The first month or so, I was still getting results and they didn't come to me with anything. Then I had a couple hiccups and now the last month or so, we've been changing stuff up. We're definitely going in the right direction. I had to take a couple steps back to go forward.
I got into some bad habits the last couple years, just because my arm wasn't feeling good. Just some lazy habits to try to generate velocity. I had to go back to step one with my mechanics and they've been really good with that here. Every outing, I'm working on a little thing here, a little thing there. It was feeling foreign to me. Hopefully in future outings I'll feel more normal and more like myself.
CC: Vinnie Pestano, who was dealing with mechanical flaws, was sent to Triple-A to sort out his issues. He said he could never have fixed his delivery at the big league level, because there was too much to correct and he couldn't afford to cost the team games. How have you managed to rectify your problems while at the big league level?
CP: It's tough up here because you're trying to win games. The way we play, we've had a lot of close games, so there's really not a lot of opportunities to go out there and just say, 'Hey, go out there and work on this. Try to get a guy out.' It's definitely tough up here to go through those kinds of things, but at the same time, luckily I'm still here at this level and I'm working on the side to figure it out.
CC: Your fastball velocity is back to 94.3 mph this season, after it tapered off to 92.8 mph last year. (It's currently at its highest average since 2010, when Perez posted a 1.71 ERA in 63 appearances with the Tribe.) How important has it been to be able to throw as hard as you used to?
CP: It's more frustrating than anything, going through this little stretch here, because it's one thing if you don't have your stuff and your arm is hurting and the numbers aren't there, but this is the best my arm has felt in two or three years, so it's more frustrating, just because I should be able to pitch like I used to since my velocity is back. The last few years, that wasn't the case. I had to hit my spots and rely on movement. This year, I've been able to challenge guys and blow it by them. It just hasn't been working.
CC: What triggered your late-season struggles last year with the Indians?
CP: It was just all the bad habits I got into in the first half of the year just to get by, when I got healthy and was throwing hard, it all flared up at once. I was flying open earlier. Early in the year, I was flying open and trying to throw it as hard as I could. When I had velocity, it just counteracted it. I was showing the ball to the hitter earlier. My front shoulder was flying open, so they could see the ball easier. And then also, just trying to get results while we were in a pennant race, it all kind of just came together and I had bad results.
CC: How difficult was it not to contribute during the final playoff push?
CP: It wasn't that bad. We won. Luckily I didn't cost us a playoff spot by my troubles or anything. We still ended up winning a Wild Card spot and making it to the one-game playoff.
But personally, it was tough. I had put in four years on a bad team just hoping to get to that point and when we got there, I wasn't a part of it. That's baseball. You live and learn. It was a good learning experience. It all worked out where I'm now able to be here with the Dodgers, which is awesome.
CC: You'll be a free agent at the end of the season. Have you thought about how your career might play out?
CP: Closing is fun, but I've been there and done that. Now I just want to win. If closing and winning go together, then fine. But if not, then I'd rather be on a good team and help try to get to a championship than close for a crappy team.
CC: Will it be strange to face some of your former teammates?
CP: It might be weird to face one or two guys, but other than that, I just hope we beat them. I don't care about facing anybody. I've faced some of them when they're on different teams anyways. The only guys it would be kind of weird to face would be [Michael] Brantley or [Jason] Kipnis, just because I played with them the longest. But everybody else, I'm just hoping it would be another out.
CC: Will it be nice to catch up with some of the guys while they are in town?
CP: A couple of them, like [Josh] Tomlin and [Justin] Masterson. But for the most part, not really. Nobody in the bullpen is really the same. Maybe [Cody Allen]. There are a couple guys. The coaching staff, I wouldn't care to see again, no.
CC: How would you evaluate your five years with the Indians?
CP: It ended a lot better than it started, team-wise. What we were able to do last year was great. Personally, I didn't pitch the way I wanted to the last two months of my time there, but overall, I gave it everything I had almost every time I went out there and for the most part, I did my job. I had a good time doing it. I have a couple good memories, but at the same time, there was a lot of turnover with coaches, pitching coaches, managers. It wasn't really stable. I think for the most part, I had a good time there, but it ended on a bad note for me, but overall for the team, it was great. So, it was fine. Things worked out for me. I had a couple good years there. They gave me the chance to close and I established myself. Hopefully it'll keep me in the league longer because of that.
CC: What was it like to see Progressive Field packed for a playoff game?
CP: It was exciting, with everybody waving their towels and stuff. It was louder than Opening Day, which is usually the only time it's sold out. It was a night game, so it was a little more energetic. But I knew I had no chance of pitching, so I was just observing, and we didn't score, so it was kind of a letdown. But at the same time, it was good what they accomplished. That fan base was probably really excited going into this year and trying to build on it. It was a good year for Tito and it changed the atmosphere and culture there.
CC: Do you miss anything about Cleveland?
CP: Not really. Maybe Lucky's Cafe in Tremont.At least 4,811 people were killed in Iraq during April, and 1,358 were wounded. Of those 168 were killed in the last day or so. Meanwhile, the U.S. and Iraq are at odds over the arming of Sunnis and Kurds. All this comes as the European Union publicly acknowledges that the situation in Iraq is just getting worse.
According to the figures compiled on Antiwar.com during April, 1,631 civilians and security personnel were killed in Iraq during the month. The number of wounded civilians and security personnel reached 1,077 in the news reports used to compile these figures. At least 3,180 militants were reported killed as well, and another 281 militants were injured. The totals are 4,811 were killed and 1, |
and industry to truly effect change and beat back government corruption, Barack Obama already took that approach — and it failed.
Goldman Sachs leaves nothing to chance. Its employees and political action committee donate not only to presidential candidates but also to individual lawmakers and both the Republican and Democratic national committees. Former Goldman Sachs employees make up four of twelve Federal Reserve board chairman.
Considering Trump’s slew of Goldman Sachs appointments, it’s likely this established order will continue to prevail despite the President-elect’s vows to drain the swamp.
As Trump’s pick for treasury secretary, Steven Mnunchin, said last May:
“I wouldn’t in any way say I distanced myself from Wall Street. I have very good friends on Wall Street.”
This article (Actually, Goldman Sachs ‘Hacked’ the Presidential Election) is free and open source. You have permission to republish this article under a Creative Commons license with attribution to Carey Wedler and theAntiMedia.org.You all know the R.A. Dickey story by now. Journeyman major leaguer reinvents himself as a knuckleball thrower in his 30s, then refines the pitch to become one of the better starting pitchers in baseball, culminating with his selection as the National League Cy Young Award winner last year. The knuckleball is always a fascinating pitch, and Dickey is a fascinating guy, so there has been no shortage of media attention focused his direction.
While I was not working here at FanGraphs last year, I could not resist taking a belated look at some of Dickey’s dominating knuckleballs from that 2012 season. I’ve selected three particularly impressive pitches from that campaign and used an effect known as StroMotion to help track their movement.
While traditional pitches create movement through spin induced by grip and arm action (exceptional curveballs have been measured at 2,500-3,000 revolutions per minute) creating high pressure zones that deflect the ball in the opposite direction, the key to the unique movement of the knuckleball is a near complete lack of spin. The ideal knuckleball makes just 1 to 1.5 rotations (~150 RPM) between release and home plate, causing the drag on the ball to shift significantly mid-flight as the leading seam of the ball rotates slightly, resulting in unpredictable and uniquely sudden movement.
While the pitches shown above are an extreme, an average knuckleball still varies its trajectory from pitch to pitch enough to throw off hitters effectively. Below, I put together a composite of a more typical variety of knuckleballs for comparison.
You can see why opposing hitters had some problems. If there’s no way to predict where the ball is going to go, hitting it is quite difficult indeed.
However, with a trade to the American League in 2013, Dickey has not yet been able to repeat his success that he achieved in New York. His walk rate in particular has risen from 2.08 per 9 innings to 3.65 BB/9, well above any mark he posted during his time in New York. Along with a drop in his strikeout rate, Dickey simply hasn’t been the dominant front-line starter that Toronto was hoping for when they acquired him.
While the inherently inconsistent movement of the knuckleball makes the small sample size movement comparisons I’ve done on other pitchers impossible to take conclusions from, FanGraph’s own Eno Sarris looked at one possible explanation for his struggles earlier this season: the drop-off in use of Dickey’s “power” knuckleball, which he throws in the 78-83 mph range.
This image from that piece really demonstrates how many fewer hard knuckleballs Dickey has been throwing this year.
While a slower knuckleball should allow for more movement, the varied speed and possibly improved control of the increased velocity likely contributed significantly to Dickey’s 2013 season. Last week, Eno published an interview with Dickey, where he noted that health issues were bothering him but he felt he was able to take the mound and compete even if he was at less than full strength.
Sarris: Why don’t you just take 15? Dickey: Because I can still muster through six or seven innings. Even though I haven’t had my best knuckleball, I still have seven or eight quality starts. So I can still give something. Just a matter of not being as dominant as I was because I’m missing a weapon or two. It’s feeling better, though, this last week.
While most changes of speed in baseball are done through grip, Dickey’s varied knuckleball speeds are induced through arm speed. When he talks about “missing a weapon”, it appears that this might be what he’s referring to. I’ve compared his pitching motions this season on several pitches in each speed range to illustrate how Dickey’s adds velocity.
It might be difficult to see, but there is in fact a difference in arm speed and a slightly more violent motion to the hard knuckler, and given his back and neck issues, it appears that he’s less willing to inflict that motion on his body this season. Thus, the switch to more of a traditional slower knuckleball, and while correlation is not causation, it seems likely that this change is contributing to his lessened performance in 2013.
While he may never repeat his Cy Young season, the Blue Jays probably haven’t yet seen a full strength version of R.A. Dickey yet. If he gets back to being able to throw his harder knuckleball in the second half of the year, he might yet give them a glimpse of the pitcher the Mets saw last year.Adding white vinegar to diluted household bleach greatly increases the disinfecting power of the solution, making it strong enough to kill even bacterial spores. Researchers from MicroChem Lab, Inc. in Euless, Texas, report their findings today at the 2006 ASM Biodefense Research Meeting.
Sodium hypochlorite (NaOCl) in the form of laundry bleach is available in most households. The concentrate is about 5.25 to 6 percent NaOCl, and the pH value is about 12. Sodium hypochlorite is stable for many months at this high alkaline pH value.
"Laundry bleach is commonly diluted about 10 to 25-fold with tap water to about 2000 to 5000 parts per million of free available chlorine for use as an environmental surface disinfectant, without regard to the pH value of the diluted bleach. However, the pH value is very important for the antimicrobial effectiveness of bleach," says Norman Miner, a researcher on the study.
At alkaline pH values of about 8.5 or higher, more than 90 percent of the bleach is in the form of the chlorite ion (OCl-), which is relatively ineffective antimicrobially. At acidic pH values of about 6.8 or lower, more than 80 percent of the bleach is in the form of hypochlorite (HOCl). HOCl is about 80 to 200 times more antimicrobial than OCl-.
"Bleach is a much more effective antimicrobial chemical at an acidic pH value than at the alkaline Ph value at which bleach is manufactured and stored. A small amount of household vinegar is sufficient to lower the pH of bleach to an acidic range," says Miner.
Miner and his colleagues compared the ability of alkaline (pH 11) and acidified (pH 6) bleach dilutions to disinfect surfaces contaminated with dried bacterial spores, considered the most resistant to disinfectants of all microbes. The alkaline dilution was practically ineffective, killing all of the spores on only 2.5 percent of the surfaces after 20 minutes. During the same time period the acidified solution killed all of the spores on all of the surfaces.
"Diluted bleach at an alkaline pH is a relatively poor disinfectant, but acidified diluted bleach will virtually kill anything in 10 to 20 minutes," says Miner. "In the event of an emergency involving Bacillus anthracis spores contaminating such environmental surfaces as counter tops, desk and table tops, and floors, for example, virtually every household has a sporicidal sterilant available in the form of diluted, acidified bleach."
Miner recommends first diluting one cup of household bleach in one gallon of water and then adding one cup of white vinegar.
###
MicroChem Lab can be found online at www.microchemlab.net
The American Society for Microbiology (ASM) is the largest single life science society, composed of over 42,000 scientists, teachers, physicians, and health professionals. Its mission is to promote research and training in the microbiological sciences and to assist communication between scientists, policymakers, and the public to improve health, economic well-being, and the environment.
Further information on the ASM Biodefense Research Meeting can be found online at www.asmbiodefense.org.Amid a massive refugee crisis, the diplomatic relations between Germany and Poland have reached a post-WWII low.
German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s EU-backed proposal to distribute large number of newly arriving Arab and North African migrants across Europe has been met with stiff resistance from the recently elected Polish government.
The rhetoric coming from Germany has turned especially hostile in recent months. Leading members of Merkel’s government have talked about taking “punitive measures” against Poland and placing the country “under supervision.” Germany’s Deputy Chancellor Sigmar Gabriel has also called for economic sanctions against EU-members who refure to “shoulder the burden” and accept their “fair share” of migrants.
However, Berlin’s tough talk has been counterproductive and has only strengthened Polish resolve to oppose the open door migrant policy. Things have gotten so bad between the two countries that even the German state-run broadcaster Deutsche Welle had to admit that bilateral relations were now “in a free fall.”
Even the German carnival celebrations over the weekend caused a renewed diplomatic spat in this series. Poland registered its diplomatic protest to a parade float in Düsseldorf showing Polish leader Jaroslaw Kaczynski stamping his jackboot on the head of a woman depicting Poland. Goernment spokesman in Berlin promptly rejected Poland’s objections citing “freedom of expression.”
This would have be a valid argument, if German police themselves were not investigating into carnival floats in the states of Bavaria and Thuringia deemed “offensive” to Muslim migrants.
At the same time, German authorities and the mainstream media have been thin skinned when it comes to open criticism of official migrant policy, clubbing together every opposition to mass migration as racism and xenophobia.
Germany’s state-run broadcaster DW reports:
Government spokesman Steffen Seibert said on Wednesday that Berlin would not interfere with carnival organizers in Düsseldorf about the controversial creation. “We have freedom of expression in Germany, freedom of art,” Seibert said, adding that this freedom would be maintained even if it became uncomfortable for those being represented. The carnival float, created by organizers in Düsseldorf, depicted Poland as a woman being stepped on by a booted Jaroslaw Kaczynski, the leader of the conservative PiS party. The float was shown in front of Düsseldorf’s city hall for a short period after the traditional carnival parade on Rose Monday was canceled due to storm warnings. On Tuesday, Poland’s Foreign Minister Witold Waszczykowski, also a PiS member, called the installation an “insult to Poland and Polish politicians” and said he would register a protest with Berlin. Relations between Germany and Poland have suffered after the conservative PiS party took over the government. Last month, Berlin and Warsaw clashed because of Poland’s restrictive media laws and a reduction in the powers of Poland’s constitutional court. Polish Prime Minister Beata Szydlo is also against a distribution quota for refugees in the European Union, which has further worsened relations.
Last October, Chancellor Merkel’s migrant policy received a big blow when Poles elected a conservative government in a landslide on promises of securing country’s borders against the EU-directives and to strengthen traditional Catholic family values.
Despite a resounding rejection of previous Polish government’s liberal migrant policy by the voters, Germany and EU are refusing to take no for an answer.
After sexually-motivated attacks on the New Year’s Eve in the city of Cologne, the welcoming attitude of ordinary German’s towards to the “refugees” has all but faded away. Merkel is facing an open rebellion from her coalition partner Christian Social Union (CSU) and the anti-immigration AfD party is expected register a record performance in next month’s German regional elections.
In face of rising opposition and spiralling migrant situation, Merkel is doubling down on her open border policy. With support of the Social Democrats (SPD), she can comfortably govern till the end of tenure in 2017.
If that was not enough, Merkel has announced her ambitions to run for the fourth term as German Chancellor in 2017.
Watch: UKIP leader Nigel Farage speaks in the EU-parliament on Merkel’s Migrant Policy
[Cover image courtesy Phoenix TV, Youtube screenshot]
[Author is a current affairs analyst based in Germany]The 13th regular season editions of the 2012-13 ESPN/USA Today and Associated Press Top 25 Polls were released on Monday with the Kansas Jayhawks (18-1) and Michigan Wolverines (19-1) taking over as the new No. 1 teams in the country based on the respective polls.
The Florida Gators, coming off a pair of dominant league victories, jumped up and evened out at No. 4 in both polls. Florida moved up three spots and gained 97 voting points in the ESPN/USA Today rankings while moving up four places and adding 239 points in the AP poll. The Gators are one of three Southeastern Conference teams listed in the rankings this week.
Florida, which received one first-place vote in each poll, registered its highest regular season ranking in the ESPN/USA Today Coaches’ Poll since Feb. 26, 2007 and in the AP Top 25 since Feb. 19, 2007.
[table “25” not found /]
[EXPAND CLICK TO EXPAND and view full versions of the top 25 polls.]ESPN/USA TODAY COACHES POLL
This Week 1-5: Kansas (16), Michigan (14), Indiana, Florida (1), Duke
6-10: Syracuse, Gonzaga, Arizona, Michigan State, Butler
11-15: Ohio State, Oregon, Louisville, Wichita State, Miami
16-20: Ole Miss, Creighton, Missouri, N.C. State, San Diego State
21-25: Kansas State, New Mexico, Cincinnati, Minnesota, Marquette
Last Week 1-5: Duke (20), Kansas (8), Michigan (1), Syracuse (2), Louisville
6-10: Arizona, Florida, Indiana, Butler, Gonzaga
11-15: Michigan State, Creighton, Kansas State, Minnesota, Ohio State
16-20: VCU, New Mexico, N.C. State, Oregon, Cincinnati
21-25: Wichita State, Missouri, Notre Dame, Ole Miss, San Diego State
ASSOCIATED PRESS TOP 25 POLL
This Week 1-5: Michigan (51), Kansas (13), Indiana, Florida (1), Duke
6-10: Syracuse, Gonzaga, Arizona, Butler, Oregon
11-15: Ohio State, Louisville, Michigan State, Miami, Wichita State
16-20: Ole Miss, Missouri, Kansas State, N.C. State, New Mexico
21-25: Creighton, San Diego State, Minnesota, Cincinnati, Marquette
Last Week 1-5: Duke (93), Michigan (11), Kansas (7), Syracuse (8), Louisville
6-10: Arizona, Indiana, Florida, Butler, Gonzaga
11-15: Kansas State, Minnesota, Michigan State, Ohio State, New Mexico
16-20: Oregon, Creighton, N.C. State, VCU, Wichita State
21-25: Cincinnati, Missouri, Ole Miss, Notre Dame, MiamiAnnette Aug 11, 2007
really liked it's review
One of my favorite passages:
"At night when I look at Boris' goatee lying on the pillow I get hysterical. O Tania, where now is that warm cunt of yours, those fat, heavy garters, those soft, bulging thighs? There is a bone in my prick six inches long. I will ream out every wrinkle in your cunt, Tania, big with seed. I will send you home to your Sylvester with an ache in your belly and your womb turned inside out. Your Sylvester! Yes, he knows how to build a fire, but I know how to inflame a cunt. I shoot hot bolts into you, Tania, I make your ovaries incandescent. Your Sylvester is a little jealous now? He feels something, does he? He feels the remnants of my big prick. I have set the shores a little wider. I have ironed out the wrinkles. After me you can take on stallions, bulls, rams, drakes, St. Bernards. You can stuff toads, bats, lizards up your rectum. You can shit arpeggios if you like, or string a zither across your navel. I am fucking you, Tania, so that you'll stay fucked. And if you are afraid of being fucked publicly I will fuck you privately. I will tear off a few hairs from your cunt and paste them on Boris' chin. I will bite into your clitoris and spit out two franc pieces..."
"The world is a cancer eating itself away"In a return as epic as the prodigal son's, Big Ben—Peaches Geldof's kiss-and-telling lover—arose and returned to Reddit on Easter Sunday, with two comments responding to the screed Eli Roth directed at his mother yesterday.
Their war over the "instantaneous connectivity of the internet" (Eli's words) has now evolved into a battle of the Jews—Bear Jew (Eli's character in Inglourious Basterds) versus Ben Jew, who once performed a "mitzvah" by gifting a blind Hasid a tandem bicycle. (Turns out Big Ben is a diplomat in Williamsburg's Hipster-Hasid bike lane war.) Ben's return to Reddit began with a simple link to our post on Eli's open letter to his mother.
Then the man of the "Big Ben" penis tattoo wandered over to a preexisting thread about Eli's letter to his family, and joined the commentariat: "Fuck it, how often do you get the chance to challenge the Bear Jew to a cage match after he tattletales to your mom." We also discover that Ben's mother finds the situation "amusing."
Thatcoolguyben 79 points 5 hours ago[-]
I'm glad to be back on Reddit and these comments are out of control in the best way possible. I never said I considered Eli Roth's statement harassment, I actually find it quite amusing, as does my mom. I did in the heat of the moment write a letter back to him that could be either public or private, but I'm sleeping on it before I send it and I want time to edit it before I come out just bashing some guy. I will eventually challenge this dude to a cage match, which chances are I will lose, but fuck it, how often do you get the chance to challenge the Bear Jew to a cage match after he tattletales to your mom. Chances are never. Also eventually I'll do an AMA on this, but will definitely wait for this to cool down. Lastly, does anyone on Reddit know anything in depth on IP and copyright laws? I've received a ton of messages with people saying things about my story and pics getting picked up without me or Reddit being credited. How should I go about handling this, if in any way at all? Feel free to post here or message me privately. All in all I find this pretty funny, all this spawning from one quick post on Reddit when I was bored and erupting into possible fights with the Bear Jew. Proof that when someone tells your tits or GTFO you should always provide the tits.
It is testament to Eli Roth's ridiculous level of asshole-itude that you end up wanting to take the side of a guy who posted naked pictures of a one-night stand on Reddit, which is not a nice thing to do.
Previously: Eli Roth Tattles to Peaches Pornographer Big Ben's Mother
Meet 'Big Ben,' Peaches' Oversharing, Heroin-Using Lover
Peaches Geldof's Heroin-Fueled One-Night Stand at the Scientology Center
Peaches Admits to Nude Pics, Denies Heroin and Scientology Allegations
Peaches' Pornographer Suspended Himself from Meathooks Last NightEffective immediately, we're looking for a Dallas resident who's mainlined into the soul of the city's dining scene to take over the job of Eater Dallas editor. Duties will include reporting on openings, closings, staff shuffles, and all the drama and delicious food that goes hand in hand with the Dallas restaurant world. This newcomer will replace the irreplaceable Whitney Filloon, who's steered the ship for over three years. Whitney is transitioning within the Eater Universe to a new full-time role at Eater.com.
Interested parties: We are looking for a restaurant-obsessed writer with a journalism background to step up. Ideal job qualifications include at least two years of reporting experience, strong restaurant industry contacts in Dallas, and a verifiably deep passion for food and restaurants. If you think you fit the bill, drop an email to jobs@eater.com with the subject line: Eater Dallas editor and include a brief description about yourself and a paragraph or two about why you're interested in the job. If you've got a blog or clips, please include links to those as well. No resumes, please. If we like what we see, we'll be in touch quickly. Thanks.New details on the mass robbery of passengers on a nighttime BART train at Oakland’s Coliseum Station are emerging — including revelations that:
•The operator of the Dublin-bound train allowed the automatic doors to open, letting a mob of as many as 60 youths storm aboard, even though they were beating on the doors and windows.
•The same crowd of youths had swarmed a San Francisco-bound train at the same station just minutes before, fleeing only when they found no one to rob.
•Four of the nine cars on the Dublin train didn’t have working surveillance cameras, including the car where at least some of the victims were robbed and beaten.
According to passenger Rusty Stapp of Dublin, who just filed a $3 million claim with BART stemming from the April 22 episode, it was clear as the train rolled up to the Coliseum Station platform that things were going to turn out badly.
“They were banging on the windows even before the train stopped,” Stapp said.
“We could hear the conductor over the intercom telling the crowd to stand back or the doors would not open,” Stapp said. “Then two seconds later, the doors opened.”
The teens rushed in, pummeled Stapp and stole his wife’s purse, robbed other passengers and ran from the train, Stapp said.
BART spokeswoman Alicia Trost conceded that the teens were waiting for the train when it pulled in and that they had jumped the fare gates to get there.
“But this train operator hadn’t been advised of the fare evasion, since it had just occurred moments before,” she said.
Trost said train operators can override the automatic controls and keep doors from opening. But an operator gets only a brief look at a platform as the train speeds into a station, and he or she is often looking at the tracks to make sure they are clear, Trost said.
She added that this operator might not have known that the mob of youths was pounding on the train before the doors opened.
“The operator hadn’t received word not to allow this to happen, since the police had just been called moments before,” Trost said.
She said the entire incident, from the moment the youths entered the station to the time they ran off, took four minutes. “It all occurred very fast,” she said.
When Stapp was interviewed by BART police, he was shown video of the same teens swarming a San Francisco-bound train minutes before, then coming back onto the platform to wait for the Dublin train.
Trost confirmed the earlier incident, but said “no crimes were committed.”
As for surveillance cameras, Stapp said police told him they had no video from the car he was in — nor any from the two adjacent cars or the lead car, where the operator sits.
BART has said it has surveillance video from some of the cars and station. But it has declined to release it, saying the footage appears to show juveniles whose identities would be withheld if they were arrested.
BART has since announced the arrest of two juveniles suspected of being part of the robbery mob.
Political poker: Lt. Gov. Gavin Newsom would like us to think that his release of six years of personal tax returns was in response to President Trump’s refusal to release his taxes — a first for a president in 40 years.
“There has been a lot of noise about what Trump may be hiding, and Gavin feels the public has a right to know how its elected officials have made their money,” said Newsom spokesman Dan Newman.
Newsom’s decision to lead by example, however, is also aimed a little closer to home — the targets being two possible Democratic opponents in his 2018 race for governor, former Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa and billionaire hedge fund operator Tom Steyer.
Newsom is looking to put pressure on Villaraigosa to disclose which businesses, unions or other interest groups he’s worked for since he left L.A. City Hall in 2013. One of those was Herbalife, the nutritional supplement company that agreed last year to pay a $200 million federal fine over questions about its marketing practices.
As for Steyer, Newsom wants the public to see the extent of the hedge fund operator’s investments.
Such financial disclosures are little trouble for either Newsom or his other major rival in the governor’s race, state Treasurer John Chiang. Both have years of public office under their belts that call for yearly financial disclosure statements.
Plus, it’s common knowledge that Newsom and his actress/filmmaker wife, Jennifer Siebel Newsom, are loaded.
The couple’s returns show the Newsoms paid about $500,000 a year in taxes at a rate of 36 percent, and gave about $100,000 a year to charities.
Gavin Newsom’s income comes from a number of sources, including restaurant, resort and wine investments he made with the Getty family.
Siebel Newsom’s income comes, in part, from a blind family trust.
Villaraigosa campaign strategist Eric Jaye said his candidate will match Newsom in releasing six years of income taxes in a matter of “months, but not days or weeks.”
“Gavin has been running for nine years, and Antonio for five months,” Jaye said. “If you asked for income taxes for six years on 24-hour notice, you couldn’t do it.”
As for Steyer, a spokesman said someone would get back to us. We’re still waiting.
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 email matierandross@sfchronicle.com. Twitter: @matierandrossWASHINGTON - Democratic presidential rivals Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders are set to meet on Tuesday evening after voting concludes in Washington, D.C.'s primary nominating contest, marking the end of a fierce battle for the party's mantle.
Clinton has all but wrapped up the Democratic nomination for the White House already after a string of wins since February, and is hoping for Sanders' support as she prepares to take on Republican Donald Trump in November's election.
The meeting between Clinton and Sanders was planned on June 7 when the former secretary of state secured enough delegates to become the presumed Democratic nominee, scoring victories in heavily populated states California and New Jersey.
"Secretary Clinton and Senator Sanders agreed to meet when she called him last Tuesday night," a Clinton campaign official told Reuters. "She looks forward to the opportunity to discuss how they can advance their shared commitment to a progressive agenda, and work together to stop Donald Trump in the general election," the official added.
Sanders, a U.S. senator from Vermont, is facing pressure from Democrats to formally concede in the drawn-out Democratic primary and begin working with Clinton to unify the party and take on Trump.
He promised supporters that he would remain in the race until every vote was cast, and that he would continue to push his self-styled Democratic socialist agenda - which focuses on wealth inequality, health, education and the environment - at the Democratic National Convention in July.
Top Democrats took steps last week to begin rallying behind Clinton, however, and ease Sanders out of the race without alienating his supporters.
President Barack Obama endorsed Clinton last Thursday, hours after meeting with Sanders at the White House. Sanders also went to Capitol Hill to meet with Senator Harry Reid, the top Democrat in the Senate. Reid said after that meeting that Sanders had accepted Clinton was the nominee.
Clinton also last week secured the endorsement of U.S. Senator Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts, who remained neutral in the primary race until it was clear Clinton would be the nominee. Warren's populist credentials will boost Clinton's ability to court Sanders voters.
(Reporting by Amanda Becker; editing by Richard Valdmanis and Marguerita Choy)
This story has not been edited by Firstpost staff and is generated by auto-feed.
Firstpost is now on WhatsApp. For the latest analysis, commentary and news updates, sign up for our WhatsApp services. Just go to Firstpost.com/Whatsapp and hit the Subscribe button.Edmonton Catholic school trustees have condemned pornography, saying it’s harmful to students and shouldn’t be accessible at home.
Trustee Larry Kowalczyk, who called pornography a moral issue, brought forward a motion Tuesday that led trustees to denounce the industry and the ease of accessibility to its content.
“This domain, pornography, has such a terrible, terrible effect on students,” Kowalczyk told a school board meeting.
Kowalczyk’s motion, which passed unanimously, means a resolution will be presented at the Alberta Catholic School Trustees’ Association annual general meeting in November. The resolution will ask broadcasters such as Shaw, Bell and Rogers to stop offering adult channels as part of their viewing packages.
“It’s not aimed at parents; it’s aimed at the television suppliers,” Kowalczyk said.
Trustee Marilyn Bergstra described women who are in the pornographic industry as “human slaves.”
“Our children are young; they’re very vulnerable,” she said.
Trustee Cindy Olsen asked whether or not the board has the capacity to make such demands through the provincial association, and if parents can be told how to handle the issue.
“We tell parents all the time,” Kowalczyk said. “We have nutrition programs.”
Tuesday’s meeting also included the election of trustee Laura Thibert as chair, replacing Bergstra, who moved into the position of vice-chair for 2016-17.
“It’s secret ballot, so you don’t know, but I’m honoured,” Thibert said.
Trustee John Acheson had been nominated to run for both the chair and vice-chair positions, but lost to his counterparts.
“Everybody is professional and everybody has got a commitment to Catholic education,” Thibert said. “There is lots of opportunity for doing great work.”In The Arena John Kasich’s Victory-That-Wasn’t Understanding Ohio shows he has more weaknesses than strengths.
Matt A. Mayer is the CEO of Opportunity Ohio and Chief Operational Officer of The Liberty Foundation of America, both free market think tanks.
Conservative ideals and the real, tough work of governing were on display this weekend as the nation’s Republican governors gathered in Boca Raton, Florida. As party leaders, pundits, and grassroots activists begin to size the field of governors who might run in 2016, it’d be easy to overlook some fundamental differences between some of the biggest names.
For instance, much is being made nationally about Ohio Governor John Kasich’s big win on election night and what it means for 2016, yet much of that premature Beltway pontificating lacks a true understanding of what happened here in Ohio: His “big win” actually shows a much less popular figure than a first glance would appear.
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Kasich certainly would love to be President of the United States. He ran once before in 2000, but he pulled out before any votes were cast, realizing congressman don’t become Presidents. Governors do.
Fast-forward to 2010 when Kasich won the governor’s race by 77,000 votes with 49% of the vote. In four years, Kasich increased state spending by 20%, expanded Medicaid under Obamacare, shifted taxes from income to sales and commercial business taxes, tried to hike taxes on Ohio’s nascent energy renaissance, failed to sustain public sector collective bargaining reform, tripled the number of legal gambling sites from four to eleven, and monitored Ohio’s middling 27 th ranked private sector job growth from 2011 to today.
With this shaky record, just reading the topline election results make it look like Kasich’s reelection win was a huge mandate for his odd brand of conservatism.
But was it?
Kasich won Ohio by some big numbers. He won 86 out of 88 counties—even Democratic strongholds like Cuyahoga (Cleveland), Mahoning (Youngstown), and Lucas (Toledo) counties. Kasich took 63.85% of the vote en route to a 31-point victory. He garnered just shy of two million votes in his reelection walk. Pro-Kasich pundits rolled out the White House red carpet.
Sounds impressive until a few other facts are revealed. His opponent, Ed FitzGerald, was a little known county executive with the weakest resume of a major party candidate in state history, which helped. Combined with FitzGerald’s self-inflicted wound when his pick for a running mate was a debt-ridden State Senator put him squarely behind the eight ball.
FitzGerald continued to dig himself into a huge hole. First, it came out that he was caught by police in a car with a woman not his wife at 4:00am. Then, we learned he was driving without a license and had been for nearly a decade. The race was over before Labor Day.
Other numbers help put Kasich’s win in proper context.
The turnout in Ohio was historically low, with just under 40% of Ohioans casting a vote. Kasich raised over $20 million, with another $4 million in television ads from the Republican Governors Association, compared to FitzGerald’s measly $2.5 million. Kasich’s 2014 vote total only added 26,764 votes to what he got when he barely won in 2010. In contrast, FitzGerald received 825,389 votes less than Kasich’s 2010 opponent, incumbent Democratic Governor Ted Strickland.
To put Kasich’s win in Ohio electoral perspective, his “huge” win only provided him with 50,943 more votes than Republican Bob Taft received in his reelection effort in 2002. Kasich’s 2014 vote total was 15,667 less than Republican George Voinovich’s 1990 win and 479,136 fewer votes than Voinovich’s 1994 reelection victory—and this is during a time when the state’s overall population has grown from 10.8 million in 1990 to 11.5 million in 2012. (Even Strickland’s 2006 win snared 512,948 more votes than Kasich did in 2014.)
It doesn’t seem a stretch to say that a strong Democratic candidate would have given Kasich a real race—and potentially even dashed his presidential hopes before the race even started.
Kasich is lucky that the Democrats in Ohio are so inept—they’ve won over the last twenty years just one gubernatorial race, one attorney general race, and one treasurer race, as well as a short-lived two-year Ohio House majority in 2006 when the anti-Bush midterm wave crushed Republicans. In fact, other than those four wins, Republicans have controlled all statewide offices and the Ohio General Assembly since 1995.
These more interesting numbers reveal that Kasich’s win was really just another chapter in that book. It also points to problems Kasich will have in getting past his Obamacare expansion of Medicaid, higher state spending, and tax shifting approach with Republican base voters. Kasich’s minimal improvement over his 2010 vote total indicates an underlying weakness.
Wisconsin Governor and potential presidential candidate Scott Walker seems acutely aware of Kasich’s vulnerability. It wasn’t accidental that he took a direct shot at Kasich in a news interview fours days after the election when asked about Kasich’s invocation of St. Peter to justify his expansion of Medicaid. “It’s probably not fair to ask the son of a preacher to use biblical metaphors. My reading of the Bible finds plenty of reminders that it’s better to teach someone to fish than to give them fish if they’re able,” Walker stated bluntly. “Caring for the poor isn’t the same as taking money from the federal government to lock more people into Medicaid.”
Ouch.
If Kasich chooses to run for president, he’ll face a more complicated landscape than a reelection against an underfunded self-defeating nobody. Jeb Bush, Chris Christie, Mike Huckabee, Rick Perry, and Walker are well-known successful governors who can raise a lot of money.
And, unluckily for him, the Republicans nationally are better than the Democrats in Ohio.The topic of Frank Dux is one that is both controversial and kind of a joke at the same time. Frank Dux was, supposedly, the inspiration behind the Jean-Claude Van Damme film “Bloodsport.” That was apparently his life story. This was of course in a pre-internet era when Frank Dux claims to have been invited to fight in a “kumite” battle against 100 men and that there were fights to the death.
Frank Dux also claims that he was undefeated and that the UFC was inspired by him. I don’t know. What I do know is that there are two new episodes of The Voice Versus on AXS TV this Friday, The Voice Versus Royce Gracie at 10pm and The Voice Versus Frank Dux at 11pm. Some may be interested in Royce Gracie, but I feel like he does enough press to where that just kind of is what it is, but Frank Dux? Dear god, that is a must watch.A pair of new faces were on the ice at Marlies practice this week after forwards Martins Dzierkals and Jean Dupuy were recalled from the Orlando Solar Bears of the ECHL on Tuesday.
The two forwards, both of whom were signed by the Marlies this summer, have had productive starts to the season in Florida. Dupuy scored seven goals and 19 points in 24 games while Dzierkals |
41/Wdc in Q3.
Module pricing in the U.S. differs widely based on order volume, producer region and individual firm. During the third quarter, delivered prices for Chinese modules ranged from $0.72/Wdc on the low side (corresponding to order volumes greater than 10 MWdc for less established firms) to $0.75/W on the high side (established, bankable firms, order volumes of less than 1 MWdc). Blended delivered pricing for Chinese modules is estimated to have stayed flat at $0.73/W for the third straight quarter, up 4% from Q3 last year. Pricing by firms in the U.S. and other Asian countries (Korea, Malaysia, Singapore) selling into the residential and commercial sector were in the range of low to mid $0.80/Wdc, largely in sync with price levels throughout the year.
For more, check out Josh’s US solar installation rundown, SEIA’s full summary, the entire report if it’s in your budget, and our upcoming piece on the US solar PV pipeline and leading solar states.In this budget George Osborne will propose to cut the tax relief on debt interest, a loophole exploited by multinational corporations to spirit untaxed profits out of the countries in which they operate and into a constellation of tax havens. When rich countries start sounding the alarm on corporate tax avoidance, you know the situation must be bad.
But while rich nations like the UK lose between 0.5% and 3% of revenue to tax avoidance, developing countries are hit considerably harder, losing 6-13%, up to 26 times more. The IMF calculates that every year around $200bn of untaxed income is taken out of poor countries by the international corporations operating on their territory. That is around 50% more than the total amount they receive in aid from rich counties.
Osborne’s tax deals are the stuff of spaghetti westerns | Stewart Lee Read more
It would appear that the notion of poor nations’ “aid dependence” stems from corporations’ tax independence. The Royal Society of Medicine Journal estimates that without the flow of untaxed money leaving the continent, Africa would on average be on course to hit the fourth Millennium Development Goal this year of reducing by two-thirds the under-five mortality rate. Now it will have to wait until 2029.
Christian Aid estimated in 2008 that 1,000 children were dying each day across the developing world from such losses, which are made possible by the financial secrecy offered by tax havens. Britain facilitates this corruption and the related losses for the world’s public finances – including its own – by heading the world’s biggest network of tax havens, which allows the super-rich to anonymously obscure trillions of untaxed and often illegal wealth. We have the world’s most restrictive tax treaties with developing countries, often imposed decades ago, which allow UK companies to renege on their fair share of tax.
On a recent trip to Ghana, I met the African Tax Justice Network, who told me that the abuse of corporate tax incentives cost the economy $2.27bn annually. Labour’s shadow chancellor, John McDonnell, has for many years been agitating against international tax avoidance and has called for a systemic reordering of the global tax system to stop companies from shifting untaxed profits into tax havens. And while I welcome George Osborne’s newfound evangelism on the issue, he is not going anywhere near far enough.
The chancellor originally said that he supported the principle that multinational corporations should make public how much they pay in tax on a country by country basis rather than getting away with their current practice of aggregating their figures to mask their tax dodging. This would mean anyone who wanted to, including the financial press, could see when companies are shifting profits to avoid tax. But days later the Treasury backtracked, dropping this call and instead only supporting the reform process now taking place in the European Commission. The EC, after being lobbied by several multinational corporations, is now of the view that only the tax authorities of the country where the corporation has its HQ – invariably a rich nation – should be made privy to the corporate accounts, not the public. This will mean that developing nations will need to ask rich nations for the information they need to discover if they are being robbed.
As well as honouring his original pledge for country by country reporting – and therefore base erosion and profit shifting (BEPS) – to be made public, the chancellor needs to go much further. Even the strongest BEPS reforms will not solve tax-dodging because it does not solve the deeper problems associated with tax rules and treaties which harm poorer countries.
Britain should require that all of its crown dependencies and overseas territories such as the British Virgin and Cayman Islands attend the anti-corruption summit in May to pressure them to make public the names of the individuals and companies who are hiding untaxed or laundered income on their territories. The government should also launch an investigation into the effects of UK tax treaties on development in poor countries. Ireland and the Netherlands have done this, Britain should do the same.
For too long we have exploited poor countries for our own enrichment. Now we are supporting the exploitation of poor countries for the enrichment of private multinationals. By fixing the global tax system we are also sending a message that Britain supports fair play. We are saying that we support the poor over the rich, the many over the few and public service over private greed.What’s best: giving a man a fish, teaching a man to fish, or lending a man a fish? Nathan Fiala, of the German Institute for Economic Research, went to Uganda to find out, and the results of his study make for fascinating reading.
Fiala’s study is the first to directly pit the newly-trendy area of cash transfers (which come in both conditional and unconditional flavors), against the slightly tarnished area of microfinance. He found a group of small Ugandan businesses, and divided them randomly into five groups. The first received loans; the second loans with business skills training; the third cash grants; the fourth cash grants with business skills training; and finally, there was a fifth control group. The loans and the grants were both around $200; Fiala went back to all of the businesses after six months and nine months to see how the various groups were doing.
The results were not what you might expect. On the simple question of loans versus grants, it stands to reason that you’re going to be better off if you don’t have to repay the money than if you do. Except that’s not what happened:
By the nine-month point in the study, businesses which received grants saw a negligible increase in profits, while businesses which received grants and training actually saw their profits go down, on average. Women-run businesses also saw a decrease in profits after getting loans, whether they were accompanied by training or not. In fact, the only area where the intervention seemed to do any good at all was in male-owned businesses receiving loans: they did well overall, and even better when they got training as well.
Obviously, this is only one study — although Chris Blattman says that it’s a “very important” one. Certainly people should start trying to replicate it. But I suspect that the effects it finds are real. For while the study itself might be new, there are three well-known effects at work here.
The first is that most microlending very rarely makes people richer. That doesn’t mean that it’s a bad thing: access to loans can be very useful in terms of things like consumption smoothing. But if what you’re trying to do is create increased wealth and economic growth, microlending is a very inefficient way of getting there.
The second is the exception to that rule. The one time when microlending does predictably make people richer is when it takes unemployed women and turns them into small businesses. In many parts of the world, women have not historically been given the opportunity to go into money-making work — and in those parts of the world, microlending can make a substantial difference. It increases the number of employed people, and thereby increases both wealth and economic growth.
Finally, as we know from Portfolios of the Poor and from David Roodman’s book, there are many mechanisms, within poor societies, for wealth to get redistributed — and those mechanisms have existed for much longer than microfinance. When one person needs money, they will get it somehow; when another person comes into an unexpected windfall, that money will find its way to people in need.
Put these three things together, and it’s easy to see how Fiala’s study found what it did. As he says, when the small business owners were given cash grants, “the cash does not appear to have been spent into the business, for men or women, but is instead either spent on family obligations or other consumption.” But loans need to be paid back, which makes it more important for the money to be invested into the business: “knowing that the loan had to be repaid appears to have led men to use the money more effectively in their businesses,” he writes.
Because everybody in the study was already running a small business when the interventions began, all of the recipients of funds — men and women both — had jobs all along. There was no opportunity, in this study, for women to use funds to enter the workforce. On the other hand, there was opportunity for men to use loans to start employing their relatives. It’s unclear why men find it easier to hire their relatives than women do — but once again, the only way to increase wealth and growth seems to be to find a way to employ people who would otherwise be unemployed.
It’s worth emphasizing, here, that Fiala isn’t measuring welfare improvements: I’m quite sure that the people who received cash grants, for instance, are noticeably better off for having received them. Instead, he’s just measuring the profitability of small businesses. Using that narrow criterion, it turns out that throwing money at the business doesn’t make it more profitable — which, if you put it that way, is maybe not so surprising. If you want to help small businesses grow, then there is a case to be made for using loans rather than grants. But even then, I suspect, the really valuable resource is underutilized labor, rather than cash.I'm so sorry that I haven't put anything up for such a long time now even though I said I would!
I have lots of drawings that are all half-done, but I have been too lazy to finish any of them. Although I am going to try to finish some of them soon, school's going to be my first priority from now on so it might take a while for me to actually put anything up.
Anyways, here is Nurse Redheart. I don't really know why but It's not until now that I realized how much I really like her design. Even though this is just something quick and not so well-done, I decided to put this one up so all of you may know that I'm not dead, but just busy with school and laziness.2014 studio album by Riff Raff
Neon Icon is the debut studio album by American rapper Riff Raff. It was released on June 24, 2014, by Mad Decent. Riff Raff enlisted the contributions from Childish Gambino, Paul Wall, Amber Coffman, Mike Posner and Slim Thug; as well as the production that was handled by DJA, Larry Fisherman, DJ Mustard, Raf Riley, Harry Fraud and Diplo (who executive produced the album). Neon Icon was supported by the singles "How to Be the Man" and "Tip Toe Wing in My Jawwdinz".
Background [ edit ]
Following the release of his mixtape Hologram Panda with a record producer Dame Grease, Riff Raff told MTV that his upcoming Mad Decent's studio album would be titled as Riff Raff, The Neon Icon, which shortens into Neon Icon.[1] In August 2013, in an interview with XXL, Riff Raff explained the album's title saying, "It’s like a whole new world that’s just all me. From going from nothing to becoming this shining star...so I mean, yeah, Neon Icon is just neon everything. It can’t be stopped."[2] He also explained the album's diversity to XXL saying, "People think it’s gonna be all pretty much just hip hop music, trap music, whatever. I’m gonna have some country songs on there, some rock songs and everything like that. And I’m fading more towards that way, so it’s gonna put people in a position where they can’t even compare me to nobody."[2]
Recording and production [ edit ]
On February 12, 2013, Riff Raff took to Twitter to revealed the collaborations with rappers such as Drake and A$AP Rocky, set to appear in his upcoming second studio album Neon Icon, uploading single photos to Instagram with both rappers respectively.[3] On March 10, 2013, Riff Raff announced that the album would be feature Wiz Khalifa, Future, Mac Miller, YG and Snoop Dogg, among others.[4][5] On the following year, he announced on his Twitter, as well as most of his multiple interviews with the other artists that would be appearing on his debut album; including Action Bronson, Asher Roth, Bun B, Childish Gambino, Fitz and The Tantrums, Juicy J, Mike Posner, Paul Wall, 2 Chainz and Skylar Grey, among others.[4][6][7][8][9][10][11][12] It was also announced that his debut album would feature the production provided by Lex Luger, Larry Fisherman, DJ Mustard, TrapZillas and Skrillex; as well as Diplo, who is also executive producing the LP.[12][13]
In November 2013, Riff Raff told Entertainment Weekly that he had recorded over 100 songs during the album's recording process.[14] Following working with Clinton Sparks on his song "Stay With You Tonight", the two completed a song titled "A Spike Lee Joint" for Neon Icon.[15] He also stated that Amber Coffman of Dirty Projectors would appear on the album.[16] The final track listing revealed that the album would feature previously announced collaborations including Mac Miller, Childish Gambino, Paul Wall, Mike Posner and Amber Coffman, as well as Slim Thug.[17] The track "Versace Python" was meant to feature a verse from Wiz Khalifa, however Atlantic Records refused to clear the vocals in a timely manner, which resulted in it being cut from the album version, although the alternate version was released by the label in the weeks preceding the album's release.[18]
Release and promotion [ edit ]
On June 16, 2013, Riff Raff announced that Neon Icon would be released in September 2013.[19] On August 12, 2013, he told The Source that the album would be released in mid-October 2013.[20] However, during the 2013 MTV Video Music Awards he told XXL that the album would be released on September 24, 2013, the same day as Drake's Nothing Was the Same album.[21] However, in September, Riff Raff implied that the album would be released in October 2013.[22][23] On October 3, 2013, he announced on his Twitter account that the album would be released on January 28, 2014, one day before his 32nd birthday.[24] However, on January 26, 2014 Riff Raff confirmed that the album had been pushed back to an unknown date and urged his fans to ask Diplo on Twitter when the album would be released.[25][26] Then on February 24, 2014, Riff Raff announced that the album would be released during April 2014.[27] A release date of April 29, 2014 was confirmed the following month.[16] On April 28, 2014, Diplo tweeted that the album would be released during June 2014.[28]
Starting on July 24, 2013 through September 2, 2013, Riff Raff toured North America on the Neon Icon Summer Tour.[29] He would extend the tour from September 28 to October 26, 2013.[30] He then followed that with the Birth of an Icon tour which continued through the end of 2013.[6] In September 2013, he was featured on the cover of both the LA Weekly and Houston Press leading up to the album's release.[31][32] He told Complex in August 2013 that he would shoot a music video for every song on the album.[33] On October 30, 2013, Riff Raff teamed up with MySpace to release a commercial in promotion of the album as well as its next single "How to Be the Man"; a behind-the-scenes look at the filming of the commercial was also posted on Riff Raff's official MySpace page.[34]
In November 2013, Riff Raff told Rolling Stone in an interview that leading up to the album's release he would release various "left-over" tracks from the album's recording sessions[35] These notably included the Boi-1da-produced "Real Boyz", featuring rappers OJ da Juiceman and Cap 1, as well as "Suckas Askin' Questions" with Lil Debbie and "Shoulda Won a Grammy" with Action Bronson.[36] In March 2014, prior to the album's release, Rolling Stone included the album on their list of "27 Must-Hear Albums of 2014".[37] On May 20, 2014, Riff Raff announced through his Twitter that after much delay, Neon Icon was scheduled for a June 24, 2014 release date.[38] On June 30, 2014, Riff Raff released the official remix to "2 Girls 1 Pipe" featuring Frankie Palmeri of Emmure.[39] On August 20, 2015, Riff Raff released a remix of the song "Wetter Than Tsunami", featuring Danny Brown along with a music video.[40]
Singles [ edit ]
On June 25, 2013 he released a single titled "Dolce & Gabbana", produced by DJ Carnage as the first single from Neon Icon, however two days later he announced that the song wouldn't be included on the album.[41][42][43] The music video for "Dolce & Gabbana" was released on September 17, 2013.[42] On November 26, 2013 he released the first official single for Neon Icon titled "How To Be the Man" and produced by DJ Mustard.[44] The music video for "How to Be the Man" was released on May 20, 2014.[45] On June 5, 2014, the music video was released for "How to Be the Man" (Remix).[46] On June 27, 2014, the music video was released for "Introducing the Icon".[47] The album's second single "Tip Toe Wing in My Jawwdinz" was released on June 10, 2014.[48]
Critical reception [ edit ]
Neon Icon was met with mixed reviews from music critics. On Metacritic, which assigns a normalized rating out of 100 to reviews from mainstream critics, the album received an average score of 61, based on 14 reviews, which indicates "generally favorable reviews".[49] David Jeffries of AllMusic gave the album four out of five stars, saying "the ever-shifting music, the endless supply of quotables, and the wonderful mashing of indie beats, oddball lyrics, ICP theatrics, and stadium-party rap hooks beats up on the "talentless" argument hard."[50] Jon Caramanica of The New York Times said, "At his best, he’s a master of psychedelic free association, with non sequitur lyrics full of 10-point words that are rapped as if he had come up with the idea for the line just after it began, then rushed to finish it on beat [...] Indeed, Neon Icon is a fine hip-hop album from someone who seemed as if he’d make anything but. It’s dispiriting to hear Riff Raff contort himself into the shape of a mediocre pop-rap song like “Maybe You Love Me” or to be scraped clean of all his idiosyncrasy on “Time,” an otherwise amusing country-rap tune."[60] Adam Narkiewicz of The Quietus stated, "RiFF RaFF is a one off, and Neon Icon is that rare product of a rapper in the modern world – an album that perfectly encompasses everything they became loved for on their come up, amplified to the glorious maximum, aiming confidently into the future."[61]
Lizzie Plaugic of CMJ said, "What prevents Neon Icon from completely imploding under the weight of its own surreality is the fact that, when he wants to, Riff Raff really can rap, and he has a way of making words do what he wants. [...] Neon Icon is the weight the internet has left us with. It’s a much-delayed product of Tumblr art, Big Brother reality TV, corporate worship and urban fetishism. Or, maybe it’s pushing against these things. I dunno, whatever, at least it’s pretty fun."[62] Jordan Sowumi writing for Now said, "His freestyle flow, along with a propensity for hooks that occasionally exude longing and pathos, have always been Riff Raff’s biggest strengths, and they turn up here, too, especially on poignant "Versace Python" and riotously funny 'Tip Toe Wing in My Jawwdinz'."[53] Pat Levy of Consequence of Sound stated, "While Neon Icon likely won't be the push that RiFF needs into the public consciousness, it certainly won’t hurt his reputation."[51] Austin Reed of Pretty Much Amazing said, "I spent an embarrassing amount of time laugh-dancing throughout the runs I made through Neon Icon. Like I was possessed by the Dustin Diamond of demonic entities. This album gets a C+ because I really enjoyed the time I spent hating it."[63]
David Drake of Pitchfork wrote, "irony and irreverence can only do so much lifting on a record this thin. Neon Icon is hardly an affront to hip-hop's very foundation; instead, it's an adequate, listenable rap album, and for a part-time rapper/full-time jaw-dropper, there couldn't be a more damning outcome."[54] Jesse Fairfax of HipHopDX stated, "Neon Icon seems aimless and not very well thought out. There are occasional hilarious moments; he throws pesos at strippers and refers to himself as “The White Wesley Snipes.” Riff ratchets up the oddity factor and gets creativity points for rhyming over Mac Miller’s sparse piano keys and the sound of a skittering dolphin (“Aquaberry Dolphin”). But on face value, Neon Icon is neither entertaining as sheer parody, nor a passable attempt at making a sincere Hip Hop album when judged by its merits."[52] Justin Block of XXL said, "The final Neon Icon product is merely 15 songs picked in the hope of just one catching some crossover play. There are many opportunities on this album for that. But on the whole, it’s completely incohesive and difficult to listen to. In some ways, Neon Icon is a sunk cost album after delays and the sheer amount of material recorded. It pans out as—at the very least—a unique and varied production that asks to be received seriously, even if Riff Raff’s choppy, uneasy flow and absurdist imagery runs counter to that."[58]
Commercial performance [ edit ]
The album debuted at number 22 on the Billboard 200, with first-week sales of 11,524 copies in the United States.[64]
Track listing [ edit ]
Vinyl bonus track[66] No. Title Writer(s) Length 16. "Stupid Girl" Simco 3:51
Pre-order bonus tracks[45] No. Title Writer(s) Producer(s) Length 16. "2 Girls One Pipe" Simco
Allen DJA 2:18 17. "Tropical Vacation" Simco Beau Billionaire
Anna Yvette 3:43
Personnel [ edit ]
Credits for Neon Icon adapted from AllMusic.[67]
Childish Gambino – featured artist
Amber Coffman – featured artist
Anna Yvette – producer
Atira – producer
Beau Billionaire – producer
Mike Dez – producer
Deezus – producer
Diplo – producer
DJ Mustard – producer
DJA – producer
Harry Fraud – producer
Jaime "Jimmy Cash" Lepe – mastering, mixing
Van Jazmin – cover image
Mac Miller – featured artist, producer
Mike Posner – featured artist
RiFF RAFF – primary artist
Raff Riley – producer
Slim Thug – featured artist
Top Secret – producer
Paul Wall – featured artist
Charts [ edit ]I love talking to kids about science. It's why I've brought Cell Press science into classrooms on numerous occasions and talked to cub scouts about power grids and engineering. It's why my kids and I do chemistry experiments, learn about genetics, and read about the research behind the Nobel Prizes. I love answering kids' endless questions stemming from their endless curiousity. It's why I share the best Cell Press video abstracts and many cool research stories at home, even with a kindergartener. I don't let the fact that the content and concepts are intended for adults get in the way of a good science story.
In fact, what I love about science is that it's often so simple and elegant once you get past the jargon. I love the challenge of translating seemingly complex ideas for an audience unfamiliar with the subject area and vocabulary, which also explains why I was headed for science journalism before a job offer from Cell Press set me on a 17-year detour (which I probably can't call a detour any more).
But how, exactly, does one make complicated science accessible to a lay audience, kid or otherwise?
I decided to search online to see what advice others had to offer. Disappointingly, I mostly found jokes and vague or dismissive tips involving avoiding the complicated explanations. The take-away message seemed to be that kids like farts and blowing things up.
Which is true, actually. But kids also like complicated, serious science; they don't want dumbed-down, oversimplified, and not-quite-accurate facts. It's the complications that make science so interesting.
Just ask the kids who participated in a live review event hosted by Frontiers for Young Minds, an open-access online science journal aimed at and reviewed by kids (check out this CrossTalk piece to learn how Cell Press is involved). The five kid panelists who participated in the event agreed that scientists writing articles for Frontiers for Young Minds shouldn't shy away from presenting the complicated details of their research. It's the jargon, not the concepts, that often gets in the way of comprehension.
In fact, according to Hakeem Oluseyi, research professor of physics and space science at the Florida Institute of Technology, one of the greatest mistakes teachers and scientists make when explaining science is to assume the technical detail is beyond the reach of their audience.
As the co-host of several Science Channel programs, including Outrageous Acts of Science and NASA's Unexplained Files, and two Discovery International programs, Oluseyi has experience translating complicated science for a lay audience.
OK, so how do you keep the details but get rid of the jargon? Here's what I've come up with on the basis of my own experience and the few tips I did find online
1. Imagine you're the audience
Taking on the audience perspective might not sound easy, but it isn't actually so different from what we do when we speak or write to anyone. For example, when I wrote about the time my family survived a lightning strike, I included many details that I didn't include when I told the same story to my mom. My mom already knows how old my kids are, that I have five of them, and that we had been camping at a remote campsite on a resevoir in Vermont. I didn't need to give her this background information in order to help her picture the events. It would have been ridiculous if I'd told her that "my 10-year-old son and I" could already hear the thunder as we neared shore in our kayaks.
Similarly, most of those reading my blog post would have been lost if I'd started with "Sam and I were almost at shore when we heard the thunder," unless I quickly explained who Sam is. In both cases, I had to filter my message for the target audience.
Telling science stories is no different. Is my audience going to know what a gear is, or could I call it a wheel with teeth carved around it? Can I talk about mitochondria without further explanation, or is my audience unfamiliar with any type of organelle, or even the word organelle? Explaining science to anyone outside your niche area of expertise—even a fellow scientist who works in a different field—requires putting the right vocabulary filters in place.
So pretend you're explaining the concept to someone you know—your mom, your nephew, your neighbor—someone who doesn't have all the vocabulary.
2. Get to know your audience
That's all well and good, but what if you don't know what words your audience knows?
If you're going to be giving a presentation to a bunch of middle-school students and you don't know any middle-school students, you need to rectify that. Find a friend or relative with a few kids you could test your message on. If you're not ready or able to do that, you could talk to them about anything—just hang out a bit and familiarize yourself with the age group you'll be addressing. Some of my colleagues have been amazed that I've been able to explain symbiosis to classrooms full of kindergarteners and talk with third graders about how the genome folds, but as the mother of five kids, I spend a lot of time getting to know my audience.
3. Use comparisons when possible
When I showed that video abstract about genome folding to third graders a couple of years ago, I was pretty sure they weren't going to understand why DNA needs to fold in the first place—possibly not even what DNA really is. Here's an excerpt from my post discussing how I shared such a complicated topic with kids:
Your DNA is the instructions that tell your cells what proteins to build. Even though hair cells and blood cells and brain cells have the same set of instructions, they don't make the same proteins or perform the same jobs in the body. It's kind of like when you get a new set of Legos whose pieces can make a dump truck, fire engine, or race car. If you want to make a race car, you follow one portion of the instructions and ignore the parts about dump trucks and fire engines. This video explores how cellular instructions are folded and how that might influence which parts of the instructions the cell follows (i.e., which genes are turned on). And even though those instructions would be 2 meters long if they were stretched out, they are folded up inside cells so small you need a microscope to see them!
When we're confronted with an unfamiliar subject or concept, it helps to have a familiar framework within which to fit the new information. Rao and colleagues, the authors who created the video abstract in question, knew this and used a great analogy as well: origami. Folding the same piece of paper in multiple different ways results in a wide variety of different origami creatures, just like folding DNA in different configuratons results in instructions for different proteins.
I imagine physicists must get pretty good at coming up with analogies. How else can anyone, even a physicist, begin to grasp the weirdness of spacetime? When The Guardian asked a bunch of physicists to explain the breakthrough detection of gravitational waves last year, every one of them turned to an analogy.
4. Using humor can be risky
If you get advice to sprinkle your presentations and explanations with random science jokes—don't. Even the best comedians don't appeal to everyone, and if you tell a bad joke, you're going to lose half your audience or worse. (See Adam Ruben's suggestion for a joke that is sure not to resonate with your audience.) If you know you're funny and lots of other people agree, maybe go for it—but personally, I leave the jokes behind.
5. Check for comprehension
There are several ways to get feedback about how well your message is getting through. Blank stares, wandering gazes, and out-of-control silliness are all signs that you've lost your audience. You can also ask directly, "Does that make sense?" Better yet, you can ask a question whose answer will reveal whether your listener has grasped the concept. For example, my 7-year-old recently asked me to explain interest charges, as pertaining to financial loans. If I wanted to check his comprehension, I could ask him who makes money on interest charges or how much interest he would have paid if I loaned him $5 and he paid me $1 for 8 weeks in order to pay off the loan.
6. Get excited!
In my first year of high school, I had a biology teacher who really loved plants. At least, he said he really loved plants, but his behavior didn't show it. He was the most unenthusiastic, boring guy on the planet, and therefore I thought plants were the most boring organisms on the planet. By extension, biology was the most boring subject on the planet.
Fortunately, later in high school I had a different biology teacher who really jazzed things up. She brought in current events, raised ethical questions, and—most significantly—allowed her voice to change pitch once in a while. I ended up majoring in biology in college, working for a publishing company specializing (until recently!) in biology, and acquiring a serious interest in foraging for wild plants (if you get me started talking about edible wild plants, it might be hard to get me to stop).
The bottom line? Science is exciting! Make sure your audience can tell you're passionate about it.Zong gets 10Mhz for 3G and 10Mhz for 4G spectrum, Mobilink gets 10Mhz for 3G, Ufone and Telenor both get 5Mhz for 3G.
ISLAMABAD: The long awaited auction of Pakistan’s digital spectrum stayed on track after sale of 3G and 4G licences raised over $1.1 billion in the auction on Wednesday, opening the door for next-generation communication technology in the country. Though disappointingly, only one 4G licences was bought.
All the four local telecom companies, who had qualified for the economy, managed to win a slice of 3G spectrum (2100 MHz) pie put on offer. Zong though managed to claim one of the two 4G licences (1800 MHz each).
Zong was the highest bidder in the 3G auciton, claiming a 10 MHz 3G band licence, qualifying for the 4G licence.
Mobilink bagged the other 10 MHz 3G licence on the auction block. It did not bid for the 4G licence.
Ufone, which had initially bid for the 15 MHz of 3G band, got 5 Mhz band of 3G. However, due to the way it initially bid, it was disqualified for the 4G licence bid.
Telenor Pakistan won a 5 MHz 3G licence.
The government managed to raise $902.8 million from the 3G auction and another $210 million from the 4G licence auction.
Talking to media after the auction, Finance Minister Ishaq Dar said that the remaining licence in the 1800 MHz band and one license reserved for new entrants will be sold in the coming months, which would fetch additional income.
If sold, the total money raised from the spectrum auction will cross the expected revenue target of $1.3 billion.
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End of live updates
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8:30pm
The winners for the 3G and 4G spectrum auction have been announced.
Zong won 10Mhz for the 3G spectrum and 10Mhz for the 4G spectrum, while Mobilink won 10Mhz for the 3G spectrum. Ufone and Telenor both won 5Mhz for the 3G spectrum.
Zong Pakistan's first and only 4G operator! http://t.co/D7QQjhxsYy — Zong (@Zongers) April 23, 2014
Proud to announce Mobilink 3G for a bigger, faster and better everyday! — Mobilink (@Mobilink) April 23, 2014
We did what we said: Dar — Azam Khan (@azamshaam) April 23, 2014
Pakistan goes 3G/4G — Azam Khan (@azamshaam) April 23, 2014
Ufone’s CEO Abdul Aziz said that they had been pushing for 3G technology for a while now and that they were happy the auction had had a positive result.
8:17pm
Dar is here pic.twitter.com/cB8hxFfhEy — Azam Khan (@azamshaam) April 23, 2014
8:00pm
Safe to assume that all four operators have managed to win one of the offered bands of 3G.
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6:50pm
There are unconfirmed reports that one 4G licence might be sold today as well.
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6:40pm
No new bids were placed in Round 7. Round 8 will be conducted shortly, after which Finance Minister Ishaq Dar will address the media at around 7:30pm.
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6:00pm
Round 7 has reportedly been delayed. Results are expected to be updated at around 6:15pm.
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5:50pm
There is confusion about whether the auction will go on to day two or will conclude today.
According to a top PTA official, if no new bids are placed at the end of the Round 7, the PTA will announce the results for both 3G and 4G today.
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5:10pm
The figures remain unchanged at the end of Round 6.
According to DG Commercial Affairs PTA Dr Mohammad Saleem, if no new bids are placed for three rounds, the PTA may conclude the auction.
“60 percent to 70 percent of the auction process is complete,” he added.
Colin Brooks, associate partner with Value Partners Management Consulting Limited, one of the firms consulting the PTA, said that the auction was transparent, efficient and timely, and will probably |
why it took so long for the problems to be corrected.
A notorious group of hackers called Lizard Squad said it carried out the hack 'for the laughs' and to expose poor online security.
The consoles rely on an internet connection for many of their functions. Parents were so angered by the issues with the machines, which cost up to £349, that they wrote hundreds of messages to both companies on Twitter accompanied by the message '#christmasruined'.
Ros Bruce said her ten-year-old son had spent weeks planning what games he and his friend would play together ahead of receiving an Xbox One for Christmas. The boy was sorely disappointed when he tried to download a game and was still unable to play it more than 15 hours later.
Gamers around the world were left disappointed on Christmas Day after hacking group Lizard Squad carried through with its threat to bring down both Sony's PlayStation Network and Microsoft's Xbox Live service
Lizard Squad first announced that it planned to take down the PlayStation Network and Xbox Live on Christmas Day in early December, describing itself as the 'next generation Grinch'
Miss Bruce, from Essex, said: 'He has spent most of the day in tears. He says it's been his worst Christmas ever. I think Xbox should compensate us all.'
A Twitter user from Scotland also called for a refund and said: '£450 later and the kids have an expensive plastic paperweight.'
Mark Haynes told the Daily Mail there had been 'tantrums, tears and everything else' after attempts to set up the Xbox One console he had bought for his children Archie, 13, and Olivia, 11, kept failing.
Mr Haynes, 50, from Ely, Cambridgeshire, criticised Microsoft's response to the problem after calling technical support four times only to be told by one staff member that the company 'had no idea what was going on'.
The hack took down Microsoft's Xbox Live and Sony's PlayStation Network. Popular games such as Call Of Duty and The Sims 4 were all but useless for frustrated gamers.
Analysts said that the attack was a DDOS, or distributed denial of service attack, in which online networks are overwhelmed by traffic, leaving normal users unable to gain access.
One of the most popular features of the consoles is the ability to play against friends and other users who are in different locations. This feature, however, requires an internet connection and many children were left disappointed at their inability to use it.
While an internet connection is not required to play all games, new Xbox One consoles need to be online to be successfully set-up.
Many of those who received the consoles as Christmas presents are thought to have experienced problems getting started. Furthermore, games on both consoles often require an internet connection to be installed fully, which was ruled out by the hack.
A message on the Xbox status page yesterday said that its core services were 'up and running' but PlayStation said engineers were continuing to work on 'network issues'.
There has been no official link between the incident and the infiltration of Sony's computers by hackers said to be working for North Korea.
However, Sony and Microsoft were heavily involved in the release of The Interview, the comedy film about the communist nation which has angered its tyrannical leader Kim Jong-Un; the film centres on a plot by two American journalists to assassinate him.
Sony's entertainment division produced the movie, and Microsoft made it available to stream on its Xbox film service.
There are 48million worldwide subscribers to the Xbox's internet features, and more than double that for the PlayStation, which has some 110million.
Last month Sony announced that it had sold one million consoles in the UK just eight months after launching, with a sales boost expected before Christmas.Dorling Kindersley/Universal Images Group/Newscom
Before scientists became aware of the toxic effects of mercury—it poisons the kidneys and nervous system—this seemingly magical metal was widely used in medicine, cosmetics, and industries like hatmaking. While mad hatters are a thing of the past, mercury exposure is now a serious and widespread health problem. Even small amounts of mercury can interfere with brain development, making exposure particularly risky for children younger than six and women in their childbearing years. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency estimates—conservatively—that more than 75,000 babies are born each year with a greater risk of learning disabilities because of their mothers’ mercury exposure. NRDC puts that number as high as 265,000 newborns every year. Before scientists became aware of the toxic effects of mercury—it poisons the kidneys and nervous system—this seemingly magical metal was widely used in medicine, cosmetics, and industries like hatmaking. While mad hatters are a thing of the past, mercury exposure is now a serious and widespread health problem. Even small amounts of mercury can interfere with brain development, making exposure particularly risky for children younger than six and women in their childbearing years. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency estimates—conservatively—that more than 75,000 babies are born each year with a greater risk of learning disabilities because of their mothers’ mercury exposure. NRDC puts that number as high as 265,000 newborns every year.
But enough of the scary stuff. Here are a few easy ways to minimize exposure.
Be finicky about fish.
Eating contaminated fish is the number one cause of mercury exposure in America. Mercury is spewed into the air from coal-burning power plants and factories. That pollution can travel halfway around the world and then settle into lakes, rivers, and oceans, where it is absorbed or ingested by small organisms and then starts working its way up the food chain, its concentration rising with each step. Big predatory fish, like sharks or tuna, can have especially high concentrations in their bodies.
You can’t see, smell, or taste mercury contamination in fish. Cooking has no effect on it, and you can’t avoid it by cutting off the skin or other parts of the fish. But you don’t need to eliminate fish altogether to stay in the mercury safe zone. Below are a few general rules of thumb. For more information about the specific mercury levels of your favorite fish, see our Smart Seafood Buying Guide.
Avoid a few key species. King mackerel, marlin, orange roughy, shark, swordfish, tilefish, ahi tuna, and bigeye tuna all contain high levels of mercury. Women who are pregnant or nursing or who plan to become pregnant within a year should avoid eating these fish. So should children younger than six.
King mackerel, marlin, orange roughy, shark, swordfish, tilefish, ahi tuna, and bigeye tuna all contain high levels of mercury. Women who are pregnant or nursing or who plan to become pregnant within a year should avoid eating these fish. So should children younger than six. Ease up on tuna. Tuna is the most common source of mercury exposure in the country. If you or your kids regularly eat canned tuna, stick to light or skipjack tuna, and limit it to less than two servings a week. A 130-pound woman can eat almost two six-ounce cans of light tuna a week and stay within the EPA-recommended safe zone for mercury. A four- or five-year-old child should eat only about four ounces of light tuna per week. The rules change when it comes to albacore tuna. Children should avoid that fish altogether, and women of childbearing age should stick to no more than four ounces per week.
Tuna is the most common source of mercury exposure in the country. If you or your kids regularly eat canned tuna, stick to light or skipjack tuna, and limit it to less than two servings a week. A 130-pound woman can eat almost two six-ounce cans of light tuna a week and stay within the EPA-recommended safe zone for mercury. A four- or five-year-old child should eat only about four ounces of light tuna per week. The rules change when it comes to albacore tuna. Children should avoid that fish altogether, and women of childbearing age should stick to no more than four ounces per week. Make safer sushi choices. Popular sushi fish are often the apex predators of the food chain, so they tend to be high in mercury. If you’re pregnant, nursing, or planning a family, you can reduce mercury exposure from sushi by holding back on all types of tuna, mackerel, sea bass, and yellowtail. Fish and shellfish like eel, salmon, crab, and clam are lower in mercury.
Popular sushi fish are often the apex predators of the food chain, so they tend to be high in mercury. If you’re pregnant, nursing, or planning a family, you can reduce mercury exposure from sushi by holding back on all types of tuna, mackerel, sea bass, and yellowtail. Fish and shellfish like eel, salmon, crab, and clam are lower in mercury. When in doubt, smaller is better. Forgo the big predators and pick the little guys, like anchovies, sardines, and scallops, which are lower in mercury.
Check your mercury level.
If you have concerns about your mercury consumption, ask your physician for a blood mercury test. Women with a high blood mercury level who are planning to start a family may decide to postpone pregnancy for a few months until that level drops.
Handle mercury thermometers with care. Or, better yet, replace them.
Although the liquid mercury in fever thermometers is less toxic than the form of mercury found in fish, inhaling it can still cause damage to the lungs, kidneys, and brain. In some cities, you may be able to exchange your old mercury thermometer for a free digital replacement. Household hazardous waste collection facilities and many pharmacies also collect and safely dispose of mercury thermometers.
If a mercury thermometer breaks, make sure that children do not touch the liquid mercury or inhale its vapors. Carefully sweep the little silver balls of mercury into a disposable plastic container and seal the container shut. Then take the container to your local household hazardous waste collection facility. Do not flush the mercury down the toilet, vacuum it, or throw it in the garbage can.
If the spill is on a rug or sofa, it’s best to get rid of the contaminated item. Mercury is extremely difficult to remove from carpets, upholstery, or other absorbent surfaces and will continue to vaporize over time.
Leave your silver-colored dental fillings alone, and avoid them if you’re pregnant.
Silver-colored dental fillings contain as much as 50 percent mercury by weight and can release mercury vapor—especially when they are new or while you’re chewing. Pregnant women, or women planning to become pregnant within a few months, should avoid getting mercury fillings. Swallowing filling fragments poses less risk of harm because metallic mercury, unlike the mercury in fish, is not as easily absorbed in the stomach and intestines.
If you already have mercury fillings, most experts agree that it’s best to leave them in place because mercury can vaporize and be inhaled during the removal process. The dentist’s drill can also release small bits of the filling, which can get embedded in cheeks and gums.
The most popular alternative to mercury fillings is composite, or porcelain, fillings. However, these fillings contain the hormone-disrupting chemical bisphenol A, or BPA. Gold fillings appear to be the safest alternative but are considerably more expensive. Discuss the benefits and drawbacks of each option with your dentist.
Don't stress about most vaccines.
In late 1990s, NRDC and others successfully pressed for the removal of thimerosal, a preservative that contains ethyl mercury, from childhood vaccines to limit mercury exposure. The flu vaccine is the only routine childhood vaccine that still sometimes includes thimerosal, but parents can request a mercury-free version. Some of the combined diphtheria and tetanus vaccines may contain trace residues of thimerosal, but the amounts are extremely small.An exclusive 5 On Your Side investigation revealed how accused abusers can walk into gun shops across the country and legally buy as many guns as they can carry despite protection orders being issued.
Here in Ohio, we found 17,019 domestic violence civil protection order petitions were filed in 2014 statewide. The most recent year statistics weren't available.
It's an issue that placed the constitutional right to own guns against growing concerns among domestic violence advocates that both state guns laws and procedures surrounding protective orders need to be changed.
Our investigation found that while there are federal gun laws that prohibit those convicted of domestic violence charges from purchasing weapons, there are significant loopholes that can allow abusers to legally buy guns.
In addition, while protective orders remain a vital tool for victims of domestic violence, we found how thousands of abusers can go weeks or even months before they are entered into a national criminal database that would prevent them from legally purchasing weapons following background checks.
Join Chief Investigator Ron Regan on Monday on NewsChannel 5 at 11 for a revealing look at how the justice system allows abusers to arm themselves and place you at risk.The biggest financial data leak in history has revealed how Vladimir Putin's inner circle and a 'dirty dozen' list of world leaders are using offshore tax havens to hide their wealth.
A host of celebrities, sports stars, British politicians and the global rich are all implicated in the so-called Panama Papers - a leak of 11million files which contain more data than the amount stolen by former CIA contractor Edward Snowden in 2013.
Documents were leaked from one of the world's most secretive companies, Panamanian law firm Mossack Fonseca, and show how the company has allegedly helped clients launder money, dodge sanctions and evade tax.
Megastars Jackie Chan and Lionel Messi are among the big names accused of using Mossack Fonseca to invest their millions offshore. And the Panama Papers also reveal that the £26million stolen during the Brink's Mat robbery in 1983 may have been channelled into an offshore company set up by the controversial law firm.
Meanwhile, Egypt's former president Hosni Mubarak, Libya's former leader Colonel Gaddafi, Syria's president Bashar al-Assad and Chinese president Xi Jinping are among those alleged to have links to tax havens through families and associates.
Lord Ashcroft, Baroness Pamela Sharples and former Tory MP Michael Mates are the only British politicians who have been named in the data release so far, while several dictators make up the 12 world leaders listed.
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Under pressure: Vladimir Putin listens during a meeting today hours after it emerged his inner circle and a 'dirty dozen' list of world leaders are using offshore tax havens to hide their wealth
Revelation: The so-called Panama Papers, part of a leak of 11million files, implicate those in Russian president Vladimir Putin's inner circle, along with families and associates of Syria's president Bashar al-Assad (above)
King of Saudi Arabia, King Salman bin Abdulaziz bin Abdulrahman Al Saud (pictured left) was also named
Argentina's president Mauricio Macri (left) and Ukraine's president Petro Poroshenko (right) were listed
German newspaper Suddeutsche Zeitung obtained the files and shared with the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists but the identity of the source who leaked them and how it was done is unknown.
The unprecedented leak of confidential documents reveal:
A network of secret offshore deals and loans worth £1.4 billion that leads to Russian President Vladimir Putin;
Twelve national leaders, including the King of Saudi Arabia, president of Ukraine and the prime minister of Iceland, are among 143 politicians revealed to have offshore accounts, including several dictators;
Six members of the House of Lords, three former Conservative MPs and dozens of donors to British political parties are among those said to have benefited from tax havens;
A member of Fifa's ethics committee, which is supposed to be reforming the organisation, worked as a lawyer for people charged with bribery and corruption.
Putin's name is not included in the records but his friends and associates appear to have earned millions of pounds from deals that would have been difficult to secure without his patronage. The BBC and The Guardian set out the details in the documents.
Among the disclosures are that six members of the House of Lords and three former Conservative MPs had offshore accounts, although the only British politicians so far named are Lord Ashcroft, Tory peer Baroness Pamela Sharples and former Conservative MP Michael Mates. Dozens of donors to UK political parties had similar arrangements, the leak reveals.
A representative for Mr Mates said the reference to the former Tory MP in the ‘Panama Papers’ related to a small shareholding the politician once held in a Bahamian company.
He insisted the company was set up legitimately to create a leisure development in Barbuda, an island that is part of the East Caribbean state of Antigua and Barbuda.
Mr Mates said he had not and would not receive any remuneration ‘unless and until the development took place, nor were the shares of any value,’ as the company ‘never had any real value’. He denies he has ever sought to avoid paying taxes.
Campaigners said David Cameron now faces a 'credibility test', having promised to end tax secrecy four years ago.
Lord Ashcroft (left), Baroness Pamela Sharples and former Tory MP Michael Mates (right) are among the British politicians also named in the data release
UAE President Khalifa bin Zayed bin Sultan Al Nahyan (pictured centre) is one of the world leaders named
Convicted former Ukraine prime minister Pavlo Lazarenko (left) and former prime minister of Georgia Bidzina Ivanishvili (right) are among those revealed to have offshore accounts
The ex-prime minister of Iraq Ayad Allawi (pictured) is also said to have benefited from using tax havens
The Prime Minister of Iceland Sigmundur Davíð Gunnlaugsson (left) and former prime minister of Qatar Hamad bin Jassim bin Jaber Al Thani (right) are both named in the leaked documents
While using offshore companies is not illegal, the practice has long been morally dubious and is under the spotlight amid a wider examination of tax avoidance by large companies such as Google.
Mr Cameron has vowed to end 'tax secrecy' in the UK. But critics say little has been done – with the Prime Minister due to hold his latest summit on the issue next month.
Mr Cameron said four years ago that some offshore schemes were 'not fair and not right'.
TWELVE NATIONAL LEADERS WHO WERE NAMED IN THE DATA LEAK 1. President of Argentina Mauricio Macri 2. King of Saudi Arabia King Salman bin Abdulaziz bin Abdulrahman Al Saud 3. President of Ukraine Petro Poroshenko 4. Prime Minister of Iceland Sigmundur Davíð Gunnlaugsson 5. UAE President Khalifa bin Zayed bin Sultan Al Nahyan 6. Former prime minister of Georgia Bidzina Ivanishvili 7. Ex-prime minister of Iraq Ayad Allawi 8. Former prime minister of Jordan Ali Abu al-Ragheb 9. Former prime minister of Qatar Hamad bin Jassim bin Jaber Al Thani 10. Former Emir of Qatar Sheikh Hamad bin Khalifa Al Thani 11. Former president of Sudan Ahmad Ali al-Mirghani 12. Convicted former Ukraine prime minister Pavlo Lazarenko
'Frankly some of these schemes where people are parking huge amounts of money offshore and taking loans back just to minimise their tax rates, it is not morally acceptable,' he added.
The Prime Minister will now come under intense pressure to abolish all the UK's tax havens, including the crown dependencies Jersey, Guernsey and the Isle of Man.
In 2012, it emerged that the Prime Minister's father Ian ran a network of entirely legal offshore investment funds to grow the family fortune. The leaked records were obtained from an anonymous source by the German newspaper Süddeutsche Zeitung, and shared by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists with The Guardian and the BBC.
The data covers nearly 40 years, from 1977 to the end of 2015, and lists nearly 15,600 paper companies set up for clients who wanted to keep their financial affairs secret.
Thousands were created by UBS and HSBC, the latter of which was fined by the US government for laundering money from Iran.
Mossack Fonseca is Panamanian but runs a worldwide operation.
Among national leaders with offshore wealth are Nawaz Sharif, Pakistan's prime minister, and Sigmundur Davíð Gunnlaugsson, prime minister of Iceland – who now faces calls for a snap election.
The leaks also reveal a suspected billion-dollar money laundering ring that was run by a Russian bank and involved close associates of President Putin.
Mossack Fonseca said in a statement: 'Our firm has never been accused or charged in connection with criminal wrongdoing.
Families and associates of Egypt's former president Hosni Mubarak (pictured left), Libya's former leader Muammar Gaddafi (right) were also implicated in the data leak
Former Emir of Qatar Sheikh Hamad bin Khalifa Al Thani (pictured) is also named in the data release
Former prime minister of Jordan Ali Abu al-Ragheb (left) and former president of Sudan Ahmad Ali al-Mirghani (right) were both listed in the leaked confidential documents
'If we detect suspicious activity or misconduct, we are quick to report it to the authorities.'
Gerard Ryle, director of the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists, said the documents covered the day-to-day business at Mossack Fonseca for the past 40 years.
He said: 'I think the leak will prove to be probably the biggest blow the offshore world has ever taken because of the extent of the documents.'
More details about the leak will be revealed in Richard Bilton's investigation, BBC Panorama: Tax Havens of the Rich and Powerful Exposed, to air tomorrow evening on BBC One at 7.30pm.
Revealed: The money trail that leads from Vladimir Putin's best friend and head of his 'crony bank' all the way back round to the Russian president
Leaked financial data reveals how a network of secret offshore deals and huge loans worth £1.4billion created a trail beginning and ending with Vladimir Putin, it has been reported.
A massive leak of documents reveal how the Russian president's best friend Sergei Roldugin and the man who heads up Putin's 'crony bank' Yuri Kovalchuk are linked to the movement of money offshore.
Bank Rossiya, which Roldugin owns 3.2 per cent of, sent instructions to Swiss lawyers who in turn got in touch with Mossack Fonseca. The Panamanian law firm then set up offshore company Sandalwood Continental Ltd in the British Virgin Islands and other offshores linked to Roldugin.
The so-called Panama Papers implicate those in Russian president Vladimir Putin's inner circle. This graphic shows how Putin's best friend Sergei Roldugin, who owns 3.2 per cent of Bank Rossiya, and the man who heads the bank up, Yuri Kovalchuk, are linked to a trail which has seen money moved offshore via Swiss lawyers, Mossack Fonseca, and a subsidiary of Russia's state-owned VTB bank in Cyprus to a firm set up in the British Virgin Islands called Sandalwood Continental Ltd. Money was then lent to Ozon, which owns the private Igora ski resort outside St Petersburg, the place where Putin's daughter Katya got married
But the money later found its way back to Russia via Ozon, which was lent $11.3million by Sandalwood in 2010/11. Ozon is the owner of the private Igora ski resort outside St Petersburg, where Putin's daughter Katya got married, according to The Guardian.
Putin's name is not included in the leaked documents but his friends and associates appear to have earned millions of pounds from deals that would have been difficult to secure without his patronage.
Meanwhile Roldugin, a professional musician, is said to have accumulated a fortune by being put in control of a series of assets worth at least $100million.
Last week a senior Russian official revealed how the Kremlin was braced for an expose on Mr Putin's alleged secret fortune.
Spokesman Dmitry Peskov, one of the president's closest aides, dismissed the allegations as false and politically motivated even before they were published.
He said a number of foreign secret services were behind the claims, which suggest that Mr Putin has amassed a secret personal fortune of more than £28billion ($40billion).
Former Tory MPs, party donors and David Cameron's late father among those named in huge leak of documents linked to Panama law firm
Ian Cameron (pictured with his son), a stockbroker and multi-millionaire, was a client of a controversial offshore law firm based in Panama
Former Tory MPs, party donors and the Prime Minister's late father were named last night in a huge leak of millions of documents exposing the use of offshore tax regimes by the world's richest people.
Ian Cameron, a stockbroker and multi-millionaire, was a client of a controversial offshore law firm based in Panama.
He was accused of using the firm, Mossack Fonseca, to shield his investment fund, Blairmore Holdings, Inc., from British taxes.
A series of British politicians were also said last night to be implicated in the massive data release.
It was reported that six members of the House of Lords, three former Conservative MPs and dozens of donors to British political parties have been shown to have had offshore assets.
None were named last night but revelations about the hidden wealth of politicians and their supporters will trigger nerves in Number Ten as names and details emerge from the leak this week.
If Tory donors or senior figures are implicated, it will be a huge embarrassment to the Prime Minister.
The BBC and the Guardian last night set out details from the so-called 'Panama Papers' – 11.5million files leaked from the database of Mossack Fonseca, the world's fourth biggest offshore law firm.
They show that 12 national leaders are among 143 politicians, their families and close associates from around the world known to have been using offshore tax havens.
Close associates of Russia's President Putin are also implicated, although the Russian president's name is not said to appear directly on any documents.
ABOUT MOSSACK FONSECA One of the world's most secretive companies, Panama-based law firm Mossack Fonseca boasts of a global network with 600 people working in 42 countries. The services it offers include incorporating companies in offshore jurisdictions such as the British Virgin Islands, as well as wealth management and administering offshore firms for a yearly fee. The company operates in tax havens such as Switzerland, Cyprus and the British Virgin Islands, as well as British crown dependencies Guernsey, Jersey and the Isle of Man.
The records were obtained from an anonymous source by the German newspaper Süddeutsche Zeitung and shared by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists with the Guardian and the BBC.
Though there is nothing unlawful about using offshore companies, the files raise fundamental questions about the ethics of such tax havens – and the revelations are likely to provoke urgent calls for reforms of a system that critics say is arcane and open to abuse.
Among national leaders with offshore wealth are Nawaz Sharif, Pakistan's prime minister; Ayad Allawi, ex-interim prime minister and former vice-president of Iraq; Petro Poroshenko, president of Ukraine; Alaa Mubarak, son of Egypt's former president; and the prime minister of Iceland, Sigmundur Davíð Gunnlaugsson.
The leaks also reveal a suspected billion-dollar money laundering ring that was run by a Russian bank and involved close associates of President Putin.
The operation was run by Bank Rossiya, which is subject to US and EU sanctions following Russia's annexation of Crimea.
Revealed: £26million stolen in 1983 Brink's Mat heist may have been channelled offshore by Panama law firm
The £26 million stolen during the Brink's Mat robbery in 1983 may have been channelled into an offshore company set up by Mossack Fonseca, the leaked documents reveal.
The theft, dubbed the 'Crime of the Century', involved criminals stealing gold bullion, diamonds and cash from the Heathrow International Trading Estate in London.
The leaked files show that 16 months later, Mossack Fonseca set up a Panama shell company called Feberion Inc.
Revealed: Cash from the notorious Brink's Mat heist at Heathrow in 1983 may have been moved offshire by the Panamanian Law Firm
Documents show that the man behind Feberion Inc. was Gordon Parry, who laundered money for the Brink's-Mat plotters.
An internal memo written in 1986 by Jürgen Mossack, one the co-founders of Mossack Fonseca, showed that it knew it was 'apparently involved in the management of money from the famous theft from Brink's-Mat in London'.
The memo stated: 'The company itself has not been used illegally, but it could be that the company invested money through bank accounts and properties that was illegitimately sourced'.
Documents appear to show that Mossack Fonseca later took steps to prevent British police from gaining control of the company in an attempt to get the money back.
The robbery of gold bullion and jewels worth £26 million from the Brink's-Mat vaults at London's Heathrow Airport at 6.30am on November 26, 1983, was Britain's biggest.
A bribed security guard let six armed men into the warehouse and within an hour had they pulled off 'the heist of the century'.
The gang doused security guards at the warehouse in petrol and threatened them with a lit match for the combination numbers of the vault.
It is thought more than £17 million of the cash realised from the gold has been accounted for by police, with the rest believed to be invested in property in Britain and Spain or drugs.
Hunt for the cash: Police have for years searched for the money, pictured here in 2001, 18 years after the heist, digging up land in east London
Eleven bars of the gold were found in 1985 and melted down and a further £1 million of gold was later recovered from the Bank of England where it was being stored after re-entering the legal market.
The rest is believed to have been melted down shortly after the robbery. But police have continued to trace cash and assets linked to profits from the haul.
And Lloyd's of London, the insurance market that paid out for the stolen millions, is believed to have forced 25 people linked to the robbery to secretly pay back every penny stolen in March 1995 following investigations by private detectives.
Only two of the actual robbers have been convicted. Michael McAvoy and Brian Robinson are each serving 25 years.
Others have been convicted of handling the bullion or making profit from the robbery. They include convicted killer Kenneth Noye, jailed in 1986 for handling the bullion for 14 years, reduced to 13 on appeal.
How billionaire husbands including Scot Young use mysterious Panama law firm to hide their fortunes from the wives they divorce
Scot Young helped hide £500million from his wife ‘in a game of hide and concealment’ aided by a Panama-based law firm, leaked documents revealed today.
The British tycoon used Mossack Fonseca and other offshore businesses to stash some of his fortune in Russia, the British Virgin Islands and Monaco, it has emerged.
Mr Young, who died after plunging onto railings below his £3million London penthouse in December 2014, is among a number of super-rich husbands named in leaked documents today.
Russia's 'fertilizer king' Dmitri Rybolovlev and aviation tycoon Clive Joy, 55, also allegedly used Mossack Fonseca to shield assets from their soon-to-be ex-wives.
Leaked emails also reveal how Mossack Fonseca helped predominantly male clients find the'silver bullet' to keep their fortunes out of the hands of their partners.
Revealed: Property Tycoon Scot Young, pictured shortly before his death in 2014 with girlfriend Noelle Reno, used a Panama-based law firm to hide cash and assets from ex-wife Michelle, right outside the High Court during their long divorce battle
Conduit: Mossack Fonseca's headquarters in Panama, where they helped mainly husbands hide assets from their wives, often before the divorce started
Evidence: This leaked email reveals how Mossack Fonseca staff joked about helping a Dutch client hide assets from his wife ahead of a divorce
Scot Young's ex-wife Michelle has spent huge sums trying to trace his money after she won £25million at the High Court but never received a penny in a six-year divorce battle.
Young was even jailed for refusing to reveal how much money he was worth and a judge refused to believe he was penniless after he went bust after a disastrous deal.
TYCOON EARNED £2BN AND LOST IT IN MYSTERIOUS MOSCOW DEAL Scot Young, once one of Britain's wealthiest property developers, claimed he was penniless after a large Moscow real estate deal collapsed. He had mysteriously risen to huge success from an underprivileged youth on a tenement block in a run-down part of Dundee. He left school with few qualifications but rode off the back of the property boom of the late 1980s and was given a hand on the property ladder by ex-wife Michelle Young's father after they met in 1988. His wife said he was always'secretive' about the deals he was doing and there were claims he was linked to players in the Russian underworld. Mr Young then apparently lost his immense wealth in a huge property development project in Russia called Project Moscow. Boris Berezovsky, who died in mysterious circumstances last year, was known to be an investor in the scheme. He also died penniless. In one hearing during their marathon divorce battle her legal team compared his story with the plot of the 1980s comedy movie Brewster's Millions, in which a failing baseball player is told he will inherit 300 million dollars if he can spend 30 million of it in 30 days and have nothing to show for it. Despite huge debts, his life was funded by some of his creditors, to whom he owed millions. But his wife Michelle maintains that he had money stashed away offshore - and spent huge sums herself using investigators to track his fortune down. He fell to his death in December 2014, with some blaming a break-up with his girlfriend Noelle and others his financial problems.
Scot Young's American girlfriend Noelle Reno, a reality star and presenter, said his loss of wealth had always 'killed him'.
However when they appeared together on the Ladies of London TV show her rented a £8,000-a-month flat with Miss Reno and had bought her a six-carat diamond engagement ring, despite claiming to be broke.
Today as his links to Mossack Fonseca were fully revealed, Ms Young, who set a support group for women like her called the 'First Wives Club', said today that Scot's tangled web of offshore businesses was 'like a baby Enron there are so many assets'.
She said that for women trying to find a husband's hidden cash is a 'blood sport', adding: 'Unless you’ve got the funds, you’re dead and buried'.
Today it was revealed that some of the world's most high profile divorce battle have links to Mossack Fonseca.
Martin Kenney, an asset recovery specialist working in offshore havens told The International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ): 'These offshore companies and foundations are instruments in a game of hide and concealment.'
Leaked emails reveal how Mossack Fonseca staff joked about helping a Dutch man hide cash from his wife before he started divorce proceedings.
The note, which contains a smiley emoji, says the client needed to “protect” his assets “against the unpleasant results of a divorce (on the horizon!)”
One husband in Thailand needed a'silver bullet' to stop his wife getting to his money.
Another client in Ecuador was offered a series of shell companies 'to transfer assets before the divorce'
Russian billionaire Dmitry Rybolovlev spent eight years battling his ex-wife Elena before they settled on a deal that could have been worth up £2.9billion.
Their very public and bitter feud brought to light accusations of his infidelity on yacht parties and attempts to 'hide' assets - including Greek islands and New York properties - out of her reach.
According to the ICIJ Mossack Fonseca incorporated his company Xitrans Finance Ltd in the British Virgin Islands.
Despite only being a post box, its assets have been described as a'mini Louvre' because it owned owned paintings by Picasso, Van Gogh and Monet as well as large amounts of Louis XVI style furniture.
Leaked emails allegedly reveal that in 2009, as their marriage disintegrated, began to move the art and furniture away from their home in Switzerland to London and Singapore to prevent Elena getting them.
Russian billionaire Dmitry Rybolovlev (left) and his ex-wife Elena (right) had divorce proceedings dubbed the costliest break-up of all time, said to be worth up to £2.9bn
An aviation tycoon embroiled with his wife in a multi-million pound divorce also used Mossack Fonseca.
Clive and Nichola Joy were even driven to fight over a £470,000 vintage Bentley Tourer during the expensive High Court battle.
Clive Joy, 55, whose fortune was once put at £69million, has been ‘pleading poverty’ in defending a massive financial claim by the mother of his three children.
But Mrs Joy, 47, says he is claiming to be ‘penniless’ as ‘part of a dishonest strategy’ to reduce any financial award she may receive by hiding his fortune in an offshore trust.
Money worries: Clive Joy was once worth £69million but is now claiming to have 80,000 euros, or £65,000, left in the bank - and facing huge legal costs
The couple met in April 2001 and married five years later. Mrs Joy petitioned for divorce in July 2011, the court heard. A decree nisi was pronounced in June last year, but the divorce has yet to be finalised while the couple run up enormous legal bills squabbling over the partition of their assets.
Zimbabwe-born Mr Joy attended university in England and has lived with his family for spells in the Caribbean and in France.
He made his fortune through a phenomenally successful aircraft leasing firm. Mr Pointer said that Mr Joy moved the money made from this venture into a trust in 2002.
His wife’s lawyers say he transferred about £69million to the British Virgin Islands-based trust. But Mr Pointer said the family’s living expenses were funded by drawing cash from a bank loan, secured against the trust.
As party of their legal wrangle her lawyers sent Mossack Fonseca a court order to freeze his wealth until the courts had agreed a settlement.
One of Mossack Fonseca's lawyers said in an email: 'The consequences for breach of a Freezing Injunction are serious, and we as Registered Agent, must act responsibly'.
The judge, Sir Peter Singer, said that Mr Joy's case was 'a rotten edifice founded on concealment and misrepresentation and therefore a sham, a charade, bogus, spurious and contrived'.
Valuable: The Joys even fought over this model of Bentley - a 192 |
God-given right to control the nutmeg trade – it's possible the islanders hadn't understood the "contract" to which they'd "agreed" – the then head of the Company, Jan Pieterszoon Coen, ordered the systematic quartering and beheading of every Bandanese male over the age of 15. The population of the Banda islands was around 15,000 when the VOC arrived. 15 years later, it was 600.
With this militarised vision of ruthless capitalism, the VOC became the richest corporation in the world. By 1669 it was paying its shareholders an annual dividend of 40% while sustaining 50,000 employees, 10,000 soldiers and around 200 ships, many armed. The Dutch perpetuated their nutmeg monopoly by obdurate force and pathological secrecy, never revealing to traders the islands' location. Then, in 1769, the impeccably named Pierre Poivre, a kind of roving French horticulturalist somewhere between the Scarlet Pimpernel and Alan Titchmarsh, swooped on to the archipelago under the noses of the Dutch and smuggled out nutmegs and nutmeg trees. The French planted the seeds on their colony Mauritius, and the Dutch monopoly was broken.
Finally, the British occupied the islands from 1796 to 1802, and were then able to grow nutmeg in Penang and Singapore and thereafter in their other possessions. The Caribbean island of Grenada, a longstanding British colony, eventually became the world's second leading nutmeg exporter.
What made nutmeg so captivating, so costly, for so long? One factor was its sheer rarity: you can see a similar effect today in £10,000-a-kilo beluga caviar and in a few red wines glugged mainly by boorish oligarchs. But nutmeg was always more than a flavouring. In its early history, like most spices, the Arabs traded it as scent, aphrodisiac and medicine. During the Black Death, nutmeg commanded hysterical prices because desperate people believed it might ward off plague. Perhaps it did: fleas seem to dislike (pdf) the smell of nutmeg, so it's just possible that someone carrying the spice might have avoided that fatal, final bite.
But the old apothecaries were more cautious with nutmeg than with other spices. The Salerno School, the leading European medical establishment during the early Middle Ages, decreed: "One nut is good for you, the second will do you harm, the third will kill you." That isn't strictly true, but in large doses nutmeg can be intoxicating. Its oil contains myristicin: in large doses this acts as a deliriant, while causing palpitations, convulsions, nausea, dehydration and pain. It's fatal to a number of animals, including dogs.
In the appendix to Naked Lunch, William Burroughs's hilarious, spasmodic and harrowing novel of excess and ecstasy, he writes that South American "medicine men" snorted powdered nutmeg to "go into convulsive states. Their twitchings and mutterings are thought to have prophetic significance." Malcolm X described US prisoners taking nutmeg in his autobiography; the authorities soon discovered and banned the practice.
Nutmeg's hallucinogenic reputation survives, and thanks to the wonders of modern technology we can all join the most boring party in the world by watching videos of gangly teenagers trying to get high on it. Most of the time it doesn't work, but some thrillseekers report positive effects, while this gothy emo type declares woozily after his dose, "I can't really feel my heart and my back hurts a little bit." Heroin, move over.
Historically, mace was more common in cooking: it tended to be cheaper than nutmeg because it's rather more pungent, as well as easier to sell in small quantities. 16th and 17th century French flâneurs would commission engraved portable nutmeg graters: they'd bring these to dinner parties and get down to some fashionable sprinkling. But the French taste for nutmeg fell away in later centuries, and now, in that cuisine, the spice is largely restricted to white sauces such as béchamel. Thanks to Venice, the Italians still have a taste for nutmeg, particularly in Tuscany.
The Dutch, who had time to get to know nutmeg, add it to most of their vegetable dishes. It's also popular in Québec, that gastronomically forsaken province which retains a number of eating habits from 17th century France. The spice is popular in historical spheres of Moorish influence but not, oddly, in India. In England, nutmegs are essential to the spiced foods of Christmas, to custard tarts and to the mealy, stodgy brood of national puddings. It has an affinity with cinnamon and can often take its place, and I like it with – but not instead of – chocolate on a cappuccino. It's lovely in mashed potato.
Of course, the spice is almost universally available today, and not particularly expensive. Dinky, rattling jars on supermarket shelves don't begin to hint at its past, and most people grate it without a thought. But the story of food can sometimes be the story of humanity, and nowhere does that seem more true than in the case of nutmeg, the headiest, most alluring, most blood-soaked of the spices.HSBC settlement approved: no criminal charges, 5 weeks' profit in fines, deferred bonuses for laundering billions for narco-terrorists
Remember when HSBC got caught laundering billions for Mexican narco-terror cartels? Remember how they offered to pay five weeks' profits in fines and to defer their executive bonuses to escape criminal charges?
The crime-fighting legal eagles at the Department of Justice approved the settlement last week. Remember, though, if you are suspected of laundering money or selling drugs, the DoJ will take your house away and put you in jail for the rest of your life. Nice to be "too big to jail." Still, deferring multimillion-dollar bonuses has gotta hurt, huh?
HSBC's struggles with its correspondent banking controls have been a long-standing issue for the bank. A 2010 OCC order flagged the issue as the bank's primary anti-money laundering problem and said HSBC had failed to properly police some high-risk cash transactions of its affiliates. HSBC operates hundreds of affiliates around the world and its US arm acts as the gateway into the U.S. financial system for this network by processing US dollar-denominated payments. A US Senate report released in mid-2012 said HSBC failed to assess the money laundering risks associated with affiliates before opening correspondent accounts for them. The interaction between HSBC's US arm and HSBC affiliates around the world continues to be a concern for the OCC, the sources said. In response, the bank has begun advising units that those that fail to implement full anti-money laundering regimes could have their correspondent accounts closed, one of the sources said.
HSBC is paying $2 billion, or 5 weeks' worth of its profit, to avoid criminal charges in drug cartel laundering case [Brett Wolf and Aruna Viswanatha/Thomson Reuters]
(via Reddit)
(Image: HSBC_valentinesdemo_DSC_0163, a Creative Commons Attribution Share-Alike (2.0) image from fleshmanpix's photostream)There’s a widely-held belief that extraordinarily successful people—be they artists, writers, actors, athletes, or entrepreneurs—are gifted with an innate talent, and that their talent is what gets them to the top. But people with standout success stories tend to have other well-honed but less-heralded skills that play an even bigger role than their talent does in reaching their objectives.
For anyone working towards a goal, time management is crucial. There are only so many hours in a day and only so many tasks we can complete during those precious hours. So how do the masters get it done?
Below are some tips for making your day-to-day routine as productive and fruitful as possible.
The One and Only Truth About Time Management
Legend has it that a Nobel laureate was asked by a group of high-flying executives how he manages to stay so productive; churning out paper after paper while teaching, doing research, and speaking around the world.
The laureate said all you need to know about time management could be taught in a two-minute demonstration. He picked up a glass jar and filled it with a couple of big rocks. Once the glass was full, he added smaller rocks which started to fill the gaps between the larger ones. After he had filled the jar with the rocks, he grabbed some sand and poured it into the glass until there was no more room. He ended his demonstration by pouring water into the jar until it was full to the brim.
The lesson is simple: You have to start with the big rocks when planning your time before letting the smaller things fill up space. Otherwise, you will never get everything into your jar.
Most of us focus on the here and now. The things which are in front of us. The immediate and urgent — not the strategic.
Make a list of the 3–5 big rocks you need to tackle. Schedule time on your calendar every week to work on those. Let the small stuff flow around it.
Keeping the Small Stuff Organized: How I Do To-Dos
From the smallest projects to the biggest, listing and prioritizing work is a great way to get things done, but to-do lists can get out of hand fast without an organizing principle.
I have had a pretty fraught relationship with my to-dos. On one hand, I consider myself fairly organized and (at least according to a personality test) like making lists. On the other hand, I never seemed to have figured out a system that really worked for me. I bounced from system to system and software to software.
That is — until my friend John O’Duinn recommended reading the book Time Management for System Administrators. Cut out the actual system administrator parts and the book presents a super-solid system for manage your working life; including a way to manage your to-dos which is now my default and the first system which works (for me — your mileage may vary).
Here’s how it works:
Start by writing down all your to-dos in a single list. Every time something new comes up, add it to the list. Each item is tagged with the expected time it takes to complete the task. For me, this is 5, 10, 15, 20, 30, and 45 minutes and 1, 2, and 3 hours — any task beyond 3 hours feels like something which needs breaking up. I also add a tag marking the importance. “A”means it needs to be done today, “B” is for tasks that need to be done soon, and “C”is for everything else.
At the beginning of each day, go through your calendar and look at how much time you have outside of meetings. For me this can be as little as literally zero and typically no more than four hours — yes, I spend a lot of time in meetings and with other people. Then go through your to-dos, first taking all the A’s (as they need to be done today) and adding up the time it will take you to complete them. Then add the B’s and eventually C’s until your time budget is full.
The last step is to transfer your to-dos into your calendar, blocking time off for each to-do. Now your calendar tells you exactly what you should be working on at any given moment. As you go through your day, new to-dos end up on your master list the moment they show up.
The software I use (and love) to manage this process is TaskPaper on MacOS, a super-simple, flexible text-based to-do list manager. Given how simple the system is, you can pretty much do this with any software or on paper (if you prefer analog).
If you’re struggling with your to-do list — give this system a try. It works wonders for me.
However you do it though, just remember: Don’t let the trivial stuff crowd out the most important and spend time organizing your work up front—you’ll get more of what matters done.
Image Credit: Monkey Business Images / Shutterstock.comCLEVELAND, Ohio - The final stage of a multiyear remake of the West Shoreway, scheduled for completion in 2017, is turning into a gift Ohio City is beginning to regret.
Plans by the Ohio Department of Transportation's to revamp Shoreway on- and off-ramps at West 25th, 28th and 45th streets - which nobody likes in their current configurations - are raising worries about whether the project will hurt more than it helps.
ODOT officials, for their part, are frustrated because they think that on balance, their plans will be an improvement. They point to amenities such as a new multipurpose trail that will run the length of the revamped Shoreway, providing a better connection to Edgewater Park.
The issue boils down to this: ODOT's plans would undeniably ameliorate one of the worst highway/neighborhood interfaces in the city.
But improvements are slight in some critical areas, such as pedestrian crosswalks, and may actually do harm in other aspects. These include a potential increase in heavy truck traffic on local streets that could dampen a nascent residential revival.
"This is a [traffic] flow intensive design," said Tom McNair, executive director of Ohio City Inc., the local community development corporation. "It just seems like they're trying to drop highway infrastructure on a residential neighborhood."
Turf war
Controversy over the project highlights a long-running turf war between trucking-intensive industries located in the Flats down by the old river channel of the Cuyahoga, and new residents and developers up the hill to the southwest in Ohio City who are transforming the neighborhood.
Caught in between are low-income residents of the Cuyahoga Metropolitan Housing Authority's Lakeview Terrace apartments at the brow of the hill between the Flats and Ohio City.
The landmark public housing project was built in 1937 north of Washington Avenue and soon cut off from the rest of Ohio City when the West Shoreway was built.
Today, Lakeview residents have to surpass the massive wall created by the Shoreway by taking dark, narrow underpasses at West 25th and West 28th streets to reach shopping and amenities in Ohio City. And they have to cross wide, dusty intersections traversed regularly by massive trucks driving up from Main Avenue in the Flats.
Roots of the Shoreway plan
In 2004, an ambitious lakefront plan developed by the city outlined ways to reconnect neighborhoods to Lake Erie that included redesigning the West Shoreway.
The current $95 million redo, which will turn the 50 mph limited-access highway into a 35 mph boulevard from Lake Avenue to West 25th Street, with a green median for much of its length, is an outgrowth of the 2004 plan.
The first half of the project, which includes renovated pedestrian tunnels leading from Detroit Shoreway to Edgewater Park, and a new railroad underpass at West 73rd Street, is nearly finished.
The second half of the remake is a $42.5 million project scheduled for completion in 2017, and designed by the Cleveland office of the engineering firm of Michael Baker International.
It's details of that second plan that are causing upset in Ohio City.
Troublesome details
One contentious item is the proposed removal of the eastbound Shoreway on-ramp at West 28th Street north of Detroit Avenue. ODOT wants to remove the on-ramp to eliminate a short, unsafe merge lane at the top of the ramp, where vehicles would be allowed to speed up from 35 to 50 mph as they cross the Main Avenue Bridge.
(The off-ramp at West 28th would remain).
Removing the on-ramp would solve the merge problem, but would also cause reverberations on surrounding streets.
Namely: It is likely to increase the number of trucks traveling east and west on Detroit Avenue to and from a reconfigured eastbound on-ramp at West 45th Street.
A higher number of trucks would rumble past a planned $60 million, 240-unit apartment complex proposed by the Snavely Group at West 25th Street and Detroit Avenue.
And more trucks would pass through Ohio City's Hingetown section, which includes the Music Settlement's Bop Stop performance venue, the recently completed 62-unit Mariner's Watch apartment complex, and the Max Hayes vocational high school at Detroit Avenue and West 45th Street, which the Cleveland Municipal School District plans to replace with a new building in 2019.
Based on three recent traffic counts, ODOT estimates that removing the West 28th Street on-ramp would increase truck movements by 33 percent on Detroit Avenue between West 25th and West 45th streets, from an average of 217 to 324 a day.
Such numbers worry residents, who are also troubled about a deep tunnel dig the Northeast Ohio Sewer District plans to start soon in the area, which could push even more heavy trucks through local streets.
(District officials said last week their plans are still fluid, and they will take neighborhood concerns into account.)
Among worried investors in the neighborhood is Fred Bidwell, the art collector and philanthropist who launched the Transformer Station gallery in 2013 at 1460 West 29th St. with his wife, Laura Bidwell.
"It is disappointing to see there is this remarkable grassroots revival of this neighborhood," he said, "but the headwinds that you get from these brute-force projects that come from the top and and represent millions of dollars are so unresponsive to what's coming up from the grassroots."
Letter of protest
In September, Ohio City Inc.'s McNair and Ward 3 City Councilman Joe Cimperman, who represents much of downtown and Ohio City, wrote a letter to Mayor Frank Jackson, asking the city - the official sponsor of the ODOT project - to terminate the reconstruction of Shoreway ramps at West 28th Street and West 45th Street.
And McNair has said in interviews that he's still fighting with ODOT over the redesign of West 25th Street north of Detroit Avenue, where an eastbound off-ramp spills onto the street opposite Main and Washington avenues and Superior Viaduct.
The closely spaced streets there are often crowded with pedestrians walking from Lakeview south to the St. Malachi Parish church at 2429 Washington Ave., and points in Ohio City.
When asked for comment, the Jackson administration released a statement saying, "The city has in the past and will continue to support the process that will have community input in determining the outcome."
Frustration on both sides
Myron Pakush, director of ODOT's District 12 office in Garfield Heights, who oversees projects in the Cleveland area, said the agency wants to improve both traffic flow and pedestrian safety in Ohio City, but that in order to obtain funding, the Shoreway design had to meet state and national highway standards.
Those standards, he said, determine the lane widths, turning radii and other details objected to by McNair and other critics.
Pakush pointed out that the city's Planning Commission in 2010 approved removing the West 28th Street on-ramp.
He also said that removing the ramp would cut truck traffic on Washington Avenue north of the Shoreway between West 25th and West 28th streets, directly benefiting Lakeview Terrace residents.
At West 25th Street, Pakush said ODOT is now willing to install a push-button-operated traffic light at the West 25th Street-Main Avenue intersection.
And ODOT's plans for West 25th Street include new sidewalks, new embossed brick crosswalks and new street lighting. Pakush even said in an interview Wednesday that he'd consider adding pedestrian refuges - curb-protected islands - in the middle of the crosswalks at West 25th Street.
Nimbleness needed
Those offers have convinced some observers, including the Rev. Anthony Schuerger, the pastor at St. Malachi, that ODOT is making concessions.
But McNair isn't satisfied, and he wants to bring ODOT back into a discussion to reduce the 14-foot-wide lanes proposed for West 25th Street and to make other changes.
Bidwell wants to see ODOT maintain a 35 mph speed limit on the Shoreway from West 25th Street east across the Main Avenue Bridge, which could obviate the need to close the on-ramp at West 28th Street.
Schuerger also said he sees wisdom in slowing the Shoreway not just on the bridge, but all the way east into downtown.
McNair and others hope that ODOT will entertain those suggestions. Pakush said he's willing, as long as officials from the Jackson administration also participate. Whether that happens in time to affect the project, for which contracts have already been let, remains to be seen.
"Part of what comes with life in the big city is getting better about compromise and better at listening," Bidwell said, alluding to ODOT and City Hall. "You have to be more nimble, flexible and faster. That's not what I see happening in this case."Budget pain taking a toll
The Department of Defense has put the construction of a Virginia-class attack submarine on hold due to budget uncertainty.
NEW YORK (CNNMoney) -- After six months of coping with stop-gap funding measures, federal agencies have quietly started instituting hiring freezes, withholding grants and curtailing work on critical projects.
The uncertainty caused by Congress' inability to pass a budget cuts across many corners of the government.
The Defense Department has put the construction of an attack submarine on hold and is struggling to avoid disrupting the workforce at the Virginia shipyard where it's built. The Justice Department is running out of money to house prisoners. And the National Institutes of Health is giving out less funding for scientific research.
Since October, agencies have been stuck at last year's funding levels as Congress has passed six so-called continuing resolutions.
And after playing it cool for months, they are starting to lay out the consequences for lawmakers, who are -- in theory -- working on a plan to fund the government for the next six months.
At the Pentagon, officials are flat out telling Congress that they are already in serious trouble. The military has delayed 75 projects, and the Army and the Marine Corps have imposed temporary civilian hiring freezes.
The Army has deferred a contract for new Chinook helicopters and delayed refurbishment of war-torn Humvees.
The Justice Department, Social Security Administration and Congressional Budget Office have frozen hiring.
Social Security Commissioner Michael Astrue said his agency won't open eight new offices and has cut back on mailing benefit statements to non-beneficiaries over the age of 25.
Financial regulatory agencies -- the Commodity Futures Trading Commission and Securities and Exchange Commission -- have struggled to implement the Dodd-Frank Wall Street reform law.
The SEC delayed the creation of five key initiatives mandated by Dodd-Frank, including a new office of women and minority inclusion and a whistle blower unit.
At the National Institutes of Health, officials are funding some grants at 90% of their optimal level, due to uncertainty over the budget.
Sally Rockey, deputy director for extramural research at the NIH, said that funding will be restored if Congress can set a spending level for the rest of the year. But Rockey warned that the longer lawmakers drag their feet, the tougher it is for the agency.
At this point, there is no chance lawmakers will pass a real budget. Instead, the most likely scenario is that Congress will pass a spending bill for the next six months that keeps funding at fiscal year 2010 levels, while trimming fat around the edges.
But some agencies argue that's not going to work.
Pentagon officials say if they don't get more funding -- and fast -- troops won't get all the training they need, flight time for pilots will decrease and maintenance will suffer in a way that does serious damage to military readiness.
Defense Secretary Robert Gates has described the prospect of a year without a funding increase as "a crisis at our doorstep."
Attorney General Eric holder said he will be forced to consider layoffs if his agency doesn't get more funds, and he might run out of money to house additional prisoners.
For lawmakers, the budget calculus isn't going to get any easier. The current spending bill expires on April 8. Republicans favor steep cuts to spending, while President Obama favors a more measured approach.
Patience is wearing thin on both sides.
When the House passed the most recent stopgap bill, 54 Republicans joined 104 Democrats to vote against the measure, which cut $6 billion in spending.
That siphoning of votes suggests that reaching a long-term agreement amenable to both parties will be more difficult this time around. The good news is lawmakers usually manage to hammer out a deal before the deadline.
For agencies, the question is: A deal at what funding level?Comey Reopens Clinton Investigation, but the most talked about story in America, isn't trending on FB. Trumpkins ask, Why?
On Twitter, folks are asking why Antarctica is trending, but Hillary Emails aren't. Is it because liberal Dem Mark Zuckerberg is trying to censor the news?
On Twitter, folks are asking why Antarctica is trending, but Hillary Emails aren't. Is it because liberal Democrat Mark Zuckerberg is trying to censor the news?
"Obama has cancelled all campaign appearances," tweeted @agentsargaevna. @trumpsuperpac tweeted: "Trump was right again! August 2015, Trump said #AnthonyWeiner knows all about #HillarysEmails through Huma #hillary's assistant! #TheFBI"
"FBI Director James B. Comey decided to inform Congress that he would look again into Hillary Clinton's handling of emails during her time as secretary of state for two main reasons: a sense of obligation to lawmakers and a concern that word of the new email discovery would leak to the media and raise questions of a coverup," says the Washington Post.
It's a big story, and folks are all over it on Twitter, where on the list of most popular hashtags, the hashtags #hillaryemails is number 4, #Weiner is number 6, and #comey is number 7. But Facebook appears to be burying the story.
Other news organizations are promoting it. For example, the New York Post headline "Dikileaks: Email Stroking Gun: Weiner Sext Probe Found Dirt on Hill" is already on the streets of Manhattan. (BTW, the NY Post headline "She's All Through With Weiner" on August 28, gets my vote for the all time best headline of the year, maybe even the decade).
Twitter American politics don't get much better than this, folks.
In May 2016, Facebook was accused by a former employee for leaving out conservative topics from the trending bar. Although Facebook denied these allegations, the site planned to improve the trending bar. Facebook was also in the news regarding this issue, on June 13, after anti-jihad activist Pamela Geller said that two of her pages were deleted (one was a page and the other a group, both named "Stop Islamization of America") and in the aftermath of Sunday's Orlando massacre, in which a pro-Islamic State gunman murdered 49 people, and injured 53 others, at a popular gay nightclub before being killed by a police tactical unit.
In case you've been living under a rock the last 52 weeks:
Huma Mahmood Abedin, 40, is a political staffer who serves as vice chairwoman of Hillary Clinton's 2016 campaign for President of the United States. Prior to that, Abedin served as the deputy chief of staff to U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton from 2009 to 2013
Abedin was the traveling chief of staff and served as assistant for Clinton during Clinton's campaign for the Democratic nomination in the 2008 presidential election. She is married to Anthony Weiner, a former U.S. Representative from New York, while legally separated from him due to a social media sexual controversy. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Huma_AbedinWhen we first began shooting with pixelstick and feeling out new techniques, we were excited to try spinning pixelstick like a propellor to see how it looked. As usual, pixelstick delivered, and we found the images produced with this method can be both interesting and unpredictable, with lots of varied outcomes based on how the selected image is constructed, how centered the spin is, and how fast or slow pixelstick is spun. We added a spin sleeve to the kit near the end of the prototyping phase because we realized people would want a simple way to get well-centered, compelling results when spinning their pixelstick. The sleeve allows for smooth spinning when held and works even better when clamped to a lightstand. We went on to employ the technique several times in our Kickstarter video, and since we began shipping last year, many pixelstick users around the world have as well.
Simple, geometric images work surprisingly well, though there’s always an element of try-and-see when determining what will look good. Unless you’re a trigonometric genius, it can be a bit difficult to tell what’s going to happen until you shoot it. Consider the relatively simple image below, consisting of overlapping white rings with a subtle drop shadow for depth. This unremarkable image produces some very cool results that vary greatly depending on speed of rotation.
In the same vein, we spun the inset image below (a bunch of simple overlapping polygons) over a series of long exposures, gradually increasing the speed each time. The effect speaks for itself, though it should be noted that we shot this before adding color correction routines, which is how the white squares ended up with a purplish cast.
But still images can be just as cool as animations – below are a few we’ve done ourselves and some of our favorites from the community at large.
A very active pixelstick spinner is Sean Rowley of Raging River Studios, whose dedication to creating geometric spun art with pixelstick rivals just about anyone we’ve seen so far. Sean has been shooting regularly for some time now, never failing to share his results with the rest of the community and also supply the custom bitmaps he’s creating so that other pixelstickers can try their hand. Thanks, Sean!
For the below animations we ran stitched individual long exposures into an animated timelapse. It made for great beatmatching when we put it to music! You can see that the edges of the artwork are feathered – this was something we found helped quite a bit when the image was going to
Some of the most unique spin work in the pixelstick community is being done by Mart Barras, who prolifically creates interesting and unusual compositions that mix in a variety of lightpainting technique. More of Mart’s excellent work can be found on his Flickr page.
Spinning is just one of the many tools available to pixelstickers, and we’ve seen it used by hobbyists out having fun and pro shooters of every kind. The key to getting great results lie in patience and a willingness to experiment.(Ten Points, in order of appearance)
1. The video promotes metro-centric and anti-religious sentiment. By aligning their bullying with the religiosity and “small-town mentality,” Dan and Terry tacitly reinforce the belief (especially rampant in queer communities) that the religious and the rural are more bigoted.
2. The message is wrong. Sometimes it gets better– but a lot of times it doesn’t get any better. Emphasizing that things will improve upon graduation is misleading both to young folks struggling and also to people with privilege who are looking on (or looking away).
3. Telling people that they have to wait for their life to get amazing–to tough it out so that they can be around when life gets amazing– is a violent reassignment of guilt. Dan Savage telling kids that if they don’t survive their teenage years they’re depriving themselves? What kind of ageist garbage is that? This quietly but forcefully suggests that if you don’t survive, if you don’t make it, it’s your own fault. It blames the queer for not being strong enough to get to the rosy, privileged, fantasy.
4. Stories of how your mom finally came around, over-write the present realities of youth. Arguing that in the future, the parts that hurt will be fixed, not only suggests that folks shouldn’t actually inhabit their own suffering but it also suggests that the future is more important. For a lot of folks, it doesn’t matter if your mother might come to love you and your spouse. It matters that right now she does not love you at all.
5. The rhetoric about being accepted by family, encourages folks to come out– even when coming out isn’t a safe idea. There is no infrastructure to catch you when your family reacts poorly. There is no truly benevolent queer family, waiting to catch you, ready to sacrifice so you can thrive. For a lot of folks, coming out doesn’t only mean that your parents will promise to hate your lovers– it means violence, homelessness, abuse.
6. Bar story: vomit. It’s no coincidence that this is the first place where Dan and Terry mention queer space. Codified queer-space, restricted to 21+, w alcohol? Try again.
7. We shouldn’t be talking, we should be listening. Telling our own stories from our incredibly privileged positions, overwrites youth experience.
8. Stories of over-coming adversity: no thank you. Narratives of how life was hard and but now is good, belittle lived pain, imply that a good ending is inevitable, and also undermine the joy and happiness in even bullied kids’ lives.
9. There is actually no path to change in this vision. Promoting the illusion that things just “get better,” enables privileged folks to do nothing and just rely on the imaginary mechanics of the American Dream to fix the world. Fuck that. How can you tell kids it gets better without having the guts to say how.
10. Then we get a baby and go to Paris? WTF? This is a video for rich kids for whom the only violent part of their life is high school. It’s a video for classist, privileged gay folks who think that telling their stories is the best way to help others. Telling folks that their suffering is normal doesn’t reassure them– it homogenizes their experience. It doesn’t make them feel like part of a bigger community, it makes them feel irrelevant.
Plus three (with a little help from my friends)
1. When we treat campaigns like this like they’re revolutionary, they undermine all the really amazing work that the youth already does for itself. Too often in the LGBT world, we are asked to thank our brave queer activist ancestors who made the world safe for us. That does have its place. But queer youth take care of themselves. They nurture and organize and love in order to save themselves and each other. Making famous messages legible as THE messages makes youth-work look minor, haphazard, or unofficial.
2. Campaigns like this lump everyone together. It doesn’t honor or respect the individuals. It turns them into icons. It sends confusing messages that we only attend to folks when their dead– when giving care doesn’t actually take anything out of us.
3. Broadcasting your story into the world, or congratulating others for broadcasting theirs is an anesthetized, misguided approach to connecting. We should help folks feel seen— by trying our hardest to see them.
It has been my experience that people are ashamed to help the folks they see as destitute. They are willing to let someone crash on their sofa for a night if they know that they have a back-up bed, somewhere else. They are happy to provide dinner, so long as they know you would be eating even without their generosity. It seems that if you’ve never been homeless or lost or hungry, if you don’t know what that feels like, is too embarrassing to give things to people who might die without them– it is humiliating to hand someone the only food they’ve had all week.
No one is skittish about giving things up so that others can live comfortably. But they are unspeakably afraid of giving away something so someone can merely live. Campaigns like this exacerbate these realities by dehumanizing the people they address, turning them into a depressing mass, ready to be farmed for beautiful tragedies, and transformed into class-passing, successful adults.
How about instead of hope: change. Even if it’s really small change. Even if it doesn’t inspire anyone and no one is grateful and no one even notices. How about doing the kind of work that makes differences in peoples lives without holding them responsible—without turning them into an icon of suffering or of hope, without using their story for a soundbyte, without using their life as your proof of goodness, or of how the world is so liberal, or how it’s great to be gay. I mean money. I mean listening. I mean time. I mean giving people space that we respect and don’t enter. I mean listening to needs and finding ways to fill them.
How about instead of honoring the bravery of youth and the sadness of our times: respecting queer youth for all the incredible work they do– despite the fact that it is so rarely recognized as work, or as adequate work.
Instead of jettisoning our religion, our upbringing, our origins: a cohesive self.
Instead of narratives of suffering and then, finally, success: a celebration of the pain and pleasure throughout.
And listening– way more listening. Because telling your personal story of adversity from a place of privilege, might have a lot of applications, might be asked of you perpetually, might seem alluring because it’s so often milked from us. But it’s not the way. Saying, “I know how you feel, because I used to feel that way, and let me tell you, I don’t feel that way anymore,” doesn’t help, it hurts. You’re dwelling in the present. Don’t insist that those in pain relocate themselves to the future.
AdvertisementsSo a wrap up of the first long trip we have done. 9 days, 2 states, 2 provinces, 3 people, two 100lb dogs. All worked pretty damn well. Truck eats up highway miles like a dream, drives really nice.
As always we come home with a list. Need to get clothes storage above the bed done. Getting under it all the time is a pain. Bed also needs a grab handle to help with lifting. Better seals are needed on the back doors. Back bumper needs to go. But all things we can tackle in time.
To start we headed from Seattle to Spokane. First night was in Riverside State park. It was hot, but the river was warm enough for careful swimming, there was a good current. Luckily we had a hook up site that night that allowed us to run our little portable AC unit.
Not a bad site.
There is a little suspension bridge across the river so you can hike up and down both sides of the canyon.
Next two nights were spent in the Silverwood Theme park RV campground. It was clean, had hook ups, but exactly zero shade. It was very very hot. But the park was a lot of fun, and water slides are good for cooling off! We had never gone before and the kid loved it.
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, because they weren’t central to consumer needs.
But stepping back from the job quality issue, a far greater failure is our inability to understand the fundamentals that enter into the employment rate—in the United States or abroad. Indeed, the real unemployment rate in the United States is likely far higher than the official figure. This confusion is rooted in an ever-changing definition of the eligible labor pool. In fact, America’s Bureau of Labor Statistics actually computes six different unemployment figures with varying definitions, with most people looking at the lowest headline number. The United States is not alone in these idiosyncrasies. While all OECD countries are supposed to use the International Labor Organization definition for “unemployment,” most create their own versions.
On the surface, calculating the unemployment rate should be straightforward—divide the number of unemployed workers by the total labor force. However, defining an “unemployed worker” and the “total labor force” is necessarily an imprecise task. The way the BLS calculates these numbers – relying heavily on phone surveys of a few thousand people and self-reported data selection – is old school in the Information Age. Rather than create knowledge about labor, BLS employment numbers – and the underlying methodologies in calculating them – lead us to ask even more questions about jobs in America.
For example, let’s say there are 100 eligible workers, and five can’t find jobs—that’s simply 5 percent unemployment. One year later, the economy hits a rough patch and five more people lose jobs. Now we have 10 percent official unemployment. But let’s assume that of the original five unemployed people, three stop looking for work – they're discouraged. The way government statisticians adjust for this is to reduce the total labor force by three to 97. Official stats now calculate a labor force of 97, with seven more unemployed, dropping the “unemployment rate” to 7.2 percent.
According to government statistics, if the same number of Americans were job-hunting today as in 2007, the official unemployment rate would be more than 11 percent, not the official rate of 8.3 percent released in early 2012. The labor pool has been reduced by the so-called “discouraged” workers who permanently drop out of the official numbers. Logic tells us more “discouraged workers” are a bad sign for any economy. Yet such a practice actually makes the official unemployment rate look better. In Japan, the historic practice of companies keeping idle employees on the books versus outright firing them is believed to depress unemployment rates substantially. Some economists believe the real rates may be as high 12.2 percent compared to the current “official” rate of 4.6 percent.
Even with headline 8.3 percent unemployment (or higher, unofficially), most Americans would be surprised to learn that the United States has labor shortages today. A 2011 Manpower Group talent survey found that that 52 percent of 1,200 key employers are experiencing difficulty filling mission-critical positions, up from 14 percent in 2010. The number of American employers struggling to fill positions is at an all-time survey high despite high official and unofficial unemployment rates. This tells us something very unflattering about our workforce, and the United States is not alone. In the Manpower survey, Japan—with its low birth rates and near-zero immigration—reported a survey-high 80 percent of their companies couldn’t fill needed jobs followed by India and Brazil. The United States ranked seventh in the survey.
HARDLY WORKING
It’s difficult to quantify national competitiveness using traditional government calculations of productivity, created by statisticians who simply divided GDP by hours of employment. Headline productivity has been growing for the last couple of decades, but there is mounting evidence that something is off here, too. Many critics suggest that shifts in global companies’ worldwide sourcing formulas designed to take advantage of lower costs—the very essence of globalization—are incorrectly captured in official statistics of any single developed country, especially the United States. Unfortunately, government statistical groups are ill equipped to deal with the offshoring or global supply chains that characterize the 21st century economy.
Michael Mandel of the Progressive Policy Institute and Susan Houseman of McKinsey & Co. suggest that increased productivity figures may be attributed to sources other than a more efficient national workforce. Let’s say Ford Motor Company normally sources one million car parts from an American supplier at $10 per part, or $10 million. In scenario one, Ford reengineers its production process, reducing the parts it needs by half, dropping its cost of goods to $5 million—effectively a productivity gain. Alternatively in scenario two, if Ford can simply source the $10 part for $5 from China, the costs of goods also drops to $5 million. In either case, Ford’s productivity goes up (sales minus the cost of materials), as does its profitability (sales minus cost of labor and materials) and measured productivity (value-added per worker). These two scenarios are virtually indistinguishable in productivity statistics. But while neither scenario helps the employment picture, one shows a country getting better, and one doesn’t. In a globalized economy, statisticians cannot realistically track all these underlying data streams to truly give us an accurate view on labor productivity or competitiveness. Such challenges bedevil most advanced economies.
MORE DISTORTIONS
Another touchstone of economic health is international trade, but again, global supply chains heavily distort trade statistics and our notion of whether our tradable economy is doing better or worse. According to the World Bank, some two-thirds of international trade is now in so-called intermediate goods—a component that goes into another product like a hard drive that goes into a computer. Global supply chains lead to segmented production processes across borders and create distinct challenges for measuring and understanding our economy and international interdependence.
Distortions can emerge at each step of the manufacturing or distributing process. First, conventional trade statistics count the gross dollar value of goods crossing each border, rather than the net value added. This is a common double-counting problem whereby the full values of the import and the export overstate the domestic value-added content of exports. For example, when China imports $143 worth of intermediate parts for an iPod, assembles them, then exports the finished iPod to the United States for $150, China officially registers $150 in exports. But the value-added component of the Chinese export is only $7. Some economists estimate that the import content of exports is 15 percent to 20 percent in countries like the United States and up to 50 percent in heavy manufacturing countries like China. So the more expensive the imported content, the more distorted trade may become. In this respect, many lower-end emerging markets may actually be less of a trade threat than more advanced countries. We might think we run a large trade imbalance with China, for example, because we run a huge headline deficit with that country. But our true value-added trade volume with China is probably lower than our politicians would have us believe. In this case, the reality is better than statistics suggest, but this deceptive data feeds the overheated anti-China rhetoric of this election year.
INFLATION
Inflation is another central measure of our economic health—helping adjust prices to suggest whether true purchasing power, hence wealth, is rising or falling. Calculating a Consumer Price Index (CPI) helps us deflate nominal GDP increases caused by rising prices. This is our first problem with inflation—if not correctly calculated, then real rates of GDP growth are probably miscalculated too. If CPI is rising, GDP would have to be lowered. So there is a perverse incentive to keep inflation low to help growth look better because so many elements of advanced economies hinge on GDP expansion or contraction—interest rates, stock market multiples, inflation-linked benefits.
Most countries price a basket of goods each month to track CPI. However, this basket is composed differently from country to country. In emerging markets, food often makes up 50 percent of the basket, while in most wealthy countries, it’s less than 15 percent. This means inflation rates in one country really can’t be compared to another’s without some serious analysis. Moreover, Washington statisticians make what are called hedonic (from hedonism or pleasure-related) adjustments to the CPI to reflect improvements that go into certain goods. If a 27-inch flat screen costs $500 in year one, but the following year a 30-inch model comes out at the same price, hedonically the price of TVs is declining, because you are getting more for the same money. This would register as deflation in terms of official inflation statistics. But statisticians are doing this on a myriad of goods including complex items like housing and medical care, where quality may be more challenging to quantify than the size of a TV screen. All told, a large amount of subjectivity goes into determining the official inflation rate. Considering the enormous impact small CPI changes can have across the world, it seems odd that there is so little transparency in these calculations. But for anyone living in the United States, college education, housing, and health care costs have been exceeding inflation rates for years. Since 1986, official inflation has risen overall by over 105 percent, but average American college tuitions have risen nearly 500 percent in the same period. Since two years of college is now essentially a prerequisite to earn a median U.S. income, a case could be made for having raised its slim 3.2 percent basket weighting—a legacy from decades ago. But the result would probably be a sharper increase in inflation, triggering higher interest rates—not a result much sought after by the government or Wall Street.
BRAVE NEW MATH
An obsessive focus on GDP expansion, coupled with misleading numbers on employment, trade, productivity, and inflation, may suggest a revisionist narrative.
The United States grew rapidly after World War II while Europe and Japan were reindustrializing. Americans bought and built houses in suburbs while domestic factories were manufacturing most of the objects that filled their homes. New roads connected these suburbs, and the cars that filled them were made in Detroit. But by the 1960s, Japanese imports arrived—bringing cheaper goods, cars, and foreign oil. We bought more, and official GDP hummed along. Employment was slowly shifting from manufacturing—a decline that began in the 1950s and accelerated into the 1980s—to retail and service. Jobs in the booming housing sector—from contractors to decorators to mortgage bankers to Wall Street securitizers—replaced old factory work. America’s focus was increasingly inward at the very moment the world was globalizing. A steady decline in American interest rates and a belief that monetary policy could control the economy’s heat like a perfect thermostat kept asset prices high and the American dream within reach. Globalization and complex supply chains concealed shaky statistics regarding the quality of American life. Government and households borrowed and spent more, fueling GDP growth, but left us with huge debts to repay. Similar traits were exhibiting themselves in Western Europe, flowing outward to the continent’s fringe as eastern and central European nations exited the communist economic world and entered the capitalist community. All of our economic doctors told us we were fine and to keep doing what we were doing, but the heart attack was looming. The crash in late 2008 woke America and the world to the vulnerabilities of our overly domestic-focused economy in a world growing intensely competitive. Economists tell us we’re regaining our health, but many in America and abroad, are still feeling a lot of pain.
If economists begin to consider what progress really means in the modern world, then new ways of measuring, analyzing, and gathering data may more accurately reflect our holistic well-being. With a clearer and more realistic picture, better policies could be crafted to prevent future economic heart attacks.
There are already important strides in this direction, particularly in understanding progress beyond GDP growth. The UN’s Human Development Index is a single statistic that measures health, education, and living standards, with yearly country rankings. Similarly, the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development developed the Better Life Index—a composite of 11 broad topics that include housing, income, and jobs as well as quality of life (community, education, environment, governance, health, life satisfaction, safety, and work-life balance). The Index already covers the 34 OECD member countries with plans to expand to its partner countries including China, India, Indonesia, Russia, and South Africa.
Some countries are designing their own national indexes to measure well-being. The UK is developing an index that not only measures economic performance of the country but also takes into account environmental and sustainability issues. Similarly, Canada has adopted something called the Genuine Progress Indicator, which starts with GDP but adjusts for negatives and economic regrettables like health care and law enforcement. In 2005, the tiny Himalayan nation of Bhutan developed the Gross National Happiness index, which takes into account health, culture, education, ecology, good governance, community vitality, and living standards—a broad way of assessing progress beyond pure GDP growth. Ron Inglehart, a pioneering social scientist at the University of Michigan, has produced his World Values Survey for almost 30 years, covering more than 40 countries, with dozens of questions that help construct an index of subjective well-being that reflects happiness and general life satisfaction.
Unlike other areas that have become multi-disciplinary, economics has been cloistered and slow to evolve. But increasingly, academics from a diverse range of social and hard sciences are seeking to understand and explain economic phenomena in new ways. Urban planner Richard Florida, for example, argues that governments should cultivate concentrated economic activity in cities or larger “megaregions” versus watered-down national efforts. Florida has identified some 40 global megaregions in advanced and emerging markets that comprise less than 18 percent of the world’s population but account for two-thirds of global economic activity and more than 83 percent of scientific research and patent innovations. Florida believes that these megaregions have been successful at attracting and cultivating his “3Ts”—talent, technology, tolerance—which appear to foster innovative, sustainable economic activity. He’s created several new indexes trying to capture data ranging from urban light emissions to scholarly scientific publications, patents, gay and artisan populations, and education levels that correspond to creativity, economic activity, and increased productivity.
Physicist Geoff West of the Santa Fe Institute is doing similar studies of urban economies, looking into what he calls “economic metabolism” and its potentially accelerating factors. Like Florida, West finds human creativity, innovation, and problem solving abilities at the core of such growth. In this vein, Parag Khanna has suggested indexes to rate city or megaregion competitiveness on a statistical basis by quantifying their infrastructure, how many multinational corporations and start-ups they host, and educational density. Khanna believes such rankings would help cities or megaregions know where they stand comparatively and help shape policies for improvement.
Private sector initiatives are also working to improve existing economic indicators. For years, the payroll processing company ADP has generated monthly payroll data on 23 million working Americans that helps illuminate labor trends. Monster.com produces the Monster Employment Index, a multi-country monthly compilation of recruitment data. Because recruitment typically precedes actual hiring by a month or two, the index is considered an interesting forward-looking barometer of the labor market and overall economy. Google has created the Google Price Index, an alternative to official inflation statistics. It uses a database of real-time Internet shopping figures, measured on a daily basis as opposed to official figures, published at least a month after the period they cover. Economists are also using digital data from sites such as Twitter, Google, and Craigslist to gauge economic performance by measuring unemployment and home sales. These sources—as opposed to the official sample surveys taken once a month—may prove more accurate. As the world completely digitizes, one would hope valuable real-time data could be mined in ways statisticians couldn’t have imagined even 30 years ago.
Finally, a number of neurological studies suggest how humans are hardwired to respond to relative progress—becoming upset even while gaining if they see others gain more. This may in part explain the Occupy Wall Street movement, which has been adopted far beyond its origins in New York’s Zuccotti Park, spreading across the United States and much of Western Europe. People get upset when they see huge income disparities. Governments in a broad range of countries need to look increasingly at broadening and diffusing income creation, in contrast to simple, gross creation of wealth, to counter the more pernicious trends of the last generation.
By going beyond simple GDP and looking at a diversity of timely data we can better diagnose our economic health. In the global age, new economic thinking needs to be oriented around developing human capital, not blindly stoking GDP through low interest rates that encourage buying bigger houses filled with more foreign-made goods. By digging deeper into trade data and devising a truer statistical picture of labor, productivity, and employment, one can determine what human capital should be cultivated to remain competitive, returning an economy to a healthier state. And as Florida notes, maybe the fixation on a “national” economy is too obtuse. Perhaps one should focus policies on cultivating smaller megaregion engines that tow the broader country. The field of economics needs to look no further than one of its greatest patron saints, Joseph Schumpeter, whose life work underscored that capitalism can only be understood as an evolutionary process of continuous innovation and “creative destruction.” For everyone’s sake, let’s hope economists, too, can rid themselves of their dependence on old data and develop new, more sophisticated metrics to keep the world economy healthy.
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Peter Marber is a professional money manager and faculty member at Columbia University. He is the author of Seeing the Elephant: Understanding Globalization from Trunk to Tail (2009) and the forthcoming Brave New Math: Why We Need New Economic Thinking in the Global Age (2012).
[Photo: Andres Musta]
(PDFs of World Policy Journal articles can be purchased through SAGE. Subscribe to WPJ here)Victorian Premier Daniel Andrews at odds with federal Labor counterparts over China free trade deal
Updated
Victorian Premier Daniel Andrews has come out in support of the China free trade agreement, putting him at odds with his federal colleagues.
As Opposition Leader Bill Shorten continues to raise concerns about the deal, Mr Andrews enthusiastically embraced it during Question Time in State Parliament.
"The Chinese free trade agreement is good news for Victorian jobs and I support it," Mr Andrews said.
The Premier acknowledged he had a different stance to federal Labor.
"The leader of the National Party expressed some surprise that a Victorian politician could disagree with his federal colleagues — well yes, yes," Mr Andrews said.
"And wouldn't we be in a stronger position if those opposite stood up and found fault with Mr Abbott and his cutbacks and closures."
South Australian Premier Jay Weatherill on Monday also backed the trade deal.
"We support the China-Australia free trade agreement... it's a great way for us to underscore the fact that South Australia is open for business with China," he said.
Mr Weatherill had previously said state safeguards were "ample" to ensure the SA workforce and SA safeguards were applied to any project built in the state.
Pressure on Shorten from Labor backbench
Mr Shorten wants Prime Minister Tony Abbott to come to the negotiating table to discuss strengthening protections for workers in the agreement and Australian jobs.
Pressure is building on the Opposition Leader from his backbench to insist on changes to the China trade deal.
WA senator Glenn Sterle has joined fellow Treaties Committee member Kelvin Thomson in saying his party should oppose it unless changes are written into the agreement.
"I think it's a croc the way it's written at the moment," Senator Sterle told ABC Radio.
"I cannot and will not support the Chinese free trade agreement while there is no mandatory testing of the labour market and while we're dropping standards to bring in tradesmen like joiners, carpenters, mechanics, machinists."
Mr Abbott told reporters on Tuesday that "there is nothing to negotiate".
"This is our economic future and it must go through the Parliament unaltered as quickly as possible," he said.
"The only person standing in the way of jobs and the China-Australia free trade agreement is Bill Shorten, who is taking instructions from his union masters and the CFMEU."
Trade Minister Andrew Robb warned last week China would "walk away" from the deal if Labor voted it down this year.
The Government insists the agreement will create jobs and drive economic growth by improving access to the growing Chinese middle class through tariff reductions.
Topics: trade, business-economics-and-finance, government-and-politics, federal---state-issues, federal-government, federal-parliament, australia, asia, vic, china
First postedVirtual reality (VR) specialist Oculus VR is no stranger to legal battles. Since being purchased by social networking giant Facebook for $2 billion USD back in 2014 the company has faced accusations from ZeniMax Media, parent company of Bethesda Softworks, surrounding former employee John Carmack’s transition to his current role as Chief Technology Officer. This week sees new claims levelled at the company, this time from a firm known as Total Recall Technologies, which was created as a partnership between Ron Igra and Thomas Seidl.
The company has filed a suit against Oculus VR and its founder and creator of the Oculus Rift head-mounted display (HMD), Palmer Luckey, with the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California. In a filed complaint Total Recall Technologies claim to have approached Luckey in December 2010, before he had created the first prototypes of what would become the Oculus Rift. The pair apparently discussed working on a 3D HMD and, the following year, asked Luckey to build a prototype of such a device. According to Total Recall Technologies these alleged conversations and works were intended to be kept confidential, and Luckey reportedly signed a contract and nondisclosure agreement to this tune.
Total Recall Technologies’ main complaint concerns the Kickstarter crowd-funding campaign for the Oculus Rift, which raised well over $2 million USD in 2012, which it claims was during the term of this contract. “Without informing the Partnership, on information and belief, Luckey took the information he learned from the Partnership, as well as the prototype that he built for the TRT using design features and other confidential information and materials supplied by the Partnership, and passed it off to others as his own,” the complaint reads.
Thus, the official complaint lists four causes of action, the first being a supposed ‘Breach of Contract’ on Luckey’s behalf, the second a ‘Breach of the Duty of Good Faith and Fair Dealing’ again levelled at the designer. The third, aimed at both Luckey and Oculus VR itself, accuses the pair of ‘Conversion’, in which Total Recall Technologies-owned property was used for the Oculus Rift. Finally, a fourth cause lists ‘Constructive Fraud’ against both.
Oculus VR itself hasn’t issued a statement on these accusations, and it’s not clear what action will be taken from here on out, though the complaint does list a ‘Demand for a Jury Trial’. VRFocus will continue to follow the situation and has reached out to Oculus VR for comment.San Diego County government and its largest labor union have reached a tentative deal on a new contract, avoiding a strike planned for later this week.
After months of little progress at the bargaining table, the county and Service Employees International Local 221 settled on a proposed pact that gives some 10,000 employees base raises of about 13 percent over five years.
The Board of Supervisors still needs to approve the county’s side of the deal, and it’s not clear if they will consider the contract at its meeting on Tuesday. The union will present the deal to its members to vote on from Tuesday through Thursday.
Regardless of the outcome to those two processes, the tentative agreement has staved off a strike planned for Tuesday and Wednesday, the first time since the mid-1990s that Local 221’s county workers would have stopped work.
Like agreements reached earlier this year with other unions that represent county employees, the proposed contract includes 13 percent across-the-board-raises for Local 221 members spread over five years. But the agreement reached late Friday includes one-time increases in base salary for registered nurses that translate into 16 percent raises — both the county and the union wanted to increase retention — and 14 percent raises for social services and social welfare workers. Psychiatrists will receive a 17 percent raise, but 5 percent of the pay hike is to correct an issue with a previous contract.
Similar to agreements with other unions, SEIU-represented members will also receive 7 percent more in county health care funding annually to offset rising costs, as well as $5,250 in cash bonuses spread over five years. The tentative agreement is expected to cost the government about $495 million, pretty much the price tag of early proposals.
The union’s president, David Garcias, said that the county “finally blinked.”
“We now have an agreement that helps to close the wage gap for critical public servants like nurses and social workers which is an essential step in alleviating chronic staff turnover and significant short staffing of services to vulnerable residents of San Diego,” he said.
But on SEIU’s Facebook page, some members said the tentative agreement seems to be nearly identical to offers the county made when negotiations began early this year. They said it doesn’t pay San Diego County’s employees on par with other counties’ workers, that it was a five-year deal rather than three, and that it fell short of expectations Local 221 had built through the lengthy negotiations. The deal also lacked a $500 signing bonus that was included in earlier offers.
The county did not immediately comment on the tentative agreement.
SEIU’s leadership had been under increasing pressure from some of its own members to allow a vote on the county’s offer. At least three different bargaining units within Local 221 have taken early steps to leave SEIU and represent themselves or join another parent union. About 1,200 of the 10,000 county workers represented by Local 221 would leave if the process is completed.
The tentative deal came after both sides accused the other of unfair labor practices, accusations both the county and union denied.
The union said that the county, at times, refused to negotiate and that its series of proposed contracts grew increasingly unacceptable.
The county said that the union violated agreements when it brought several groups into bargaining sessions, including the American Civil Liberties Union, the Community Advocacy Network and others. It also accused some of the union’s senior members of prematurely campaigning for a strike.
“SEIU has attempted to short-circuit bargaining, by exerting unlawful economic pressure on the County by threatening and preparing for a pre-impasse strike in violation” of labor relations laws, the county said in unfair labor practice charge.
Union members voted for a strike in July, and in late August announced that they would not work on this Tuesday and Wednesday. The timing was to coincide with the supervisors’ first board meetings after their summer recess.
Twitter: @jptstewart
joshua.stewart@sduniontribune.com
(619) 293-1841Forensic hypnosis is the use of hypnotherapy in the field of law enforcement. It’s often used to help witnesses recall details of events and descriptions of suspects that can’t be extracted through conventional interviewing techniques.
In my police career, I’ve been involved in a number of cases where we used hypnotic memory enhancement. Several had amazing success.
I’ve always been fascinated with how the human mind works. I think that modern medicine and psychiatry are just beginning to understand the complexity of how consciousness works. Hypnosis is a tool to assist in entering a person’s subconscious and unlocking the vault where memory is stored. Its ‘magic’ is the ability to alter the subject’s state of consciousness which is what Shamanism is all about. But that’s for another discussion.
The best hypnotherapist I’ve had the pleasure to work with is Dr. Lee Pulos of Vancouver, BC, Canada. Here’s how he explains it.
“Hypnosis is a natural state of consciousness that we drift in and out of quite regularly. For example, while driving along a highway and then suddenly discovering that you ‘lost’ several miles without being aware of it. This can also happen during reading when you may notice that you have ‘read’ a chapter or two without being mindful of the content. Hypnosis is basically a technique for focusing consciousness by entering a deep state of absorption. It allows you to shift from your outer to inner awareness and tap deeper levels of consciousness, so that we can re-educate and reprogram the subconscious with empowering suggestions or beliefs.”
The word “hypnosis” comes from the name of a Greek god Hypnos, who presided over sleep. In the late1700s, Anton Mesmer brought the technique into popular consciousness in Europe and in 1843 Scottish physician James Braid coined the term, “hypnotism,” for the experience that was passing in many circles as “animal magnetism.”
Hypnosis places a person in a trance state that can resemble sleep, but is instead an altered state of consciousness more akin to a lucid dream. Often people in a trance are quite alert, but focused in a way that differs from their normal conscious state. Contrary to popular notions, subjects in a light trance may be aware of everything that is going on.
I’ve seen a rough and tough biker-witness under hypnosis who was instructed to play ‘patty-cake’ by clapping his hands on his knees. He couldn’t stop laughing at the fact that he couldn’t control his hands, though he seemed perfectly conscious in a way that ought to have enabled him to resist the instruction. His hands changed to patting his head and stomach at the hypnotist’s instruction. They looked at each other the whole time and even had a conversation with his hands patting about.
The trance-state, which has its own ebb and flow, is the result of a trusting and cooperative process between the subject and the hypnotist. It’s not one person controlling another and there’s no way the hypnotist can make the subject do something they would not do while they’re in a normal state, such as an illegal or immoral act.
“Hypnosis,” says Kevin McConkey, President of the Australian Psychological Society and co-author of Hypnosis, Memory, and Behavior in Criminal Investigation, “is essentially a phenomenon that reflects genuinely experienced alterations of reality in response to suggestions administered by a hypnotist.” The subject’s testimony is what confirms the trance, although susceptibility varies among individuals. Those who are highly suggestive will behave as if going through truly significant cognitive alterations.
Hypnosis involves concentration that is heightened to the point where one can recall details that seemed to elude that same person in a conscious state. That’s why it appears to be a powerful forensic tool for criminal investigation, although some researchers challenge the notion that hypnosis leads to significant increases in memory.
There are two basic purposes for using forensic hypnosis. The most common is to induce relaxation when anxiety and stress may be obstructing a witness’ ability to recall as much information as possible. The second use occurs when retrieval of information from witnesses cannot be acquired through any other means.
The very first court case to involve forensic hypnosis was Cornell v. Superior Court of San Diego in 1959. Although forensic hypnosis is mostly used by prosecutors, in this particular court case, it was the defense that used hypnosis as an aid in preparing its strategy. Since then, many famous cases have used hypnosis as an aid, including the Boston Strangler, Ted Bundy, and Sam Sheperd.
Currently no overriding judgment has yet been handed down regarding admissibility of evidence achieved through forensic hypnosis and the use of such evidence varies from one jurisdiction to the next. Adding to the reliability problem is that solid evidence can be devalued as a result of unprofessional circumstances surrounding the obtaining of evidence through hypnosis.
There’s nothing more unreliable than an eyewitness, never mind one who is tainted by hocus-pocus. ” One the other hand, I recall another judge who was fascinated by the process and readily accepted the witness evidence, particularly because the information obtained under hypnosis was corroborated by other facts. As in all types of evidence, the key is reliability. I remember one judge rejecting evidence from a witness who had been subject to hypnotic recall stating “” One the other hand, I recall another judge who was fascinated by the process and readily accepted the witness evidence, particularly because the information obtained under hypnosis was corroborated by other facts. As in all types of evidence, the key is reliability.
In order to ensure that solid forensic hypnosis used in the investigation of a crime is not devalued, it’s become standard and vital operating procedure that all hypnosis sessions are recorded on video and audio and that the session is witnessed by independent observers. In addition, to further strengthen the case, the hypnosis must be performed by a trained forensic hypnotist.
Before a forensic hypnotist is allowed to begin a session, one very important condition must be met. The subject must be assured that during the hypnotic session no attempt shall be made to elicit any information that is not directly relevant to the investigation. In addition, the forensic hypnotist must also assure the subject that no information retrieved will lead to self-incrimination.
Critics of forensic hypnotism center their attacks on the accuracy and reliability of the evidence that’s obtained. The concern is that suggestion(s) implanted during hypnotism may create false memories through the use of leading questions.
One thing that a forensic hypnotist cannot do, and is never called to do, is to help a suspect confess to a crime. Not only is this impossible, but any confession arrived at through hypnosis would never be admissible in court.
Here’s a true case that I investigated where forensic hypnosis for memory enhancement led to a break-through in solving the crime. It was conducted by Dr. Lee Pulos.
In April, 1986, a lady was alone in her cabin on a remote gold claim in northern British Columbia. A masked man with a hand gun appeared at her door demanding that she hand over her gold stash. She refused so he proceeded to blindfold and hog-tie her, then began torturing her by burning her hands and ribs with a red-hot knife heated on her wood stove.
Now this lady was one tough old bird, as you’d expect a gold miner to be. She later stated that she’d worked so hard to build her gold stash that she’d ‘rather die than turn it over to this asshole.’ Realizing that his interrogation technique was going nowhere, the bad guy quit in frustration, set the cabin on fire with her still tied and blindfolded, and left her to die. She was able to wiggle over and boot the door, then crawled outside where she laid in excruciating pain on the snow in sub-zero temperature until her husband returned from town and found her.
Because this was such a horrific crime, the Mounties pulled out all stops. We flew her to Vancouver to undergo hypnosis with Lee Pulos. He was able to extract two things that led to solving the case. One was that she recalled that the bad guy was using a two-way radio or ‘communicator’ as she called it. The second was that he kept using the term for the gold stash as being ‘squirreled away’.
Now being positive that an accomplice was involved, we focused the investigation on a neighbor who’d been involved with a gold-claim boundary dispute. We identified the suspect as a Hells Angels connection who’d been hired by the neighbour so we ran a wiretap which caught him using the term ‘squirreled away’. This led to an elaborate sting being set-up that resulted in his confession to an undercover agent. He was convicted and got twenty years.
Like I said, I’ve always been fascinated with how the human mind works. One thing I’m positive about – there’s way more to consciousness than modern medicine and psychiatry know – except for the Shamans. But that’s for another discussion.Christine Merrifield is sitting outside a courtroom in Newmarket, Ont., explaining to a seat mate that she has two sons. One is quiet and laid back like his father. Then there's Peter, whom she describes as "very proud to be a member of the RCMP."
He takes after his mother, says the septuagenarian: "He speaks up."
Many of the Mountie white-shirts wish Sgt. Peter Merrifield had kept quiet. For the last 10 years, Merrifield has said he was harassed and bullied by his superiors, all because, he claims, he irked them by running for a federal Conservative nomination in Barrie in May 2005.
His civil suit against the RCMP that alleges bullying and harassing him finally commenced at trial last November. There was some media coverage when RCMP Commissioner Bob Paulson was called to testify in December, but it waned after Department of Justice lawyers successfully put a clamp on controversial affidavits, submitted for the case, which — among other things — purportedly revealed personal information about Prime Minister Stephen Harper's family.
Although it is not a typical harassment case like those filed by several female RCMPs officers across the country, the revelations of the Merrifield case are still troubling.
By all accounts, Merrifield was an exemplary officer who joined the force in 1997. He stood out in each department where he worked: he resolved a case involving a threat to the life of Prime Minister Paul Martin and U.S. President George W. Bush; completed a large-scale cross-border gun smuggling investigation; and obtained the first conviction under the United Nations act dealing with nuclear counter-proliferation by stopping an Iranian man from shipping devices to Iran to aid in uranium enrichment.
Merrifield ran in the 2004 federal election for the Conservatives, but it was his campaign literature while seeking a nomination for the upcoming 2006 election that would turn his life upside down. He was called on the carpet and asked to defend the Conservative campaign tenets. Recent testimony at his hearing confirmed that he was asked if he was being fair to his constituents in advocating the abolishment of the gun registry,supporting the traditional interpretation of marriage and calling the then Liberal government corrupt.
Multiple code of conduct investigations
Unbeknownst to Merrifield, and against RCMP policy, a secret code of conduct investigation was opened because he had stood for the nomination (which he lost) without being on leave, and because in a subsequent radio interview he gave — as a private citizen — the RCMP claimed he was discussing national security and terrorism without prior authorization.
He was told all the issues were resolved, but he had lost three plum assignments and was transferred out of his area of expertise, national security. He began seeking answers through requests under the Access to Information Act, but those requests came back with little information.
Then on Jan. 5, 2006, court heard, he told his superior officer, Insp. Marc Proulx, that he was going to take his treatment to another level and seek legal help. The next day, Proulx initiated a code of conduct investigation into his use of his force-issued American Express card.
Later that month, when it was learned that Merrifield had handed over his performance reviews to his lawyer, another code of conduct investigation against him was commenced for "his release of protected and classified information."
A fourth code of conduct investigation was opened against Merrifield when he received London Police Service documents that revealed that Proulx, his superior officer, had been talking to an undercover police officer posing as a prostitute.
(Proulx testified last week that the contents of the leaked London police document were true, and he tearfully apologized to the Merrifield hearing adjudicator, Judge Mary Vallee.)
All four investigations into Merrifield were closed with no discipline meted out. But Merrifield only learned of the first |
once we have a solid plan — including diagrams of every utility pole our fiber will travel on, detailed maps of where we’ll need to dig up streets to install new conduit, and the specs for every single hut and cabinet — can we get boots on the ground to start building our network. That’s when you’ll start to see crews out in the streets with their boom trucks, boring machines, and rolls of conduit and cables.
In other words, this is a huge undertaking, and we know you might get a bit impatient with us from time to time. We know you want your Google Fiber — please know that we’ve got our teams hard at work to get you connected just as soon as we can.
Posted by John Toccalino, Manager of Outside Plant Engineering, Google FiberThis is the greatest giveaway ever! 3 cool DLC keys at once with worth $48 in total. Want them?
No problem, we hand out hundreds here.
First get free premium key ($20), install My Lands (it’s f2p) and play a bit and post here your city name and server name where you play.
Simply do the folllowing:
Sign up for My Lands here: My Lands: Black Gem Hunting on Steam Play a bit and and give your city a name in-game. Submit the name into comments of this announcement.
Congratulations! You get the Key of Premium account, you can find more details on this premium in store:
Want +2 DLC keys more? No problem, you will get them easily, just play a bit further.
Reach the very first in-game achievement 5 level castle and as you done post phrase ‘reached 5lvl’ into comments below. Then you get +2 DLC more ($2 in total worth):
Hero Courage – Starter DLC Pack ($19) for faster gameplay, here it is on Steam:
Miner’s Luck ($9) for more in-game resources:
We have plenty of keys for you and your friends, so please share this giveaway.
It would be nice, if you share this posting on your favourite social networks: Facebook
Twitter
Google
Reddit
Pinterest
TumblrSo I took clips of your clip show, so you can have scraps of recaps! (Thank you, 2007.)
What a hyperactive blur of non-sequiturs and sparkly nonsense. There were dubiously target-demographic-relatable football metaphors!
Willam cohosted with a pigeon!
They sopped up Latrice!
RuPaul taught us how to hide our carrots!
Jinkx gave us a new ringtone!
JinkxTradeTRADE
"Trade! TRADE! Come here and sit on my face, bitch!" You're welcome, hunties.
Biggest bummer: No audition videos! I live for audition videos. I could do an entire episode of just audition videos. I was hoping for a whole segment called "Alaska: A Five-Year Casting Retrospective."
Favorite bits: the RuPaul Roast outtakes, the rundown of Drag Queen Musical Ventures, the inclusion of fan art and recappers (whose dick do I need to hire Willam to suck if I want to be included next year?), and the introduction of the new-to-us Alyssa-ism of "Not on tonight!"
Oh, and the video for "The Beginning." What bizarre shinanigans!
As far as I can tell, the plot is this: Alaska, Jinkx, and Roxxxy go for a breezy desert ride, until Alaska crashes the car and they all die.
They wake up in Gay Heaven, where all the cameras have Vaseline and nobody's #Chiffonography has to be synchronized to anybody else's! RuPaul dances a greeting, and they watch their trials from the acid-magenta clouds: apparently, they're being tried for their own vehicular manslaughter. Children, this is what happens when you drink until the drag queens look like real girls. Eventually, this Kanga-Ru Court convicts everybody to Tuckahoe State Prison for Ladies, where their mugshots were seemingly used for the Top Three Profile segments that ran earlier in the show.
Or something. If you were able to make any goddamn sense of the video, please explain it to me.
So that's almost our season! In real-time, this Tuesday afternoon, the entire Season Five cast is gathering in Los Angeles, and they're taping the reunion and all four crownings tomorrow afternoon. Yes, four: in addition to Miss Congeniality, they'll film all three of Alaska, Jinkx, and Roxxxy being crowned the winner, and nobody (even the queens themselves) will know the true winner until the Monday night finale broadcast. Which means that in less than twenty-four hours, we'll have already crowned Schrödinger's Next Drag Superstar!
I took this photo last night, at the Atlanta RuPaul's Drag Race viewing party at Blake's. (Clock my amazing tacky-ass race-flag nails, by the way.) Here's my official final-vote alliance, via the awesome Team Buttons they gave us:
I truly cannot choose. I hate giving the pageant answer, but I want two crowns. I'll be happy either way.
I know this is hella premature, but perhaps because I'm already satisfied with the conclusion of Season Five, I must admit: I'm already really, really excited about Season Six. (You've read my Season Six casting endorsement, right?) I do have a hope for the editing on Season Six, though. I don't want this Top Three:
The young, unconnected, genius-misfit ingenue whose winning streak baffles the other queens,
The dagger-tongued villain, whose tragic childhood doesn't quite excuse the shade she throws at the oddball ingenue, and
Their mutual friend, the older-sister voice of reason, well-connected in the drag community and an excellent queen in her own right, who provides a diplomatic bridge among the Top Three.
Because those finalists? We did that in Seasons Four and Five. It didn't have to be that way: Jinkx's meek-bullied-odd-duck edit felt increasingly forced as the season progressed (and the queens, including Jinkx, have all said that Jinkx wasn't nearly as timid as she was made to look), and while Roxxxy did lash out, she apologized for each attack over and over, during filming and during broadcast. And yet, we got the Jinkx-the-protagonist, Alaska-the-big-sister, Roxxxy-the-villain edit to this season's endgame.
(Of course, if Jinkx wins on Monday night, Alaska's chances of winning All Stars Season Two look very good.)
I don't want a protagonist in Season Six. When I first watched Season Three, it wasn't my favorite, but I've come to appreciate the lack of protagonist-narrative it had. Of course, Jinkx (and Sharon) didn't choose their edits, didn't cast themselves as the protagonists of their seasons--but their actions and antics that ran counter to the edits chosen for them were left on the cutting room floor. I hope that Season Six doesn't have to be this way: the show will benefit from allowing more of the whole-people of the queens to show, and while that might make the producers' jobs more complicated, it would also make the show more interesting.
Okay, my stilettos are punching holes through the top of this soapbox. Anyway. I'm hella excited for the national game of Where's Waldo? we'll get to play this summer, when a dozen-or-so drag queens quietly disappear from their regular gigs for a couple months (you guys will help me figure out who's gone missing, right?). And I'm looking forward to finding out the official cast list, and watching dozens of grainy bar-performance videos on YouTube and guessing who's the most sick'ning of the bunch. And although I'm going to keep this blog active after Season Five is over, I'm really, really looking forward to watching the first Season Six queen strut through those big pink werkroom doors in January.
That's it for this week! Give me quantifiable validation on Facebook and Twitter (do you like me? Or do you Like-button-me-like-me? I hope you Like me!), and stay tuned: the season's almost over, but we're not done here yet, darlings!Republican Senate candidate Roy Moore of Alabama sought to refocus his campaign on the conservative religious ideals most likely to motivate his base voters, dismissing the national firestorm over allegations that he pursued teenage girls when he was in his 30s.
Addressing a gathering at the Huntsville Christian Academy in Huntsville, Ala., on Sunday night, the former judge suggested that he was investigating his accusers, threatened to sue The Washington Post and called on the United States to restore its culture by going “back to God.”
“We can be proud of where we came from and where we’re going if we go back to God,” Moore said at his second public event since The Post reported the allegations of misconduct last week.
“If we go back to God, we can be unified again,” he said.
Moore’s attempt to steer the political conversation in Alabama back to conservative Christian values came as he weathered a fourth day of repercussions from allegations by four women that he sought romantic or sexual relationships with them when they were teenagers and he was in his 30s.
One of the accusers, Leigh Corfman, said she was 14 when Moore initiated a sexual encounter with her.
“We’ve still got investigations going on,” Moore said, referring to his accusers. “We’re still finding out a lot we didn’t know.”
Echoing a remark made by his wife Saturday, Moore also said The Post “will be sued” for its reporting. The event was closed to news reporters, but aides to Moore broadcast his remarks live on Facebook.
[Roy Moore: Alabama voters will ‘see through this charade’ of sexual misconduct claim]
Moore’s campaign received backup Sunday from Breitbart News, which sent employees to Alabama to investigate Corfman and the three other women.
In an article published Sunday titled “Mother of Roy Moore Accuser: Washington Post Reporters Convinced My Daughter to Go Public,” Breitbart quoted Corfman’s mother as saying that Post reporters sought out her daughter, not vice versa.
“She did not go to them,” Nancy Wells said, according to Breitbart. “They called her.”
Neither Corfman nor any of the other women sought out The Post. While reporting a story in Alabama about supporters of Moore’s Senate campaign, a Post reporter heard that Moore allegedly had sought relationships with teenage girls. Over the ensuing three weeks, two Post reporters contacted and interviewed the four women. All were initially reluctant to speak publicly but chose to do so after multiple interviews, saying they thought it was important for people to know about their interactions with Moore.
Breitbart’s chairman, Stephen K. Bannon, supports Moore’s candidacy and has said the accusers are trying to “destroy a man’s life.” Bannon is a former adviser to President Trump and is still considered close to him.
Moore’s remarks Sunday night in northern Alabama received a standing ovation. But in Washington, support for his campaign to fill the seat vacated by Attorney General Jeff Sessions continued to flag throughout the weekend.
Sen. Patrick J. Toomey (R-Pa.) on Sunday called on Moore to exit the race and said that Sen. Luther Strange (R-Ala.), who lost to Moore in the GOP primary, would be a strong candidate for a write-in bid.
“This is a terrible situation.... We’ll probably never know for sure exactly what happened,” Toomey said on NBC’s “Meet the Press.” “But from my point of view... I think the accusations have more credibility than the denial. I think it would be best if Roy would just step aside.”
Ohio Gov. John Kasich, a frequent Republican critic of President Trump and his wing of the GOP, said the party “ought not to be for” Moore’s candidacy and also raised the possibility of a write-in candidacy.
“It’s just really a matter of whether he ought to be the candidate, the standard-bearer of the Republican Party. And I just think he shouldn’t be,” Kasich said on ABC’s “This Week.”
Under Alabama law, Moore’s name cannot be removed from the ballot this close to the election, but the state GOP can petition to disqualify him. If Moore is disqualified or withdraws, votes for him would not be counted.
The remarks came after multiple Republican senators rescinded their endorsements of Moore and the National Republican Senatorial Committee pulled out of a joint fundraising committee with him.
Some Republicans had hoped Alabama Gov. Kay Ivey (R), who has called the allegations “deeply disturbing,” would delay the election. But her staff told local media outlets over the weekend that it will take place as scheduled on Dec. 12.
Moore described the backlash as a political conspiracy among Democrats, establishment Republicans and the national media to keep him out of office.
“Why do they come now?” Moore said of the accusations, using parts of a statement he recited Saturday in Vestavia Hills, Ala.
“Because there are groups that don’t want me in the United States Senate. They’re desperate,” he said.
It remains unclear whether the allegations will damage Moore’s campaign, although some signs over the weekend suggested it might.
Representatives of the Trump administration appeared split on how to handle the situation.
Marc Short, the White House director of legislative affairs, said that Moore needs time to defend himself against the allegations and that Trump will look more closely at the issue after he returns from a trip to Asia.
“Roy Moore is somebody who graduated from West Point, he served our country in Vietnam, he’s been elected multiple times statewide in Alabama,” Short said on “Meet the Press.” “The people in Alabama know Roy Moore better than we do here in D.C., and I think we have to be very cautious... of allegations that are 40 years old that arise a month before Election Day.”
In an interview on “This Week,” White House adviser Kellyanne Conway repeatedly declined to say whether she believes the allegations.
“I don’t know the accusers, and I don’t know Judge Moore. But I also want to make sure that we as a nation are not always prosecuting people through the press. He has denied the allegations,” she said.
Appearing on CNN’s “State of the Union,” Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin said the allegations against Moore require a closer look.
“I’m not an expert on this issue, but what I would say is people should investigate this issue and get the facts,” he said. “And if these allegations are true, then absolutely, this is incredibly inappropriate behavior.”
Senate Democrats continued to wrestle with how to leverage the allegations — and what they might do if Moore becomes their colleague after the Dec. 12 special election.
On “Meet the Press,” Sen. Amy Klobuchar (Minn.) floated the idea of expelling Moore from the Senate if he wins.
“We may not have much choice on that but we have choice on something else,” said Klobuchar, who recently co-sponsored a bill requiring sexual harassment training for senators and their staff members. “That is that you can expel a senator once they are in with two-thirds of the vote after the ethics committee does an investigation.”
But Richard J. Durbin (Ill.), the No. 2 Democrat in the Senate, said that unseating a senator is “several steps removed from where we are today,” arguing that Trump needs to “do more when it comes to this situation in Alabama.”
Asked about Moore, Trump more recently has told reporters traveling with him in Asia that “I have not seen very much about him, about it.”
“And, you know, I put out a statement yesterday that he’ll do the right thing,” the president added.
After the allegations surfaced last week, White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders issued a statement saying that Trump “believes that if these allegations are true, Judge Moore will do the right thing and step aside.”
She also said “a mere allegation” should not “destroy a person’s life.”TOKYO — President Obama encountered setbacks to two of his most cherished foreign-policy projects on Thursday, as he failed to achieve a trade deal that undergirds his strategic pivot to Asia and the Middle East peace process suffered a potentially irreparable breakdown.
Mr. Obama had hoped to use his visit here to announce an agreement under which Japan would open its markets in rice, beef, poultry and pork, a critical step toward the Trans-Pacific Partnership, the proposed regional trade pact. But Prime Minister Shinzo Abe was not able to overcome entrenched resistance from Japan’s farmers in time for the president’s visit.
In Jerusalem, Israel’s announcement that it was suspending stalemated peace negotiations with the Palestinians, after a reconciliation between the Palestine Liberation Organization and the militant group Hamas, posed yet another obstacle to restarting a troubled peace process in which Secretary of State John Kerry has been greatly invested.
The setbacks, though worlds apart in geography and history, speak to the common challenge Mr. Obama has had in translating his ideas and ambitions into enduring policies. He has watched outside forces unravel his best-laid plans, from resetting relations with Russia to managing the epochal political change in the Arab world. On Thursday, as Russia staged military exercises on the border with Ukraine, Mr. Kerry denounced broken promises from the Kremlin but took no specific action.Network graphs are pretty data visualizations, and I like pretty data visualizations. Recently, Reddit user CuriousGnu posted a network graph of the comment patterns of the top 50 Reddit subreddits:
The visualization was made with Gephi, a very popular free and open-source network graph tool.
Gephi is extremely difficult to use, and most blog posts about the software are in the form of Step 1: Gephi, Step 2:???, Step 3: Profit. Even if you know do how to use it, most of the network design customizations must be done manually, which is not helped by software slowness even on high-end machines. My own attempts to use Gephi for nice-looking networks have had mixed results.
Additionally, there is very little discussion on how to gather the data for large-scale network graph visualizations, and how to make them in a reproducible manner. It is time to fix that and create a Reddit network graph visualization with many more nodes, step by step.
Getting Reddit Edge Data
Network graphs are typically formed by getting the relationship data between two entities (the edges), then extrapolating the vertices of the graph (the nodes) from that data.
There are two common data structures for representing edge data. One is an adjacency matrix, which is a 2D matrix where the rows/columns represent the entities, and the value at the intersection between a row/column represents the weight of the relationships. For the visualization above, CuriousGnu made an adjacency matrix by querying the relationships from BigQuery for each subreddit manually. That requires adding a line of SQL for each subreddit you want to plot, which is time-consuming and I am lazy.
Let’s try option #2: an edge list, which is a tabular dataset where each row contains the two entities and a weight. With clever use of BigQuery, we can query the edges for every single subreddit at the same time. And we can query on real-time Reddit data from approximately the past 6 months using Jason Baumgartner’s Reddit dataset on BigQuery.
The process works like this:
Determine active users of a subreddit by identifying the subreddits where a user has commented on at least 5 different submissions within the past 6 months. Perform a self-join by joining the table on itself: this will create links between all subreddits where a given user is active. (e.g. an active user of /r/askreddit, /r/pics, and /r/gifs will form 9 links: askreddit → askreddit, askreddit → pics, askreddit → gifs, pics → askreddit, etc.) Aggregate the counts of the number of links between two subreddits; this will become the edge Weight. Filter the resulting dataset by removing self-loops and reverse-edges. (e.g. since we have askreddit → pics, remove pics → askreddit). Additionally, we should only retain edges with at least 200 active users to keep the resulting dataset a manageable size for this analysis.
Putting it all together results in this query:
SELECT a. l_subreddit as Source, b. l_subreddit as Target, COUNT ( * ) as Weight FROM ( SELECT author, LOWER ( subreddit ) as l_subreddit, COUNT ( DISTINCT ( link_id )) as unique_threads FROM [ pushshift : rt_reddit. comments ] GROUP BY author, l_subreddit HAVING unique_threads >= 5 ) a JOIN ( SELECT author, LOWER ( subreddit ) as l_subreddit, COUNT ( DISTINCT ( link_id )) as unique_threads FROM [ pushshift : rt_reddit. comments ] GROUP BY author, l_subreddit HAVING unique_threads >= 5 ) b ON a. author = b. author GROUP BY Source, Target HAVING Source < Target AND Weight >= 200 ORDER BY Weight DESC
Only 13 lines of code, with 3 of those lines repeated. Running the query only takes a few minutes. (which is actually forever in BigQuery time: when people talk about “big data,” this is actually big data!)
That query (at the time of analysis) returns this dataset of 7,498 edges; more than enough. Now for the fun part.
Visualizing the Reddit Data
The edge list linked above can actually be imported into Gephi as-is. Don’t.
Instead, let’s use R and my favorite data visualization tool ggplot2, with a twist.
First, we load the edge list into R, and create an undirected network graph using the igraph package.
net <- graph.data.frame ( df, directed = F )
The imported edge list results in a network with 1,131 nodes/subreddits. After pruning nodes with only a few neighbors and removing the subsequently-orphaned edges, we get a network of 517 nodes/subreddits with 6,732 edges.
We can then add summary statistics for the nodes, such as the group/community each node belongs to, and the eigenvector centrality of the node.
V ( net ) $ group <- membership ( cluster_walktrap ( net, weights = E ( net ) $ Weight )) V ( net ) $ centrality <- eigen_centrality ( net, weights = E ( net ) $ Weight ) $ vector
Convert the network to a dataframe suitable for plotting using the ggnetwork library.
df_net <- ggnetwork ( net, layout = "fruchtermanreingold", weights = "Weight", niter = 50000 )
Now time for ggplot2/ggnetwork fun. In this case, we will color the nodes whether or not they are a default subreddit (orange if default, blue otherwise) and color the lines accordingly (orange if either end is a default subreddit, blue otherwise).
Yes, writing and optimizing all of this code is significantly easier than using Gephi, believe it or not.
default_colors = c ( "#3498db", "#e67e22" ) default_labels = c ( "Not Default", "Default" ) ggplot ( df_net, aes ( x = x, y = y, xend = xend, yend = yend, size = centrality )) + geom_edges ( aes ( color = connectDefault ), size = 0.05 ) + geom_nodes ( aes ( fill = defaultnode ), shape = 21, stroke = 0.2, color = "black" ) + geom_nodelabel_repel ( data = df_net, aes ( color = defaultnode, label = vertex.names ), fontface = "bold", size = 0.5, box.padding = unit ( 0.05, "lines" ), label.padding = unit ( 0.1, "lines" ), segment.size = 0.1, label.size = 0.2 ) + scale_color_manual ( values = default_colors, labels = default_labels, guide = F ) + scale_fill_manual ( values = default_colors, labels = default_labels ) + ggtitle ( "Network Graph of Reddit Subreddits (by @minimaxir)" ) + scale_size ( range = c ( 0.1, 4 )) + theme_blank ()
If you are on a smartphone or tablet, tap this link to view the network in a zoomable format.
The large networks in the blog post are rendered as a PDF, which allows for easy pan/zooming at a very low file size (284KB!), while SVG/d3/sigma.js approaches have very poor performance at large numbers of nodes/edges.
As we expect, the default subreddits are in the center of the network graph and have high centrality (although /r/art and /r/earthporn are oddly far separated from the other defaults). The large amounts of orange graph-wide illustrate the breadth of the defaults.
Now let’s color the nodes and edges by group, just as you saw in the introductory visualization:
If you are on a smartphone or tablet, tap this link to view the network in a zoomable format.
If an edge links to a node of the same group, the edge is colored that group. Otherwise, the edge is colored gray. (the code that implements this is not shown because it is somewhat convoluted). This color scheme helps gauge the overall impact of the communities on Reddit. But why not look at specific groups?
Subgraph Surprises
As you can see plainly in the group-colored visualization, there is a giant green group at the center which includes the default subreddits. Analyzing that is not helpful. But we can filter the network on other specific groups and their subgraphs to see if we can define any Reddit subcultures. (note that the Group number is merely an ID; the value and order are not relevant).
The most notable Reddit groups are gaming groups. We have two distinct groups of gamers:
Plus Nintendo gamers? With a little Vita on the side?
Subreddits related to sports and sporting teams form a nice cluster:
PC-building has a distinct community:
The British make nice triangles!
Relationship and female-oriented subreddits have a relationship.
Lastly, DC Comics has their own sector, particularly with the corresponding CW television shows. (although some Marvel shows sneak in!)
Of course, Reddit itself has better data for identifying relationships between subreddits, as they can track user activity more intimately. Meanwhile, the output for this post turned out better than expected and I hope to include similar visualizations in future blog posts. Hopefully, it dispelled some of the mystery behind pretty network graphs. (if you do use the code or data visualization designs from this post, it would be greatly appreciated if proper attribution is given back to this post and/or myself. Thanks!).
As always, the full code used to process the edge list and generate the visualizations is available in this Jupyter notebook, open-sourced on GitHub.
Additionally, thanks to Professor James P. Curley of Columbia University for providing helpful slides which have good code samples for getting started with igraph/ggnetwork.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 said that a trio of attacks across the U.S. on Saturday prove that President Obama's and 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 policies can't protect Americans.
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"Under the leadership of Obama & Clinton, Americans have experienced more attacks at home than victories abroad. Time to change the playbook!" he wrote.
Under the leadership of Obama & Clinton, Americans have experienced more attacks at home than victories abroad. Time to change the playbook! — Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) September 19, 2016
Saturday’s attacks show that failed Obama/Hillary Clinton polices won’t keep us safe! I will Make America Safe Again! — Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) September 19, 2016
Terrible attacks in NY, NJ and MN this weekend. Thinking of victims, their families and all Americans! We need to be strong! — Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) September 19, 2016
On Saturday, 29 people were injured in New York City when a homemade bomb exploded in Chelsea. A pipe bomb was also found in New Jersey, but it did not cause any injures. And in Minnesota, a man stabbed eight people in a shopping mall. A news site affiliated with the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria called the man a "soldier" of the terrorist group.
In a statement Sunday, Clinton said she's praying for those wounded and their families and said "this should steel our resolve to protect our country and defeat ISIS and other terrorist groups."After fourteen rounds of the 1989 F1 season, Alain Prost led the championship with four wins and a sixteen point advantage, while Ayrton Senna had six wins and needed a victory to keep the title battle alive to Adelaide, highlighting how consistency is key in a year-long fight with your teammate.
Prost realised in practice that the Mclarens were a class above the field and that he could qualify on the front row of the grid with his car being setup for the race rather than qualifying, giving him an advantage over his teammate, who was focused on claiming first on the grid.
Senna took pole position while Prost completed the front row lockout in second. The next row of the grid was Ferrari territory, with Gerhard Berger looking poised to challenge the Mclarens in third after his win at Estoril, and Mansell behind him in fourth.
Both Mclarens got away well, but it was Prost who made it to turn one in first place; Berger looked to attack Senna but inevitably ran out of room on the outside line. Later in the race the two Ferraris broke down from gearbox and engine failures, confirming the team’s unreliability that year. From the off Alain pulled out a gap and held it at around five seconds for the first half of the race. The pair traded fastest lap times leading up to the first round of pit stops and the gap was five seconds as the Frenchman came into the pits. The Brazilian pitted the lap after but the pit crew took about two seconds longer on the reigning World Champion’s car.
From that point on, Ayrton was on the offensive and began closing the five second gap. By lap 40 he had closed to within a second of Alain and began the assault on the Frenchman, what the Brazilian didn’t know was that Prost had slowed down deliberately so that Senna had to use up his fresh tyres battling for the lead.
Six laps later and Senna was still attacking the Professor, he closed up into the double-apex spoon corner, used the slipstream down the back straight and had a brilliant run through 130R to put himself right behind his teammate heading into the chicane. This began one of the most iconic moments in Grand Prix history, Alain closed the door as Ayrton squeezed down the inside and they inevitably collided. Murray Walker’s famous quote “This is fantastic!” summed up what everyone was thinking.
Prost immediately jumped out of his Mclaren-Honda MP4/5 while Senna restarted with the help of the marshals crucially taking to the escape road and cutting the chicane in the process. He completed another lap then pitted for a new front wing, after coming in to replace his nose-cone Ayrton re-joined the race five seconds behind Alessandro Nannini with five laps to go.
Senna closed the gap within two laps of the pit stop and passed the Italian at the same chicane where he had just collided with Prost. Nannini didn’t give in but wasn’t willing to cause an accident over the position, this meant Senna slipped past at the chicane and went on to win the race three laps later.
As soon as the race finished the FIA disqualified Senna for cutting the chicane and Nannini was awarded the race victory. McLaren appealed this decision making it clear that it was not an attempt to stop Prost winning the championship (as he was moving to Ferrari for 1990) but that it meant a loss in prize money for the team. The decision was upheld and an additional six month ban and fine were given to the Brazilian.
This ended one of if not the most fiercely fought and exciting teammate battles in the history of the sport and it remains an iconic moment to all F1 fans.
Thank you for reading. Please take a moment to follow me on Twitter – @GeorgeWilsonF1C. Support LWOS by following us on Twitter – @LastWordOnSport and @LWOSworld– and “liking” our Facebook page.
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Have you tuned into Last Word On Sports Radio? LWOS is pleased to bring you 24/7 sports radio to your PC, laptop, tablet or smartphone. What are you waiting for? GO!The good people of Woodland, North Carolina are not 100% convinced by these solar panel thingamabobs, to put it lightly.
On Tuesday, the Woodland Town Council voted to reject a rezoning application that would allow a solar farm to be built by Strata Solar Company, the Roanoke-Chowan News-Herald reported. It also put a moratorium on all solar development.
See also: Australian government finally overturns ban on wind farm investment
The council had previously ruled in favor of three other solar farms that are yet to be completed, but suspicious locals put the kibosh on the latest application.
Retired science teacher Jane Mann told the publication she was concerned the panels would prevent photosynthesis from occurring, keeping plants, which rely on the chemical process, from growing. Plants in the area around the solar panels are brown and dead due to not getting enough sunlight, Mann claimed.
No reports have yet emerged as to whether science education is also "brown and dead" in Woodland.
Local resident Bobby Mann, for his part, announced he was worried the panels would "suck up all the energy from the sun," the paper said.
Let's have a moment of quiet sympathy for representatives of the Strata Solar Company, who had to try and counter the fears of locals with, um, facts.
Brent Niemann, for one, tried to argue the panels only use sunlight that hits them directly rather than sucking it up willy nilly. "The panels don’t draw additional sunlight," he said. "This is a tried and true technology."
The global climate change accord completed in Paris on Saturday was the most significant indication yet the world is turning way from fossil fuels and looking to renewables. It looks like there's still some convincing to do in Woodland, however.Did you know that grunting is a natural part of Japanese conversation?
There’s a lot at stake.
If you forget to utter that “un”, “hai!” or “sou?”, then your silence could be interpreted as lack of interest or even disagreement.
On the other hand, a well-placed “sou” could really go a long way in establishing rapport.
Hopefully, this post can help you get the most out of aizuchi.
So, What is Aizuchi?
From a young age many of us are taught not to interrupt someone while they’re speaking. For example, my kindergarten in the United States had a special totem stick which allowed its holder to talk. If any other students tried interjecting without the stick in hand, then they’d be scolded by the teacher and the whole class would be reminded that only one person could talk at a time.
This, however, is completely opposite in Japan, as popular video blogger Micaela explains:
Instead, to show someone that you’re interested in what they’re saying, or that you understand them, we use aizuchi (相槌).
Aizuchi consists of frequent interjections throughout a conversation to indicate that we’re listening attentively to whatever the speaker is saying. Aizuchi is similar to saying, “uh-huh,” “yeah,” “really,” “I see,” “I get it,” “right,” and so on.
Perhaps you already use some of these interjections in conversation. While your friend is retelling you that tale about slaying a beast single-handedly in the arctic, you might nod a few times or throw in a surprised, “No way!” or “What happened next?”. Aizuchi is similar, but it’s relentless. As the listener in a conversation, you might find yourself doing just as much talking as the speaker. In fact, according to renowned linguist Laura Miller, Japanese listeners interject with aizuchi two or three times more often than English speakers do!
Why You Need Aizuchi
Without aizuchi, the speaker might think you’re uninterested in what they’re saying, or a bit distant.
“But that doesn’t make sense,” you might say, “I’m looking the person right in the eye while they’re speaking.” Sometimes nodding and staring directly at the person just doesn’t cut it. In fact, the speaker might become more frazzled and continuously ask you if you’re listening and can understand them! Sound familiar? I’ve been in this scenario more times than I can count!
Even if your Japanese buddy is speaking to you in English, they might wait for an expected “mmhmm” at the very least. I have plenty of Japanese friends who use aizuchi in the English language classroom to their teacher, or coworkers who use it while we’re chatting in the office.
Similarly, if you’re talking on the phone and don’t use aizuchi, then a conversation might be full of, “Hello??” “Can you hear me?” “Are you there?” Next time you hear someone on the phone, try to listen in for aizuchi!
How to Use Aizuchi Like a Native
So now that you now what aizuchi is, and how to use it, you’re ready to rock it! The most common aizuchi are:
はい Yes
ええ Yes; That’s right
うん Yeah; Yup; Uh-huh
はい： “Hai” is one of the most common aizuchi words to hear.
You’ll hear it used heavily in formal situations, or with female speakers.
It can be used to say, “yes,” “uh-huh,” and “okay”.
ええ： “Ee” is also very common, and can be used by ladies who are familiar with each other, or in a familiar setting.
It’s similar to saying, “yes,” “that’s right,” and “gotcha”.
うん： “Un” |
. In a 2000 profile of Meyer, The New Yorker claimed that he has “so thoroughly shaped the program that by now the comedic sensibility of The Simpsons can be seen as mostly his.”
Richard Appel, co–executive producer, The Simpsons (1995–99): One thing George does, in any room he’s in, he sets the bar high just by being in it. One of the best things to have in a writers’ room is a sense that you’re trying to make the best person in the room laugh. And George was always that at The Simpsons in my time there, and I don’t think it’s presumptuous to say that’s what he was before I got there and after I left.
Conan O’Brien: George Meyer has just such a discerning comedy mind, your biggest fear is saying something hacky or contrived.
Wally Wolodarsky: There’s a darkness and lightness in George, both of which are surprising. For someone who could pitch such dark material, he also had a kind of hippie lightness of spirit that you wouldn’t necessarily think go together.
Richard Appel: George did the most, of anyone I know, to sustain the voice of the show. And I think he had a huge hand in defining the voice of the show, but so did Jim Brooks and Matt and Sam Simon. I have heard everyone say it’s just a thrilling experience to be in a room with Sam, and I think George really thinks the same things of Sam, and for me, my Sam was George.
John Swartzwelder has written far more Simpsons scripts than anyone—upward of 50, including classics such as “Krusty Gets Kancelled,” “Rosebud,” and “Bart Gets an Elephant.”
Bill Oakley: If you look at the Swartzwelder scripts—it’s like he comes from another dimension. He is a genius—his material is so strange you almost wonder how his brain works. The ultimate Swartzwelder joke that I still remember appears in the episode “Whacking Day.” Homer is letting people park on his lawn, and he has a sign that says, parking: $10 per axle. And this foreign guy in this crazy foreign car, with like eight axles, drives up, and Homer goes, “Woo-hoo!” and the foreign man goes, “Hooray!” God, it just makes me laugh.
Wally Wolodarsky: Swartzwelder seemed to go directly from being a homeless person to a writer on The Simpsons. He was a little bit older than us and had, I think, seen a little bit more of the world, in terms of being up and down. He did have interesting preoccupations. I know for a while he was collecting wanted posters. Real Patty Hearst wanted posters.
Jay Kogen: One time, I remember, [Swartzwelder] bought a painting that Hitler had painted. I was like, “Really? You want to buy a Hitler painting?” But he loved historic artifacts.
Animation had opened up a whole new world—the world, in fact—to the creative staff. Not only could they take their characters anywhere, physically and emotionally, but there were no adorable actors to become tangled up in pubescence, no live studio audience to pander to, no laugh track. (Even when Seinfeld premiered, in 1990, certainly a step forward for the sitcom, the viewer was still being told when to laugh.) Another advantage was the cover that a cartoon provided for humor that could never be permitted in live action.
Donick Cary: We’d have episodes where it starts with Homer’s car crashed into the front porch, ‘cause he drove home drunk. If an episode of Everybody Loves Raymond started with Ray Romano’s car crashed into the front porch, there’d be a lot of chat about that.
One factor keeping the show’s writing fresh has been the lack of network influence. Fox executives are forbidden to give notes to The Simpsons.
Larry Doyle, writer-producer, The Simpsons (1997–99): When you have a table read with a regular sitcom, you go in there and there’s always a sense of fear, because those people [at the network] are unpredictable. They can come back and say, “No, we don’t want you to do that,” and then you’ll have a day to write a new script. That never happens to us.
Josh Weinstein: Working on The Simpsons then felt like being in the graduate school of comedy, or a great comedy lab, where you could try and do anything and no one would stop you, as long as it was good or funny. That had an amazing feel.
Brad Bird: There were discussions [with the network], but they were over pretty quickly. I think people felt good being under the titanium shield of Jim Brooks. The studio might get upset and they might make notes, but we didn’t have to take them unless Brooks said we had to take them.
Barry Diller: Anything with Jim Brooks has a level of independence in it, but it’s not exclusionary. Jim’s not about being exclusionary, and in this case couldn’t be—there was just too much strife going on [between Sam Simon and Matt Groening]. Were we engaged in the early development of it, Fox network people? Yes. Did we give line notes? Not ever. I never gave line notes in my life.
Colin Lewis: David Mirkin was the first [show-runner] who said, “Why do we have to change it? We’re The Simpsons. We’re in control because they want their hit show, and I will get to Saturday night and I won’t deliver them a show, and then they will have to air what I give them.”
What is striking about the early episodes is how sweet, and at times dramatic, they can be. “The question was: could you make cartoon characters that looked this weird and grotesque and actually make you feel some real emotion,” Groening has said. The Simpsons faced legitimate problems: Homer lived in fear of losing his job; he had trouble connecting with his daughter. It was only in later years, to keep the writing interesting, that the characters became more exaggerated, as did their situations—Homer went to space; Maggie shot a man; the family created an international incident with Australia.
Conan O’Brien: Homer’s a real temptation. We had so much fun trying to make him dumber and dumber and dumber that there was one time where Homer’s brain got angry at him because he was so stupid, and so you heard the brain say, “That’s it, I give up,” and walk down a corridor and slam a door. I loved it—but it’s like, “Wait, if his brain is his consciousness, who’s his brain walking out on? And who is his brain angry with?”
Donick Cary: I think we got to times where it felt like Homer was just being dumb, like literally he’s on the floor eating out of the garbage. And you’re like, “Hmm. Is this really the best place to take this character?”
Conan O’Brien: There is a strong lack of sentimentality on The Simpsons, but something that Sam and Jim and Matt stressed was: this is a family. And that kind of talk can start to sound pretty treacly, but you can’t have an episode where Homer sells Bart, or harvests his organs. So I think one of the things that works is respect for that unit was always kept intact.
Wally Wolodarsky: I think that Sam had helped to create such a vibrant world that once he left, his vision was in place, and I don’t think that that ever really changed.
Donick Cary: At Letterman [where Cary had been a writer] it was always like, “We need material for tonight! What are we gonna do? We need jokes!” I got to The Simpsons, and I was like [speaking rapidly], “All right. Homer’s under the table—and he’s eating butter, and he’s running around. And Homer... “ And people are like: “Dude... we got nine months to get a joke together.”
Conan O’Brien: By the time an episode came out, you had maybe heard the script read through like 20 times, and if for some reason the joke wasn’t getting a laugh on the 21st time, you had to rework it. Sometimes your first pitch is your best pitch, but over time, if you revisit it constantly, you’ll grow weary of it, it will start to wilt, and then you’re just coming up with a different pitch that’s maybe not necessarily better.
Donick Cary: So you go out—you write like crazy, your script. You bring it back in. And then the room would spend a week rewriting it.... If it was a story that was close to your heart, it could be a very painful process. Suddenly there’s 15 opinions on why it’s good or bad.
Josh Weinstein: The table read is a very exciting, nerve-racking event for a writer or show-runner because that is the first time that you hear your lines, like the opening night of a play. And there are also a lot of outside factors that can affect the table read. If it’s raining in L.A., or if there’s bad traffic, and people come in a bad mood, that can affect a table read as well.
Larry Doyle: A lot of the Fox “offices” are actually trailers that they just never moved, and one of them where the table reads were while I was there was a big double-wide trailer, and it’s got a giant wooden table and the writers and actors sit at the table and then the entire room is lined with chairs that are always filled with everyone else who works on the show, and sometimes guests and sometimes various celebrities come in to hear a table read... they’ll bring their kids. I remember once we had a couple Make-A-Wish kids. Ron Howard brought his kids. Stephen Hawking came to a table read.
As Bartmania cooled off, and the series moved toward institutional status with its fourth, fifth, and sixth seasons, the show’s quality miraculously refused to drop. It got funnier, smarter, richer in allusion and parody. The producers changed animation studios from Klasky Csupo to Film Roman in the fourth season, updating the rudimentary look with slicker designs and a more varied palette.
After Simon had left, in 1993, different writers were promoted to fill the role of show-runner. Al Jean and Mike Reiss took over first. Then the producers brought in David Mirkin, who had written for Three’s Company and created Get a Life, with Chris Elliot. After Mirkin came longtime writers Bill Oakley and Josh Weinstein, followed by Mike Scully (who stayed in charge for four seasons—the unwritten rule had been that show-runners stay for two years), before the show was given back to Al Jean, who has run The Simpsons since 2001.
Jay Kogen: Those years with Al [Jean] and Mike [Reiss] running it were pretty darn good. And then the ones after that maybe not so much... some people ran it better than others.
Wally Wolodarsky: We left during the fourth season, and at that point we were already running out of childhood anecdotes. And I think as a result the show got crazier and crazier. Because all the stories we had experienced, or seen other people experience, had been exploited. And to see the show go on is mind-boggling to me.
Colin Lewis: [Under David Mirkin] it stopped being like the geeky guys from college writing the show and became people who just really wanted to be comedy writers, and wanted to be Hollywood, so they could say, “I work on The Simpsons.” That’s when Homer sort of became stupid.
Rupert Murdoch: The show’s had its ups and downs. It had a couple years there where it grew a bit dark, but we sort of got them out of that.
As the series relinquished the emotional grounding of the early years, it became more topical. Later episodes seemed increasingly tailored to guest appearances—a forgivable sin, concerning the impressive list: Mick Jagger, Mel Gibson, Alec Baldwin and Kim Basinger, Steve Martin, Elton John, Ludacris, Ricky Gervais, Elvis Costello, Stephen Hawking, Tony Blair, Frank Gehry, Susan Sarandon, Tom Clancy, and J. K. Rowling (to name a few). Even the earliest seasons had been graced by Michael Jackson, Penny Marshall, and Elizabeth Taylor, who voiced Maggie’s first word, “Daddy.” (Taylor said “Fuck you” to Matt Groening and stormed out of the recording session after he made her read the line more than 20 times. He said it kept sounding “too sexual.”)
Hank Azaria: They sent me down to greet Mick Jagger [when he arrived to record his part], and I said, “Hey, Mick, we’re all thrilled to have you here.” And he kind of blew right by me like I was the greeter, and went [dismissively], “Yeah, we’ll get it,” which I knew was going to be awkward, because I was about to walk upstairs and record with him. And it also made me a little bit annoyed. So before I even thought, I went, “No, I don’t think we’ll get it—I’m just glad you’re here.” And he kind of turned around and looked back at me like, What the fuck did you just say to me? And I was just like, “Hi. I’m Hank, I’ll be recording with you.” So that was slightly awkward.
Tim Long, co–executive producer, The Simpsons (1999–present): Mr. T [another guest] was telling me the scenes that happened in Rocky III, where he lost. The reason he lost was because his mother needed money for an operation, and so he was paid to take a dive. And I said, “Well, I don’t remember that in the movie.” And he just looks at me right in the eye and says, “Things you don’t see!”
I said to him, “I remember you put out a record called Mr. T’s Commandments.” And somehow he heard that as “Mr. T, please sing ‘Mr. T’s Commandments.’” So he sang me the whole song. And I just thought, If I’m killed by a sniper tonight, well, my life would have ended beautifully, because I have been sung to by Mr. T.
Ricky Gervais, guest writer and voice, The Simpsons (2006), creator and star, BBC’s The Office: We had a lunch with Matt and Al Jean and all the writers and producers and everything, and at the very end, I was doing the nerdy thing, asking Matt to draw me a Homer. I was jealous of Moby’s. I saw a Cribs, and it was Moby and he said it was his prized possession—I think the first Cribs where you actually saw a bookshelf. Matt said, “Would you like to be a guest voice?” And I said, “What are the hours?” And he said, “The hours are really good.” I went, “Of course I would.”
One battle the network decided to fight was against the actors who provided the voices on the show. According to a former producer, up until 1999, the actors were paid only about $25,000 an episode, while the Seinfeld cast had been making $600,000 per episode each. Negotiations that year for new contracts turned bitter. Though show-runner Mike Scully refused to participate, Fox began auditioning replacements.
Colin Lewis: There was a day, there was an actual moment when the actors, who are normally just friendly, sat down and started talking more in depth about contracts.... They asked us to give them some time alone, and it was like, “Alone? You guys don’t hang out alone.” They literally, like, closed the door.
Hank Azaria: You know, the show has made so much money, in so many ways. Eventually, we just wanted to get our piece of the pie. And Fox is tough. They’re very tough negotiators. Their business model is not to give money away. So it got a little intense at times.
Larry Doyle: The actors actually didn’t come to work for a while. Their contract expired, and we weren’t recording them for I think a month. Fox had started to audition people. The actors got their deal because of a last-minute thing, some sort of bonus. And it turned out that they weren’t going to get [the bonus money] until 2005 or something. So it was a real, like, Fox-studio “Fuck you,” where the fine print means, “We’re going to deliver that, in pennies, after you’re dead.” So Harry [Shearer], for the longest time, came to every table read wearing a T-shirt that said, you’ll get it in 2005. The suggestion being that he wasn’t going to do anything but work to contract.
Rupert Murdoch: The voices, who have been there since the very beginning, are now getting very large salaries... I’m not saying whether they’re worth it or not. Or whether you could replace them or not, but Jim [Brooks] wouldn’t hear of that, because they’re all his friends.
Larry Doyle: I doubt that’s what Jim Brooks said—I think that Jim Brooks might have been friends with some of them, but he wasn’t really good friends with them. And he is first and foremost a businessman. If he was saying he didn’t want to replace them, it was because he thought the show would tank, and I think it probably would have. Had they replaced Homer, I think that would have been the last year of the show.
Hank Azaria: I think that Fox, and even our own representation, didn’t realize how much these voices couldn’t just be replaced. And also, by the way, you don’t animate first and then stick in voices. You’re animating to the vocal performance, so that means comic timing and inflection and character all comes first, and then you animate. Bottom line is: they tried to replace us and couldn’t.
A second contract dispute in 2004 spilled into the press when the cast demanded equity positions. This too was resolved—the actors now make more than “a hundred thousand dollars” an episode, according to Murdoch—and the show has kept rolling on. It has been renewed until 2009, and on July 27 of this year, the characters will make the jump to the big screen. While debate over the show’s quality will rage (mostly on the Internet), what is significant is that it has persevered. Over 18 years, however, the relationship between Matt Groening and Jim Brooks has apparently deteriorated. “Jim and Matt hardly talk to each other now. They can’t stand each other,” Rupert Murdoch told me. But one former producer says that this is not quite accurate: while relations between the two have at times been strained, they are working together on the movie, and are far from not speaking.
Tim Long: [Matt Groening’s] involvement with the show lately has kind of been in an advisory role. If this were a sort of medieval farming situation, he’s like a benevolent feudal lord. He allows us to till the ground the way we want.
While The Simpsons’ glory days passed a decade ago, the show is still reliable for some intelligent laughs, and comfortably sits in its eight-o’clock Sunday spot, watched by 10 million viewers every week. The writers’ room is nearly as vibrant as ever, continuing to draw from Harvard and the cream of the young comedy-writing crop. (A rare exception came in 2006, when show-runner Al Jean allowed his wife, who had been a personal trainer, to write a script.)
Donick Cary: It seems like it’s gotten a little simpler—it goes a little more topical. And... it’s a little easy, you know? But, at the same time, they’re in Season 18—so, what the hell?
Rupert Murdoch: I can’t say I’ve watched every episode, but I watch it at every opportunity. And I think it’s still as brilliant as ever.
Ricky Gervais: The longevity is astounding. Four hundred episodes. I had to have a lie-down after six [episodes of The Office]. I imagine the show’s influence is as a paradigm of excellence. People go, “Would that pass in The Simpsons?” Because it’s timeless and universal. But I don’t know if it’s changed the way people make TV. I don’t know if many things do that outside technology and law.
Wally Wolodarsky: I see it in a continuum that starts with Martin and Lewis, Your Show of Shows, Honeymooners, early Carson, early Letterman, Get Smart, early SNL and just keeps moving. I don’t see it as a revolution. I see it as a natural continuum of all the stuff we really loved.
Tim Long: I’d like to think that we prevented the president from invading Iraq and we kept Bush from being re-elected... Oh, whoops, we didn’t do any of those things. I think that you can overstate the importance of comedy. At best I think comedians tend to be like that guy standing in front of the tank in Tiananmen Square—I think that you’re actually flattering yourself if you think you’re actually affecting anything.
Conan O’Brien: For the last 14 years of doing my show, I’ve been working hard on this comedy, but it’s pretty disposable. I could light my arms on fire on the show tonight and you might see it for a couple of days on YouTube, but then it’s gone. I’m constantly, no matter where I go in the world, running into people who know which episodes of The Simpsons I worked on, and they’re quoting lines to me. I think long after my Late Night show is gone, I feel like the Simpsons episodes I worked on will always be in the ether. People will be watching them on some space station, like, 200 years from now. That’s a nice feeling.
Jay Kogen: We thought we were really writing these really funny, smart, special shows that were chock-full of jokes every few seconds. And then someone showed us this study Fox had done: the No. 1 reason why people liked The Simpsons was “all the pretty colors” and they liked it when Homer hit his head. We were writing the show for ourselves—we always made it funny for ourselves—but who knows why America likes it. Maybe they like the pretty colors and when Homer hits his head, but I hope it’s for more.
Also on VF.com: A Q&A with former Simpsons writer Conan O’Brien and our picks for the top 10 episodes ever.
This is an expanded version of the text that appears in the August 2007 Vanity Fair.
John Ortved is a Vanity Fair contributing editorial associate.If the world's cities focused their investments on expanding public transportation, walking and cycling, they could save more than $100 trillion in public and private capital and urban transportation operating costs between now and 2050, according to a report released today by the University of California, Davis, and the Institute for Transportation and Development Policy (ITDP).
In a "high shift" scenario with far greater urban passenger travel by clean public transport and nonmotorized vehicles, as compared to a base-line scenario matched to mobility forecasts by the International Energy Agency, roughly 1.7 gigatons of carbon dioxide could be eliminated each year—a 40 percent reduction in urban passenger transport emissions—by 2050.
"A most affordable but largely overlooked way to cut global warming pollution is to give people clean options for using public transportation, walking and cycling," said Michael Replogle, ITDP's managing director for policy and a co-author of the report, in a statement.
"Transportation, driven by rapid growth in car use, has been the fastest-growing source of CO2 in the world," he continued. "While every part of the global economy needs to become greener, cleaning up the traffic jams in the world's cities offers the least pain and the most gain."
In 2010, urban transportation accounted for almost a quarter of all carbon emissions produced across all parts of the transportation sector. As cities continue to grow, particularly in developing economies, these emissions are on track to double over the next 35 years without policy intervention.
China and India could follow U.S. example
The United States is the current world leader in urban passenger transport emissions, at 670 megatons of CO2 annually. More efficient vehicles and a decline in driving are expected to lower those emissions to 560 megatons by 2050. However, under the high shift scenario—based on mode shifting and policies that encourage denser development and the substitution of telecommunications for travel—the United States could drop its emissions much faster to 280 megatons of CO2 by 2050.
Transportation emissions in China, which recently became the largest vehicle market in the world, are expected to mushroom in the coming decades, from less than 200 megatons of CO2 annually today to nearly 1,200 megatons of CO2 in 2050. In the high shift scenario, China could slash its emissions to 700 megatons by developing extensive bus rapid transit and metro systems.
India will also see a huge jump in urban transportation emissions, from about 70 megatons of CO2 today to more than 500 megatons in 2050. By addressing crucial infrastructure deficiencies its public transport systems and slowing car use, India could curb that increase at 350 megatons of CO2.
"If there are no further interventions by these governments, expect to see strong increases in urban car travel and urban energy and carbon dioxide emissions in China and India and elsewhere around the world," said Lew Fulton, a co-author and co-director of the NextSTEPS Program at the Institute of Transportation Studies at UC Davis.
Cars will still be needed in the future for intercity travel, but if cities are to address their escalating emissions, they need to put policies in place that curb vehicle use and improve vehicle fuel efficiency, he added.
Cities will run out of room
Making it easier to take mass transit will also improve social mobility and expand access to economic opportunities to more members of society.
"Unmanaged growth in motor vehicle use threatens to exacerbate growing income inequality and environmental ills, while more sustainable transport delivers access for all, reducing these ills," said Replogle. "This report's findings should help support wider agreement on climate policy, where costs and equity of the cleanup burden between rich and poor are key issues."
The report comes just days ahead of the U.N. secretary-general's climate summit on Sept. 23, which will seek to elicit bold action from governments, business, finance and civil society groups on emissions from transportation and seven other sectors. Failure to take action, said Fulton, isn't really an option.
"I must admit there's a question about whether business as usual is even plausible, because many cities are going to run into infrastructure constraints and space constraints at some point," he said of rapidly growing vehicle adoption. "But that is the trend, the trend is such fast motorization rates that if nothing is done to try and redirect that, it looks like a very unsustainable future."
Reprinted from Climatewire with permission from Environment & Energy Publishing, LLC. www.eenews.net, 202-628-6500Player Comparison Finder: LaMarcus Aldridge (2007-08) vs. Tobias Harris (2014-15)
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Click on the red text to pre-fill the form with various values Compare Cumulative Seasons (e.g., compare Kobe Bryant through age 28 to Michael Jordan through age 28) Compare Single Seasons (e.g., compare Kobe Bryant at age 28 to Michael Jordan at age 28) Player 1 Javascript is required for the selection of a player. Type name to select an option LaMarcus Aldridge Select Season 2006-07 (age 21, 1st season) 2007-08 (age 22, 2nd season) 2008-09 (age 23, 3rd season) 2009-10 (age 24, 4th season) 2010-11 (age 25, 5th season) 2011-12 (age 26, 6th season) 2012-13 (age 27, 7th season) 2013-14 (age 28, 8th season) 2014-15 (age 29, 9th season) 2015-16 (age 30, 10th season) 2016-17 (age 31, 11th season) 2017-18 (age 32, 12th season) 2018-19 (age 33, 13th season) Choice is: Player 2 Javascript is required for the selection of a player. Type name to select an option Tobias Harris Select Season 2011-12 (age 19, 1st season) 2012-13 (age 20, 2nd season) 2013-14 (age 21, 3rd season) 2014-15 (age 22, 4th season) 2015-16 (age 23, 5th season) 2016-17 (age 24, 6th season) 2017-18 (age 25, 7th season) 2018-19 (age 26, 8th season) Choice is: Player 3 Javascript is required for the selection of a player. Type name to select an option Player 4 Javascript is required for the selection of a player. Type name to select an option Player 5 Javascript is required for the selection of a player. Type name to select an option Player 6 Javascript is required for the selection of a player. Type name to select an option
Per Game Per Game Table Rk Player Season Age G GS MP FG FGA FG% 3P 3PA 3P% 2P 2PA 2P% eFG% FT FTA FT% ORB DRB TRB AST STL BLK TOV PF PTS 1 LaMarcus Aldridge 2007-08 22 76 76 34.9 7.4 15.3.484 0.0 0.1.143 7.4 15.2.486.484 3.0 3.9.762 2.9 4.7 7.6 1.6 0.7 1.2 1.7 3.2 17.8 2 Tobias Harris 2014-15 22 68 63 34.8 6.5 14.0.466 1.3 3.5.364 5.2 10.4.500.512 2.8 3.6.788 1.1 5.3 6.3 1.8 1.0 0.5 1.7 2.0 17.1
If you utilize material unique to a Sports Reference site for a tweet, an article, or for research for a broadcast or podcast, please strongly consider citing this site as the source for the material. It would be greatly appreciated and would help us continue to produce this material.Sometime in the past few years, the blog died. In 2014, people will finally notice. Sure, blogs still exist, many of them are excellent, and they will go on existing and being excellent for many years to come. But the function of the blog, the nebulous informational task we all agreed the blog was fulfilling for the past decade, is increasingly being handled by a growing number of disparate media forms that are blog-like but also decidedly not blogs.
Instead of blogging, people are posting to Tumblr, tweeting, pinning things to their board, posting to Reddit, Snapchatting, updating Facebook statuses, Instagramming, and publishing on Medium. In 1997, wired teens created online diaries, and in 2004 the blog was king. Today, teens are about as likely to start a blog (over Instagramming or Snapchatting) as they are to buy a music CD. Blogs are for 40-somethings with kids.
Instead of launching blogs, companies are building mobile apps, Newsstand magazines on iOS, and things like The Verge. The Verge or Gawker or Talking Points Memo or BuzzFeed or The Huffington Post are no more blogs than The New York Times or Fox News, and they are increasingly not referring to themselves as such.
The primary mode for the distribution of links has moved from the loosely connected network of blogs to tightly integrated services like Facebook and Twitter. If you look at the incoming referers to a site like BuzzFeed, you’ll see tons of traffic from Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, Stumbleupon, and Pinterest but not a whole lot from blogs, even in the aggregate. For the past month at kottke.org, 14 percent of the traffic came from referrals compared to 30 percent from social, and I don’t even work that hard on optimizing for social media. Sites like BuzzFeed and Upworthy aren’t seeking traffic from blogs anymore. Even the publicists clogging my inbox with promotional material urge me to “share this on my social media channels” rather than post it to my blog.
The design metaphor at the heart of the blog format is on the wane as well. In a piece at The Atlantic, Alexis Madrigal says that the reverse-chronological stream (a.k.a. The Stream, a.k.a. The River of News) is on its way out. Snapchat, with its ephemeral media, is an obvious non-stream app; Madrigal calls it “a passing fog.” Facebook’s News Feed is increasingly organized by importance, not chronology. Pinterest, Digg, and an increasing number of other sites use grid layouts to present information. Twitter is coming to resemble radio news as media outlets repost the same stories throughout the day, ICYMI (in case you missed it). Reddit orders stories by score. The design of BuzzFeed’s front page barely matters because most of their traffic comes in from elsewhere.
So, R.I.P. The Blog, 1997-2013. But this isn’t cause for lament. The Stream might be on the wane but still it dominates. All media on the web and in mobile apps has blog DNA in it and will continue to for a long while. Over the past 16 years, the blog format has evolved, had social grafted onto it, and mutated into Facebook, Twitter, and Pinterest and those new species have now taken over. No biggie, that’s how technology and culture work. If you want something to cry about, cry about the decline of the open web, the death of which would be a huge blow for us all. But perhaps that’s a topic better left for 2015.
Happy trails, old friend. It’s been grand.Texas will become the largest state in the United States to allow citizens to openly carry handguns.
The bill of open-carry handgun is passed on Friday; this change is long sought by gun-rights activists.
The Texas House of Representatives have voted 96-35 to allow residents who are having license for the concealed handgun to openly carry their gun in public places.
Last month a similar open-carry bill is passed by Texas Senate. The two open-carry bills must be squared before it is sent to the Republican Governor Greg Abbott, who has earlier indicated support for the idea.
Texas is one of the six states including California, Florida and New York, which bars its citizens to carry handguns openly. People who want to carry handgun in public must obtain concealed-weapons permit and they must keep the weapon hidden.
Terry Holcomb Sr., executive director of Texas Carry, a gun-rights group said, “We are seeing historic progress in Texas.”
Texas is now allowing its residents to openly carry handgun in public contrary to their reputation. This has allowed gun-rights group to carry rifles into stores and restaurants and along sidewalk adjoining the Texas Capitol, to highlight what they see a senseless legal distinction.
The gun enthusiasts a powerful constituency within the Texas Republican Party, has helped in moving the legislation which was stalled for several years. They have moved the legislation through GOP-controlled Legislature.
These groups are also calling for legislation which will allow students and university employees to carry handguns.
Last month, Texas senate has approved campus-carry measure.
The Texas House is also expected to pass a companion measure, and this idea is also supported by Mr. Abbott.
Texas will become one of the eight states which allow concealed guns on college campus, and this is the largest state to do so.
Terry Holcomb Sr., executive director of Texas Carry, a gun-rights group said, “We are seeing historic progress in Texas.”Pretend for a moment that you have the key to a fully-fledged, dirt-eating, petrol-guzzling WRC car in your grubby little hand.
What would you do? Apart from whooping like an idiot and high-fiving everyone within a five-metre radius, of course.
Well, with all of the super special stages from the 2016 Rally Australia firmly closed, taking it to the Macca’s drive-through seemed like a good idea. Mostly because I was hungry, but also because of the ‘fish out of water’ element.
You know, taking one of the world’s most extraordinary cars, and seeing if it can do something completely ordinary.
The first problem is the noise. This car belongs to Kiwi rally ace Hayden Paddon, who used it to take fourth place in Rally Australia a day earlier, and its 1.6-litre turbo four is noisy. Like, properly raucous.
It’s so loud I have to turn it off so I can hear the intercom and deliver my order.
“A large quarter pounder meal, thanks.”
The next issue is the clutch. And how tight the Macca’s driveway is. Hyundai insisted the car’s chief mechanic (a lovely Spaniard named David) sits next to me at all times to ensure I don’t do anything too untoward, but he doesn’t seem too worried about scraping the wheels on the kerb.
“It’s a rally car!” he laughs. “Just drive over it!”
Happily we don’t have to, and everything goes swimmingly until it’s time to receive our order. WRC cars are left-hand drive, so it’s up to David to try and squeeze the bag, and the large Coke, through the tiny slit in the polycarbonate window.
Watch the video to see how successful he is. And rest assured Macca’s is only the beginning. Stay tuned to see where else we take Hyundai’s i20 WRC car.Get the biggest Newcastle United FC stories by email Subscribe Thank you for subscribing We have more newsletters Show me See our privacy notice Could not subscribe, try again later Invalid Email
Mathieu Debuchy says he used Newcastle United as a stepping |
hadn't taken off as they had. Positive feedback, support, and the small and dedicated fan-base made me keep going with the show. I am hugely thankful for all who ever gave the show affection or praise, but I have especial gratitude to those who donated their money to me. Some gave hundreds, which I still feel guilt about to this day. I don't think I deserved that much for what I was doing, but I suppose that's indicative of what the show meant to them. I was and still am in equal parts stunned and moved by their charity and commitment. If you donated to me during the four years I worked on This Year, please know that seeing a donation of any size come in meant the world to me: on the surface it meant that I didn't have to worry about finding a way to pay for the show's hosting fees, but in a more meaningful way it told me that the show was wanted and valued. That support is something I will always remember and cherish.
In the end I stopped working on This Year simply (and entirely) because I ran out of time. I wanted to find ways to continue, but couldn't—I started the show while in university and ran out of steam by the time I started a full time job. But you can find every episode of This Year, including the previously unreleased episode #100, below. A final thank you to those who listened over the years! It would not have happened without you.• Ottawa Street from Charles to Mill Street is open to two-way traffic, but Mill at Ottawa will remain closed until late December to allow the concrete time to cure.
In addition to the Mill at Ottawa, the only remaining closure is for the King Street grade separation.
Some minor closures are expected in 2017 as well but details weren't available.
Most of the remaining work is the completion of the overhead catenary system, landscaping and final asphalt.
Progress on other work includes:
• 100 per cent of the 56 kilometres of new underground sewer, sanitary and water main pipe has been installed.
• 31 kilometres, about 92 per cent, of the light rail track has been installed.
• 100 per cent of the footings and 68 per cent of the poles that make up the overhead catenary system which will supply electric power to the light rail vehicles is installed.
• 43,200 of the more than 56,000 square metres of sidewalk required have been installed.
• The operations, maintenance and storage facility on Dutton Drive is complete,
For more construction information, visit rideion.ca
pdesmond@therecord.com, Twitter: @DesmondRecordFor the last thirteen years, he’s been busy digging up a lost underwater civilization the size of Paris off the coast of Egypt. The remarkably well-preserved ruins that were discovered have been sitting at the bottom of the Mediterranean sea for the past 1,200 years, at long last solving the mystery of the lost city of Alexandria’s ancient eastern harbour, Portus Magnus. Not bad for a day job.
All photos ©Franck Goddio/Hilti Foundation, photographed by Christoph Gerigk
Frenchman Franck Goddio is our man, a pioneer of modern maritime archeology who has wanderlust running in his veins. He’s the grandson of the inventor of the modern catamaran, Eric de Bishop, and a specialist of ancient navigational routes in the South Pacific. Yet, before pulling up Pharoah’s heads from the seabed, Franck was a finance guy — an advisor to governments and United Nations. It wasn’t until the 1980s that he left the world of finance behind and decided to find his sea legs (and a few other things)…
He founded the Institut Européen d’Archéologie Sous-Marine (IEASM) and put together a team of divers, archaeologists, scientists, and other experts. To date, his ongoing thirteen-year excavation off the coast of Egypt has been Goddio’s most ambitious. In 2000, after nearly eight years of prior research (dedicated to determining the location of the submerged civilisations), Goddio and his team rediscovered the ancient port cities of Thonis-Heracleion and Canopus in Aboukir bay.
More than a thousand years ago, they had fallen prey to natural disasters and disappeared beneath the waves. Colossal statues, giant tablets inscribed in ancient Greek and ancient Egyptian, gold and bronze artifacts forgotten on the seabed — they were all unearthed from layers of sediment by Goddio and his team.
Everything that’s been found dates from the 8th century AD (or earlier), and experts have been astounded by how well preserved the artifacts are. Canopus was a city famous for its extravagant shrines and the opulent lifestyles of its citizens. Heracleion, just 3km east of Canopus, was home to an enormous ancient temple and convent. This colossal red granite statue of red granite above, discovered on the site by Goddio’s team, represents (rather ironically) Hapi, the god of the flooding of the Nile. Never before has such a large-scale representation of the divine figure been discovered.
To raise heavy artefacts, Goddio’s team will often use airbags capable of resisting a pressure of 100 atmospheres. But the work lies mostly in finding the treasure first, a process that can occupy underwater archeologists for decades, and requires meticulous study of ancients texts and archives in order to determine a probable location (that alone can take years). Then, the cutting edge technology comes in. We’re talking specially developed nuclear magnetic resonance magnetometers, multi-beam bathymetries, sidescan sonars, and other hi-tech stuff I can’t pronounce. Once they think they’ve found something, test excavations are performed, and if the data gives some positive signals, the full archaeological excavation can finally begin (in full accordance with UNESCO, of course).
Water dredges (underwater suction devices) are used by the divers to remove thousand-year-old sediment. As per the Convention for the Protection of Underwater Cultural Heritage, artifacts are “usually” left on site but if they’re deemed at risk, they may be risen for their “safeguard, study and conservation.” At the Alexandria National Museum (a renovated 1929 Italian style mansion in Alexandria, Egypt), one can find Franck Goddio’s most important findings on permanent display for the public.
See here for more museums housing Franck Goddio finds.
Franck Goddio with the intact and inscribed Heracleion stele (1.90 m); It was commissioned by Nectanebo I (378-362 BC) and is almost identical to the Naukratis Stele in the Egyptian Museum in Cairo. The place it where was intended to be situated is clearly marked: Thonis-Heracleion.
A gold vessel (Phiale) recovered from Thonis-Heracleion. Phiale were shallow dishes used throughout the Hellenistic world for drinking and pouring libations.
This gold object (11 x 5 cm) was found during the preliminary exploration of the southern sector of Heracleion. It is engraved with a Greek text of five and a half lines. It is an example of a plaque that act as a signature for foundation deposits in the name of the king, Ptolemy III (246–222 BC), responsible for building.
A limestone head of a statue found at Canopus. It probably originates from Cyprus (contacts between Cyprus and Egypt are well attested during the middle of the 1st millennium BC).
Animal footprints preserved at Canopus after the removal of 2.5 m of sand.
Golden coins dating from Byzantine (7th century AD) and Islamic (8th Century AD) periods, found at Canopus.
Franck also dabbles in excavating odd shipwrecks from ancient trade routes now and then, such as this “junk,” as he calls it, which sank around 1490 off the coast of the Philippines. Inside, he found a time capsule of blue and white porcelain bowls stacked together from the cargo of the sunken “Lena” at 48 metres deep.
Archaeological divers carefully excavating (left), and lifting a heavy artifact by airbag (right).
Pictured below are Goddio’s findings from Napoleon Bonaparte’s fleet, which was lost in the Battle of the Nile in 1798.
So, how’s your week at the office looking so far?!
Visit the water world of Franck Goddio
All photos ©Franck Goddio/Hilti Foundation, photographed by Christoph GerigkIllustration by Sam Taylor
I remember reading an interview once with Stephen Hendry, in which he said that when he first started playing snooker as a kid, he just didn't think it was hard. He could see all the adults around him, struggling with their cues, endlessly chasing the black around the table, swallowing wounded pride in gulps of lager, but when he tried it himself, he couldn't see what all the fuss was about.
I think that's probably how the best footballers at our respective secondary schools felt as they slalomed round the rest of us in the playground. To the normal kids, who probably weren't even good enough to play against our own fathers in Sunday League, it seemed that these peers of ours had been blessed by a higher power. That they were destined for greatness. Or – at the very least – to come on in the 63rd minute of an international friendly at some point in their lives. But none of them ever did. None of them even came on in the 63rd minute for Brentford. None of them had that certain something that it takes to convince people to pay you to play football. That certain something that, come to think of it, millions of dads probably look for in their young sons during their weekly strolls around the park. Maybe Marcus Bent's dad saw it in him, as he watched him bully callow centre halves on the playing fields of the school next door to mine. I think Michael Mancienne might have grown up nearby, too. That's the closest my small part of the world ever came to achieving greatness in the modern footballing era.
But clearly, some of those kids who seemed destined to become footballers did become footballers. And if there's one player who's got "best player in his year" written all over him, it's Joe Hart.
Granted, he's not an outfield player. But most goalkeepers weren't when they were at school, because they were simply better than everyone else at everything. When he was 13, Paul Robinson was probably the best trequartista in Yorkshire. You can imagine Hart started off up front, grudgingly going in nets one day to replace a kid whose collarbone he'd just shattered, only to realise that he was just as good at it as he was at most other things – being Head Boy, playing county cricket, fingering the hottest girl in the year above, geography lessons. In a way, we all went to school with Joe Hart. He's one of life's winners; an everyman, an Übermensch and an arsehole all at the same time.
But much like the miserable school bully pasting their ugly wife and fat children into your Facebook feed, or Philip Roth's crisis-ridden Swede Levov in American Pastoral, Hart is now finding out that the wider world isn't school. It's hard out here. The thousands of men calling you a wanker every weekend aren't interested in the good work you did in the first half, let alone your school days. A tricky South American centre-forward won't try to spare you any embarrassment because you won a piffling Premier League trophy a couple of seasons back. Football is a cruel, laughing Jabberwocky filling your trophies with its piss.
His series of recent blunders have seen him sent to the bench, replaced by the gangly goal golem Costel Pantilimon, who so far has done a solid job, even if he does look like an ogre wearing the head of an Inbetweener. Poor Joe has been forced to look on; he's become a man whose existence seems increasingly distant. He's both dignified and sour-faced, a gum-chewing Napoleon in Elba, patiently awaiting his second shot at glory.
Will his chance come? Perhaps, but there is an undeniable air of demise about this season's Joe Hart. Looking at him in his current state, he seems like a Golden Boy who's started to rust. An English jock who saw the abyss once in a nightclub toilet and can't stop thinking about it when he's on the job. A spikey-haired Samson given a buzz cut by fate. He seems haunted by the idea that one day it might all just disappear. That petrified, helpless look that falls over his massive face every time he goes to pick a ball out of the back of his net is the physical personification of "losing it".
In golf, they call it "the yips". In darts, they call it "dartitis". In science, they call it "focal dystonia". But in football, they just call it "a bad patch". "He'll find his feet again, he always does," they say. But the awful truth is that not every footballing fuck-up story has a redemption arc. Sometimes it just gets worse and worse and worse, careers turning into tragically extended versions of those Danny Baker gaffes videos, and eventually you end up like David Bentley; existing in a state of perma-loan, passed from Blackburn to West Ham to FC Rostov and back to Blackburn again like a dog that keeps biting the children.
It's hard to understand how David Bentley became a reference for people who don't know much about football to find common, sadistic ground over. Perhaps it was because he commanded a high transfer fee that he's become a byword for falling off the radar, or perhaps it was the speed at which it happened, or maybe it's just that god-awful haircut that drove a stranger to punch him in the face in a restaurant. But at least people keep track of his career (albeit only for schadenfreude). Many other players of his generation don't get such a privilege – like Kieron Dyer, who stopped being a "thing" so long ago that no one's even bothered to update his Wikipedia page to say that he's retired. He's almost a player who doesn't really exist, standing inside and outside of English football culture like Schrödinger's cat with a recurring knee injury.
Bentley, Dyer, Chris Kirkland, Wayne Bridge, Shaun Wright-Phillips, Kieran Richardson, Steve Sidwell: these and many others are English football's "nowhere men"; the guys who went from being potential world-beaters to benchwarmers, contract squatters and amateur DJs so quickly that we barely even noticed they'd gone. Actually, Sidwell and Richardson were probably never much good, but what are they now? Just another couple of ghost pirates in Fulham's haunted ship of nevermen and dilapidated flair players.
The truth is that for every Rocky Balboa or Rickie Lambert story, there's another story that's just so depressing nobody even bothers to tell it. The story of the guy or girl who nearly had it, but then... didn't. A story not just without a comeback or a last-second touchdown, but also without even a proper tragedy to sink your teeth into. A story like that of David Duval, the brash young face of American golf who won 13 PGA tournaments in the four years leading up to 2001 and then one day, just lost it. Within a year of his last PGA win, he'd dropped to 80th on the sport's money list; a year later he was 211th and now he's basically fallen off the radar altogether – still plying his trade somewhere but so unrecognisable from the man he once was that it'd take his mother to ID him.
All of football's sad young men have developed bad cases of the "career yips". You could attempt to tease out the causes behind career yips forever, trying to locate a tipping point, a point of no return, a common link in all of them, but you'd find red herrings all day long. You could say it's a phenomenon seen most commonly among players who move to big clubs at a young age but there are plenty who have succeeded. You could say it was lifestyle that caused it, all those all night cheeky Vimto sessions with Helen Flanagan and Kevin Nolan. But Kaka has been a shell of himself for years, and he's one of the most devoutly religious and humble footballers out there.
I think it's something a bit more intangible, a bit more existential. Looking at Joe Hart's transformation from the tongue-wagging, changing room Flashman he once was, to the shell-shocked accident machine that he is now, you can't help but wonder if it's something deeper than just relationships, or money, or football that's caused it. It could be something in his soul. At the risk of asking a question straight out of AS-level Philosophy, if a man can no longer do the one thing he's spent his whole life doing, is he the same man?
It's a question Joe surely asks himself every time he finds himself face-to-face with the grass after a speculative lob from a Hull full-back goes over his head.
Time will tell if Joe Hart will pull up a chair and join the endless game of poker that Messrs Dyer, Wright-Phillips and Bentley have been playing since the days when Pro Evo was better than FIFA, or if he'll go on to become a legend. Right now, it's impossible to tell. The silver lining is that while Hart used to be an easily hateable figure, with his boorish posturing and tedious "110 percent from the lads" post-match plati-views, he now seems somehow more human. In his demise, he has found humanity. In his fallibility, he has found a type of grace.
So we must welcome Joe, to the real world, the world of people who are shit at football. Because for now Joe, you are one of us.
Follow Clive (@thugclive) and Sam (@SptSam) on Twitter.
Previously – Roy Keane and Martin O'Neill Are Just What Irish Football NeedsIf you have even the most peripheral knowledge of the Broadway world, you'll know that one show is making heaps of money. That musical is Hamilton which is poised to sweep the Tony awards this Sunday. As such, the man behind the magic, writer and actor Lin-Manuel Miranda has become a giant success, and has been booking a variety of film credits to accompany his status as Broadway royalty. And now it appears that Miranda's notoriety as lead to his Broadway musical being adapted into a big budget Hollywood movie. No, a Hamilton movie isn't coming yet, but rather an adaptation of his first Tony winning musical In The Heights.
THR is now reporting that a major Hollywood director is circling the project. That director is none other than Jon M. Chu, who currently has a blockbuster in theaters- Now You See Me 2. The Weinstein Co. has recently secured the rights to a film adaptation of In The Heights, and is trying to move quickly into pre-production on the heels of Hamilton's impending Tony wins. And Chu seems like a rather appropriate fit to direct the movie musical.
While Jon M. Chu has yet to direct a movie musical, he has done plenty of projects that have theatricality and dance on the forefront. In addition to Now You See Me 2, which is garnering positive reviews, Chu has also directed two Step Up movies, as well as Justin Bieber's concert movie Never Say Never. While the latter two films might not be critical darlings, it proved that Chu has a musical sensibility that will surely help him in bringing In The Heights to the big screen.
In The Heights is a hip hop musical that is set in the neighborhood of Washington Heights in New York City. The story follows a largely Latino-American cast of characters as they face a new crossroads, and the possibility of abandoning their neighborhood and community forever. In The Heights enjoyed a long Broadway run, and racked up an impressive four Tony Awards, including Best Musical. Additionally, the soundtrack went on to win a Grammy and the show was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize. This musical was what cemented Lin-Manuel Miranda's role as a bonafide Broadway star, and surely helped him get Hamilton produced, which is the hottest ticket on Broadway, with the best seats currently going for an outstanding $849.
This is just the latest in Lin-Manuel Miranda's opportunities in the world of film. After seeing Hamilton, director J.J. Abrams hired Miranda to compose the music for Maz Kanata's cantina in Star Wars: The Force Awakens. Additionally, he was recently cast in Mary Poppins Returns as the male lead alongside Emily Blunt. In the world of theater, it's Miranda's world and we're all just living in it.
We'll continue to update you on the In The Heights movie as more details become public.PLAYBOY: Did she share her secret?
ROBBINS: Yes. She’d focus on a memory from her previous life that would get her laughing. And she got outside of herself by lifting people up with music. Compare her story to someone saying “I lost my job on Wall Street and now it’s over.” Give me a break. You’re not in Somalia, right? You haven’t lost your abilities. You can find a way to retool.
PLAYBOY: What’s the real problem?
ROBBINS: We’re emotionally unfit. We expect things to be given to us that other generations had to earn. We think we’re supposed to get homes with no money down and be supported by the government if we’re unemployed.
PLAYBOY: What do you tell people who lose their jobs?
ROBBINS: First, feed and strengthen your mind with something that inspires you. If you don’t, disaster and fear is where your brain will go. Second, feed and strengthen your body. Fear is physical. When you lift weights or go for a sprint, that energy flows back into your body and restores you to certainty. Third, find a role model, someone who has turned their life around. Fourth, take massive action and keep changing your approach. Fifth, find somebody who is 10 times worse off and help them. It reminds you that you have something to give and to be grateful.
PLAYBOY: Some people think you have all the answers. Do you?
ROBBINS: I have no delusions that I’m the only source of improving people’s lives or that I’m even the right source. My style is intense, and it’s not going to be right for everybody.
PLAYBOY: Some mental health professionals might say you attempt to fix people in a weekend, when it takes months or years to properly delve into a psyche.
ROBBINS: First of all, I don’t fix anybody, because I don’t think anybody’s broken. I think what people have are patterns, and those can be changed. People quickly understand that what’s controlling their thoughts and emotions are their values and rules, and they learn how to shift those.
PLAYBOY: Don’t some who are physiologically depressed require medication?
ROBBINS: Without a doubt. But biochemistry can be instantly changed without drugs, which may sound like bullshit hyperbole. But I’ve been demonstrating for decades that you can alter anyone’s state by a radical change in physiology—lifting weights, sprinting, abruptly changing breathing, all of it shifting your mind-set in a heartbeat. But we take on these identities of diseases and feel we’re doomed. Are there people for whom only medication can make a difference? Yes, but I’d say it’s rare, a small percentage. And 75 percent of people who take antidepressants are still depressed.
PLAYBOY: Yet 30 million Americans are taking them, and countless doctors would disagree with you.
ROBBINS: We’ve been sold a bill of goods that says you shouldn’t have pain and that if you do you should end it with a pill, a message reinforced by ridiculous commercials. You hear beautiful music and see somebody floating through a meadow, and at the end you find out that the drug may blow up your brain, but try it anyway, right? A pill can’t solve the problem. All it can do is numb you and lose the pain that would otherwise drive you to finally change something.
PLAYBOY: Ever taken an antidepressant?
ROBBINS: Never. I’m not saying it isn’t useful for people; it’s just not my path. That’s not because I’m a superman. I grew up in a family where both my parents were alcoholics and users of prescription drugs. At the age of 11 I’d go to the pharmacy and convince the pharmacist that my mom had lost her Valium, and he’d refill it. So I saw the severe effects of drugs.
PLAYBOY: Have you ever seen a therapist?
ROBBINS: No.
PLAYBOY: Are you against it?
ROBBINS: No, I actually train therapists through my Center for Strategic Intervention, using films of my interventions. But I believe therapy can be done more rapidly. I’m into your finding the source of what’s making you think and feel the way you do and shifting it quickly.
PLAYBOY: How do you feel when you’re onstage? Does the adrenaline start to flow?
ROBBINS: It’s not just adrenaline; oxytocin is flowing too. I love that audience. I’m out there feeling them rather than being inside my head. I don’t use teleprompters or notes. I’d want to kill myself if I did the same regurgitated stuff every time. I’m always loading my brain with new ways of looking at something. To me, words are like stickpins. I can throw a word at you and it will bounce right off your body. But if I take that little stickpin and wire it to the back of an iron bar called human emotion, I can put that thing right through your heart.
PLAYBOY: During those hours, are you wearing down people’s defenses as a means of creating a breakthrough?
ROBBINS: That’s bullshit. In a world where people won’t stay in their seats to watch a three-hour movie that cost $300 million, why do they stay put for 50 hours in my seminars? They can vote with their feet and get a full refund. Nobody’s holding them there. When Oprah came to Unleash the Power Within, her people said she’d stay for two hours max, but she stayed until one A.M.
PLAYBOY: Did she do the fire walk?
ROBBINS: She did.
PLAYBOY: What’s the point of walking across coals heated to 1,200 degrees?
ROBBINS: To have a breakthrough, you want to give people the experience of doing something they thought impossible. I use fire walking as a metaphor, a test of someone’s strength and courage.
PLAYBOY: About a year ago, at one of your seminars in San Jose, Fox News reported a “hot coal catastrophe,” saying more than two dozen participants out of 6,000 were injured and hospitalized with second- or third-degree burns during the fire walk.
ROBBINS: Those reports were absurd, and they have been proven to be completely false. A handful of people had a mild degree of redness, and we gave them immediate treatment. Nobody was hospitalized. And there wasn’t one third-degree burn. Fox later issued a rare on-air retraction.
PLAYBOY: How safe can a fire walk be?
ROBBINS: In the past 35 years, more than 2 million people from 100 countries have done the fire walk successfully. It’s like skydiving—if you know what you’re doing and prepare for it, it’s an exhilarating and unforgettable experience.
PLAYBOY: In Oprah’s case, being a tough, sophisticated woman, what would she be afraid of?
ROBBINS: Everybody has fear. I was surprised by her level of vulnerability. Right now she’s in the spotlight, working to build a TV network with positive and uplifting content in a world where humiliation and voting people off the island are what sell. That’s not easy, even for Oprah. What I learned from her is grace under pressure.
PLAYBOY: What did she learn about you?
ROBBINS: Before coming to the seminar Oprah thought I was a salesman, an infomercial guy, nonspiritual in some way. But now she’s been introducing me as her spiritual warrior. We laughed about it, and I teased her a bit.
PLAYBOY: When you first met her, years ago, how was the rapport?
ROBBINS: Well, I’d never been on her show. It’s ironic. I’d been on every show dozens of times—God only knows how many times on Today—but Oprah never invited me.
PLAYBOY: You’ve often said “You’ve got to discipline your disappointments.”
ROBBINS: Yes. When I say I rarely fail in life, that’s bullshit. I fail all the time, but I don’t view it as failure. Unless you can discipline your disappointment, it overwhelms you. It puts you in a mental and emotional state that drains your energy. You lose your will and your capacity to be resilient. The one common denominator of all successful people is their hunger to push through their fears.
PLAYBOY: Is fear the biggest problem people have?
ROBBINS: No question. Our deepest fear is that we’re not enough. I don’t care if it’s the president, a prisoner, an Olympic athlete or a parent. We feel we’re not competent enough—or smart, strong, athletic, humorous or beautiful enough. And if we’re not, our second fear is that we won’t be loved.
PLAYBOY: But what about fear of illness, death, our children’s welfare, unemployment, living in a post-9/11 world?
ROBBINS: Do people feel afraid of many things? No question. Those fears are real, but all roads lead to Rome, down to the twin fears. It’s okay to feel afraid, and you can use that emotion to propel yourself forward. I don’t tell people, “Go to your garden and chant ‘There are no weeds’ and do a bunch of affirmations.” I’m not Mr. Positive Thinking. I never have been. I’m a strategist, not a motivator. I’m obsessed with finding strategies that create real results in the shortest period of time.
PLAYBOY: You often say change happens in a second. Do you mean that literally?
ROBBINS: People say it takes 10 years to change your life. It’s bullshit. It takes a moment, a second, yes. But it may take you 10 years to get to the point of finally saying, “Enough.”
PLAYBOY: What do most people do when they have a problem?
ROBBINS: They feed their fear because they are deathly afraid of failing, of not being enough. They will say, “I can’t lose weight because I’m big-boned.” I say, “No, you’re freakin’ fat!” You don’t like your body, your job, your relationship? Change it. It’s obvious. But most people won’t do that. It’s too scary.
PLAYBOY: What fear keeps you up at night?
ROBBINS: I’m not kept up right now, but I’ve certainly had those moments. One fear was that I would die young. I thought, Why me? That fear helped me because it gave me a sense of urgency to have an impact.
PLAYBOY: But if you had to name a fear today, what would it be?
ROBBINS: I love my wife, Sage, at a level that’s just ridiculous, so when I think of all the things in my life that give me joy—besides my mission—it’s my wife and kids. When Sage was born, her vestibular system, which controls balance and eye movement, was damaged, and the result was severe motion sickness. With me traveling constantly by plane, she was throwing up on every flight, losing weight, wilting away to nothing. I thought I was going to lose her.
PLAYBOY: How did you cope?
ROBBINS: I was punishing myself. Here I am, Mr. Solution, right? But not being able to turn things around for her was torturous. For nine years we went to doctors, nutritionists, natural healers, even experts at NASA and the U.S. Navy’s Top Gun school—nothing worked. And at one point she developed a tumor in her lymph gland and I thought she was going to die. She’s fine now, but her constitution isn’t as strong as mine. I’m always aware of that, so that’s the one fear out there for me. But I don’t obsess about it, and I don’t live in that fear. And the good news is we finally solved the problem.
PLAYBOY: How?
ROBBINS: It’s a crazy story. It was a natural hands-on healer who did it, a monk at Oneness University, on the eastern coast of South India. It sounds like complete bullshit, but after Sage learned a form of self-meditation that calms the parietal lobe of the brain, she was able to tolerate motion. We took the most turbulent helicopter flight I’d ever had, and she sat there smiling. I’m crying because it had taken years, but here’s the grace of this woman who is finally healthy.
PLAYBOY: How has this changed you?
ROBBINS: It got me to say, “Look, maybe this is a gift from God. I think I’m indestructible, but no one is. Maybe this woman was sent into my life because I would never have slowed down for me, but I’ll do it for her.” So I cut the number of events by half.
PLAYBOY: Aside from public seminars, you coach private clients too. Is it true you charge up to $1 million a year?
ROBBINS: Yes. From one client I’ve had for 20 years—one of the top financial traders in the world—I get a base fee plus a piece of the upside. He e-mails me each day, and I monitor both his financial performance and his psychology and emotion. And I go see him four times a year for a couple of hours each time.
PLAYBOY: You also get emergency calls from celebrities, right?
ROBBINS: It could be anyone from Billie Joe Armstrong ofGreen Day to President Clinton wanting just another point of view, or a financial trader who just lost $30 million, or Hugh Jackman wanting to take his acting to the next level, or Serena Williams after she’s been injured. I have to deliver right there and right then.
PLAYBOY: What was the coaching about for Serena?
ROBBINS: A few years ago, after surgery, she was in bad shape. She’d lost her drive and hunger and, quite frankly, was afraid to fail, having stacked up so many painful experiences. I had to dig inside and find the part of her that was unstoppable. She reclaimed her rhythm and energy and went on to the U.S. Open, improving every aspect of her game.
PLAYBOY: Among those you’ve met or coached, give us some snapshot impressions. For example, Mother Teresa.
ROBBINS: I asked her, “What really excites you, lights you up?” Kind of a bizarre question, right? She giggled, looked directly at me and said, “Seeing a person die with a smile on their face.” I was stunned. But to her, seeing the end of suffering is what she lived for.
PLAYBOY: Nelson Mandela.
ROBBINS: I made the mistake of asking, “Sir, how did you survive all those years in prison?” He gave me a stern look: “I didn’t survive, I prepared.” He believed he’d either die in jail and become a martyr, or live—in which case he needed to lead. His strength, that sense of authority and certainty, was mind-boggling.
PLAYBOY: Who surprised you the most?
ROBBINS:Mike Tyson. I found out he’s incredibly well-read—religious books and a wide range of literature. He was describing how he’d brought Aryan and African gangs in prison together, preventing a riot. And in the middle of telling me all this stuff about love, he snaps, “But sometimes I think if there was a button you could push and kill everybody in the world, I’d just do it!”
PLAYBOY: Princess Diana.
ROBBINS: I’ll never forget the sad expression on her face when she said she felt like a lonely sparrow in a gilded cage, like she had no choices, that she was trapped in a system where she couldn’t be herself. My primary goal was to show her that there were choices. And she made the giant choice to end her marriage. One of her biggest concerns was that her son would not have the chance to be king. She believed that both sons were born to serve, that her own life was about service.In a new “Last Week Tonight” segment, the British comedian breaks down the terrifying realities of America’s complicated relationship with weed.
John Oliver has a good way of making things feel ridiculous. On his HBO show Last Week Tonight, the British comedian strips current events down to their bare bones, adds a few jokes, and then exposes our social, political, and economic realities as complete farces.
This week, Oliver set his sights on America’s tenuous affair with cannabis, and boy is it a doozy. He touches on the irony of election day legal weed celebrations in the face of Trump’s victory, Nixon’s anti-Semitic grounds for declaring the War on Drugs, inconsistencies in federal and state law, issues with legal weed and banking, veterans using cannabis to treat PTSD, Jeff Sessions’ ridiculous fear-mongering, and more.
On each and every one of those subjects, Oliver makes cannabis prohibition seem exactly like the archaic absurdity that it is.
Oliver ends the segment with the same sentiments cannabis advocates have been screaming about for years.
“Marijuana laws affect everything from environmental regulations to international treaties, and ideally we should also go back and expunge records of people convicted of low level marijuana offenses in the past. And all of this, I know, is a lot of work, which is why we should really start right now.”
You’re running out of excuses, America - it’s time to legalize weed already.ATLANTIC CITY -- Jose Canseco was knocked out by former Philadelphia Eagles return man Vai Sikahema in their celebrity boxing match Saturday.
Canseco's size advantage -- he is 6-foot-4, 245 pounds to Sikahema's 5-9, 205 -- was not a factor in the bout, which was over in the first round.
"When you step inside the square circle," Sikahema said, according to the Press of Atlantic City, "don't ever think that your size is going to matter because in Philadelphia, we will chop you down."
Sikahema was asked if there were any surprises.
"That it didn't finish in the first 30 seconds," |
boosters to accelerate the ship to 161 kilometers per hour (100 mph.) But by the time the first minute has passed, the shuttle is traveling more than 1,609 kilometers per hour (1,000 mph) and it has already consumed more than one and a half million pounds of fuel. First Stage Ascent Six seconds before launch the space shuttle main engines ignite one at a time just milliseconds apart. After about two minutes, when the shuttle is about 45 kilometers (28 miles) high and traveling more than 4,828 kilometers per hour (3,000 mph), the propellant in the two boosters is exhausted and the booster casings are jettisoned. They parachute into the Atlantic Ocean, splashing down about 225 kilometers (140 miles) off the Florida coast. The empty boosters -- the largest solid rockets ever built -- are recovered by special NASA ships to be eventually refilled with fuel and launched again. The solid fuel used by the boosters is actually powdered aluminum -- a form of the same metal you find in foil wraps in your kitchen -- with oxygen provided by a chemical called ammonium perchlorate.DURHAM, New Hampshire – Hillary Clinton will take a break from the New Hampshire campaign trail Sunday to travel to Flint, Michigan, where she’ll highlight the city’s water crisis and push a stalled piece of legislation to aid the city, campaign officials tell MSNBC.
Clinton’s campaign stressed that she will hold a public event in New Hampshire every day before the state’s first-in-the-nation primary Tuesday, including Superbowl Sunday. She trails Sen Bernie Sanders by 20 points in the Granite State, according to a new NBC News poll.
RELATED: Hillary Clinton: There are too many Flints
The visit to Flint follows Clinton’s attentiveness to the issues of the water crisis, which has left thousands of residents with leaded and undrinkable running water in their homes. Clinton sent a top staffer to the poor, largely minority city to speak out about the issue on MSNBC’s “Rachel Maddow Show” shortly before Michigan Gov. Rick Snyder requested funds to help residents.
The mayor of Flint has endorsed Clinton, who devoted her entire closing argument in the last Democratic debate in Charleston, South Carolina to to the crisis. Her campaign has called for another Democratic debate in Flint.
Clinton is counting on strong support among African-Americans in states that hold primaries and caucuses in March to help her stop Sanders’ insurgent campaign, and Flint’s water crisis has been an effective symbol in reaching out to the underserved community.It is more than six months since the government's benefits cap was introduced, with the aim of encouraging people into work. Panorama followed council officers in the London Borough of Brent for seven months to find out how it was affecting families.
"I don't know how anyone can be rich and proud on benefits. For me, it's very shameful. I hate being in this situation. I hate having to rely on the government," said single mother-of-two Tanya Blake.
She is head of one of the 38,000 households in England, Scotland and Wales that have seen their benefits capped at £26,000 a year since the measure was introduced last April.
To avoid being capped she has been trying to find a job, which must be for more than 16 hours a week. Some 60% of those capped are single parents, who are treated in the same way as couples.
Under the policy, couples with or without children, or lone parents with a child, can claim £500 a week in benefits - single adults can claim no more than £350 a week.
In comparison, the average UK salary of £27,000 works out at about £400 take-home pay a week.
New mother
It applies to people receiving jobseeker's allowance, child benefit, child tax credits, housing benefits and other key support from the government. No-one who works enough hours to claim working tax credit is affected.
Ms Blake was moved to a home outside Brent to Notting Hill three years ago and the council paid her £500-a-week rent. But since the cap came in, she has lost £200 a week and all her benefits go on rent.
"I need a job and cheaper accommodation so then I've got more money to spend on the household and the boys, because it isn't cheap," she says.
"I don't blame them what they [the government] are doing, getting lazy people back to work. But I've just had a baby. When he's six months or seven months and he's ready to go back into nursery, then yes, I can go back to work, but it's hard."
Media playback is unsupported on your device Media caption Awes Osman and his wife are told that they cannot afford to live in London
Ms Blake discovered from council advisers that she had been given a temporary benefit top-up called discretionary housing benefit because her child is under one. By the end of filming the council had managed to find her a cheaper privately rented property in Brent - but she was still unemployed.
About £95bn a year is currently paid in benefits to families of working age. Iain Duncan Smith, the Work and Pensions Secretary, said the cap would return "fairness to the benefits system" and provide an incentive for people to work. The government hopes the cap will save about £110m in the first year, and £300m over the next two years.
Labour supports the idea of a cap, but is considering having it set at different levels in different parts of the country.
Latest figures to the end of January from the Department for Work and Pensions showed that some 10,900 households - 28% - had come off the cap since last April. Some 4,250, a tenth of the total of those capped, had found employment.
Evicted tenants
Of the 20 local authorities with the highest number of households affected by the benefit cap, only one - Birmingham - was outside London.
Across Britain, most claimants' rents are covered by housing benefit - but rents in the capital are expensive and councils fear the cap could result in people losing their homes.
I see the impact and the distress on these families... children having to move schools and being located to other parts of the country Laurence Coaker, Brent's head of housing needs
Councils such as Brent are also struggling because, in 2011, the government cut what they could pay private landlords.
Laurence Coaker, Brent's head of housing needs, said some private landlords were losing £200 or £300 a week, so they evicted tenants and refused to relet their accommodation to the council.
"By putting on a cap, which is for the whole country, it hasn't worked for London or the South East," he said.
"What we're having to do is to find accommodation which the households can afford by claiming the housing benefit, but that's outside of Brent, and families don't want to go there, understandably, because they've lived in Brent all their lives."
Since changes to the welfare system began in 2010, Brent says 549 households have been moved to accommodation outside the borough.
Entire life
Mr Coaker gave evidence to MPs at the Work and Pensions Select Committee three months after the cap was introduced.
"I see the impact and the distress on these families... children having to move schools and being located to other parts of the country. I didn't get a sense that the politicians were aware of that or the same empathy of what is actually happening on the ground," he said afterwards.
Panorama: Find out more Image copyright bbc Panorama - Don't Cap My Benefits
BBC One, Thursday, 10 April, at 21.00 BST Then available in the UK on the BBC iPlayer
Large families, such as that of Awes Osman, who originally came from Somalia and has lived in Brent for 23 years, are worst hit.
He has seven children and the rent for his four-bedroom house was around £500 a week, but that is the total amount of benefits he received after the cap. The council believed his only option was moving to cheaper accommodation, in Birmingham.
"I've never been to Birmingham. We lose everything if we go to Birmingham. If we lose the school, that will be the biggest damage. And we have to lose our job as well. I live all my entire life in London," he said.
A council investigation later proved he and his wife were legitimately working and were not subject to the cap. Although the family moved to Birmingham, they rarely lived there, preferring to stay with relatives in Brent.
Correction 17 April 2014: This report has been amended to clarify that average weekly income is £400 rather than £500, which is the pre-tax figure.
Panorama: Don't Cap My Benefits, BBC One, Thursday 10 April at 21:00 BST and then available in the UK on the BBC iPlayer.Oh, Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee.
Despite the fact that thousands and potentially millions of Americans have had their plans canceled due to noncompliance with minimum standards of the Affordable Care Act, that's just no big deal to Rep. Lee.
Speaking to National Review Online (emphasis added):
Representative Sheila Jackson Lee, a Texas Democrat, told National Review Online today that instead of sending out cancellation letters, insurance companies should have told their customers that their coverage was about to get better. She said she wrote an amendment before the president’s announcement that would require insurance companies to “tell the truth.” “The cancellation notice was not the truth,” she says. “It should have been: ’We intend to or expect to modify your insurance.’”
Really, Rep. Lee? Really? How else could you possibly describe a letter from an insurance company that blatantly states that their plan will no longer be offered due to Obamacare? It is, in the literal sense of the word, a cancellation letter.
And that's the truth.RUSSIAN President Dmitry Medvedev has reportedly been urged to investigate a prominent politician who claims he was abducted by aliens.
Kirsan Ilyumzhinov, the leader of the country's southern region of Kalymkia, told a prime-time television show he was taken on a spaceship sent to Earth and met extra-terrestrials wearing yellow spacesuits, The Sun reported.
Now a Russian politician fears Mr Ilyumzhinov may have divulged state secrets and wants him investigated.
Mr Ilyumzhinov told television host Vladimir Pozner on Channel One on April 26 that he had spent several hours in the company of aliens.
He said they visited his apartment in downtown Moscow on September 18, 1997.
The leader said he was falling asleep when he heard someone calling him from the balcony.
Mr Ilyumzhinov went outside and said he saw the spaceship which was a "half-transparent half tube".
He went inside and met human-like creatures in yellow spacesuits.
Mr Ilyumzhinov said he could not communicate with the aliens.
He said: "I am often asked which language I used to talk to them. Perhaps, it was on a level of the exchange of ideas."
He said the aliens then gave him a tour of their spaceship.
Mr Ilyumzhinov said the alien spaceship had come to Earth to take samples - and claims to have several witnesses.
Russian parliamentarian Andre Lebedev has called for an inquiry into the claims and written a letter to Mr Medvedev raising a list of his concerns.
In his letter he says that - assuming the whole thing was not just a bad joke - it was an historic event and should have been reported to the Kremlin.
Read more at The Sun.There are significant differences between most of the Futura fonts on the market. Some simply have different character sets with varying degrees of language support or extras like small caps and oldstyle figures. And some actually differ in letterform design.As a brief general reference, here are some key design differences between a few of the major releases:As the owner of the Bauer foundry assets, Neufville claims to have the most accurate digital rendition of the original Futura drawings. This may be true, but Neufville isn’t necessarily the best font maker in the business — they have some spacing issues (see the ‘ro’ in the Bold above, for example). Still, this release has the largest family of styles, with small caps and italics for nearly every weight and width.Similar in design to the Neufville. Perhaps with better spacing. Not as large a family with all the extra small caps, but it does have some display weights that could be useful on occasion.I read somewhere that this variant appears to be optimized for small text. It is wider, the ascenders are shorter, the counters are larger, and the apertures are more open. On the other hand, the round glyphs (a, g, e,) are more true to the circle than the other URW version. This is especially apparent in the 'e' which looks like it was drawn by an engineer with a compass. This attribute doesn’t make this a great text face, but if you want that strict geometry, No. 2 delivers more of that than most of the others. Only 5 weights — no Light, the thin Book weight fills that gap. The Extra Bold is unique and I think puts on the weight more successfully than the other Extra Bolds out there.This version and E+F’s offer the broadest range of weights with 7. (This is because their Heavy is actually usable.) No small caps, though. ParaType is a Russian foundry specializing in Cyrillic, so if you think you might need Russian someday, this is the one to get. Otherwise similar to URW and E+F.Virtually the same design as URW and ParaType. A "Heavy New" weight corrects the problems with the original Heavy.This Futura is a major redraw from the original. In many ways it is a more successful typeface because it abandons some of the strict geometry in favor of a more harmonious whole, but it may not be the Futura you were expecting. The acsenders and descenders are shorter, letter widths are more uniform, weights are more consistent (note how little the lettershapes differ between Light and Bold), and the rounds (a, g, b, d, p, q) and's' are significantly different than other Futuras. In short, this is the least true to the source but may be the most versatile Futura for contemporary design.This version is unique in that it offers separate families for display (SH) and text (SB) use. The display version is narrower, very tightly spaced, and has no ink traps. Unfortunately, it’s not truly optimized for use at extra large sizes because it still suffers from overshoot distraction (see). A versatile 7 weights in each family.Avoid this one. Adobe produces some excellent original designs but many of their early revivals (see also Helvetica) are a bit of a mess. In many weights the round shapes are much more oval than circular. In some cases they are even egg-shaped! The Heavy style is a particular atrocity.Same design as Adobe’s (I believe it was licensed), though spacing, small details, and character sets may vary.This overview just touches the surface. There are other design differences (some fonts include the wacky experimental glyphs from Renner’s original drawings), other foundry versions and alternatives (check out the early American competitor Twentieth Centuryand the very useful East German follower Superla), and many other non-design considerations, such as language support, figure sets, licensing costs, and webfont availability and quality. I’d love to do a proper review if someone wants to fund it.Added URW Futura No. 2.Tampermonkey license terms
This Tampermonkey Browser Extension End-User License Agreement (“EULA” or “Agreement”) is a legal agreement between you, and Jan Biniok (the “Company”), which is the legal owner of the Tampermonkey browser extension (“Tampermonkey” or “Tampermonkey browser extension”), and provides the terms and conditions by which you may use Tampermonkey, including any associated media, scripts, printed materials, and online or electronic documentation. This EULA supersedes any other agreement or understanding with respect to its subject matter. If you don't like what you see here, do not install or use the Tampermonkey browser extension. By downloading it, however, you agree to use the Tampermonkey browser extension consistent with the terms of this EULA. Tampermonkey is the intellectual property of the Company and is protected by copyright, trademark laws and international copyright treaties, as well as other intellectual property laws. Intellectual property, includes, but is not limited to, computer or software code, scripts, design elements, graphics, interactive features, artwork, text communication, tracker libraries, and any other content that may be found in Tampermonkey. 1. GRANT OF LICENSE The Company grants to you a limited, worldwide, non-exclusive, royalty-free, revocable, and non-commercial license to: download Tampermonkey to a computer via a web browser; use Tampermonkey as herein set forth in the following section; copy and store Tampermonkey in your web browser cache memory; and print pages from Tampermonkey for your own personal and non-commercial use. The Company does not grant you any other rights whatsoever in relation to Tampermonkey. All other rights are expressly reserved by the Company. 2. DESCRIPTION OF OTHER RIGHTS AND LIMITATIONS. (a) Unless you have the express written permission from the Company, you may not distribute Tampermonkey or any portion thereof to any third parties. (b) You may not disassemble or reverse engineer Tampermonkey for any purpose, other than for reviewing the code for personal review, and at all times are bound by the terms of this EULA. (c) We don't charge for Tampermonkey, and neither can you. You may not rent, lease, or lend Tampermonkey and may only use it for you own personal, non-commercial use. (d) The Company may provide you with support services, and any supplemental software code provided to you as part of those services shall be considered part of Tampermonkey and subject to the terms and conditions of this EULA. (e) You must comply with all applicable laws regarding use of Tampermonkey. 3. ALLOWABLE USES OF TAMPERMONKEY You may only use Tampermonkey for your own personal, non-commercial use. 4. NON-ALLOWABLE USES OF TAMPERMONKEY You are strictly prohibited from, and agree that you will not, adapt, edit, change, modify, transform, publish, republish, distribute, or redistribute Tampermonkey or any elements, portions, or parts thereof, including without limitation, to any elements, portions, or parts of Tampermonkey software (in any form or media) without the Company’s prior written consent. You agree not to use any automated data collection methods, data mining, robots, scraping or any data gathering methods of any kind on Tampermonkey. You will not use Tampermonkey for any commercial use whatsoever. 5. ENFORCEMENT OF COPYRIGHT AND PROTECTION OF INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY If the Company discovers that you have used its copyrighted or other protected intellectual property in contravention of the terms of the license above, the Company may bring legal proceedings against you, seeking monetary damages and an injunction against you. You could also be ordered to pay legal fees and costs. If you become aware of any use of the Company’s copyright or protected intellectual property that contravenes or may contravene the terms of the license above, immediately report this by email to kontakt@tampermonkey.net or by first-class mail to Jan Biniok, Pestalozzistr. 38, 09350 Lichtenstein/Sa., Germany. 6. TERMINATION Your right to use Tampermonkey continues until terminated by the Company, which may terminate this Agreement and your license to use Tampermonkey at any time, without cause and without notice. You may terminate this agreement at any time by uninstalling Tampermonkey. This Agreement will automatically terminate if you fail to comply with any of the terms of this EULA. Upon termination, you agree to stop using and to uninstall Tampermonkey. 7. NO WARRANTIES Tampermonkey is provided “As Is” and does not come with any kind of warranty whatsoever. The Company does not warrant or assume responsibility for the accuracy or completeness of any information, text, graphics, links or other items contained within Tampermonkey. Tampermonkey makes no warranties respecting any harm that may be caused by the transmission of any kind of computer virus. 8. LIMITATION OF LIABILITY In no event shall the Company be liable for any damages (including, without limitation, lost profits, business interruption, or loss of data) rising out of use of or inability to use Tampermonkey. In no event will the Company be liable for indirect, special, incidental, consequential (including lost profit), punitive, exemplary, or other damages based in contract, tort or otherwise. The Company shall have no liability with respect to the content or operation of Tampermonkey.MALMO, Sweden — A family whose members say they fled Albania to escape a blood feud was rejected for asylum by Swedish officials, who months later asked them to leave.
But so far, only one has been deported.
Sentila Kernaja, who turned 21 this week, three siblings and their disabled mother each collect 1,800 Swedish kronor, about $200, a month from the government. The government covers round-the-clock care for the mother, who is 42 and paralyzed from the waist down. The siblings attend a public high school, free of charge.
Ms. Kernaja cleans houses off the books, while inhabiting a legal limbo. “It’s ridiculous,” she said in an interview here in Malmo, Sweden’s third-largest city. “I told them to keep the money and give me a work permit.”
The family is among an estimated 18,000 people who live in Sweden even though their claims for asylum have been turned down. Their status has come under scrutiny after Rakhmat Akilov, a 39-year-old failed asylum seeker from Uzbekistan, drove a truck into a pedestrian shopping street in Stockholm on April 7 in the country’s worst terrorism attack in decades. (The toll from that attack rose to five on Friday, when a 66-year-old teacher died from her injuries.)A Napier church that received thousands of dollars in donations from a disabled rest home resident has returned the money.
Bruce Collingwood, from Oasis Elim Church, has returned money donated by Whetu Abraham over the last two years, Elim Church of New Zealand has announced.
Spokesman Chris Bethwaite would not reveal how much money the church had refunded to the Otatara Rest Care and Rehabilitation rest home resident, but said it was only money that was recorded as coming from Mr Abraham.
''Mr Abraham may have donated more funds in cash amounts, but did not identify himself as the giver, so there is no way for the church to identify this,'' he said.
It appeared Mr Abraham may have given away more than he should have, given his circumstances, he said.
"The church had queried with Mr Abraham about his giving and he was adamant that he wanted to give the funds to the church. The funds returned today have been done so as an act of good will.''
The decision to refund the money came after The Dominion Post revealed the church took nearly $12,000 from Mr Abraham last year and about $10,000 in 2008.
Mr Abraham, 54, is a partial tetraplegic with head injuries incurred when he was hit by a car in 1986. He could not afford dental care for his rotting teeth.[Update: The press release offered lots of confusion – the story’s been updated now for clarity]
Valve are rocking the boat in a really big way, especially for PC gaming piracy. They have just announced the release of a complete collection of publisher power, called Steamworks, available to developers and publishers completely free. Valve describe it as,
“A complete suite of publishing and development tools – ranging from copy protection to social networking services to server browsing – now available free of charge to developers and publishers worldwide.”
What does this actually mean? Well, its extensive. The complete press-release is beneath the cut, as well as our explanation of what it means. And what it means could be huge.
What does it mean? It gives publishers and developers the ability to control their games in a brand new way, with Steam itself dropping in the final executable to get the game working, which could have a hefty impact on how we buy our games. And most importantly, no one’s paying Valve a penny, neither the publisher, nor the player.
The suite will allow developers to perform many of the tricks that have distinguished Valve, such as monitoring sales stats, hefty anti-piracy measures, automatic updating, voice chat, multiplayer matchmaking, social networking and even the ability to run beta testing. The possibilities this opens up for independent developers, and smaller publishing companies, could be enormous.
It’s a bit confusing what this will actually means, so here’s what we understand: A publisher can sell their game in the shops or distribute it digitally via their own system, customers install it, and then have Steam drop in the executable. It kills off day-one piracy in a single shot. Bam. Then updates will be delivered automatically for the game via Steam, and all the post-release stats and tools will be available, with Valve charging no one any money for this at all.
Does this give Valve more power? It certainly means more people will be installing Steam on their systems, and that isn’t going to hurt them. But since they won’t be responsible for distribution, nor handling money for these companies, the control seems to be firmly in the hands of each game’s publisher.The Beatles in the USA
The Fab Four made two hysteria-inducing visits to America in 1964, launching the so-called "British Invasion" of the mid-1960s.
As they visited Washington DC and Baltimore a young photographer, Mike Mitchell, snapped dozens of images of John, Paul, George and Ringo.
Now, after being filed away for nearly 50 years, these never seen before black-and-white photographs are being sold at auction at Christie's in New York.
Take a look at some of them, and hear The Beatles perform and talk about their visits to the USA.
To see the enhanced content on this page, you need to have JavaScript enabled and Adobe Flash installed.
The Beatles Illuminated: The Discovered Works of Mike Mitchell will be auctioned at Christie's New York on 20 July.
All images copyright Mike Mitchell and courtesy Christie's. Music by The Beatles. Additional audio from BBC Archives.
Slideshow production by Paul Kerley. Publication date 18 July 2011.
More audio slideshows:
Bob Dylan at 70
John Barry's music
Golf: A day at the OpenWealthy French are moving to Britain to escape Hollande's plan for 75% tax on rich
Large numbers of France's well-heeled families are selling up and moving to 'wealth-friendly' nations
British estate agents say they have sold more £1m-plus properties since April than last year
It is thought many are leaving France to avoid Hollande's (pictured) proposed tax rate
France's super-rich are flocking to 'wealth-friendly' nations like Britain and Switzerland to escape looming tax hikes announced by the country's new socialist government.
Large numbers of France's most well-heeled families are selling up and moving to neighbouring countries, estate agency figures have shown.
It is thought many are leaving France to avoid a proposed tax rate of 75 per cent on earnings of more than 1million euros - £780,000.
The countries previous top tax bracket of 41 per cent on earnings over 72,000 euros is also set to increase to 45 per cent.
British estate agent Sotheby's said it's French offices sold more than 100 properties over 1.7 million euros between April and June this year - a marked increase on the same period in 2011.
Sotheby's French boss Alexander Kraft said: 'The result of the presidential election has had a real impact on our sales.
'Now a large number of wealthy French families are leaving the country as a direct result of the proposals of the new government.
'These properties are then bought up by foreign investors looking for a stable real estate market like France to invest in.
'It shows the high-end property market is holding up very well, even in these difficult times.'
Swiss tax consultant Gilles Martin also told his country's 20 Minutes newspaper: 'Since the socialists came to power in France, I have been deluged with inquiries from rich French people who would rather pay their tax in Switzerland.'
David Cameron with Francois Hollande last week. Britain's Prime Minister angered the French last month when he said he would 'roll out the red carpet' to wealthy French citizens and firms who wanted to pay their taxes in Britain
A report earlier this year by London estate agents also showed France's richest people were heading to Britain to escape new higher taxes.
Inquiries from wealthy French for London homes worth more than £5million soared by 30 per cent in the first three months of this year, UK estate agency statistics showed.
And interest in homes worth between £1million and £5million rose by 11 per cent, it was found.
According to British estate agent Knight Frank, French interest in luxury London homes has rocketed since the tax plans.
Exodus: Scores of wealthy French families are considering turning their backs on cities like Paris (picture)
Rolling out the red carpet: Wealthy French citizens and firms are looking at luxury homes in London (pictured) and are considering paying their taxes in Britain
Liam Bailey, Knight Frank's global head of residential research, said: 'It is too early to see the impact of the proposed wealth taxes in France in terms of actual purchases in London.
'But there is strong evidence from our web search statistics. This evidence from web search activity backs up a noticeable spike in anecdotal comments from our office network, where French applicants have become much more noticeable in recent months.'
'These properties are then bought up by foreign investors looking for a stable real estate market like France to invest in'
Prime minister David Cameron angered the French last month when he said he would 'roll out the red carpet' to wealthy French citizens and firms who wanted to move out and pay their taxes in Britain.
He told the B20 business summit in Mexico in June: 'I think it's wrong to have a completely uncompetitive top rate of tax.
'If the French go ahead with a 75 per cent top rate of tax we will roll out the red carpet and welcome more French businesses to Britain and they can pay tax in Britain and pay for our health service and schools and everything else.'
The comments left French politician so offended he suggested Mr Cameron must have been 'drunk' when he made them.
Gallic MP Claude Bartolone, a staunch ally of President Hollande, said: 'I hope that it was an after-dinner remark and that he didn't have all his wits about him when he said these things.
'He can't have had his wits about him because if he had, he would have paid more attention to all those Europeans who go to work in England but who come for medical treatment in France and who put their children in French schools because there are no more public services in England.'
France's European Affairs Minister Bernard Cazeneuve also told Canal Plus television: 'What I can answer to this statement from the British prime minister is that French bosses are patriots.Here are some fun facts about your favorite Disney Princesses that you may or may not have known, courtesy of BuzzFeed! Enjoy!
1. The current official lineup of Disney Princesses includes Jasmine, Ariel, Rapunzel, Tiana, Belle, Merida, Cinderella, Pocahontas, Aurora, Mulan, and Snow White.
2. Snow White is supposed to be 14 years old. She remains the youngest Disney Princess.
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3. Belle is the only Disney Princess to have hazel eyes.
4. Mulan’s story is based on an ancient Chinese legend of Hua Mulan, a female warrior famously described in the poem “The Ballad of Mulan.”
5. Mulan is also the first Disney Princess to not actually be a princess. All the others are either royal by birth, or marry into royalty.
6. Cinderella was originally intended by Disney to be produced as one of the Silly Symphony series.
7. Ariel is the only Disney Princess who was not born a human.
8. Pocahontas is the only princess based on a real person. (Mulan is legend, and impossible to know whether she was real or not.)
9. Tiana is the only Disney Princess with dimples.
10. Both Mulan and Tiana are left-handed.
11. Mulan and Jasmine’s singing voices are performed by the same person, Lea Salonga.
12. Snow White is the only Disney Princess to receive a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. This happened in 1987.
13. Walt Disney once told Ilene Woods (the voice of Cinderella), that Cinderella was his favorite heroine.
14. Belle is supposed to be 17.
15. Ariel translates to “lion of God” in Hebrew.
16. Rapunzel’s eyes are the biggest compared to her Disney Princess counterparts.
17. Frozen’s Anna and Elsa are expected to join the lineup as official Disney Princesses this year.
18. Many of Ariel’s quirks and mannerisms came out of improvisation from her live-action model.
19. Pocahontas actually isn’t the first Native American Disney Princess. It’s actually Princess Tiger Lily in Peter Pan (but, clearly, Tiger Lily is not an official Disney Princess).
20. Jasmine’s character is based on the princess from an Arabic folktale called One Thousand and One Nights.
21. Rapunzel and Snow White are both from Bavaria.
22. Princess Aurora is the first Disney Princess to have violet eyes.
23. Walt Disney has said that the transformation scene in Cinderella — where Cinderella’s dress goes from rags to a ball gown — was one of his favorite pieces of animation.
24. A Disney intern who was still in school ended up providing some of the inspiration for Tiana. Inspiration also came from Anika Noni Rose, the voice of Tiana.
25. Kristin Chenoweth was originally cast as the voice of Rapunzel, but she dropped out. Reese Witherspoon was then cast, who also dropped out. (Jeez.) The role eventually went to Mandy Moore.
26. Reese Witherspoon was also originally cast as the voice of Merida… In the end Kelly Macdonald did the job. (Jeez, Reese.)
27. Cinderella is supposed to be 19.
28. Princess Aurora had only 18 minutes of screen time and 18 lines of dialogue in the film, making her the most quiet Disney Princess.
29. After auditioning more than 150 girls for the voice of Snow White, the part serendipitously went to 20-year-old Adriana Caselotti, whose father, a singing coach, was helping Disney find a fit. Adriana overheard her father’s phone conversation and began talking in the background to prove she had the right voice. She got the part.
30. Belle and Ariel share the same live-action reference model, Sherri Stoner.
31. Pocahontas is the only Disney Princess with a tattoo.
32. Jasmine actually helped influence the design of Aladdin. Earlier sketches showed him seeming much younger.
But once Jasmine was designed, animators thought she wouldn’t go for someone who looked like a scruffy kid.
33. When Disney first announced The Princess and the Frog, the principal character was named Madeline or Maddy for short. This upset critics, who called it a “slave name.” Disney then changed it to Tiana.
34. Merida is the only princess with brothers. WHAT?
35. In earlier drafts of the film, Cinderella has a pet turtle named Clarissa.
36. Mary Pickford and Betty Boop helped inspire Snow White’s look.
37. Disney shot the entirety of Cinderella in live-action, using it as a guide for animation.
38. One thing Belle shares in common with Sleeping Beauty: Belle’s dance with the Beast was created from the same cells as Aurora’s dance with the Prince. Apparently, the animators were running out of time.
39. Belle is the second princess to not be of royal descent. (With Cinderella being the first.)
40. Merida is the only Disney Princess with a non-American accent.
41. When Snow White’s Scary Adventures opened at Disneyland in 1955, it didn’t feature Snow White anywhere in the ride; riders were supposed to experience the ride as her. This proved confusing and she was added in an overhaul in 1983.
42. Ilene Woods, a radio singer and personality, didn’t actually know she was auditioning for the role. She recorded a couple songs for the film as demos, as a favor to the songwriters with whom she was friends. When Walt heard the recordings, he chose her over the 400 other girls who had auditioned for the role.
43. Beauty and the Beast screenwriter Linda Woolverton wrote an important character detail into the script: Belle’s “little wisp of hair that keeps falling in her face” — this showed that Belle wasn’t perfect.
44. Why is Ariel a redhead? For starters, Splash had just come out, featuring Daryl Hannah as a blonde mermaid — Disney wanted to be different from this image. Second, it was easier and more pleasing to make darker shades of red (rather than darker yellows) when Ariel was in dark or shaded places.
45. Jasmine is the second-youngest princess. She’s 15, one year older than Snow White.
46. Disney’s Pocahontas is 18 in the film. In real life, Pocahontas met John Smith at a much younger age. By aging her, Roy Disney said that it made a more dramatic telling of the story.
47. Glen Keane, the creator of Rapunzel, drew inspiration for the character from his daughter, who, as a girl, always wanted to paint her bedroom walls. By the time Keane started on Rapunzel, his daughter had become an accomplished painter and he hired her to create the look of Rapunzel’s room.
48. Belle, the first Disney Princess with more character depth, was partly inspired by Katharine Hepburn’s portrayal of Jo in the 1933 film version of Little Women.
49. Disney used Alyssa Milano’s face as part of the inspiration for Ariel’s look.
50. In 2012 and 2013, the Disney Princesses were redesigned.
51. Mulan’s redesign caused a significant upset because she appeared to have her skin lightened. Similar claims were made for Pocahontas and Jasmine.
52. Merida’s hair is CRAZY: “Merida has more than 1,500 individually sculpted, red strands that generate about 111,700 total hairs.” Also: “If Merida’s curls were straightened, her hair would be four feet long and reach the middle of her |
cover-up
By Steve James
26 May 2009
For all the details of sadistic physical, sexual, emotional abuse, neglect and brutalisation of children in Ireland’s industrial school system, the report of the Commission to Inquire into Child Abuse (CICA) is a cover up. Nine years of hearings, the probing of hundreds of childhood hells, have resulted in a huge report—five volumes and 3,000 pages—which will not lead to the prosecution of those individually or collectively guilty of crimes against thousands of children.
Neither has political responsibility been attributed. The report by Judge Sean Ryan continues to obscure the role of the Catholic Church, which is an essential element of the Irish state, and successive governments in operating a cruel workhouse system through which at least 170,000 children passed through in the middle decades of the twentieth century.
Even the publication of the report was characterised by official arrogance, contempt and indifference to former inmates who braved hearings and interviews, including cross examination by representatives of the religious orders in whose schools they were incarcerated and brutalised. Paddy Doyle, wheelchair bound, attempted to attend publication of the report last week in the Conrad Hotel, Dublin and was confronted by locked doors, PR and security men. When other victims of abuse managed to force their way into the hearing, police were called.
Co-ordinator of the campaign group Survivors of Child Abuse, John Kelly, told the press from the steps of the hotel, “There is nothing by way of justice in any means significant in this report, nothing...We were encouraged by this commission and by the former Taoiseach to open our wounds. We did this and they’ve been left gaping open.”
The Irish state has consistently refused to take any real action against the perpetrators. This is not only because it is complicit, by its silence, in the abuses. More fundamentally, it was dependent upon the Catholic Church to force submission onto numerous poor children exploited as cheap labour in its industrial school system.
The report was only commissioned in 1999 following decades in which the appalling conditions in the industrial religious schools were common knowledge. From as early as 1961 news broadcasts, films, plays and countless personal experiences led to numerous complaints being filed against schools. Yet only in 1999 did then Taoiseach Bertie Ahern commission the CICA inquiry under Judge Mary Laffoy. Laffoy published interim reports and reportedly won respect from the survivor groups, but found her investigations hampered by the Department of Education and the Church. Laffoy resigned in 2003 and Judge Sean Ryan was appointed.
In 2004, Ryan struck a deal to ensure continued participation from the religious orders, agreeing not to name those accused of abuse. The hundreds of religious brothers, nuns and lay persons accused of abuse have been given pseudonyms in the CICA report. Only those previously convicted of child abuse are named. Another deal in 2002 limited the financial liability of the orders to compensation claims to a maximum of €128 million.
The CICA report nevertheless does make clear the horrifying crimes of the child-care system. Dealing mainly with the period between 1930 and 1970, the commission interviewed 1,090 former residents of 216 schools, reformatories and day schools—90 percent of whom said they had been physically abused and over 500 sexually abused.
Compiling other information from the Department of Education, the Vatican and the schools themselves, the commission concluded that some 800 individuals were identified as having physically or sexually abused children in their care.
Nothing more clearly condemns the political system that emerged from the partition of Ireland, the accommodation reached between the Irish bourgeoisie, the Catholic Church, and the former imperialist master in Britain, than the protracted existence of a children’s gulag intended to provide cheap pliant, unskilled, largely agricultural, Catholic labour. Ireland maintained the industrial school system, run by various Catholic, orders until the 1970s.
Journalist Bruce Arnold wrote in the Irish Independent, “The report contains nothing about the steady flow of reform in the British system of childcare, begun by Winston Churchill when he was Home Secretary and continued throughout the grim period in which Tomas Derrig was our Minister for Education. From 1932, Derrig placed an iron fist on top of the smouldering drum of industrial school illegality and did nothing at all. Irregularly, cases came up in the court, the press and in the Dail. They cried out for investigation. Derrig always refused. Investigation was generally refused by other ministers. Nothing is said of this in the report.”
Arnold also noted that the report contains no serious assessment of the role of the District Courts, from which children were committed to the schools. The young people forced into the system—some 1.2 percent of the childhood population between 1936 and 1970—were from the poorest backgrounds. At any time between 5,000 and 6,000 were held in around 50 or so boarding institutions.
Children would be referred by the courts for begging, having no visible means of subsistence, no obvious guardian, being in the charge of parents who were in prison, or had criminal or otherwise dubious reputations. Others were referred for petty offences including non-attendance at school. Young girls who had been raped were sent to reformatories.
Most of the industrial schools held around 250 children. The largest, Artane near Dublin, held around 800. They were universally characterised by violence, fear, neglect, hunger, poor clothing, cold and miserable conditions, bullying, poor education, emotional, physical and sexual abuse.
The greatest numbers of industrial schools were run by the Christian Brothers, which opened its first school in Dublin in 1870 and expanded operations to the UK, Australia, Canada, Gibraltar, India and the United States and still operates in 26 countries.
The Christian Brothers recruited young, often badly educated men from the age of 14 onwards, who took permanent vows of chastity and silence from the age of 25. They were entirely untrained, learning only by the primitive and brutal practice of their elders. The report notes, “The Christian Brothers became a powerful and dominant organisation in the State and were responsible for providing primary and post primary education to the majority of Catholic boys in the country.”
Industrial Schools were funded on a per-capita basis, encouraging the orders to cram in as many children as possible. The section on Artane notes reasons for committal between 1940 and 1969: 1,374 children were committed for “improper guardianship”, 1,045 for bad school attendance, 720 for destitution, 227 for being homeless, 220 for larceny, 90 for other crimes.
These children were plunged into a medieval environment, with the report compiling a vast litany of atrocities. A few examples are enough.
A letter from the head of the school warns Brother Beaufort, “You are passionate in your dealings with the boys. In fact at times you show so little control of your temper that you are in danger of inflicting serious bodily harm on the boys by your manner of correcting them.”
One victim was picked up and thrown around a class by Brother Beaufort, knocked unconscious, and was only saved by the intervention of another Brother. The child suffered lacerations, broken teeth, eye and neck injuries.
All the staff carried leather straps which were freely used on children. A Brother Oliver repeatedly beat children with particular violence. One victim reported, “I was running trying to get away from him. He hit me, it didn’t matter where, legs, back, head, anywhere...”
Oliver forced one 12-year-old child to lick excrement from his shoes.
Instruments of punishment included rubber from a pram wheel, hurley sticks, hurley balls, fists, finger nails and fan belts. One child’s hand was held in boiling water. Boys were repeated pulled around by the hair, punched, strapped for crimes such as being left handed, being slow, tearing a blanket, having worn out shoes.
Another inmate commented, “You don’t seem to understand, the place was built on terror, regular beatings were just accepted. What you’re hearing about is the bad ones, but we accepted as normal run of the mill from the minute you got up, that some time in that day you would get beaten.”
Sexual abuse was rife. Artane’s staff hosted a number of Brothers who had repeatedly been warned for “embracing and fondling” boys. Two such paedophiles went on to be hung for child murder in Canada. Others accused of rape, beat or bribed their victims into silence. Accused Brothers were invariably excused, lightly admonished or, typically, moved to other institutions where they were free to continue abusing children for decades.
The children provided cheap labour for running the institutions. A 1957 report by the Department of Education complained, “These lads really make the running of Artane possible yet in all the apartments devoted to the farm and the trades there is not a single toilet or wash-basin for these boys. They come into their meals in a shocking condition, hands, faces and clothes are covered with the grime of the trades, boots, stockings and portions of the trousers often soaking from working in the cowhouse or the manure pit.”
St Vincent’s Industrial School, Goldenbridge featured in two broadcasts, “Dear Daughter” and “States of Fear”, which undermined the official silence on the schools. Run by the Sisters of Mercy, young girls were held in conditions of neglect and near starvation, subject to repeated beatings. One victim summed up the lasting impact of their experience. Their comments could apply to the entire system.
“The screaming of children, the screaming of children will stay with me for the rest of my life about Goldenbridge. I still hear it, I still haven’t recovered from that. Children crying and screaming, it was just endless, it never never stopped for years in that place.”
The report is available from here: http://www.childabusecommission.com/rpt/The Brexit-backing chairman of JD Wetherspoon has urged the government to unilaterally grant EU citizens living in Britain the right to remain following the country’s departure from the bloc.
Tim Martin said such a move would give Theresa May the “moral high ground” from which to create an immigration system similar to that of Australia, Singapore or New Zealand.
Immigrants carry out vital jobs in many areas of UK life Tim Martin
• READ MORE: Wetherspoon founder Tim Martin blasts CBI over Brexit
He said: “Since virtually no one wants hard-working immigrants from the EU to leave the UK, the government should start by unilaterally granting them the right to stay. Their efforts benefit our economy, we have low unemployment and are also one of the wealthiest countries in the world.
“Immigrants carry out vital jobs in the health service, in the professions and in many other areas of UK life, as UK voters understand.”
Own an innovative start-up? Find out how to win £5,000 for your business
The Prime Minister and Brexit secretary David Davis have continually refused to guarantee the three million EU citizens living in Britain their current status, leaving the threat of forced deportation lingering.
Martin also called on the government not to bother negotiating a new trade deal with the EU because it would probably end in a stalemate, and derided the bloc’s representatives as “posturing prima donnas”.
He said Britain should adopt World Trade Organisation rules and declare its intention to drop tariffs from all countries that export to the UK, including the EU.
200 Voices: find out more about the people who have shaped Scotland
“This will dramatically reduce consumer prices in the shops, thereby increasing purchasing power and our general standard of living,” Martin said.
“Singapore, Hong Kong, Israel and Norway, for example, have dropped almost all tariffs and their economies have raced ahead. It is possible that the EU will impose tariffs on our exports to the EU even so, but let them do it, since the tariffs imposed will be relatively small – less than half the amount the UK will save by ending its EU contributions in two years’ time.”
Click here to ‘Like’ The Scotsman Business on FacebookPlanned Parenthood taps crisis communications firm
Planned Parenthood has enlisted high-profile Washington public relations firm SKDKnickerbocker as it scrambles to deal with the ongoing scandal and release of a third undercover video Tuesday showing a clinic’s staff handling fetal tissue after an abortion.
The additional PR firepower reflects the growing pressure on the women’s health organization amid building GOP calls to cut its $540 million in government funding. House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) earlier this week called to halt Planned Parenthood’s federal funding while Congress investigates whether the organization broke a federal ban on profiting from fetal tissue donation. The Senate plans to hold a vote on a defunding amendment from Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) and others that is likely to fail.
Story Continued Below
SKDKnickerbocker is no newbie to working on Planned Parenthood issues. The Democratically aligned firm is run by well-connected operatives, including Anita Dunn and Hilary Rosen. It also worked with the group during the 2012 election cycle, according to SKDKnickerbocker’s website.
“Planned Parenthood is a longtime client, and we are proud to help them push back against these extremist attacks from people who want to end reproductive health care for women in this country,” a SKDKnickerbocker spokesman said in a statement.
The group circulated a memo to reporters and producers late Monday that discouraged them from airing the undercover videos, arguing that they were obtained under false identification and violated patient privacy.
“Those patients’ privacy should not be further violated by having this footage shared by the media,” the memo reads.
Planned Parenthood also has lobbying firms Capitol Counsel on retainer. Glover Park Group has also previously done work for the group. Planned Parenthood spent nearly $1.3 million on lobbying during the first six months of 2015, according to federal disclosures.It appears that the Conspiracy Files programme has form. As a programme it has investigated the conspiracy theories behind the death of Princess Diana, Dr David Kelly and 9/11. More often than not, because of their method of dramatising the evidence against the conspiracy theorists, they have actually given kudos to the theories they hope to destroy.
In the days before Iplayer, these shows were available to stream through real media (use real alternative – it is just better). This is yet another area where BBC Iplayer has actually reduced choice. Many of the shows that used to available for streaming are now gone from their archives.
I have to say, this was a very very poor attempt by the BBC to label all those calling for a public inquiry into 7/7 as nuts. A typical guilt by association tactic more associated with the darker arts of propaganda than journalistic research. Another blog has directly accused the BBC of siding with “spooks” on a show that was nothing more than a whitewash.
My post yesterday predicted that the BBC would fail to provide any reasonable explanation about why 7/7 happened. For a start not questioning even the basic actions of the “bombers” on that day. Buying a parking ticket for the car and return train fares? What were they worried Network rail would chase them for the fines in the afterlife?
They attacked the youtube author for his videos, accusing him of deliberately stirring up Islamic hate of the Police. They do a good enough job of that themselves anyway. The police (and indeed the BBC) have continually demonised Muslims. They continue to do so. The police launch bigger and bigger “terror raids” that result in no prosecutions. The BBC often have cameras there for the raid itself. When these raids fail to turn up any evidence the BBC is then happy to repeat the lie they were not terrorists they were kiddie fiddlers.
(Update – this is the bit I can not get over. Tony Blair said hand on his Zanu Labour v1 battery cell that his Foreign Policy of invading Muslim Countries had nothing whatsoever to do with London getting bombed. However the BBC have the gall to say that the conspiracy theorist may be responsible for any future Islamic extremist terror outrage. Someone please explain how I can make this compute)
Can the BBC seriously say that if Jean Charles De Menezes had have been Muslim the Police and the BBC would not still be claiming that another tube outrage was prevented? Which on the day of the shooting is exactly what they were trying to do.
In fact the BBC made up lies on the behalf of the Police while reporting the shooting. In one of the early articles, the BBC flat out lied.
Home affairs correspondent Margaret Gilmore said officers had challenged a known suspect they had been following. “He ran, they followed him. They say they gave him a warning, they then shot him. “They brought in the air ambulance. They did everything they can to revive him. He died at the scene.”
None of that actually happened did it Ms Gilmore?
In fact does this person the BBC “interviewed” really exist?
Another passenger on the train, Anthony Larkin, told BBC News the man appeared to be wearing a “bomb belt with wires coming out”.
Or this person?
Londoner Dan Copeland was in the carriage in which the man was shot. He told BBC News: “We were sitting for a few minutes on the platform, then we heard shouting from the concourse between the two platforms. “Then the man burst in through the door to my right and grabbed hold of the pole and a person by the glass partition near the door, diagonally opposite me. “An officer jumped on the door to my left and screamed, ‘Everybody out!’
The fact that the police used illegal hollow point rounds in that shooting was hardly covered at all by the BBC. Yet more crimes carried out by our Government forces in our name.
It is not as thought the police did not try and besmirch his name either, early on claiming he was an illegal over-stayer. Which again the BBC reported.
The BBC do themselves a disservice by completely dismissing Israeli links. Operation Kratos, the illegal and never debated or agreed shoot to kill policy originated in Israel.
The BBC themselves asked very similar questions. The Panorama video is still available to stream. I guess that they are allowed to ask questions because they get their money at the point of a gun. They are after all responsible a large percentage of women prisoners, who were too poor to pay the BBC TV tax. Members of the public who ask questions are just nuts and must be attacked.
Well the BBC have continually stamped on their own legitimacy, they have lied for the Government as demonstrated here and by siding with the Government on this one has to question their legitimacy again. If they were prepared to lie on behalf of the police who murdered an innocent civilian on the streets of London, are they prepared to do so again?
The official version of what is supposed to have happened has never been tested at an inquiry. It is therefore nothing more than a conspiracy theory itself. Which makes their show nothing more than a hit piece.
The facts of 7/7 are very much open to question.
It seems that the BBC, who require us to fund them will now happily belittle those who simply want answers to questions. Well that as the Pet Shop Boys say in their homage to Jean Charles makes us all criminals now.
And if you criminalise a whole Country, well no one does have anything to hide any more except of course – the Government. Iran is beginning to discover the consequences of that.PayPal for Android has, at long last, been updated with a killer-feature iUsers have enjoyed since last October: camera-based check scanning and depositing. As a frequent PayPal user, myself, I have to say: this is awesome. Checks are the very bane of my (financial) existence; I mean, who uses checks? Every time I get one of those evil little slips, I scurry down to my local Wells Fargo, wasting precious gasoline and time - assuming it doesn't just sit on my desk for a month, taunting me with its hand-scrawled promise of currency (if you haven't noticed, I'm kind of lazy.)
Yes, I'm poor
While I could wait for Wells Fargo to implement such a feature, I might be waiting a while: their Android app is still just a URL bar-less mobile web page. Unfortunately, not all of our banks are as cool as Chase.
To use the new check capture feature, just open up the PayPal app, hit "Tools", and head over to "Add Money from Checks." You'll need to take a picture of the front of your check, and a picture of the back with your endorsement (signature.) Once you've done that, just enter the amount the check is for, and submit. If your picture-taking skills are up to par, you should get a screen like this:
Now, it's just a matter of waiting for PayPal to process it. They estimate 6 days, but in my experience, PayPal generally beats those estimates every time - they're just playing it safe.
Just two things, there is a daily deposit limit of $1000US, and a monthly deposit limit of $3,000. So don't expect PayPal to replace your bank 100% just yet. Also, the feature is only available in the U.S. You can get the updated version of PayPal on the Market right now (it's a manual update).Yazidis displaced by ISIS violence, in August 2014. (AP Photo/Khalid Mohammed, File)
(CNSNews.com) – Yazidi girls kidnapped by Islamic State of Iraq and Syria jihadists were given the chance to convert to Islam but told if they refused they would automatically become Muslims anyway the moment an ISIS fighter raped them, U.S. lawmakers heard on Wednesday.
During a House Foreign Affairs Committee hearing on ISIS’ war on religious minorities, a representative of a California-based, non-profit organization recounted the testimony of some of the Yazidi girls she met and counseled during recent trips to Iraq.
“In one night [in Sinjar town in northern Iraq] ISIS came and took all these girls,” said Jacqueline Isaac, vice-president of the group Roads of Success.
“And they told them first – they gave them an option. They said, ‘Will you become a Muslim? Will you convert to Islam?’
“And many of them said no,” Isaac continued. “And they told them, ‘You are going to be Muslim regardless, because we are going to sleep with you. And the moment that we do that, once we rape you, you will be Muslim.’”
Foreign Affairs Committee chairman Rep. Ed Royce (R-Calif.) asked whether the kidnapping and sale of women and girls from religious minorities was “an outcome of lawlessness, or is it part of a more deliberate ISIS policy to destroy and to subjugate those who do not share their fanaticism.”
Isaac replied that it was the ISIS philosophy, with regard to Yazidis in particular, not only to torture, but to destroy them. “They want them off the face of this earth.”
Isaac said while the ISIS atrocities had begun with the Yazidis, they would ultimately affect not just Christians but “every woman that doesn’t fit within their philosophy.”
She described the region as a nerve center of a “menace” that needs to be stopped.
“Right now all the crazies from all over the world are coming to this center point, to this nerve center,” she said, adding that the “snake” had to be destroyed at the head.
“Their sex trafficking is systematic and will continue,” Isaac warned. “And it can reach our families if we don’t do something about it.”
Yazidis are ethnic Kurds whose religious practice predates Islam and Christianity and has links to Zoroastrianism. Historically based around Sinjar, the community was an early target of ISIS, along with minority Christians, as the terrorists captured territory across the traditional Christian and Yazidi heartland in the Nineveh plains, last summer.
Hundreds of thousands of people fleeing the ISIS advance sought shelter, many in the nearby Kurdish autonomous region.
In her written testimony, Isaac said she had spent time during her most recent visit last March with people displaced or affected by ISIS violence in Iraq as well as in Egypt.
“It is clear to me that ISIS aims to eliminate all religious minorities in the region,” she said. “ISIS continues to destroy the towns and livelihoods of the ancient Yazidi, Christian and other religious minority communities. The survivors are calling on the world to save their ancient communities from complete destruction.”
She called in particular for more U.S. military and humanitarian support for the autonomous Kurdish region, which she said had become a haven for many fleeing minorities – “a place of equality, religious freedom and most importantly, safety.”
“The Kurdistan Regional Government’s track record proves that the people of Iraqi-Kurdistan are reliable friends to the United States and standard bearers of decency in the region,” Isaac said. “They have acted with humanity and bravery to protect innocent civilians fleeing from terror – regardless of race, creed or religion.”
Isaac conceded that the U.S. could not do everything, everywhere, but argued that defeating ISIS, “both as an idea and as a military movement” was a U.S. national security interest, while preserving human life and property was “commensurate with our highest ideals.”amongst other things,
his recent rise to fame, the money and guilt that came with it, and his love for Suze Rotolo. The letter was published in the magazine's next issue.
A LETTER FROM BOB DYLAN
for sis and gordon an all broads of good sizes
let me begin by not beginnin
let me start not by startin but by continuin
it sometimes gets so hard for me --
I am now famous
I am now famous by the rules of public famiousity
it snuck up on me
an pulverized me...
I never knew what was happenin
it is hard for me t walk down the same streets
I did before the same way because now
I truly dont know
who is waitin for my autograph...
I dont know if I like givin my autograph
oh yes sometimes I do...
but other times the back of my mind tells me
it is not honest... for I am just fulfillin
a myth t somebody who'd actually treasure my
handwritin more'n his own handwritin...
this gets very complicated for me
an proves t me that I am livin in a contradiction...
t quote mr froyd
I get quite paranoyd
an I know this isn't right
it is not a useful healthy attitude for one t have
but I truly believe that everybody has their fears
everybody yes everybody...
I do not think it good anymore t overlook them
I think they ought t be admitted...
an I think that all fellings should be admitted...
people ask why do I write the way I do
how foolish
how monsterish
a question like that hits me...
it makes me think that I'm doin nothin
it makes me think that I'm not being heard
yes above all the mumble jumble an rave praises
an all the records I've sold... thru all the packed
houses I play... thru all the communication systems
an rants an bellows an yellin an clappin comes
a statement like "why do you do what you do"
what is this?
some kind of constipated idiot world?
some kind of horseshoe game we're all playin
responding only when a ringer clangs
no no no
not my world
everybody plays in my world
aint nobody first second third or fourth
everybody shoots at the same time
an ringers dont count
an everybody wins
an nobody loses
cause everybody lives an breathes
an takes up space
an cant be overlooked
an I am a people too
I cannot pretend I'm not
an I feel guilty
god how can I help not feel guilty
I walk down on the bowery and give money away
an still I feel guilty for I know I do not
have enuff money t give away...
an people say "think a yourself, dylan, you're
gonna need it someday" and I say yeah yeah
an I think maybe about it for a split second
but then the floods of vomit guilt swoop my
drunken head an I spread forth more gut torn
bloody money from the depths of my forsaken
pockets... an I whisper "ah it's so useless"
man so many people need so many things
an what am I anyway? some kind a messiah walkin
around...?
hell no I'm not
an I ask why dont other people with things give
some of it away
an I know the answer without lookin
security security security...
everybody wants security
they want t be secure
they want t be protected
an I say protected?
protected aginst what?
protected against starvin I guess
an power too
an protected against the forces that they know will
get them if they lose their money.
an why does it have t be like that?
man why are these walls built?
who is this god that is so feared?
certainly not in my life this isnt
yes I have my fears but mine are the fears of
the mind. the fears of the head
a lonely person with money is still a lonely person
I have never had much money before
an so it is easy for me I guess t spend it
an overlook it
but I'm sure that many other people could overlook
some of theirs too
I'm not speakin now of the century ridin millionares
but rather of "get theirs and get out" people
I dont understand them
I dont understand them at all
there's many things I admit I dont understand
I dont understand the blacklist
I dont understand how people aginst it go along
with it
I'm talkin about the full thing
not just a few of us refusin t be on the show
I'm talkin about the poeple that stand up
against it violently an then in some way have something t do with it...
not just the singers mind you
but the managers an agents an buyers an sellers...
they are the dishonest ones
for they are never seen
they play both sides against each other
an expect t be repected by everybody
the heroes of this battle are not me an Joan
an the Kingston Trio nor Peter Paul an Mary
for none of us need t go on that show
none of us really need that kind of dumbness
but there's some that could use it
for they could use the money
I mean people like Tom Paxton, Barbara Dane,
an Johnny Herald... they are the heroes if
such a word has t be used here
they are the ones that lose materialistically
ah yes but in their own minds they dont
an that is much more important
it means much more
we need more kind a people like that
poeple that cant go against their conscience
no matter what they might gain
an I've come to think that that might be the most
important thing in the whole wide world...
not going against your conscience
nor your own natural senses
for I think that that is all the truth there
is... an no more
thru all the gossip, lies, religions, cults
myths, gods, history books, social books,
all books, politics, decrees, rules, laws,
boundarie lines, bibles, legends, an bathroom
writings, there is no guidance at all except
from ones own natural senses
from being born
an it can only be exchanged
it cant be preached
nor sold
nor even understood...
my mind sometimes runs like a roll of toilet paper
an I hate like hell t see it unravel an unwind
at my empty walls
I'm movin out a here soon
yes the landlord has beaten me it hurts t tell you.
this place I am typin in is so filthy
my clothes cover the floor an once in a while
I pick up somethin an use it for a blanket...
the damn heat goes off at ten
an dont come on til ten...
that's mornin wise
gushes of warm smelly heat always wake me up
when I sleep here
the plaster falls constantly
an the floor is tiltin an rottin
but somehow there is a beauty to it
columbia records gave me a record player
of the goodness of some keeps on amazin me
an sometimes I play it.
gettin back t the landlord tho
he is really too much
he owns I guess three buildings
I pay him way too high
an I'm gettin screwed an I know it
an he knows it
but I just dont have the time t go down t the
rent control board. I been told they'd get after
him but I'm so lazy. when sue was here he was
gonna jack up the price cause he said I never told
him I had a wife. you really got t see this place
t believe it. I ought a've jacked him up a long
time ago an used him for heat. last year he put
in a new window (there was a god damn hole in the
other one) man it was like I asked'm for his blood relation
or something. (which he'd probably give away)
anyway the record player's on now
an I'm listenin t Pete sing Guantanamera for
the billionth time. I dont have many folk music
records (I dont have many records really) but
I do have that one of Pete's.
god it's like I go in a trance
he is so human I could cry
he tells me so much
he makes me feel so good
it's as tho of all the things that're sold t make
one feel better, aint none of it worth while.
all the cars, an clothes, an trinkets an foods,
an jewels an diamonds an lollypops an gifts of
glad tidings, just dont do nothin for the soul.
I believe I'd rather listen t Pete sing Guantanamera than t
own everything there is t own...
(that's my own private selfishness shinin thru there)
yes for me he is truly a saint
an I love him
perhaps more than I could show
(as always is the case ha)
I think of love in weird terms.
sometimes I even feel guilty about it
because I know I love sue
but I should love everybody like I love sue
an in all honesty I dont
I just love her that way
an I say what way?
an a voice says "that way"
an I get quite up tite
an I know I have a long way t go
when the day comes when I can love everything
that breathes the way I love sue then
I will truly be a Jesus Christ ha ha
(but I dont wanna be a Jesus Christ ha ha)
an so I am again contradictin myself
away away be gone all you demons
an just let me be me
human me
ruthless me
wild me
gentle me
all kinds of me
saw the last issue of broadside
an especially flipped out over
"talkin Merry Christmas"
I have never met Paul Wolfe but I'd like to
he has an uncanny sense of touch
as for Phil, I just cant keep up with him
an he's gettin better an better an better
(spoke with someone who was with him in Hazzard
named Hamish Sinclair.. an englishman
of high virtues an common tongue)
I want t get over an see Phil's baby
I'm told the girl came out yellin about
the bomb. good girl
my novel is going noplace
absolutely noplace
like it dont even tell a story
it's about a million scenes long
an takes place on a billion scraps
of paper... certainly I cant make nothin out of
it.
(oh I forgot.
hallelullah t you for puttin Brecht in your
same last issue. he should be as widely known as
Woody an should be as widely read as Mickey Spalline
an as widely listened to as Eisenhower.)
anyway I'm writin a play out of this here so called
novel (navel would be better I guess)
an I'm up to my belly button in it.
quite involved yes
I've discovered what the power of playwriting means
as opposed t song writing means
altho both are equal, I'm wrapped in playwriting
for the minute, my songs tell only about me an how
I feel but in the play all the characters tell how
they feel. I realize that his might be more confusin
for some but in the total reality of things it might
be much better for some too. I think at best you could
say that the characters will tell in an hour
what would take me, alone, two weeks t sing about
I shall get up t see you one of these days
just cause I haven't in a while please dont think
I'm not with you. I am with you more'n ever.
yours perhaps is the only paper that I am on the
side of every single song you print
an I am with with with you
my nite is closin again now
an I shall drift off in dreams
an climb velvet carpets up t the stars
with newsweek magazines burnin an disappointin
people smoulderin and disgustin tongues blazin
an jealous mongrel dogs walkin on hot coals
before my smilin unharmful eyes
(oh such nitemares)
an I shall wake in the mornin an try t start
lovin again
I got a letter from Pete an he closed by sayin
"take it easy but take it" I thought about that
for an hour or more when I reached my conclusion
of what it really meant I either cried or laughed
(I cant remember which) I will repeat the same an
add "give it easy but give it" an I'll think about
that for an hour an at the end either cry or laugh
(I'll write you another letter an tell you which
one it is)
all right then
faretheewell
shaloom an vamoose
I'm off agian
off t the hazzards an lost angels an minneapoilcemen
an boss towns an burnin hams an everything else
combined an combustioned for me...
tryin t remain sane at all times
love t agnes
she is one of the true talents of the universe
I've always thought that an would like t see her
again some time
love t everybody in your house
see yuh
softly an sleepy
but ready an waitin
Bob Dylan
Early-January of 1964, at which point his third studio album was soon-to-be released, 22-year-old Bob Dylan wrote the following letter to Sis Cunningham and Gordon Friesen — both founding editors of Broadside, a highly influential underground magazine of the period — and spoke of,Below is an image of its first page, followed by a full transcript; the original signed letter can be seen its entirety, hereBrussels is preparing to crack down on accountants and lawyers running tax |
settled on reserves in southern Alberta.
This began a period of great struggle and economic hardship; the Niitsitapi had to try to adapt to a completely new way of life. They suffered a high rate of fatalities when exposed to Eurasian diseases, for which they had no natural immunity.
Eventually, they established a viable economy based on farming, ranching, and light industry. Their population has increased to about 16,000 in Canada and 15,000 in the U.S. today. With their new economic stability, the Niitsitapi have been free to adapt their culture and traditions to their new circumstances, renewing their connection to their ancient roots.
Early history
The Niitsitapi, also known as the Blackfoot or Blackfeet Indians, reside in the Great Plains of Montana and the Canadian provinces of Alberta and Saskatchewan.[9] Only one of the Niitsitapi tribes are called Blackfoot or Siksika. The name is said to have come from the color of the peoples' moccasins, made of leather. They had typically dyed or painted the soles of their moccasins black. One legendary story claimed that the Siksika walked through ashes of prairie fires, which in turn colored the bottoms of their moccasins black.[9]
Kainai (Blood) women with travois.
Due to language and cultural patterns, anthropologists believe the Niitsitapi did not originate in the Great Plains of the Midwest North America, but migrated from the upper Northeastern part of the country. They coalesced as a group while living in the forests of what is now the Northeastern United States. They were mostly located around the modern-day border between Canada and the state of Maine. By 1200, the Niitsitapi were moving in search of more land.[citation needed] They moved west and settled for a while north of the Great Lakes in present-day Canada, but had to compete for resources with existing tribes. They left the Great Lakes area and kept moving west.[10]
When they moved, they usually packed their belongings on an A-shaped sled called a travois. The travois was designed for transport over dry land.[11] The Blackfoot had relied on dogs to pull the travois; they did not acquire horses until the 18th century. From the Great Lakes area, they continued to move west and eventually settled in the Great Plains.
The Plains had covered approximately 780,000 square miles (2,000,000 km2) with the Saskatchewan River to the north, the Rio Grande to the south, the Mississippi River to the east, and the Rocky Mountains to the west.[12] Adopting the use of the horse, the Niitsitapi established themselves as one of the most powerful Indian tribes on the Plains in the late 18th century, earning themselves the name "The Lords of the Plains."[13] Niitsitapi stories trace their residence and possession of their plains territory to "time immemorial."
Importance and uses of bison
Bison hunters with wolf skin disguises.
Depiction of Bison being driven over a "buffalo jump".
The Niitsitapi main source of food on the plains was the American bison (buffalo), the largest mammal in North America, standing about 6 1⁄ 2 feet (2.0 m) tall and weighing up to 2,000 pounds (910 kg).[14] Before the introduction of horses, the Niitsitapi needed other ways to get in range. The buffalo jump was one of the most common ways. The hunters would round up the buffalo into V-shaped pens, and drive them over a cliff (they hunted pronghorn antelopes in the same way). Afterwords the hunters would go to the bottom and take as much meat as they could carry back to camp. They also used camouflage for hunting.[14] The hunters would take buffalo skins from previous hunting trips and drape them over their bodies to blend in and mask their scent. By subtle moves, the hunters could get close to the herd. When close enough, the hunters would attack with arrows or spears to kill wounded animals.
The people used virtually all parts of the body and skin. The women prepared the meat for food: by boiling, roasting or drying for jerky. This processed it to last a long time without spoiling, and they depended on bison meat to get through the winters.[15] The winters were long, harsh, and cold due to the lack of trees in the Plains, so people stockpiled meat in summer.[16] As a ritual, hunters often ate the bison heart minutes after the kill. The women tanned and prepared the skins to cover the tepees. These were made of log poles, with the skins draped over it. The tepee remained warm in the winter and cool in the summer, and was a great shield against the wind.[17]
The women also made clothing from the skins, such as robes and moccasins, and made soap from the fat. Both men and women made utensils, sewing needles and tools from the bones, using tendon for fastening and binding. The stomach and bladder were cleaned and prepared for use for storing liquids. Dried bison dung was fuel for the fires. The Niitsitapi considered the animal sacred and integral to their lives.[18]
Discovery and uses of horses
Mounted Blackfoot warrior on horse painted from life by Karl Bodmer
Up until around 1730, the Blackfoot traveled by foot and used dogs to carry and pull some of their goods. They had not seen horses in their previous lands, but were introduced to them on the Plains, as other tribes, such as the Shoshone, had already adopted their use.[19] They saw the advantages of horses and wanted some. The Blackfoot called the horses ponokamita (elk dogs).[20] The horses could carry much more weight than dogs and moved at a greater speed. They could be ridden for hunting and travel.[21]
Horses revolutionised life on the Great Plains and soon came to be regarded as a measure of wealth. Warriors regularly raided other tribes for their best horses. Horses were generally used as universal standards of barter. Medicine men were paid for cures and healing with horses. Those who designed shields or war bonnets were also paid in horses.[22] The men gave horses to those who were owed gifts as well as to the needy. An individual's wealth rose with the number of horses accumulated, but a man did not keep an abundance of them. The individual's prestige and status was judged by the number of horses that he could give away. For the Indians who lived on the Plains, the principal value of property was to share it with others.[23]
Blackfoot warriors at Fort MacLeod, 1907
After having driven the hostile Shoshone and Arapaho from the Northwestern Plains, the Niitsitapi began in 1800 a long phase of keen competition in the fur trade with their former Cree allies, which often escalated militarily. In addition both groups had adapted to using horses about 1730, so by mid-century an adequate supply of horses became a question of survival. Horse theft was at this stage not only a proof of courage, but often a desperate contribution to survival, for many ethnic groups competed for hunting in the grasslands.
The Cree and Assiniboine continued horse raiding against the Gros Ventre (in Cree: Pawistiko Iyiniwak – "Rapids People" – "People of the Rapids"), allies of the Niitsitapi. The Gros Ventres were also known as Niya Wati Inew, Naywattamee ("They Live in Holes People"), because their tribal lands were along the Saskatchewan River Forks (the confluence of North and South Saskatchewan River). They had to withstand attacks of enemies with guns. In retaliation for Hudson's Bay Company (HBC) supplying their enemies with weapons, the Gros Ventre attacked and burned in 1793 South Branch House of the HBC on the South Saskatchewan River near the present village of St. Louis, Saskatchewan. Then, the tribe moved southward to the Milk River in Montana and allied themselves with the Blackfoot. The area between the North Saskatchewan River and Battle River (the name derives from the war fought between these two tribal groups) was the limit of the now warring tribal alliances.[24]
Enemies and warrior culture
When Blackfoot and Sioux Meet by western artist by western artist Charles Marion Russell
The Death of Omoxesisixany or Big Snake by by Paul Kane, depicting a battle between a Blackfoot and Plains Cree warrior on horseback.
Blackfoot war parties would ride hundreds of miles on raids. A boy on his first war party was given a silly or derogatory name. But after he had stolen his first horse or killed an enemy, he was given a name to honor him. Warriors would strive to perform various acts of bravery called counting coup, in order to move up in social rank. The coups in order of importance were: taking a gun from a living enemy and or touching him directly; capturing lances, and bows; scalping an enemy; killing an enemy; freeing a tied horse from in front of an enemy lodge; leading a war party; scouting for a war party; stealing headdresses, shields, pipes (sacred ceremonial pipes); and driving a herd of stolen horses back to camp.[25]
The Niitsitapi were enemies of the Crow, Cheyenne (kiihtsipimiitapi – ″Pinto People″), and Sioux (Dakota, Lakota, and Nakota) (called pinaapisinaa – "East Cree") on the Great Plains; and the Shoshone, Flathead, Kalispel, Kootenai (called kotonáá'wa) and Nez Perce (called komonóítapiikoan) in the mountain country to their west and southwest. Their most mighty and most dangerous enemy, however, were the political/military/trading alliance of the Iron Confederacy or Nehiyaw-Pwat (in Plains Cree: Nehiyaw – 'Cree' and Pwat or Pwat-sak – 'Sioux, i.e. Assiniboine') – named after the dominating Plains Cree (called Asinaa) and Assiniboine (called Niitsísinaa – "Original Cree"). These included the Stoney (called Saahsáísso'kitaki or Sahsi-sokitaki – ″Sarcee trying to cut″),[26] Saulteaux (or Plains Ojibwe), and Métis to the north, east and southeast.
With the expansion of the Nehiyaw-Pwat to the north, west and southwest, they integrated larger groups of Iroquois, Chipewyan, Danezaa (Dunneza – 'The real (prototypical) people'),[27] Ktunaxa, Flathead, and later Gros Ventre (called atsíína – "Gut People" or "like a Cree"), in their local groups. Loosely allied with the Nehiyaw-Pwat, but politically independent, were neighboring tribes like the Ktunaxa, Secwepemc and in particular the arch enemy of the Blackfoot, the Crow, or Indian trading partners like the Nez Perce and Flathead.[28]
The Shoshone acquired horses much sooner than the Blackfoot and soon occupied much of present-day Alberta, most of Montana, and parts of Wyoming, and raided the Blackfoot frequently. Once the Piegan gained access to horses of their own and guns, obtained from the HBC via the Cree and Assiniboine, the situation changed. By 1787 David Thompson reports that the Blackfoot had completely conquered most of Shoshone territory, and frequently captured Shoshone women and children and forcibly assimilated them into Blackfoot society, further increasing their advantages over the Shoshone. Thompson reports that Blackfoot territory in 1787 was from the North Saskatchewan River in the north to the Missouri River in the South, and from Rocky Mountains in the west out to a distance of 300 miles (480 km) to the east.[29]
Between 1790 and 1850, the Nehiyaw-Pwat were at the height of their power; they could successfully defend their territories against the Sioux (Lakota, Nakota and Dakota) and the Niitsitapi Confederacy. During the so-called Buffalo Wars (about 1850 – 1870), they penetrated further and further into the territory from the Niitsitapi Confederacy in search for the buffalo, so that the Piegan were forced to give way in the region of the Missouri River (in Cree: Pikano Sipi – "Muddy River", "Muddy, turbid River"), the Kainai withdrew to the Bow River and Belly River; only the Siksika could hold their tribal lands along the Red Deer River. Around 1870, the alliance between the Blackfoot and the Gros Ventre broke, and the latter began to look to their former enemies, the Southern Assiniboine (or Plains Assiniboine), for protection.
Six Blackfeet chiefs painted by Paul Kane along the South Saskatchewan River in Canada ( c.1851-1856).
Anthony Henday of the Hudson's Bay Company (HBC) met a large Blackfoot group in 1754 in what is now Alberta. The Blackfoot had established dealings with traders connected to the Canadian and English fur trade before meeting the Lewis and Clark expedition in 1806.[30] Lewis and Clark and their men had embarked on mapping the Louisiana Territory and upper Missouri River for the United States government.
On their return trip from the Pacific Coast, Lewis and three of his men encountered a group of young Blackfoot warriors with a large herd of horses, and it was clear to Meriwether Lewis that they were not far from much larger groups of warriors. Lewis explained to them that the United States government wanted peace with all Indian nations,[31] and that the US leaders had successfully formed alliances with other Indian nations.[30] The group camped together that night, and at dawn there was a scuffle as it was discovered that the Blackfoot were trying to steal guns and run off with their horses while the Americans slept. In the ensuing struggle, one warrior was fatally stabbed and another shot by Lewis and presumed killed.[32]
In subsequent years, American mountain men trapping in Blackfoot country generally encountered hostility. When John Colter, a member of the Lewis and Clark expedition, returned to Blackfoot country soon after, he barely escaped with his life. In 1809, Colter and his companion were trapping on the Jefferson River by canoe when they were surrounded by hundreds of Blackfoot warriors on horseback on both sides of the river bank. Colter's companion, John Potts, did not surrender and was killed. Colter was stripped of his clothes and forced to run for his life, after being given a head start (famously known in the annals of the West as "Colter's Run.") He eventually escaped by reaching a river five miles away and diving under either an island of driftwood or a beaver dam, where he remained concealed until after nightfall. He trekked another 300 miles to a fort.[33][34]
In the context of shifting tribal politics due to the spread of horses and guns, the Niitsitapi initially tried to increase their trade with the HBC traders in Rupert's Land whilst blocking access to the HBC by neighboring peoples to the West. But the HBC trade eventually reached into what is now inland British Columbia.
By the late 1820s, [this prompted] the Niitsitapiksi, and in particular the Piikani, whose territory was rich in beaver, [to] temporarily put aside cultural prohibitions and environmental constraints to trap enormous numbers of these animals and, in turn, receive greater quantities of trade items.[35]
Mehkskeme-Sukahs, Blackfoot chief (c. 1840)., Blackfoot chief (c. 1840).
The HBC encouraged Niitsitapiksi to trade by setting up posts on the North Saskatchewan River, on the northern boundary of their territory. In the 1830s the Rocky Mountain region and the wider Saskatchewan District were the HBC's most profitable, and Rocky Mountain House was the HBC's busiest post. It was primarily used by the Piikani. Other Niitsitapiksi nations traded more in pemmican and buffalo skins than beaver, and visited other posts such as Fort Edmonton.[36]
Meanwhile, in 1822 the American Fur Company entered the Upper Missouri region from the south for the first time, without Niitsitapiksi permission. This led to tensions and conflict until 1830, when peaceful trade was established. This was followed by the opening of Fort Piegan as the first American trading post in Niitsitapi territory in 1831, joined by Fort MacKenzie in 1833. The Americans offered better terms of trade and were more interested in buffalo skins than the HBC, which brought them more trade from the Niitsitapi. The HBC responded by building Bow Fort (Peigan Post) on the Bow River in 1832, but it was not a success.[37]
In 1833, German explorer Prince Maximilian of Wied-Neuwied and Swiss painter Karl Bodmer spent months with the Niitsitapi to get a sense of their culture. Bodmer portrayed their society in paintings and drawings.[32]
Contact with the Europeans caused a spread of infectious diseases to the Niitsitapi, mostly cholera and smallpox.[38] In one instance in 1837, an American Fur Company steamboat, the St. Peter's, was headed to Fort Union and several passengers contracted smallpox on the way. They continued to send a smaller vessel with supplies farther up the river to posts among the Niitsitapi. The Niitsitapi contracted the disease and eventually 6,000 died, marking an end to their dominance among tribes over the Plains. The Hudson's Bay Company did not require or help their employees get vaccinated; the English doctor Edward Jenner had developed a technique 41 years before but its use was not yet widespread.[39]
Indian Wars
Single-Handed, Charles Marion Russell 1912. The painting shows a North-West Mounted Police officer attempting to arrest a defiant warrior at a Blood camp, probably in Alberta or Saskatchewan.
Winnipeg Jack), a Blackfoot scout and interpreter for the NWMP. Dog Child (), a Blackfoot scout and interpreter for the NWMP.
Like many other Great Plains Indian nations, the Niitsitapi often had hostile relationships with white settlers. Despite the hostilities, the Blackfoot stayed largely out of the Great Plains Indian Wars, neither fighting against nor scouting for the United States army. One of their friendly bands, however, was attacked by mistake and nearly destroyed by the US Army in the Marias Massacre on January 23, 1870, undertaken as an action to suppress violence against settlers. A friendly relationship with the North-West Mounted Police and learning of the brutality of the Marias Massacre discouraged the Blackfoot from engaging in wars against Canada and the United States.
When the Lakota, together with their Cheyenne and Arapaho allies, were fighting the United States Army, they sent runners into Blackfoot territory, urging them to join the fight. Crowfoot, one of the most influential Blackfoot chiefs, dismissed the Lakota messengers. He threatened to ally with the NWMP to fight them if they came north into Blackfoot country again. News of Crowfoot's loyalty reached Ottawa and from there London; Queen Victoria praised Crowfoot and the Blackfoot for their loyalty.[40] Despite his threats, Crowfoot later met those Lakota who had fled with Sitting Bull into Canada after defeating George Armstrong Custer and his battalion at the Battle of Little Big Horn. Crowfoot considered the Lakota then to be refugees and was sympathetic to their strife, but retained his anti-war stance. Sitting Bull and Crowfoot fostered peace between the two nations by a ceremonial offering of tobacco, ending hostilities between them. Sitting Bull was so impressed by Crowfoot that he named one of his sons after him.[41]
The Blackfoot also chose to stay out of the Northwest Rebellion, led by the famous Métis leader Louis Riel. Louis Riel and his men added to the already unsettled conditions facing the Blackfoot by camping near them. They tried to spread discontent with the government and gain a powerful ally. The Northwest Rebellion was made up mostly of Métis, Assiniboine (Nakota) and Plains Cree, who all fought against European encroachment and destruction of Bison herds. The Plains Cree were one of the Blackfoot's most hated enemies; however, the two nations made peace when Crowfoot adopted Poundmaker, an influential Cree chief and great peacemaker, as his son. Although he refused to fight, Crowfoot had sympathy for those with the rebellion, especially the Cree led by such notable chiefs as Poundmaker, Big Bear, Wandering Spirit and Fine-Day.[42]
When news of continued Blackfoot neutrality reached Ottawa, Lord Lansdowne, the governor general, expressed his thanks to Crowfoot again on behalf of the Queen back in London. The cabinet of Sir John A. Macdonald (the current Prime Minister of Canada at the time) gave Crowfoot a round of applause.[42]
Hardships of the Niitsitapi
During the mid-1800s, the Niitsitapi faced a dwindling food supply, as European-American hunters were hired by the U.S government to kill bison so the Blackfeet would remain in their reservation. Settlers were also encroaching on their territory. Without the buffalo, the Niitsitapi were forced to depend on the United States government for food supplies.[43] In 1855, the Niitsitapi chief Lame Bull made a peace treaty with the United States government. The Lame Bull Treaty promised the Niitsitapi $20,000 annually in goods and services in exchange for their moving onto a reservation.[44]
In 1860, very few buffalo were left, and the Niitsitapi became completely dependent on government supplies. Often the food was spoiled by the time they received it, or supplies failed to arrive at all. Hungry and desperate, Blackfoot raided white settlements for food and supplies, and outlaws on both sides stirred up trouble.
Events were catalyzed by Owl Child, a young Piegan warrior who stole a herd of horses in 1867 from an American trader named Malcolm Clarke. Clarke retaliated by tracking Owl Child down and severely beating him in full view of Owl Child's camp, and humiliating him. According to Piegan oral history, Clarke had also raped Owl Child's wife. But, Clarke was long married to Coth-co-co-na, a Piegan woman who was Owl Child's cousin.[45] The raped woman gave birth to a child as a result of the rape, which oral history said was stillborn or killed by band elders.[46] Two years after the beating, in 1869 Owl Child and some associates killed Clarke at his ranch after dinner, and severely wounded his son Horace. Public outcry from news of the event led to General Philip Sheridan to dispatch a band of cavalry, led by Major Eugene Baker, to find Owl Child and his camp and punish them.
Colorized photograph of chief Mountain Chief.
On January 23, 1870, a camp of Piegan Indians were spotted by army scouts and reported to the dispatched cavalry, but it was mistakenly identified as a hostile band. Around 200 soldiers surrounded the camp the following morning and prepared for an ambush. Before the command to fire, the chief Heavy Runner was alerted to soldiers on the snowy bluffs above the encampment. He walked toward them, carrying his safe-conduct paper. Heavy Runner and his band of Piegans shared peace between American settlers and troops at the time of the event. Heavy Runner was shot and killed by army scout Joe Cobell, whose wife was part of the camp of the hostile Mountain Chief, further along the river, from whom he wanted to divert attention. Fellow scout Joe Kipp had realized the error and tried to signal the troops. He was threatened by the cavalry for reporting that the people they attacked were friendly.[47]
Following the death of Heavy Runner, the soldiers attacked the camp. According to their count, they killed 173 Piegan and suffered just one U.S Army soldier casualty, who fell off his horse and broke his leg, dying of complications. Most of the victims were women, children and the elderly, as most of the younger men were out hunting. The Army took 140 Piegan prisoner and then released them. With their camp and belongings destroyed, they suffered terribly from exposure, making their way as refugees to Fort Benton.
The greatest slaughter of Indians ever made by U.S. Troops Lieutenant Gus Doane, commander of F Company
As reports of the massacre gradually were learned in the east, members of the United States congress and press were outraged. General William Sherman reported that most of the killed were warriors under Mountain Chief. An official investigation never occurred, and no official monument marks the spot of the massacre. Compared to events such as the massacres at Wounded Knee and Sand Creek, the Marias Massacre remains largely unknown. But, it confirmed President Ulysses S. Grant in his decision not to allow the Army to take over the Bureau of Indian Affairs, as it had been suggesting to combat corruption among Indian agents. Grant chose to appoint numerous Quakers to those positions as he pursued a peace policy with Native Americans.
The Cree and Assiniboine also suffered from the dwindling herds of the buffalo. By 1850 herds were found almost exclusively on the territory of the Blackfoot. Therefore, in 1870 various Nehiyaw-Pwat bands began a final effort to get hold of their prey, by beginning a war. They hoped to defeat the Blackfoot weakened by smallpox and attacked a camp near Fort Whoop-Up (called Akaisakoyi – "Many Dead"). But they were defeated in the so-called Battle of the Belly River (near Lethbridge, called Assini-etomochi – "where we slaughtered the Cree") and lost over 300 warriors. The next winter the hunger compelled them to negotiate with the Niitsitapi, with whom they made a final lasting peace.
The United States passed laws that adversely affected the Niitsitapi. In 1874, the US Congress voted to change the Niitsitapi reservation borders without discussing it with the Niitsitapi. They received no other land or compensation for the land lost, and in response, the Kainai, Siksika, and Piegan moved to Canada; only the Pikuni remained in Montana.[48]
The winter of 1883–1884 became known as "Starvation Winter" because no government supplies came in, and the buffalo were gone. That winter, 600 Niitsitapi died of hunger.[49]
In efforts to assimilate the Native Americans to European-American ways, in 1898, the government dismantled tribal governments and outlawed the practice of traditional Indian religions. They required Blackfoot children to go to boarding schools, where they were forbidden to speak their native language, practise customs, or wear traditional clothing.[50] In 1907, the United States government adopted a policy of allotment of reservation land to individual heads of families to encourage family farming and break up the communal tribal lands. Each household received a 160-acre (65 ha) farm, and the government declared the remainder "surplus" to the tribe's needs. It put it up for sale for development.[50] The allotments were too small to support farming on the arid plains. A 1919 drought destroyed crops and increased the cost of beef. Many Indians were forced to sell their allotted land and pay taxes which the government said they owed.[51]
In 1934 the Indian Reorganization Act, passed by the Franklin D. Roosevelt administration, ended allotments and allowed the tribes to choose their own government. They were also allowed to practise their cultures.[51] In 1935, the Blackfeet Nation of Montana began a Tribal Business Council. After that, they wrote and passed their own Constitution, with an elected representative government.[52]
The Blackfoot nation is made up of four nations. These nations include the Piegan Blackfeet, Siksika, Piikani Nation, and Kainai or Blood Indians.[19] The four nations come together to make up what is known as the Blackfoot Confederacy, meaning that they have banded together to help one another. The nations have their own separate governments ruled by a head chief, but regularly come together for religious and social celebrations. Today the only Blackfoot nation that can still be found within US boundaries is the Piegan, or Pikuni, which reside in Montana.[21]
Culture
Electing a leader
Family was highly valued by the Blackfoot Indians. For traveling, they also split into bands of 20-30 people, but would come together for times of celebration.[53] They valued leadership skills and chose the chiefs who would run their settlements wisely. During times of peace, the people would elect a peace chief, meaning someone who could lead the people and improve relations with other tribes. The title of war chief could not be gained through election and needed to be earned by successfully performing various acts of bravery including touching a living enemy.[54] Blackfoot bands often had minor chiefs in addition to an appointed head chief.
Societies
Scalp dance, Blackfoot Indians, 1907
Within the Blackfoot nation, there were different societies to which people belonged, each of which had functions for the tribe. Young people were invited into societies after proving themselves by recognized passages and rituals. For instance, young men had to perform a vision quest, begun by a spiritual cleansing in a sweat lodge.[55] They went out from the camp alone for four days of fasting and praying. Their main goal was to see a vision that would explain their future. After having the vision, a youth returned to the village ready to join society.
In a warrior society, the men had to be prepared for battle. Again, the warriors would prepare by spiritual cleansing, then paint themselves symbolically; they often painted their horses for war as well. Leaders of the warrior society carried spears or lances called a coup stick, which was decorated with feathers, skin, and other tokens. They won prestige by "counting coup", tapping the enemy with the stick and getting away.
Women of the Blood Nation in battle dress, 1907
Members of the religious society protected sacred Blackfoot items and conducted religious ceremonies. They blessed the warriors before battle. Their major ceremony was the Sun Dance, or Medicine Lodge Ceremony. By engaging in the Sun Dance, their prayers would be carried up to the Creator, who would bless them with well-being and abundance of buffalo.
Women's societies also had important responsibilities for the communal tribe. They designed refined quillwork on clothing and ceremonial shields, helped prepare for battle, prepared skins and cloth to make clothing, cared for the children and taught them tribal ways, skinned and tanned the leathers used for clothing and other purposes, prepared fresh and dried foods, and performed ceremonies to help hunters in their journeys.[56]
Ethnobotany
Blackfoot man with braided sweet grass ropes
Sage and sweet grass are both used by Blackfoot and other Plains tribes for ceremonial purposes and are considered sacred plants. Sage and sweet grass are burned with the user inhaling and covering themselves in the smoke in a process known widely as smudging. Sage is said to rid the body of negative emotions such as anger. Sweet grass is said to draw in positive energy. Both are used for purification purposes. The pleasant and natural odor of the burning grass is said to attract spirits. Sweet grass is prepared for ceremony by braiding the stems together then drying them before burning.
Sweet grass is also often present and burned in pipe-smoking mixtures alongside bearberry and red willow plants. The smoke from the pipe is said to carry the users prayers up to the creator with the rising smoke. Large medicine bags often decorated with ornate beaded designs were used by medicine men to carry sage, sweet grass, and other important plants.[57] Blackfoot also used sweet grass smoke, or sachets of sweet grass in their clothing, as an effective insect repellent.[58]
They apply a poultice of chewed roots Asclepias viridiflora to swellings, to "diarrhea rash", to rashes, to the sore gums of nursing infants[59] and to sore eyes.[60] They also chew the root of Asclepias viridiflora for sore throats,[61] and use the plant to spice soups, and use the fresh roots for food.[62] They make use of Viola adunca, applying an infusion of the roots and leaves to sore and swollen joints,[63] giving an infusion of the leaves and roots to asthmatic children,[64] and using the plant to dye their arrows blue.[65]
Marriage
In the Blackfoot culture, men were responsible for choosing their marriage partners, but women had the choice to accept them or not. The male had to show the woman's father his skills as a hunter or warrior. If the father was impressed and approved of the marriage, the man and woman would exchange gifts of horses and clothing and were considered married. The married couple would reside in their own tipi or with the husband's family. Although the man was permitted more than one wife, typically he only chose one. In cases of more than one wife, quite often the male would choose a sister of the wife, believing that sisters would not argue as much as total strangers.[66]
Responsibilities and clothing
In a typical Blackfoot family, the father would go out and hunt and bring back supplies that the family might need. The mother would stay close to home and watch over the children while the father was out. The children were taught basic survival skills and culture as they grew up. It was generally said that both boys and girls learned to ride horses early. Boys would usually play with toy bows and arrows until they were old enough to learn how to hunt.[54]
They would also play a popular game called shinny, which later became known as ice hockey. They used a long curved wooden stick to knock a ball, made of baked clay covered with buckskin, over a goal line. Girls were given a doll to play with, which also doubled as a learning tool because it was fashioned with typical tribal clothing and designs and also taught the young women how to care for a child.[67] As they grew older, more responsibilities were placed upon their shoulders. The girls were then taught to cook, prepare hides for leather, and gather wild plants and berries. The boys were held accountable for going out with their father to prepare food by means of hunting.[68]
Typically clothing was made primarily of softened and tanned antelope and deer hides. The women would make and decorate the clothes for everyone in the tribe. Men wore moccasins, long leggings that went up to their hips, a loincloth, and a belt. Occasionally they would wear shirts but generally they would wrap buffalo robes around their shoulders. The distinguished men of bravery would wear a necklace made of grizzly bear claws.[68]
Boys dressed much like the older males, wearing leggings, loincloths, moccasins, and occasionally an undecorated shirt. They kept warm by wearing a buffalo robe over their shoulders or over their heads if it became cold. Women and girls wore dresses made from two or three deerskins. The women wore decorative earrings and bracelets made from sea shells, obtained through trade with distant tribes, or different types of metal. They would sometimes wear beads in their hair or paint the part in their hair red, which signified that they were old enough to bear children.[68]
Headdresses
Three Piegan Blackfoot men in traditional clothing including straight-up and standard war bonnets.
Headdress Case, Blackfoot (Native American), late 19th century, Blackfoot (Native American), late 19th century, Brooklyn Museum
Similar to other Plains Indians, the Blackfoot developed a variety of different headdresses that incorporated elements of creatures important to them; these served different purposes and symbolized different associations. The typical war bonnet was made from eagle feathers, because the bird was considered powerful. It was worn by prestigious warriors and chiefs (including war-chiefs) of the Blackfoot. The straight-up headdress is a uniquely Blackfoot headdress that, like the war bonnet, is made with eagle feathers. The feathers on the straight-up headdress point directly straight upwards from the rim (hence the name). Often a red plume is attached to the front of the headdress; it also points straight upward.
The split-horn headdress was very popular among Northern Plains Indians, particularly those nations of the Blackfoot Confederacy. Many warrior societies, including the Horn Society of the Blackfoot, wore the split-horn headdress. The split-horn headdress was made from a single bison horn, split in two and reshaped as slimmer versions of a full-sized bison horn, and polished. The horns were attached to a beaded, rimmed felt hat. Furs from weasels (taken when carrying heavy winter coats) were attached to the top of the headdress, and dangled from the sides. The side furs were often finished with bead work where attached to the headdress. A similar headdress, called the antelope horn headdress, was made in a similar fashion using the horn or horns from a pronghorn antelope.
Blackfoot men, particularly warriors, sometimes wore a roach made from porcupine hair. The hairs of the porcupine are most often dyed red. Eagle and other bird feathers were occasionally attached to the roach.
Buffalo scalps, often with horns still attached and often with a beaded rim, were also worn. Fur "turbans" made from soft animal fur (most often otter) were also popular. Buffalo scalps and fur turbans were worn in the winter to protect the head from the cold.
The Blackfoot have continued to wear traditional headdresses at special ceremonies. They are worn mostly by elected chiefs, members of various traditional societies (including the Horn, Crazy Dog and Motokik societies), powwow dancers and spiritual leaders.[69]
Sun and the Moon
One of the most famous traditions held by the Blackfoot is their story of sun and the moon. It starts with a family of a man, wife, and two sons, who live off berries and other food they can gather, as they have no bows and arrows, or other tools. The man had a dream: he was told by the Creator Napi, Napiu, or Napioa (depending on the band) to get a large spider web and put it on the trail where the animals roamed, and they would get caught up and could be easily killed with the stone axe he had. The man had done so and saw that it was true. One day, he came home from bringing in some fresh meat from the trail and discovered his wife to be applying perfume on herself. He thought that she must have another lover since she never did this before. He then |
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1. On the way into Stillwater, Oklahoma along I-35 North, I saw four accidents in an hour, cars discarded by indifferent roads into guardrails and each other. Oklahoma State Troopers attended services for the cars, gingerly motioning for flatbed tow trucks and shaking their heads at the wreckage, the panhandle-shaped state outlined in white on the black doors of their Magnums.
Signs for Continental Resources drilling line the road, reminding Oklahoma that without horizontal drilling, life would be nearly impossible here.
WITHOUT CONTINENTAL RESOURCES YOU WOULD BE EATING SOD
OKLAHOMA: A SUBSIDIARY OF CONTINENTAL RESOURCES
YOU SHOULD PAY US TO BE HERE, REALLY. LOVE, CONTINENTAL RESOURCES
HORIZONTAL DRILLING, BUT ENOUGH ABOUT YOUR MOTHER
That all may be partially true. This is the part of America where ease runs out, where the weather turns mean. Look down from the airplane on the way in, and you will see the giant, skidding path of tornadoes carved into the fields around Moore, Oklahoma, where an EF5 tornado blew up a good chunk of a town in minutes. You can't see the swath the El Reno tornado cut from the plane. That one, also an EF5, from this past June was 2.6 miles wide and had other smaller tornadoes spitting out of it like bubbling lottery balls.
one hand reaching up for warmth, the other holding a beer away from the heat. USA Today Images
2. It is a beautiful place, even with the sky coughing sleet. Pass the giant arrows stuck in the ground at Will Rogers World Airport, then run north though the city and out into the country that hits shockingly fast for anyone accustomed to living in sprawling web-cities like Atlanta or Los Angeles or Dallas. It is rolling, tawny farmsides, the occasional headbanging motion of an oil pump, billboards saying YES! WE HAVE THE COLDEST BEER, and a giant crucifix somewhere between Edmond and Guthrie. Look to the roadside long enough, and in the distance you will see a natural gas vent, an orange flame on the horizon like a stuttering sun.
I followed the sand truck into Stillwater, which was like steering into a soft rain of buckshot for 10 miles.
3. The cowboys huddled in tents pregame, some with tree-like gas warmers posted just outside the tent, one hand reaching up for warmth, the other holding a beer away from the heat. Others put blazing fire pits under the canopies, safety be damned. It was cold.
If the fire pit sparked an ember into the canopy, and the whole damn thing caught fire, the cowboys could pull the flatscreens and beer away from the blaze before it got too far out of hand, then warm their hands by the now-larger and more impressive fire.
The wind blew in the sides of the cloaked tents, turning them into warped cubes humming with footbally TV noises and the murmuring sounds of drinking. Students and alumni walked around with open beers in gloved hands. Some dealt with the warmth by donning full worksuits -- some in Realtree camo, some taken straight off the rack at Walmart -- after putting no fewer than three layers of clothing on first. Others stretched the limits of their goin'-out jeans by putting on long underwear tucked into their boots, but skipping the cowboy hat completely. The wind would have taken them straight off and parked them somewhere in a field just west of Tulsa.
4. On the Strip, just by the corrugated metal sides of the brew-through called The Barn, a dude walked by me with a tall boy in hand. The other three were hanging out off a plastic four-ring he'd tied into his pockets. He looked cold and drunk. The sign on The Barn announced that they had the season's Beaujolais nouveau, and that they also had Lime-A-Ritas waiting and ready.
5. Below a certain temperature, everyone outside the city of Philadelphia makes the conscious choice to be nice to each other. Baylor fans hurried from point to point in the cold unharassed, for the most part. Oklahoma State fans are not there to break either rank or rules. A mob of jaywalkers after the game crossed against the signal when traffic cleared, and an older fan plaintively complained, "NOOOO DON'T CROSS AGAINST THE SIGNAL." A fan next to me said that Boone Pickens Stadium was the only place he had ever been told to cheer less loudly.
Maybe that's a byproduct of the setting, which can be foreboding enough to allow for some free courtesy. The campus of Oklahoma State is the usual mishmash of new and old -- some utilitarian shed-buildings from the '60s, a glass-and-metal research center straight from the Logan's Run school of architecture, the old engineering building topped by two old oil derricks, and an old campus with broad lawns and turn-of-the-century campus buildings topped with dark cupolas. In sunshine it probably looks like any other pleasant college campus; in foreboding, overcast bluster, it has a prairie Something Wicked this Way Comes vibe.
6. The trees opposite the Atherton Hotel are swept back, blown to a perma-lean by the unceasing wind. Someone has filled out the panes of the windows of one old building with messages. The most visible one, spelled out one letter per pane, reads: "ESPN > SI."
USA Today Images
7. Boone Pickens Stadium has T. Boone Pickens' name on it no fewer than four times in 10-foot high lettering, lit from behind with a soft orange glow. It is the biggest and most visible building in Stillwater, a blocked-in horseshoe with jack-o-lantern lighting topped with a ring of luxury suites that hum with warmth and probably expensive brown liquor. It's being poured to people not sitting on cold, aluminum bleachers.
T. Boone could be somewhere up there, watching the beast he's fed from a wee pup into its burgeoning, snarling maturity. Pickens is largely responsible for taking the erector set of Lewis Field and morphing it into this, the place that will get so loud No. 4 Baylor can't make simple line calls on the field. He's also responsible for the JumboTron that plays Kurt Russell's snarling "Hell's comin' with me!" speech from Tombstone. He played a large part in making Mike Gundy the head coach. Oklahoma State stayed in the Big 12 when the conference was at risk of imploding and scattering to the winds. Assuming Pickens had nothing to do with that would be ignoring the basic realities of the program and the four huge, identical names ringing the stadium.
Pickens is also not sitting in the stands on this Saturday night, losing all feeling in his lower body and regretting, every time the wind picks up a gear or two, the choice to not wear a second pair of long underwear. Pickens might be a lot of things, but he is definitely a.) the most influential and visible donor to any major program in college football outside of Phil Knight at Oregon, and b.) smarter than you, since he built a stadium and can sit where he pleases, such as inside where it's warm and they have booze.
8. Baylor will not win this football game with No. 10 Oklahoma State. Baylor has not won a football game in Stillwater since 1939. They will walk off the field at Boone Pickens Stadium a numb, bedraggled mess standing behind a 49-17 margin. They will be savaged by 370 yards passing from the suddenly brilliant Clint Chelf and the mean work of a defense all too happy to let Baylor hand the ball over and to stand in the middle of Baylor's perpetually open passing lanes.
And let's talk about how a team comes completely off the rails somewhere between Oklahoma City and Tulsa. You do it one stuttering wheel at a time until the entire train flips over and catches fire. You do it when Bryce Petty, with zero tacklers in the vicinity, trips over an invisible marmot on the one-yard line.
You do it when, on the next play, Shock Linwood, Baylor's third-string running back playing due to injuries, reaches toward the goal line and hands the ball to the flummoxed-but-pleased Cowboys defense.
You pull another wheel off the rails when a rattled Petty, pressured by three- and four-man fronts all night, can't hit on simple passes he has completed with ease all year. You continue the derailment when your defense can't stop Oklahoma State's receivers in double coverage, much less single coverage, and when the last real hiccup of a comeback attempt dies on a horrendous shotgun snap that soars over Petty's head like a wounded grouse.
That's how it happens, one wheel at a time.
9. That's too passive, though. You can't really imply that something just happened to Baylor. It was done, committed, ripped out of their hands and literally taken at every turn by Oklahoma State.
The Cowboys were playing with naked aggression in freezing temperatures and doing everything Baylor was supposed to have been able to do. They were the ones baffling defenders with play-fakes out of a glorified wishbone and heaving throw-backs to the quarterback. They were the ones who spread the field. They then countered heavy up the middle with Kye Staley, 236 pounds of glorious, ripped rumble-up-the-middle who scored on the most important sequence of the game: the turnaround 99-yard trample by the Oklahoma State offense.
There was nothing passive about this. Oklahoma State took this game, and then beat Baylor about the head and shoulders with it.
10. It is a joy forever watching a bowling ball like Staley scatter pins and scare the hides off tacklers on the way into the end zone. That is all.
USA Today Images
11. "It's not Ames," he said. They said this more than once, especially in the dying minutes of the fourth quarter when, after a late cannibal's special of a passing touchdown, Oklahoma State began to run the clock out. (If you're wondering when that is in the Big 12, it's when you're up by 30 or so with five minutes left.) Up in Ames it was nine degrees, and someone was watching a bitter, meaningless contest between Kansas and Iowa State somewhere in the dark of superflyover country, someone with less reason to watch than anyone staying or leaving the Strip in Stillwater, someone wondering why they were watching at all out in the darker dark of an Iowa winter.
Stillwater is not Ames in at least one sense: the Cowboys ruin dreams as a habit, not as accident. That the dark days of Squinky are dead, and that losing to a team like West Virginia can be regarded as a genuine accident that just happens to even the best of football teams. That Sports Illustrated's worst attempts at detailing the extraordinary benefits of being an athlete at Oklahoma State -- They have sex! And the mari-huana! Unlike any other student! -- slide off their truck hoods like so much goose shit in a gale. That they can now complain as a luxury, as fans did in the fourth quarter, that Gundy was letting Baylor back into the game when they knew Oklahoma State could score again if they wanted to really put some stank on what was already a lopsided beatdown.
(For the record: shortly after this complaint, Oklahoma State passed for the final touchdown. Gundy also danced in the locker room, because he is a showman who gives the people what they want: destruction and light twerking.)
Standing against titans like Texas and the historical bully to the south in Norman, Oklahoma State does more than survive. That they were the ones to kick Baylor back down the ladder is appropriate. They're ahead of them on the upstart trail and will brook no passing on the left or right.
12. But Oklahoma State thriving is all the more astronomically unlikely and remarkable because of where it is and what it is. It is not a simple place to survive, a place of intense extremes and Biblical weather, of a sky so freaking huge it threatens to swallow the eyeballs if you look at it long enough. The economy rides the whims of geology and the market and the endless need to not freeze in your own house somewhere a thousand miles away.
The bumps are real, substantial, and come without warning, just like the 3.9 earthquake that shook Stillwater on the morning of the Baylor game. Forget that for too long, and the land itself may remind you of just how tenuous and hard-fought the smallest of successes can be, much less the moment when your football team -- the most frivolous of things --pummels the speed freaks from Baylor on national television in the dark of a freezing Oklahoma night.
13. TL; DR: Standard western plot. It got cold, and everybody but the cowboys died.
* * *– A group that supports the protesters in Baltimore gathered in Union Square Wednesday and shut down the outbound Holland Tunnel, the West Side Highway and several other city streets as they marched.
More than 100 protesters were arrested as officers clashed with protesters around Manhattan, CBS2 reported. The protests followed rioting that began in Baltimore on Monday, in response to the police custody death of Freddie Gray.
PHOTOS: NYC March In Baltimore Solidarity Protest
Several hundred people gathered in Union Square around 6 p.m., and during the 7 p.m. hour, about 200 people broke off from Union Square and marched down 17th Street despite an order by officers to stay off the streets, 1010 WINS’ Gary Baumgarten reported.
On 17th Street between Fifth and Sixth avenues, protesters marched for less than five minutes before coming face to face with a line of NYPD officers in riot gear – a barrier that sparked instant anger and countless clashes in the street.
Protesters Shut Down Holland Tunnel, West Side Highway, In Solidarity March With Baltimore
No serious injuries were reported, but a commanding officer from the NYPD 13th Precinct suffered minor injuries when he was hit with a flying object near Union Square, police said.
There were too many arrests to track on the ground – some of them more dramatic than others, CBS2’s Weijia Jiang reported.
Jiang reported she and her crew got jostled around running in the middle of the action, and said the confrontation was more physical than those seen in Baltimore on Tuesday – the day after the riots.
Three officers were seen carrying one man, using every ounce of his energy to resist. Another handcuffed man was crouched in the street with his mouth gagged, and police also put several women into custody.
Still, hundreds of people stayed defiant and determined.
“They’re obstructing us,” one man said. “We would like to march. These are our streets.”
The man said it did not matter that police did not want protesters in the street.
“This is what justice is,” he said. “Sometimes it’s not pretty, but it has to happen.”
One woman said she was disappointed that police were arresting people for being in the street after being so accommodating in other protests.
As some protesters got into a shoving match with officers on 17th Street, and one woman ran in and shouted to stop, WCBS 880’s Alex Silverman reported.
“Please. We’re not here to fight with the police. That’s not what we do,” she said. “We make more noise when we don’t be violent.”
The protesters were of all ages and races with a shared voice, Silverman reported.
“A civilian who’s unarmed can just be murdered by a policeman,” the woman said. “It’s a terrible situation.”read
Last week, Jason Turner presented an intro to Travis CI. I’ve never used it but have wanted to try for a while, so I gave it a shot. Here is a short summary of this small adventure…
First of all, what are these tools we are talking about?
Travis CI: a build farm for GNU/Linux and Mac OS X that also runs your unit tests
Coveralls: it works on the top of Travis CI, by generating coverage report (lcov on Linux)
Appveyor: like Travis CI, but for Windows
TL;DR You can checkout all the configuration files on this github demo project
To start, simply sign in with your GitHub account on Travis CI, this will import all your repositories. From there, just enable one of them and add the following.travis.yml to your repo:
dist : trusty sudo : false language : cpp script : - cmake. - cmake --build.
On git push, it will automatically trigger your first Travis build.
GCC 6 & Clang 5
By default, Travis CI is using a quite old version of GCC — 4.8, so no C++14 support. Switching to GCC 5 is quite simple and Jason explains in his video how to change the.travis.yml. The one for GCC 6 is almost identical:
dist : trusty sudo : false language : cpp addons : apt : sources : - ubuntu-toolchain-r-test packages : - g++-6 script : - CXX=/usr/bin/g++-6 CC=/usr/bin/gcc-6 cmake. - cmake --build.
Here, we are using the apt add-on to install the g++-6 package. You can add any packages or libraries on which your project depends. Alternatively, you can also use the last clang release to build your project:
dist : trusty sudo : false language : cpp addons : apt : sources : - llvm-toolchain-trusty-5.0 packages : - clang-5.0 script : - CXX=/usr/bin/clang++-5.0 CC=/usr/bin/clang-5.0 cmake. - cmake --build.
Google Test
GTest is not handled by default — and we cannot blame Travis for that, but more Ubuntu that decided to stop distributing the library package. This means that your CMake FindPackage will fail:
CMake Error at /usr/share/cmake-3.2/Modules/FindPackageHandleStandardArgs.cmake:138 (message) : Could NOT find GTest (missing : GTEST_LIBRARY GTEST_MAIN_LIBRARY) Call Stack (most recent call first) : /usr/share/cmake-3.2/Modules/FindPackageHandleStandardArgs.cmake:374 (_FPHSA_FAILURE_MESSAGE) /usr/share/cmake-3.2/Modules/FindGTest.cmake:204 (FIND_PACKAGE_HANDLE_STANDARD_ARGS) CMakeLists.txt:21 (find_package) -- Configuring incomplete, errors occurred!
I looked around and found that people solve this in various ways:
With a pre-build bash script that installs the libgtest-dev package, builds it and copies the libraries — this is quite hacky and fragile as it depends on the various system paths and library names. With the GTest source in the repo — importing the whole source tree isn’t necessary By adding GTest as a submodule — this is the way to go
Add GTest as a submodule: git submodule add git@github.com:google/googletest.git gtest
Then create a gtest.cmake file with this content:
set(GOOGLETEST_ROOT gtest/googletest CACHE STRING "Google Test source root") include_directories(SYSTEM ${PROJECT_SOURCE_DIR}/${GOOGLETEST_ROOT} ${PROJECT_SOURCE_DIR}/${GOOGLETEST_ROOT}/include ) set(GOOGLETEST_SOURCES ${PROJECT_SOURCE_DIR}/${GOOGLETEST_ROOT}/src/gtest-all.cc ${PROJECT_SOURCE_DIR}/${GOOGLETEST_ROOT}/src/gtest_main.cc ) foreach(_source ${GOOGLETEST_SOURCES}) set_source_files_properties(${_source} PROPERTIES GENERATED 1) endforeach() add_library(gtest ${GOOGLETEST_SOURCES})
Note the SYSTEM keyword in include_directories. Without it, you will get spammed on every build by all the warnings from GTest, especially if you build with -Wall -Wextra etc.
Last step, include it in your main CMakeLists.txt and link to gtest:
cmake_minimum_required(VERSION...) project(...) include(gtest.cmake)... # GTest needs threading support find_package (Threads) target_link_libraries(... gtest ${CMAKE_THREAD_LIBS_INIT})
Coveralls
As you did for Travis CI, you need to sign in with your GitHub account on Coveralls and enable your project.
Now edit your.travis.yml to install and run cpp-coveralls:
dist : trusty sudo : false language : cpp addons : apt : sources : - ubuntu-toolchain-r-test packages : - g++-6 before_install : - pip install --user cpp-coveralls script : - CXX=/usr/bin/g++-6 CC=/usr/bin/gcc-6 cmake -DCOVERAGE=1. - cmake --build. -./tests after_success : - coveralls --root. -E ".*gtest.*" -E ".*CMakeFiles.*"
A few things to note here:
We excluded Google Test from the coverage with -E “.*gtest.*” -DCOVERAGE=1 is passed to CMake — locally, you might not want to enable coverage Don’t forget to run your unit tests if you want them in the coverage report
Finally, we need to enable the gcda files generation — needed by lcov — in our toolchain. This is done by adding the –coverage flag to both compiler and linker:
SET(COVERAGE OFF CACHE BOOL "Coverage")... if (COVERAGE) target_compile_options(tests PRIVATE --coverage) target_link_libraries(tests PRIVATE --coverage) endif()
Appveyor
As a Linux user, Appveyor was a bit tricky as I couldn’t build locally. Be sure to remember:
Appveyor will NOT clone your project with git clone –recursive, so you need to run manually git submodule update –init –recursive after the checkout
It is not possible to build directly with CMake — Appveyor expects a sln file, you can generate it via CMake, e.g. cmake -G “Visual Studio 15 2017 Win64”
The last 1.8.0 release of GTest does not build with Visual Studio 2017 — you need to add the definition GTEST_HAS_TR1_TUPLE=0 to tell GTest not using ::tr1 stuff
Here is my appveyor.yml file:Getty Images
When it comes to politics, the politicians find plenty of different ways and means to extend a hand and ask for money. For presidents, the process extends beyond the victory and to the inauguration, which hinges on private citizens forking over cash to assist in the throwing of a party that happens with the rarity of the Olympics.
According to Politico.com and the Washington Post (via SportsBusiness Daily), seven NFL owners coughed up $1 million each for the Donald Trump inaugural committee. Seven-figure donors included Jets owner Woody Johnson, Jaguars owner Shad Khan, Washington owner Daniel Snyder, Patriots owner Robert Kraft (via The Kraft Group), Rams owner Stan Kroenke, Texans owner Bob McNair, and Cowboys owner Jerry Jones (via Glenstone Limited Partnership).
NFL Ventures separately gave $100,000 to the cause, which reportedly generated $106.7 million — twice the amount Barack Obama raised for his initial inauguration.
Apparently, the most beautiful piece of chocolate cake you’ve ever seen ain’t cheap.Former PGA of America president Ted Bishop is writing a tell-all book about his time at the organization, including his firing in late 2014.
Bishop tweeted a photo of the manuscript titled, “‘Unfriended:’ The Power Brokers, Political Correctness and Hypocrisy in Golf,” which is set to be released this summer.
Bishop’s swift ouster centered around comments he made on social media about Ian Poulter, who had criticized former European Ryder Cup captain Nick Faldo in his book, No Limits. Bishop called Poulter a “lil girl,” and equated Poulter’s criticisms of Faldo to that of a “little school girl squealing during recess.” The posts have since been deleted.
Manuscript done. Stay tuned for the details regarding my book slated for release this summer! # Unfriended 38 pic.twitter.com/0S15mmE6xm — Ted Bishop (@tedbishop38pga) March 5, 2016
RELATED: Ted Bishop Removed as PGA of America President
The PGA of America removed Bishop from office less than 24 hours later, and informed him he would not be considered for Honorary President nor would he be referred to as a Past President in the association’s history. Many discussions followed as to whether Bishop’s punishment fit the crime.
In a January 2015 interview with GOLF magazine, Bishop admitted he thought the PGA of America wanted him out and were looking for the right opportunity to show him the door.
Now, it appears the public will get a chance to read about Bishop’s tenure in the industry for themselves.Lyric Song Name So inviting, the way you're messing with my reason That's the way it's been in town ever since they tore the jukebox down Just like Wolfman Jack Tell me all that you know, I'll show you snow and rain You ask me where the four winds dwell Gone are the days when the ladies said please Shall we go, you and I while we can 20 degrees of solitude, 20 degrees in all Reach out your hand if your cup be empty It's all a dream we dreamed one afternoon long ago She's a summer love in the spring, fall and winter We used to play for silver, now we play for life She was too pat to open and too cool to bluff Sun went down in honey, moon came up in wine Great North special, were you on board?
Lyric Song Name Spent a little time on the mountain top, spent a little time on the hill Seasons have frozen us into our souls A rare and distant tune Wherever he goes the people all complain Truckin' in style along the avenue I can't help you with your troubles if you won't help with mine And I left his dead ass there by the side of the road Everybody's dancing a ring around the sun Come to daddy on an inside straight Lord, you know they made a fine connection I can tell by the mark he left you were in his dream I beg of you, don't murder me please Wonder who will water all the children of the garden Sometimes we live no particular way but our own I got no dime but I got time to hear this storyImage Credit: Universal Studios[/caption]
You don’t have to wait until season 3 premieres on AMC on Oct. 14 to get the bejesus scared out of you by The Walking Dead. That’s because the zombie drama will be part of the annual Halloween Horror Nights event taking place at Universal Studios theme parks in Orlando and Hollywood starting on Sept. 21. Those who dare to enter will need to survive what a Universal press release describes as “eerily authentic, elaborately designed movie-quality sets that include some of the most iconic locations and scenes from the show. Mobs of undead walkers bring to ‘life’ the vicious, hungry zombies from the show.”
And we’ve got your first look at some of those zombies right here and right now with three exclusive photos. “We want people to experience the same terror of the walker-filled reality our characters faced in seasons 1 and 2, and will continue to face in our third season,” says the show’s co-executive producer and monster makeup guru Greg Nicotero in the release. The Walking Dead mazes will open, along with all of Halloween Horror Nights, in both Universal parks on select dates Sept. 21 through Oct. 31. Now scroll down to check out Nicotero with some of the walkers in a recreation of the show’s famous post-apocalypse hospital set. And for more breaking Walking Dead news, follow me on Twitter @DaltonRoss.
Image Credit: Universal Studios[/caption]
Image Credit: Universal Studios[/caption]
Image Credit: Universal Studios[/caption].
Biography
Warren Robinett is a designer of interactive computer graphics software, and new forms of computing hardware. He likes the new stuff, and has been on the cutting edge of one thing or another ever since he finished his computer-science training at Rice and UC Berkeley.
In 1979, he designed the Atari video game Adventure, the first action-adventure game. (New: His 2016 book, The Annotated Adventure, presents and analyzes the program which implemented this genre-defining video game.)
In 1980, he co-founded The Learning Company, which became a major publisher of educational software in the 1980s and 1990s. There he designed Rocky's Boots, a computer game which taught digital logic design to upper grade-school children, using an interactive, visual simulation. Rocky's Boots won Software of the Year awards from three magazines in 1983.
In the mid-1980s at NASA Ames Research Center, Robinett designed the software for the Virtual Environment Workstation, NASA's pioneering virtual reality project. This system used the first glove employed in VR, and he invented and implemented a gesture-based user-interface, allowing the user to give manual commands (such as pointing to fly through the virtual world, and grabbing to move virtual objects).
In the early 1990s at the University of North Carolina, he co-invented the NanoManipulator, a virtual-reality interface to a scanning-probe microscope, which allowed a scientist to be virtually present on the surface of a microscopic sample within the microscope. By using a haptics (force-feedback) subsystem, the user could take direct control of the microscope's probe, and could actually feel and manipulate nano-scale features in the microscopic environment, feeling (via amplification) the nano-newton forces measured by the Atomic-Force Microscope's probe. Some molecular-scale entities which were pushed around were: individual strands of DNA, carbon nanotubes, and individual viruses.
In the mid-1990s, he started a company to make Virtual-Reality-based video games: a good idea, but one which was (at the time) about 20 years ahead of commercial feasibility.
During 2003-2012 at HP Labs, he did computer architecture research (inventing defect-tolerant computing circuits and memristor-based logic circuits).
Working in the Stan Williams's research group (the group which discovered the new electronic device called the "memristor", and explained its physical mechanism), Robinett developed replica watches software and hardware to test the prototype devices; and developed circuits to improve their reliability (via defect tolerance) and circuits to exploit their capabilities (by performing logic computations).
Robinett has a long-term interest in using computer games to teach mathematics (especially algebra) to children, and has invested several years into this quest (1988, 2001-2002, 2014); the ideas and software are still under development.Hear ye! Hear ye! Today we’re releasing Exploded Builds: Medieval Fortress - a new book that teaches you how to put together your own medieval kingdom piece by (possibly plague-ridden) piece.
If you’re a history nerd like me, it’s an absolute delight, jam-packed with both Minecraft and medieval facts, and full of gorgeous rendered diagrams demonstrating how each bit of your mighty castle plugs together. It has ramparts, dungeons, everything in between and a good deal outside too, from Ye Olde taverns to bustling market squares. It’s not just about antique architectural artistry either: the book includes detailed explanations of redstone engineering, helping you to construct elaborate trap rooms, a switch-activated portcullis, ballistas and loads more.
It’s probably one of the nicest looking things we’ve produced, too. Just look:
Construct keeps to defend your loyal subjects and build a bustling township within your high walls, sending noble knights to spread your benevolent rule across the land. Alternatively, subjugate serfs from a decadent throne-room, toss naughty mobs into the dungeons and build battlements to prevent the peasants from disturbing you. It has everything a righteous ruler or a megalomaniac monarch might want.
It costs £12.99, though you may be able to get a sweet discount from some retailers. The US release will follow shortly.
You can order it here!
Cheerio!
Marsh - @marshdaviesThe number of adults using marijuana more than doubled in recent years, according to new research culling data from two massive surveys.
In 2001, just 4.1 percent of adults said they used marijuana. That increased to 9.5 percent by 2013. The findings were published Wednesday in JAMA Psychiatry.
Researchers also found that marijuana abuse or dependence increased during that 12-year time frame, likely because the overall number of adults using increased so much.
[Why college students are now smoking more pot than cigarettes]
Increased marijuana use came during roughly the same timeframe that Americans' attitudes about legalizing the drug shifted; less than one-third of Americans were in favor of legalizing marijuana in 2002, while a majority favored legalization in 2013, according to the Pew Research Center.
Starting in 2012, states began legalizing small amounts of marijuana for adult recreational use; it's now legal in four states and the District of Columbia. And medical marijuana is now legal in 23 states and the District, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures.
Lead study author Deborah Hasin, a professor of epidemiology in psychiatry at Columbia University, said she's been particularly interested in tracking usage trends "given all the changes in attitudes and changes in laws."
The coverage of marijuana in PSAs, politics and pop culture has evolved quite a bit since the 1960s. See how the messages about pot have changed as much as the faces delivering them, from Sonny Bono to Barack Obama. (Gillian Brockell contributed to this video) (Kate M. Tobey/The Washington Post)
But it's unclear what's behind such a dramatic increase in marijuana use. "We showed that it happened," Hasin said. "Now, the thing that really needs to be researched is the why."
"You can speculate that Americans are increasingly viewing marijuana as a harmless substance... or laws are changing," she added. "But we don't really know until you do good, empirical studies on what factors are really influencing it."
[One surprising downside of marijuana legalization: major energy use]
Researchers analyzed two rounds of the National Epidemiologic Survey on Alcohol and Related Conditions; in the 2001-2002 round, 43,093 people participated, while 36,309 participated in the 2012-2013 round.
In addition to marijuana use, participants answered other questions that helped determine whether they also experienced use disorder, such as: did they continue using marijuana despite it causing trouble with friends and family, or physical or psychological problems; did they try and fail to cut down despite repeated attempts; and did they repeatedly drive under the influence.
According to the findings, use disorder among users did decrease slightly. About three out of every 10 marijuana users experienced abuse or dependency, representing approximately 6.8 million Americans.
Hasin said it's important to present information "in a balanced way" about the risks associated with marijuana use.
[A majority favors marijuana legalization for first time]
"While many in the United States think prohibition of recreational marijuana should be ended, this study and others suggest caution and the need for public education about the potential harms in marijuana use, including the risk for addiction," the authors write. "As is the case with alcohol, many individuals can use marijuana without becoming addicted. However, the clear risk for marijuana use disorders among users (approximately 30 percent) suggests that as the number of U.S. users grows, so will the numbers of those experiencing problems related to such use."
Read more:
Scientists say ‘runner’s high’ is like a marijuana high
Sleep study on modern-day hunter-gatherers dispels notion that we're wired to need 8 hours
Healthy people can now order a $299 ‘liquid biopsy’ blood test for cancer. Should you get it?
The latest study about antioxidants is terrifying. Scientists think they may boost cancer cells to spread faster.
White wines may be just as good for you as red (in some ways, at least)
SPECIAL REPORT: Billionaire Paul Allen's quest to build an artificial brain
For more health news, you can sign up for our weekly newsletter here.Early life
Naval career
Farming
Earl Carter died a relatively wealthy man, having also recently been elected to the Georgia House of Representatives. However, between his forgiveness of debts and the division of his wealth among heirs, his son Jimmy inherited comparatively little. For a year, Jimmy, Rosalynn, and their three sons lived in public housing in Plains; Carter is the only U.S. president to have lived in subsidized housing before he took office. Carter was knowledgeable in scientific and technological subjects, and he set out to expand the family's peanut-growing business. The transition from Navy to agribusinessman was difficult because his first-year harvest failed due to drought; Carter was compelled to open several bank lines of credit to keep the farm afloat. Meanwhile, he also took classes and read up on agriculture while Rosalynn learned accounting to manage the business's books. Though they barely broke even the first year, the Carters grew the business and became quite successful.[19][20]
Early political career, 1962–1971
Governor of Georgia (1971–1975)
1976 presidential campaign
Presidency (1977–1981)
Post-presidency (1981–present)
Political views
Personal life
Public image and legacy
See also
Notes
^ [32] With Carter out of the race, Maddox narrowly won the runoff ballot over Arnall, clinching the Democratic nomination. In the general election, Callaway won a plurality of the vote but came short of the 50 percent majority. The election was thus decided by the Georgia House of Representatives with its Democratic majority; they settled on Maddox. ^ Eagleton was later replaced on the ticket by Sargent Shriver ^ [418][416][417] After working in the Georgia governor's mansion as a trustee prisoner, she had been returned to prison in 1975 when Carter's term as governor ended, but intervention on her behalf by both Jimmy and Rosalynn Carter, with Jimmy Carter asking to be designated as her parole officer, enabled her to be reprieved and to work in the White House.
ReferencesThe Weyburn restaurant at the centre of temporary foreign worker scandal today issued a statement. It is republished in full below:
********
We feel it is necessary to address some of the allegations made in the media about our family owned and operated business.
As a result of changes in our business this past winter, we found ourselves in the position of having to restructure our restaurant hours of operation.
As part of the restructuring process, employees were advised their current positions would no longer be available and were laid off.
We held a subsequent meeting with employees to discuss the changes and the implications to their future employment opportunities with us.
As a result of the changes of our hours of operations, some of our employees advised us they required more hours than we were now able to offer and made the decision to not return to our employment.
Most employees did so in |
supporters!
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As a token of thanks for your wonderful support, and for suffering Vikki's gallant, enthusiastic insistence on using every possible Top-Gun reference... we have wrangled together some sweet rewards to send out to you, our backers, for this campaign. :)
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Check out the right column of this Kickstarter page to see the tier contents spelled out in (those pesky) words.
SO MANY SHINY THINGS! SUCH VALUE!
The tier values include shipping within Australia. For our friends overseas, we ask for an additional $8 AUD to cover the distance between you all and this land full of dangerous animals.
IMPORTANT CONDITIONS:
☆ ALL A5 Colour Fantastica Exclusive Limited Edition Print, Badge and Greeting Card rewards will be randomly picked from 12 designs made exclusively for this crowd funding campaign. This is your only chance to obtain these items! The prints will all be hand-numbered and packaged with great care.
A5 Colour Fantastica Exclusive Limited Edition Print, Badge and Greeting Card rewards will be randomly picked from This is your only chance to obtain these items! The prints will all be hand-numbered and packaged with great care. ☆ The BEHIND-THE-SCENES BONUS BOOKLET will be a handmade soft-bound A5 booklet featuring extra info, concept art and sketches by all 12 Artists. A must-have for the avid collector and those wishing to find out more of how the project and all our stories came about!
will be a featuring extra info, concept art and sketches by all 12 Artists. A must-have for the avid collector and those wishing to find out more of how the project and all our stories came about! ☆ The *ORIGINAL SKETCH may be from any participating artist and subject is determined by individual artist. This is original artwork and may come in varying sizes not limited to - but no smaller than - A4 size, and is not a commission (i.e. no requests).
may be from any participating artist and subject is determined by individual artist. This is and may come in varying sizes not limited to - but no smaller than - A4 size, and is a commission (i.e. no requests). ☆ The * 3 BONUS PRINTS may be from more than one artist and subject is determined by individual artist. These are high quality prints and may come in varying sizes not limited to - but no smaller than - A4 size. Exciting!
may be from more than one artist and subject is determined by individual artist. These are high quality prints and may come in varying sizes not limited to - but no smaller than - A4 size. Exciting! ☆ The contents of the ULTIMATE MAVERICK ART PACKAGE may also be of varying sizes not limited to A5 with subjects determined by the individual artist and contain more than one artists' work & gifts FOR YOU
may also be of varying sizes not limited to A5 with subjects determined by the individual artist and contain more than one artists' work & gifts FOR YOU ☆ *ORIGINAL ARTWORK Specification: This will be a beautiful physical A4 original picture/painting, the subject matter and background of which is at the participating artists' discretion, and is not a commission (i.e. no requests).
The book will be launched in February 2015, so we hope to have the rewards shipped to everyone by April 2015.
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The money raised from this kick starter will help make our goal a reality - to self-publish a full colour comic anthology!
We passionately believe that the artists here are stunning individuals whose works deserve to shine.
The pie chart above is where we estimate our base goal of $7500 will go towards. This is the bare minimum we need to print 350 soft-cover books.
But the real magic will start to happen once we start hitting those stretch goals! And so below is what we CAN achieve if we surpass our base goal!
Extra funds we collect between and beyond stretch goals will be channelled towards paying our artists. For example, in the event we surpass our goal of $7,500, but fall short of the next stretch goal of $9,000, the extra money raised will be given back to the artists who give us a part of themselves every single time they produce their art.
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Be sure to check out their work!!!
Alicia Braumberger / Alisha Jade / Rebecca Hayes
Eri Kashima / Eevien Tan / Sam Jacobin
Nadia Attlee / Sai Nitivoranant / Sheree Chuang
Tash Sim / Vikki Ong / Viet-My Buiclick to enlarge SHOT A TEACHER: Jeremy Hutchinson's wayward bullet in training exercise didn't dissuade him from advancing the cause of more arms in school.
After the shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Connecticut, Hutchinson became interested in arming school personnel, he said. He was invited to attend an “active shooter” training and - using a rubber bullet-loaded pistol - he mistakenly shot a teacher who was confronting a “bad guy.”
The experience gave Hutchinson some pause, but he still supports giving schools the authority to decide how best to secure their campuses.
A legislative committee today will discuss the law on guns in school, an outgrowth of the determination that the law doesn't currently allow school districts to license their own employees as security guards for the purpose of carrying weapons.had hoped to put nearly two dozen armed staff members, including teachers, in its schools this year until an attorney general's opinion prompted a state licensing board to suspend permits it had granted.Only a handful of school districts have sought broader arming power. But this being Arkansas and guns being inviolate, many of the usual legislative suspects are rushing to support the cause of more guns in school.These include, who's leading the legislative hearing today. Hat tip to the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette's Brenda Bernet for unearthing this:That would include, presumably not choosing Jeremy "Batman" Hutchinson to be among those packing heat.CALGARY – Alberta Health Services says it’s closing one of its out-patient mental health programs at the end of March because of “inefficiencies.” The urgent psychotherapy program operates out of the Rockyview General Hospital. It employs three therapists who provide care to 60 patients; 17 additional patients are on a waiting list.
“We understand that this is a small group of patients that are affected, but we will go the extra mile to understand what their needs are and provide that service accordingly,” said Dr. Bev Adams, psychiatry department head with Alberta Health Services.
Adams says all 77 patients impacted will be assessed by the end of the month, triaged and put on waiting lists for other mental health programs.
Patients currently enrolled in the mental health outpatient program at Rockyview may be transitioned to services at the Central Clinic at the Sheldon M. Chumir Centre downtown or to Adult Outpatient Services at South Health Campus. AHS says a recent expansion at Sheldon Chumir has reduced the program’s wait time from six months to one month. At South Health Campus, the wait time is approximately six weeks.
READ MORE: NDP says Calgary hospitals are crumbling after years of neglect
NDP leader Rachel Notley says she was disturbed to hear the Rockyview outpatient program was being cut and believes the move could ultimately place more pressure on the system’s overburdened emergency departments.
“We know that mental health services across this province don’t measure up and that every day families suffer as a result, and the notion that we can take 77 patients out of the system and somehow find a different place for them is utterly ridiculous,” she said.
READ MORE: Province to add beds due to hospital overcrowding crisisImage caption The campers have launched an appeal against their eviction from Holyrood
Appeals against the decision to evict independence campaigners from outside the Scottish Parliament will be heard at the Court of Session in October.
Lord Turnbull ruled that the IndyCamp group should be evicted from their Holyrood camp after a lengthy case.
Four different groups have lodged appeals against the ruling, making a range of arguments against eviction.
The inner house will consider the case on 19 and 20 October after Lord Malcolm accepted calls to fast-track it.
The court ruled against the campers in July after a seven-month legal battle, when Lord Turnbull concluded that evicting the IndyCamp would not breach their human rights.
He criticised the campaigners, who want to remain outside Holyrood until Scotland is independent, as "rather selfish or even arrogant" for seeking long-term occupation of the site, saying they had shown "open disregard" for others.
The campers maintain they have a right to protest and freedom of assembly at Holyrood, and appealed against Lord Turnbull's judgement.
Parliament chief executive Sir Paul Grice pushed for an accelerated appeal process, but warned MSPs that the "intransigence" of those occupying the camp could see the stand-off continue for some time.
Image caption The group have been ordered to quit the camp, which sits outside the Scottish Parliament
The campers, who originally styled themselves as the "sovereign and indigenous peoples of Scotland", have split into a number of different groups for the appeal.
Four different arguments will be heard at the October sitting.
Arthur Gemmell, who was a second respondent in the original case, said that his arguments had "affected Lord Turnbull's decision on the vigil" negatively, and said he wanted his case heard separately.
Some of the campers earlier issued a written letter distancing themselves from the views of another respondent, Richard McFarlane, who had claimed in court that Christ had returned to earth and had given permission to the camp to use the parliamentary estate. He will also make a separate case on behalf of himself and another respondent.
Two of the campers continue to style themselves as the "sovereign and indigenous peoples". One of them, who asked to be referred to in court only as "David", demanded that a jury sit on the case, as he claimed that "a trial by the state is illegal" and that the court "might be inept or corrupt".
The remaining four respondents will make a fourth case, and have stated their intention to appoint a Mr Keatings as a lay representative.
Lord Malcolm, who declined a call from David to recuse himself from the case as well as rejecting bringing in a jury, said the court would consider all four arguments at a two-day hearing in October.June 25, 2017 | by John Oreovicz
Let’s ignore for a moment the debate about ovals and what constitutes pack racing and talk about what happens when you let Indy cars loose at a proper road racing venue.
Not a Mickey Mouse, concrete-canyon street course. Good ones are few and far between and they usually produce results like what we saw Sunday in Baku, where Formula 1 did a pretty solid job of replicating a bad IndyCar street race.
Meanwhile, the IndyCar Series raced at Road America, a classic natural terrain road course, one with long enough straights to let the cars stretch out and create the circumstances that allow faster entries to move up through the field if the team and the driver have the savvy to make it happen.
On Saturday, Scott Dixon said he was racing for “best in class” after qualifying his Ganassi Racing Honda fifth behind the four Team Penske Chevrolets, 1.6 seconds off Helio Castroneves’ pole-winning pace. The prevailing attitude was that Team Penske’s speed advantage over the rest of the field was insurmountable.
Of course, by now we all know that you can never count Dixon out. With the help of longtime strategist Mike Hull, who was celebrating his 25th anniversary working with Chip Ganassi Racing this weekend, the four-time IndyCar Series champion produced one of the greatest drives of his career to put a whipping on the Penske foursome.
It’s the kind of performance that probably couldn’t have happened on a tight and twisty street course with few passing opportunities and an inevitable series of full-course cautions for crashes or debris.
Some people enjoy street course crash-fests and the unpredictable (and often unrepresentative) results they usually produce. But count me among those who enjoy watching Indy cars being stretched to their limits, with 200-mph straights and fast, sweeping corners with speeds that aren’t that much lower.
Incidents are generally few and far between at fast road courses like Road America and Watkins Glen International, which often means that races there are won on skill and speed rather than blind luck.
That’s how Dixon, Honda and the Ganassi team won on Sunday. Dixon’s 41 career Indy car wins put him fourth on the all-time list, just one behind Michael Andretti.
There are many reasons why Dixon should be considered one of the greatest Indy car racers of any era. He’s fast when he needs to be, and he’s one of the best at maintaining his speed while saving fuel, which is absolutely vital for the current crop of drivers.
At Road America, Dixon was one of just three drivers who were able to stretch their first tank of fuel to Lap 14 of 55. A quick in-lap moved Dixon from fourth to third, taking the position from Penske’s Will Power, and the New Zealander quickly began to close on leaders Castroneves and Josef Newgarden.
Penske recognized the threat coming from Dixon – “He was gaining on us quite a bit,” said Team Penske president Tim Cindric – and orchestrated Newgarden past Castroneves into the lead. At this point, Dixon had moved up one position and cut a 7-second deficit to the leader prior to the first round of pit stops to 2.9 seconds.
Castroneves pitted on Lap 28, with Newgarden and Dixon, on the same strategy, following suit a lap later. Once again, Dixon gained a position, emerging from the pits in second place and perhaps benefitting from the yellow for Takuma Sato’s spin at The Kink that prevented Castroneves from taking advantage of his one-lap warmer tires.
On the restart, Dixon demonstrated his ability to race wheel-to-wheel by passing Newgarden for the lead going around the outside at Turn 1. Admittedly, Dixon was on grippier Firestone ‘red’ tires while Newgarden was on the standard ‘blacks,’ but it was still an impressive and audacious move.
“It was a good pass,” Newgarden told reporters after the race. “I tried to race him as clean as I could. I went as deep as I could with him on the black tires. That’s as hard as I could go without running into him, into the side. I tried to give him some racing room.”
From there, Dixon controlled the pace and held off Newgarden at the finish by 0.558 second as Team Penske took what could only be called a disappointing 2-3-4-5 result in a race they expected to win. Pole man Castroneves (his milestone 50th, tops among active drivers) held on to the final podium position ahead of Simon Pagenaud and Power.
Ganassi’s Charlie Kimball earned the real “best of the rest honors” by finishing sixth, 15 seconds down on teammate Dixon.
“Very gratifying,” Dixon related after the race. “[The Team Penske drivers] looked pretty disappointed. They’re always the team you’ve got to beat. Championship fights, they’re the ones that are going to come down to it. Especially with their lineup right now, four very strong cars, as you can see with qualifying, makes it very difficult to get one out.
“We raced as hard as we could,” he added. “We had a little bit of luck go our way. We had good strategy. The pit stops were fantastic. These are the days you have to capitalize on trying to beat them. We did as a group. Yeah, it feels good when you can achieve that.”
Dixon stretched his championship lead to 34 points over Pagenaud and 37 over Castroneves. Newgarden (-61) and Power (-63) are fifth and sixth in the standings, split from their Penske teammates by Takuma Sato, who remains in the hunt 56 points back thanks to his big haul of points at the Indianapolis 500.
“It stings a little bit coming home second when you feel like you have a winning car,” said Newgarden. “Scott was great today and so was Ganassi Racing. Those guys did a great job and were certainly very deserving of the win.
“But that’s tough coming up a little bit short.”
Dixon could only marvel at his latest triumph. He doesn’t like to talk about what he has achieved in historical perspective, but the statistics speak for themselves.
“Yesterday, I didn’t really think we would be in this situation,” he said. “But huge credit to Honda. The engine is very strong. They don’t really have to turn it down for the race, which definitely performs very well for us. To get the fuel mileage, as well, is always very difficult when you’re making so much power.”
Dixon led the championship coming into Road America without having won a race with a Honda aero package that is still thought to be inferior to the competition for Chevrolet. Now he and the Ganassi team are headed to a series of tracks where they have been historically strong in the past, including Mid-Ohio Sports Car Course and Watkins Glen.
Given Dixon’s mastery of those traditional road courses, it is perhaps surprising that until Sunday he hadn’t won at Elkhart Lake. Then again, he’s only raced Indy cars there four times.
He won at Nazareth Speedway as a CART series rookie in 2001 driving for PacWest Racing, but often overlooked is the fact that one of Dixon’s finest performances that year came at Road America, where he finished fourth after making seven pit stops under yellow to replace his rear wing after incurring damage from debris from Memo Gidley’s huge accident in a Ganassi Racing car.
Later that year, two-time Indy car champion Gil de Ferran told me: “Dixon is in his rookie season, but he has a fantastic head on his shoulders. He’s a tremendous driver. He really drove extremely well all year long. He was very strong, mature and fast, all in one package.”
Back in 2001, not too many people predicted that the quiet kid from New Zealand being tutored by respected veterans like Mauricio Gugelmin, Russell Cameron and the late John Anderson would turn out to be one of the greatest Indy car drivers of all time.
But as long as the IndyCar Series continues to race at venues like Road America that emphasize talent over luck, Scott Dixon will re-write the record book.Media playback is unsupported on your device Media caption Lam Wing Kee was seized in the Chinese city of Shenzen in October 2015
One of five Hong Kong booksellers who disappeared last year says he was forced by Chinese agents into a confession of "illegal trading".
Lam Wing Kee was seized in the Chinese city of Shenzhen last October.
He and the four other men worked at a publishing house that sold books critical of China's leaders.
Mr Lam said a confession broadcast on Chinese television in February, featuring four of the men, had been scripted.
"It was a show, and I accepted it," he told a news conference on Thursday, according to the South China Morning Post.
"They gave me the script. I had to follow the script. If I did not follow it strictly, they would ask for a retake."
HK booksellers 'author' attacks China
Four of the men from Mighty Current publishing house, Mr Lam, Gui Minhai, Lui Bo and Cheung Jiping, gave details of their alleged offences during their appearance on Phoenix TV in February.
Lam Wing Kee returned to Hong Kong on Tuesday. Only one of the men has yet to return from the mainland.
Some people in Hong Kong believe the four were detained by China because of a book about President Xi Jinping.
They said they had sold 4,000 "unauthorised" books to 380 customers in mainland China, Phoenix TV reported.
Mighty Current publishing house disappearances
1. Lui Bo, general manager. Went missing: Shenzhen, 15 October 2015 Returned: March 2016
2. Cheung Jiping, business manager. Went missing: Dongguan, 15 October Returned: March 2016
3. Gui Minhai, co-owner. Went missing: Thailand, 17 October Still missing
4. Lam Wing Kee, manager. Went missing: Shenzhen, 23 October Returned: June 2016
5. Lee Bo, shareholder. Went missing: 30 December - he says from the mainland, Mr Lam says it was from Hong Kong Returned: March 2016
Public confessions have long been a part of China's criminal law, but experts say many confessions are forced.
In the news conference, Mr Lam also said:
he was arrested in Shenzhen, a southern city on the mainland, before being held overnight
he was then blindfolded and put on a train for up to 14 hours to the city of Ningbo
while there, he was kept in a small room by himself, and made to sign a document agreeing he would not contact his family or a lawyer
the Chinese authorities had asked him to return to the mainland and hand over disks containing the names of people who had bought the books - he said he would not now do so
he spoke out as he was the only one of the five men with no relatives on the mainland. "If I myself, being the least vulnerable among the five booksellers, remained silent, Hong Kong would become hopeless," he said
The defiant bookseller's bombshell revelations electrified the journalists in the room, as well as social media in Hong Kong.
At the scene: Juliana Liu, BBC News, Hong Kong
Image caption Lam Wing Kee was surrounded by reporters as he gave details of his detention
No-one had expected him to tell all.
Besides Gui Minhai, who remains in custody, Mr Lam was the last of the associates of the Mighty Current publishing house to be released from detention.
The others - Lee Bo, Lui Bo and Cheung Jiping - had all been released much earlier and said little about their time in mainland China.
They had all decided it was better, perhaps safer, to stay silent.
But Mr Lam chose a different route.
He decided to take a public stand, he said, because he wants Hong Kong people to defend the system that separates this city from China.
Under Hong Kong law, Chinese police do not have jurisdiction in Hong Kong, which is governed under the principle of "One Country, Two Systems".
But the case has sparked international concern that China could be attempting to rein in freedom of expression in Hong Kong.
China's foreign ministry said its officials would not behave illegally and urged other countries not to meddle in its affairs.
Hong Kong's government said in a statement "that the police are now proactively contacting Mr Lam himself to understand more and will take appropriate follow-up action".
It added that any evidence of intervention by Chinese law enforcement agencies in Hong Kong would be "unacceptable".
"Lam Wing Kee has blown apart the Chinese authorities' story," Mabel Au, director of Amnesty International Hong Kong, said.
"He has exposed what many have suspected all along - that this was a concerted operation by the Chinese authorities to go after the booksellers."Spread the love
In a development with the shocking potential to upend the U.S. presidential election, ten Electoral College electors have requested further insight into President-Elect Donald Trump’s alleged ties to Russia to determine “whether Mr. Trump is fit to serve as President of the United States.”
Led by Christine Pelosi, daughter of Democratic House leader Nancy Pelosi, the group of ten electors penned an open letter to Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, stating:
“Allegations that Donald Trump was receiving assistance from a hostile foreign power to win the election began months before Election Day. When presented with information that the Russian government was interfering in the election through the course of the campaign, both in private briefings and public assessment, Donald Trump rejected it, refused to condemn it, and continued to accept their help. Donald Trump even made a direct plea to the Russian government to interfere further in the election in a press conference on July 27, saying, ‘Russia, if you’re listening, I hope you’re able to find the 30,000 emails that are missing.’”
Indeed, Democrats and a smattering of Republicans touting utterly unverifiable reports from unnamed CIA officials and unprovable corporate media articles published by the Washington Post and New York Times have seemingly gone out of their way to link Trump to the Putin administration — thereby discrediting the democratic outcome of the 2016 election.
But claims of Russian interference — running the gamut from responsibility of hacks of the Democratic National Committee to a coordinated, state-sponsored propaganda campaign implemented by alternative media outlets — have been thoroughly discredited, if nothing else but for a complete lack of evidence.
Nevertheless, the electors say they “require to know from the intelligence community whether there are ongoing investigations into ties between Donald Trump, his campaign or associates, and Russian government interference in the election, the scope of those investigations, how far those investigations may have reached, and who was involved in those investigations.”
And that “We further require a briefing on all investigative findings, as these matters directly impact the core factors in our deliberations of whether Mr. Trump is fit to serve as President of the United States.”
It would seem truth has recently been put up for debate, judging by such articles as the Washington Post’s “Secret CIA assessment says Russia was trying to help Trump win White House,” for which the outlet quoted an unnamed and thus wholly unvettable agency official allegedly briefed on an intelligence presentation, stating,
“It is the assessment of the intelligence community that Russia’s goal here was to favor one candidate over the other, to help Trump get elected. That’s the consensus view.”
While mainstream presstitutes repeatedly harp on the vagaries of Russian meddling in the U.S. elections, a number of level-headed analysts and journalists have denounced the allegations as hysterical McCarthyite fearmongering to deflect from damaging contents of documents published by Wikileaks.
Alarmingly, the ten electors cite the unfounded so-called news articles from corporate media in their letter to Clapper:
“According to reports in the Washington Post, New York Times, and other outlets, the United States intelligence community has now concluded definitively that the Russian interference was performed to help Donald Trump get elected, yet even today Mr. Trump is refusing to accept that finding. In response to the reports, the Trump transition office instead released a statement which called into question the validity of United States intelligence findings, and declared the election over despite the Electoral College not yet casting its votes. Trump’s willingness to disregard conclusions made by the intelligence community and his continuing defense of Russia and Russian President Vladimir Putin demand close scrutiny and deliberation from the Electoral College.”
In fact, while countless corporate outlets spread the evidenceless CIA claim like steel truth, the intelligence community-at-large is not at all in full agreement on the accusations.
According to an unnamed high-level FBI official, the Bureau is not at all in agreement with the CIA on allegations Russia actively interfered with the U.S. electoral process, calling the agency’s report “fuzzy” and “ambiguous” — and saying the FBI is refusing to corroborate the apparently baseless and dangerous accusation.
This modern Red Scare — if not called out for the anti-Russian propaganda it constitutes — could not only be the final unraveling of the shreds of an American free press, but could see the overthrowing of a democratically-elected leader of the United States.
It would be more than worth noting the CIA — the same agency behind these alleged confirmations Russia has interfered with the election — has been responsible for the overthrow of myriad foreign governments. Whether or not those leaders were elected democratically had no bearing on the agency’s subversive and military tactics when U.S. foreign policy dictated the putative necessity of such a move.
To imagine such a departure from the democratic process on American soil — regardless one’s feelings about a Trump presidency — is to recognize the power of pure, evidenceless propaganda in motion.
No proof of the CIA officials’ allegations have yet been offered for public scrutiny and investigation. No evidence of Russia coordinating to thwart a Hillary Clinton presidency has yet been proffered. Nothing evincing an active Russian state hand in U.S. politics has yet surfaced — anywhere.
Astonishingly, that appears to matter little to the very electors in whom American voters entrust with the highest office in the land — and instead have placed the burden of proving the baseless reports on President-Elect Trump, himself, stating:
“Additionally, the Electors will separately require from Donald Trump conclusive evidence that he and his staff and advisors did not accept Russian interference, or otherwise collaborate during the campaign, and conclusive disavowal and repudiation of such collaboration and interference going forward.”
How Trump is supposed to provide evidence of something that didn’t take place has been lost on these ten electors, who have opted for the running ‘guilty until proven innocent’ narrative of the new McCarthyism.
What chilling effect their demands will have on the one vaguely democratic power held by the people of the United States — the election of a president of their choosing — has yet to be seen. But by every indicator, this could be the final canary call of a once free land.There is only one country which would like to see Donald Trump enter the White House - and it’s not the US.
According to a new survey from YouGov for the Handelsblatt Global Edition, Russia is the only major economy in the world that prefers the Republican, yellow-haired candidate over Hillary Clinton.
The survey polled more than 20,000 adults in every G20 country. The results show that Mr Trump leads by 21 points in Russia, while Ms Clinton claims more than 21 points over her rival in 15 other countries.
We’ll tell you what’s true. You can form your own view. From 15p €0.18 $0.18 $0.27 a day, more exclusives, analysis and extras.
The same survey shows that 79 per cent of Russians are dissatisfied with their economic situation - only second to South Korea - yet 74 per cent of Russians vote for their president Vladimir Putin as the most trusted leader.
Mexico gives Ms Clinton the widest berth from Mr Trump at an incredible 54 points. Mr Trump has continually targeted Mexican immigrants, saying he will build a wall to keep out illegal immigrants and has implied they are responsible for murdering and raping citizens and drug dealing.
Ms Clinton, however, has spoken against the Republican’s racist rhetoric. Speaking in Staten Island on Monday, one day before the crucial New York primary, she claimed that she is “sick and tired” of other candidates looking at the US in a negative way.
“[...] we have candidates running for president on the Republican side who are deliberately inciting divisiveness, who are insulting whole groups of Americans, who are saying things like “build the walls” – not the bridges, the walls; make it impossible for some people to come to this country because of their religion – a country founded on religious liberty,” she said.
Compared to other countries, in China Ms Clinton holds a relatively small lead of 12 points over Mr Trump.
Chinese officials have remained quiet over the election, but the outspoken finance minister Lou Jiwei admitted in a Wall Street Journal interview this week that he thinks Mr Trump is an “irrational type” who will not manage to bring about change to US-Chinese trade policies as he has proposed.
South Korea and Japan, who Mr Trump claimed should obtain nuclear weapons to deter North Korea without US financial aid, prefer Ms Clinton by 37 and 27 points over Mr Trump respectively.
In the UK, where MPs seriously considered debating banning Mr Trump from the country after several offensive remarks about crime and the police in London, Ms Clinton is well ahead of the Republican by 34 points.
We’ll tell you what’s true. You can form your own view.
At The Independent, no one tells us what to write. That’s why, in an era of political lies and Brexit bias, more readers are turning to an independent source. Subscribe from just 15p a day for extra exclusives, events and ebooks – all with no ads.
Subscribe nowIn one of the most beautiful beaches of Pilio, Greece, Damouhari, which is the only natural harbor on the south side of Pelion, is a breathtaking country house.
The property belonged to a family that lived for years in the area and built it for personal use, without any specific architecture, in the 1940s.
It consisted of two single rooms, a dining area and a communal wc, accessible from the courtyard.
It is a cluster of spaces, with their back to the sea, for protection from damp and waves.
Located below and beside the rock, it creates an internal courtyard between the spaces and the rock. The unique landscape and its location are the ones that led to its reuse as a holiday home, with the infrastructure now combining comfort and luxury, but at the same time offering an ascetic atmosphere.
The Genius loci [The spirit of the place] was the basic principle of design by the architectural firm Urban Soul Project. It included the conversion of the larger space into a room with a wc and a loft for accommodating two people while the second room was also wc.Bronze sculptures of goblins on motorbikes, R2D2 t-shirts, one sock, imaginary products from the world of Rick and Morty, a dog, the most majestic cat… EVER. This is what users of OpenBazaar, a peer-to-peer digital mall that’s just emerged after a lengthy gestation, will see as they peruse the various stores from the comfort of their desk.
Though it’s very early stages (OpenBazaar has only just opened a test service, with full launch expected later this month), the current app, running on Apple Mac in FORBES’ test drive, is a far cry from what some hyperbolic commentators were expecting. When OpenBazaar’s operators proposed the idea of a distributed marketplace where there was no central authority to hold to account, the currency was the untraceable (but actually very traceable) Bitcoin cryptocurrency and the rules almost non-existent, it led to assumptions OpenBazaar would house next -generation narcotics markets like Silk Road, illegal weapons stores and child abuse content dealers that police could never track. But right now, OpenBazaar is shaping up to be a slicker, more secure, anarchist eBay... ON ACID.
There are, undoubtedly, some benefits to using OpenBazaar for anonymous trading. Encryption in transit across the nodes used to host the network (see map below for the spread) helps prevent simple snooping, whilst the very nature of a peer-to-peer setup means the US government cannot target an authoritative, centralized body, whether with a subpoena or a technical taskforce looking to knock out a server. Bringing the network crumbling down, though not impossible as shown in police P2P botnet takedowns, will be considerably harder than if command and control of the network were hosted on a small number of boxes. The chat feature is also end-to-end encrypted, which should prove popular given the rise of such services in response to revelations of mass government surveillance.
Why it ain't Silk Road [insert iteration number here]
But there are a few key reasons OpenBazaar is unlikely to become the next Silk Road. First, IP addresses of users are viewable to those have the technical ability to look. If the user can pull data from the OpenBazaar API (the application programming interface that allows outside access to some OpenBazaar systems), it’s possible to build a crawler that maps out all participants in the P2P network. Anyone who isn’t routing their traffic through other servers and thereby masking their IP address (typically done over a Virtual Private Network or the Tor anonymizing network) can, therefore, be quickly identified and located if police have a warrant.
This is pointed out in a stark warning during registration: “OpenBazaar users are not anonymous by default. Most communications between parties are encrypted, but IP addresses are public and can be associated with activity on the network. Malicious parties could use this information against you; protecting your privacy is your own responsibility.” Even where users take extra precautions, governments have documented methods of exploiting VPNs and Tor.
Then there’s the ethos of OpenBazaar’s chief purveyors: Brian Hoffman, a former lead associate for cybersecurity at Edward Snowden’s old employer Booz Allen Hamilton, long-time Bitcoin specialist Sam Patterson and academic Dr. Washington Sanchez. After taking over the OpenBazaar project after a few emails from its original creator Amir Taaki, one of the first to promote and develop Bitcoin and the associated Dark Wallet, the trio sought to make a platform free of government control where companies could make more money by cutting out the middleman, typically the owner of the store like eBay or Amazon, who take a small percentage of each sale on their respective platforms. With Bitcoin, the middlemen, the banks and credit card companies who took a cut of traditional transactions, were already removed. But the platforms (yes, including those dark web drug and gun markets) still took their slice. With OpenBazaar, there’s only the buyer and the seller.
The creation of the network will earn them nothing directly. Hence why they founded OB1, which is looking into numerous avenues to bring big names to OpenBazaar with which it will partner on certain stores. It’ll also provide merchant support services, such as vetting legitimate businesses and arbitration, for which it may charge. “We have a list of several hundred individuals and businesses who, over the past months, have asked to be notified when we go live. So we'll be starting with them and anyone else who wants to join,” says Patterson, talking to me over OpenBazaar’s encrypted chat.
“We won't be targeting big players immediately. Part of this is that we want to make sure the client and network have been well tested before we push for wider adoption. The other part is that the client currently doesn't have a lot of tools to do proper inventory management, something that will be necessary for anything larger than a small business.
“The initial roll-out is still very much through an excited and engaged community and word of mouth, and we aren't going to be doing marketing until we're confident we've really nailed down this new way of doing commerce online. Peer to peer commerce isn't going to take over the internet overnight, and we're in this for the long haul.”
The beginnings of a retail revolution? Or more dark web drugs?
It’s been an auspicious start for OpenBazaar. Since the test went live at the start of March, Hoffman tells me there have been roughly 15,000 downloads of the app for testing. Having acquired a small amount of funding in a $1 million seed round from Union Square Ventures, Andreessen Horowitz and angel investor William Mougayar, Hoffman says his company is focused on growing the site without any more outsider investment in the near future.
OpenBazaar could still become attractive to those flogging illicit gear. Hoffman and his colleagues plan to increase security on the app, providing much more effective anonymization. They believe buyers and sellers have the right to keep their identity secret; understandable in light of global surveillance, where digital stores have been infiltr |
: the dangerous world of British betting shops | Tom Lamont Read more
Along with Waugh and Rough, YGAM’s trustees and ambassadors include Steve Donoughue, a prominent management consultant who specialises in the gambling industry and has worked as political adviser to the William Hill Group; and Andrew Poole, who started his career with counselling service GamCare and is now a compliance manager for Lotto24, and formerly SkyBet.
Another trustee, Anna Small, does not have a background in the gambling industry. Three directors were appointed shortly after YGAM’s incorporation as a private company but resigned a month later, Companies House records show.
One of the directors, Paul Buck, said he did not resign exclusively over funding concerns but admitted to the Guardian he was uncomfortable.
Buck, a reformed gambling addict who now runs Epic, a problem gambling consultancy that accepts no funding from the industry, said he helped Willows set up YGAM because he liked the principle of YGAM.
He said he would have supported YGAM taking funding from the Responsible Gambling Trust (RGT), a charity that distributes contributions from the industry to other charities. But after he helped set up the then private company, it started to take a different direction.
“Lee made the decision to gain and seek funding directly from gambling industry operatives. I’m not saying I resigned because he got involved with the industry because we’re not anti-industry, I’m not anti-gambling, I’m just anti-problem gambling, but it didn’t particularly sit right that direct funding was coming from the industry.”
• This article was amended on 22 August 2016 to remove the names of Sean Hurley and George Parnavelas who are no longer trustees of YGAM. They were listed on the Charity Commission website as trustees at the time of publication.Swim in the Shark-Infested Waters with a Unique Look Behind-the-ScenesOf the Hit Show Airing Friday, May 2, 8 pm on ABCIn the high pressure world of "Shark Tank," entrepreneurs battle to win a better future for themselves and their companies. Featuring updates on more than a dozen of the show's most memorable and controversial entrepreneurs, "Shark Tank: Swimming with Sharks" goes behind the scenes of the hit reality show and reveals what happens after the deals are made and the entrepreneurs plunge into the uncharted waters of the shark-eat-shark business world. Anchored by "Good Morning America's" Lara Spencer, "Shark Tank: Swimming With Sharks" is an all-new special made to give viewers a unique look behind-the-scenes of ABC's hit show, "Shark Tank," airing FRIDAY, MAY 2 (8:00-9:00 p.m./ET). In keeping with the evening's theme, an all-new, original episode of "Shark Tank" will air immediately following (9:00-10:01 p.m., ET) on the ABC Television Network.
With unprecedented access, "Shark Tank: Swimming with Sharks" features surprisingly candid interviews with all six Sharks -- Mark Cuban, Lori Greiner, Barbara Corcoran, Robert Herjavec, Daymond John, and Kevin O'Leary - revealing what the business titans really think of one another and the strategy behind landing the best deals and making the most money.For the first time, the Sharks reveal which deals they mistakenly let get away. Plus, the most successful entrepreneur from the past five seasons of "Shark Tank" will be revealed -- a business that has already generated more than $15 million in revenue since appearing on the show.Entrepreneur updates include:
Owners of Lollacup, Mark and Hanna Lim, not only expanded their spill-proof sippy cup's product line, since "Shark Tank" they have also moved production from their garage into a full size warehouse.Rick and Melissa Hinnant, owners of Grace & Lace, have seen exponential growth for their sock company, enabling them to give back by funding two orphanages overseas.Ex-NFL Player turned restaurateur Al "Bubba" Baker, who invented Bubba's Boneless Ribs, became an overnight sensation and his ribs are now in 150 stores nationwide.Post "Shark Tank," 20-year-old CEO Lani Lazzaro of Simple Sugars, an all-natural sugar scrub, quadrupled her employees and brought in $2.1 million in sales this past year.Johnny Georges, inventor of water-saving irrigation device, the Tree-T-Pee, is one of the most memorable and humble entrepreneurs in "Shark Tank" history. ABC's cameras join Georges on a cross-country drive as he visits with local farmers and makes the biggest deal of his life.
John Green is the executive producer of "Shark Tank: Swimming with Sharks." Samantha Chapman and John Palacio are senior producers. "Shark Tank: Swimming with Sharks" is produced by Lincoln Square Productions for ABC. Morgan Hertzan serves as Vice President of Lincoln Square Productions.
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About Shark Tank: "Shark Tank" is back for a fifth season, with the Sharks continuing the search to invest in the best businesses and products that America has to offer. The critically-acclaimed business-themed show that is as educational as it is entertaining has grown in popularity and appeal. Regularly winning Friday, ABC's "Shark Tank" has finished as the No. 1 TV series on the night in Adults 18-49 on 21 of its 22 original telecasts this season. Mark Burnett, Clay Newbill and Phil Gurin are the executive producers of "Shark Tank," which is based on the Japanese "Dragons' Den" format created by Nippon Television Network Corporation. The series is produced by Sony Pictures Television.Share
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Google has just rolled an update for its Android and iOS Street View apps that lets you explore its massive database of 360-degree imagery using Cardboard, the company’s cheap-as-chips virtual reality headset.
So whether you’re up for a leisurely jaunt through the English countryside, a wander through the busy backstreets of Bangkok, a quick look at the view from the southern tip of Africa, or any number of curated adventures available right here, with Cardboard pressed up against your face the experience should feel a whole lot more real.
“With more than 15 million installs of Cardboard apps from Google Play, we’re excited to bring VR to even more people around the world,” Google “stereoscopic sightseer” Brandon Wuest wrote in the post.
Finally, improvements have been made to Cardboard’s software development kit, giving developers even better tools for creating new VR apps, as well as improving existing ones.
Monday’s news follows Google’s recent announcement that it’s working to take its school-focused VR Expeditions initiative to more classrooms around the world.
The next best thing to a real-life field trip, the Expeditions Pioneer Program, to give it its full name, takes students to far-flung places around the world using VR gear.
The classroom kit includes a Cardboard headset and accompanying phone to use with it, while the teacher gets a tablet for directing the adventure.Game of Thrones: The Complete Fifth Season is arriving soon, available on Blu-ray and DVD on March 15th. Along with the DVD extras such as commentaries and deleted scenes, the Blu-ray set includes a free Digital HD copy of all 10 episodes, an In-Episode Guide and fifteen new Histories and Lore animated videos, including a 20-minute-long animated feature on “The Dance of Dragons.”
Today, we have a special treat for you- an exclusive first look at the Histories and Lore feature focusing on the Many-Faced God, worshipped by the Faceless Men of Braavos. The video includes stunning artwork and a narration by everyone’s favorite Faceless Man, Jaqen H’ghar, played by Tom Wlaschiha.
Here’s the complete list of Season 5 Histories and Lore from the Game of Thrones Season 5 Blu-ray:
· The Seven-Pointed Star: narrated by The High Sparrow (Jonathan Pryce)
· The Faith Militant: narrated by The High Sparrow (Jonathan Pryce)
· Volantis: narrated by Lord Varys (Conleth Hill)
· Braavos: narrated by Tycho Nestoris (Mark Gatiss)
· The Faceless Men: narrated by Tycho Nestoris (Mark Gatiss)
· Winterfell: narrated by Roose Bolton (Michael McElhatton)
· The Lord Commanders: narrated by Ser Alliser Thorne (Owen Teale)
· Robert’s Rebellion: narrated by Barristan Selmy (Ian McElhinney)
· Dorne: narrated by Ellaria Sand (Indira Varma)
· The Fighting Pits of Meereen: narrated by Daario Naharis (Michiel Huisman)
· The River Rhoyne: narrated by Lord Varys (Conleth Hill)
· The Many-Faced God: narrated by Jaqen H’ghar (Tom Wlaschiha)
· Greyscale & The Stone Men: narrated by Qyburn (Anton Lesser)
· The Great Masters: narrated by Missandei (Nathalie Emmanuel)
· The Dance of Dragons: narrated by Shireen Baratheon (Kerry Ingram), Viserys Targaryen (Harry Lloyd), Oberyn Martell (Pedro Pascal), Robert Baratheon (Mark Addy), Catelyn Stark (Michelle Fairley), and Joffrey Baratheon (Jack Gleeson)
Look for our detailed review of Game of Thrones: The Complete Fifth Season in the coming weeks!Florida Woman Calls 911 for Sex
People call 911 for all kinds of reasons. Some do it after witnessing an old woman get mugged in Detroit. Others might dial it up after seeing a kid texting and driving what used to be his daddy’s car through a red light.
But Maria Montenez-Colon dialed 911 last week because she hadn’t “been penetrated in years.”
After initially calling to report a missing Corvette, the mantsy 58-year-old Punta Gorda woman told the responding officer, “I haven’t been penetrated in years. I’m so horny right now. You can f!%* me.”
The officer declined and left the scene, perhaps because the woman pictured on the left is Maria Montenez-Colon.
But that wasn’t the end of this sexcapade, as Montenez-Colon called 911 again less than an hour later to say the police officer “pissed her off.”
The original responding officer returned to her residence with backup this time, and Montenez-Colon told that officer his partner was “a perfect gentleman, but when I asked him to f!%* me, he turned me down and that made me angry.”
When the initial officer asked her if she remembered their talk about the misuse of 911, she retorted, “I do, but how else am I going to get you to f!%* me?”
That was finally enough to get her arrested.
She was booked into the Charlotte County Jail, where she should find that getting penetrated is much less of a problem.
(via NBC-2)
She’s not the only one with issues: Hilarious But Real 911 CallsOh hi - just thought I’d show off my boxer briefs again from @underwearexpert 💎 This is my favorite design so far from the collection, blue is only of my favorite colors and it’s super comfortable 💕 I highly recommend them (they have different underwear styles and you can choose how many pairs you want a month) And just in case you’re still on the fence about trying them, you can use my code “NEUTRALWOLF30” for 30% off your first box!
Oh hi - just thought I’d show off my boxer briefs again from @underwearexpert 💎 This is my favorite design so far from the collection, blue is only of my favorite colors and it’s super comfortable 💕 I highly recommend them (they have different underwear styles and you can choose how many pairs you want a month) And just in case you’re still on the fence about trying them, you can use my code “NEUTRALWOLF30” for 30% off your first box!Sources say the unidentified buyer paid over $350,000 per key for the 527-key property
JLL arranged the sale of a beachfront casino hotel in San Juan, Puerto Rico, to an unidentified Chinese buyer.
The 527-key San Juan Marriott Resort & Stellaris Casino sold for more than $350,000 per key, according to market sources.
The hotel’s occupancy rate has averaged 87.6 percent over the last five years.
The San Juan hotel occupies more than four beachfront aces near the Port of San Juan, the Puerto Rico Convention Center and San Juan International Airport.
Managing director Gregory Rumpel and senior vice president Andrew Dickey led the JLL team that handled the transaction on behalf of the sellers, Rockwood Capital and Interlink Group.
“The San Juan lodging market has performed well over the past few years, despite short-term impacts in 2016 in the Caribbean region and Puerto Rico’s debt pressures,” Dickey said in a prepared statement. “This property garnered interest from both international and domestic investors due to its beachfront location, outstanding financial performance and affiliation with a globally recognized brand.”
JLL is the brand name of Jones Lang LaSalle Inc., a professional services firm specializing in real estate and investment.Many breastfed infants may not get enough vitamin D because their mothers prefer not to give babies supplement drops, a study suggests.
Pediatricians recommend that mothers exclusively breastfeed infants until at least six months of age because it can reduce babies' risk of ear and respiratory infections, sudden infant death syndrome, allergies, childhood obesity and diabetes.
Because breast milk typically doesn't contain enough vitamin D to help infants develop healthy bones, the American Academy of Pediatrics advises nursing mothers to give their babies daily supplements of 400 IU (international units) of vitamin D. As an alternative, women can take vitamin D supplements themselves - typically 4,000 to 6,000 IU daily - to give babies enough in breast milk so that drops aren't needed.
The research team surveyed 184 breastfeeding mothers, including 44 mothers who also gave their babies formula in addition to breast milk.
Altogether, just 55 percent of the women said they gave their babies vitamin D drops and only 42 percent supplemented with the recommended 400 IU.
"Many mothers were not aware of the need for vitamin D supplementation or their physician had not recommended supplementation," said senior study author Dr. Tom Thacher, a researcher at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota.
"Others believed that breast milk had all the needed nutrition, and some mentioned the inconvenience of giving a supplement or their poor experience of giving a supplement to previous children," Thacher added by email.
Severe vitamin D deficiency can lead to rickets, or soft bones, seizures due to low calcium or heart failure in infants. While adults may get some vitamin D from sunlight, direct sun exposure isn't recommended for babies.
About 76 percent of mothers said they took vitamin D themselves, and most of them preferred daily supplements to longer-acting versions taken less often. Overall, nearly nine in 10 women said they would prefer to take supplements themselves rather than give drops to their babies.
Women who didn't give babies vitamin D most often cited safety concerns, the survey found.
One limitation of the study is that it included mostly white mothers, and the findings might not apply to women of other racial or ethnic groups or with a high risk of vitamin D deficiency, the authors note in the Annals of Family Medicine.
Still, the findings highlight the need to educate new parents about vitamin D and make sure breastfeeding mothers take supplements themselves or give babies drops, said Dr. Lydia Furman, a researcher at Case Western Reserve University and Rainbow Babies and Children's Hospital in Cleveland, Ohio.
"Infants can only receive adequate vitamin D if their mothers receive adequate vitamin D and thus there is adequate vitamin D in their breast milk, or if they are supplemented," Furman, who wasn't involved in the study, said by email.
Some infant formulas may contain enough vitamin D to make drops unnecessary. But babies who consume both breast milk and formula may not get enough vitamin D and still need drops or mothers who take supplements.
Many women who breastfeed incorrectly believe that this gives babies all the nutrients they need, said Dr. Carol Wagner of the Medical University of South Carolina in Charleston.
"There is an inherent belief that breast milk is the perfect food for their baby," Wagner, who wasn't involved in the study, said by email.
It's no surprise women prefer taking supplements themselves, because infant drops can be hard to remember and hard to get babies to swallow, Wagner added.
"We have found that mothers are more apt to take medications and vitamin supplements themselves than to give anything to their infants," Wagner said. "It is much easier to give a vitamin to an adult than to an infant."FORT BEND COUNTY, Texas - Authorities continue to search for a good Samaritan who was helping a crash victim, then possibly went over a bridge and into a river when an alleged drunk driver plowed into the accident scene.
Crews from Texas EquuSearch resumed their search early Tuesday morning, following an extended search Monday night.
The wreck occurred shortly after 9 p.m. Sunday on the Grand Parkway northbound on the Brazos River.
Nehra, 43, has not been located. Deputies believe he may have gone over the bridge and into the river.Deputies said Puneet Nehra, of Sugar Land, had stopped to assist with an accident on the bridge when an intoxicated driver crashed into the original scene.
"We didn't realize that it had happened until it was time to clear the scene and we had one more vehicle than we had drivers, and that's when the deputies had to reassess what happened and figure out where he might be," said Maj. Chad Norvell, with the Fort Bend County Sheriff's Office.
A family friend told KPRC 2 News that Nehra was on his way back home after picking up dinner for his family when he encountered the crash.
Texas EquuSearch, the Fort Bend County Sheriff's Office and local fire departments are searching the river by boat and helicopter.
Tim Miller with Texas Equusearch said high water levels and debris in the water were making the search more difficult.
"The Brazos River is unforgiving, down there where he went in, it goes anywhere from 25 to 48 feet."" Miller said.
Nehra is about 5 feet 9 inches tall, weighing around 154 lbs with black hair. He was wearing a white Polo shirt with red and blue strips, blue jeans and green New Balance shoes.
Investigators said the suspected drunk driver, Gregory Kure, of Needville, was arrested. Kure, 30, is charged with driving under the influence.
"If you can envision a sweet and pure soul, willing to help anyone in need, who would open his heart to anyone he saw, that's Mr. Nehra," said close family friend Anjali Bakshi-Rami.
Bakshi-Rami spoke on behalf of Nehra's family. His wife and two young children are having a difficult time with this, hoping and praying for the best and asking anyone with information about what happened at the crash site to come forward and contact the Sheriff's Office.
"We hope with all of our hearts this will yield some info and bring Puneet home," Bakshi-Rami said.
Anyone who may have witnessed the crash is asked to contact Detective Williams at 281-341-3839.
Copyright 2015 by Click2Houston.com. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.Space shooter
[1][2][3][4][5][6][7][8][9][10][11][12][13][14][15][16][17]
GridWars 2
by Mark Incitti
A very special and amazing Space Shooter
99 %
2,48 MB
Laser Age
by Ingava
A small and funny space shooter
99 %
5,34 MB
Star Trek: The Neutral Zone
by Kresimir Spes
Very fun space shooter for on/off line.
99 %
2,02 MB
Swiv Decimation
by Ayden Wolf
Space shooter / Arcade
93 %
8,14 MB
Shadow Armada
by Lame Game Productions (Walt Woods)
A turn based action/strategy space game.
92 %
2,2 MB
Blast Radius
by Andreas Forsen (DaDDe), Caspar Raarup
A very fine side scrolling space shooter.
91 %
3,65 MB
Goldrake Spacer
by Crian Freesoft X
A terrific Italian Space Shooter using 3D graphics
91 %
48,3 MB
Idinaloq
by Namikaze project
A Space shooter with excellent graphics
91 %
12,7 MB
Battleships Forever
by Sean th15 Chan
A very good full featured space Real Time Strategy game
90 %
17,3 MB
Cloudphobia
by unknown (Japanese)
A very nice side scrolling shooter
90 %
8,36 MB
Galax
by masaHG
Excellent vertical scrolling shooting game
90 %
2,1 MB
Alientreasure
by Volker Stepprath
Scrolling space shooter with lots of features
89 %
4,83 MB
Aurikon
by Aggressive Game Designs
A great one-key Space Shooter game
89 %
4,49 MB
Raven Assault Squad
by Bertone Ermes
An amazing 3D space shooter
89 %
3,55 MBHundreds of dead fish have surfaced in an Alberta lake near Edson, and an avid fly fisherman blames the government's new winter aeration technique.
Alton Hunter said he noticed dead trout appearing on the shores of Millers Lake, near Edson, when the ice began to melt this spring.
Hunter, who lives at the lake and owns Ron's Outdoor Source for Sports in Edson, said this winter the government replaced the surface aerators that had been used for 20 years to oxygenate the lake with a different aeration system.
It didn't work, Hunter said.
"The oxygen didn't go into the lake, and it's dead," he said. "I was down there when the ice first came off and you could count 200 to 300 dead fish floating on the surface. The whole lake is dead, there's not a live fish in there."
Previous aeration system a liability, Alberta Conservation Association says
Millers Lake is one of 17 Alberta lakes aerated by the government and the Alberta Conservation Association each year to ensure stocked fish survive when the lakes freeze over.
The lake was one of nine in central Alberta fitted by the ACA with new diffuser aeration systems this winter.
Has it worked as well as we had hoped it would work? No. There is some degree of fish kill at some lakes. - Ken Kranrod, vice-president, Alberta Conservation Association
Vice-president Ken Kranrod said the switch from surface aerators, which leave a hole in the ice, was necessary after lawyers advised them of legal ramifications of leaving an open hole.
Under Section 263 of the Criminal Code, anyone "who makes or causes to be made an opening in ice that is open to or frequented by the public is under a legal duty to guard it." That means serious charges — including manslaughter — could arise if someone were to accidentally fall through ice.
Liability issues meant doing nothing wasn't an option, Kranrod said, so the ACA settled on using diffuser aerators this winter.
"When you weigh all the different factors, we came up with this as the best approach and we gave it a try," Kranrod said. "Has it worked as well as we had hoped it would work? No. There is some degree of fish kill at some lakes."
Kranrod said aeration is a shared responsibility with the Alberta government. He said not all aerated lakes were affected by fish kills, but the ACA is already in talks with the government to see how aeration outcomes can be improved.
The only reason they changed aeration techniques was to avoid liability issues as defined in the Criminal Code, he said.
"We're revisiting that again to hopefully come up with a solution in conjunction with government to perhaps address that issue right at the start," he said.
"If not, then we will be looking at re-jigging the types of aeration that we do."
David Park, director of fisheries management policy with the Alberta government, said he's not aware of anyone having fallen through a hole drilled in the ice for a surface aerator.
But given this year's results, he said the government will reconsider the use of diffusion aerators.
"My understanding is the surface aerators can and will likely be used next year," Park said.
The Alberta Conservation Association says they're in talks with the government to use the surface aerators next year, which have been successful for decades. (Weekly Anchor)
Fisherman wants old system put back in use
Hunter said in the past 20 he hasn't heard of a single problem with holes cause by surface aeration at Millers Lake. He would like to see a return to the surface aerators and the lake restocked with fish.
The lake has been annually stocked with around 12,500 rainbow and brown trout for 20 years, he said, and without good fishing, his property value and business would suffer.
"I know they didn't deliberately want to destroy the lake," he said. "[But] it did not function, it did not work, and basically we've lost the lake. It's sort of like watching your mother-in-law drive off a cliff in your antique Cadillac. Somebody dropped the football on the one yard line in the last play of the game."
"We've got to look at the future, what can we do to change this so it never happens again? And how fast can we get that done?"Hillary Clinton says she’s not running for president again, but she may be running out of excuses for why she lost the White House to President Trump.
Former FBI Director James Comey, Facebook, The New York Times, Russia, WikiLeaks, misogyny, the pressure of high expectations and the Democratic National Committee have been among the people, organizations and attitudes Clinton has saddled with responsibility in recent days for her stunning November loss.
Clinton, who has said she's writing another book, has often told her interviewers she takes “absolute personal responsibility” for the loss. However, in other questions, she’s spread the blame liberally.
“I take responsibility for every decision I make – but that’s not why I lost.” — Hillary Clinton
“I take responsibility for every decision I make – but that’s not why I lost,” Clinton said Wednesday at the Recode Code Conference in California.
The former Democratic standard-bearer was perhaps her most forthcoming at Recode, even slamming her party for an inept election operation.
“It was bankrupt, it was on the verge of insolvency, its data was mediocre to poor, non-existent, wrong,” Clinton said. “I had to inject money into it – the DNC – to keep it going.”
But those charges drew a swift rebuke from former DNC director of data science Andrew Therriault, who fired off a series of tweets on Thursday critical of Clinton -- before deleting them.
"DNC data folks: today's accusations are f------ b-------, and I hope you understand the good you did despite that nonsense," Therriault wrote in one message.
Clinton on Wednesday night also took aim at The New York Times – typically viewed as a left-leaning publication – for treating her secret server scandal “like it was Pearl Harbor.”
And the man in charge of that server investigation, Comey, didn’t escape Clinton’s wrath, either – particularly at issue for Clinton was the letter Comey sent to Congress late in the campaign announcing new evidence in the case may have been discovered. Comey ultimately never recommended Clinton be prosecuted.
“I can’t look inside the guy’s mind,” Clinton said. “He dumped that on me on Oct. 28, and I immediately start falling.”
She told a Women for Women International event in early May: “…if the election had been on Oct. 27, I’d be your president.”
“It wasn’t a perfect campaign – there is no such thing – but I was on the way to winning until the combination of Jim Comey’s letter on Oct. 28 and Russian WikiLeaks raised doubts in the minds of people who were inclined to vote for me but got scared off,” Clinton said, drawing a link between anti-secrecy site WikiLeaks and its rumored connection to Russian spies who allegedly meddled in the 2016 election.
Misogyny is named as a factor in a May 26 New York Magazine article.
“Once I moved from serving someone – a man, the president – to seeking that job on my own, I was once again vulnerable to the barrage of innuendo and negativity and attacks that come with the territory of a woman who is striving to go further,” Clinton said.
And she again namechecks Comey and the Russians.
“I would have won had I not been subjected to the unprecedented attacks by Comey and the Russians, aided and abetted by the suppression of the vote, particularly in Wisconsin,” said Clinton, who did not visit Wisconsin a single time after the Democratic National Convention in July.
Clinton is set to speak later Thursday at BookExpo in New York City. It’s unclear who’ll face the blame there.by Bruce Moore
Bruce Moore is a former director of the Australian National Dictionary Centre, who is currently editing the second edition of the Australian National Dictionary. The following is an extract from his book What’s their Story? A History of Australian Words (published by Oxford University Press Australia, 2010).
Anzac is a central word in the expression of Australian attitudes and values, and it carries its history more overtly than any other Australian word. It had humble beginnings: it is an acronym formed from the initial letters of Australian and New Zealand Army Corps, originally used as a telegraphic code name for the Corps when it was in Egypt in 1915, just prior to the landing at Gallipoli. It first appears in writing in the Australian war historian C.E.W. Bean’s Diary on 25 April 1915: ‘Col. Knox to Anzac. “Ammunition required at once.”’1 Two weeks later Bean writes: ‘Anzac has become the sort of code word for the Army Corps’ (6 May).2 It was eventually to become ‘a sort of code word’ for Australia and its beliefs and values.
Soon after in 1915 Anzac was used as the name for the place where the troops landed at Gallipoli—‘Anzac Cove’, often abbreviated to ‘Anzac’. The term was also used more generally to refer to the Gallipoli campaign, and even in the earliest references there are signs in the language of the tradition that the word would later define and evoke: (1916) ‘The whole nation brooded over these young men, guardians of Australia’s honor, and waited anxiously for them to wipe out this slur. That explains Australia’s pride in “Anzac”. It meant for us not merely our baptism in blood—it was more even than a victory—for there, with the fierce search-light of every nation turned upon it, our representative manhood showed no faltering.’3 It was also in 1916 that the term Anzac was first used to refer to a member of the Australian and New Zealand Army Corps who served in the Gallipoli campaign: ‘Lord Mayor Dick Meagher has decided to entertain returned Anzacs at luncheon at the Town Hall’;4 ‘The children unborn shall acclaim / The standard the Anzacs unfurled, / When they made Australia’s fame / The wonder and pride of the world.’5 By 1918 the term Anzac was being extended to refer to any Australian or New Zealand soldier or ex-soldier: ‘Anzacs are pouring in—an endless stream of tattered bloody figures—night and day.’6
During the war the term Anzac was used in various compounds: an Anzac button (first recorded 1919) was ‘a nail used in place of a trouser button’, Anzac soup (1919) was ‘shell-hole water polluted by a corpse’, Anzac stew (1919) was ‘an urn of hot water and one bacon rind’, and an Anzac wafer (1918) was ‘a hard biscuit supplied to the AIF in place of bread’. W.H. Downing (1919) adds to the definition of Anzac wafer: ‘One of the most durable materials used in the war.’7 It was inevitable that most terms of this kind did not survive their wartime contexts, although the Anzac wafer survives transformed into the Anzac biscuit (or called, as in the first record of it in 1923, simply Anzac). This is the 1923 recipe:
Anzacs: 2 breakfast cups John Bull oats, 1/2 breakfast cup sugar, 1 scant cup plain flour, 1/2 cup melted butter, 1 tablespoon golden syrup, 2 ditto. boiling water, 1 teaspoon carb. soda. Mix butter, golden syrup and soda together, pour boiling water on, then add dry ingredients. Put on oven sheet or scone tray with teaspoon. Slow oven till browned.8
The name Anzac is protected under Australian law, and can be used only with the permission of the Minister for Veterans’ Affairs. There has been some controversy over the recent use of the term Anzac cookie (with its strong American overtones) rather than Anzac biscuit, and the website of the Department of Veterans’ Affairs spells out the rules clearly:
In 1994 a general policy relating to biscuit products was adopted. The policy recognises that the names ‘Anzac biscuit’ and ‘Anzac slice’ have been in general use in Australia for many years, recipes appear in many cookbooks and biscuits are sold at numerous small fetes and fundraising events. It should be noted that approvals for the word ‘Anzac’ to be used on biscuit products have been given provided that the product generally conforms to the traditional recipe and shape, is not advertised in any way that would play on Australia’s military heritage, and is not used in association with the word ‘cookies’, with its non-Australian overtones. For instance, an application for Anzac biscuits dipped in chocolate would not be approved as they would not conform with the traditional recipe.
Anzac slice appeared much later than Anzac biscuit, and is made with the same ingredients but baked in a tray as a traditional ‘slice’ and then cut up.
By the end of the First World War, the term Anzac was being used emblematically to reflect the traditional view of the virtues displayed by those who served in the Gallipoli campaign, especially as these virtues are seen as national characteristics: (1918) ‘The marvellous spirit and genius of the Australian and the immortal name of Anzac;’9 (1920) ‘Hundreds and thousands of heroes of the Empire … gladly come out to these smiling “plains of promise” … and multiply and prosper, and breed up a race of future Anzacs.’10 The compounds Anzac spirit and Anzac tradition appeared in 1916: (Australians in Kent responding to a Zeppelin raid) ‘The old Anzac spirit was back in a minute’;11 ‘Can we doubt that Australia will prove true—true to the great motherland which has shielded and protected her in the past, true to the great Anzac tradition which this war has already established for her.’12
During the war the compound Anzac Day was formed. The first Anzac Day was proclaimed by the acting Prime Minister George Pearce to be held on 25 April 1916, and some 60,000 to 100,000 people took part in Anzac Day activities in the Domain in Sydney. In Egypt, Australian soldiers commemorated the day with a religious service followed by sports and entertainments. In London, 2000 Australian and New Zealand troops marched through the streets to a service at Westminster Abbey attended by Lord Kitchener and the King and Queen. The tradition continued, with marches of troops in various cities in Australia, from 1917 on, these sometimes being called Anzac march or Anzac parade. By the late 1920s the dawn service, now such an important part of Anzac Day ceremonies, had also become established.
Anzac and its compounds are now often pressed into service in a variety of ways. The Anzac spirit can infuse a football match: (2000) ‘On a day when the Anzac spirit pervaded a packed MCG the big guns in Kevin Sheedy’s unbeaten Essendon rose to the occasion against a brave Collingwood. … Hird … carried on the work in the last quarter to clinch a special medal struck for the player who best epitomised the Anzac spirit out on the field of battle.’13 It can win an America’s Cup: (2008) ‘Australia needed heroes. … We portrayed the Aussie Anzac spirit of fighting with our backs to the wall, from 3-1 down. It surpassed a yachting event, it surpassed a sporting event.’14 It can save a dying Murray River: (2008) ‘This situation is not acceptable and as Australians in the true Anzac spirit we must act to reverse this environmental, social and economic disaster.’15 And it can help us prevent superbugs invading our hospitals: (1998) ‘Australia is part of a new global war and it’s going to take more than a good dose of the Anzac spirit to keep this enemy at bay.’16 This all bears testimony to the continuing strength of the Anzac tradition and the power of its central word.By Alexandra Ulmer and Alexandra Valencia
QUITO (Reuters) - Ecuador’s presidential election will go to an April runoff between leftist government candidate Lenin Moreno and ex-banker Guillermo Lasso, the electoral body said on Tuesday, after a nail-biter first round over the weekend.
Moreno needed 40 percent of valid votes and a 10 percentage-point difference over his nearest rival to win outright. He was the clear leader of Sunday’s election, pocketing 39.21 percent of valid votes versus 28.34 percent for Lasso, with 95.3 percent of votes counted.
With the Andean country on tenterhooks and the opposition protesting for prompt results, the electoral body said the results could not change although it was waiting for all ballots to be counted before officially proclaiming a second round.
“No, it’s not possible,” electoral council president Juan Pablo Pozo told reporters, when asked if a runoff could be avoided. “But we have to wait for official results to be 100 percent.”
Opposition protesters had massed in front of the electoral council headquarters in mountainous capital Quito since Sunday to denounce what they say were fraud attempts |
but he has quite a large forehead. Bringing him up to I think 5ft 11.75. I'd be very surprised if he was genuinely a flat 6 feet tall
Madzie2000 said on 4/Jan/17
The top of my head sits just above Benedict Cumberbatch's nose... this is annoying me so much.
Sandy Cowell said on 4/Jan/17
I have just seen 'the Imitation Game'!
It is so inspiring that I had that 'overwhelmed chill' during nearly all the second half!
It seems a bit mundane to talk about his height after seeing something so breathtaking, but I could see he was a good few inches taller than 5ft7 Keira Knightley, so I rated him as a 6-footer, give or take half-an-inch. I'll guess 5ft11.75 in fact, giving him the extra quarter-inch than he is listed here because I have taken into account the comment from Victor Surratt (29th Dec.) about the way he is standing in the picture with Rob. Also, I am loving him right now for moving me so much, so he has earnt it - and more! 🔎 💻 📝 📣 👏
Stephen Vincent Strange said on 4/Jan/17
Strong 5'11". About 2-3 inches shorter than Mark Gatiss who plays Mycroft Holmes in BBC Sherlock, don't you think, Rob?
Editor Rob: Stephen, he can look at times 2 inches smaller than Gatiss.
In person I saw that as a possibility, though I think Gatiss overall has a better posture.
In the Imitation Game you could argue he looked near 3 inches shy of Charles Dance, who is still 6ft 2 range today. said on 4/Jan/17Strong 5'11". About 2-3 inches shorter than Mark Gatiss who plays Mycroft Holmes in BBC Sherlock, don't you think, Rob?
Shaun said on 3/Jan/17
So Rob who do u think looked taller in person? Mark Selby or Benedict?
Editor Rob: Selby could look nearer 6ft than Benedict I feel. said on 3/Jan/17So Rob who do u think looked taller in person? Mark Selby or Benedict?
Victor Surratt said on 29/Dec/16
He looks 5'11.5 flat with Rob because his back seems slightly bowed, but with better posture he will look a 6'0 guy I think.
GamerGoneWild said on 28/Dec/16
I'm fairly sure he's 6 feet
Jordan87 said on 8/Dec/16
5'11 on the Dot.
Redwing said on 29/Nov/16
Jimmy Kimmel is 5'11 I think on your page and dr strange and him were in a video together. Strange was taller.
Giorgi said on 29/Nov/16
Rob, why are you being unfair to yourself. I bet you're 174 cm here ;)
Guest said on 28/Nov/16
I can see 8cm difference here, take -1cm because of his footwear and it's 7cm difference. 5'11" flat guy.
Tarinator said on 23/Nov/16
I am 181.3 cm tall so would I be the same height as him Rob?
Andrea said on 22/Nov/16
The top of his head is the top of his head, Rob! No matter how long is his head...
In the most recent picture, he looks 5'11.5 WITH hair and shoe advantage!
Editor Rob: to be fair Andrea, you wouldn't entirely rule out a chance of him falling to 181cm, but I'm just not so sure he is that low. said on 22/Nov/16The top of his head is the top of his head, Rob! No matter how long is his head...In the most recent picture, he looks 5'11.5 WITH hair and shoe advantage!
Dmeyer said on 20/Nov/16
Considering the haí¯r And that Malcolm had less haí¯r/footwear 5 ft 11-11,25 might be closer hé should look 6 ft because of the 0,3in extra shoe, rob hé should have looked 5 ft 11,75-6ft not looking at shoes
Editor Rob: one thing Dmeyer, Benedict has a genuine long head in person, probably near to 10 inches.
said on 20/Nov/16Considering the haí¯r And that Malcolm had less haí¯r/footwear 5 ft 11-11,25 might be closer hé should look 6 ft because of the 0,3in extra shoe, rob hé should have looked 5 ft 11,75-6ft not looking at shoes
slurkapfson said on 19/Nov/16
looks 5'11 flat. 181 afternoon.
Sam said on 15/Nov/16
I know what its like having no sleep and suddenly feeling shorter during the day. I'm not sure if that's exactly the case here because Rob is normally already at his low when he has a photo taken. Cumberbatch could really just be 5'11". Not a legit 6 footer like many people believe, even though a lanky framed 5'11" is an easy in todays world.
Pierre said on 10/Nov/16
by the scale he's around 5"11' with advantageous shoes so i think he's around 5"10.75'
Ed Kline said on 9/Nov/16
Seemed ever so slightly shorter (half inch?) than Jimmy Fallon the other day who is listed here at 5'11.5. Also looks more like 5'11 flat with Rob above.
S.J.H said on 9/Nov/16
Cumberbatch long head/face and long torso making him short looking like david gandy. More i see him he could be 5'11.5 in real
Johno said on 8/Nov/16
Not really over 5'11, does not look over it with Rob, nor Andrew Scoot, nor James Corden.
Arthur said on 6/Nov/16
Rob, Benedict kinda claims 6 foot here.
He says ''How dare you!'' jokingly, when a fan said she initially thought he was a ''5'11 wannabe 6 footer''
I bet he really claims 6 feet but he is 5'11.5 at the very most. said on 6/Nov/16Rob, Benedict kinda claims 6 foot here. Click Here He says ''How dare you!'' jokingly, when a fan said she initially thought he was a ''5'11 wannabe 6 footer''I bet he really claims 6 feet but he is 5'11.5 at the very most.
richinkle said on 2/Nov/16
5'-11"
Benjamin Fritz said on 23/Oct/16
Looks VERY tall in Dr.Strange and in behind the scenes + interviews. 5'11,65 would be my guess.
1,83 out of bed.
1,81 before bed.
Bobby said on 22/Oct/16
I'm quite certain he's 6ft, this appears to be a true least a 4 inch height difference, and if he's 5'11.5, he's closer to 6ft anyway, so he can round up. He looked very tall in The Doctor Strange trailer.
BT said on 21/Oct/16
@Editor Rob: Yeah, but shouldn't the footwear advantage make up for some of that though? I think he does look a little over 5'11 mostly so it's not a big deal, I just find it strange that he looks just barely 5'11 with you even with a footwear advantage.
Editor Rob: yeah you could make a strong 5ft 11 argument, but as I said the first time I met him, looking at him with the photographer I think he certainly wasn't shorter and could have edged him a little, but had a bit more footwear, hence 5ft 11.5. said on 21/Oct/16@Editor Rob: Yeah, but shouldn't the footwear advantage make up for some of that though? I think he does look a little over 5'11 mostly so it's not a big deal, I just find it strange that he looks just barely 5'11 with you even with a footwear advantage.
BT said on 18/Oct/16
@Editor Rob: I trust your judgement, you've met plenty of 5'11 and 5'11.5 guys, but don't you think you're being just a wee bit generous here? You seem to stand with a similar posture, he has a little more footwear and he still only looks 5'11, logically that would imply he measures a little under 5'11. What's your thinking behind the "phantom" half inch?
Editor Rob: phantom half inches can easily get added or taken away.
I would say I think cumberbatch is over 5ft 11 but under 6ft, so 181 or 182 could be argued for him.
Could have been I wasn't quite at my low, he had a bad night and was at low already... said on 18/Oct/16@Editor Rob: I trust your judgement, you've met plenty of 5'11 and 5'11.5 guys, but don't you think you're being just a wee bit generous here? You seem to stand with a similar posture, he has a little more footwear and he still only looks 5'11, logically that would imply he measures a little under 5'11. What's your thinking behind the "phantom" half inch?
S.J.H said on 16/Oct/16
Cumberbatch is not over 5'11.25 and could be just 5'11
HonestSlovene said on 16/Oct/16
He looks around 5'11.25"-5'11.5" with you, Rob. Would not argue under a flat 5'11 and nothing over 5'11.5"
Jay 184cm said on 15/Oct/16
He looks a flat 180cm in the second picture.
J dowd said on 14/Oct/16
How the google do you guys differentiate between 0.25 of an inch when looking at a person? That's what I'd really like to know...
Editor Rob: well it's still estimates, and if you see somebody beside lots of others, maybe one figure might seem more likely than another.
said on 14/Oct/16How the google do you guys differentiate between 0.25 of an inch when looking at a person? That's what I'd really like to know...
josh jeffords said on 9/Oct/16
Hell of an actor funny he looks pretty tall but lanky guys do.
Must have had even thicker lifts than Pine in Star Trek like a lot.
Great voice and of course does well in live acting as well.
Johno said on 1/Oct/16
I was thinking that this picture maybe fluke, that Benedikt is not as short as he appears with Rob up there but comparing him to Andrew Scott; who Rob has been pictured with and who Rob is taller than, Benedikt comes off even worse than he does with Rob.
I would be confident in saying Benedikt looks like in the lower end of the 5'10-range at his lowest and around 5'11-5'11.25 at his tallest. He is basically around 5'10.75, which is kind of surprising for me.
so said on 30/Sep/16
Could be a spot on 6.
travis said on 28/Aug/16
i thought he was 6'0 because he about my size lanky and slim
Justbringit said on 10/Aug/16
I think that his listing is solid.He can appear both 5'11.25" and 5'11.75" to me at times but for the most part I would stick with 5'11.5"
MD said on 28/Jul/16
@xaoxio,
Chris Hardwick isn't even 5'9", either.
The Man said on 26/Jul/16
Looks rather 5'11" than 5'11.5", even with the shoe advantage. The most I'll give him is 5'11 1/4".
xaoxio said on 25/Jul/16
with 5'9'' Chris Hardwick
Editor Rob: he's got probably nearly half inch less sneaker than the type of footwear chris is wearing. said on 25/Jul/16with 5'9'' Chris Hardwick Click Here Time to downgrade Benedict Cumberbatch, Rob?
anon said on 12/Jul/16
Looked possibly around 2-3 Inches shorter than Tennis Star Andy Murray the other day backstage after he Andy won Wimbledon, pretty hard to peg Murray down clearly as his posture is a bit iffy etc He is listed officially as 6'3 he is on record as saying he is 6'3 in shoes and he is down on here as 6'2 I think he is a solid 6'2 guy in general
justbringit said on 10/Jul/16
so rob in the 2nd photo did he have footwear advantage?
Editor Rob: both, but the first is a small fraction, the other a bigger fraction. said on 10/Jul/16so rob in the 2nd photo did he have footwear advantage?
Rampage(-_-_-)Clover said on 7/Jun/16
I wouldn't argue shorter than this...he might just edge out Redmayne by a fraction.
Peter 179cm said on 3/Jun/16
Nothing over 180cm flat in the second picture,imo.He could be as low as 179 though,since he has a bit more footwear than you,Rob...
Domti said on 3/Jun/16
Judging solely by the eye level comparison with Rob he looks a bit under 1,82. But he also has a rather large forehead so maybe that could push him in the weak 6' range. His posture is not that great either. The listing seems fair in my opinion.
That guy said on 1/Jun/16
i like both of your hand signs in the first pic
Editor Rob: I think he thought I was doing rock/paper/scissors, but I was doing a wee sideways vulcan ;) said on 1/Jun/16i like both of your hand signs in the first pic
Johno said on 27/May/16
Using the height chart and taking away footwear advantage would put Benedikt at ~5'10.3 at his lowest but he is probably a bit over 5'11 at his tallest thus an average of between 5'10.75-5'11 would be fair.
Mat said on 26/May/16
Rob, he looks 5'11 in the height chart you added, plus he has thicker shoes. Do you think he could be 5'11 or below?
Editor Rob: while I wouldn't rule that out completely, I feel he overall has looked a bit more than 5ft 11. said on 26/May/16Rob, he looks 5'11 in the height chart you added, plus he has thicker shoes. Do you think he could be 5'11 or below?
Johno said on 1/May/16
The above snapshot on the right is a fair comparison and you can see him going sub-5'11 easily.
His eyeline is around 5'6 and i can't see much of a tilt because Rob and him are not that far apart in height thus their eyelines should not vary that much in perspective when both are looking at the camera man.
Take footwear into consideration and he is comfortably below 5'11 at his lowest, if you want to argue higher than you have to throw away that picture; i see no reason to, it's a good shot.
Editor Rob: he was at least 1.5 inches smaller than gatiss that day...but he was definitely taller than rupert graves... said on 1/May/16The above snapshot on the right is a fair comparison and you can see him going sub-5'11 easily.His eyeline is around 5'6 and i can't see much of a tilt because Rob and him are not that far apart in height thus their eyelines should not vary that much in perspective when both are looking at the camera man.Take footwear into consideration and he is comfortably below 5'11 at his lowest, if you want to argue higher than you have to throw away that picture; i see no reason to, it's a good shot.
truth said on 30/Apr/16
Looks like a solid 5ft11.5, nice job Rob.
Medium Round said on 17/Apr/16
This is confusing. I am quite exactly 181 cm (at night), which means that with regular shoes on I will quite exactly clear 183 cm (which is ever so slightly over 6 foot, remember). Accordingly, my eye level is such that I would gaze straight over the head of someone who is 173 cm no matter how good their military posture was.
I guess what I'm trying to say is that generally, even a 5'11" flat should look taller than this next to you. Specifically, compare this picture with the John Amos one, Cumberbatch looks very close to his height. Of the two, one cannot be less than 5'11" and the other closer to 6' without some kind of tricks.
Also, those measuring lines seem to suggest the distance from your chin to the top of your head is 10 inches? Are you sure about that, because it seems a bit (actually, about an inch) too much... I would think it'd look a little disproportionate on you. Could be an optical illusion if you indeed have measured it.
Editor Rob: normally it is 9.5 inch to, sometimes it could be longer/shorter in a photo if I tilt eyes up or down a little. said on 17/Apr/16This is confusing. I am quite exactly 181 cm (at night), which means that with regular shoes on I will quite exactly clear 183 cm (which is ever so slightly over 6 foot, remember). Accordingly, my eye level is such that I would gaze straight over the head of someone who is 173 cm no matter how good their military posture was.I guess what I'm trying to say is that generally, even a 5'11" flat should look taller than this next to you. Specifically, compare this picture with the John Amos one, Cumberbatch looks very close to his height. Of the two, one cannot be less than 5'11" and the other closer to 6' without some kind of tricks.Also, those measuring lines seem to suggest the distance from your chin to the top of your head is 10 inches? Are you sure about that, because it seems a bit (actually, about an inch) too much... I would think it'd look a little disproportionate on you. Could be an optical illusion if you indeed have measured it.
Sean said on 16/Apr/16
Love the new feature showing the measurements. You seem to be giving some credit for hair though in this and others.
miko said on 15/Apr/16
Rob if you put Matt Smith & Benedict under the stadiometer of doom with the taller man getting eternal life who would come out taller?
Editor Rob: flip a coin really! said on 15/Apr/16Rob if you put Matt Smith & Benedict under the stadiometer of doom with the taller man getting eternal life who would come out taller?
Rampage(-_-_-)Clover said on 11/Apr/16
Could really be somewhere in the 5ft11½-5ft11¾ range. He can pull off a decent 6ft w/h Martin Freeman. I'd give him the edge over Eddie Redmayne who might still be 5ft11 flat.
Greg_NYC said on 4/Apr/16
Hey Rob, just curious if you actually tell the actors you take pics with that you are from a celeb height judging website?
Editor Rob: not directly. said on 4/Apr/16Hey Rob, just curious if you actually tell the actors you take pics with that you are from a celeb height judging website?
S.J.H said on 2/Apr/16
Johno said on 6/Mar/16
Look at cumberbatch face level while he facing down like 0.4" with rob and deduct shoe advantage he could still struggle 5'11 or right on it but what you say 5'10.75 could be possible for his height by lowest.
Mat said on 18/Mar/16
Rob, the height scale you added shows his eyelevel to be at 5'6. That's an average eyelevel for a 5'10.5 man. Are you saying that he has a 5.5 inch eyelevel? That's massive. He could have a 5 inch eyelevel at most, so he should be 5'11, right?
Editor Rob: his eyelevel could be close to 5 inch, but tilt your eyelevel down a fraction and it looks bigger. said on 18/Mar/16Rob, the height scale you added shows his eyelevel to be at 5'6. That's an average eyelevel for a 5'10.5 man. Are you saying that he has a 5.5 inch eyelevel? That's massive. He could have a 5 inch eyelevel at most, so he should be 5'11, right?
Bobby B. said on 15/Mar/16
Wow Rob your photo skewers the measurements because your head's bigger than his. He looks no more than 3 inches taller. Hard to tell because of the head sizes
Johno said on 14/Mar/16
If your saying he is 5'11 the most Alex then your automatically insinuating that you may believe he is shorter so i don't understand what the "No" was about.
5'10.75
AlexMahone said on 11/Mar/16
No Johno. He's 5'11" at most.
Johno said on 6/Mar/16
Then you need to deduct footwear advantage S.J.H and he would appear no taller then 5'10.75.
He is a strong 5'10-ranger.
datguy said on 6/Mar/16
wow the new 5'11 line shows him barely hitting the 5'11 line without the hair. I also don't see how it's possible for him to be this tall with a 5'6 eyelevel wouldnt that be an insanely low eyelevel
S.J.H said on 5/Mar/16
He can be 5'11.5 only in morning half hour out of bed and probably 5'11.75 out of bed and 5'11 is how he look on the 2nd picture in person
184.3cm (Night) said on 27/Feb/16
5'6 eyelevel? Wouldn't that put him at 5'11 tops? My eyelevel is around the 5'8 mark. How can this guy be 1-1.25 inches shorter? He would need to have an eye round 5'7.
NBAer said on 24/Feb/16
In the 2015 picture, Sherlock looks max 7-8cm taller than Rob with more footwear,so about 6-7cm taller really...So,this makes Cumberbatch a solid 180cm guy.Rob,i think a 0.5 inch downgrade is fair,he could even pass for 179cm next to you because of his bigger forehead honestly...!
mickey said on 16/Feb/16
in these pics he looks more 5'11
Johno said on 15/Feb/16
Even under this height chart, when you deduct hair, he barely comes out at 5'11 and then you deduct footwear and his height drops into the 5'10-range.
It is quite clear that Benedikt does not stand any better then how Rob's father did with him when he was in the 5'10-range.
datguy said on 13/Feb/16
Rob I like the new height chart in the picture but doesn't it throw off this listing? he seems 5 11.5 without the hair and that's WITH the thicker footwear. shouldn't this make him 5'11.25?
Editor Rob: at times someone can look above or below their height in photos. I think if you measured him he could still be roughly 5ft 11.5 said on 13/Feb/16Rob I like the new height chart in the picture but doesn't it throw off this listing? he seems 5 11.5 without the hair and that's WITH the thicker footwear. shouldn't this make him 5'11.25?
datguy said on 11/Feb/16
Klask how on earth do you see a 4 inch difference in the new picture?
Klask said on 6/Feb/16
Legit 183cm. Maybe pushing up on 184cm, even. Clearing 6' flat either way.
datguy said on 6/Feb/16
Rob is he dropping any height in the newest picture?
Editor Rob: he wasn't moving much, the shoot was very fast so people jump in, snap and 'next'... said on 6/Feb/16Rob is he dropping any height in the newest picture?
Johno said on 1/Feb/16
Take footwear disadvantage away and Rob would stand better with Mr Cumberbatch then Tom Hardy does. Tom Hardy for me is nothing over 5'8.
Even without taking footwear into consideration, Rob is nearly reach 2/3s above his eyeline towards the top of his head. 2/3s 5 inches that is. It is therefore very reasonable to assume that benedict without the footwear advantage would look 5'10.25 with a 5'8 Rob. Giving him a height estimate of a weak 5'11 is very-very fair.
Rampage(-_-_-)Clover said on 31/Jan/16
I agree with Jake. I think he can look nearer 6ft than 5ft11. In Sherlock he looked a strong 6ft guy!
Jake: 1.84 m- 1.85 m said on 19/Jan/16
He is at least 182 cm in my opinion.
Rampage(-_-_-)Clover said on 18/Jan/16
Cumberbatch can give a slightly taller impression than Redmayne in photos. Anything under this listing is too low.
pjk said on 18/Jan/16
Wow, in these photo's he looks no more than 5'11 flat i would say. Very revealing, nice one Rob. This would also explain the slight disparity between himself and Chris Pine.
Andrea said on 16/Jan/16
Basing on Rob's photos, no...
Rampage(-_-_-)Clover said on 15/Jan/16
Rob, is he really just a centimetre taller than Redmayne?
Editor Rob: I think they are relatively close, eddie with more up and down posture though. said on 15/Jan/16Rob, is he really just a centimetre taller than Redmayne?
Rampage(-_-_-)Clover said on 15/Jan/16
Weak 6ft was closer.
176.2 said on 11/Jan/16
Wow he has incredible short legs for that height!
datguy said on 9/Jan/16
Maybe a 5'11.5 listing would be better since you saw him at that height.
Editor Rob: that is pretty much the mark I should give him. said on 9/Jan/16Maybe a 5'11.5 listing would be better since you saw him at that height.
MD said on 8/Jan/16
When Eddie Redmayne stands at his full height (rare) in pictures with Benedict, they are basically the same height. Both are just over 5'11".
Ferris said on 7/Jan/16
That's weird, I always thought he was a solid 6fter like 183-184 range in most of his tv shows and movies. But standing next to Rob, he looks more 181 range (with footwear advantage)!
amaterasu said on 5/Jan/16
He doesn't look 5'11.75, but he is nothing under 5'11" consider footwear advantage. I would put him right at 5'11.25, he is most likely 183cm out of the bed and drops 2cm during the day, so solid 181cm.
Rob, if you really like to see him as 182cm, then at least put him at 5'11.5
datguy said on 5/Jan/16
Why hasn't he been downgraded yet basically everyone here agrees that 5'11.25 at the most.
Byron T. said on 4/Jan/16
I think Benedict Cumberbatch can pass for 6'0'' even if he's a little under it.
Rob, how much did it cost for your 2015 photo op with Cumberbatch?
Editor Rob: in 2014 £35 then 2015 £45 ($65 - 70). said on 4/Jan/16I think Benedict Cumberbatch can pass for 6'0'' even if he's a little under it.Rob, how much did it cost for your 2015 photo op with Cumberbatch?
Andrea said on 4/Jan/16
He can look a weak 5'11 in the new picture, considering he has got more shoes!
Ferris said on 4/Jan/16
He's a bit taller than Eddie Redmayne, Ioan Gruffudd and especially Matt Smith!
Mat said on 4/Jan/16
Give him the 5'11.5 Rob. It's still 182 cm. Right now, even 181 cm could be argued for Benedict
Mat said on 4/Jan/16
Rob, you didn't answer this: in a 3 inch difference you should be looking at his mouth, correct? How much difference do you have in the photo?
Editor Rob: yes normally, but remember if somebody had a longer eyelevel in a photo then you could be looking above their mouth. said on 4/Jan/16Rob, you didn't answer this: in a 3 inch difference you should be looking at his mouth, correct? How much difference do you have in the photo?
Blade said on 3/Jan/16
Looks 5'11.
jtm said on 3/Jan/16
another lift wearer?
Rampage(-_-_-)Clover said on 2/Jan/16
I think this is the lowest he could be. He can look 6ft
Mat said on 2/Jan/16
Rob, seriously, how much difference do you have in the latest photo? If you were looking at his mouth it would be 3 inches. But you are not. It's a 2.5 inch difference. Let's say you are 5'8.5 in the pic. That makes him 5'11 flat. He also has 1/3 more shoe, so 5'10 and 2/3 in aka 179.5 cm. Mind explaining this? Even if we assume you have a 3 inch difference in the picture, it's 5'11.5 minus the third inch more shoe, 5'11-5'11.25 aka 180-181, and that's assuming he didn't sleep all night. Correct me where I'm wrong, please, because I too thought he was 182 cm and I'm a bit shocked.
Editor Rob: he definitely wasn't shorter than Malcolm the photographer (who is near 5ft 11.5 himself), but I think Malcolm was in converse and cumberbatch hair made him look taller. In 2015 he didn't look 6ft range up close. said on 2/Jan/16Rob, seriously, how much difference do you have in the latest photo? If you were looking at his mouth it would be 3 inches. But you are not. It's a 2.5 inch difference. Let's say you are 5'8.5 in the pic. That makes him 5'11 flat. He also has 1/3 more shoe, so 5'10 and 2/3 in aka 179.5 cm. Mind explaining this? Even if we assume you have a 3 inch difference in the picture, it's 5'11.5 minus the third inch more shoe, 5'11-5'11.25 aka 180-181, and that's assuming he didn't sleep all night. Correct me where I'm wrong, please, because I too thought he was 182 cm and I'm a bit shocked.
datguy said on 2/Jan/16
I could believe 5'11.25 if he was already a his absolute low at the time of this picture. He should definitely at least be put at 5'11.5 though.
Johno said on 1/Jan/16
Rob, i honestly think if he did not have the footwear advantage, you could make a case of Mr Cumberbatch looking less then 2 inches taller then you. You would be very near his hairline and his hairline is not 2 inches and above. He therefore could look sub-5'10 in this picture.
But since you saw him around 5'11.5, i am keeping my weak 5'11 option open.
Editor Rob: I think his eyelevel in that photo will be around 5 inches though said on 1/Jan/16Rob, i honestly think if he did not have the footwear advantage, you could make a case of Mr Cumberbatch looking less then 2 inches taller then you. You would be very near his hairline and his hairline is not 2 inches and above. He therefore could look sub-5'10 in this picture.But since you saw him around 5'11.5, i am keeping my weak 5'11 option open.
Johno said on 1/Jan/16
Taking his footwear advantage out of the equation and that picture would be a real shocker.
If Rob opted to wear thick shoes from now on and support a haircut with volume; he would basically pull-off a Hollywood "6-footer", this is without wearing elevator boots, just normal large shoes.
datguy said on 31/Dec/15
barely even looks 5'11. Is it time for a downgrade Rob?
Editor Rob: 5ft 11.5 could be nearer, 5ft 11 flat I don't think he's that low. said on 31/Dec/15barely even looks 5'11. Is it time for a downgrade Rob?
cole said on 30/Dec/15
@Editor Rob: How tall would you say you were at the time of the picture? Between 174 and 175 cm? I feel like even if the restless night theory was the case and he had already dropped to his low or extreme low, over 181 cm range is quite hard to believe looking at the new picture... It's weird as he usually does look a decent 182 cm guy.
Editor Rob: out the hotel at 8am and on feet at least 3 hours, that photo was bang on 11am, so I'd likely be anywhere in 8.25-3/8th range that moment.
I'm in a clark route which is just under 0.7 inch and cumberbatch in a out the hotel at 8am and on feet at least 3 hours, that photo was bang on 11am, so I'd likely be anywhere in 8.25-3/8th range that moment.I'm in a clark route which is just under 0.7 inch and cumberbatch in a 1-inch shoe said on 30/Dec/15@Editor Rob: How tall would you say you were at the time of the picture? Between 174 and 175 cm? I feel like even if the restless night theory was the case and he had already dropped to his low or extreme low, over 181 cm range is quite hard to believe looking at the new picture... It's weird as he usually does look a decent 182 cm guy.
Johno said on 29/Dec/15
Looks 5'10.5 - 5'10.75 in that picture; i am going to give him 5'11.JERUSALEM — The human rights group Amnesty International said in a report Thursday that Palestinian militant organizations had committed war crimes during the 2014 Gaza-Israel conflict, by killing both Israeli and Palestinian civilians using indiscriminate projectiles.
The report comes after two other reports issued in late 2014 that accused Israel of war crimes for attacks on multi-storey civilian buildings and attacks on Palestinian residential homes during the war.
The 50-day Gaza war left more than 2,100 Palestinians dead, mostly civilians, according to Palestinian and UN officials. On the Israeli side, 66 soldiers and six civilians were killed.
Palestinian militants, including the armed wing of Hamas, launched unguided rockets and mortars which cannot be aimed at a specific target and are a breach of international law, the human rights group said.
Six civilians in Israel were killed in such attacks, and 13 Palestinian civilians were killed when a Palestinian projectile launched from the Gaza Strip apparently landed in a Gaza refugee camp.
Palestinians have claimed that the Israeli military was responsible for that attack, but Amnesty International said an independent munitions expert examining the evidence on the group’s behalf concluded that a Palestinian rocket was responsible.
The report also alleged other international humanitarian law violations during the conflict, including |
answers, and accountability—hence the lawsuit. "They charged these guys with interfering with police activity," Makled told the Detroit Free Press. "In essence, they were accused of stopping prostitution in the making... these officers were just out of control."
With Makled and Hadous' help, the teenagers got the criminal charges against them dropped in August. In November, they filed the federal lawsuit alleging "false arrest" and mistreatment. According to their lawsuit, police officers swarmed the teen's car and forced them out, searching it and placing them in handcuffs before impounding their car. One of the officers allegedly took a Snapchat photo of Bazzi in handcuffs. The officers then drove the teens around for a bit before dropping them off at a random Detroit street corner, "instead of a police station where their parents could safely pick them up," and allegedly laughed as they told the teens to walk the five miles home.
Hadous called the whole situation outrageous, nothing that the teenagers could have been hurt or "had criminal records as a result of nothing—an imaginary crime."
Arresting Teens for Something They Can't Legally Consent To
Under federal law, a teenager cannot consent to sex for money, even if they are above the age of sexual consent in the state they live in; the federal criminal code defines anyone under 18 who is involved in prostitution as a sex-trafficking victim, even if no on else is involved and they are simply "trafficking" themselves. But this doesn't stop state and local law-enforcement from routinely arresting teenagers for engaging in prostitution.
The latest examples comes out of Southport, New York, where the local NBC affiliate recently reported that two 17-year-olds, one male and one female, had been arrested for prostitution. Why this story was important enough to make TV news is beyond me, but it's notable that NBC reported on the story with no hint that this action might be at all controversial.
Funding a Ministry of Prostitution Prevention
El Paso officials have approved $31,000 in public funds to help pay the salary of a "prostitution prevention advocate" at the Center Against Sexual and Family Violence (CASFV). A statewide law pass in 2013 requires every Texas county to take a "non-adversarial" approach to prostitution, and El Paso authorities say they are complying with that law.
"A lot of people think of [prostitution] as a victim-less crime, and it's not," said Teresa Chavira, a retired police officer who now works at CASFV in a position partially funded by the city.
In total, El Paso received $150,000 from the state to hire prostitution prevention staff. "The County received the grant to establish a structured nine-month program benefiting approximately 25 women," according to KVIA.com.Before we get into this recap, can I get a “hell yeah” for the Season Three renewal of Wynonna Earp?! This show is so deserving of another season, and the fans that tirelessly campaigned for it, you are true cinnamon rolls. I know I often draw parallels between Wynonna Earp and Buffy the Vampire Slayer (and I’m not alone) but this season very much feels like when Buffy came into its own in Season 3. It wasn’t about fighting monsters so much as it was about what it means to be a human being with fears and dreams. The helpless feeling of having no choice, and the crushing pressure of being the girl with all the gifts. Giving Wynonna Earp a third season is not only smart, but it’s going to give us another chapter in this show which is quickly becoming as much of a legend to a new generation as Buffy was to the one before it. Ok, I need to move on before I start to cry. (Hold it together, Piccoli!) Here are the ten best moments of “Everybody Knows.”
10. Stache vs stache. It’s hard to compete with Doc Holliday’s bushtastic mustache, but when this Ghost Marshall comes a callin’, it’s a full on war.
9. Pussywillows is revealed. Ok, I’ll admit, I was a tiny bit disappointed that Pussywillows wasn’t actually a lesbian bar, because that’s what I’ve been going with since Emily Andras teased fans with the name a few months back. (There’s that fanfic down the tubes.) But having it be a strip club full of sassy ladies and revenants was pretty cool too.
8. Jeremy’s first stakeout. Jeremy has quickly found his way into my heart, and on to Dolls’ nerves. When Dolls takes Jeremy on a stakeout to keep an eye on the Black Widows he not only spills sunflower seeds all over the floor of the car (vacuums don’t get them all, Jeremy), but he fanboys over Doc and Wynonna. Basically, he’s all of us.
7. Wynonna confesses her one night stand to Waverly. Wooboy, this we knew this wasn’t going to be easy. It practically physically pains Wynonna to admit that Doc might not be the father of the lil’ Earper, but Waverly does her best to swallow her concerns and support her sis. That’s why these two are the best.
6. Waverly lays down the law. There’s just something about a pocket-sized bi lady reading you the riot act. She might be mad, but you’re still her sweetie pie.
5. We meet possible Daddy #2. Oh man, I had a feeling this was coming and it still hit me like a ton of bricks. One night stand guy Jonas is a revenant, and kind of a dick too. The glee he took in possibly impregnating the Earp heir was nauseating, and I can’t say I was too sorry (or surprised) when Wynonna sent him back to hell.
4. Dolls saving Doc. Bass Reeves was about to execute Doc for the crime of being, well, Doc, until Dolls stepped in and defended his begrudging friend. When he put the pieces together that he was negotiating with his idol, he smiled like a little kid and saved the day. All in a day’s work, Marshall Dolls.
3. A Revenant Baby!? Aaaaaaand here we have it folks. The pieces are falling into place, especially with Waverly’s doubts about her own Earpness. Before Wynonna dispatched of Jonas, he told her that an Earp/Revenant hybrid had happened only once before, or so the rumors say. Could that be Waverly? What’s going on? Hold me, Officer Haught!
2. We are family. So what do you say to your sister when she’s had to kill the possible-father-of-her-maybe-demonish child? That she’s a damn superhero and she’s not alone. The scenes between these two couldn’t be more satisfying or heart-wrenching.
1. Drunk Nicole. Kat Barrell is a funny lady, and she’s really getting to show off those chops this season. She gets to be a swoonworthy crush object, and an awkward goober all in the same episode. Drunk Nicole wasn’t a caricature. She was authentically, adorably drunk and not gonna lie, that’s pretty much how I am when I’m drunk. See you at the strip mall Tiki bar in Vegas 2018!
What were your favorite moments from “Everybody Knows”? Ps I loved this Spaghetti Western WE poster so much by Ally Baldwin Designs, that I had to pick one up. Check it out.By Lo-Ping - Fri Jul 29, 1:19 pm
Does your internet feel tired? Run down? Does it pop out of parties? Is it unpoopular? Well, you probably have Pando Media Booster to blame for your poor internet performance as of late. But what exactly is Pando Media Booster?
Pando Media Booster [PMB] is a stealth P2P program many games (mostly F2P) install. It will run on start-up under Pando.exe or PMB.exe. It uploads without prompt from your computer and does not show on tray or task manager. It WILL whore out your internet bandwidth and capacity – anywhere from 10% to 70% of your current speed may be occupied. This is a method for companies to shove bandwidth bills to the consumer.
Current known list of games :
League of Legends [LoL]
Grando Espada
Vidictus
Allods
Lord of the Rings Online
Maplestory [Any Nexon games in general, it seems]
Bloodline Champions (to some degree)
And these are the ones that the company admits to. There will be more.
Fixes:
1. Uninstall from control panel: This is the easiest, simplest solution.
It will re-install itself once you run an update from games that utilize it.
If you don’t play those games much, this is your solution.
2. Remove it from start-up
Type msconfig in Start Menu -> run.
Remove PMB.exe or Pando.exe from startup list.
The Pando will run again once an updater is started, but at least this will reduce 24/7 whoring.
3. Internalize with hosts file
Find output address (Either ip or address) of Pando, this will depend on what game you play and may not be available to you. Open hosts file (Not hosts.txt, just hosts) at : en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hosts_%28file%29
Edit with notepad and add line :127.0.0.1 WhateverAddressWas
This will prevent Pando from sending packets out. It will still occupy some CPU, but won’t whore as much bandwidth.
Fight the power gentlemen. Do not let the companies use your internet for their benefit. Check SpeedTest.net before and after if you so wish. Imagine, there are hundreds of thousands of uneducated players with this bull leaching off them. You are free now, but the companies will abuse this ignorance with full force when they can. I’m not sympathetic for those who don’t even check their computer now and then, but I am worried where this will lead.
If anyone else is aware of any other games that use this invasive software, let us know so we can add it to our wall of shame here.
Let the world know: Facebook
Twitter
Reddit
Like this: Like Loading...It’s time for the 2014 NBA playoffs, so we’re getting fired up by messing with logos again. This time we’ve moved into basketball. You may have vaguely heard of this animated series out of Japan known as Pokemon? Now imagine if they became NBA logos? (some of them might actually convert into logos who knows, they do change a lot)
Someone (we actually don’t know who specifically, it wasn’t us, we just wrote the snark below them) decided to bring this to life and show us what every logo in the NBA would look like if they were Pokemon.
All 30 NBA teams are here from the world champion Miami Heat to even the Tankadelphia 76ers. Plus a couple throwback bonuses on the final page.
Just like other remixes we’ve had, they’re broken down by a division per page. Check ‘em out (by clicking the page numbers at the bottom) and catch ‘em all, because remember with Pokemon: you gotta catch ‘em all.
All of the logo pictures are from imgur.com. The captions are ours, the drawings are…well, whoever did them. If you know, leave us a comment or a link and we’ll credit them and link back, but imgur’s how we found them.
EASTERN CONFERENCE
Atlantic Division
Raptors
Improvement: the logo no longer looks like Chris Bosh. Well…not as much anyway.
Nets
Snorlax here looks a lot like Kevin Garnett does these days. Add “Home” to the bottom of this logo and it’s perfect.
Knicks
The Knicks are more like Kicks anyway, because they’ve been kicking their fans in the nuts for years now.
Celtics
The vine they’re whipping these days is more like a licorice vine. Maybe the Bulbasaur can start. Rondo needs help.
76ers
The ninetales looks good, but these days they’d much prefer zerowins #TankadelphiaSAN DIEGO (CNS) - A 24-year-old heavyset woman with facial hair who allegedly stabbed a man in the East Village was arrested, police said Friday.
Maryann Victoria Reeves was nabbed at about 5 a.m. Thursday, in the same 300 block of Park Boulevard near K Street where the unnamed, 39-year-old victim was stabbed the day before at 7:40 p.m., police said.
Reeves was being held in lieu of $30,000 bail, according to San Diego County jail records. She is scheduled to be arraigned on Wednesday on a charge of assault with a deadly weapon.
According to San Diego police Officer Robert Heims, the victim was attacked as he attempted to bum a cigarette from someone in a group of people.
Reeves allegedly walked up to the victim and told him to get away from her things just prior to stabbing him in the left side of his neck, Heims said. She allegedly ran off before police arrived, headed south on Park Boulevard.
Heims said the victim was taken to a hospital and was treated for non-life-threatening injuries.
Reeves is white, stands 5 feet 7 inches tall and weighs about 395 pounds, according to jail records.Spread the love
Few people in the U.S. would publicly advocate the need for children as young as 12 to marry; yet, Governor Chris Christie not only believes religious freedom erases Western mores about child marriage, he codified that personal belief for New Jersey residents — by vetoing a bill which would have banned the practice, outright.
“I agree that protecting the well-being, dignity, and freedom of minors is vital,” Christie opined, “but the severe bar this bill creates is not necessary to address the concerns voiced by the bill’s proponents and does not comport with the sensibilities and, in some cases, the religious customs, of the people of this State.”
Christie stunned lawmakers in his conditional refusal to sign into law A3091, which would have barred “persons under age 18 from marrying or entering into a civil union,” according to its text.
According to Politico, Republican Assemblywoman Nancy Munoz — a legislator from Christie’s own party — led sponsorship of the bill, which garnered virtually full support from the New Jersey Senate and Assembly, after hearing “compelling” anecdotal testimony from minors who had been forced into marriage under religious pretenses.
Nevertheless, Christie proffered religion as a central focus to rubber-stamping the continuation of legal child marriage in his state.
“Underage marriage is widespread in the United States, where about 170,000 children were wed between 2000 and 2010 in 38 of the 50 states where data was available, according to activists,” Reuters reports.
“Although age 18 is the minimum for marriage in most of the nation, every state has legal loopholes allowing children to wed.”
Indeed, definitive reasons may exist for minors to marry — opposition cited pregnancy or that 17-year-olds may enlist in the military with parental consent — but the law as it stands allows children under the age of 16 to wed with permission of a family court judge.
“An exclusion without exceptions would violate the cultures and traditions of some communities in New Jersey based on religious traditions,” Christie explained.
While maturity cannot be dictated by age, detractors feel the potential for abuse, mental health concerns, and the inherent rights of minors overwhelmingly preclude the dictates of any religious doctrine — leaving the legality of underage marriage untouched while exceptions are debated seems unwise.
Reuters notes, “Studies have shown that child marriage is associated with mental health problems, poverty and increased high school drop-out rates.”
“The shocking truth is that child marriage is legal right now in New Jersey, and it’s shocking that thousands of children have been married here recently, most of them minor girls married to adult men,” Fraidy Reiss, executive director of the nonprofit Unchained At Last, told the state’s Assembly last year.
Reiss also noted, reports Politico, “that almost 3,500 marriages involving at least one partner under 18 took place in New Jersey from 1995 to 2012. Of those, 163 involved at least one spouse 15 or younger. Most were religious arranged marriages.”
New Jersey isn’t alone, by far, in allowing teens — and, in some instances, preteens — to wed, though Americans would be shocked at a comparison to the rest of the planet.
Although the age at which each state allows exceptions for minors to marry varies greatly, several, including Massachusetts, will give the green light for the marriage of children as young as 12 to a partner — but that prospective spouse rarely also is underage.
Most often, child marriages involve underage adolescent girls and men decades their senior.
“In Virginia itself,” The Independent reported in March, “according to state health statistics, more than 4,500 minors were married between 2000 and 2013, including about 220 who were 15 or younger.”
That any of the United States permit 12-year-olds to wed puts the nation on a questionable level matched only by war-torn Yemen and opprobrious human rights-abuser, Saudi Arabia.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, anti-choice activists rallied against the bill under the auspices pregnant youth should be allowed to marry under because it would be better for offspring.
Although the governor’s refusal to sign A3091 leaves New Jersey in line with multiple U.S. states on the topic, his conditional veto came with the proposal to ban marriage entirely for those under 16 years of age and require consent from a judge before 16- and 17-year-olds could wed.
“It is disingenuous to hold that a 16-year-old may never consent to marriage, although New Jersey law permits the very same 16-year-old to consent to sex or obtain an abortion without so much as parental knowledge, let alone consent,” Christie, quoted by Politico, asserted in the veto. “That inconsistency in logic undercuts the alleged logic of an outright ban.”
Munoz — bewildered, disappointed, and unsure precisely how to proceed — retained measured optimism in the governor’s suggestions that the restrictions on child marriage may still find their way into the New Jersey law books.
“It’s not an absolute veto, which is good,” she told Reuters.
Christie would likely sign the bill into law should legislators append its text to include his recommendations on age-specific exceptions.
“I thought it was a good bill,” Munoz continued. “I thought it was OK to be first in the country on this.”In May 2012, researchers observed a pod of killer whales attacking a gray whale and its calf in Monterey Bay, California. After a struggle, the calf was killed. What happened next defies easy explanation.
Two humpback whales were already on the scene as the killer whales, or orcas, attacked the grays. But after the calf had been killed, about 14 more humpbacks arrived—seemingly to prevent the orcas from eating the calf.
“One specific humpback whale appeared to station itself next to that calf carcass, head pointed toward it, staying within a body length away, loudly vocalizing and tail slashing every time a killer whale came over to feed,” says Alisa Schulman-Janiger, a whale researcher with the California Killer Whale Project.
For six and a half hours, the humpbacks slashed at the killer whales with their flippers and tails. And despite thick swarms of krill spotted nearby—a favorite food for humpbacks—the giants did not abandon their vigil.
It’s not clear why the humpbacks would risk injury and waste so much energy protecting an entirely different species. What is clear is that this was not an isolated incident. In the last 62 years, there have been 115 interactions recorded between humpback whales and killer whales, according to a study published in July in the journal Marine Mammal Science.
“This humpback whale behavior continues to happen in multiple areas throughout the world,” says Schulman-Janiger, who coauthored the study.
“I have witnessed several encounters, but nothing as dramatic as [the May 2012 event],” she says. It remains the longest humpback-to-killer whale interaction known to date.
What Is Going on Here?
The most logical biological explanation for the humpbacks’ vigilante-like behavior is that the whales receive some sort of benefit from interfering with orca hunts.
For instance, orcas are known to attack humpbacks, and the whales are most vulnerable when they are young. Once fully grown, though, a single humpback is large enough to take on an entire pod of killer whales.
So perhaps the “rescuing” behavior has evolved as a way to help the species get through its weakest life stage, with humpbacks charging in when they think a young whale is at risk.
There’s also a good chance that the calf under attack is related to the whales coming to its rescue.
Was This Whale Trying to Save a Diver’s Life?
“Because humpbacks calves tend to return to the feeding and breeding grounds of their mothers, humpbacks in a given area tend to be more related to neighboring humpbacks than to the population as a whole,” says study leader Robert Pitman, a NOAA marine ecologist and National Geographic Society grant recipient.
But there’s a wrinkle in this explanation. Of all the incidents the scientists investigated over the last five decades, killer whales targeted humpbacks just 11 percent of the time. The other 89 percent involved orcas hunting seals, sea lions, porpoises, and other marine mammals.
There’s even one incident in which humpbacks apparently tried to save a pair of ocean sunfish from becoming orca hors d'oeuvres.
Perhaps it’s personal. Schulman-Janiger notes that not all humpbacks interfere with orca hunts, and many that do bear scars from being attacked by orcas earlier in their lives, perhaps as calves. Therefore, it’s possible that personal history drives humpbacks to respond to orca hunts.
The study also notes that it’s possible the humpbacks are responding to auditory calls made by the killer whales rather than the animals they are hunting. This would mean that the humpbacks don’t know what species is being attacked until they have already invested energy in swimming to the battle.
Such a behavior could persist in the population because it would occasionally benefit humpbacks—apparently enough to justify benefiting other species the majority of the time.
View Images A Weddell seal rests on the chest of a humpback whale, safe for the time being from attacking killer whales. Photograph by Robert L. Pitman
All for One, and One for All?
Other whale experts see a dose of something even more complex: altruism.
“Although this behavior is very interesting, I don’t find it completely surprising that a cetacean would intervene to help a member of another species,” says Lori Marino, an expert in cetacean intelligence and president of the Whale Sanctuary Project.
Humpbacks are capable of sophisticated thinking, decision-making, problem-solving, and communication, says Marino, who is also the executive director of the Kimmela Center for Animal Advocacy.
“So, taken altogether, these attributes are those of a species with a highly developed degree of general intelligence capable of empathic responses.”
Furthermore, humpbacks are not the only animals that seem to display some sort of regard for another species. Dolphins have been famously depicted as “aiding” dogs, whales, and perhaps even humans—though it should be noted that onlookers, not animal experts, often report such events, and it can be easy to misinterpret animal behavior.
Whether humpbacks are truly performing what amounts to a good deed or are benefiting from the process, it’s clear that we still have much to learn about the minds and motivations of the animals around us.
For the most part, Pitman says animals tend to do what is in their own best interest—even if the motivations themselves aren’t entirely clear to us.
“As biologists,” he says, “that is where we should start our search for explanations.”A new scientific dating technique has revealed there was a building spree more than 5,500 years ago, when many of the most spectacular monuments in the English landscape, such as Maiden Castle in Dorset and Windmill Hill in Wiltshire, were built, used and abandoned in a single lifetime.
The fashion for the monuments, hilltops enclosed by rings of ditches, known to archaeologists as causewayed enclosures, instead of being the ritual work of generations as had been believed, began on the continent centuries earlier but spread from Kent to Cornwall within 50 years in about 3700 BC.
Alex Bayliss, an archaeologist and dating expert at English Heritage, said: "The dates were not what we expected when we began this project but prehistorians are just going to have to get their heads around it, a lot of what we have been taught in the past is complete bollocks."
Bayliss worked on the new dating system with Professor Alasdair Whittle of Cardiff University and other experts, combining hundreds of thousands of scraps of dating evidence, obtained from the last century of excavations, on Cardiff's computers. They matched notoriously imprecise carbon-14 dates from organic remains – which can have a margin of error of centuries – with all the other evidence from archaeological finds, narrowing the dates for sites from centuries to decades.
"The old techniques gave us such imprecise results that it's like taking the Napoleonic wars, the first world war, the second world war and the computer revolution and insisting that they're all contemporary.
"Now we can narrow that down dramatically. You take a granny with a good long life living near Windmill Hill in Avebury, she could have seen her family start the enclosure as a child, see it fall out of fashion and them turn to building barrows, and then return to do more work on the enclosure, all in her lifetime."
Although some sites were used for generations, the evidence suggests others were built with enormous effort, and then used only once or on a handful of occasions.
"Their construction may have been sparked by a critical mass of population, power and goods to trade around 3700 BC. It's the Swinging Sixties, everything changes – new wealth, new goods."
Bayliss added: "We began by looking at the evidence from the causeway enclosures but then to get the story into which they fit, we ran every other carbon date taken for the period. What we found is that the spread of agriculture was far more rapid than we had believed.
"It took two centuries for agriculture to reach Cheltenham from London – and then just 50 years to get from Cheltenham to Aberdeen."In this undated photo provided by the Chicago White Sox, outfielder Mark Gilbert poses at Comiskey Park in Chicago. (Photo11: AP) Story Highlights If confirmed by the Senate, Mark Gilbert will be ambassador to New Zealand
Gilbert played seven games for the White Sox in 1985
Gilbert has been a banking executive and was a member of the Obama for America finance team
Mark Gilbert batted leadoff in the same lineup with future Hall of Famers Tom Seaver and Carlton Fisk, tracked down a flyball lofted by Eddie Murray and hit a key single off Orel Hershiser.
Now the former Chicago White Sox outfielder is on deck for a new position: If confirmed by the Senate, he'll become the U.S. ambassador to New Zealand.
The U.S. State Department said it couldn't find any other record of a former major league player having served as an ambassador.
CARDINALS: Bullpen has bright future
Gilbert played seven games for the White Sox in July 1985. Fleet and good with the glove, he hit.273, scored three runs and drove in three for manager Tony La Russa's team.
"Sure, I remember him," La Russa told The Associated Press on Wednesday. "I was always taken with his intelligence and how he was committed to what we were trying to teach — to become a teammate, a competitor and to pursue excellence as a professional."
"You do that and get a proper foundation and out of the bottom, out drops your fame and fortune. I think he's now raised his excellence to a new level," he said.
Told that ambassadors are often addressed as "His Excellency" or "Your Excellency," La Russa chuckled.
"I think if Mark walks into a clubhouse with his old teammates, I don't think they're going to call him 'Your Excellency,'" he said with a laugh.
WORLD SERIES THREAT?: Man arrested after alleged Twitter comments
GOLD GLOVES: Several repeat winners
Cal Ripken Jr., Barry Larkin and Dennis Martinez are among the many former big leaguers who have served the State Department in roles such diplomacy envoys, goodwill ambassadors and baseball sports envoys. Gilbert, incidentally, once hit a bases-loaded double off Martinez at Comiskey Park.
Next up, a rookie diplomat in a new field.
"Baseball is America's pastime, so what better way to represent the United States overseas than with someone who, before he was a successful businessman, began his career as a major league baseball player?" State Department spokeswoman Marie Harf said.
"While this clearly wasn't the reason for his nomination, it doesn't hurt that ambassador-designate Gilbert played for the president's favorite team, the Chicago White Sox," she said. "As fans all around the country and the world, including die-hard Rex Sox fan Secretary of State John Kerry root for their teams in the World Series, Embassy Wellington is preparing to hopefully get a new manager sometime soon."
President Barack Obama officially nominated Gilbert on Tuesday. The 57-year-old Gilbert has been a banking executive and was a member of the Obama for America national finance team.
Those nominated for ambassadorships typically don't comment during the confirmation process.
Several baseball executives have become ambassadors. Among them, Texas Rangers President Tom Schieffer served in Japan and Australia.
Gilbert starred at Florida State, where he also played basketball for a season. He was a 14th-round draft pick by the Chicago Cubs in 1978 and hit an RBI single off Hershiser in the 1979 Midwest League playoffs.
Twice Gilbert stole at least 50 bases in the minors, stealing 55 while playing alongside Eric Davis in 1984 at Class AAA Wichita, the top farm team of the Cincinnati Reds.
Gilbert signed with the White Sox before the 1985 season. Called up in midseason, he went 6 for 22 with four walks. One of his hits came against former Cy Young winner Mike Flanagan.
New Zealand is known more for rugby, cricket and America's Cup sailing more than baseball. The Kiwis played in the qualifying tournament for the most recent World Baseball Classic, and local star Scott Campbell was a Class AAA infielder for Toronto in 2009.
The country does play a lot of softball. That could come in handy: When he gets time, Gilbert still likes to run around the softball field.
"Mark was a very talented player. He could hit, he could bunt, he could steal his bases," Davis said Wednesday. "But what I remember about Mark is how meticulous he was about his game, how he took pride in wearing the uniform right and passing along what he knew."
Davis was a two-time All-Star and World Series champion. In the minors, he became the leadoff man and Gilbert moved to the second spot.
"I was young, had power and didn't want to walk. Mark taught me about taking pitches, setting things up for the hitters behind me. That tutelage really helped," Davis said.
"I never got a chance to thank him for all the time he spent with me, our paths took us in different directions," he said. "But I never forgot what he did for me."
PHOTOS: WORLD SERIES WALK-OFFS
Copyright 2013 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.The appointment of Ray Wilkins as Aston Villa assistant manager will see the Chelsea man link up with Tim Sherwood and we are pretty happy about that.
Aston Villa fans can look forward to the twin sights of Tim Sherwood and Ray Wilkins in the Villa Park dugout next season, after the former Queens Park Rangers and Fulham boss was confirmed on their website as the club's new assistant manager.
Once no.2 to Carlo Ancelotti at Chelsea, the 58-year-old's most recent stint in management came with the Jordan national team.
It was something of a disastrous spell, however, with Wilkins winning just one of the 12 games he was in charge for with Jordan exiting the 2015 Asian Cup in the group phase.
So how will Wilkins fare at Aston Villa? Who knows? But if there is one thing the Villa new boy has got up his sleeve, it's a daft quote or five – here are some of the best.
Assessing aerial ability:
"That's exactly how you head a ball... you use your head."
How yellow and red cards work:
"It's the first booking that gives him the second one."
The Liverpool groove:
"Liverpool don't take touches — it's either one-touch or two-touch."
Transfer deadline day, Wilkins-style:
"My phone has been red-hot and we are making some progress."
A fusion of styles:
"The gelling period has started to knit."
A man of the people:
"Look at the fans behind the goal. Nobody’s appealing for a Villa penalty. OK, they’re QPR fans, but..."
The secret of Nani's success:
"The interesting thing about Nani is that he has two feet."
Commenting on one particular Emmanuel Adebayor injury:
"[It looks] a bit hamstringy. If it’s a hamstring, then ooh, it’s a naughty one. He’s certainly holding his hamstring or the top of his buttock."
The magic of Ronaldo:
"Ronaldo is always very close to being onside or offside."
SEE ALSO: Aston Villa feature in special Game of Thrones inspired club badges
Wilkins coming over all David Brent:
"West Ham have committed 13 fouls, but they weren't fouls, they were commitment."The Jay-Z and Beyonce bill
Republicans on the House Appropriations Committee are looking to limit Jay-Z and Beyonce’s travel options.
A spending bill approved on Wednesday by one of the panel’s subcommittees contains a provision that seeks to tighten travel restrictions to Cuba, following the celebrity couples headline making trip the communist country earlier this year.
Story Continued Below
“This is the Jay-Z, Beyonce Bill,” Rep. Jose Serrano (D-N.Y.), a member of the House Appropriations Committee who opposes the provision, told POLITICO. “Absolutely [it’s a response to the trip], and it’s playing to the audience in Miami” — a reference to opponents of relaxing economic and diplomatic relations with the island country.
( Also on POLITICO: Beyoncé: Cuba response 'quite shocking')
The provision is part of a larger $17 billion financial services spending bill that funds the operations of several agencies, including the Treasury Department, which approved the cultural trip that included Jay-Z and Beyonce. The department has said it approves the trips based on their itinerary and not the specific travelers.
Panel Republicans said that’s too broad a policy and in response the spending would restrict travel to Cuba to educational exchanges involving academic study related to a degree program. So unless Jay-Z and Beyonce are earning a degree — the Treasury Department wouldn’t have been able to approve their trip.
Their trip “was an example of how the guidelines are not being enforced,” Subcommittee Chairman Ander Crenshaw (R-Fla.) told POLITICO. “I think that if we’re going to say that we have this policy in place that relates to travel in Cuba that it ought to be enforced and that becomes a grey area where they’re probably not really following the guidelines.”
Serrano, an advocate for opening up relations with Cuba, said he has no problems with the married celebrity couple’s anniversary trip, which sparked criticism for what could be perceived as an endorsement of the communist country.
“The mistake they made was being seen in public, by that I mean they being who they are walked down the street.,” he said. “We may consider Cuba a closed society, but even it is – it’s not closed enough so they don’t know who Jay-Z and Beyonce are.”
He added: “What you’re seeing here is the result of a successful trip …isn’t it educational for a superstar in our country to go to Cuba and say, ‘Look who we are?’”It's almost time for this year's Frankfurt International Motorshow, but there must be something in the air because car makers seem to be jumping over each other to reveal their new products days or even weeks before doors open to the press. Last week, Ferrari jumped the gun with its new entry-level Portofino. Yesterday, Bentley did the same for its new Continental. Today, it was Mini's turn. It's bringing what we think is a thinly veiled concept to the show, called (imaginatively) the Mini Electric Concept. We say thinly veiled, because there's a production Mini electric vehicle due in 2019.
"With its characteristic go-kart feeling and powerful electric motor, the MINI Electric Concept is great fun to drive while also being completely suitable for everyday use—and producing zero emissions to boot. That’s how we at MINI envisage electric mobility in tomorrow’s world," said Peter Schwarzenbauer, Member of the Board of Management of BMW AG, which is responsible for MINI, Rolls-Royce, and BMW Motorrad.
The front of the car has been given a redesign compared to the Minis on our roads today. As a battery EV, it has little need for a big air intake to feed a combustion engine. Asymmetric alloy wheels make use of 3D-printed bits to mimic the revised front grille, and it's covered in Es to signal to the onlooker that "this Mini is electric!" Oh, and the rear LED tail lights each form half of the Union Flag, a nod to Mini's British heritage.
Technically, when the production electric Mini hits the showrooms in a couple of years' time, it will be the second Mini EV on sale, as the brand does have a plug-in hybrid Mini Countryman in its lineup already. That car uses a similar (but less powerful) powertrain to the one found in one of my all-time favorites, the BMW i8 (although in this case, the 1.5L three-cylinder engine drives the front wheels and the electric motor powers the rears).
We’ve been here before
But there was actually a previous all-electric Mini—the Mini E of 2009. About 450 of these EVs came to the US as part of a test by parent company BMW to see how its customers might adapt to alternative powertrains, data that led to the BMW i program. The Mini E had a 30kWh battery pack that took up so much space that the car was strictly a two-seater with little room for cargo |
about strip mining.
AMY GOODMAN: Yet isn’t tourism in Utah one of its main sources of revenue?
TAYLOR McKINNON: There’s a lot of tension between fossil fuel extraction—industrializing landscapes for fossil fuels and protecting them for tourism.
AMY GOODMAN: What’s the Grand Canyon Trust, your organization, doing?
TAYLOR McKINNON: We’re engaged on a number of different fronts. In 2012, the Obama administration allocated 800,000 acres of public lands as available for oil shale and tar sands leasing. We’re challenging that leasing framework in court, in federal district court. We’re also challenging several of the individual projects that are moving forward: the first tar sands lease pursuant to that leasing program, in addition to oil shale projects on state land.
AMY GOODMAN: What are the companies that will stand to benefit?
TAYLOR McKINNON: One is Enefit American, which is an Estonian company.
AMY GOODMAN: A company from Estonia?
TAYLOR McKINNON: Essentially, yes. Estonia has relied on oil shale for a long time for much of their power, and they’re one of the most carbon-intensive nations in the world, and they have vast pollution problems right now as a result of burning and mining oil shale. US Oil Sands is one of the leading players in the tar sands in the region. They’re pursuing tar sands mining on state land. And they are—
AMY GOODMAN: US—
TAYLOR McKINNON: On U.S. state land. They are—they plan to take that technology and use it in Alberta. Another company is Red Leaf—
AMY GOODMAN: That’s a U.S. company?
TAYLOR McKINNON: They are—they are, I believe, American, but with Canadian interests, if not Canadian-owned. These are foreign companies that are here in the U.S. on the front end of a play to try to get a foot in the door.
AMY GOODMAN: Total also involved?
TAYLOR McKINNON: Total is—dumped—
AMY GOODMAN: The French company, oil company.
TAYLOR McKINNON: Total allocated about $300 million in support of Red Leaf Resources, which is one of the oil shale plays that we see in the Uintah Basin.
AMY GOODMAN: Geographically place this for us in Utah in terms of cities, like Moab, for example.
TAYLOR McKINNON: We’re talking about north of Moab and to the southeast of Salt Lake City and to the northwest of Grand Junction, Colorado.
AMY GOODMAN: And the residents in these areas, how divided are they?
TAYLOR McKINNON: There’s division. There’s also a lot of support for jobs in some of the rural committees. So, some of the ranchers—the folks who stand to lose from the industrialization of these landscapes and who stand to lose from the pollution of groundwater and surface water are opposed to it. So some of the ranchers around there are opposed to it. But the people who want the jobs are often for it.
AMY GOODMAN: Compare this to the area of tar sands in Alberta, Canada, the size.
TAYLOR McKINNON: The oil shale deposits, in terms of barrels, are larger—in terms of the barrels of oil, are larger than Alberta’s tar sands. They’re not as accessible. And that’s good news.
AMY GOODMAN: Requiring more energy to—
TAYLOR McKINNON: Requiring more energy to get at. And that energy investment thus far has precluded them from being commercially viable. But as supplies of conventional oil wane, we see, as in Alberta, more and more investment being put towards these more energy-intensive and carbon-intensive unconventional fuels.
AMY GOODMAN: Where does the Bureau of Land Management stand, and President Obama himself?
TAYLOR McKINNON: The BLM and President Obama have allocated about 800,000 acres of public lands as available for oil shale and tar sands leasing. There are conditions imposed on when a lease can be let, but those lanes are available. And as a matter of climate and energy policy, it’s difficult to reconcile that with our climate goals.
AMY GOODMAN: Taylor, I want you to stay with us in this next segment as we move on to the issue of uranium mining, particularly on Native lands. And we’ll speak with a Native American activist, Klee Benally, as well. This is Democracy Now! We’re broadcasting from Northern Arizona University in Flagstaff, Arizona. Stay with us.Matt Oswalt (voted #8 ep of 2014)
The 43 year-old comedy writer/director opens up about his idyllic childhood, and a couple of traumatic events he believes contribute to his isolating and fighting the demons of depression while being single, unemployed and living alone.
Follow Matt on Twitter @Puddinstrip
To purchase the live video stream of the upcoming LAPodfest recording on 9/26 at 7pm Pacific time go to www.lapodfest.com/live and use offer code “Gilmartin” You’ll get $5 off the $25 price which includes access to the dozens of other podcasts recording there. The show will stream live and be available to watch for three weeks afterwards.
This episode is sponsored by Bulubox. Visit www.bulubox.com, click on the microphone in the upper left-hand corner and enter the promo code “HappyHour”
This episode is sponsored by SquareSpace. For 10% off your first purchase and to show support for this podcast go to www.squarespace.com and use offer code “Mental“.Come out to our March public star party at Inks Lake State Park!
The evening will begin at 7:30 p.m. for nighttime observing until 10:00pm.
This public is invited to share our telescopes to observe the sky. We’ll show such objects as planets, the moon, galaxies, nebulae, star clusters, and more. Festivities will take place at Inks Lake’s Central Park just southwest of the park store.
There is no charge for the star party itself, but visitors must pay the park entry fee of $6 for ages 13 and up, with children 12 and under free. If you are coming just for the event, no reservations with either the park or us are required. If you want to stay overnight, go to https://tpwd.texas.gov/state-parks/ for more information about individual parks.
A flashlight with a red bulb is good, but we have red cellophane we can use to cover a white light. Please do not bring a dog, unless it is a service animal; we prefer not to have dogs around the telescopes in the dark. Smoking is not permitted in the area of the telescopes because the smoke can damage optical equipment. Public consumption of alcoholic beverages is not allowed in state parks.
If the weather on a scheduled star party day seems questionable for viewing, you can check this website or call the state park office.
X marks the spot where the telescopes will be set up in the image below.Rob Zombie is planning to enter the studio this summer to begin work on the follow-up to last year's "The Electric Warlock Acid Witch Satanic Orgy Celebration Dispenser" album. The rocker-turned-film-director told Kerrang! Radio at this weekend's Download festival in the U.K.: "Right now we're just doing shows all summer, then we're starting a new record in August. And then I won't start a new movie till next year, 'cause it's all music for the rest of this year. So that's about it."
Rob added that his band will continue to play scattered shows while making the new disc. He explained: "These days, as everybody knows, there's not really like a proper album cycle where you make an album and you just tour it to death, because no one really gives a shit if anyone's making records that much anymore."
While rock radio has largely stopped playing his newer records, fans are continuing to embrace new music from Rob Zombie. The week of its release, "The Electric Warlock Acid Witch Satanic Orgy Celebration Dispenser" debuted at No. 6 on the Billboard album chart and was the only rock record in the top 30. It would have been No. 4, if two previously released Prince albums weren't near the top of the chart.
Several of Zombie's singles from "The Electric Warlock Acid Witch Satanic Orgy Celebration Dispenser", including "In The Age Of The Consecrated Vampire We All Get High" and "Well, Everybody's Fucking In A U.F.O.", were accompanied by their respective attention-grabbing videos, a trend that is likely to continue with the upcoming effort.
"I love making videos," Rob told Kerrang! Radio. "We made more videos for the last record than we've made in the last ten years, because that's all that matters. People go, 'Oh, no one listens to music.' Yeah, they do, but they watch it at the same time. I mean, you look at a video and go, 'Wow, it's got fifty million views.' Well, you didn't get fifty million views on fucking MTV. It's great!"
"The Electric Warlock Acid Witch Satanic Orgy Celebration Dispenser" was released on April 29, 2016 via UMe/T-Boy Records. The disc was produced by Chris "Zeuss" Harris and features Zombie alongside John 5, Piggy D. and drummer Ginger Fish.by Eric Peterson on June 1, 2015, 02:54 pm MDT
www.stormbowling.com
Brigham City, Utah
Founded: 1985 (as High Score Products)
Privately owned
Employees: 165 (120 in Utah)
Founder and CEO Bill Chrisman commands a market-leading share of bowling balls for the sport market, and they're all made in Utah.
A lifelong bowler, Chrisman was making and distributing industrial cleaners and chemicals with C-C Distributing in the mid-1980s when he saw a pain point that came with new urethane bowling balls. "They would soak up lane oil and lose some of their action," he explains.
He came up with a new product to clean them and started selling it to bowling alleys on the side in 1985.
By the early 1990s, he jumped on an opportunity to manufacture bowling balls.
"Our first bowling ball name was Storm," says Chrisman. "You try to make a powerful name -- you have Rhinos and Hammers."
He bootstrapped the company to launch and learned how to make bowling balls by trial and error. "You don't buy a manual on how to do it," Chrisman says. "As we went along, we learned."
Storm's sales grew by 50 to 100 percent a year in the late 1990s. It now makes a wide range of bowling balls, bags, and accessories in Utah, and has two additional operations in California and Texas.
A big innovation came in 2000. "I got the idea to put fragrance in a bowling balls," says Chrisman. The reason? Pro shops at bowling alleys are small, congested places. "They don't smell very good," he explains. "I knew it would work."
What he didn't know was how much free publicity it would generate. USA Today picked it up, then the Wall Street Journal ran a front-page story. "Jay Leno did a skit on it," says Chrisman. "Saturday Night Live did a skit on it. It went crazy."
It helped Storm climb to the top of the sport bowling market. Today the company makes about 500,000 balls a year and sells into 70 countries around the world. "Our specialty is high-end bowling balls," says Chrisman. "We make more high-performance bowling balls than anyone in the world. We do make some inexpensive ones, but we don't make very many of them."
The company continues to grow, but the curve has flattened in the last 15 years. Chrisman has grown the company through acquisitions and adding more colors and design options. He's now torn between expanding capacity and taking a wait-and-see approach.
"There are more bowlers than ever, but our market is sport bowlers. That's a shrinking market," he says. "Bowling probably bottomed out as far as sport bowlers go. It's slowly going to go back up."
Storm has withstood the soft market by upping its game. "We've had to continually change our processes, and we want to change our processes to get better," he says.
It's paying off. About 5 percent of balls made in 2000 were rejects. That number dipped to 1 percent in 2010 and is now at 0.1 percent. "We had to do that," says Chrisman.
He's also looking at diversifying beyond the bowling market. "We could manufacture some other things and we are looking into that," says Chrisman.
Challenges: Rules and regulations can stifle innovation. "They started tightening up the rules," says Chrisman. "They have been for 10 years -- they started going backwards. We made balls in 2008 that would be illegal today." That limits Storm's ability to come up with new balls. "As far as leaps and bounds, it's very difficult. You make minor adjustments."
Opportunities: "We're always researching different accessories," says Chrisman. "We come out with a couple of new products a year and we innovate our bags every year."
Needs: Growth in the sport bowling market. "We need more people to be serious bowlers," says Chrisman. He is on the boards of numerous organizations that aim to do just that. "I'm actively involved in getting bowling into the Olympics and we actually have a really good shot." He says bowling could be an exhibition sport at the 2020 summer games in Tokyo.Guide to Spring Festivals (March – May) Starting as early as March, the cold winds and freezing temperatures of winter begin to subside as spring draws near. Tag Event Food History
Date 02/26/2019
02/26/2019 Hit644109
Nature & Art Await in Gangwon-do There is no shortage of wonderful places in Korea, but perhaps none quite as naturally beautiful and pure as the Gangwon-do region. However, nature isn’t the only beauty waiting for tourists. Tag etc Tour
Date 02/22/2019
02/22/2019 Hit220754
Enjoy Cultural Arts in Seoul! For all you culture vultures, here is an all-in-one guide to the representative cultural art centers in Seoul! Tag etc Tour
Date 02/19/2019
02/19/2019 Hit16423
Instagramming through Seoul Love it or hate it, Instagram has changed the way many people travel, with some people even going so far as to plan their itineraries around instagrammable spots. Tag Trend
Date 02/13/2019
02/13/2019 Hit2579
Fall in Love at the TOP 5 Chocolate Dessert Cafés Chocolate products and trending chocolate cafés become a craze every February in anticipation of Valentine’s Day. Tag Food Trend
Date 01/31/2019
01/31/2019 Hit28674
Celebrating Seollal in Korea: A Glimpse of Local Customs Seollal (Lunar New Year; first day of the lunar calendar) is one of the most celebrated national holidays in Korea. Tag Event Food History
Date 01/28/2019
01/28/2019 Hit356128
Learn Traditional Culture to Celebrate Seollal! Seollal, Lunar New Year’s Day, is one of Korea’s main holidays. The holiday takes place around the first new moon of the lunar calendar and serves as a time for people to greet each other with words of blessing for the year ahead. During the holiday period, Koreans also participate in ancestral memorial services, bow to their elders, and... Tag Event Food History
Date 01/24/2019
01/24/2019 Hit1969
Outdoor Activities for Winter in Gangchon Pedal along the tracks of Gangchon Rail Park to enjoy the region’s beautiful scenery throughout the year. In particular, the railbike provides a way to enjoy fantastic winter scenes without having to trek through the cold, wet snow. Tag etc Tour
Date 01/21/2019
01/21/2019 Hit13394
TOP 10 Most Popular Korean Attractions of 2018 With so many places to visit, planning a trip to Korea can be overwhelming. To help you decide where to go, Korea Tourism Organization has created a list of the top 10 most searched attractions in Korea during 2018. Tag Tour Trend
Date 01/17/2019
01/17/2019 Hit350381Football in the River (Bourton on the Water)
Comments Added on Sep 04, 2010 / Category : Sports
Tired of playing dry football? How about trying it in the river? The annual Burton-on-the-Water football match is an old tradition that still manages to draw the interest of thousands of football fans. It's not entirely clear how the idea of playing a football match in a river first got started, but the tradition has reportedly been going strong for around 100 years. Goal posts are set up under the bridges and players brave the cold knee-deep water wearing nothing but bright coloured football shorts or fancy dress. Bourton Rovers 1st and 2nd team players sloshed through their wettest match of the season on Monday, August 30, and was watched by over 1,000 spectators.I stumbled across an article on Salon.com this morning by Edwin Lyngar called “Why I fled libertarianism—and became a liberal.” It was, well, an interesting (?) read and I suppose somewhat confirmed my opinions about the weird cult of politics that we have in this country.
To very briefly summarize, Lyngar left libertarianism because of all the conspiracy theorizing nutcases he met and interacted with during the 2008 Ron Paul primaries. He became a Democrat because, in his words, “I began to think about real people, like my neighbors and people less lucky than me. Did I want those people to starve to death? I care about children, even poor ones.”
The idea that libertarians don’t care about the poor is such an old and tired argument. It displays such a basic and brutal misunderstanding of the movement and of economics. If Lyngar truly were a libertarian (or should I say actually put some thought into his views prior to his “conversion”), he would have probably found that individual liberty could help the poor as opposed to well-intentioned, but doomed-to-failure government programs.
The problem we have in this country (and in numerous others) is that so many people, like Lyngar, feel the need to align with a certain political party. This includes a Libertarian Party that I don’t consider to be very libertarian at all. Lyngar felt more comfortable in a group that seemed to have more “rational” people as its members. I’m not saying that I wouldn’t get annoyed if people talked my ear off about the government poisoning us through chemtrails, but I don’t define myself by what the members of the political party I’m registered with think. Heck, I’m still registered as a Republican—it simply does not matter to me.
I was hoping against hope, but I held out some optimism that Lyngar might actually talk about why he thinks centrally planned markets are better than free markets. Or why forcing people to associate with others is better than allowing voluntary associations and contracts. Instead, he was more concerned about which political party had more conspiracy theories that were socially accepted by the masses. Yes, chemtrails are fun to laugh at, but so is the liberal rejection of Game Theory and their belief that many prices are controlled by collusion outside of the government’s reach.
The world would be much better off if people, unlike Lyngar, actually thought for themselves and didn’t care how their beliefs lined up with a certain political party. You don’t have to go “shopping” for ethical, economic, or social views. Those that do are in shackles—but at least they get to pick their master!
Like what you’re reading? Let us keep in touch and subscribe to us!For the second year in a row, Jimmy Kimmel teamed up with U2 front man Bono and the (RED) campaign to raise awareness and money to help fight AIDS. They assembled an amazing guest lineup to get the word out on Tuesday’s late-night episode.
Neil Patrick Harris joined DJ Khaled, Halsey, Bono, Kristen Bell, Channing Tatum, Julia Roberts, The Killers, and more on Tuesday’s (RED) edition of “Jimmy Kimmel Live.” The show kicked off the second annual (SHOPATHON)RED, featuring limited edition (RED) products as well as once-in-a-lifetime experiences with celebrities via OMAZE. World AIDS Day is December 1.
Neil Patrick Harris joined Kristen Bell to showcase his new deck of NPH Premium Playing Cards from Theory 11. these playing cards are elegant, intricately designed, and visually stunning. Every aspect was handcrafted with relentless, unrivaled attention to detail.
The deck is advertised as being “Laced With Mystery” and claims that there is more than meets the eye with secret symbolism within the deck. NPH Playing Cards feature a custom Ace of Spades, Joker, box design, and modified court card typography. Even the INSIDE of the box has a custom, elegant gold foil pattern by Jay Fletcher. For every purchase of NPH Playing Cards, $1 will go to (RED)’s fight against AIDS, which can provide more than 3 days of life-saving HIV medication. You can purchase the deck from Theory 11. JUST CLICK HERE.
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We analyze how the deployment of US troops affects host-state defense spending. We test this relationship, from 1951 to 2003, by examining how the deployment of US military forces impacts defense spending in different types of states, including US allies, NATO members, non-allies of the United States, and all states. We also utilize spatial measures of US troop deployments to analyze how regional and neighborhood concentrations of forces shape host-state policies. Using both traditional panel methodology, and incorporating a simultaneous equation model for the deployment of troops, we find that non-allied states tend to decrease their defense burden when the United States places troops within their borders. However, NATO allies consistently increase their defense burden in response to the presence of US troops within their borders. Additionally, most states tend to increase spending when the United States places troops near their borders.
Since the end of the Second World War, the United States has deployed hundreds of thousands of military personnel to overseas locations. As Figure 1 shows, overseas deployments have historically constituted a large proportion of the United States’ total number of military personnel. 2
Fig 1. View largeDownload slide Number of US Troops Deployed to the United States and Its Territories and Overseas Locations, 1950–2005
Fig 1. View largeDownload slide Number of US Troops Deployed to the United States and Its Territories and Overseas Locations, 1950–2005
The size, scope, and purpose of these deployments can influence host-states in a variety of ways. Recent research has begun to explore the impact that US troop deployments have on a range of issues. Biglaiser and DeRouen ( 2007 2009 ) have examined how US troop deployments affect foreign direct investment and trade in developing states. Other work has evaluated the effect that US troop deployments have on economic, infrastructural, and human development ( Jones and Kane 2012 Kane 2012 ). Other studies have examined the relationship between US troop deployments and crime within the host-state ( Nelson 1987 Allen and Flynn 2013 ).
While these studies have expanded our knowledge of how US military forces affect host-states, there has been far less research on how these deployments affect the foreign policy decisions of states on more traditional security issues. To date, only Lake (2009) and Machain and Morgan (2013) analyze how US troop deployments affect the host-state's foreign policy behavior, focusing on how deployments affect patterns in the host-state's conflict involvement, military spending, and the number of military personnel. We build upon these works by focusing on how the deployment of US troops in and around the host-state affects host-states’ contributions to their own security. Our analysis advances research on the subject in two key ways. First, we look at how alliance ties condition the effect of troop deployments on host-state's defense spending. Lake (2009) provides only a broad look at how troop deployments affect host-state's defense spending, finding that larger troop deployments correlate negatively with the host-state's defense spending. Alternatively, Machain and Morgan (2013) look at the effect of US troop deployments on the size of the host-state's military by looking at personnel. The authors find a negative correlation between the size of US military deployments and the host-state's military personnel, drawing inferences as to what this implies for host-states’ military spending patterns. However, there are historical, theoretical, and empirical reasons to suspect that this general relationship does not hold for all deployments, and that alliance ties have shaped the response of host-states to the presence of US troops. Looking at several subsamples of types of alliance relationships, we find that NATO members increase their defense burden in response to a larger US troop presence, while non-allies decrease their burden.
Second, we utilize dynamic spatial measures of US troop deployments to understand how regional concentrations of military forces around a state influence the state's foreign policy decisions. There are numerous examples of how US military deployments have affected the foreign policy of host-states. However, it is likely that deployments in the region around a state also have an impact. US military deployments to NATO member states aimed to influence the behavior of the Soviet Union and the other Warsaw Pact states. Deployments to Saudi Arabia after the Persian Gulf War were meant to deter Iraqi aggression in addition to providing security to Saudi Arabia. Not only is it important to know how NATO members and Saudi Arabia responded to the deployments, but the Soviet and Iraqi responses are just as important. Accordingly, we build upon this work by improving our understanding of the spatial effects of US troop deployments.
These issues have broader significance. The deployment of US military forces has long played a key role in providing for global and regional stability. In recent years, however, scholars and policymakers have increasingly debated the wisdom of sustaining the United States’ overseas military commitments, with advocates of retrenchment stressing the costs and risks of such policies, and supporters emphasizing the benefits the United States accrues from such activism ( Brooks, John, and Wohlforth 2012 ; Drezner 2013 ; Posen 2013 ). The fiscal costs of these deployments are often contested by scholars, but these arguments often lack systematic evidence to shed light on the broader costs/benefits that US military deployments yield. We contribute to these debates by providing such a systematic analysis of the effects that US security policies have on the foreign policy behavior of other states.
Theoretically, our analysis draws upon a large body of literature concerning the foreign policy decisions of US allies. We begin with a basic theoretical framework in which defense is one good that leaders seek to maximize under a constrained budget. From this basic model, we further develop our theoretical framework using Lake's ( 1999, 2009 ) work on international hierarchy. This literature provides a basic framework through which we can discuss the effect of overseas troop deployments on host-states' defense spending, and to generate some basic hypotheses. Our research provides evidence that the relational contracts between the United States and other states do not cause a uniform shift in how states respond in maintaining their own defense spending; instead, the terms of the contract between the United States and its allies can encourage active participation in the provision of defense. We supplement this basic approach by incorporating previous research on defense spending and alliance ties to explore the ways in which alliance ties will affect state decisions concerning military spending.
We proceed as follows. First, we provide theoretical expectations regarding the effects of US troop deployments in host-states and surrounding areas. Second, we review the data and estimation strategy used for modeling these effects. Third, we discuss the results from our statistical models. We analyze the data using both traditional panel methodology as well as simultaneous equation models for the deployment of troops in relation to social and defense spending; we employ the latter method to account for the suspicion that troop deployments may respond to defense spending levels by countries. In our most general models, we find that host-states decrease their defense burden when the United States places troops within their borders. However, we find that NATO allies actually increase their defense burden when the United States places troops within their borders. Our results also suggest that as the United States places more troops in a region, states within that region spend a larger portion of their income on defense. This finding is consistent across all subsamples except for non-NATO allies of the United States. Furthermore, the relationship between troop deployments and spending does not appear to be spurious as it proves robust to the inclusion of variables measuring the host-state's involvement in military disputes as well as the broader threat environment that the host-state faces—factors which may cause both higher deployments and higher defense burdens.
Troop Deployments and Host-State's Defense Spending
We begin with the basic assumption that government leaders have competing domestic and foreign policy goals ( Powell 1993 ; Morgan and Palmer 2000 ). Ideally, leaders could allocate the required amount of resources to all policy areas, but since governments have constrained budgets, they have to make trade-offs when allocating resources among competing programs. Scholars represent this opportunity cost as determining the allocation between two primary goods: guns (for external security) and butter (social policies for internal consumption) ( Powell 1993, 1999 ; Garfinkel and Skaperdas 2007 ). Other research focuses on how states make trade-offs when allocating resources among foreign policy programs, such as military spending and foreign aid ( Morgan and Palmer 2006 ). The right balance of resources among all these policy areas secures the survival of the state from external threats and the survival of the leader from domestic discontent ( Bueno de Mesquita, Smith, Siverson, and Morrow 2003 ). This research allows us to build a basic model to explain how states allocate resources among domestic and foreign policy programs, especially when they are suddenly faced with a resource increase with the introduction of US troops within their borders.
Figure 2 illustrates the basic guns versus butter model. Note that we can extrapolate from this model to draw more general inferences for substitution among foreign policy outcomes as well ( Morgan and Palmer 2006 ). In this model, we assume a sole decision-maker for a society that holds the societal utility function as his or her own utility function. Additionally, the actor is limited to a single time period, is not bound to past behavior, and the societal demand is responding to an exogenous budget, demand for security, and demand for social spending. The X -axis represents the range of available resources that a state can allocate to guns. The Y -axis represents the possible amounts of butter that a state can choose to spend. Given a production possibility frontier ( PPF 1 ) that is concave to the origin and a convex aggregate, societal utility curve ( U 1 ), the optimal allocation between guns and butter is at the tangential point between those two lines (point X in Figure 2 ) and produces the consumption of G and B. The concave PPF curve suggests there are diminishing returns from moving to produce extremes in either butter or guns. In general, states prefer to produce beyond the PPF if possible, but that requires relaxing budget constraints. If a major power like the United States provided additional security through the deployment of its own military personnel to the host-state, this effectively allows for a societal level of consumption of guns that is beyond the PPF, as represented by point Y ( B remains the same given that there is only an increase of G ) and creates a new PPF 2 that is the dotted line. This allows for a new aggregate indifference curve ( U 2 ) for society that intersects with the expanded PPF 2 at point Z. Since the new allocation of Y provides suboptimal utility for the host-state society (and provides lower than expected returns for leadership survival), then the savvy government cuts down its own spending on guns and diverts those freed resources to butter; this produces the new allocations at G* and B*. This yields our first hypothesis:
Fig 2. View largeDownload slide Theoretical Adjustment with New Resources on the Production Possibility Frontier (PPF)
Fig 2. View largeDownload slide Theoretical Adjustment with New Resources on the Production Possibility Frontier (PPF)
Hypothesis 1. The size of a US troop deployment in a state negatively correlates with the proportion of its national income that state devotes to defense.
The above analysis suggests that states decrease their defense burden when the United States places troops within their borders. Japan serves as the classic example. By the end of World War II, its annual defense expenditure level was 67.69%. 3
Post-World War II, with US occupation and a significant deployment of US troops, Japan only maintained a 1% defense expenditure level for over 50 years ( Tanzi and Schuknecht 2000 Lake 2009 ). More recently, during the early 1990s Albania spent an average of 1.48% on military expenditures. From 1995 to 2004, when Albania hosted a modest number of US troops (between 1 and 83), its spending level dropped by 47%, from 1.25% to.58%, even though there were two active conflicts in the Balkans. Although the number of US troops was small, the ongoing conflict near Albania's border should have encouraged Albania to increase its defense burden, but we see the opposite trend.
The basic model we build upon suggests that increased external resources in the form of US troop deployments should lead to reductions in defense spending. However, there are several reasons to believe that, under certain conditions, troop deployments could lead to increases in defense spending. Our basic model assumes that a host-state does not offer any sort of reciprocal payment when the United States places troops within its borders. This assumption may be unrealistic. The United States may expect the host-state to either increase defense spending or may expect the host-state to concede some authority over its foreign policy to the United States ( Morrow 1991 ; Lake 1999, 2009 ; Morgan and Palmer 2006 ). Depending on the nature of the agreement between the United States and the host-state, some states may decrease military spending when the United States places troops in their borders, while other states may increase military spending.
For theoretical, empirical, and historical reasons, we divide states into three subgroups based on their alliance ties with the United States: (i) NATO members, (ii) non-NATO allies, and (iii) states with no alliance ties to the United States. As we discuss in more detail below, we assume all non-NATO allies and non-allies of the United States to be weak in comparison to the United States. Due to this power imbalance, we expect non-NATO allies and non-allies to decrease defense spending when the United States places troops within their borders. In contrast, we expect NATO allies to be closer to the United States in power capabilities ( Morrow 1991 ; Lake 1999, 2009 ). Since the nature of the relationship between the United States and NATO allies is relatively more balanced, we expect NATO allies to increase defense spending when the United States places within their borders.
According to Lake (2009), varying degrees of hierarchy and authority characterize the relationships between states in the international system. Since the beginning of the Cold War, the United States has built up hierarchical relationships with weaker states across a number of different areas, negotiating for itself more authority over the foreign policies of these states. Under these conditions, the United States provides certain goods (i.e., security) to these weak states in exchange for influence over foreign policy decision making. 4
For example, when Saudi Arabia accepted US troops in 1990 to protect itself against Iraq, in exchange, it allowed the United States to dictate its policies toward Iraq and Kuwait ( Lake 2009 ).
Once a weak state concedes some foreign policy decision-making power to the United States, it may pull resources away from defense spending and allocate them to policy areas it has more control over. US troops constitute a substantial resource endowment, which allows the host-state to divert resources from the production of security to other policy areas. A weak state may be willing to concede some of its authority over foreign policymaking to the United States because the United States may be able to provide greater external security for the state than the state can provide on its own. Furthermore, the potential for joint economies of scale in the production of security is small when the United States is contracting with a weak state ( Lake 1999 ). Hence, we should expect weak states (that is, non-NATO allies and non-US allies) to decrease defense spending when the United States deploys troops to their states. This yields our second hypothesis:
Hypothesis 2. The size of a US troop deployment in a non-NATO state negatively correlates with the proportion of its national income that state devotes to defense.
While non-NATO states may decrease military spending in exchange for US troops, there is reason to expect NATO members to behave differently. Lake ( 1999, 2009 ) argued that not all of the security relationships forged by the United States since World War II have been equal. Some organizations, like NATO, have been more anarchic in their structure, meaning NATO allies have ceded less control over foreign policy decision-making to the United States. Lake (1999) argues that this more anarchic structure resulted because the governance costs of controlling large and powerful states, like many of NATO's members, would be prohibitively high for the United States. Instead, the NATO alliance has placed greater emphasis on burden sharing than other US alliances because the potential for joint economies in the production of security, and the ability of member states to specialize in their contributions, have been substantially greater than other states the United States has allied ith.
Not only did the purpose and structure of NATO ensure that the relationship between its members was relatively |
outpatient alcohol treatment program -- Maspero called Chief Deputy Richard Elliott, whom Maspero appointed to head the department during his absence, and threatened to fire him "if he did not make media statements supportive of Maspero." Taylor's lawsuit contends that the threat constitutes a host of infractions, including coercion of a public servant and official oppression, and the allegation forms the basis for Taylor's request that a judge grant a temporary restraining order, enjoining Maspero from having contact with "any current or former employees" of the sheriff's office for the duration of the case. When asked about the veracity of the allegations in the suit, Maspero attorney Walsh told reporters that he hadn't asked Maspero about each individual allegation, but that the sheriff didn't think he should be removed from office. Walsh did not return phone calls requesting additional comments.
Notably absent from Taylor's 19-page petition is any detailed information about the witnesses against Maspero -- save for the nine-page affidavit of Randall Nichols, the chief investigator in Taylor's office. Still, less than 24 hours after Taylor filed suit, Visiting Judge James Clawson ruled that Taylor's petition contained enough information for the case to go forward, scheduling a Nov. 21 hearing to consider whether an interim sheriff should replace Maspero -- as Taylor has asked -- for the duration of the case. Friday's hearing will be the first time that witnesses against the sheriff will take the stand, and, presumably, Maspero will call his own, favorable witnesses.
Of course, that could present additional legal problems, especially if Maspero's witnesses are also law-enforcement officers. Indeed, if Maspero was with other cops during, for example, the Penthouse dog-bite incident, then those officers would be faced with having to explain why they failed to report the alleged assault on the dancer and failed to take any action against Maspero. "I'm looking forward to these things coming to a conclusion," Maspero told reporters last week, "and the facts will come out on the allegations that have been made."Indiana, a mid-western state of the United States of America known for its farmland, has officially recognized the Church of Cannabis as a legitimate religious body.
The church is said to have gotten the legitimacy following the Religious Freedom Restoration Act (RFRA), which has allowed LGBT people to practice any religion of their choice without harassment and intimidation.
According to the RFRA, if you have a religion, the government will not impede on your right of that religion. It also states, that the government will openly profess that religion to the public.
The church was granted legitimacy on the 20th of April this year, and it is now “a visible religion for worshippers of Cannabis to congregate.” It held its first service on July 1, just one minute after the Religious Freedom Restoration Act took effect. Members of the church are called “Cannetarians”.
To boost the church’s activities, it is said the Internal Revenue Service in the state has granted the church tax exemption. This is because the church adheres to the characteristics of any other church, such as a distinct legal existence, a recognized creed, and regular congregations of its own.
“Somebody at the IRS loves us because we got it back in less than 30 days,” the church reportedly posted on its Facebook page.
The supreme leader of the church [the Grand Pooba], Bill Levin, revealed that when the church applied for legal status, it was granted by the state the same day the RFRA was signed.
As it stands now, the church is established as a religious corporation, and is recognized by law as The First Church of Cannabis Inc.
It is also said that cannabis is the church’s holy sacrament. The church’s tenets include love, equality, compassion and a prosperous way of life.
The church is also said to have raised over $15,000 in two months, with more than 700 backers on a GoFundMe campaign. The minimum donation for the campaign was appropriately $4.20. The money will be used to buy an existing church or build one with “Hempcrete,” a material similar to concrete that has hemp infused in the mixture.
According to the Plaid Zebra, Grand Pooba Levin plans to grow hemp, and adhere to a “Diety Dozen,” similar to a contemporary version of the 10 commandments, ranging from “Don’t be an asshole,” to “Do not be a ‘troll’ on the Internet,” to “Cannabis is our sacrament.” Levin believes that this church promotes love, equality, compassion and a prosperous way of life.
Levin also plans to set up an alcoholics anonymous and heroin counseling program, to help those suffering with addiction find a community within the church.
According to statistics, more than one million people legally use marijuana for medicinal purposes. Levin believes marijuana is “the Healing Plant,” and has stated that those who are members of his church embrace it with their whole heart and spirit.
Levin told MSNBC in an interview, “We are celebrating life, love, community involvement, and we are doing all the things that churches are supposed to do. Because we embrace the cannabis plant as our sacrament doesn’t mean we’re sad people.”
But despite the church being recognized publicly, cannabis is still illegal in Indiana. By state law, possession of cannabis is considered a misdemeanor, and can result in offenders receiving up to 6 months in jail or a fine of $1000.
Therefore, members of the church are not allowed to buy, sell or practice marijuana in the Indiana State.
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This Article (Confirmed: Church Of Cannabis Gets Recognition As A Religious Organization In Indiana) is free and open source. You have permission to republish this article under a Creative Commons license with attribution to the author and AnonHQ.com.By By Megan Hamilton Jan 24, 2016 in Science "Why do zebras have stripes?" Thanks to a recent study, we may now be much closer to the answer. It's a question that has intrigued scientists for decades:"Why do zebras have stripes?"Thanks to a recent study, we may now be much closer to the answer. The problem is, we look at zebras through human eyes, said the study's lead author, Truth be told, most mammals don't see that well — including lions, hyenas, and other predators. "Knowing that most mammals have pretty poor visual acuity, I thought 'I bet they can't even see these stripes very far, especially at night," Melin said. It's more likely that predators have instead heard or smelled their zebra prey before catching a glimpse of them, and that rules out camouflage protection. Melin and her team conducted a series of calculations that allowed them to estimate how far lions, spotted hyenas, and other zebras can see zebra stripes in daylight, twilight, or during a moonless night, She conducted the study with The study was published in How the test was conducted To test whether stripes camouflage zebras in their natural environment, Melin and her colleagues passed digital images that were taken in Tanzania in the field inside spatial and color filters that simulated how zebras would look to their main predators, especially lions and spotted hyenas, and to other zebras, UC Davis reports. The scientists also measured the width and light contrast (known as luminance) of the stripes, and that allowed them to estimate how far they could be seen by lions, spotted hyenas, and other zebras, judging from information regarding the visual capabilities of these animals. What they found: Zebra predators tend to hunt in woodlands and shrubby areas on moonless nights, As for the zebras themselves, they also can't tell the difference between solid and stripe patterns at long distances, the researchers found. This means that their stripe patterns don't serve as a social function, either. In the past, some scientists had suggested that zebra stripes might break up the animal's outline, making it trickier for predators to spot them, but the researchers found that in grassy, treeless habitats, where zebras usually spend most of their time, lions could see them as easily as they could prey with solid-colored hides, such as topi antelope, waterbuck, and impala. Caro said that the team's findings don't provide evidence or lend support to the theory that zebra stripes provide camouflage against predators. "Instead, we reject this long-standing hypothesis that was debated by Charles Darwin and Alfred Russell Wallace," he said. Darwin and But what about those biting flies? It turns out that the idea that stripes might repel these bad bugs originated in the 1930s, Then they cross-referenced the patterns with where the animals lived and found there was definitely a tight correlation with areas where biting flies are found. If, for instance, scientists found But what is it about stripes that bug the bugs? Scientists don't know why the biters avoid them, and they note there's more research to be done in order to prove this theory. Stay tuned. Most of us think zebra stripes are for camouflage, but a University of Calgary study has found that's not the case, CBC News Calgary reports.The problem is, we look at zebras through human eyes, said the study's lead author, Amanda Melin, who's an assistant professor of anthropology at the University of Calgary. Truth be told, most mammals don't see that well — including lions, hyenas, and other predators."Knowing that most mammals have pretty poor visual acuity, I thought 'I bet they can't even see these stripes very far, especially at night," Melin said.It's more likely that predators have instead heard or smelled their zebra prey before catching a glimpse of them, and that rules out camouflage protection.Melin and her team conducted a series of calculations that allowed them to estimate how far lions, spotted hyenas, and other zebras can see zebra stripes in daylight, twilight, or during a moonless night, UC Davis reports.She conducted the study with Tim Caro, a University of California, Davis professor of wildlife biology. Caro and other colleagues provided evidence in previous studies suggesting that the zebra's stripes give it an evolutionary edge by discouraging biting flies — natural pests of zebras.The study was published in PLOS one. To test whether stripes camouflage zebras in their natural environment, Melin and her colleagues passed digital images that were taken in Tanzania in the field inside spatial and color filters that simulated how zebras would look to their main predators, especially lions and spotted hyenas, and to other zebras, UC Davis reports.The scientists also measured the width and light contrast (known as luminance) of the stripes, and that allowed them to estimate how far they could be seen by lions, spotted hyenas, and other zebras, judging from information regarding the visual capabilities of these animals.What they found:Zebra predators tend to hunt in woodlands and shrubby areas on moonless nights, TechTimes reports. Under these conditions, a zebra's stripes can only be distinguished by big cats at about 29 feet. During twilight, the stripes only remain visible within 98 feet. Within short distances, big cats can locate their prey via sense of smell and hearing, the researchers found. When that happens, camouflage isn't effective.As for the zebras themselves, they also can't tell the difference between solid and stripe patterns at long distances, the researchers found. This means that their stripe patterns don't serve as a social function, either.In the past, some scientists had suggested that zebra stripes might break up the animal's outline, making it trickier for predators to spot them, but the researchers found that in grassy, treeless habitats, where zebras usually spend most of their time, lions could see them as easily as they could prey with solid-colored hides, such as topi antelope, waterbuck, and impala.Caro said that the team's findings don't provide evidence or lend support to the theory that zebra stripes provide camouflage against predators."Instead, we reject this long-standing hypothesis that was debated by Charles Darwin and Alfred Russell Wallace," he said.Darwin and Wallace began the debate over the purpose of zebra stripes 120 years ago, TechTimes notes. Darwin dismissed the idea that the stripes were camouflage and proposed that they were, instead, a tool for sexual selection.It turns out that the idea that stripes might repel these bad bugs originated in the 1930s, George Strombopoulos posits. In an earlier study, Caro and his colleagues examined previous attempts to link flies to stripes, and they also studied the striping pattern on the seven species of horses that have stripes.Then they cross-referenced the patterns with where the animals lived and found there was definitely a tight correlation with areas where biting flies are found. If, for instance, scientists found tsetse flies (which no human or zebra wants to find if they can help it), there were horses with stripes. If tsetse flies weren't found, neither were stripes. In humans, tsetse flies can cause African trypanosomiasis, and a similar illness in horses.But what is it about stripes that bug the bugs? Scientists don't know why the biters avoid them, and they note there's more research to be done in order to prove this theory.Stay tuned. More about Zebras, Stripes, Camouflage, biting flies, University of Calgary More news from Zebras Stripes Camouflage biting flies University of Calgar... Amanda Melin Mammals Lions spotted hyenas Predators Daylight Twilight moonless nights university of califo... UC Davis tim davis wildlife biology digital images spatialJapanese (And American) Governments Go to Extreme Lengths
Japan and the U.S. are doing everything they can to cover up the danger of the Fukushima crisis.
The Daily Beast notes:
The Japanese government, which already has a long history of cover-ups and opaqueness, is on its way to becoming even less open and transparent after the lower house the Diet, Japan’s parliament, passed the Designated Secrets Bill on Tuesday. With new powers to classify nearly anything as a state secret and harsh punishments for leakers that can easily be used to intimidate whistleblowers and stifle press freedom, many in Japan worry that the if the bill becomes law it will be only the first step towards even more severe erosions of freedom in the country. *** Even politicians inside the ruling bloc are saying, “It can’t be denied that another purpose is to muzzle the press, shut up whistleblowers, and ensure that the nuclear disaster at Fukushima ceases to be an embarrassment before the Olympics.” *** The new law would enact harsher punishment to leakers and ominously would allow journalists who obtained information by “inappropriate means” and whistleblowers to be jailed for up to ten years. The law would also allow the police to raid the offices of media organizations and seize evidence at their discretion. *** The bill has even grants no longer existent agencies the power to classify secrets. *** Despite the bill’s enlargement of the state’s power over information, it contains no oversight process to act as a check on ministries and government agencies designating large amounts of information as ‘secret’ for capricious or self-interested reasons. *** Masako Mori, the Minister of Justice, has declared that nuclear related information will most likely be a designated secret. For the Abe administration this would be fantastic way to deal with the issue of tons of radiated water leaking from the Fukushima Daichi Nuclear Power Plant since the triple meltdown in March of 2011.There seems to be no end to stopping the toxic waste leaks there but the new legislation would allow the administration to plug the information leakspermanently. *** Mizuho Fukushima, former leader of the Social Democratic Party, compared the bill to the pre-World War II Peace Maintenance Preservation Laws and other Secrecy laws at the time, remarking that there was a time in police-state Japan when the weather reports could be considered “secret.” ““Once you open the door to such kind of laws, the government will have the right to designate anything as a state secret and by speaking about it or mentioning it, you can be arrested and prosecuted.” Ms. Fukushima explained, “Especially during war time, it was very difficult for defendants and lawyers to fight their court cases, because they were not told what exactly what was the state secret that they had been accused of having revealed.” Outspoken Upper House Councilor Taro Yamamoto, who is known to be a strong supporter of investigative journalism, minces no words: “The path that Japan is taking is the recreation of a fascist state. I strongly believe that this secrecy bill represents a planned coup d’état by a group of politicians and bureaucrats,” he warned. While his statement may seem alarmist, even a senior official of the National Police Agency agrees. “I would say this is Abe’s attempt to make sure that his own shady issues aren’t brought to light, and a misuse of legislative power. *** The Japan Newspaper Publishers & Editors Association, the Civil Broadcasters Federation, and most major news organizations in Japan’s have expressed staunch opposition to the bill. *** Japan is about to take a giant step back into its oppressive past. When one also considers Prime Minister Abe’s stated ambition to restart Japan’s nuclear power plants and remove Article 9 from the constitution, the article which prevents Japan from waging war, it seems like the Empire of The Sun may be moving towards darker times.
Indeed, Ex-SKF notes that :
A citizen was forcibly removed from the balcony in the Diet where he was observing the debate of the State Secrecy Protection Law in the Lower House on November 26, 2013, as he shouted his opposition to the passage of the law. His mouth was stuffed with cloth so that he couldn’t shout any more while being removed by several guards against his will. (From Tokyo Shinbun, 11/26/2013, via this tweet) What’s even scarier to me than the man being forcibly removed by the guards is people sitting near him. They just sit there as if nothing is happening. They are not even looking; the one in the same row even looks away.
It’s not just Fukushima … and It’s not Just Japan
It’s not just Fukushima …
Governments have been covering up nuclear meltdowns for 50 years.
There has been a cover-up by the American government ever since the Fukushima earthquake. TheAmerican (and Canadian) authorities virtually stopped monitoring airborn radiation, and are not testing fish for radiation.
The U.S. government increased allowable radiation levels so that we could be exposed to radiation. Nuclear expert Arnie Gundersen says that high-level friends in the State Department told him that Hillary Clinton signed a pact with her counterpart in Japan agreeing that the U.S. will continue buying seafood from Japan, despite that food not being tested for radioactive materials.
The American government controls Japanese nuclear policy. And the Japanese would never have proposed such a draconian bill without U.S. backing. Indeed, the U.S. Charge d’Affairs Kurt Tong said of the Japanese bill:
It’s a positive step that would make Japan a “more effective alliance partner.”
Earlier this year, the acting EPA director signed a revised version of the EPA’s Protective Action Guide for radiological incidents, which radically relaxed the safety guidelines agencies follow in the wake of a nuclear-reactor meltdown or other unexpected release of radiation. EPA whistleblowers called it “a public health policy only Dr. Strangelove could embrace.”
Whistleblowers at American nuclear facilities (like all other types of whistleblowers) have also beenmercilessly harassed.
It’s not just nuclear accidents … it’s everything.
The American government repeatedly covers up how bad things are, uses claims of national security to keep everything in the dark, and changes basic rules and definitions to allow the game to continue. Seethis, this, this and this.
When BP – through criminal negligence – blew out the Deepwater Horizon oil well, the governmenthelped cover it up (and here). As just one example, the government approved the massive use of ahighly-toxic dispersant to temporarily hide the oil.
The government also changed the testing standards for seafood to pretend that higher levels of toxic PAHs in our food was business-as-usual.
The government covers up the disgusting and unhealthy natureof much industrially-produced food.
The government’s response to the outbreak of mad cow disease was simple: it stopped testing for mad cow, and prevented cattle ranchers and meat processors from voluntarily testing their own cows (and seethis and this)
The EPA just raised the allowable amount of a dangerous pesticide by 3,000% … pretending that it won’t have adverse health effects.
In response to new studies showing the substantial dangers of genetically modified foods, the government passed legislation more or less pushing it onto our plates.
The Centers for Disease Control – the lead agency tasked with addressing disease in America – covered up lead poisoning in children in the Washington, D.C. area.
The former head of the National Mine Health and Safety Academy says that the government whitewashed the severity of the Tennessee coal ash accident.
And after drug companies were busted for using fraudulent data for drug approval, the FDA allowed the potentially dangerous drugs to stay on the market.
Indeed, the cynical might say that the main function of government these days is to throw money at giant corporations and to cover up for them when their misdeeds are revealed.
And the American government is censoring reporters at least as much as Japan.New financial fair play rules could scupper West Ham's hopes of signing striker Andy Carroll, manager Sam Allardyce says.
The on-loan Liverpool striker, 24, is open to a move to the London club.
But Allardyce said restrictions due to be introduced next season may prevent any move for the England man.
Allardyce said: "I will still point towards financial restrictions being implemented next season - they could blow the whole deal in one go."
I might not be able to afford Andy Carroll, full stop, even if I wanted him, even if the chairmen wanted him, even if we all wanted him, which we do Sam Allardyce
The new financial rules agreed by Premier League clubs mean each team will not be allowed to make a total loss of more than £105m over the next three seasons.
They must also limit their player wage bills - and breaching the rules could result in a points deduction.
Liverpool paid a club-record £35m to sign Carroll from Newcastle United in January 2011 and would be looking to recoup at least half of that fee if they were to sell a forward who has scored four times in his last five appearances.
Allardyce fears the change, due to come into force next season, could affect his ability to strengthen his side.
"Financially you are restricted to be able to do it," he said.
"So in one fell swoop the financial restrictions mean Andy Carroll can't sign for us from Liverpool because it's too expensive, even if he wanted to.
"I might not be able to afford Andy Carroll, full stop, even if I wanted him, even if the chairmen wanted him, even if we all wanted him - which we do - it will not be allowed to happen."
However the Hammers manager, whose side host league leaders Manchester United on Wednesday, accepted it would take some time before the real impact of the regulations on clubs was known.
"I suppose across the board when you first introduce something new the fair/unfair scenario has to get sorted out somewhere along the line to find out how you have to tweak it to make it better," he said.Abstract
Working memory (WM) is an essential neuropsychological system that supports complex cognitive processes. Transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS) uses electrical current to modulate brain activity and may serve as a tool for studying or even enhancing WM. Here, we review the recent research that has explored the effects of tDCS on WM in healthy young adults, older adults, and patient populations. We also discuss several recent meta-analyses that have examined the efficacy of tDCS as a WM intervention. While a majority of the papers reviewed suggest that tDCS can modulate WM, this effect is highly inconsistent. These seemingly conflicting results may be driven by differences in study design, tDCS protocol, or inter-individual differences. Future research should systematically vary stimulation parameters, combine tDCS with neuroimaging, and account for individual differences in order to accurately assess the value of tDCS as a way to study and enhance WM.Another new complex is heading to Buckhead.
Atlanta-based Coro Realty Advisors plans to soon begin work on its long rumored apartment complex on Piedmont Road. The complex will be built in place of the former Bridgetown Grill / Bertucci's Pizza restaurant on Piedmont Road, in front of LA Fitness and across the street from Terminus. The restaurant building was demolished a few years ago and has sat vacant ever since.
The artist's rendering seems to show at least a few hundred units and at least a half dozen ground level retail / restaurant spaces.
Coro has been quite active in capitalizing on their existing assets by adding residential components to their properties. In Buckhead Place, Coro previously built "05 Buckhead," a 20-story, 155 unit luxury apartment complex in 2009.
Coro also separated its Brookwood Place property in south Buckhead to create two projects. Brookwood Place would remain intact on the south end of the center while Coro partnered with Grayco to develop a 249 unit apartment complex in place of the northern portion of the center.
As a proud Buckhead homeowner, I'm pleased to see development. I worry though, with over 10,000 new units recently completed, under construction, or announced, that the streets and infrastructure of the area can't support this tremendous boom in residential development.
Especially in the case of Maple Drive and Stratford Road, for there to suddenly be nearly 600 new units on each road, it sounds like an added traffic nightmare.
Below, I've compiled a sampling of Buckhead apartment complexes announced, under construction, or recently completed.
SkyHouse Buckhead (open)
3390 Stratford Road
364 units
Studio,1,2 & 3 BR from $1400 - $3015
Broadstone Maple (under construction)
Maple Drive, between East Paces Ferry an Peachtree Roads
250 units
Units and pricing TBD
Cyan on Peachtree (under construction)
3800 Peachtree Road
329 units
1-3 BR starting at $1625 - $4885
Berkshire Terminus [fka Crescent Terminus] (open)
20 Terminus Place
355 units
Studio-2 BR $1128-2021
The Elle of Buckhead (open)
235 Pharr Road
373 units
1 & 2 BR units. $1445-$2586
Un-named Gables Residential complex (planned)
Corner of East Paces Ferry Road and Maple Drive
327 units
*Apartments with townhomes and limited commercial space
Pricing and units TBD
Camden Paces (open)
77 East Andrews Drive
379 units
1-3 BR starting at $1699 - $5229
AMLI CityPlace (under construction)
16-acre parcel at Roxboro and East Paces Ferry Roads
640 units
Studio,1,2 & 3 BR units, pricing TBD
Former Parkside at Buckhead (under construction)
475 Buckhead Avenue
375 units
Unit size and pricing TBD
Vacant parcel adjacent to the Buckhead Theatre (planned)
3116 Roswell Road
353 units
*Nearly 13,000 of ground floor commercial space
Unit size & pricing TBD
Domain at Phipps Plaza (under construction)
319 "mid-rise" units
Studio, 1 & 2 BR
Pricing TBD
Lenox Towers (planned)
440 units
Pricing and units TBD
Post Alexander (under construction)
3410 Alexander Road (Corner of Phipps Boulevard & Lenox Road)
340 units *Second phase of existing property
Although not especially close (in its current form) to any of the aforementioned complexes, PATH 400 has the potential to be a wonderful amenity for the Buckhead community. The 5.2 mile greenway path will eventually connect to the Atlanta BeltLine and will offer area residents a great bike / walk / run option close to home.
What are your thoughts on the dizzying number of new apartment units coming to Buckhead? What complex are you most intrigued / angered by? What one thing could the City of Atlanta, the Buckhead Coalition or any other group do to make transit better in Buckhead?.
Every part of the world is susceptible to natural disaster, but somehow, the quiet western part of Massachusetts steered clear over the years. In fact, in 2005, Slate.com declared inland Massachusetts one of the top three places in the United States “to hide from Mother Nature.”
So imagine the surprise when a series of surprise tornados slammed through Western and Central Massachusetts in June 2011, killing four and causing $200 million in damage.
One of the towns hit was Monson, Massachusetts, the hometown of sisters Caitria and Morgan O’Neill. While Caitria had just moved home after graduating from college, on a pit stop before beginning a master’s program in Moscow, Morgan was in Boston, studying (as it happens) atmospheric science at MIT. The two felt helpless as they watched a tornado wreak havoc on their town, knocking the steeple clear off the church across the street.
In this touching talk given at TEDxBoston, Caitria and Morgan tell the harrowing story of the tornado — and the day after, when they discovered just how unprepared their community was to coordinate a local recovery. The sisters decided to take action, building systems to organize volunteers and donations using two laptops and an AirCard.
After a disaster, people around the country want to help with donations of money, food and more. But as Caitria points out, after any disaster, 50 percent of all web searches on that disaster happen within just seven days. Meaning that a community has just a week to organize — in the thick of survival and clean-up efforts — to maximize donations and support.
Having gathered plenty of knowledge through experience, Caitria and Morgan are hoping to help more communities hit by natural disaster. Their first step: the website Recovers.org, which they call a “recovery in the box.”
So what should one do if their community is hit by a natural disaster? Below, Caitria and Morgan share the first six steps.
1. Recovery begins before a disaster. You need to prepare yourself, your family, and your community to survive at least 72 hours before rescue in an emergency. You can also start planning at the community level right now, speaking with community leaders about recovery plans and familiarizing yourselves with organizing tools. You can also tap into the knowledge of towns who have been through the recovery process before.
2. In the immediate aftermath of a disaster, care for yourself and your family first. Use the Red Cross’s Safe and Well program or Google’s Person Finder to announce that you are unharmed. Don’t rush directly into the disaster area with a shovel trying to help — professional first responders need time to make sure the area is safe before volunteers can come in. Try to send text messages instead of placing calls whenever possible, since the phone networks will be strained and emergencies need priority access.
3. Get online as soon as possible. Make a clear plan as a community to decide where you’ll be getting and sharing information. It is important to have a way to accept offers of money, labor and donations immediately — people will be searching online to help you, far before you’re able to accept that help in person. Facebook is a decent place for this, but our organization built a platform to directly meet all the different needs you’ll have — check it out at Recovers.org. It’s essential that the wider public has a clear place to offer donations and volunteer help while your area has the attention of the media cycle.
4. Find a place to organize massive amounts of people and volunteers. Again — people want to help, and if you can manage their time, you can turn that goodwill into useful aid. Think school parking lot, church with large basement, or function hall. Get the local hardware store or a neighbor to lend a generator. Post a call for volunteers on your webpage and open the floodgates.
5. Database or record everything. First, find out where the damage is by sending crews of volunteers to visually assess damage. (As long as it’s deemed safe! No walking near downed power lines or sneaking into totaled houses!) Inform homeowners of the services they can get from your group. Then, deploy volunteers to help with the cleanup. Be sure to have everyone sign waivers for safety reasons, and track what hours are being worked at what worksite. FEMA needs this information to process federal disaster aid, and it can make a big difference for the community.
6. Train seven of yourself. Disaster recovery at the community level is a logistical circus. You will burn out, and it is important that you hand off the torch before doing so. As your area transitions into long-term recovery, often grants are available through the United Way and other organizations to pay your long-term volunteers.
As long as you are organized, you don’t need to wait for a large organization to come in. You’re not alone — at least a few people in every area affected by disaster will step up and start putting the community back together again. We’re assembling a community of these “local organizing” veterans to share their best practices with others. Are you doing this kind of organizing in your community? Please get in touch with us on Recovers.org — we want to learn from you!Coal CEO Robert Murray warns that if the Senate version of tax reform is enacted by President Trump he'll be destroying thousands of coal mining jobs in the process.
"We won't have enough cash flow to exist. It wipes us out," Murray told CNNMoney in an interview on Tuesday.
Murray, a fierce supporter of Trump's efforts to revive coal, condemned the Senate bill as a "mockery" that would inflict a devastating tax hike on beleaguered coal mining firms as well as other capital-intensive companies.
"This wipes out everything that President Trump has done for coal," said Murray, the CEO of Murray Energy, one of America's largest coal companies.
The tax bill the Senate passed last week would help companies by lowering the corporate tax rate, but it also eliminates some tax breaks.
For coal companies, it could be a double-whammy. It would preserve the Alternative Minimum Tax (AMT) and impose new limits on the interest payments that businesses can write off. Murray Energy estimates that these changes would raise its tax bill by $60 million per year.
The House bill eliminates the AMT, something that would save Murray Energy and other companies money. The AMT prevents companies from claiming so many tax credits and deductions that they owe Uncle Sam nothing at all.
Like other coal companies, Murray Energy borrows heavily to pay for its expensive mining operations. The Senate bill would cap the amount of interest payments that can be written off to 30% of a company's income.
Auto dealers would also have been harmed by the Senate bill's interest deduction cap. But, after fierce lobbying from auto dealers, the Senate made a last-minute change to the legislation that exempts them from the interest deduction cap.
Related: Senate bill would allow oil drilling in Alaskan refuge
Murray declined to say if he shared his concerns with Trump, who has promised to "put our coal miners back to work" by reducing environmental regulations. Trump attended a West Virginia fundraiser hosted by Murray in June 2016.
"I know he cares about the coal miners and their jobs," Murray said.
Murray warned that a bankruptcy of his Ohio-based company would hurt its 5,500 employees along with their families. Asked if other coal mining companies could go out of business, he said: "Most certainly."
Roughly half of American coal jobs have disappeared since the end of 2011 amid a wave of coal bankruptcies, according to a Columbia University study. The research found that coal's decline has been mostly caused by an abundance of cheap natural gas that has led power plants to switch away from coal. Regulation, which Trump commonly blames for coal's troubles, also hurt coal but not by as much as natural gas.
More recently, the coal industry has been pressured by declining costs for renewable energy like solar and wind.
Related: John Oliver sued by coal CEO over 'character assassination'
Murray's comments about the tax overhaul are not the first time he's made dire predictions about his own business.
In August, Murray warned that his company could immediately go bankrupt if the Trump administration didn't issue an emergency order protecting coal-fired power plants from being closed. "Our time is running out. Please fight for us," Murray wrote in a letter to the White House.
The Trump administration ultimately rejected the cry for help, deciding there wasn't enough evidence to "warrant the use of this emergency authority."
Murray told CNNMoney that his company now believes it can survive by ramping up exports. That could shield Murray Energy from the shutdown of more U.S. power plants that it supplies. "We believe we can get through it," he said.
Murray is known for fiercely defending the coal industry. In June, he filed a defamation lawsuit against comedian John Oliver, HBO and CNN owner Time Warner (TWX), alleging "character assassination" during an episode of "Last Week Tonight." HBO has filed a motion to dismiss the lawsuit. A hearing on the motion is scheduled for January 10 in West Virginia, according to an HBO spokesman.
The coal boss has also enraged environmentalists by repeatedly denying the risks posed by climate change, a stance he repeated on Tuesday.
"Climate change is not only a hoax, it's a fraud," Murray said.
--CNNMoney's Lydia DePillis and Chris Isidore contributed to this report.(Reuters) - Exxon Mobil Corp has shut the 160,000 barrel-per-day (bpd) North Line crude oil pipeline in Louisiana after a leak spilled 1,900 barrels of crude oil in a rural area over the weekend, affecting a conduit that supplies the nation’s third-largest refinery.
A view of the Exxon Mobil refinery in Baytown, Texas September 15, 2008. REUTERS/Jessica Rinaldi
The 22-inch line originates in St. James, Louisiana, and provides shippers with access to oil from the giant Louisiana Offshore Oil Port and crude from offshore platforms, according to Exxon’s website.
It was unclear Monday, the second full day the North Line was shut, how long it might be down. The line pumps crude to ExxonMobil’s 502,000 barrel per day (bpd) Baton Rouge, Louisiana, refinery as well as a handful of other plants.
The U.S. pipeline regulator said it had sent an inspector to investigate the leak, but has not issued any orders that would prevent Exxon from resuming operations when it is ready. The company said it had contained the oil in the “immediate area”.
“Prior to resuming operation, the failed section of pipeline will need to be repaired and tested in accordance with PHMSA safety requirements,” Jeannie Layson, a spokeswoman for the Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration, said in a statement. “At this time, PHMSA has not issued any enforcement orders to the operator requiring restart approval.”
A spate of recent leaks and incidents has heightened local concerns and prompted calls for tougher scrutiny from regulators. |
organization in August.
Planned Parenthood has maintained that it was not selling fetal tissue, which would have been illegal, and commissioned a study that demonstrated the videos were manipulated. The organization sued the Center for Medical Progress, the anti-abortion group behind the videos, earlier this month.
The grand jury’s decision hasn’t affected Republicans' plans to continue investigating Planned Parenthood, however. Rep. Marsha Blackburn (R-Tenn.), who is chairing a select investigative committee that purports to be investigating “big abortion providers" -- but for all intents and purposes is only scrutinizing Planned Parenthood -- said in a statement Tuesday that “the mission of our investigation has not changed.”
“We will continue to gather information and get the facts about medical practices of abortion service providers and the business practices of the procurement organizations who sell baby body parts,” Blackburn said. “These are issues of importance to the American people. We will study the laws on the books and follow the facts to defend life."
Blackburn's committee was created even as other Republicans, like Rep. Jason Chaffetz (R-Utah), said they didn’t find any evidence of wrongdoing on the provider’s part. Multiple state investigations have come to similar conclusions.
Planned Parenthood says that its Texas health centers do not donate tissue for medical research, and haven’t done so since they partnered with the University of Texas Medical Branch at Galveston in 2010 to study the causes of miscarriages.
Dawn Laguens, Planned Parenthood Federation of America’s executive vice president, suggested on a call with reporters Tuesday that the videos “served as a cover” for anti-abortion politicians to push their ideological position forward.
“It’s become totally clear that the only people who engaged in wrongdoing are the criminals behind this fraud,” she said. “You would hope that other people who now have very clear evidence in this impartial and thorough grand jury proceeding would reconsider some of these attacks.”
Many abortion opponents in Congress cited the Center for Medical Progress' undercover footage to justify their votes to cut off Planned Parenthood’s federal funds for Medicaid and Title X services for low-income patients and to pass new abortion bans. They were largely silent after Monday's grand jury decision, and did not respond to The Huffington Post’s requests for comment.
But the lawmakers who did respond echoed indicted Center for Medical Progress founder David Daleiden’s argument that the the tactics he used to tape the videos -- like assuming fake identities and creating a fake tissue procurement company -- are "the same undercover techniques that investigative journalists have used for decades.”
Rep. Brian Babin (R-Texas), for instance, said he was “disappointed and shocked” by the grand jury’s decision, and added that Daleiden employed “a common tactic used to uncover criminal activity.”
“It’s deeply offensive and ridiculous that those who illegally sell aborted human body parts get a pass -- while these two pro-life defenders are indicted for using aliases to expose Planned Parenthood’s unlawful and disgusting practices of selling baby body parts,” Babin said in a statement. “This decision begs the question: how else could they get the truth?”
Anti-abortion groups have now taken the stance that the criminal investigation -- which was initiated by a Republican lieutenant governor and led by an anti-abortion Republican district attorney -- was biased because a prosecutor in the district attorney’s office sits on the board of Planned Parenthood’s Texas affiliate.
“It is unacceptable that the office did not recuse itself to eliminate any and all questions of potential bias,” Lila Rose, the founder of anti-abortion group Live Action, said in a statement. “A special prosecutor should be appointed now to review this entire investigation."The income gap has grown prominently in the US since the 1980s The gap between rich and poor in most wealthy nations has widened, the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) has said. Across the 24 OECD countries where data was available, the cumulative rise in inequality was 7% over the past 20 years, the Paris-based group said. But this was not as large a rise as had been expected, it said. Since 2000, income inequality had risen sharply in the US and Germany and declined in the UK, Mexico and Greece. But the OECD report, which covers a period of two decades between 1985 and 2005, said the UK still had one of the highest levels of income inequality in the developed world. The 'Hello' effect The report found that the income of the richest 10% of people was, on average, nearly nine times that of the poorest 10%. But the size of the income differentials varies, with the greatest disparity in Mexico, which has a ratio of 25 to one, followed by Turkey and the US. The most equal distribution of wealth is in the Nordic countries, including Denmark, Sweden and Finland. "The increase in inequality, though widespread and significant, has not been as spectacular as most people probably think it has been," the report said. It added that the difference between what the data indicated and what people thought was likely to reflect the "Hello magazine effect", meaning that people read widely about the super-rich and imagined many people lived the life of luxury. Children and low-skilled workers were more likely to be poor than the population in general, said the OECD, which represents the world's richest countries. Meanwhile, pensioner poverty has fallen in many countries, with those around retirement age seeing the biggest increases in incomes over the past 20 years. Labour market changes Launching the report in Paris, OECD Secretary-General Angel Gurría warned of the dangers posed by inequality and the need for governments to tackle it. "Growing inequality is divisive. It polarises societies, it divides regions within countries, and it carves up the world between rich and poor," he added. THE GROWING GAP BETWEEN RICH AND POOR The US has the highest inequality rate after Mexico and Turkey In the past five years, the gap between rich and poor has grown the fastest in Germany Since 2000, income inequality and poverty have fallen faster in Britain than in any other OECD country, but the UK still performs poorly against its neighbours France is one of just five countries where inequalities have fallen in the past 20 years Source: OECD Growing Unequal report
Rich and poor gap 'narrows' in UK In developed countries, governments had been taxing more and spending more on social benefits to offset the trend towards more inequality, but the effectiveness of these policies had declined, the OECD said. As an example, OECD countries spend three times more on family policies than they did 20 years ago and yet single-parent households are three times as likely to be poor. Poverty is defined as applying to households with less than half the median income. "Trying to patch the gaps in income distribution solely through more social spending is like treating the symptoms instead of the disease," said Mr Gurría. He urged governments to act to increase education opportunities and job prospects for blue collar workers and to offer welfare-in-work to working-class families to boost income.
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StumbleUpon What are these?Man shot by IRS agent faces assault charge CRIME
One of two suspects shot and wounded by an Internal Revenue Service agent as they tried to rob her in San Francisco's Bayview-Hunters Point has been charged in federal court with assault, court records show.
Michael Higginbotham, 20, was charged Thursday in U.S. District Court in San Francisco with assault on a federal officer and a gun violation in connection with last month's incident involving the agent, identified in court documents as 36-year-old Dena Crowe. He is to appear in court Tuesday.
About 11:55 p.m. Aug. 4, Crowe was putting items into her department-issued car outside her home on the 100 block of Marlin Court and was preparing to drive to meet her partner for work, authorities said. She was confronted by a teen, identified only as K.M. in court records, who demanded money, and a man, later determined to be Higginbotham, who pointed a Mossberg 12-gauge shotgun at her, investigators said.
In fear for her life, Crowe identified herself as an agent and fired her.40-caliber semiautomatic handgun at the suspects, and both fled on foot after being shot, authorities said. Crowe briefly chased after the juvenile, and her husband grabbed a shovel and chased after Higginbotham, John Hartman, a special agent with the U.S. Department of Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration wrote in an affidavit.
Crowe and her husband lost the suspects, but K.M. was later found hiding under a stairwell on Jerrold Street. He had been shot in his right pelvis.
Early the next morning, Higginbotham showed up at UC San Francisco Medical Center with a gunshot wound to his left leg. He initially claimed that he had been shot near Market and Turk streets downtown and that his mother had taken him to the hospital from that location, Hartman wrote.
The mother later admitted that she had lied and that she had in fact taken her son to the hospital from her home, about a quarter-mile from where the shooting happened, Hartman wrote.
San Francisco police found the shotgun in a backpack in the backseat of his mother's car, authorities said.AMERICAN FORK, Utah — Minivans circled the shop like wagons in a western epic. Employees passed giant cups through a drive-through window. And inside, a woman named Taylor Warner reveled in her bit role in the battle that has overtaken Utah: the soda war of 2015.
“It gets wildly heated,” said Ms. Warner, 21, an assistant manager at Sodalicious, a soft drink shop where a team of mixologists tossed shots of coconut syrup into schooners of Dr Pepper and sent them out the door.
So-called dirty soda shops have woven themselves into this state’s fabric in recent years, offering concoctions spiked not with liquor but with flavor shots — a winning business model in a deeply Mormon state where alcohol and coffee are largely off limits and where sugar is the vice of choice. At Sodalicious, best sellers include the Extra Dirty Second Wife (Mountain Dew, fruit syrups, a shot of half-and-half), while down the road at a drive-through called Swig, customers like the Missionary (Sprite, tiger’s blood syrup, coconut cream). Doctors, needless to say, are not thrilled by the trend.Over the last two decades, thanks largely to government policy, the poverty rate in Brazil has halved. With this, income inequality (measured by the Gini coefficient) has also fallen sharply, declining on average by 1.2% a year. Brazil's economy is forecast to grow by 3.6% this year. According to the Economist Intelligence Unit, a sister company of The Economist, this year Brazil will overtake Britain to become the sixth largest economy in the world. GDP per person, at around $11,000 (or 19,000 reais) has been growing at an average annual rate of 1.7% since 1990; closing the gap with high-income countries. And income growth is faster among the poorest (comparable to China's GDP per person growth rates). Consequently by 2015 Brazil could reach its Millennium Development Goal of poverty reduction, some ten years early. But further action is needed; 8.5% of Brazil's population still live on less than 70 reais per month, equivalent to $1.50 a day.Playing the Game from Your Chair
We have all faced that moment, many times: The ball you shot into the corner pocket rattled, and didn’t fall. Dejected, you trudge to your seat as your opponent jumps eagerly out of his chair, ready for battle.
I know how it feels. You want to keep your opponent in his chair as long as possible, while you run out rack after rack. Or, you want to play a lock-up safety on him, knowing that there is a very favorable chance you’ll be coming back to the table in a moment, hopefully with ball in hand.
But, alas, that is not to be. You have left him with a duck, and you know that you’ll probably be sitting in your seat for a while. Oh, well… at least you’ll get to enjoy a few of your fries, right?
Hold on a second there! Don’t be so quick to give up. Your job is far from over!
Many of us pool players are known for playing poker. Maybe it’s the gambling that draws us. Whatever the reason, we love to play. And as you might know, poker is a game that takes a lot of focus and observation, even (or especially) when you are not in the current hand. You need to watch your opponents, to see how they are playing, figure out their tells, and look for weaknesses.
Pool is very similar. I would go so far as to say that sitting in your chair observing your opponent is an incredibly vital part of the game.
Of course, we always want to keep our opponent in his seat, and run rack after rack. But that rarely happens, even amongst the pros. You will have some time in your seat, and while you are there, you have a job to do.
First, observe the table. You are not standing over it now, so your perspective is a little different. You might notice something you completely missed while you were at the table. Maybe there’s a cluster that can be broken up, or a safety you might be able to play. Perhaps you’ll see a pattern that was not clear before. Study the table carefully, and plan what you would do to run the table out, if you were in your opponent’s shoes.
Second, watch your opponent. Observe the choices he is making. Is he going for that long, straight shot in the corner, or is he thinking about playing safe? That might indicate that he is not comfortable with his straight distance shots at the moment.
Is he looking to bank his next ball across to the side pocket, or is he looking to cut it down to the corner? Have you ever seen him bank? Does he make most of them, or is he struggling? Does his cut shot go in every time? If not, does he have a tendency to overcut, or undercut?
If you left him safe behind another ball, is he opting to jump, or kick out of the safety? Is he capable of jumping a full ball? Does he prefer to masse?
Look at your opponent’s face, and his body language. Does he look confused, or annoyed? Have you been leaving him safe a lot, making him frustrated? Is he talking to himself, or to the balls? Or, does he look focused, and determined?
And why do you care about any of this?
The fact is, this game is more mental than anything else. Yes, it’s important to know how to make balls, and leave your cue-ball where you want. But if you are fairly evenly matched, then whether you win or lose is really going to come down to which one of you is more mentally prepared. If you can get your opponent to start talking to himself, you have a distinct mental advantage!
Observing your opponents and discovering their weaknesses will help guide you in your decision-making. If he’s having trouble with the long straight shots, then leave him a tester if you need to play a safety, instead of locking him up behind a ball. Give your opponent a chance to make mistakes, and you might get him to unravel a bit.
One last piece of advice, while you are planted in your seat: root for your opponent to do well. It’s very easy to fall into the trap of hoping on every shot of his that he’s going to miss. And when he doesn’t, you get more and more frustrated, watching him march slowly toward that final ball for the win. If you can get into the mind-space of cheering him on, then you won’t get frustrated unless he misses – and guess what? You’ll get over that frustration awfully quickly when you realize that miss means you get to eagerly jump out of your seat, ready to attack the table while he trudges to his chair in dejection.
And because you’ve been studying the table, you know exactly what you are going to do, and how you’re going to do it.
Keep your head in the game – especially when you are in your chair. You’ll give yourself that mental edge, and you’ll be much better prepared to win!
If you would like to share some of your success stories (or even the failures), or have suggestions for future articles, please feel free to drop me a line at pool@billiardsprofessor.com. I can also be found hanging out with fellow billiards enthusiasts at reddit.com/r/billiards. Come on by and join the discussion!Doug Rivers, YouGov's chief scientist, sets out how YouGov's 2017 General Election model works
Every day YouGov interviews approximately 7,000 panellists about their voting intentions in the 2017 General Election. Over the course of a week, data are collected from around 50,000 panellists. While this is a much larger sample than our usual polls, the samples in each of the 650 Parliamentary constituencies are too small (on average, only 75 voters per constituency per week) to produce reliable estimates.
In the 2016 EU Referendum, in the 2016 US Presidential election, and again in the 2017 UK General Election, YouGov is using a recently developed technique called Multilevel Regression and Post-stratification (or 'MRP' for short) to produce estimates for small geographies (local authorities for the EU referendum, states in the 2016 American Presidential election, and Parliamentary constituencies for the 2017 General Election).
The idea behind MRP is that we use the poll data from the preceding seven days to estimate a model relating interview date, constituency, voter demographics, past voting behaviour, and other respondent profile variables to their current voting intentions. This model is then used to estimate the probability that a voter with specified characteristics will vote Conservative, Labour, or some other party. Using data from the UK Office of National Statistics, the British Election Study, and past election results, YouGov has estimated the number of each type of voter in each constituency. Combining the model probabilities and estimated census counts allows YouGov to produce a fairly accurate estimate of the number of voters in each constituency intending to vote for a party on each day.
It is important to understand the limitations of the model results. First, they are estimates of current voting intentions, not a forecast of how people will vote on 8 June. Panellists tell us how they intend to vote, but they may change their minds and we do not attempt to quantify this uncertainty. Second, the samples in each constituency are too small to be reliable by themselves and are subject to more than just sampling error. To compensate for small sample sizes, we rely on a model that pools data across constituencies. This uses data from panellists who live in other constituencies to augment the small number of actual interviews conducted in a constituency. The model is based on the fact that people with similar characteristics tend to vote similarly, but not identically, regardless of where they reside. While this has worked well in the past (our MRP model in the 2016 EU Referendum consistently showed that more voters favoured leave than remain, and that Hillary Clinton would win the popular vote in the 2016 US Presidential election by a narrow margin, but that midwestern battleground states were too close to call), models cannot produce estimates as accurate as a full scale poll in each constituency.
Using MRP, we have classified constituencies as safe, likely, or leaning to a party or as a toss-up. The displays for each constituency provide a vote estimate for each party and a 95% confidence interval. These are the model's best guess of what a large poll would show if it were conducted in that constituency on the same day. Readers should focus on the confidence intervals as giving a more reliable estimate of current voting intentions. Even these are not fail-safe: we would still expect the interval to be wrong in 30 to 40 constituencies.
The model was developed primarily by Professor Ben Lauderdale of the London School of Economics in conjunction with YouGov's Data Science team, headed by Doug Rivers of Stanford University. The data are streamed directly from YouGov's survey system to its Crunch analytic database. From there, the models are fit using Hamiltonian Monte Carlo with the open source software Stan. Stan was developed at Columbia University by Andrew Gelman and his colleagues, with support from YouGov and other organisations. YouGov will be updating the model estimates on a daily basis.Image copyright EPA
There are "strong" links between June's Tunisia beach massacre and the killings at the Bardo Museum in the country's capital in March, British police say.
Metropolitan Police counter-terrorism officers say they are now connecting the two attacks based on evidence.
The Bardo Museum attack saw 22 people killed, while 38 tourists, including 30 British nationals, were killed in the resort of Sousse in June.
The militant group Islamic State (IS) have said they are behind both attacks.
Tunisian authorities have arrested 150 people to date over the Sousse attack.
Of those, 15 have been charged with terrorism offences.
Those charged face allegations including being involved in a terrorist plot, not informing police of a plan and providing logistical or other support.
A trial in relation to the murders is not expected to take place for up to 18 months.
Image copyright AFP Image caption This image of the Seifeddine Rezgui was distributed by IS-linked social media ccounts
Commander Richard Walton, of the Metropolitan Police, which supplied officers to help the Tunisian investigation into the massacre, gave no details of the suspected connection between the attacks but said it was based on "strong" evidence.
Tunisian authorities have also drawn a connection between the attacks, saying that the Sousse attacker likely trained at the same Libyan jihadi camp as the two Bardo attackers.
Accomplices
In Sousse a gunman, who was later identified as Tunisian student Seifeddine Rezgui, opened fire on the beach after coming in from the sea using a jet ski or speedboat.
After shooting on the beach, he entered the Hotel Imperial Marhaba, where explosives were detonated and more tourists were shot. Rezgui then ran out of the hotel and police shot him dead.
Tunisian authorities believe the 23-year-old's suspected accomplices provided a Kalashnikov assault rifle and helped Rezgui get to the scene, interior ministry spokesman Mohamed Ali Aroui told AP.
Mr Walton also disclosed that Rezgui's body has not been claimed due to the shame his family feel and fear of reprisals if they do so.
Analysis
In Tunis - Rana Jawad, BBC North Africa correspondent
The announcement by the Metropolitan Police's counter-terrorism unit is not surprising, but it provides some credence to what has so far remained cryptic rhetoric from Tunisian officials.
Less than a week after Saifeddine Rezqui's rampage in Sousse, authorities here said the gunman had "likely" trained in Libya at the same time as the Bardo Museum assailants.
How and why they reached that conclusion was unclear.
By mid-July security services here had arrested more than 100 people they describe as being "suspected members of terrorist gangs" - in the majority of these cases, it's unknown what happens to these detainees or what "gangs" they belong to.
Image copyright AFP Image caption Security was heightened following the attack on the museum in Tunis
The Bardo Museum in Tunis was stormed by three gunmen on 18 March. British, Japanese, French, Italian and Colombian tourists were among the 22 they killed.
Witnesses said the gunmen, carrying assault rifles, opened fire on tourists outside the museum in front of a row of buses before charging inside and taking hostages.
Two of the gunmen - identified by the authorities as Yassine Laabidi and Hatem Khachnaoui - were killed by security forces.
Nine people have now been arrested in connection with the museum attack.'Stellaris' images courtesy author
The mushroom people of the Suldlom Collective weren't created fascists. Warmongering and xenophobia were alien concepts to the early space-faring Suldlom. They may have been living under an autocratic Archprophet that sanctioned slavery, but, in a strange twist, the Suldlom ideology of collectivism was so entrenched that they actually preferred serving as slaves to being free fungoids. There was no conflict, no apparent cruelty. No dissenting voices.
Then there came the outsiders. The Suldlom discovered the boar-like, "primitive" Hadadeshi on a planet inside their territory and welcomed them into their theocracy, but those fierce individualists wanted no part of this utopia and rebelled. Angered, the Archprophet enslaved the ungrateful Hadadeshi, divided and force-migrated them to far-flung planets, sowing the seeds of future unrest all over the empire.
The grand strategy games of Paradox Entertainment are at their most interesting if you make a conscious effort to reject meta-gaming and min-maxing in favor of more organic playstyles. Even Stellaris, which plays more like a traditional 4X with a focus on victory conditions than, say, Crusader Kings 2, becomes a richer experience if you try to go with the flow. The Suldlom Collective wasn't created for victory. Neither was it cast as a beacon of freedom or a totalitarian hellscape. It was free of a preconceived destiny it had to live up to, and I was curious to see what it would become after dozens of hours of play.
Soon, the Suldlom Collective found itself a victim of alien aggressions, threatened on all sides and by rebels from within. It was time for the Archprophet's strong hand to secure the realm. Desperate times call for desperate measures, and so the Suldlom forces annexed their former ally, the meek Shabtak Polity, as well as the already war-torn Nharr Colonies. There was much militaristic pride over this turning of the tables, and an expectation that the enemies of the Suldlom would soon receive their due punishment.
The pre-fascist Suldlom, surrounded by rivals and potential enemies.
Stellaris isn't a game "about" fascism. But being part game, part political simulation, it alludes to some of the mechanisms that drive fascism and thus cannot help but take a stance, express something about it through its systems. Despite the carefully cultivated amorality of most strategy games, there can be no political fence-sitting. Following Ian Bogost's term of "procedural rhetoric", which is concerned with how world views are expressed not through words but systems, the question is not whether it has anything to convey about fascism, but what.
Strategy games like Stellaris, with their constantly shifting power struggles, are adept at seducing players into a lust for domination (perhaps even humiliation) of others. The ponderous beasts of the turn-based or grand strategy genus are especially good at this. The sheer length of these games builds a sense of history, of past slights. The inexorable logic of the simulation, as evident when a much stronger foe invades and there's nothing you can do, creates grudges that can be nursed for perhaps a hundred hours or more. It oscillates between fantasies of victimhood and megalomania. Victory by force in these games is, unlike in a quick match of StarCraft, not just the result of a sports-like competition, but also of a hunger for power, or of disdain for nations or ideologies that stood in your way for far too long. Of course, you can often succeed through peaceful means, but brute force always beckons in the background. They brought this on themselves, you might think. It's a necessary evil, done for the greater good. Or even: it's just numbers, just a game.
It's the promise of a simple, easy solution to all your problems. Why bother with ineffectual diplomacy if you could just eradicate that pesky enemy? That's the fantasy, at least.
Suldlom fleets occupying a star system.
In the long run, the conquest of its enemies only brought about more problems for the Suldlom Collective. Dozens of alien species were integrated or enslaved into the empire, each group with its own explosive concoction of ideologies. And the more the empire expanded, the more difficult it became for the Collective to keep its own fungoids in line. In distant colonies far from the influence of their home world, Suldlom citizens began to question slavery, and even the Archprophet's teachings. While foreign aggressors were biding their time to strike back, the Suldlom Collective was almost torn apart from the inside, and longed for a distant past when its "essence" and ideological "purity" was still undiluted by alien elements.
One of the most ingenious systems of Stellaris is its elegant escalation of complexity. Every nation starts out homogeneous, with just one species whose members share the same cultural dogma and the same genetic traits. It gives the appearance of a "natural order" (all mushroom people are this way), and in most other games, it would stay that way. In Stellaris, however, whether through conquest, migration, or colonization, more and more species and views will settle within your borders over time. There are many real benefits to increasing diversity (different species may be able to colonize previously inaccessible planets, for example), but as your empire grows more complex, it is easy to yearn for a simple, idealized past.
Gradually, Stellaris becomes about the question of how to face the entropic forces of interstellar, multi-species multiculturalism, a question that concerns politics as well as ethics. Will you embrace the foreign and the diversity it brings with it, adjust your policies if necessary? Will you exclude – or even eradicate – it for fear of change and the challenges it brings? Or will you include it only to enslave and exploit it for the benefit of those who are at the center?
The increasingly-complicated population-management screen.
In the end, the Suldlom Collective decided to assimilate, to make the foreign its own; at first, it used old-fashioned propaganda, then orbital mind control stations, and finally even genetic modification to transform its diverse citizens into conformists. Over the course of many decades and a short period of desperate, genocidal purges against dissenters that will never appear in the Suldlom history books, divergence became a distant anomaly at the fringes of a harmonic nation—a place where everyone, Suldlom or not, embraced the slavery that bound them to the greater whole.
When I realized that I helped create a nightmare vision of an unchallenged, sustainable fascist world order encapsulating the better part of the galaxy, I stopped playing. Not just because things had gotten a bit too uncomfortable, but also because there was nothing worthwhile left to struggle against. The machinery of empire and pervasive coercion sustained itself without a hitch.
There are many aspects of fascism that are excluded from this simulation. Casting players in the role of a disembodied, almost godlike ruler, Stellaris struggles to comprehend fascism's populist nature and metastasis. Forcing the player to pick and choose from a menu of political ideologies ignores the way these systems historically bleed into each other, how fascism emerges from dying democracies not as a valid alternative in the political buffet, but as a cancer. And, perhaps, by allowing the player to succeed in building a stable totalitarian state, it ignores that real fascist regimes tend to end in flames and ruin.
Still, it succeeds in other regards. It shows that not all fascist ideologies are created equal. The Suldlom model of a deeply spiritual techno-theocracy that swallows and reshapes the Other rather than trying to eradicate it is just one of many ways in which fascism may rear its ugly head in Stellaris. It also manages to give an impression of fascism's blunt seduction by placing its tools just within the player's reach as promises of easy solutions.
Endgame for the Suldlom, a galaxy-spanning fascist hegemon.
Like most strategy games, Stellaris remains non-judgmental in the face of any atrocities committed by the player, but its world does react to them and gives those choices some moral weight and consequences. Other governments will judge and oppose you, citizens will rebel against you. There's no straightforward fulfilment of the totalitarian fantasy.
This seduction can work only in a fictionalized setting such as Stellaris' sci-fi world. In this world of spacefarers, the player is mostly free of the gravitational pull of outrage felt in the face of real-life incarnations of fascism, allowing them to get up close and personal without being repulsed. At the same time, the similarities are obvious enough that they may encourage players to think about actual political or historical parallels and to look at them from fresh angles.
In the end, Stellaris is not "about" fascism, as its simulation is geared towards escapist entertainment, not political theory. But precisely because of those reasons, it's treatment of fascism can be surprising, empathetic, and instructive. Not the worst way to learn something about the false promises and dangerous mechanisms of a totalitarian ideology.Relations between the sexes have gotten a little tense. So, in "Women & Men," a special section in Esquire's April 2015 issue, we candidly address a complicated question that we should all be discussing openly: What is the state of relations between the men and women of America today?
More from the "Women & Men" special issue:
♀+♂
____________
Growing up in the 1990s, it was clear that the world was a hostile place for women. My mom had to leave her job after a boss told her that women had to choose between having a career and having a family. On the soap opera she started watching during what used to be work hours, a man raped a woman and then married her. The soap opera got interrupted for the Clarence Thomas hearings, where Anita Hill testified that Thomas had harassed her and made her feel threatened, and then-senator Joe Biden presided over Thomas's confirmation to the Supreme Court, because it couldn't have been as bad as she said, right?
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So when, in graduate school, a professor looked at my chest and said he was reluctant to let me take his class because I looked like a "C student," I didn't get angry or even yell; I just walked away and cried on my own time.
Some men say that things aren't that bad for women anymore. They point to Hillary Clinton and the twenty women in the U. S. Senate; to Sheryl Sandberg and Marissa Mayer; to their one-off female bosses and the girls that did better than them in school and who now have the social power to (God forbid!) refuse to date or sleep with them. I am not sure whether to laugh or scream. Because the fact that things are better doesn't mean the scales have tipped in our favor.
Some men say that things aren't that bad for women anymore. I am not sure whether to laugh or scream. Because the fact that things are better doesn't mean the scales have tipped in our favor. Share Tweet
According to the White House Council of Economic Advisors, women are 21 percent more likely to finish college and 48 percent more likely to finish graduate school, but within five years of graduation, they start to earn less than their male peers. While census data shows women now make up 40 percent of the nation's household breadwinners, the Bureau of Labor Statistics reports that women are almost twice as likely as men to be on the hook for housework and childcare. And even with gender-neutral parental-leave policies, the Supreme Court had to weigh in on whether employers had the right to choose whether to let pregnant women sit down or just fire them because it was inconvenient to provide a chair.
So who wouldn't be mad? Who wouldn't want to carry a mattress around campus just to say, "I am here, and this happened, and I'm not going to pretend it didn't"? Who wouldn't want to claim to be a misandrist and declare that it's time to #BanAllMen on Twitter? Who wouldn't want to march and yell at an anti-rape or pro-choice rally? We told young women, over and over, that the world was their oyster and forgot to mention that most oysters are scum-sucking bottom feeders that don't hatch pearls.
The question shouldn't be why women are mad but why it's so scary to everyone. Angry women on Twitter and Tumblr or women's Web sites are hardly an army of Clytemnestras and Medeas, murderesses and emasculatrixes walking around in leather pants with switchblades and rage in their eyes. At their most empowered, they're not even as righteously violent as Lisbeth Salander. They're just speaking up, just as they would if they were men, because they understand that they can.
Besides which, if you think hell hath no fury like a woman scorned, you haven't seen one who just found out she earns $30,000 a year less than the male counterpart who stares at her tits in meetings.The Chinese government have been criticised for the ‘manipulation’ of their currency. They would prefer not to use the word ‘manipulation’ perhaps they have an unofficial exchange rate target to keep Chinese currency undervalued to promote growth and exports. At the moment China only pegs its currency against the dollar and not a wider basket of currencies.When the UK was in the Exchange Rate Mechanism, we were trying to target a semi-fixed exchange rate. Though in 1992, we had to work hard to keep the Pound above its market value, whereas the Chinese are working to keep it lower.
Q. What does it Mean that the Chinese Currency is Undervalued?
An undervalued currency suggests that agents (i.e. Government) are keeping the currency below it’s ‘fair’ market equilibrium price by currency controls and intervention buying.
Many analysts argue that in a free market, the Chinese Yuan would appreciate because of the strong demand for Chinese goods and the large Chinese Current Account Surplus. However, the Chinese government is trying to prevent the currency rising. Essentially, the Chinese Central Bank is buying Dollar assets which increase the value of the US dollar relative to the Chinese currency.
This policy of buying foreign assets has led China to accumulate $2.4 trillion of foreign currency reserves. (China’s Foreign Currency Reserves)
Why is China Pursuing this Policy?
China is pursuing a policy of reducing the value of its currency to try and boost growth, especially in its key exporting industries. Chinese growth is very high by western standards. However, China needs a high rate of growth to absorb labour that is made unemployed from the agricultural sector. Because China doesn’t have much in the way of social welfare payments, it is concerned that without job creation in the manufacturing sector they could face high unemployment and social unrest. Therefore, keeping a weak currency helps to boost demand for Chinese exports and therefore Chinese jobs.
Why is US Unhappy at Situation?
By keeping the dollar strong, US exports become less competitive. Also by keeping the dollar strong to the Chinese Yuan, it makes Chinese imports relatively |
qualified for free or reduced price lunch, a common measure of poverty. A teacher like Mr. Allen, who grew up in New Orleans and has seen firsthand what students go through, will have a better time connecting with them than one who hasn’t.
Truly understanding the environment that students come from – rather than just knowing the statistics that describe their lives – can benefit teachers and students. I firmly believe that having more local teachers and more teachers who understand the city’s social and political problems can provide students with the training they need to be successful as students and as adults. If we replace tactics such as hiring teachers from outside of the city or state with methods that focus on hiring qualified local teachers, we can greatly improve the quality of education.
This essay is part of a collaboration between The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, nonpartisan news outlet based at Teachers College, Columbia University, and high school students at Bard’s Early College in New Orleans.A reproduction Kuman Thong sold as a souvenir at a Buddhist temple in Ayutthaya wrapped in a cloth featuring Nang Kwak
Kuman Thong (Thai: กุมารทอง) is a household divinity of Thai folk religion. It is believed to bring luck and fortune to the owner if properly revered. Kuman, or Kumara (Pali) means " Sanctified young boy" (female kumari); thong means golden.
Description [ edit ]
The veneration of Kuman Thong is not part of mainstream Buddhist practices, but it is popular in Thailand.
Origins [ edit ]
The authentic Kuman Thong originated in a practice of necromancy. They were obtained from the desiccated fetuses of children who had died whilst still in their mothers' womb. The witch doctors were said to have the power to invoke these stillborn babies, adopt them as their children, and use them to help them in their endeavours.
According to ancient Thai manuscripts used by practitioners of black magic (Thai: ไสยศาสตร์ Saiyasat), first the unborn fetus was surgically removed from the womb of its mother. Then the body of the child would be taken to a cemetery for the conduction of the proper ceremonial ritual to invoke a Kuman Thong. The body was roasted until dry whilst the witch doctor chanted incantations of magical script. Once the rite was completed, the dry-roasted Kuman was painted with Ya Lak (a kind of lacquer used to cover amulets and Takrut with gold leaf) and covered in gold leaf. Thus this effigy received the name of “Kuman Thong”, meaning “Golden Little Boy”.
Some Kuman effigies were soaked in Nam Man Phrai,[1] a kind of oil extracted by burning a candle close to the chin of a dead child or a person who died in violent circumstances or an unnatural death. This is much less common now, because this practice is now illegal if using fat from human babies for the consecrating oil. Occasionally there are still some amulets obtained through the authentic methods appearing in the market. Some years ago a famous monk was expelled from the Buddhist Sangha for roasting a baby. He was convicted, but later continued to make magic as a layperson after his release.[2]
Hong Phrai [ edit ]
In the case of a female spirit child, the effigy is not called Kuman Thong, but Hong Phrai (โหงพราย).[3]
In literature [ edit ]
The Kuman Thong is mentioned in the Thai legend of Khun Chang Khun Phaen, where the character Khun Phaen made one by removing the stillborn baby from the stomach of his wife, whom he had killed.[4]
Recent events [ edit ]
On May 18, 2012 a 28-year-old British citizen of Taiwanese origin, Chow Hok Kuen, was arrested in a Bangkok hotel room with six male fetuses that had been roasted and covered in gold. Police reported that Kuen intended to sell the fetuses in Taiwan for about 6,300 USD each.[5][6][7]
In 2011, a case was reported in Laos of a man murdering his pregnant wife, so as to use the fetus as a "Louk Lord".[8]
Hyper-realistic dolls of children (but not made out of real children), "Luk Thep" or "Look Thep" ("child angel"),[9] have recently (2015) become popular in Thailand.[10][11][12][13][14] Some people believe the dolls can be injected with the spirit of a child after being blessed by a Buddhist monk. Their owners provide such care as food, water and clothes "in the hope of receiving good fortune in return", and some companies offer owners of the dolls the option to reserve them their own seats and services.[15]
See also [ edit ]At this point, cryptocurrency’s year can only be described as ridiculous.
Bitcoin, the original and highest-profile distributed digital currency, has been on a sustained rally since last December. Now it has reached yet another all-time high, hitting $4044 on the CoinMarketCap index as of this writing.
That means an investment in Bitcoin made on January 1st, at a value of $973, would have produced a 315% return today – or an annualized return of over 900%.
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The entire cryptocurrency sector has been on a tear this year, as major institutions pursue applications for the underlying blockchain security protocol: Bank of America has filed more than 20 block chain patents and Microsoft is adding blockchain tech to its cloud services. Meanwhile cryptocurrency startups have been raising huge amounts of money, both via traditional channels and through so-called Initial Coin Offerings (which the SEC recently signaled it would crack down on).
Bitcoin’s latest record high is particularly notable given that valuations for other cryptocurrencies, including stalwarts such as Ethereum and Litecoin, were down in recent days.
This discrepancy is actually a good thing, as it signals that cryptocurrency investors are making substantive choices between the competing systems. Bitcoin’s fundamentals have made major progress in recent weeks, and Segwit2x, a long-awaited and contentious software upgrade, is on its way to implementation.
Segwit2x will make Bitcoin more usable for individual transactions and as a financial ‘backbone’ for secondary services. So while there’s certainly plenty of dumb money flooding into Bitcoin, there’s also more than just mania behind investors’ continued bullishness.The Astros needed Justin Verlander. It was obvious on July 31. It was obvious on Aug. 31. It's too cute to draw a line directly from the disappointment felt by Dallas Keuchel and the fans after the trade deadline directly to the 11-17 record in August, but that doesn't mean you can't think it. If the Astros won 95 games and lost in the ALDS because their starters had a collective 8.49 ERA, there would have been a lot of discussion about everyone's 20/20 foresight.
The Tigers needed to trade Justin Verlander. Or, at least, rebuild with a great vengeance. They kept cracking their window open, just enough, year after year, turning a last-place disaster season in 2015 into a reanimated corpse-stagger of a second-place finish the next year. They were in before this season, but just barely, and only if their expensive, mid-to-late-30s crew could find a way to be the All-Stars they were in their early 30s. They could not.
This was a trade that should have happened a month ago, but credit everyone involved for making it happen now. Both sides get an A. Most of the attention will be, rightfully, focused on the Astros, who have quickly become the sentimental favorite for fans looking for a team to cheer on this postseason. Sports are pointless, sports are everything, sports are dumb, sports are what we look forward to, sports can help us remember, sports can help us forget. All of that will be a focus in Houston over the next month or two, and the Astros are charging into it with a team that’s stronger in just the right ways.
The Tigers deserve a eulogy, though. They weren’t contenders in every season since their miracle 2006 pennant, but they’ve been a constant presence in the American League, even when they finished in last place. Mike Ilitch kept adding rooms onto his personal Winchester Mystery House, adding staircases to nowhere, sparing no cost, trying to get that elusive World Series title.
The Tigers were, above all, fun. At their peak, they had the best pitcher in baseball and one of the greatest hitters of all time, a rare combination that’s easy to appreciate while it exists and easier to appreciate when it’s gone. The Tigers were the default pick in the AL Central for years because of Verlander and Miguel Cabrera.
The Tigers were a constant offseason threat, too. They were the ones who sprung up at the last second to leaf through the 73-page Scott Boras binder and sign Prince Fielder. They were the ones to snatch Victor Martinez away from the rest of the league. They were always willing to spend, spend, spend on players like Fielder, Martinez, Ordonez, Rodriguez, Sanchez, Hunter, Peralta, and Nathan. They were always willing to give up that one extra prospect to get players like Cespedes, Price, and Cabrera. They even had their moments turning released players like J.D. Martinez into all-stars.
And it almost worked.
If the goal is to enjoy baseball over a long, long season, it worked brilliantly, giving Tigers fans four consecutive postseason appearances for the first time in franchise history. If the goal is to win that one stupid championship after putting a billion dollars in the claw machine, it almost worked. The stuffed trophy was in the claw, but it always jostled out right before it dropped down the hole. Another $200 million into the machine, then...
Now that Verlander is gone, Cabrera is mortal, and the rest of the team is a mess, it’s far too easy to go back and pick those nits. Was there a way to lock up Max Scherzer before he turned into a Cy Young winner or spend money on him instead of Anibal Sanchez, at least?
Was there a better option than Prince Fielder for a team with a quarter-billion to spend? What was with all the Don Kelly? Was there a way to anticipate the bullpen being bad? Was there a way to anticipate the bullpen being bad the season after it was bad? Was there a way to anticipate the bullpen being bad after it was bad for two straight seasons? We’ll never know the answers to these questions.
There was always a buzzsaw to run into, whether it was a Giants team that was incredibly high on comeback dust and unwilling to allow runs, a Cardinals team that was busy converting the baseball world to orthodox youneverknowism, or a Red Sox team that had weaponized the bitterness and disappointment from previous seasons. In retrospect, this was when the dam burst:
In that series, Cabrera was hurt and not himself (foreshadowing). Verlander was excellent, but he wasn’t an MVP candidate anymore (foreshadowing). The bullpen was in the business of breaking hearts (law of physics), and the aging, expensive free agent tried valiantly to succeed, but he tumbled over the wall and out of sight (a metaphor that’s waaaay too on the nose). This series led to the bizarre Doug Fister trade, which led to the bizarrier Robby Ray trade, which led to, well, you reading this right now.
The nitpicking and the buzzsaws are too easy to dwell on, though. It was a fun team. It was a fun team for a decade. The 2003 Tigers were one of baseball’s worst teams, one of the worst we’ll ever see, and the franchise was able to use every one of those 119 losses as stinky lumps of methane pudding that helped them build a bigger, better fire. They lost those games so they could draft Verlander and turn him into a Cy Young winner, into an MVP. They turned one of the all-time worst teams into one of the all-time best pitchers, which isn’t always how it has to work.
Plenty of teams have fallen into the abyss, only to screw up the draft pick who was supposed to be their reward. Consider the Padres, who had the first pick in the Verlander draft and went with not-Verlander. The Tigers didn’t have to come out of the 2003 season with positive momentum.
But they did, and it was with Verlander, and it was fun, so much fun, tremendous fun. That’s how baseball is supposed to be — with the bad teams becoming good with the good draft picks they picked up from being so bad, a wheel that keeps spinning around, bringing teams up and down, depending where they just were.
Except it’s not always like that. There’s no wheel. The Yankees haven’t finished under.500 in 26 years. The Mariners have never won a pennant. The Nationals have been up for years, except they haven’t won a postseason series since they spoke French. There’s no fairness, no equity.
The Tigers are proof of that, both in the best and worst possible way.
This easily identifiable era of prolonged success is over, and Tigers fans know that Verlander deserves as much credit as any player has ever deserved. It’s easy to look back and wonder what if every time the calendar flips to October.
That will drive a baseball fan mad, though. My advice would be to bury those thoughts, look back wistfully, and think, wasn’t that fun? Justin Verlander isn’t on the Tigers anymore, and it’s the end of an era that was never going to last forever. But, hear me out on this one: Wasn’t that fun?
Because it was. It really, really was.Okay, maybe we were too harsh.
Wall Street’s massive counteroffensive against Dave Camp’s tax reform, and especially his provision to tax “too big to fail” financial institutions, is a compelling drama in its own right. It also clears up a source of widespread confusion that has hung over the Obama years: Does the tea party and other right-wing populist groups actually oppose the agenda of the financial industry, or are they mainly its allies? We now have an answer.
It is certainly true that conservative grassroots activists and Republican elites have gone at each others’ throats several times over the last half-dozen years. One of those fights, the uprising against TARP, certainly pit the grassroots against the elite. But the right-wing revolt against TARP has never translated into any important pressure against the financial industry’s agenda. Instead, since TARP’s passage, conservative activists have stood shoulder-to-shoulder with the industry on its highest priorities: opposing Dodd-Frank, and higher taxes on the one percent.
The episodes that have split the grassroots from the base have a different element in common. They are all cases where activists opposed bipartisan cooperation. On TARP, on the debt ceiling, and on the government shutdown – these are all the major episodes pitting activists against the Republican business elite – the activists demanded confrontation, which threatened to unleash economic chaos.
The driving passion of the conservative base was not distrust of Wall Street, per se. It was a suspicion that Republican leaders were somehow cooperating with the nefarious Obama administration. (This belief was deranged, of course, but no more deranged than the elites’ belief that Obama’s regulatory and tax proposals amount to a kind of pro-Hitlerism, expressed once again today by Ken Langone.) “Wall Street” became the explanation tea party activists furnished for the Republican “capitulation.”
Wall Street’s current pressure campaign on Capitol Hill should dispel any doubt about the source of the tension. Financial lobbyists are sweeping through the GOP, reports the Wall Street Journal, and encountering little resistance. “This is a fairly large effort,” said one industry lobbyist. “Most of the offices we’re talking to are saying they’re opposed, and some are willing to make their views known.” Politico’s report today, which quotes the latest Godwin’s Law violation by a Republican gazillionaire, has the key passage:
The Camp draft catalyzed most of the business community around the notion that it was so bad, and it’s not just private equity and financial services — there were so many other punitive measures in there — that people just decided, the whole system’s broken here, nothing’s going to get done,” another senior Republican business leader said. “And that’s what we need to work toward. We need to work toward gridlock.
Wall Street wants to stop bipartisan agreement. And because it is pushing for partisan combat rather than bipartisan cooperation, it has provoked zero backlash from conservative activists – even though it is killing a reformist, preference-eliminating, tax-rate-lowering reform that is the most promising legislative incarnation of a populist reform to have emerged in years.
The Washington Examiner’s Timothy Carney has been fervently arguing that Obama is the true ally of the plutocrats, and the tea party their true enemy. Just the other day, when Paul Krugman dismissed tea party backlash against Wall Street – he dismissed it too much, I’d agree – Carney retorted angrily:
Paul Krugman is embarrassing when he tries to write about conservatives. Just awful. http://t.co/aV02V2910E — Timothy P Carney (@TPCarney) March 17, 2014
But now we have a real moment when Carney’s libertarian populist vision has a real chance to break through. A bold tax reform that slays preference after preference in the tax code and enrages Wall Street has emerged from the tax-writing committee, and offers the prospect for real bipartisan support, meaning passage into law. The financial industry is mounting a full-scale effort to crush it. This is your chance, Tim Carney! The tanks are rolling into the square.
Instead, Carney wrote one positive column about it, concluding, “Republican leaders aren’t yet rallying behind Camp’s proposals — which must come as a relief for the special interests.” (“Yet” is some hilariously misguided optimism.) Then another column picking away at one of Camp’s proposals. Then nothing.
Now, I’m not Carney’s assignment editor. Maybe he has important projects in the works. The point is not just that Carney isn’t covering the slaughter on Capitol Hill. It’s that if Carney isn’t going to raise any objections, nobody is. I’ve been unable to detect any pushback on the right whatsoever. Wall Street is systematically eliminating all opposition within the party, and the right is greeting it with radio silence.
But what’s being killed here isn’t merely a single proposal. It’s their whole analysis.Compiled by Joseph Tucker
10. Backslashes And Bad Ideas – There’s No Place Like Home
Even though it is last on this list it is far from a bad album (considering the volume of pop punk releases in 2013). This record is littered with reasons why it should be noticed – from the insanely inspiring intro to learning about Josh’s bad life choices (listen to the record and you’ll get it). This record gives us great music coupled with amazing lyricism that in the end hits the spot. (purchase)
9. Home & Away – Still Breathing
St. Louis is home to a group of dudes that produced an album that would catch any true pop punk fan’s eye. Still Breathing is full of unique subject matter and comes complete with ringing guitars and rough vocals, which are used to weave stories of happiness as well as heartbreak and disappointment. At the end of the day, this record has all the components to be on this list and deserve to run with the best. (purchase)
8.The Wonder Years – The Greatest Generation
After listening to Suburbia I’ve Given You All and Now I’m Nothing I thought that no matter what, this band couldn’t do any better, I’m so glad I was wrong. With tracks like “I Just Want To Sell Out My Funeral” and “An American Religion,” which pour out melodic riffs and crashing hats complete with the signature tones that remind us of suburbia and tales of childhood, this is a hard album to ignore. (purchase)
7. The Story So Far – What You Don’t See
I have never been disappointed with any of TSSF’s records and WYDS is no exception. The Story So Far has always had a sound that many have tried to match, but to no avail. Parker carries so much emotion in every track that it is impossible to not get attached to the music. With raw tracks like “Things I Can’t Change” and “Stifled,” this album should always be one you come to! (purchase)
6. Real Friends – Put Yourself Back Together
I can honestly count on Real Friends to give a piece of themselves to me with every record of theirs I purchase. Bony knees and sleepy eyes were back on everyone’s mind with this release and the lyrics from these songs showed up multiple times on my Twitter feed, being used to either win a girl over or trying to forget one. There is no other album out there that can have this sort of delivery to its audience. You can literally cry to this album as much as you can sing it to that special someone, and that makes it valuable in my eyes. (purchase)
5. Knuckle Puck – The Weight That You Buried
Joe Taylor and the rest of the crew that make-up Knuckle Puck pack so much aggression in their music, but not the type that makes you angry. The aggression shown in their performances and in The Weight That You Buried isn’t the kind that is associated with hardcore acts, but the aggression that goes into making a completely honest record. Influences like New Found Glory and The Movielife can be heard in their sound, but collectively Knuckle Puck has a sound all their own which transfers into The Weight That You Buried, making it a top record for 2013. (purchase)
4. Old Again – Broken People
I think this is the only time that I have put a band on a list twice, but Old Again’s early March release just couldn’t be missed. Broken People is the result of a lead vocalist seeing that people in this day and age lack empathy, and compassion and for one person in particular, love. An ugly society has made for a beautiful record that is very relatable to anyone who listens to it. Broken People is a shoe in for any future “classic records” list. (purchase)
3.Firestarter/Old Again – Split
I have been super passionate about Old Again ever since I interviewed them early this year. Their sound is refined and their lyrics are brutally honest and is just what I need when I’m in a tight emotional spot. I had little idea who Firestarter was before this split but afterwards I went and bought all of their records, including the acoustic versions. If either had been paired with any other outfit the chemistry between both bands and songs would have never been there. One thing that makes this record great is the fact that the two bands coagulate so well. (purchase)
2. Pentimento – Inside The Sea
What I like about this record is that it was made so perfectly that each song could have its own interpretation based on your situation. Pentimento itself has been a band that has left the interpretation of them and their music totally up to their fans. This is one of the most emotionally raw albums I have ever had the joy of listening to. If you do happen to pick up this record (which I hope you do) know this: State Champs almost lost their top spot on the list after I re-listened to this record. (purchase)
1. State Champs – The Finer Things
This record embodies pop punk (which isn’t just about cats and pizza) and is arguably the best record of all time in this genre. From the level of diversity in every song to the thought provoking lyricism this album is one that future generations of musicians shows every journalist and says, “ this is what shaped my sound; this is what made me love music.” (purchase)Get the biggest Liverpool FC stories by email Subscribe Thank you for subscribing We have more newsletters Show me See our privacy notice Could not subscribe, try again later Invalid Email
Jurgen Klopp is not unfamiliar with footballing psychology.
He has already tried it at Anfield.
“Before you are tired, you think you are tired. If you don’t think you are tired, it is easy,” he said just two weeks ago.
But that one WAS easy.
All Klopp had to do was convince his players that a Europa League match and a 2,000 mile plane journey, two days before the visit of a fully rested Crystal Palace, was not significant.
Much trickier is convincing Daniel Sturridge that he can play through a pain barrier when required and enjoy the kind of consistency of appearance he last achieved in 2013/14.
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Sturridge made 33 appearances that season. He scored 24 goals. It is no coincidence that Liverpool nearly won the league.
Just five months later, after sustaining the latest in a long list of injuries, he declared: “Maybe it’s my body type, maybe it’s hereditary. Both my uncles had injuries, and my dad had them as well. Maybe it’s the Caribbean vibes, maybe I have speed but maybe it makes you more vulnerable because of the fast twitch muscles and the speed in which you’re moving. I am vulnerable to muscle injuries.”
Sturridge appears to believe he is injury prone.
And he does have good reason.
A thigh problem has been his most common complaint – nine at the last count during his Liverpool career alone.
But the 25-year-old has also injured his calf, hamstring, ankle and most recently hip. As Thomas McMahon memorably quipped on This Is Anfield, “All he needs is a groin and knee injury and he’s officially won Fabio Aurelio bingo.”
But the biggest problem seems to be upstairs.
Injuries have become a self fulfilling prophecy for Sturridge.
If you think you’re tired, you will become tired.
If you think you’re going to get injured, you will. Every twinge becomes a strain, every cramp becomes a tear.
Daniel Sturridge is fully fit and back in training. For now.
Jurgen Klopp may have to get into his player’s head before he can cure his body long term.
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Is Prenno on the money with this week's column? Let us know in the comments section or @LivEchoLFCFreddy Candia Aguilar, affectionately known as “MacGyver” for his uncanny ability to make something out of nothing, proudly held a banner with the words “Cochabamba Pedal Project” emblazoned on it. He had been providing free bike tune-ups all day to participants in Cochabamba, Bolivia’s first Bike and Pedestrian Day, while promoting his new social enterprise.
While Bike and Pedestrian Days are common in Bolivia, it was the first time Cochabamba Pedal Project participated. The organization came to life with the help of two Bolivian NGOs, a US-based nonprofit, two innovative American volunteers, and funding from an American social enterprise.
At the time of the Bike and Pedestrian Day, held this past April, Cochabamba Pedal Project was months in the making and at the very beginning and was never intended to be more than a month-long volunteer project.
The story began with another Freddy, Freddy Rosa Echeverria, the principal of a small school in Tiquipaya, on the outskirts of Cochabamba.
Principal Freddy smiled broadly as his elementary school students clamored to demonstrate to two American visitors the correct method for washing their hands.
“Just one volunteer,” he bellowed, but the children couldn’t contain their excitement. A dozen or more rushed to the front of the classroom. Freddy’s smile grew even more. He allowed them all to participate in the exercise. The students mimed the method they used for washing their hands. They lathered their hands intently, not wanting to miss any crease or crevice.
“This is how we wash our hands,” Freddy proudly told us.
Washing hands was such a big deal at Freddy’s school that students wanted to start a soap-making business. With help from Cochabamba Pedal Project, the school began realizing that dream.
Few Bolivian children knew such basic hygiene. Only 32 percent of schools nationwide have access to handwashing facilities, while only 61 percent have sanitation systems of any kind. Without appropriate hygiene infrastructure, health problems abound: food poisoning, diarrhea, and staph infections are common and infectious diseases spread unchecked.
Fortunately, schools like Freddy’s have help to face this crisis. Fundacion SODIS, a Cochabamba-based public health nonprofit organization, partners with schools to educate teachers and students about the importance of proper hygiene and hand-washing.
“Students must learn appropriate hygiene practices at school,” said Elsa Sanchez Montaño, executive director of Fundación SODIS. "Only 3 percent of families in Bolivia have a place to wash their hands with soap and water after they use the latrine. Proper hygiene is not being taught at home, so it must be done in the schools.”
Educating students was of the utmost importance, but Freddy and Elsa were doing more. The Tiquipaya school treated its water by a solar disinfection method and produced its own soap – handmade by the students – for everyday use. The students learned the chemical process of soapmaking and, of course, the health benefits of using soap.
The ultimate goal for this joint project was to create a self-sufficient, sustainable business, producing enough high-quality soap to sell to the local municipality for distribution to other schools in the region. The Tiquipaya school´s business model, if successful, would be replicated throughout Bolivia at other schools and communities.
The plan was good, but Freddy needed help to make it a reality. What the school needed, he said, was soap-making machinery to increase the efficiency and quality of the soap production.
No one knew it that day, but the seed was planted that grew into Cochabamba Pedal Project, a small social enterprise that harnesses the power of pedal-powered machines to improve the daily lives of Bolivians.
Working with Sustainable Bolivia we met with Freddy to brainstorm ways to increase the school’s soap productivity and quality. After some research, we found the designs for a pedal-powered soap mixer that were developed by an engineering professor in Nigeria. After getting the go-ahead from Principal Freddy, we went to work.
There was no way we could do it alone, however. With the help of another local NGO, CECAM Bolivia, run by Freddy Candia Aguila and his wife, Rosio, the sourcing of raw materials and the construction of the bike machine or “bicimaquina” began to take shape. Funding for the project was provided by Soapbox Soaps, a one-for-one beauty care enterprise located in the United States.
Three weeks (and a lot of sanding, cutting, welding, and painting) later, the completed pedal-powered soap mixer was delivered to the school. A school assembly featured soapmaking, a lesson on how to better merchandise the soap, and a performance from the school marching band.
The project was a huge success.
Several months later, Freddy and Rosio contacted us, with news that a second pedal-powered soap mixer had been built and donated to a second school.
Could utilizing simple pedal-powered devices, like the soap mixer, be a sustainable and economically viable solution to the difficulties that many Bolivians face on a daily basis?
The staff at Cochabamba Pedal Project think so. Freddy and Rosio have already started devising new ways to implement the pedal-powered machines, from pedal-powered clothes washers and water pumps to bike-operated corn shellers and smoothie makers. The possibilities for this simple, yet effective technology are endless.
Freddy and Rosio are the heart and soul of Cochabamba Pedal Project. They hope to create a sustainable social enterprise by refurbishing and selling bikes to community members for transportation, then use the funds created by the bike sales to construct and donate more bicimaquinas.
It will take a collaborative effort from community members, local NGOs, and volunteers, but we are confident that this social enterprise will flourish. We are excited about what lies ahead for Cochabamba Pedal Project as we continue #pedalingforward to increase public health outcomes in Bolivia.
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• Cochabamba Pedal Project is on Facebook at CochabambaPedalProject; Instagram @cochapedal; and Twitter @cochapedal. Email: CochabambaPedalProject@gmail.com.
• This article originally appeared at Global Envision, a blog published by Mercy Corps.news Under siege from all sides of politics over the Federal Coalition’s reluctance to pursue a full Fibre to the Premises (FTTP) broadband rollout in Tasmania, Communications Minister Malcolm Turnbull has spoken to NBN Co about the possibility of conducting FTTP trials in the state that would test Labor’s plan to deploy fibre on aerial electricity poles.
Many Tasmanians believe the Coalition, specifically Malcom Turnbull, committed the Coalition’s Broadband Network rollout (CBN) in the state to a full FTTP deployment during last year’s Federal Election. However, in fact, Turnbull never explicitly made such a promise; stating only that a Coalition Government would honour construction contracts signed by NBN Co. Some Tasmanians took this statement to mean that the Coalition would commit to a full rollout of Fibre to the Premises broadband in the state.
The Coalition has always stated that it preferred a Fibre to the Node and HFC-based alternative to Labor’s NBN project. In mid-December, NBN Co delivered its Strategic Review, recommending that Labor’s all-fibre approach to its broadband network be replaced by a mixed FTTN/HFC cable/FTTP approach under the Coalition.
Speaking on ABC Radio in Tasmania last week, NBN Co executive chairman Switkowski confirmed Fibre to the Node would be used in Tasmania. “Obviously in the previous model, the infrastructure was going to be an all fibre infrastructure,” he said. “Post the election and post the strategic review, we’ve now agreed on a multi-technology model where we’ll seek to use a existing copper network where we can.”
However, the issue is still a hot one in Tasmania, which is shortly slated to head to its state election. At this stage, every political party in Tasmania has lined up in support of a full FTTP broadband rollout in the state, including Tasmanian Liberal Leader Will Hodgman, who said last week that the broadband issue could lead to the Liberals in the state losing the election.
Subsequently, Tasmanian Labor Premier Lara Giddings offered NBN Co free access to the overhead power poles of state-owned energy utility Aurora to incentivise a full rollout of Fibre to the Premises broadband in the state, as part of a package of technology policy promises associated with the State Election.
The deployment style mimics a trial carried out back from 2005 under Giddings’ watch as then-Tasmanian Minister for Economic Development. Called tasCOLT for the Tasmanian Collaborative Optical Leading Test-bed, the trial deployed optic-fibre broadband to some 1,250 premies throughout the suburbs of New Town, South Hobart and Devonport. At the time, Tasmanian electrical utility Aurora provided the infrastructure, with its retail telecommunications arm TasTel providing ISP services over the network.
A detailed report on the trial was published by TECC in October 2008 (PDF). It found that the trial had been successful and the learnings incorporated into the Federal Government’s rollout of the comparable National Broadband Network project, which was still being considered by Kevin Rudd’s Cabinet at that time.
In a press conference yesterday in Sydney, Turnbull acknowledged that he had spoken personally to Hodgman about the issue, who had pressured his Federal Liberal colleague to consider the FTTP option.
“There is a series of tools, and what we’ve said to NBN Co is you are free to choose the best technology for the particular locations. And if we can use, for example, access to Aurora’s poles, electricity poles, to reduce the cost of FTTP, it may well enable us to do more FTTP in Tasmania,” Turnbull said. “… We’re certainly looking at it, but equally we’re not going to make irresponsible economic decisions.”
And then this morning on ABC Local Radio, Turnbull said: “We’re taking the proposal on board and we’re doing quite a bit of work at the NBN CO now to see if we can progress that idea of some trials and really test this proposition that Tasmania’s different and the cost structure is different because of these aerial assets.”
opinion/analysis
I’ve been saying for quite some time that NBN Co must seriously consider deploying more aerial fibre, based especially on the TasCOLT trial. As I wrote for Delimiter 2.0 in mid-November last year (paywalled):
“NBN Co’s Strategic Review process gives the company an unmissable opportunity to re-evaluate the early decision to deploy its FTTP network primarily through Telstra’s underground ducts. The company and its new Coalition masters must now seriously consider deploying more fibre aerially on power poles in an effort to speed up its rollout substantially. … Tasmania has form in this area. The State Government’s TasCOLT project saw several thousand households in several metropolitan areas in the state receive aerial fibre deployments constructed by state-owned energy utility Aurora Energy in 2006 and 2007. According to a report published in 2008, the model was successful, and Tasmania gained key learnings from the deployment that would aid in future rollouts. Now the state is proposing that that concept be extended throughout the NBN rollout in Tasmania, in an effort to ensure that it receives FTTP broadband across the state under the NBN, and not inferior FTTN options. It’s a model Tasmania has proposed before — back in 2007 and 2008, when Kevin Rudd’s first Labor administration was examining a nationwide FTTN rollout in partnership with industry, as the first NBN plan. And now it’s back. The thing which NBN Co’s team of executives, analysts and consultants needs to realise when considering the aerial FTTP model, as compared with the underground FTTP model which it has largely been pursuing so far, is that the model makes a hell of a lot of sense not just for Tasmania, but for the wider national NBN rollout in general.”
So with the TasCOLT experience already live to some 1,200 premises in Tasmania since 2008 or so, why the hell do we need to do further trials? It’s not like the results of that trial are not already available.
One further thing I will add: It is rather audacious of Turnbull and Hodgman to try and chalk this one up as a Liberal victory. Hodgman has only just recently drunk the FTTP “kool-aid”, after all … it was Giddings that worked on the TasCOLT project back in 2005, when the Premier was Tasmanian Minister for Economic Development |
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Our long-term plans are contingent on future developments in the field of AI. Because these developments are highly uncertain, we currently focus mostly on work that we expect to be useful in a wide variety of possible scenarios. The more optimistic scenarios we consider often look something like this:
In the short term, a research community coalesces, develops a good in-principle understanding of what the relevant problems are, and produces formal tools for tackling these problems. AI researchers move toward a minimal consensus about best practices, normalizing discussions of AI’s long-term social impact, a risk-conscious security mindset, and work on error tolerance and value specification.
In the medium term, researchers build on these foundations and develop a more mature understanding. As we move toward a clearer sense of what smarter-than-human AI systems are likely to look like — something closer to a credible roadmap — we imagine the research community moving toward increased coordination and cooperation in order to discourage race dynamics.
In the long term, we would like to see AI-empowered projects (as described by Dewey [2015]) used to avert major AI mishaps. For this purpose, we’d want to solve a weak version of the alignment problem for limited AI systems — systems just capable enough to serve as useful levers for preventing AI accidents and misuse.
In the very long term, we can hope to solve the “full” alignment problem for highly capable, highly autonomous AI systems. Ideally, we want to reach a position where we can afford to wait until we reach scientific and institutional maturity — take our time to dot every i and cross every t before we risk “locking in” design choices.
The above is a vague sketch, and we prioritize research we think would be useful in less optimistic scenarios as well. Additionally, “short term” and “long term” here are relative, and different timeline forecasts can have very different policy implications. Still, the sketch may help clarify the directions we’d like to see the research community move in.
For more on our research focus and methodology, see our research page and MIRI’s Approach.
Our organizational plans
We currently employ seven technical research staff (six research fellows and one assistant research fellow), plus two researchers signed on to join in the coming months and an additional six research associates and research interns. Our budget this year is about $1.75M, up from $1.65M in 2015 and $950k in 2014.
Our eventual goal (subject to revision) is to grow until we have between 13 and 17 technical research staff, at which point our budget would likely be in the $3–4M range. If we reach that point successfully while maintaining a two-year runway, we’re likely to shift out of growth mode.
Our budget estimate for 2017 is roughly $2–2.2M, which means that we’re entering this fundraiser with about 14 months’ runway. We’re uncertain about how many donations we’ll receive between November and next September, but projecting from current trends, we expect about 4/5ths of our total donations to come from the fundraiser and 1/5th to come in off-fundraiser. Based on this, we have the following fundraiser goals:
Basic target – $750,000. We feel good about our ability to execute our growth plans at this funding level. We’ll be able to move forward comfortably, albeit with somewhat more caution than at the higher targets.
Growth target – $1,000,000. This would amount to about half a year’s runway. At this level, we can afford to make more uncertain but high-expected-value bets in our growth plans. There’s a risk that we’ll dip below a year’s runway in 2017 if we make more hires than expected, but the growing support of our donor base would make us feel comfortable about taking such risks.
Stretch target – $1,250,000. At this level, even if we exceed my growth expectations, we’d be able to grow without real risk of dipping below a year’s runway. Past $1.25M we would not expect additional donations to affect our 2017 plans much, assuming moderate off-fundraiser support.
If we hit our growth and stretch targets, we’ll be able to execute several additional programs we’re considering with more confidence. These include contracting a larger pool of researchers to do early work with us on logical induction and on our machine learning agenda, and generally spending more time on academic outreach, field-growing, and training or trialing potential collaborators and hires.
As always, you’re invited to get in touch if you have questions about our upcoming plans and recent activities. I’m very much looking forward to seeing what new milestones the growing alignment research community will hit in the coming year, and I’m very grateful for the thoughtful engagement and support that’s helped us get to this point.I once heard that Geroge Lucas initially wanted to update the Flash Gordon franchise, but couldn't get the rights. Therefore, he went ahead and eventually hammered out the Star Wars concept. As the theory goes, this is why (at least in spirit) the trilogy looks so "Flash Gordon-y" (their description, not mine). Is this true?
Songbird replies:
The force must be with you, Steve. Here it is, straight from Lucas’ first Hollywood boss and fellow USC graduate, Francis Ford Coppola: “George wanted to do Flash Gordon … he met with the people who owned it, and they didn’t take him at all seriously. So he took the Flash Gordon trailers — the diagonal titles that talk about the universe at that point [he means the opening story synopsis that seems to recede from the viewer as it scrolls up] — and sort of combined it with a Stanley Kubrick ‘2001’ world and created his own ‘Flash Gordon.’ ” Lucas says the characters of “Star Wars” are not originals but “tributes.”
To add to the intergalactic mix, Lucas says, “I realized we had no myths, and what I needed to do was create a modern kind of myth.” Lucas studied mythology, partly thorugh the writings of Joseph Campbell. He also found fodder for “Star Wars” in a little-known 1958 Japanese film entitled “Hidden Fortress,” which is a humorous story about a reformed general and two surly farmers escorting an undercover princess to claim her throne. Hmmmm, that sounds a bit familiar, doesn’t it?
Remember that Lucas had a rough go of it early in his career. He lucked out by winning the Warner Brothers scholarship that would place him with Francis Ford Coppola (working on the movie “Finian’s Rainbow). But Lucas’ first movie “THX:1138,” an independent version of his award-winning student film which Coppola had recommended, was a big bomb for Warner Brothers. The studio demanded Lucas and Coppola pay them back to the tune of nearly $500,000.
As a result, Coppola had to take a job directing a little film called “The Godfather” (guess you could say they made him an offer he couldn’t refuse). Lucas, taking Coppola’s advice to “write from your own history,” got Universal Studios to back his next film “American Graffiti,” which netted $50 for every $1 invested and made Lucas a millionaire.
Suffice to say, Lucas saw Hollywood as the evil empire.
Now, reduce the main Star Wars character’s last name to an initial, and his name becomes Luke S. Lucas.
And you know what young Skywalker did to the evil empire when the force was with him …
One last tidbit: Star Wars launched the career of Harrison Ford. But do you think Ford was destined for stardom? Not hardly. Ford wasn’t the first choice in Lucas’s casting of either Han Solo or Indiana Jones. Christopher Walken was the leading contender for the first role, and Tom Selleck was the top pick for the second.
Send questions to Cecil via cecil@straightdope.com.
Related
STAFF REPORTS ARE WRITTEN BY THE STRAIGHT DOPE SCIENCE ADVISORY BOARD, CECIL'S ONLINE AUXILIARY. THOUGH THE SDSAB DOES ITS BEST, THESE COLUMNS ARE EDITED BY ED ZOTTI, NOT CECIL, SO ACCURACYWISE YOU'D BETTER KEEP YOUR FINGERS CROSSED.ACTION IS URGED TO AVERT GLOBAL CLIMATE SHIFT
Special to the New York Times
Published: December 11, 1985
WASHINGTON, Dec. 10— A group of senators and scientists today called for national and international action to avert a predicted warming of the earth’s climate resulting from a buildup of carbon dioxide and other man-made gases in the atmosphere.
They warned at a Senate hearing that such an effect, like that of a greenhouse, would produce radical climate changes and a subsequent rise in ocean levels that could have catastrophic results in the next century unless steps were taken now to deal with the problem.
Senator Albert Gore Jr., Democrat of Tennessee, said he would introduce legislation to expand and focus scientific efforts on this greenhouse effect.
Because the rise in temperature is expected to be higher at the earth’s poles, another effect of the climate change is expected to be a melting of the icecaps and a rise in the level of the oceans of seven feet or more
ACTION IS URGED TO AVERT GLOBAL CLIMATE SHIFT – NYTimes.comAmazon announced on Thursday that its $13.7 billion acquisition of Whole Foods will close on Monday.
As the two companies work to integrate their business, all customers will immediately see "lower prices on a selection of best-selling staples across [Whole Foods] stores."
And Amazon promises "more to come," as the internet giant begins to integrate Prime into the Whole Foods ecosystem. Eventually, Prime members will receive "special savings and in-store benefits."
Amazon didn't disclose how long that would take, but said it would first need to integrate Amazon Prime into the Whole Foods point-of-sale system. Once complete, the offers will begin and eventually Prime will become Whole Foods' customer rewards program.
Grocery stocks immediately tumbled Thursday afternoon on the news. Shares of Kroger, Costco, Sprouts Farmers and Supervalu were all seen trading at session lows. Big-box retailers Target and Wal-Mart also watched their stocks fall.
Amazon promising immediate price cuts puts pressure on traditional grocers that are already operating in a thin-margin business. Meal-kit businesses, like Blue Apron, have also taken a beating after Amazon announced it would be creating a similar service.
On Wednesday, Whole Foods shareholders voted to advance Amazon's acquisition of the grocery chain, moving the proposal one step closer to reality. Amazon shareholders didn't need to sign off on the deal.
The two parties were saying they expected to finalize their merger during the second half of 2017. Though, a source familiar with the matter told CNBC the deal could happen "sooner rather than later."
Just hours after Wednesday's shareholders vote, the Federal Trade Commission said it would allow the Amazon-Whole Foods deal to proceed. The FTC had been conducting an investigation to gauge whether the merger would decrease competition under federal regulations.
A spokesperson from Amazon told CNBC on Thursday that it has no plans for layoffs or to use automation to replace Whole Foods' cashiers. This was a widely held concern that sparked debate when the acquisition was first announced.
Looking at the future of Whole Foods stores, Amazon said that soon Amazon Lockers will be available in select locations. Using these, shoppers can either have products shipped from Amazon.com to their local Whole Foods, or return items back to Amazon during a trip to the grocer.
Whole Foods' private-label products will also now be available through Amazon.com, AmazonFresh, Prime Pantry and Prime Now. A move like this could put more pressure on competitors on the low-price end of the supermarket spectrum, like Wal-Mart, and German-based Aldi and Lidl.
And this is particularly concerning for those companies, like Sprouts, that operate neck and neck with Whole Foods in organic. Here, prices have tended to be higher than with conventional and nonperishable items.
"The bottom line is that this isn't theory any more," GlobalData Retail Managing Director Neil Saunders told CNBC. "The deal is happening and it will drive change in the grocery sector. Competitors will need to think about what that means for them and respond accordingly."
Among many things, this deal will provide Amazon a much more extensive real estate footprint. However, Amazon is entering the brick-and-mortar world at a time when many are saying the supermarket space is overcrowded.
Some of the bigger names in grocery are already trimming plans for expansion. Kroger, for example, has said it will cut its store openings in 2017 to 55 from 100, opting to invest less in its physical retail and more in digital initiatives. Even Whole Foods had scaled back its own expansion plans prior to Amazon arriving on the scene.
In its press release on Thursday, Amazon didn't mention exactly how it would use Whole Foods' portfolio of more than 450 stores — whether it would keep all locations open, or transform them over time.If you've walked through San Jose's Rose Garden neighborhood, you might have seen a large, furry animal staring out a window at you. Many people walking by think a wild animal, but it is not a bobcat. It's just a really, really big house cat."Spock" is no ordinary house cat. Holding him requires two hands and a strong back.The large cat is 27 pounds, eats a pound of food a day and is nearly four feet long.Spock is a Maine Coon and usually gets a startled reaction when people see him in the window of the home.Animal Control has come to Spock's Rose Garden home plenty of times because people who spot him through the window get freaked out."I know Colleen has been approached on several occasions with people making a claim that she's got a wild animal in here," neighbor Terry Reilly said.Colleen Pizarev is Spock's owner. To have a pet like Spock requires a lot of patience. He refuses to be alone, so he will open closed doors. He watches YouTube videos to help him fall asleep and he tends to break just about anything in his path."It's a lot like having a toddler in the house. We have to Spock-proof the house," Pizarev said.She pointed out all of the decorative home items on top of the end tables are locked down with earthquake putty. It's the price for having a cat like Spock.$\begingroup$
I saw this riddle posted on reddit a long time ago, called the "Seven Immortals."
In the beginning, the world is inhabited by seven immortals, ageless and sexless, who begin to multiply and populate the land. Any immortal can mate with any other to produce exactly one child, and the same is true of their descendants, with the caveat that no immortal could mate with his own ancestors or relatives. No couple can mate more than once, and they continue to intermingle until no more matings are possible. How many immortals are left in the end?
The solution is
$19873$, which I lazily confirmed by writing a Mathematica program.
Having a mathematical mind, I of course immediately wondered about the "$n$ Immortals" problem. Surely a combinatorial solution with binomial coefficients should be attainable by extending the "genes" approach discussed in the comments. But is this the only way? It feels like a graph theory problem to me.
My second question is, is there any significance to this problem? Does the solution arise in any other mathematical contexts?This Easter was celebrated by all Christian denominations on the same day, which is unusual. The date usually differs, often even by weeks, between Eastern and Western Christianity, since the calculations are based on the Julian calendar and Gregorian calendar respectively.
Like last Christmas, Muslims in Abadan joined on Easter Sunday the single Christian family in the city at Surp Karapet Church.
The majority of Iranian Christians are ethnic Armenians and Assyrians, who follow the Armenian Apostolic Church and the Assyrian Church of the East respectively. Armenians celebrate the Nativity and baptism of Jesus on January 6, at the same time as the Epiphany. The Assyrians today celebrate Christmas on December 25.
St. Grigor Lusavoritch, Armenian Catholic Church in Tehran – Photo credit Erfan Kouchari, TASNIM St. Grigor Lusavoritch, Armenian Catholic Church in Tehran – Photo credit Erfan Kouchari, TASNIM St. Grigor Lusavoritch, Armenian Catholic Church in Tehran – Photo credit Erfan Kouchari, TASNIM St. Grigor Lusavoritch, Armenian Catholic Church in Tehran – Photo credit Erfan Kouchari, TASNIM St. Grigor Lusavoritch, Armenian Catholic Church in Tehran – Photo credit IRNA St. Grigor Lusavoritch, Armenian Catholic Church in Tehran – Photo credit IRNA St. Grigor Lusavoritch, Armenian Catholic Church in Tehran – Photo credit IRNA St. Grigor Lusavoritch, Armenian Catholic Church in Tehran – Photo credit IRNA St. Grigor Lusavoritch, Armenian Catholic Church in Tehran – Photo credit IRNA St. Grigor Lusavoritch, Armenian Catholic Church in Tehran – Photo credit IRNA St. Grigor Lusavoritch, Armenian Catholic Church in Tehran – Photo credit IRNA St. Grigor Lusavoritch, Armenian Catholic Church in Tehran – Photo credit IRNA St. Grigor Lusavoritch, Armenian Catholic Church in Tehran – Photo credit IRNA St. Grigor Lusavoritch, Armenian Catholic Church in Tehran – Photo credit Erfan Kouchari, TASNIM St. Grigor Lusavoritch, Armenian Catholic Church in Tehran – Photo credit Erfan Kouchari, TASNIM St. Sarkis Cathedral, Tehran – Photo credit Mohammadreza Abbasi, MEHR St. Sarkis Cathedral, Tehran – Photo credit Mohammadreza Abbasi, MEHR St. Sarkis Cathedral, Tehran – Photo credit Mohammadreza Abbasi, MEHR St. Sarkis Cathedral, Tehran – Photo credit Mohammadreza Abbasi, MEHR St. Sarkis Cathedral, Tehran – Photo credit Mohammadreza Abbasi, MEHR
Photos: St. Grigor Lusavoritch Church and St. Sarkis Cathedral in Tehran
Sources: Tasnim News, IRNA, Mehr News, Fars News, Payvand News, WikipediaIf you are unfamiliar with Charles Blow, let me speed you up: He’s never here for the fuckshit. He’s educated, informed and opinionated and isn’t willing to “play nice” during Donald Trump’s dictatorship.
During a late-night CNN panel, conservative Trump supporter Kayleigh McEnany thought she was going to throw shade at Mr. Blow, and she learned quickly that that is what she won’t be doing, ever.
McEnany praised Don Lemon for having her on and trying to create an open dialogue, and then she touched Blow’s arm while noting that some other publications have sinister motives.
“Don’t do that,” Blow told McEnany. “Don’t touch me and say that’s your ‘sinister motivations.’ That’s not going to happen tonight.”
McEnany told Blow that she didn’t realize that she couldn’t touch him and that maybe she should move her chair over.
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“You can scoot until you fall off that ledge,” Blow replied. “What I’m telling you is don’t touch me and while you’re saying I’m sinister.”
Watch the gloriousness unfold below:Netflix may be known for offering some of our favorite TV and movie streams, but the company is about to step up its game and begin offering original content. Netflix has allegedly outbid a number of major cable networks for a new drama series produced by and starring Kevin Spacey called House of Cards, and may be about to close a deal at more than $100 million, according to a report on Deadline.com.
The deal has yet to be finalized, but Deadline's unnamed source claims that Netflix has made a commitment to two seasons of House of Cards, which the media site described as "staggering" and "pretty unheard of these days." A source for the New York Times later confirmed that Netflix was indeed involved in the bidding, but said there was "considerable uncertainty" about the terms of the deal. Yet another source for the Wall Street Journal said that Netflix was likely to pay much less than Deadline's speculated $100 million.
If things go smoothly, House of Cards will be the first original series to appear exclusively on Netflix, and it may not be the last. Though deals like this usually end up going to cable TV networks like HBO or Showtime, digital movie sites are constantly working to differentiate themselves from the competition, and an original series would help position Netflix as a premium entertainment offering instead of just a "dumb" video delivery service.
There's plenty of reason to try and stay ahead, too. Although Netflix currently delivers 61 percent of all digital video to US viewers according to NPD, Amazon recently introduced its own Instant Video service. Amazon's offering comes as part of Prime for just $79 per year (compared to Netflix's $95.88 per year on the streaming-only plan) and, although the selection has yet to match Netflix, Amazon is constantly adding new content to its library. Eventually, the two will end up on equal footing unless Netflix takes steps to offer more than what everyone else has. This is why nabbing the rights to new original series is so important.
In fact, by locking down House of Cards, Netflix is not only positioning itself ahead of Amazon, but "real" premium cable channels as well. It's currently difficult—though not impossible, depending on the show—to get legal online access to shows from premium channels until long after the season has ended and the DVDs are out.
With this deal, Netflix has begun the process of transcending traditional cable channels with its own original offerings that can be delivered to almost any device on demand. This, combined with major league sports beginning to stream live games to certain devices, is more data for would-be cord cutters.General manager Ryan Pace describes why he and the Bears were adamant about drafting QB Mitch Trubisky. (2:49)
San Francisco 49ers general manager John Lynch thought the Chicago Bears wanted to trade up for the No. 2 pick of the NFL draft to take defensive end Solomon Thomas, not quarterback Mitchell Trubisky, according to The MMQB.
"Man, who do they want?" Lynch said, according to the report. "Gotta be Solomon, right?"
"Call me crazy," 49ers chief strategy officer Paraag Marathe said, "but I think it's Trubisky."
"Then why did they go get [Mike] Glennon?" Lynch responded.
Editor's Picks John Fox was right about Julius Peppers. Is he about Mitchell Trubisky? John Fox reached into the past to find a way to bolster optimism about the Bears' top draft pick.
The MMQB embedded a reporter with the 49ers on draft day, leading to the story detailing how the trade of two of the top three picks went down.
Bears general manager Ryan Pace refused to tell the 49ers whom he intended to choose, but Chicago agreed to give San Francisco its third overall choice, a 2017 third-round pick, a 2017 fourth-round pick and a 2018 third-round pick.
After moving back one spot, the 49ers selected Thomas, one of the top three players on their draft board, along with defensive end Myles Garrett (No. 1 overall to the Browns) and linebacker Reuben Foster, whom San Francisco eventually got at No. 31.
The 49ers had no interest in drafting Trubisky at No. 2, and the Bears seemingly knew it.
"[Pace] said, 'I think you guys are going to be comfortable with what we do,'" Marathe said, according to the report, following a phone call with the Bears GM.
Another unidentified team contacted the 49ers about obtaining the second pick, according to the report.
Pace insisted Thursday night that the Bears had to be aggressive for fear of losing Trubisky to another team.
"We have a lot of feelers out there, and you're kind of feeling the situation out, and I didn't want to sit on our hands and have some team jump us or have it not work out," Pace said. "When we were this close, within reach of a player that was all really valued, I didn't want to sit on our hands and risk not getting that player."
The Bears signed Glennon to a three-year, $45 million contract during free agency. The deal contains $16 million guaranteed for the 2017 season and $2.5 million in 2018.Women who drink water contaminated with low levels of the weed-killer atrazine may be more likely to have irregular menstrual cycles and low estrogen levels, scientists concluded in a new study.
The most widely used herbicide in the United States, atrazine is frequently detected in surface and ground water, particularly in agricultural areas of the Midwest. Approximately 75 percent of all U.S. cornfields are treated with atrazine each year.
The newest research, which compared women in Illinois to women in Vermont, adds to the growing scientific evidence linking atrazine to altered hormones.
The women from Illinois farm towns were nearly five times more likely to report irregular periods than the Vermont women, and more than six times as likely to go more than six weeks between periods. In addition, the Illinois women had significantly lower levels of estrogen during an important part of the menstrual cycle.
Tap water in the Illinois communities had double the concentration of atrazine in the Vermont communities’ water. Nevertheless, the water in both states was far below the federal drinking water standard currently enforced by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.
The amount of water consumed also seemed to make a difference: Women who said they drank more than two cups of Illinois tap water daily reported an even greater occurrence of irregular periods.
In recent years, some tests on lab animals have linked the herbicide to fertility issues, including altered hormone levels, delayed puberty and pregnancy loss.
Co-author Lori Cragin, an epidemiologist with Colorado State University at the time of the study, said the new findings fit with the results of the animal studies, as well as with some limited research that reported human effects.
In 2009, a study tied atrazine in drinking water to low birth weight in Indiana newborns. And in a study of more than 3,000 women enrolled in the Agricultural Health Study, those who described using atrazine and other pesticides had an increased risk of missed periods and bleeding between periods. The Agricultural Health Study is a nationwide project sponsored by the National Institutes of Health.
The manufacturer of atrazine says some unknown factor – not atrazine – might have caused the menstrual irregularities.
“Many things can cause changes to a woman’s menstrual cycle – stress, exercise, diet,” said Tim Pastoor, principle scientist for Syngenta, the Switzerland-based company that makes atrazine.
Pastoor noted that the company’s mice studies have not found reproductive effects, even at atrazine levels far greater than those found in the drinking water in the new study.
The researchers did not test the water for other contaminants.
“It is possible that the difference we found is due to pesticide exposure in general or another, unmeasured chemical in the drinking water,” said Cragin, who now is an epidemiologist at the Vermont Department of Public Health.
Cragin and her team, which included researchers from Colorado State University, Emory University and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, collected questionnaires from 102 premenopausal women in the Illinois farm towns of Mount Olive and Gillespie, and in the Vermont towns of Waterbury and Fair Haven, where atrazine is not used. The authors said they considered lifestyle factors, such as physical activity, weight and foods, and found no significant differences between the two groups of women.
The findings, which were published in the journal Environmental Research earlier this month, were based on municipal tap water tested between July and September of 2005.
Cragin was surprised to see a significant effect in the women whose water contained atrazine levels far below the EPA’s standard of 3 parts per billion.
In Illinois water, the average concentration of atrazine was 0.7 parts per billion, several times lower than the averages recorded in previous and subsequent summers. Cragin said drought conditions in 2005 would have slowed runoff from farm fields.
The researchers did not examine whether the menstrual and hormonal changes reduced the women’s ability to become pregnant. However, estrogen levels and menstrual cycle characteristics are known to affect fertility.
“These types of changes to hormone concentration and ovarian function could potentially lead to problems with fertility,” said Emily Barrett, a reproductive health scientist at the University of Rochester in New York.
Hormonal changes also have been associated with greater risk of certain diseases such as osteoporosis, diabetes, heart disease and some cancers.
Though scientists are not sure how atrazine would disrupt hormone levels, some studies suggest that the chemical may block the production of estrogen in the body.
The small number of women involved in the study could increase the possibility that the differences between the two communities are due to chance. However, “to find a profoundly higher incidence of reproductive irregularities in such a small group of people suggests that something is definitely going on here,” said Laura Vandenberg, a reproductive scientist at Tufts University.
First registered as an herbicide in 1958, atrazine is used primarily to eliminate weeds on land where crops including corn and sorghum grow, but it is sometimes used on lawns and golf courses too.
In 2003, the EPA reevaluated the safety of atrazine and determined that the current safety standard of 3 parts per billion is sufficient to protect against hormonal effects of atrazine.
At the time, the EPA mandated Syngenta to begin monitoring roughly 100 community water systems nationwide for levels of the chemical in drinking water. Environmental groups criticized the decision because they said it allowed the chemical company to oversee itself.
Since 2003, more than 150 new studies raising concerns about the potential health effects of atrazine have been published. The European Union has since banned it due to safety concerns.
Studies in frogs suggest that atrazine, even at low levels, may affect development of the male reproductive system, decreasing fertility and in some cases leading to hermaphroditic frogs.
“In frogs, atrazine disrupts the balance between what it means to develop and function as a male or a female,” said Tyrone Hayes, a scientist from the University of California, Berkeley who studies the reproductive effects of pesticides in frogs.
In 2009, the EPA ordered another review in light of new studies. The agency is currently awaiting the results of an evaluation by a scientific advisory panel.
In the meantime, use of the herbicide continues to rise. In the first half of 2011 alone, Syngenta reported double-digit growth in sales, with atrazine as a high performer.
Some environmental groups and scientists are frustrated with the pace of the regulatory process when it comes to evaluating chemical safety.
“We can’t continue to allow the use of this chemical when we are seeing adverse effects on animals and people,” said Vandenberg.
This article originally ran at Environmental Health News, a news source published by Environmental Health Sciences, a nonprofit media company.After the violence in Charlottesville that was sparked by plans to remove a Robert E. Lee statue, cities across the country are stepping up efforts to uproot Confederate monuments from public spaces. (Reuters)
This past weekend’s violence in Charlottesville, Virginia arose from a gathering of racists, neo-Nazis, and white nationalists, whose ostensible purpose was to protest the removal of a statue of Confederate General Robert E. Lee. Over the last several years, efforts to remove Confederate monuments from public spaces have gathered steam because more and more people are coming to realize that government should not honor people who principal claim to fame was fighting a war in defense of the evil institution of slavery.
Defenders of Confederate monuments sometimes try to argue that slavery actually had nothing to do with the Civil War and secession. This theory is undermined by the Confederates’ own explanation of their motives, including those in the Southern states’ official statements outlining their reasons for secession, which focus on slavery far more than any other issue, Confederate Vice President Alexander Stephens, who famously said that “slavery... was the immediate cause of the late rupture and present revolution” and that protecting it was the “cornerstone” of the new Confederate government.
Despite longstanding mythology to the contrary, Robert E. Lee was no exception. He was a staunch supporter of slavery who chose the Confederacy over the Union in large part for that very reason and denounced the Emancipation Proclamation as a “degradation worse than death.”
Perhaps because efforts to separate the Confederacy from slavery are so implausible, defenders of keeping Confederate monuments in place increasingly resort to slippery slope arguments. Here’s Donald Trump making the case earlier today:
“I wonder, is it George Washington next week?” Trump asked…. He went on to make a slippery slope argument — equating Confederate general Robert E. Lee with presidents like Washington and Thomas Jefferson, who were slave owners… “So, this week it’s Robert E. Lee,” Trump said. “I notice that Stonewall Jackson is coming down. I wonder is it George Washington next week, and is it Thomas Jefferson the week after? You know, you really do have to ask yourself, where does it stop?”
In fairness, the slippery slope argument is sometimes advanced by more intellectually serious advocates than Trump. It is wrong, even so. The argument fails because there are obviously relevant distinctions that can be made between Washington and Jefferson on the one hand and Confederate leaders on the other.
One crucial distinction it misses is that few if any monuments to Washington, Jefferson and other slaveowning Founders were erected for the specific purpose of honoring their slaveholding. By contrast, the vast majority of monuments to Confederate leaders were erected to honor their service to the Confederacy, whose main reason for existing was to protect and extend slavery. I noted another key distinction here:
Some try to justify continuing to honor Confederates because we honor many other historical figures who committed various moral wrongs. For example, many of the Founding Fathers also owned slaves, just like many leading Confederates did. But the Founders deserve commemoration because their complicity in slavery was outweighed by other, more positive achievements, such as establishing the Constitution. By contrast, leading a war in defense of slavery was by far the most important historical legacy of Davis, Robert E. Lee, and other Confederate leaders. If not for secession and Civil War, few would remember them today.
Endorsing the slippery slope case against removing Confederate monuments also creates a problematic slippery slope of its own. If we should not remove monuments to perpetrators of evil for fear that it might lead to the removal of monuments to more worthy honorees, that implies that eastern European nations were wrong to remove monuments to communist mass murderers like Lenin and Stalin, and Germany and Italy were wrong to remove monuments to Nazi and Fascist leaders. After all, there is no telling where such removals might lead! By Trump’s logic, taking down German monuments to Hitler and Goebbels might lead to the removal of monuments to Immanuel Kant, who expressed racist sentiments in some of his writings. Getting rid of monuments to Lenin and Stalin might lead people to take down monuments to Picasso, who was also a communist. Where will it all stop?
In some instances, of course, the question of whether the good a historical figure did in one area outweighs the evil he did in another is a legitimately close one. For example, I believe that Woodrow Wilson was one of the worst of all the presidents, and have no objection to renaming the Woodrow Wilson School at Princeton. But I can understand progressives who argue that his racism and other flaws were outweighed by the good they believe he did on other issues. We differ in part because I take a far more negative view than they do of Wilson’s economic policies and of his role in the botched peace settlement after World War I. Both are major aspects of Wilson’s legacy that must be considered alongside his segregationism and his terrible record on civil liberties. By contrast, most Confederate leaders have no legacy comparable in magnitude to their role in fighting for slavery. The Wilson case is a closer call than those of Lee or Jefferson Davis.
Over time, it is inevitable that we will get some of the closer cases wrong. But that risk is inherent in the practice of honoring historical figures with monuments at all. Only a tiny minority of people can get such an honor. Deciding which few it will be inevitably involves value choices. And the decision-making process will never be perfect. The risk of making a mistake is not a good reason to continue to honor large-scale evildoers with few or no offsetting virtues. Giving undeserved honor to the evil is at least as grave an error as denying proper recognition to those who merit it.
Obviously, freedom of speech allows private individuals to honor whoever they choose. But that does not mean those who honor Confederate leaders are right to do so. And it certainly does not mean the government should continue to join them in doing so.
Trump and others also make the claim that taking down Confederate monuments is somehow “chaging” or “erasing” history. But ceasing to honor evil-doers is not the same as erasing all memory of them. No one proposes that we simply forget about Robert E. Lee, Jefferson Davis, and the Confederacy – or Hitler and Stalin, for that matter. To the contrary, we should continue to remember and study all of them, and derive such lessons as we can from the history of the wrongs they committed. And we can do all of that without continuing to glorify those who fought a war to perpetuate slavery.
UPDATE: To avoid any confusion, I should incorporate by reference the qualifications I made in this post:Anker is upgrading the PowerIQ fast charging technology used in its chargers and battery packs to a new, faster version, known as PowerIQ 2.0. The new charging chip allows Anker’s chargers to output up to 18W of power off a single chip. While previous Anker products could charge at that rate, they required two charging chips to do so.
Smaller, thinner, lighter, and cheaper chargers
Anker notes that using a single PowerIQ 2.0 instead of multiple chips will also result in “smaller, thinner, and lighter” products that should cost less than their predecessors.
Alongside the new PowerIQ 2.0 chips, Anker also announced its first battery pack to use it, the PowerCore II 10000, a 10,000mAh battery pack that will cost $29.99 when it goes on sale in May later this year.(Charles Dharapak/AP Photo)
Analysis
South Carolina's Republican primary is looking like a last stand for the anti-Mitt Romney forces. And it's not likely to leave much room for candidates other than Mitt Romney to remain standing.
Romney has benefitted greatly from forces outside of his control. He stands on the edge of clinching the Republican presidential nomination, both because of his party's newfound focus, and because of an utter lack of focus in other areas where the GOP has traditionally derived strength.
The new focus that Romney benefits from is the intense attention being paid to the economy in the Obama era. That ordering of priorities - the economy was the No. 1 issue for six in 10 |
smirk.
Scores of lawsuits have been filed against Trump and his enterprises. His corporations have declared bankruptcy four times. His stated worth of $10 billion has been credibly challenged — for years. He has pressed the levers of power in city halls, state capitols and Washington, D.C., to gain financial advantage for decades. Surely these all deserve tough dissection.
Yet we knew far more, and far earlier, about more modest controversies involving the other candidates, such as Bush's financial ties to the Common Core curriculum. Or Rubio's personal finances. Look at those dates: January and June 2015. These stories deserve coverage. But so did Trump's activities, even if they required a form of reporting unfamiliar to the political press corps.
You can rightly point to some strong exceptions: For example, the Washington Post on Trump University last summer; Bloomberg in February on his international holdings. But these can't be one-and-done stories. Readers and viewers are being swamped with information and content — and occasionally real journalism — and such useful reports often sweep past us.
As an institution, the news media (much like government itself) are held in very low regard; one can reasonably argue that reporters won't be trusted no matter how vigorously they dissect Trump's record and life.
But that fact shouldn't allow the profession to abdicate its actual mission.
The press had an obligation to surround its unfiltered and sometimes fond treatment of Trump as a celebrity and controversialist with tough-minded scrutiny. That turned out to be the exception rather than the rule.
Some press defenders argue the media do not have the kind of influence that their critics would suggest they have.
"I only wish that CNN had that much power to be able to create a front-runner on either side," Zucker told the Guardian.
News organizations don't need to be powerful. They need to fulfill their jobs. That involves informing, enlightening, illuminating, stimulating and entertaining their audiences, usually while making a profit. It also involves equipping their consumers with the knowledge and context they need to act as citizens.
I'm not arguing the media should have acted as one to block Trump. I'm arguing the media largely failed, at least in the primary season, to rise to an anomalous figure who has scrambled ideologies and deeply degraded what constitutes acceptable public discourse.Why leaning against the wind is the wrong monetary policy for Sweden
Lars E.O. Svensson
Sweden has pursued a tighter monetary policy than is necessary to achieve the inflation target in order to reduce risks associated with household indebtedness. The net benefit to ‘leaning against the wind’ has been hotly debated; this column argues strongly against it. By reducing inflation, the Riksbank has in fact increased household debt, and contractionary pressure has worsened the employment situation. The author estimates that the benefits to leaning are worth only 0.4% of the costs.
There is a lively ongoing debate about whether raising interest rates beyond the level needed to stabilise prices – ‘leaning against the wind’ – is a justified modification of flexible inflation targeting (as discussed in Smets 2013). In a new paper, I explain why leaning against the wind is the wrong monetary policy for Sweden (Svensson 2014).
According to the Riksbank’s own recently published calculations, the benefit of this policy – in the form of lower risks from household debt – is completely insignificant compared to the cost in terms of higher unemployment and lower inflation (Sveriges Riksbank 2014). Since inflation has fallen much below the inflation target and households’ inflation expectations, the policy has instead actually increased households’ real debt burden and, if anything, increased any risks from the debt. Thereby it has made more difficult the work of the Finansinspektionen (FI, the Swedish FSA) to reduce any such risks.
‘Leaning against the wind’ is a monetary policy that is tighter than that necessary to achieve the inflation target and to support Swedish economic policy’s most important goal: full employment. It thus leads to lower inflation than the inflation target and a higher unemployment rate than is sustainable in the long-run. The Riksbank has been leaning against the wind rather aggressively in the last few years, with the purpose of reducing household indebtedness and thereby any associated risks.
Leaning against the wind would be justified in Sweden under two conditions, as discussed in a paper by Smets (2013):
The macroprudential policy of the FI is insufficient to reduce any risks from household debt.
A higher policy rate leads to benefits in the form of lower risks of a future crisis – benefits that are larger than the costs in terms of higher unemployment and lower inflation over the next few years.
Regarding the first condition, the FI has already taken several actions that have reduced risks from household debt. It has introduced a loan-to-value cap for mortgages, increased risk weights on mortgages, increased capital and liquidity requirements for systemically important banks, and proposed that banks suggest individually adapted amortisation plans to their borrowers. The FI considers these actions sufficient at present, but is monitoring the developments and is prepared to take additional action if justified. It is difficult to maintain that macroprudential policy in Sweden would be insufficient.
Regarding the second condition, I show in the paper, in some detail, that the Riksbank’s own calculations imply that the benefit of a higher policy rate – in the form of possible both lower probability and less depth of a future crisis – is negligible compared to the policy’s cost (Sveriges Riksbank 2014). Expressed in terms of a lower expected future unemployment, the benefit is only about 0.0038 times the cost (in the form of higher unemployment) during the next few years. That is, the benefit is only about 0.4% of the cost.
Thus, none of the conditions that would together justify leaning against the wind in Sweden are satisfied. Without any noticeable benefits, the Riksbank’s leaning against the wind over the last few years has led to high costs in the form of a higher unemployment rate – arguably about 1.2 percentage points higher than necessary – and an inflation rate of around zero; that is, two percentage points lower than the inflation target and household inflation expectations.
That inflation over the last few years has fallen much below the target and household expectations implies that the households’ real debt burden has increased substantially. The real value of a given loan has (in two and half years) become 5% larger than if inflation had equaled the target. This has, if anything, increased the risks from household debt rather than reducing them, thereby making the FI’s work to reduce any such risks more difficult. As the FI writes in its latest stability report:1
"A lower than expected inflation rate contributes to increasing the real debt burden, that is, debt relative to the general price level. This may in turn contribute to the building up of financial risks and make it more difficult for households, firms, governments, and countries to manage their balance sheets. If inflation becomes negative over a longer period, there is deflation and a further-increasing debt burden, and expectations about falling prices may lead to falling aggregate demand and thereby even lower prices. As the experience of Japan since the 1990s has shown, such a spiral may be difficult to break out of."
Thus, it is difficult not to conclude that the Riksbank’s leaning against the wind is the wrong monetary policy for Sweden.
References
Finansinspektionen (2014), “The Stability of the Financial System”, (“Stabiliteten i det finansiella systemet,” in Swedish).
Smets, F (2013), “Financial Stability and Monetary Policy: How Closely Interlinked?” Sveriges Riksbank Economic Review 3: 121-160.
Sveriges Riksbank (2014), “The Effects of Monetary Policy on Household Debt,” box in Monetary Policy Report February 2014.
Svensson, L E O (2014), “Why Leaning Against the Wind is the Wrong Monetary Policy for Sweden,” working paper.
Footnote
Finansinspektionen (2014, p. 12), so far only available in Swedish (hence my translation from Swedish here).I have decided to leave Undefined!
Few days before #CBE - i got an offer from something i really wanted to try. But i had to finish my duties here in Undefined before leaving for my new stuff!
Undefined have been a weird project from the beginning - we started early this summer testing out players for the lineup. We never really got into the level we had at Copenhagen Games and Dreamhack Tours. We really tried to create something new, but the talents in Denmark dont have place for 6 topteams.
So we was the unlucky ones without any kind of support from sponsors, but we really tried to fix everything!
I would like to thank all the players here in Undefined - Borup, AcilioN, smF, cadian, Andkilde, bubski, frøslev. All the players who tried to work this out! It was funny :)
Reply · Report PostRepublican candidate breaks with his own history of describing plan as a 'job killer' as new poll show president widening lead
Republican presidential hopeful Mitt Romney said Sunday he will keep some of Barack Obama's controversial healthcare reforms if he wins November's election, breaking from a prior whole-scale rejection of the plan.
"Of course there are a number of things that I like in healthcare reform that I'm going to put in place," he said in an interview broadcast Sunday on NBC's Meet the Press.
Republicans have pledged to repeal "Obamacare" – legislation that has become the focus of a furious backlash from Republicans. Paul Ryan, the party's vice-presidential pick, has described the affordable care act as a "Ponzi scheme that would make Bernie Madoff proud". Romney himself has described the legislation as a "job killer" that "puts the federal government between you and your doctor".
But the former Massachusetts governor said Sunday there were a number of pieces of the legislation he would keep if elected, including making sure that people with pre-existing conditions can get insurance. Romney also said he would allow young adults to keep their coverage under their parents' health insurance.
"I say we're going to replace Obamacare. And I'm replacing it with my own plan," Romney said. "And even in Massachusetts when I was governor, our plan there deals with pre-existing conditions and with young people."
The interview came as it emerged that Obama had received a larger boost than Romney in the polls following their respective conventions. According to Scott Rasmussen's latest poll Obama now leads Romney 49% to 45%, his biggest lead since March 17 and his best approval rating of the year. Obama also has a four-point lead in the most recent Gallup and Reuters/Ipsos polls.
Rasmussen said: "The president's bounce began the night after Bill Clinton spoke to the convention and received rave reviews. Sixty-six percent of voters nationwide have a favourable opinion of the former president. Democrats overwhelmingly believe Clinton and Obama have similar views on how to fix the economy, but few Republicans and unaffiliated voters share that assessment."
He said the president had made significant gains in voters aged 40-64.
The poll Sunday comes even after disappointing jobs figures released Friday that showed the US added just 96,000 jobs in August. Obama has spent the weekend defending his record on the economy and attacking Romney's plans. In the swing state of Florida on Saturday Obama summed Romney's platform up as: "Tax cuts, tax cuts, gut a few regulations, some more tax cuts."
In an interview aired Sunday on CBS's Face the Nation, Obama further criticised his opponent for refusing to consider tax increases on America's super-rich as a way to help reduce the deficit.
He said:"You can't reduce the deficit unless you take a balanced approach that says, 'We've got to make government leaner and more efficient, but we've also got to ask people – like me or governor Romney, who have done better than anybody else over the course of the last decade and whose taxes are just about lower than they've been in the last 50 years – to do a little bit more."
Romney attacked Obama's record on the economy on Sunday, stating: "This does not look like a recovery."
He also tackled Democratic claims that his tax policies will favour the rich. "We're not going to have high-income people pay less of the tax burden than they pay today. That's not what's going to happen," he said.
Romney said he would keep taxes down by closing loopholes but declined to provide an example of a loophole he would close.
"I can tell you that people at the high end, high-income taxpayers, are going to have fewer deductions and exemptions. Those numbers are going to come down. Otherwise they'd get a tax break. And I want to make sure people understand, despite what the Democrats said at their convention, I am not reducing taxes on high-income taxpayers," Romney said.Riot policemen stand guard against protesters after young pro-democracy activists forced their way into Hong Kong government headquarters, September 27, 2014.
Hong Kong democracy protesters defied volleys of tear gas and police baton charges to stand firm in the center of the global financial hub on Monday, one of the biggest political challenges for Beijing since the Tiananmen Square crackdown 25 years ago.
The demonstrators, whose use of umbrellas, plastic wrap and other improvised defenses has led some to dub their movement the "Umbrella Revolution," remained camped out on a normally busy highway near the Hong Kong government headquarters. Supporters were using the phrase on social media.
China wagged its finger at the student protesters, and warned against any foreign interference as they massed again in business and tourist districts of the city in late afternoon. "Hong Kong is China's Hong Kong," Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Hua Chunying defiantly told a news briefing in Beijing.
The unrest, the worst in Hong Kong since China resumed its rule over the former British colony in 1997, sent white clouds of gas wafting among some of the world's most valuable office towers and shopping malls before riot police suddenly withdrew around lunchtime on Monday, after three nights of confrontation.
China rules Hong Kong under a "one country, two systems" formula that accords the territory limited democracy. Tens of thousands of mostly student protesters are demanding Beijing give them full democracy, with the freedom to nominate election candidates, but China recently announced that it would not go that far.
As riot police withdrew on Monday, weary protesters slept beside roads or sheltered from the sun beneath umbrellas, which have become a symbol of what some are calling the "Umbrella Revolution". In addition to protection from the elements, umbrellas have been used as flimsy shields against pepper spray.
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Nicola Cheung, an 18-year-old student from Baptist University, said the protesters in the central Admiralty district were assessing the situation and planning what to do next.
"Yes, it's going to get violent again because the Hong Kong government isn't going to stand for us occupying this area," she said. "We are fighting for our core values of democracy and freedom, and that is not something violence can scare us away from."
Organizers have said that as many as 80,000 people have thronged the streets after the protests flared on Friday night. No independent estimate of numbers was available.
The protests, with no single identifiable leader, bring together a mass movement of mostly young tech-savvy students who have grown up with freedoms not enjoyed in mainland China. The movement represents one of the biggest threats for Beijing's Communist Party leadership since its bloody 1989 crackdown on pro-democracy student protests in and around Tiananmen Square.
Cracking down too hard could shake confidence in market-driven Hong Kong, while not reacting firmly enough could embolden dissidents on the mainland.
The protests are expected to escalate on Oct. 1, China’s National Day holiday, with residents of the nearby former Portuguese enclave of Macau planning. Other supporters from across the world are expected to protest in what would serve as an embarrassment to Beijing as it holds celebrations to mark the holiday.
Such dissent would never be tolerated on the mainland, where the phrase "Occupy Central" was blocked on Sunday on Weibo, China's version of Twitter. The protests have received little coverage on the mainland, save for government condemnation.
Televised scenes of the chaos in Hong Kong over the weekend have already made a deep impression on many viewers outside Hong Kong. That was especially the case in Taiwan, which has full democracy but is considered by China as a renegade province that must one day be reunited with the Communist-run mainland.
"Taiwan people are watching this closely," Taiwanese President Ma Ying-jeou said in an interview with Al Jazeera.
The U.S. Consulate General in Hong Kong issued a brief statement calling for all sides to "refrain from actions that would further escalate tensions".
China's Hua said Beijing noted statements expressed by countries such as the United States. "We hope that the relevant country will be cautious on this issue and not send the wrong signal," she said.
"We are resolutely opposed to any foreign country using any method to interfere in China's internal affairs. We are also resolutely opposed to any country, attempting in any way to support such illegal activities like 'Occupy Central'."
"We are fully confident in the long-term prosperity and stability of Hong Kong, because I believe this is in keeping with the interests of all the people in China, the region and the world," she said.
In 1989, Beijing's Tiananmen crackdown sent shockwaves through Hong Kong as people saw how far China's rulers would go to keep their grip on power.
SOME BANKS PULL DOWN SHUTTERS
Banks in Hong Kong, including HSBC, Citigroup, Bank of China, Standard Chartered and DBS, temporarily shut some branches and advised staff to work from home or go to secondary branches.
The Hong Kong Monetary Authority (HKMA), the city's de facto central bank, said it had activated business continuity plans, as had 17 banks affected by the protests.
The HKMA said the city's interbank markets and Currency Board mechanism, which maintains the exchange rate, would function normally on Monday. It said it stood ready to "inject liquidity into the banking system as and when necessary".
Hong Kong witnessed extraordinary scenes at the weekend as thousands of protesters, some armed with nothing more than umbrellas, blocked the main road into the city and police responded with pepper spray, tear gas and baton charges.
Markets more or less took the weekend's unrest in their stride, proof yet again of the pre-eminent place trade has always taken in Hong Kong. Hong Kong shares ended down 1.9 percent.
The protests have spooked tourists, with arrivals from China down sharply ahead of this week's National Day holidays. Hong Kong on Monday canceled the city's popular fireworks display over the harbor meant to mark the holiday. The United States, Australia and Singapore have also issued travel alerts.
SCUFFLES BREAK OUT
Some protesters erected barricades to block security forces early on Monday, although a relative calm descended after dawn. By mid afternoon, hundreds of protesters were seen streaming again into downtown areas of Hong Kong island. A bus draped with a banner reading "Democracy" was parked haphazardly across a main road.
People placed discarded umbrellas over students sleeping in the sun, while others distributed water and masks to guard against tear gas and pepper spray.
Only hours earlier, police had baton-charged a crowd blocking a road into the main government district in defiance of official warnings that the demonstrations were illegal.
Protesters called on Hong Kong leader Leung Chun-ying to step down. Several scuffles broke out between police in helmets, gas masks and riot gear, and demonstrators angered by the firing of tear gas.
"If today I don't stand up, I will hate myself in future," said taxi driver Edward Yeung, 55, as he swore at police. "Even if I get a criminal record it will be a glorious one."
Across Hong Kong's famed Victoria Harbour, smaller numbers of protesters, including some secondary school students, also gathered in the Mong Kok district of Kowloon.
About 200 workers at Swire Beverage, a unit of Hong Kong conglomerate Swire Pacific and a major bottler for The Coca-Cola Company, went on strike on Monday in support of the protesters, a union representative said. They also demanded the city's leader step down.
The "one country, two systems" formula guarantees Hong Kong a high degree of autonomy and freedoms not enjoyed in mainland China, with universal suffrage set as an eventual goal.
However, Beijing last month rejected demands for people to freely choose the city's next leader, prompting threats from activists to shut down the Central business district.
China wants to limit 2017 elections to a handful of candidates loyal to Beijing. Communist Party leaders worry that calls for democracy could spread to cities on the mainland.Meta‐analysis techniques were used to examine the effect of elevated atmospheric carbon dioxide [CO 2 ] on the protein concentrations of major food crops, incorporating 228 experimental observations on barley, rice, wheat, soybean and potato. Each crop had lower protein concentrations when grown at elevated (540–958 μmol mol −1 ) compared with ambient (315–400 μmol mol −1 ) CO 2. For wheat, barley and rice, the reduction in grain protein concentration was ∼10–15% of the value at ambient CO 2. For potato, the reduction in tuber protein concentration was 14%. For soybean, there was a much smaller, although statistically significant reduction of protein concentration of 1.4%. The magnitude of the CO 2 effect on wheat grains was smaller under high soil N conditions than under low soil N. Protein concentrations in potato tubers were reduced more for plants grown at high than at low concentrations of ozone. For soybean, the ozone effect was the reverse, as elevated CO 2 increased the protein concentration of soybean grown at high ozone concentrations. The magnitude of the CO 2 effect also varied depending on experimental methodology. For both wheat and soybean, studies performed in open‐top chambers produced a larger CO 2 effect than those performed using other types of experimental facilities. There was also indication of a possible pot artifact as, for both wheat and soybean, studies performed in open‐top chambers showed a significantly greater CO 2 effect when plants were rooted in pots rather than in the ground. Studies on wheat also showed a greater CO 2 effect when protein concentration was measured in whole grains rather than flour. While the magnitude of the effect of elevated CO 2 varied depending on the experimental procedures, a reduction in protein concentration was consistently found for most crops. These findings suggest that the increasing CO 2 concentrations of the 21st century are likely to decrease the protein concentration of many human plant foods.
Introduction Atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide (CO 2 ) have been steadily rising from preindustrial values of approximately 280 μmol mol−1 to a current global mean of approximately 380 μmol mol−1 (Keeling & Whorf, 2005; IPCC, 2007). Concentrations are projected to increase to approximately 540–958 μmol mol−1 by the year 2100 (IPCC, 2001). Numerous effects of elevated atmospheric CO 2 concentrations on plants have been documented, including changes in plant elemental composition. As growth CO 2 concentrations increase, plants typically show increased concentrations of carbon in their tissues, with correspondingly reduced concentrations of other elements, including nitrogen (Cotrufo et al., 1998; Gifford et al., 2000), phosphorus (Gifford et al., 2000) and several trace elements (Loladze, 2002). Along with changes in elemental composition, changes have frequently been noted in macromolecular composition, with proteins (which contain substantial amounts of nitrogen and sulfur) decreasing and relatively carbon‐rich molecules such as carbohydrates increasing in concentration at higher concentrations of atmospheric CO 2 (e.g. Poorter et al., 1997). Such changes in plant composition might be expected to have important implications for the growth and nutrition of animals that consume plant material. In a recent meta‐analysis, Zvereva & Kozlov (2006) found that insect herbivore performance was diminished when feeding on plants grown at elevated vs. ambient concentrations of CO 2. Several authors have also considered the possible implications of altered chemical composition of plants in elevated CO 2 for human nutrition. Loladze (2002) argued that elevated CO 2 may lead to ‘globally imbalanced plant stoichiometry’ and negatively impact human nutrition, particularly with regard to micronutrients such as zinc and iodine. Idso & Idso (2001) in a narrative review, examined a number of studies on the effects of elevated CO 2 on food composition. They found that, for a given nutrient, the results of CO 2 enrichment varied: for example various studies have shown that CO 2 may increase, decrease or have no effect on the protein concentration of crops. In spite of the potential for elevated CO 2 to affect the nutritional composition of foods, there have been few attempts at meta‐analysis or quantitative synthesis of the available data. Loladze (2002) synthesized data from five published studies on wheat grains and found reductions in the concentration of eight elements (including nitrogen) when plants were grown at elevated CO 2. Jablonski et al. (2002) performed a meta‐analysis of studies on the effects of elevated CO 2 on plant reproductive characteristics, including seed N concentration, for several seed/grain crops. They found that growth at elevated CO 2 resulted in significant decreases in seed N for wheat and barley, but not for soybean or rice. Neither of these studies focused exclusively on the effect of elevated CO 2 on crop nutrient composition and both surveyed only a limited number of crops and a limited selection of the available literature on those crops. In order to rigorously address the question of how elevated CO 2 affects the protein composition of food crops, we performed a comprehensive meta‐analysis, attempting to include all available data for all food crop species.
Results All of the crops included in the analysis had significantly lower protein concentrations when grown at elevated vs. ambient CO 2 (Fig. 1). For potato, the mean reduction in protein was 13.9% and for the grain crops (barley, rice and wheat) the reduction in protein was 15.3%, 9.9% and 9.8%, respectively. For soybean the reduction was a much smaller 1.4%. Figure 1 Open in figure viewerPowerPoint Response of crop protein concentrations to growth at elevated CO 2 for five major crops. Means and 95% confidence limits are depicted. Numbers of experimental observations for each species are in parentheses. For wheat and soybean, the two species with the largest sample size of studies, there were significant differences among CO 2 enrichment technologies in the effect of CO 2 on protein concentration (Fig. 2; P<0.001 for each species). For both species, the largest effects of elevated CO 2 were seen in open‐top chamber studies. For barley and for rice there were no significant differences among CO 2 enrichment technologies. Figure 2 Open in figure viewerPowerPoint Response of crop protein concentrations to growth at elevated CO 2 in studies using various CO 2 enrichment technologies. Means and 95% confidence limits are depicted. Numbers of experimental observations are in parentheses. FACE, free‐air CO 2 enrichment; OTC, open‐top chamber; CTC, closed‐top field chamber; GH, glasshouse; GC, growth chamber. There was some suggestion that CO 2 had a greater effect in studies performed in pots than in studies in which plants were rooted in the ground (Fig. 3). Comparing all studies performed in pots with those involving plants rooted in the ground, no species showed a significant rooting environment effect, although for rice there was a near‐significant trend toward a greater CO 2 effect in pot studies vs. ground studies (P=0.051; Fig. 3a). However, for both soybean and wheat it was additionally possible to make the pot vs. ground comparison focusing solely on studies performed in open‐top‐chambers (OTC; Fig. 3b). For both species, in OTC studies there was a significantly greater effect of CO 2 when plants were grown in pots (Fig. 3b; for soybean P=0.005, for wheat P=0.003). Figure 3 Open in figure viewerPowerPoint Response of crop protein concentrations to growth at elevated CO 2 in studies with plants rooted in pots vs. rooted in the ground. (a) All studies, (b) studies in open‐top chambers. Means and 95% confidence limits are depicted. Numbers of experimental observations are in parentheses. The effect of elevated CO 2 on protein concentrations was affected by environmental variables in several instances. Protein concentrations in wheat grains were reduced more when elevated CO 2 was applied to plants at low N supply than at high N supply (Fig. 4a). Across this group of studies, grain protein concentrations were decreased by 16.4% in low nitrogen treatments compared with 9.8% in high nitrogen treatments, with this difference statistically significant (P=0.038). Figure 4 Open in figure viewerPowerPoint Response of crop protein concentrations to growth at elevated CO 2 in studies that varied (a) nitrogen, (b) temperature or (c) ozone. Each point represents one study. Percent change is the percent change in protein concentration under elevated [CO 2 ]. The diagonal lines represent the 1 : 1 relationship. There was no significant difference in the effect of elevated CO 2 on wheat grain protein concentration between plants grown at high vs. low temperatures (Fig. 4b), although the trend was for elevated CO 2 to have a greater effect on protein concentrations at high than at low temperatures. The effect of ozone differed greatly between species (Fig. 4c). In potato, tuber protein concentrations were decreased by 19.3% under high ozone compared with 7.7% under low ozone, with this difference statistically significant (P=0.013). For soybean, the effect of ozone was the reverse of that seen for potato. Elevated CO 2 increased protein concentrations by 3.0% under high ozone, and decreased protein concentrations by 1.3% under low ozone, with this difference statistically significant (P=0.005). For wheat, the effect of CO 2 on protein concentration was nearly twice as large when protein was measured in grain rather than flour. (Table 1; P=0.004). Table 1. Response of crop protein concentrations to growth at elevated CO 2 for studies on wheat in which protein concentration was measured in grains or flour Itemmeasured Number ofobservations Percent decrease inprotein concentrationunder elevated CO 2 95%confidenceinterval Grain 87 11.0 8.7–13.3 Flour 28 6.0 4.1–8.2
Conclusions Rising atmospheric [CO 2 ] is likely to reduce the protein concentration for many plant crops. The magnitude of this effect is difficult to estimate, due to the sensitivity of this effect to experimental conditions. Nonetheless, decreases in protein are seen consistently for several species across a wide range of experimental techniques and environmental conditions. This effect may be partially mitigated by increased use of nitrogen fertilizers, but this seems likely to be only a partial solution to the effect of elevated CO 2 on the protein concentration of human foods. The effect of atmospheric CO 2 on crop protein therefore seems likely to be of genuine importance for human nutrition in and beyond the 21st century.
Acknowledgements This work was supported by the Fleming Fund for Collaborative Research of Southwestern University. We thank Eli Taub for assistance in typing the manuscript, Lisa Anderson for help in obtaining literature and Xianzhong Wang for valuable comments on the research and manuscript.
Appendix Appendix A. Publications with data included in the analyses. Allen LH, Vu JCV, Valle RR, Boote KJ & Jones PH (1988) Nonstructural carbohydrates and nitrogen of soybean grown under carbon dioxide enrichment. Crop Science, 28, 84–94. Amthor JS, Mitchell RJ, Runion BR, Rogers HH, Prior SA & Wood CW (1994) Energy content, construction cost and phytomass accumulation of Glycine max (L.) Merr. and Sorghum bicolor (L.) Moench grown in elevated CO 2 in the field. New Phytologist, 128, 443–150. Bai Y, Tischler CR, Booth DT & Taylor EM (2003) Variations in germination and grain quality within a rust resistant common wheat germplasm as affected by parental CO 2 conditions. Environmental and Experimental Botany, 50, 159–168. Bencze S, Veisz O & Bedö Z (2004) Effects of high atmospheric CO 2 and heat stress on phytomass, yield and grain quality of winter wheat. Cereal Research Communications, 32, 75–82. Blumenthal C, Rawson HM, McKenzie E, Gras PW, Barlow EWR & Wrigley CW (1996) Changes in wheat grain quality due to doubling the level of atmospheric CO 2. Cereal Chemistry, 73, 762–766. Chadhuri UN, Burnett RB, Kanemaso ET & Kinkham MB (1986) Effect of Elevated Levels of CO 2 on Winter Wheat under two Moisture Regimes (Response of Vegetation to Carbon Dioxide No. 29). United States Department of Energy, Carbon Dioxide Research Division, Washington DC. Conroy JP (1992) Influence of elevated atmospheric CO 2 concentrations on plant nutrition. Australian Journal of Botany, 40, 445–456. Conroy JP, Seneweera S, Basra AS, Rogers G & Nissen‐Wooler B (1994) Influence of rising atmospheric CO 2 concentrations and temperature on growth, yield and grain quality of cereal crops. Australian Journal of Plant Physiology, 21, 741–758. Cure JD, Israel DW & Rufty TW (1988) Nitrogen stress effects on growth and seed yield of nonnodulated soybean exposed to elevated carbon dioxide. Crop Science, 28, 671–677. Donnelly A, Lawson T, Craigon J, Black CR, Colls JJ & Landon G (2001) Effects of elevated CO 2 and O 3 on tuber quality in potato (Solanum tuberosum L.). Agriculture, Ecosystems and Environment, 87, 273–285. Fangmeier A, Grüters U, Vermehren B & Jäger H‐J (1996) Responses of some cereal cultivars to CO 2 enrichment and tropospheric ozone at different levels of nitrogen supply. Angewandte Botanik, 70, 12–18. Fangmeier A, Grüters U, Högy P, Vermehren B & Jäger H‐J (1997) Effects of elevated CO 2, nitrogen supply and tropospheric ozone on spring wheat‐ II. Nutrients (N, P, K, S, Ca, Fe, Mg, Zn). Environmental Pollution, 96, 43–59. Fangmeier A, De Temmerman L, Mortensen L, Kemp K, Burke J, Mitchell R, van Oijen M & Weigel HJ (1999) Effects of nutrients on grain quality in spring wheat crops grown under elevated CO 2 concentrations and stress conditions in the European multiple‐site experiment ‘ESPACE‐wheat’. European Journal of Agronomy, 10, 215–229. Fangmeier A, Chrost B, Högy P & Krupinska K (2000) CO 2 enrichment enhances flag leaf senescence in barley due to greater grain nitrogen sink capacity. Environmental and Experimental Botany, 44, 151–164. Fangmeier A, De Temmerman L, Black C, Persson K & Vorne V (2002) Effects of elevated CO 2 and/or ozone on nutrient concentrations and nutrient uptake of potatoes. European Journal of Agronomy, 17, 353–368. Hakala K (1998) Growth and yield potential of spring wheat in a simulated changed climate with increased CO 2 and higher temperature. European Journal of Agronomy, 9, 41–52. Heagle AS, Miller JE & Pursley WA (1998) Influence of ozone stress on soybean response to carbon dioxide enrichment: III. Yield and seed quality. Crop Science, 38, 128–134. Heagle AS, Miller JE & Pursley WA (2003) Atmospheric pollutants and trace gases Growth and yield responses of potato to mixtures of carbon dioxide and ozone. Journal of Environmental Quality, 32, 1603–1610. Israel DW & Rogers HH (1982) The effect of N 2 ‐fixing ability of Rhizobium strain on response of nodulated soybeans to atmospheric CO 2 enrichment. In Field Studies of Plant Responses to Elevated Carbon Dioxide Levels (eds. H.H. Rogers and G.E. Bingham), pp. 122–161. United States Department of Energy, Carbon Dioxide Research Division, Washington, DC. Kimball BA, Morris CF, Pinter PJ, Wall GW, Hunsaker DJ, Adamsen FJ, LaMorte RL, Leavitt SW, Thompson TL, Matthias AD & Brooks TJ (2001) Elevated CO 2, drought and soil nitrogen effects on wheat grain quality. New Phytologist, 150, 295–303. Kleemola J, Peltonen J & Peltonen‐Sainio P (1994) Apical development and growth of barley under different CO 2 and nitrogen regimes. Journal of Agronomy and Crop Science, 173, 79–92. Lieffering M, Kim H‐Y, Kobayashi K & Okada M (2004) The impact of elevated CO 2 on the elemental concentrations of field‐grown rice grains. Field Crops Research, 88, 279–286. Manderscheid R, Bender J, Jäger H‐J & Weigel HJ (1995) Effects of season long CO 2 enrichment on cereals. II. Nutrient concentrations and grain quality. Agriculture, Ecosystems and Environment, 54, 175–185. Pleijel H, Gelang J, Sild E, Danielsson H, Younis S, Karlsson P‐E, Wallin G, Skärby L & Selldén G (2000) Effects of elevated carbon dioxide, ozone and water availability on spring wheat growth and yield. Physiologia Plantarum, 108, 67–70. Rogers GS, Gras PW, Batey IL, Milham PJ, Payne L & |
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JavaScript 101 Workshop Thursday, March 7th, 6:30pm to 9:30pm Fullstack Academy
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Built In Brews at Cisco Meraki Thursday, March 21st, 5:30pm to 7:30pm Cisco Meraki
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1104 South Wabash, 8th Floor
Chicago, IL View Map UX Camp Chicago is a 1-day mini-conference for all things UX. Spend the day getting immersed in what's happening in the UX design and development space, and leave bursting with new ideas and insights. Cost: $60 Event link: Sign Up Here On Twitter: @chicagocamps
Eckerson Data Analytics Seminars Series Monday, April 15th, 8am to Wednesday, April 17th, 4:30pm Northern Illinois University (Naperville)
1120 E Diehl Rd
Naperville, IL View Map Eckerson Education combines the best of the classroom experience and their massive content catalog in a seminar setting. This allows you to interact and network with peers while learning valuable new techniques and concepts. Cost: $890 (1 day) $1,580 (2 days) $1,950 (3 days) Event link: Sign Up Here On Twitter: @eckersongroup
Perry Govier from Ionic. Tuesday, April 16th, 6pm Apervita
1 North La Salle St
Chicago, IL View Map Perry Govier returns to CHIHTML5 from the wilds of Madison, Wisconsin where he is a Frontend Engineer at Ionic.io. Cost: FREE Event link: Sign Up Here
GOTO Chicago 2019 Sunday, April 28th to Thursday, May 2nd Navy Pier
600 E Grand
Chicago, IL View Map GOTO Chicago 2019 is all about What Works. Learn from the creators, pioneers and thought leaders. Cost: $300 - $1390 Event link: Sign Up Here On Twitter: @gotochgo
May
Apache Roadshow Chicago '19 Monday, May 13th, 9am to Tuesday, May 14th, 9pm Revolution Brewing - Brewpub
2323 North Milwaukee Avenue
Chicago, IL View Map The Apache Software Foundation and several Chicago Meetup Groups such as Chicago Hadoop User Group (CHUG), Chicago Kafka Enthusiast (CAKE), Chicago Java User Group (CJUG), Chicago Women in Big Data (CWiBD), and many many more, are partnering to host a two day Apache Road Show for approximately 200 attendees, focusing on Apache projects at work in AdTech, FinTech, Ecommerce, and more in the Chicago area, as well as a special focus on increasing diversity and encouraging involvement in smaller projects throughout the Apache Ecosystem. Cost: $100 Event link: Sign Up Here
New Manager Series: Coaching & Communication Wednesday, May 15th, 5:30pm to 8pm TechNexus (hosted by ITA)
20 N. Wacker Dr, 12th Floor
Chicago, IL View Map Are you looking to refine your managerial approach and develop a stronger open communication style with your team to bring out the best in them? If the answer is yes, you should be attending our New Manager Series: Coaching & Communication course. Everyone communicates differently - learn to coach to each style. Cost: FREE Event link: Sign Up Here On Twitter: @ITABuzz
June
React Loop Friday, June 21st VenueSIX10
610 S Michigan
Chicago, IL View Map React Loop is a single day ReactJS conference bringing together a diverse and inclusive group of React enthusiasts from all backgrounds and levels of experience. Cost: $149 - $169 Event link: Sign Up Here
React Summer Party Part 1 Wednesday, June 26th, 6pm TEKsystems
111 N Canal St Suite 305
Chicago, IL View Map Extended to 3 hours instead of 2 * Rooftop Networking * 3 Lightning Talks * Food + beverages. Cost: FREE Event link: Sign Up Here On Twitter: @ReactJSChicago
JulySeated at a table with other Alabama assistant coaches, Derrick Ansley looked around a field covered by reporters in attendance for the Crimson Tide's national championship media day.
Hundreds of reporters were there, interviewing Alabama coaches and players two days before the Tide played Clemson.
"I was a broadcast journalism major, so I know exactly what you guys have to do," a smiling Ansley said.
Alabama's second-year defensive backs coach was once interested in pursuing a career in broadcast journalism and may have done so if not for a coaching opportunity that came about shortly after he graduated from Troy in 2005.
Twelve years later, a 35-year old Ansley continues to establish himself as a rising star in the coaching world aided by skills developed while majoring in broadcast journalism.
"I feel like I have a creative mind as far as being able to produce and put things together, and I think that part marries up with being a defensive coordinator or head coach," Ansley said. "Producing and directing, you've got to put it all together and make one product. So, with us, Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday practice, you're putting together the production. Saturday, you go out there and you let the world see it."
***
Ansley was a Stuart Scott fan.
That's where the interest in journalism came from, watching the popular former ESPN anchor.
At Troy, Ansley both produced and served as an anchor in the school's TV studio.
"I feel like I still use that every day," Ansley said. "Talking to the media, you're articulating back and forth. And when I'm putting together my install tape or my meeting tapes for my players, the production and what actually goes into that -- making the decision of what they see vs. what we can hold to get the most important things covered -- I think all those things directly correlate with journalism and broadcasting."
Ansley initially wasn't thinking about coaching after college.
After posting 19 career interceptions as a safety at Troy, Ansley wanted to play in the NFL and had tryouts with the New York Giants and New England Patriots.
Neither signed him, so he thought about heading to the Canadian Football League or potentially pursuing a broadcast journalism job until getting a phone call from one of his old coaches at Troy.
New wide receivers coach Mike Locksley a 'triple threat' for Alabama Locksley was promoted in January after helping Alabama as an offensive analyst last year
Ansley remembers it being a Saturday morning when he got the call from Mike Turk.
Turk was entering his second season at Huntingdon College, a Division III school in Montgomery.
"I've got a defensive backs job that opened up," Turk said to Ansley. "I want you to have it. Are you interested?"
Ansley wasn't sure at first until heading to Huntingdon to further discuss the job.
Ansley interviewed, took the job as Huntingdon's defensive backs coach and, as he says, "the rest is history."
Five years later, Ansley joined the staff at Alabama after passing up a job with the Tide one year earlier.
Ansley met then-Alabama defensive coordinator Kirby Smart at a Montgomery event during the summer of 2009. Smart eventually offered Ansley a job as an off-field graduate assistant, meaning Ansley could help the Tide behind the scenes but couldn't coach. Ansley told Smart no, a decision he second-guessed while watching Alabama beat Texas in that year's national championship game.
"I was sitting at home watching the national championship game with my wife and I'm like, 'Man, we could be playing for a national championship," Ansley said. "'Did I make the right decision?'"
A year later, Ansley saw Smart at that same event in Montgomery. Smart again offered Ansley a job, this time as an on-the-field grad assistant. Ansley accepted, serving two years in that role before leaving and progressively establishing himself as one of the nation's top young coaches and recruiters at Tennessee, Kentucky and now back at Alabama.
***
While interviewing Ansley for the defensive backs coach job, Nick Saban asked him about his personal goals.
"I told him that I want to be a defensive coordinator at some point during the next couple years and to be a head coach before I'm 40 or early 40s," Ansley said, "and he told me he'd help me with any goals or aspirations I have."
Those aspirations are part of the reason Ansley left Kentucky for a lesser position at Alabama, leaving one month after being promoted to co-defensive coordinator. He wanted to learn under Saban and defensive coordinator Jeremy Pruitt.
It's worked out well for both sides.
Under Ansley, Anthony Averett developed into a high-level starter at cornerback after not playing a single meaningful snap on defense during his first three years with the Tide. In addition, Minkah Fitzpatrick led the SEC with six interceptions while cornerback Marlon Humphrey further established himself as one of the top cornerbacks in the country and is now widely projected to go in the first round of this year's NFL draft.
Overall, Ansley's secondary helped Alabama rank 24th nationally in pass defense and first in scoring defense last season.
"Coach Ansley's definitely a hands-on coach," Humphrey said. "He's quick to be right there and follow up whatever coach Saban says or to give advice even before coach Saban gives it. He's definitely a good coach."
'It's come full circle': The path that brought Brian Daboll to Alabama Former NFL head coach Eric Mangini said: "I think it's a great situation for him, and I think it's a great situation for Alabama as well."
One of Ansley's most recent victories came during recruiting, helping the Tide land four-star wide receiver Henry Ruggs despite a late push from Florida State.
Ansley was 16th in 247Sports' 2017 recruiter rankings after serving as the primary recruiter for three four-star members of Alabama's most recent recruiting class -- Ruggs, four-star safety Xavier McKinney and four-star linebacker Markail Benton.
According to 247Sports, Ansley was also the secondary recruiter for four-star offensive tackle Jedrick Wills, four-star safety Daniel Wright and three-star cornerback Kyriq McDonald.
"Ansley is loved by recruits in the Southeast," Rivals recruiting analyst Woody Wommack tweeted in January.
Now comes spring practice, which started Tuesday for Alabama.
For Ansley, it's time to get back to "producing and directing."Photo-Illustration: Maya Robinson and Photos by FOX, HBO, ABC, CBS and Hulu
Priyanka Chopra may be the first Bollywood biggie to take center stage on the small screen Stateside, but she’s hardly the only actor of South Asian descent to make a dent in Hollywood. Vulture rounded up some of the brown folks taking to the small screen these days as way more than your geeky sidekick, along with their two cents on being an actor of color in the industry.
HEROES REBORN – “The Day” Episode 107 – Pictured: Sendhil Ramamurthy as Mohinder Suresh – (Photo by: Sophie Giraud/NBC) Photo: Sophie Giraud/NBC
Sendhil Ramamurthy, Heroes Reborn
Ramamurthy made sci-fi fans swoon on the original Heroes, and he’ll no doubt do the same on NBC’s reboot, where he reprises his moody scientist Mohinder Suresh. In the five years since the first series wrapped, Ramamurthy’s split his time on Covert Affairs, The Office, and Beauty & the Beast, typically playing characters that weren’t originally meant to be cast as South Asian. Ramamurthy has said that finding strong, diverse characters is slim pickings. “Since Heroes started, I’ve probably had about 15 or 16 film scripts sent to me with Indian characters, and out of those, maybe one was good.” But he’s had better luck playing more ethnically diverse roles. “Now I’m getting a lot of scripts that have nothing to do with being Indian, and I think that’s amazing.”
Latest role: Mohinder Suresh on Heroes Reborn.
Previous roles: Covert Affairs, The Office, CSI: Miami, Beauty & the Beast.
Years in Hollywood: 15
THE MINDY PROJECT: Mindy (Mindy Kaling) starts her fellowship at Stanford in the “Stanford” episode of THE MINDY PROJECT airing Tuesday, Jan. 6 (9:30-10:00 PM ET/PT) on FOX. ©2014 Fox Broadcasting Co. Cr: John P. Fleenor/FOX Photo: John P. Fleenor/FOX
Mindy Kaling, The Mindy Project
Perhaps the best-known actor of Indian descent, Kaling honed her comedy chops as a writer-actor — playing the beloved Kelly Kapoor — on The Office for more than a decade before immortalizing herself as Mindy Lahiri on her eponymous show, which recently shuffled over to Hulu. Kaling has frequently been criticized for her casting choices on the show, specifically their lack of diversity, to which she’s responded, “I’m a fucking Indian woman who has her own fucking show,” then allowing, “I have a great job, a great life, and a great responsibility, like Spider Man. I have to do more, and that’s fine. I’m excited about it.”
Latest role: Writer, producer, and star of The Mindy Project, on which she plays a quirky, romantically challenged ob-gyn.
Previous roles: The Office.
Years in Hollywood: 13
NEW GIRL: Cece (Hannah Simone) shows Jess that she purchased a purse they were fighting over in the “Girl Fight” episode of NEW GIRL airing Tuesday, Dec. 2 (9:00-9:30 PM ET/PT) on FOX. ©2014 Fox Broadcasting Co. Cr: Ray Mickshaw/FOX Photo: Ray Mickshaw/FOX
Hannah Simone, New Girl
As New Girl BFF Cece, Simone — who’s Indian, German, and Greek — steals scenes with her perfect timing. Her small-screen success came as a surprise to the actress, who grew up between Canada, Cyprus, and India, studied international relations, and worked for the U.N. before hitting Hollywood. “Growing up, I remember watching TV and I didn’t see a lot of people who looked like me, especially someone who passed as a glamorous model on a mainstream TV show,” Simone has said. “I do feel there’s a shift in American television. Women are no longer being defined by where they were born or their color. That’s huge.”
Latest role: Cece on New Girl.
Previous roles: A model turned TV host, pre–New Girl, Simone did time on HGTV Canada’s Space for Living, MuchMusic, and SyFy’s WCG Ultimate Gamer.
Years in Hollywood: 10
KJ2A1786.dng Photo: Murray Close/Netflix
Naveen Andrews, Sense8
Fans will remember Andrews from turns in The English Patient and Lost, but cult interest in the Wachowski sibs’ global sci-fi Netflix drama Sense8 has no doubt further raised his profile. Despite his success, it’s been a tough road, and over the course of a decades-long career, Andrews has been very vocal about racism in Hollywood. “It is not easy to get parts in mainstream films for most people of color,” he told The Guardian in 2007. “Hollywood and British writers are not writing parts for us, or the directors are not interested in casting us in parts that are color-blind.”
Latest role: Secretive spiritual guide Jonas Maliki on Netflix’s Sense8.
Previous roles: The English Patient, Lost, Once Upon a Time in Wonderland, countless indie films.
Years in Hollywood: ~25
PARKS AND RECREATION – “Gin It Up” Episode 606 – Pictured: Aziz Ansari as Tom Haverford – (Photo by: Colleen Hayes/NBC/NBCU Photo Bank via Getty Images) Photo: Colleen Hayes/NBC/NBCU Photo Bank via Getty Images
Aziz Ansari, Master of None
South Carolina native Ansari — whose family hails from the Tamil Nadu region of India — spent six years as the dapper but doofy Tom Haverford on Parks & Recreation, but he was well known on the comedy circuit before that as one of the stars of the MTV sketch hit Human Giant. He’s also an Apatow darling, and frequently does stints in films like I Love You, Man, Funny People, and 30 Minutes or Less. Before locking November’s semiautobiographical Netflix comedy Master of None, exec-produced by Parks co-creator Mike Schur, Ansari also did two Netflix-exclusive stand-up shows and released a book of autobiographical essays, Modern Romance, in June. “I don’t think anything held me back because of my ethnicity, because my view was always, if I just do good shit, it’ll be fine,” Ansari told Vulture in March. “I remember early on, Eugene Mirman told me, ‘If you’re killing, people are gonna book you. That’s all that really matters.’ And that’s true. Sometimes I would get asked to do ‘Asian shows’ where they would have certain themes, or there would be a ‘diversity showcase.’ And I’m like, whatever, man, put me up against the white people, I’ll destroy them. I don’t need to be separated. I’m not doing weird comedy, I’m just doing jokes like everyone else.”
Current role: Playing a version of himself on Master of None, debuting November 6 on Netflix.
Previous roles: Parks and Recreation, Human Giant, Flight of the Conchords, Scrubs, Bob’s Burgers.
Years in Hollywood: 11
Photo: Netflix
Anupam Kher, Sense8
A relative newcomer to Hollywood, Kher is a 40-year vet of Indian cinema, where he’s largely known for playing meaty comedic and character roles. These days, the 60-year-old actor also hosts his own talk show for Indian TV. In his relatively short time Stateside, he’s managed to make an impression, rubbing shoulders with pals like Bradley Cooper and Robert De Niro at De Niro’s recent birthday bash. And he’s planning to open a New York branch of his acting studio, The Actor Prepares. I hate to use [the term] Bollywood,” the actor has said. “We have coined a word similar to Hollywood. Our industry is [the] Hindi film industry and it has the potential to take over any industry in next 10 years.”
Latest role: Proud papa Sanyam Dandekar on Netflix’s Sense8.
Previous roles: Bend It Like Beckham, Silver Linings Playbook.
Years in Hollywood: 11
Photo: HBO
Kumail Nanjiani, The Grinder
Nanjiani admits that most people he runs into simply know him as Dinesh, the sardonic tech geek he plays on HBO’s Silicon Valley. But the Karachi-born actor is also a stand-up comic with his own long-running show, The Meltdown With Jonah and Kumail. He also runs video game and X-Files podcasts with his wife, writer-producer Emily V. Gordon. “The representation of brown people on TV has changed quite a bit,” Nanjiani told NPR this summer. “I actually saw Kal Penn tweeted a few days ago he said that somebody congratulated him on Silicon Valley, and I was like, ‘Okay, good. Now you know how it has been for me for the last ten years.’”
Latest role: Dinesh on HBO’s Silicon Valley, upcoming turns on The Grinder and the X-Files remake.
Previous roles: Portlandia, Life As We Know It, Burning Love.
Years in Hollywood: 7
Photo: HBO
Aasif Mandvi, The Brink, The Daily Show
Best known from his long-running stint as a correspondent on The Daily Show, Mandvi has had a long career on TV, including roles on ER and Jericho. HBO’s The Brink sees Mandvi playing a powerless Pakistani driver to Jack Black’s egotistical American diplomat. Mandvi will return for the new incarnation of The Daily Show With Trevor Noah, and he’s co-producing a web series called Halal in the Family. The themes he addresses onscreen usually harken back Mandvi’s own experiences as a Muslim-Indian kid growing up in the U.K. and United States. “Sometimes I describe myself as a turducken — an Indian baby wrapped in an English schoolboy wrapped in an American adult,” he told the New York Post earlier this year. “This was useful on The Daily Show because I was able to tell stories [as an American and] as an outsider at the same time.”
Latest role: The Brink and The Daily Show.
Previous roles: ER, Jericho, Spider-Man 2, The Proposal, Ruby Sparks, The Internship, Million Dollar Arm.
Years in Hollywood: 25
“The Graduation Transmission” – Raj (Kunal Nayyar, pictured) pits his parents against each other when his father cuts him off financially, on THE BIG BANG THEORY, Thursday, April 23 (8:00-8:31 PM, ET/PT), on the CBS Television Network. Photo: Michael Yarish/CBS é2015 CBS Broadcasting, Inc. All Rights Reserved Photo: Michael Yarish/CBS
Kunal Nayyar, The Big Bang Theory
As female-phobic astrophysicist Raj on The Big Bang Theory, Nayyar has been mining his Punjabi upbringing for laughs since 2007. But the New Delhi–raised actor pulls no punches in his new book of autobiographical essays, Yes, My Accent Is Real: And Some Other Things I Haven’t Told You, in which he talks about his rise to fame, dating, and his big fat Indian wedding. Despite his Big Bang success, there is one career goal still high on the actor’s list: a Bollywood film. “I’ve been incredibly lucky, but it’s never easy to be an actor, whether you’re white or you’re black or you’re yellow or you’re blue,” Nayyar has said. “If a role calls for an Indian, there are going to be 20 other Indians in that waiting room with you. It can be frustrating, because why can’t I play a David? Because my skin is brown, I have to play Raj? Why can’t I be the high school quarter- back or the lawyer, rather than the geek or the doctor? I think that’s going to change.”
Latest role: The Big Bang Theory.
Previous roles: Sanjay and Craig, Sullivan and Son.
Years in Hollywood: 8
Photo: Spike
Avan Jogia, Tut
Fans will remember Canadian actor Jogia from his Nickelodeon smash Victorious and his role as a troubled teen accused of murder on ABC Family’s Twisted. But indie darling Jogia — who’s recently snagged roles in I Am Michael, 10,000 Saints, and Shangri-La Suite — was also the swoon-worthy centerpiece in the Spike TV mini-series TUT, alongside none other than his acting idol, Ben Kingsley, who also has some South Asian ancestry. For his ABC Family drama Twisted, Jogia told Parade, “They changed [the character’s race] after they brought me on. It’s an interesting thing — it’s not very common yet on TV, but I think that’s changing. It’s becoming less of this uncharted territory. It’s much less of a thing than it was even five years ago. [When] I did Aliens in America, [race] was the central focus. It was the point of the show. But this is very much not that. It’s just displaying the very modern family.”
Latest role: Spike TV’s TUT mini-series.
Previous roles: Aliens in America, iCarly, Caprica, Victorious, Twisted.
Years in Hollywood: 10
Photo: Claire Folger/Disney Enterprises, Inc. All rights reserved.
Abhi Sinha, Chasing Life
Mumbai-born and Pittsburgh-raised, Sinha plays eager newspaper journalist Danny Gupta on ABC Family’s tearjerking drama Chasing Life — fitting because the actor was studying to be a sports journalist at USC before the acting bug bit. And while he’s enjoying his comic turn on a show about cancer, Sinha still thinks Hollywood has a long way to go. “You know, at this point as an actor, I’ll literally take what I can get, whatever I can sink my teeth into,” Sinha has said. “I just feel that I’m lucky that this role [as Danny] isn’t stereotypical. I do feel like 80 to 90 percent of them are. I take the responsibility on myself as an actor to show Hollywood, if you will, that not every Indians [sic] are as stereotypically-cut as you may see them.”
Latest role: ABC Family’s Chasing Life.
Previous roles: Rizzoli & Isles, Bones, Greek, The Social Network, In Time.
Years in Hollywood: 10
Raza Jaffrey as Aasar Khan in Homeland (Season 4, Episode 8). - Photo: David Bloomer/SHOWTIME - Photo ID: Homeland_408_0021.R Photo: David Bloomer/Showtime
Raza Jaffrey, Code Black
Brit actor Jaffrey — whose dad is Indian and mom is English — got his start on the U.K. hit EastEnders before doing the BBC spy drama Spooks. But he’s best known Stateside as the cranky boyfriend on Smash and Pakistani colonel Aasar Khan on Homeland. The Royal Shakespeare Company–trained actor has made his mark on British theater but tanked Stateside in the short-lived Broadway musical Bollywood Dreams. These days, he’s playing a hot but harried doc on Code Black, premiering tonight on CBS. “I am very proud of having mixed-race heritage,” Jaffrey told U.K.’s The Standard on being labeled an “Asian” actor. “Being a product of those two cultures and being relatively well adjusted is something to talk about as well as being black or Asian or white.”
Current/latest role: Code Black.
Previous roles: EastEnders, Spooks, Smash, Once Upon a Time in Wonderland, Elementary, Homeland.
Years in Hollywood: 15
Also on TV in recent years: Irfan Khan, In Treatment; Danny Pudi, Community; Parminder Nagra, The Blacklist, NCIS: Los Angeles; Archie Punjabi, The Good Wife; Kal Penn, a bunch of canceled stuff; Dev Patel, The Newsroom; Nimrat Kaur, Homeland; Suraj Sharma, Homeland; Sarita Choudhury, Homeland.Graham Walker reflects on the latest controversy at the Durham Free School, and reflects on the need for inclusive schools across the state sector.
Many will remember the education scandal associated with the so-called ‘Operation Trojan Horse’ in 2014. A letter was given to the authorities which purported to be evidence of a plot by hardline Islamists to replace leadership in Birmingham schools with a high proportion of attendees from Muslim backgrounds, in order to instil a much more religiously conservative ethos and curricula. Though the letter was widely suspected to be as a hoax, it triggered several investigations into 21 different schools in Birmingham.
This triggered at-the-time Education Minister, Michael Gove to demand that we must start teaching ‘British values’. There was much controversy at the time of what constituted British values, and for some these questions have not been satisfactorily answered. In its response to Mr Gove’s consultation, while remaining generally positive towards the proposed requirements, the British Humanist Association (BHA) pointed out that ‘none of the values listed are uniquely British’. It is interesting to reflect with this that David Cameron, also in 2014, called England a ‘Christian country’, which many saw as an archaic view of the country not acknowledging the cultural diversity of the UK, nor the fact that 48% (later that year revised to 51%) of the British population identified as having ‘no religion’.
These points raise serious questions about the role of religion in school. In a multicultural and pluralistic British society, can we identify the country as having one religion? Is it worth stating a religious identity at all? And either way, what does this mean for our education system?
These questions and others like it have become a lot more difficult to answer with Ofsted delivering, on 19 January, one of its worst ever reports to ‘The Durham Free School’: a school with a strong ‘Christian ethos’. The school received inadequate (the worst rating) in all areas covered in the inspection. Many of the inspector’s comments give significant cause for alarm, in relation to schooling generally but also in relation to the role that religion played within the school. In the report we find comments such as:
‘Reviewing the curriculum so that there are appropriate opportunities to teach students about sex and relationships and to promote respect for different faiths, beliefs and values so that they are fully ready to function as young citizens of modern Britain’
‘Governors place too much emphasis on religious credentials when they are recruiting key staff and not enough on seeking candidates with excellent leadership and teaching skills’
‘The religious studies curriculum was too narrow and did not give students enough opportunities to learn about different faiths and beliefs. Consequently, students’ understanding of different faiths and beliefs is sketchy with some holding prejudiced views which are not challenged.’
It is clear that the school’s management and teaching staff, and the governors have all, to some extent, allowed their own personal religious beliefs to negatively impact on the opportunity for the pupils of this school to receive an adequate education; a very sad state of affairs.
With two serious incidents in education from schools where religious values are put before teaching the role of religious schools within Britain has to be called in to question.
Hardly anyone should be saying that schools should be wholly secular, with no religious education; this is not a way to foster understanding and compassion for people and their beliefs. The BHA, which was pivotal in supporting whistleblowers to blow the lid on what was going on at the school at the centre of the ‘Trojan Horse’ scandal, argues for a comprehensive, broad-based religious education system which teaches about religious and non-religious views such as Humanism side-by-side. Religion should not, however, dominate the school’s management structure, nor should it compromise the quality of education in things like sex education and biology.
America has always believed, constitutionally, in the firm separation of church and state, and while Britain has never enjoyed this same state secularism, there has always been a healthy scepticism from the public at attempts to politicise religion, or crusade politically on a religious basis. Schools are a bedrock of any healthy society, and so reasonably they should fall under the same dictum that religion does not have a place within the governance of our schooling systems.
Graham Walker is a student and blogger. Graham has studied psychology and cognitive behavioural therapy, and is currently studying for an MSc in occupational therapy. He blogs on various issues that he feels are important. You can follow him on Twitter at @think_damn_it.Photo: Black Lives Matter NashvilleAlex Little, a Nashville attorney with experience on both sides of the bar, offers a blunt response when asked why he was so stunned by the news that the Metro Nashville Police Department had obtained a warrant to dig through the social media accounts of Jocques Scott Clemmons.
“It’s highly irregular to conduct an investigation into someone who is dead,” he says.
Clemmons is not just a curious target for such scrutiny because he is dead, though. He was shot and killed by MNPD officer Josh Lippert last month, after Lippert attempted to stop him for running a stop sign and Clemmons tried to run away. Police say Clemmons had a handgun on him. The Tennessean broke the news today that, in the days following the shooting, MNPD sought and obtained warrants to search data from Clemmons' cell phone and social media accounts.
From that story:
Police leaders say the information is |
. So power is articulated deeper and deeper into the base.
As Joost Jongerden and Ahmet Akkaya write in Confederalism and autonomy in Turkey: “the DTK is not simply another organization, but part of the attempt to forge a new political paradigm, defined by the direct and continual exercise of the people’s power through village, town and city councils.”
It is worth noting that this new political paradigm is not only advocated by those initiatives that exist outside of the institutionalized political realm, but also by pro-Kurdish political parties such as the Democratic Regions Party (DBP) and the Peoples’ Democratic Party (HDP). The ultimate goal is not to establish Democratic Autonomy exclusively in the Kurdish regions, but at the national level too, both in Turkey and Syria.
Social ecology
Bookchin’s theory of social ecology is characterized by the belief that “we must reorder social relations so that humanity can live in a protective balance with the natural world.” A post-capitalist society cannot be successful unless it is created in harmony with the ecological environment.
Bookchin argues that “the most fundamental message that social ecology advances is that the very idea of dominating nature stems from the domination of human by human.” Social ecology moves beyond the traditional Marxist and anarchist view of how to organize a non-hierarchical, egalitarian society in that it places the need to avert an impending ecological catastrophe at the heart of contemporary social struggles.
For the Kurds, traditionally a rural people living on agriculture and animal husbandry, maintaining the ecological environment is as crucial as creating an egalitarian society. State-driven destruction of the environment in their mountainous homelands and on the fertile Mesopotamian plain is occurring on a daily basis.
The most obvious example is the GAP project in Turkey, in which dozens of mega dams have either already been built or are under construction. The project is presented as bringing development to the region in the form of employment opportunities at the construction sites, better irrigated mega-farms producing cash crops for export, and providing day jobs for the expropriated small farmers and an upgraded energy infrastructure with the construction of several hydroelectric power plants.
What is perceived as “development” by the agents of the state is experienced in an entirely different way by the people who see their homes and villages flooded, the free-flowing rivers turned into commodities, their lands being expropriated and bought up by large corporations and used for the industrial-scale production of goods that serve no purpose but to enrich the farm-owners in their faraway villas. These large-scale, highly destructive mega-projects expose the urgent need for local control over local environments.
But whereas wresting the natural environment away from the destructive claws of ever encroaching capitalist forces entails a direct confrontation with the state, a crucial first — and potentially even more revolutionary — step involves the abolition of hierarchy at the interpersonal level. Since, as Bookchin argued, the domination of humans over nature stems from the domination of one human over another, the solution has to follow a similar trajectory.
In this regard, the emancipation of women is one of the most important aspects of social ecology. As long as the domination of man over woman remains intact, the treatment of our natural environment as an essential and integral part of human life — rather than a commodity to be exploited for our benefit — is still far away.
In this regard, the emancipatory projects currently underway in Kurdish society are a hopeful sign. Although in many cases social relations within Kurdish families and society are still guided by age-old customs and traditions, radical changes can already be observed. As one activist of the Amed Women’s Academy put it in an interview with Tatort Kurdistan:
Kurdish families still aren’t really open to the new system, Democratic Autonomy. They haven’t yet internalized it. We, the activists, have very much internalized it and it’s our responsibility to make change, to impart the ideas of Democratic Autonomy to families, even if it’s only in small steps. We can start talking about it at home the way we do outside. When our families see how seriously we take it, that will affect them. Of course, discussions are often very difficult. Doors get slammed, people shout. But a lot of perseverance and discussion has also begun to create change in families.
Listen, learn and follow
The developments in Kurdistan — and especially in Rojava, the Kurdish region in northern Syria — have tickled the radical imagination of activists around the globe. The revolution in Rojava has been compared to Barcelona in 1936 and the Zapatistas in Chiapas, Mexico. The radical left needs its own mythology as much as everybody else, and in this sense Rojava, Barcelona and Chiapas serve as hopeful reminders that there is an alternative; that it is possible to organize society in a different way.
However, by merely placing these instances of radical organization on a pedestal, as a beacon of hope to be revered when times get rough, our support for these struggles is often not very different from the support we display when we cheer on our favorite football team on TV. The Zapatistas in the jungles of Chiapas and the Kurds on the Mesopotamian plains have come a long way by relying on nothing but their own strength and determination. Their relative isolation has allowed for the development of their radical alternatives, but for these experiments to survive in the long run they need more than supporters and sympathizers. They need partners.
“Global capital, precisely because of its very hugeness, can only be eaten away at its roots,” Bookchin writes in A Politics for the Twenty-First Century, “specifically by means of a libertarian municipalist resistance at the base of society. It must be eroded by the myriad millions who, mobilized by a grassroots movement, challenge global capital’s sovereignty over their lives and try to develop local and regional economic alternatives to its industrial operations.”
Bookchin believes that if our ideal is a Commune of Communes, the natural place to start is at the local political level, with a movement and program as the “uncompromising advocate of popular neighborhood and town assemblies and the development of a municipalized economy.”
Ultimately, the best way to support the struggles of the Kurds, the Zapatistas and many other revolutionary movements and initiatives that have sprung up across the globe in the past few years, is by listening to their stories, learning from their experiences and following in their footsteps.
A confederation of self-organized municipalities, transcending national borders and ethnic and religious boundaries is the best bulwark against the ever-encroaching imperialist powers and capitalist forces. In the struggle to achieve this goal, there are worse examples to follow than the ideas set out by Murray Bookchin and the practice of libertarian municipalism.A bizarre indie film starring Daniel Radcliffe as a farting corpse with supernatural powers that turn him into a flatulent jet ski has left audiences at the Sundance Film Festival perplexed.
Paul Dano co-stars in Swiss Army Man as Hank, a suicidal castaway whose zest for life returns after the dead body washes up on the beach and he discovers he can use it as a gas-powered escape vehicle.
What a gas... Paul Dano contemplates his new best mate (Daniel Radcliffe). Credit:Sundance Film Institute
But that is only the beginning of the corpse's hidden talents. As well as functioning as a portable water tank and a weapon (the body shoots objects from its mouth), Radcliffe's character, Manny, is also able to direct Hank back to civilisation with a penis that apparently doubles as a GPS.
Eventually Manny comes partially back to life and the pair form a bond that goes considerably beyond what would conventionally be described as a bromance.Are you new to CSS? This article is for you! Perhaps the biggest key to understanding CSS is understanding selectors. Selectors are what allows you to target specific HTML elements and apply style to them. Let's not think about style right now though, let's just focus on the selecting.
In the examples below, the CSS would be in a file called something like style.css that is referenced from an HTML document called something like index.html. They are separate files, which is the great thing about CSS, keeping the design away from the document.
Here's what that HTML file would be like:
<!DOCTYPE html> <html lang="en"> <head> <title>We're learning selectors!</title> <link rel="stylesheet" href="style.css"> </head> <body> <h1 id="yay">Yay</h1> <body> </html>
And the CSS file would contain just the selector blocks like you'll see below.
ID selector
#happy-cake { } <!-- WILL match --> <div id="happy-cake"></div> <!-- WILL match --> <aside id="happy-cake"></aside> <!-- Will NOT match --> <div id="sad-cake">Wrong ID!</div> <!-- Will NOT match --> <div class="happy-cake">That's not an ID!</div>
Leveling Up
ID selectors are the most powerful type of selector in terms of CSS specificity. Meaning that they beat out other types of selectors and the styles defined within win. That sounds good, but that's typically considered bad, because it's nice to have lower-specificity selectors that are easier to override when needed.
Class Selector
.module { } <!-- WILL match --> <div class="module"></div> <!-- WILL match --> <aside class="country module iceland"></aside> <!-- Will NOT match --> <div class=".module">The dot is for CSS, not HTML</div> <!-- Will NOT match --> <div class="bigmodule">Wrong class</div>
Leveling Up
Class selectors are your friend. They are probably the most useful and versatile selectors out there. In part because they are well supported in all browsers. In part because you can add multiple classes (just separated by a space) on HTML elements. In part because there are JavaScript things you can do specifically for manipulating classes.
Tag Selector
h2 { } <!-- WILL match --> <h2>Hi, Mom</h2> <main> <div> <!-- WILL match --> <h2>Anywhere</h2> </div> </main> <!-- Will NOT match --> <div class="h2">Wrong tag, can't trick it</div> <!-- Will NOT match --> <h2class="yolo">Make sure that tag has a space after it!</h2>
Leveling Up
Tag selectors are at their most useful when changing properties that are unique to that HTML element. Like setting the list-style on a <ul> or tab-size on a <pre>. Also in reset stylesheets where you are specifically trying to unset styles that browsers apply to certain elements.
Don't rely on them too much though. It's typically more useful to have a class define styling that you can use on any HTML element.
Attribute Selector
[data-modal="open"] { } <!-- WILL match --> <div data-modal="open"></div> <!-- WILL match --> <aside class='closed' data-modal='open'></aside> <!-- Will NOT match --> <div data-modal="false">Wrong value</div> <!-- Will NOT match --> <div data-modal>No value</div> <!-- Will NOT match --> <div data-modal-open>Wrong attribute</div>
Leveling Up
You might argue that attribute selectors are even more useful than classes because they have the same specificity value, but can be any attribute not just class, plus they can have a value you can select by.
Hardly an issue anymore, but attribute selectors aren't supported in IE 6.
Positional Selectors
:nth-child(2) { } <ul> <li>nope</li> <!-- WILL match --> <li>yep, I'm #2</li> <li>nope</li> </ul>
Leveling Up
There are several different positional selectors beyond :nth-child. Using simple expressions (like 3n = "every third") you can select elements based on their position in the HTML. You can play with that idea here or check out some useful recipes.
Other Pseudo Selectors
:empty { } <!-- WILL match --> <div></div> <!-- WILL match --> <aside data-blah><!-- nothin' --></aside> <!-- Will NOT match --> <div> </div> <!-- Will NOT match --> <div> </div>
Leveling Up
:empty is one of many pseudo selectors, which you can recognize by the colon (:) in them. They typically represent something that you couldn't know by just the element and attributes alone.
Note that these are slightly different than pseudo elements, which you can recognize by the double colon (::). They are responsible for adding things to the page by the things they select.
More Leveling Up
Selectors can be combined together. For instance:
.module.news { /* Selects elements with BOTH of those classes */ } #site-footer::after { /* Adds content after an element with that ID */ } section[data-open] { /* Selects only section elements if they have this attribute */ }
There are also selector combinators like ~ and + and > that affect selectors, like:
.module > h2 { /* Select h2 elements that are direct children of an element with that class */ } h2 + p { /* Select p elements that are directly following an h2 element */ } li ~ li { /* Select li elements that are siblings (and following) another li element. */ }
Here on CSS-Tricks there is an entire Almanac that covers all the selectors in CSS, as well as properties.DENVER – The case of three teenage girls being investigated for trying to join ISIS militants poses vexing questions for U.S. officials about the use of social media by terror groups to recruit people inside the United States, experts said Wednesday.
A Colorado school official said the Denver-area girls — two sisters ages 17 and 15, and a 16-year-old friend — were victims of an online predator who encouraged them to travel overseas and eventually to Syria.
Mia Bloom, a professor of security studies at the University of Massachusetts-Lowell, said the girls’ story so far suggests how Islamic extremists have mastered social media to prey on younger and younger women with “Disney-like versions of what it is like to live in the caliphate,” complete with promises of husbands and homes.
At least one of the girls was communicating with someone online who encouraged the three to travel to Syria, said Tustin Amole, a spokeswoman for the Cherry Creek School District where the girls attend high school.
Fellow high school students told school officials that the girls had been discussing travel plans over Twitter, Amole said.
The girls were detained at an airport in Frankfurt, Germany, and sent home over the weekend. They were interviewed by the FBI and returned to their parents in suburban Aurora. Those in the tight-knit east African community where they live said the sisters are of Somali descent and their friend is of Sudanese descent.
“There’s no indication they had been radicalized in a way that they wanted to fight for ISIS,” Amole said.
A U.S. official said evidence gathered so far made it clear that the girls were headed to Syria, though the official said investigators were still trying to determine what sort of contacts they had in that country. Another U.S. official said that investigators were reviewing evidence, including the girls’ computers. The officials spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss the ongoing investigation by name.
“Social media has played a very significant role in the recruitment of young people,” said FBI spokesman Kyle Loven in Minneapolis, home to the largest Somali community in the U.S. Authorities there have been concerned about terror recruiting of the young for years.
“What we’ve experienced here in Minneapolis is that young, disaffected youth who exist primarily on the fringes of society — they seem to be more susceptible to this type of propaganda, unfortunately,” Loven said.
Terror recruiting has been a problem for years in Minneapolis. Since 2007, roughly 22 young Somali-Americans have travelled to Somalia to take up arms with al-Shabab, an al-Qaida linked group. Those were all men.
Social media has played a very significant role in the recruitment of young people
Within the last year, a handful of people from the community left Minnesota to join militant groups in Syria, and this time, there are fears that women might have been targeted. Loven said the FBI is working with the Somali community to establish trust and help identify young people at risk for radicalization.
In Colorado, Amole said the three teens had no prior problems at school, aside from unexcused absences on Friday.
Still unknown is how they managed to get to Frankfurt.
The U.S. government doesn’t have any restrictions on children flying alone, domestically or internationally. Airline policies vary. Most U.S. airlines allow children 12 and older to fly alone but often with restrictions on international flights, according to the U.S. Transportation Department.
Our biggest concern is for the safety and well-being of these girls
The girls’ parents reported them missing Friday after they skipped school. They had taken passports and $2,000 in cash from the sisters’ parents’ home.
At some point, the U.S. informed German authorities at the airport about the girls arriving alone on their way to Turkey, German Interior Ministry spokeswoman Pamela Mueller-Niese told reporters Wednesday. She said the three were detained by German police, with approval from a judge, and returned voluntarily to the U.S. on Sunday.
Once home, the girls told a deputy they went to Germany for “family,” but wouldn’t elaborate.
A spokesman for the U.S. attorney’s office in Denver would not say whether prosecutors plan to charge the girls with a crime. State prosecutors said they have no imminent plans to charge the girls. Amole said they will not face discipline
“Our biggest concern is for the safety and well-being of these girls,” Amole said.On Oct. 25, Israel unmasked the identity of the Hezbollah commander in charge of the southern Syria front, and the Iranian-backed Lebanese movement reacted a day later by releasing photos taken inside an Israeli settlement. While these acts might be interpreted as psychological warfare, they inherently reflect how both sides are striving to set limits on their rules of engagement in Syria. They also highlight the critical role Russia has increasingly played in preventing clashes between Israel and Hezbollah on the Golan Heights.
Three phases have defined the confrontation between Israel and Hezbollah in the past decade: The July 2006 war set new rules of engagement by restricting the scope of the conflict to Lebanese territory under Israeli occupation (mainly Shebaa Farms); between 2011 and 2015, the Syrian conflict expanded the battlefield and challenged the tactics of a covert war; since 2015, the Russian intervention in Syria has made Moscow the de facto power broker, containing potentially serious fallout from their enmity.
In fact, the parameters of the Syrian war altered the conflict dynamics between the two adversaries. Hezbollah has acquired freedom of navigation inside Syria, and rockets fired from Syria occasionally hit the Israeli-occupied side of the Golan Heights. The Syrian regime is no longer seen by Israel as a stabilizing force able to guarantee stability on the Golan or contain Hezbollah in Lebanon.
As a result, the two archenemies have had to reassess their postures, tactics and priorities. Hezbollah’s military cabal, the Jihad Council, overcame a number of upheavals, including the mysterious assassination in May 2016 of its leader Mustafa Badreddine, who had replaced Imad Mughniyeh after he was killed in 2008. In the early years of the Syrian war, Hezbollah primarily focused on opening a new battlefield against Israel from inside Syria. Israel responded by assassinating those charged with carrying out that mission, mainly Samir Kuntar (killed in December 2015) and Jihad Mughniyeh (killed in January 2015).
Hezbollah’s reaction to these two killings was surprisingly measured, most likely at Tehran’s request, as a representative of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps sits on the powerful Jihad Council. The retaliation came at Shebaa Farms, indicating that the Iranian-backed Lebanese group had opted not to change the rules of the game by targeting Israel in Syria. Hezbollah’s message was that it would avoid escalation if Israel refrained from further targeting its commanders.
Indeed, the Russian role of containing any escalation between Israel and Hezbollah was a turning point in early 2016 and allowed Moscow to keep its focus on saving the regime of President Bashar al-Assad. Russia and Israel reached an agreement allowing the Israelis to target Hezbollah’s arms shipments and Syrian regime forces when necessary. In return, Israel would not challenge the Russian intervention or threaten Assad's survival. In the case of Iran, Russia offers full air support to its proxies to shape the balance of power on the ground, but Moscow still dictates the scope of these confrontations.
In July, Hezbollah acceded to Russian demands by withdrawing fighters from Daraa, in southern Syria, to fight al-Qaeda along the Lebanese-Syrian border. In recent weeks, however, the Iranian-backed group sent fighters back to the Syrian desert, with Russian consent. This new development highlights that Tehran’s priority is to seize the Damascus-Baghdad highway and establish a supply line between Iran and Beirut.
Israel’s approach has also evolved since 2011, most notably since 2016, when Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu shifted focus from Iran’s nuclear program to Tehran’s role in Syria. Recent developments suggest that the political and security establishments in Israel do not share the same assessment of Hezbollah’s threat. While Defense Minister Avigdor Liberman noted last month that the group was “behind firing rockets on the Golan Heights,” the Israeli army immediately downplayed the analysis. The military establishment believes that Hezbollah is primarily focused on the Syrian war, and it prefers to avoid a scenario where it shifts gears back to Israel.
Despite containing a confrontation, Russia's balancing act in the context of the Syrian conflict remains a dangerous exercise. An Oct. 16 episode is illustrative. Hours before Russian Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu landed in Israel, the Syrian regime fired an SA-5 anti-aircraft missile at an Israeli aircraft conducting a reconnaissance mission over Lebanon. Within two hours, the Israeli army had retaliated by bombing the Syrian missile battery. Moscow’s ambiguous policy of playing both sides might lead the parties to serious miscalculations.
The Israeli approach to a “good neighbor” policy, by providing aid and air support to Syrian armed groups in return for a security belt as the first line of defense, is neither effective nor sustainable. The Syrian regime shares control of the area surrounding the Golan Heights with armed opposition groups and extremist militants, which could lead to unintended escalation. As the Syrian war is winding down, a permanent agreement on who will ultimately control the Quneitra area will become necessary.
Once the race to control the Iraqi-Syrian border crossing concludes in Deir ez-Zor, Russia and the United States will have to normalize the de-escalation zone in southern Syria. The situation will require more than the current Russian checkpoints deployed 8 miles from the demarcation line between Israel and Syria. Israel’s unmasking of Munir Ali Naim Shati, also known as Hajj Hashem, was a warning shot in the absence of a channel for reducing tensions with Hezbollah. While it is hard to envision how both sides can resist the temptation of clashing in Syria in the long term, Russia will have to try to set new rules of engagement, or the next war will do so instead.The world’s largest wind farm was officially opened in the Thames Estuary by Prime Minister David Cameron.
With 175 turbines, the London Array is capable of powering two-thirds of the homes in its home county of Kent and the government hopes it will renew interest among international investors in Britain’s green economy.
“This is a great day for Britain and a big win for renewable energy,” David Cameron said at the ribbon-cutting opening ceremony yesterday.
We’ll tell you what’s true. You can form your own view. From 15p €0.18 $0.18 $0.27 a day, more exclusives, analysis and extras.
“London Array shows you can build large-scale renewable energy projects right here in Britain. This is because when it comes to clean energy, the UK has one of the clearest investment climates globally.”
The project - joint owned by Denmark’s Dong energy, Germany’s E.On and Abu Dhabi investment firm Masdair – is expected to provide enough energy to power almost half a million homes and save upto a million tonnes of CO2 every year.
Britain was in fact the record holder for the largest offshore wind farm even before the opening of London Array, which has been operational since April. The Thames construction took the title from the 500MW Greater Gabbard project off the coast of East Anglia.
Marking the latest step in a fairly consistent government commitment to wind power, yesterday’s opening means saw the UK's offshore energy capacity official expand to 3.6GW. The country is expected to have around 18GW by the end of the decade.
“It shows Britain is a great county to come and invest in, and means jobs for local people. It is part of what we need to have secure, reliable supplies of electricity and to get investment and jobs for our people,” the Prime Minister added.
RenewableUK chief executive Maria McCaffery celebrated the move in a statement. "Such a strong signal from the very top of our political establishment will help to put an end to the siren calls from the naysayers who have failed to appreciate the scale of the opportunity Britain has here,” she said. “We need to maintain our pole position in offshore wind energy to reap the full economic and environmental benefits."
We’ll tell you what’s true. You can form your own view.
At The Independent, no one tells us what to write. That’s why, in an era of political lies and Brexit bias, more readers are turning to an independent source. Subscribe from just 15p a day for extra exclusives, events and ebooks – all with no ads.
Subscribe nowIn a very real sense, a philosophy is a way of life which may incorporate but does not embody a political agenda. On the other hand, ideology is usually based in theory, the precepts of which often have little or no connection to actual observations in the real world. And, unlike philosophy, ideology generally defines a group identity or political agenda.
__ http://theroadtoconcord.com/2013/11/01/philosophy-vs-ideology/
An ideological construct comes as a package that contains all sorts of things, such as starting points, assumptions, premises, conclusions, prejudices, etc., and it is through this package that the world can be interpreted. The problem, however, is that if one does not know how to think on the basis of primary principles (principled thinking), one will be unable to critically evaluate the ideological superstructure through which one interprets data. Rather, one will be critical of things on the basis of the ideological package, and thus feel as if one is a free and critical thinker, but one isn’t quite sure whether the ideological package contains some rotten items that should be discarded. __ http://www.lifeissues.net/writers/mcm/ph/ph_01philosophyyouth7.html
A philosopher seeks knowledge, whereas an ideologue wants to change the world by any means necessary.
The Dark Enlightenment has generally been a loosely linked network of attitudes and ways of seeing through mainstream smokescreens and ideologies. For the Dark Enlightenment to become an ideology itself, would be tragic. Yet that is what some of the newcomers — many not pictured above — would like to see. Interlopers can be defined by their wish to co-opt a movement to their own ends.
Here is a description of the early movement, and the original underlying ideas:
Leave aside the occasional long-windedness, the sometimes plain silly or even outlandishly alarming, the Neoreactionaries appear marked by a curiosity and openness to humanity and its doings that does not stop at barriers erected arbitrarily for whatever reasons. In short, Neoreactionaries appear to like humans and humanity. This is refreshing, encouraging, and ultimately liberating after experiencing the intense dislike for hominids so often displayed by those who have fixed ideas what and what should not be. I recommend that you linger in the Neoreactionary biotope, soak up its atmosphere, emerge refreshed for battles and wars to come. __ Quoted in GOV
The writer is describing his impressions of the writings of people such as Mencius Moldbug, Nick Land, and others who might be described as “early philosophers” of the Dark Enlightenment (TDE). “Curiosity and openness” truly was an attribute of TDE, early on.
That openness and curiosity was reflected in the fact that TDE has always been very broad and difficult to define. Observe the graphic below:
The graphic above does not capture the half of the territory that TDE explores and happily tramples upon. The radical nature of TDE is obscured under an ambiguous cloud of “neoreaction,” which may hamper some of the recently “academically lobotomised” from exploring more deeply.
Neoreaction when taken properly, reveals itself as quite radical:
I mean, I did propose the liquidation of democracy, the Constitution and the rule of law, and the transfer of absolute power to a mysterious figure known only as the Receiver, who in the process of converting Washington into a heavily-armed, ultra-profitable corporation will abolish the press, smash the universities, sell the public schools, and transfer “decivilized populations” to “secure relocation facilities” where they will be assigned to “mandatory apprenticeships.” If this doesn’t horrify you, I’m not sure what would. __ Mencius Moldbug via
Here, Moldbug is attempting to shock the reader into either rejecting his ideas, or moving into a higher and more inclusive mode of reasoning. His writings are full of such ideas — but they were never meant to be turned into “doctrine.” Even more, they were never meant to serve as corollary or cover doctrine for pre-existing ideologies.
Nick Land takes a more steady, even approach:
Ironically, then, the world’s regnant Universalist democratic-egalitarian faith is a particular or peculiar cult that has broken out, along identifiable historical and geographical pathways, with an epidemic virulence that is disguised as progressive global enlightenment. The route that it has taken, through England and New England, Reformation and Revolution, is recorded by an accumulation of traits that provide abundant material for irony, and for lower varieties of comedy. The unmasking of the modern ‘liberal’ intellectual or ‘open-minded’ media ‘truth-teller’ as a pale, fervent, narrowly doctrinaire puritan, recognizably descended from the species of witch-burning zealots, is reliably — and irresistibly — entertaining. __ Nick Land via
TDE is first about achieving a better, more complete understanding of the web or matrix within which we find ourselves, and then — if one is still interested and possesses enough wit and energy — it is about how to untangle oneself from the constricting and blinding web.
But if one is to untangle oneself from a massively inter-tangled and suffocating worldview, he does not wish to emerge into another constricting worldview of closed-minded ideas. No, it is the openness of TDE that attracts, the liberating nature of its philosophy.
Totalitarianism — whether that of the “Cathedral” or that of countries such as Putin’s Russia, North Korea, Saudi Arabia, etc. etc. — is something to be thrown off, not something to be rebuilt under a different name. The fact that some “neoreactionaries” look admiringly on selected prison-states and wish to emulate them, is a tip-off that they either never absorbed the underlying philosophy of TDE, or that they have tipped over into an ideological swamp of their own making.
TDE is often set in opposition to the “hatred” that is embodied in the mainstream, sometimes referred to as the skankstream. And yet many prolific bloggers who call themselves “neoreactionary” define themselves largely by their hatred for particular poorly defined groups of people.
Righteous hatred — the hatred of the wholesale ideological murder of innocents, for example — is as legitimate a hatred as one might find. But such hatred generally seeks to halt the murder, and prevent further episodes of ideologically based murder.
In a bid to shock, Moldbug recommends placing Cathedral functionaries in camps, where they can be re-trained and apprenticed to perform more productive roles. Others suggest a drastic reduction of foreign aide to nations with rapidly reproducing populations of very low average IQ, and an apparent predisposition to violence.
These suggestions are mildly stated, and quite far from being a prescription for genocide — unlike the past actions of Communists and Nazis, and unlike what one hears from leftist greens, feminists, and doomers.
All neoreactionaries and most who are engaged in TDE, understand that human populations are being overwhelmed by another massive, cyclic, dysgenic idiocracy. It is happening under the camouflage of a utopian cult that promotes universal altruism and suicidal compassion — the Cathedral.
But how many utopian cults are hiding under the banner of neoreaction? Reverting to utopian ideology is a natural human impulse within societies that were formed and shaped by utopian ideologies themselves. A post-communist Russia, for example, is still crowded with minds shaped by totalitarian ideologies and mindsets. A post-Christian Europe is still under the sway of institutions and ideologies that were moulded by an evangelistic religion.
What should those who swim in the mindstreams of TDE do about these “utopians in their midst?” Nothing at all. Take note of the phenomenon, then continue doing what you had been doing. Take it as an opportunity to once again contrast ideologies with philosophies, and consider again why you might choose one over the other.
The Dark Enlightenment is not a thing. It is a diverse set of philosophical ideas and propositions that enrich the discourse of political philosophy, and have the potential to liberate university trained psychological neotenates and academic lobotomates from the many acts of indoctrination committed by university faculty and staff, government personnel and politicians, and by mainstream media and other cultural institutions.
Escaping ideology is one of the most liberating things a mind can do. Sometimes it has to happen repeatedly before it becomes effective, as in escaping from the innermost of a life-sized set of matryoshka dolls.
Interesting quick and nutritious introduction to TDE for conservatives
http://www.thedarkenlightenment.com/the-dark-enlightenment-by-nick-land/
http://neorxn.com/resources/
http://moldbuggery.blogspot.com/
http://neoreactionarymap.blogspot.com/
Paths to the Human Dieoff from the original Al Fin blog
Remember: If you understand how the dieoff might come about, you will better understand the ultimate aims of the Cathedral and many other modern utopian ideologues.
Walter Kaufman’s Critique of Philosophy and Religion — a broad and deep look at the underpinnings of both religion and philosophy.Ron Paul won another Republican straw poll this weekend, in Illinois this time.
It’s starting to become routine for Mr. Paul, points out The State Column, an online source of state political news:
“Paul has consistently demonstrated his ability to rally his supporters to straw polls throughout the nation. Paul took second place in the Ames Straw Poll in August, finishing just 1 percentage point behind Minnesota Congresswoman Michele Bachmann. Paul won a Values Voter Summit straw poll in October and a California Republican Party straw poll in September. On Saturday, October 22, Paul garnered 53 percent of the votes to win an Ohio GOP poll. Last weekend, Paul won an Iowa straw poll at the National Federation of Republican Assemblies in Des Moines, Iowa with 82 percent of the votes.”
In Illinois Saturday, Paul won 52 percent of the vote – more than neck-and-neck front-runners Mitt Romney and Herman Cain.
How does Paul do it – winning state after state in these kinds of contests – while generally being relegated to second-tier or “also ran” status by most pundits and pollsters?
Pundits have a hard time categorizing Paul, the Texas congressman who’s as much (maybe more) libertarian as he is Republican.
As was pointed out in this space last month, try to imagine a Republican presidential candidate these days who would not support a constitutional ban on abortion, who would cut defense spending by nearly a billion dollars, or who would end all US aid to Israel. Hard, isn’t it?
Paul has said he will not run for reelection to his congressional seat next year, raising questions about the possibility of running for president as an independent or third-party candidate.
On “Fox News Sunday,” he ruled that out. But confirming his status as something of a GOP outlier, he also said he wouldn’t necessarily support the Republican presidential candidate once the primaries and caucuses are over.
“If they believe in expanding the wars, if they don’t believe in looking at the Federal Reserve, if they don’t believe in real cuts, if they don’t believe in deregulation and a better tax system, it would defy everything I believe in,” he told Chris Wallace. “And so therefore I would be reluctant to jump on board and tell all of the supporters that have given me trust and money … ‘All we have done is for naught and let’s support anybody at all … even if they disagree with everything we do.’ ”
But back to all those straw polls that Paul keeps winning or at least doing well in.
They’re typically not scientific, and they can’t be compared with nationwide polls.
In the most recent ABC News/Washington Post, Rasmussen Reports, and Quinnipiac polls, Paul remains in single digits behind Herman Cain, Mitt Romney, Newt Gingrich, and Rick Perry among those likely to vote in the Republican primaries or caucuses. And like Michele Bachmann, he’s dropped several percentage points since October, according to the latest ABC News/Washington Post poll.
But Paul continues to do well in the straw polls because of the way they’re designed and because it’s easier for his enthusiastic and very loyal supporters to take part.
At the Values Voter Summit last month, young Paul supporters showed up by the busload to vote for him in that straw poll. The result? He won 37 percent of the vote, much more than Herman Cain (23 percent).
In Illinois over the weekend, Paul’s 52 percent win over his GOP rivals comes with interesting caveats.
Voters in the straw poll (who had to contribute $5 to the Illinois Republican Party for the privilege) could participate either in person or online.
Paul won 66.5 percent of the votes cast over the Internet but just 8 percent of those cast in person (the way actual elections happen), suggesting a heavy online turnout by his supporters. Mr. Romney, on the other hand, took 35 percent of the in-person vote, and Cain won 29 percent of that vote.
Paul supporters continue to claim media bias against their man.
“If the advocates of Ron Paul often seem like they're paranoid about the way he's overlooked in the mainstream media, there's good reason for it,” columnist Paul Mulshine writes in the Star Ledger in New Jersey.
As evidence, he points to a Sunday New York Times Magazine piece by political analyst Nate Silver headlined “What Are the Chances for Republicans?” Silver’s piece virtually ignores Ron Paul.
“The candidate who has been running third in many polls is conspicuously absent from the article,” writes Mr. Mulshine, who also notes that in the Real Clear Politics polling average only Romney |
one in 16 women cited the reason sexual difficulties. Natsal-3 data show that sexual function problems are common, and that among individuals in a sexual relationship for the past year, one in five men and women report an imbalance in level of sex interest between partners, and one in six says that their partner has sexual difficulties [30]. This suggests that sexual difficulties may exist while not always being viewed as a primary reason for partnership breakdown. Our estimates of the prevalence of reporting this reason are lower than in Natsal-2 (men 9% and women 12%, respectively), and considerably lower than in the Dutch national survey (41% and 44%) [9], and a recent US study (27% and 22%) [29]. This may be due to measurement differences as participants in the Dutch survey tended to report more reasons (averages of 6.6 vs. 1.8 reasons in Natsal-3), while the US study used the same questionnaire as the Dutch and was conducted in a non-representative sample. The greatest gender difference was found in the proportion citing domestic violence as a reason for the breakdown of their relationship and, in this respect, our research is consistent with those of others in that women are more likely than men to give this as reason [8, 9, 11, 19, 20]. Given our estimate of one in six women reporting domestic violence as a reason for the breakdown is likely to grossly underestimate the role of domestic violence in relationship dissolution, then these data support calls for a greater emphasis on tackling violent partnerships in public health policy and interventions.
Implications for policy and practice Accepting that data of these kind can only ever be what people report, then the predominance of reported reasons concerned with communication and a deterioration of the relationship quality suggest that there is a place for promoting better communication and conflict resolution skills in relationship counselling and education [29, 31], including in the context of young people’s sex and relationship education. This recommendation tallies with other data from Natsal-3 which showed that young people desire more information on communication within relationships, and not just the physical aspects of sex [32].
Unanswered questions and future research There is a need for qualitative research and longitudinal studies to assess how partnership characteristics and life course events preceding break-up correspond to the reasons reported [9, 20]. Future studies might attempt, where possible, to interview both partners to explore more fully initiation of the break-up, the attribution and weighting of cited reasons. The case can be made for distinguishing between the different types of cohabitations, and also addressing new topics, such as disagreement on the use of social media within the partnership [33].You’re Going to Get Sick of Winning!
The number of Americans drawing unemployment benefits dropped to its lowest level in 28 years in April.
Not since 1988 have unemployment claims been so low.
The Washington Examiner reported:
The end of April saw the fewer workers getting unemployment benefits than anytime in the last 28 years, the Department of Labor reported Thursday in a sign of the labor market’s increasing health.
Just 1.9 million people received unemployment insurance benefits at the end of the month, the fewest since 1988. Benefits are available for up to 26 weeks in most states.
Even more engouraging: Averaging over the past four weeks, total unemployment benefit claims are running at the lowest rate since 1974, despite the workforce being 75 percent bigger.
Thursday’s report also showed new jobless claims dropping to 236,000 in the first week of May, an extremely low level.August's Lowdown
Bill Watterson is Mark Twain--with a drawing pen. He is a master cartoonist, but also a sharp-witted observer of the absurd, with an impish sense of humor. From 1985-1995, Watterson penned "Calvin and Hobbes," the truly marvelous comic strip that featured six-year-old Calvin and his stuffed tiger Hobbes. In Calvin's inventive and iconoclastic mind, Hobbes was a genuine tiger (and his best friend) and they shared boundless adventures that challenged conventional thinking and defied authority, often crashing right through the prescribed social order of the'real' world.
A recurring theme in the strip was a two-player baseball competition in which both the kid and the tiger simply made up the rules as they went. In one strip, Calvin has hit the ball thrown by Hobbes, and he's scampering toward home plate:
Calvin: Ha Ha! A home run!
Hobbes: You didn't touch all the bases!
Calvin: I did, too.
Hobbes: No, you didn't. You didn't touch seventh base.
Calvin: Yes, I did! I touched the water barrel right after the front porch.
Hobbes: That's not seventh base. That's twelfth base!
Calvin: I thought the garage door was twelfth.
Hobbes: The garage door is twenty-third base. You touched them all out of order, and you didn't touch the secret base.
Calvin: The secret base?? What's the secret base?!
Hobbes: I can't tell you. It's a secret.
That exchange between a six-year-old and a stuffed tiger pretty well sums up the nonsensical political gamesmanship being played out today by the five-man lineup of corporatists on the Supreme Court: Chief Justice John Roberts and Justices Samuel Alito, Anthony Kennedy, Antonin Scalia, and Clarence Thomas. They are on an unrestrained ideological tear, making up their own rules to score big points for corporate power. Reasoning? Try twenty-third base! Precedent? Throw it out! History? Rewrite it! The Constitution? Slide by it! Judicial restraint? Only for liberals! Logic? That's a secret! The rule of law? The law is us!
Only, this isn't a game. Barely six years into Roberts' tenure, he and his narrow majority have thoroughly politicized the Court. The one branch of our national government that was intentionally designed by the Founders to set the rule of law above politics has been turned into another political front group to advance corporate rule. The Constitution granted life tenure to the justices specifically so they could feel free to stand up to wealthy wrongdoers--particularly those avaricious business schemers who wanted to endanger the people's rule by establishing, as Jefferson put it, "the aristocracy of our moneyed corporations."
Hiding under robes
"Leveling the playing field can sound like a good thing. But in a democracy, campaigning for office is not a game."
--Chief Justice John Roberts, fumbling a sports metaphor in a June ruling that does, indeed, tilt the political field to assure that corporate-backed players win the crucial money game.
In case after case, the five hard-core Republicans of the Roberts Court have been chopping furiously at the hard-earned legal rights of workers, consumers, voters, and others who dare to challenge the power of big business elites to reign over us, both politically and economically. There has been way too little public attention focused on (much less a sustained political challenge to) what has become a spectacular abuse of government power. A survey last year by the Pew Center found that nearly three-fourths of Americans have no idea who John Roberts is. Eight percent named Thurgood Marshall as the chief justice (and I certainly wish he was, even though he's been dead for 18 years).
It's not that the public is stupid, but that the Court deliberately hides itself. No C-SPAN or other television cameras are allowed, even in the relatively few times the justices convene in public session. The bulk of the justices' official policy-making work takes place behind closed doors. They practically never have press conferences or give interviews, and some have even refused to let the media cover their 'public' speeches.
Curiously, mass media outlets show little journalistic curiosity about the doings of this tiny but enormously powerful third branch of our national government. If Obama so much as sneezes, newscasters and pundits are all over it, and hordes of reporters and analysts constantly poke into the back rooms and dark corridors of Congress. Yet, nine black-robed mandarins--with the power to overturn the decisions of the two elected branches, as well as decisions by state governments and even of the voting public-- sit in splendid obscurity in an imposing, white marble bunker, periodically tossing out rulings that essentially make law.
When the mass media do cover the Court (usually only when a new justice is named or a major edict is handed down), the reporting is superficial, even lazy. Two months ago, for example, the New York Times ran an "analysis" of decisions in the 2010-2011 term, concluding that the hallmark of the Roberts Court is "defending free speech." Never mind that it is corporate speech that they have radically enhanced, to the detriment of your voice and mine. But the Times didn't probe.
It's time for you and me to probe, because the Roberts-Alito-Kennedy-Scalia-Thomas cabal is openly aligning itself with the all-out political push by such far-right billionaires as the Koch brothers to impose a corporate plutocracy over America (see February 2010 and June 2011 Lowdowns). "Come on, Hightower," you might say, "such learned jurists wouldn't be engaged in such extremism." Oh? Remember Bush v. Gore in December 2000? In that case, five justices abruptly shoved their way into totally unprecedented, overtly partisan territory to dictate who would be America's president. With no need to do so, they imperiously interrupted a recount of the people's vote in Florida, usurped jurisdiction from state courts, invented a legal theory out of thin air, and arbitrarily seated corporate-favorite George W in the White House.
This was so far beyond the bounds of the Court's role, such an arrogant act of magisterial extremism, that none of the usurpers were willing to claim the decision as their own. None put their name on the opinion. Also, in an extraordinary confession, the opinion itself concedes its legal shoddiness by saying that it's a one-of-a-kind decision that should not be cited as a precedent for any other case. Tellingly, it hasn't been.
Eleven years later, three of those five Bush v. Gore judicial extremists--Kennedy, Scalia, and Thomas--are still on the bench, forming a solid core of today's corporate cabal.
Also, while it's not widely known, Roberts himself was a key member of Bush's election-stealing team in Florida. A protege of Republican attack dog Kenneth Starr, Roberts was a corporate lawyer in Washington at the time (becoming a multimillionaire by helping such clients as Big Coal defend the abominable min-ing method of mountaintop removal). He was flown to Florida to polish legal briefs and do a dress rehearsal to prepare Bush's lead lawyer for getting the Supremes to seize the election for the Republican.
In 2005, George W returned the favor by entrust- ing the top spot on the nation's highest Court to this radical corporate activist. With the addition of Alito in 2006, Corporate America had its slim ideological majority in place.
Not only did pro-corporate decisions begin to flow, but the cabal also became brazen about its alliance with the right-wing Republican network that's now pushing aggressively in Washington, state capitals, and all of America's courts to rewrite laws so an "aristocracy of our moneyed corporations" can rise above the American people's democratic rights and authority. Jeff Shesol, author of Supreme Power (a history of FDR's fight with the Court), wrote a June New York Times op-ed about this "flurry of judicial fraternization," warning that it threatens to destroy the Court's credibility as an impartial guardian of the rule of law. Here's a sampling of their fraternization:
In 2010, Scalia was a featured participant in the Koch brothers' annual political retreat, joining assorted billionaires and GOP operatives as they plotted strategy and raised money for defeating Democrats. And this January, when tea party Republicans marched triumphantly into Washington to take their seats in Congress, they were welcomed by Scalia, who presented a constitutional tutorial to the newly minted partisans.
In 2008 and 2010, Alito lent his supreme prestige to the fund-raising efforts of the right-wing, anti-Democrat mag, American Spectator. He served as chief draw and keynote speaker at the group's 2008 fund-raiser, where he regaled wealthy funders with Joe Biden jokes. In 2009, he headlined a fundraiser for the Koch-backed Intercollegiate Studies Institute (which boasts the right-wing video trickster and criminal activist James O'Keefe among its alumnae). Also, in 2010, Alito was the chief sparklie at a high-dollar event for the Koch-funded Manhattan Institute.
Thomas, too, has put his judicial imprimatur on the Koch boys' annual plutocratic political gathering. He addressed their 2008 getaway at a Palm Springs resort, apparently enjoying four days there on the tab of the Koch-funded Federalist Society. He also is closely tied to the Heritage Foundation, which is richly financed by the Kochs. In 2009, he was the featured draw at a fundraiser for the group, which often takes part in Supreme Court cases--and which employed Thomas' wife, Ginny, from 2003-2007, paying her $686,000 that the justice "inadvertently omitted" from his financial disclosure filings. In addition, Thomas is corruptly entangled with Dallas real estate billionaire and right-wing political funder Harlan Crow. Even though Crow's financial and political interests are directly affected by the high court's rulings, Thomas has been injudiciously accepting a steady flow of gifts from the tycoon, including: a $175,000 donation from Crow to a Georgia library project dedicated to Thomas; a $2.8 million gift for an historic preservation project being developed under Thomas' supervision near his childhood home; and a $500,000 donation to Thomas' wife, Ginny, last year so she could start a tea party lobbying and political group (which, by the way, takes an aggressive partisan stance on legal questions that will soon come up for Justice Thomas' consideration, including Obama's health care law).
Good grief! Is there no code of ethics outlawing such rank conflicts of interest for federal judges? Yes. But, conveniently, Supreme Court justices have been exempted from the code.
Soiling clean elections
The Lowdown has periodically exposed the Court's slaphappy extremism and its make-up-the-rules activism as found in such now-infamous cases as Citizens United (see Sept. 2009, March 2010, and Feb. 2011 issues). In that 2010 ruling, using contorted language that even Orwell could not have dreamed up, the five actually re-wrote the laws of nature, decreeing that lifeless corporate entities are "persons" with a constitutional right to "speak" in every American election. These necromancers then invented a "voice" for corporate-speak: money. They ruled that top executives of these inanimate for-profit constructs are entitled to spend unlimited sums of corporate cash (money that belongs to shareholders, not to them) to run secretly funded campaigns for or against anyone they choose.
Interestingly, none in this bloc of five has ever run for office, much less won. So they have no real- life experience with the way big money suffocates democracy, both in politics and in the close confines of government decision-making. Worse, all of them express an uncommonly deep contempt for a truly democratic process, in which the people would reign over corporations, allowing grassroots human endeavor and ideas to trump the blunt force of money.
They really should talk to their shrinks about this psychosis. But, meanwhile, they keep working out their contempt on us, not only by jacking up the clout of corporate players, but also by slapping down grassroots efforts to give people power a path around the ever-rising money barrier:
2006. Roberts, Alito, Kennedy, Scalia, and Thomas vote to overturn limits that the people of Vermont placed on campaign contributions.
2007. The same five throw out Wisconsin's effort to keep corporations from swamping their elections with last-minute ad blitzes.
2008. The same five strike down the "millionaire's amendment," a part of the McCain-Feingold election finance reform passed by Congress in 2002; this provision had allowed candidates who were confronted by self-financed millionaire opponents to raise more money than otherwise allowed in order to level the playing field.
June 27, 2011. The same five kill the "matching funds" provision of Arizona's Citizens Clean Elections Act--a provision that was key to making the state's extremely popular and successful public financing system work.
The Arizona ruling was a stinging slap in the face to the conscientious citizens of that state. Arizonans have labored diligently to free their politics from the corruption of big money, while also opening the possibility of holding office to those who don't have piles of money or don't want to be beholden to those who do. Nauseated in the 1990s by an epidemic of gubernatorial and legislative scandals, the people themselves launched a grassroots initiative to get the democracy-destroying corrosion of special-interest political contributions out of their elections. In 1998, Arizona voters emphatically said, "yes."
Their Clean Elections Act established a voluntary public financing system that gave office-seekers of all parties and all economic classes an alternative, no-strings-attached way to finance their campaigns. By agreeing not to take any special interest contributions, these candidates received a fixed sum of public money--enough for them to be competitive under normal campaign conditions and have their voices heard. However, abnormal happens. So, if clean-running contenders found their voices being drowned out by a flood of special interest cash flowing to a rival, the "matching funds" provision allowed them to get a limited level of extra money from the public fund to help counter the free-spending opponent's unfair advantage.
It is this matching mechanism that the mammon-worshipping Supremes went after. Why? Because it works. Former Governor Janet Napolitano, for example, says she could not have even considered running for Arizona's top office without the availability of this funding alternative, but with it she won two terms. A majority of all parties' candidates use the Clean law, and it is enormously popular with the public.
But the corporate powers hate, hate, hate it, for it diminishes their political control. Having failed again and again to repeal it at the state level, they turned to the vipers nest of Koch-funded, right-wing policy fronts to find a way for the federal courts to inter- vene and do their dirty work. With support from the American Legislative Exchange Council (see Feb. 2011 Lowdown) and the Institute for Justice, this clique developed a perversely-novel theory of law, framed it into a lawsuit, and had the Republican leader of the state house, John McComish, sign on as plaintiff.
The Roberts quintet happily swallowed the perverse legal theory fed to them in the case, known as Arizona Free Enterprise Club v. Bennett. Turning both common sense and the Constitution topsy-turvy, the Court found--get this--that Arizona's matching provision gives cash-poor candidates an unfair advantage over those flush with money. Huh?
Well, explained the five, money speaks in politics, and the speech of the rich is inhibited if they know that their money-raising can result in "counterspeech" from opponents. Corporatespeak, good; counterspeak, bad. In a twisted and overwrought opinion for the majority, Alito wrote that public matching funds impose an "unprecedented penalty on any candidate who robustly exercises [the First Amendment right to buy an election]." Okay, I edited-in that last bit, but that's precisely what the Court's majority (and the Koch brothers) are actually saying. Not only are they freeing big money to shout as loud as it wants in our elections, but the Court has now allowed the money interests to quash the political speech of others. The good news is that Roberts & Company only nixed the matching provision, not the Clean Election Act itself. At least not yet. As Roberts wrote: "We do not today call into question the wisdom of public financing."
Stop them before they rule again
These guys are a clear and present danger to our democratic rights, not only in election cases, but also in a rising flood of upside-down economic rulings--including their shameful June decision involving Walmart's discrimination against women employees and their ridiculous ruling in April allowing AT&T to defraud customers. Both of these court opinions eviscerate the people's right to hold corporations accountable by filing class-action lawsuits. The Roberts Five are not objective and reasoned judges. They are crass political operatives disguised in robes of authority, deliberately contorting the law to transfer huge chunks of the people's power to corporate suites.
Roberts. Alito. Kennedy. Scalia. Thomas.
Memorize these names, for they are thieves. Put their names and deeds into every political discussion. Spread their infamy. Distribute wanted posters! Make bumper stickers. Send emails and letters-to-the-editor. Chastise Republicans for coddling them, Democrats for doing nothing, and tea partiers for giving these ultimate Big Government authoritarians a pass. Go to the "Do Something" box on page two and hook up with groups that are taking action. It's up to us.Plummeting values of recyclables and rising costs to process them could threaten recycling programs and ultimately send more waste to the landfill — in Linn County and elsewhere.
Declining oil prices have made it more costly to haul recycled materials and cheaper to produce brand-new plastic. Foreign demand for recycling commodities, particularly China, has dried up. Recycling vendors are struggling to sell the products, making it more expensive to find a second life for plastic bottles, newspapers and tin cans.
“It’s all about the recycling markets,” said Joe Horaney, a spokesman for the solid waste agency. “Oil prices are so low, there’s no demand for recycled plastics. It’s cheaper to make new.
“The paper market is down. Scrap metal prices are one-sixth of what they were a year ago. There’s just not the demand for material.”
See also: Recycling in Eastern Iowa: Questions and answers
The downturn is being felt around the country, and in Linn County a new two-year recycling contract between Cedar Rapids/Linn County Solid Waste Agency — which serves the communities in Linn County — and Republic Services Inc., a national recycling processor, is expected to be finalized next month. The contract is anticipated to increase the tipping fee 88 percent for recycling, up from $34.50 to $65 per ton, effective July 1.
Republic, which bought out the area’s old recycler, City Carton, last year, sorts the recycling and finds end buyers, and that has become more challenging. The company was contacted but didn’t comment for the article.
Residents in larger communities such as Cedar Rapids may barely notice the difference. The 41,000 curbside recycling customers should see a 39 cent or 9 percent increase, up from $4.29 per month, to $4.68 per month.
The question is what happens with the next contract, said Mark Jones, an agency board member and the Cedar Rapids solid waste manager.
“At what point does a community decide, ‘This is getting to be too expensive to continue,’” Jones said. “I have no answer to that.”
The cost increase in Cedar Rapids is defrayed over its many residents. In smaller communities, such as Walker, which has about 800 residents, the impact could be greater, a city official said.
“I can guarantee you, our citizens are not going to want to see their bills go up from $15 to $25, $30 or $35 a month,” Connie Helms, Walker’s treasurer and clerk told members of the agency board last week. “They will just say, ‘Quit recycling, and we will be throwing it in the garbage.’”
The tipping fee for solid waste at the landfill is $38 per ton.
Less lucrative
Marion officials have yet to identify new rates for residents. Projects in the works may mitigate the size of the increase, but there will be some increase, said Ryan Miller, Marion’s public service director.
The Des Moines Metro Waste Authority, which primarily serves Polk County, saw its recycling tipping fee increase from about $40 to $46 and lost about two-thirds of the rebate from resale of recyclables, said Leslie Irlbeck. program and outreach manager for the authority.
The authority gets back about $12,000 per month, down from about $36,000.
“Recycling is just as important as it always has been, but it just isn’t as lucrative as it once was,” Irlbeck explained. “What consumers are realizing is, in the end, it is a waste. They purchased it, and when they are done using, there is a cost associated with maintenance and removal of that material.”
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Until this new contract in Linn County, the solid waste agency has subsidized the $34.50 per recycling ton from garbage revenue, said Karmin McShane, executive director of the solid waste agency. The agency plans to continue to set aside about $400,000 a year to subsidize $34.50 per recycling ton for communities also dumping solid waste — if the community signs an affidavit saying the curbside recycling program will continue, McShane said.
Those that don’t also use the landfill would bear the full brunt of the $65 per ton recycling tipping fee.
The agency can’t afford to subsidize the whole amount, though, she said. The new contract is an opportunity to show people disposing waste, whether solid waste or recycling has a cost, she said.
“The price was been hidden for a long time, but recycling isn’t free and I don’t think many people realize that,” McShane said. “There’s a cost to recycling.”
However, McShane said the sticker shock of an 88 percent increase to $65 a ton for recycling is misleading.
In fiscal 2015, the agency received 177,252 tons of landfill material compared to 12,284 tons of recycled material. It averages about 7.23 pounds of recycling per house per week, or about 376 pounds a year, she said.
Recycling is extremely light, she said. Plastic bottles are getting thinner and thinner, which is another factor in the decreasing value of recycled plastic because more is needed to make plastic reusable, she said.
While the bulk cost looks high, the true cost of recycling is fairly minimal, she said.
“It’s reported in tons, but impact to the household is in pounds,” she said. The cost is about $3.25 per pound of recycling.
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The waste agency has seen a 4 percent decrease in tons of recycled materials from 2011 to 2015. The Dubuque Telegraph Herald reported a 19 percent decline in that time frame.
McShane challenged the notion people are recycling less, saying the material is getting lighter and certain heavier products are being consumed less, such as newspapers.
McShane agreed the recycling industry is changing and communities will face important questions, such as what materials to recycle. However, she expects the recycling commodity to bounce back — at least for certain materials — and that recycling programs will survive. It remains as important as ever that they do, she said.
“I think what people recycle and how they buy materials will change,” McShane said. “People will be able to base their decision of what does and doesn’t get recycled based on costs and what has value.”Stand up and take notice of NASA astronaut Peggy Whitson.
Not only is Whitson the first woman to command the International Space Station twice, she's the oldest woman to fly to space for NASA, and we think she might be the record holder for most records set in space (though we don't know that for sure).
On Monday morning, Whitson beat out every single one of NASA's male astronauts to become the overall record holder for the most cumulative time spent in space for any space agency astronaut in history.
"It is one of those rides that you hope never ends," Whitson said in a tweet posted the day before she broke the record. "I am so grateful for all those who helped me on each of my missions!"
It is one of those rides that you hope never ends. I am so grateful for all those who helped me on each of my missions! #LifeInSpace pic.twitter.com/msjKSg6WWH — Peggy Whitson (@AstroPeggy) April 23, 2017
Whitson broke the record at 1:27 a.m. ET when she accumulated 534 days, 2 hours, and 49 minutes of spaceflight time, according to NASA, officially beating out Jeff Williams' record of 534 days, 2 hours, and 48 minutes.
Whitson will receive a congratulatory call from President Donald Trump on Monday. You can watch the call live via NASA at 10 a.m. ET in the window below.
Whitson will extend her record further. She isn't expected to come back to Earth until September, meaning that by the time her feet touch solid ground again, she'll have spent more than 650 days in space over the course of her lifetime.
This spaceflight marks Whitson's third long-duration stint on the Space Station. Her first was in 2002, only two years after the station started continuously hosting rotating crews of astronauts and cosmonauts, and her second trip took place in 2008.
Breaking records long-held by men is nothing new for Whitson.
She became the first woman to head up NASA's astronaut office in 2009, and she became the first female commander of the Space Station during her 2008 trip to orbit.A group of anti-Trudeau protesters and anti-racism counter-demonstrators clashed in Toronto on Saturday.
According to organizers, the anti-Trudeau protest was planned as a means of expressing displeasure with the Liberal government’s tax policies, spending and controversial multi-million dollar settlement with former Guantanamo Bay inmate Omar Khadr.
Held at Nathan Phillips Square, the protest was met by counter-demonstrators who accused the former group of using an anti-Trudeau stance as a veneer for far-right and racist views.
Police separated the two sides and oversaw the tense standoff. Behind them, protestors held signs expressing both anti-Islam and pro-free speech views while many counter-demonstrators held signs urging tolerance and love.
At least one woman was injured during the dueling demonstrations and an officer was assaulted. According to police, four people were arrested for disturbing the peace.
“There’s many people, many Canadians that oppose Justin Trudeau and what he’s doing right now, and I wanted give people an opportunity to come together, voice their opinion, meet other like-minded Canadians,” Ronny Cameron, who helped organized the ‘Let Trudeau Know He Has To Go!’ rally, told CP24.
“And, unfortunately, Antifa shows up and tries to make it seem like we’re a bunch of racists -- and we’re obviously not.”
Cameron, a self-described “political activist and social commentator,” uses his social media accounts to espouse anti-Islam and other far-right opinions.
Sarah Khan, a counter-demonstrator and a member of the group, “SAFE: Solidarity Against Fascism Everywhere,” said that right-wing activists like Cameron are using concerns about the federal Liberals to mask their true intentions.
“Over the last year, there’s been a serious rise of far-right hate groups and white supremacist organizations showing up, not just across our city, but specifically convening at Nathan Philips Square,” Khan told CP24 from the scene.
Khan linked their increased visibility with the election of U.S. President Donald Trump.
“I know today they’re out here with a message that they say is anti-Trudeau,” Khan added, “but these are the same folks and the same groups we’ve seen over and over again since the beginning of the year.”
With files from CP24The Duke Controller For Xbox One
xbox duke The Xbox inventor is thinking to bring back The Duke Controller for Xbox one. Let’s see why the developers think that “The Duke” controller could become part of Xbox One. For that, you need to know about The Duke controller.
THE DUKE Controller
The Xbox controller was introduced at the Game Developers Conference in 2000, and it was the main controller for Microsoft’s Xbox console. It was called as “Duke” because it was huge and was difficult for small hands to use it. It was the first controller but after some time it got phased out and was replaced by a smaller version by Microsoft named: controller S. After that the Duke was not seen in the market. The Controller ‘S’ was the typical controller in Japan, but when its demand increased the developers decided to release it in other territories.
Read also: Resident Evil 7 Teaser Beginning Hour Available Now On Xbox One
Xbox
Xbox was released in November 2001 by Microsoft. It became very popular soon after its release. Microsoft sold more than 24 million units that year. According to the Microsoft’s Chief Xbox officer stated in 2001, it was frequently sold out after its launch. During a week more than 100,000 units were delivered. That is why it was not available during all the vacations. It became the biggest game controller according to Guinness World Records in 2008. It would be interesting if Microsoft agrees to release the Duke for Xbox One.
Seamus Blackley’s Effort
Seamus Blackley is an American video game designer and the co-inventor of Xbox. He surprised the Xbox community by giving them a clue that there might be a possibility that Duke would make its comeback for Xbox One Release. Seamus consulted his fans on twitter asking them that would they like the idea if Microsoft made an official Xbox One compatible Duke.
As promised, I am doing actual work to see if we can release a new Duke. Please stay tuned! RT if psyched! pic.twitter.com/BhkKEk7IUQ — Seamus Blackley (@SeamusBlackley) December 6, 2016
The Duke makes everyone's hands appear tiny. I just set mine down and seismometers in Japan picked it up, triggering earthquake warnings. https://t.co/fDDLd4CKQf — Seamus Blackley (@SeamusBlackley) December 7, 2016
If the response of people would be optimistic then he might persuade the boss of Xbox Phil Spencer to introduce an Xbox One compatible Duke controller because he is no longer a member of Microsoft. Still, there is no update about, whether this controller will come to market or not.
Comments
commentsSUNRISE, Fla. - A 110-year-old lobster will not be served as dinner at a Sunrise restaurant any time soon.
Instead, the 15-pound crustacean named Larry will be shipped off to Maine State Aquarium thanks to the efforts of an animal rescue group and several South Florida businesses.
The male lobster was originally caught and brought to Tin Fish, where the restaurant’s owner, Joe Melluso, planned on serving it up as someone's dinner if no one came forward to purchase it by Thursday.
That's when John Merritt from iRescue stepped forward.
"When there was a group that wanted to save him, I was disappointed in myself for not having that feeling myself," Melluso said.
Merritt told Local 10 News that several South Florida businesses chipped in to cover all the expenses of shipping the lobster to Maine, including Estren and Associates, La Playa Real Estate, Nu World Title and Royal Auto Brokers.
A woman from Maryland, Vicki Brewer, also chipped in for the lobsters expenses.
Amir Rossi, who owns Royal Auto Brokers, said it cost $300 to buy the lobster from Melluso.
"I asked him if he would like to contribute to saving a lobster. He was on the other end of the phone, and he didn't know whether to laugh or think that I'm crazy or what," Rossi said. "We decided to go ahead and rescue it. We put together a team of people."
The team did their part to help Larry prepare for his journey, including gathering all of the necessary supplies.
"I ran down to the beach, soaked a beach towel in salt water, had to package it, put it in my freezer for the night -- all things that I never knew when you are trying to transport a live lobster," Brooke Estren said.
So Larry was laid out on a bed of ice and wrapped in the towel before he was sent off to Maine, and for those who made the last-ditch efforts to save him, they are feeling quite proud.
"He's been around a long time," Estren said. "Hopefully, he'll keep growing and he'll enjoy his new home."
"It's something different that I'm proud of that we did," Rossi said. "How many people can actually say that they saved a lobster?"
Once Larry arrives at the Maine State Aquarium officials there will decide whether they should release him out into the wild or if he should be a part of their exhibit, where they currently have a 17-pound lobster already on display.
Magaly Madrid, who advocated for Larry with her group everydayHumane, said she is happy that the community came together to help the lobster.
"I find there are a lot of caring people out there," she said. "It means people have big hearts."
Copyright 2016 by WPLG Local10.com - All rights reserved.Scott Smith will forever be known for the Hail Mary he landed while clutching at his liver against Pete Sell back in 2006. The knockout wasn’t a "miracle" in the theological sense, but it was improbable, and it did redirect fate before we even knew whose fate was being decided.
The sequence lasted all of a few seconds.
Smith getting caught with a short left to the body…Smith doubled over, rapidly retreating towards some safe haven that didn’t exist while Sell’s nostrils flare to the smell of blood in the water…Smith glancing up, still holding his side with his left hand, as Sell closes in for the finish…Smith planting and erasing the onrushing Sell with his right hand.
The whole thing felt like a cinematic put on. Real life fights just don’t end like that.
Yet it wasn’t fiction that night at the Hard Rock Hotel. It happened at The Ultimate Fighter 4 Finale -- the "Comeback" season -- and Smith, as if on cue, showcased one of the fight game’s most ridiculous comebacks. People were lining up outside to get their picture taken with the man who snatched victory from the jaws of defeat. Mark DellaGrotte, who was one of Smith’s coaches, had to pull Smith aside afterwards to emphasize the gravity of the moment.
"He said, ‘you need to |
project, Cargill can work directly with farmers to help influence how soy is produced. Over the past decade, the Responsible Soy project successfully has promoted responsible soy production in the Santarém area in Brazil, where Cargill has a soy terminal. The success of collaboration is evident from the reduction in illegal deforestation in the farms participating in the project since 2006, reaching near zero deforestation in most farms.
We know that we will not create a sustainable planet unless we engage the private sector in new conservation solutions. In tackling deforestation, progress has been made in the past five years. Numerous commodity traders and consumer companies have announced zero deforestation policies. The traceability of commodities, notably palm oil, has improved and spread. Investors are taking increasingly active roles in encouraging companies to change. Banks are looking more carefully at their investment portfolios.
We can make progress on palm oil in Indonesia, just as we are making progress on soy production in Brazil, collaborating effectively with big private sector players, to constructive ends.VeraSun Energy, the second-largest producer of corn-based ethanol in the United States has run out of money and filed for bankruptcy protection.
The South Dakota-based company said in a court filing on Monday that it wouldn't be able to make this week's payroll without help and also needs money to buy corn, natural gas, and pay its leases and other expenses.
Verasun lost $63m to $103m when attempting to hedge risks in the corn market, Bloomberg reports. This summer, VeraSun had agreed to purchase corn at a fixed price of $6.75 to $7 a bushel when Midwest flooding sent grain prices sky-rocketing.
But the flood damage wasn't as bad as anticipated, and combined with worldwide economic slowdown, corn futures settled back down to $4 a bushel.
The credit crisis also found VeraSun unable to secure funding needed to pay the interest on its debt.
"Today's filing allows VeraSun to address its short-term liquidity constraints as we navigate historically challenging market conditions while we focus on restructuring to address the company's long-term future," company CEO Don Endres said in a statement Friday.
In its SEC filing, VeraSun claims $3.45bn in assets and $1.91bn in debt.
Ethanol investments gained much of its legitimacy when the uber-nerd himself, Bill Gates bought a $84m stake in Pacific Ethanol in 2006. But the former Microsoft chief later started selling off the shares, taking a big financial hit to get the hell out of Dodge. ®Coming Soon
Seis Manos (Working Title)
Three orphaned martial arts warriors join forces with a DEA agent and a Mexican Federale to avenge the death of their beloved mentor.
Spectros
A teenage boy and his friends get caught in a clash between Brazilian witchcraft and Japanese Shinto spirits in their neighborhood.
Wu Assassins
The last in a line of Chosen Ones, a wannabe chef teams up with a homicide detective to unravel an ancient mystery and take down supernatural assassins.
The I-Land
In this sci-fi adventure series, ten people wake up on a treacherous island with no memory and soon discover this world is not as it seems.
Typewriter
When a family moves into a suburban Goa house believed to be haunted, a group of young friends dares to investigate.
Tuca & Bertie
Two bird women -- a carefree toucan and an anxious songbird -- live in the same apartment building and share their lives in this animated comedy.
ReMastered: The Lion's Share
A journalist seeking the author of "The Lion Sleeps Tonight" discovers the story of Solomon Linda and finds his family living in the slums of Soweto.
Nate Bargatze: The Tennessee Kid
Comedian Nate Bargatze takes aim at the absurdity of everyday life in an approachable and deadpan stand-up set shot in Duluth, Georgia.Well put.Everything has to be analyzed in context.Was the loss because of you? Could you have prevented it? Answers to questions like these are always "it depends" and make numerical analysis of player skill pretty difficult.With the intent of a balanced match being a 50/50 outcome, there's no telling what impact someone playing a different character that they don't know will have on the match, or the impact of two people teaming up and working together.I don't know how much Blizzard factors in but there's a gazillion variables: who you've teamed with, or your opponents or teammates have teamed with (positive or negative group synergy could have a bigger impact than individual skill), class selection and their relative performance with that class, the impact a given map and attack and defense has on those, etc.If you're swapping classes to try to fill in gaps in the team, more often than not (at least in my experience) the rest of your team is doing something pretty dumb and rolling a bad comp. Your chances of winning still probably aren't that good.That competitive seems so heavily based on win or loss and expectations therein is one of my complaints. I don't think it adequately accounts for all these variables, just because your team lost, should you really lose rank? Unless it's changed in S2, you'll still lose rank, just not as much. I don't think that's right. I also don't think a gain in rank should be guaranteed for a win, but either way, that's how it's been.Chistophe Champenois allegedly put Bastien, three, in machine on spin and then wash cycles while he and his partner ignored screams, court in Melun told
A couple have gone on trial in France accused of murdering their three-year-old son by putting him in the washing machine and switching it on.
The case has shocked France and raised questions about child protection policies, as the family was known to social services. Three reports of a child in danger and nine of worrying information had been filed before the alleged murder.
Christophe Champenois, 37, who is charged with murder, told the court he had no memory of putting his son, Bastien, into the top-loading washing machine on 25 November 2011.
The court heard he placed the child in the machine and switched on the spin cycle. Champenois is said to have then put on a wash cycle that lasted between 30 minutes and an hour.
The boy died from the impact of the spin cycle, rather than from drowning, the trial in Melun was told. Bastien screamed for five to 10 minutes while his father looked on the internet and the boy’s mother, Charlene Cotte, 29 – who is charged with aiding and abetting the murder – did a jigsaw puzzle with their five-year-old daughter, it is alleged.
“At the moment I don’t remember anything,” Champenois told the court, after giving various explanations of what happened during the investigation.
Just after Bastien’s death, he called the emergency services from the family’s small flat in Germigny-l’Eveque, east of Paris, and said he had a small problem as his son had fallen down the stairs. Champenois said he had given him a bath and the toddler must have drowned because he had water coming out of his nostrils. But the couple’s daughter told the emergency services: “Daddy put Bastien in the machine.”
Cotte told investigators she was doing a puzzle with her daughter and Champenois was on the internet while their son screamed inside the spinning machine. She said that when Champenois removed Bastien from the washing machine and noticed he was no longer breathing, he said: “At least he won’t bother us any more.”
She accepted that she had seen him put the child in the washing machine and turn it on. In court, Cotte denied aiding or abetting and said she had tried to intervene, but was pushed back by her partner and fell on the floor. It is alleged that they wanted to punish the boy for his supposed bad behaviour at school.
The night before Bastien’s death, Champenois left a phone message for his social worker, which said of his son: “I’m going to throw him from the second floor, even if I get 15 years in prison.” The social worker was away on sick leave and did not get the message until he returned to work.
Isabelle Steyer, a child protection lawyer, said: “This is not an isolated act... it is not a fit of rage or madness, it is the final act of violence against a child who was always mistreated.” She said Bastien had “fallen through all the cracks”.Yet another thing to hang on Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump: lackluster sales at Wendy's.
Yet another thing to hang on Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump: lackluster sales at Wendy's.
"There is a lot of uncertainty in the consumer mind as we work through the election," said Wendy's CEO Todd Penegor, citing the charged presidential race between Clinton and Trump as one drag on the fast-food industry this year.
The election has cast a malaise on consumers, Penegor said, and the effect on the company was exacerbated in its second quarter by limited-time offers such as the mozzarella bacon burger that fell flat, the ongoing fallout of a recent data breach at franchise locations, and falling food prices at grocery stores.
Together, these forces have depressed sales: Wendy's posted a 0.4 percent increase in same-store sales, just a fraction of the growth in previous quarters.
The lower costs of groceries, especially eggs, beef and milk, have eaten away at fast food's top selling point � it's cheap. Eating at home is cheaper than dining out by the widest margin since 2010, according to the federal Bureau of Labor Statistics.
"It has gotten a lot cheaper to go and get fresh beef at your local butcher and go home and grill it," Penegor told analysts on an earnings call.
Analysts polled by FactSet forecast a 2.4 percent increase in same-store sales, an important industry measure. Wendy's did attract more customer traffic in its restaurants and posted a bigger profit than expected, but analysts warn that the worst is not over for the fast-food set.
"While Wendy's does not say this," Mark Kalinowski, an analyst for Nomura, wrote in a research note, "we believe that July was the worst month for U.S. quick-service burger-sector same-store sales so far this year. This may not bode well for the rest of 2016."
Later this year, Wendy's will lap its October 2015 rollout of the hit 4-for-$4 value meal, which will be hard to beat, Kalinowski said. Penegor acknowledged on the call that same-store sales for the rest of 2016 might be flat.
Although many chains have struggled to maintain sales growth this year � earlier this week, Steak 'n Shake posted negative same-store sales results for the first time in more than seven years � some signs point to a better second half of the year.
Continued job and wage growth, coupled with low gasoline prices, should induce consumers to dine out, said Stephen Anderson, an analyst with Maxim Group, in a recent research note on the restaurant industry.
"Barring any dramatic shift," Anderson said, "in the meantime, we anticipate modest improvement in restaurant spending in the next six to 12 months."
Although lower beef prices might have kept some burger eaters at home, they also have helped Wendy's bottom line. Lower commodity costs offset much of the inflation the company has seen in wages, according to Gunther Plosch, the company's chief financial officer.
Wendy's narrowed its profit forecast for all of 2016, bumping its range of expected earnings per share to 39 to 40 cents from 38 to 40 cents.
Wendy's shares fell 2.75 percent Wednesday, closing at $9.91.
jmalone@dispatch.com
@j_d_maloneYou need not be a media historian to notice that we live in a golden age of press harassment, domestic propaganda and coercive efforts to control political debate. The Trump White House repeatedly seeks to discredit the press, threatens to strip broadcasters of their licenses and calls for the firing of journalists and football players for speaking their minds. A foreign government tries to hack our elections, and journalists and public speakers are regularly attacked by vicious, online troll armies whose aim is to silence opponents.
In this age of “new” censorship and blunt manipulation of political speech, where is the First Amendment? Americans like to think of it as the great protector of the press and of public debate. Yet it seems to have become a bit player, confined to a narrow and often irrelevant role. It is time to ask: Is the First Amendment obsolete? If so, what can be done?
These questions arise because the jurisprudence of the First Amendment was written for a different set of problems in a very different world. The First Amendment was ignored for much of American history, coming to life only in the 1920s thanks to the courage of judges like Learned Hand, Louis Brandeis and Oliver Wendell Holmes. Courts and civil libertarians used the amendment to protect speakers from government prosecution and censorship as it was practiced in the 20th century, such as the arrest of pamphleteers and the seizure of anarchist newspapers by the Post Office.
But in the 21st century, censorship works differently, as the writer and academic Zeynep Tufekci has illustrated. The complete suppression of dissenting speech isn’t feasible in our “cheap speech” era. Instead, the world’s most sophisticated censors, including Russia and China, have spent a decade pioneering tools and techniques that are better suited to the internet age. Unfortunately, those new censorship tools have become unwelcome imports in the United States, with catastrophic results for our democracy.Image Credit: Warner Bros. Entertainment Henry Cavill, 27, best known for playing Charles Brandon on Showtime’s The Tudors, has been cast as Clark Kent/Superman in the new Superman movie to be directed by Zack Snyder, Warner Bros. announced today. “In the pantheon of superheroes, Superman is the most recognized and revered character of all time, and I am honored to be a part of his return to the big screen,” Snyder says in the release. “I also join Warner Bros., Legendary and the producers in saying how excited we are about the casting of Henry. He is the perfect choice to don the cape and S shield.” The film is expected to hit theaters in December 2012. David S. Goyer is writing the script, based on a story by Goyer and Christopher Nolan, director of The Dark Knight and Inception, who is among the movie’s producers.
Cavill was at the top of EW’s list of contenders last October. The British actor had been in the running for 2006’s Superman Returns, which ultimately starred Brandon Routh.
Henry Cavill shares his five favorite filming locations with EW in 2008
Henry Cavill proves he’ll look good in Clark Kent’s suits
More on the road to Superman’s casting:
The new Superman to be 28 to 32, maybe from TV, probably not Jon Hamm
The Superman movie has a director, writer, and producer. But who should be the star?
‘Superman’ director Zack Snyder on the Man of Steel: ‘He’s the king of superheroes.’
Brandon Routh as Superman again? Why not?
The new Superman: Vote for your favorite!Baghdad, Iraq (CNN) -- The Iraqi government Friday demanded the withdrawal of an Iranian "armed group" that it says seized an oil well in southern Iraq on Thursday night.
Iran is denying any takeover took place.
The Iraqi government issued a strong statement deploring the act after Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki headed an emergency meeting of Iraq's National Security Council to discuss the situation.
"The council stressed that such incidents would be considered a violation of the border and violated Iraq's sovereignty and its territories and calls upon Iran to pull out the group from well No. 4 and take down the Iranian flag from the tower of the well immediately," Iraqi government spokesman Ali al-Dabbagh said in the statement.
Senior Iraqi government sources initially referred to the Iranians as "security forces," but the official Iraqi government statement later called them an "armed group."
Drilled in 1979, the well is in Iraq's Maysan province, east of Amara, near the Iranian border. It is within the province's Fakka oil field, the Iraqi government said.
Al-Dabbagh said in the statement that the Iraqi government had summoned the Iranian ambassador in Baghdad, Hassan Kazemi Qomi, to inform him officially about the incident and asked him to provide a note to Iran's Foreign Affairs Ministry "to address such a violation."
The statement said the Iraqi government called upon Iran "to resolve all border problems through diplomatic dialogue and avoid the use of military force in order to preserve our common security and bilateral relations between the two countries."
An official at the Iranian Embassy in Baghdad had said earlier that Iraqi authorities had not yet contacted them.
Iraq and Iran share a long border, and high-ranking committees from both countries handle all border matters, an Iranian Embassy official said.
Iraq and Iran fought a bloody eight-year war that ended in 1988 in a cease-fire with no clear victor and parts of the border under dispute.
But political, economic, cultural and religious ties between Iran, a predominantly Shiite Muslim nation, and Iraq, a majority Shiite Muslim nation, greatly improved after the overthrow of the Saddam Hussein regime in 2003. At the same time, there has been widespread concern among Iraqi and U.S. officials that Iran has been providing Iraqi insurgents with material for roadside bombs during the Iraq war.
The report of the oil well incident comes several days after the Oil Ministry's two-day auction of oil fields. Aimed at increasing Iraqi oil production, deals were struck for seven of the 15 fields offered. There also had been oil bidding in June.
CNN's Mohammed Tawfeeq and Yousif Bassil contributed to this report.Midfielder James Aish has informed the Brisbane Lions that he wants to be traded.
Midfielder James Aish has informed the Brisbane Lions that he wants to be traded.
Talent Acquisition and Retention Manager Peter Schwab met today with Aish’s manager Liam Pickering, who said the 19-year-old wanted a trade to Collingwood.
Brisbane Lions CEO Greg Swann said the Club remained committed to keeping Aish, and he would not be traded.
“We understand his position but the Club has no intention of trading James,” said Swann. “That’s all we have to say on it right now.”
Midfielder Aish, the No.7 pick from the 2013 NAB AFL National Draft, has played 32 senior games in his first two seasons.
Last week, Brisbane Lions Football Director Leigh Matthews said: “James Aish will either be playing at the Lions or he'll be going into the draft, he won't be traded, that I can guarantee you."Trump was referring to data from the U.K. Office for National Statistics released Thursday. The report said British police have recorded 13 percent more crimes in 2017 than in 2016. The British agency said the increase “reflects a range of factors,” including an increase in incidents, more victims reporting crimes and changes in the way crimes are categorized and counted.
The report did cite recent terrorist incidents in Britain but did not explicitly mention Islam.
British Member of Parliament Nicholas Soames retweeted Trump with a message that the U.S. president should “fix gun control” at home.
Another Labour Party lawmaker asked Trump to mind his own business and said Trump does not understand what the statistics show.
Trump has regularly cited “radical Islamic terror” as a principal threat to the United States, and as a candidate he mocked President Barack Obama, Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton and others for refusing to use that term.
Military leaders, including some now working for Trump, have said the term wrongly impugns Islam and needlessly alienates Muslims whose help the United States seeks in tracking and fighting terrorists.
Karla Adam in London contributed to this story.
Anne Gearan is a White House correspondent for The Washington Post, with a focus on foreign policy and national security. She covered the Hillary Clinton campaign and the State Department for The Post before joining the White House beat. She joined the paper in 2012.
Post RecommendsPROUD Hayden Cross has made history by becoming the first British man to give birth.
The 21-year-old, said of daughter Trinity-Leigh: “She’s my angel.”
12 Hayden Cross pictured with his little baby today
News Group Newspapers Ltd 12 Hayden Cross has become the first British man to give birth
Hayden, born Paige, gave birth by caesarean.
He put his transition on hold to fall pregnant by a sperm donor.
Cradling his daughter the beaming parent said: “She’s perfect in every way.”
And he told The Sun: “She is so good. I’m so lucky.”
Following the birth Hayden now plans to return to complete his gender realignment as soon as possible.
The proud father was born a girl, Paige, 21 years ago.
News Group Newspapers Ltd 12 Hayden's scan of daughter from November last year
He has been living legally as a man for more than three years and taking male hormones, giving him facial hair and a deep voice.
The cost of gender reassignment is £29,000 per patient, including support and surgery.
But Hayden was also desperate to have a baby.
Before completing his transition he asked the NHS to freeze his eggs in a £4,000 process in the hope he might have children years later.
But health chiefs refused.
When The Sun on Sunday exclusively revealed his pregnancy in January, Hayden, from Gloucester, said: “I faced the prospect of not becoming the man I’m supposed to be, physically, or a dad.
“So I didn’t feel like I had any choice but to have a baby now then get back to transitioning.
News Group Newspapers Ltd 12 Hayden grew up as Paige before starting transition
News Group Newspapers Ltd 12 Hayden's maternity card with his sex as male
“In September I got pregnant by a sperm donation.
“I found the donor on the internet.
“I looked on Facebook for a group and found one — it’s been shut down now. I didn’t have to pay.
“The man came to my house, he passed me the sperm in a pot and I did it via a syringe.”
Hayden Cross has no contact with the child’s biological dad and does not know his name.
He said at the time: “I found I was pregnant two weeks after the sperm was inserted.
“It was mixed emotions.
“I was happy but I also knew it would be backtracking on my transition.
“It’s like I have given myself one thing, but taken away something else.
“It’s a very female thing to carry a baby and it goes against everything I feel in my body.
"I was finally starting to become myself and become a man physically — but now my body is going in the opposite direction.”
News Group Newspapers Ltd 12 Hayden fell pregnant via an anonymous sperm donor he found on Facebook
News Group Newspapers Ltd 12 Hayden gave birth to daughter Trinity-Leigh via caesarean
News Group Newspapers Ltd 12 The 21-year-old parent called his daughter'my angel'
Hayden’s mum also gave birth to a boy last month.
Hayden, who used to work for Asda and in a clothes shop, aims to find a job once the baby is aged one.
The Man United fan told us in January: “I want the baby to have the best of everything. I will be the greatest dad.”
He insisted: “I will go back to Asda or something.
“I will work anywhere.
“I’ll put the baby in childcare so I can provide for it.
“I want to save lots of money so I can send the baby to private school.
“I don’t mind what the kid does when older.
“As long as they are happy and respectful, I don’t care.
“I just want to make sure that they have the best opportunities in life.
“I will be proud no matter what.”
News Group Newspapers Ltd 12 Hayden now plans to return to complete his gender realignment as soon as possible
News Group Newspapers Ltd 12 The Sun on Sunday exclusively reported on Hayden's pregnancy back in January
But he ruled out breastfeeding, saying: “I hate my boobs.
“I want to have the child and get back to full transitioning.”
Hayden later told Lorraine Kelly on her ITV show: “I’ve had some good reactions and bad ones.
“I’ve had death threats, people threatening to beat me up.
“But a lot of people don’t really understand the situation.
“I want them to be more aware.”
American Thomas Beatie, now 43, said he suffered after becoming the world’s first man to give birth in 2008.
Born female, he was able to conceive as he had retained his womb after a partial sex change.
He now has three children — Susan, eight, Austin, seven and Jensen, six.
Thomas, of Phoenix, Arizona, said he was called a “freak” and received death threats.
ITV 12 Hayden speaking to Lorraine Kelly about the death threats he has received since going public with his news
ITV 12 He has been living legally as a man for more than three years
His 26-year relationship with first wife Nancy was a casualty of his fame in 2012.
Thomas said: “Before I became pregnant I was a millionaire but I plunged into a financial crisis.
“Being labelled the world’s first pregnant man left me unemployable and barely able to afford to eat.
“My family were disgusted by me.
“Hayden must prepare for all that and more as he is much younger than I was and doesn’t have a partner to support him.
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“My advice would be to grow a very thick skin.”
In January The Sun arranged for Thomas to speak to Hayden.
The American warned: “We weren’t prepared for the abuse.
“They threatened to kill me and my unborn baby.”
Thomas married teacher Amber, 46, last year.
He added: “I wish people could be less bigoted and more accepting of men like Hayden and me.
“But I guarantee no abuse will matter to Hayden when he holds his baby in his arms.”Ed Dorn and the politics of the New American Poetry
By Andras Gyorgy
9 October 2013
Edward Dorn, Collected Poems, eds. Jennifer Dunbar Dorn, Justin Katko, Reitha Pattison and Kyle Waugh, Carcanet paperback, 995 pp.
In an increasingly insolvent age with publishing in deep crisis, it seems something of a miracle that Britain’s Carcanet Press has brought out in an almost 1,000-page, well-annotated volume, the Collected Poems of an American poet of Allen Ginsberg’s post-war “generation of war”—Edward Dorn, who died in December 1999.
Jennifer Dunbar Dorn, the poet’s wife for decades, leading a team wonderfully attuned to the twist and turns of his career, makes sense through attached essays and appendices of a difficult and brilliant man whose work followed in an almost patriarchal transmission from a teacher of an equally fiery temperament, fellow American poet Charles Olson (1910-1970). These are figures who deserve to be better known and read than they are today.
Ed and Jennifer Dunbar Dorn at gallery opening, Pearl Street Mall, Boulder
Born in small-town Illinois in 1929, six months before the Wall Street Crash and the Great Depression (he was “born under a dark star,” observed poet Robert Duncan), Dorn settled with his poverty-stricken family in Washington State, which became the setting for By the Sound (1969), his autobiographical novel. In the documentary-style novel, originally published as Rites of Passage (1965), Dorn describes the grinding poverty that brought out in his work a rare compassion for the poor and dispossessed for whom he gave voice to the end of his life, with the exception perhaps of a period of ironic detachment fueled by drugs characteristic of his and other writing of the late 1960s.
From 1933 to 1941, Black Mountain College was located at the YMCA Blue Ridge Assembly.
After working as a lumberjack and day laborer, Dorn somehow wound up with Olson as his teacher at North Carolina’s experimental Black Mountain College (founded in 1933 and at which John Dewey’s theories of education played an important role) in its last days, in the early 1950s. Clearly, “downtown New York in North Carolina,” as painter Franz Kline called the school, was doomed when composer John Cage, architect Buckminister Fuller, artists Ben Shahn, Josef and Anni Albers and Robert Motherwell and dancer-choreographer Merce Cunningham, not nearly exhausting the faculty notable for artistic innovation if not common sense, thought Olson as provost would save the progressive college!
Charles Olson
An apprentice poet walking past the first geodesic dome, exposed to musical works performed by chance, action painting and modernist dance, on the way to Professor Olson’s class on anthropology…all that may seem appealing now, but it took place in North Carolina near a hostile town at a time (April 1953) when President Dwight Eisenhower issued Directive 10450 removing from federal government service every “security risk,” all those who had been soft on communism, drug addicts and homosexuals, even members of nudist colonies. (Dorn may have had an aversion to presidents, as he later referred to Ronald Reagan as one of the “greatest hirelings of the dark powers the world has ever known.”)
When Ed Dorn burst into prominence among the interlinked circles of poets in Donald Allen’s seminal New American Poets (1960) anthology, he was far from the bohemian colonies of his associates. His brilliant “What I See in the Maximus Poems,” dated 1959-1960, follows his teacher Olson’s aversion to the “lyrical interferences of the ego” and the latter’s advocacy of immediate experience in which “eyes are in all heads to be looked out of.”
Showing what he has learned from his classes with Olson, Dorn tells us nothing in that work either about himself or the Maximus Poems, for that matter. Rather, we follow the sounds and sights of Santa Fe, New Mexico, where he was on the job as poet and laborer, its weather, people and geography, content seeking form in the essay and the beginning of a lifelong obsession with the West as Olson had with Gloucester, Massachusetts, and its geography, the people, land and history.
Dorn’s first works in prose and words burnt with anger and anguish for the trapped miners who starved to death in Hazard, Kentucky, in 1963, the desperate poor on the breadlines of Los Alamos in 1960, the talk of gandy dancers (rail workers) at the edge of the Western Plains, so liberating to read when the very reactionary literary criticism of the 1950s thought Allen Tate’s odious and parochial “Ode to the Confederate Dead” a masterpiece. There is a relationship to land and people in Dorn’s lifelong obsession with the West so distinct from Tate’s affiliations with an imagined plantation culture of the Old South.
Dorn went from poverty to professorship, campus to campus (Idaho State, Northeastern Illinois, University of Kansas, Kent State, etc.), eventually to guide (or occasionally misdirect) generations of youngsters from a teaching post at the University of Colorado where he spent his last days (1977 to 1999).
Dorn in 1987
Unfortunately for him, Dorn attracted an impressive following over the years, many of postmodern tastes from the time his long poem Gunslinger (1968-1975), later Slinger, unfolded in a serial publishing format in five huge volumes that roughly correspond to his years teaching in Britain and conclude, or rather close shop unfinished, when the poem was published in 1975 to rave reviews.
The eminent poet-critic-academic, Donald Davie, had sought to create a department to shake things up at the University of Essex, and so in 1965, Ed Dorn, itinerant laborer, became professor. Soon enough, by all accounts, Sussex “swung like a pendulum do,” in the hopeful language of those days.
As his friend and associate, the British poet Jeremy Prynne, puts the dominant view of Gunslinger in his “Afterword” to the Collected Poems, “the entire American adventure is laid out there with great wit and humour.” That’s the majority view. Slinger, to be sure, is a hippie masterpiece, but to this reviewer’s ears as dated as the era, with its cast of characters who come on the “stage” coach on which a troubled and indistinct “I” lifted from space and time explains that he really doesn’t know what is going on, dies unexpectedly, only to come back to life when drip-fed five gallons of LSD.
Along the way we follow this displaced “I” of postmodernism or his alter ego Slinger as one or the other, or neither, ride a “Stoned Horse,” who is also called Heidegger (Hi Digger) and Levi Strauss, searching for the elusive Howard Hughes in Las Vegas.
Dorn, apparently tired of the poem, forgot all about its original conceits to retreat into a very self-centered solipsistic lyricism about failed love and the groundlessness of existence. The cast of characters, Kool Everything, Tonto Pronto, Taco Desoxin and Dr. Flamboyant, disappear. As Abraham Lincoln might have said diplomatically, this is the kind of book for people who like this kind of book, which the eminent critic Marjorie Perloff thought the paradigmatic text of postmodernist poetry.
The earlier Dorn had such an ear for common speech, the equal of William Carlos Williams and more. Now, he sounds phony, putting on the style: “you don’t want none of your sacred/quatrapeds packin no Honky Bi-peds to/ the top of no sierras for a look at whets/ left of their more prominent hysterias!” For comparison, here is how Dorn sounded in a poem published in 1960, “Los Mineros”: “Now it is the winter and the fallen snow/ has made its stand on the mountains, making dunes/of white on the hills, and the cold cover/has got us to look for fuel.”
He is now in the relatively good years mounted on a postmodernist talking horse who, asked how far it is from Mesilla to Vegas, replies, “Across/two states/of mind.” Nothing is real and nothing to get hung up about. No wonder Gunslinger is that mythologizer Stephen King’s favorite poem and title of the first novel of The Dark Tower series.
Then, to the surprise of many, Dorn utterly changed his poetry from the ground up, again the historical content of the epoch seeking new forms in art to express itself, as it does in life, in contradictory ways. Responding very differently, radicals from many confused political streams of the 1960s poured out of graduate schools and surrounding coffee houses abuzz with the newspeak of postmodernism, and rose over the next decades to pre-eminent positions over disintegrating English departments.
There were many who were startled and made unhappy by Dorn’s political poems after his return to the US, especially in his second long poem, Languedoc Variorum: A Defense of Heresy and Heretics, written starting in 1990 to the end of his days in 1999 specifically in opposition to the imperialistic looting presented as “liberation” from Kosovo onward. Indeed, Dorn lost a lot of fans when postmodernism from many diverse skeptical trends of French intellectuals gathered force over American campuses. “The political urgency of the later writing seems to overtake the poetry and, finally, to undermine it,” one prominent reviewer of an earlier collection disapprovingly commented.
With this volume, we have a wonderful opportunity to observe how Dorn’s late work of overt political engagement was in fact a return at the higher, structurally more complex level to the concerns he displayed when leading in youth, and throughout his career, the life of an itinerant laborer become itinerant professor with deep roots and sympathy for working people, so rare in today’s artistic productions. Ed Dorn was always a little different, a poet of the American working class, writing in its voice and blessedly without “Populist Front,” condescending imitation.
Dorn turned those eyes Olson said were in each head to be looked out of sharply and with great anger toward the events unfolding in time, real time, at a time when the working class, betrayed by its unions and ever more financially successful “left” allies, suffered serious defeats.
The poet Tom Clark describes Dorn, his teacher, in 1979 as Dorn woke up from his hippie-era stupor and remembered where he came from: “I learned quite a bit from travelling with him across the upper Plains in 1979 on what was supposed to be a reporting assignment. We were ‘covering’ the Wyoming energy boom for a magazine, but Ed’s coverage always went deeper, wider, longer. We crested the Wind River range in white light and came down to Moorcroft, Wyoming, where Ed drove me past the old New Moorcroft Hotel, a landmark in his great early story ‘C. B. & Q.’ We found Tiny’s restaurant, back of which the half desert still begins, just as it does in that story. In Ed’s day crews of gandy dancers hung out there between shifts. Ed was remembering his wandering working-life circa 1951, when ‘You could work endless hours but it was dangerous.’ ”
Dorn lived in a “human universe,” in which what is expressed is also physically experienced. These lines from early 1999 link Dorn’s cancer treatment with the impeachment of Bill Clinton and the US bombing of Iraq: “...as the drip is connected to the pump I see W. J. Clinton... / I see him in the Taxol pooling over my brow / move his arky hand from the arm rest / to the Iraqi button... / an experimental / missile vibrates and flames and then launches / from the carrier, and Oh Good Lord, minutes later, / as the nurse strips away the Medusan tubes of my oncology, / American dumb missile arrives with punity / in the southern suburbs of Baghdad, ruined Cradle of Civilization, / just north of the Garden of Eden... / And Lo now the Taxol infusion clears the atmosphere / where I see the Super |
proposals for Wales' first privately run station at St Mellons.
"Disruptive electrification works between Cardiff and Swansea will no longer be needed because the new fleet of trains will be doing the route in exactly the same amount of time as they would be on a fully-electrified route."Via Guy Milliere of The Gatestone Institute,
In 1990, the "Gayssot law" was passed, stipulating that "any discrimination based on ethnicity, nation, race or religion is prohibited". Since then, it has been used to criminalize any criticism of Arab and African delinquency, any question on immigration from the Muslim world, any negative analysis of Islam. Many writers have been fined and most "politically incorrect" books on those topics have disappeared from bookshops.
The French government asked the media to obey the "Gayssot law." It also asked that history textbooks be rewritten to include chapters on the crimes committed by the West against Muslims, and on the "essential contribution" of Islam to humanity. All history textbooks are "Islamically correct."
In hospitals, Muslims are increasingly asking to be treated only by Muslim doctors, and refusing to let their wives be treated by male doctors.
February 2, 2017: A "no-go zone" in the eastern suburbs of Paris. Police on patrol hear screams. They decide to check. While there, a young man insults them. They decide to arrest him. He hits them. A fight starts. He accuses a policeman of having raped him with a police baton. A police investigation quickly establishes that the young man was not raped. But it is too late; a toxic process has begun.
Without waiting for any further evidence, the French Interior Minister says that the police officers have "behaved badly." He adds that "police misconduct must be condemned". French President François Hollande goes to the hospital to give his support to the young man. The president says he has conducted himself in a "dignified and responsible manner." The next day, a demonstration against the police is cobbled together. The demonstration turns into a riot.
Riots continue for more than two weeks. They affect more than twenty cities throughout France. They spread to the heart of Paris. Dozens of cars are torched. Shops and restaurants are looted. Official buildings and police stations are attacked.
The police are ordered not to intervene. They do what they are told to do. Few arrests take place.
Police look on as a car, which was destroyed by rioters in a Paris suburb, is removed on February 13, 2017. (Image source: Ruptly video screenshot)
Calm is slowly returning, but the riots can easily start again. France is a country at the mercy of large-scale uprisings. They can explode anytime, anyplace. French leaders know it, and find refuge in cowardice.
What is happening is the result of a corrosive development initiated five decades ago. In the 1960s, after the war in Algeria, President Charles de Gaulle directed the country toward closer relations with Arab and Muslim states.
Migratory flows of "guest workers" from Algeria, Morocco and Tunisia, which had started a few years earlier, sharply increased. Immigrants were not encouraged to integrate. Everyone assumed they would return home at the end of their employment contracts. They were settled in the outskirts of big cities. The economy was dynamic, with strong job creation. It seemed there would be no problems.
Twenty years later, serious difficulties became obvious. The immigrants now numbered millions. People from sub-Saharan Africa joined those coming from Arab nations. Neighborhoods made up of just Arabs and Africans were formed. The economy had slowed down and mass unemployment settled in. But the jobless immigrants did not go back home, instead relying on social benefits. Integration still did not exist. Although many of these new arrivals had become French citizens, they often sounded resentful of France and the West. Political agitators started teaching them to detest Western civilization. Violent gangs of young Arabs and Africans began to form. Clashes with police were common. Often, when a gang member was wounded, political agitators would help to incite more violence.
The situation grew difficult to control. But nothing was done to fix it; quite the opposite.
In 1984, a movement called SOS Racisme was created by Trotskyist militants, and began to define any criticism of immigration as "racist". Major leftist parties supported SOS Racism. They seem to have thought that by accusing their political opponents of racism, they could attract the votes of "new citizens." The presence of Islamist agitators, alongside agitators in Arab and African neighborhoods, plus the emergence of anti-Western Islamic discourse, alarmed many observers. SOS Racisme immediately designated those who spoke of Islamic danger as "Islamophobic racists."
In 1990, a law drafted by a Communist lawmaker, Jean-Claude Gayssot, was passed. It stipulated that "any discrimination based on ethnicity, nation, race or religion is prohibited." Since then, this law has been used to criminalize any criticism of Arab and African delinquency, any question on immigration from the Muslim world, any negative analysis of Islam. Many writers have been fined, and most "politically incorrect" books on those topics have disappeared from bookshops.
The French government asked the media to obey the "Gayssot law." It also asked that history textbooks be rewritten to include chapters on the crimes committed by the West against Muslims, and on the "essential contribution" of Islam to humanity.
In 2002, the situation in the country became dramatic.
Arab and African neighborhoods had become "no-go zones." Radical Islam was widespread and Islamist attacks began. Dozens of cars would be torched each week. Muslim anti-Semitism was rising rapidly and led to an increase in anti-Jewish attacks. SOS Racisme and other anti-racist organizations were silent on Muslim anti-Semitism. Unwilling to be accused of "Islamophobic racism," organizations tasked with fighting against anti-Semitism were also silent.
A book, The Lost Territories of the Republic, by Georges Bensoussan (under the pen-name "Emmanuel Brenner"), was released. It depicted accurately what was going on. It spoke of the sweeping hatred for the West among young people of immigrant origin, and of the full-blown hatred of Jews among young Muslims. It said that "no-go zones" were on the edge of secession and no longer a part of French territory. The mainstream media ignored the book.
Three years later, in October 2005, riots broke out across the country. More than 9,000 cars were torched. Hundreds of stores, supermarkets and shopping centers were looted and destroyed. Dozens of police officers were seriously injured. The storm stopped when the government reached an agreement to make peace with Muslim associations. Power had changed hands.
Since then, the state scarcely maintains law and order in France.
Another book, A Submissive France, was recently published by the man who had written The Lost Territories of the Republic fifteen years before, the historian Georges Bensoussan. Now, the French Republic itself is a lost territory.
"No go zones" are no longer French territory. Radical Islam and the hatred of the West reign among Muslim populations and, more broadly, among populations of immigrant origin. Muslim anti-Semitism makes life unbearable for Jews who have not yet left France and who cannot afford to relocate to areas where Jews are not yet threatened: the 16th and 17tharrondissements, the Beverly Hills of Paris; or the city of Neuilly, a wealthy suburb of Paris.
Everywhere in France, high school teachers go to work with a Qur'an in their hands, to make sure that what they say in class does not contradict the sacred book of Islam.
All history textbooks are "Islamically correct". One-third of the French Muslims say they want to live according to Islamic sharia law and not according to the laws of France.
In hospitals, Muslims are increasingly asking to be treated by Muslim doctors only, and refusing to let their wives be treated by male doctors.
Attacks on police officers occur on a daily basis. The police have orders: they must not enter "no-go zones." They must not respond to insults and threats. They must flee if they are assaulted. Sometime, they do not have time to flee.
In October 2016, two policemen were burned alive in their car in Viry-Châtillon, south of Paris. In January 2017, three police officers fell into an ambush and were stabbed in in Bobigny, east of Paris.
Police officers did respond to the incident on February 2. When a man became violent, they did not flee. The French government could only find them guilty, accusing a police officer of raping his attacker. But the police officer was not guilty of rape; he was guilty of simply having intervened. The French government also found his colleagues guilty. They were all accused of "violence." They now will have to go to court.
The young man who destroyed the lives of these police officers is not being accused of anything. In all the "no go zones," he is now a hero. Mainstream television channels ask him for interviews. His name is Theodore, or Theo. "Justice for Theo" stickers are everywhere. Banners sporting his name are waved at demonstrations. Rioters shout his name along with the name of Allah.
A few journalists have said that he is not a hero; that "no go zones" are reservoirs of anti-Western, anti-Semitic and anti-French hatred ready to burst. But these journalists are also cautious. They know they might be prosecuted.
Georges Bensoussan, the Moroccan-born author of The Lost Territories of the Republic and of A Submissive France -- is currently on trial. A complaint was filed against him by the Collective against Islamophobia in France (CCIF). They are suing him for having said: "Today we are witnessing a different people in the French nation; they are causing the return of a number of democratic values to which we adhere," and "This visceral anti-Semitism, proven by the Fondapol Survey last year, cannot remain in silence."
Judges were immediately assigned to the case. The verdict is due March 5. If Bensoussan is not sentenced, the CCIF will be sure to appeal. Bensoussan is a man from the left. He is a member of "J Call" (European Jewish Call for Reason), a movement criticizing "Israel's occupation of the West Bank", and asking for "the creation of a viable Palestinian state". Even such positions are no longer enough to protect him. The International League against Racism and Anti-Semitism (LICRA), an organization founded in 1927 to combat anti-Semitism, supported CCIF. Organizations ostensibly fighting anti-Semitism in France instead seem to be clinging to futile fantasies of appeasing their tormentors. They never mention Muslim anti-Semitism, and have now fully joined the fight against "Islamophobic racism" against Jewish authors such as Georges Bensoussan.
Elections will be held in France, in April. The Socialist Party chose a candidate, Benoît Hamon, supported by the UOIF (Union of Islamic Organizations of France), the French branch of the Muslim Brotherhood.
The far-left and the communists will also have a candidate, Jean-Luc Mélenchon, an unconditional admirer of Lenin, Hugo Chavez and Yasser Arafat, and a resolute enemy of Israel.
Hamon and Mélenchon will likely each receive about 15% of the vote.
A third candidate from the left, Emmanuel Macron, is a former member of the French Socialist government under François Hollande. To attract the Muslim vote, Macron went to Algeria and said that French colonization was a "crime against humanity." He stated several times that French culture does not exist, and that Western culture does not exist either; but he added that Arab Muslim culture must have "its place" in France.
The conservative candidate, François Fillon, promises to fight Sunni Islam, but says he wants a "strong alliance" between France, Iran's mullahs and Hezbollah. His reputation is badly damaged by a "fake jobs" scandal. He has attacked France's Jewish community, presumably to secure the Muslim vote. He said it does not respect "all the rules of the Republic." He has said that Israel represents a threat to world peace.
Marine Le Pen, the far-right candidate of the National Front, may seem the most determined to straighten France out, but her economic program is as self-defeatingly Marxist as that of Hamon or Mélenchon. Le Pen also wants to attract the Muslim electorate. She went to Cairo a few months ago to meet the Grand Imam of al-Azhar. Like all other French political parties, her party supported the anti-Israeli positions of former U.S. President Barack Obama, as well as UN Security Council Resolution 2334, passed last year on December 23.
Le Pen will likely win the first round of the two-round election, but will almost certainly be defeated in the second round: all the other candidates will gather behind the candidate facing her, probably Macron or Fillon (if he still is in the race). Le Pen might think that in five years the situation in France will be even worse, and that then she will have a serious chance to be elected President.
A few months ago, in a recently published book, Civil War is Coming, the French columnist Ivan Rioufol wrote: "The danger is not the National Front, which is only the expression of the anger of an abandoned people. The danger is the ever-closer links between leftism and Islamism.... The danger must be stopped."Uganda has commissioned a 10MW solar power plant, the largest in East Africa, in its eastern district of Soroti. Built by Dubai’s Access Energy Group and France’s Eren RE, the $19m plant will provide clean electricity to 40,000 residents.
It is Uganda’s first grid-connected solar plant as the country looks to raise power generation capacity to 1,500MW by 2020, from the current 850MW. The power plant has the potential to increase its net output capacity by a further 20MW of solar energy. “We are ready to double generation capacity as soon as the national grid is ready,” David Corchia, Eren’s chief executive, said.
“We are really proud to have the project here in Soroti, some of us had even lost hope in expanding our businesses,” said 30-year-old Daniel Owundo, who owns a restaurant in the outskirts of Soroti, plagued by soaring costs of using a diesel-powered generator.
According to Owundo, for years, government has promised but not delivered electricity to his small township of Ongori, located some 10km from the main town. Since the connection of solar, Owundu has retired his generator and is looking forward to introducing a fast food section in his restaurant, which has previously concentrated on only local dishes.
“More people are visiting this area now, business is picking up,” Owundu said. The government of Uganda has been keen to develop alternative energy sources to diversify away from its hydropower plants, which are currently beset by unstable water levels blamed on dry spells and changing weather patterns.
With the sun shining every day in the country, analysts say solar is the way to go. “It’s an untapped potential. While there is uncertainty about fuel prices, we are assured of daily sunshine,” said Benon Mutambi, the head of the Electricity Regulatory Authority (ERA).
Demand for electricity has also been growing spurred by the increasing population. Statistics from the ERA indicate that peak demand for power is growing by 15% every year. All this is crucial in an economy that is expanding fast and aims to give half of its 34m people access to electricity by 2017.
The government has long regarded solar energy as a viable option for renewable energy generation. According to the renewable energy policy, the country has a solar electricity potential of about 200MW, 1650MW from biomass, 800MW from peat, 2200MW from hydropower stations and 400MW from geothermal energy.
Uganda recently signed a €90m ($95.5m) loan deal with the German development bank KfW and the French government finance agency AFD to build a 45MW power plant. According to the Ministry of Energy, 85% of the population does not have access to electricity and that number is rising. There is a desperate need for more energy.Before she broke up with her boyfriend, quit her job, attempted suicide, and began using drugs and alcohol, before the nightmares in which Bikram Choudhury takes her and some other women into a room and sets them on fire, the woman sitting across the table from me in a lawyer’s office in Oakland, California—I’ll call her Jane—says she had a carefree, sunny disposition. In 2004, then 21 years old, she was just another young American woman who fell under the spell of Bikram yoga, the original celebrity-favored form of “hot yoga”—a series of 26 postures and two breathing exercises performed in a precise sequence for 90 minutes in a room heated to 105 degrees. She had been working as a manicurist when she took her first class at a Bikram studio, and she’d fallen hard for it. “I loved it,” she told me. “It became part of my daily routine. It gave me energy; it was healing, it was spiritual, it was a workout, it was everything combined into one spot.” As her commitment to the yoga discipline deepened, her businessman boyfriend surprised her with a gift that deeply touched her: he wanted to pay $10,900 for her to attend one of founder Bikram Choudhury’s twice-yearly teacher trainings so that she could share with others what had been so meaningful to her. And so, in September 2010—joining some 380 other mostly female Bikramites, from 33 countries—she went to San Diego, where that fall’s training was being held at the Town and Country Resort hotel. A Bikram teacher training is many things. Obligatory for anyone who wants to teach Bikram yoga, it’s a nine-week boot camp, featuring two 90-minute classes six days a week, plus anatomy lessons, posture clinics, and meandering Choudhury soliloquies. It’s an ordeal of over-stressed bodies and poor hygiene, a place where, according to several accounts, the combination of heat and vigorous activity causes people to vomit and weep and pass out and lose bladder control in a room full of their peers. It’s a mass education, with numbing hours of rote memorization of the 45-page Bikram “dialogue” (i.e., the class script: “Your spine is bending backwards from the coccyx to the neck / Arms back, lean back, way back, fall back,” etc.), overseen by an autocratic leader (permission is required to go to the bathroom; no one may wear green, a color Choudhury hates) and intensified by deprivations of food, water, sleep, and sex (forbidden). It’s also a Bollywood film festival: most nights, though the next day’s program will begin at eight A.M., the hundreds of trainees gather in a darkened tent and stay up, often past three in the morning, watching Hindi-language films while Choudhury merrily narrates what’s playing out on-screen and name-drops which actors he knows, according to a source. How the action and comedy movies are supposed to advance one’s yoga practice or teaching efficacy is never explained, but attendance is mandatory. If you nod off mid-movie, one of the staff volunteers monitoring the room will shake you awake. A Bikram training, in other words, has some of the flavor of a 70s est event. Choudhury himself has likened it to “brainwashing.” Above all, a training is Choudhury’s biannual moment of sustained stardom, when he gets to be Andrew Dice Clay with a Bengali accent, dubbing a bosomy trainee “Miss Boobs,” by several accounts, or asking a man he deems insufficiently tough, “Boss, you got one ball or two?” And Choudhury—who at 67 still conducts classes in his signature outfit of black Speedo, jewel-encrusted Rolex, and headset mike, his chest waxed, his thinning black hair pulled into a topknot, his baby-soft skin radiating a miasma of cologne—has fully embraced his guru prerogatives. Throughout the nine weeks, during daytime classes—when he perches on a raised leather chair with cool air blowing directly on him while everyone else melts in the suffocatingly hot tent—as well as evening lectures and the Bollywood-film viewings, he surrounds himself with clusters of lithe trainees who brush his hair and massage him. “He’d walk into the room,” Jane says, “and people would literally put their hands together in prayer and get down on the floor and bow down, out of respect for him.”
Jane says she was flattered, at first, when Choudhury paid her special attention, telling her after one class, “There were hundreds of bodies in that room tonight but you were the only one that listened to me… Put your mat upfront and close to me every class.” She did as her guru asked, and initially he showered her with praise and took special care to correct her postures. “You kind of felt you were in a safe place,” Jane says. “It was such an honor to be around him.” As the weeks passed, though, she says that Choudhury’s comments took on a creepy complexion as he began weaving sexual innuendo into his patter. Jane says she was offended, but felt she was too far into training to back out, and she didn’t want to disappoint her boyfriend, who’d paid so much to send her there. As alleged in a lawsuit Jane filed in Los Angeles Superior Court this past May, under the name Jane Doe 2, Choudhury’s behavior escalated. (Bikram Choudhury declined to be interviewed for this story or to respond to questions.) One night, the guru kept Jane after class and said he wanted her to move to L.A. to work at his headquarters. “I can see something inside of you that no one else can,” he said, according to her account. “You will be greater than Mother Teresa, but you have to follow me. You have to do everything I tell you to do.” He gripped her hand and stared at her. “I am your guru,” he said. “I am your god.... Without me, you will be a piece of gold undiscovered and covered in dirt.” Another night, as Jane came out of the women’s bathroom, she says that Choudhury was waiting and suddenly hugged her. “No one has ever made me feel the way you do,” he allegedly said, pulling her toward him and kissing her. She pushed him away, saying, “This is not right!” He apologized and said it wouldn’t happen again. He really wanted her to work at headquarters. “I just need you to be around me all the time. You have a spirit of gold that I need to learn from.” Still another night, according to her lawsuit, during a Bollywood movie, Jane was sitting on an arm of Choudhury’s chair, massaging him at his behest, when he again pressed his case for her to come and work for him. “Let’s go up to my room,” he said. “We can talk about it there.” As Jane looked concerned, Choudhury hastened to add, “Don’t worry, we won’t be alone.” Trusting that he was going to tell her about a career opportunity, she went with him, but as soon as they entered his room, she realized her mistake. They were alone. “I can’t stay here,” she said. “I need to leave!” She says she started to walk out, but Choudhury began crying and begging her to “save” him: “I am all alone. I need someone to love me. I need someone to touch me with love.” His wife, Rajashree, was “mean,” he said, and “hates me.” Jane protested that she had a boyfriend, but Choudhury allegedly said, “I need to spiritually enlighten you. In order to do that, we need to become one.” She says he grabbed her pants, pulled them down, and forced her onto the bed. As Jane was crying and pleading for Choudhury to stop, he “forced his unprotected penis in her vagina,” according to her legal complaint. “Within moments it was over. The only thing Defendant Bikram Choudhury said was ‘How many times did you come?’ ” Jane says he ordered her to watch him fall asleep, and as soon as he did, she fled the room, numb and uncertain as to what to do or whom to turn to. She told me she thought about going to the police and giving them her jeans and telling them what had happened, but her roommate calmed her down and convinced her to stay at the training. “I wish I hadn’t washed them,” she says today of the jeans. “I wish I had saved them.” The next day in class, according to Jane’s account, as Choudhury’s lecture went off on a particularly sexual tangent—the yogi waxed nostalgic about how, when he first moved to the U.S., women would “rape” him, and he volunteered his preference for “pussy” without hair—Jane started crying and ran out of the tent. A male staffer followed her and said, “You can’t just leave. You won’t graduate if you don’t attend every lecture.” “Bikram is a rapist!,” she screamed. “This is all an act and a scam. All of you know what’s going on here and yet you turn a blind eye! I’m going home. You people are all sick and I’m not going to be a part of this anymore.” According to Jane’s lawsuit—one of five that women have filed against Choudhury in the past year and which include charges ranging from sexual harassment to rape—the staffer responded, “We all know how Bikram is, that’s just part of it. If you leave now, you will never be able to come back. You will be out of the Family forever. You will not graduate and all of your hard work will be for nothing.” Jane stayed at the training, and says that, when Choudhury told her to sit next to him and Rajashree at the graduation dinner, she did so, humiliated and afraid. Afterward, according to her suit, Choudhury took her aside and said, “If you come be with me, you will have everything you have ever dreamed of.” When Jane didn’t respond, he allegedly said, “If you fuck with me, I’ll fuck with you.” (In response to Jane’s and other women’s suits, the Los Angeles Police Department launched an investigation into their allegations against Choudhury. The district attorney’s office has reviewed the police reports and declined to prosecute.) The Teacher
By outward appearance, Choudhury is a ludicrous character, a flashy showboat who wears crocodile shoes and gangster fedoras; owns dozens of Rolls-Royces, Bentleys, and the like (including Howard Hughes’s Royal Daimler, with a toilet in back); lives in an 8,000-square-foot Beverly Hills mansion seemingly built entirely from gold, stone, and mirrors; and has released a maudlin album, Bikram Love, on which he sings synthy ballads with titles like “I Feel Lonely” and “People Are Beautiful.” He claims to sleep only two hours a night, and he is given to swaggering pronouncements—e.g., “I have balls like atom bombs, two of them, 100 mega-tons each. Nobody fucks with me.” Fashioning himself as a kind of suicide-prevention sexual Samaritan, he once said of his female trainees, according to a Details-magazine interview, “If they say to me, ‘Boss, you must fuck me or I will kill myself,’ then I do it. Think if I don’t! The karma!” Choudhury regularly makes outlandish, non-F.D.A./F.T.C.-approved claims for his yoga, asserting that it cures cancer, rid Janet Reno of her Parkinson’s, and saved John McEnroe’s career, among other miracle tales. (Choudhury reserves his least palatable thoughts, on women, gay people, various ethnic groups, and leadership—“He said, ‘Hitler was a genius,’ ” Jane says—for the relative privacy of his teacher trainings, according to multiple sources.) He could be easily reduced to a cartoon, except that his eccentric brand of yoga has been wildly popular. Glamorous practitioners such as George Clooney and Lady Gaga have lent luster to the brand. More than 600 studios, from Hawaii to Alabama, and Buenos Aires to Bangkok, are dedicated to Bikram yoga. Most of them operate under affiliation rather than franchise agreements, however, and the font of Choudhury’s wealth is his teacher trainings. With several hundred students each paying about $13,000 to attend the most recent training, he takes in an estimated $8 million from the two annual events. Choudhury has happily embraced the label “McYoga” to describe his empire of studios offering a standardized product. By Choudhury’s count, he has certified more than 11,000 teachers. In its militant repetitiveness, its quality of heat-purifying ritual, Bikram yoga represents an extreme of the yoga world, and the people most drawn to it are themselves often extreme in the level of zeal they bring to their yoga practice. Talk to any Bikram devotee and you’re likely to hear a story of healing, of a lame back made straight or obesity conquered or a suicide averted. “The one thing to understand about the Bikram community is it’s premised on self-transformation,” says author Benjamin Lorr, who immersed himself in the Bikram community and wrote a book about it, Hell-Bent. “It attracts lots of people who have things they need to transform.” This seems especially true of Choudhury’s inner circle: the people who work at his L.A. headquarters and live in “the yoga house,” a building owned by Choudhury; who staff his trainings and studios; who are on Choudhury’s handpicked list of teachers authorized to give advanced seminars; who place in the yoga competitions run by the U.S. Yoga Federation, which Choudhury’s wife founded; and who are invited to dine at his home or spend the night or even live there. Here, at the center of the Bikram universe, many people don’t just do Bikram yoga, they believe in it. They believe in him. Lorr, in Hell-Bent, quotes a senior teacher at the 2010 San Diego training telling the tentful of trainees that Choudhury is “a fully realized human being, a true master,” and another who said that Choudhury “will see your future and understand your past.” Choudhury encourages this attitude, regularly likening himself to Jesus Christ and Buddha. He often describes his yoga as the one true yoga, and all other yoga modalities as “shit.” Presiding over the Bikram “family” with patriarchal capriciousness, he alternates carrot and stick to keep members in line. He has allegedly banished any number of disciples over the years, because they were becoming too successful, or getting too much attention, or for choosing a mate whom he disapproved of. Francesca Asumah says she experienced Choudhury’s ideas about family firsthand. Among the litany of things Choudhury reportedly likes to express his disapproval of at trainings is inter-racial marriage. Asumah, a British woman of mixed race, says that when he did this at a teacher training in 2002 she challenged him, asking whom someone like her should marry. “He said, ‘People like you shouldn’t be born.’ The whole room went quiet.” Asumah later volunteered at Choudhury’s headquarters. Like many people who love Bikram yoga, however they might feel about its namesake, she heeded the community bromide about “separating the yoga from the man.” All she wanted was to be a yoga teacher, and HQ was the place to get the best training; she simply steered clear of Choudhury. After three years there, she fell in love with a man who did I.T. work for Choudhury, and in 2009 they married. “I’m English. We don’t do cults. It never even occurred to me we had to ask Bikram or tell him.” The next year, within hours of Choudhury finding out about the marriage, Asumah says, he threw her out of the studio and told her husband, who’d been in the Bikram community since he was 15, and whose brother and father were also in the community, that he must divorce her immediately or else lose his job and no longer be welcome in the community. “Two days later, my husband left and went to live in the yoga house.... I cannot to this day blame my husband for what he did. But it was only then that I understood that this was a cult. It was just racism, deep unadulterated racism, and a cult, where they tell you who can love you and who can’t. Honestly, my heart is broken.” (Asumah’s husband disputes her account but would not discuss the details.) Coming to America
I rene Tsu, then a 27-year-old former starlet who had once dated Frank Sinatra, remembers the day in 1976 when she first walked into Choudhury’s original Beverly Hills studio in the basement of a bank building. Maybe two dozen students were on the floor, sitting Japanese-style with foreheads on the floor and arms stretched out, hands in prayer position in the half-tortoise pose, and Choudhury was standing on a woman’s back while describing the proper posture. “He was literally surfing and gyrating and talking and moving all at the same time. I don’t remember paying anyone. I think someone told me: you can leave as much as you want.” Yoga was still a wifty California subculture, years away from entering the American mainstream, but Choudhury, just shy of 30, was becoming a darling of Hollywood. Stars such as Michael Jackson, Barbra Streisand, Herbie Hancock, Tom Smothers, Quincy Jones, Jeff Bridges, and later Kareem Abdul Jabbar and Jamie Lee Curtis were among the students drawn to this cocky showman with his charismatic mix of punishing yoga (the heated room is, according to Choudhury, meant to reproduce conditions in his native Calcutta), comic monologue, and egalitarian hazing. (Interviewed by a tabloid in 1977, four years after he had arrived in Los Angeles, he said of his student Raquel Welch, “She has a terrible body. She has cottage cheese muscles, fat legs, and a stiff body.”) Choudhury’s Forrest Gump–ian origin story, as told by Choudhury, describes a yoga prodigy, a child who was plucked from his parents’ home in Calcutta by a prominent guru named Bishnu Ghosh, proceeded to become the national yoga champion three years running, and toured India with Ghosh’s vaudevillian troupe doing yoga demonstrations. Among his students were the Beatles. Dispatched by his guru to Tokyo, then Honolulu, he claims he crossed paths with Richard Nixon, whose persistent phlebitis he cured using his “magic yoga.” He was then invited to the U.S., where, he says, Nixon personally greeted him on the runway. After he arrived in L.A. in 1973, Shirley MacLaine, who’d met him in Bombay years earlier, told him he had to start charging students a fee; Americans wouldn’t understand the donation concept. (MacLaine’s publicist didn’t respond to requests for comment.) Later, he said, he taught his yoga to American astronauts. Swaths of Choudhury’s biography are unverifiable. Lorr, in researching Hell-Bent, found both the Nixon presidential library and NASA unable to locate any record of a Choudhury connection, and he points out that the year when Choudhury claims he worked with the Beatles, 1959, pre-dates the band’s formation. Choudhury’s first real disciple in the U.S. was Tony Sanchez, who started taking classes in 1976, when he was still in high school. After his first class, Sanchez approached Choudhury to thank him, and asked what his philosophy of life was. “He said, ‘Be good to others, so others will be good to you.’ ” Choudhury was already heating his studio, but only to 85 or 90 degrees. Sanchez started coming every day, then began working the front desk part-time. “He felt that yoga was sacred,” says Sanchez, “a discipline that would actually help people not only physically but also mentally and spiritually and morally.” When Sanchez met Choudhury, Sanchez says, the yogi was attached to his strict Indian diet. As Choudhury began to make some money, he found a fellow Indian immigrant to emulate, the controversial ashram leader Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh. “There were a lot of articles about Rajneesh, his affluence and power and the way he lived his life with Rolls-Royces and Rolexes, that made Bikram feel anything was possible,” Sanchez says. Rajneesh was also known as the “sex guru,” but in those days, according to Sanchez, Choudhury was in a series of monogamous relationships and was more interested in massages than anything else. “I always thought he was asexual.... Even he said, ‘Sex for me doesn’t mean that much.’ I think what happened was, after Bikram became very famous and successful, he started taking chances, and people started looking the other way and forgave a lot of behavior. They didn’t say, ‘Bikram, you need to stop.’ He was like a kid in a candy store.” Sanchez was with him on the trip back to India when Choudhury first met Rajashree, the teenage girl who would become his wife, through an arranged marriage. “I believe he was convinced it was the right thing to do to salvage the lineage; he was marrying a yoga champion from the same school he’d studied in.” It was after Choudhury got married, in 1984, that he became more serious about his business. (Sanchez, for his part, says he found himself excommunicated in 1984 after refusing Choudhury’s order that he break up with his then girlfriend, now his wife.) “Yoga’s Bad Boy”
Before 199 |
naturally some news reporters buck the trend maintaining independence, e.g., Carlotta Gall (New York Times) and Kathy Gannon come to mind. I have documented this in numerous publications. (21) During 2001-5, this media was enthralled with the notion of “precision weaponry,” assuring the U.S public that the U.S was waging a clean, antiseptic war. A core requirement of the post-Vietnam Pentagon’s public-relations-ized warfare model has been the need to keep media corralled in order to black out news of “blood” (especially dead civilians). (22) Once the Taliban & Co. resistance began going on the offensive and war-related deaths soared, the media simply chose to omit reporting upon Afghan civilian casualties; the only exception being cases where the death toll was huge and simply could not be hidden, e.g., a fine example of that was the recent slaughter of close to 100 Afghan civilians executed by two USAF F-15E Strike Eagles. (23) Special effort was devoted to not printing any photos of innocent Afghans killed or wounded by U.S bombs or ground forces. (24) Photos like the following never appear in the U.S corporate media or in Human Rights Watch (and publications of the other humanitarian interventionists):
Slides #’s 7, 8, 9, 10 and 11
The truth is that Afghanistan is largely irrelevant to U.S designs. For U.S. officialdom,
Afghanistan is seen as an “empty space” as I have argued many times, most recently in my book. (25) The U.S. seeks to re-establish Afghanistan as an empty buffer state at minimum cost (by which I mean few soldiers’ bodies and a few dollars). Interestingly, a central component of Al Qaeda’s strategy is to bleed America to bankruptcy and to spread out U.S. forces to the greatest degree possible (26) (both captured in the phrase “imperial overstretch”). All the talk about democracy and girls’ schools is for public consumption in Euro-America. Indeed, the new so-called humanitarian interventions are merely a smokescreen to hide and sell larger geopolitical agendas. (27)
Al Qaeda is eminently succeeding in piggy-backing upon the Taliban nationalist resistance and turning the U.S-led war in Afghanistan into a major financial burden at the time when the Obama administration faces unprecedented deficits. The U.S war in Afghanistan is currently costing $ 5 billion a month, or $115, 740 a minute! (28) U.S war spending on Afghanistan promises to be a replay of Lyndon Johnson’s escalation which served to scuttle his Great Society Plans and ultimately his presidency.
A steady chorus has been maintained by the humanitarian imperialists – enamored with nation-building – who use human rights to sell war. (29) Charter members of this group include Human Rights Watch, Sarah Chayes, the Carr Center at Harvard, Samantha Powers, Code Pink, and many of the guests on National Public Radio. They dream of an idyllic end-game where jolly Afghan farmers labor in cooperatives producing the likes of pomegranates or saffron for export in an Afghan countryside dotted with girls’ schools. For such a vision to be established would require the occupation of the countryside. That would involve half a million reliable (presumably NATO) troops – the Vietnamese were far better-trained and much more numerous in 1974-75 and could not prevail. (30) In the interim, the Taliban & Co. sow sufficient violence in order to keep large areas of rural Afghanistan - estimated now at around 80% of the countryside - off-limits to reconstruction. Even U.S. officialdom is now forced to concede that Afghan civil society is in shambles,
Afghanistan is now so dangerous, administration officials said, that many aid workers cannot travel outside the capital, Kabul, to advise farmers on crops, a key part of Mr. Obama’s announcement in March that he was deploying hundreds of additional civilians to work in the country. The judiciary is so weak that Afghans increasingly turn to a shadow Taliban court system because, a senior military official said, “a lot of the rural people see the Taliban justice as at least something.” (31)
The U.S. policy of setting up Provincial Reconstruction Teams which blend military and civic activities has served to make all reconstruction appear part of counter-insurgency. Such reconstruction efforts thus became targets. You will recall that Medecins Sans Frontieres left Afghanistan in 2004 for that reason despite having been present during the 1990’s and the Taliban years. We can thank America for having blurred the boundary between military operations and pure humanitarian efforts to aid the long-suffering Afghan people.
I close with three interrelated points: the American-led war has failed; the only option is to exit as soon as possible; but, sadly, if history provides a lesson such a U.S. exit will not take place until the level of U.S casualties reaches a magnitude which spurs a level of popular opposition to the war that the Obama administration will be forced to act.
Maybe the simplest way to document the utter failure of the American-led war is simply to look at the map of Afghanistan released September 10, 2009 by the British-based International Council on Security and Development (ICOS): Substantial Taliban activity exists in 97 percent of Afghanistan. Areas with heavy Taliban presence rose from 54% in 2007 to 72% in 2008 and to 80% in 2009:
Slide # 12: Taliban Presence Map: January-September 2009
The U.S military policies of bombing Afghanistan and Pakistan have strengthened not weakened the Taliban and Al Qaeda. As the foreign occupation has worn on, simple Afghan nationalism has soared which, combined with Afghans’ practice of revenging a family or friend’s death, has fuelled the Afghan resistance. William Polk, a participant in U.S. foreign relations since the Kennedy Administration, put it spot-on,
US military intervention in Afghanistan has not only solidified the Taliban as an organization but has also created increasing public support for it. There is much evidence in Afghanistan, as there has been in every insurgency I have studied, that foreign soldiers increase rather than calm hostility. The British found that to be true even in the American Revolution (where the two sides were "cousins," shared the same religion and spoke the same language). (32)
The very presence now of foreign occupation troops in Afghanistan fuels the resistance. Many Afghans see us as they regarded the Russians, as foreign, anti-Muslim invaders. Again, Polk argues
Even in the tactical short run, I believe, trying to defeat the Taliban is not in America's interest. The harder we try, the more likely terrorism will be to increase and spread. As the history of every insurgency demonstrates, the more foreign boots there are on the ground and the harder the foreigners fight, the more hatred they engender. Substituting drone attacks for ground combat is no solution. Having been bombed from the air, I can attest that it is more infuriating than a ground attack. (33)
The obliteration of Al Qaeda camps has merely served to decentralize that organization across two large continents – Asia and Africa. Thanks to America, Al Qaeda is now a global organization, serving as a force multiplier to local radical Islamic groups. (34)
The only solution is for the U.S. to withdraw as soon as possible just as the Soviets did in early 1989. Even conservative columnist George Will agrees. (35) Certain myths have been cultivated to counter calls for immediate withdrawal.
The first myth asserts that a Taliban presence would lead to a renewed sanctuary for Al Qaeda and again the United States would be vulnerable to a 9/11-style attack. Melvin Goodman at Johns Hopkins has refuted such nonsense,
There are very few al-Qaeda forces in Afghanistan, and both the Bush and Obama administrations have been successful in using Predator strikes against the al-Qaeda leadership in Pakistan, Somalia and Yemen. In the past year, US and Pakistani intelligence have enabled the Predator and other means to eliminate a significant number of al-Qaeda leaders, restrict al-Qaeda's ability to operate and to eliminate some of its financial support. More importantly, al-Qaeda's leadership does not need a sanctuary or safe haven in Afghanistan to plan its operations. The training and preparations for the 9/11 attacks in Washington, DC, and New York City, after all, took place in US flight schools as well as in several apartments in German cities. Paul Pillar, the former deputy chief of the CIA's counterterrorist center has argued that al-Qaeda's terrorist threat is "less one of commander than of ideological lodestar, and for that role a haven is almost meaningless." (36)
A second myth involves the much-ballyhooed fantasy that with judicious carrots-and-sticks the Taliban can be split and weakened. Again, Goodman provides a cogent refutation,
Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal, who commands more than 100,000 US and international forces, has endorsed a counterinsurgency strategy that views the Taliban as a collection of armed groups with different political and economic objectives. McChrystal believes that an additional 40,000 US troops would make it easier to divide the Taliban and wean a significant number of Taliban fighters away from the insurgency. In fact, it is the international coalition that lacks clear direction, and it is Taliban forces that currently have the strategic initiative. The Taliban have demonstrated an increasingly coordinated and centralized approach in their tactics and operations over the past several years, and there is ample evidence that the Afghan population recognizes this fact and has provided greater support to the insurgency. Conversely, the US offensive in Helmand this summer, which involved nearly 20,000 troops, failed to weaken the Taliban on the southern front; the British offensive there three years ago also failed. Secretary of Defense Robert Gates' belief that a significant number of Taliban forces can be brought to our side is dead wrong, and this is the kind of wishful thinking that appears to be central to McChrystal's counterinsurgency strategy. The Taliban may not be monolithic, but they have political control of their forces. Increasing US forces will likely strengthen the Taliban and enhance Taliban recruitment efforts.
Recently, McChrystal proposed outright paying Taliban fighters to defect, a proposal which drew a sharp rebuke from Gilles Dorronsoro of the Carnegie Institute,
You cannot break an insurgency that strong with money. It’s not a mercenary force – it’s a very powerful movement. (37)
A third myth is to present the Taliban and Al Qaeda as one-and-the-same. This is false as the Taliban have a domestic agenda with no international aspirations whereas Al Qaeda and similar groups are engaged in a global jihad. Moreover, the Taliban learned in late 2001 what the wrath of the United States can accomplish and would not host Al Qaeda again, a point admitted by the few more thoughtful western commentators. (38)
A fourth myth is that the U.S. should stay-the-course and redouble efforts to train Afghan army and police units, akin to the Vietnamization the U.S Indochinese war. (39) Vietnam had a much more developed institutional capacity and a far better motivated army, but in the end little mattered. The Afghan army and police are notoriously unreliable and ineffective as recently argued by Ann Jones. (40)
The Biden approach of relying mostly upon drone strikes targeting alleged Al Qaeda targets in the border areas would further inflame the Pashtuns living in these areas. The Pashtuns and radical Islamists are helpless against the drones and hence revenge would have to be taken out elsewhere, such as in India (Mumbai), Europe (Madrid, London) or the United States. The asymmetric drone warfare would elicit a repeat of 9/11.
Conclusion:
But, in my view, none of the reasoning above will encourage the Obama-led occupation of and war in Afghanistan to end. The only thing which will, history has clearly shown us, is when the number of U.S casualties (dead and injured) reaches very high levels as occurred in Indochina after the Tet offensive of 1968, in Beirut in 1983, and in Somalia in 1993. This brings me right back to my beginning point: some bodies matter much more than others in the United States. Regardless of their bodies, when the numbers of ours mount, a U.S war ends.
APPENDIX A. U.S. attacks upon Afghanistan on October 15, 2001
October 15th : the official story
Attacks carried out by: 6-8 bombers, 92-94 Navy strike aircraft; 5 cruise missiles
Planned targets for the day: 12 targets - a training camp south of Jalalabad, the airports of Kabul and Mazar, and garrisons in Kandahar [@7] and Kabul [@2] - per map at Global Security at http://www.globalsecurity.org/military/ops/images/011016-D-6570C-002.jpg
The day was discussed [so-to-speak] at the October 16th Pentagon press briefing held by 'fightin' Victoria Clarke and General Newbold. Newbold reported,
"We did continue our operations against al Qaeda and the terrorists yesterday. We struck 12 target areas that included a terrorist camp and a training area. We struck, and continue to strike, airfields, aircraft, AAA and SAM sites. We struck the Taliban forces in a robust way that included troop and vehicle staging areas, some storage and maintenance sheds. And we hit some troop equipment storage buildings. We used over 100 strike aircraft. Most of them came off the carriers. We used six to eight long-range bombers in the mission...... As most of you know, we also introduced the AC-130 Spectre gunship yesterday. As you all also know, we won't discuss the specific targets it was used against or the bases it came from."
Newbold also mentioned that strikes on October 15th took place around Mazar, on SAM sites in Kandahar, and the use of two deadly AC-130 gunships in Kandahar. (41)
Lt. Gen. Newbold sang the craft's praises Tuesday:
"The AC-130 gunship is an excellent platform to use in this environment," he said. "It has precision weapons platforms which allow us to reduce collateral damage at the impact point. It has the ability to station itself over a target area for a long period of time. It also has a large crew of specialists able to acquire targets to a degree that a fighter aircraft cannot."
A retired Air Force colonel put it,
“The A (for Attack) C-130 gunship is low, slow, and ever so deadly. You use them when you own the sky. They carry a 25-mm Gatling Gun capable of firing 1,800 rounds per minute, as well as 40-mm and 105-mm cannons — all side-firing. Out of a crew of 13, there are five gunners on board." (42)
The Real Story in Alternative reporting:
The Center for Defense Intelligence reported that "following weekend raids in which cruise missiles and warplanes struck two dozen targets, bombs were dropped on Kabul, Kandahar, and Jalalabad in some of the heaviest daytime raids to date. They were accompanied in some areas by leaflets and humanitarian rations. AC-130 gunships were used to attack Taliban strongholds and troop concentrations on the ground. A dwindling number of strategic fixed targets has necessitated a reorientation toward mobile ground forces and other targets of opportunity."
Jane's Defense Weekly citing Northern Alliance sources reported that 5'000 - 6'000 Taliban Pakistani and Arab troops were ranged across a fontline that stretched across the Shomali plain some 40 kms. north of Kabul, from Sinjendera in the west to the Koh-i-Safi mountains in the east. (43) North of Kabul, Arab and Pakistani units occupied several key positions including the Tutakhan ridge/village [a key Arab command center], Gozar and the Old Road.
The U.S. missile and bombing attacks on October 15th hit empty training camps, killed goats in Pakistan, struck a World Food Program warehouse in northern Kabul, killed Haziza's mother and father in Kabul, hit a hospital in Kandahar, missed a camp near Agam but set two small mountain villages ablaze, and impaired the Naghlu hydro power station which supplies Kabul.
On this Monday, U.S. planes launched their heaviest daytime strikes on Kabul since the raids began eight days ago. (44) Explosions rocked the city at 6:30 AM, again at 9:20 AM, two more times at 10:00 AM and 11:30 AM, and another two bombs hit the already battered airport at 12:30. A large cloud of dust was seen north of the city, indicating some mud-brick houses had been struck. The Taliban's 16th Army Division garrison located in Khair Khana, a northern outskirt of Kabul, on the road to Bagram was bombed, killing 3 Taliban militiamen. A stray U.S. bomb hit 12-year old Haziza's house in a poor neighborhood near the Kabul airport. It killed her mother and 13 year-old brother. After burying his family members, her father decided to leave Kabul for Peshawar to save his remaining children. (45)
The Naghlu power station was hit late Monday, disabling power supply to Kabul for 48 hours. (46) Abdul Himat of the Taliban Bakhtar news agency put it well,
"Targeting electricity supply and international telephone lines is against international law. This can only hurt ordinary people - it is really contemptible."
At least three powerful explosions rocked the eastern edge of Jalalabad. Two bombs were dropped on the empty Taliban military of 1st Army Corps east of the city which had been vacated.
Table. Summary of the Day's U.S. Bombing Attacks
Kabul city Airport area and adjacent military base Attacks started at ~6:30 AM and lasted all day. Killed two members of Haziza's family Jalalabad Army No. 1 Corps base near the city's airport ~9 AM attack involved 10 explosions east of city. Army No. 1 Corps base had been vacated near Parachinar in Pakistan in the Spin Ghar mountains A stray cruise missile landed at night Hit tiny shepherd village, killing goats and sheep northern area of Kabul bombing Strikes close to UN's World Food Program warehouse on Afsotar, injuring one worker with shrapnel Nangarhar province, area 35 kms. south of Jalalabad Intense bombing and missile attacks 11 AM attack, missed Tora Bora camp and hit two small villages - Gerekhil and Morgai - setting them ablaze. Injures 6 and 1 dies on way to hospital Kandahar city Heavy strafing by AC-130s and bombing Intense evening strafing, kills 5 in a hospital and 3 in a village near army barracks in eastern district. Himat says 13 killed on Monday night Mazar-i-Sharif Airport area bombed four times Killed five Area east of Kabul Hit the Naghlu hydroelectric facility on the Kabul River Disrupted power supply to Kabul for two days. Naghlu is Afghanistan's largest power station, a 100 MW unit built in 1967 by the Soviets
Al-Jazeera's reporter in Kandahar said that an AC-130 had hit a hospital in the area of the huge Qishla Jadeeed military base in northern Kandahar, killing five people who were seeking treatment. Later, Mr. Himat said the Monday night attacks had killed 13 civilians. (47) Afghans were fleeing Kandahar to neighboring Pakistan. Abdul Wail, a shopkeeper from Kandahar told the Reuters news agency in Quetta,
"I've seen the bodies of women and children pulled out of the rubble of their homes." (48)
The Afghan Islamic Press reported that U.S. jets bombed two villages in the Agam area near Tora Bora - Gerekhil and Morgai - injuring six people of whom one died on his way to a hospital. (49) Four intense attacks hit the Mazar area before 5 AM. A bomb fell on houses in northern part of the city leaving one woman and four men dead. (50)
A $ 1 million Tomahawk cruise missile aimed at the Tora Bora camp strayed, landing on the Pakistani side of the Spin Ghar [White Mountains] hills near the border town of Parachinar. It hit shepherd's hamlets in Spin Ghar, killing sheep and goats. (51)
Many months later, a reporter described what he saw at the Taliban Army's No. 1 Corps military base outside Jalalabad :
"Outside the eastern city of Jalalabad, there is an army base, heavily bombed by the Americans. Craters 40 feet deep mark the spot where buildings once stood. Nearby, tanks are blown to pieces, or lie upside down as if some oversize child had cast them about. Strewn about the area are unexploded cluster bombs, each capable of destroying a large truck -- hazards that will linger long after the American campaign ends. Those bombs are on top of the estimated 10 million landmines left over from the civil war, which kill or wound an average of at least three people each day." (52)
On October 14/15, 2001, U.S. psyop planes dropped leaflets on Paktia and Samangan provinces. (53) The leaflet [see below] announced, "The partnership of nations is here to help." (54) Other U.S. planes - warplanes - dropped bombs upon Kabul city, Jalalabad, the villages of Gerekhil and Morgai, Kandahar city, Mazar-i-Sharif, and the Naghlu hydroelectric power station, killing 16 -21 innocent Afghan civilians on October 15th. Another such leaflet with the same text showed a U.S. soldier shaking hands with an Afghan civilian.
By mid-October, U.S. Navy and Air Force pilots had run out of pre-authorized targets and were allowed to fire at will after receiving the go-ahead from forward air-controllers. (55) Some regions of Afghanistan were henceforth designated as 'kill boxes', or 'engagement zones', patrolled day-and-night by low-flying aircraft with the charge to shoot at anything moving - memories of Vietnam's free-fire zones.. Two such kill zones were established: one near Kabul and the other near Kandahar. On the 15th, two AC-130s flying out of Oman were put into action, joined on the 17th by F-15Es flying out of Kuwait.
The U.S. attacks on October 15, 2001 killed 16-21 Afghan civilians.
Recall General Newbold, “we struck the Taliban forces in a robust way."
Footnotes:< Earlier Kibitzing · PAGE 19 OF 19 · Later Kibitzing>
Jul-19-15
morfishine : It looks like White erred with 24.Rh1 when <24.a3> holds; the point being, White holds the balance on the f-file *****
Jul-19-15
patzer2 : <wooden nickel> While 26...c5 and 26...c5+ also win, Nezhmetdinov's brilliant 26...Bg7! is strongest. Lev Polugaevsky - Rashid Gibiatovich Nezhmetdin, Sochi 28th RSFSR ch 1958
click for larger view Analysis by Deep Fritz 14 x64 @ 24 depth:
1. (-3.55): 26...Bg7 27.Ng1 Rxg3 28.Ne2 Rf3 29.Ng1 Ned3+ 30.Kc4 Nxb2+ 31.Kxb4 Bc3+ 32.Ka3 b5 33.Qd4 Bxd4 34.Nxf3 Bc3 35.b4 a5 36.Kb3 axb4 37.a3 Nc4 38.Rg2 h5 39.Nd4 Na5+ 40.Ka2 Bxd4 41.Rh1 Nc4 42.Kb3 2. (-2.22): 26...c5+ 27.dxc6 b5 28.Bd3 Nexc6+ 29.Kc3 Bg7+ 30.Kd2 Rxd3+ 31.Ke1 Rxd1+ 32.Rxd1 Bxb2 33.Rxd6 Ne5 34.Rh5 Nxa2 35.Kf2 Nb4 36.Kg2 Re8 37.Rd2 Ba1 38.Nf4 Bc3 39.Rd1 a5 40.Rg5+ Kh8 41.Nd5 Nxd5 42.exd5 3. (-2.22): 26...c6 27.dxc6 b5 28.Bd3 Nexc6+ 29.Kc3 Bg7+ 30.Kd2 Rxd3+ 31.Ke1 Rxd1+ 32.Rxd1 Bxb2 33.Rxd6 Ne5 34.Rh5 Nxa2 35.Kf2 Nb4 36.Kg2 Re8 37.Rd2 Ba1 38.Nf4 Bc3 39.Rd1 a5 40.Rg5+ Kh8 41.Nd5 Nxd5 42.exd5
Jul-19-15 tavitabara : Nice combination
Jul-19-15
PawnSac : he certainly is one of the most unpredictable players I've seen. All but the strongest GM's must have found him a real pain in the kiester to face OTB. lol
Jul-19-15
chrisowen : 26.Kd4 Bg7 or fleece 26...c5+ aim ciao now i focus again wave creaks and i camper am strike perchance go build ash i caller key angle vets cooler am pins cooker alaa show boat cockle and muscle if ive this right honour in hope cables wire bus tore clean through ive then casks aids am debrief 27.dxc6 b5 28.Bd3 Nexc6+ do bind callers am manage have goods cuffers and tile ground ash in fatten calfs and weigh caskets at bod ive spurs clefts again right creates am cascadence 29.Kc3 Bg7+ inceed ghostarm cedar kin would gangways walk then plank erm perchance decode gashhips am decadent alined gumption an gumballs etc swerve bishop gladdens again cruise a wave in blew away am cook 30.Kd2 Rxd3+ an deo meo dive at dock an dark rook as dips am good man again as ghoul at dug in dice an dook em up have now win am fed catch aint mooted point scale an doot bung free dine it low ave learn aim i 31.Ke1 Rxd1+ piece and pawn ahead at addlers 24.a4 mate in eight balance banjo in bullshine am gone at gaskets 27.Ng1 Rxg3 28.Ne2 Rf3 29.Ng1 c5+ minced in word creaks again am caller key angle in black checks aims choose win then camped vows cables at wire cackle wins craves amply angles son ar blip cuffer tile cogger pin flinch am pink cuties ave invoke wave cajole go build crock pot code 30.dxc6 Ned3+ am deo meo an dig strike at dugs out several in ja shin am good free cascadence an dips again am doot chin at door as call i wagged in free e5 in dips aim i 31.e5 Bxe5+ hood ebbers ave then define good elines again abreast in call elegy rates encircle at upon energy rung effect special case enters a phase in cog as 32.Kc4 b5+ hoe an besets again betcha grin down ive at scream alink be lane barber share bus stop binded off at in belief at ever pins beefed in up ballet etc two heads am janus warrior seem banals again banana boat over bets bangle chain as right rung carry then blinks twice bottle ive get able bunker ash aid bet 33.Kxb5 Rb8+ die good bullshine in gauge gives abreast behemoths in agog again cleanse bullrush and well bullseye arrives behoofed it edict in have then am bells peelers besetters again cruise am waves bidmodals agreement ave wind bootheels and bughouses then blues light at trapped in among brashhind ave joys 34.Ka4 Nxb2+ jab i hut judge spark i bible lesson am good jug head an bet as over i bless to bat in crick etc am ban call an bind jig to bed in booted i bet near in shave then aid dance 35...Nxd1 piece ahead big head ave band job ive chin shape i dane mind kind hail bat alcove spark bassoon b8 a key angle band bribe ive invade to blew away arm i have over aid a4 bad again old fol light monarch eg win mate in cave c5 links c6 why then slim picker patch in d3 did strike if ive this left e5 and c4 amps b5 lines b8 and a4 when i b2 in a3 aid one piece up ride an lion am i d1 over then maybe rack alive g1 gas hi haywire in f3 at chance repeat in perchance at g3 as f3 c5 and wins check and piece ahead at as i d1 in down then hatch recover one doth dupe cares so quoff i veer reignition as hive stang cob icicled rummage recline fag f4 josh fjord goth am back two win red in offer pebble beach an difficult mind jangles ave ok lint hog sprung bocker doot seed it edict in foot ave ha vehicle horse to biff rook runt lane code bastion drive on as have shirt sand chooses b8 vehement it low ave learn then roper doper so wallowed it edge in back lack bad facet cast one sell e5 winch ebbers aint runt map erm plans mind over at wand gas hi recind dote hugger g7 arrive gist inky oh to protocol permeate then rides and slides scud afar castigate a chin elevates a chin choose jig skim palm cone live task beyond my range over tickles b8 race dip in aid his seller dote rook sac fog free ja shine in cars am dote saves stay inter glide carver dog hit low ave learn small pan potent snip quip aim in no time like fang band map did free bank rove won dad d4 ramble give spark any joy angle refine barge and ate balances again back wo did dynamo arrest band gum etc meet cab have baffle stuff fluff fab blip fash am rook h1 bad an a3 good amble give sate burp slim man pop f7 in an fare cherry pick i h2 at crane in fly am f3 check aid d4 dips g7 link c5+ good and a4 bad good maybe an g1 an estimate gets piece back at d1 in ahead it's not good again ash a4 cold c5 linch c6 an d3 take act c4 amps d5 light drive take back b5 up angle b8 aids a5 and c6+ mate in two ebb one f4 ate an destiny samurai blade to rest amo i rai free cascadence give spur aim f4 old in aim dank and dusty srung coil.
Jul-19-15
patzer2 : In going through the comments of other posters in 18 pages of kibitzing, some of the contributions I found most interesting and instructive were: <Penguincw> June 19, 2015 post (page 17) of a Chess Network video analysis of this game at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-DL.... <Tigranny>'s Dec 27, 2011 post (page 15) of a Kingcrusher video analysis of this game at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OIj.... <MyDogPlaysChess>'s Jan 27, 2012 post (page 15) of user <Jessica Fisher>'s excellent biographical video about Rashid Nezhmetdinov at https://www.youtube.com/user/jessic.... <RandomVisitor>'s Jan 7, 2012 post (page 16) recommending a look at <LIFE Master AJ>'s very detailed analysis at http://www.ajschess.com/lifemastera.... <ChessVIP>'s Apr 12, 2014 post of a video Lecture with GM Seirawan on this game at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9HQ....
Jul-19-15
morfishine : <patzer2> Yes, coincidentally, I went over the previous postings too, mainly to see what got <Once> so upset. A pretty sorry spectacle going back and forth over what is either 'unsound' or 'inaccurate'. Pretty pathetic, if you ask me. But I too was able to separate out value, especially for me at least, <Jessica>'s links to Nez information Nice job condensing the other useful links, particularly <kingscrusher> *****
Jul-19-15 20MovesAhead : Sssshhhh Guys, there's a genius at work here
Jul-20-15 mikrohaus : <Pawnsac: "All but the strongest GM's must have found him a real pain in the kiester to face OTB."> Polugaevsky was one of the strongest GMs, although not at his peak in 1958. If you want to see Nezhmetidinov's Immortal Game (against Tal with Black), it's in the database here. Look under 1961 Soviet Championship, when, I believe, Tal might still have been WC. The truth is he kept all the best on their toes. Lesser GMs got slaughtered or had to hope he was having a bad day. He reminds me of Nakamura today. Nobody really wants to play people like that, unless you are Em. Lasker's ghost or Karpov at his best.
Jul-20-15
CHESSTTCAMPS : Material is even in this wild middle-game position. I'm fairly certain I've seen the position, probably in Chess Life, but not nearly recently enough that I can recall a solution from memory. In any case, the themes are clear - black's queen is trapped, so black is playing for mate. One must assume black does not have gxf3e.p.+ because that would be too easy and white most likely played Rh1 on the last move. Black would love to play 24... Bxf4+(?) 25.Nxf4?? Nxc2+ winning the WQ, but white kills that idea with 25.gxf4, when black's queen is still trapped and black has given away the critical bishop. However, there is another way to open up lines for the dangerous bishop: 24... Rxf4!! and now
A) 25.gxf4 Bxf4+! 26.Nxf4 (Kd4 Qf2+ 27.Kc3 Qc5#) Nxc2+ 27.Qxc2 Qxc2 wins. B) 25.Nxf4 Nxc2+ wins
C) 25.Rxh2 (best) Rf3+ 26.Kd4 (forced) Nxc2+! (c5+ 27.dxc6e.p bxc6 allows Bd3) 27.Qxc2 Be3+! 28.Kc3 Bc1+! 29.Qd3 (Kd4 Bxb2+ 30.Qxd2 Rd3#) Bxb2+ 30.Kxb2 Nxd3+ 31.K-moves Nc5 and white's e-pawn must fall, with a 2-pawn advantage for black. Maybe there's a mate, but I can't see it from the problem position. Time for review....
Jul-20-15
CHESSTTCAMPS : I considered 26... Bg7 (as well as c5+), but didn't work it through. "How absurdly simple!" as Watson said to Holmes.
Jul-24-15 Moszkowski012273 : 12...Ng4 seems to be a better way to create advantage.
Sep-17-15
DarthStapler : I have a question about the annotation, should black's 29th move be written as Nexd3+, or just Nxd3+, because it's the only Nxd3 move that would give check?
Oct-14-15 ttran9235 : <DarthStapler> it is written like you said
Jan-04-16 xzws : What if 27.Rh7 was played?
Jan-04-16
morfishine : <xzws: What if 27.Rh7 was played?> Forget that, Nezhmetdinov was a demon...I would've played <27.Nf4> and hoped for the best *****
May-29-16 The Kings Domain : Nezhmetdinov is one of the finest attacking players of the game. His patient, confident counter against Polugayevsky's exercise in positional masochism is impressive.
Feb-26-17 bkpov : 27. a4??, although much damage had already taken place the fighting way was Rh7 followed by Qh1+ and capturing the rook. Game was lost for white even then but not this insulting
May-20-18
ChessHigherCat : Really beautiful mating net.
Dec-14-18 Open Defence : Im not sure if 20.Bxe5 was discussed.
click for larger view and now after 20...Nxe5 21. Kf2 Qh2+ 22. Ke3
click for larger view Perhaps they should settle for a perpetual with 22... Qh3 23. Kf2 Qh2+ Play can continue 23.Kd2 Bxd5 24. exd5 Nxd3
click for larger view when the attack has petered out but Black is probably better after 25.Kxd3 but there is no immediate forcing combination that I can see e.g. 25...Qg2 26. Rh1 Qf3+ 27.Kd2 Rae8 28.Rxh6 Qe3+ 29. Kc2 Qxe2+ 30.Qd2 Qf3 31.Re1 Qxg3 32.Rhe6
click for larger view I am not sure if the extra pawn is really enough though White may not like to be defending against the h and g pawns 25. Rh1 is interesting but perhaps not the best for White and I will post about this later
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echtig and her staff did, despite their slanted attempt to portray in their documentary the private sale of firearms as unregulated and legal.
It is also unlawful for any person other than a dealer to transport into or receive in the state where they reside any firearm purchased or otherwise obtained outside that State. (18 U.S.C. § 922(a)(3).) Violations of these laws can result in a hefty fine and a felony conviction of up to five years. (18 U.S.C. § 924(a)(1)(D).) Further, if two or more persons conspire to commit any offense, and at least one person commits an overt act in furtherance of the conspiracy, each party to the conspiracy can also face an additional fine and imprisonment for up to five years. (18 U.S.C. § 371.)
In other words, in nakedly advocating for more gun control laws in a one-sided and deceptive piece of propaganda, Ms. Soechtig and her staff likely violated existing federal laws by apparently conspiring to unlawfully import firearms from Arizona into Colorado, and by failing to properly conduct an interstate firearms transfer through a dealer.
It is clear from the fraudulent way in which gun rights supporters were portrayed in the documentary, and the unlawful way in which firearms were obtained to support the documentary’s gun control theme, that neither truth nor the law were concerns of Ms. Soechtig or her staff in creating the film.
Given this latest development, Ms. Soechtig, Katie Couric, and any other individual involved in this possible conspiracy should seek legal counsel immediately, as each could face criminal charges stemming from violations of federal firearm and conspiracy laws.
AmmoLand Editors Update 11:11amEST 6/3/2016: (In response to readers questions) While we may personally agree that the private transfer or sale of guns should be lawful regardless of what state or territory you live in or come from. The fact is, current federal and state laws, prohibit the exact scenario discussed by Ms. Soechtig, and she should be held to the same standard as all of us under the law.
AmmoLand Editors Update 8:48pm ESt 6/7/2016 The Lip TV files a Copyright Takedown Notice with Youtube to prevent AmmoLand News from showing a small clip of their video of Ms. Soechtig breaking the law. “AmmoLand is deeply disappointed that Youtube would pull a video that is part of a legitimate news story highlighting main stream media's total disregard of Federal and State gun laws. We will be appealing the copyright takedown notice. ” Fredy Riehl, Editor AmmoLand News.”
AmmoLand Editors Update : 10:19amEST 6/08/2016 Added back embedded video. This time from alternate source not hosted or managed by AmmoLand News.
Same incriminating Video from alternate source:Rock and Ice caught up with the Japanese climber to talk about his free ascent of the Nose, in Yosemite, earlier this week.
[UPDATE: Kurakami has clarified the original statements he made to RI and in social media posts, explaining that, based on the style in which he climbed, he does not think he has any claim to the fifth free ascent. For more, see Keita Kurakami Says He Did Not Do Fifth Free Ascent of Nose.]
On November 13, Keita Kurakami became just the fifth person to free climb the Nose, following Lynn Hill, Tommy Caldwell, Beth Rodden and Jorg Verhoeven. Rock and Ice caught up with Kurakami via email to find out a bit more about his experience. To read more about his ascent, see It goes (again): Keita Kurakami Makes Fifth Free Ascent of the Nose.
How long were you working on the Nose to prepare a free ascent?
It was over 20 days from last year. Mostly I spent it for crux pitches, Great roof and Changing corners. [For] other pitches, I mostly onsighted. [Ultimately], I climbed the Nose four times from the ground. [For] Changing Corners, I fixed a rope to the top of El Cap so that I could rest after working it and trying it.
The ascent itself – how long did it take you? How many tries for the crux pitches?
I took two days in Great roof, and a day in Changing corners on my redpoint attempt. But I spent many days and times working them on top rope.
What was the most difficult part of the process for you?
Just hauling over 50 kilograms of stuff!
How did the Nose compare to some of your other hardest climbs, like The Votive Light (5.13d/14a R) and Senjitsu-no Ruri (5.14a R/X)?
That’s a very difficult question. I can’t compare it. Because those routes are so bold but the Nose isn’t so bold. Changing corners is like a hard, high boulder. It’s just my style.
I enjoyed some interesting experiences from each [of these] routes. It’s one of the most charming things about climbing, I think.
Was Yusuke Sato, your partner on the Nose, close to freeing the route as well?
Yeah! I will go back there to belay him after the rain! You [might] see the 6th ascent soon!
Do you have any plans to try other El Cap free climbs in the future?
Of course! I hope to do the Nose free in a day like legendary climbers Lynn hill and Tommy caldwell. And I want to try more hard routes on the big stone, because I only concentrated on the Nose in my Yosemite visits…
How did it feel to finally send the route?
This route is known as the most famous big wall route in the world. Therefore, there are some [unusual] difficulties to climbing it free. There are so many other climbers, gear falling and pee showers… Actually, I [wasn’t really looking forward] to trying it again after my time in Yosemite last year.
But I realized that if really wanted to climb it, I could find a solution [to these things]. This year I decided to visit in the cold season, I chose a bivy spot that deviated from the route a little, and of course I trained for crux pitches during the year.
So it just needed effort and patience. That’s the most important thing for this route. I learned many things from the Nose.
Also read It goes (again): Keita Kurakami Makes Fifth Free Ascent of the NoseSaracens have named their side for the New Year's Day Aviva Premiership clash away to Leicester Tigers at Welford Road, kick-off 15h00.
In the front-row, Richard Barrington continues at loosehead prop and will pack down alongside Jamie George (hooker) and Juan Figallo (tighthead prop).
Lock forward George Kruis is ruled out of the round 12 Aviva Premiership trip after sustaining a facial injury against Newcastle Falcons as Wallabies lock Will Skelton starts alongside Maro Itoje with former Tigers man Jim Hamilton named on the bench.
In the back row, Schalk Burger continues at openside flanker alongside his compatriot Michael Rhodes (blindside flanker) with Jackson Wray named at No8.
At half-back, Ben Spencer starts at scrum half with Owen Farrell continuing at fly-half.
In the backs, Brad Barritt captains the side alongside Marcelo Bosch from centre whilst in the back three, Chris Ashton returns to the Saracens starting line-up after making a try scoring return from suspension off the bench in last weekend's clash against Newcastle. Ashton is joined by Alex Goode who slots in at full-back with Sean Maitland shifting to the left-wing.
Saracens team to face Leicester Tigers
15 Alex Goode
14 Chris Ashton
13 Marcelo Bosch
12 Brad Barritt ©
11 Sean Maitland
10 Owen Farrell
9 Ben Spencer
1 Richard Barrington
2 Jamie George
3 Juan Figallo
4 Will Skelton
5 Maro Itoje
6 Michael Rhodes
7 Schalk Burger
8 Jackson Wray
16 Schalk Brits
17 Titi Lamositele
18 Petrus Du Plessis
19 Jim Hamilton
20 Kelly Brown
21 Neil De Kock
22 Alex Lozowski
23 Nathan EarleWith the start of the Spring 2014 anime season, Twitter's Japan server has been flooded with tweets about everyone's new favorite and most anticipated shows. It turns out that the most popular item on the agenda this season is none other than the new season of Sunrise's Love Live!
The musical idol show came in as the most tweeted anime subject from March 31 to April 7, with a total of 153,790 tweets containing the phrase "Love Live! School Idol Project Season 2." Love Live was followed up in the trend ratings by Haikyū!! in second place with a total of 101,145 tweets and Jojo's Bizarre Adventure: Stardust Crusaders with a total of 59,617 tweets.
The rest of the Top 20 Tweet anime is as follows:
Love Live! School Idol Project (Second Season) Haikyuu!! Jojo's Bizarre Adventure: Stardust Crusaders Happiness Charge Precure! Yu-gi-oh ARC-V Gundam Build Fighters Nagi no Asukara Pokemon XY Special: Saikyou Mega Shinka ~Act 1~ Pokemon XY Aikatsu! Idol Activities One Week Friends Mahouka Koukou no Rettousei Mushishi: The Next Chapter Captain Earth Brynhildr in the Darkness Kanojo ga Flag o Oraretara Pretty Rhythm All Stars Selection Saki: The Nationals Kamigami no Asobi Selector Infected WIXOSS
Anime Engine has the complete list of all trending anime related tweets from the past week.
[Via: Yaraon.]We have no long-term strategy to deal with Moscow. Kissinger’s original concept of détente can help.
On 28 April the lower house of the French parliament voted through a (thankfully, non-binding) resolution to lift sanctions on Russia. Not longer ago than March, John Kerry’s visit to Moscow occasioned talk of a possible new “thaw” between the Kremlin and Washington. Even the NATO-Russia council has been revived recent weeks. These are not freak political “accidents” but simply expressions of an obvious reality: the relationship with Moscow is complex and sometimes contradictory, particularly given the growing diversity of NATO’s membership. A varying level of openness for conciliation with Russia, whether driven by political preference or interest and necessity, will always exist within the alliance. While the approaching NATO summit, with its displays of cohesion and robust language on Russia, has now placed a lid over some of these tendencies, we can expect them to resurface sooner or later.
But we should not be fooled: any “thaw” with Russia can only be circumstantial, if not part of a wider, binding process that gives Russia a real stake in its overall success. It will be vulnerable to future crises. This is because the adversarial posture of Putin’s Russia is unlikely to be substantially transformed anytime soon, especially now that Moscow has restored its military power to a significant degree. This only leaves two options going forward: either aiming to “win” the competition; or to stabilize and manage it.
At the moment there is no coherent Western approach to Russia, and no long-term strategy. There have been only improvised reactions to Russian moves; transitioning to a more complex deterrence concept does not change the essentially reactive nature of NATO’s policy in Eastern Europe. Looking beyond the Warsaw summit, this drift could eventually lead us either into a trap (forsaking sanctions for a mere illusion of Russian cooperation in the short term) or, at worst, into a major crisis, even a war.
“Winning” this renewed competition with Russia – in the sense of breaking its will and capacity to continue on its present course and removing it as a threat, as happened in the dying years of the Soviet Union – is a fanciful proposition. Russia is proving very resilient to political and economic pressure from a much more divided West, and in a more complex, fluid and open international system. This is no re-run of the Reagan-Thatcher final push of the Soviet Union over the ideological and economic brink.
Stabilization, in its turn, can come about in three ways: either via appeasement; through a balance of threat (responding to the enemy’s build-up and effectively entering an arms race dynamic for deterrence purposes); or through a balance of security (a de-escalatory spiral). The first two options represent the dovish and hawkish extremes of policy, which is where the conversation usually revolves. But it is the third approach that should be the focus – and for this, history provides some lessons in the form of détente.
Détente
The détente policy concept was best articulated by its architect, Henry Kissinger, in his statement to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on September 19, 1974. Détente, unlike appeasement, is highly targeted, seeking incremental progress on specific issues rather than a wholesale, Yalta-type sudden “grand bargain,” and does not require (or expect) cessation of competition in other areas. There is no prospect of “peace for our time” notes fluttering in the wind on the tarmac. The general “atmosphere” of political relaxation is designed to signal a shared interest in the end goal of stable relations, rather than an immediate suspension of all hostile action. Cheerful Nixon-Brezhnev summits did not dent Communist subversion but they did create the conditions for arms control. Kissinger insisted that it was all about ensuring stable “coexistence” and the “regulation of competition” rather than its elimination. It seems difficult to fault that logic today.
There are two key advantages to détente, as prescribed by Kissinger. The first is that it is safe: by definition, it can only progress in an equitable fashion, leaving neither side worse off – overall – at any phase. The condition is to be able to actually deliver in the end on individual intermediary commitments that can be highly controversial at home. In practice, détente was undermined – and its potential therefore never fully realized – by Congressional legislation like the Stevenson amendment of 1974. This limited to $300 million the amount of U.S. financial loans the Soviet Union could access, with none of it allowed to be used for energy projects that were of key interest to Moscow.
The second advantage is that progress is verifiable and it does not depend on “trust” but on what Kissinger called, in his Senate statement, “a balance of mutual interests.” The “true intentions” of the Kremlin are immaterial, as détente deals in verifiable facts, whether it is meeting arms control targets or making progress on political issues on the negotiating agenda.
A similar context
Henry Kissinger and Richard Nixon reached for détente at a time when strategic pressures of similar weight were at work. The United States was mired in Vietnam and its leadership of the free world was being questioned; its economic lead over other international competitors was reducing; domestic political and social tensions were rocketing; the Soviets were surging ahead with their military build-up; and important allies, like West Germany with its Ostpolitik, were already moving towards engaging more with the Soviets and reducing tensions. Eventually, the Soviet Union collapsed in the context of a diametrically-opposed U.S. approach pursued over the 1980s, but this should not obscure the role of détente in the 1970s as a strategically-useful policy at a challenging time.
A balance of interests
Beyond the shared incentive of avoiding a potentially uncontrollable crisis, détente happens when it is also serves both sides’ separate interests, being mutually beneficial.
From a Western perspective, détente would be a way to manage the fundamental defense dilemma of our days, which is how to deliver more security in a context of continued budgetary pressures, increasingly diverse and sophisticated global threats, and domestic political turmoil. Open-ended confrontation with Russia erodes wider international stability, and undermines our own defensive architecture. Unchecked either by Western coercive measures or its own national interests (having little left to lose politically), a hostile Russia actively empowers our adversaries (like Assad, Iran), undermines our friends (like Ukraine, Georgia, Moldova) and Eastern frontline allies, and/or ties down increasingly large chunks of our spare military capabilities (especially in Eastern Europe), limiting our capacity for strategic response elsewhere. This is a challenge we can and are already meeting, but at a cost. Détente – especially its arms control component – is a means to reduce strategic commitments in a non-destabilizing way.
For Russia, the main attraction of détente would be the prospect of sanctions relief – by far the issue of most pressing concern for the Kremlin, despite Putin’s cavalier attitude to it. Détente, through a new form of arms control (as suggested below) is also the only realistic pathway available to the Kremlin for stopping or reversing a NATO military build-up on Russia’s borders, and restoring Moscow’s place at the top international table. Force will achieve neither.
Strategic equivalence
Finally, and crucially, Kissinger’s détente was designed to define and maintain a “strategic equivalence.” Reviving that Cold War notion today might seem misplaced, given that 2016’s Russia is not the Warsaw Pact military behemoth of the 1970s. But what military capacity Russia lost in the European theatre via Soviet collapse (comparatively modestly restored now), NATO has lost by voluntary scale-down coupled with the United States having to split its forces to face new challenges in Asia and the Middle East. In the meantime, new NATO allies have added vulnerabilities rather than strength to the alliance. Finally, hybrid, cyber and internet-powered informational warfare also act as force multipliers for the weaker side.
Arguably, where it actually matters – that is, in Europe – the question of strategic equivalence with Russia, in a broad sense, is becoming relevant again. Russian rearmament has transformed Moscow from the usual “spoiler” or “nuisance” into a real threat. This is now an irreversible situation: Russia will keep its new weapons for decades. Détente is the responsible way to deal with it in the long run.
Adapting détente
Although much of Kissinger’s sophisticated concept for détente remains valid today, this is not simply a question of “reviving” his 1970s policy or applying a blueprint – but of adapting it to the current context, particularly when it comes to arms control.
Cold War arms control developed as a very specific form of agreement which roughly traded “like-for-like” in conventional and/or nuclear capabilities to achieve a mutually satisfactory military balance. Today this negotiating model is difficult to replicate given the asymmetric advantages made possible by certain modern military technologies – particularly anti-access/area-denial (A2/AD) weapons.
A potential solution is to develop custom NATO-Russia mutual security agreements tailored to the operational specificities of particular regions – such as the Baltic and the Black Sea. The principle of arms control – striking a military balance that satisfies both sides – would be retained, but the trade-offs would be ”non-traditional.”
Kaliningrad and Crimea seem ripe for this kind of approach. The basic political deal would involve Russia deflating these A2/AD “bubbles” in exchange for the West lifting some of its sanctions, with a clear prospect of halting and reversing NATO’s ongoing build-up once the Russian military pressure is reduced. Arguably, in some ways the Iran deal has been road-testing a similar logic.
An agreement along these lines would carry little risk for Russia in defense terms, since it would concern highly mobile A2/AD systems. Russia would retain the option of easily restoring its “bubbles” in the extreme case of a total political breakdown of détente. Likewise, NATO would continue to increase its readiness – from a non-provocative distance – so that plans for large-scale deployment in frontier countries could be resumed swiftly if needed.
A balance of security, not threat
Kaliningrad, particularly with its S-400 systems deployed there, is the principal obstacle to an effective NATO defense of the Baltics since it can prevent allied reinforcements arriving quickly by air and sea in the event of a crisis. This gives Russia the initiative and cancels out the benefits of (eventually) having a sizeable NATO Very High Readiness Joint Task Force if it cannot be deployed in time. NATO’s ostensible inability to continue to project adequate security over the Baltics without actually stationing troops there is the main military reason why local allies are pushing for permanent NATO bases in the region, which in turn impacts Russian security and fuels escalation.
To the south, Crimea plays a similar role. From there, Russia can hold at risk all NATO naval forces in the Black Sea, thereby achieving maritime dominance, and can in theory launch surprise attacks toward Odessa and Transnistria (the breakaway sliver of Moldova where Russian “peacekeepers” have been present since 1992), with a high risk of drawing neighboring Romania into a conflict. Various Crimean-based non-strategic missile systems – including nuclear-capable Iskanders, whose deployment has been considered by the Russian MoD for over a year and will likely ensue after the Warsaw summit – can also target directly the main Romanian port of Constanta and the nearby Kogalniceanu air base. As with Kaliningrad, Russian build-up in Crimea is prompting Romania to press for a “NATO fleet” in the Black Sea and more NATO troops on its territory which already hosts a U.S. missile defense facility (whose Mk-41 Vertical Launch System can also accommodate Tomahawk cruise missiles). Not linked to a wider strategy, this is only a recipe for increased tensions rather than mutual security.
Even if enacted, none of these measures can provide an effective, sustainable solution for Eastern defense, or represent more than temporary reassurance for jittery, weak and exposed local allies who know that in their neighborhood Russia maintains escalation dominance. In all likelihood, decisions at the upcoming NATO summit in Warsaw will fall short of East European allies’ initial expectations, but will be robust enough to prompt further destabilizing responses from Moscow.
However, a successful negotiation over the A2/AD “bubbles” would make political room in Western capitals for stopping or reversing NATO land deployments and equipment pre-positioning in the region – a key Russian concern – if the Russian threat from Kaliningrad and Crimea is likewise verifiably scaled down. This would benefit NATO too: a deal that stabilizes the security situation on NATO’s Eastern flank, without much further American involvement and cost, will also add more pressure on local allies to seriously improve their own defenses as a matter of urgency rather than over-rely on Western resources which are needed elsewhere. The current imbalance of effort is straining the political fabric of the alliance to dangerous levels, potentially entailing a far greater ultimate risk than that of Russian aggression: American retreat.
Negotiating from a position of strength
Such an agreement cannot be achieved at a stroke. It can only be the culmination of a process – in a détente framework – that begins with confidence building measures. Ongoing, selective cooperation with Russia in Syria, for example, is something to build on – as is the Minsk II process in Ukraine. Other measures can include things like more information sharing between Russia and NATO on military exercises (especially Russian “snap” drills) or on air patrol routes. But once finalized, a Kaliningrad/Crimea accord can then open the way to a more comprehensive, CFE-type agreement for East European security, in a subsequent phase of détente further down the line.
Naturally, there is no expectation that Russia, on its own, would fully embrace détente – let alone the notion of drawing down in Kaliningrad and Crimea. But NATO could (and should) do much more to press the Kremlin on to this path, as Nixon and Kissinger did in their time by leveraging the opening to China.
For one, NATO can threaten the permanent deployment to Europe of F-22 stealth aircraft, which is likely the only aircraft able to evade the S-400. (F-22s have already been briefly deployed for two weeks in Germany in 2015 for training, as an early warning to Moscow; this April F-22s have been training in Britain.) Then, there are options to introduce new ballistic or land-based cruise missiles to Europe, and, as a final resort, even new nuclear weapons. Further and permanent land deployments closer to Russia (2-3 brigades above what has already been announced) can also credibly be put on the table in a real negotiation – this is well within NATO’s material capacity.
The point to retain from this approach – and one that Kissinger ultimately failed to adequately make in the face of fierce domestic political opposition – is that détente would not leave NATO exposed at any stage. Far from being “soft,” this strategy is grounded in the imperative of a strong defense all through.
Conclusion
With an implacable adversary which also cannot be overthrown, neither appeasement nor an open-ended arms race are satisfactory logical bases for policy, especially in the long term. A middle way that helps to both decrease tensions and increase mutual security is preferable. There are enough similarities today with Kissinger’s time to warrant a serious new look at détente, and there are pressures on both sides to move past the current situation.
The question is how to adapt Kissingerian détente to work in today’s context. This could mean taking a creative new look at arms control – with a focus on the two flashpoints in the Baltic area and the Black Sea – as well as keeping an open mind about developing linkages between various issues on the common agenda, including Ukraine and Syria.
Détente is based on the idea of mutual benefits. The risks in case of failure are low (indeed, the U.S. went on to win the Cold War despite détente unravelling), but the potential rewards are great: stability in bilateral relations, cooperation on mutual threats, a freer hand for the West to deal with other security challenges. Détente also holds a distant and faint promise of the greatest prize of all: a new, genuine “reset,” years from now, perhaps under a new Kremlin regime. But this can only be the outcome of a sustained process that generates real, interlocking interests – not of some diplomatic coup as was erroneously believed possible in 2009.
This makes détente worth attempting, especially as we would act from a position of strength. Indeed, Russia will likely have to be pressed on to this course – and now, with sanctions still in place, we have the leverage to do so. Paradoxically, détente might be the only way to maintain a solid stance on Russia after the Warsaw summit – let alone in case of major electoral surprises in key Western capitals – and prevent the return of an overly-conciliatory mood among some allies willing to give away our current strategic advantage for only short term gains. With Russia, we should know better than that – and we should be ready to play the long game.
(Written in April 2016)[1][2] Chart showing the number of sterilisations reported to the central authority, Medicinalstyrelsen or Socialstyrelsen, between 1935 and 1979 and the various indications for operations performed between 1941 and 1975. In order to keep a lid on sterilisations,[3] eugenicists arranged to collect detailed information. As a consequence, Swedish data is complete when it comes to legal operations since 1941. An unknown number of men were sterilised abroad or illegally in Sweden. This may have been the cause of the lower number of operations during the early 1970s.[4] When, from January 1976, permission was no longer needed, the number of sterilisations grew considerably. Sources.Chart showing the number of sterilisations reported to the central authority, Medicinalstyrelsen or Socialstyrelsen, between 1935 and 1979 and the various indications for operations performed between 1941 and 1975. In order to keep a lid on sterilisations,eugenicists arranged to collect detailed information. As a consequence, Swedish data is complete when it comes to legal operations since 1941. An unknown number of men were sterilised abroad or illegally in Sweden. This may have been the cause of the lower number of operations during the early 1970s.When, from January 1976, permission was no longer needed, the number of sterilisations grew considerably.
Compulsory sterilisation in Sweden were sterilisations which were carried out in Sweden, without a valid consent of the subject, during the years 1906–1975 on eugenic, medical and social grounds. Between 1972 and 2012, sterilisation was also a condition for sex change.
Legal grounds [ edit ]
The general rule between 1941 and 1976 was that sterilisation was illegal, but there were three grounds on which sterilisation could be permitted:[5]
Medical, if a pregnancy could seriously put a woman suffering from chronic illness or permanently weakened constitution at risk of life and health.
Eugenic, which allowed sterilising people considered insane or with severe illness or with a physical disability.
Social indication allowed sterilisation of people considered unsuitable to foster a child due to mental illness, being feebleminded or having an antisocial lifestyle.
It was never legal to physically restrain a person.[6]
From 1944, the number of eugenic sterilisations under the 1941 legal provisions gradually decreased.[citation needed]
Statistics [ edit ]
The number of eugenic sterilisations peaked in the 1940s; from 1944, the number of sterilisations under the 1941 legal provisions gradually decreased.[citation needed]
In 1997, on behalf of the Swedish government, the ethnologists Mikael Eivergård and Lars-Eric Jönsson made an attempt at estimating what percentage of sterilisations were coerced. They found that a quarter of the applications were made under circumstances similar to coercion such as a condition for release from an institution and that another 9 percent were signed under pressure. In half of the cases they found no sign of coercion or pressure, but signs of the applicants own initiative. Tydén uses these percentages to make an estimate of the number of operations under coercion. He found that 15,000 were made as a condition for release and that another 5500 to 6000 were made under other kinds of pressure, whereas 30,000 were voluntary and on the applicants' own initiative.[7] From the 2000s, the Swedish state paid out damages to victims who filed for compensation.[8]
Sterilisation during sex change [ edit ]
Until 2012, sterilisation was mandatory before sex change.[9] This last mandatory sterilisation has been criticised by several political parties in Sweden and since 2011 the Parliament of Sweden was expected to change the law but ran into opposition from the Christian Democrat party. After efforts to overturn the law failed in parliament, the Stockholm Administrative Court of Appeal overturned the law on 19 December 2012, declaring it unconstitutional[10][11] after the law was challenged by an unidentified plaintiff.
See also [ edit ]Councilman Kirby Delauter of Frederick County, Maryland lashed out on Saturday at a reporter for using his name in an article without his permission.
In a Facebook post, Delauter slammed reporter Bethany Rodgers of the Fredericks News-Post “for an unauthorized use of my name and my reference” in an article over the weekend.
“So let me be clear,” he continued, apparently addressing Rodgers, “do not contact me and do not use my name or reference me in an unauthorized form in the future.”
Rodgers responded, telling the council member that reporters are not required to seek a public figure’s permission before using his or her name.
Delauter responded with a threat: “Use my name again and you’ll be paying for an Attorney [sic].”
Delauter did not respond to a message left by TPM at his office seeking comment.
(screengrab via The Washington Post)
h/t WaPoNot Only Is Steve Bannon Sitting In On National Security Meetings, The Usual Paper Trail Is Disappearing
from the THINK-BEFORE-YOU-PRINT-[reduce,-redact,-obfuscate] dept
The new boss is not the same as the old boss. While Obama was routinely terrible at keeping his promise to run the Most Transparent Administration, positive changes still resulted in the aftermath of the Snowden leaks. The intelligence community is more open than ever -- but then we're comparing a barely-cracked door to one that has been shut, locked, and bricked over for years.
Now that Trump's in charge, it looks as though transparency and accountability aren't ideals closely held by his administration. While Trump has portrayed himself as a populist, there's very little being done currently that suggests the public -- including members employed by the government -- is welcome to participate in the process. The public has outlived its usefulness. Post-election, it just doesn't have much to offer someone who appears to believe he was elected "Boss," rather than "Top Public Servant."
Executive orders and presidential directives are being issued without legal guidance or consultation with the agencies affected. And the national security framework is being heavily altered by a man best known for running a highly-partisan website. Steve Bannon, Trump's chief advisor and former head of Breitbart, is being given a seat at the "Adults" table for National Security Council meetings.
This isn't totally unusual. Obama often invited his advisors to these meetings. What Obama didn't do was guarantee them a spot at the head table, much less do so at the expense of actual national security officials. This is what National Security Council meetings look like now, under the new president.
Bannon's spot is guaranteed. (This, despite reports that Bannon must be approved by Congress. Nothing in the law says Council members need to be confirmed.) But the Director of National Intelligence and the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff are only invited if Trump feels they should be there. This is an incredibly odd -- and possibly dangerous -- situation. Two officials considered essential to national security decisions aren't guaranteed a chance to offer their insight in national security meetings.
Worse, Bannon's apparently permanent position in the NSC has resulted in him obtaining far more power than presidential advisors normally have. His efforts are further burying national security efforts under thick, black layers of opacity. The council meetings will continue. But it appears any record-keeping will not.
Even before he was given a formal seat on the National Security Council’s “principals committee” this weekend by President Donald Trump, Bannon was calling the shots and doing so with little to no input from the National Security Council staff, according to an intelligence official who asked not to be named out of fear of retribution. “He is running a cabal, almost like a shadow NSC,” the official said. He described a work environment where there is little appetite for dissenting opinions, shockingly no paper trail of what’s being discussed and agreed upon at meetings, and no guidance or encouragement so far from above about how the National Security Council staff should be organized.
Bannon's paperless national security "office" appears to be the result of NSC officials doing what they've always done: share drafts and briefing notes with affected agencies and their employees. Bannon has put an end to that.
More stringent guidelines for handling and routing were then instituted, and the National Security Council staff was largely cut out of the process. By the end of the week, they weren’t the only ones left in the dark. Retired Marine Gen. John Kelly, the secretary of homeland security, was being briefed on the executive order, which called for immediately shutting the borders to nationals from seven largely Muslim countries and all refugees, while Trump was in the midst of signing the measure, the New York Times reported.
Cutting down on sharing is only part of the paper trail elimination. The second part ensures there's less paper than ever to share. As Kate Brannen of Just Security reports, NSC meetings have been memorialized for years with a "summary of conclusions (SOC)" -- basically minutes of the meetings, along with guidance resulting from it. Officials could refer back to these notes if they ran into issues directly addressed in those meetings. They were also given an opportunity to correct the record if they felt something has been misconstrued or misquoted. These SOCs are now just relics of the past.
During the first week of the Trump administration, there were no SOCs, the intelligence official said. In fact, according to him, there is surprisingly very little paper being generated, and whatever paper there is, the NSC staff is not privy to it. He sees this as a deterioration of transparency and accountability. “It would worry me if written records of these meeting were eliminated, because they contribute to good governance,” Waxman said.
What appears to be happening (although there's been no confirmation yet) is that Steve Bannon is being given the job of putting together Trump-approved SOCs of NSC meetings. These will be the only official records of the meetings and they're in the hands of a person who has plenty of motivation to only memorialize what adheres to administration talking points or furthers its goals. With the administration in full control of NSC meetings and any resulting narratives, whatever paper trail survives this bizarre reshuffling of power will be mostly useless.
Filed Under: national security, national security council, nsc, paper trail, steve bannon1 Signs: Boarding Up The House 03:00
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7 A Nightmare on elm Street (1984) Soundtrack: Prologue/ Main Title 04:07
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9 20 - All Gone (No Escape) The Last of Us Soundtrack 02:55
10 Left 4 Dead Soundtrack- 'Blood Harvest' 01:21
11 Dead Island Soundtrack - [Track 1/29] - Main Theme 04:36
12 The Last of Us Soundtrack 16 - Home 03:08
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15 Deus Ex: Human Revolution [FULL SOUNDTRACK] - 03 - Main Menu 01:51
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21 Dead Island Soundtrack - [Track 2/29] - Surrounded By Zombies 02:00
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, 277). Meanwhile, the CNT defended the expanding council democracy and self-management system against the violent far right, while fostering tolerance for views liberal, socialist, nationalist and religious.Thus, the CNTs Diego Abad de Santillán ([1937] 2005, 47):Revolution was not the rule-from-above of a committee, of a party, of a given tendency but instead enabled a range of views (48). This is a dramatically different approach to that applied by Lenin, Trotsky or Stalinnot to mention the Marxists in the First and Second Internationals.These experiences underscore Glasers observation that the broad anarchist tra- dition has rather more convincing democratic credentials than mainstream Marxism. Yet, these experiences, and the ideas that they expressed, also suggest that his charge that anarchism/syndicalism would be liable to reproduce Stalinist governance (2012, 279 280) is unfair.It is, on the contrary, perfectly justified for anarchists/syndicalists to deny responsibility (2012, 282) for the Soviet tyrannyas Glaser concedes, Bakunin had accurately predicted (decades before) that revolutionary Marxist regimes would be repressive one-party dictatorships based on forced labour (e.g. Bakunin [1872] 1971, 284). It is also, therefore, justified to insist that the fate of the Soviet Union and its ilk requires no rethink of anarchist precepts (cf. 2012, 282).I agree with Glaser that Soviet Union tyranny arose directly from Lenins and Trotskys one-party dictatorship, censorship and a ban on autonomous associations, establishing the institutional design and modus operandi of Stalins Russiaand also that these actions were in significant, although not sole, part an outcome of the Bolshevik ideology (Glaser 2012, 287; van der Walt 2011).[4]However, I find Glaser less convincing when speaking of the council form... advocated and practiced by Lenins Bolsheviks (Glaser 2012, 292), or when implying that council democracy helped lay the basis for Soviet tyranny. Council democracy played no essential role in classical Marxist thought, other than as a tactic to attain state power. While Marx praised the Paris Commune (Glaser 2012, 290), he did not champion council democracy, instead consistently returningeven after 1871to his long-standing programme of centralisation, nationalisation and state planning under a Communist Party (e.g. Marx and Engels [1848] 1954, 55 56; Gerth 1958, 216 217, 285 286). In the 1872 Marx/Bakunin split, for instance, Marx argued for a centralised state and Bakuninnot Marxadvocated council democracy; it was Marx who sought to impose his statist programme against the will of the majority of the First International.But what Marx really meant (or could be construed to mean) pales in the face of what Marxism really meant: the history of Communist Parties, and also of the third of the globe once ruled by Marxists, are not the byways, but the highways, of Marxist history. In Russia, for instance, the councils were quickly subordinated to the Bolshevik state.Those who insist that Lenin had to dispense with free soviets to defend the revolution also thereby concede that council democracy was inessential to the Leninist project. The same treatment of council democracy as inessential to Marxist socialism is necessary for those who maintain (e.g. Trotsky 1967) that the Soviet Union and others were workers states or socialistdeformed, degenerate or otherwise.None of this is to disparage the minority of committed Marxists who have sought to rescue Marxism from the stench of the gulag; it is merely to suggest the awesome scale of that task.By contrast, the core democratic measures in the Communemandated recallable delegates, co-operative production, militias with elections, etc.did not arise from nowhere, and certainly not from Marxs earlier work. They were, rather, the long-standing programme of the Proudhonists and of the anarchists (Bakunin ([1870] 1971), both of which currents were key groups in the Communal Council and Clubs (McKay 2008; Bakunin ([1870] 1971); these measures were also demonstrably central to the later anarchist revolutions, as previously shown.There is, in short, no necessary link between council democracy and Soviet Union-type tyranny. Bolshevism took power not due to councils, but through their destruction. On the other hand, the protection of civil and political rights in the anarchist revolutions, despite wartime conditions, further discredits claims that Lenin and Trotsky and Stalin were forced into dictatorship.The anarchist/syndicalist analysis of the state also provides a reasonable explanation why Lenin and Trotsky were able to create their dictatorship: by reconstructing the state, they could centralise administration and coercion in the hands of their party, followed by means of production. This new state did not require (and indeed could not tolerate) an independent system of council democracy and self-management. And its heads thus soon, and inevitably, found themselves clashing with the popular classes that they claimed to represent.Writing on China, Dirlik argues that recall anarchism, which Leninist Marxism suppressed, is to recall the democratic ideals for which anarchism... served as a repository (1991, 3 4). This paper has sought to recall those ideals, not as an epitaph, nor yet as a defence of every dot and comma of the anarchist/syndicalist tradition, but to recall pathways in libertarian and socialist thought that move beyond the impasses of classical Marxism, liberalism, social democracy, and the lifestyle politics of personal (not social) change.Anarchism rejects parliament because it aspires to nothing less than the most complete realisation of democracy, based on economic and social equality (van der Walt and Schmidt 2009, 70, original emphasis). Here, common ownership of means of production is necessary but insufficient, since it must be matched to bottom-up democratic control of administration, coercion and production generally, which must itself be based upon the principle of individual freedom.Glaser suggests this level of collective governance is not so very different to states as most people understand this term (2012, 295). Very few people understand (and none experience) the state in this way. The issue, moreover is not what most people think, but how anarchism/syndicalism understands the state: a centralised institution of minority class rule, it is abolished by genuine democracy, for when the whole people govern then there will be no one to be governed... there will be no government, no State (Bakunin 1953, 287). Thus, Price: Anarchism is democracy without the state (2007, 172, original emphasis).AcknowledgementsMy gratitude to Warren McGregor, Iain McKay and Nicole Ulrich for comments.Department of Sociology and Industrial Sociology, Rhodes University, South Africa. Email: l.vanderwalt@ru.ac.za[1]. For a classic statement: CNT [1 May 1936] n. d.[2]. Within this tradition, there are rich debates, including on consensus versus majority decision-making, andanti-organisationalism versus formal rule-bound structures. This paper only outlines the approach defending majority decision-making where necessary; formal organisation as a norm; and militarily defending social revolutionwith the rider that this was dominant within historic anarchism/syndicalism.[3]. I refer only to the more sophisticated version of these arguments, leaving aside more economistic variants.[4]. An important resource is Iain McKays AnarchistFAQ, http://anarchism.pageabode.com/afaq/secH6.html Bakunin, M. 1953. Criticism of Marxism. In The Political Philosophy of Bakunin, edited by G. P. Maximoff, 283 289. Glencoe: Free Press.Bakunin, M. [1866] 1971. The Revolutionary Catechism. In Bakunin on Anarchy, edited by S. Dolgoff, 76 97. London: George Allen & Unwin.Bakunin, M. [1867] 1971. Federalism, Socialism, Anti-Theologism. In Bakunin on Anarchy, edited by S. Dolgoff, 102 147. London: George Allen & Unwin.Bakunin, M. [1870] 1971. Letters to a Frenchman on the Current Crisis. In Bakunin on Anarchy, edited by S. Dolgoff, 183 217. London: George Allen & Unwin.Bakunin, M. [1871] 1971. The Programme of the Alliance. In Bakunin on Anarchy, edited by S. Dolgoff, 244 258. London: George Allen & Unwin.Bakunin, M. [1872] 1971. Letter to La Liberte´. In Bakunin on Anarchy, edited by S. Dolgoff, 274 285. London: George Allen & Unwin.Bakunin, M. n.d. On the Internal Conduct of the Alliance. In Bakunin on Anarchism, edited by S. Dolgoff, 385 387. Montreal: Black Rose.CNT (National Confederation of Labour). [May 1, 1936] n.d. Resolution on Libertarian Communism as adopted by the Confederacion Nacional del Trabajo, Zaragoza, May 1. Johannesburg: Zabalaza Books.Dirlik, A. 1991. Anarchism in the Chinese Revolution. Berkeley: University of California.Fraser, R. 1979. Blood of Spain: An Oral History of the Spanish Civil War. New York: Pantheon.Gerth, H., ed. 1958. The First International: Minutes of the Hague Conference of 1872. Madison: University of Wisconsin.Glaser, D. 2012. Visions of Socialist Democracy from South Africa: A Critical Review of Three Recent Contributions. Politikon: The South African Journal of Political Science 39 (2): 279 298.Ha, Ki Rak. 1986. A History of Korean Anarchist Movement [sic.]. Taegu: Anarchist Publishing Committee.Kropotkin, P. [1912] 1970. Modern Science and Anarchism. In Kropotkins Revolutionary Pamphlets: A Collection of Writings, edited by R. N. Baldwin, 145 194. New York: Dover.Laclau, E., and C. Mouffe. 1985. Hegemony and Socialist Strategy. London: Verso.Malatesta, E. 1965. Anarchists and the Working Class Movements. In Errico Malatesta: His Life and Ideas, edited by V. Richards, 113 133. London: Freedom Press.Malet, M. 1982. Nestor Makhno in the Russian Civil War. London: London School of Economics/Macmillan.Marx, K., and F. Engels. [1848] 1954. The Communist Manifesto. Chicago: Henry Regnery.McKay, I. 2008. The Paris Commune, Marxism and Anarchism. Anarcho-Syndicalist Review, no. 50: 24 41.Palij, M. 1976. The Anarchism of Nestor Makhno 1918 1921: An Aspect of the Ukrainian Revolution. Seattle: University Of Washington.Price, W. 2007. The Abolition of the State: Anarchist and Marxist Perspectives. Bloomington: AuthorHouse.Rachman, G. 2010. The Realities Behind the Cult of Lula, Financial Times, September 28.Rocker, R. [1938] 1989. Anarcho-Syndicalism. London: Pluto.Santilla´n, D. A. [1937] 2005. After the Revolution: Economic Reconstruction in Spain. Johannesburg: Zabalaza Books.Thomas, H. 1986. The Spanish Civil War. New York: Touchstone.Trotsky, L. 1967. The Revolution Betrayed. London: New Park.van der Walt, L. 2011. Counterpower, Participatory Democracy, Revolutionary Defence: Debating Black Flame, Revolutionary Anarchism and Historical Marxism. International Socialism, no. 130: 193 207.van der Walt, L., and M Schmidt. 2009. Black Flame: The Revolutionary Class Politics of Anarchism and Syndicalism. San Francisco: AK Press. Digg this del.icio.us Furl Reddit Technorati Facebook Twitter << Back To Newswire
English Italiano Deutsch This page can be viewed inIt’s that time of year again. Football fans across the nation are rejoicing the arrival of NFL training camps and the first few preseason clashes. Every team is a Super Bowl contender, every GM having the power to change players’ lives with a simple thumbs up or down.
The stakes are no less for Fantasy Football players, who face the same decisions as GMs, but with something more precious at stake: pride. In the quest to win, players look to experts for advice. But many Fantasy players might be overlooking the best strategy of all – thinking together.
Research shows that harnessing Collective Intelligence can be far more effective than looking to individual experts. Of course, many people run their Fantasy Football teams as pairs or groups, but there hasn’t been a good way tap their collective knowledge and intuition. Until now.
Last year, a group of sports fans used a new tool called UNU to not only predict the Pats’ win months in advance, but also made amazing predictions about the Super Bowl itself, correctly estimating yardage, turnovers, field goals…
How do groups make predictions together online? See the 90 second video below:
As for the Super Bowl predictions… see below:
By thinking together, the group predicted Lynch would run for 105 yards. He finished with 102. Of course, if the Seahawks handed off on the final drive, he’d have finished with exactly 105 yards.
The group also predicted Russell Wilson would throw for 230 yards. He threw for 247, putting the group within 5% accuracy. In fact, UNU helped the group make all kinds of predictions from Brady’s QBR to the color Gatorade poured on the winners. There’s intelligence in numbers!
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First Name: Last Name: Email address: Message:On Friday, several men on Detroit’s west side attacked a black transgender woman, shooting her four times in the back and left arm. She has two bullets lodged near her spine, according to Fox 2 Detroit, but she is in stable condition. Recent reports indicate that this violence is a common threat for black trans women.
Monday is Transgender Day of Remembrance, a time to memorialize the transgender people who were killed due to transphobia and discriminatory circumstances that put transgender people’s lives at greater risk. So far this year, at least 25 transgender people have been killed. The victims were mostly women of color, who were killed by men they knew, police officers, or assailants who are still unknown.
According to a Human Rights Campaign (HRC) and Trans People of Color Coalition report released last week, 84 percent of the victims were people of color and 80 percent were women. Out of the 102 transgender people killed since 2013, 87 were trans people of color, and there are likely more deaths than HRC could document, given the fact that many media outlets and police departments do not always provide an accurate account of the person’s gender.
In 2013, when HRC first began counting these deaths, they found 19 cases. In 2014, there was a dip in the number of deaths HRC was aware of, but the number of deaths each year has steadily increased since then. Most of the deaths were from gunshot wounds. Since 2013, 55 victims were killed in the South, with as many as 10 trans people killed in Louisiana. The report notes that this region generally has fewer legal protections for the LGBTQ community, including for hate crimes.
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Fourteen out of 25 victims’ murders are unsolved, which amounts to over half of the murders. Looking at all murders, one-third of homicide cases result in the killer never being identified. As Cheryl L. Neely wrote in her 2015 book, You’re dead — So What? Media, Police, and the Invisibility of Black Women as Victims of Homicide, black women are often ignored by the media in its coverage of sexual violence and homicide:
Therefore, race- or gender-only approaches eclipse black women’s experiences as victims of violence and are limited in explaining their unique position of vulnerability. Furthermore, these feelings of vulnerability are rooted in a historical context — namely the inherent bias of the criminal justice system since courts routinely have been reluctant to prosecute rape and other crimes of sexual violence against black women, irrespective of the race of the accused. Ultimately, black women have long been disregarded as “legitimate” victims due in part to sexually deviant stereotypes.
According to two researchers from Indiana University and Ohio University, black women who go missing receive limited attention, negative attention or no attention at all. And too often, the media does not cover the stories of missing black women when they are linked to crime, mental illness, and “other issues to suggest they were some how responsible or deserving of their predicament,” according to the 2016 journal article.
Transgender people also face similar, if not higher, rates of intimate partner violence compared to cisgender people in the LGBTQ community, research shows, particularly when it comes to dating violence and sexual assault, according to a 2014 research article.
The arguably severe police reactions to tense situations involving people who are mentally ill should also be recognized as one of the myriad reasons for the deaths of trans people this year. Three of the victims — Sean Ryan Hake, Scout Schultz, and Kiwi Herring — were killed during altercations with police. After Hake’s mother called 911 to report that her son was acting suicidal and violent. Police say Hake threatened his mother and the District Attorney argued that the shooting was justified. Hake’s family brought a lawsuit against the department and said police used excessive force. The case is now in mediation.
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Schultz died in a similar incident when police were called to the scene while Schultz was having a mental breakdown. Schultz’s family attorney said officers overreacted and the situation is being investigated by Georgia Bureau of Investigation. Kiwi Herring was killed by officers after neighbors called police during an argument Herring had with one of her neighbors. Police say she had a knife and had stabbed her neighbor, but it was not clear how many shots had been fired. Her sister told The Huffington Post she heard “four shots and then a second set of three more.”
According to a 2015 Washington Post analysis that analyzed nearly 400 police killings, about 25 percent of people shot and killed by police in the first half of 2015 were identified as having a mental illness. Thirty-nine percent of trans people who participated in the 2015 U.S. Transgender Survey reported they experienced serious psychological distress during the month before completing the survey. According to a 2014 report from the Williams Institute and American Foundation for Suicide Prevention, 41 percent of trans people will attempt suicide at some point in their lives. Although Trans Day of Remembrance is usually focused on those who were murdered, not those who died by suicide, Katelyn Burns writes for The Establishment that there are many suicides of trans people that the public will never know about:
There are about 42,773 suicides in the United States alone every year, and not all of them left notes behind explaining why. The only reason we know that 41% of trans people have attempted suicide is because those trans people survived to both come out and also to be counted. How many closeted trans people have attempted suicide? And an even scarier question, how many trans people have taken their own lives without ever letting anyone else know they were trans?
In addition to all of the reasons that trans people are targeted, including misogynoir for black trans women, trans people are grappling with discrimination, which puts them at greater risk for being victims of violence. Higher rates of homelessness, as well as housing and workplace discrimination play a major role in enabling violence against trans people, especially trans women of color. According to the 2015 U.S. Trans Survey (USTS), one in five respondents participated in some kind of underground economy for income and those who participated in sex work were more likely to have experienced violence. It doesn’t help matters that nearly half of Black and Latinx trans women who have had interactions with police say they were harassed or mistreated by officers.
The last known trans person murdered this year was Candace Towns. Towns, a 30 year-old black transgender woman was found shot to death in a driveway. Her best friend, Malaysa Monroe, said of her friend, “If I needed anything she would give it to me. She would give me the clothes off her back.”Wherever the blame lies, the fallout is record migration from the island that has surpassed the rates of the 1950s. According to American Community Survey estimates, Puerto Rico has seen a net population loss of nearly 50,000 residents per year in recent years.
“Puerto Rico’s been a colony since 1917, so anything that affects Puerto Rico is directly tied to the American system,” said Marcos Dimas, executive director of the Puerto Rican workshops at the Julia de Burgos Cultural Arts Center. “So what else can I say? I’m not a banker but I know that Puerto Rico is like a captive economy for the U.S.”
“As a Nuyorican, my impression is that Puerto Rico is in the situation it’s in right now due to the politics and the mismanagement of the funds that are being available for the island,” said Fuentes, the retired counselor.
Puerto Rico faces regular electricity and water shortages, and high rates of poverty and crime. The government has implemented austerity measures to stave off financial crisis, including reducing pension payments, raising property and small business taxes, increasing water and gas prices, and laying off government workers. Despite these measures, Puerto Rico’s credit was downgraded to junk earlier this year, making borrowing extremely expensive. On July 1, the sales tax was raised from 7 percent to 11.5 percent — the highest in any U.S. state or territory.
“Doctors, teachers, they’re flying out to Miami like crazy. They don’t want to be there,” said César Fuentes, 73, a retired counselor standing outside El Cataño Community Garden while his friends played dominoes on 110th Street, aka Tito Puente Way. “What’s going to happen to a country like that? Doom.”
“Puerto Rico only exists when it becomes a problem and suddenly attention is galvanized in that area,” said Nelson Denis, an attorney, journalist, former New York State Assemblyman and author of the recent book War Against All Puerto Ricans.
But the economic crisis came as little surprise to the 4.6 million Puerto Ricans who live on the U.S. mainland, including more than 700,000 in New York City who, despite heavy migration flows to Florida in recent years, still make up the largest Puerto Rican population outside the island.
Puerto Rico’s mounting debt over the past decade came to a head late last month when Gov. Alejandro Garcia Padilla deemed his country’s $73 billion public debt “not payable.”
“My father’s about to pack up and come to New York again. He worked so many years here, went to Puerto Rico — that was his dream, buying his house, retired, being there — and he can’t even afford the medicine [anymore]. He’s 75 years old.”
Guzmán said she has many family members in Puerto Rico, including her father, who moved back 12 years ago.
“I don’t think so. I’m going upstate, not to Puerto Rico,” said Guzmán, standing outside her apartment in Bushwick, Brooklyn. “Every day, like 400 people leave Puerto Rico. Can’t nobody afford the food there. Everything is expensive.”
María Guzmán, 63, moved to New York from Puerto Rico when she was 6 years old. She visits the island every year and planned to retire there — she has a house in Guánica on the southern coast. But with the island facing economic crisis, those plans have changed.
'We are millions. And we are looking at the President and the candidate for President in the United States about the situation on our isle.'
While earlier generations of Puerto Ricans settled in New York City and other northeastern cities, residents leaving the island these days tend to opt for central Florida, particularly Orlando. Jorge Duany, director of the Cuban Research Institute at Florida International University, has studied the Puerto Rican diaspora. According to Duany, Florida’s Puerto Rican population has grown from slightly more than 2 percent of all U.S. Puerto Ricans in 1960 to more than 18 percent in 2010, making Puerto Ricans the second largest Latino group in Florida after Cubans.
“They are going to Orlando, Florida; Texas... I don’t think the movement right now is to New York,” said Jorge Ayala, 51, owner of the La Fonda Boricua restaurant in East Harlem. “After they finish whatever they’re studying the need to get out to get a better job or better salary or better opportunities in other places.”
While New York is seeing fewer new arrivals from the island than other parts of the country, local Boricuas are nonetheless alarmed.
“It’s affected people who are from there and our relatives who are living over there,” said Michelle Centeno, president of the New York Chapter of the National Conference of Puerto Rican Women.
“We are suffering now... the people who are living there and the people who are living here,” said María Cortés, 63, a part-time home aide in New York City. “We are still working and sending money to Puerto Rico to support all the family because they don’t have no way to provide on our isle.”
According to the "Puerto Rico — A Way Forward" report, written by former IMF employees and released June 29, Puerto Rico’s economy has contracted at a rate of 1 percent a year for nearly a decade. It’s a reduction the authors of the report describe as “remarkable for an economy suffering neither civil strife nor overt financial crisis.”
The report says that only 40 percent of adults in Puerto Rico — versus 63 percent on the U.S. mainland — are employed or looking for work. “The rest are economically idle or working in the gray economy,” the report adds.
Hector Cordero, a professor in the School of Public Affairs at Baruch College, has researched the demographics of low-income families on the island.
“Clearly low-income people will be asked now to bear the brunt of the challenges and pay for what needs to be paid for — cuts in services and reduction in quality of services, higher fees, higher taxes in consumption,” he said.
Still, those on the island may need to rely on those on the mainland for not just economic and housing assistance but political mobilization, according to Angelo Falcón, president of the National Institute for Latino Policy, a nonpartisan policy center that focuses on Latino issues in the U.S.
“Ironically now the politicians in Puerto Rico who have themselves ignored the community here, the diaspora, in many ways, are now having to become very dependent on possibly the Puerto Ricans here in the U.S. stateside bringing attention to the problem of Puerto Rico,” Falcón said.
José Calderón, president of the Hispanic Federation, a New York-based organization whose mission is to empower the Hispanic community, said Padilla’s announcement was a turning point that has compelled his and other organizations to focus attention on Puerto Rico.
“Like any Latino organization, our principal charge is what’s happening to Latinos in the United States and there are a multitude of issues … job creation, immigration, environment,” Calderón said. “This has made this a top priority without a question.”
The federation is busy organizing Latino and Puerto Rican leadership across the country to articulate a unified position on what the U.S. government response should be.
Meanwhile, New Yorkers like Cortés are figuring out how to make their own positions heard, perhaps at the ballot box.
“We have a very big populations of Puerto Ricans over here in the United States,” said Cortés. “We are millions. And we are looking at the President and the candidate for President in the United States about the situation on our isle.”Tales of the yeti, the "Abominable Snowman" of the Himalayas, have been recorded for centuries. Mountaineers tell of coming face-to-face with a hairy, ape-like creature that walks on two legs. There have been blurred photos and even the odd shaky home video. But no one has ever come close to identifying what this mythical creature might be, or even if it is indeed real.
Today, news websites were filled with tales that this mysterious creature may have been identified. Bryan Sykes, a geneticist at the University of Oxford, had obtained DNA from some hair samples from suspected yetis and had pulled back a corner of the curtain from this enduring mystery, identifying the animal and putting the mystery to rest.
Well, sort of. "The principle purpose of the project is not to find the yeti – though it can be interpreted that way and usually is – but really it's to do a systematic study on what material is alleged to have come from a yeti, because that's never been done," Sykes told the Guardian.
One leading theory behind the strange creatures known as yetis (or bigfoots or sasquatches, depending where you are in the world) is that they are surviving relic populations of hominids, an ancient relative of humans, somehow isolated but clinging on to life. To test out what might be possible, Sykes worked with colleagues at the University of Lausanne to put out a call for people claiming to have samples from these sorts of creatures.
"I'm as curious as anyone to know what these creatures might be and I saw an opportunity to do a proper scientific study because of the advances in the analysis of hair samples," said Sykes. "I've been able to develop a protocol to get good DNA from a single hair shaft, no roots required. I've been going around museums and also getting samples sent in from mummies and stuffed animals and putting them through the analysis of mitochondrial DNA."
In the latest analysis, he looked at hairs from two animals, one found in the western Himalayan region of Ladakh and the other from Bhutan, 800 miles away. The objective, he said, was to give the samples a thorough scientific examination. "These creatures are under the umbrella of cryptozoology and the last 50 years have been off-limits to science – it's been handed over to a more eccentric fringe over the last 50 years."
Sykes examined a gene in the mitochondrial DNA from the hair samples. Mitochondria are the tiny powerhouses in biological cells, turning food into the type of energy required for the body to carry out its functions. They are passed down from mothers and have a small genome that can be examined to map out the how a specimen might be related to other specimens.
Specifically, Sykes's team looked at the 12S RNA gene, something that has already been analysed in all known mammalian species. By comparing his samples with those in GenBank, the international repository of gene sequences, Sykes was able to identify the animals that the hair might have from. "In the case of these two yeti samples that we're talking about, they matched a sequence in the GenBank from a polar bear jaw found in Svalbard, which is at least 40,000 years old." This was around the time that the polar bear and the related brown bear were separating into different species.
Bill Amos, a professor of evolutionary genetics at the University of Cambridge, cautioned that forensic samples of DNA, such as the ones being examined by Sykes, were always difficult to deal with. First off, scientists needed to be careful about the true source of the samples. The sorts of people who might go looking for yetis, said Amos, might have also have been up to the Arctic and encountered polar bears at some point, leaving open the possibility that their clothing had been contaminated with polar bear hairs.
"We are always aware of hoaxes and things in this kind of area and you have to take Brian Sykes's word that the hairs came from somebody who genuinely believed they had seen a yeti or found a footprint [and kept it safe]," said Amos. "Equally there are people who quite like a good story and clever somebody might have planted some hairs or given them to some villagers and told them: 'Why don't you say this comes from a footprint?' The evidence is as strong as the veracity of the links. From Brian Sykes back to the hair is fine. Where the hair comes from and how it got there, I would be more sceptical about."
Amos said he was sceptical that the samples found in the Himalayas were those of polar bears but the idea there might be an unknown type of white bear in the region was not out of the question. "What a large bear up there would find to feed on is another matter," he said. "I guess it could be looking at domestic cattle but most species do leave quite a lot of evidence around. If there was anything like a medium population of 20-50, which is the minimum number that most people think would allow a viable population, why aren't these things being seen more often by people out looking for snow leopard pelts and all the rest of it? There is very little these days that is so remote that you don't get actually appreciable numbers of humans with binoculars out there."
Amos was not involved in the analysis of the hairs but said that, from what he had heard, he was "90% convinced that there is a bear in these regions that has been mistaken for a yeti. The scientific approach is fine. It would have been nice if [Sykes] had been able to get some nuclear DNA and been able to say a bit more."
Sykes said the results had been submitted to a journal for peer review, so other scientists will be able to examine the results more closely as soon as they are published. He is aware of the limitations of his analysis, saying that there was only a limited amount that could be learned with the hair. "It's 40 years old and not much DNA there really. The next best thing to do is to get an expedition together to find one and see what one is like in the wild and to see if any aspects of its behaviour are more likely to be identified as a yeti. And genetically to find out how much polar bear is in this animal. It might be a hybrid or a new species of bear. But we can't tell all this from one hair sample."CAIRO (Reuters) - Egypt has sent a robot submarine to join the hunt for an EgyptAir plane which crashed in some of the deepest waters of the Mediterranean Sea with 66 people on board, President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi said on Sunday.
Ships and planes scouring the sea north of Alexandria have found body parts, personal belongings and debris from the Airbus 320, but are still trying to locate the black box recorders that could shed light on the cause of Thursday’s crash.
Sisi said that underwater equipment from Egypt’s offshore oil industry was being brought in to help the search.
“They have a submarine that can reach 3,000 meters under water,” he said in a televised speech. “It moved today in the direction of the plane crash site because we are working hard to salvage the black boxes.”
An oil ministry source said Sisi was referring to a robot submarine used mostly to maintain offshore oil rigs. It was not clear whether the vessel would be able to help locate the black boxes, or would be used in later stages of the operation.
Air crash investigation experts say the search teams have around 30 days to listen for pings sent out once every second from beacons attached to the two black boxes. At this stage of the search they would typically use acoustic hydrophones, bringing in more advanced robots later to scan the seabed and retrieve any objects once they have been found.
Separately, the U.S. Navy’s Sixth Fleet said one of its patrol aircraft supporting the search had spotted more than 100 pieces of debris positively identified as having come from an aircraft, and passed the data to the Egyptian Navy.
EgyptAir flight 804 from Paris to Cairo vanished off radar screens early on Thursday as it entered Egyptian airspace over the Mediterranean. The 10 crew and 56 passengers included 30 Egyptian and 15 French nationals.
French investigators say that the plane sent a series of warnings indicating that smoke had been detected on board shortly before it disappeared.
The signals did not indicate what caused the smoke or fire, and aviation experts have not ruled out either deliberate sabotage or a technical fault, but they offered early clues as to what unfolded in the moments before the crash.
“Until now all scenarios are possible,” Sisi said in his first public remarks on the crash. “So please, it is very important that we do not talk and say there is a specific scenario.”
The crash was the third blow since October to hit Egypt’s travel industry, still reeling from political unrest following the 2011 uprising that ousted Hosni Mubarak.
A suspected Islamic State bombing brought down a Russian airliner after it took off from Sharm al-Sheikh airport in late October |
greater on the Fujita scale, including two rated F3 in Fairfax County and Newport News. The tornadoes caused one death, 19 injuries, damaged 270 homes, and destroyed three homes, amounting to $6 million ($20 million in 2005 USD) in losses. In Maryland, David's outer bands formed seven tornadoes,[20] including an F2 in Kingsville.[21] In New Castle County, Delaware, an F2 tornado damaged numerous homes and injured five.[22]
Aftermath [ edit ]
Dominica [ edit ]
Immediately after the storm, lack of power prevented communications and the outside world had little knowledge of the extent of the damage in Dominica. A citizen named Fred White ended that by using a battery-operated ham radio to contact the world.[6]
In response to the severe agricultural damage, the government initiated a food ration. By two months after the storm, assistance pledges amounted to over $37 million (1979 US$) from various groups around the world. Similar to the aftermath of other natural disasters, the distribution of the aid raised concerns and accusations over the amount of food and material, or lack thereof, for the affected citizens.[6] The Hurricane destroyed some important landmarks, including a significant part of the ruins of the Fort Young which had stood since the 1770s.[23]
Another occurrence less typical of the aftermath of other natural disasters was the looting. In supermarkets, seaports, and homes, what was not destroyed by the hurricanes was stolen in the weeks after the storm.[7]
HMS Fife (a Royal Navy County Class Destroyer) was on its way back to the United Kingdom when the hurricane struck, and was turned back to provide emergency aid to the island. Sailing through mountainous seas The Fife docked in the main harbor at Roseau without assistance, and was the only outside help for several days. The crew provided work details and medical parties to offer assistance to the island and concentrated on the hospital buildings, the airstrip, and restoring power and water. The ship's helicopter (called Humphrey) took medical aid into the hills to assist people who were cut off from getting to other help by fallen trees. The ship also used its radio systems to broadcast news and music to the island to inform the population of what was being done and how to get assistance. This was the first time a Royal Navy ship had provided a public broadcast news service.[citation needed]
United States [ edit ]
Despite the casualties and damages attributed to David, the storm's effects were not as bad as in other countries. In particular, South Florida escaped relatively lightly. Because of this, then NHC Director Neil Frank was accused of overly stirring up panic before the arrival of David: two local psychiatrists even claimed that the experience would make residents more complacent towards future storms. However, the NHC defended their methods, with Frank stating: "If we hadn't [raised public alarm] and our predictions had been more accurate, the consequences would have been disastrous."[8] One reporter who covered Hurricane David was Dick Baumbach, a journalist with TODAY newspaper, now known as Florida Today. He along with news photographer Scott Maclay followed the path of the hurricane from Miami to Central Florida. In Cocoa Beach, Baumbach decided to ride out the hurricane in his home with two other journalists. While it was a difficult and trying experience all three reporters survived and ended up winning numerous awards. The hurricane also interrupted the filming of the movie Caddyshack that was taking place at the Rolling Hills Country Club in Fort Lauderdale.
Retirement [ edit ]
The name David was retired following this storm because of its devastation and high death toll, and will never be used again for an Atlantic hurricane, making it the first male hurricane name in the Atlantic Ocean to be retired. It was replaced with Danny for the 1985 season.[24]
In popular culture [ edit ]
David, DP Express, 1979 [25]
See also [ edit ]An internal federal analysis says lower income Canadians remain highly dependent on cars to get to work — a finding that surfaces as Ottawa considers infrastructure investment models that could put more toll booths on the country's roads.
The February briefing note was prepared weeks before the Trudeau government signalled its intention to engage institutional investors, such as pension funds, to help raise money for public infrastructure projects.
Senior pension plan officials have said they are looking to invest in infrastructure projects with reliable, predictable returns that could include user fees — like road tolls.
The Finance Department memo said that user fees ensure those who benefit most from infrastructure are the ones who pay for it.
But a case study contained in the "secret" briefing package warned that when it comes to road tolls, a significant proportion of lower-income Canadians could be forced to dig into their wallets.
The document said about 85 per cent of people whose after-tax earnings were in the top two fifths of the income spectrum commuted in private vehicles.
By comparison, 77 per cent of taxpayers in the bottom fifth of income earners also took private vehicles to work, the briefing said.
User fees'regressive,' says memo
"Higher income people do tend to use road infrastructure more than lower income people," said the study, which aimed to evaluate the potential implications of charging user fees on roads and highways.
"However, lower income people still rely heavily on road infrastructure."
The document, prepared for deputy finance minister Paul Rochon, was obtained recently by The Canadian Press under the Access to Information Act.
The analysis also noted that about 17 per cent of taxpayers in the bottom fifth of earners pay for road infrastructure through their taxes, even though they don't directly use it to commute to work — such as those who walk to and from their jobs.
But in general, the document said imposing user fees on public infrastructure is typically considered "regressive" because people of all income levels are usually required to pay the same amount.
Liberals open to private investment
"The regressivity of user fees on roads, for example, would be especially acute in regions where there are fewer substitute methods of transportation," said the partially redacted memo.
"In contrast, it can be argued that in cases where higher-income individuals use relatively more of the infrastructure, general taxation is implicitly more regressive than charging user fees since charging user fees would remove the kind of subsidization implicit in the general tax system."
The note also laid out two perspectives on equity.
Any implementation of road tolls would fall under municipal and provincial jurisdictions. ((CBC))
One view argues that individuals should pay for public infrastructure based on their incomes to ease the burden on lower earners. The other states that people should pay for the benefits they receive from the infrastructure rather than asking non-users to subsidize it via general taxation.
The subject of user fees on public infrastructure in Canada has gained attention in recent months.
Since their March budget, the federal Liberals have said they would welcome some private investment cash to help enhance Ottawa's commitment to spend $120 billion on infrastructure over the next decade.
Municipal and provincial concerns
"I think just to meet the needs of the communities, government investments are not going to be sufficient on their own, so we need to engage (the) private sector," Infrastructure Minister Amarjeet Sohi told The Canadian Press in a recent interview.
"All government resources are not going to meet that need, so we need to unlock the pension funds."
Pension funds have said they're looking to invest in projects that would generate steady returns — everything from snack bar sales to road tolls.
Andrew Claerhout, who leads the Ontario Teachers' Pension Plan infrastructure group, recently said major federal assets like airports and ports would offer some of the most intriguing opportunities for private investment — should they ever go up for sale.
Claerhout also said certain types of provincial and municipal infrastructure, such as wastewater, utilities and highways, can also be attractive to big investors.
Any implementation of road tolls, for example, would fall under municipal and provincial jurisdictions.
When asked about the possibility that inviting institutional investors to the table could eventually lead to the installation of new road tolls, Sohi insisted Ottawa would respect the choices of other governments.
"We don't tell municipalities and provinces how they run their infrastructure, how they build their infrastructure," said Sohi, a former Edmonton city councillor.
"But if they want to price, or not price, that's their decision."2010 Arizona State Sun Devils Undie Run (Video/Pics)
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Anything that incorporates “Arizona State girls” and “undies,” and my interest is immediately piqued. I have friends that go to ASU, so I had the luxury of seeing some Undie Run pics before they were all over the internet and they certainly did not disappoint, to say the least.
In case you’re playing the extremely innocent card, the ASU Undie Run, which has become ASU’s largest, craziest, sexiest, and most amazing end of the year tradition the campus has come to know, involves its students running around campus in, you guessed it, their undies. And the best part about it being the year 2010 is that college students are well aware of the internet now, so they’re not going to whip out the grandma tighty whities for such marvelous occasions. We’re going to see the damn best Victoria’s Secret’s sexy section has to offer because these hot mostly-teenage girls all know they are going to wind up on the internet for creeps like us to gawk at. Good for them for being so aware and so easy to look at.
Without further ado, I present the 2010 Arizona State University Undie Run pics, with as many retracted dudes in boxers as possible.
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Share ThisLONDON/GENEVA (Reuters) - The air we breathe is laced with cancer-causing substances and is being officially classified as carcinogenic to humans, the World Health Organization’s cancer agency said on Thursday.
A gas-fired power station is seen during a frosty night in Minsk, December 4, 2012. REUTERS/Vasily Fedosenko
The International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) cited data indicating that in 2010, 223,000 deaths from lung cancer worldwide resulted from air pollution, and said there was also convincing evidence it increases the risk of bladder cancer.
Depending on the level of exposure in different parts of the world, the risk was found to be similar to that of breathing in second-hand tobacco smoke, Kurt Straif, head of the agency’s section that ranks carcinogens, told reporters in Geneva.
“Our task was to evaluate the air everyone breathes rather than focus on specific air pollutants,” deputy head Dana Loomis said in a statement. “The results from the reviewed studies point in the same direction: the risk of developing lung cancer is significantly increased in people exposed to air pollution.”
Air pollution, mostly caused by transport, power generation, industrial or agricultural emissions and residential heating and cooking, is already known to raise risks for a wide range of illnesses including respiratory and heart diseases.
Research suggests that exposure levels have risen significantly in some parts of the world, particularly countries with large populations going through rapid industrialization, such as China.
IARC reviewed thousands of studies on air pollution tracking populations over decades and other research such as those in which mice exposed to polluted air experienced increased numbers of lung tumors.
In a statement released after reviewing the literature, the Lyon-based agency said both air pollution and “particulate matter” - a major component of it - would now be classified among its Group 1 human carcinogens.
That ranks them alongside more than 100 other known cancer-causing substances in IARC’s Group 1, including asbestos, plutonium, silica dust, ultraviolet radiation and tobacco smoke.
CARCINOGEN ENCYCLOPAEDIA
Air pollution is highly variable over space and time.
Loomis said there was relatively high exposure in Asia, South Asia, eastern North America, some places in Central America and Mexico, as well as North Africa.
But although both the composition and levels of air pollution can vary dramatically from one location to the next, IARC said its conclusions applied to all regions of the world.
“Our conclusion is that this is a leading environmental cause of cancer deaths,” Dr. Christopher Wild, director of IARC, told the news briefing in Geneva.
IARC’s ranking monographs program, sometimes known as the “encyclopedia of carcinogens”, aims to be an authoritative source of scientific evidence on cancer-causing substances.
It has already classified many chemicals and mixtures that can be components of air pollution, including diesel engine exhaust, solvents, metals and dusts. But this is the first time that experts have classified air pollution as a cause of cancer.
Wild said he hoped the comprehensive evidence would help the WHO, which is revising its global 2005 guidelines on air quality. The U.N. agency makes on recommendations on public health issues to its 193 member states.
Asked why it had taken so long to reach the conclusion, he said that one problem was the time lag between exposure to polluted air and the onset of cancer.
“Often we’re looking at two, three or four decades once an exposure is introduced before there is sufficient impact on the burden of cancer in the population to be able to study this type of question,” he said.WASHINGTON – While other Republican presidential candidates are taking swipes at front-runner Donald Trump, Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, is instead joining forces with him to try to stop President Obama’s nuclear deal with Iran.
Cruz invited Trump to join a Capitol Hill rally and Trump accepted, telling people at an event in South Carolina, it will be “essentially a protest against a totally incompetent deal we’re making with Iran.”
Cruz tweeted that he was glad Trump had accepted the invitation.
A statement from Catherine Frazier, national press secretary for the Cruz presidential campaign, said:
“Sen. Cruz has invited Donald Trump to join him on the Capitol grounds for a rally to call on members of Congress to defeat the catastrophic deal that the Obama administration has struck with the Islamic Republic of Iran. The event will be sponsored by Tea Party Patriots, Center for Security Policy, and the Zionist Organization of America. We are thankful for all their hard work on this effort and will have more details on time, date, and location as they are finalized.”
The Tea Party Patriots have since announced the rally will be on Wednesday, Sept. 9, on the West Lawn of the Capitol.
“This deal does not prevent Iran from getting nuclear weapons; it virtually guarantees it. Congress must reject this terrible deal,” said Jenny Beth Martin, the CEO and co-founder of Tea Party Patriots.
While some of the other GOP candidates, notably Jeb Bush, have attacked Trump and become ensnared in a war of words, Cruz has refrained. The senator has said he agrees with Trump on many key issues.
Trump joked Thursday he wouldn’t “hit” Cruz who has been “so nice.” But Trump kiddingly added, “I may have to if he starts getting really close.”
Cruz and Trump met earlier this summer in New York but did not reveal what they discussed.
Obama’s Iran deal has been blasted by critics as dangerously unrealistic.
Even top Democrats have come out against it.
Sens. Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., and Bob Menendez, D-N.J., both plan to vote for an upcoming Senate bill disapproving of the deal.
J.B. Pritzker, a lifelong Democrat who chaired Hillary’s 2008 campaign, wrote last week:
“Regrettably, the Iran deal fails to meet these goals and raises the prospects for war … By legitimizing Iran’s nuclear program, removing the pressure of economic sanctions and allowing it to obtain conventional weapons and ballistic missiles, this agreement makes the prospect for war more likely, not less.”
President Bill Clinton’s CIA director, James Woolsey, also wrote last week:
“Congress must stop President Obama’s nuclear deal with Iran. The most important reason — Iran can threaten the existence of the United States by making an electromagnetic pulse (EMP) attack using a single nuclear weapon.”
WND has worked extensively with one of the groups sponsoring the anti-Iran deal rally, the Center for Security Policy.
Clare Lopez, the group’s vice president, is one of the top experts on Iran.
She told WND the Cruz and Trump rally is “a great development, because these two are among the sharpest, best-informed of the entire candidate lineup,” and that the duo “speak out forthrightly about what they believe.”
“To see them taking a public stance against this disaster of a deal is important and encouraging,” concluded Lopez.
Earlier this week, she told WND she concurred with the detailed assessment recently published by John Bolton, the former U.S. ambassador to the U.N., that only a military strike can now stop Iran’s nuclear weapons program.
And Lopez told WND she agreed that such a strike “does not necessarily mean all-out war.”
While she also agreed with Bolton that stopping President Obama’s nuclear deal will not prevent Iran from getting the bomb, Lopez still stressed the importance of having Congress reject the agreement.
She insisted it’s worth voting down the deal as an expression of the will of the American people and their recognition that it is a bad deal, and because there seems to be some indication that Iranian Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei will make his own decision, up or down, based on the vote in Congress.
“As Iranian experts have explained to me, and as (Iran expert and former Harvard professor) Daniel Pipes has also written, there is strong opposition to this deal inside the Iranian regime itself. And the embarrassment before the world should Congress indeed vote it down would be unbearable to the supreme leader,” said Lopez.
She said that means Khamenei “cannot get out in front. Nor is the Majlis (the Iranian parliament) likely to vote on it before Congress. This makes Congress’s vote even more important than many may realize.”
Lopez was an instructor for military intelligence and special forces students; has been a consultant, intelligence analyst and researcher within the defense sector; has published two books on Iran; and has an analytical acumen honed by 20 years as a CIA field operative.
She appeared as a speaker at a “Stop Iran Rally” recently in Cleveland and another rally in Santa Barbara, California, on Sunday.
“Absolutely insane,” was the succinct reaction from Lopez to WND on the revelations last week of details in the secret side deals in Obama’s nuclear agreement with Iran.
The Associated Press had confirmed a pair of stunning details in the agreement:
A secret side deal lets Iran decide which sites to inspect.
The side deal also lets Iran do the inspections at a key site.
AP reported it had reviewed a document outlining the side deal between Iran and the International Atomic Energy Agency, or IAEA.
In a nutshell, the secret side deal would:
Let Iran use its own inspectors to investigate the Parchin site where experts suspect it has been developing nuclear arms.
Let Iran provide the IAEA its own photos and and videos of suspect locations, while, “taking into account military concerns.”
AP said that wording suggests international inspectors will be barred from sites Iran declares have “military concerns.”
AP said the wording also suggests the IAEA won’t get photo or video information from areas Iran says are off limits because they have military significance.
While the document says the IAEA “will ensure the technical authenticity” of Iran’s inspection, it does not say how.
“Never before did the IAEA simply allow a party suspected of violations to inspect themselves,” a stunned Lopez told WND.
There is apparently more than one side deal.
AP reported the document is labeled “separate arrangement II,” which indicates there is at least one more confidential agreement between the IAEA and Iran.
AP said the document it reviewed is a draft, but “one official familiar with its contents said it doesn’t differ substantially from the final version.”
The IAEA chief told Republican senators two weeks ago that he could not let them see the side deal.
“Enough,” responded Cruz.
“Enough of the concessions, capitulations and backroom deals that make up President Obama’s catastrophic nuclear deal with the Islamic Republic of Iran. The most recent revelation that Iran will be selecting its own inspectors to verify the nature of its nuclear program is made all the more egregious by the fact that as the single largest contributor to the IAEA (support that is mandated in the deal) United States taxpayers will be paying for a farce that is a direct threat to their own security.”
Cruz concluded, “This is not a partisan issue. It is not about President Obama’s political legacy. It is about the future of our country, and that of our allies. We have to stop this disastrous deal.”
Lopez rhetorically asked WND: “Why do inspections at all at sites deemed ‘suspect’ if those suspected of doing something that violates the deal are going to be trusted, essentially, with inspecting themselves?
“Was there ever anything more absurd?” she wondered incredulously.
“That’s not how the IAEA inspects any other country with a nuclear program. When (former Libyan leader Moammar) Gadhafi gave up his weapons of mass destruction program, the various agency inspectors were given access everywhere to verify that he’d genuinely given up.
“When South Africa terminated its nuclear weapons program under IAEA supervision, the government welcomed the inspectors and gave them access to wherever they needed to go. It’s attitude was one of cooperation and transparency. That’s not how Saddam Hussein behaved, and it’s not how Iran’s regime is behaving now,” she concluded.
Critics of the Iran deal say it is based on trust of the Iranian regime while the administration claimed on Wednesday “the IAEA has separately developed the most robust inspection regime ever peacefully negotiated.”
AP reported, “The agreement in question diverges from normal procedures by allowing Tehran to employ its own experts and equipment in the search for evidence of activities it has consistently denied – trying to develop nuclear weapons.”
The deputy IAEA director general in charge of the Iran probe from 2005 to 2010 told AP he could think of no similar concession with any other country.
Secretary of State John Kerry said in April that, under the deal, Iran would allow the IAEA to inspect anywhere it wants. He would later deny saying that, while testifying under oath to Congress.
After the deal was concluded, Kerry told senators on July 23 he “never uttered the words anywhere, anytime” regarding inspections of Iran’s facilities, and claimed “it was never part of negotiations.”
That’s not what the Obama administration said in April, and it directly contradicted what Deputy National Security adviser Ben Rhodes promised back then, when he said the International Atomic Energy Agency would have immediate access to any Iranian nuclear site.
Rhodes has since flip-flopped and directly contradicted himself.
On April 6, he said, “Under this deal, you will have anywhere, anytime, 24/7 access as it relates to the nuclear facilities that Iran has.”
On July 14, he said, “We never sought in this negotiation the capacity for so-called anytime, anywhere” inspections.
Parchin is just one of the sites where Iran has not permitted IAEA inspectors to go.
Iran has denied any nuclear weapons work was done at Parchin but has never allowed access to the site. The IEAE suspects Iran experimented on nuclear detonators at Parchin, based on U.S., Israeli and other intelligence.
Work at Parchin stopped more than decade ago, but the IAEA has cited satellite image evidence of apparent attempts to clean the site.
Lopez told WND in April that if “you read between the lines” of its report back in November 2011, it was clear that even the IAEA believed Iran had been working on a nuclear warhead as well as the explosive triggers for initiating the implosion sequence.
She also said, “All the evidence suggests Iran already has nuclear warheads.”
Worse yet, she said the Obama administration almost certainly knows that.
“IAEA (International Atomic Energy Agency) reporting over recent years indicates at a minimum they strongly suspect that Iran already has built nuclear warheads. It’s certainly known that Iran has long range ICBMs (intercontinental ballistic missiles.)”
Lopez added, “They’ve had the information how to build a warhead for a long time. They’ve had expert assistance from, at a minimum, North Korea and Pakistan.”
“They’re documented by the IAEA as having engaged in activities related to warhead development. There are satellite images from Parchin of what are believed to be ‘containers’ in which warhead triggers were tested. And Iranian officials have been reported present in North Korea during nuclear tests.”
Follow Garth Kant @DCgarth
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My outrage is dampened by the feeling of deja vu. Each episode in this conflict is actually routine. There is nothing new anymore. Colony expansion is to be expected on Israel’s part. It is enacting a long-term strategy to swallow up Palestine while excluding as many Palestinians as possible.
It is also hardly surprising that a politically compromised United States leadership would only do more of the same. Its self-assigned job is to manage conflict without violating the tenets of the US-Israeli alliance, even under the pretence of being a honest broker. It is consistently inconsistent. We cannot expect anything better from Israel and the US no matter how outside of world opinion they stand.
What is really disappointing is the failure of the Palestinian leadership to propose anything imaginative in response.
Palestinian officialdom in Ramallah is invested in the whole land-for-peace con, a tired, uninspirational and fixed scheme. The absurd formula is based on Palestinians giving Israel peace — really submission — in exchange for getting their own land back. This also means that anything resembling intransigence will cost the Palestinians more of their own land. But for Palestinians to produce this peace, it must tolerate increasing deprivations of its non-land rights by — guess who — the Israelis. The trick is that it is really the Israelis who control both the land and, as the stronger party, the peace.
This dooms Palestinians to a rigged accounting. It is scheme in which Palestinians can only lose. Yet, the Palestinian elite are vested in it, keeping the Palestinians as the party that Israel constantly does things to, whether or not Israel can cite a pretence. Palestinians have only one strategy acceptable in this paradigm: Surrender. Even when they do, Israel expands the colonies. Where is Palestinian agency, inventiveness and action?
Land-for-peace is less a game than a cover for the colonies’ programme. The plan for occupied Jerusalem is an intricate ring strategy to isolate the central city from surrounding Palestinian populations as a way of diminishing their claims to the city. Israel wants to preclude occupied Jerusalem from being part of Palestinian life, which also includes squeezing the Palestinians in occupied Jerusalem.
Its ring approach to surrounding occupied East Jerusalem is matched by a larger administrative machine designed to strain occupied Jerusalem’s Palestinians. The excessive policing and intricate rules around Palestinian residency status are part of a slow motion de-Palestinianisation effort in the city revered by the three monotheistic religions.
The Palestinians of occupied Jerusalem resist this plan by just existing in the face of intense pressure. This is a vital and commendable strategy. The problem is the Palestinian leadership in Ramallah takes the same approach. That is a dereliction of duty.
With the latest announcement of colony-building in occupied East Jerusalem, the Israeli government set off another equally hopeless round of meetings and stern comments by spokespeople. Following a Palestinian request, Jordan called for a UN emergency session last week. A UN spokesman dutifully criticised Israel’s plans, calling on it to take back the decision and to start magically abiding “by its commitment to the international law.”
The US answered with softcore words of criticism. US Ambassador David Pressman warned against “actions that pollute the atmosphere for peace.” Infractions against Palestinians are for American officials rarely framed as anything other than opposed to some abstraction — “peace” or its “process,” or the “international community” — as if these are victimless crimes.
US Secretary of State John Kerry inspired Netanyahu to issue a warm and fuzzy request to the Knesset to temper the provocations on the holy city. Right-wing Member of the Knesset Moshe Feiglin happily defied it by visiting the Al Haram Al Sharif on Sunday. It did not have the immediate impact of former prime minister Ariel Sharon’s 2000 visit with hundreds of riot police in tow, which sparked a new intifada. This only showed the absurdity of asking Netanyahu to do something about provocation. It is like appointing a thief as the chief of police.
Despite the ever-so-slight verbal spanking from the US over the plan, there was some echo chamber panic in the US and Israeli news media over deteriorating US-Israeli relations stemming from an unnamed Obama administration official calling Netanyahu names in confidential comments to Jeffrey Goldberg. If there was any confusion about what impact these insults and hurt feelings have on the state of the special relationship, the US announced it was selling Israel a batch of F-35 stealth fighter jets the same day; a robust sign of business as usual.
For its part, the political council of the Palestine Liberation Organisation said it would be seeking a UN Security Council resolution “to end the Israeli occupation in the [Occupied] Palestinian territories.”
However, every Palestinian can rattle off the litany of UN resolutions that codify her rights and Israel’s obligations. Every Israeli foreign ministry attorney can list the many acrobatic interpretations and loopholes that render them toothless. It is not the legal arguments that leave the resolutions unimplemented. It is the realpolitik calculations of world powers. What would another UNSC resolution really accomplish then?
Even if the Palestinian National Authority finds the nine Security Council members it needs to pass a resolution, the US will either veto it or water down the language to preserve Israeli impunity. The only US veto at the UNSC under President Barack Obama was a 2011 resolution condemning Israeli colony expansion.
PLO Secretary General Yasser Abed Rabbo contemplated this, saying that “If the Americans veto or abort the motion, this would not be the end of the process.” What is the backup plan, the brilliant counter? He said, “We will have another chance to go to the Security Council in January 2015.”
Palestinian leadership should look to the activists who have more imaginative ideas for marshalling public support that press upon Israel’s real pressure points. Their latest victory is getting the carbonated beverage device manufacturer Sodastream to move its factories from the colonies through pressures of economic boycott. If Palestinian officials do not embrace grassroots solidarity tactics, they will find themselves being pushed by Israel and the western powers to obstruct them. It takes a more visionary leadership to act on this potential.
Will Youmans is assistant professor of Media and Public Affairs at George Washington University. You can follow him on Twitter at www.twitter.com/@wyoumansProfessional fighter turned promoter Jesse Finney is using his tenacious attitude to develop Shamrock FC, and his fighters.
Former kickboxer and mixed martial artist Jesse Finney has been competing since grade school. While competing in mixed martial arts, Finney amassed an impressive record of 6-1 with five finishes.
Since retiring, Finney has since settled into the business side of mixed martial arts. Finney currently heads the Shamrock FC promotion, but that does not do his resume justice.
Before settling into his current position, Finney worked many roles in the fight world, from trainer to manager. Finney’s varied fight game experience gives him an interesting look into MMA, and some inside knowledge.
Cage Pages got the opportunity to pick Finney’s brain, to find out more about the unheralded aspects of MMA.
Finney began the conversation by explaining his martial arts beginning.
“Robert Biggs, my stepfather, owned a martial arts studio. He was a kickboxer, fought on ABC Wide World of Sports and even won a title in the 80’s. He got me started in boxing and kickboxing when I was 8, or 10. I competed until college, but I actually played baseball in college. After that I didn’t really know what to do, but my stepfather got me to compete in kickboxing and MMA.”
While he may sound gung-ho, Finney quickly explained that he wasn’t keen on fighting originally.
“At first when I was training MMA fighters, just holding pads. When they tried to talk me in to competing, at first I thought they were crazy.
Finney’s move to promoting came off as a bit more natural than fighting.
“I’m lucky. I’ve been a trainer, fighter, manager and promoter. I even helped run Chuck Norris’ World Combat League. I got into promoting when I owned a gym, but was disappointed with local promotions-you need to create an experience for fans and fighters. I thought I could do better. I want to create an energy that will set us apart from other promotions.”
Before getting too heavy into business discussions, Finney dove into his fight career.
“I fought very aggressive like how I do business-either kill or be killed. I could always control my conditioning, and control the pace. It translates a lot into business. If you’re going to do it, do it right. Young promoters always ask for my advice and, excuse my French, don’t do anything half-assed.”
Finney went on to comment on when it was finally time to retire.
“I was starting a family and fighting wasn’t paying the bills. I already owned a gym and a promotion company. I knew it was time when fighting was the last thing on my agenda for the day. I was the last person that got any attention. I wasn’t really sleeping, and was probably just getting away with everything based on athletic ability.”
While Finney has had to deal with his own career ending, he claims he has never had to tell another to retire.
“I don’t think I’ve ever directly said you need to retire. Life is about scaring people in the right direction, and I have suggested it a few times. They’ve listened to me and they haven’t, but if you ask for my opinion I’ll give it to you.”
Finney went on to explain his plans for the promotion, and his intelligent business model.
“I think our spot is all about the fighters. We are in a position where we want to be the best triple A organization in MMA. Without a doubt, we do it right, with how we treat fighters, and how we pay fighters. We promote pro-am cards because we bring so many people up through the ranks with us. We almost have it like small steps, we start people on smaller shows and move them up to bigger cards. If you win our amateur title, we’ll give you a pro contract. If you win our pro contract, you’ll go to Bellator. We have a contract with Bellator.”
Before getting off of the phone, Cage Pages asked Finney to comment on the ongoing Conor McGregor drama playing out in the UFC. Being a former fighter and current promoter, Finney was bound to have a more informed opinion.
“At the end of the day, the UFC spent a lot of money on Conor McGregor. Who made Conor McGregor? The UFC. Five years go he was begging to get into the UFC, and now he’s begging for money. Fighters get so big because of the promotion behind them. When Conor is guaranteed to make 10 million, he made the choice to complete his obligations. I understand/appreciate where he is coming from, but if you say you’re going to do something you better do it. The UFC probably asks a bit much, but he agreed to do it. I’m actually happy to see the UFC sticking to their guns. Maybe I’m too loyal of a person, but I say don’t forget where you came from. The UFC is probably a five billion dollar company, do you really think 50 million is going to break them? Not going to lie, I’m kind of over it.”
With such an in-depth understanding of the fight game, Finney is doing his best to do right for the mixed martial arts community. Thus far, Finney has only promoted amateur and professional mixed martial arts to higher levels. Make sure to give Shamrock FC some love, and keep your eyes on Cage Pages for more fight coverage.
Make sure to follow Cage Pages on Twitter for more MMA news.
Want to write for Cage Pages? Please click on the link here for more info.Prime Minister Justin Trudeau's government spent more than $416,000 to renovate a two-year-old office building in downtown Ottawa, including paying more than $5,000 for 56 coat hooks.
Among the taxpayer-funded renovations carried out to the 17-floor Elgin Street office tower since the Liberal government came to power: $52,413 to build a bike storage room; $59,451 for new furniture; and $3,426 to "modify the lighting to an existing quiet room" by installing a window film and a dimmer switch.
The largest expenses were $131,640 for acoustical panels and another $75,781 for a "demountable partition."
Some renovations were carried out for safety reasons, such as $4,562 to remove a tripping hazard, or $772 for two convex mirrors to cover an area between the freight elevator and a blind corner.
'A lot less... at Canadian Tire'
The expenses are detailed in the government's response to an opposition MP's order paper question, tabled in the House of Commons this week.
In the documents that outline $416,067 worth of renovations during the Liberal government's first year in office, it was the spending on coat hooks that raised the eyebrows of opposition critics.
This bike storage room in the new Flaherty building cost taxpayers $52,413. (Department of Finance website)
The Treasury Board, which keeps tabs on government spending, shelled out $5,148 "to supply and install 56 coat hooks in washrooms." The Finance Department spent another $3,254 to supply and install an unspecified number of robe hooks in a "shower facility."
New Democrat MP Daniel Blaikie said he would like an explanation from the government of how 56 coat hooks ended up costing that much.
"You can go pick up 56 coat hooks for a hell of a lot less than $5,000 at the local Canadian Tire, and they actually look pretty good."
Conservative MP Blaine Calkins called the federal government spending $400,000 on renovations on a new building 'a shocking waste of taxpayers' money.' (Blaine Calkins/Twitter) Conservative MP Blaine Calkins was surprised to find out how much the government spent.
"I have absolutely no idea how something this simple could end up costing taxpayers this much money," he said, pointing out most Canadians would pick up coat hooks at a local hardware store for a few dollars.
While the money was spent after the Liberals came to power, Jean-Luc Ferland, spokesman for Treasury Board President Scott Brison, said some of the renovations were authorized while the Conservatives were still in office.
"The renovations to the James Michael Flaherty Building began under the previous government in early 2015, well before we formed government. None of them applied to the |
, but my ideal ice texture would be somewhere between the superfine and the sightly crunchy, like in Hawaiian shave ice.
NO SMOKING. They really mean it.
Lastly, continuing the theme of unique "No Smoking" signs from my first post, here are two different signs in SFT featuring a merciless fork that'll break your cigarette in half...and a cute lil' bird-thing wearing blue pants and a tiny blue cap who will put out your cigarette with a tiny red hose awwww.
Related
Taipei 2011, Day 1: Fried Crullers, Bear Head Doughnuts, Scallion Pancakes, Etc.
Belated Intro to Taipei, or "What's That Smell?"
Addresses
Tai Yi Milk King
No. 82號, Section 3, Xīnshēng South Road, Daan District, Taipei City, Taiwan 106 (map)
+886 2 2363 4341
Ay Chung Noodles
No. 8之1號, Éméi St, Wanhua District, Taipei City, Taiwan 108 (map)
+886 2 2388 8808
Water Drop Teahouse
No. 10, Lane 101, Fùxīngsān Rd, Beitou District,Taipei City, Taiwan 112 (map)
02-2891-4019; closed Mondays
Shilin Night Market
MRT stop Jiantan Station; (map)
Specific directions
We did some non-food activities for a bit.
Xin Fa Ting (辛發亭冰品店)
No. 1號, Ānpíng St, Shilin District Taipei City, Taiwan 111 (map)
+886 2 2882 0206Wow, here it is Christmas, and I got a present early this year, or at least thought I did anyway, when I picked up a bottle of RJ Rockers The First Snow Ale. You see, I had heard good things about this beer, but as it turned out, my present turned out to be more like coal in my stocking. More on that in just a few.
First, a little background here on RJ Rockers The First Snow Ale. From the bottle label:
This hearty American pale ale contains a rich blend of spices that warms the soul on a cold winter's night. Chill the mug, stoke the fire, and savor this quality seasonal brew.
Sounds good enough. A pale ale with spices, then, of 6% alcohol by volume. Let’s try it, shall we?
RJ Rockers the First Snow pours to a bright orange color with a thick head of creamy foam and a very fruity nose packed with luscious apricot and, not so nicely, a bit of vinegar. Taking a sip, I get some of the honey richness up front and spicy notes of nutmeg and cinnamon to complement more of that apricot fruitiness the nose promised. The problem is that the vinegar is there all throughout and especially more in the finish. Our own Red Rooster confirmed that his bottle purchased in DC was vinegar, too.
This stuff goes for $10.99 a six-pack, about $2 higher than average, so I am glad I only got a single. $11 a six is bad enough (and RJ Rockers beers have suddenly got pricey in Georgia, their Gruntled Pumpkin was $11.99 a six this year); when the beer is infected, well, that’s adding insult to injury.
I have made multiple attempts to contact the brewery about this, but they have not been very responsive to my complaints. Shame on you, RJ Rockers.
This drain pour is getting one star and two thumbs down.
And remember, try a new beer today, and drink outside the box. *Pricing data accurate at time of review or latest update. For reference only, based on actual price paid by reviewer. (B)=Bottled (D)=Draft
New York Rangers forward Ryan Callahan is another player who has stepped up to defend his head coach, releasing a statement on Sunday that responded to Sean Avery's assertion that John Tortorella be fired.
"Sean Avery's comments solely represent his own thoughts and opinions," said Callahan in a statement released by the team. "He did not speak for us as a team when he was here and certainly does not now."
Avery tweeted on Saturday, five minutes after the Rangers' 3-0 loss to the Montreal Canadiens that the Rangers should "Fire this CLOWN. His players hate him and wont play for his BS.... @imseanavery is #winning."
The Rangers loss on Saturday is their fourth in five games, dropping New York to 16-15-3 on the season and down to No. 8 in the Eastern Conference. The Rangers were expected to be Stanley Cup contenders after making a series of blockbuster moves in the offseason, including trading for Rick Nash.
Derek Stepan responded to Avery as well, telling the New York Daily News after the loss that the blame shouldn't rest squarely on Tortorella.
"Our problem isn't with our coaching staff, and it hasn't been," said Stepan. "And I think if you asked everyone on our team, they would say the same thing, that that's not the case here... I don't agree with (Avery's tweet) at all, no. I think it's safe to say that all 23 guys on our roster would say that's not the case."
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• Jeremy Jacobs, still awful
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• The best of our hockey networkHTC Vive launch title Budget Cuts is one of virtual reality’s most versatile experiences yet, requiring players to shoot, throw, duck and crawl in order to sneak past an army of murderous robots. Develop caught up with Neat Corp’s Joachim Holmér to ask why he threw virtual knives at a wall for a day and find out why stealth is the perfect fit for VR
What was the inspiration for Budget Cuts?
It came from lots of experimentation. We didn't really know what we were getting ourselves into with VR, so we did two weeks of prototyping to see what works and what doesn't.
What made us go the route of first-person stealth was simply that an enemy pointing a gun at you in VR feels very intimidating. A stealth game would enhance that feeling of being watched, triggering all the instinctive reactions for ducking and hiding.
The game uses a unique movement mechanic, combining SteamVR’s room-scale VR with a Portal-like gun. How did you come to rest on this combination as the best way to traverse Budget Cuts’ environments? What challenges did you face when building in the mechanic – such as the player’s ability to move quickly if spotted or to specifically position themselves to remain hidden?
We decided early on that anyone should be able to play the game, without motion sickness. This means joystick movement is immediately ruled out, along with any other methods using continuous acceleration.
In our case, we still wanted to be able to move around large levels, so the first test we did was a simple point and click to teleport. It works well, and doesn't cause any motion sickness, but it is pretty jarring. Simply flashing to teleport to a new location is harsh when there's no transition.
We then decided to try a combination of the translocator from the Unreal Tournament series, and the portal from the Portal series. The translocator in UT fires a small pad that flies in an arc. You can then press a button to teleport to that location.
We're doing the same thing, but when the pad lands, we also open up a portal, allowing you to see what the other side looks like, before teleporting. When you then press the button to teleport, the portal wraps around you, and you're then standing in the new location.
It has worked very well so far. The fact that you can see where you'll end up, makes sure that players know where they will stand in relation to any enemies that may be near that location. The fact that the portal pad flies physically in the air, makes for a natural limitation as for why you can't just immediately teleport anywhere how quickly you like.
"An enemy pointing a gun at you in VR feels very intimidating."
Joachim Holmér, Neat Corp
Players can use a variety of weapons to defend themselves in Budget Cuts – from a crossbow to throwing knives. How did you balance the use of the weapons by players to maintain a fair, but realistic level of accuracy in VR?
It generally works out pretty well. The crossbow is pretty straightforward, we've added iron sights if you want to aim accurately, which works well for people as long as they've seen where they sit in the weapon. The dart does have gravity and a travel time though, which is extra noticeable for longer distances, which you need to compensate for.
The knives on the other hand, could almost be an entire story in and of itself.
There are many factors that affect how well you can throw knives in VR. To name just a few: your throwing skills in reality, your ability to predict arcs and motion, the path your hand and arm takes when throwing, your sense of when – during the analog trigger release – the object is actually released and how well the code can parse the sparse data given to it during the fast hand motion.
We started out by simply reading the tracking data through SteamVR. They give accurate data, but only at a specific framerate. In reality, lots of motion happens between frames, especially when moving your hand quickly. So reading the raw data worked pretty well, but I wanted to see if there was room for improvement given how central it is in our game.
I dedicated a whole day for improving throwing in the game, I set up a scene with 88 knives, and five metres of distance to a target on the wall. I then tried to hit the target with all knives as best I could.
I repeated this process for about eight different iterations of the code, and found some ways to improve it.
To select from the variety of weapons available, Budget Cuts uses a unique inventory system. How did you go about creating a UI that works in tandem with the Vive’s motion controllers and still communicates enough information to the player about how to perform specific actions?
The more we work with VR, the more we realise how important it is to move all interactions from a panel/UI style to a physical in-game representation instead.
Even if people are used to menus, it's simply harder to understand them in VR, because you're no longer using a screen and a cursor, you're in another world.
The inventory system is one such physical system, which almost everyone immediately understands. You hold a button to open the inventory, you release to close. While it's open, you have a bubble where you can drop items to store them. All your stored items show up physically above this bubble while it's open. Given how physical they are, we don't need to explain that you can grab them using your other hand, since this is what you would do with any other item.
Contrast this with our tool selection system, which people have a very hard time understanding. This is a simple radial menu, similar to what you have in many weapon selection systems in console shooters. But on a touchpad, showing a UI panel in VR, is simply hard to understand. We're going to redesign that shortly, simply because the panel approach, again, fails to communicate well enough.
Budget Cuts is (to my knowledge) one of, if not the, first stealth titles in VR. What makes the genre suitable for VR? Does it offer any design challenges unique to the genre versus other types of gameplay?
We found stealth to be perfect for VR, and especially room-scale VR, given how your body is controlled by, well, moving your body. There's no limit to how you want to stand, crouch, sit, lie down and so on. Do you want to hide under a desk? Well, just hide under the desk. There's nothing stopping you from doing all of these natural body movements, which is very fun in this genre.
It fits VR very well given how, in VR, you're no longer controlling a character, you are the character in the game. This makes a huge difference, because now, you feel presence like you've never done in games before. Sadly, it sounds like a bunch of buzzwords that most people will just shrug off as PR talk. It's near impossible to communicate how real it feels. You really have to try high-end VR with tracked controllers to feel presence yourself. It sounds like a cliché, but in this case it has the virtue of being true.
As for the design challenges of stealth versus other types of genres – the biggest difference is how locomotion works. In many stealth games, walking and sneaking in elaborate paths is commonplace. That's something we're missing out on, because there's no long-range walking at all. We have to design it with our translocator in mind, which means that the player can often teleport to locations that would be impossible to walk to undetected. We have yet work out all the level design and game design implications of it. We're still very much in an experimental stage of the game, even though we've got the core mechanics down.
As well as walking around the Vive’s play area, Budget Cuts requires players to duck and more for a variety of in-game actions. Does the game adapt to work with a reduced play area? Do you believe the space requirement for the Vive could limit the game’s audience?
The playspace we're designing for is a cylinder with a radius of one metre, which roughly translates into a 2x2m space. You can get by quite well even if you're just standing still, but the crucial part is that you need to have controller tracking in all directions and have some space to reach for items. You can probably technically play the game in a 1x1m space, but there's a very high risk of you accidentally hitting reality with your controllers or your head, and it'll be a very uncomfortable experience in general.
The space requirement is something that does limit the audience, the same goes with 360-degree controller tracking, which Oculus Rift and PlayStation VR aren't pushing for given their front-facing camera setup.
It definitely limits our audience, but we didn't start out thinking ‘What game would be commercially viable to make?’ – we simply wanted to experiment with the Vive until we found out what was exciting to play. For us, VR wasn't all that interesting until we tried controllers in room-scale, so that was our starting point for Budget Cuts.
That being said, we are going to experiment to see if we can make a version of the game adapted for a front-facing camera setup, but we'll keep the Vive version as-is.
"We didn't start out thinking ‘What game would be commercially viable to make?’ – we simply wanted to experiment until we found out what was exciting to play."
Joachim Holmér, Neat Corp
Objects needed for progression are hidden around Budget Cuts’ environment – in drawers, under tables, in vents etc. How do you tutorialise the player so that they are encouraged to explore in VR and interact with a greater number of objects than they might in a ‘traditional’ title?
Usually we don't have to tutor that part very much – players naturally poke around with everything, simply because it's fun in VR. The only part we need to establish is that some of those objects matter in terms of gameplay.
In the current demo, we introduce this quite quickly and early on, where you have to find a key to open a safe. That being said, even ‘useless’ items can be used to trigger sounds to lure enemies.
What were the key tools, methods and technology you used to build Budget Cuts?
On the hardware side, we've been using the HTC Vive from the start. As for the engine, we're using Unity, with a few plugins: Valve's SteamVR plugin, our own Shader Forge plugin and DOTween. For art, we're using Maya and Photoshop primarily.
What development challenges remain for VR? How can these be overcome?
I think one of the bigger challenges is how to reach a bigger audience, how to convince people of VR. As mentioned earlier, you have to try it in order to be convinced by it. Many people who haven't played proper high-end VR with tracked controllers, simply don't see why it's such a big deal. They often compare it to the Kinect, or the Wiimote, or the previously failed VR push, or 3D TV. The list goes on.
What’s next for Neat Corp and Budget Cuts?
We're far from finished with Budget Cuts, so we're focusing 100 per cent on finishing the game, until we're hopefully done by the end of the year. Time will tell what happens after that.
This article is part of our month-long Virtual Reality Special. You can find more VR content here.Jeremy Hunt, the culture and sport minister in the Cameron cabinet, said Thursday that people who saw the Olympics as an economic body blow were premature and taking too narrow a view. The government now acknowledges that there is unlikely to be any short-term boost from the Games. It has reassured those nervous about its outlay on the Games — put at about $15 billion by government officials and as high as $20 billion by some experts, with road, railway and other improvements factored in — that the expense will be recouped in the long term by a $20 billion boost in Britain ’s trade.
“Having the Olympics in London is the best possible gift you could ask for because it has given London a profile on the global stage,” Mr. Hunt said, to the surprise of those who might have thought that London was already well established as one of the world’s major cities.
Mayor Boris Johnson, one of the Games’ biggest boosters, has made a midcourse correction of his own. He has admitted that the instant Olympic bounce he once forecast for London’s economy has evaporated, replaced by a “patchy” performance across many important sectors. But holding out for a turnaround, he has said things could improve as people realize that London without the crowds has become an unusually inviting place to go.
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Perhaps the most striking feature of the past week has been the absence of traffic congestion. Transport for London, which oversees the city’s transit system, warned on Thursday that 200,000 people were expected to head to Olympic Park on Friday for the start of the track and field competition, double the number who showed up on any previous day of the Games so far.
But mostly, the emphasis has been on pulling back from the forebodings that characterized the prelude to the Games. Many of the so-called Zil lanes on roads running to Games sites, named for the V.I.P. limousines that ran in dedicated lanes across Moscow in the Soviet era, have been opened to everyday traffic.
Trains and subway lines have run smoothly. Recordings of Mr. Johnson urging people not to “get caught” in the Olympic crush — and to work from home if they can — have played across eerily quiet concourses at mainline stations like King’s Cross, Victoria and Waterloo.
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Normally crowded sidewalks in areas like Knightsbridge, Oxford Street, Bond Street, Piccadilly and Soho have looked much as they do when the city empties for summer weekends. Tables at sidewalk cafes have gone begging, and tickets to the West End’s normally sold-out hit shows are readily available, often at 20 percent discounts.
Cabdrivers complain that business is down 30 percent from normal at this time of year. “Where are the million extra visitors that we were promised?” asked Steve McNamara, a spokesman for the Licensed Taxi Drivers’ Association. He coupled this with a palpable absence of the national pride Mr. Cameron has urged on a nation hosting its first Olympics since 1948. “I’m looking forward to the closing ceremony,” on Aug. 12, Mr. McNamara said.
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Hundreds of West End hotels that had advertised rooms at premium prices, in some cases five times the normal rate, have dropped prices back to the usual level or even offered heavy discounts. One of the few places that is doing a roaring trade is the campsite at the Lea Valley Waterworks Center, a golf course and nature reserve within sight of the Olympic Park. Angie Oliver, general manager of the center, said Friday that she expected a full house of 1,600 campers this weekend. “People just don’t want to pay extortionate prices for hotels,” she said.
Stores in the upscale West End shopping district have said sales are down by 10 percent and more, and restaurants used to turning people away are desperate for trade. Ricky McMenemy, managing director of the Rules restaurant in Covent Garden, popular with Americans for a menu specializing in traditional British foods, said that after a “disaster” last Friday, when diners stayed away to watch the opening ceremony, the restaurant was “seeing a 50 percent downturn” in diners this week.
Still, Mr. McMenemy shared Mr. Johnson’s optimism that things would look up as people realized that the warnings of crowding were overstated. “There are some amber flags up at the moment, but there’s no need for any red ones to be waved just yet,” he said.
But the stoicism has been rare. Nica Burns, chief executive of Nimax Theaters, which owns six of the West End’s best-known show houses, said the week before the Olympics began had been the worst week of the year, The Evening Standard reported. “We’re bleeding,” she was quoted as saying. “I think the Olympics are great, but I feel like I’ve been the bull’s-eye for the archery competition.”Washington (CNN) The Trump administration on Wednesday night withdrew Obama-era protections for transgender students in public schools that let them use bathrooms and facilities corresponding with their gender identity.
The announcement is a significant victory for opponents of the Obama administration's guidelines who believe the federal government never should have gotten involved in the issue.
Civil rights groups, meanwhile, denounced the withdrawal as a politically motivated attack that will endanger transgender children and sow confusion over the federal government's role in enforcing civil rights.
Last May, the departments of Education and Justice issued joint guidance directing schools to let transgender students use facilities that correspond with their gender identity. The " Dear Colleague " letter, addressed to school districts and colleges that receive federal funding, was based on the Obama administration's interpretation of Title IX, the federal law that bans sex discrimination in schools, to include gender identity.
Reaction was swift and divisive, culminating in the Trump administration's first " Dear Colleague " letter rescinding the guidance without offering a replacement. Issued jointly by the departments of Education and Justice, the letter did not take a position on the underlying question of whether Title IX protects gender identity. The departments withdrew the guidance "in order to further and more completely consider the legal issues involved," the letter said.
The announcement follows the Department of Justice's recent withdrawal from a court challenge related to the guidance. Observers said it portended more anti-LGBTQ sentiment from the administration, despite promises from President Trump and Education Secretary Betsy DeVos to protect the LGBT community.
"This is a mean-spirited attack on hundreds of thousands of students who simply want to be their true selves and be treated with dignity while attending school," Mara Keisling, executive director of the National Center for Transgender Equality, said in a statement.
How we got here
The Obama administration said the guidance was based on best practices from schools across the country that have already taken up the issue. Though many states have laws consistent with the guidance, lawmakers and educators called the directive federal overreach that threatened safety and privacy of non-transgender students.
Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton sued on behalf of several states and won a nationwide injunction barring federal agencies from taking action against the schools that resisted the guidance. The Justice Department under the Obama administration challenged the lawsuit and arguments were scheduled for early February. Then, one day after former Alabama Sen. Jeff Sessions was sworn in as attorney general, the Justice Department withdrew its challenge so the parties could decide "how to best proceed."
Paxton welcomed the withdrawal and said his office was evaluating how it would impact the litigation.
"Our fight over the bathroom directive has always been about former President Obama's attempt to bypass Congress and rewrite the laws to fit his political agenda for radical social change. The Obama administration's directive on bathrooms unlawfully invaded areas that are left to state discretion under the Tenth Amendment. School policy should center on the safety, privacy and dignity of its students, not the whims federal bureaucrats."
Why the guidance was rescinded
In the two-page letter to public schools, the Trump administration said the Obama-era guidance did not provide "extensive legal analysis" of how its position was consistent with Title IX.
The letter cited "significant litigation" caused by the guidance, showing the need for "due regard" of the role of states and local school districts in shaping education policy.
"As President Trump has clearly stated, he believes policy regarding transgender bathrooms should be decided at the state level," the White House said in a statement.
"The joint decision made today by the Department of Justice and the Department of Education returning power to the states paves the way for an open and inclusive process to take place at the local level with input from parents, students, teachers and administrators."
However, sources told CNN Wednesday that DeVos originally opposed a draft of the Trump administration's plan for withdrawing the guidance.
'Not what Betsy wanted to do'
When the new guidance was issued Wednesday night, DeVos was publicly on board. Behind the scenes, however, "This is not what Betsy wanted to do," one source outside of government who said he's familiar with DeVos' thinking on the plans told CNN.
She communicated her feelings to Sessions, the source said. Then, she was summoned to the White House on Tuesday for a meeting with him and President Trump, where she was told to agree to the plans.
"It was the President's decision," the source said. "When the President tells you to do something you don't want to do, that is a hard spot to be in."
DeVos reminded Trump that both of them had publicly promised to protect all students, and she felt that withdrawing the guidance ran counter to those promises. She was concerned that some people may interpret the action as removing protections.
She requested additional language in the letter affirming that students would still be protected and the Department of Education's Office of Civil Rights would investigate issues.
Ultimately, the letter states that withdrawal of the guidance "does not leave students without protections from discrimination, bullying, or harassment."
On Wednesday, DeVos reaffirmed the administration's responsibility "to protect every student in America and ensure that they have the freedom to learn and thrive in a safe and trusted environment.
"This is not merely a federal mandate, but a moral obligation no individual, school, district or state can abdicate," she said in a statement. "At my direction, the department's Office for Civil Rights remains committed to investigating all claims of discrimination, bullying and harassment against those who are most vulnerable in our schools."
Supreme Court poised to consider related case
Civil rights groups were quick to point out that the announcement does not undo Title IX or state-level protections for transgender students.
"Trump's actions do not change the law itself -- transgender students remain protected by Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972 -- but abandoning the guidance intentionally creates confusion about what federal law requires," Rachel B. Tiven, CEO of Lambda Legal, said in a statement.
"The law bars discrimination -- the new administration invites it."
It remains to be seen how it will impact courts' interpretations of anti-discrimination law in pending cases, including the first Supreme Court test of Title IX as it relates to transgender students.
The court is poised to consider the case of Gavin Grimm, a 17-year-old transgender student from Virginia who wants to use the bathroom that corresponds to his gender identity.
JUST WATCHED At the center of the transgender bathroom debate Replay More Videos... MUST WATCH At the center of the transgender bathroom debate 01:34
Last April, a federal appeals court ruled in favor of Grimm, who fought a school board policy that denied him access to the boys' bathroom but allowed him the use of recently constructed single-stall unisex restrooms.
In ruling for Grimm and against the school district, the court deferred to the Obama administration's interpretation of Title IX.
The Gloucester County School Board welcomed the Trump administration's withdrawal of the letter at issue in its case.
"This action shows 'due regard for the primary role of the States and local school districts in establishing educational policy.' We look forward to explaining to the Supreme Court why this development underscores that the Board's commonsense restroom and locker room policy is legal under federal law," a lawyer for the school board said Wednesday.
Arguments in the case are scheduled for March 28. While the Trump administration's new guidance may not stop the case, it could give the justices an off-ramp to send the matter back to the lower court to consider the new guidance. The court could also decide to send the case back before arguments.
"While it's disappointing to see the Trump administration revoke the guidance, the administration cannot change what Title IX means," said ACLU Senior Staff Attorney Joshua Block, lead counsel for Grimm.
"When it decided to hear Gavin Grimm's case, the Supreme Court said it would decide which interpretation of Title IX is correct, without taking any administration's guidance into consideration. We're confident that that the law is on Gavin's side and he will prevail just as he did in the Fourth Circuit."Here's a vector of Spike from Hurricane Fluttershy after the instructional film was ruined! This vector was especially difficult for me, I think I'm better at vectoring ponies than dragons. I tried to use some new techniques with this vector to get things to look smoother (like clipping for Spike's eyes and film strips and path division for his hair). As always, feel free to critique and I hope you like it! Svg can be found here: [link] Edit: Fixed some strokes' colors and film layering. I may extend the two film strips on Spike's tail so they actually look like they're wrapping around his body (the current way is how it looks in the show) and re-upload again. New svg can be found here: [link] Edit (March 30, 2012): Fixed the tail stroke so that it goes all the way to the end, added eye accents to Spike's left eye, and extended the film so that it actually looks like it wraps around his tail. New svg can be found here: [link]It’s easy enough to put an always-on camera somewhere it can live off solar power or the grid, but deep in nature, underground, or in other unusual circumstances every drop of power is precious. Luckily, a new type of sensor developed for DARPA uses none at all until the thing it’s built to detect happens to show up. That means it can sit for years without so much as a battery top-up.
The idea is that you could put a few of these things in, say, the miles of tunnels underneath a decommissioned nuclear power plant or a mining complex, but not have to wire them all for electricity. But as soon as something appears, it’s seen and transmitted immediately. The power requirements would have to be almost nil, of course, which is why DARPA called the program Near Zero Power RF and Sensor Operation.
A difficult proposition, but engineers at Northeastern University were up to the task. They call their work a “plasmonically-enhanced micromechanical photoswitch,” which pretty much sums it up. I could end the article right here. But for those of you who slept in class the day we covered that topic, I guess I can explain.
The sensor is built to detect infrared light waves, invisible to our eyes but still abundant from heat sources like people, cars, fires, and so on. But as long as none are present, it is completely powered off.
But when a ray does appear, it strikes a surface is covered in tiny patches that magnify its effect. Plasmons are a sort of special behavior of conducting material, which in this case respond to the IR waves by heating up.
“The energy from the IR source heats the sensing elements which, in turn, causes physical movement of key sensor components,” wrote DARPA’s program manager, Troy Olsson, in a blog post. “These motions result in the mechanical closing of otherwise open circuit elements, thereby leading to signals that the target IR signature has been detected.”
Think of it like a paddle in a well. It can sit there for years without doing a thing, but as soon as someone drops a pebble into the well, it hits the paddle, which spins and turns a crank, which pulls a string, which raises a flag at the well-owner’s house. Except, as Olsson further explains, it’s a little more sophisticated.
“The technology features multiple sensing elements—each tuned to absorb a specific IR wavelength,” he wrote. “Together, these combine into complex logic circuits capable of analyzing IR spectrums, which opens the way for these sensors to not only detect IR energy in the environment but to specify if that energy derives from a fire, vehicle, person or some other IR source.”
The “unlimited duration of operation for unattended sensors deployed to detect infrequent but time-critical events,” as the researchers describe it, could have plenty of applications beyond security, of course: imagine popping a few of these all over the forests to monitor the movements of herds, or in space to catch rare cosmic events.
The tech is described in a paper published today in Nature Nanotechnology.By Jeremy Deaton
Rooftop solar power is getting cheaper and cheaper, and nowhere does that scare utilities more than in Arizona, where abundant sunshine makes solar an attractive option for many homeowners.
Over the last several years, the Arizona Public Service Company (APS), the largest power provider in the state, has tried thwarting rooftop solar by getting utility-friendly candidates elected to the Arizona Corporation Commission, which regulates the state's utilities. Now, APS is reportedly being investigated by the FBI over its political spending.
"The FBI is currently conducting a long-term investigation related to the financing of certain statewide races in the 2014 election cycle," special agent Matthew Reinsmoen told the Arizona Republic in early June. In 2014, APS allegedly funded a political nonprofit that supported the candidacy of two utility-friendly Republican candidates for the regulatory commission. The nonprofit is not required to disclose its donors.
The allegations of wrongdoing suggest the lengths to which embattled utilities are willing to go to protect their interests. For most of its long history, APS steered clear of politics. But, in recent years, the utility has supported the candidacy of utility-friendly Republicans running for seats on the five-member regulatory commission. Until recently, the commission included two Democrats. Thanks in part to a concerted effort by APS, all five commissioners are now Republicans, most of whom oppose rooftop solar.
The investigation kicked off after the former chairman of the regulatory commission, Gary Pierce, was indicted for allegedly raising the rates for a water and sewer company in exchange for payments to his wife. The FBI probe of Pierce led to an inquiry into APS, which had allegedly tried to influence Pierce by contributing to his son's campaign for Arizona secretary of state.
Here's a brief timeline of events. This draws from the reporting of the Arizona Republic and other local news outlets.
To understand solar's threat to utilities' financial interests, it helps understand how power companies work. Utilities make money by selling power to consumers, but rooftop solar allows ratepayers to generate their own power. Furthermore, net metering policies, which require utilities to buy surplus electricity generated by rooftop solar panels, means that the utilities aren't profiting off all the electricity they sell.
It's not that utilities oppose solar power, per se—many are investing in large-scale solar projects, but many utilities are opposed to customers generating their own electricity and selling it to the grid. Think of APS like a grocer who doesn't want home gardeners selling vegetables in the town square—except this grocer enjoys a government-sanctioned monopoly.
Solar resources available across the U.S. Arizona is one of the sunniest states. National Renewable Energy Laboratory
Because the utility owns the transformers, transmission lines and other infrastructure needed to sell electricity, it is, by necessity, a monopoly. As it faces no competitors, regulators oversee the utility to ensure it keeps prices low and provides a high level of service. In other words, regulators are charged with making sure the utility serves the public interest.
For a long time, this arrangement served both the public and the utility. Now, distributed solar is disrupting this model. Rooftop panels are shrinking electric bills, reducing pollution and making the grid more resilient. They are also taking a bite out of power utility profits. The only recourse APS has to ward off cheap, distributed solar is to petition regulators to pass anti-solar policies.
What's clear is that the old centralized model of power generation is under threat, and utilities are fighting back any way they know. Through targeted political spending, APS helped turn a bipartisan regulatory commission into a panel of anti-solar Republicans. The FBI investigation could reveal how they did it.
Bob Burns, the lone Republican commissioner whose candidacy was supported by both APS and the solar sector, is also investigating the utility's political activities. He is suing to subpoena utility officials to learn whether they used ratepayer dollars "to capture the allegiance or influence the actions or attitudes of commissioners or candidates." APS is trying to block Burns' investigation until after the regulatory commission rules on a proposed rate increase.
Reposted with permission from our media associate Nexus Media.Richard Goodwin, producer
It was difficult to persuade Agatha Christie to sign over the rights. She’d hated the film version of The ABC Murders. But she trusted us. Sidney Lumet was directing, even though his agent didn’t want him to. She called it “the dumb train movie”. She wanted him to work in Los Angeles, but he didn’t like it there.
The cast were all such huge stars, yet somehow the film cost only $4.5m. Were there any divas? No, they were well behaved, although Lauren Bacall insisted on having her shoes made in Paris, Albert Finney got paid more because his Hercule Poirot had most of the lines, and Sean Connery got a percentage because he was such a big star. The rest all got paid the same: $100,000 each.
Vanessa Redgrave would spend all her lunchtimes converting the workers, making speeches about politics in the canteen, while the rest of the actors would sit and listen to John Gielgud telling his amazing stories. Eventually, the guys in the canteen asked if we could get Vanessa to go and talk to someone else.
We had terrible trouble filming the scene where the train is blocked by |
, but Pikiell went super-deep all season. I don’t recall one of the teams on my beat ever doing that.
Two other things: How quickly he turned around the rebounding, and how good of an assistant Jay Young is (I had always heard good things, but to see him teaching up close was very impressive---definitely head-coaching material).
OTB: What do you think this year's team will have that last year's didn't? And then flip flop that question, what will this year's team be missing?
JC: It will be better physically---stronger, quicker, and better conditioned.
Also on the plus side: Mike Williams is ready to take on the crucial senior leader role that has been vacant since Jonathan Mitchell and Mike Coburn.
On the minus side, I am concerned that the team will actually be worse-shooting. I know that sounds hard to believe, but C.J. Gettys was a polished finisher and Nigel Johnson, though streaky, could get red hot and burn a defense from deep. Who’s replacing those guys?
OTB: Who is the most important newcomer on the team, and why?
JC: Geo Baker. He shot the ball well in high school. Different game here obviously, but if he’s even a serviceable college shooter as a freshman it will make a world of difference. Also, as I said indicated earlier, maybe he can give help Sanders raise his game.
OTB: What is your feeling about Pikiell's recruiting so far? Will he land a good class for 2018 to keep the rebuild going?
JC: It’s the great unanswered question after year one: Can Pikiell recruit at the Big Ten level? At his introductory press conference, Steve made it very clear that his M.O. is finding under-the-radar guys and coaching them up. So far, those are the types of players he has brought in (minus [Mamadou] Doucoure, who’s not here yet).
The best example of that method so far is Eugene Omoruyi, a late addition who showed flashes as a frosh and looked real good in Thursday’s workout. He powered through this one attack-the-rim drill the way a Big Ten power forward should.
You need guys like Omoruyi, but building a Big Ten program requires at least the occasional immediate-impact recruit. So the onus is on getting one of those guys in 2018 and another in 2019.
It’s hard to predict the recruiting game---it’s a murky, ever-shifting sea. They need a 2018 guy like Montez Mathis to take a leap of faith and then win some more games to help your case in 2019. It sounds like Mathis is going well but there is no crystal ball for this stuff, despite what you may see online.
Healing a damaged brand takes time. Remember: Kevin Willard pieced things together and treaded water at Seton Hall with Europeans and transfers (Sterling Gibbs, Patrik Auda, Eugene Teague) until he hit stride, and now Seton Hall is an attractive brand. Willard benefitted from his boss’ patience, and based on the competence he displayed in year one, I’m sure Pikiell will be afforded the same courtesy.
Thanks, Jerry, as always!October’s 2017 BET Hip-Hop Awards were a big night for Cardi B, DJ Khaled and Kendrick Lamar. Between them, they more or less swept the board: Cardi B took home five gongs, Khaled and Kendrick three each. But the night’s big story, at least as far as most news outlets were concerned, was The Storm, a “cypher” freestyle filmed specially for the event by Eminem: four minutes of beatless invective aimed at Donald Trump that variously took in immigration, corruption, gun control, white supremacy and the NFL controversy, rapturously received by everyone from J Cole to Snoop Dogg.
It’s a long time since Eminem has garnered those kinds of headlines. He has never stopped shifting millions of albums – 2009’s Relapse and 2010’s Recovery are among the biggest-selling albums of the century so far – and he’s still a big enough star to pull in special guests such as Beyoncé and Ed Sheeran for his latest album, Revival, out next week. Sales aside, his position as a kind of cultural locus – an artist who, in 2002 alone, was apparently discussed 153 times in the pages of the New York Times – has long since faded, perhaps to his relief. And yet, here he was again, the night’s biggest story, being debated everywhere from Fox News to Fortune magazine.
You can see why some commentators looked askance at a white artist upstaging hip-hop’s biggest current stars, but the Eminem of The Storm sounded like a revitalised figure, as indeed he did on two other recent Trump-baiting tracks, last autumn’s Campaign Speech, and February’s No Favors. The former, a standalone freestyle, is a relentless verbal onslaught that threatens to waterboard Trump’s supporters and enact revenge on the killers of Eric Garner and Trayvon Martin, while deriding Trump, then just a presidential candidate, as “a fuckin’ loose cannon who’s blunt with one hand on the button, who doesn’t have to answer to no one”.
Play Video 4:29 Eminem lambasts Donald Trump in freestyle rap – video
His guest verse on the latter, a track from rapper Big Sean’s album I Decided, is something else entirely: both a firework display of his technical skills and as wilfully repellent, stomach-churning and unconscionable as anything he came up with in the heyday of his alter ego Slim Shady. In it, he threatens to rape far-right commentator Ann Coulter “with a Klan poster, with a lamp post, door handle, shutter, a damn bolt cutter, a sandal, a can opener, a candle, rubber, piano, a flannel, sucker, some hand soap, butter, a banjo and a manhole cover” before murdering her. It’s unremittingly unpleasant listening, but Eminem sounds more energised than he has in some time: for all the technical wizardry on display in the lyrics of a track like 2013’s Rap God, the sense that he was going through the motions, ticking off each outrage – homophobia, misogyny, violence – was hard to miss. Whatever you make of No Favors, he doesn’t sound like that here.
It’s an intriguing development, not least because Eminem has seldom engaged with politics before, notwithstanding some vague anti-Gulf war statements and cries of “fuck Bush” on 2002’s Square Dance and 2004’s Mosh – easy to miss among the queasy gags and the venting of spleen at virtually everyone who isn’t Eminem. The question hangs heavy: why the author of Just Don’t Give a Fuck and Still Don’t Give a Fuck now suddenly cares so vociferously.
The most prosaic answer is that in Trump, he has encountered a political figure so horrifying he feels impelled to comment. A cynical voice might suggest that Eminem is simply being pragmatic. Hip-hop has changed immeasurably since the years when Eminem’s albums sold 30m copies. He arrived in an era when “jiggy” and “bling” were the genre’s watchwords and socially conscious rap was very much a minority pursuit. Perhaps he’s just cannily refurbishing his approach to fit in with a new era, in which Kendrick Lamar is hip-hop’s defining figure and To Pimp a Butterfly its epochal album, with the No Favors verse introducing the world to the unlovely mindset of a deeply improbable figure: a woke Slim Shady. Or perhaps there’s another, rather more complicated reason behind Eminem’s dexterous venting at Trump.
Facebook Twitter Pinterest Eminem performing at the 2001 Brit awards. Photograph: Dave Hogan/Getty Images
Revisiting the years of Eminem’s rise and commercial supremacy – from 1999 to 2004 – feels like peering at a distant era, in its own way as remote from and alien to the present as the 1970s or the early 80s seem. There was no social media, no smartphones, no streaming; broadband internet, digital downloads and reality TV were all novelties. The US charts into which Eminem’s My Name Is and The Slim Shady LP crashed in early 1999 were dominated by Lauryn Hill, Shania Twain, Celine Dion and TLC. DMX was hip-hop’s biggest name: Juvenile and Silkk the Shocker were the year’s other big new crossover successes.
But re-reading Anthony Bozza’s authoritative 2004 Eminem biography The Way I Am in 2017 is a slightly disconcerting experience – it’s hard not to be struck by the way Marshall Mathers’ success prefigures the rise of the alt-right. He wasn’t the first commercially successful white rap act, nor among the first white rappers to attain the respect of, and be treated as an artistic equal to, his black peers: that would be the Beastie Boys and MC Serch and Pete Nice of the interracial trio 3rd Bass, respectively. But he was the first white rapper to appeal to an almost exclusively white audience.
The saga of Eminem’s pre-fame days is liberally splashed with stories of him winning over sceptical black audiences at hip-hop clubs and rap battles. “Just give it to the white boy, it’s over,” yelled a crowd member after the first round of 1997’s Rap Olympics in LA. But by the time Bozza joins him at a Staten Island club show after the success of My Name Is, the audience are “predominantly white”. “Where I’m at, if I was to take you to different parts of Oakland, West Oakwood, you’re not going to hear Eminem being played, and you’re not going to hear him being played for a long time,” hip-hop scholar and activist Dave Cook tells me. “To suggest that his album is bumped left and right and people are quoting him day in and day out, at least among black folks from the hood, I don’t see that. I just don’t.”
And the more successful he got, the whiter his audience became, at least partly because that was the audience Eminem courted. A dyed-in-the-wool hip-hop fan, distraught when the era’s predominant hip-hop magazine, The Source, declined to give any of his albums their coveted “five mics” rating, he nevertheless knew on what side his bread was buttered commercially. He faced down bottle-throwing crowds who had come to see Blink-182 and Suicidal Tendencies on the 1999 Warped Vans Tour; the following year, he supported nu-metallers Limp Bizkit on the Anger Management tour. By the time he released his third album, 2002’s 31m-selling The Eminem Show, his sound had become audibly rock-based; largely produced by the rapper himself rather than his mentor Dr Dre, it eschewed syncopated beats in favour of straightforward rock rhythms and samples from Aerosmith’s 70s catalogue.
You don’t sell 31m albums without having widespread appeal, but Bozza – by no stretch of the imagination one of Eminem’s naysayers – keeps highlighting one group at the core of Eminem’s audience: “The angry white young misanthrope who feels marginalised by society and feminised by feminism and who rejoices in the freedom of his uselessness … with a sense of aggrievement that is out of proportion to reality … The new paradigm of the young American male – opinionated, untrusting of women and any authority but his own, and very, very angry.” He suggests that Eminem’s initial success came at a time of economic downturn and growing scepticism in the US about government – in the wake of the Lewinsky scandal, Bill Clinton’s impeachment and subsequent acquittal – and authority generally, following the OJ Simpson trials. For those who, in Bozza’s words, “found nothing but lies on the evening news”, Eminem’s appeal lay partially in the fact that – at least when he was in character as Slim Shady – he represented someone not bound by the regular rules, an image bolstered by the recurring skits on his albums in which wiser heads attempt to convince him that he has gone too far and should rein himself in.
It was a state of affairs compounded by the fact that his first flush of fame was punctuated by 9/11, which changed the nation’s character further. “The violence and hate in Eminem’s music … is the soundtrack of our times,” says Bozza. “America is angry, poor, out of work, misunderstood and gunning for revenge, a country which has had it up to here and is ready to flush reason and act rashly.” Certainly, by the time of 2002’s White America, Eminem was fantasising about leading a kind of disaffected populist revolution – “like a fuckin’ army marching in back of me … so much anger aimed in no particular direction, just sprays and sprays” – against the government: “The ringleaders of this circus of worthless pawns/Sent to lead the march up to the steps of Congress and piss on the lawns of the White House.”
You don’t have to be a genius to work out the parallels between the Eminem audience Bozza describes and the kind of Pepe-touting 4chan warriors and “isolated man-boy” Gamergaters the alt-right has mobilised. Or between Slim Shady – the “monster freak who knew only how to say and do what no one was supposed to,” as Bozza writes – and Milo Yiannopoulos or even Trump. When considering the latter comparison, it’s perhaps worth noting that, for someone who delighted in giving offence while in Slim Shady character, Eminem also seemed remarkably prickly and easily hurt, given to going on the attack at the slightest criticism, filling 2000’s The Marshall Mathers Album with splenetic blame-shifting and self-justification.
Facebook Twitter Pinterest Looking left... Eminem performing at the MTV EMAs in November. Photograph: Dave J Hogan/Getty Images for MTV
It isn’t much of a stretch to suggest that Eminem’s vast success in the late 90s and early 00s was predicated on tapping into precisely the kind of disaffected white rage that Trump and the alt-right later did. Indeed, some people would go further. Back in 2004, one of Eminem’s most vociferous detractors was Richard Goldstein, then executive editor of the Village Voice, a man who opined that Eminem was not an anarchic anti-authoritarian or a gleeful agent of chaos, but a reinforcer of a grim conservatism – “gay liberation and women’s liberation threaten the hierarchy of male dominance … a hierarchy that figures like Eminem stand for, which is heterosexual males, with white males at the top”. He worried about the effects of the rapper’s success, about what happened next to the people who took the Slim Shady character at face value, as a hero. “From a social perspective this is really dangerous,” he said, “because when a generation grows up under these values, they become normal.”
And perhaps that’s what’s at the root of Eminem’s politicisation and artistic renaissance. Did he merely mirror – or, with the ridiculous Slim Shady, even satirise – the rise of the angry white man, or did he help drive it? Either way, he’s the hip-hop figurehead most likely to have ardent Trump supporters and alt-right wingnuts among his audience. Maybe that’s what the verse in Big Sean’s No Favors is about: an attempt to retool the cartoon violence and misogyny that lured some of his fans to him in the first place, and use it as a weapon against the far right. With the best will in the world, this seems like a risky strategy: you can imagine conservative commentators rubbing their hands with delight at a hip-hop track that advocates horrific murder in the name of the Black Lives Matter movement.
But if it doesn’t work, there’s always the more direct approach, as evidenced at the end of The Storm. “And any fan of mine who’s a supporter of his/I’m drawing in the sand a line/You’re either for or against, and if you can’t decide who you like more and you’re split on who you should stand beside, I’ll do it for you with this: fuck you.”Going to Ukraine?
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Since the Ukrainian IT sector is facing significant growth; the ongoing process of visa simplification is under current discussion. The Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Ukraine is reviewing current legislation to facilitate the international communication with Ukraine and grant potential clients and investors to Ukrainian IT market with less red tape procedures. For an eased traveling connection, Ukraine has widely established air and land transportation.
Types of visas, categories, validation, issuing grounds and processing
B or Transit visa is allowed for issuing only for transit passing of Ukraine’s state borders to a third destination. Be that cargo or vehicle travelers, the officials should be provided with the proof of forwarding traveling. The visa validity period will not exceed one year if other has been specified in accordance with the current legislation. As to the documents, the following ones are required along with the application (full list of the documents is available from the official website of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs):
confirmation of transit traveling – a third destination visa, vehicle ticket, etc.;
confirmation of cargo and/or passengers in transit;
document proving legal nature of transportation services – license, etc.
C or Short-term visa is issued for 90 days within the provided 180 days since the first entering the country. Among the documents for issuing this type of visa an individual is to present (full list of the documents is available from the official website of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs):
an invitation from a person, or entity, a ministry, a state institution, an organization or other authorities, etc.;
contract proving the nature of goods, cargo or passengers international transportation;
documents proving an individual is a tourist under the current legislation;
treatment facility document or invitation;
a document from a religious organization or institution;
foreign mass media representatives coming to Ukraine under the professional duty;
members of diplomatic missions or consular services, or persons granted visa issuing by the aforementioned representatives of consular services or diplomats, etc...
D or Long-term visa is subject to issuing for the foreign citizens for the period of not more than 90 days for the sake of arranging the documents for obtaining the legitimate purpose for staying in Ukraine (temporary or permanent resident card, or any other ID allowing the stay in the country for a long-term period). F-type visa can be also issued by the Consulate General or the Diplomatic Mission of Ukraine. To apply for the long-term visa, an application should be supported with one of the documents listed below (full list of the documents is available from the official website of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs):
the employment permit or its certified copy;
invitation from the Ministry of Education and Science for study or internship in Ukraine;
invitation from an agency for sports, science, volunteer program, culture, education, etc...
A foreigner applying for a visa might be also asked for additional conversation/interview or documents supporting the traveling objective. The requirements related to the traveling documents or passport include valid passport for not less than three months; issuing year not earlier than 10 years with at least two spare pages. For minor children, the visa processing procedure requires permission from parents or representatives, and other documents.
Documents applied for a visa are usually processed within fifteen calendar days (possibly more, depending on the requirements). If applying for an express visa (processed within less than 15 days), a person will pay the double price due to burning processing period if possible.
We also recommend visiting the Ministry of Foreign Affairs’ official website for advanced information provided you have not found the required information peculiar to your passport and country.
Travelling communication
What makes Ukraine especially attractive is the location: practically in the middle of Europe and Asia, which magnetizes both potential clients and investors seeing the prosperous future of Ukraine's IT outsourcing market.
Ukraine's cities comprising the TOP-5 of IT outsourcing destinations: Kyiv, Kharkiv, Lviv, Dnipro and Odesa offer vast options of travelling communication, including international air traffic, busses, trains, etc. What makes Ukraine even more enticing is that it does not matter where you come from: it is easy to get here from the world's largest cities. For instance, if compared, the distance from Kyiv to London is 2402 km, to Berlin is 1347 km, to New York – 7520 km, whilst Delhi – London is 6719 km, Delhi to Berlin is 5787 km, and Delhi to New York – 11768 km.
You can also check our Playbook for additional information on air transportation to Ukraine.
According to the recent information by Pavlo Klimkin, Ukraine’s Foreign Minister, Ukraine is on the verge of signing the agreement with EU on non-visa required for Ukrainian citizens. The decision is to be taken within few months, although, it has been promised for a while already.Will Sugar Mobile increase my home internet bill? If you talk on Sugar Mobile for 24 hours straight, you'll use less data than you would to stream a single movie on Netflix. Since the average person talks for about 8 hours per month, it's unlikely that Sugar Mobile will increase your home internet bill.
Do I have to unlock my phone in order to use Sugar Mobile? Yes. You must unlock your device in order to use the Sugar Mobile SIM card.
What happens if I use all of my 400MB of non-WIFI data before my 30 days? You may still make unlimited Canada and US calls and texts using WIFI data for the remainder of the 30 days.
What if I need additional non-WIFI data before my 30 days expires? You may Top-Up your account for $19. When you Top-Up your account, you get an additional 30 days of usage and 400MB of non-WIFI data.
What if I Top-Up my account before 30 days and I still have unused non-WIFI data? Your unused non-WIFI data will carry over to your next 30 days. So, if you have 50MB remaining, your next 30 days will include 450MB (50MB + 400MB).
Do i lose my non-WIFI data if my account expires? When your account expires your non-WIFI data is not lost. However, if your account remains expired for 90 days your non-WIFI data will be lost and your account will be closed permanently.
Can I keep my existing phone number? Yes. You may request to transfer your number from your existing carrier to Sugar Mobile online at no cost. Click here for more information.
Can I use Sugar Mobile without transferring my existing phone number? Yes. We provide you with a new phone number. You simply use the new phone number until you decide to transfer your current phone number. When you’re ready, login to your account at sugarmobile.ca and request a transfer.
How do I know if my smart phone supports your SIM card? Our SIM card works on all smart phones. It’s a 3-in-1 design and supports Standard, Micro, and Nano SIM sizes.
Can I make international calls and texts with Sugar Mobile? Yes. However you’ll have to purchase an international credit. Your international credit never expires as long as your account is active and you can also setup your account so that your international credit automatically tops up when you’ve used it. (Please note, the International Addon is currently in testing and not available for purchase as this time)
How do I know when I’m running low on non-WIFI data or International credit? Sugar Mobile will send you text messages and/or email notifications.
What type of network facilitates the non-WIFI data? Sugar Mobile uses 3G technology to facilitate non-WIFI data.
What network does Sugar Mobile operate on? We have our own network, however, when our customers are offnet we use several Tier 1 Network Operators across Canada and the US to ensure coverage.
Will I incur roaming fees when using Sugar Mobile? No. You will never incur roaming fees or additional charges regardless of where you are in Canada and the US.
Can I use Sugar Mobile outside Canada and the US? Yes. Regardless of where you are in the world, as long as you're connected to WIFI, you may use Sugar Mobile. However, Canada and the US are the only countries that our SIM card currently supports non-WIFI service.
Can i use Sugar Mobile with my Blackberry? If you have a newer Blackberry that uses the Android OS, yes, otherwise no, we don't have an App for Blackberry OS devices.[ibimage==23679==Large==none==self==null]
It's being touted as the 'Bell Labs' of the Midwest, with hopes of one day employing hundreds of world-class researchers tackling the world's biggest problems, including energy, advanced-computing, manufacturing, transportation, health and more.
UI Labs, the multimillion-dollar research institute, hopes to bridge academia with the business sector to boost economic development throughout the entire Midwest.
The project is backed by many, including Governor Quinn, and just recently moved one step closer to reality by filing for incorporation with the State of Illinois. The first three board of directors members were named in the filing: they are Larry Schook, Vice President for Research of the University of Illinois, Henry Bienen, former president of Northwestern University and Warren Holtsberg, vice chairman of IllinoisVentures.
Although it's named UI Labs, the institute will not be funded directly by the University of Illinois. The board members are looking to raise funds from outside, private partners.
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I personally think it's super exciting to see the U of I's powerhouse research capacity being put to use for practical, possibly groundbreaking results right here in the City of Chicago... (after all, radio astronomy, the transistor, the laser, the charge-coupled device (CCD), information theory, the UNIX operating system, the C programming language and the C++ programming language were all created at Bell Labs. Seven Nobel Prizes have also been awarded for work completed there.)
This research institute, in addition to so many other (already-existing) amazing places in Chicago promoting startups and innovation, will without a doubt cement the City of Chicago as one of the global leaders of research and technology. What a time to be a part of this tech community!
There's no timeline set in stone, but the next step is for the UI Labs board of directors to choose a director for the institute. Once that happens expect a Chicago location to be chosen, the ground to be broken, and innovation to start flowin'!
Sources:
Chicago-based UI Labs gaining backing via News-Gazette
UI Labs files for incorporation via News-Gazette
UI Labs project taking shape via Crain's Chicago Business
Bell Labs via Wikipedia ;)Ellis Island records show that about 1,700 Gangi residents landed in New York between 1892 and 1924, he said. Starting in the 1930s and 1940s, Argentina became the preferred destination.
Many family homes left behind were the so-called pagglialore typical of this town. The squat, tower-like structures housed donkeys on the ground floor with the paglia, or straw. Chickens and goats were kept on the middle floor. The farmer’s family lived on top.
These structures are now among those that the city has made available, with the local government acting as real estate broker of sorts, facilitating the convergence of the town’s considerable supply of abandoned dwellings and the growing demand. Some have been given away, others sold for a nominal price. The owners decide.
The community has gone one crucial step further, radically streamlining the intricate and often convoluted bureaucracy that accompanies buying and renovating a home in Italy.
“The bureaucracy is what worries people most, but we don’t sell a house and leave people alone,” said Alessandro Cilibrasi, a local real estate agent who assists the municipality in the initiative.
A website for British investors, shelteroffshore.com, advises would-be buyers to get advice from English-speaking or non-Italian lawyers well versed in Sicilian legislation; if property has been handed down through generations, “the path of ownership is not clear,” and there may be outstanding taxes, or debts and loans.
Building and renovation costs can be high. “Sicily is not for everyone,” the website warns.
Yet so far, Gangi’s answer to depopulation has been more successful than recent plans of other places. More than 100 houses have been given away or sold for less than market prices.Never.
Nice guys are the biggest fools. Literally!
Some of the answers here that talk about women actually noticing nice guys are so tragicomic that they compelled me to write this. Notice all the instances wherein the answers claim that girls notice nice guys are the ones when they need someone to drop home, someone to listen, someone to get gifts from, etc. Basically, women use nice guys as emotional tampon when they breakup with their boyfriends, need favors or just need a company for the sake of it. No matter what they say, women are never attracted to “nice” guys.
The truth is, niceness in this sense is just a behavioral technique employed by guys to slip through the defenses of girls and get what they really want which can be anything from a romantic relationship to a hookup. They think that the girl will some day notice how “nice” they are and fall for them. But in reality this backfires big time. Under the pretense of being nice, the so called “nice” guys sideline their own personalities. They become a completely different person in the presence of that girl. It is extremely evident and the girls see through it. Over the time, they get friend-zoned and then blame the girl for it.
As a matter of fact, girls are naturally attracted to confidence. No girl wants to be in a relationship with a guy who is unsure of himself. Bad guys exhibit confidence in tremendous amounts. They are so sure of themselves, they don’t care if the girl rejects them. Confidence stimulates primal instincts in a girl’s brain which she just can’t ignore. Nice guys fail to be confident simply because they are under a huge pressure of not getting rejected/judged by the girl and prefer to play it safe. This is the borderline difference between the nice guys and the guys who actually get girls.
So if you are a nice guy reading through all the other answers and feeling good about yourselves being the friend-zoned guy, ‘Wake the fuck up!’
If you can’t stop supplicating to the girl’s likes and dislikes; if you forgot about who you really are in front of a girl you want to date but are friend-zoned; if you can’t express your true feelings to a girl you like in clear and confident words; if you put a girl on a pedestal and undervalued yourself as an individual; if you can’t handle a simple rejection from a girl and move on with your own life; you deserve to be used as a doormat! The girls can’t be blamed for you being a loser.
Tell the girl you like her. Doesn’t matter if you get rejected. Take charge of your life. Develop self love. Work on your damn self. Read some good self-help books. Meet new people. Get some new hobbies. Have a passion for life. Invest in yourself and it will pay off a thousandfold.
The only way to get the girls notice you is to become a man worth noticing.By guest contributor Saraswathi Shukla
The first periodical to successfully distribute musical scores to the French public was founded in 1762 and continued under different names by different editors through the French Revolution (Bruce Gustafson and David Fuller, A Catalogue of French Harpsichord Music: 1699-1780, 1990, 17-19). In its first ten years, it ran as the Journal de Clavecin, offering its public “harpsichord pieces composed on ariettes and airs selected from intermèdes and opéras comiques which have had the greatest success.” Opéras comiques were comic Italianate operas with spoken dialogue produced at the Opéra Comique in Paris.
The publication initially consisted of harpsichord arrangements of individual opera airs grouped into “suites” of three or four on a monthly basis. The premise of the Journal was unprecedented and risky given the failure of other ventures in the aftermath of the Querelle des bouffons, the debate over French and Italian operatic styles that dominated the 1750s. Its success can be attributed to the shrewd marketing strategies of its editor, Charles-François Clément.
Clément ensured that its presentation and contents were consistently of a high quality even as other competitive periodicals emerged in its wake. Madame Leclair, a leading engraver of the day, prepared the plates, and the issues, distributed by Le Menu, were printed monthly but paginated continuously so that a single year’s issues collectively comprised 60-70 pages. (That said, no set of issues was ever bound, to my knowledge.)
Aligning himself with the conservative harpsichord traditions of Paris may have enabled Clément to explore recent Italian musical developments without alienating factions of musical society. He embraced idiomatic French harpsichord style and ornamentation, and he adopted the typically French custom of grouping pieces into suites. Until the early 1770s, each issue consisted of two suites composed of airs from different operas instead of the traditional dance movements.
At the same time, Clément used both French and Italian tempo markings and combined airs by French and Italian composers in his suites. He sometimes labeled the left and right hands “G” (gauche) and “D” (droite) to clarify ambiguities about the division of music between the hands, a nomenclature first used in France by Domenico Scarlatti in his Italianate harpsichord sonatas (Jean Duron, “La recepción de la obra de Domenico Scarlatti en Francia,” Sevilla y corte: las artes y el lustro real (1729-1733), 2010, 313-328). Even the physical layout of the Journal was associated with Italianness in the public eye: Rousseau described landscape staff paper as “Italian” in the Dictionnaire de Musique (Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Dictionnaire de musique, 1772, 199-206).
Although the transcriptions were intended primarily as solo harpsichord pieces, flexibility of instrumentation widened the publication’s appeal to a broader range of instrumentalists. On the title page of the first print run in 1762, Clément wrote, “These pieces include the accompaniment to their airs. They can be played on harp.” The following year, he added that they could be played ad libitum by harpsichord and violin (the violin played the highest notes). As the fortepiano gained popularity, Clément ensured that his arrangements remained compatible with both fortepiano and harpsichord: dynamics in the keyboard parts are limited to forte and piano while the violin parts feature more gradations.
Perhaps the key to Clément’s success was his ability to adapt to changes in musical style. The operas of André-Ernest-Modeste Grétry and his contemporaries prompted several musical and logistical changes in the Journal. The Journal had always presented isolated opera airs without text or context, but in its last years, it included complete vocal parts with obbligato violin and a figured bass line, representing a decisive shift away from solo keyboard repertoire. As the scores became more suitable for chamber performances of opera airs, Clément’s replaced his ariette-based suites with entire operatic scenes. Beginning in 1765, the groupings of pieces began to loosely resemble the Classical sonata, and in 1767, Clément abandoned the term “suite” entirely and stopped grouping his excerpts at all. The increasing length of each pieces probably prompted the replacement of the monthly publication of the Journal by an annual volume sometime between 1768 ad 1770.
These changes are broadly consistent with what we know of the shifts in musical aesthetics that took place soon after the arrival of Christoph Willibald Gluck in Paris in 1774 (James Johnson, Listening in Paris: A Cultural History, 1995). Could we trace parallels between the selection of “the most successful airs” printed by the Journal and the new operatic tastes of the Parisian public? Unfortunately, the shift from suite to sonata, the increasing length and changing structure of musical excerpts, the attempt to capture orchestral sound, and the inclusion of text to provide dramatic narrative predate Gluck’s arrival and influence in France. Moreover, the turnaround time between the premieres of opéras comiques and Clément’s publications often left little time for public feedback. The Journal appears not to have been printing “the most successful” works, as its title page claimed, but rather the newest works of the Opéra-Comique. So what attracted buyers to Clément’s untested musical excerpts?
One possibility sees the Journal as part of an Enlightenment project in intellectual and cultural democratization. Clément’s uncle, the Abbé Clément, was known for his commentaries on contemporary music and co-wrote the three-volume Anecdotes dramatiques, containing “histories” about the creation and production of French spectacles from its “origins” (Jean-Baptiste Lully under Louis XIV) to the present (1774). The series, the elder Clément hoped, would offer something to everyone: amateurs of opera, men of letters, women, foreigners, young people. This was a project to familiarize a new class of amateurs with the cultural currency of Parisian spectacles (Clément, i-iv).
Unlike the Anecdotes dramatiques, the Journal did not purport to teach everything about the “most popular opera airs.” The periodical was inaccessible without a musical instrument and without knowing how to read music. Still, its dedication to a fermier général, composer, and future author of L’Essai sur la musique ancienne et moderne (1780), Jean-Benjamin de Laborde, should not be taken lightly. Opera transcriptions enabled amateur musicians to engage closely with opera in ways that were impossible at the theater.
Periodicals like the Journal became viable business ventures around the time catalogues of spectacles circulated among amateur musicians and music lovers. Opportunities abounded in the 1770s for the musically inclined to build entire careers, not on performing transcriptions, but on preparing arrangements. By aiding in the formation of a new métier of commercial opera arranging, Clément handed cultural capital that had once been prized among a musical elite to amateurs and buyers of cheap music prints.
The following sound examples of ariettes from the Journal de Clavecin were recorded by the author:
Saraswathi Shukla is a second-year graduate student in the Music Department at UC Berkeley. She draws on her undergraduate training in history to research the instrumental music and |
course, I was tasked with implementing an algorithm for "variational image segmentation by motion detection." The algorithm was, as they say, a doozy. Tersely described over the course of half a dozen papers, it had dozens of subroutines, which when implemented grew to span thousands of lines of MATLAB code. But there was one subroutine, mysteriously called the "numerical upgrading" routine, whose description was mysteriously absent from the scientific record. Without this small but vital routine, the whole marvelous image segmenting machine just sputtered and ground to a halt. Crash! Panic! Woe.
Fortunately, after many late nights, I managed to track down an unpublished technical report that outlined the missing routine (in Japanese, but that's another story). The marvelous machine rumbled to life, images were segmented, and my GPA was saved.
That course taught me many lessons, and one of them was that we have a long way to go toward making scientific work, and particularly scientific code, reproducible. This is one reason we've recently started an open source project called JotGit.
JotGit brings together git, for powerful version control and offline working, with online, collaborative rich text editing. Our aim is to make it easy to use git to track and publish everything related to a scientific paper: the text of the paper itself, the data that goes into the paper, the code used to process the data, and, well, everything else. Here's a quick demo of the prototype:
The code's here on GitHub. JotGit's still a prototype, but we're releasing early and will be releasing often. To make it easy for you to run, host, and hack JotGit yourself, we've built it with the meteor web framework, which is very easy to get running on any Mac or Linux system and has minimal dependencies. Meteor makes it really fun to develop for the real time web, so even if you haven't done any web development before, it's a great way to start!
The big idea behind JotGit is that everyone should be able to contribute to a scientific paper using the tools and processes they love. The scientists who currently use git also tend to write their papers with tools like LaTeX and Markdown, which are text-based and easy to manage with git, but most scientists still use Word documents, which aren't compatible with git. And, unfortunately, there's a steep learning curve from Word to Markdown/LaTeX/git.
This is a problem we know well from our experience running writeLaTeX, an online collaborative editor for LaTeX with a rich text layer that brings WYSIWYG to LaTeX. One of our major goals for writeLaTeX has always been to help LaTeX geeks (like us) collaborate with non-LaTeX geeks (like most of the people we work with). If you're used to writing your papers in LaTeX with powerful scripting, version control, and history features, you probably cringe when someone hands you a Word document. But, if you're used to Word, you probably have the same reaction when someone hands you a bunch of computer code that don't look anything like a paper. With JotGit, we use powerful tools like git, LaTeX, and Markdown on the back end, but we wrap them up in a simple, collaborative, WYSIWYG front end. Ultimately, you can use whichever tools you prefer.
We're excited about the opportunities for collaborating on and sharing scientific papers afforded by a distributed version control system like git. GitHub has really revolutionized open source software with its fork and pull request collaboration model. Can we do the same for the scientific record? What does it mean to "fork" a paper? Right now JotGit works with local git repositories, but soon we'll be hooking it up to GitHub, so we aim to find out.
That's all for now. Watch for more updates soon. There's a short roadmap in the repo with next steps, and if you have any questions, just drop us a line or open up an issue for discussion.
Happy hacking!
View the complete collection of stories for Open Science Week.By Kate Monica
June 08, 2017 - As healthcare professionals attempt to navigate an increasingly data-driven, high-tech industry, some providers and patients remain skeptical that increased reliance on EHR systems is the right move.
EHRs have their advantages: several studies cite examples of the systems being key assets in efforts to improve preventive medicine, patient-provider communication, and positive drug interactions. Additionally, EHR systems offer patients increased transparency through patient portals providing a view of their own health information.
However, not everyone is a fan of the technology. The question of whether EHR systems help or hurt the industry has driven a wedge between providers on either side of the argument.
It’s no secret many providers are fed up with the arduous tasks inherent to inputting thorough documentation and entering new patient information into the systems.
Frustrated providers blame EHR systems for sucking the personal touch out of medicine and making many doctors feel like little more than data entry clerks.
READ MORE: Main Characteristics of Successful EHR Vendors, Technologies
Increased reliance on health IT is also causing instances of patient harm.
A recent study found health IT systems could be a contributing cause to medication errors resulting in significant patient safety threats.
Researchers found 889 medication errors in provider reports submitted between January 1 and June 30 of 2016 cited health IT as a contributing cause for the listed error.
Of these reported medication errors, the most frequently cited problems were dose omission, dosage errors, and extra doses.
“Errors due to HIT spanned across all HIT components, including the CPOE system, pharmacy system, electronic medication administration record (eMAR), clinical documentation system, clinical decision support system, ADC, and BCMA system,” stated researchers in the report. “There were many causes for HIT-related errors, and they were unique depending on the context in which the system was used.”
READ MORE: Realizing the Benefits of Clinical Documentation Improvement
However, these problems with health IT often arose from human error rather than problems with the technology itself. Distracted nurses and physicians entering incorrect information into EHR systems lead to prescription ordering errors and misinformation.
“Oftentimes, failures in the HIT systems are attributed to human error, which hinders the investigation into secondary causes of the patient safety event such as limitations in software interoperability, usability, and workflow processes,” researchers wrote.
Researchers concluded offering nurses and physicians better training on how to use health IT and limiting distractions would decrease instances of human error.
However, there could be an even more efficient way of cutting down on these patient safety issues: eliminating manual entry entirely.
The key to mitigating human error and shifting some of the burden of tedious data entry off providers’ shoulders could be an increased reliance on the very technology causing consternation among industry insiders.
READ MORE: EMR v. EHR: Electronic Medical, Health Record Differences
Innovators are beginning to take notice.
Specifically, Siemens Healthineers may have the right technology to minimize some of these problems.
A new partnership between the solutions vendor and Relaymed delivers test results to physician EHR systems directly through point-of-care instruments.
The secure, cloud-based service automatically delivers patient test results into physician EHR systems so providers don’t have to worry about manually entering the information themselves.
Designing technology capable of entering data into EHRs automatically removes the possibility for human error that often leads to additional costs and patient harm.
This kind of automation also takes data entry off the provider’s plate, freeing up time for physicians to focus more on patient care.
The technology could also increase hospital revenue — the service ensures all tests are saved into the physician EHR system to avoid accidental omission and lost revenue due to unbilled tests.
"We were finding our testing procedure to be time consuming and inefficient so we sought out a device connectivity solution,” said Senior Director of Operations and Compliance Officer for MD Medical Group Christy Vedia. “Since we implemented the service, we now have it live on 120 devices across 30 locations.”
Limiting the need for manual data entry could also reduce physician burnout—a growing problem in the healthcare industry now being labeled as a public health crisis.
“The spike in reported burnout is directly attributable to loss of control over work, increased performance measurement (quality, cost, patient experience), the increasing complexity of medical care, the implementation of electronic health records (EHRs), and profound inefficiencies in the practice environment, all of which have altered work flows and patient interactions,” wrote healthcare CEOs in a post on Health Affairs Blog. “The high level of burnout among physicians should be considered an early warning sign of dysfunction in our health care system.”
While CEOs in the post recommend improving EHR usability to limit the interruptions, frustrations, and distractions brought on by EHR technology, automation could be a more efficient way to limit how often providers are required to interact with their EHR systems.
Automation could also benefit clinicians through alerts built into EHR systems signaling when a provider is attempting to complete a task on the system that could pose a potential patient safety threat or result in unnecessary costs.
A nationwide initiative to cut down on test ordering in hospitals recently gave rise to an automatic alert system in physician EHR systems with the potential to reduce instances of patient harm and save money.
The Choosing Wisely campaign, launched by the American Board of Internal Medicine (ABIM) foundation and Consumer Reports in 2012, sought to reduce medical test ordering by prompting providers to cut back on five tests or procedures they deemed ineffectual.
According to the National Academy of Medicine, over $200 billion a year is wasted on excessive medical testing and treatment. The organization also stated patient harm stemming from excessive medical testing and treatment accounts for 30,000 deaths a year.
Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles participated in the initiative and reduced test ordering through an alert built into the physician EHR workflow that automatically scanned 18 Choosing Wisely recommendations embedded into the software whenever doctors electronically ordered tests or drugs.
In a study, Cedars-Sinai analyzed alerts from 26,424 patient encounters between 2013 and 2016. Six percent — 1,591 cases — followed all Choosing Wisely guidelines.
Cedars-Sinai researchers found patients in groups that did not comply with Choosing Wisely guidelines had a 14 percent higher rate of readmission and a 29 percent higher risk of complications, increasing costs by 7 percent.
In groups that did not comply with Choosing Wisely guidelines, patients had a 14 percent higher rate of readmission and a 29 percent higher risk of complications, increasing costs by 7 percent.
After a year of implementing the electronic alert system, Cedars-Sinai saved 6 million in spending.
While this particular alert system was tailored specifically to Choosing Wisely recommendations, alerts aligned to other safety or cost-saving recommendations could be useful in automatically signaling providers to potential problems in the same way.
Automating data entry and built-in alerts could be the tip of the iceberg.
In theory, any rote task requiring manual input could be automated so physicians can shirk the more tedious responsibilities inherent to EHR systems while also mitigating problems arising from the technology.
However, as with any relatively fresh undertaking, automation could be a slippery slope.
Automating too many tasks could increase the likelihood of a system malfunction affecting a larger portion of patient care.
Additionally, increased reliance on EHR systems and technology could leave hospitals even more vulnerable in instances where hackers force healthcare organizations offline.
Erie County Medical Center (ECMC) recently gave the healthcare industry an alarming glimpse into the repercussions of operating a technology-dependent hospital in the age of cybercrime.
Hackers broke into the hospital’s network and forced ECMC back to paper records for over six weeks.
ECMC was able to continue running somewhat smoothly with all staff members working diligently to keep up with incoming patients, but the ordeal served as a warning to other hospitals. EHR systems are by no means impervious and can be derailed by malevolent hackers at a moment’s notice.
Staying in the dark ages, however, is not the solution. Updating security measures along with developing technologies is an organization’s best bet when combatting criminal activity.
Increasing automation in EHR systems could change perceptions among patients and providers regarding the usefulness of the technology and reduce the administrative burden imposed on users.
However, whether automating more daily clinical processes will mitigate or augment patient safety threats remains to be seen.
It will be up to innovators to find the line where too much automation and reliance on EHRs becomes a hindrance rather than a helping hand.In the previous installment of How To Make Your Own Glass Bong, you picked out your liquor bottle and ordered the special diamond bit to cut the hole in it. Somewhere between then and now, you’ll have to empty that bottle, but I’ll leave that up to you 🙂 Right now, you have just a few things left to get, and luckily, they shouldn’t take long.
The Glass
As much as I like to say “Support Your Local Head Shop”, I tried. They didn’t have anything I needed in stock, and if they did it would have cost $50 minimum just for the parts. So I dug around on the web, and found something even better: Free Glass!!!
That’s right, GlassblowersDirect sells all kinds of cool stuff, and one of their offers is a free (diffused!) downstem for new customers. You will need both a special hard-to-find downstem to fit the Bottaro bottle, as well as an actual bowl (to smoke out of!), so you can order both those things and only pay for one (plus shipping, which is incredibly quick). I don’t have any connection to them, just found them on the web and they seem to really have their act together, except for their slightly funky credit card ordering system (it’s secure through Paypal, they just haven’t hooked it to their website so they manually send you a link).
Here’s exactly what to order:
14mm Standard downstem, 3″ long (use this link for free downstem)
14mm Glass-on-glass clear bowl (use this link to add it to your cart)
If you want any other colors, customization, or accessories (nail domes for dabbers!), scroll around that page and choose them now, while you’re already paying for shipping (they use heavy-duty boxes and lots of bubble wrap). Remember, you need all 14mm stuff here.
If you’re using any other bottle than the Bottaro, you’ll have to measure it for the downstem. There are very detailed instructions on the GlassblowersDirect website, and these guys carry downstems in every quarter-inch increment between 3″ and 10″, so it’s a good place to know about in any case.
The Magic
The magic in this case is a little rubber grommet that just happens to fit exactly into a 3/4″ hole and whose inside is just tight enough to grip the lower ground glass portion of the downstem securely. The rubber also shock-mounts the downstem while sealing the connection so air or smoke don’t escape. How much is this miracle? Just 75 cents at your local Ace Hardware!
Here is what you want for your grommet: ID 1/2″, OD 31/32″, groove 3/4″, stock 55059 (the link actually goes to Ace’s supplier and shows you what they look like, but any grommet will do as long as it’s the same groovy size :-). My local Ace carries these in their electrical department, but you should be able to find one of these in any decent hardware store.
The Total
Bottaro Bottle: $8.47
Grommet: $0.75
Downstem, bowl, and shipping: $18.00
Diamond-tipped hole cutter: $8.00
Total: $35.22
How To Do It
(This mandatory video covers steps 5 through 10 in detail — Watch It First!)
WARNING: Please read all steps carefully, and if possible print them out as a checklist, before starting work.
Empty and wash out the bottle, clear your sink, and fill the bottle with warm (not hot) water. This will dampen vibration, support the bottle from the inside, and help the glass survive drilling on a molecular level. I forgot where I read that, but it worked for me 🙂 Put the diamond bit/hole saw into your battery-powered drill (do not use a plug-in drill for reasons that should be obvious shortly). Most typical household or commercial drills have two ranges; set yours to “high”. In any case, you’re looking for somewhere between 600 and 1000 rpm. Put on some safety equipment, since little pieces of glass will be flying around. At the very minimum, you should wear safety goggles or some sort of full eye protection. Protective gloves are nice too. Drilling glass creates a lot of heat, so we’re going to be cooling the area by running water over it (this is why you must use a battery drill; AC power and water do not play well together). Find the spot you want to drill by placing the gasket on the glass just above the straw covering, and draw a circle around it with a Sharpie or similar. If you’re using one of the recommended liquor bottles, most of them have a dedicated round area that’s ideal and obvious for drilling. Simply pry off the plastic cover with a flat screwdriver first. Now, place the bottle in the sink so the mark is below the faucet, and run some warm water over the mark. It shouldn’t be either pouring down or barely trickling; you just want a steady stream of moving water flowing over your work area. This also helps carry away glass shards before they can fly around. With one hand, hold the bottle firmly by the neck (on the Bottaro, that’s the top twisty section :-). With the other, get your drill running at about 3/4 of maximum speed. When it’s spinning well, center the bit on the mark and hold it on the glass. Don’t push too hard; just keep a steady light pressure and let the spinning bit and weight of the drill do all the work. Make sure you’re drilling at a 90 degree angle to the glass so that the entire surface of the saw contacts the glass at the same time! It is possible to drill at an off-angle to the glass, but not recommended. This is why you need a bottle with a flattish spot and proper slant. It will only take about 2 or 3 minutes to go through the glass. Don’t rush it, but watch carefully. When you start seeing swirls in the water on the inside of the glass, you’re almost through, so ease up the pressure a little but keep the speed going. Once you cut through, use the bit to grind away any sharp edges you see, and then carefully pour the water out. Try to keep track of the piece of glass that used to be in the hole, so it doesn’t go down your drain and mess up your garbage disposal. Rinse the entire inside and outside of the bottle several times to get all the glass powder out before you start inhaling it! Break off any possible sharp pieces of glass with a pair of pliers, then put the grommet into the hole. Work the edges of the grommet around the glass. Put some water on the body of the downstem for lubrication, then slowly and carefully push and turn the downstem into the grommet (hopefully without popping the grommet out into the bottle itself). Now put the bowl into the downstem. You’ve reached 11 and you’re done! Congratulations!
This really isn’t hard to do. I never did it before and it came out fine both times, other than a bit of ground glass around one side when the bit slipped. In face, once you see how easy it is, you can set up a side business drilling bottles for your buddies and recoup the cost of all this experience 🙂
Now you definitely deserve to smoke a bowl or two! I suggest putting all the tools and such away first though. If you’ve never used a bong before, make sure you pack a small bowl…you won’t believe how well it works!
If you don’t even know how to use a bong…that’s what Part 4 is all about!
Part 1: Make Your Own Glass Bong
Part 2: How To Choose Your Bottle.
Part 3: The Magic. And how to make it happen (this article)
Part 4: How to smoke from your bong!Dolores Park hit again by vandals
Zachary Jen (3), of San Francisco, peers across caution tape into the sandbox at Dolores Park in San Francisco on Sunday, March 1, 2015. The sandbox was found full of broken glass bottles on Friday, forcing maintenance staff to close it while they replace the sand. less Zachary Jen (3), of San Francisco, peers across caution tape into the sandbox at Dolores Park in San Francisco on Sunday, March 1, 2015. The sandbox was found full of broken glass bottles on Friday, forcing... more Photo: Terray Sylvester, The Chronicle Buy photo Photo: Terray Sylvester, The Chronicle Image 1 of / 39 Caption Close Dolores Park hit again by vandals 1 / 39 Back to Gallery
City crews are cleaning up Dolores Park once again this weekend, this time after a new group of vandals left dozens of broken bottles strewn in the children’s sandbox.
Less than two weeks after two teenagers broke into the fenced-off construction site on the park’s north side and caused $100,000 in damage, a late-night boozing session turned destructive at the children’s playground area on the south side of the park.
Park maintenance staffers showed up to Dolores Park Friday morning to find the sandbox full of glass from what appears to be dozens of broken beer bottles. While shards of glass from one or two bottles can be sifted out with relative ease, the huge amount of glass, much of it shattered against a nearby retaining wall, meant the sand has to be hauled out and replaced.
It will take about a week to get rid of the glass-laced sand and bring in about 20 tons of fresh stuff.
“There were a lot of parents with kids who did not get to use the sandbox today,” said Recreation and Parks Director Phil Ginsburg. “Parks are sacred spaces and as a community we all need to be a little angrier about this.”
In February, a pair of teenagers — one 17 and one 18 — broke into an area on the park’s north side where construction workers are close to completing a $20 million renovation that will include new tennis courts, bathrooms and playing fields. The suspects, who were arrested, hot-wired a construction vehicle, did some doughnuts on the newly sodded turf and popped wheelies on some uncured pavement.
The escapade ripped up sod which had not rooted yet, and damaged some of the newly installed drainage infrastructure. The vandals also tagged a new maintenance shed and then lit a fire to roast marshmallows and make s’mores they had brought with them.
Supervisor Scott Wiener said the series of incidents underscores the need for more park security. Over the past decade the city has gradually cut back on park patrols to the point where in recent years there have been just a pair of officers on duty at any given time. Wiener successfully pushed to get funding for another two positions in the current budget, but says there’s a desperate need for more.
“In the upcoming budget process, it’s a high priority for me to seek a significant expansion of park patrol,” he said. “We have two park patrol officers at any given time watching over 220 parks representing 15 percent of the city’s land mass.”
Vandalism is a major issue at Golden Gate Park and other city parks as well, he said
“People in the community work so hard, and our staff works so hard, to make these parks as good and usable and beautiful as they can be, and you have these sociopaths who just come in and brutalize them,” said Wiener. “That is deeply frustrating.”
And as apartment towers continue to pop up around the city, the wear and tear on city parks is only going to become more of a challenge, Ginsburg said.
“We have 10,000 people on a nice weekend at Dolores Park,” he said. “There were not 10,000 people in Dolores Park a decade ago. As a community we need to make sure our open space is well maintained.”
J.K. Dineen is a San Francisco Chronicle Staff Writer. E-mail: jdineen@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @sfjkdineenStory highlights Frida Ghitis: The U.S. will become the world's leading oil producer in a few years
Ghitis: It is truly transformational that the U.S. is giving up its addiction to foreign oil
Despite energy independence, we need to keep looking into green energy, she says
Ghitis: It's beneficial for the U.S. to not rely on unstable, undemocratic Middle East for oil
We pay a lot of attention to revolutions when they emerge suddenly and violently, but when a transformation arrives gradually and peacefully it's easy to miss.
Let's stop for a moment and take a look at a slow-motion development changing the world as we know it: The United States is giving up its addiction to foreign oil.
For decades, we bemoaned the awful toll this addiction has taken. The need for oil and natural gas -- much of it from Middle Eastern dictatorships -- shaped the foundation of global geopolitics. It created morally questionable alliances and repeatedly placed Washington in a position to choose between its fundamental values and its economic interests. Now all that could change.
When President Obama started his first term, the country faced stiff economic headwinds. Now, as he prepares to start his second term, the country enjoys a rare and unexpected tailwind, propelling it in one of the most important areas, with a host of positive implications.
Clearly, the booming American oil and gas businesses are not problem-free, but the benefits -- economic, geopolitical and environmental -- of this impending energy independence far outweigh the drawbacks.
Frida Ghitis
The days when Mideast oil-producing dictatorships and their friends at OPEC could so easily wave their power over a trembling, oil-thirsty West are on their way to becoming a relic of the past.
America still needs imported oil. But growing production and shrinking consumption have created a most promising trend. According to the International Energy Agency, the United States will become the world's leading oil producer in just a few years. Imagine that. The United States could produce more oil than Saudi Arabia as early as 2017 and become a net oil exporter by 2030.
And if you count other petroleum products, the future is already here. In 2011, the United States exported more petroleum products -- including gasoline, diesel and other fuels -- than it imported. That had not happened in more than half a century.
The first major sign of impact is visible in Iran. The loosening of oil markets has strengthened the world's hand against oil-rich Iran. One main reason the international community has been able to impose strong sanctions on Tehran, aimed at persuading the regime to stop its illegal nuclear enrichment program, is that the global economy can do without Iranian oil. Iran's production has fallen 40%, a drop that not long ago would have created unacceptable economic hardships for the rest of the planet.
The trend is even more dramatic when you include natural gas, a product that is revolutionizing energy markets. The United States is about to become the second-largest exporter of natural gas behind Russia. Gigantic oil and gas finds in the United States and elsewhere are transforming the landscape, in some cases quite literally.
JUST WATCHED U.S. oil production on the rise Replay More Videos... MUST WATCH U.S. oil production on the rise 05:29
JUST WATCHED To frack or not to frack Replay More Videos... MUST WATCH To frack or not to frack 01:29
Other than rising oil prices, the reason for this shift is that new and controversial technologies such as fracking and horizontal drilling have multiplied the amount of viable deposits in unexpected places. The techniques take an environmental toll, but there are upsides.
Fracking, as we keep learning, is creating very troubling problems, which deserve scrutiny. But it is helping to replace coal, the dirtiest form of energy production, with much cleaner natural gas.
Another dark lining in this silver cloud is that cheaper oil and gas will reduce incentives to produce green energies. Rather than abandoning the new sources of energy, efforts should focus on finding ways to reduce the negative impact of fracking and on continuing the push for alternative energy.
The Obama administration now faces a balancing act as it starts its new term. Energy policy, the quest for full energy independence, must be weighed against the growing threat of climate change.
A decision on the controversial Keystone XL pipeline is imminent and political pressure against fracking will grow. The president should support strong climate legislation, without reversing the powerful gains of surging U.S. oil and gas production, with all its transformational benefits. The two goals are not mutually exclusive.
Once upon a time, America was the Saudi Arabia of whale oil, the fuel of its day. Whale oil was displaced by hydrocarbon production, which the United States also dominated. That started changing with enormous geopolitical consequences after easy, high quality oil was found in the Arabian Peninsula and other parts of the Middle East.
The United States built alliances with autocratic regimes as part of a commitment to satisfy its needs and preserve the free flow of oil, which became the life-blood of the global economy.
For oil-rich countries, this brought enormous fortunes, but it also brought something known as the " resource curse." With wealth concentrated in the hands of autocrats, corruption mushroomed, and other sectors of the economy withered.
A trend away from the concentration of oil production in such an unstable, undemocratic part of the world bodes well. It bodes well for human rights, and it also bodes well, ironically, for the economies of oil-rich countries, which may at long last find an incentive to diversify into other industries. It certainly bodes well for the U.S. economy, which is already creating tens of thousands of jobs in industries related to the new boom
In what sounds like something from another era, the Energy Information Administration forecast declining gasoline prices for the next few years. That's the first bit of good news for American consumers. The really good news is the knowledge that soon, every time you fill up your tank you will not be sending a piece of your paycheck to the Middle East.
That, among other things, is excellent news for America's balance of trade and for the soundness of the U.S. economy, which sadly now struggles with a politically dysfunctional Washington.
No matter how much oil the United States and its friends in the Western Hemisphere produce, the Middle East remains a principal global petroleum producer for the foreseeable future. The United States still needs to ensure the free flow of oil, because a stop in production will cause prices to spike on global markets, affecting the entire planet.
But America and its friends are becoming much less vulnerable to oil shocks. And supplies from other parts of the world are becoming more plentiful. The emerging changes in the world's energy markets, if they continue to develop, are nothing short of revolutionary.
As Obama prepares for a new term in office, they are gradually rerouting us from a destiny that we had thought was inescapable and rather dismal to one that, while far from assured, looks much more promising.
Follow us on Twitter @CNNOpinionWe were all lucky to be born at the right time. Over the past 50 years, world GDP growth has been averaging 3.6 per cent, driven by employment increases and productivity improvements in roughly equal proportions. An exhaustive and important study by the McKinsey Global Institute concludes that over the next 50 years, population growth will decline to 0.3 per cent annually. If productivity continues to contribute 1.8 per cent, overall growth will decline to 2.1 per cent, a rate 40 per cent less than during the past half-century. The implications of this slowdown on global changes in the standard of living and investment opportunities could be enormous.
The developing world can improve its growth potential by adopting operational practices and technology used by the advanced countries (that is, by catching up), but the US, Europe and Japan will continue to depend heavily on innovation to approach anything like their historical rate of growth. Those subscribing to Mohamed El-Erian's concept of "the new normal" or Harvard Professor Alvin Hansen's "secular stagnation" may turn out to be right, but for reasons somewhat different than they originally thought. I have been worried about a lack of demand causing a slowdown in growth. I had not thought that the main problem might be that there aren't enough people out there to do the buying.
The global economy grew sixfold in the past 50 years. Taking into account the projections above, it is only expected to grow threefold in the next 50. Population growth rose because of high fertility rates, declining infant mortality and longer life expectancy. Also, the number of people of working age (15-64) grew from 58 per cent of the population in 1964 to 68 per cent last year. The productivity improvement resulted from a shift from agriculture to manufacturing and services. Technology obviously played an important role. According to the McKinsey study, the average world employee today generates 2.4 times the output of his counterpart in 1964. Because Europe and the US were relatively efficient in 1964, their productivity rose only 1.5 per cent and 1.9 per cent annually respectively, while South Korea and Japan rose 4.6 per cent and 2.8 per cent respectively. As expected, China's productivity grew at 5.7 per cent annually, but Mexico and Saudi Arabia experienced less than 1 per cent annual productivity growth. The study notes that the productivity gap between the developed and the developing economies remains wide, at almost five times, providing a big opportunity for emerging markets.
The big change in the future will be the slow growth in population. Fertility rates are declining, and the average age of the population in Europe, China and Japan is rising. China's peak employment is expected to occur in 2024. The working age population in the G19 countries plus Nigeria is expected to decline from 68 per cent to 61 per cent over the next 50 years. By 2064, India's employment could expand by 54 per cent, while China's could shrink by 20 per cent. The number of employees in the US is expected to continue to rise, but at a slower rate than in the past. By employing more women and encouraging people to stay at their jobs beyond age 64, the expected 0.3 per cent rate of working population growth could double, but that would still be well below the pace of the last 50 years.
The McKinsey estimates of annual population growth seem low to me, but the concept of slower growth in the number of people in the world appears sound. A somewhat less pessimistic study of population growth was prepared for me by Dick Hokenson, the demographic analyst at Evercore ISI. He points out that the G19 plus Nigeria universe includes Germany, Russia, Japan, China and South Korea, all of which will experience overall declines in their populations and labour forces over the next 50 years. If you look at the entire world, the decline in growth is still significant but goes only from 1.8 per cent to about 0.5 per cent. By last year, world population had risen to 6.4 billion from 2.9 billion in 1964. Some put it higher. I have seen estimates of 9 billion in 2064, implying a population growth roughly half that of the past 50 years.
The McKinsey study states that productivity improvement could compensate for the slower rise in population, but over the next 50 years it would have to be 80 per cent faster than the already rapid growth of the past half century. Given all the technology breakthroughs of the past few decades, including the cell phone, the personal computer and the internet, that accelerated rate seems unlikely to me. The study concludes that, worldwide, as much as three-quarters of productivity growth will come from a broader adoption of best practices. These opportunities exist in certain geographic areas and include using more effective retail formats, increasing the scale and capacity of automobile assembly, improving operational efficiency in health care and reducing waste in food service. The developing world would be the greatest beneficiary of the adoption of best practices, which would account for 82 per cent of its estimated productivity improvement. In contrast, the developed world would realise only 55 per cent of its productivity improvement from the implementation of best practices. The rest would come from "pushing the frontier" or innovation.
While one usually thinks adopting best practices applies mainly to manufacturing and services, agriculture continues to provide considerable opportunities. On the innovative side, the study argues that the technological advances of the last 50 years will continue to have a significant impact on productivity. Profit margins for the Standard & Poor's 500 are now above 10 per cent, having risen sharply since the end of the recession in 2009. Historically they have never been much higher than that. Margins have improved as a result of employing technology and keeping labor costs low. Capital equipment has been used to replace labor and the vast pool of people looking for a job has enabled companies to hire workers without significant increases in wages. As a result, unit labour costs have been rising very slowly. Given that a Ned Davis Research study of non-farm productivity year-by-year over the past 65 years shows increases of 2.3 per cent a year, the likelihood that this statistic could rise significantly seems remote. The most recent quarterly gain was less than 1 per cent. Over the past 20 years there have been several quarters where productivity improvements have exceeded 5 per cent, but about 2 per cent is the best the US economy has been able to achieve since the recovery began in 2009.
Ten enablers of growth
Productivity growth has actually slowed in the developed economies, from 3.2 per cent in the 1964-74 period to 0.8 per cent during 2004-14. In the emerging markets, however, it has more than doubled from 2.6 per cent during 1964-74 to 5.6 per cent in 2004-14. In 1964, the differential between the dollar output per employee in the developed economies versus the developing economies (on a purchasing power parity basis) was $US32,000. Even though productivity has improved faster in the developing economies, the differential last year was dramatically higher at $US73,000.
In the recent past, companies were clearly willing to spend a significant part of their operating cash flow on capital equipment. They were not, however, building new plants. Instead, they were buying hardware, software and robotics to enable them to increase the output of goods and services using fewer workers. While the net income per employee has increased in each cycle, capital spending as a percentage of operating cash flow has actually declined in the past three cycles. I still expect capital spending to be one of the positives for the economy this year, but this factor may be less robust than I originally thought.
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dog effortlessly snaps his collar]
Garfield: But I love them anyway. Dogs are stupid. [ slaps dog repeatedly ] With bad breath.[dog effortlessly snaps his collar]But I love them anyway.
Fan Works
Films — Live-Action
Literature
Live-Action TV
Video Games
Visual Novels
Gilgamesh of Fate/stay night is easily capable of defeating any of the Servants simply by raining an endless number of Noble Phantasms down on them. However, he does not subscribe to overkill theory; even though he uses overwhelming force in battle, he could easily use even more, but chooses not to. Most notable is his refusal to bring out Ea, a sword capable of destroying worlds, unless very impressed or in significant danger. Even then he never uses more than a small fraction of Ea's true power, since destroying the planet he's standing on would be a very stupid thing to do.
In Sharin no Kuni when Kenichi fights Houzuki, he finds out that Houzuki's leg is actually completely fine, and promptly loses the fight as a result.
Web Comics
Web Original
The New Adventures of Captain S: In the final showdown between Captain S and the Game Genie, Captain S seems to have the Genie's number before the Genie proclaimed "We're not *snort* left-handed." and proceeded to transform into his true form
After failing to do any damage to Malachite in Suburban Knights using their costumed weapons (which makes sense since they were mostly just props) everyone abandons their "characters" (Lupa stops acting princessy, Linkara starts using his magic gun, Angry Joe gets out his weapon arsenal etc.) It still doesn't work though since Malachite is a dark mage while everyone else are mostly un-powered nerds.
Atop the Fourth Wall: On the subject of Linkara's magic gun a.k.a. Margaret, she has been holding back her full strength most of the time. There are a couple sneak peaks of it in the "Silent Hill: Dead/Alive" and "Silent Hill: The Grinning Man]]" reviews, but we don't really properly see the gun cut loose until Star Wars 3D #1.
has been holding back full strength most of the time. There are a couple sneak peaks of it in the "Silent Hill: Dead/Alive" and "Silent Hill: The Grinning Man]]" reviews, but we don't really properly see the gun cut loose until Star Wars 3D #1. In Noob, Gaea is a notable hoarder of both money and precious items and a Dirty Coward when it comes to combat. However, if she's cornered into combat and has her mind set on winning, she does NOT consider her most powerful items to be Too Awesome to Use.
Western Animation
Real Life
Rafael Nadal, an 11-time Grand Slam champion in tennis, is right-handed, but he learned to play left-handed for purely strategic reasons; there are not too many lefties in tennis so opponents can find it difficult to adjust to playing against. In particular, it helped him become the only player to consistently beat Roger Federer (arguably the greatest player of all time), because Federer's one-handed backhand is vulnerable to Nadal's lefty forehand.
In a boxing match on November 4, 1947, left-handed fighter Mike Collins emerged from his corner in a right-handed stance and then shifted into a left-handed stance, flooring his opponent and winning the match in four seconds.
It's common knowledge that professional wrestling is largely a staged fight but what isn't common knowledge is that a large part of the training is learning how to hold back so as to not seriously injure the opponent, and for the wrestlers to willingly cooperate in order to reduce injury. In essence, every match has the wrestlers fighting "left-handed". While professional wrestling moves are meant more for show than for actual practical application, often telegraphing most severely, it's safe to say that if some of those moves were performed in earnest, they would hurt. A lot. To further illustrate this point, a lot of old school wrestlers-turned-trainers (such as Stu Hart) were legit amateur wrestlers and made a point of training their students to really wrestle and grapple fight.
Billiards and particularly Snooker players sometimes switch hands to avoid awkward stretching across the table; some even actively train to become near-ambidextrous. However, only superstar Ronnie O'Sullivan will sometimes play entire frames left-handed just to mess with his opponent's head. Opinions differ on whether this is pure awesome or just jerkassery. O'Sullivan once received a formal complaint about being disrespectful after playing left-handed. In response he claimed that he could play left-handed better than his opponent could play right-handed. He wasn't disciplined because he proceeded to play a three games in a row against a professional, left-handed, and won all three.
Many left-handed people will have found themselves in situations where the opposite applies. For whatever reason you will be forced to do something with your right hand and because of this will generally be pretty bad at it, but then when you get the chance to use your left hand you will surprise everyone at how much better you are. A common example is using something designed for right-handed people, then switching to something that can be used by either hand.
A famous example is the "Rumble in the Jungle" fight between heavyweight boxers Muhammad Ali and George Foreman. While everyone knows the story now, back then, people had no idea Ali was intentionally holding back and letting Foreman pound him on the ropes. He told everybody who would listen that he was going to dance and make Foreman look silly, but he was bluffing. He knew Foreman was too powerful to stick and move, because all it would take was one good shot by the big man to seriously hurt him. So he laid on the ropes until Foreman punched himself into exhaustion, then he knocked him out. Ali, afterwards, called the tactic the "rope-a-dope".
Justified in the case of Károly Takács, an Olympic pistol shooter. He was already a world-class marksman when he suffered injuries to his right hand whilst handling a faulty grenade, whilst serving in the Hungarian Army. Determined to continue his shooting career however, he trained using his left hand and eventually went on to win two Gold Medals in the 1948 and 1952 Olympic Games.
A similar case to this is the pianist Paul Wittgenstein, who lost his right arm in World War I, but continued his pianist career by commissioning works for the left hand alone by many prominent composers of the day, most notably Maurice Ravel's Piano Concerto for the Left Hand.
Also this talent show performance.
Common when nations with a superior technologically advanced military, attacks a nation with an inferior and primitive military to keep civilian casualties low or avoid total destruction of the country's limited infrastructure. Sometimes an objective becomes so important to neutralize, they unleash their full might to achieve it (innocent bystanders and collateral damage be damned), showing they could actually annhilate everything if they really wanted to. Moreover they never seriously consider using a Nuke 'em to just end the conflict in 15 minutes.
Used in Cricket. While a batsman's handedness is usually known to everyone by the time they get to top level, sufficiently nimble ones can switch stances while the bowler is in mid-bowl (mid-pitch). Since players on the field in cricket are positioned asymmetrically, this completely throws off the attempted formation.
Golf, a sport in which left-handed play is pretty rare at the top level, has some illustrations of this trope. Played straight by Phil Mickelson, probably the most successful left-handed player in history; in golf circles, if you make a reference to "Lefty", everyone knows you're talking about him. Mickelson does everything else right-handed — he learned to play golf as a child by mirroring what his father did while facing him; his father played right-handed. An inversion: All-time great Ben Hogan was actually left-handed, but played right-handed. Both played straight and averted by 2003 Masters champion Mike Weir. Like Mickelson, he's a natural righty, but learned to play golf as a lefty. In Weir's case, it was largely because he was a left-handed shot in his first sport of (ice) hockey (he's Canadian). note Handedness in ice hockey is based on the side from which a player normally shoots. Most Canada-trained players are taught to play with their dominant hand on top of the stick, meaning that forehand shots will come from the side opposite their dominant hand. This is thought to be the main reason why left-handed golf play is much more common in Canada than in almost any other country. While he enjoyed considerable junior golf success as a lefty, he had people telling him that he might be an even better player if he switched to right-handed play. He decided to write a letter to a pretty well-known golfer whom he had met at an exhibition when he was 11... none other than Jack Nicklaus. The Golden Bear quickly wrote back, telling Weir that if he felt comfortable playing left-handed, he should stick with it. Weir plays left-handed to this day.
As part of a prank, a nerdy girl asked two new Muay Thai trainers at a gym to spar with her. She goes a few rounds letting them think she's an unskilled newbie before proceeding to school them, since that nerdy girl is actually Germaine Yeap, a professional Muay Thai fighter.
. She goes a few rounds letting them think she's an unskilled newbie before proceeding to school them, since that nerdy girl is actually Germaine Yeap, a professional Muay Thai fighter. Michael Vick, considered one of the most athletic Quarterbacks in the history of the NFL, and one of the biggest What Could Have Beens, throws left-handed, despite being right-handed. He was so good as a child, the neighborhood kids made him throw with his left hand, and it stuck.
This is a common strategy used by chess hustlers. They'll play a few games with someone with no money at stake, and play deliberately poorly to make the opponent think they're weak. Then they'll get them to make a bet on the next game, and start playing for real.
On a broader sense, few military powers respond with the full strength of their arsenal to threats anymore, least of all the nuclear ones. The reason is that doing so would result a lot of neutral civilian casualties. Perhaps one of the greatest illustrations of this trope comes from Fallujah when over a hundred insurgents barricaded themselves in a booby trapped three story apartment building. The US Army's response was to simply blow the whole thing up using a single tank since there was no risk to civilians. In less than an hour all the insurgents were dead with no other casualties. This is also the case because, should one country start using nuclear weapons, the rest will probably do so also, and, well, good night world.Midway through her speech endorsing Hillary Clinton for president at the first night of the Democratic National Convention, first lady Michelle Obama made what’s ultimately a pretty remarkable statement for a Democratic convention, though it’s not one that will seem remarkable on its face.
"Hillary understands that the presidency is about one thing and one thing only," she said. "It is about leaving something better for our kids. That is how we have always moved this country forward — by all of us coming together on behalf of our children. Volunteering to coach the team, teach the Sunday school class, because they know it takes a village."
"It takes a village," of course, refers to the title of Clinton’s book about child rearing, of the same name, published in 1996. At the time of its publication, the book was much mocked — especially in right-wing circles — for its argument that, in essence, every one of us is responsible for the well-being of a child, even if that child is not our own.
In 1996, it was easy for the right-wing punditry complex to paint Clinton’s words as ridiculous. After all, in the '90s, the GOP owned family values. It was a central plank of the party’s platform, while the Democrats flirted with recognizing that, say, gay people exist. (It should be said they didn’t flirt particularly well, but they at least thought about it.)
But in 2016, "It takes a village" was a huge applause line — at least at the DNC. And what’s more, it signaled something wholly unexpected that’s happened in the intervening two decades: The Democrats have made a credible claim for being the family values party.
The Democrats embrace (modern) "family values"
If anything, that belief in progressive family values was the narrative of the first day of the DNC, which had a largely satisfying build and payoff, in contrast to the chaotic first day of the RNC. (The Republicans, to their credit, got better as their event went on, but this is the sort of thing you want to nail from day one.)
And the argument Democrats are making isn’t that they’ve co-opted Republican space on so-called family values, but that the country’s definition of family values has largely shifted to meet progressives where they already are.
In a country where the majority of people support marriage equality, for instance, it’s ludicrous to suggest that adhering to "true" family values means reversing the Supreme Court decisions making same-sex marriage legal in the United States. Even Donald Trump’s nomination acceptance speech left room for applause lines for LGBTQ citizens (though the party’s platform left no such room for LGBTQ rights).
But this idea was laced throughout the rest of the evening as well. Both Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders talked about making sure working-class people could make enough money to feed their families. A long succession of families who benefited from the DREAM Act talked about how it allowed them to stay together. And so on.
But it was Michelle Obama who most potently delivered on this theme, which may be why her speech served as the night’s emotional highpoint. Her speech positioned her own daughters — both eight years older than the young girls they were when their father stepped into the Oval Office — as symbols of an America that aims to raise up as many children as possible, regardless of their family background.
"So that today, I wake up every morning in a house that was built by slaves. And I watch my daughters — two beautiful intelligent black young women — play with the dog on the White House lawn," she said. "And because of Hillary Clinton, my daughters and all of our sons and daughters now take for granted that a woman can be president of the United States."
The implication is clear: Electing a woman president for the first time won’t just be a historic moment — it will be a victory for every daughter out there, Republican, Democrat, or otherwise.
This pivot also made sense of the angry protesters
As someone who spent most of his childhood raised in a staunch Republican household that was so staunch entirely because of the idea of family values, I can’t tell you how strange it is to hear this particular suite of issues be applied to the exact opposite party.
What’s even more remarkable is that the Republicans barely even tried to make the argument for this particular vote at their own convention. Their own narrative — things are terrifying, Donald Trump is a great businessman, and we know how to protect you — didn’t really have much room for it.
I don’t particularly know if ceding this territory will pay off one way or another for either party. But it proved to be a key part of the Democrats' (perhaps accidental) strategy in helping overcome what might have been the first day’s dominant storyline: anger from Bernie Sanders supporters over both his loss in the primaries and the DNC email leaks that proved several within the party didn’t take Sanders all that seriously.
If political parties, or maybe even the country, are part of some weird, gigantic family, then, well, families can disagree about stuff. They can argue about stuff. They can even yell loudly at each other and realize they have more common ground than not.
It remains to be seen if this is going to lead to some sort of party unity — or even grudging acceptance of Clinton’s place as the party nominee on the part of Sanders’s most die-hard supporters. But this is the advantage of having a narrative for your convention: If it’s good enough, it can morph to pull in all sorts of dissension and rancor. Now the Democrats hope this narrative will stick.A $1.15 billion arms deal with Saudi will go ahead after the US Senate rejected a bipartisan proposal to block arms sales to the Gulf kingdom yesterday.
The Senate voted 71 to 27 to kill legislation that would have stopped the sale.
A deal that was approved the State Department for the sale of more than 130 Abrams battle tanks, 20 armoured recovery vehicles and other equipment to Saudi Arabia will go ahead.
Critics of the arms deal attempted to block the sale of arms to the kingdom over its 18-month-long war in Yemen and worries that it may have committed war crimes as well as the monarchy’s international support for a conservative form of Islam.
A vocal opponent of the deal, Senator Paul Murphy said: “If you’re serious about stopping the flow of extremist recruiting across this globe, then you have to be serious that the … brand of Islam that is spread by Saudi Arabia all over the world, is part of the problem.”
Meanwhile lawmakers are expected to back another measure seen as anti-Saudi, a bill that would allow lawsuits against the country’s government by relatives of victims of the September 11 attacks.
President Barack Obama has promised to veto the bill, but congressional leaders say there is a strong chance that lawmakers will override the veto and let the measure become law. Overriding a presidential veto requires a two-thirds vote in both the House of Representatives and the Senate.Bengaluru: Diversity is a hot topic of discussion, from Fortune 500 company boardrooms to start-ups, in the corporate world. While companies have started taking some steps towards making workplaces more women-friendly, women also need to step up and make use of the opportunities available.
This is where Women Who Code, a global non-profit registered in the US, steps in.
Started in 2011, the organisation, which has about 50,000 members across the globe, conducts events on creating safe spaces for women in technology careers, helps them come together, learn new technologies and how to grow in their careers.
Women Who Code, which is present in about 20 countries, is looking to expand its base in India, targeting the large base of women developers who might need career guidance. The non-profit is currently operational in Bengaluru, New Delhi and Mumbai, and plans to launch in two other cities by the end of the year.
“Bengaluru is a leader in the tech industry. As a city it really has a great potential for showcasing a successful organisation or a successful network not just in India but in South-East Asia and in Asia in general, which is why this is a tremendous opportunity for us," said Alaina Percival, chief executive officer, Women Who Code.
Percival was in Bengaluru recently to train India directors to take the network forward and get their feedback. Of the 1,000-odd members in India, about 700 are in the Bengaluru chapter.
Women Who Code works by electing directors for each city chapter who then evangelise the community by conducting at least one free technical event for women every month. At the events, soft skills and leadership training are woven into technical discussions.
“We have two program avenues, one is in-person events where we had 1,500 events last year. The other is a weekly publication called Code Review where we highlight success stories, and through that we gave away $270,000 worth conference tickets last year. We also gave away $350,000 in education scholarships," said Percival.
The organisation has partnered with and is sponsored by companies like cloud storage provider Box, Zendesk, Etsy, VMware and Nike.
These companies also look at the organisation as a ground for recruiting top women developers and building their brands as diverse tech organisations.
While in the US, one of the main problems is getting enough women interested in technology, in India, there are a far greater number of women developers whose challenge then becomes to get noticed in their organisations, stay in the workplace, and progress in their careers.
Through their continuous event and network support, Women Who Code hopes to help Indian women achieve this, said Percival.
For Bengaluru chapter director Shwetha Lakshman Rao, who works in the research and development department at VMware, Women Who Code provided a crucial lesson in leadership.
“I became the city director in early December 2015. In just a few months after taking up this initiative, I have learnt a lot in terms of technical and non-technical aspects. I get to learn leadership skills, delegation, time management, prioritization etc., which you can’t otherwise," said Rao.Bell’s Brewery will release only 48 bottles of Pumpkin Peach Ale as early as this week. Proceeds will benefit the Kalamazoo River Trail Association. (Photo: Bell’s Brewery)
"Let them sip their pumpkin peach ale, we'll be brewing us some golden suds."
That was the message Anheuser-Busch sent to millions of beer drinkers with their Budweiser commercial that aired during Super Bowl XLIX in February. The ad, which showed mustached, hipster-looking guys sniffing beer, poked fun of craft beer culture.
Some craft beer breweries and fans have taken the ribbing personally and have decided to poke back. Shortly after the Super Bowl, Hopstories.com (a craft beer-boosting website) released a spoof of the Budweiser commercial that stated "we will savor our hundreds of styles, you keep pushing your one."
Larry Bell of Bell's Brewery of Kalamazoo was watching the Super Bowl when the Budweiser ad aired and wasn't pleased.
"I just about jumped out of my chair," Bell told The Detroit News on Tuesday. Then he thought about the pumpkin growing on his roof.
He was staying at his Chicago home and about to head to Kalamazoo to the brewery the next day. In spite of the cold winter, he still had a pumpkin growing on his rooftop garden, so he took it with him to the home-brewing store near Bell's Brewery and asked brewers to make him 5 gallons of beer using peach puree and his rooftop pumpkin. Bell's Pumpkin Peach Ale was born, if only for a short run.
The 5 gallons was only enough to fill 48 bottles, which Larry Bell will sell at his Eccentric Cafe in Kalamazoo once it's approved for sale by the state, which could be this week.
"We're getting crushed with calls already," said Bell, who will sell the limited edition fruity ale for $20 a 12-ounce bottle. All proceeds will be donated to the Kalamazoo River Trail Association. Any beer fans lucky enough to get one of the 48 bottles must drink it at the bar. They can take the bottle home, but no unopened beers will be allowed off the premises.
Scott LePage of Birmingham's Griffin Claw Brewery had a similar reaction to the Budweiser jab and created Beechwood Aged Pumpkin Peach Ale.
Griffin Claw Brewery’s Scott LePage decided to brew Beechwood Aged Pumpkin Peach Ale in response to Budweiser’s snarky Super Bowl commercial. (Photo: Griffin Claw Brewery)
He took Griffin Claw's popular Screamin' Pumpkin Ale and added fresh peach to it. The brewery went one step further and aged it in beechwood. (The Budweiser commercial claims it's the only beer aged in beechwood.) The label also has little images of a griffin riding a Clydesdale horse, Budweiser's mascot.
"We just had fun with it more than anything," LePage said. "The beer ended up being really good."
LePage said they made about 600-700 bottles of the Beechwood Aged Pumpkin Peach Ale earlier this year and released it in late March. Half of it was sold at the Griffin Claw tap room in Birmingham, and the other half was distributed across the state. He's not sure where it all went exactly, but he knows he's sold out of it at the tap room. It wasn't a money-making endeavor (he broke even), just a way to make a joke out of the Super Bowl commercial.
"I don't understand why they don't just embrace (craft breweries). There are two different customers" said LePage of Anheuser-Busch. "They're great at what they do, which is make flavored water, and we're incredible at what we do, which is making a beer that's a little more complex, and we're locally owned and operated."
Bell said the King of Beers is on the defensive. In November it was widely reported that for the first time craft beer sales as a whole out shined Budweiser's.
"We're starting to eat their lunch," said Bell, who founded his brewery in 1983. "Budweiser sales have basically been plummeting... but typically in the industry you don't go after somebody else's beer, you promote your own."
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First Half-Step->Franklin's Tower combo opens this great spring '78 show at the Uptown Theater. Solid half-step and the franklin's is nice. Mellow, but groovy and meanders some near the end, in a good way. Bobby even "leading" a bit on slide. Double dose of Jerry is followed by double dose of cowboy Bob on Me and My Uncle->Big River. Sweet, emotive versions then follow of It Must Have Been The Roses and Looks Like Rain. The band's in good form. Donna and Bobby singing nicely off each other. Keith getting in on the action on Tennessee Jed. Sounds good, here. Pumped up, "LAAAAWW come to get you if you don't walk right." '78 has this sort of drippy sound that I really actually like. Fine example of this on Jed. Not quite as mellow as '76, neither as tight and bound as '77, it's somewhere in between, stretching and meandering, and adds a bluesy-rock-psychedelic edge. Band goofing off, wish both Mickey and Billy a happy birthday, then go into Finiculi Finicula. Always pleasing Lazy Lightning->Supplication Jam to close out set.Standard fare for set two, but it's well-played. Fast, nearly 15-minute Dancin' highlights the set. It segues into another really long 15 minutes of drums, then is followed by five minutes of space. Early '78 is when they started their conventional drums->space segment coming roughly midway through the second set. This space is neat and sort of spooky and cooky- it's punctuated by Phil (it sounds like) screaming at the start and Donna joining in on the fun near the end. This blogger thinks it's the year's best: http://www.deadlistening.com/2008/02/1978-may-16-17-uptown-theater-chicago.html. It segues into Terrapin- no big jam at/around it. NFA->A&A to close brings back that groovy, drippy '78 sound. More of Weir on the slide. Then there's a nice Werewolves encore -- Jer's turn with the slide -- to conclude the two-night Chicago run. (This is the 7th of 13 Werewolves. It was played 9x in '78, 1x in '79, then 3x, respectively, on Halloween '85, '90, and '91.)This two-night run marks a good return to the Uptown, just not as good as the winter run. Keith's final trip comes fall for three more. No third night -- if the rumors are to be believed -- as Billy returned to the west coast following some sort of kurfuffle with Keith. Or perhaps, absent the drama, this fellow seems to think (recall?) the show being canceled "on account of Billy coming down with the mumps." Read more: http://www.deadlistening.com/2008/02/1978-may-16-17-uptown-theater-chicago.html. Who knows?PS: DeadBase50 lists 5/18 - the third night - as a cancelled show (xii): "The reason given at the time was that Billy was exhausted. This started rumors that he was leaving the band." Hmm. Exhaustion, the mumps, AND a kurfuffle?!H/T:
Many people point to Bob Weir and his sit-in (and many others) with Phish as “passing the baton” in the jam band world. I believe to some degree, he and Phil have passed the baton to Phish, but also to so many others.Bobby has said in interviews that the music of the Grateful Dead is timeless and will be played for generations to come. In his paternal instinct to teach and groom the next bearers of the Dead, Bob (and Phil) have also made an extraordinary effort to recruit and nurture young talent.Bobby made his way across the bay a couple of nights ago to fulfill that paternal instinct and to make some great music with Joe Russo’s Almost Dead. Reprising their acoustic set’s that they did at the Brooklyn Bowl, JRAD came out for a mini 5 song set in between their two electric sets. After “It Must Have Been the Roses,” the band welcomed their hero Bob Weir for the rest of the set.Bob took the helm and shined on old Bobby standards like “Cassidy” and “Black Throated Wind” and for the pair of Dylan covers, “When I Paint My Masterpiece” and “A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall.”Thanks to Ted Silverman for the excellent front row footage of the historic sit-in! Check out his channel for more tunes from the electric sets.Security forces stand guard at the entrance of the United Nations headquarters in Geneva, Switzerland, Dec. 10. The city was placed on high alert this week after a CIA tip warning of a possible planned attack. | Getty 2 Syrians arrested in Switzerland with traces of explosives
Swiss authorities arrested two Syrians in Geneva on Friday who had traces of explosives in their vehicle, according to Swiss media.
The Tribune, Geneva’s daily newspaper, didn’t provide additional details on the men who were apprehended and said it was unclear whether it was connected to the heightened security alert authorities had called for.
Story Continued Below
Geneva was placed on high alert this week after a CIA tip warning of a possible planned attack on the city. U.S. officials had urged Americans who were in Switzerland to be vigilant.
According to NBC News, Switzerland's public prosecutor said authorities were looking for suspects linked to al Qaeda and the Islamic State.
“In light of the international and national investigation that followed the attacks in Paris, the Police Department in Geneva is actively searching for several individuals under the guidance of the Federal Intelligence Services,” the city’s security department said Thursday in a statement.
Just last month, the Islamic State claimed responsibility for terror attacks in Paris that killed more than 130 people. The known pepetrators of those killings, however, were all citizens of European countries.HOST FOR US
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Veterinarians and rangers are relocating rhinos in the country's Kruger National Park
Rhinos are targeted for their horns, which are wrongly believed to have medicinal value
Insatiable demand in Asia means rhino horn is worth more per ounce than gold, platinum
Flying above Kruger National Park, veterinarian Peter Buss steps out onto the helicopter's skid and aims his rifle; below him a white rhino lumbers across the South African bush. As the helicopter swoops in low, herding the animal closer to the road, Buss looks through the scope and fires a single shot.
A flash of pink on the rump is all it takes to bring the two-ton animal staggering to the ground where fellow veterinarians are ready and waiting, armed with a blindfold.
The Wildlife Veterinary Team works quickly: an oxygen tube is inserted into the subdued rhino's nostril. Blood, hair and skin samples are taken for DNA.
Then, after another injection to partially reverse the effects of the tranquilizer, the rhino is pulled to its feet and led into a trailer for the journey to safer ground -- away from this poaching hotspot along the Mozambique border, to a recently established "intensive protection zone" deeper into the park.
The team's members are no ordinary veterinarians, but daily captures like this one are quickly becoming the norm for a team tasked with the care of Kruger's most threatened species. They've already conducted more than 30 relocations since last month, and will conduct hundreds more.
Photos: Relocating Kruger National Park's rhinos Photos: Relocating Kruger National Park's rhinos Relocating Kruger National Park's rhinos – A forensics team searches the area around the body of a poached rhino looking for clues. The rhino was shot along Kruger National Park's border with Mozambique. The investigators have had such a backlog of rhino poaching cases that it has taken them 10 days to get to this one. Hide Caption 1 of 7 Photos: Relocating Kruger National Park's rhinos Relocating Kruger National Park's rhinos – Environmental Crime Investigation Inspector Frikkie Rossouw uses a metal detector to search for the bullet used by poachers. He and his team later discovered that the dead rhino was a pregnant female. The fetus, like the rest of her, long picked away by scavengers. Hide Caption 2 of 7 Photos: Relocating Kruger National Park's rhinos Relocating Kruger National Park's rhinos – The rhino is slaughtered for a horn that for millennia has been its first line of defense. The poaching is fueled by an insatiable demand in Asia, where the horn is believed to have medicinal value -- though there is no scientific evidence for this -- and is prized as a sign of wealth. It is made of keratin, the same protein found in human fingernails. Hide Caption 3 of 7 Photos: Relocating Kruger National Park's rhinos Relocating Kruger National Park's rhinos – South African vets are experts in the field of relocation and techniques like oxygen to assist breathing are now standard practice during all procedures. "This is exactly what we've been doing for the last 30 years," said Markus Hofmeyr, head of veterinary services at Kruger National Park. Hide Caption 4 of 7 Photos: Relocating Kruger National Park's rhinos Relocating Kruger National Park's rhinos – Vets work quickly to gather blood samples. Relocations are carried out early in the morning, before the sun gets too hot, to ensure the animal's safety. During the relocation, the horn is microchipped and crucially for South Africa's anti-poaching endeavors, DNA samples are taken. Hide Caption 5 of 7 Photos: Relocating Kruger National Park's rhinos Relocating Kruger National Park's rhinos – Kruger National Park's Wildlife Veterinary Team slowly brings a captured rhino to its feet. This rhino is headed from a poaching hotspot along the Mozambique border to a newly-established "intensive protection zone" deeper inside the park. Hide Caption 6 of 7 Photos: Relocating Kruger National Park's rhinos Relocating Kruger National Park's rhinos – Relocations like this one are a key part of a protection plan which has taken on even greater urgency since the country's environmental minister announced a record 1,020 of South Africa's rhinos have been poached in 2014. Hide Caption 7 of 7
Photos: Rhino poaching: By the numbers Photos: Rhino poaching: By the numbers Hide Caption 1 of 5 Photos: Rhino poaching: By the numbers Hide Caption 2 of 5 Photos: Rhino poaching: By the numbers Hide Caption 3 of 5 Photos: Rhino poaching: By the numbers Hide Caption 4 of 5 Photos: Rhino poaching: By the numbers Hide Caption 5 of 5
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They are a key part of a protection plan which has taken on even greater urgency since the country's environmental minister announced that a record 1,020 of South Africa's rhinos have been poached this year.
The illegal trade in rhino horn is fueled by an insatiable demand in Asia, where it is prized as a sign of wealth and believed to have medicinal value -- though there's no scientific evidence to support claims that it has healing properties.
Rhino horn is made of keratin, the same protein found in human fingernails, but it can still fetch as much as $5,550 an ounce on the black market -- that's more than the price of gold, more than the price of platinum -- and roughly equivalent to the price of cocaine.
Kruger National Park, which is home to roughly 10,000 rhinos -- a quarter of the world's population -- shares a 350-kilometer border with impoverished Mozambique, making it a massive target for poachers.
"We were rangers, now we're at war," the park's head of anti-poaching, Major General Johan Jooste, told CNN.
But while new equipment and new technology has helped lead to a record number of poaching arrests this year |
you will literally fly through caves with the Jet Engine and grab faraway treasure with the new Hookshot. Expect even more awesome gear as the game progresses.
4. A Big, Sprawling World To Explore
SteamWorld Dig 2 is huge and full of treasure, traps and dangers. While the original was short and sweet, SWD2 will be a much longer experience. Expect at least 10 hours of gameplay time, and even more if you plan to explore every corner of the world and find every dirty little secret…
5. A New Musical Backdrop
El Huervo of Hotline Miami fame is composing the game’s soundtrack. It’s got a new vibe compared to previous SteamWorld soundtracks and we think you’re gonna dig it!
Excited yet? We sure are and can’t wait to let you play. If you have any questions about the game, please ask away in the comments.
What features would you like to see in SteamWorld Dig 2?Sokolovsky posted footage of him catching Pokémon in the Yekaterinburg's Church of All Saints back in August 2016. The video was posted in response to the government imposing tougher penalties on people judged to have purposely insulted the feelings of believers in places of religious worship.
"Who can ever be offended by you walking around a church with your smartphone?" he asked at the start of his video. "Why the f*ck would they lock you up for that?" A few weeks after it went live on YouTube, Sokolovsky was awoken by police who had accessed his apartment using keys from his landlord and arrested. He was then placed under house arrest until his court appearance.
Prosecutors lobbied for at least a three-year sentence for Sokolovsky under the new religious laws, but it could stretch to five. It is thought to be the same Article 282 of the Russian Criminal Code that helped prosecute Russian punk band Pussy Riot.
Human rights organization Amnesty International has lobbied for Sokolovsky's release, arguing that the punishment and the law is a restriction on free speech. In September 2016 alone, over 14,000 people had contacted the Russian authorities demanding he be set free.Many teachers have such a wide range of student ability in their classrooms that they often grapple with a five to six-year difference between their most advanced and least advanced students particularly in maths, a new report reveals.<!--[if!supportFootnotes]--><!--[endif]-->
The report by public policy think-tank the Grattan Institute says extensive research shows that achievement levels in a single year can be so vastly spread that in the case of maths, many students have lagged behind their peers for several years by the time they reach secondary school.
Most teachers have a wide range of student ability in their classrooms. Credit:Photo: Quentin Jones
"Australian research shows that achievement can be spread over five to eight year levels within a single class: a year 7 class may have students working at a year 1 level, while others have mastered concepts from year 8," the report says.
"The typical year 8 maths teacher must target his teaching in a way that meets the needs of students at eight different levels of conceptual mathematical understanding, while still addressing curriculum requirements. This is no easy task."One in four samples of chicken bought from major supermarket chains contained antibiotic-resistant E coli in a study by the University of Cambridge.
The bacterium was discovered in packs of meat sold at Tesco, Sainsbury’s, Asda, Aldi, Waitrose, the Co-op and Morrisons. Scientists tested products such as whole roasting chickens, diced breast meat and packets of legs, thighs and drumsticks, detecting ESBL E coli – resistant to many types of antibiotics – on 22 of 92 samples.
The study, commissioned by the campaign group Save Our Antibiotics, also found 51% of E coli from pork and poultry samples were resistant to the antibiotic trimethoprim, which is used to treat more than half of lower urinary tract infections
Dr Mark Holmes, from the University of Cambridge, studied 189 chicken and pork samples. He told the Daily Mail: “The levels of resistant E coli that we have found are worrying. Every time someone falls ill, instead of just getting a food poisoning bug they might also be getting a bug that is antibiotic resistant.”
People developing urinary tract infections may discover that the bug they have is resistant to a first-choice antibiotic, and by the time a suitable one is found the bug could be “out of control”, potentially leading to death.
Facebook Twitter Pinterest A quarter of chicken samples contained ESBL E coli. Photograph: Milena Boniek/Getty Images/PhotoAlto
“I am concerned that insufficient resources are being put into the surveillance of antibiotic resistance in farm animals and retail meat,” Holmes said. “These results highlight the need for improvements in antibiotic stewardship in veterinary medicine.”
Cóilín Nunan, a scientific adviser to Save Our Antibiotics, said the findings should be a wake-up call for supermarkets and the government.
“They show that many consumers are being exposed to high levels of antibiotic resistance daily at meal time,” Nunan said. “Scientific evidence is accumulating that the overuse of antibiotics on farms is an important contributor to antibiotic resistance in E coli infections.
Mixed salad leaves linked to E coli outbreak that has killed two in UK Read more
“E coli is now killing more than twice as many people as MRSA and Clostridium difficile combined, so the price of any further inaction will be measured in human lives.’
Symptoms of E coli infection normally include a fever, leading to sickness and diarrhoea. Precautions that can be taken to reduce the risk of infection include washing hands after contact with possible sources such as raw food.
In May, the then chancellor, George Osborne, said antimicrobial resistance would present a greater danger to humankind than cancer by the middle of the century unless world leaders agreed to tackle the threat.
Sally Davies, the chief medical officer for England, has warned of an “apocalyptic scenario” in the next two decades, in which people could die of routine infections during simple operations “because we have run out of antibiotics”.
Earlier this year, a patient in the US was infected with E coli that was resistant to the “last resort” antibiotic colistin, the first time such resistance had been recorded.Susanne Posel, Contributor
Activist Post
How powerful is a social meme? The control over the belief of society is the control over the members of that society. The means by which control is exerted means less than the strength of the control.
By tapping into our base needs, humanity is more easily forced into this “hamster on a wheel” existence. We are completely out of sync with our environment. We are too busy keeping up with the conditions set forth before us to question why we need any of this at all.
A social meme is the dictator that runs society alone for a social meme transfers the burden of oversight to the one that is controlled. This amazing film explains just how insidious and overwhelmingly power our social memes are. And the methodology by which we “freely choose” to pursue the life that is dictated to us from birth.
RELATED ACTIVIST POST ARTICLE:
10 Modern Methods of Mind Control
The Singularity Movement, Immortality, and Removing the Ghost in the Machine
Human Colony Collapse Disorder: The Top 10 Countdown To Our Own Extinction
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Susanne Posel is the Chief Editor of Occupy Corporatism. Our alternative news site is dedicated to reporting the news as it actually happens; not as it is spun by the corporately funded mainstream media. You can find us on our Facebook page.Serving breakfast all-day has already helped McDonald’s boost slumping sales in 2016.
Now breakfast fans will have yet another a.m. delicacy they can enjoy around the clock.
On Wednesday, the chain announced that it will be adding McGriddles—a breakfast sandwich made with maple-flavored cakes—to its all-day menu in September.
Most restaurants already serve either McMuffins or biscuit sandwiches all day—but it fall all locations will serve all three of the chain’s most popular breakfast items.
McDonald’s spokeswoman Melissa Layton told USA Today that McGriddles are now the most requested menu item not offered nationally.
The Golden Arches chain introduced the world to McGriddles in 2003. In the 12 months after they first hit the market, sales of the breakfast sandwich accounted for about 40 percent of McDonald's same-store sales growth nationwide.Anderson Cooper took on Arizona state senator Al Melvin Monday night over the state’s proposed legislation to allow businesses to exercise their religious freedom to discriminate against LGBT citizens. Melvin insisted, “It’s nothing more and nothing less than protecting religious freedom in our state.” Cooper noted how Arizona doesn’t expressly prohibit discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation, and grilled Melvin on why, then, they would need to reaffirm a right that isn’t under threat in the state in the first place.
Cooper asked, “Can you give me a specific example of someone in Arizona who’s been forced to do something against their religious belief or successfully sued because of their faith?”
Melvin said he could not, arguing the bill is “preemptive.” Cooper asked him if, hypothetically, a Catholic loan officer could refuse to give a loan to a divorced woman. Melvin told Cooper he was being “far-fetched,” insisting, “I don’t know of anybody in Arizona who would discriminate against a fellow human being.”
When Cooper pointed out that Arizona businesses (including the state Chamber of Commerce) oppose the bill, Melvin said it’s “because there has become a media frenzy on this.” Cooper incredulously asked, “You’re seriously blaming the media on this?! Oh, come on.”
Cooper then pressed Melvin on whether he believes firing someone for being gay or lesbian is discrimination. Melvin did not give a direct answer, telling Cooper, “I know you’re trying to set me up, and I’m not going to stand for it, sir.”
Watch the video below, via CNN:
[photo via screengrab]
— —
Follow Josh Feldman on Twitter: @feldmaniac
Have a tip we should know? tips@mediaite.comSuper Robot Wars UX announced for 3DS
3DS game to support new robot series.
Namco Bandai and B.B. Studio have revealed Super Robot Wars UX, produced by Ayumi Uta, for 3DS in the latest issue of Weekly Famitsu.
Due on March 14, 2013 for 7,140 yen in Japan, the game will include new series featured for the first time in a Super Robot Wars game. They include:
Kishin Houkou Demonbane
Fafner in the Azure: Heaven and Earth
The Wings of Reanne
Cyber Troopers Virtual-On series (Fei-Yen HD)
Mobile Suit Gundam 00: Awakening of the Trailblazer
SD Gundam Sangokushi: Brave Battle Warriors
Mazinkaiser SKL
Heroman
In addition, the following seven other titles will also appear:
Macross F: Sayonara no Tsubasa
Aura Battler Dunbine
Ninja Senshi Tobikage
Mobile Suit Gundam Seed Destiny
Linebarrels of Iron
Juso Kiko Dancouga Nova
Fafner in the Azure
Other details on the game include: battle scenes are voiced and have greater appeal; the resolution is higher; and the animation cut-ins are smoother than before.
A 3DS special bundle is also being planned. Download content, such as as campaign maps and a Tsume Suparobo with chess problem-like rules, will be offered as special favors to first-run consumers.
Thanks, Game Nyarth.When it comes to propping up the stock market in the US, the Federal Reserve does so with a certain degree of nuance, keeping at least one layer of disintermediation between itself and the market, which usually involves "advising" Citadel to intervene when it comes to acute moments of market stress, granting the HFT-heavy hedge fund a green light to stop and reverse and violent selloffs, or more traditionally, allowing companies to repurchase their own stock thanks to (until recently) record low interest rates.
This is nothing new: as Goldman has repeatedly pointed out, in 2016 corporations have been the largest source of equity demand, purchasing $450 billion of US equity through buybacks and cash M&A (net of share issuance). Outside of the Great Recession, corporates have been the primary source of US equity demand (see Exhibit 1).
Furthermore, Goldman recently predicted that as a result of Trump's proposed repatriation tax holiday, buybacks in 2017 will surge even more, to wit:
Buybacks ($780 billion, +30%) will rise sharply in 2017. Our economists expect tax reform legislation will pass during 2H 2017. President-elect Trump and House Republicans have expressed support for a one-time tax on previously untaxed foreign profits as part of their tax reform proposals. We forecast that S&P 500 firms will repatriate $200 billion of their total $1 trillion of cash held overseas in 2017 and spend $150 billion of the repatriated funds on share repurchases. Managements generally remain committed to buybacks, which will benefit from 2% US GDP growth and ex-Energy earnings growth of 6%.
None of that should be news to regular readers, however it is worth repeating that the primary source of demand for US equities are the stock-issuing corporations themselves, who - in a page right out of Baron Munchausen - continue to pull themselves up by their bootstraps with the blessings of the Federal Reserve's cheap money. That may soon be changing, however, now that rates have spiked higher and announced buyback have tumbled 28% Y/Y according to FactSet.
Meanwhile, in Japan, the BOJ had taken a less "stealthy" approach, and as has been the case for years, the Japanese central bank under Kuroda has had far fewer qualms about intervening directly in the equity markets by purchasing either ETFs, REITs or single name securities.
Did we say "less stealthy?" We meant the central bank is now intervening directly in the stock market with all the finesse of a stock bull in a china store (just not Chinese china, it's a patriotic thing), and according to a report by the Nikkei, the Bank of Japan is set to become the biggest buyer of ETFs in 2016 for the second straight year, in the process masking a srecent surge in foreign investor selling.
According to data through Thursday, the value of the BOJ's ETF purchases this year has topped 4.3 trillion yen ($36.5 billion), up 40% from 2015. Last year, the central bank bought more than 3 trillion yen worth of ETFs. The data was released by the BOJ and compiled by the Tokyo Stock Exchange. Should it continue at this rate, in a few years, the BOJ will have nationalized the entire market: as of this moment it own approximately 2.5% of the market cap of the entire Topix according to the FT chart below.
As the FT recently noted, "the central bank’s overwhelming dominance of ETFs, combined with the structural oddities of Japan’s most famous but esoteric equity benchmark, the price-weighted Nikkei 225 Average, has given the BoJ indirect but massive positions in many of the country’s biggest corporate names." Normally, this kind of activity would be associated with command-style, centrally-planned economies such as that of the USSR. Now, however, it is considered part of the "new normal."
As the BOJ bought, foreign investors sold... a lot; in fact more than a net 3.5 trillion yen worth of Japanese shares through Dec. 16. These sales were "offset" by the BOJ's intervention, traditionally through trust banks, including those commissioned by the Government Pension Investment Fund, to buy a net 3.5 or so trillion yen worth of shares.
What is scarier, however, is the BOJ's own direct intervention: the figure for trust banks was below that for the BOJ, which "will become the largest buyer of ETFs this year," said Masatoshi Kikuchi of Mizuho Securities.
This year, the central bank increased its buying after doubling its annual ETF goal to purchase 3 trillion yen worth of the instruments. The decision came in July as the bank stepped harder on its yen-printing pedal. The central bank's ultimate goal is to flood the economy with so much money that prices get moving predictably upward again; the BOJ is targeting a 2% inflation rate. Instead, one day it will create a currency crisis, as faith in the Yen collapses and unleash hyperinflation. We are not there just yet, though.
The value of the bank's ETF holdings, based on purchase prices, is 11 trillion yen. However, unrealized gains send the market value to 14 trillion yen, according to an estimate by Mitsubishi UFJ Kokusai Asset Management, Nikkei added.
And while foreigners have bought more than a net 2 trillion yen of Japanese shares since November, when Trump was elected president, the amount does not offset their selling in the first half of 2016. Furthermore, there is speculation that the Trump rally is on its last legs, and the next move will be lower. This has already been noted in the USDJPY which has fallen for 4 straight days.
The BOJ's ETF program has propped up share prices but distorted "the formation of stock prices," said Shingo Ide of NLI Research Institute. Alternatively, one could say that the BOJ's ETF program has made the very definition of "market" a joke. The ETF-buying program allows, and in fact mandates, that the central bank purchase a wide range of stocks regardless of the issuing companies' business results. This means that zombie companies which would otherwise be insolvent and bankrupt, are kept artificially alive thanks to central bank intervention, which in turn leads to deflation as in the race to the bottom, "zombie companies" around the globe are willing to undersell all their competitors in "hail Mary" hopes of survival, leading to lower interest rates and even more central bank intervention.Amazon.com Product Description (ISBN 0393068382, Hardcover)
A brilliantly researched and wickedly funny rebuttal of the pseudo-scientific claim that men are from Mars and women are from Venus.
It’s the twenty-first century, and although we tried to rear unisex children—boys who play with dolls and girls who like trucks—we failed. Even though the glass ceiling is cracked, most women stay comfortably beneath it. And everywhere we hear about vitally important “hardwired” differences between male and female brains. The neuroscience that we read about in magazines, newspaper articles, books, and sometimes even scientific journals increasingly tells a tale of two brains, and the result is more often than not a validation of the status quo. Women, it seems, are just too intuitive for math; men too focused for housework.Drawing on the latest research in neuroscience and psychology, Cordelia Fine debunks the myth of hardwired differences between men’s and women’s brains, unraveling the evidence behind such claims as men’s brains aren’t wired for empathy and women’s brains aren’t made to fix cars. She then goes one step further, offering a very different explanation of the dissimilarities between men’s and women’s behavior. Instead of a “male brain” and a “female brain,” Fine gives us a glimpse of plastic, mutable minds that are continuously influenced by cultural assumptions about gender.Passionately argued and unfailingly astute, Delusions of Gender provides us with a much-needed corrective to the belief that men’s and women’s brains are intrinsically different—a belief that, as Fine shows with insight and humor, all too often works to the detriment of ourselves and our society.The big business and open borders lobbies are praising an expansion of the H-2B foreign guest worker visa included in the 2017 budget.
The budget, promoted by House Speaker Paul Ryan, will allow Department of Homeland Security Secretary John Kelly to expand the number of foreign workers who come to the U.S. for blue-collar jobs by at least 20,000.
The H-2B visa brings foreign nationals to the U.S. for low-skilled nonagricultural jobs. The visa impacts working-class and poor Americans most, as jobs in the hotel industry, theme parks, retail, and restaurants can insource jobs to foreign workers under the program. More than half a million jobs in the U.S. have been filled by H-2B visa workers in the last five years.
Now, the key organization which lobbied members of Congress to pass the expansion of the H-2B visa is praising the move, according to POLITICOPro’s Ted Hesson, as their business allies and pro-immigration associates will profit from the continued insourcing of blue-collar work in the U.S.
The H-2B Workforce Coalition lobbied Congress to include a 2015-like expansion of the H-2B visa where returning foreign workers would be exempt from the annual cap of 66,000, quadrupling the number of foreign workers entering the U.S. and taking jobs from American workers.
Instead, the H-2B Workforce Coalition got an expansion in the form of leaving the decision up to Kelly, which they are regarding as a win for business and immigration interests.
As Breitbart Texas reported, claims of “labor shortages” in the U.S. workforce by H-2B advocates are unfounded, according to critics.
“Missing workers,” as the Economic Policy Institute (EPI) calls them, are discouraged American workers who are either unemployed or no longer looking for work because they see a weak job market, whether that be low wages, bad working conditions, or other reasons.
Currently, there are 1.37 million “missing workers” in the American labor force between the ages of 45 and 74-years-old. These workers are not included in the monthly unemployment rate, but if they were, the unemployment rate would be 5.3 percent, according to EPI.
Additionally, the H-2B visa keeps American workers’ wages stagnant, and in some cases, have actually decreased their wages. According to EPI analysis, for landscaping and grounds-keeping jobs given to H-2B foreign workers, wages decreased by 3.4 percent between 2004 and 2014. For jobs in the amusement and recreation industry, which also employs a multitude of H-2B foreign workers, wages between 2004 and 2014 fell by 1.3 percent.
John Binder is a reporter for Breitbart Texas. Follow him on Twitter at @JxhnBinder.Image: University of Montreal
Seeking to understand why sex offenders commit acts of violence is a strangely archaic undertaking. Researchers often present visual stimuli in the form of photos and audio tapes and measure the offender's responses with a ring around their dick that detects the amount of enlargement. As you might imagine, it's a hotly debated practice.
Penile plethysmography, or PPG, as the test is known, has been criticized for being easily beaten by offenders who merely have to look away from the stimuli. The stimulus itself is usually somewhat abstracted from reality and may not provide adequate arousal levels, or simply not the right kind of arousal.
Taking the procedure into virtual reality could change this, according to forensic psychiatrists at the University of Montreal who built a virtual reality chamber at the Philippe-Pinel Institute, a mental hospital for the criminally insane, to assess offenders as part of their treatment and study what sets them off.
"With our work, we have improved the validity of the stimuli. They are closer to reality than audio, they're also dynamic," Massil Benbouriche, one of the researchers, wrote me in an email. "And to control for the strategies used, we have an eye-tracking device. With that we are able to know when and where our patient is looking. So we can improve our understanding of his information processing (on which cues his decision or reaction is based) and improve the validity of the assessment."
The chamber is a cave-style virtual reality cube, wherein realistic renderings of various environments are projected in 3D on every wall, constituting an immersive space. As various avatars designed to look anywhere from 6 to 25 years old amble across the environment, the offender then puts on a pair of 3D glasses to get the full effect.
By hooking the person inside the chamber up to myriad sensors—eye-tracking, skin conductance, heart rate monitors, and even electroencephalographic brainwave monitoring—the University of Montreal researchers hope to get a better picture of what offenders are thinking and feeling when they decide to assault someone. Oh, and the dick ring is there, too.
According to Benbouriche, a virtual reality approach to investigating the psychology of sex offenders could be beneficial when it comes to understanding how offenders self-regulate in complex and triggering locales. Testing someone's response to stimulus in a controlled lab environment isn't the most realistic approach, after all.
"It's one thing to believe to be able to manage your anger but it's another to do so when you are in a bar, drunk, with a guy who is pushing your buttons, etc.," Benbouriche wrote. "The aim of our work will be to be able to assess not only the risk factor but how it unfolds in a given context. We are not there yet; but we are closer today than yesterday."
For all of the approach's sensational tassels—sex offenders! dick rings!—it's really not so different from how virtual reality is being used in other disciplines. Virtual reality therapies for phobias and drug addictions are making use of the technology's realistic environments to present patients with stimuli accurate enough to trigger them. Hell, even heroin addiction is being tackled by researchers using virtual reality.
The technology has plenty of uses outside of testing sexual offenders. "Sexual offending is just one area of forensic psychiatry," Benbouriche wrote. "We are currently working on the use of virtual reality to deal with auditory hallucinations in schizophrenia [...] as well as a brain-computer interface to deal with empathetic deficits."
Benbouriche noted that the eventual goal is to make virtual reality accessible enough for the average researcher to make use of in their routine investigations. Even though a full on virtual reality cave might be out of reach for most researchers, an Oculus Rift headset costs just a couple hundred dollars, and cheaper alternatives are already popping up. To this end, the University of Montreal researchers will be developing virtual reality apps to study the psychology of violence.Image copyright Reuters Image caption Both of the jet fighter's pilots were killed in the crash
A ninth French national has died after a crash involving a Greek F-16 fighter jet at a Spanish military base, officials say.
The airman suffered serious burns in the crash and died on Tuesday at a Madrid hospital, Spain's defence ministry announced.
It brings the death toll from Monday's accident to 11, including the pilots.
Spanish investigators are trying to find out what caused the crash at Los Llanos air base in Albacete.
Defence ministry officials have said that the F-16 "lost power" after take-off from the base, which lies 260km (160 miles) south-east of Madrid.
In Greece, the defence ministry announced a three-day period of mourning beginning on Tuesday to mark the deaths of the Greek pilots.
'Incorrect manoeuvre'
The plane came down about 1,000ft (305m) from the runway.
Local media reports said one of the two Greek pilots had performed an incorrect manoeuvre, though this has not been confirmed.
Among the injured were 11 Italians and nine French nationals, according to the Associated Press news agency.
Spanish officials said the jet had been participating in a Nato training exercise called the Tactical Leadership Programme (TLP).
The TLP is not part of the Nato structure but is an organisation formed under an agreement between 10 Nato nations.
Its aim is to increase the effectiveness of allied air forces through the development of leadership skills.The Egyptian government is planning to introduce new healthcare legislation, Deputy Finance Minister Mohamed Moeit told Al Borsa yesterday, and income from taxes on cigarettes is expected to cover nearly 30% of the cost.
Supposedly, the new Universal Health Insurance Act would require the government to upgrade and modernize over 500 hospitals, and the Finance Ministry will allocate some 5bn EGP to the Health Insurance Authority. The funding will come partly from taxes on alcohol, cigarettes, and nightclubs, Enterprise wrote this morning, in addition to 1% taken from workers’ salaries, and 3% of employee salaries paid by employers.
1.6bn EGP is expected to come solely from taxes on cigarettes. The new law will be presented to the House of Representatives in October, when it comes back into session.
WE SAID THIS: Details are still a bit fuzzy, but we’re curious…Suffer the little children.
On March 6, 2013, Arkansas State Representative Justin Harris posted pictures of two young girls, 3 and 6, to his social-media accounts. They were now his daughters, he explained — siblings that he and his wife Marsha had adopted after the usual extensive vetting process and a six-month in-home trial period.
But today, when you view the short biographical video that’s posted on Harris’ page at the Arkansas House of Representatives website, and you fast-forward to the 1:51 mark where he talks about his family, those girls, unlike his three biological sons, are neither mentioned nor shown. The girls’ photos have been scrubbed from Harris’ social-media profiles, and the posts about them removed.
What happened to the siblings?
That’s the subject of an investigative piece in the Arkansas Times. It’s a long and convoluted story, and some pivotal facts remain unknown, but the gist of it is this:
Harris (below, right) and his wife “rehomed” the girls — gave them away and abandoned them — to a man named Eric Cameron Francis (at left) and his wife Stacey. Francis, a former youth pastor, had worked as head teacher at Growing God’s Kingdom Preschool, which happens to be owned by Harris. Those godly credentials didn’t prevent Francis from forcing himself on the oldest girl. He is now serving a 40-year prison term for her rape.
The children, who came from a broken biological home where at least one of them had already been abused, have reportedly been placed in yet another foster home.
Between one and five percent of adoptions go wrong — so wrong that the children involved, almost all of whom have suffered early-life trauma, have to be brought back into the Department of Human Services system that will attempt to find them a new family. In rare cases, though, the adoptive parents simply rehome the children by giving them to a willing taker. While that’s not quite above-board, most states, Arkansas included, don’t have specific laws forbidding it.
According to the Arkansas Times,
Sometimes the families on the receiving end of such transactions turn out to be good parents seeking an easy alternative to the expense and bureaucracy of legal adoption; sometimes they turn out to be abusive or predatory. [In a 2013 investigative report,] Reuters uncovered harrowing stories of kids passed between homes like unwanted puppies, of pedophiles effectively shopping for children online, of prospective parents whose backgrounds bristled with red flags but were never remotely vetted by any authority. In most states, with a simple power of attorney document, a child’s guardian can delegate temporary parental responsibility to another adult.
We do not know why Justin and Marsha Harris rehomed their adoptive daughters; no one is talking. The kindest explanation is that the oldest was mentally unstable and possibly a danger to herself and others ( it happens ; some children, even young ones, become firebugs, or exhibit suicidal or homicidal tendencies). The Harrises may have dealt with such a situation by offloading the children on the first suitable-seeming couple that agreed to take them.
The Arkansas Times article asks whether Justin and Marsha Harris received a state subsidy for caring for the children, as is customary in some cases; and whether they gave up that periodic payment after the girls were no longer under their wing. Because everybody is tightlipped about the case, in part for privacy reasons relating to the children, those questions can’t presently be answered.
We do know of one other instance in which Justin Harris took money from the state that he shouldn’t have received:
In late 2011, he tangled with the agency [the Department of Human Services] over overtly Christian practices at Growing God’s Kingdom, which receives public funding under the Arkansas Better Chance program. At the request of an organization promoting separation of church and state, a DHS inspector investigated whether the preschool was using taxpayer money to teach a Christian curriculum; she found regularly scheduled Bible study in most classrooms, scripture posted on the walls and children singing “Jesus Loves Me.”
When a local journalist asked Rep. Harris to explain what happened with his adopted daughters, he refused, saying that the paper was out to “smear” him. “It’s evil,” he added.
When asked whether he rehomed his adoptive children with another family, he replied, “I’m not confirming that.” When asked about the statements made in the State Police report in the Francis case, Harris said he hadn’t read the file because of the disturbing descriptions of sexual abuse that they contain. Harris then quoted Isaiah 54:17: “No weapon forged against you will prevail, and you will refute every tongue that accuses you.” “You don’t know what we’ve been through this past year. You have no idea what my family has been through,” he said emphatically. “I don’t care what the people of Arkansas think about me. I don’t care if I lose my position. I care what my wife thinks about me, and I care what my three sons think about me.”
It’s anybody’s guess what the two abandoned girls think of him.
As the adoptive father of two daughters — three, by this time next month! — I find this an especially compelling and heartbreaking story. I’ll keep an eye on it, and revisit it here on Friendly Atheist if salient new facts emerge.For the first time since crack cocaine sparked a war on drugs 20 years ago, the number of black Americans in state prisons for drug offenses has fallen sharply, while the number of white prisoners convicted for drug crimes has increased, according to a report released yesterday.
The D.C.-based Sentencing Project reported that the number of black inmates in state prisons for drug offenses had fallen from 145,000 in 1999 to 113,500 in 2005, a 22 percent decline. In that period, the number of white drug offenders rose steadily, from about 50,000 to more than 72,000, a 43 percent increase. The number of Latino drug offenders was virtually unchanged at about 51,000.
The findings represent a significant shift in the racial makeup of those incarcerated for drug crimes and could signal a gradual change in the demographics of the nation's prison population of 2 million, which has been disproportionately black for decades. Drug offenders make up about a quarter of the prison population.
The Sentencing Project report and other experts said the numbers could reflect several factors, including an increased reliance by prosecutors and judges on prison alternatives such as drug courts and a shift in police focus to methamphetamines, which are used and distributed mostly by white Americans. In addition, the report said, crack use and arrests have declined steadily since the 1990s.
The report relied heavily on data compiled by the federal Bureau of Justice Statistics and covered six years, ending in 2005, the last year the bureau broke down the state prison population by race and drug offense.
Maryland and Virginia authorities said the racial breakdown of prisoners incarcerated in their states for drug offenses was not available. But the racial makeup of their overall prison populations had not changed significantly over that period, they said.
African American drug offenders, who have been convicted most often for dealing and possessing crack cocaine, still made up a disproportionate share of drug offenders in state prisons, 45 percent in 2005. That was down from nearly 58 percent in 1999. Black Americans make up about 12 percent of the U.S. population.
The number of white drug offenders in state prisons rose from 20 percent to 29 percent, and Latino prisoners made up 20 percent of such inmates.
"I have no doubt that crystal meth explains some of the white increase, but I'm not ready to say it's the reason for all of the white increase," said Marc Mauer, executive director of the Sentencing Project, which opposes stiff penalties for nonviolent drug crimes. "It's also hard to imagine that [drug courts] are not having some effect. Most drug courts are in urban areas where African Americans live."
Twenty percent of white inmates used methamphetamines in the month before they were arrested, compared with 1 percent of black inmates, according to interviews conducted in the nation's 14,500 state prisons and 3,700 federal prisons.
Drug courts offer nonviolent offenders the option of undergoing rigorous substance-abuse treatment and criminal rehabilitation or going to jail. There are more than 2,000 such courts in operation, mostly in cities with large black communities ravaged by violence associated with crack cocaine. White offenders also are increasingly winding up in drug courts for abusing methamphetamines.
Mauer also hypothesized that drug dealers might have shifted from open-air crack cocaine markets to dealing indoors, making them harder for police to catch. And he speculated that because so many African American men have been incarcerated, there are fewer on the street to be arrested.The State Department has sought to delay the court-ordered release of emails between four of Hillary Clinton's top aides and officials at the Clinton Foundation and a closely associated public relations firm.
The motion, filed in federal court by the Justice Department late Wednesday, seeks to put off the release of the emails by 27 months. It was first reported on by The Daily Caller.
In the filing, the State Department says it originally estimated that approximately 6,000 emails and other documents were exchanged between the aides — identified as former Deputy Assistant Secretary of State Michael Fuchs, former Ambassador-At-Large Melanne Verveer, Chief of Staff Cheryl Mills, and Deputy Chief of Staff Huma Abedin — and the Clinton Foundation and Teneo Holdings, a communications shop that former President Bill Clinton helped launch.
However, the State Department said that due to errors in the initial document search, the number of "potentially responsive documents" was in fact more than 34,000. The department estimated that it had more than 13,000 pages still left to review.
U.S. District Judge Rudolph Contreras had previously ordered the State Department to release the requested documents by July 21.
If the State Department request is granted, the emails would not be released until October 2018, nearly halfway through the first term of a potential Hillary Clinton presidency. The documents are being sought by the conservative nonprofit group Citizens United.
"The American people have a right to see these emails before the election," Citizens United President David Bossie told The Daily Caller, adding that the delay was "totally unacceptable |
especially in times of economic constraints and given the authoritarian stalemates on the ground—i.e., in Azerbaijan. Nonetheless, in the long-run, not turning a blind-eye on nondemocratic developments and encouraging Azerbaijani civil society to develop and raise its voice might be necessary to ensure that Azerbaijan will be a lasting ally of Europe and the U.S. In fact, not despite, but because of geopolitics, achieving democratic consolidation should be a real possibility for Azerbaijanis who seek it. It should be a goal they know is supported by not only their civil society counterparts in Europe and the U.S. but also by European and U.S. governments. The day may come when a democratic system emerges in Azerbaijan. If and when this happens, Europeans and Americans may not want to reproduce the hypocrisies of the past: supporting a dictator one day and praising his demise the next.The new brewery plans to open at 6031 Pillsbury Ave. S. in late spring or early summer, and will specialize in lesser known rustic Belgian ales.
"About 70 percent of our beer will fall into the sour, wild, and farmhouse categories,” says Mat Waddell, founder and head brewer. The remaining beers will pull from familiar styles like pales ales, stouts, and potentially cider and mead.
Wild Mind is stressing the rustic aspect of its beers, which will use Minnesota cultured wild yeasts. The taproom will be green, welcoming, and family-friendly in the Windom neighborhood. Inside it will have a community feel, with a large projection TV for movie nights and screening the Olympics this summer; outside, the courtyard will have yard games and a screen for summer movies.
Waddell plans to pull from the neighborhood’s lush scenery, integrating elements from nearby parks, trails, and lakes to capture Windom's personality. Inside the brewery, the wood cellar will be on full display, where the beers will be aged in large oak barrels called foudres.
A mechanical engineer by trade, Waddell notes that his family has been making beer since his great-grandparents’ generation. He’s volunteered at Capital Brewing in Madison, Wisconsin, and will be interning with Badger Hill this spring. Rustic ales have long appealed to him, with their varied profiles and ingredients, and he sees an opening in the current beer scene.
A beer garden with outdoor movie nights will soon fill this open courtyard.
“I started out three years ago wanting to open an oak barrel-aging brewery because I couldn’t find these styles of beer in Minnesota,” he says. “Nobody was really focusing on that.”
With the build-out underway, south Minneapolis will have its new brewery soon enough. “I’m really excited to showcase these, especially in our foudres," says Waddell. "It is a style that I truly enjoy and am passionate about brewing.”The earliest dinosaurs may have roared with a British accent, according to a new study.
And that’s the least of the fallout from a newly proposed dinosaur family tree that upends and bulldozes the one that stood for the past 130 years. If lead author Matthew Baron and his colleagues are correct, dinosaurs may have emerged millions of years earlier than previously thought, and A-listers such as Tyrannosaurus rex and Velociraptor may have been misclassified. Oh, and the first dinosaurs could have come from England.
While genetic data gains ground as a method of determining how closely living species are related, most dinosaur DNA decayed millions of years ago, so scientists have to rely on the classic technique of comparing physical features, such as the shapes of bones.
One such pivotal divide hinges on hip shape, which has long split dinosaurs into two groups: those with hips like birds and those with hips like lizards. The bird-hipped Ornithischia group was made up of mostly plant eaters such as Stegosaurus and Triceratops, while the reptile-hipped Saurischia group welcomed those of all diets, including the vegetarian Brontosaurus and the carnivorous T. rex.
Mr. Baron’s new analysis, which draws on a much wider variety of samples than what was available a century ago, concluded that the meat eaters were out of place. It turns out that Ornithischia has always been a bit of a wild card, with hips that have been described as “enigmatically organized.” In the light of a number of new species discovered in just the past 30 years, Baron suggests paleontologists should actually consider those meat eaters to be members of the Ornithischia family.
This new place would resolve some longstanding mysteries, such as why many meat eaters show birdlike features, such as feathers, despite also having lizard-looking hips.
"It seems that the dinosaur family tree is being shaken quite firmly. It will be interesting to see what drops from its branches in years to come," Cambridge University’s David Norman, who supervised the study, told the BBC.
And fruit is falling already. The reorganization places two fossils in particular near the base of the new tree. These previously peripheral species, originally unearthed in Scotland and England, now find themselves in a role of central importance, suggesting that early dinosaurs first evolved 245 million years ago in what is now the United Kingdom, rather than 230 million years ago in today’s East Africa.
"A British scientist, Sir Richard Owen, gave the word dinosaur to the world. Now we may be looking at the possibility that the very earliest dinosaurs were roaming an area that has become Britain and the group itself could have originated on these shores," explained Baron.
But Great Britain and Ireland were unrecognizable back then. Part of the supercontinent Laurasia, they were crammed together with what is now North America and Eurasia into one giant landmass after the breakup of Pangea. This finding contradicts the established model, which proposes that dinosaurs emerged on the southerly supercontinent of Gondwana, which would go on to become South America, Africa, Australia, and New Zealand.
The new tree has plenty of critics as well. Hans Sues of the Smithsonian Museum in Washington, D.C., told the BBC that extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.
"I am skeptical as none of the other recent analyses obtained similar results – but I keep an open mind," he said.
Those involved with the study agree that such a huge claim needs independent verification.
"All the major textbooks covering the topic of the evolution of the vertebrates will now need to be re-written if this suggestion survives academic scrutiny and becomes accepted more widely," Dr. Norman said.
The team points out that the early dinosaur fossil record is quite thin, but hopes future discoveries will bear out their proposals.
The new classification did feature at least two prominent casualties. Under the updated tree, old favorites such as Brontosaurus and Diplodocus could no longer technically be called dinosaurs.
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Perhaps learning from the public outcry over Pluto’s loss of status as a planet, Baron and his team carefully redefined their usage of the term "dinosaur" to avoid angering dino-fans.
"I didn't want to make Dippy not a dinosaur," said Baron, referring to the beloved Diplodocus skeleton in the lobby of London’s Natural History Museum. "That would have created a lot of upset. They are a very well known group and everyone has recognised them to be dinosaurs. To be truthful, I didn't want to be chased out of every conference I went to for the rest of my career."Media playback is unsupported on your device Media caption Emma Simpson visited a branch of Poundland to find out what shoppers go there to buy
Budget retailer Poundland has said it wants to buy 99p Stores for £55m, subject to approval by competition authorities.
The two firms have signed a conditional deal for £47.5m in cash and £7.5m in shares.
The sale, should it go through, includes 99p Stores' network of 251 shops, which trade as 99p Stores and Family Bargains.
Discounters in the UK have been taking market share from supermarkets.
Poundland-branded
Over time, 99p Stores will be converted to Poundland shops, a spokeswoman for the firm said. The deal is subject to approval by the Competition and Markets Authority (CMA).
The company floated in March 2014 at 300p per share.
Poundland shares closed 15.4% higher on Friday at 413p, valuing the company at £970m.
Chief executive Jim McCarthy said: "Poundland will improve choice, value and service for 99p Stores' customers, bringing Poundland's proven know-how and range to 99p Stores."
Since 1990, Poundland has opened almost 600 shops in the UK, Ireland and Spain, and plans to open 16 new shops per year for the next two years in the UK and Ireland.
It trades as Poundland in the UK, and Dealz in Ireland and Spain.
Southern expansion
Independent retail analyst Nick Bubb said the deal would ease Poundland's effort to expand in the south of England.
"Having always said that it wasn't interested in buying out its aggressive but smaller rival 99p Stores... as it came south, Poundland has decided that it is better to deal with the nuisance by pursuing a path of 'consolidation' and buying the company," he said.
Nevertheless, because of the way the chains overlap, Mr Bubb said the CMA could take up to two months to decide whether the takeover should be permitted.
He said Poundland's proposed £7.5m share sale, to fund the "relatively modest" £55m acquisition, will be "up in the air for some time" due to the CMA scrutiny.
In a research note, US bank Citi said 99p stores had sales of £370m in the year to February 2014, but that its underlying profits suggested "very thin" margins compared with Poundland.
In November, Poundland reported a 12% rise in half-year profits to £9.3m.
Analysis
BBC business correspondent Jonty Bloom
Pound shops face a continual struggle to keep prices down, after all, inflation means that a pound doesn't go as far as it did. So how do they do it?
Buying up stock from bankrupt companies was a very successful move during the downturn, but not so easy now. Also they search out products that have been redesigned, are coming to the end of their shelf life, and have been made for different markets where they didn't sell; they are all available at much lower prices.
And there are companies importing and making cheap jewellery, hair accessories, plastic flowers, toys, stationery and a thousand other things, all for under a pound. Many are made in Yiwu, a city in China that specialises in the pound shop market.
Other techniques include, continually reducing the size of products rather than raising the cost, so fewer biscuits in a packet or smaller shampoo bottles.
But the margins are still very tight as highlighted by the savings planned by Poundland, which is buying 99p Stores. Handing out all those 1p pieces will end and of course prices will rise by a penny.
Image copyright Getty Images
Pound-shop boom
According to the Fung Business Intelligence Centre (FBIC), pound shops have boomed in the UK, mirroring the rise of discounters such as Aldi and Lidl.
"The low-price, no-frills formula has found particular resonance in Britain's era of sluggish economic growth," said FBIC head of global retail and technology Deborah Weinswig.
Nina Rahmatallah, of marketing consultants Added Value, said that "consumer behaviours adopted during the downturn, such as shopping for cheap items at stores like Poundland, have stuck".
She said Poundland faced a challenge in "ensuring customers continue to shop there as the economy grows ever stronger".Frans Lanting via Getty Images A Thylacoleo carnifex at an archaeological dig in Australia's Naracoorte National Park.
For years, the Australians have been lying to us.
Our “friends” down under have long perpetuated a blatant falsehood that their island nation is home to “drop bears” -- large, predatory koalas that supposedly drop from eucalyptus trees to kill and eat prey, including humans.
Even the Australian Museum perpetuates the hoax, with a page on its website written as if drop bears were real.
But guess what? The joke is on them. It turns out drop bears aren't totally the stuff of legend. Or at least, there was once a prehistoric creature that suspiciously resembles the animal of Australian lore, explained science writer Brian Switek in a National Geographic blog post this week.A few hours before the Giants took the field for their first training camp practice in Albany this summer, Jason Pierre-Paul, wearing a spotless white Super Bowl XLVI Champions hoodie, was asked how much room there was for improvement in his game.
The third-year defensive end answered with an assertion that left reporters scratching their heads and opposing offensive coordinators surely shaking theirs.
“I am about 50 (percent),” Pierre-Paul nonchalantly calculated. “I am still learning. That is the good thing about it. I want to come out here and learn and keep on improving.”
Can it possibly be true? A player coming off a season in which he registered 86 tackles and finished fourth in the NFL with 16½ sacks is only halfway to his potential? By sheer statistics, admittedly a limited measure of a defensive player’s impact and ability, that means he can be...
“A 30-sack guy?” Giants linebacker and part-time defensive end Mathias Kiwanuka asked.
“He could be. Absolutely,” Kiwanuka continued. “He definitely has the potential to be one of the best ever. There’s so much that goes into it that’s out of his control so you don’t want to jinx him or anything like that, but if the kid keeps working and God’s on his side and he stays healthy, we expect to see great things out of him.”
Pierre-Paul, 23, is the latest elite defensive end in the Giants’ seemingly endless supply. He is already widely regarded as one of the NFL’s best defensive linemen and will be joined by a healthy Osi Umenyiora and Justin Tuck tonight in the Giants’ season opener against the Dallas Cowboys — completing perhaps the league’s premier group of defensive ends.
It took until the 2011 regular-season finale, against the Cowboys, for the trio to play together at full strength and the impact was season-changing.
The Giants sacked Tony Romo six times as they clinched the NFC East title with a 31-14 victory on Jan. 1.
And the group created chaos throughout the postseason, logging 6½ of the defense’s 11 sacks while alleviating the pressure from what was a faulty secondary earlier in the season.
"These three D-ends are probably top 10 in the National Football League," said former Giants linebacker Antonio Pierce. "One might be No. 1 or 2. I think JPP is on that mission to be one of the best defensive ends in the game. It's always been known as a linebacker city, now it's turned into a defensive end city."
A revved-up rush
Finding their way on the field together via defensive coordinator Perry Fewell’s
“NASCAR” package — four defensive ends at once on passing downs — Pierre-Paul, Tuck and Umenyiora completed the Super Bowl run by disrupting Tom Brady and the Patriots’ juggernaut offense four years after Umenyiora and Tuck did the same in Super Bowl XLII, with Michael Strahan as the third component.
“I think those last few games, where you saw all three of us, was us playing at the height of what we could’ve been the entire year,” said Tuck, the defensive captain who had three and a half sacks in the playoffs after just five in 12 regular-season games.
“Everyone knows that when we play well, this team, this defense plays well. A lot of pressure is on us, but we like it that way.”
Tonight, they’ll be on the field together again. Fewell said Tuck’s play is “night and day” from last season, when he battled through a variety of injuries and personal tragedy.
Umenyiora, who had nine sacks in just nine regular-season games in 2011, finally ended a very public contract dispute over this past offseason and has overcome his knee and ankle ailments.
Then there’s Pierre-Paul, who played in all 16 games in 2011.
It was against the Cowboys in Week 14 last season that Pierre-Paul enjoyed his breakout, prime-time performance.
With Umenyiora sidelined and Tuck hampered, he recorded six tackles and hounded Tony Romo for two sacks, one in the end zone for a safety. Pierre-Paul topped off his night by blocking the potential game-tying field goal with one second remaining in the Giants’ season-saving 37-34 victory.
“We talk about putting the four guys out there; it’s hard to find out who’s the quickest and who’s the fastest,” Fewell said. “Some days I look and I say, ‘Boy, JPP looks great today.’ But he looked awesome down there and then Osi comes flying off the end and I’m saying, ‘Wow, boy, that’s pretty fast.’ And then Tuck, he makes a move and I’m saying, ‘Wow, man....’ I’m scratching my head, and then Kiwi does something.”
Holding the line
Pierre-Paul’s emergence has cemented the Giants’ ability to identify and cultivate pass-rushers. What began with Strahan wreaking havoc solo, evolved into a duo of Strahan and Umenyiora. In 2007, Tuck emerged as the third cog and the three fueled a pass rush that accumulated a league-leading 53 sacks and propelled an unlikely Super Bowl run.
When Strahan retired, Kiwanuka returned from an injury-plagued 2007 and was inserted into the defensive end rotation in 2008. The Giants finished 12-4 and sixth in sacks with 42, but the number fell to 32 in 2009 and, consequently, the Giants finished 8-8 and out of the playoffs.
The plunge was enough for general manager Jerry Reese to address the pass rush with the Giants’ first-round pick. With the 15th overall pick, Reese chose Pierre-Paul, a freakishly athletic defensive end who began playing football his senior year of high school and had just 13 games of Division 1 experience at South Florida.
Reese heard the skeptics. It was a reach. It was a panic move. They already had Umenyiora and Tuck, and there were other positions of need.
But it was another example of what the Giants value most: pass-rushers up front that can get to the quarterback without a blitz.
“I’ve never seen a guy like that -- maybe Jevon Kearse, physically,” said backup quarterback David Carr, who was sacked an NFL-record 76 times in 2002 with the Houston Texans.
“He’s a freak. Everyone knew he was physically able to do it, but he’s picked up so much. He’s learning from the best in the game.”
Pierre-Paul arrived in East Rutherford without some of the basic football knowledge players learn at the high school and college levels. There were technique shortcomings and mental misunderstandings.
He relied on pure athleticism and his 6-5, 270-pound frame to record four and a half sacks in 2010, his rookie year.
His education continued under Umenyiora and Tuck. He prodded the veterans on how to play the run, and on technique and down-and-distance situations, but during last season they stayed out of his way.
“We didn’t tell him anything. Hell no,” Umenyiora said. “The way he was performing, what were you going to tell him? ‘Just keep doing what you’re doing, man.’ You don’t want to mess that up when somebody’s rolling like that.”
Pierre-Paul continued improving on his technique and football IQ this past offseason and the veterans say they have seen vast improvements, enough to warrant projections as wild as the one Kiwanuka made.
Thirty sacks would shatter the single-season record of 22½ Strahan set in 2001. But with players of Tuck’s and Umenyiora’s caliber surrounding him on and off the field, Pierre-Paul is left wondering where his ceiling might be.
“This is only my third year, man,” Pierre-Paul said. “How cool is that? And I’m only 23 years old. I’m just getting better. Who knows by the time I’m 25, 26?”
Jorge Castillo: jcastillo@starledger.com; twitter.com/jorgeccastilloPrime Minister Justin Trudeau has been getting a lot of attention from international media, but now the spotlight has landed on his senior adviser, Gerald Butts, and his dealings with a contentious figure in the White House.
Steve Bannon, the controversial chief strategist to U.S. President Donald Trump, told the New Yorker he struck up a friendship with Butts, the long-time friend and principal secretary to Trudeau, after the pair met in New York during the transition to government.
The magazine reported Bannon, who is apparently on the outs with Trump, has been mulling the idea of raising taxes on the wealthy and that Butts had spoken to him about how such a move could have a populist appeal that could boost the president's political fortune.
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"There's nothing better for a populist than a rich guy raising taxes on rich guys," the magazine said Butts had told Bannon.
Cameron Ahmad, a spokesman for Trudeau, did not comment directly on the contents or accuracy of the story, but said the Liberal government — including staffers — have been working hard to make connections with the Trump administration since its earliest days.
"Our government has worked hard to grow Canada's strong and constructive working relationship with the United States, highlighting our close and mutually beneficial ties," Ahmad said in an emailed statement.
He added that cabinet ministers have also been reaching out to their U.S. counterparts, which has been part of a large-scale campaign to make the case for Canada going into the North American Free Trade Agreement renegotiations, which began Wednesday in Washington, D.C.
Chad Rogers, a Conservative strategist, said Butts and others are wise to make such connections with the Trump administration, even if their politics do not align.
"Having friends in the White House who will take your call is good for Canada," said Rogers, a founding partner at Crestview Strategy.
New Democrat Leader Tom Mulcair, meanwhile, called on Butts to distance himself from Bannon, which would allow the Liberals to put action behind their words rejecting the racism surrounding the weekend violence in Charlottesville, Va.
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"It means that (Trudeau's) closest friend and adviser must immediately disavow any friendship he has with Steve Bannon," Mulcair said.
"Mr. Trudeau can't have it both ways."
Bannon is a former leader of the conservative website Breitbart News, which he once described as "the platform for the alt-right," a U.S.-based offshoot of conservatism that combines elements of racism, white nationalism and populism.
Greg MacEachern, a former Liberal strategist who is now at lobby firm Environics Communications, said what Mulcair is demanding is irresponsible.
"Mr. Mulcair also called President Trump a fascist," said MacEachern, adding the NAFTA negotiations mean the government must tread carefully to protect Canadian jobs that depend on trade.
"Mr. Mulcair does not have that responsibility," he said.
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Ian Capstick, the founder of MediaStyle and a former NDP press secretary, said the New Yorker piece shows how courting American publications can be "a double-edged sword" in terms of media strategy.
"They have a limited context, a limited understanding of Canada, they are prone to more hyperbole, they tend to torque Canadian facts a little bit harder, perhaps, than they would feel free to torque an American fact," said Capstick.
Capstick noted the article was incorrect in saying the Liberals decided to raise taxes on high-income earners in response to a slump in the polls.
In fact, the Liberals campaigned on raising taxes on individuals earning more than $200,000, while cutting taxes for those earning between $45,282 and $90,563, and passed those changes soon after winning the 2015 election.Frank Ocean is now... Frank Ocean. After a long battle in the courts, the "Bad Religion" singer has officially legally changed his name to his onstage moniker, bidding adieu to Christopher Edwin Breaux.
Yesterday (April 23), TMZ reported that Ocean's name change has been made official in Los Angeles. The official legal documents were approved roughly one year after Ocean first attempted to strip away Christopher Edwin Breaux.
However, his first go around was denied due to Ocean's less than stellar driving record in California. TMZ also reported in November 2014 that Ocean had three driving offences in three months (driving 31 mph above the speed limit, driving with expired insurance and driving with his headlights off). Due to his unfortunate vehicular record, Ocean's first motion to be "Frank Ocean" was denied and he had to reapply.
But now, Christopher Edwin Breaux is no more.
Ocean's news of a name change comes at what may be a critical point for the Grammy winning R&B star. After releasing and promoting the critically acclaimed Channel Orange in 2012, Ocean has been largely quiet in terms of new music (or even announcing intentions to record an LP).
However, that all changed earlier this month. On April 7, Ocean logged on to his Tumblr to announce "I got two versions. I got twooo versions..."
What exactly he had two versions of still remains unclear, but what is confirmed is that Ocean has his third studio album set to arrive in July, entitled Boys Don't Cry. He's also planning on publishing an accompanying magazine, because why not?Ashen-Shugar, Lord of the High Reaches - Valheru, Ancient One, Dragon Lord, etc. etc., from Raymond E. Feist's Riftwar Cycle. Don't let the shininess fool you - the Valheru were very much a "might makes right" type of race - or "shiny armour makes right", as the case may be.You know, for such a long time, one of my main motivations in learning to draw was wanting to be able to depict book characters as I envision them - and very particular book characters, at that.Not THIS one, though. This is one of those things I honestly hadn't been planning to do. It was just supposed to be a sketch - just a concept brainstorm of a Valheru helmet, in fact - when I decided to draw something of the rest of the body, and then just add a little colour, to see how it would look, and before I knew it I was filling out the backgroud and obssessing over highlights. Still looks messy in part because the sketch is technically still there. Gah.Tweaked it to look less bland.Edited AGAIN because dammit, it DOES look more spooky when clean.Image caption Judge John Devaux returned to court minutes after the assault
A judge's wig came off when he was attacked in court by the brother of a man he had just jailed.
Paul Graham, 27, stripped to his vest before "battering the hell" out of Judge John Devaux at Ipswich Crown Court, according to an eyewitness.
The judge had just jailed Mr Graham's brother for two-and-a-half years for causing death by dangerous driving.
Paul Graham later appeared before the judge and was remanded in custody to return to court on Tuesday.
Judge Devaux told the court: "It's an incident which does not occur every day."
The attack happened in courtroom two at about 10:45 BST as the judge was sentencing Philip Graham, 30, of Quendon Place, Haverhill, Suffolk.
'Extremely horrific'
A jury had earlier found him guilty of causing the death by dangerous driving of Derek Foster, 37, of Winstanley Road, Saffron Walden, Essex.
Judge John Devaux Born in 1947, he was called to the Bar in 1970
He has been a circuit judge since 1993
He has presided over some of the most high-profile murder cases in Suffolk
The judge presided over the the trial of Ireneusz Melaniuk who was given a life sentence for the murder of Bury St Edmunds jeweller Peter Avis in November last year
He died in a crash on the B1054 at Hempstead, near Saffron Walden, in July 2012.
Jaimie Budd, who was in the public gallery, said Paul Graham removed his top to reveal a black vest after the judge passed sentence on his brother.
"We thought that he was going to reveal some sort of statement or tribute, but instead he got up and ran to the judge's bench," she said.
"He ran up the steps and started battering the hell out of the judge.
"He pulled his robes, his wig came off. It was extremely horrific."
She said Mr Graham, of Haverhill, said that his brother had been victim of an "injustice" and shouted: "Arrest me."
Sitting alongside the judge at the time of the attack was Sir Edward Greenwell, High Sheriff of Suffolk, and his chaplain, the Reverend Robin Alderson.
Another eyewitness, John Weston, said: "I looked into the court and saw a couple of chairs had been turned over.
"I was grabbed on the back and told to 'wait' by two security guards who rushed past me."
Eyes closed
Two Essex Police officers in court for the sentencing hearing intervened.
The plucky judge returned to court minutes after the assault to hear the next listed case.
He told the court: "I think we're all unharmed."
Paul Graham was arrested on suspicion of assault and contempt of court and appeared before the judge, handcuffed to two police officers.
Still dressed in his black vest, with blood on his left elbow, he kept his eyes closed throughout the hearing.
Judge Devaux told the court: "It's not right I should deal with this case."
Mr Graham was remanded in custody to reappear before the court on Tuesday morning.
Ipswich MP Ben Gummer said Judge Devaux was a "pillar of the community in Ipswich".
"This is an appalling thing to have happened to a man dispensing justice on behalf of the community," he said.
"I hope there's a review in Ipswich as to what happened."There is no way to understand death if you don't know what life is. What happens between the moment you take your first breath and the moment you draw your very last?
Who is it that is looking out through your eyes?
Is it not the same quality of awareness that existed right before you read these words? Is that quality of awareness not the same quality that existed yesterday and the day before?
And that awareness, the pure state of awareness was there before you could form words or even knew your name. It is independent of personal history, of labels, of nationality of ethnicity of religion of political orientation or even a gender. This is the essential self. And the awareness of this self, even if momentary, is what is often referred to as "Self Realization".
The essential self is not contained within the boundaries of worldly identification, although it plays in those fields.
The essential self is not limited in perception by the five senses, although it enjoys experiencing them.
The self that is eternal is not limited by space and time, although it uses space and time to creatively express its essence.
The Realized Self came from nowhere and is going nowhere, but may choose different manifestations perhaps throughout the birth-life continuum.
The brain that tells the lungs to breathe will die with the body, but the Awareness that animates the organ called the brain is eternal.
You are not your thoughts. You are not your story. You are not your body.
Experience your thoughts, experience your story, experience your body, as none of it will last.
That which experiences remains constant. We can call that constant the "Self" - the real self and not that which masquerades as you.
So when you ask the question, "What happens when I die?" I would have to ask you a question in return...
Who is asking?
Peace,
Eric Allen Bell
Eric Allen Bell is Founder of
http://www.GlobalOne.TV
Consciousness-Based Television
ॐArsenal forward Alexis Sanchez wishes he could have played alongside Gunners legend Thierry Henry, saying that "as a partnership we would do great together."
Sanchez has drawn comparisons to Henry this season after flourishing as a centre-forward for Arsenal, with 14 goals for the campaign so far.
And like many fans, Sanchez enjoys thinking of what might have happened if he had had the chance to line up next to the club's all-time leading scorer.
"I would like to have played with Henry," Sanchez told Arsenal's weekly membership newsletter. "He could score, play one-twos with you, pass the ball, hold it. He had a huge repertoire and great vision too. I like playing with players with such a panoramic vision."
Like Henry, Sanchez is a mobile forward who can drive at defenders from outside the area, while also possessing great finishing skills in the box.
Alexis Sanchez has hit 14 goals for Arsenal this season. Peter Byrne/PA Images via Getty Images
Sanchez has 56 goals for Arsenal so far, halfway through his third season at the Emirates Stadium, but remains some way behind Henry's club record of 228.
And the Chile international says that it would probably be Henry doing most of the scoring were they to play alongside each other.
"I think as a partnership we would do great together," Sanchez said. "We would be constantly moving, going up and down, coming and going. I would have loved playing with Henry.
"He was more of a scorer than I am. I think I would assist him for every goal he would score. I'm more into passing and he is a great goal scorer."White House Further Embraces Open Source For Government... But Tell It To Do Even More
from the good-to-see dept
This policy requires that, among other things: (1) new custom code whose development is paid for by the Federal Government be made available for reuse across Federal agencies; and (2) a portion of that new custom code be released to the public as Open Source Software (OSS).
Would an “open source by default” approach that required all new Federal custom code to be released as OSS, subject to exceptions for things like national security, be more or less effective in achieving the goals above?
With so much annoying stuff coming out of the White House lately, it's good to see the tech folks there continue to do some good work, including pushing for a policy that should lead to further embracing open source technologies inside the federal government -- in part by pushing the government itself to open source the code it writes for its own work (and even when not releasing the code to the public, at least sharing it inside the government for other agencies to use).This new policy has been put out for comment, andwith this policy. The current request asks if the policy could be improved in the following manner:I think the answer to this question needs to be that, yes, such a policy would be greatly improved by pushing for open source by default. With the current policy stating that just "a portion" of the code is released that way, it almost guarantees thatwill be. Moving to a policy where it's open source by default would lead to a design mentality that keeps that in mind.Of course, some may (quite reasonably!) argue that copyright does not apply to any works created by the federal government itself (though itto anything written by contractors, who can then assign that copyright to the government). Thus, if the software in question was created by federal employees, then it should, automatically be, in which case the government has no legal right to placelegal restrictions on its use, even open source restrictions. Though, of course, in that case, it still has to make the decision over whether or not to release the code publicly. Unfortunately, the current policy says that it would apply to software written by federal employees as well -- and that might actually not be allowed under the law. That software is in the public domain.Of course, it's likely that plenty of code used in government is actually written by contractors, and for that code, the default shouldbe that it be open sourced whenever possible.For what it's worth, rather than the annoying standard commenting process for most government comments, this one is being done on Github, so join in.
Filed Under: code sharing, copyright, federal government, open source, public domainThe first female Federal Reserve Chairwoman forcefully emphasized the necessity of closing the gender wage gap and inequities in workforce opportunities, arguing that economic growth depended on it.
Speaking at Brown University’s “125 Years of Women at Brown Conference,” a celebration of the decision to admit women into the Ivy League university, Janet Yellen, a Brown alumna, used anecdotes from her own family to trace female economic progress over the past century.
She highlighted the progress that had been made, saying female participation was crucial to the growth and prosperity of the 20th century, but noted it hasn’t been sufficient.
“Despite this progress, evidence suggests that many women remain unable to achieve their goals,” Yellen said.
Women, she said, still face an opportunity gap, underrepresented in many industries and often unable to fulfill their potential due to adequate workplace policies.
“If these obstacles persist, we will squander the potential of many of our citizens and incur a substantial loss to the productive capacity of our economy at a time when the aging of the population and weak productivity growth are already weighing on economic growth,” Yellen said.
Yellen titled her speech “So We All Can Succeed,” which she explained was inspired by Malala Yousafzai’s remarks that “we cannot all succeed when half of us are held back.”
Yellen’s full remarks can be found here.In Algonquian mythology, the thunderbird controls the upper world while the underworld is controlled by the underwater panther or Great Horned Serpent. The thunderbird throws lightning at the underworld creatures and creates thunder by flapping its wings.[1] Thunderbirds in this tradition are commonly depicted as having an X-shaped appearance. This varies from a simple X to recognizable birds.[1] The X-shaped thunderbird is often used to depict the thunderbird with its wings alongside its body and the head facing forwards instead of in profile.[2]
Menominee Edit
The Menominee of Northern Wisconsin tell of a great mountain that floats in the western sky on which dwell the thunderbirds. They control the rain and hail and delight in fighting and deeds of greatness. They are the enemies of the great horned snakes - the Misikinubik - and have prevented these from overrunning the earth and devouring mankind. They are messengers of the Great Sun himself.[3]
Ojibwe Edit |
With the 2012 NBA Draft a little more than a day away, NBA rumors are picking up steam in the last couple of hours. The newest ones has the Denver Nuggets and Golden State Warriors talking trade with Wilson Chandler going to the Warriors in exchange for the 7th pick in the draft. I would imagine Denver takes back a bad contract in that exchange.
I love this move for the Nuggets but I am not so sure how this works out for the Warriors. Then again, name the last logical move the Warriors made. You would be hard pressed to come up with one. Chandler is a very solid player, but I am not sure you give up the 7th pick for him. You could get a very solid player there for a lot cheaper than Chandler.
Unfortunately, Golden State is stuck in a bad spot. They have some albatross contracts as they try to rebuild their roster. Adding Chandler would be good if they could ship out Richard Jefferson with that pick. If they simply do the trade straight up, I would question the intelligence level of the Warriors brass.
More NBA rumors like this are going to pop up in the next 12 hours or so. I think once a trade or two goes through, it will open the flood gates for everyone else. There are a ton of moves out there to be made and many teams are trying to get up into the lottery.
Riley Schmitt is a writer for Rant Sports.TORONTO — Two people have been charged in connection with the seizure of a large quantity of chemicals used to make date rape drugs, with an estimated street value of more than $500,000.
Toronto police said Canada Border Service Agents intercepted a couriered shipment that was labelled as containing 36 kilograms of cinnamyl acetate, a legal fragrance or flavouring ingredient that can also be used in cosmetic products.
Investigators tested the substance and discovered it was Gamma-Butyrolactone, the only restricted ingredient required to make Gamma-Hydroxybutyrate, or GHB, more commonly known as a date rape drug.
Police said the seized GBL could have produced 264 litres of GHB, or 53,000 doses of the drug, with an estimated street value of $527,000.
Toronto Drug Squad officers arrested one of the alleged importers and recipients on Wednesday.
Ayron Borovic, 30, of Oshawa, has been charged with two counts of possession of a Schedule I substance for the purpose of trafficking, possession of proceeds of property obtained by crime, failing to comply with a recognizance order and unauthorized possession of a prohibited weapon.
On Thursday, police arrested the second alleged importer and intended recipient.
Malik Jadavji, 38, of Toronto, has been charged with importing a Schedule VI substance, two counts of possessing a Class A precursor for the purpose of producing the preparation or mixture and three counts of possession of a Schedule I substance for the purpose of trafficking.
They are scheduled to appear in court in Toronto on Jan. 18.The default network in the brain may be responsible for daydreaming Researchers may have found a way to predict whether severely brain-damaged patients will regain consciousness. A part of the brain which can stay active even in severely brain-damaged patients could offer a clue about the chances of recovery, they claim. The Belgian team told a conference that activity within a "default network" in the brain appears to match the level of consciousness of the patient. Some believe the default network is associated with daydreaming. The findings were reported in New Scientist magazine. We could just scan someone for 10 minutes and get an easily quantifiable readout
Dr Steven Laureys
University of Liege The default network in the brain's cortex appears to be more active when the brain is not actively working on a goal - hence the proposed link with daydreaming. Some evidence suggests that it helps get the brain ready for the next task, although this remains a controversial theory. A number of techniques are used to assess the level of consciousness in people following head injury, and while some are diagnosed as "brain dead", with no sign of any activity in the brain, it can be difficult to make an exact diagnosis when the patient has a higher level of activity, but is still unconscious. Dr Steven Laureys, from the University of Liege in Belgium, believes that activity within the network could help confirm the level of consciousness, and help doctors decide on whether or not to treat them. He measured activity in 13 brain-injured patients with a variety of different levels of consciousness. Some were "minimally conscious", while others were in a coma, or a persistent vegetative state (PVS). A final group were "brain dead". He found that minimally conscious patients had only a 10% fall in normal activity in this area, while in coma and PVS patients, it fell by approximately 35%. There was no activity at all in the brain-dead patients. Clinical test Dr Laureys told New Scientist this could be more reliable method of assessing patients: "We could just scan someone for 10 minutes and get an easily quantifiable readout." Dr Jon Simons, a neuroscientist from Cambridge University, said that the study, although preliminary, was "very interesting". "It suggests that connectivity in the default network might correlate with level of consciousness as measured by a coma-recovery scale. "Although the functional significance of the default network is still being hotly debated, this study does suggest that scans of the default network might perhaps have clinical utility as a diagnostic tool."
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Before Democrat Hillary Clinton “overturns Citizens United,” curtails “secret, unaccountable money in politics” and ends “the stranglehold that the wealthy and special interests have on so much of our government,” she has some business left to do.
Namely, obliterating Republican Donald Trump with her historically massive, big-dollar, lobbyist-loaded campaign cash machine — one she says she’ll gladly disassemble once she wins the White House, but not before.
And new campaign finance reports show Clinton is sticking to that plan as Election 2016 enters its final days.
In the last campaign finance filing before the election Clinton and her super PAC allies have reported raising $702 million through Oct. 19, compared to Trump and his supportive groups, who have raised $312 million.
It is a startling rebuke to the no-longer-so-true truism that Republicans are the primary beneficiary of big political money.
Clinton’s advantage will likely to hold to the end, as she and her super PAC allies reported $79 million in the bank as of Oct. 19, according to a Center for Public Integrity analysis of new campaign finance reports. Compare that to Trump and his super PAC supporters, who have about $32 million in reserve.
Clinton’s campaign committee alone has raised more than twice as much money as Trump’s: $513 million versus $255 million.
Her $62.4 million cash on hand as of Oct. 19 is nearly four times Trump’s $16 million.
And, in a reverse of four years ago when Republicans more quickly embraced super PACs and their ability to raise and spend unlimited amounts of money, Clinton’s cadre of supportive super PACs have outraised comparable pro-Trump groups by a more than three-to-one margin: $189 million to $57 million.
Trump-backing super PACs filed anemic reports showing few big contributions in October, a sign donors are shifting money elsewhere as Trump falters.
Clinton has also utilized “joint fundraising committees” to a far greater extent than Trump. These political groups collect six-figure checks from donors and then split the proceeds among the candidate’s own campaign and national and state parties.
Clinton’s financial might, buoyed by her campaign’s embrace of the Supreme Court’s 2010 decision in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, has helped her play offense and defense against a billionaire who once pledged to invest $600 million of his own money on a presidential run.
Trump appears poised to actually spend just a fraction of that sum.
It’s a special sort of indignity for Trump. He predicated his presidential run on his business brilliance and cunning. “We need a leader that wrote ‘The Art of the Deal,’” he said during his June 2015 announcement speech, referencing his 1987 best-selling book. His wealth, Trump reasoned, would both propel his presidential ambitions and inoculate him from politics’ seedier side, populated by super PACs, professional lobbyists and partisan hangers-on.
“I’m self-funding my own campaign. It’s my money,” Trump declared earlier this year.
“I don’t need anybody’s money,” he said another time.
Donald Trump’s big money bait-and-switch By Dave Levinthal The presumptive GOP presidential nominee is embracing the super PACs and lobbyists he not long ago decried.
But as Trump vanquished his remaining Republican primary opponents and turned toward the general election, his tenor changed.
No longer did he disavow political groups that sought to raise huge amounts of money to support him. Nor did Trump maintain he’d be the overwhelming source of his campaign’s cash. Instead, his campaign launched aggressive fundraising efforts aimed at filling his coffers, and quickly.
When Trump’s campaign called Republican ad guru Fred Davis last year and reiterated that Trump would spend up to half a billion dollars of his own money to fuel a presidential campaign, Davis listened — but “never found it credible,” he told the Center for Public Integrity.
Davis’ instincts proved correct: Trump has only invested about $56 million into his effort overall, and just $10 million since June 1, when Trump had all but secured the Republican nomination. (If Trump changes his mind and gives his campaign more than $1,000 between now and the election, he must, by law, report the cash to the Federal Election Commission within 48 hours of making the donation.)
Perhaps only the political gods could ever divine whether an additional $100 million — or $500 million — could have helped Trump assuage the damage done to his campaign this autumn, much self-inflicted.
First came Trump’s fat-shaming of a former Miss Universe.
The revelation of a lewd 2005 recording from “Access Hollywood,” in which Trump boasted of assaulting women, rocked his campaign — and poll numbers — soon thereafter.
Then, Trump’s talk of genital grabbing on the tape prompted numerous women to accuse him of something far more sobering than “locker room talk” — attacking, groping or otherwise inappropriately touching them. Trump has denied the accusations as “pure fiction.”
One might almost forget about Trump’s other problems. New York state is hammering his nonprofit Trump Foundation for “fraud.” Former clients of Trump University are arguing in federal court that Trump cheated them of their money. And Trump, as the Center for Public Integrity and the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists reported, once rented space in one of his Manhattan skyscrapers to an Iranian bank that U.S. authorities have linked to terrorism.
So while Trump for months benefited from the outsized — and cost-free — attention news outlets showered on his candidacy, it “all has turned into horrific, negative Trump free press” made worse by Trump’s limited ability to push back through paid advertisements, Davis said.
“He gave Clinton so much ammo,” said Davis, whose presidential campaign client list includes George W. Bush, John McCain and, most recently, a pro-John Kasich super PAC.
Team Clinton has gleefully spun Trump’s scandals into attack ad gold bricks, using its massive cash machine to pummel Trump with them at his every tawdry turn.
Particularly in swing states, where the presidential campaign will be won and lost, Team Clinton has overwhelmed Team Trump in TV advertising, thanks in large part to Clinton’s campaign cash advantage.
Since the primaries ended in June, Clinton and her supporters have aired about 292,000 broadcast and national cable TV ads, compared to about 87,000 aired by Trump and his allies, according to a Center for Public Integrity analysis of data provided by ad tracking firm Kantar Media/CMAG.
Most TV ads have targeted traditional battleground states such as Florida and Ohio. Clinton and her allies have dramatically outgunned Trump in all of them.
Since mid-June, Team Clinton has aired more than five times as many TV ads as Team Trump in both Iowa and Nevada, according to Kantar Media/CMAG. In North Carolina, that ratio is nearly four-to-one.
In Florida and Ohio, Team Clinton has aired more than three times as many TV ads as Team Trump since mid-June. And in Pennsylvania, likewise, it’s nearly three-to-one as well, according to Kantar Media/CMAG.
And during the third week of October alone, the most recent week for which data is available from Kantar Media/CMAG, Team Clinton is even investing modest advertising dollars into several historically Republican-leaning states, such as Arizona, Georgia and Texas, where Democrats have a small, but growing chance of winning.
Trump’s comparatively small advertising budget means his campaign isn’t amplifying Clinton’s own set of troubles — her State Department email server scandal, foreign influence peddling within the Clinton Foundation, Wikileaks’ revelations of potential pay-to-play politicking, the for-hire private speeches she gave to Wall Street banks — nearly as much as it could be.
Consider that at comparable times in their campaigns, Bush in 2000 ($22.3 million), Bush again in 2004 ($22.4 million), McCain in 2008 ($21.3 million), Mitt Romney in 2012 ($52.7 million), all had more money on hand than Trump’s campaign committee alone ($16 million) has in its account.
And although super PACs may theoretically raise as much money as they want, including from corporations, unions, certain nonprofits and individuals, Trump’s collection of supportive super PACs are underperforming compared to those that aid Clinton. That’s particularly true in recent weeks.
Take the Robert Mercer-backed Make America Number 1 PAC. The Mercer family has ranked among Trump’s staunchest supporters. Nonetheless, it reported raising nothing from Oct. 1 to Oct. 19 — a departure for the group, which has reported raising seven-figure amounts every month since the Mercer family threw their support behind Trump at the end of June.
The super PAC spent about $2.1 million during early- and mid-October, mainly on ads and other media opposing Clinton. It had less than $2 million on hand for the final run-up to Election Day.
In contrast, Priorities USA Action, the flagship pro-Clinton super PAC, had more than seven times the available cash. Priorities USA Action has raised more than $175 million this election cycle, including $18 million between Oct. 1 and Oct. 19 alone.
Justin Barasky, a spokesman for Priorities USA Action, said the big numbers reflect steady support from major donors. “Donors have understood what’s at stake and are invested in seeing Hillary win and Trump lose,” he said.
Hillary for America Campaign Manager Robby Mook likewise struck a confident pose.
“We are able to close out the final days of this campaign by running an unprecedented coordinated campaign to mobilize voters who will help elect Democratic candidates up and down the ballot,” Mook said in a statement Thursday night.
A key indication of how primed Clinton is to help her partisan brethren down-ballot are her joint fundraising groups, particularly the “Hillary Victory Fund.”
They’ve raised about $516 million during the election cycle, while Trump’s comparable joint fundraising committees with national and state Republican party affiliates have only raised about $292 million.
Clinton and Trump each transferred about 30 percent of those hauls back into their own campaign war chests, while the rest was spent by their respective parties on efforts that aided them and other candidates on their tickets.
Prior to the U.S. Supreme Court’s 2014 decision in McCutcheon v. Federal Election Commission, individual donors were prohibited from donating more than about $123,000 to joint fundraising committees. However, because of the McCutcheon ruling, that aggregate limit on individuals is gone.
Clinton’s joint fundraising group now collects money for 40 different beneficiaries and routinely brings in checks of more than $400,000. Meanwhile, Trump’s raises money for about two-dozen groups.
Shaun McCutcheon, a Republican-backing Alabama businessman who successfully petitioned the Supreme Court in the McCutcheon case, says Trump and the Republicans only have themselves to blame for their financial lot.
“Give it to the Democrats — they’ve done a great job fundraising,” McCutcheon said. “And they’ve taken advantage of the McCutcheon and Citizens United decisions. Trump said early on he was going to pay his own way, so now that he’s not doing it, it hurts.”
Chris Zubak-Skees contributed to this report.
This story was co-published with TIME.DeepMind has yet to find out how smart its AlphaGo Zero AI could be
Once Alphabet’s artificial intelligence company DeepMind had masted the ability to defeat the best human Go players in the world, it tried to beat its own best attempts using an approach based strictly on a virtual Go player that was totally self-taught.
That Go-playing virtual intelligence was called AlphaGo Zero, and it managed to rediscover over 3,000 years of human knowledge around the game in just 72 hours. It then beat the version of the original AlphaGo that beat champion Lee Sedol in just over three days, and bested the most powerful previous version of AlphaGo ever in just 40 days after that.
DeepMind’s AlphaGo Zero was an immense achievement not just because of its speed, but because it was able to accomplish all this starting from scratch – researchers didn’t do the first step where it uses human data as a baseline from which to begin the system’s education. Instead, it used spontaneous data to start, literally trying out moves on the board at random and working out which were most effective.
Perhaps the most interesting thing about AlphaGo Zero, though, isn’t how fast it was able to do what it did, or with such efficacy, but also that it ultimately didn’t even achieve its full potential. DeepMind CEO and co-founder Demis Hassabis explained on stage at Google’s Go North conference in Toronto that the company actually shut down the experiment before it could determine the upper limits of AlphaGo Zero’s maximum intelligence.
“We never actually found the limit of how good this version of AlphaGo could get,” he said. “We needed the computers for something else.”
Hassabis said that DeepMind may spin up AlphaGo Zero again in future to find out how much further it can go, though the main benefit of that exercise might be to help teach human AlphaGo players about additional, “alien” moves and stratagems that they can study to improve their own play.
DeepMind’s whole goal is to build artificial general intelligence, however, which can use its smarts to accomplish different tasks – so a smarter AlphaGo Zero might be able to better optimize energy management in Google’s data centers, for instance, or even in the electrical grid in general.Media playback is unsupported on your device Media caption Jim Kirchner: "Fossil groundwater fell as rain when mastodons still roamed the Earth"
The world's oldest and deepest waters are not immune from contamination, warn scientists.
It had been assumed that "fossil" reserves found hundreds of metres underground would be largely untouched by modern water sources.
But sampling from some 10,000 wells shows this not to be the case.
The new study reveals that about half of the deep groundwater has had contact with rains and snows that fell in the past 60 years.
And that means these ancient aquifers are also at some risk from pollution if waste and land management practices are defective.
It is an issue of significance because fossil waters are an important resource, providing drinking supplies and irrigation for billions of people across the globe.
The scientists presented their findings here in Vienna at the European Geosciences Union General Assembly. They have also published a report in the journal Nature Geoscience.
Image copyright Richard Taylor Image caption We will become increasingly dependent on deeper, older groundwater if shallower, younger groundwater becomes depleted
The team tested the deep waters for the presence of two radioactive elements.
The first was carbon-14 which occurs naturally in the environment and is pulled out of the air by rain and snow. This precipitation will eventually percolate into deep soil pore-spaces and rock fractures.
Because carbon-14 decays relatively slowly, a very low count in water will indicate great antiquity. Scientists will use the term fossil in this context to mean water that last touched the atmosphere more than about 10,000 years ago.
The second radioisotope to be checked was tritium, a heavy form of hydrogen which, in contrast, decays very rapidly. It was put in the atmosphere by A-bomb tests in the 1950s/1960s, so its presence is a sign of water's youth.
"What we've learnt from these two radioisotopes is two things," explained team-member Jim Kirchner from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich.
"One is that more than half of groundwater under our feet is fossil groundwater. The second important finding is that of this fossil groundwater, the water that comes out of those wells also contains a component of modern groundwater in at least half of cases.
"That means the water we are pumping from these deep wells, from what we think are ancient aquifers, also can potentially contain modern contaminants, either because of mixing within the well itself as the water is brought up, or because of mixing within the aquifer," he told BBC News.
Image copyright Richard Taylor Image caption A deep, handpump well supplying freshwater in the Sundarbans of coastal Bangladesh
The study's lead author, Scott Jasechko of the University of Calgary, Canada, added: "We're using the analogy of grandkids visiting their grandparents.
"Imagine fossil groundwaters are the grandparents and that younger groundwaters are the grandkids.
"We're finding that groundwater grandkids often visit groundwater grandparents deep underground, and, unfortunately, sometimes these grandkids have the flu.
"These young groundwaters may carry contaminants down with them, impacting deep groundwater once considered immune to modern contamination."
The scientists say the issue of pollution also now needs to be considered alongside the oft-discussed concern over the sustainable use of groundwater.
The deeply buried ancient water is what it is because of the time taken to build up, and hydrologists have long warned that it should really be viewed as a kind of "credit card", to be drawn on principally only in periods of major water stress, such as during a severe drought.
This case will continue to be made, but the new study now adds in the extra matter of contamination risk.
Image copyright Mark Hughes Image caption Groundwater supports about 40% of the world's irrigated agriculture
Jonathan.Amos-INTERNET@bbc.co.uk and follow me on Twitter: @BBCAmos5 Things To Know About The Keystone XL Pipeline
Enlarge this image toggle caption Nicholas Kamm/AFP/Getty Images Nicholas Kamm/AFP/Getty Images
After spending years as a political football in the U.S., the Keystone XL pipeline's would-be builder is now asking for a timeout in the review process. Why now? Changing politics in the U.S. and Canada, falling oil prices and mounting pressure from environmentalists have marked a turnaround for the company, which had pushed for approval of the project, and its supporters.
Here are five things to know about where the pipeline stands now:
1. Geography gives the U.S. government a say
The United States has more than 150,000 miles of oil pipelines, most of which function with little fanfare. The proposed Keystone XL pipeline has attracted outsized attention because it would cross the international border with Canada, and thus requires a special presidential permit. Environmentalists have urged the Obama administration to deny that permit, in hopes of discouraging development of Canada's tar sand oil reserves. Critics say extracting the carbon-intensive oil worsens climate change.
2. The pipeline's builder wants a timeout
The pipeline's would-be builder, TransCanada, sent a letter to Secretary of State John Kerry this week asking for a timeout in the review process. This marks a turnaround for the company and its supporters, who have long pushed for speedy approval of the project. Worried that the Obama administration was about to reject its permit application, TransCanada may be hoping for a friendlier climate under the next president. The company may also be stalling in hopes that oil prices rebound from their current low levels.
3. Oil prices have tumbled sharply since the pipeline was proposed
Oil is selling for less than $50 a barrel today. That's less than half the price when the Keystone XL pipeline was proposed in 2008. According to the State Department's environmental review, at prices above $75 per barrel, producers would find it worthwhile to develop the tar sands with or without a pipeline. The efficiency of pipeline transportation is most important to tar sands development at prices between $65 and $75 per barrel. And at prices below $65 per barrel, it may not be worth producing tar sands oil, even if cheap pipeline transportation is available.
4. Environmentalists smell blood
Rather than a timeout, environmentalists want the Obama administration to reject the Keystone permit application altogether. They're continuing to urge the president and the State Department to use this leverage to discourage tar sands development. The decision comes just weeks before President Obama travels to Paris for an international climate summit.
5. Canadian politics have shifted
Keystone XL lost one of its staunchest supporters when Prime Minister Stephen Harper's conservative party was defeated in last month's parliamentary elections. Harper's liberal successor, Justin Trudeau, also supports the pipeline but not as vociferously as Harper. Alberta, where TransCanada and the tar sands are located, also elected a left-leaning provincial government in May that has been less favorable to the pipeline project.There's something off-kilter about commodities traders--all that yelling, screaming and cursing, all that sweat pouring off their faces, even ankle-biting that draws blood--all of this over soybeans, corn, wheat and oil that the traders don't even want. What would any of these people do with an actual truckload of soybeans? At the Chicago Mercantile Exchange, real things are reduced to numbers and to the desperate "Fill or kill" cries of brokers who need to buy or sell for clients or themselves at a moment's notice.
Cari Lynn's Leg the Spread (Broadway Books, $24.95) is based on her two years as a clerk at the Merc. She started by working for a buddy who traded from home on a Globex machine and finally had to limit the value of his trades because of his uncontrollable tendency to pound his fist through the walls of his home when deals went sour.
The Merc that Lynn found is indeed the boy's club of legend, populated by the kind of characters who inspired the early plays of David Mamet. These men wander the floor donning ID badges like "BZRK," "LOCO" and "KOJK," and they have physical altercations about seemingly minor issues such as where they get to stand in the pit. Here, what would seem like a minor, even juvenile issue to those of us on the outside, really isn't. Where these traders stand determines whether they're seen, which can determine whether they lose thousands of dollars in a few minutes.
Finance might be a gentleman's industry and investment management is often described as the ideal profession for a man of leisure. But the Merc's pits thrive on pure physicality, and an ex-basketball player with some good height on him stands a better chance of making money than a quantitative genius with three degrees from MIT--if the genius is short. Think about it. The Merc handles $138 trillion worth of trades per year--ten times the assets invested in mutual funds--and the winners and losers on those trades are determined by who's the tallest, the biggest, the most noticeable or the loudest. And when size isn't the issue, it comes down to relationships. Is your commodities broker pals with the best broker on the floor? He'd better be.
As Lynn enters this machismo-drenched world, she's told tales of a female trader who nose-dived off the roof of her building after being wiped out in a single trading day. Lynn's attempts to separate fact from lore show up throughout the book as she encounters her share of grizzled veterans and also the women who work at the exchange, including one pioneer who formed an all-female firm.
The book changes subtly as it goes on. Lynn begins the adventure as a detached writer, perhaps looking for a thrill, definitely looking for information about her big, hometown industry--and perhaps looking for answers about her friend who nearly cracked up while day-trading stocks. It doesn't take long for Lynn to see herself as an insider, and to relish the role. As she quotes her friend, "It always surprises me how greedy I really am."
A tale that starts out as an anthropological study by a detached observer ends with Lynn forever changed by her experience, or so it seems. And, really, who could resist the allure of all that money?
As Leg the Spread makes clear, anyone who wants to encounter capitalism red in tooth and claw should visit the Merc's trading floor. If there's ever a street rumble between commodities brokers and stock brokers, bet on the commodities brokers. They don't call it "the Pit" for nothing.Even as Singapore-owned True Group fitness and wellness chain announced aggressive expansion plans in China, it has abruptly closed clubs in Thailand and Malaysia, leaving its close to 50,000 Singapore members worried if they too will be left in the lurch.
Last Monday, The Straits Times quoted the chain's group chief executive, Mr Patrick Wee, on his plans to expand into China with 20 new clubs over the next three years, and a possible stock exchange listing.
By the end of the week, it was a very different story. The group abruptly shut its two remaining True Fitness outlets in Bangkok on Friday and the following day, it shuttered all its True Fitness and True Spa centres in Malaysia.
The group has 47,000 members in Singapore, and some of them are beginning to wonder if its outlets here will be next.
The True Group was established in Singapore in 2004 and has 10 outlets here, including eight True Fitness outlets. It also has centres in Taiwan and China.
A company spokesman maintained on Friday that nothing was amiss. "The Singapore, Taiwan and China partnership is a totally different legal entity from Thailand. The terms of the partnership are specifically to grow the businesses in Singapore, China and Taiwan. As such, the closure in Thailand will not affect the Singapore outlets or the planned expansion (in China) as announced.
The True Group has 47,000 members in Singapore and some of them are beginning to wonder if its outlets here will be next. The group was established in Singapore in 2004 and has 10 outlets here, including eight True Fitness outlets. It also has centres in Taiwan and China.
"In Thailand, we are a minority partner and the past years have proved challenging, and unfortunately the businesses are no longer financially viable due to evolving market conditions."
Regarding the closure in Malaysia, True Fitness gave similar reasons on its Malaysia website, saying "the businesses are no longer financially viable due to evolving market conditions".
It said it was unable to refund its Malaysian customers in cash, adding that arrangements had been made with another fitness centre, Chi Fitness, for customers to continue their prepaid packages. It said it was looking to make a similar arrangement for its spa customers with a "reputable" provider.
Related Story True Fitness ceases operations in Thailand; Company says it is business as usual in Singapore
A True Group spokesman told The Sunday Times yesterday that it is business as usual in Singapore. It could not respond to other queries by press time.
But some members here are uneasy, and worry that True Fitness would follow the footsteps of gym chain California Fitness, which closed last July, prompting some 600 complaints about prepaid membership fees and under-utilised gym sessions. California Fitness closed all its outlets suddenly, a week after 12 of its gyms in Hong Kong shut due to debt.
Ms A. Lim, 42, an executive in the building industry and aformer California Fitness member, said: "I'm a bit worried that True Fitness gyms here would close too. I may consider reducing the duration of future membership contracts, but I won't stop having them as I don't want to stop exercising."
Recruitment consultant Cynthia Teo, 28, said: "I don't want another California Fitness situation to happen, so I think reassurance from the (True Fitness) management should be given. I'll probably ask them about it and find out what my membership rights are if it closes down."
•Additional reporting by Melissa LinThe Japanese company behind humanoid robot Pepper has told its owners not to get frisky with it. In the user agreement for the android, mobile phone firm SoftBank states: "The policy owner must not perform any sexual act or other indecent behaviour" on the machine, which is designed to live with humans.
Pepper was produced in collaboration with French robotics company Aldebaran SA and went on sale in June for $1,640 (£1,078). The so-called "social companion" is already greeting and interacting with customers in SoftBank's 74 stores in Japan. Nestle also employs Pepper to sell its coffee machines in the country. Touted as the world's first personal robot with its own "emotions", Pepper is so popular that 1,000 units produced for September sold out within a minute, according to a statement issued by SoftBank. The next batch is set to go on sale on 31 October.
Aldebaran says: "Pepper is much more than a robot, he's a companion able to communicate with you through the most intuitive interface we know: voice, touch and emotions." The user agreement also forbids using the four-foot humanoid to send spam or cause harm to other people. SoftBank has said that perpetrators of sexual acts with Pepper could face punitive action, but did not specify the consequences or how anyone would find out.
Earlier in September the "Campaign Against Sex Robots" was launched, calling for a ban on the development of machines that can be used for lewd acts. "Sex robots seem to be a growing focus in the robotics industry and the models that they draw on – how they will look, what roles they would play – are very disturbing indeed," Dr Kathleen Richardson, a robot ethicist at De Montfort University, told the BBC.
"We think that the creation of such robots will contribute to the detriment of relationships between men and women, adults and children, men and men and women and women," she said.
Also earlier in September, it was reported that Pepper was assaulted by Kiichi Ishikawa, a 60-year-old Japanese man unhappy at the level of service provided by the bot's human colleagues. Pepper was left nursing possible internal processor damage after the alcohol-fuelled episode, which resulted in Ishikawa's arrest.“We believe in honoring the V.A.’s history, but the best way to do that is to provide the best care today,” said Gary Kunich, a spokesman for the Milwaukee Veterans Affairs medical center. He was giving a tour of a new, state-of-the-art spinal injury clinic built near Old Main that cost $27 million. Renovating the old soldiers home would have cost nearly twice that, he said, adding, that knocking it down would also cost millions. “We’d rather spend the money here.”
Old Main was a model of modernity when it was authorized in 1865 by one of the last official acts of President Abraham Lincoln. It became home to about 1,000 former soldiers who rose at reveille each morning and dressed in blue uniforms, then filed into companies organized by disability. One visitor at the time praised the wards as “large and cheerful: well ventilated and well lighted.”
As the building aged into obsolescence, though, it stubbornly resisted solutions. A proposed lease to the City of Milwaukee for offices and apartments, fell apart a decade ago amid protests from local veterans groups.
As Old Main and the theater next-door deteriorated, the department considered calling in the bulldozers. But that plan stopped in 2011 when local preservationists got Old Main protected as a national historic landmark.
Then, in recent years, preservationists working with local veterans and the Department of Veterans Affairs, worked out a 75-year lease that will allow a developer who specializes in historic preservation, the Alexander Company, to renovate Old Main and five other historic buildings on the campus as apartments for homeless veterans.
“The bones of this building are great. You could never afford to build something like this today,” said Joe Alexander, company’s chief executive, as he toured the dark halls in a white hard hat.
Just behind him, the company’s finance expert, Jonathan Beck, added, “The trick was putting together the money.”Tracking A 'Sisterhood' Of Traveling Ants
Hide caption Marauder ants coordinate their efforts to forage for food and protect their swarm. Large ants will bus the smaller ants to a particular site to save the colony energy. Previous Next All photos by Mark Moffett
Hide caption Venezuelan Daceton ants are not as cooperative as marauder ants when transporting food. Two workers have pulled a caterpillar in opposite directions. Previous Next
Hide caption Different ants perform different tasks in a colony. The larger "submajor" army ant is lifting a centipede piece while the smaller ant is tasked with lifting the centipede's rear. A third ant below them serves to fill in the pothole below them — for smooth transport. Previous Next
Hide caption Some ants protect themselves and their colonies in dramatic ways: A Camponotus cylindricus -group "exploding ant" has ruptured her body to spew a sticky yellow substance, which killed both her and the larger worker of another species of carpenter ant in Brunei, Borneo. Previous Next
Hide caption Most ants can swim, at least to some degree. A Camponotus schmitzi worker in Brunei dives into the digestive fluids of a pitcher plant to retrieve the corpse of a cricket. Previous Next
Hide caption Honeypot ants engage in ritualized combat over food. Near Portal, Ariz., the worker at right stands on a pebble — "cheating" to appear larger than she is and driving off a larger honeypot ant. Previous Next
Hide caption Leafcutter ants carry leaf fragments on Barro Colorado Island, Panama. The leafcutter ant is one of the most destructive to vegetation, causing hundreds of billions of dollars in damage annually. Previous Next
Hide caption To maintain good hygiene, worker ants will climb on the body of a larger ant and lick her body. Here, the larger ant has begun to kick them away. Previous Next
Hide caption The aggressive Argentine ant is a threat to ecosystems worldwide. Worker ants can eliminate populations of caterpillars, snails, moths, bees — or a whole piranha (above). Previous Next 1 of 9 i View slideshow
Enlarge this image toggle caption Frank J. Sulloway Frank J. Sulloway
Adventures Among Ants
By Mark Moffett
Hardcover, 288
University of California Press
List price: $29.95
On The Web Adventures Among Ants
Ants are a sisterhood.
"The guys don't really do too much," entomologist |
negatively with changes in peripheral fasting insulin. This double-blind randomized interventional study provides first-time evidence that LC-n3-FA exert positive effects on brain functions in healthy older adults, and elucidates underlying mechanisms. Our findings suggest novel strategies to maintain cognitive functions into old age.
© The Author 2013. Published by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved. For Permissions, please e-mail: journals.permissions@oup.com.Be among the first to hear Trent Reznor's new album, and let us know what you make of it
So here it is, the eighth album from Nine Inch Nails, and the first since 2008's The Slip. There are collaborators you would expect – Atticus Ross and Alan Moulder are on hand – and some you wouldn't: who'd have expected Lindsay Buckingham of Fleetwood Mac to crop up on a Nine Inch Nails album, let alone the king of the fretless bass session players, Pino Palladino?
This is a new Trent Reznor, free of what he told the Guardian was "an unending bottomless pit of rage and self-loathing inside me … And I'm happy that I don't feel that way any more. I've learned to recognise, a lot of it forced through the process of recovery, that I'm wired wrong in certain ways, the chemical balance of my brain is off in terms of depression a little bit. This record was written as the other side of that journey. The despair and loneliness and rage and isolation and the not-fitting-in aspect that still is in me, but I can express that in a way that feels more appropriate to who I am now. And often that rage is quieter."
So listen in, and tell us what you think in the comments below.Norwich City boss Alex Neil confirms no bids for Robbie Brady
Norwich City's Euro 2016 Robbie Brady has been the subject of interest confirms Alex Neil. Picture by Paul Chesterton/Focus Images Ltd ©Focus Images Limited www.focus-images.co.uk +447814 482222
Alex Neil insists there have been no offers for Norwich City’s Republic of Ireland international Robbie Brady.
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The 24-year-old has been touted with a host of Premier League clubs following his starring role for the Irish at Euro2016 with reports claiming City had slapped a £20m price tag on the Dubliner.
Neil reiterated at Colney on Friday morning Brady will remain a Norwich player until a potential top flight suitor reaches the Canaries’ valuation.
“We have had a couple of contacts and different things and asking about his availability but in terms of firm offers then no,” he said. “I don’t think anybody is naïve enough to think we need to keep our fingers crossed he stays here. It is going to be a case of if people come in and offer the right money we will have a look at it. But if they don’t then the simple fact is he will be here and Robbie being the lad he is and the player he is he will go and attack the season.
“We are not trying to actively sell Robbie, by any means, and if he was here at the start of the season I would be delighted. Like anything else, every single player has a price, regardless of what club you are at.”
Neil completed a deal for Liverpool starlet Sergi Canos earlier this week and the Scot insists Norwich will not stop there.
“We will be doing business before the end of the window. No doubt about that,” he said. “I am not going to specify what positions but we have a lot of irons in a lot of fires and hopefully something will happen quite soon.
“Steve Stone has come in (as interim chief executive) and to be fair is working extremely hard to do his bit behind the scenes. He has been a big help. We are certainly making progress on certain things but like Canos, we are the type of club who don’t publicise a lot in the press. When it is done we let people know.”
Neil confirmed on Friday morning young back-up Remi Matthews will join Hamilton on a season-long loan.There are many ways to show your support for a candidate.
Some buy bumper stickers or T-shirts. I, however, took what some might think was an extreme path.
Aartistic Inc, a tattoo parlor in Winooski, Vermont, is giving away free Bernie Sanders tattoos to anyone who wants one. I took this as an opportunity to show my support.
A question that I get asked daily is: “Will you regret it if he does not win?”
The answer is simple: no. Because even if he does not win the nomination, this is just the start of something very big – a movement, more than just a campaign. And, surprising as it may seem, Bernie Sanders has influenced me greatly, even before his candidacy for president of the United States.
I lived in Vermont for 18 years, and I have personally experienced Bernie’s contributions to our state. While mayor of Burlington in the 1980s, he took our waterfront railyard and transformed it into a beautiful landmark of leisure and tourism in for those living in the community and the surrounding area. In May 2015 I had the pleasure of viewing Bernie Sanders announce his presidency on the waterfront. It was an incredible moment for anyone who had Vermont and Senator Sanders near to their heart.
This is why it was so simple for me to do something others might consider so “drastic”. Sanders is truly an iconic figure to me, as I believe he will be so to many others in our country’s future. He will go down in history for starting an uprising of Americans – prompting us to stand up and saying enough is enough. The billionaires own our country’s political system and we want to reclaim our democracy.
I’m 24, but I have never voted in a presidential election before. To tell you the truth, Bernie Sanders is the first candidate who has ever gotten me excited about politics. He is the first candidate who has ever made me feel like he truly cared about the people and was for the people. He doesn’t attack his opposing candidates, and instead focuses on the issues. He has not only opened my eyes, but those of millions of Americans.
My tattoo not only symbolizes my support for Bernie, but also serves as a reminder to myself for years to come: he started something big, a revolution in people’s thinking, that I am so proud to have been a part of.Image copyright Getty Images Image caption Sir Bruce Forsyth said if people are suffering "it can be more cruel to do nothing"
Sir Bruce Forsyth has called for a change in the law on assisted dying so that people can choose to die with "a bit of dignity left".
He said watching his first wife Penny Calvert spend her last years in a care home with dementia had convinced him people should not be "left to suffer".
Sir Bruce visited regularly to help with her care until she died last year.
He told the Mail on Sunday it could often be "more cruel to do nothing" than to let someone die.
"It's a terrible illness, awful to see and awful for everyone close to the person suffering," he said of his first wife's dementia.
"It's a very difficult situation. She didn't remember me. It's just so awful to have your mind and your memories taken away from you."
Sir Bruce, 87, continued: "It bothers me an awful lot that people are just left to suffer. If I had Alzheimer's or dementia I would do something about it.
"The law should be changed and if people want to die with a bit of dignity left they should be able to do so.
"If it is what the person wants and it can be proved they are living a life of suffering it can be more cruel to do nothing. I'd like that right for myself."
Image copyright Getty Images Image caption Sir Bruce and his wife Wilnelia Merced, who is a former Miss World
The Alzheimer's Society said: "Everyone experiences dementia differently and it can be extremely difficult and painful to find yourself losing your memories and abilities. It is important that people with dementia know there is information and support out there so they don't have to struggle.
"The Alzheimer's Society is not calling for a change in the law on assisted dying or euthanasia. We believe that people with dementia are entitled to good end of the life care. Improving staff training and awareness is vital to make people's final days as comfortable as possible.
"This must include the maintenence of dignity of each person and their loved ones."
Sir Bruce married Ms Calvert in 1953 and they had three children before they split up 20 years later. However the pair remained on good terms and he helped nurse her through her illness after she went in to a home in 2008.
The veteran presenter, who quit as the host of Strictly Come Dancing last year, has been married to third wife Wilnelia Merced since 1983.
'Huge concern'
Other names who have spoken out in support of assisted dying include late author Terry Pratchett, Sir Richard Branson and Professor Stephen Hawking.
Labour peer Lord Falconer has tabled a bill asking that patients with less than six months to live be allowed to take their own life with the help of a doctor.
However Judge Baroness Butler-Sloss is against the bill, which she says would "cross a line" towards euthanasia.
Alistair Thompson from Care Not Killing told the BBC: "Clearly comments like these are disappointing, but what we need to do is look at the level of care.
"There are cases where people have not received the right level of care and that is what we should be looking at or assessing - rather than making such a huge step in the law and saying, 'you are not entitled to the same levels of protection as the young and able bodied'. Rather than putting people at risk."
He added: "When you look at the detailed polling on this issue, there is a huge amount of concern among the general population about how people might feel pressured into ending their lives - because they may feel like a care burden or a financial burden.
"It sends a very bad message."At home in Iceland, Gylfi Sigurdsson’s face stares down from billboards advertising everything from Pepsi to the Premier League. Arguably his country’s most famous footballer now Eidur Gudjohnsen’s career is winding down, the Swansea City midfielder has a former Miss Iceland on his arm, the biggest brands pursuing him and is not bad at taking free-kicks. Could this be Iceland’s David Beckham? “You can say that if you want,” Sigurdsson says, laughing.
Nicknamed the Ice Man – a moniker Brendan Rodgers, one of his former managers, was particularly fond of – Sigurdsson is coolness personified. He strolls into the interview room an hour and 45 minutes late, which would be a tad annoying but for the fact he is such a nice bloke and has a good excuse – Sigurdsson, in keeping with his reputation, was out on the training field practising.
Sigurdsson talks like he plays – intelligently – although there is one thing that, on the face of it, is not quite in keeping with the 25-year-old’s suave image. On his Wikipedia page, under “Business Interests” it mentions how Sigurdsson is a “prominent member of the Icelandic fishing industry”, having become chairman of a company in his homeland in 2011, and his boats catch lumpfish, cod, wolffish and plaice.
At Swansea it is well known this is total nonsense and, as a result, a subject which is a source of annoyance to Sigurdsson whenever it is mentioned. In which case, why has he not bothered to edit the damn thing? “I’ve got more important things to do!” Sigurdsson says. “I’d rather play golf than go on to Wikipedia!”
Although Sigurdsson was kicking a football as soon as he could walk, he loves golf. He plays off “four or five” and his brother is a professional in Iceland, where he runs a driving range. With that in mind, it is easy to imagine Sigurdsson’s excitement when he spotted Rory McIlroy wandering outside Old Trafford on the opening day of the season with the Claret Jug in his hand. “He had been there presenting the Open,” Sigurdsson says. “I was just waiting for a taxi because I was going back to the train station. All of a sudden Rory walked past with the trophy, so I asked him for a picture.”
While McIlroy was happy to oblige, word has it the world No1 golfer was oblivious to the fact he was posing for a photograph with the player who had just scored Swansea’s winning goal against the team he supports. “Well, Rory said: ‘All the best’,” Sigurdsson says, “so I’m assuming he knew who I was … unless he was just being polite!”
As for fishing, it transpires it is Sigurdsson’s father whose life revolves around what is caught at sea. When Sigurdsson joined Reading at the age of 15, both parents moved to England with him, and his father ran his fishing business in Iceland via a mobile phone in Berkshire. He also found time to offer Reading’s manager some matchday advice on his son.
Following Brian McDermott’s first game in charge, after Rodgers had been sacked, Sigurdsson’s father politely made the point that substituting a player who scores goals is not a good idea. “To be fair, those two have a good relationship, it’s not like my dad would come up to Garry Monk now and say that,” Sigurdsson says, smiling. “Brian was involved when I was in the youth team and I think they knew each other quite well. But it’s quite funny he said that to him.”
Monk, the Swansea manager, was delighted to get his hands on Sigurdsson this summer. Signed as part of the deal that took Michel Vorm and Ben Davies to Tottenham Hotspur, Sigurdsson is back at the club where he enjoyed a successful loan spell during the second half of the 2011-12 season. With two goals and four assists to his name this season, Sigurdsson is doing the business for Swansea again.
“You never know how long it’s going to take for you to get the first goal but it was nice to get it in the first game [against Manchester United], that probably took some pressure off and allowed me to play my own game and relax,” Sigurdsson says. “But the team plays really good attacking football, so it’s easy to get into the flow of it and enjoy it.”
Getting into the flow of it was trickier at Tottenham. Sigurdsson made 58 Premier League appearances for Spurs after joining from Hoffenheim in 2012, but completed a full game on only nine occasions and rarely got the chance to play in his favourite role. “Of course a little bit of frustration,” Sigurdsson says, reflecting on his time at Spurs. “I think every professional player wants to play every game and every minute because you never know when you’re going to get a chance to score, in the first minute or the 90th. I also probably played too much on the left for my liking – I’m not that kind of player who is going to get the ball and run past the full-back. Of course if it happens, you’ve got to do a job for the team, and no problem. But I feel better – and think you get more out of me – playing me through the middle.”
Those who know Sigurdsson well are convinced he has the ability to play at the highest level, but if there is one slight reservation it relates to that situation at Spurs and whether such an affable man is single-minded enough to bang on the manager’s door and ask to play in his best position. Did Sigurdsson do that at Tottenham?
“You have a chat with the manager, I think it’s just the way you do it,” he says. “You can’t go in screaming, I think you’ve got to be doing it the right way, speaking to the manager and asking for what he’s thinking, how he sees you and what position he thinks will get the most out of you. We had a chat. Tim [Sherwood] came in and I played more through the middle, which I enjoyed a lot.”
Sigurdsson, in fairness, speaks with genuine fondness about his time at Spurs. He loved playing with Gareth Bale in his first season, particularly enjoyed the experience of the Europa League and waxes lyrical about the club’s facilities. “An unbelievable training ground. Probably too good,” he says.
At the same time, he could not tolerate another season being a bit-part player. “It was a tough decision to [leave] because Tottenham are a big club, I really enjoyed playing for them, especially in the London derbies and games like that. But once you finish your career, you don’t want to be looking back and thinking: ‘Maybe I spent too much time there sitting on the bench and not playing.’ I had the chance to come here, I really enjoyed it when I was here last time, and I’m playing regularly, so I think it was the right move for me.”
The personnel and the surroundings have changed a little since Sigurdsson was at Swansea before. Monk is the manager and not a team-mate – “That was strange for the first couple of weeks, I’m not going to lie,” Sigurdsson says – and interviews like this one no longer take place in a cafe at a leisure club, which was where the players reported for training in their first season in the Premier League.
“At Virgin Active,” Sigurdsson says, smiling at the memory. “Swansea have come a massive way since then. They’re in the process of finishing off a new training ground and, no disrespect to the players who were here before, I think the size and the strength of the squad is bigger and better. The club is moving on, they’re talking about expanding the stadium, that just shows the ambition.”
The target for this season, Sigurdsson says, should be “a good FA Cup run and sitting somewhere nicely above 10th place”, which feels realistic given that Swansea are fifth going into Saturday’s home game against Newcastle United. “As for me personally, I’ll keep my goals to myself,” Sigurdsson adds. “You can ask me in May whether I achieved them or not.”PFF's Team of the Week selections following Week 6
By Steve Palazzolo • Oct 11, 2016
Another action-packed weekend brought us memorable performances from skill position players, breakout games from pass-rushers and a Heisman-worthy effort from Jabrill Peppers at any position he pleased. As usual, it’s PFF’s play-by-play grading of every FBS game that allows us to find the weekend’s best performances, beyond just the usual hype. Here’s your Week 6 Team of the Week in college football.
Quarterback: Baker Mayfield, Oklahoma 76.7
After a slow start, Mayfield found his groove against Texas, finishing 22-for-31 for 390 yards and three touchdowns. His best throw of the day came on a post route to fellow Team of the Week star Dede Westbrook for one of his three touchdowns. Mayfield consistently moved the chains, through the air and on the ground, while missing only a handful of throws on the afternoon.
Running back: Alvin Kamara, Tennessee 88.1 and Ryan Nall, Oregon State 83.3
Texas A&M couldn’t tackle Kamara who broke six tackles in the run game and another seven as a receiver in one of the best performances by a running back all season. He rushed for 127 yards and two touchdowns on his 18 carries and caught all eight of his targets for 161 yards and another score. Nall only had 14 official carries but he found the end zone on three of them and ran for 221 yards, forcing 10 missed tackles along the way.
Wide receiver: Dede Westbrook, Oklahoma 88.5 and Cedrick Wilson, Boise State 84.7
Westbrook was an easy selection after catching all 10 of his targets for 232 yards and three scores against Texas. He got behind the defense with nifty route running while also showing well with the ball in his hands, picking up 108 of his yards after the catch. Wilson found the end zone three times, catching nine total passes on 12 targets for 167 yards. It was the best game in what has become a breakout season for Wilson.
Slot: Thomas Sperbeck, Boise State 80.3
Boise State dominates the wide receiver list as Sperbeck had 198 yards and two touchdowns of his own with a national-high 152 of those yards coming from the slot. His 8.44 yards per route from the slot also paved the way for the week.
Tight end: Hayden Hurst, South Carolina 84.7
Hurst had his best game of the season as he stretched the middle of the field for South Carolina and made a number of key catches on his way to 86 yards, 48 of which came after the catch (8.0 YAC per reception). Hurst also had a reasonable performance in the run game.
Offensive tackle: Andreas Knappe, UConn 83.7 and Forrest Lamp, Western Kentucky 82.1
With a perfect day in pass protection and strong run blocking on the right side of the Huskies’ line, Knappe earns the spot with his best game of the season. Lamp returned to action with another perfect day in pass protection, now putting him at 155 pass blocking attempts on the year with only one pressure surrendered. He also held his own as a run blocker.
Guard: Jordan Roos, Purdue 85.0 and Isaiah Wynn, Georgia 82.7
Few players have improved as much as Roos this season and he continued his strong play with an outstanding run blocking effort and clean day in pass protection. He did some of his best work on the move as a puller and in the screen game. Wynn had a similar day for Georgia as the Bulldogs ran behind him in the power game while he did not surrender a pressure on his 18 attempts.
Center: Evan Brown, SMU 85.9
Brown continually found second-level linebackers to open holes for SMU runners while only losing handful of times on his 90 snaps. He surrendered one negated pressure on his 56 snaps in pass protection.
Defense
Edge rusher: Joe Mathis, Washington 88.5 and Harold Landry, Boston College 87.2
Mathis was the best player on the field in Washington’s domination of Oregon as he picked up a sack, two QB hits, and seven hurries on only 22 rushes while adding two stops in the run game. Landry’s Eagles’ didn’t fare as well, but it didn’t stop him from posting a sack, QB hit, and four hurries on his 31 rushes. He’s heated up in recent weeks as he starts to live up to his preseason PFF College 101 hype.
Defensive interior: Kingsley Opara, Maryland 85.7 and Greg Gaines, Washington 83.7
Opara made a huge impact on hi s43 snaps, pressuring the quarterback with a hit and three hurries on only 14 rushes while posting the week’s third-best grade against the run at 85.8. Gaines continued his strong play as he now owns the ninth-best grade among interior defensive linemen in the nation. He had a well-rounded 81.2 grade against the run and 83.0 as a pass-rusher as he picked up two sacks and four hurries on only 22 rushes.
Linebacker: Jerome Baker, Ohio State 88.2; Andrew Motuapuaka, Virginia Tech 87.0; Zach Cunningham, Vanderbilt 86.6
Baker had the best game of his short career, leading Ohio State with seven stops and leading the nation with an 88.9 run defense grade this week. Hurricane or not, Virginia Tech had a dominant performance against North Carolina and Motuapuaka led the team in both solo tackles with 12 and stops with five while capping the day with a fourth quarter interception. Cunningham brought his usual aggressive brand of football to Kentucky, and he finished with eight stops on his way to an 86.1 grade against the run.
Cornerback: Jace Whittaker, Arizona 89.7 and Minkah Fitzpatrick, Alabama 88.7
With four passes defensed and only 11 yards surrendered on nine targets, it was a career day for Whittaker, even with a touchdown surrendered in the fourth quarter. Fitzpatrick got his hands on the ball five times, knocking away two and picking off three more and those big plays offset some of the six catches he gave up on 12 targets.
Safety: Jabrill Peppers, Michigan 82.9 (not including offense/special teams) and Nate Holley, Kent State 87.6
Let’s put Peppers at safety this week as he’s allowed to make the team at multiple positions. He got into the action as a pass rusher with a QB hit and a hurry while also playing well against the run, but it was his electric punt return that was negated by penalty and 74 yards on three carries leading to two touchdowns that cemented his place on the team. For the third-straight year, Holley is quietly one of the best safeties in the country and he now leads all safeties with 32 stops after picking up six more against Buffalo while adding in a pass defensed.
From special teams analyst Gordon McGuinness:
Kicker: Jonathan Barnes, Louisiana Tech
Barnes was only asked to kick two field goals this weekend, but both came from over 40 yards, with one coming from beyond 50, and he made them both.
Punter: Mitch Wishnowsky, Utah
Wishnowsky had a great game for Utah, averaging 50.0 ney yards per punt, and seeing five of his six punts land inside the 20 yard line. None of his punts were returned, with two resulting in fair catches and four being downed.
K/PR: Adoree’ Jackson, USC
Jackson helped spark USC on Saturday with two big returns. While he didn’t find the end zone, he did have a 38-yard kick return, and a 47-yard punt return.
SEC — Gordon McGuinness
QB: Jalen Hurts, Alabama, 72.7
HB: Alvin Kamara, Tennessee, 88.1
FB: Christian Payne, Georgia, 78.3
WR: Josh Reynolds, Texas A&M, 82.1; Christian Kirk, Texas A&M, 78.9
TE: Hayden Hurst, South Carolina, 84.7
OT: Robert Leff, Auburn, 76.3; Darius James, Auburn, 75.4
OG: Isaiah Wynn, Georgia, 82.7; Lamond Gaillard, Georgia, 75.2
C: Frank Ragnow, Arkansas, 82.1
ED: Derek Barnett, Tennessee, 83.7; Tim Williams, Alabama, 82.5
DI: Nifae Lealao, Vanderbilt, 83.6; Daylon Mack, Texas A&M, 81.1
LB: Zach Cunningham, Vanderbilt, 86.6; Colton Jumper, Tennessee, 84.4; Roquan Smith, Georgia, 84.2
CB: Minkah Fitzpatrick, Alabama, 88.7; Malkom Parrish, Georgia, 86.0
S: Ronnie Harrison, Alabama, 80.3; Ryan White, Vanderbilt, 78.3
K: Austin MacGinnis, Kentucky
P: Toby Baker, Arkansas
K/PR: Darrius Sims, Vanderbilt
ACC — John Breitenbach
QB Deshaun Watson, Clemson 74.7
WR Deon Cain, Clemson 73.7; Stacy Coley, Miami 73.9
OT Bentley Spain, North Carolina 78.1; Yosuah Nijman, Virginia Tech 73.7
OG Kc Mcdermott, Miami 77.4; Tommy Hatton, North Carolina 74.0
C Lucas Crowley, North Carolina 78.1
TE Cole Cook, North Carolina State 75.1
HB Wayne Gallman, Clemson 72.5
DE Harold Landry, Boston College 87.2; Chad Thomas, Miami 77.2
DT Dexter Lawrence, Clemson 83.2; Nazair Jones, North Carolina 79.9
LB Andrew Motuapuaka, Virginia Tech 87.0; Ben Boulware, Clemson 85.7
LB Jerod Fernandez, North Carolina State 84.0
CB Cordrea Tankersley, Clemson 79.4; Greg Stroman, Virginia Tech 82.9
S Jarius Morehead, North Carolina State 81.4; AJ Westbrook, Florida State 81.1
Big 12 — Bryson Vesnaver
QB: Baker Mayfield, Oklahoma, 76.7
HB: Samaje Perine, Oklahoma, 77.7; D’Onta Foreman, Texas, 76.4
WR: Dede Westbrook, Oklahoma, 88.5; James Washington, Oklahoma State, 82.5; Keke Coutee, Texas Tech, 78.6
OT: Victor Salako, Oklahoma State, 82.2; Zachary Crabtree, Oklahoma State, 81.3
OG: Marcus Keyes, Oklahoma State, 80.6; Patrick Scoggins, Iowa State, 78.7
C: Joe Gibson, Kansas, 80.7
ED: Josh Carraway, TCU, 81.2; Ogbonnia Okoronkwo, Oklahoma, 80.6
DI: Vincent Taylor, Oklahoma State, 83.4; Ondre Pipkins, Texas Tech, 80.5
LB: Courtney Arnick, Kansas, 83.0; Travin Howard, TCU, 81.8; Chad Whitener, Oklahoma State, 81.4
CB: Brandon Stewart, Kansas, 81.8; Ranthony Texada, TCU, 80.9; Ashton Lampkin, Oklahoma State, 78.7
S: Tre Flowers, Oklahoma State, 83.9; Nick Orr, TCU, 79.0
K: Trent Domingue, Texas
P: Nick Walsh, Kansas State
KR: Bryon Pringle, Kansas State
Pac-12 — Jordan Plocher
QB: Jake Browning, Washington, 73.9
WR: River Cracraft, Washington State, 86.0; Dante Pettis, Washington, 84.3; John Ross, Washington, 77.6
OT: Trey Adams, Washington, 80.0; Garrett Bolles, Utah, 79.8
OG: Cody O’Connell, Washington State, 82.2; Chris Borrayo, Cal, 79.5
C: Nico Falah, USC, 78.5
RB: Ryan Nall, Oregon State, 81.3
TE: Austin Roberts, UCLA, 84.3
ED: Joe Mathis, Washington, 88.5; JoJo Wicker, ASU, 84.0
DI: Greg Gaines, Washington, 83.7; Pasoni Tasini, Utah, 82.3; Elijah Qualls, Washington, 82.0
LB: Raymond Davidson, Cal, 85.2; Jimmie Swain, Oregon, 81.4
CB: Jace Whitaker, Arizona, 89.7; Fabian Moreau, UCLA, 84.7
S: Laiu Moeakiola, ASU, 85.5; Jaleel Wadood, UCLA, 82.8
Big Ten — Josh Liskiewitz
QB: Trace McSorley, Penn State 72.8
WR: Malik Turner, Illinois 84.5; Jehu Chesson, Michigan 72.2
RB: Ty Isaac, Michigan 76.1
TE: George Kittle, Iowa 81.2
OT: Cole Croston, Iowa 81.9; Brendan Mahon, Penn State 77.3
OG: Jordan Roos, Purdue 85.0; Terrance Davis, Maryland 79.0
OC: Pat Elflein, Ohio State 77.1
DI: Kinglsey Opara, Maryland 85.7; Dre’Mont Jones, Ohio State 83.3; Steven Richardson, Minnesota 82.3
ED: Nick Bosa, Ohio State 85.1; Anthony Nelson, Iowa 80.0
LB: Jerome Baker, Ohio State 88.2; Ben Gedeon, Michigan 84.3
CB: John Reid, Penn State 89.5; Jalen Myrick, Minnesota 87.3
S: Jabrill Peppers, Michigan 82.9; Delano Hill, Michigan 81.3
Group of 5 — Zoltan Buday
QB: Mike White, Western Kentucky 76.0
RB: Donnel Pumphrey, San Diego State 87.8
WR: Thomas Owens, Florida International 86.0; Cedrick Wilson, Boise State 84.7
Slot: Thomas Sperbeck, Boise State 80.3
TE: Tyler Conklin, Central Michigan 78.6
OT: Andreas Knappe, Connecticut 83.7; Forrest Lamp, Western Kentucky
OG: Tyler Bowling, Tulsa 81.7; Micah St. Andrew, Fresno State 81.2
C: Evan Brown, SMU 85.9
ED: Haason Reddick, Temple 86.4; Malik Reed, Nevada 85.8
DI: Mackendy Cheridor, Georgia State 84.0; Ed Oliver, Houston 78.1
LB: Blair Brown, Ohio 89.9; Xavier Woodson-Luster, Arkansas State 80.3; Calvin Munson, San Diego State 82.4
CB: Justin Backus, Louisiana-Monroe 89.6; Amari Coleman, Central Michigan 86.5
S: Nate Holley, Kent State 87.6; Chris Morley, Memphis 81.4A British teenager who made a graveside pledge to devote herself to the PKK cause has been convicted of intending to join the proscribed Kurdish terrorist organisation to fight Islamic State.
Silhan Özçelik, 18, from north London, ran away from home, took a train to Brussels, and left behind letters and a video for her distraught family telling them she wanted to be a guerrilla fighter and was joining the Kurdistan Workers’ party’s women’s militia.
She is the first British citizen to be convicted for trying to join the campaign against Isis jihadis in Syria.
Özçelik, who was 17 when she went to Belgium in October 2014, had been “smitten” by the PKK since she was 13 after watching a film, Comrade Beritan, about a PKK female guerrilla who threw herself off a cliff rather than face capture and died in 1992.
She had also visited the Turkish grave of Leyla Saylemez, whose nom de guerre was Comrade Ronahi and one of three female PKK activists shot dead at a community centre in Paris in January 2013.
In the 25-minute video Özçelik left behind explaining her decision to her family, she said she had taken soil from Ronahi’s grave and made a promise, which she was now going to fulfil.
The jury at the Old Bailey dismissed Özçelik’s claim that she had invented the PKK story because she was running away to meet a 28-year-old man in Belgium with whom she hoped to kindle a romantic relationship, and wanted to spare her family shame in the strict, traditional Kurdish community.
Dan Pawson-Pounds, prosecuting, said the video and letters, in which she passionately described her love for the PKK, her wish to become a militant and “bride to the mountains”, and her desire for her family to be proud of her, “couldn’t be clearer or more consistent” with her long-held ambition to be a fighter and guerrilla.
Özçelik had made the incriminating video because “she had no intention of ever returning to the UK”, the jury heard.
The court was told she had yearned for five years to join the PKK, her video explaining that she had tried to join previously, contacting someone “high ranking in the organisation” when she was 16, but being rejected because she was too young. She tried again at 17, but was once more rejected on the grounds of her “emotional decision”.
She wrote to her family: “I have been thinking about this for many years. I have been wanting to join for many years. Furthermore I am leaving my diary, and it is written in my diary … I wrote, every minute, how much I wanted to become a militant, how much I wanted to become a guerrilla, are all written in those pages.”
Özçelik was “passionately engaged” with the PKK cause. She spoke of her anger that Islamic State at that time was crushing her people in Kobani, the largely Kurdish city in Syria, and that no men were going out there to fight against Isis. She was attracted by the active role women were allowed to play in the PKK, the jury was told.
She wrote: “Maybe I will go to Kobani, or I will not go. That is a different matter. It is up to the PKK to decide. But I see myself as a fighter, I see myself as a militant, a guerrilla.”
Özçelik was the baby of her family. She was 10 years younger than the youngest of her three siblings and found life in the strictly traditional family home restrictive. Her father, a chef, and mother, a textile factory machinist, gained political asylum in 1993 and settled in Britain. Though born in London, Özçelik identified strongly with her Kurdish roots and told school friends she used the name Dersim, the Kurdish name for the city of Tunceli – where the family of Comrade Beritan, the nom de guerre of Gülnaz Karataş, was from.
Posters, collages and Photoshopped pictures of PKK slogans and armed female guerrilla fighters were found in her bedroom. She had “glorified” the fighting and use of guns, especially by women, the prosecution said.
At the time she ran away she was a student of media studies at Holloway College. She had gained nine GSCEs |
Block Rate 13 Potential 45 Durability 1 Socket 피그리 스피어 (??? - 1H Spear) Purple Rarity iPWR 322 Lv. 315 293-358 Physical Attack 38 Critical Rate 461 Critical Damage 161 Medium Type Attack 258 Large Type Attack 12 Potential 42 Durability 2 Sockets 윙샤드 스피어 (??? - 1H Spear) Orange Rarity iPWR 368 Lv. 315 334-409 Physical Attack 1 AoE Attack Ratio 32 Strength 26 Accuracy 294 Medium Type Attack 368 Large Type Attack 13 Potential 45 Durability 3 Sockets 세크메트 (??? - 2H Spear) Purple Rarity iPWR 403 Lv. 315 467-633 Physical Attack 2 AoE Attack Ratio 28 Strength 20 Accuracy -225 Cloth Type Attack 726 Leather Type Attack -120 Plate Type Attack 12 Potential 42 Durability 2 Sockets 리가드 혼 파이크 (??? - 2H Spear) Orange Rarity iPWR 461 Lv. 315 534-722 Physical Attack 48 Critical Rate 501 Critical Damage 13 Potential 45 Durability 3 Sockets 라이온 헤드 대거 (Lion's Head Dagger - Dagger) Purple Rarity iPWR 403 Lv. 315 318-373 Physical Attack 12 Dexterity 8 Evasion 321 Fire Property Attack -15 Ice Property Resistance 12 Potential 42 Durability 1 Socket 에멘가드 대거 (Emen Guard Dagger - Dagger) Orange Rarity iPWR 461 Lv. 315 363-426 Physical Attack 37 Critical Rate 13 Potential 45 Durability 1 Socket 블러드 스틸러 (Blood Stiller - Dagger) Orange Rarity iPWR 555 Lv. 330 437-513 Physical Attack -18 Constitution -115 Physical Defense -115 Magic Defense 17 Potential 12 Durability 2 Socket 비엔나라지스 스태프 (Vienna's Large Staff - Staff) Purple Rarity iPWR 403 Lv. 315 529 Magic Attack 72 Intelligence 30 Spirit 22 Evasion 435 HP Recovery 12 Potential 42 Durability 2 Sockets 리가드 혼 스태프 (??? - Staff) Orange Rarity iPWR 461 Lv. 315 604 Magic Attack 103 Intelligence 41 Constitution 45 Spirit 13 Potential 45 Durability 3 Sockets 더블 스택 (Double Stack - Pistol) Purple Rarity iPWR 403 Lv. 315 427 Physical Attack 15 Dexterity 8 Intelligence 128 Maximum Attack 77 Minimum Attack 12 Potential 42 Durability 2 Sockets 아스파나 리볼버 (??? - Pistol) Orange Rarity iPWR 461 Lv. 315 488 Physical Attack 15 Strength 11 Constitution 3 Spirit 28 Critical Rate 226 Critical Damage 7 Block Penetration 13 Potential 45 Durability 3 Sockets 라이온 헤드 캐논 (Lion's Head Cannon) Purple Rarity Cannoneer Only iPWR 403 Lv. 315 370-687 Physical Attack 15 Strength -11 Dexterity 8 Accuracy 367 Critical Damage 12 Potential 42 Durability 2 Sockets 에멘가드 캐논 (Emen Guard Cannon - Cannon) Orange Rarity Cannoneer Only iPWR 461 Lv. 315 423-785 Physical Attack 2 AoE Attack Ratio 302 Maximum Attack -12 Accuracy 12 Critical Rate 13 Potential 45 Durability 3 Sockets 드라군 파이퍼 (Deuragan Fighter - Musket) Purple Rarity Musketeer Only iPWR 403 Lv. 315 541-598 Physical Attack 1 AoE Attack Ratio 115 Maximum Attack 75 Minimum Attack -13 Physical Defense 15 Accuracy 12 Potential 42 Durability 2 Sockets 드라군 파이퍼 (Emen Guard Musket - Musket) Orange Rarity Musketeer Only iPWR 461 Lv. 315 618-683 Physical Attack 1 AoE Attack Ratio 33 Strength 35 Dexterity 15 Critical Rate 15 Accuracy 99 Block Penetration 13 Potential 45 Durability 3 Sockets 마블 그랜드 크로스 (Marvel Grand Cross - Crossbow) Purple Rarity iPWR 299 Lv. 270 374-413 Physical Attack 6 Strength 23 Accuracy 157 Critical Attack +2 to all Quarrel Shooter Skills +1 to Running Shot 12 Potential 42 Durability 2 Sockets 비레타 메이스 (Bireta Mace - Mace) Purple Rarity iPWR 296 Lv. 270 300 Magic Attack 488 Physical Attack -15 Constitution 101 Spirit -3 Block Rate 11 Potential 41 Durability 2 Sockets 아틸라 (Attila - Mace) Purple Rarity iPWR 296 Lv. 270 324 Magic Attack 1 AoE Attack Ratio 369 Physical Attack 15 Intelligence 41 Spirit 181 Holy Property Defense +2 to all Priest Skill Levels 10 Potential 14 Durability 2 Sockets ----- 뉴트 로브 (Newt Armor) Purple Rarity iPWR 292 Lv. 270 79 Physical Defense 28 Magic Amplification 24 Magic Defense 1305 HP 12 Potential 36 Durability 2 Sockets 뉴트 팬츠 (Newt Pants) Purple Rarity iPWR 290 Lv. 270 77 Physical Defense 10 Physical Defense 24 Magic Defense 385 SP 12 Potential 36 Durability 2 Sockets 뉴트 부츠 (Newt Boots) Purple Rarity iPWR 290 Lv. 270 117 Evasion 11 Magic Defense 257 SP 36 SP Recovery 12 Potential 36 Durability 1 Sockets 뉴트 글로브 (Newt Gloves) Purple Rarity iPWR 290 Lv. 270 72 Magic Amplification 11 Magic Defense 321 HP 12 Potential 36 Durability 1 Sockets ----- 뉴트 레더 아머 (Newt Leather Armor) Purple Rarity iPWR 292 Lv. 270 106 Physical Defense 19 Evasion 47 Critical Resistance 12 Potential 38 Durability 2 Sockets 뉴트 레더 팬츠 (Newt Leather Pants) Purple Rarity iPWR 290 Lv. 270 102 Physical Defense 1 AoE Defense Ratio 20 Magic Defense 385 SP 12 Potential 38 Durability 2 Sockets 뉴트 레더 부츠 (Newt Leather Boots) Purple Rarity iPWR 290 Lv. 270 147 Evasion 15 Stamina 64 Critical Damage 12 Potential 38 Durability 1 Sockets 뉴트 레더 글로브 (Newt Leather Gloves) Purple Rarity iPWR 290 Lv. 270 147 Accuracy 19 Physical Damage 18 Critical Rate 12 Potential 38 Durability 1 Sockets ----- 뉴트 플레이트 아머 (Newt Plate Armor) Purple Rarity iPWR 292 Lv. 270 159 Physical Defense 1591 HP 23 Fire Property Resistance 12 Potential 40 Durability 2 Sockets 뉴트 플레이트 레깅스 (Newt Plate Pants) Purple Rarity iPWR 290 Lv. 270 154 Physical Defense 1430 HP 21 Fire Property Resistance 12 Potential 40 Durability 2 Sockets 뉴트 플레이트 그리브 (Newt Plate Boots) Purple Rarity iPWR 290 Lv. 270 117 Evasion 408 HP 23 Stamina 39 Block 12 Potential 40 Durability 1 Sockets 뉴트 플레이트 건틀릿 (Newt Plate Gloves) Purple Rarity iPWR 290 Lv. 270 117 Accuracy 408 HP 29 HP Recovery 40 Block Penetration 12 Potential 40 Durability 1 Sockets ----- Manahas Set 2-Pieces: 240 HP Recovery 3-Pieces: 6 to All Stats 4-Pieces: 110 Additional Ice Damage, +12 Strength & Spirit 마나하스 아머 (Manahas Armor) Blue Rarity iPWR 298 Lv. 270 108 Physical Defense 645 HP 15 Ice Property Resistance 8 Poison Property Resistance 1 Sockets 마나하스 팬츠 (Manahas Pants) Blue Rarity iPWR 294 Lv. 270 107 Physical Defense 6 Magic Defense 645 HP 15 Ice Property Resistance 9 Potential 28 Durability 2 Sockets 마나하스 부츠 (Manahas Boots) Blue Rarity iPWR 290 Lv. 270 147 Evasion 14 Evasion 10 Stamina 15 Ice Property Resistance 9 Potential 28 Durability 1 Sockets 마나하스 글로브 (Manahas Gloves) Blue Rarity iPWR 286 Lv. 270 145 Accuracy 14 Accuracy 11 Block Penetration 15 Ice Property Resistance 9 Potential 28 Durability 1 Sockets ----- 실리 플레이트 부츠 (Seeley Plate Boots) Purple Rarity Swordsman Only iPWR 278 Lv. 270 112 Evasion -24 Physical Defense 16 Evasion 511 HP 2 Movement Speed 10 Potential 38 Durability 2 Sockets 셰이드 그리브 (??? Boots) Purple Rarity Swordsman Only iPWR 278 Lv. 270 112 Evasion -71 Physical Defense 131 Magic Defense 534 HP 5 Fire Property Resistance 11 Potential 40 Durability 2 Sockets 데블린 건틀릿 (??? Gloves) Purple Rarity Swordsman Only iPWR 278 Lv. 270 112 Accuracy 15 Stamina 112 HP -2 Block 15 Block Penetration Additional slash damage to plate type defense. 10 Potential 34 Durability 2 Sockets 스윕 오그마 건틀릿 (??? Gloves) Purple Rarity Swordsman Only iPWR 278 Lv. 270 112 Accuracy 15 Stamina 112 HP -2 Block 15 Block Penetration Additional strike damage to leather type defense. 10 Potential 34 Durability 2 Sockets 드라그 네클리스 (??? Necklace) Purple Rarity iPWR 334 Lv. 270 98 Magic Defense 15 Strength 15 Stamina 8 Spirit 10 Attack Range 10 Fire Property Resistance 10 Holy Property Resistance 5 Dark Property Resistance 11 Potential 40 Durability 드라그 브레이슬릿 (??? Ring) Purple Rarity iPWR 312 Lv. 270 92 Magic Defense 12 Stamina 20 Magic Defense 420 SP -55 HP Recovery 11 Potential 41 Durability
RAW Paste Data
Other items from the update. SOME TRANSLATIONS MAY BE INCORRECT. THIS IS MOSTLY ACCURATE. THIS IS UPDATED AS OF 09/08/2016. PLEASE MESSAGE ME IN-GAME (Saintone, Klaipeda) IF THERE IS AN ERROR. ALSO NOTE: All items found in this Pastebin are tradeable with the exception of the iPWR 555 dagger, Marvel Grand Cross, Newt armor set recipes, and completed Newt items. 14 recipes for the iPWR 403 purple items come from the 290 dungeon. It is not yet known where the iPWR 461 orange items come from yet, though there are implications it comes from Fantasy Library, the 315 scenario instance (not a dungeon - separate entry count from normal dungeons; 1 for normal user & 2 for token user). Only the purple item recipes are confirmed (the recipes, both purple and orange, are tradeable as well). All iPWR 403 purple items AND 463 orange items require x25 Phydecium, x25 Ferinium, and x25 Portium AT THE MOMENT. The last material for both recipe types is an unknown rare mat (another ore, Uranium), which you need only one of. Please bare in mind it is perfectly possible that the orange recipe materials are a copy-paste placeholder of the purple item recipes. It's not impossible that if the orange recipes are not implemented yet, the recipes will change, and may ask you to do something like consume the purple item to create the orange (pure speculation). The iPWR 403 and 461 items were added in the 9/8/2016 bi-weekly Korean Tree of Savior maintenance and were explicitly stated to be obtainable by players. They do not simply exist in the files as unused assets. The 270 blue Manahas blue set is a direct upgrade of the Cafrisun set. The ice damage it adds for the four piece bonus is an additional line of damage, and not just regular property damage. The English names are rough translations. Only IMC knows how they'll translate most of these items. ----- 피레네 소드 (??? - 1H Sword) Purple Rarity iPWR 403 Lv. 315 336-447 Physical Attack 18 Constitution 3 AoE Defense Ratio 45 Evasion 330 Magic Defense 12 Potential 42 Durability 2 Sockets 아브도챠 (??? - 1H Sword) Orange Rarity iPWR 461 Lv. 315 418-511 Physical Attack 1 AoE Attack Ratio 158 Maximum Attack 245 Physical Defense 1837 HP 13 Potential 45 Durability 3 Sockets 게일 슬래셔 (Gale Slasher - 2H Sword) Purple Rarity iPWR 403 Lv. 315 427-793 Physical Attack 111 Physical Attack 30 Dexterity -30 Spirit 358 Minimum Damage 15 Critical Rate 15 Block Penetration 12 Potential 42 Durability 2 Sockets 사크미스 (??? - 2H Sword) Orange Rarity iPWR 461 Lv. 315 488-906 Physical Attack 2 AoE Attack Ratio 15 Strength -72 Constitution 20 Critical Rate 430 Critical Damage -150 HP Recovery 530 Dark Property Attack 180 Dark Property Resistance 13 Potential 45 Durability 3 Sockets 윈디아 로드 (??? - 1H Rod) Purple Rarity iPWR 403 Lv. 315 407 Magic Attack 60 Intelligence 25 Constitution 60 Spirit 13 Magic Amplification 12 Potential 42 Durability 2 Sockets 하트 오브 글로리 (Heart of Glory - Rod) Orange Rarity iPWR 461 Lv. 315 465 Magic Attack 88 Intelligence 13 Spirit 132 Physical Defense 127 SP Recovery 13 Potential 45 Durability 3 Sockets 아프가울레 보우 (??? - Bow) Purple Rarity iPWR 403 Lv. 315 520-781 Physical Attack 246 Maximum Attack 148 Minimum Attack 8 Accuracy 32 Critical Rate 12 Potential 42 Durability 2 Sockets 아스트라 보우 (Astra Bow - Bow) Orange Rarity iPWR 461 Lv. 315 595-892 Physical Attack 44 Dexterity 44 Critical Rate 476 Critical Damage 13 Potential 45 Durability 3 Sockets 아프가울레 보우 (Silver Hawk - Crossbow) Purple Rarity iPWR 403 Lv. 315 502-555 Physical Attack 16 Strength 28 Dexterity 211 Maximum Attack 102 Minimum Attack 12 Potential 42 Durability 2 Sockets 리가드 혼 크로스보우 (??? - Crossbow) Orange Rarity iPWR 461 Lv. 315 574-634 Physical Attack 1601 SP 28 Critical Rate 380 Critical Damage 13 Potential 45 Durability 3 Sockets 비엔나라지스 메이스 (??? - Mace) Purple Rarity iPWR 403 Lv. 315 374-439 Physical Attack 111 Intelligence 20 Constitution 532 Magic Attack 320 Maximum Attack 168 Minimum Attack 28 Critical Resistance -3 Block 12 Potential 42 Durability 2 Sockets 스컬 스매셔 (Skull Smasher - Mace) Orange Rarity iPWR 461 Lv. 330 465 Magic Attack 669 Physical Damage 92 Intelligence 33 Evasion 1838 HP 13 Potential 45 Durability 3 Sockets 라이온 헤드 실드 (Lion's Head Shield - Shield) Purple Rarity iPWR 403 Lv. 315 187 Physical Defense 40 Constitution 3 AoE Defense Ratio 15 Physical Defense 325 Magic Defense 3 Block Rate 12 Potential 42 Durability 1 Socket 에멘가드 실드 (Emen Guard Shield - Shield) Orange Rarity iPWR 461 Lv. 315 214 Physical Defense 67 Constitution 5 AoE Defense Ratio 22 Physical Defense 440 Magic Defense 1 Movement Speed 7 Block Rate 13 Potential 45 Durability 1 Socket 피그리 스피어 (??? - 1H Spear) Purple Rarity iPWR 322 Lv. 315 293-358 Physical Attack 38 Critical Rate 461 Critical Damage 161 Medium Type Attack 258 Large Type Attack 12 Potential 42 Durability 2 Sockets 윙샤드 스피어 (??? - 1H Spear) Orange Rarity iPWR 368 Lv. 315 334-409 Physical Attack 1 AoE Attack Ratio 32 Strength 26 Accuracy 294 Medium Type Attack 368 Large Type Attack 13 Potential 45 Durability 3 Sockets 세크메트 (??? - 2H Spear) Purple Rarity iPWR 403 Lv. 315 467-633 Physical Attack 2 AoE Attack Ratio 28 Strength 20 Accuracy -225 Cloth Type Attack 726 Leather Type Attack -120 Plate Type Attack 12 Potential 42 Durability 2 Sockets 리가드 혼 파이크 (??? - 2H Spear) Orange Rarity iPWR 461 Lv. 315 534-722 Physical Attack 48 Critical Rate 501 Critical Damage 13 Potential 45 Durability 3 Sockets 라이온 헤드 대거 (Lion's Head Dagger - Dagger) Purple Rarity iPWR 403 Lv. 315 318-373 Physical Attack 12 Dexterity 8 Evasion 321 Fire Property Attack -15 Ice Property Resistance 12 Potential 42 Durability 1 Socket 에멘가드 대거 (Emen Guard Dagger - Dagger) Orange Rarity iPWR 461 Lv. 315 363-426 Physical Attack 37 Critical Rate 13 Potential 45 Durability 1 Socket 블러드 스틸러 (Blood Stiller - Dagger) Orange Rarity iPWR 555 Lv. 330 437-513 Physical Attack -18 Constitution -115 Physical Defense -115 Magic Defense 17 Potential 12 Durability 2 Socket 비엔나라지스 스태프 (Vienna's Large Staff - Staff) Purple Rarity iPWR 403 Lv. 315 529 Magic Attack 72 Intelligence 30 Spirit 22 Evasion 435 HP Recovery 12 Potential 42 Durability 2 Sockets 리가드 혼 스태프 (??? - Staff) Orange Rarity iPWR 461 Lv. 315 604 Magic Attack 103 Intelligence 41 Constitution 45 Spirit 13 Potential 45 Durability 3 Sockets 더블 스택 (Double Stack - Pistol) Purple Rarity iPWR 403 Lv. 315 427 Physical Attack 15 Dexterity 8 Intelligence 128 Maximum Attack 77 Minimum Attack 12 Potential 42 Durability 2 Sockets 아스파나 리볼버 (??? - Pistol) Orange Rarity iPWR 461 Lv. 315 488 Physical Attack 15 Strength 11 Constitution 3 Spirit 28 Critical Rate 226 Critical Damage 7 Block Penetration 13 Potential 45 Durability 3 Sockets 라이온 헤드 캐논 (Lion's Head Cannon) Purple Rarity Cannoneer Only iPWR 403 Lv. 315 370-687 Physical Attack 15 Strength -11 Dexterity 8 Accuracy 367 Critical Damage 12 Potential 42 Durability 2 Sockets 에멘가드 캐논 (Emen Guard Cannon - Cannon) Orange Rarity Cannoneer Only iPWR 461 Lv. 315 423-785 Physical Attack 2 AoE Attack Ratio 302 Maximum Attack -12 Accuracy 12 Critical Rate 13 Potential 45 Durability 3 Sockets 드라군 파이퍼 (Deuragan Fighter - Musket) Purple Rarity Musketeer Only iPWR 403 Lv. 315 541-598 Physical Attack 1 AoE Attack Ratio 115 Maximum Attack 75 Minimum Attack -13 Physical Defense 15 Accuracy 12 Potential 42 Durability 2 Sockets 드라군 파이퍼 (Emen Guard Musket - Musket) Orange Rarity Musketeer Only iPWR 461 Lv. 315 618-683 Physical Attack 1 AoE Attack Ratio 33 Strength 35 Dexterity 15 Critical Rate 15 Accuracy 99 Block Penetration 13 Potential 45 Durability 3 Sockets 마블 그랜드 크로스 (Marvel Grand Cross - Crossbow) Purple Rarity iPWR 299 Lv. 270 374-413 Physical Attack 6 Strength 23 Accuracy 157 Critical Attack +2 to all Quarrel Shooter Skills +1 to Running Shot 12 Potential 42 Durability 2 Sockets 비레타 메이스 (Bireta Mace - Mace) Purple Rarity iPWR 296 Lv. 270 300 Magic Attack 488 Physical Attack -15 Constitution 101 Spirit -3 Block Rate 11 Potential 41 Durability 2 Sockets 아틸라 (Attila - Mace) Purple Rarity iPWR 296 Lv. 270 324 Magic Attack 1 AoE Attack Ratio 369 Physical Attack 15 Intelligence 41 Spirit 181 Holy Property Defense +2 to all Priest Skill Levels 10 Potential 14 Durability 2 Sockets ----- 뉴트 로브 (Newt Armor) Purple Rarity iPWR 292 Lv. 270 79 Physical Defense 28 Magic Amplification 24 Magic Defense 1305 HP 12 Potential 36 Durability 2 Sockets 뉴트 팬츠 (Newt Pants) Purple Rarity iPWR 290 Lv. 270 77 Physical Defense 10 Physical Defense 24 Magic Defense 385 SP 12 Potential 36 Durability 2 Sockets 뉴트 부츠 (Newt Boots) Purple Rarity iPWR 290 Lv. 270 117 Evasion 11 Magic Defense 257 SP 36 SP Recovery 12 Potential 36 Durability 1 Sockets 뉴트 글로브 (Newt Gloves) Purple Rarity iPWR 290 Lv. 270 72 Magic Amplification 11 Magic Defense 321 HP 12 Potential 36 Durability 1 Sockets ----- 뉴트 레더 아머 (Newt Leather Armor) Purple Rarity iPWR 292 Lv. 270 106 Physical Defense 19 Evasion 47 Critical Resistance 12 Potential 38 Durability 2 Sockets 뉴트 레더 팬츠 (Newt Leather Pants) Purple Rarity iPWR 290 Lv. 270 102 Physical Defense 1 AoE Defense Ratio 20 Magic Defense 385 SP 12 Potential 38 Durability 2 Sockets 뉴트 레더 부츠 (Newt Leather Boots) Purple Rarity iPWR 290 Lv. 270 147 Evasion 15 Stamina 64 Critical Damage 12 Potential 38 Durability 1 Sockets 뉴트 레더 글로브 (Newt Leather Gloves) Purple Rarity iPWR 290 Lv. 270 147 Accuracy 19 Physical Damage 18 Critical Rate 12 Potential 38 Durability 1 Sockets ----- 뉴트 플레이트 아머 (Newt Plate Armor) Purple Rarity iPWR 292 Lv. 270 159 Physical Defense 1591 HP 23 Fire Property Resistance 12 Potential 40 Durability 2 Sockets 뉴트 플레이트 레깅스 (Newt Plate Pants) Purple Rarity iPWR 290 Lv. 270 154 Physical Defense 1430 HP 21 Fire Property Resistance 12 Potential 40 Durability 2 Sockets 뉴트 플레이트 그리브 (Newt Plate Boots) Purple Rarity iPWR 290 Lv. 270 117 Evasion 408 HP 23 Stamina 39 Block 12 Potential 40 Durability 1 Sockets 뉴트 플레이트 건틀릿 (Newt Plate Gloves) Purple Rarity iPWR 290 Lv. 270 117 Accuracy 408 HP 29 HP Recovery 40 Block Penetration 12 Potential 40 Durability 1 Sockets ----- Manahas Set 2-Pieces: 240 HP Recovery 3-Pieces: 6 to All Stats 4-Pieces: 110 Additional Ice Damage, +12 Strength & Spirit 마나하스 아머 (Manahas Armor) Blue Rarity iPWR 298 Lv. 270 108 Physical Defense 645 HP 15 Ice Property Resistance 8 Poison Property Resistance 1 Sockets 마나하스 팬츠 (Manahas Pants) Blue Rarity iPWR 294 Lv. 270 107 Physical Defense 6 Magic Defense 645 HP 15 Ice Property Resistance 9 Potential 28 Durability 2 Sockets 마나하스 부츠 (Manahas Boots) Blue Rarity iPWR 290 Lv. 270 147 Evasion 14 Evasion 10 Stamina 15 Ice Property Resistance 9 Potential 28 Durability 1 Sockets 마나하스 글로브 (Manahas Gloves) Blue Rarity iPWR 286 Lv. 270 145 Accuracy 14 Accuracy 11 Block Penetration 15 Ice Property Resistance 9 Potential 28 Durability 1 Sockets ----- 실리 플레이트 부츠 (Seeley Plate Boots) Purple Rarity Swordsman Only iPWR 278 Lv. 270 112 Evasion -24 Physical Defense 16 Evasion 511 HP 2 Movement Speed 10 Potential 38 Durability 2 Sockets 셰이드 그리브 (??? Boots) Purple Rarity Swordsman Only iPWR 278 Lv. 270 112 Evasion -71 Physical Defense 131 Magic Defense 534 HP 5 Fire Property Resistance 11 Potential 40 Durability 2 Sockets 데블린 건틀릿 (??? Gloves) Purple Rarity Swordsman Only iPWR 278 Lv. 270 112 Accuracy 15 Stamina 112 HP -2 Block 15 Block Penetration Additional slash damage to plate type defense. 10 Potential 34 Durability 2 Sockets 스윕 오그마 건틀릿 (??? Gloves) Purple Rarity Swordsman Only iPWR 278 Lv. 270 112 Accuracy 15 Stamina 112 HP -2 Block 15 Block Penetration Additional strike damage to leather type defense. 10 Potential 34 Durability 2 Sockets 드라그 네클리스 (??? Necklace) Purple Rarity iPWR 334 Lv. 270 98 Magic Defense 15 Strength 15 Stamina 8 Spirit 10 Attack Range 10 Fire Property Resistance 10 Holy Property Resistance 5 Dark Property Resistance 11 Potential 40 Durability 드라그 브레이슬릿 (??? Ring) Purple Rarity iPWR 312 Lv. 270 92 Magic Defense 12 Stamina 20 Magic Defense 420 SP -55 HP Recovery 11 Potential 41 DurabilityBailing out the rich while stealing from the working class
The way out? Hyperinflation of the currency
Who will bail out the U.S. government?
How the U.S. government plans to steal every last dollar from you
(NaturalNews) The dire financial situation unfolding in our world today directly impacts you. The safety of your money affects your ability to afford organic foods, nutritional supplements and "alternative" health care services that you have to pay out of pocket. There are also huge implications for Big Pharma and the continued drug industry due to cascading bankruptcies that are about to start impacting city, state and national governments. That's why we're covering this financial topic so closely on NaturalNews.com.Just today, the Fed scraped together a desperate, last-minute agreement to provide a jaw-dropping $85 billion in funding to save AIG (the insurance firm). Why did they do this? Because if they hadn't stepped in to save AIG, the entire global financial system would have collapsed within days.That's no exaggeration. The Fed was the bailout funder of last resort, and it has just barely averted a global financial disaster so large, nothing in the history of human civilization even compares. This is what happens when $445 trillion in leveraged financial instruments start to unravel...But the rescue was done by creating money from nothing and injecting it into the system. That $85 billion, it turns out, dilutes the existing money supply, making your dollars increasingly worthless, and in the months ahead, everything you buy is going to get more expensive: Food, supplements, gasoline, rent, health care services and much more.The Fed, in essence, is stealing billions of dollars from the American people and using it to bail out rich bankers and powerful CEOs of huge financial institutions. That $85 billion is on top of another $70 billion the Fed created just two days ago. It totals $155 billion, or over $500 for every man, woman and child in America. Think about it: The Fed just reached into your pocket and stole $500 worth of purchasing power from you, and if you have a family of four, they just stole $2,000 from you.And yet that's only how much they stole in the last two days! Add in all the money creation cash injections in just the last few months, and you get a HUGE number... $200 billion in March, $30 billion to bail our Bear Stearns, $70 billion to prevent a stock market plunge... the numbers just keep mounting. The Federal Reserve is literally printing its way to YOUR bankruptcy. To prevent the failure of wealthy financial institutions, it has decided to decimate the life savings of the American people.It's no surprise, of course: Every nation throughout history has done the same. When push comes to shove, governments always sacrifice their people to save their wealthy elite, and the U.S. is no different.This is a "Once-in-a-century type of event," says former Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan said on ABC television. "There's no question that this is in the process of outstripping anything I've seen, and it still is not resolved and it still has a way to go," he added.These words, remember, are from the king of understatement. When the dot-com crash took place, he famously called it an era of "irrational exuberance." Now he's calling this a once-in-a-century event. That means this is bigger than the '87 "black Monday" crash, and possibly bigger than the Great Depression in '29.As banks are failing, the FDIC is bailing them out. The FDIC, of course, insures banks against catastrophic loss. Thanks to a string of recent bank failures, the FDIC is now down to its last $43 billion in reserves. Sounds like a lot, right? Well consider this...Washington Mutual looks to be headed towards outright bankruptcy. It's a huge bank, and if it fails, it will need $180 billion to cover its depositors. That's $137 billion MORE than the FDIC has.In other words, if Washington Mutual fails,So what happens when the insurer itself goes bankrupt? The U.S. government steps in, of course. Only there's a problem here too:It's $9 trillion in debt right now, nearly double what it was four years ago. That's nine trillion with a "T" -- it's a whole lot of money, even by global finance measures.The government is so broke that it's actually borrowing money from other countries every single day just to keep its doors open. Day-to-day operations of the U.S. government, in other words, are not funded by U.S. taxpayers... they're funded by borrowing money from overseas investors! And those investors are increasingly realizing they're fools to loan yet more money to a nation that's already $9 trillion in the hole.The day is coming when foreign nations and central banks end their welfare support for the United States of America, and when that happens, all bets are off... literally. The U.S. government will be forced to shut down within days. UNLESS, of course, it finds a way to steal money from the People and continue funding its own operations.It just so happens there's a very clever way for the U.S. government to transfer virtually all the wealth from the hands of its citizens into the pocket of the U.S. Treasury. It requires no direct theft, no taxation and no new laws. In fact, it can be done quietly, silently, and without any warning. In fact, it's already started to happen.What is it?The runaway creation of new money. Fire up the printing presses in Washington, Chief! Here comes a trillion dollars in fiat currency!Yes, ultimately, the United States government will havebut to print its way out of debt, and it will do it by creating so much new money out of thin air that your own money becomes virtually worthless. Sure, you'll still have your $5,000 in the bank; it just won't be worth $5,000 anymore.Today, you can use $5,000 to buy a motorcycle. After the U.S. government hyperinflation bailout, you might be lucky to be able to buy a bicycle with the same $5,000. If things get really bad, you'll be lucky to trade it for a skateboard.So what can you do to protect yourself from all this? For one, don't leave your dollars hanging around as dollars. Right now, you can convert silly paper dollars into REAL things like land, gold, food or even shares in selected companies.Listen to my podcast to hear yet more analysis on what's happening and how to protect yourself: https://www.naturalnews.com/podcasts/Financia... Lastly, I highly recommend you subscribe to Stephen Leeb's. This is where I get grounded, yet uncensored financial information that's been spot on in its predictions about global finance events.Everybody in my family subscribes to this newsletter. It shows you exactly where to put your money (savings, IRAs, etc.) where you'll be protected against hyperinflation, bank failures and economic hard times.Anyone concerned about what's coming needs this information. Click here to subscribe now Also, stay tuned to NaturalNews, where I'll be covering these financial events in order to help NN readersfor what's coming. You don't have to be afraid. (I'm not.) All you have to be is informed and prepared, and then you can face the future with a sense of confidence and optimism.Don't be afraid, be informed. And certainly don't leave your money sitting around in U.S. dollar-denominated bank accounts. In this global meltdown environment, that's equivalent to financial suicide.Those who survive these financial hard times will be those who are best informed (and who ignore all the nonsense from the mainstream media).You may also want to check out my upcomingwhere I reveal protection and preparedness strategies. That starts next Wed., September 24th, at 7pm. Click here to learn more about this LIVE audio event. But even if you can't attend any of these events, or you don't want to read the Leeb newsletter, just remember this one principle:, and you'll be better off. Land, food, skills, a roof over your head, a vehicle, etc. Get OUT of debt. It's better to get completely out of debt rather than have dollars sitting in the bank while you still have a mortgage on your home. Learn more in my LIVE audio event, above.Everyone seems to agree that as a species we've taken Too Many Photographs. But only some people are prepared to do something about it. Parisian artist and engineer SaladeTomateOignon is one such individual, and has created a 'camera' that doesn't show you the photos you take, but similar images it's found online instead. The project is powered by a Raspberry Pi, and there are instructions online on how to make your own.
"Even more imprecise than a blurry polaroid picture."
The camera is called "Le Myope" (as in, the short-sighted person) and is actually a development of an earlier, similar project by SaladeTomateOignon called the "Layer Cam." But while the Layer Cam replaced users' pictures with those found on the web from the same location, Le Myope is intentionally vague, using machine learning to hunt out images "roughly similar" to the ones you've taken. "Even more imprecise than a blurry polaroid picture," says the project's blurb, "Or than a filter-abused Instagram shot."
Some tinkerers have gone even further though. The Camera Restricta project by Philip Schmitt is a prototype device that doesn't let users take any pictures it can already find on the web. Cameras like this are conceptually fun, but of course, who really gives a damn. Like faces, places, feelings, and, well, anything human, photographs can be both similar and unique at the same time. And that's fine.
Raspberry Pi 3 hands-onBackground Pony #A330
And now, some literature (wall-o-text)
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It ate him! That damn pony-THING ate him!
Dave had gone up to pet the then assumed pony; it was just a cute pony. Nothing could go wrong, right? For a moment, it sat there and soaked in the attention, it even looked like it was smiling. Then, it stood up…
Before either of us could react, its mouth split open like some kind of twisted flower, bristling with tentacles and snared Dave’s legs, then the tentacles immediately starting to retract, with Dave still entangled. When his legs were in touching range of its face, nothing I could have guessed prepared me for what happened next.
It scooped up his legs with its maw are started swallowing! No-nononono, how? How was this thing doing this? This shouldn’t be possible. It proved me wrong by continuing to stuff Dave’s legs into its maw, neck muscles bulging to accommodate the mass and stomach beginning to undulate as his waist disappeared. Apparently when his legs brushed the interior of her stomach, his brain finally clicked as to what was going on and began yelling and struggling to no effect. I was still in shock. Half his body had vanished into the pony, its neck straining wider than her stomach as its twisted maw approached his shoulders. Dave managed to pull his arms and hands out of its maw and in front of him to try and free himself, but in the process, he streamlined his body into accidental "please eat me faster" position. The thing obliged him by clasping his arms and stuffing him in faster. The bulging mass in its neck finally began to shift to its stomach as his legs reflexively bent to fit the cramped space.
My train of thought never came back to me. "Run" was all that came to me, no clue where, or to whom, anywhere but here. I started to turn around, my legs entwined and I hit the ground. I looked back, I wished I hadn’t. Right in the middle of its maw, Dave’s head was about to follow the rest of his body. He was still yelling and struggling, still fighting despite his predicament; I could see ripples and undulations in its stomach from his legs jerking. With small pull of her neck muscles |
.6 <0.0001 0.02 9,19,27,29,34,38,46,47,51–58,66,68,75,98,136,137,139 Per 200 g/d 22 86264 1050795 0.87 (0.82–0.92) 82.3 <0.0001 0.02 9,19,27,29,33,35,40,45,52,53,56–58,62,66,68,75,131–133,139 Food group Comparison n Cases Participants RR (95% CI) I2 p heterogeneity Egger References Coronary heart disease Fruit and vegetables High vs low 16 18516 792197 0.87 (0.83–0.91) 0 0.52 0.21 23,29,31,32,56,58,64,86,88,90,91,93,94,98 Per 200 g/d 15 17742 775132 0.92 (0.90–0.94) 0 0.96 0.12 23,29,31,32,56,58,64,86,88,90,91,94,132 Fruit High vs low 25 40229 1568460 0.86 (0.82–0.91) 23.2 0.15 0.52 9–11,22,23,27,29,36,55,56,58,60,63,64,86,88,91,94,95,98–100,104 Per 200 g/d 24 43336 1555553 0.90 (0.86–0.94) 43.7 0.01 0.04 9,10,22,23,27,29,36,56,58,60,62–64,86,88,91,92,94,95,99,104,132 Vegetables High vs low 22 34754 2123415 0.87 (0.84–0.90) 1.9 0.43 0.03 9,10,23,27,29,34,55,56,58,64,86,88,91,94,95,98,100,101,103,104 Per 200 g/d 20 20853 1047071 0.84 (0.79–0.90) 60.6 < 0.0001 0.001 9,22,23,27,29,56,58,62,64,86,88,91,94,95,100,103,104,132 Stroke Fruit and vegetables High vs low 8 10560 226910 0.79 (0.71–0.88) 37.6 0.13 0.80 31,56,58,64,109,118,120,122 Per 200 g/d 10 11644 303338 0.84 (0.76–0.92) 73.3 < 0.0001 0.08 31,56,58,64,108–110,118,120,122 Fruit High vs low 17 46951 960337 0.82 (0.77–0.87) 36.3 0.07 0.60 11,25–27,55,56,58,60,63,64,109,112–117 Per 200 g/d 16 46203 964142 0.82 (0.74–0.90) 72.9 < 0.0001 0.62 25–27,56,58,60,62–64,109,112–114,116,117,126 Vegetables High vs low 13 14519 427124 0.87 (0.81–0.95) 38.2 0.08 0.82 25–27,55,56,58,64,109,112,113,115–117 Per 200 g/d 13 14973 441670 0.87 (0.79–0.96) 63.4 0.001 0.15 25–27,56,58,62,64,109,112,113,116,117,126 Cardiovascular disease Fruit and vegetables High vs low 16 27842 963240 0.84 (0.79–0.90) 53.5 0.006 0.005 15,16,18,31,39,42,53,56,58,64,75,86–88,98,125 Per 200 g/d 13 20329 877925 0.92 (0.90–0.95) 31.3 0.13 0.05 15,16,18,31,39,53,56,58,64,75,86–88 Fruit High vs low 21 81807 1605227 0.87 (0.82–0.92) 70.9 < 0.0001 0.99 11,16,19,24,27,53–56,58,60,63,64,75,76,88,98,124,125,127 Per 200 g/d 17 72648 1492617 0.87 (0.82–0.92) 79.1 < 0.0001 0.41 15,16,19,24,27,53,56,58,60–64,75,88,127 Vegetables High vs low 18 32049 1112174 0.89 (0.85–0.94) 43.2 0.03 0.05 16,19,24,27,53–56,58,64,75,76,88,98,124,125,127 Per 200 g/d 14 23857 1009038 0.90 (0.87–0.93) 11.5 0.33 0.53 15,16,19,24,27,53,56,58,62,64,75,88,127 Total cancer Fruit and vegetables High vs low 13 54123 904300 0.93 (0.87–0.98) 41.2 0.06 0.97 7,8,13,15,16,18,20,42,53,56,59,87,128 Per 200 g/d 12 52872 902065 0.97 (0.95–0.99) 48.7 0.03 0.18 7,8,13,15,16,18,20,53,56,59,87,128 Fruit High vs low 21 105401 1569168 0.92 (0.88–0.96) 49.3 0.006 0.16 7–11,13,14,16,17,19–21,53,54,56,57,59,65,114,128 Per 200 g/d 20 112370 1648240 0.96 (0.94–0.99) 52.1 0.004 0.05 7–10,13,15–17,19–21,53,56,57,59,61,65,114,128 Vegetables High vs low 17 101118 1505948 0.95 (0.90–0.99) 52.6 0.006 0.25 7–9,13,16,17,19–21,53,54,56,57,59,65,128 Per 200 g/d 17 108855 1597722 0.96 (0.93–0.99) 55.2 0.003 0.47 7–9,13,15–17,19–21,53,56,57,59,65,128 All-cause mortality Fruit and vegetables High vs low 22 87574 1035556 0.82 (0.79–0.86) 62.3 <0.0001 0.001 18,29,31,32,39,42–44,47–50,53,56,58,67,68,75,87,98,134,161 Per 200 g/d 15 71160 959083 0.90 (0.87–0.93) 82.5 <0.0001 <0.0001 18,29,31,32,39,49,53,56,58,67,68,75,87,132,134 Fruit High vs low 30 93473 >1144194 0.87 (0.84–0.90) 60.2 <0.0001 0.01 9–11,19,27,29,30,36,37,43,46,47,51–58,61,66,68,75,98,135–137,139 Per 200 g/d 27 94235 >1104255 0.85 (0.80–0.91) 89.5 <0.0001 0.10 9,10,19,27,29,30,35–37,40,43,45,52,53,56–58,61,62,66,68,75,131–133,139 Vegetables High vs low 24 82904 1082960 0.87 (0.82–0.92) 78.6 <0.0001 0.02 9,19,27,29,34,38,46,47,51–58,66,68,75,98,136,137,139 Per 200 g/d 22 86264 1050795 0.87 (0.82–0.92) 82.3 <0.0001 0.02 9,19,27,29,33,35,40,45,52,53,56–58,62,66,68,75,131–133,139
Figure 1. View largeDownload slide Flow-chart of study selection.
Figure 1. View largeDownload slide Flow-chart of study selection.
Coronary heart disease
Seventeen studies (15 publications),23,29,31,32,56,58,64,86,88,90,91,93,94,98,132 26 studies (26 publications),9–11,22,23,27,29,36,55,56,58,60,62–64,86,88,91,92,94,95,98–100,104,132 and 23 studies (23 publications)9,10,22,23,27,29,34,55,56,58,62,64,86,88,91,94,95,98,100,101,103,104,132 were included in the analyses of fruit and vegetables combined, fruits alone and vegetables alone and coronary heart disease, respectively. The summary RR per 200 g/day was 0.92 (95% CI: 0.90–0.94, I2 = 0%) for fruits and vegetables (Figure 2a, b, Table 1; Supplementary Figure 1), 0.90 (95% CI: 0.86–0.94, I2 = 44%) for fruits (Figure 2c, d, Table 1; Supplementary Figure 2), and 0.84 (95% CI: 0.79–0.90, I2 = 61%) for vegetables (Figure 2e, 2f, Table 1; Supplementary Figure 3). There was no evidence of a nonlinear association for fruits and vegetables, P nonlinearity = 0.30, and there was a 24% reduction in the relative risk at an intake of 800 g/day (Figure 2b; Supplementary Table 8). Nonlinear associations were observed for fruits, P nonlinearity < 0.0001 (Figure 2d, Supplementary Table 9), and vegetables, P nonlinearity < 0.0001 (Figure 2f, Supplementary Table 9), with most of the reductions in risk observed at the lower levels of intake, and there was a 21% reduction in relative risk up to 750–800 g/day for fruits and a 30% reduction in the relative risk up to 550–600 g/day for vegetables.
Figure 2. View largeDownload slide Fruits, vegetables and coronary heart disease, linear and nonlinear dose-response..
Figure 2. View largeDownload slide Fruits, vegetables and coronary heart disease, linear and nonlinear dose-response..
Of specific types of fruit and vegetables9,10,11,28,34,36,56,60,62,64,89,91,92,94,96,97,100,102,105,106,140–148,163,164 apples/pears, citrus fruits, fruit juices, green leafy vegetables, beta-carotene-rich fruits and vegetables and vitamin C-rich fruits and vegetables showed inverse associations with coronary heart disease in the high vs low analysis, and in addition tomatoes were inversely associated with coronary heart disease in the dose-response analysis (Table 2; Supplementary Tables 19–20, Supplementary Figures 32–76).
Table 2. High vs low analysis Dose-response analysis Fruit, vegetable subtype n RR (95% CI) I2 P h References n Increment RR (95% CI) I2 P h References Apples, pears 10 0.85 (0.79–0.93) 1.9 0.42 34,56,60,64,89,94,142,145,163 8 Per 100 g/d 0.99 (0.89–1.09) 33.9 0.16 56,60,64,89,94,142,145 Bananas 3 0.90 (0.67–1.20) 47.2 0.15 56,94 3 Per 100 g/d 0.81 (0.26–2.58) 69.4 0.04 56,94 Berries 6 0.94 (0.81–1.08) 51.6 0.07 34,56,60,89,102,163 4 Per 100 g/d 1.13 (0.90–1.43) 14.0 0.32 56,60,89,102 Citrus fruits 14 0.91 (0.86–0.96) 0 0.69 9,56,60,64,89,91,94,97,142,143,146,147 15 Per 100 g/d 0.95 (0.89–1.01) 19.1 0.24 9,56,60,62,64,89,91,94,97,142,143,146,147 Dried fruits 2 0.93 (0.78–1.11) 0 0.51 11,60 1 Per 100 g/d 0.55 (0.19–1.52) - - 60 Fruit juices 2 0.79 (0.63–0.98) 0 0.56 60,143 3 Per 100 g/d 0.93 (0.80–1.08) 79.6 0.007 60,92,143 Grapes 4 0.91 (0.76–1.10) 43.5 0.15 56,60,142,145 4 Per 100 g/d 0.87 (0.56–1.37) 71.0 0.02 56,60,142,145 Strawberries 2 1.17 (0.71–1.91) 76.5 0.04 142,144 1 Per 100 g/d 4.66 (1.14–19.03) - - 144 Watermelon 2 0.87 (0.64–1.18) 0 0.36 94 2 Per 100 g/d 0.91 (0.72–1.15) 46.2 0.17 94 Allium vegetables 3 0.98 (0.79–1.20) 0 0.40 89,94 3 Per 100 g/d 0.99 (0.34–2.86) 4.4 0.35 89,94 Cruciferous vegetables 7 1.01 (0.90–1.13) 30.4 0.20 56,64,91,94,147 8 Per 100 g/d 0.99 (0.89–1.09) 0 0.59 56,62,64,91,94,147 Green leafy vegetables 10 0.83 (0.75–0.91) 31.6 0.16 10,36,56,64,89,91,143,147 9 Per 100 g/d 0.72 (0.64–0.82) 0.4 0.43 36,56,62,64,89,91,143,147 Onions 3 0.75 (0.56–1.02) 61.9 0.07 34,105,145 2 Per 100 g/d 0.60 (0.15–2.42) 76.5 0.04 105,145 Potatoes 5 0.92 (0.79–1.07) 64.0 0.03 100,140,143,164 6 Per 100 g/d 0.99 (0.93–1.05) 48.8 0.08 92,106,140,143,164 Tomatoes 5 0.90 (0.80–1.00) 0 0.64 56,141,143,145,147 6 Per 100 g/d 0.94 (0.89–0.98) 0 0.48 56,141,143,145,147,148 Beta-carotene rich F&V 3 0.83 (0.75–0.92) 20.4 0.29 64,91 3 Per 100 g/d 0.77 (0.65–0.91) 27.3 0.25 64,91 Lutein rich F&V 3 0.97 (0.89–1.05) 31.2 0.23 64,91 3 Per 100 g/d 0.80 (0.60–1.07) 9.5 0.33 64,91 Lycopene rich F&V 3 1.01 (0.93–1.09) 0 0.39 64,91 3 Per 100 g/d 1.00 (0.91–1.10) 0 0.77 64,91 Vitamin C rich F&V 3 0.86 (0.78–0.95) 19.4 0.29 64,91 3 Per 100 g/d 0.91 (0.85–0.99) 15.2 0.31 64,91 Raw F&V 2 0.89 (0.61–1.30) 67.1 0.08 28,96 1 Per 100 g/d 0.88 (0.77–1.01) - - 28 High vs low analysis Dose-response analysis Fruit, vegetable subtype n RR (95% CI) I2 P h References n Increment RR (95% CI) I2 P h References Apples, pears 10 0.85 (0.79–0.93) 1.9 0.42 34,56,60,64,89,94,142,145,163 8 Per 100 g/d 0.99 (0.89–1.09) 33.9 0.16 56,60,64,89,94,142,145 Bananas 3 0.90 (0.67–1.20) 47.2 0.15 56,94 3 Per 100 g/d 0.81 (0.26–2.58) 69.4 0.04 56,94 Berries 6 0.94 (0.81–1.08) 51.6 0.07 34,56,60,89,102,163 4 Per 100 g/d 1.13 (0.90–1.43) 14.0 0.32 56,60,89,102 Citrus fruits 14 0.91 (0.86–0.96) 0 0.69 9,56,60,64,89,91,94,97,142,143,146,147 15 Per 100 g/d 0.95 (0.89–1.01) 19.1 0.24 9,56,60,62,64,89,91,94,97,142,143,146,147 Dried fruits 2 0.93 (0.78–1.11) 0 0.51 11,60 1 Per 100 g/d 0.55 (0.19–1.52) - - 60 Fruit juices 2 0.79 (0.63–0.98) 0 0.56 60,143 3 Per 100 g/d 0.93 (0.80–1.08) 79.6 0.007 60,92,143 Grapes 4 0.91 (0.76–1.10) 43.5 0.15 56,60,142,145 4 Per 100 g/d 0.87 (0.56–1.37) 71.0 0.02 56,60,142,145 Strawberries 2 1.17 (0.71–1.91) 76.5 0.04 142,144 1 Per 100 g/d 4.66 (1.14–19.03) - - 144 Watermelon 2 0.87 (0.64–1.18) 0 0.36 94 2 Per 100 g/d 0.91 (0.72–1.15) 46.2 0.17 94 Allium vegetables 3 0.98 (0.79–1.20) 0 0.40 89,94 3 Per 100 g/d 0.99 (0.34–2.86) 4.4 0.35 89,94 Cruciferous vegetables 7 1.01 (0.90–1.13) 30.4 0.20 56,64,91,94,147 8 Per 100 g/d 0.99 (0.89–1.09) 0 0.59 56,62,64,91,94,147 Green leafy vegetables 10 0.83 (0.75–0.91) 31.6 0.16 10,36,56,64,89,91,143,147 9 Per 100 g/d 0.72 (0.64–0.82) 0.4 0.43 36,56,62,64,89,91,143,147 Onions 3 0.75 (0.56–1.02) 61.9 0.07 34,105,145 2 Per 100 g/d 0.60 (0.15–2.42) 76.5 0.04 105,145 Potatoes 5 0.92 (0.79–1.07) 64.0 0.03 100,140,143,164 6 Per 100 g/d 0.99 (0.93–1.05) 48.8 0.08 92,106,140,143,164 Tomatoes 5 0.90 (0.80–1.00) 0 0.64 56,141,143,145,147 6 Per 100 g/d 0.94 (0.89–0.98) 0 0.48 56,141,143,145,147,148 Beta-carotene rich F&V 3 0.83 (0.75–0.92) 20.4 0.29 64,91 3 Per 100 g/d 0.77 (0.65–0.91) 27.3 0.25 64,91 Lutein rich F&V 3 0.97 (0.89–1.05) 31.2 0.23 64,91 3 Per 100 g/d 0.80 (0.60–1.07) 9.5 0.33 64,91 Lycopene rich F&V 3 1.01 (0.93–1.09) 0 0.39 64,91 3 Per 100 g/d 1.00 (0.91–1.10) 0 0.77 64,91 Vitamin C rich F&V 3 0.86 (0.78–0.95) 19.4 0.29 64,91 3 Per 100 g/d 0.91 (0.85–0.99) 15.2 0.31 64,91 Raw F&V 2 0.89 (0.61–1.30) 67.1 0.08 28,96 1 Per 100 g/d 0.88 (0.77–1.01) - - 28
Table 2. High vs low analysis Dose-response analysis Fruit, vegetable subtype n RR (95% CI) I2 P h References n Increment RR (95% CI) I2 P h References Apples, pears 10 0.85 (0.79–0.93) 1.9 0.42 34,56,60,64,89,94,142,145,163 8 Per 100 g/d 0.99 (0.89–1.09) 33.9 0.16 56,60,64,89,94,142,145 Bananas 3 0.90 (0.67–1.20) 47.2 0.15 56,94 3 Per 100 g/d 0.81 (0.26–2.58) 69.4 0.04 56,94 Berries 6 0.94 (0.81–1.08) 51.6 0.07 34,56,60,89,102,163 4 Per 100 g/d 1.13 (0.90–1.43) 14.0 0.32 56,60,89,102 Citrus fruits 14 0.91 (0.86–0.96) 0 0.69 9,56,60,64,89,91,94,97,142,143,146,147 15 Per 100 g/d 0.95 (0.89–1.01) 19.1 0.24 9,56,60,62,64,89,91,94,97,142,143,146,147 Dried fruits 2 0.93 (0.78–1.11) 0 0.51 11,60 1 Per 100 g/d 0.55 (0.19–1.52) - - 60 Fruit juices 2 0.79 (0.63–0.98) 0 0.56 60,143 3 Per 100 g/d 0.93 (0.80–1.08) 79.6 0.007 60,92,143 Grapes 4 0.91 (0.76–1.10) 43.5 0.15 56,60,142,145 4 Per 100 g/d 0.87 (0.56–1.37) 71.0 0.02 56,60,142,145 Strawberries 2 1.17 (0.71–1.91) 76.5 0.04 142,144 1 Per 100 g/d 4.66 (1.14–19.03) - - 144 Watermelon 2 0.87 (0.64–1.18) 0 0.36 94 2 Per 100 g/d 0.91 (0.72–1.15) 46.2 0.17 94 Allium vegetables 3 0.98 (0.79–1.20) 0 0.40 89,94 3 Per 100 g/d 0.99 (0.34–2.86) 4.4 0.35 89,94 Cruciferous vegetables 7 1.01 (0.90–1.13) 30.4 0.20 56,64,91,94,147 8 Per 100 g/d 0.99 (0.89–1.09) 0 0.59 56,62,64,91,94,147 Green leafy vegetables 10 0.83 (0.75–0.91) 31.6 0.16 10,36,56,64,89,91,143,147 9 Per 100 g/d 0.72 (0.64–0.82) 0.4 0.43 36,56,62,64,89,91,143,147 Onions 3 0.75 (0.56–1.02) 61.9 0.07 34,105,145 2 Per 100 g/d 0.60 (0.15–2.42) 76.5 0.04 105,145 Potatoes 5 0.92 (0.79–1.07) 64.0 0.03 100,140,143,164 6 Per 100 g/d 0.99 (0.93–1.05) 48.8 0.08 92,106,140,143,164 Tomatoes 5 0.90 (0.80–1.00) 0 0.64 56,141,143,145,147 6 Per 100 g/d 0.94 (0.89–0.98) 0 0.48 56,141,143,145,147,148 Beta-carotene rich F&V 3 0.83 (0.75–0.92) 20.4 0.29 64,91 3 Per 100 g/d 0.77 (0.65–0.91) 27.3 0.25 64,91 Lutein rich F&V 3 0.97 (0.89–1.05) 31.2 0.23 64,91 3 Per 100 g/d 0.80 (0.60–1.07) 9.5 0.33 64,91 Lycopene rich F&V 3 1.01 (0.93–1.09) 0 0.39 64,91 3 Per 100 g/d 1.00 (0.91–1.10) 0 0.77 64,91 Vitamin C rich F&V 3 0.86 (0.78–0.95) 19.4 0.29 64,91 3 Per 100 g/d 0.91 (0.85–0.99) 15.2 0.31 64,91 Raw F&V 2 0.89 (0.61–1.30) 67.1 0.08 28,96 1 Per 100 g/d 0.88 (0.77–1.01) - - 28 High vs low analysis Dose-response analysis Fruit, vegetable subtype n RR (95% CI) I2 P h References n Increment RR (95% CI) I2 P h References Apples, pears 10 0.85 (0.79–0.93) 1.9 0.42 34,56,60,64,89,94,142,145,163 8 Per 100 g/d 0.99 (0.89–1.09) 33.9 0.16 56,60,64,89,94,142,145 Bananas 3 0.90 (0.67–1.20) 47.2 0.15 56,94 3 Per 100 g/d 0.81 (0.26–2.58) 69.4 0.04 56,94 Berries 6 0.94 (0.81–1.08) 51.6 0.07 34,56,60,89,102,163 4 Per 100 g/d 1.13 (0.90–1.43) 14.0 0.32 56,60,89,102 Citrus fruits 14 0.91 (0.86–0.96) 0 0.69 9,56,60,64,89,91,94,97,142,143,146,147 15 Per 100 g/d 0.95 (0.89–1.01) 19.1 0.24 9,56,60,62,64,89,91,94,97,142,143,146,147 Dried fruits 2 0.93 (0.78–1.11) 0 0.51 11,60 1 Per 100 g/d 0.55 (0.19–1.52) - - 60 Fruit juices 2 0.79 (0.63–0.98) 0 0.56 60,143 3 Per 100 g/d 0.93 (0.80–1.08) 79.6 0.007 60,92,143 Grapes 4 0.91 (0.76–1.10) 43.5 0.15 56,60,142,145 4 Per 100 g/d 0.87 (0.56–1.37) 71.0 0.02 56,60,142,145 Strawberries 2 1.17 (0.71–1.91) 76.5 0.04 142,144 1 Per 100 g/d 4.66 (1.14–19.03) - - 144 Watermelon 2 0.87 (0.64–1.18) 0 0.36 94 2 Per 100 g/d 0.91 (0.72–1.15) 46.2 0.17 94 Allium vegetables 3 0.98 (0.79–1.20) 0 0.40 89,94 3 Per 100 g/d 0.99 (0.34–2.86) 4.4 0.35 89,94 Cruciferous vegetables 7 1.01 (0.90–1.13) 30.4 0.20 56,64,91,94,147 8 Per 100 g/d 0.99 (0.89–1.09) 0 0.59 56,62,64,91,94,147 Green leafy vegetables 10 0.83 (0.75–0.91) 31.6 0.16 10,36,56,64,89,91,143,147 9 Per 100 g/d 0.72 (0.64–0.82) 0.4 0.43 36,56,62,64,89,91,143,147 Onions 3 0.75 (0.56–1.02) 61.9 0.07 34,105,145 2 Per 100 g/d 0.60 (0.15–2.42) 76.5 0.04 105,145 Potatoes 5 0.92 (0.79–1.07) 64.0 0.03 100,140,143,164 6 Per 100 g/d 0.99 (0.93–1.05) 48.8 0.08 92,106,140,143,164 Tomatoes 5 0.90 (0.80–1.00) 0 0.64 56,141,143,145,147 6 Per 100 g/d 0.94 (0.89–0.98) 0 0.48 56,141,143,145,147,148 |
a TV analyst, fired the opening salvo last week by declaring that Harden is "not a leader." Harden responded by calling McHale a "clown" and questioning his character.
"Calling me names is not going to change my opinion as to what I saw when I was there," McHale said Friday on TNT. "It's hard to have a lot of credibility if you don't play good defense."
Editor's Picks Harden fires back at McHale: 'He's a clown' Rockets guard James Harden didn't take too kindly to former coach Kevin McHale's comments about his leadership skills, saying McHale "never taught me anything to be a leader" during their three-plus seasons together in Houston.
Ex-Rockets coach McHale: Harden 'not a leader' Former Rockets coach Kevin McHale questioned James Harden's leadership skills, saying leading a team is not part of the All-Star guard's personality. McHale also said newly acquired Chris Paul will make Harden a better player. 1 Related
McHale remained complimentary of Harden's basketball skills while explaining what he considers to be leadership.
"He's a hell of a basketball player, he really is," McHale said. "And to James' credit, I will say this: He organizes guys in the summer. He does a lot of stuff. He does a lot of those things. When I was talking more about leadership is... it's a tie game at half. It's a playoff game, or you're playing another team that's tough and rumble, and they're going to get after you. And all of a sudden, with four minutes to go in the third, you're down nine. They're getting every loose ball, they're getting every rebound, they're doing this stuff. It's not about skill at that point. It's about will. I gotta impose my will on you.
"James at that point gets a little bit -- that's not his personality. Chris Paul, in turn, will get in your face, go nose-to-nose with you, say, 'Hey, let's go,' and I think that's what you need. Draymond Green does a great job, whenever you need a spark. He's out there going jawing with somebody."
Houston acquired Paul during the offseason, and McHale has praised the move because of Paul's leadership abilities.
"Chris Paul will have that leadership at those times where [Harden] gets a little bit introverted, a little bit quiet," McHale said Friday. "You saw the game with the Spurs; he gets to the point where he's just passive. And Chris Paul's not like that."
McHale coached Harden for three-plus seasons in Houston.
"He's a clown, honestly," Harden said after the Rockets' open practice last Saturday, in response to McHale's initial comments. "I did anything and everything he asked me to do. I've tried to lead this team every day since I stepped foot here in Houston. To go on air and just downplay my name, when honestly he's never taught me anything to be a leader...
"But I've done a great job. The organization, my coaches, you can ask any of those guys how I've worked extremely hard every single day to better [myself], obviously as a basketball player, but be a leader as well. To go on air and downplay my name like that, it just shows his character. I usually don't go back and forth on social media with anybody or with interviews, but I'm going to stand up for myself, and there it is. But you just don't go and do that. It shows what type of person he is."
McHale was fired in November 2015 despite being only 11 games into a four-year, $12 million contract he received in the wake of the Rockets' trip to the Western Conference finals the previous season. Harden believes that bitterness about the firing played a significant role in McHale criticizing him.
"Sure. And I had nothing to do with it," Harden said. "I'm just here to do my job, compete at the highest level I can. But when you're here, you're face-to-face, and you're telling me one thing -- how great of a player you are, how you're lucky that he's able to be a part of this process -- and then you go back just a few years later and basically just say the opposite, it just shows your character, shows who you really are.
"I'm not that type of person. I don't operate that way. I don't say things to somebody behind their back or tell them one thing or go on air and say another thing."
Information from ESPN's Tim MacMahon was used in this report.Today I was working on chillout.io client and while I was debugging some parts, I had a look at some Ruby gems. This is always an interesting experience because you can learn how other developers design their API and how different it can be from your approach.
Sidekiq
So here are some interesting bits from sidekiq code.
Sidekiq::Client initializer
module Sidekiq class Client def initialize ( redis_pool = nil ) @redis_pool = redis_pool || Thread. current [ :sidekiq_via_pool ] || Sidekiq. redis_pool end end end
Quoting the documentation:
Sidekiq::Client normally uses the default Redis pool but you may pass a custom ConnectionPool if you want to shard your Sidekiq jobs across several Redis instances…
I generally don’t like globals as a gem consumer but sometimes they are convenient and provide the convention over configuration magical feeling.
The nice thing about this global is that you don’t need to use it. It is easily overridable with such constructor. If you have specific requirements, your own connection pool, special redis connection, multiple clients and multiple connections etc, etc, you can still get the work done.
Sidekiq :: Client. new ( ConnectionPool. new { Redis. new })
Delegating class methods
Going further with global which you don’t need to use.
module Sidekiq class Client def push ( item ) #... end def self. push ( item ) new. push ( item ) end end end
With this code, instead of
Sidekiq :: Client. new (). push ( 'queue' => 'one', 'class' => MyWorker, 'args' => [ 'do_it' ] )
you can do
Sidekiq :: Client. push ( 'queue' => 'one', 'class' => MyWorker, 'args' => [ 'do_it' ] )
Again. No one forces you to use the class method. If for any reason, the first approach works better than the second, if you need to have a new instance with specific constructor arguments, do it. Sidekiq can handle both.
Sidekiq.redis_pool
module Sidekiq def self. redis_pool @redis ||= Sidekiq :: RedisConnection. create end def self. redis = ( hash ) @redis = if hash. is_a? ( ConnectionPool ) hash else Sidekiq :: RedisConnection. create ( hash ) end end end
This redis=(hash) setter can handle a Hash with redis configuration options or a Sidekiq::ConnectionPool instance.
yielding for configuration
module Sidekiq def self. server? defined? ( Sidekiq :: CLI ) end def self. configure_server yield self if server? end def self. server_middleware @server_chain ||= default_server_middleware yield @server_chain if block_given? @server_chain end def self. default_server_middleware Middleware :: Chain. new end end
Quoting the documentation:
Sidekiq has a similar notion of middleware to Rack: these are small bits of code that can implement functionality. Sidekiq breaks middleware into client-side and server-side. Server-side middleware runs ‘around’ job processing.
runs ‘around’ job processing. Client-side middleware runs before the pushing of the job to Redis and allows you to modify/stop the job before it gets pushed.
So the sidekiq client is the app (usually a Rails app) responsible for pushing jobs and scheduling them.
Sidekiq server is the worker process that execute on a different machine for processing jobs in the background.
Sidekiq needs to know which mode it is in, and it needs to have the ability to have different configurations for both of them. Especially considering that usually it is the same Rails application running either in client mode (http application server such as puma or unicorn) or server mode (worker process executed with sidekiq command).
The configuration can be set such as:
Sidekiq. configure_server do | config | config. redis = { namespace:'myapp', size: 25 } config. server_middleware do | chain | chain. add MyServerHook end end Sidekiq. configure_client do | config | config. redis = { namespace:'myapp', size: 1 } end
So the configure_server method yields the block only when the if-statement evaluates we are in a server process. It uses block for lazy configuration. It is not evaluated when unnecessary (in the client).
server_middleware yields for nicer readability, I believe. Especially in the case of many middlewares.
BTW. chillout.io client uses a middleware to schedule sending metrics when a background job is done.
ActiveSupport
ActiveSupport::TaggedLogging
ActiveSupport::TaggedLogging wraps any standard Logger object to provide tagging capabilities.
logger = ActiveSupport :: TaggedLogging. new ( Logger. new ( STDOUT )) logger. tagged ( 'BCX' ) { logger. info 'Stuff' } # Logs "[BCX] Stuff" logger. tagged ( 'BCX', "Jason" ) { logger. info 'Puff' } # Logs "[BCX] [Jason] Puff"
There is one method which brought my attention:
module ActiveSupport module TaggedLogging def flush clear_tags! super if defined? ( super ) end end end
I’ve never seen this super if defined?(super) but it turns out it is useful to dynamically figure out if the ancestor defined given method and you should call it or this is the first module/class in inheritance chain which defines it.
class Fool def foo puts "foo from Fool" end end module Baron def bar puts "bar from Baron" end end module Bazinga def baz puts "baz from Bazinga" super if defined? ( super ) end end module Freddy def fred puts "fred from Freddy" super if defined? ( super ) end end class Powerful < Fool include Baron prepend Freddy def foo puts "foo from Powerful" super if defined? ( super ) end def bar puts "bar from Powerful" super if defined? ( super ) end def baz puts "baz from Powerful" end def fred puts "fred from Powerful" end def qux puts "qux from Powerful" super if defined? ( super ) end def corge puts "corge from Powerful" super end end p = Powerful. new p. extend ( Bazinga ) # inheritance p. foo # foo from Powerful # foo from Fool # module included in class p. bar # bar from Powerful # bar from Baron # object extended with module p. baz # baz from Bazinga # baz from Powerful # module prepended in class p. fred # fred from Freddy # fred from Powerful # nothing p. qux # qux from Powerful # without `if defined?(super)` p. corge # corge from Powerful # NoMethodError: super: no superclass method `corge' for #<Powerful:0x000000015e8390>
self.new in a module
Also, check this out.
module ActiveSupport module TaggedLogging def self. new ( logger ) logger. formatter ||= ActiveSupport :: Logger :: SimpleFormatter. new logger. formatter. extend Formatter logger. extend ( self ) end end endSome predict we're on the verge of a 'coffee revolution' here in NH, and a small Bedford-based roaster is leading the charge.
It's a cold, raw morning, but in Claudia Barrett's climate-controlled garage-turned-coffee-roastery, the tastes and smells are tropical. Today, she's tasting four selections from her company, CQ Coffee Roasters, slurping up a spoonful at a time and describing the flavors. “Good grape acidity, red currant...” announces Barrett, Licensed Q Grader (and “Coffee Jedi”), using the standardized cupping method and terminology used in coffee tastings the world over. “Some Merlot,” she adds after another slurp. “Some guava fruit punch...”
At CQ Coffee Roasters, everything is meticulous, each carefully-selected variety roasted just enough, in pursuit of flavors far beyond your standard cup of joe. “What we really try to do with each coffee is bring forward one mind-blowing tasting note from that coffee,” Barrett explains.
And it looks like they're succeeding.
Every year, a ranking of the thirty best coffees comes out from a magazine called Coffee Review (think Wine Spectator for coffee, with its own highly trained tasters). This year, CQ's Kenya Kirinyaga Peaberry was ranked fifth, beating out submissions from some of the biggest names in the specialty-coffee world.
Barrett says that recognition puts her little roasting company – and New Hampshire – on the map. “It's very exciting when you wake up and you get coffee orders from Portland, Oregon, or Seattle, Washington,” she says. “These coffee meccas are coming to a website, to a roaster in New Hampshire.”
But she says her goal is to be a roaster in New Hampshire, for New Hampshire.
Specialty coffee, more associated with the West Coast and big cities, is just starting to get a foothold in the state, but Barrett is no newcomer to high-end coffee. “I was in a grad school program for my PhD in American Literature, and I went to a cafe to work, and I began tasting all these things in the cup,” she recalls. That was in the early '90s; she dropped out of the PhD program and dove into the coffee world, learning, tasting, writing, roasting, and actually helping launch Starbucks. She took a break to have her kids, now 8 and 6, and last year decided she had the experience and the passion to make a go of starting her own company here in Bedford.
CQ Coffee Roasters is small by design, just a couple of employees in a garage, and one roaster – a machine about as tall as a person, that looks like a cross between a washing machine, a countertop mixer, and the front of a steam locomotive. Most sales are mail-order, but CQ also delivers door-to-door in the Bedford area.
CQ also supplies D Squared Java in Exeter, which might be the state's only specialty coffee cafe. Dan Demers, who owns D Squared, says Barrett just came into the cafe one day. “When she came in she strangely enough had an air pot of brewed coffee,” he recalls. “So she ran out to her car and brought it back in, and we just tasted some of her coffee.”
“It was like a super strawberry bomb,” he says. “You just tasted sweet, juicy strawberry, and it was pretty much at that instant that I knew that we were going to have to start offering some of her coffees.”
CQ is one of three area roasters supplying D Squared, but Demers expects that number to grow. “We're on the cusp of a coffee revolution,” he says. He's seeing a growing demand for this kind of carefully-crafted coffee, and plenty of pleasantly-surprised faces when customers find out it came from Bedford.
For her part, Barrett hopes to open up a storefront of her own, selling bags of specialty-roasted beans like bottles of wine – that is, plenty of variety, plenty of quality, and plenty of tastings, “where they taste how sweet it is, how juicy it is, how unique it is from cup to cup, and they want to keep coming back,” says Barrett. “They want to learn to brew right at home, they want to buy a grinder, and we're there to take them on this stairway to heaven.”
Fueled by passion, and a fair amount of caffeine, she just might make that dream come true.Building innovative applications on cloud technologies is critical for organizations to accelerate growth and create differentiated customer experiences. Applications leveraging cloud technologies with pay-as-you-use pricing are now standard. Our goal is to ensure that organizations choosing hybrid cloud environments have this same flexibility and innovation capability to match their business objectives and application designs. This is why we are extending Azure technologies on-premises with Azure Stack and today, are announcing several updates for Azure Stack:
TP3 available for download: Technical Preview 3 (TP3) is available for download today and has new features that enable: more modern application capabilities; running in locations without connections to Azure; along with infrastructure and security enhancements.
Technical Preview 3 (TP3) is available for download today and has new features that enable: more modern application capabilities; running in locations without connections to Azure; along with infrastructure and security enhancements. Packaging and pricing model: Azure Stack brings the cloud economic model on-premises with pay-as-you-use pricing.
Azure Stack brings the cloud economic model on-premises with pay-as-you-use pricing. Roadmap Update: Shortly after TP3, Azure Functions will be available to run on TP3, followed by Blockchain, Cloud Foundry, and Mesos templates. Continuous innovation will be delivered to Azure Stack up to general availability and beyond. TP3 is the final planned major Technical Preview before Azure Stack integrated systems will be available for order in mid-CY17.
Extending Azure on-premises
Azure Stack enables three unique hybrid cloud scenarios for organizations looking to build new apps and/or renovate existing apps across cloud and on-premises environments:
Consistent hybrid application development: Organizations investing in people, processes, and applications can do so knowing that it is transferable between Azure and Azure Stack. Individuals looking to develop skills can take those skills to any organization using Azure. Consistency between Azure and Azure Stack means organizations can draw from a worldwide pool of talent that can be productive on day one, easily moving from one project to another. Individuals with Azure skills can move projects, teams, DevOps processes or organizations with ease. The APIs, Portal, PowerShell cmdlets, and Visual Studio experiences are all the same.
Organizations investing in people, processes, and applications can do so knowing that it is transferable between Azure and Azure Stack. Individuals looking to develop skills can take those skills to any organization using Azure. Consistency between Azure and Azure Stack means organizations can draw from a worldwide pool of talent that can be productive on day one, easily moving from one project to another. Individuals with Azure skills can move projects, teams, DevOps processes or organizations with ease. The APIs, Portal, PowerShell cmdlets, and Visual Studio experiences are all the same. Azure services available on-premises: Infrastructure and Platform services fuel the next generation of application innovation. Delivering Azure IaaS and PaaS services on-premises empowers organizations to adopt hybrid cloud computing based on their business and technical requirements. They have the flexibility to choose the right combination of public, service provider, and on-premises deployment models. If they decide an app should be deployed in another location, they can easily move it without any modifications.
Infrastructure and Platform services fuel the next generation of application innovation. Delivering Azure IaaS and PaaS services on-premises empowers organizations to adopt hybrid cloud computing based on their business and technical requirements. They have the flexibility to choose the right combination of public, service provider, and on-premises deployment models. If they decide an app should be deployed in another location, they can easily move it without any modifications. Purpose-built systems for operational excellence: To help organizations focus on work that drives their business, Azure Stack is delivered through integrated systems that are designed to continuously incorporate Azure innovation in a predictable, non-disruptive manner.
Hybrid use cases for Azure and Azure Stack
As we talk to customers about their cloud strategy, hybrid will be their steady state operating model and are looking to augment their cloud strategy with Azure Stack in a few key scenarios:
Edge and disconnected solutions: Address latency and connectivity requirements by processing data locally in Azure Stack and then aggregating in Azure for further analytics, with common application logic across both. Modern applications across cloud and on-premises: Apply Azure web & mobile services, containers, serverless, and microservice architectures to update and extend legacy applications with Azure Stack, while using a consistent DevOps process across on-premises and cloud. Cloud applications that meet every regulation: Develop and deploy applications in Azure, with full flexibility to deploy on-premises with Azure Stack to meet your regulatory or policy requirements, with no code changes needed.
Customers who have factory floor automation, remote use needs like cruise ships and mines, or requirements for isolation, like government systems, can all adopt modern designs, developing in the cloud and deploying in their locations.
What’s new in Azure Stack TP3
With Azure Stack TP3, we’ve worked with customers to improve the product through numerous bug fixes, updates, and deployment reliability & compatibility improvements from TP2. With Azure Stack TP3 customers can:
Deploy with ADFS for disconnected scenarios
Start using Azure Virtual Machine Scale Sets for scale out workloads
Syndicate content from the Azure Marketplace to make available in Azure Stack
Use Azure D-Series VM sizes
Deploy and create templates with Temp Disks that are consistent with Azure
Take comfort in the enhanced security of an isolated administrator portal
Take advantage of improvements to IaaS and PaaS functionality
Use enhanced infrastructure management functionality, such as improved alerting
Roadmap Update
As part of our continuous innovation model, we will be adding Azure Functions, VM Extension syndication and multi-tenancy shortly after TP3. This will be followed by new workloads such as Blockchain, Cloud Foundry, and Mesos templates. We will continue to refresh TP3 until we GA in mid-CY17.
In mid-CY17, the Proof of Concept (POC) deployment will be renamed to the Microsoft Azure Stack Development Kit. This single server dev/test tool enables customers to prototype and validate hybrid applications. It is a key piece of the continuous innovation model that Azure Stack will use to bring new functionality from Azure quickly to customers. It provides a way for new updates to be distributed early to customers so that they can experiment, learn and provide feedback.
TP3 is our final planned major Technical Preview before GA. The Azure Stack Development Kit will be released as GA first and at the same time we will release the software to our hardware partners so that they can finish the last mile of co-engineering work required to deliver multi-server Azure Stack integrated systems, mid-CY17.
After GA, we will continuously deliver additional capabilities through frequent updates. The first round of updates after GA are focused on two areas: 1) enhanced application modernization scenarios and 2) enhanced system management and scale. These updates will continue to expand customer choice of IaaS and PaaS technologies when developing applications, as well as improve manageability and grow the footprint of Azure Stack to accommodate growing portfolios of applications.
Extending cloud economics to on-premises with pay-as-you-use pricing
Azure Stack brings the cloud economic model on-premises, with pay-as-you-use pricing. As with Azure, there are no upfront licensing fees for using Azure services in Azure Stack and customers only pay when they use the services. Services are transacted in the same way as they are in Azure, with the same invoices and subscriptions. Services will be typically metered on the same units as Azure, but prices will be lower, since customers operate their own hardware and facilities. For scenarios where customers are unable to have their metering information sent to Azure, we will also offer a fixed-price “capacity model” based on the number of cores in the system.
Customers will acquire Azure Stack hardware from our hardware partners, Dell EMC, HPE, Lenovo and (later in the year) Cisco. We are excited to work with our hardware partners to provide a flexible range of buying options, including pay-as-you-go, for the hardware that underpins the integrated systems.
Customers can reach out to their Microsoft and hardware partner account representatives for detailed pricing information.
Final thoughts and next steps
Every company in every industry around the world transforming from an organization that simply uses digital technology, to a digital organization. We are dedicated to helping organizations grow by creating continually evolving products for their customers.
Azure and the Azure Stack integrated systems enable businesses to focus on investing energy and talent on turning their application portfolio into a strategic differentiator for their business. This approach enables customer choice and flexibility of deploying and operating their application where it best meets their business needs. IT can deliver far greater value by empowering development teams with self-service provisioning and cloud services while partnering with them to establish DevOps workflows that meet business policies and requirements.
Learn more about Azure Stack and download Azure Stack TP3.
Jeffrey Snover
Azure Infrastructure and Management Technical Fellow
Follow me on Twitter at @jsnoverAn 18-year-old girl is helping police hunt for the man who shot her in the head and murdered her girlfriend at a Texas park last month.
Mary Kristene Chapa is still recovering in a hospital bed from brain injuries sustained in the shooting, but she's managed to help police refine their sketch of the suspect who killed her girlfriend, 19-year-old Mollie Judith Olgin, ABC News reports.
Article continues below:
PHOTO GALLERY Mary Kristene Chapa/Mollie Olgin Shooting
"She wants very badly to help us identify Mollie's murderer," Portland, Texas, Police Department Chief Randy Wright told ABC News. "Our eyewitness sustained a brain injury that initially affected her ability to communicate effectively. The good news is she has made exceptional progress. Her sight and speech have improved and she can now interact with the artist much better."
Chapa already provided the sketch artist with an initial physical description, but she requested a second meeting to clarify the rendering, Wright said. Her description did not change from the first version.
The suspect is described as a white male in his 20s, 5 foot 8 inches tall, thin build, 140 pounds, with brown hair and a scruffy beard.
Chapa and Olgin were both found shot in the head at around 9 a.m. on a Saturday last month at Violet Andrews Park in Portland, Texas, according to the Corpus Christi Caller-Times.
A couple visiting the park found the girls -- who are believed to have been shot with a large-caliber handgun at around midnight the night before -- in knee-deep grass. Olgin was pronounced dead at the scene, as reported by local TV station KRIS-TV.com.
Whether the girls' sexuality had anything to do with the attack remains unkown, Wright told MSNBC.com.
"That’s always something that we’re looking for," he said. "But as of this point, we have not been able to establish that that had anything to do with the attack."
The shooting is not being investigated as a hate crime, according to ABC News.
Still, people close to Chapa and Olgin won't forget the brutality of this crime any time soon.
“It’s something that I think all of us are going to carry with us for a while,” Frank Reyna, a friend of both girls, said to MSNBC.com. “It’s going to take a while to get past this, the idea that there is somebody still out there that did this to these two amazing, beautiful people, and that they’re walking free right now.”Sometimes it can be difficult to find time to meditate, or to reflect, or make some other conscious effort to embrace Zen. It feels like work. You’d rather just flick through Facebook for those fifteen minutes you have to free.
As it happens, you can do both.
Kill a few minutes on Facebook or Reddit or Twitter or whatever floats your online boat. And then maybe check out one or two of these.
https://www.donothingfor2minutes.com/ – Do Nothing For Two Minutes is a cool little website that reminds you just to take a break from all that. It times how long you can sit and relax. It has a picture of a peaceful beach that you can use to guide your relaxation. Using it often can help you with meditation, or it can just be a nice way to get some peace from the everyday rush.
https://freedomcards.tumblr.com/ – Freedom Cards has been compiled by some clever Tumblr user to remind people of the importance of freedom. It includes the definition of the word and idea of ‘freedom’ from over 650 people from all walks of life. Those people include everyday folk such as you or me, actors, historians, scientists, writers, all kinds of influential or unheard-of people. Because freedom matters to everyone.
https://mynoise.net/noiseMachines.php – MyNoise is great whether you want to block out your noisy housemates or noisy kids while you’re trying to work or need some relaxing background music for your meditation. Or if you just fancy a soundtrack for your day. It has a range of different noises for whatever mood you’re in, categorised so you can find them easily and adjustable to your own preferences. It even has a section dedicated purely to meditation.
https://scaleofuniverse.com/ – Scale of the Universe might seem like a typically nerdy site, but it’s actually a really great site for perspective. If you’ve ever felt small, it shows you all the billions of creatures and particles and bacteria that so much smaller. If you’ve ever felt like a personal problem takes up the whole world, it shows you how small anything one person can experience is compared to the world, the galaxy, the universe. It’s really useful if you ever need to acknowledge the grand scheme of things.
https://ourworldindata.org/ – Our World in Data might also seem kind of dorky and too much about numbers to be particularly Zen, but it’s great for when you need not just a reminder but evidence that humanity as a species is getting better. It shows statistics from around the world that show how the world is progressing and changing. You see people’s quality of life get quantatively better in terms of the education, employment and the amount of people getting increasing access to food, shelter and clean water. And that can be really reassuring.
https://www.airpano.com/ – AirPano brings the most wonderful places in the world to you. We all wish we had the time and money to go travelling to all the world’s most breath-taking manmade and natural places, but even if you can manage one or two there are still a lot you’re missing out. Instead, this site offers panoramic shots of the most incredible places on Earth.
https://complimentmachine.com/ – The Compliment Machine is kind of self-explanatory. It’s for when you need a little boost.
https://www.futureme.org/ – FutureMe is a handy site for if you ever feel uncertain about the future, about your ability to stick to the goals you set for yourself. It gives you the opportunity to write an email to yourself that will be delivered on the date of your choosing. You can address your future self, remind you what you really want, what’s really important to you.
Kirstie Summers,
Daily Zen.
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May 24, 2016, 9:44 AM GMT / Updated May 24, 2016, 9:44 AM GMT By Alexander Smith
A retired doctor discovered a likely piece of Malaysia Airlines MH370 on a beach — but left it in the sand because it smelled so bad, local media reported.
A photograph of the barnacle-encrusted piece found by Schalk Lückhoff in South Africa was released Tuesday by the Australian Transport Safety Bureau, which is coordinating the search for the missing airliner.
An aircraft engine cowling stencilled with the Rolls-Royce logo that is believed to be from Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370. Schalk Lückhoff / via Australian Transport Safety Bureau
The ATSB's release drew attention to an interview Lückhoff gave with Afrikaans-language broadcaster Netwerk24 last week, in which he explained why he had not collected the object or reported it to authorities.
He told Netwerk24: "It was the only object on the empty sands. It was smelly because it was encrusted in rotting mussels so I didn't handle it, I just took a photograph. It did not occur to me this could be a piece of a plane's insignia... After the next high [tide] I didn't see it anymore and assumed it had been taken back into the sea."
Lückhoff took the photo in South Afirca's Mossel Bay on December 23, according to the ATSB. Barnacles and sand could be seen partially covering a distinctive Rolls-Royce "RR" stencil, likely from one of MH370's two engines.
But three months later the very same piece was found again in Mossel Bay again, this time by South African archeologist Neels Kruger. The object had apparently been shorn of its barnacles and seaweed, and the 35-year-old contacted authorities.
"When I flipped it around, I didn't know immediately what it was but just thought, 'Oh my word!'" he told The Associated Press at the time.
The object is one of four washed up across South Africa, Mozambique and the Mauritian island of Rodrigues — all of which authorities say "almost certainly" came from MH370.
The only confirmed piece from the stricken jetliner was a wing flap found on Reunion Island, a French territory in the Indian Ocean, in July.The Gift That Changes Everything
Those of you that have been following this blog for awhile have read these words before:
“You don’t have to see the whole staircase, just take the first step.” – Martin Luther King, Jr.
This quote resonates so deeply with me because this journey that we are on, this road to living our dreams, is an act of faith. We have faith that if we do this thing that speaks to our soul, even if we aren’t quite sure how to do it or what it means to do it, that the next step will appear.
And so far the next step has always appeared. Maybe not in the way we expect it to appear, or at the time we want it to appear, or even in the place we hope it will appear, but it has always appeared nonetheless.
Last Sunday Brian and were out to dinner with friends and once again the next step appeared. We were not expecting it, we weren’t even looking for it, but along it came anyway. And for the past week Brian and I have been a little dumbfounded, trying to digest it’s meaning and the possibilities of it. Like all next steps, in the very instant that it arrived the world shifted a little and we could see, quite clearly, that this is exactly what needed to happen. And now we do not look at our travels in quite the same way that we did before. This new way is even better.
The story behind the story
Before I tell you what the next step is I want to give you some background information. So hold tight because this is going to be a long post. But I think it is worth sticking through to the end.
I’ve talked a bit about how Brian and I moved to Oregon with whatever we could fit in our car. But the story behind that story is that we moved to Oregon because I’d been hired by a woman named Michele to run the recycling program at a local university. Michele hired me over the phone, sight unseen, and took a big chance on me, a young girl from Ohio whom she had never met before.
So Brian and I prepared to come to Oregon. Over email I told my new boss my plans, outlining the date we’d leave Ohio, the date we expected to arrive in Oregon, and the day I anticipated I’d be ready to start my new job. Oh, I added, and we’re going to camp until we can find an apartment.
Michele must have thought I was insane. There’s no place to camp in Portland (except under the bridges). Yet, instead of telling me that I was completely out of my mind (I was) she simply extended an offer: Why don’t you stay with us until you get a place to live?
The offer was incredibly kind but of course I couldn’t accept it. I’d be arriving in Portland with my boyfriend and my two dogs and my best friend Jenny who was tagging along for the road trip. Were I coming alone, I might have said yes, but I’d be showing up in Portland with a posse. I explained the situation to Michele. Stay anyway, she said. And because Brian and I were ridiculously naive and because we clearly had no idea how much we were putting them out, I said okay.
So just in case you didn’t catch that: Brian and I drove 2,500 miles across the country and moved in with my boss. My boss and her husband and her three dogs and two cats. Brian and I and our two dogs and my best friend. Oh, and did I mention that Michele and her husband, Glenn, had just moved into their home? They hadn’t even had time to unpack and we showed up at their doorstep. But their kindness never wavered. They just opened up their door and invited us in.
In the days that followed, Michele and Glenn showed us around Portland and took us to the movies and to dinner and refused to let us pay for a thing. When, a week or two later, we found an apartment, they gave us their old furniture and dishware and sent us on our way. Brian and I were flying by the seat of our pants. Michele and Glenn were pure goodness and kindness.
Over the years Brian and I have reminisced back on the sequence of events that brought us here and we are always awed that we had the good fortune to show up at the door of the two kindest humans in America. And over time we really began to see that Michele and Glenn changed everything for us. They were the reason we were in Oregon, and moving to Oregon transformed our lives in so many amazing ways.
In the early days, when we were fighting loneliness and homesickness, Michele and Glenn’s kindness got us through. Because they had welcomed us with such grace, we never felt completely alone in our new city. Brian and I began to think of them as our Portland angels.
The gift that changes everything
Fast forward to last Monday, three weeks before we leave on our trip around the world.
Because Michele and Glenn have played such a big role in our lives, it was important to us to have a final meal with them before we leave Portland. Our plan was to buy them dinner and thank them one more time, face to face, for all that they had done for us over the years.
But you know what John Steinbeck said about the best laid plans.
As we were finishing dinner and I was mentally preparing everything that I wanted to say to them, Michele and Glenn told us that they had a gift for us.
Michele handed us a beautiful yellow envelope tied with a silky yellow bow. She explained that for the gift to be properly |
and the "Extended Mag" which is based off the 40-round magazine, but it only holds 32 rounds.
Sa. Vz.61 Skorpion(**)
The Sa. Vz.61 Skorpion appears as the "Cobra" and is unlocked for purchase by buying the "Hotline Miami" DLC. Out of all the Hotline Miami DLC weapons, the Skorpion is the more spray and pray oriented. It has some fairly good stability and impressive concealment, but one of the lowest base damages in the game, as you'd expect for a.32 ACP submachine gun. But the mods for the gun allow it to be spun into a stealth SMG or a full-on battle SMG with ease, so long as you want to double to triple tap your enemies.
CZ Vz. 61 E / Yugoslavian made M84 distinguishable by its black pistol grip -.32 ACP
Note the undermounted rail, which should clue players in that this was likely modeled after an airsoft replica. While there are similar rail mounts for the Skorpion, they are for the most part fixed to the barrel "neck" rather than the receiver itself
The black grip can be swapped out for a rubber grip or the Czech original wood.
With time to kill, John takes his Skorpion out for a walk.
Iron sights, cramped but usable in close quarters.
Reloading. Pushing the mag release to pull out the magazine.
About to insert a new one.
Pulling the charging handle. Note that no bullet is visible in the chamber.
Sa. Vz.61 Skorpion -.32 ACP
Fitting the "Wooden grip" to the Vz.61 makes it resemble the classic Czechoslovakian model.
John Wick channeling his inner mallninja with a decked out Skorpion. Seemingly, nobody had ever clued the Payday gang in that mounting a large scope directly on top of where hot brass shoots out from is a bad idea. Also note the "Extended" magazine. Somehow two magazines clamped together give the gun a 40 round capacity. How it feeds from both magazines isn't clear, but it might be black magic.
Intratec TEC-9(**)
An Intratec TEC-9 modified to allow for fully-automatic firing appears as the "Blaster 9mm" and is unlocked for purchase by buying the "Hotline Miami" DLC. It holds 20 rounds by default and it's Extended Magazine modification gives it a correct 32 rounds. The TEC-9 is the all-rounder SMG of the "Hotline Miami" DLC, with decent damage, fairly good stability combo'd with absolutely horrible accuracy that can't really be improved no matter what mods you run.
In-game, it operates in strange ways uncharacteristic of the real TEC-9, the weapon fires from a closed bolt, meaning that it could be based on the US-import KG-9 model. The KG-9 was forced to be converted to a closed-bolt firearm by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms and Explosives (ATF) before the weapon could be marketed in the United States. The closed bolt would make the full automatic conversion unfeasible, which is an intended feature of the forced redesign as to discourage users from illegally modifying their TEC-9s. It is also capable of selective-firing, which is a highly unusual trait, that few illegal gunsmiths would implement into a weapon when converting from semi to fully-automatic. This also suggest that the Blaster could be partially based on the Interdynamic MP9, the parent design of the TEC-9.
However, Payday 2 depicts several open-bolt firearms (the MAC-10, Uzi, AA-12, M/45) as firing from a closed bolt, so the TEC-9 having a closed-bolt in-game could (and probably is) simply a mistake made by whoever modeled the weapon. As for the select-fire capability, once again, either a mistake or the devs decided to add it for gameplay reasons and didn't care that it doesn't make sense, which would be feasible considering how little sense the game makes overall.
Intratec TEC-9 - 9x19mm
Iron sights
Reloading. Inserting a twenty round magazine.
Reloading. Continuing the debate above, a rather curious detail with the TEC-9 is that, in the reload animation, once the charging handle is pulled, the bolt doesn't move at all. This is probably a mistake. However, in the original reload animation, the character holds the TEC-9 at an angle when pulling the charging handle that makes this mistake rather obvious. This "mistake" was not fixed in the new animation for the weapon, despite it still being held at an angle that makes it very obvious.
However, while farming some Sniper kills in Hotline Miami Day 2, Sydney reloads her modified Blaster to find that the animation has actually been fixed! The bolt now properly opens on an empty reload, showing the chamber (and the bullet within it). Of course it snaps closed again owing to Payday 2 treating the TEC as a closed-bolt weapon, but hey, it's something.
Intratec AB-10 pistol in factory Black Finish - 9x19mm. Note the absence of barrel threads.
IMI Uzi(**)
The IMI Uzi appears as the "Uzi" (one of the few guns to be called by its actual name in-game) and is unlocked for purchase by buying the "Hotline Miami" DLC. It holds 30 rounds in a 32-round magazine, but a more recent update increased it to a 40-round capacity for no explicable reason. The Uzi is the solid choice of the whole DLC lineup, with solid accuracy, stability and damage that is only capped by how expensive the gun is to buy.
IMI Uzi with buttstock extended - 9x19mm
Note the "K" foregrip. This is mounted by default.
Like many other open-bolt guns in PD2, the UZI is depicted as firing from a closed bolt.
John and his Uzi take a break outside and converse on the graphitti that adorns the wall outside the hideout.
Iron sights, clean and functional but dated.
Reloading. About to pull out the magazine.
In with a new one.
Just about to pull the charging handle.
IMI Uzi with detachable wood buttstock (late model with cheek cut out in comb) - 9x19mm
Fitting the weapon with the "Solid stock" mod gives it this late model wooden stock.
IMI Uzi with Sionics suppressor - 9x19mm
The UZI can also have its stock folded. Note the suppressor (called "Silent Death" in-game) It's similar but not quite the same as the Sionics Suppressor.
Sterling L2A3(**)
The Sterling L2A3 appears as the "Patchett L2A1" and is unlocked for purchase by buying the "Gage Historical Pack" DLC. It also holds an incorrect 20 bullets in the standard 34-round magazine. The name "Patchett" refers to the weapon's designer, George William Patchett, and the name of the weapon in its early development. The Patchett's a very finicky gun to use in game, with stellar stability and a deep ammo pool pitted against piddly damage and really bad inaccuracy that really can't be modded out without significant effort. Even worse, the rate of fire is abysmally low, which makes even spraying for headshots dificult.
Sterling L2A3 (Mk.4) - 9x19mm
Note that this is one of the few weapons in-game properly depicted with an open bolt.
Wick admiring his collection of guns. As with most Sten models and derivatives in video games, the Sterling is held in the improper "Sten grip" position, which is even more jarring in the hands of the series' resident Brit, Hoxton...
...who promptly demonstrates, as he sights up the blueprint of a Pancor Jackhammer that Chains just happened to have for some reason.
If one empties the mag, the chamber will be properly shown as empty.
Reloading. About to pull out the magazine.
In with a new one.
Pulling back the bolt. Note that the bolt only goes locks forward at the beginning of the reload animation and not when the gun runs dry, as common in video games.
Sterling L34A1 (Mk.5), suppressed version of the Sterling L2A3 - 9x19mm
The "Suppressed Barrel" mod turns the L2A3 into the Sterling L34A1
Star Wars. The L2A3 can be modified with a "Combat Sight", "Short Magazine", "Folded Stock" and "Heatsinked Suppressed Barrel" to make it look like the BlasTech E-11 Blaster from
Cobray M11/9(**)
The Cobray M11/9 appears as "Jacket's Piece" and is unlocked for purchase by buying the "Jacket Character Pack" DLC. It correctly holds 32 rounds. The M11/9 is a decent alternative for someone running an uber 80's loadout with a high rate of fire and quick ammo pickup and some decent stability and accuracy for a bullet hose. However the sights are pretty tight, any modern option gets mounted very far on the barrel and a painfully long dry reload.
SWD/Cobray M11/9 with folding stock - 9x19mm
Note the aftermarket vertical foregrip in place of the barrel nut. The fire selector is set to "SMG", whatever that means.
open. Note that the open bolt is properly depicted as
Jacket holding his piece while bathing in the neon light.
Iron sights, cheap and somewhat effective.
Reloading. Pulling out the magazine with the heel mag-release.
Mashing in a new mag.
Then pulling the charging handle...
...revealing the chamber.
The M11/9 modified with a shoulder thing that goes up (or a "Slotted barrel extension" as the game calls it)
Hotline Miami character Richard's face on the rear of the receiver. The M11/9 with the "Werbell's suppressor" and its unique skin modification, known as "80's Calling". The M11/9 is currently the only weapon that can be modified with an alternate finish that isn't counted as a weapon "skin". Note the presence ofcharacter Richard's face on the rear of the receiver.
KRISS Vector(**)
The KRISS Vector was added with the "Gage Ninja Pack" DLC. It is marketed as the "Polygon SMG" in-universe and called "Kross Vertex" by the inventory screen. The weapon holds 30 rounds in the "25+"-round magazines. The Vector is an amusingly powerful weapon in any heist with solid damage, accuracy and stability. However it's really low concealment means that stealth is not worth using this for, plus the high rate of fire will chew through your ammo fast if you aren't careful.
KRISS Vector -.45 ACP
"Polygon SMG" can be seen on the receiver near the muzzle.
Iron Sights, which appear to be based on Daniel Defense A1 BUIS.
Reloading. About to insert a new magazine.
Pressing the bolt release, or rather, the surface just underneath it.
TDI CRB/SO with barrel "safety extension" -.45 ACP
The Vector fitted with the "Precision barrel" giving it a similar appearance to the Vector CRB, which is the civilian semi-auto only variant.
The Vector's unique suppressor, called "HPS Suppressor" in-game. It was modeled after the Defiance HPS 4GSK.45ACP, an actual Kriss USA product for Vector models of this caliber. Note that the "S" in "HPS" is already short for "suppressor", so the in-game suffix is redundant.
Sydney reloading her Vector. Note that it no longer has a foregrip, it's still held as it has one however. Strangely, when fitting a "skin" to the gun, the foregrip will appear again. Why it disappears when no "skin" is used is unknown.
The Vector with the "Urban camo" finish, showing the foregrip. Also note the stock interface, which is a Kriss USA's proprietary Enhanced Stock Adapter that appears when the Vector's default stock is swapped out for a mod.
IMI Micro Uzi(**)
The IMI Micro Uzi appears as the "Micro Uzi" and is unlocked for purchase by buying the "Yakuza Character Pack". The Micro Uzi is a very powerful piece of kit, with a blazing rate of fire (tied with the MG42 and Vector at 1200rpm), fast reloads and great concealment. However the accuracy is pretty piddly, the sights can't be modded, and the high rate of fire plus fast reloads means you can very easily burn through your ammo.
IMI Micro Uzi with bent trigger guard - 9x19mm
Fresh in America, Jiro makes sure his Micro Uzi survived the FedEx shipping over.
Iron sights. Note how the gun is held at an angle.
Reloading. Inserting a magazine.
Yanking the charging handle.
SR-2M Veresk
The SR-2M Veresk was added along with the Jimmy character from the free Hardcore Henry Packs DLC, with his voice and likeness given by Sharlto Copley from the movie Hardcore Henry. The weapon is called "Heather" ingame, which is the English translation of "Veresk". It's notably the first subgun that can be dual-wielded. It has a slightly incorrect magazine capacity of 32 rounds instead of the real-world 30, likely because the stats, sans the rate of fire and stability, are a copy-and-paste of the Cobray M11/9 (Jacket's Piece).
SR-2M - 9x21mm
Here you can see the fire-selector is set to full-auto...
...and the safety is set to fire!
Jimmy and his Veresk wait in the laundromat for his suit to be dry cleaned.
Iron sights, replacements are highly reccomended.
Reloading. Removing the dry mag...
...inserting a new one...
...and pulling the charging handle. Note the coke stains on Jimmy's suit.
The SR-2 with its two unique mods, an extended stock (that mod has to be unlocked, it is however free to install once the player has one) and the Tishina suppressor. Tishina means silence in Russian, an apt name. It might look like it's clipping into the gun but it's actually supposed to fit that way.
Akimbo
Reloading. Since the Veresk has an ambi mag-release, this is atleast somewhat conceivable.
Heckler & Koch UMP45(**)
The Heckler & Koch UMP45 was originally an NPC-exclusive weapon, being used by enemy factions such as the GenSec Elite SWAT and the Murkywater PMC enemies. It was eventually added as a player-usable weapon with the "John Wick Weapon Pack" alongside the P30L and Desert Tech SRS-A1. Named the "Jackal SMG", it is otherwise known in-universe as the "Schäfer & Gewehr AMP", made by the same company that created the Bootleg, Gewehr 3, and Contractor pistol.
Despite being ostensibly based on the.45 ACP model, the weapon's statistics and performance in the game are more akin to the UMP-40 variant, most notably the fire rate and 30-rounder magazine.
Heckler & Koch UMP45 with vertical foregrip and flash hider -.45 ACP
If the player squints hard enough, the ".45 ACP" engraving can be seen on the bolt, thus confirming that this indeed is a UMP45, unlike what its stats may have suggested. Also despite being apparently milspec, the weapon also bears the caution to read the user manual above the fire selector, a feature not present on military UMPs.
Wick admiring Sokol's hockey corner.
Iron sights.
After filling the goal with the wrong sort of projectile, Wick reloads the UMP45. First by pulling back the charging handle.
Removing the empty mag.
In with a new one.
And the slapping (or punching, rather) the bolt into battery.
Heckler & Koch USC Tactical Match Rifle -.45 ACP
It's possible to modify the UMP45 into the Heckler & Koch USC with the "Civilian Barrel" and "Civilian Stock". Add the "Short Magazine" (which holds 20 rounds instead of 10) and "Single Fire" mod for more "immersion". The impersonation is less than perfect as the USC stock is not integral to the gun's frame, plus the UMP's stock hinge, 3-point fire selector switch and gadget rails remain attached to the weapon.
Iron Man (2008) and Live Free or Die Hard. A similar configuration, with the Surefire M900 replaced with a standard RIS foregrip, was used in XXX Heckler & Koch UMP45 -.45 ACP. This is a Screen used UMP45 fitted with a C-More red dot sight and Surefire M900 weaponlight foregrip as used on the filmsand. A similar configuration, with the Surefire M900 replaced with a standard RIS foregrip, was used in
The UMP decked out with a suppressor, "Twinkle Grip" (this makes it one of the two weapons currently in the game with a second vertical foregrip as a modification, the other being the Uzi) "Military Laser Module", "See More sight" and "Extended Magazine".
The GenSec Elite SWAT officer closest to the right side of the door holds a UMP45.
A dropped UMP wielded by a former Murkywater PMC.
PP-19 Bizon-2(**)
The PP-19 Bizon-2 was added with the "Gage Russian Weapon Pack" DLC. Named the "Tatonka" submachine gun in-game, the Bizon-2 is a rather inaccurate weapon with quite some recoil, though the latter is already remedied by the SMG's average fire rate. On the flip side, it is as compact as one would think and boasts unusually high damage per shot despite being chambered in pistol ammunition.
Like the AK-12 in the same pack, the Bizon-2 lacks unique modifications.
PP-19 Bizon-2 with side-folding stock - 9x18mm Makarov
Looking for trouble with the "Tatonka" SMG. The in-game name is actually a Native American word for "bison."
Iron sights of the PP-19.
Removing the helical mag on a customized Bizon.
Locking in another magazine.
Sokol chambering a round with his dominant hand.
MP40
The MP40 was added to the game in the free WWII Weapon Pack update alongside the M1 Garand and Luger P08. Known by its real name, the MP40 handles almost identically to the Swedish K, but has a very slightly faster reload animation. This is offset by its beastly recoil even when modified and a whopping total of two magazines to its name. It, like most open-bolt guns in the game, is incorrectly depicted firing from a closed-bolt.
The MP40's sole unique modification folds back its stock, which doesn't help at all with recoil control.
Unlocking the MP40 requires the player getting 50 kills with the Luger P08.
MP40 submachine gun - 9x19mm
Despite being proportioned after a real MP40 magazine, the in-game iteration stocks 40 rounds per box as opposed to the standard 32 (usually down-loaded to 30). This is a side effect of the MP40 being a near-identical clone of the Swedish K statistics-wise.
Taking a peek through the open ejection port shows the MP40's rather stunning lack of internal details. The magazine top and breech face are barely visible by rotating the weapon model as far as the game would allow.
Hoxton bringing his antique to the range.
Iron sights of the MP40.
Admiring the MP40's details with a strictly less-than-advisable low front grip. Hoxton would practically be asking for his magazine to fall out at this rate.
Ditto, right side.
Hoxton tops off his MP40 by a yank to the charging handle. The mag comes off shortly afterwards.
Out with the old and in with the new, Hoxton finishes the reload by slapping the bolt with his fist HK-style.
SIG-Sauer MPX
The SIG-Sauer MPX was added to the game alongside the new character Joy as a timed exclusive for the Nintendo Switch, before being added to the Steam version on Day 1 of operation ICEBREAKER. Known in-universe as the "Signature" SMG, it comes with provisions for alternative forends, stocks and magazines. It performs similarly to the existing Olympic Arms K23P with some minor stat differences and supports dual-wielding.
SIG-Sauer MPX, Gen 2 - 9x19mm. This is the semi-auto SBR model used for reference image; the in-game weapon instead has a three-position selector switch.
The in-game version seems to make use of a collapsible stock, which gets removed when dual-wielding. Also note the tiny magazine, which holds 20 rounds in-game, a good 10 more than the box's length might suggest.
Note the Signature banner in place of the usual SIG logo. This is also present on the P226R.
Hoxton trying out his new SIG at the shooting range.
Looking through the very clear iron sights of the MPX.
Reloading the MPX is as straightforward as replacing the magazine...
...followed by a press on the bolt release.
Admiring the nicely-detailed left side of the MPX. And no, the stock stays on fully-opened unless removed, there simply is no option to collapse it back in.
Ditto, right side.
SIG-Sauer MPX-K
Modifying the Signature with the Short Foregrip produces a rough approximation of the MPX-K PSB, though with autofire capability and a much more truncated front that lacks the subcompact model's finger guard. Removing the stock entirely turns it into a regular MPX-K.
SIG MPX-K - 9x19mm
SIG MPX-K PSB - 9x19mm
A valiant effort at replicating the looks of the kurz.
Ditto, PSB model.
Akimbo
Previewing a pair of "Signatures".
three MPXes to the shooting range. Because one SIG is not enough, and two is too few, Hoxton elects to bringMPXes to the shooting range.
Trying to aim properly with these is a lost cause...
Reloading the dual MPX is the same story as every other akimbo in the game.
After some magdumps, Hoxton takes some time to appreciate the finer details of his two SIGs.
Ditto, other sides.
Assault Rifles / Battle Rifles
This section spans most of the assault rifle-type weapons in the game. Most of the assault rifles not covered in this section are inside the carbines section.
AKS-74
The AKS-74 is the second primary weapon unlocked, at reputation level 1. It's simply called the AK Rifle and holds 30 rounds. Given its early unlock point, the AK is a fairly all-rounder weapon. It has better damage than the AMCAR with only lower stability as a real negative. Once you level up, the AK remains a solid rifle for loud heists, so long as you have the mod packs to keep it up to date.
Fun fact, the AKS-74 is the only AK to get bakelite mags in-game.
A nice sunny day and a nice shiny AK.
Iron sights what you'd expect from an AK.
Reloading. Rocking in a new mag...
...then pulling the charging handle. One can make out a round in the chamber.
Fitting the "Classic Stock" from The "Butcher's AK/CAR Mod Pack" turns the rifle into a regular AK-74
Unusable solid stocked AK-74s with wood pistol grips and metal magazines can be found as loot called "Assault Rifles" They always come in twos and the models are noticeably higher quality than the in-game model.
Steyr AUG A2
The Steyr AUG A2 becomes available to players at reputation level 8 and is named the "UAR" (presumably short for Universal Army Rifle, the English translation of Armee Universal Gewehr, or AUG). It holds 30 rounds and is rather accurate and powerful. It can be fitted with a railed fore end to make it resemble an AUG A3, but the rifle lacks the third gen's bolt release. Oddly, instead of its built-in folding foregrip, it has a section of rail added to the hinge where a TROY vertical grip is mounted.
The AUG is a weird gun that is built more for accuracy than anything else. Apart from its stellar damage and accuracy, the AUG has very few mods that improve upon anything else but these two stats. Combined with how pretty much every other stat is gimped to the point of uselessness, this makes the AUG an attractive option for starting players, but is quickly phased out when other, more moddable gear become available.
Steyr AUG A2 (Military Version) - 5.56x45mm
The AUG in all of its Austrian glory. The proprietary Steyr mag was actually introduced via an update. The AUG previously came with yellow PMAGs, which the real deal couldn't use.
Sadly there are no foregrip mods that let you swap out the drab stock grip.
Sokol enjoying the Maryland sun with his AUG.
Iron sights, these are the same sights used on the Kobus 90, the Marksman mod for the Deagle and Crosskill and other guns.
Reloading. Note the bullets are actually modeled inside the magazine!
Thales F90
As of Update 61, the Raptor Polymer Body was added as a mod for the weapon, giving it the appearance of the Thales F90 and a slight overall stat boost that still keep it a mediocre rifle in comparison to others.
Thales F90 - 5.56x45mm
Slapping the "Raptor Polymer Body" onto the AUG makes it sorta resemble the Thales F90, it lacks the bolt release however.
AKMS
The AKMS appears as the AK.762 and is unlocked at reputation level 16. It holds 30 rounds and has less total ammunition than the AKS-74 but has obviously more damage and more punch that allows it to stay in the game for higher difficulties with ease. A golden version of this weapon with diamond plating on the wooden handguard was released as a community reward, though is more expensive and has a lower concealment stat with no other differences. It can become a AKM if the "Classic Stock" from The Butcher's AK/CAR Mod Pack is equipped.
AKMS, stamped steel receiver w/ slant muzzle brake and under-folding stock - 7.62x39mm
Iron sights.
Reloading. Rocking in a new magazine.
Racking the charging handle. A round can be seen in the chamber if one looks closely enough.
The Gold AKMS in all its fugly glory.
AIMR - 7.62x39mm. The original Romanian designation for this rifle is the PM md. 90 cu țeavă scurtă (short barreled).
Fitting the "AK Slavic Dragon Barrel" to the AKMS allows it to impersonate the Romanian AIMR
AKM - 7.62x39mm
The AKM fitted with the "Classic stock" giving it that classic look.
The Russian mercs in the Boiling Point heist use AKMs with solid stocks as their weapon. They were the only enemies to use AKMs initially, but eventually enemies such as the Hotline Miami gangsters, cartel members, gang members and AI companions started using them too.
The AI Houston using an AKM.
M14 Designated Marksman Rifle
An M14 Designated Marksman Rifle with a McMillan M2A stock and a short 16" barrel appears as the "M308" as in the first Payday. It is set to semi-auto by default but can be switched to full-auto and holds 10 rounds in a 20-round magazine. Prior to the first Gage Weapon Pack release, it was semi-automatic only, making it the only assault rifle to have the mode; as of then, it is now one of only two weapons with multiple fire modes that defaults to semi-auto, the other being the much-later-added HK417. The weapon can be modified with a JAE 100 G3 stock or a SAGE EBR Chassis, the later makes it resemble a Mk 14 Mod 0 EBR.
Before anyone had ever considered sniper rifles an option for PAYDAY, the M308 was go-to for the team marksman with dependable power and accuracy well into extended ranges. Even now, it's still a useful rifle in the right hands, so long as you remember how little ammo you actually have.
M14 Designated Marksman Rifle in a McMillan M2A stock - 7.62x51mm NATO
M14 with Sage stock and scope - 7.62x51mm NATO
Note fire-selector below the rear sight.
Iron Sights.
Reloading. About to remove the magazine.
About to insert a fresh mag.
Hitting the bolt-release, a very rare sight with M14-style rifles in video-games. Note that the bolt is just about to lock into battery.
The M14 DMR in a JAE 100 G3 stock...
...and here in a SAGE EBR Chassis.
In the "Butcher mod pack" update, a scope mount was added for the M14. Without the mount, any optics will be mounted further forward on the rifle.
Bofors Ak 5
The whole Bofors Ak 5 family appears as the "AK5", all packed inside one gun's upgrade selection. Its accuracy and recoil are solid from the start, but the low damage needs help to reach its best. Unlocked at level 33.
Bofors Ak 5 - 5.56x45mm.
The stock model.
Ak 5B
Sticking on the "Bertil Stock" from the designated marksman model turns the AK5 into an ersatz Bofors Ak 5B.
This DMR stock is enough to boost shot accuracy. The stock foregrip doesn't get rails, the components just sort of clamp on.
Ak 5C
The modernized Bofors Ak 5C comes together by replacing almost everything that comes off the receiver.
Bofors Ak 5 - 5.56x45mm.
The true form of the rifle gains a leap to all important stats with the addition of the "Caesar" stock, "Karbin Ceres" foregrip and the recently introduced "CQB Barrel", decorated here with a yellow laser module and a Lancer L5 magazine. The resemblance is far from perfect, however, due to the lack of the Ak 5C's railed top and duckbill flash hider, and the complete absence of vent holes on the foregrip.
The sight picture is the western type, but the extra lateral vision is a welcome change from the AR-15 fashion.
More targets means more bullets. The real-life foregrip's venting holes are nowhere to be seen.
The first-person animation update introduced this baffling maneuver - Chains here is strong enough to tug back the charging handle, with one finger, even when he's twisting his left arm through the gap between the stock and his right hand.
The reload animation has since been updated to be more conventional.
Chambering a round.
FN FNC
The "Belgian Heat" handguard is cribbed straight off the FN FNC in a direct reference to Lt. Vincent Hanna (Al Pacino) from the movie Heat.
FN FNC - 5.56x45mm
This unusual upgrade is a shunned choice. It helps less than the 5C handguard in every way.
The ghetto-FNC showing off a modeling bug. The Tactical and Expert magazines are misaligned and oversized for the magazine well, clipping through the front. This has since been patched.
Looks like he's seen the film. The front sight is more reminiscent of the AR-15 types, very legible.
An empty magazine coming off the Bofors FNC. The voided barcode sticker is numbered "1KTG40885".
Another shot of the Ak 5's cocking acrobatics, showing off the clashing difference between the black handguard and the Swedish green lacquer.
M16A4
An M16A4 with a shorter 18" barrel appears as the "AMR-16" and is unlocked at reputation level 39. It is shown with a safe/semi/auto selective fire capability, meaning it was based on the export International Model R0901, and incorrectly holds 30 rounds in a 20-round magazine. It can be equipped with an M16A1 handguard with the Blast From The Past modification. Unlike the other AR-15 type rifles, the M16's gas block and front sight disappear when using optics.
One of the last weapons you can unlock from the original release's arsenal, the AMR is another rifle you need to train with to run right. It's similar to the AKMS except with a much higher fire rate meaning you can easily annihilate your ammo as you also only get 3-4 mags. Trigger control is key to make good use out of this USGI standard.
M16A4 - 5.56x45mm
The magazine is modeled after a 20 round mag but somehow it holds 30 rounds. For some reason, the various upgrade magazines hold 34 or 38 rounds in a 30-round mag. A 60-round quad stack and 30-round "Speed Pull Magazine" for faster reloads are also available.
Having arrived in America, Dragan and his AMR enjoy the sights of intercity DC.
Iron sights, relatively efficient.
Reloading. Inserting a new magazine.
Then pulling the charging handle.
FN SCAR-H(**)
The FN SCAR-H appears as the "Eagle Heavy Rifle" and is available to purchase for owners of the Gage Weapon Pack #1 DLC. It holds 20 rounds and is a powerful weapon. A version with a FN SSR stock is used by some Murkywater PMC enemies. The Eagle is for someone who really, really dislikes high health enemies like the Bulldozer. While at first you might want to run this as a DMR given it's decent accuracy and mediocre stability, the Eagle Heavy can be very effective in full auto as a rifle for dropping any manner of big enemy so long as you keep stocked up on ammo.
FN SCAR-H - 7.62x51mm NATO
Note the Magpul AFG, it is on the weapon by default and cannot be removed.
Iron sights.
Reloading. About to insert a magazine. The lack of feed lips is all too obvious in this frame.
correct, as it uses the bolt release to chamber, until Update #65 released this new animation that seemingly "broke" the rifle. Pulling the charging handle to chamber a new round. Seemingly, this SCAR-H has a broken bolt catch since the bolt does not lock back when the gun runs dry. Rather oddly, the original reload was, as it uses the bolt release to chamber, until Update #65 released this new animation that seemingly "broke" the rifle.
The SCAR-H used by the Murkywater PMCs. Note the AN/PEQ-15 IR designator on top of the front-rail.
Modified Version
Modified version with FN SSR stock, EOTech XPS, Command Arms pistol grip, and AN/PEQ-15 IR designator.
DSA SA58 FAL(**)
A DSA SA58 FAL fitted with a DSA bolt-on railed scope mount and a paratrooper rear sight appears as the "Falcon Rifle" and is available to purchase for owners of the Big Bank DLC. It holds 20 rounds and is a very flexible weapon. Notably, the SA58 was the first weapon to have its accessories linked to DLC achievements rather than random drops. In comparison to the other two major battle rifles, the Falcon just kinda sits weird. It has the same overall stats as both the Gewehr and the Eagle and only beats either with the ability to have more mods plus 40 round magazines. It makes it pretty rare for you to see a Falcon anymore in regular usage.
DSA SA58 with 18" barrel - 7.62x51mm NATO
Besides the DSA bolt-on railed scope mount and the eared paratrooper rear sight, it matches the above image to a T. Although difficult to spot in this screenshot, the receiver texture claims this weapon is chambered in.308 Winchester, a caliber that the original FAL cannot support while the SA58 can by using a proprietary receiver. Also note the fire selector being set to "Einzelfeuer" (single-fire), but the weapon still fires fully-automatic by default.
Note the DSA bolt with "sand cuts". The line "BARRINGTON, IL" milled onto its side is an obvious reference to the Barrington, Illinois-based DSA Arms.
Iron sights.
Reloading. Rocking in a new magazine...
...then finishes by racking the charging handle.
DSA SA58 OSW - 7.62x51mm NATO
A DSA SA58 OSW can be replicated by equipping the "CQB Foregrip", "Tactical Grip", and "CQB Stock" modifications. An Extended Mag is optional, but will further improve the look, though this 30-round magazine somehow holds 40 rounds.
Israeli FAL "Romat" with Wooden Furniture - 7.62x51mm NATO.
Attaching the "Retro Foregrip" and "Wooden Stock" to the SA58 allows it to impersonate the IMI Romat
FAMAS F1(**)
The FAMAS F1 appears as the "Clarion Rifle" and is unlocked for purchase by buying the "Gage Assault Pack" DLC. It incorrectly holds 30 rounds in a 25-round magazine. It features unique modifications based on other, often obscure variations of the weapon; alongside the "G2 Grip" to turn it into the FAMAS G1, it also gets alternate barrels based on those of the G2 Commando, the G2 Sniper, and the Century Arms MAS.223 civilian rifle. The Clarion |
incarnation, then it goes against trade liberalization. Before trade liberalization, Indian producers had to use domestically made intermediate goods, which were inefficient, rendering finished products costly and uncompetitive. One of the ways in which trade liberalization improved productivity was that it allowed producers to use more efficient imported materials and components.
As long as they are in favour of trade liberalization, I welcome efforts to boost manufacturing. I don’t completely agree with the reported view of Dani Rodrik that the days of manufacturing are over. Yes, there are some countries where manufacturing has peaked. But for countries such as India, China, and Indonesia with large domestic markets, there is still a huge scope for manufacturing. Think of the huge increase in demand for light manufactured items when living standards in the rural areas of states such as Odisha, Bihar, UP, and Madhya Pradesh improves. What is disconcerting is that India is not able to get into manufacturing products in the global value chain that China is getting out of. Countries such as Bangladesh, Vietnam, and Indonesia are ahead of us in making those products.
Are our labour laws to blame for this?
The labour regime is a constraint but as I have written earlier, it may not be the binding constraint. I looked at the data on a very labour-intensive industry: garments. Now, if labour laws are the binding constraint, you will expect to find many firms just below the threshold level of 100 workers beyond which stringent labour regulations kick in. But the data do not show that. There is instead bunching at a very low level: at around the eight-employee mark. So, the question really is what prevents an eight-employee firm from becoming an 80-employee firm.
If you ask an eight-employee firm’s owner what prevents him from expanding, he is likely to tell you that if he were to expand, and invest in better machines, he will need to assure himself of regular power supply. So, the binding constraint, in my view, may well lie in the poor quality of infrastructure in India, whether it be power, roads, or ports.
China’s success in manufacturing is a classic example of infrastructure-led growth. Most people don’t know that long before China initiated economic reforms, it had already created the base for an industrial boom by investing heavily in the power sector. Under Mao, China carried out a lot of rural electrification, whereas even today, half of the households in our villages don’t use electricity. Of course, China also invested heavily in health and education and that created a much more productive workforce. But even in infrastructure, China had already solved its problems much earlier, in the Maoist period.“The director didn’t get a clean bill of health at the end of this hearing,” Mr. Issa said.
Under questioning by committee members, Ms. Pierson said that an outer glass door at the North Portico remained unlocked after the intruder breached the fence and that an inner, wooden door was in the process of being hand-locked when the intruder came through the doors. She said the Secret Service had since installed an automatic lock on the door, which drew a tongue-in-cheek response from Mr. Issa.
“We learn from our mistakes,” he said.
Ms. Pierson, who said she took “full responsibility” for the security failure, also offered new details about the route that Mr. Gonzalez took inside the White House. She said he “knocked back” an agent inside the building, and then fought with the agent as he continued through the Entrance Hall, turned left into the Cross Hall, got a few steps inside the East Room and was finally tackled by two Secret Service officers back in the Cross Hall, just outside the Green Room.
Officials said the two were assisted by at least one off-duty agent who had just entered the building after seeing Mr. Obama off in Marine One, the presidential helicopter.
Ms. Pierson, a 30-year veteran of the Secret Service, spoke mostly in a monotone and exhibited little emotion, but at times she appeared flustered as lawmakers pressed her for short, quick answers. In a classified session after the hearing, Ms. Pierson told lawmakers that in jumping the fence, Mr. Gonzalez had set off a couple of security systems but acknowledged that the officers did not properly respond, Mr. Issa said. He said that some Secret Service members were under investigation, and that one “will not be standing post at any time in the near future.”
Shortly after the hearing, the United States attorney’s office in Washington announced that Mr. Gonzalez had been indicted by a grand jury on charges of unlawfully entering a restricted government building while carrying a weapon. The grand jury also indicted Mr. Gonzalez on charges of carrying a dangerous weapon in public and unlawfully possessing ammunition.The price of freedom isn’t paid in full by the valiant American servicemen and women who now rest beneath white marble tombstones. An ongoing toll is also exacted from those who return home in pain from wounds that are physical, mental or both.
The nation has long acknowledged its obligation to care for those who have served and who struggle back on the homefront. The hospitals and clinics run by the Department of Veterans Affairs have long tended to the medical needs of returning soldiers. Nothing short of the best possible care is acceptable for those who risked all for country.
But a recent Star Tribune series raised a troubling new set of questions about whether the VA system is still falling short of that duty when it comes to pain management — a care component that is critical for recovery and health.
The VA system has been under fire in recent years for overprescribing potent yet addicting pain medications, particularly opioids such as OxyContin. A 2013 congressional hearing provided harrowing details about tragic personal costs of abuse. Spouses, parents and children also suffer as veterans struggle with addiction.
The two-part Star Tribune series, which ran Sunday and Monday, documented a different though equally disturbing facet of pain medication mismanagement. The series’ findings suggest that the VA system swung too suddenly in the other direction after the national spotlight on overprescribing. Veterans with a legitimate need for powerful pain medications aren’t getting them or are facing unacceptable delays in getting refills. The VA also appears to have been ill-prepared to help veterans access alternative therapies — such as acupuncture — during pain medication tapering.
The series’ findings merit the same kind of scrutiny that overprescribing did. Veterans should not be imprisoned by pain because doctors are unwilling or unable to prescribe the medications they need.
WALZ WEIGHS IN “There isn’t a one-size-fits-all solution to this problem. But I … have advocated for a stepped care model to get those most in need assigned to a pain-management specialist that would work with them to create individualized plans to reduce pain, reduce prescriptions appropriately and improve quality of life.” U.S. Rep. Tim Walz, D-MINN.
Some point out that medicine in general still struggles with pain management. That is a fair point. But it does not excuse the VA from striking a better balance than it has for this critical care. The agency must continue addressing concerns about opioid abuse. But veterans absolutely cannot be left to suffer with life-limiting pain.
Minnesota U.S. Rep. Tim Walz, a veteran, rightly points out that the Veterans Health Administration has failed to fully implement a best-practices medical treatment blueprint — the Stepped Care Model of Pain Management — that was established by a systemwide “Pain Directive” in 2009. Walz authored the 2008 legislation that led to the pain directive’s creation.
No delays should have been brooked in carrying out this best-practices model. It’s not too late to embrace it now. Doing so would be a solid step toward striking the improved balance desperately needed for this crucial component of medical care.There are a lot of stats that matter during March Madness. But one that’s not often tallied as the country’s best college basketball teams compete for a national championship is how often those schools graduate players. On the whole, comparatively few Division I men’s college basketball players wind up playing professionally, and that underscores a central question facing some of the top programs in the country: Are schools preparing their student athletes to lead productive lives off of the basketball court after their playing days are over?
The answer hasn’t always been a good one, and it’s often colored by race. The Institute for Diversity and Ethics in Sports (TIDES) at the University of Central Florida released its annual study, “Keeping Score When It Counts: Graduation Success and Academic Success for the 2012 NCAA Division I Men’s Basketball Tournament Team” just in time for this year’s tournament.
Also, Inside Higher Ed put together their March Madness Academic Performance Tournament bracket for the seventh consecutive year. The bracket is based on each team’s Academic Progress rate which is used to measure classroom performance. This year, the winner of the academic tournament is Kansas.
Overall, there was an increase in the number of teams that graduated 50 percent or more of their student-athletes, and a decrease in teams that graduated less than 40 percent. But the number of teams with above 60 and 70 percent student-athletes graduates decreased.As high school seniors in Louisiana, Ben Simpson and I testified before the Senate Education Committee and asked them to repeal Louisiana's creationism law. The committee shot our bill down 5-1.
Ben had never been in a meeting where creationists testified about things like the secret science that the scientists didn't know about before. He had never seen his public officials insult students and criticize Nobel laureate scientists as people who only had "little letters behind their names." He took notes on claims made by creationist so he could correct the record. Our elected officials did not allow that.
Ben told me that before the meeting, he "saw the Senators and respected them as smart, capable leaders." He became disillusioned after they aggressively attacked scientists and voted against science, and said,
"However, when they opened their mouths, everything changed; they obviously had no idea what they were talking about... I felt deceived all these years."
Our generation can't hope and wait for for our leaders to do the right thing. We can't wait for them to decide whether they want students to learn science. We must speak out and be that change.
I asked Ben about many of our classmates at Rice, who are brilliant scientists, but apathetic about politics, he said, "Unfortunately science policy is frequently not in the minds of STEM oriented students. Many of these students are excited to do science and are uninterested in the political circus that controls science and technology funding."
Our classmates and students around the country must recognize that science policy does affect them. That is why Ben and I are launching a grassroots student movement to help inspire humankind's Second Giant Leap.
We are calling a permanent end to legislation, like the creationism law in Louisiana that promotes science denial. We are calling for 1 trillion dollars of new funding for scientific research and development over the next decade.
In an article for Richard Dawkins' website, Ben said, "We cannot even conceive how technology will change our species over the next million years -- a melancholy thought for those, like me, who want to be there to experience it."
Even if we won't be around in a million years, every one of us has the power to help humankind take a giant leap. Ben described the future he envisions after this movement:
"We have started to crack the human genetic code and put super computers in everyone's pocket. This is just the beginning. Evacuated Tube Transport technology has the potential to reinvent transportation and physically connect the world. Major killers like cardiovascular disease, cancer, and HIV/AIDS may soon be a thing of the past."
But he notes none of this will come to pass, "without the support of government policy and the public." We need students to stand up and speak out. We need the support of politicians and teachers. We need celebrities and scientists. We must call on our leaders to take another giant leap.
There is hope for the future though, as Ben says,
"Humanity is still so young. Even with all of our advancements we're still just animals surviving on our small rock of a planet. However, we are on the cusp of a new tier of civilization. We have globalized communication, and we are working on globalizing transportation, solving renewable energy, manipulating our own genetics, exploring our solar system, and curing our most dangerous diseases."Researchers at the Swiss university Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne (EPFL)'s Embedded Systems and Telecommunications Circuits lab have developed a non-invasive wireless cardiac monitor powered by a smartphone. The prototype is intended to alert potential patients and their doctors to cardiac anomalies.
The wireless body sensor network (WBSN) uses four sensors applied to the skin, as well as a radio module that attaches to the user's waist, to transmit ECG data to a smartphone app.
“This system collects very reliable and precise data, it’s equipped with a very effective noise filtering system, and it has batteries that can last for 3-4 weeks at a time,” stated EPFL professor David Atienza, head of EPFL’s Embedded Systems Lab, in an article on the EPFL website. “Above all it provides an automatic analysis and immediate transmission of data in compressed format to the doctor, preventing him or her from having to work through hours of recorded data.” In a video on the site, Atienza offered up an additional use case: The sensor can detect when a driver is falling asleep at the wheel and alert them to wake up.
“Its size, its lightness, its ease of use, the fact that it measures continuously and remotely, which allows analysis to take place anywhere, makes this device very attractive to doctors,” stated Etienne Pruvot, a cardiologist in the Lausanne University Hospitals (CHUV) Cardiology Service.
While Pruvot believes its ease of use is attractive to physicians, will consumers really be interested in spending the entire day with four leads attached to their chests? Many heart monitoring offerings that have bubbled up in the past year have avoided going down the path of requiring users to attach multiple leads to their bodies. iPhoneECG is one such case in point.
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Check out the CNN story hereIraqi security forces patrol an area near the borders between Karbala and Anbar provinces on June 16, 2014. Photo by stringer/Reuters
It’s stunning that, as we witness the spectacle of a crumbling Iraq and wonder what to do about it, the media turn for wisdom to the junkyard oracles who helped spawn the mess to begin with.
Bill Kristol, Paul Wolfowitz, L. Paul Bremer—no one should care a whit what they think, they’ve been so consistently wrong about everything. (As the first U.S. proconsul in post-Saddam Iraq, Bremer issued two directives—abolishing the Iraqi army and ousting all Baathists from government jobs—that had the effect of fueling the Sunni insurgency, prolonging the war, and siring the jihadist movement that’s causing trouble today.) Yet there they are, granted airtime not on Fox News but the three major networks, spouting advice to President Obama on how to fix things.
In Monday’s New York Times, Jason Horowitz has a jaw-droppingly fawning profile of historian Robert Kagan, author of a long essay in the New Republic that criticizes Obama for abandoning what he sees as America’s mission to spread democracy around the world. Horowitz suggests that the crisis in Iraq vindicates Kagan’s critique. Alternative views are barely acknowledged. Incisive reviews of Kagan’s New Republic piece, by serious foreign-policy analysts, go unmentioned. Nor does the article (and this is an article in the news section of the paper) recite Kagan’s record as a front-line cheerleader for the invasion of Iraq (and for the use of military force in nearly every crisis) or his assurances, throughout the war, that Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction.
Certainly this new crisis in Iraq is serious. It is not in U.S. interests for a well-armed, well-funded jihadist group like the Islamist State of Iraq and Syria to fulfill its self-proclaimed destiny, i.e., to create an Islamist state that spans Iraq and Syria. The question is how to stop this from happening and what role, if any, the United States should play in the stopping.
The New York Times’ Roger Cohen, in an opinion piece headlined “Take Mosul Back,” concludes, “President Obama should use targeted military force to drive back the fanatics of ISIS,” but he doesn’t elaborate. “Targeted military force”—I assume that’s a finessing euphemism for smart bombs and drones. But it’s fantasy to believe that air power alone will “drive back” the ISIS fighters.
Bill Kristol and Frederick Kagan (Robert’s brother) go further. The only way to stop ISIS, they write in the Weekly Standard, is “to send American forces back to Iraq … not merely conducting U.S. air strikes but also accompanying those strikes with special operators, and perhaps regular U.S. military units, on the ground.”
Before Kristol and the Kagans wax lyrical on the glories of spreading democracy abroad, they might want to check out the imperatives of democratic rule at home. They’d discover that almost no Americans want to send ground troops back to Iraq. Nobody—no politician, party leader, interest group, or military officer—is clamoring for it. They also seem oblivious to the fact that, if U.S. troops were to stomp on Iraq soil once more, their boots would be plastered on the recruitment posters for jihadist fighters worldwide. The campaign might even foment a Sunni-Shiite resistance movement—not quite the unified Iraq we have in mind.
American ground troops would be needed to oust the ISIS forces if we were to take on the problem by ourselves. And that’s the main point: Kristol, the Kagans, and neocons generally want the United States to reassume the burdens of maintaining what Robert Kagan calls the “liberal world order” (and what others might call “American dominance” or imperialism).
Kristol and Fred Kagan make the point explicitly. Their solution, they write, “is to act boldly and decisively to help stop … ISIS—without empowering Iran.” (Emphasis added.) There’s the rub—and the dilemma that Kristol, the Kagans, and all the others would like to evade. The fact is, the United States and Iran have a common interest in keeping Sunni radicals from taking over Iraq. Yes, forming an alliance with Iran to beat back ISIS would leave Iran—which already has huge influence over the Iraqi government—stronger still. So, we have to decide which prospect we dislike less: an Islamist state in Iraq (perhaps joined with one in Syria) or a strengthened expansionary Iran.
This business of bad choices is nothing new. The most instructive precedent in recent times is the decision by Franklin D. Roosevelt and Winston Churchill to team up with Joseph Stalin for the sake of defeating Adolf Hitler. One outcome of this grand alliance was that, at the end of World War II, the Soviet Union controlled all of Eastern Europe. But the alternative would have been for Nazi Germany to control all of Europe, east and west, and perhaps eventually more.
Iraq is not Europe, ISIS is not the Nazis, Obama is not Roosevelt, Hassan Rouhani is not Churchill. In other words, the analogy is far from perfect. But the point is the same: Sometimes nations have to form alliances with unpleasant nations to prevent the victory of something worse.
As it happens, U.S. and Iranian diplomats are meeting this week as part of the ongoing negotiations on Iran’s nuclear program. It’s a good bet that there will be some kind of discussion, perhaps in a side room, on the possibility of joint action in Iraq. If an agreement can be struck, it should be. Even Sen. Lindsey Graham advocates for working with Iran to save Iraq. (Now that Graham has staved off his primary challengers, maybe he’ll lay off his more absurd attacks on Obama, especially his obsession with Benghazi.)
Iran isn’t the only possible ally here. Turkey, on Iraq’s northern border, has a deep interest in staving off an ISIS triumph. During their rampage through Mosul, ISIS fighters sacked Turkey’s embassy and kidnapped Turkish diplomats; in other words, they attacked Turkey. Prime Minister Recep Erdogan’s government is likely revving up to do something. Nor can the rise of ISIS be pleasing to the leaders of Saudi Arabia, Jordan, or Egypt—all Sunnis but leery of the ISIS brand of Sunni.
However, just because nations have common interests doesn’t mean they’ll automatically take common action. This is where the United States comes in. Like it or not, we are the only power that can coordinate this action. This is what shuttle diplomacy is for. Secretary of State John Kerry and Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel should get on their planes right away.
More critically, Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki has to reach out to moderate Sunni politicians (while they still exist)—which is to say, he has to make good on promises, which he’s made for years, to form a more inclusive government. His systematic exclusion, even persecution, of Sunnis has made them ripe targets for subversion, and it’s significant that the cities overrun by ISIS—Mosul, Tikrit, Tal Afar—are Sunni strongholds. At this point, Maliki has little authority to bring together Sunni and Shiite representatives. However, if anti-ISIS Iraqis saw an international coalition coming to their aid, they might be emboldened, or at least less fearful, to act.
None of this means that the United States should send troops or even launch airstrikes. First, realistically, this isn’t going to happen. Second, it shouldn’t happen. But we can provide other assets, especially intelligence and reconnaissance. Drones are the most obvious tools, but there’s also the tracking of insurgents’ cellphones and the interception of their emails. (These played a big role, bigger than publicly acknowledged, during the “surge” of 2007 and 2008.)
It’s a good thing that Obama stays famously cool under pressure. The incessant chants from his critics to “do something” clearly annoy, even exasperate him, but so far they haven’t pushed him into action without thinking through the interests that compel (or argue against) it and the consequences that might follow. He’s defined the “Obama doctrine,” in private conversations, as “Don’t do dumb shit.” And, looking at the record of many presidents, that’s harder than it might seem.
In the new Iraq crisis, he might not have to do much. The Grand Ayatollah Sistani has called on all Shiites to come to the aid of the Iraqi nation. Iran has reportedly mobilized Quds special forces. ISIS has been halted in its drive to Baghdad. And I wonder how many troops ISIS has left behind to hold the towns they laid waste. Hoisting a black flag on the pole at city hall isn’t the same as conquering the city. U.S. commanders learned that during their dash through Iraq; they’d “liberate” a city, leave, then the insurgents would come back. This pattern can work both ways.
Still, Obama has to do something that’s limited, focused, but possibly effective. The opportunities are there, with Iran, Turkey, and other nations in the region to do something smart.If you have a few drinks, there is something new in Indiana this Memorial Day weekend to help you get home.
If you're drinking you can always have a designated driver, call an UBER or a taxi. But for this busy weekend you can also call a tow truck to come get you.
‘Tow to Go’ is a project available through AAA and Budweiser.
If you are drinking and have your car somewhere, instead of getting in it and driving drunk you can have a tow truck come.
It will pick up you and your car and take you home safely free of charge.
Since it began in 1998, it's picked up 2,000 drivers. But this is the first time it will be in Indiana.
Police say this is just another way to keep everyone safe this weekend.
"There are those people that get stubborn where they drink and they don't want to leave their car behind so this is one of those instances where there's no other, you have no excuse,” said St. Joseph County Sheriff, Mike Grzegorek. "I think it benefits everybody. I mean it keeps people out of jail, it keeps people out of the hospital and it keeps people out of the morgue. We don't want to see a tragedy this weekend."
Even if you're not a AAA member you can use the service. It's important to note that it should be used as a last resort.
If you take a taxi home, you can get your car towed for free to your home, or anywhere safe, as long as it is within 10 miles.
The program will start Friday and run through Tuesday morning.
Call Tow to Go toll-free at (855) 2-TOW-2-GO or (855) 286-9246.This was the extraordinary moment a 7ft long tuna fish was spotted in a British river 30 miles from the sea.
The huge tuna - which are usually found in oceans - was found washed up on the banks of the River Severn as experts have said it may have been chasing salmon upstream.
Kevin Brady, 33, was paddle boarding with friends Steve Burgess and Alec Foster when they came across the dead fish near to the village of Minsterworth in Gloucestershire.
This was the extraordinary moment a 7ft long tuna fish was spotted in a British river 30 miles from the sea
The huge tuna – which are usually found in oceans - was found washed up on the banks of the River Severn
He said: ‘Steve spotted it on his jetski and came to myself and Alec Foster on paddle boards shouting, “I’ve found a 7ft fish”.
‘We didn’t believe him, thinking it must have been a cow or something. It wasn’t until we got right up next to it we realised it was a fish.’
The adventurer, who took a month to swim the 220-mile River Severn last year, showed off the rare sighting on social media.
It had been washed up onto the side of the river, which is better known for salmon and elvers.
Kevin Brady, 33, was paddle boarding with friends Steve Burgess and Alec Foster when they came across the dead fish near to the village of Minsterworth in Gloucestershire
He said: ‘Steve spotted it on his jetski and came to myself and Alec Foster on paddle boards shouting, “I’ve found a 7ft fish”
Dai Francis, of the Severn and Wye Smokery, said the giant fish may also have been tempted in to British waters by rising temperatures.
He said: ‘This last week we have had some massive tides so it’s probably followed the salmon and everything else up the river.
‘You do not usually get tuna in British waters but as the water temperature increases, they are getting spotted more and more.
‘The water temperature in the River Severn is about 17C, which is really warm for this time of year.
‘That means all the fish from the West coast of France, the Bay of Biscay for instance, come around the corner and into the Bristol Channel.’
He added: ‘Basically the big fish follow the smaller fish and climate change means they come in further.’
The adventurer, who took a month to swim the 220-mile River Severn last year, showed off the rare sighting on social media
Dai Francis, of the Severn and Wye Smokery, said the giant fish may also have been tempted in to British waters by rising temperatures
The World Wildlife Fund’s website claims if the tuna fish was a car, it would be the Ferrari of the ocean world as they are sleek, powerful, and speedy.
There are 14 species of tuna, but the Atlantic bluefin can reach 10ft in length and weigh as much as 1,500 lbs, more than a horse, and can swim up to 43 miles per hour across long distances.
The WWF website says: ‘Some tuna are born in the Gulf of Mexico, cross the entire Atlantic Ocean to feed off coast of Europe, and then swim all the way back to the Gulf to breed.’
Large bluefin catches can sell for as much as £1million in Japan, where a single 500lb fish could make 10,000 servings of sushi.
Bluefin tuna are rarely seen in the English Channel although they were once common in the Mediterranean and Atlantic.
Expert Mr Francis said in years gone by North-East ports were known for excellent tuna fishing, and the rich would go there on their yachts to try and catch the species that are now more likely to be found in a can.
He said although the fish in the Severn looked like a whopper, it was probably not close in size to a 526lb tuna once reportedly caught off the coast of Scarborough.
There are 14 species of tuna, but the Atlantic bluefin can reach 10ft in length and weigh as much as 1,500 lbs, more than a horse, and can swim up to 43 miles per hour across long distancesTwo Russian-linked Facebook accounts — one anti-immigrant and the other pro-Muslim — pitted Houston-area residents against each other prior to the 2016 election, Senate Intelligence Committee Chairman Richard Burr (R-N.C.) said Wednesday.
One group, titled “The Heart of Texas,” promoted pro-Texas and anti-immigration messages with a tagline “Texas: Homeland of Guns, BBQ and ur heart!"
The other, titled “United Muslims of America,” claimed to be pro-Islam, and had a tagline “I’m a Muslim and I’m proud.”
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The two groups placed advertisements on Facebook promoting events at the same time on May 21, 2016, near an Islamic Community Center. The ads were viewed by nearly 15,000 people combined, Burr said.
Supporters from both pages then attended competing protests on opposite sides of the street near the community center.
Russian-linked trolls created and advertised the events for $200, Burr said during a hearing with representatives from Facebook, Google and Twitter about Russian interference in the election.
“What neither side could’ve known is that Russian trolls were encouraging both sides to battle in the streets and create division between real Americans," Burr said. "It’s hard to attend an event in Houston, Texas, when you’re trolling from a site in St. Pete, Russia. Establishing these two competing groups, paying for the ads and causing this disruptive event in Houston cost Russia about $200."
The senator told Facebook General Counsel Colin Stretch that while the site’s stated goal is to bring people together, the social media giant failed in this instance.
The Houston event is not the first 2016 rally to be backed by Russian accounts.
As many as 5,000 to 10,000 people attended a New York City march last November a few days after the election that was organized by BlackMattersUS, a Russian-linked group that sought to capitalize on racial tensions.Aughts were a lost decade for U.S. economy, workers
By Neil Irwin
Washington Post Staff Writer
Saturday, January 2, 2010; A01
For most of the past 70 years, the U.S. economy has grown at a steady clip, generating perpetually higher incomes and wealth for American households. But since 2000, the story is starkly different.
The past decade was the worst for the U.S. economy in modern times, a sharp reversal from a long period of prosperity that is leading economists and policymakers to fundamentally rethink the underpinnings of the nation's growth.
It was, according to a wide range of data, a lost decade for American workers. The decade began in a moment of triumphalism -- there was a current of thought among economists in 1999 that recessions were a thing of the past. By the end, there were two, bookends to a debt-driven expansion that was neither robust nor sustainable.
There has been zero net job creation since December 1999. No previous decade going back to the 1940s had job growth of less than 20 percent. Economic output rose at its slowest rate of any decade since the 1930s as well.
Middle-income households made less in 2008, when adjusted for inflation, than they did in 1999 -- and the number is sure to have declined further during a difficult 2009. The Aughts were the first decade of falling median incomes since figures were first compiled in the 1960s.
And the net worth of American households -- the value of their houses, retirement funds and other assets minus debts -- has also declined when adjusted for inflation, compared with sharp gains in every previous decade since data were initially collected in the 1950s.
"This was the first business cycle where a working-age household ended up worse at the end of it than the beginning, and this in spite of substantial growth in productivity, which should have been able to improve everyone's well-being," said Lawrence Mishel, president of the Economic Policy Institute, a liberal think tank.
The miserable economic track record is, in part, a quirk of timing. The 1990s ended near the top of a stock market and investment bubble. Three months after champagne corks popped to celebrate the dawn of the year 2000, the market turned south, a recession soon following. The decade finished near the trough of a severe recession.
But beyond these dramatic ups and downs lies an even more sobering reality: long-term economic stagnation. The trillions of dollars that poured into housing investment and consumer spending in the first part of the decade distorted economic activity.
Capital was funneled to build mini-mansions in Sun Belt suburbs, many of which now sit empty, rather than toward industrial machines or other business investment that might generate economic output and jobs for years to come.
"The problem is that we mismanaged the macroeconomy, and that got us in big trouble," said Nariman Behravesh, chief economist at IHS Global Insight. "The big bad thing that happened was that, in the U.S. and parts of Europe, we let housing bubbles get out of control. That came back to haunt us big-time."
The housing bubble both caused, and was enabled by, a boom in indebtedness. Total household debt rose 117 percent from 1999 to its peak in early 2008, according to Federal Reserve data, as Americans borrowed to buy ever more expensive homes and to support consumption more generally.
Consumers weren't the only ones. The same turn to debt played out in commercial real estate and at financial firms. It resulted in a corporate buyout boom that often produced little of lasting value. It is a truism of finance that for businesses, relying heavily on borrowed money makes the good times better but the bad times far worse. The same thing, as it turns out, could be said of the nation as a whole.
The first decade of the new century was an experiment in what happens when an economy comes to rely heavily on borrowed money.
"A big part of what happened this decade was that people engaged in excessively risky behavior without realizing the risks associated," said Karen Dynan, co-director of economic studies at the Brookings Institution. "It's true not just among consumers but among regulators, financial institutions, lenders, everyone."
The experiment has ended badly. While the stock market bubble that popped in 2000 caused only a mild recession, the housing and credit bubble has had a much greater punch -- driving the unemployment rate to a high, so far, of 10.2 percent, compared with a peak of 6.3 percent following the last such downturn.
The impact of the real estate crash has been broad. Among middle-income families, 69 percent owned a home in 2007, more than four times the proportion owning stocks. And as the housing meltdown cascaded through credit markets, the banking system was buffeted, rocking the whole financial system on which the world's economy rests.
Economists and policymakers will be chewing on the lessons of the Aughts for many years to come; the events of the past two years alone are enough to launch a thousand economics dissertations. If past periods of economic trauma are a guide, this research will yield a deeper understanding of how to manage the economy.
The Great Depression of the 1930s led to new insights about the impact a financial collapse can have. The primary lesson -- espoused by Ben S. Bernanke as an academic before acting on it as Fed chairman -- was "Don't let the financial system collapse."
The Great Inflation of the 1970s brought a rethinking of what drives inflation, such that economists now put a premium on maintaining the credibility of central banks and keeping inflation expectations in check.
The lessons of the Bubble Decade are still being formed. At the Federal Reserve, the major lesson that top officials have taken is that bank regulation shouldn't occur in a vacuum; rather than monitor how individual institutions are doing, bank supervisors should try to understand the risks and frailties that the banking system creates for the economy as a whole -- and manage those risks.
Fed leaders have been more skeptical of the idea that they should routinely raise interest rates to try to pop bubbles. "I can't rule out circumstances in which additional monetary policy actions specifically targeted at perceived asset price or credit imbalances and vulnerabilities" would be advisable, Fed Vice Chairman Donald L. Kohn said in a recent speech.
"But given the bluntness of monetary policy as a tool for addressing developments that could lead to financial instability, the side effects of using policy for this purpose, and other difficulties, such circumstances are likely to be very rare."
And the question of how Washington can prevent a recurrence is an overarching theme in the Obama administration's efforts to overhaul the financial system and support growth through investments in clean energy and other areas. "One of our challenges now," President Obama said in November, "is how do we get what I call a post-bubble growth model, one that is sustainable."
The financial crisis is, for all practical purposes, over, and forecasters are now generally expecting the job market to turn around early in 2010 and begin creating jobs. The task ahead for the next generation of economists is to figure out how, in a decade that began with such economic promise, things went so wrong.
© 2010 The Washington Post CompanyTimothy Theodore Duncan (born April 25, 1976)[1] is an American former professional basketball player. He played his entire 19-year career with the San Antonio Spurs of the National Basketball Association (NBA). Widely regarded as the greatest power forward of all time as well as one of the greatest basketball players of all time,[2] he is a five-time NBA champion, two-time NBA MVP, three-time NBA Finals MVP, and an NBA All-Star Game MVP. He is also a 15-time NBA All-Star[3] and the only player to be selected to both the All-NBA and All-Defensive Teams for 13 consecutive seasons.[4]
Duncan started out as a swimmer and only began playing basketball in ninth grade after Hurricane Hugo destroyed the only |
1931, a Japanese officer detonated a bomb on the tracks of the South Manchuria Railroad. The Kwantung Army—Japan’s guardians of the railroad in China—blamed the explosion on Chinese troops at the nearby Peitaying Barracks. The Mukden Incident, as it became known, was the Kwantung Army’s attempt to drag Japan into war. For years the Japanese had skirmished with Chinese troops under the command of the Chiang Kai-Shek and the local Generalissimo Zhang Zuolin—the latter of whom was killed on Jun. 4, 1928 when the Kwantung Army destroyed the railway bridge as his train crossed. As the fighting continued month after month, the Japanese officers in Manchuria grew restless and ambitious. The Kwantung Army enjoyed exceptional autonomy over its dominion and frequently operated under a doctrine of “loyal insubordination” (gekokujo) which put it in direct opposition to the political leadership in Tokyo. Faced with economic hardship in the home islands, many of the Kwantung officers subscribed to militarist conspiracies meant to revive Japan’s people and economy. One such conspiracy—the Plan for Acquiring Manchuria and Mongolia—came out of this desire for stability and security. Manchuria was rich in coal, iron and minerals, all strategic resources that Japan needed for its economic security and independence. The Imperial General Headquarters in Tokyo approved the plan as a possible response to a major Chinese provocation—but the officers of the Kwantung Army were eager to ensure that this provocation actually occurred. Despite the opposition of the emperor, the prime minister and the cabinet to the build-up of the Kwantung Army around Mukden—now known as Shenyang—the officers hurried plans to realize the Japanese occupation. They did so against the clock. Their contacts back in Tokyo had informed them that the minister of War, Gen. Jiro Minami, had dispatched a government envoy—Maj. Gen. Yoshitsugu Tatekawa—to bring the officers to heel. At a section of the South Manchuria Railroad near Liutiao Lake, 1st Lt. Suemori Kawamoto—from the Independent Garrison Unit of the 29th Infantry Regiment—set a minimal amount of explosives to damage the railway but not destroy it. At 10:20 p.m. on Sept. 18, the charges detonated, causing no injury and little damage. But the blast would propel Imperial Japan down the path to its own destruction. The Kwantung Army blamed the attack on Chinese troops at Peitaying Barracks, some 1,200 yards away, and implemented a brutal response that had been long in the making. Based on plans that had been decided months before, late on Sept. 18 the Kwantung troops bombarded the garrison into submission with a pair of 9.2-inch howitzers brought up from Port Arthur in July. The cannons had been hidden away in a bunker disguised as a swimming pool built in complete secrecy on the grounds of the Japanese Officers’ Club in Mukden. Victory was swift. Five hundred Japanese soldiers assaulted the 7,000-strong garrison, killing 500 Chinese soldiers for the loss of only two Japanese. As the world watched on in dismay, the Kwantung Army moved quickly to occupy Manchuria, forcing Prime Minister Reijiro Wakatsuki to recognize the Imperial Army’s victory and legitimize the Kwantung Army’s war-footing. This, for many Japanese, was the beginning of the war that would engulf the Pacific.
The northern barracks at Peitaying in 1934. East Asia Image Collection, Lafayette College photo
Dogs of war The Japanese military on the Asian continent relied heavily on animal-based logistics—horses for transportation, pigeons for long-range communications and dogs for short-range communications and sentry duties. There were some 10,000 dogs in service with the Imperial Army as messengers, sentries, trackers and sled teams at time and, as Japan marched across Manchuria and later China, the military recognized the need to ensure a steady supply of animals. It asked the citizens of the empire to donate their pets to the military for use in Manchuria, which officials described as a “working dog’s heaven.” How do you convince families to give up their household pets to serve on the front lines? Through propaganda—particularly aimed at children. It was in this fashion that Itakura’s story became a popular tale, one taught to children as a prime example of “acts of loyalty, bravery and martial passion,” to borrow a wartime government phrasing. The following account blends the dramatized account contained in Genichi Kume’s 1932 propaganda book Major Itakura and his Loyal Dogs with added details from Japanese blogger Benigara’s investigation of the memorial at Enmei Temple. A well-known researcher of military dogs, Itakura arrived in Manchuria from the Japanese home islands in March 1931, having been transferred from the Army Infantry School in Chiba, where he served as chief of the War Dog Training Center. Itakura—then still a captain—lived in an area of Mukden known as Inaba, where he looked after his unit’s dogs. Of all the hounds he housed, his favorites were the German Shepherds Meri, Nachi and Kongo. Itakura trained them to deliver messages and patrol with their handlers at night. As artillery thundered on Peitaying Barracks on the night of Sept. 18, Meri, Nachi and Kongo put their skills to work. From 11 p.m. to 4 a.m., the handlers dispatched the dogs to and from battalion headquarters carrying messages from 1st Company out in the field. Despite being outnumbered, the Japanese soldiers quickly seized the upper hand, because the Chinese soldiers were under orders not to retaliate. But under relentless artillery fire, the Chinese soldiers couldn’t help but try to protect themselves. According to Kume, Meri was with his handler Pvt. Ueno as he joined the assault on the barracks. As Ueno’s squad closed on one of the buildings, a hand grenade exploded and Chinese soldiers leaped up, forcing the Japanese into close-quarters combat. Shrapnel gashed Ueno’s leg. Through the pain, he desperately tried to hold onto Meri, but the dog slipped away and dashed inside the barracks. Ueno attempted to run after him but Meri vanished into the smoke and dust. Elsewhere, Kongo and Nachi had also been cut off from their handlers and were also missing. The Chinese retreated in the morning. Peitaying Barracks was in Japanese hands, but the three dogs were nowhere to be found. Even when Itakura went out whistling for them to come back, they did not return. Three days later the bodies of siblings Nachi and Kongo were found covered in wounds and lying in blood-stained snow. According to Kume, the pups had been forced into the snowy wastes outside. There they had made an impassioned last stand—evident from the bitten-off scraps of enemy uniforms still clenched between their teeth and the nearby mauled bodies of Chinese soldiers. The propagandist Kume described a likely fictional exchange between Itakura and his eight-year-old daughter Atsuko, upon the officer’s return home following the battle. Itakura watched his daughter’s eyes turn wide and brim with tears as he told her of Kongo and Nachi’s fates. He tried to console her. “They worked very hard. Even with all the fighting, they made sure our messages made it all the way to headquarters. They were on their way back to me when they were shot by Chinese soldiers.” “What about Meri? Was Meri shot, too?” “We don’t know where Meri went or what happened to him. That’s why I came home—I thought maybe he had come back here but … ” Itakura’s voice trailed off. Atsuko’s large eyes filled with tears. Outside the house’s gate, a cart trundled up, its contents concealed under a white sheet. Itakura steeled himself and peered under the cover to see Nachi’s corpse. “Where was she?” Itakura asked the private pulling the cart. “At the north end of the parade ground, sir. She died from a shot to the chest. I brought her over with Kongo.” “Thank you. Still nothing about Meri?” “No, sir. The others have split up to search for him, but there is still no word.” As her father listened to his subordinate’s report, Atsuko begged to be allowed to see under the sheet. Itakura refused to let her see the bloodied canine corpses and ordered the private to take the cart to the rear of the house. Before long, the private had whittled down a plain piece of wood into a suitable grave marker. Itakura took a brush and wrote upon it, “Here lie the devoted Japanese dogs Kongo and Nachi.” Sentry dog training at the Imperial Army Infantry School in Chiba in 1930. Benigara scan Japanese pride The account above is based on Kume’s popular story, published in 1932. It’s not the original account as written by Itakura himself. It’s an embellished dramatization—and the seed of a wider propaganda effort surrounding the dead dogs. One florid account from 1932’s Conversation With an Anonymous Soldier From the Mukden Independent Garrison describes five dogs at work that night and three bodies being found—their blood staining the white snow around them. Hirotoshi Asano, the man who gave Kongo and Nachi to Itakura, took these dramatizations to task in his own account, Remembering the War Dogs Kongo and Nachi. “To say that there would be white snow in Manchuria on Sept. 18 is going a little far.” Yet the imagery is found in many of the popular retellings. The story goes that Nachi and Kongo’s bodies were buried in the grave at Peitaying, but an original account written by Itakura himself states that the bodies of Nachi and Meri, not Kongo, were recovered that day. In The Desolate and Mournful Wind of the Raoyanghe from 1931—one of the earliest popularizations of the incident—this key fact has not yet changed. But accounts from 1932 onward resemble the story presented above, with Kongo found in Meri’s place. Why didn’t Meri make the cut? The names Kongo and Nachi carry a lot of weight. They originally come from exceptionally old Shinto shrines and Buddhist temples in the western Japanese mountains. Mt. Nachi also lent its name to a Japanese navy Myoko-class cruiser that sank off Manila in November 1944. Three war vessels have taken their name from Mt. Kongo—an iron-clad that served in the First Sino-Japanese War of 1894, a battleship that sank in the Formosa Strait in 1944 plus a modern missile destroyer. By contrast, Meri’s name is a transliteration of the English name Mary. As was common in those days, Meri was also a male name. It’s possible the propagandists changed Meri to Kongo to honor the grand Shinto heritage. While Meri’s Western name might have been unacceptable, the fact that he was a European breed would have had little bearing on his place in history. All three of the Sept. 18 war dogs were German Shepherds, just like 90 percent of serving Imperial Army canines at the time. And the Japanese military loved German Shepherds. As government bureaucrat Kikuyoshi Miyagawa wrote in the teachers’ manual of a 1935 textbook recounting the Peitaying story, German Shepherds were the “essential expression of the Yamato spirit, the exemplars of repaying accumulated debt, the incarnation of dauntless courage whose loyalty and bravery rank with the imperial soldier, and which would even make a fierce god weep.” According to Miyagawa, the dramatized popular accounts emphasized to school-aged children that the dogs had “died a death that is heroic beyond comparison” so that “a tough and courageous spirit may be cultivated through which the greatness of the Japanese nation (kokutai) will become visible.” One school textbook from 1935 describes Kongo and Nachi’s deaths as follows: At last they were found. However, they lay among a pile of dead enemies’ remains. The two dogs had taken several bullets each, and their death had been a bloody one. Looking closely, it turned out they were clenching shreds of enemy clothing between their teeth. The soldier who saw them immediately broke into tears. According to Itakura’s original telling, there were no dead bodies around the dogs’ corpses, no clothes between their teeth and no heroic deaths. Meri was killed by a bullet to the abdomen, Nachi by a bullet to the chest—and they were both found together. Kongo, whose body was lost, was presumed killed in action. Itakura noted that they bravely performed their duties under a hail of bullets and that their deaths would further the army’s commitment to the use of military dogs. “Brave soldiers honorably killed in battle by enemy bullets, their deaths were not in vain—they have secured the future of working dogs in the army,” he wrote. “I am confident their meritorious service will aid the development of younger working dogs.” Itakura was absolutely right. The military dog program would continue in large part thanks to Kongo, Nachi and all the other subsequent stories in the press, cinema and literature of dogs fighting for the emperor. Itaru Itakura, far left, with his colleagues at the Military Dog Research Group in 1930. Imperial Army photo The compassionate handler The story of “speechless warriors” dying with honor on the battlefield would probably have been compelling enough for a propaganda piece, but what gave the story legs was Itakura’s subsequent death on Nov. 27, two months after the Mukden Incident. The 33-year old Itakura was a military academy graduate from Sanbu District, Chiba. Entering the army in 1921, he initially served with the 28th Infantry Regiment. He moved to the Army Infantry School in 1927 as a light-machine gunner cadet, after which he was promoted to first lieutenant. The Infantry School at Tendai in Chiba split from the Tokyo-based Army Toyama School in 1912. It existed to research and propagate infantry tactics and education throughout the Imperial Army. One subject that greatly interested army leadership was the Germans’ extensive use of military working dogs and carrier pigeons. On the orders of its commandant in 1913, the school began research into military dogs—and received its first actual canines in 1919. All of the German Shepherds at the school descended from 11 German colonial police dogs confiscated in Qingdao, China, which was occupied by the Japanese during their limited engagement in World War I. Until the arrival of the Japanese, Qingdao had been a de facto German colony. Itakura became the chief of the War Dog Training Center in February 1930, but was called to Mukden a year later by Lt. Col. Sadao Yoshida, the founder of the Mukden Garrison’s War Dogs Section. Itakura took the dog Meri with him from the Infantry School. Meri, a male German Shepherd, had been donated to the Army by the National Shepherd Club, of which Itakura was also a member. Nachi was donated to Itakura directly by Hirotoshi Asano, another National Shepherd Club member. Asano had considered Nachi particularly suited for service after taking her and her litter-mates for a walk. The puppies scattered in panic when a motorbike backfired. Asano searched and searched for Nachi as he collected the puppies, and was sure she was gone for good as he walked her litter-mates home. He found Nachi was waiting for him back at home. This intelligence and homing instinct was rare among his dogs, and this encouraged Asano to supply Nachi to the army. Kongo was Nachi’s brother, and his donation to the military was entirely accidental. As Asano’s wife prepared to crate and send Nachi to Itakura in Mukden, she worried that the pup would be lonely on her long journey. Searching for a companion for poor Nachi, Asano selected Kongo due to his similar character. The pair arrived in Dalian and from there joined Itakura and his wife on their trip to their new home in Mukden. Itakura had one other dog he wanted to take with him—Hopu (“hope”), donated to the army by Qingdao resident Kakusaburo Suzuki. But the army understood the need for good public relations to maintain a steady supply of donated working dogs, so it rejected Itakura’s request and sent Hopu back to Japan to do publicity work. It’s safe to say that Itakura loved dogs. He worked with them, lived with them and reportedly brought them home to bathe and play with his daughter and son. It seems fitting that his legacy would be dominated by them.
League of Nations political map showing railroads of Japanese-occupied Manchuria in 1932. Heidelberg University scan
Death of the master Clashes between Japanese and Chinese troops escalated in the aftermath of the Mukden Incident. Anti-Japanese Volunteer Army troops invaded Jinzhou on Nov. 27, 1931. The Kwantung Army dispatched its own troops from the Mukden Independent Garrison in armored trains to fend off the Chinese advance. At 5:40 a.m., Itakura left Mukden on an armored train heading west toward Shanhaiguan. His train did not go unnoticed—a spy reported its departure and a Chinese armored train was dispatched to intercept. The Japanese arrived at Baiqi Station at 8:15 a.m. Station staff told them there was a freight train inbound from Raoyanghe Station. The staff was unable to contact other stations up the track because the communications cable had become disconnected, so two messenger boys boarded the Japanese train and at 8:30 a.m. it set off through the snow at a steady 30 kilometers per hour. At 9:30 a.m., the Japanese train suddenly came under fire. As shells burst around them, the chief of the train’s guard element, 1st Lt. Shimoshiba, ordered the train’s mountain guns to return fire. The attacking train’s front carriage came into view—it was the eight-carriage Chinese Zhongshan. Buy ‘Sergeant Rex: The Unbreakable Bond Between a Marine and His Military Working Dog.’ As many as 80 shells rocked the Japanese train in the first hour. The continuous volleys of gunfire by the Japanese had slowly depleted their ammunition supply. With only 20 shots remaining, one of the messenger boys from Baiqi headed back along the tracks to request resupply from the next train down the line. On the way, the messenger bumped into Itakura, who had been busy scouting the area. Itakura told the boy to return to the train with orders to charge the enemy. The messenger asked about the civilians aboard—including a Tokyo Nichinichi Shimbun journalist—but Itakura reiterated that the train was to charge with all hands. Frustrated, Itakura decided to deliver the message himself. Aboard the train, members of the Japanese 2nd battalion prepared their counter-attack. The Tokyo Nichinichi Shimbun reporter noted the pre-battle nerves that rippled through the train at 11:30 a.m., as it began to close the 1,500-meter gap with its attacker. The Chinese halted the advance by pulling back to Raoyanghe Station and destroyed the connecting bridge. The Japanese train made an emergency stop and was now a sitting duck. A crewman died. The Chinese bombardment continued unabated across the river and Shimoshiba, seeing the danger his troops faced, ordered a 300-meter retreat. Itakura was now 700 meters away, in the middle of his round trip to deliver a situation report and receive orders from the battalion commander. After arranging an ammunition resupply to the forward train car, Itakura opened the carriage door to continue down the tracks when an artillery shell exploded, spraying him with shrapnel. The Nichinichi reporter described Itakura falling to the floor, calling out, “I’ve been hit!” Shrapnel had penetrated the left side of his abdomen and he was bleeding out. Battalion commander Kojima lifted Itakura onto his shoulder and rushed him back inside the train. The Desolate and Mournful Wind of the Raoyanghe includes the propaganda version of Itakura’s last moments. Despite being spread thin by mounting casualties, the battalion physician Tamura came over to tend Itakura’s wounds. The shrapnel had penetrated deep into Itakura’s gut and shredded his insides. His prognosis was not good. Crouching beside Itakura, Tamura shouted, “Capt. Itakura, pull yourself together!” He was pleasantly surprised when Itakura opened his eyes. “You’re awake!” the physician said. “Guess what—the enemy is retreating!” It was a lie to make a dying man happy, and it worked. Itakura bowed his head to the doctor. “Tamura, I can die in peace, following behind my beloved dogs. If you go back to Mukden, tell my children that I died fighting for my country and to take care of the remaining dog in my place.” The Asahi Shimbun report tells what is probably the true story of Itakura’s last moments. “Please take care of my three children,” he asked battalion commander Kojima. The fighting raged until the the Chinese train beat a retreat at 3 p.m., one of its carriages completely destroyed. In recapturing Raoyanghe, the Japanese lost several of non-commissioned officers wounded or killed. Itakura was the only officer killed in the attack. He was posthumously promoted to major for his actions that day. The Asahi Shimbun’s coverage of Itakura’s death also included the original and unaltered story of the deaths of his dogs. Itakura became inextricably linked to his faithful canines. For that, he surely would have been happy. Postcard depicting the Monument to the Loyal Dogs in Zushi. Benigara scan Endorsing the myth On July 5, 1933, during the first award presentations for animals of the Imperial Army, Kongo and Nachi each received the highest honor—an honorific collar which is now kept in the museum on the grounds of the controversial Yasukuni Shrine. The Mukden Independent Garrison Headquarters had requested public recognition of the dogs’ efforts on June 10: First, on the night of Sept. 18, 1931 the 2nd Battalion were dispatched for the offensive on Peitaying near Liutiaoman. Kongo and Nachi, war dogs attached to 1st Company participated in the battle. Namely, on that battlefield they were responsible for carrying orders between the company and battalion headquarters through darkness and under enemy fire and performed with distinction. In addition, at the height of the battle 1st Company broke through under machine gun fire, the dogs broke into the ranks of the enemy volunteers, killing and wounding with their bites, causing much loss and menace, aiding the company’s battle before being honorably killed in action. For their meritorious deeds we put them forward for highest honors. Meri received no mention—and it is blindingly obvious that the “official” story was taken from the popularized retelling and not the initial account Itakura gave to Asano. Four days later on July 9, the dogs were commemorated by the opening of the Monument to the Loyal Dogs at Enmei Temple in Zushi. Itakura’s widow, Army Minister Sadao Araki and former minister of war—and soon-to-be commander of the Kwantung Army—Gen. Jiro Minami all attended the ceremony along with other political and military dignitaries plus more than 2,000 school-children who had raised the funds to erect the statue. The students sang a song in the dogs’ honor called “Nachi and Kongo’s War Feat.” Shizuko and her children stand in front of the Monument to the Loyal Dogs. Benigara scan Hijacking a family memorial Itakura’s widow Shizuko moved to Zushi from Mukden following her husband’s death, taking with her a male German Shepherd named Juri—taken from the English name Julie. Juri had been purchased by the Shanghai Shepherd Club from a Russian trader in the city and donated to Itakura in September, immediately after the deaths of Kongo, Nachi and Meri. Itakura had put this new dog to work as a railway guard in Mukden. Shizuko returned to Japan in 1932 with her three children and Juri. She had worked at an elementary school in Mukden and found work in Kanagawa Prefecture teaching English and music at Zushi Practical Course Girls’ High School and Zushi Elementary School. Juri died from distemper-related infection on Valentine’s Day in 1932, around the same time that Nachi and Kongo were becoming household names. His remains were buried at the rear of Enmeiji Temple. Itakura’s eldest daughter Atsuko entered Zushi Practical Course Girls’ High School—where her mother worked—in April 1933. Principal Yujiro Arai learned of Itakura’s story during the initial entrance inspection. He visited Juri’s grave with children from the school and related the story of Nachi and Kongo. According to a bulletin by the Imperial War Dog Association, he concluded his story, saying: Even though they were non-native dogs, Kongo and Nachi lived in the empire and were trained by a solider of the Imperial Army, working loyally to the Imperial Japanese Army. … We should remember their devotion and loyalty. Arai’s words apparently stirred something in the pupils. Flowers and money started to stack up in front of Juri’s grave. The head priest of the temple promised the children he would set aside a corner for Juri if they could raise enough money for a gravestone. The children solicited donations and handed over their own pocket money. Some kids placed a collection box outside the staff room at the school and in two days it was full. The funds totaled ¥20, approximately $75 today. The school itself had raised enough money to purchase a gravestone—but the collection efforts were far from over. On April 22, Tokyo Nichinichi Shimbun published a story on the children’s efforts. Money flooded in from the public. Very quickly, the children’s coffers exceeded ¥900, or $3,350 today. With the explosion in donations, the principal founded a support committee including Enmeiji’s chief priest, Zushi’s mayor, the local veteran’s association and Vice Adm. Kamiizumi. Inevitably, plans for the memorial evolved beyond a simple grave for a beloved dog and instead became a monument to faithful hounds everywhere. Toshio Aoyanagi, a young engraver, won the commission to produce a bronze statue in Juri’s image. But with Juri already deceased, Aoyanagi was forced to use a dog from Tokyo named Hirumoa—probably from the name Gilmore. In contrast to the obedient canine his image would represent, Hirumoa was reportedly a very difficult model. But after a year of labor, Aoki finished the double-size mold of a German Shepherd standing tall with his messenger pack. Juri’s remains were placed in the memorial alongside the remains of “Kongo” and Nachi, retrieved from Peitaying. Their interment capped the much adapted story of Itakura and his loyal dogs—but what had been gained? Postcard of military dogs in a large-scale Japanese army exercise in 1932. H. Kohno scan Barking for the war effort The propaganda continued in Tokyo Broadcasting’s May 28, 1932 Famous Dogs of the World, which had Meri suddenly showing up again months after his disappearance and the subsequent death of his master. The pup arrived at the Itakura home in Inaba, exhausted and emaciated but alive. The show featured an interview with Capt. Shigemitsu Kishi, who had been stationed in Mukden during the Incident. Kishi described the dogs being unleashed upon the enemy barracks, attacking the enemy while the Japanese attackers were pinned down. According to Kishi, when the Japanese soldiers checked the barracks the next morning, they found Kongo and Nachi with their throats slit and several gunshots to the abdomen. He claimed that Meri had returned home 53 days later without a single cut on his body. He said that Meri was still at work in the military, two years after Itakura had recorded that the dog had died. Kishi was no knave—he was the adopted son of Lt. Gen. Iyajiro Kishi, advisor to Zhang Zuolin, the warlord of Manchuria killed by a Kwangtung Army plot in 1928. He was also Itakura’s successor at Mukden and had passed through the Chiba Infantry School’s War Dog Section. Keenly aware of the need to promote the military in the eyes of the public, Kishi and colleagues pushed this new and even more dramatic version of Itakura’s loyal hounds to the media. The donation of dogs to the military was a primary source of canine recruitment, as Aaron Herald Skabelund recounts in his book Empire of Dogs. Just as parents watched their children march off to war, waving flags emblazoned with the rising sun insignia, so too were pet owners expected to sacrifice their beloved dogs for the good of nation. Popularizing the 1928 story, glamorizing the three dogs’ roles and portraying their deaths as heroic helped the army meet growing demand for canines and handlers. The introduction of Meri’s survival to the story had lasting impact. It appears in Genichi Kume’s Major Itakura and his Loyal Dogs, as well as many other later retellings. Yet we know from Itakura’s letter to Asano that Meri was found dead—and it is unlikely that his return would have gone unreported in the press. It also seems unlikely that the Itakuras left Meri in Manchuria. Nor does the pup’s name also appear in records of dogs dispatched for “anti-bandit operations” in 1932. The lack of evidence for the survival of one of Itakura’s dogs suggests that Kishi was lying.
Entrance to Enmei Temple in Zushi in 2014. James Simpson photoEndorse early, endorse often. That’s how Kathleen Wynne turned the old political joke (“Vote early, vote often”) on its head. Except she wasn’t fooling around.
Premier Kathleen Wynne’s early and enthusiastic endorsement of Justin Trudeau payed off on Monday night when the Liberals won the election. ( Lucas Oleniuk / Toronto Star )
Long before Canadians settled on Justin Trudeau, well before any prime ministerial honeymoon, Ontario’s premier was an early adopter. And an enthusiastic endorser. She showed him political love when he was running last, and showered him with praise when he was pulling ahead. Wynne went out on a limb by placing a big bet on the Liberal leader when few others saw his growth potential. Wynne cheered him on, early on, at a Regent Park rally with a passion that seemed unseemly to critics. And she badmouthed NDP Leader Thomas Mulcair in an un-premier-like way when he was still well-placed to win the election.
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The investment was not only personal but political — Wynne didn’t just stick out her own neck, she loaned out much of her provincial electoral machine: The vast majority of campaign managers for federal Liberal candidates emanated from the party’s provincial wing. Now, the gamble has paid off. Wynne is the bearer of a monumental IOU. So too are the Ontarians who voted massively for Trudeau at her behest. They are counting on her to collect in full on their behalf, and fully expecting his new government to deliver. How big is that political debt? About $11 billion big, if you count the amount that Ottawa collects annually from Ontario taxpayers for distribution everywhere else through equalization and other social transfers for health and education. But that fiscal imbalance, long an irritant at Queen’s Park, won’t evaporate overnight.
Ontarians have swung massively behind the federal Liberals in the past, only to be taken for granted when it came time for Ottawa to give the country’s biggest province its due. Former prime minister Jean Chrétien won virtually every seat in Ontario yet cheerfully shortchanged the province in the aftermath, because in Canadian politics the squeaky wheel gets the grease — and the squawky provinces get the regional largesse. Wynne’s wish list for federal leadership is long: Pension reform, infrastructure investments, global warming, fiscal fairness, child care and pharmacare.
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The province has long lobbied for an expanded Canada Pension Plan. Thwarted by Stephen Harper’s Conservatives, Wynne campaigned hard in the 2014 provincial election for a new Ontario plan to plug the gap, and is now moving on that mandate. The common assumption is that an Ontario Retirement Pension Plan would be superseded by an expanded CPP under Trudeau. Not so fast — or more precisely, not fast enough: Ontario’s plan is advancing rapidly, while any CPP expansion remains embryonic. Changes to the national plan require the consent of other provinces; agreeing on how much to scale it up could also prove challenging. In short, a pan-Canadian pension expansion could prove too little, too late. It’s quite possible that Trudeau will find himself following Ontario’s lead on pension reform, rather than leading the way nationally. His major contribution would be to support Ontario’s recent request to streamline administrative functions — something Harper bizarrely refused to do. It’s a similar scenario on climate change, pharmacare and child care. Not just Ontario, but Quebec and B.C. have made major gains in these fields. In all these sectors, progress may be measured by how well a new federal government gets along with the provinces — as opposed to getting in their way. For the first time in a decade, there will be political congruence between Liberal governments in Ottawa and Ontario, and personal chemistry between the prime minister and premier. The new alignment disproves the old axiom that voters deliberately choose different parties in the two different jurisdictions to play them off against each other. Will Wynne do any better than her predecessors in getting Ontario’s fair share? She will certainly get a better hearing than she ever got from Harper. After all, the federal Liberals are already familiar with Ontario’s pitch — some of Trudeau’s top aides having crafted it when they worked at Queen’s Park during Dalton McGuinty’s perennial crusades for fiscal fairness. Ultimately, though, Trudeau’s calculus will be about political interests, not personal loyalties. All the more reason for Wynne to remind him that Ontario holds two IOUs, not just one: First, her personal campaign on his behalf; and second, the critical support he got from voters across the province. Martin Regg Cohn’s Ontario politics column appears Tuesday, Thursday and Sunday. mcohn@thestar.ca, Twitter: @reggcohn
Read more about:Mastering Human Relationships
The most important and the most highly paid form of intelligence in America is social intelligence, the ability to get along well with other people. Fully 85 percent of your success in life is going to be determined by your social skills, by your ability to interact positively and effectively with others and to get them to cooperate with you in helping you to achieve your goals.
Learning how to develop and maintain superior human relationships can do more for your career and for your personal life than perhaps anything else you can accomplish.
The bad news is that the inability to get along with others is the primary reason for failure, frustration and unhappiness in life and work. According to one study, more the 95 percent of men and women let go from their jobs over a ten year period were fired because of poor social skills rather than lack of competence or technical ability.
According to psychologist Sydney Jourard, most of your joy in life comes from your happy relationships with other people, and most of your problems in life come from unhappy relationships with them. Most of your problems in life are people problems.
Fortunately, you can become extremely skilled at getting along with others, and in this chapter, you will learn how. You’ll learn a variety of proven methods to immediately improve your relationships with virtually anyone, under almost any circumstances.
The Law of Indirect Efforts
The Law of Indirect Effort states that you get almost everything in your relationships with others more easily by approaching them indirectly rather than directly.
For example, if you want to impress people, the direct way of going about it is to try to convince them of your admirable qualities and accomplishments. But trying to impress another person by talking about yourself usually makes you feel a little foolish, and sometimes embarrassed.
The indirect way of impressing another person; however, is simply to be impressed by the other person. The more you are impressed by the other person, by who he or she is, or what he or she has accomplished, the more likely it is that the other person will be impressed by you.
If you want to get someone interested in you, the direct way is to tell him or her all about yourself. But the indirect way works better. It is simply to become interested in him or her. The more interested you become in another person, the more likely it is that the other person will become interested in you.
If you want to be happy, the direct way is to do whatever you can think of that will make you happy. However, the most enjoyable and lasting form of happiness comes from making someone else happy. By the Law of Indirect Effort, whenever you do or say anything that makes someone else happy, you feel happy yourself. You boost your own spirits, your own self-esteem.
How do you get another person to respect you? The best way is to respect him or her. When you express respect or admiration for another person, he or she feels respect and admiration for you. In human relations, we call this the Principle of Reciprocity. Whenever you do something nice for someone else, the other person will want to reciprocate by doing something nice for you. Most of our romances and friendships are based on this principle.
How do you get a person to believe in you, given the Law of Indirect Effort? The answer is to believe in him or her. Whenever you show that you believe or have confidence in another person, he or she will tend to believe in and have confidence in you. You get what you give. What you send out, you get back.
Applying the Law of Indirect Effort
The most important applications of the Law of Indirect Effort have to do with developing a healthy personality in yourself. You are structured in such a way that everything you do to another person has a reciprocal effect |
strand/AFP/Getty Images)
OK, but reindeer do.
17. They're religious about recycling.
(Justin Sullivan/Getty).
Scandinavians love to recycle. Seriously. Recycling has become such an obsession in Sweden, for instance, that even The Daily Show poked fun at it (starting at 4:00 minute mark).
Sweden's waste recycling progam is so successful that they've been importing — yes, importing — about 800,000 tons of trash a year from the rest of Europe.
18. No permits no problems.
(Flickr Creative Commons).
Norway calls it "allemannsrett." Sweden, Iceland, and Norway have variations of it too. The concept is that the public has a legal right to roam any "uncultivated" land even if it's commercially owned (though specific rules vary by country).
You can hike through forests, camp in the mountains, and pick wildflowers, as long as you are doing it responsibly.Tesla Motors (TSLA) is expanding operations by adding a facility in the Northern California city of Lathrop. Despite the news, Tesla shares fell almost 4% in Wednesday morning trading.
The luxury electric car marker has leased a 431,000-square-foot facility formerly occupied by Chrysler’s Mopar parts distribution unit. Tesla has secured permits from the city to renovate the structure to meet its needs and is installing production equipment, Automotive News notes.
Tesla has also posted ads to fill 32 new positions at the Lathrop facility on its website.
In a statement, Tesla said that its “ongoing infrastructure expansion” would lead to more jobs in California. Tesla noted that it has leased “more than 625,000 square feet of Californian real estate, independent of sales and service centers,” over the last two months.
Earlier this year, Tesla announced plans to build a massive factory to produce batteries for its vehicles. Tesla says it is looking at potential sites for the new factory in Arizona, Nevada, New Mexico and Texas.
TSLA stock closed at $218.64 a share on Tuesday.
More Tesla News:We are pleased to announce that we have put wheels in motion to revamp a piece of UK Counter Strike history, a regional championship. This event used to be a regular addition to an old cornerstone of UK Counter Strike – Enemy Down. We aim to give this event a new lease of life to help promote UK CSGO and hopefully find some more UK talent.
At this stage we are still planning the event, but we would like to open the floor to applications for captains. In order to help we have put together a very quick form for applicants to fill in. The form can be found below or by following this link. We will look over all applicants and pick out the best choices for each county and announce the captains at a later date.
The UKCSGO County Championship is an event where each team is made up of people who reside the the same county. It will be a double elimination structure run over a number of weeks depending on how many teams we have. We are pleased to announce we already have two sponsors on board for this event to offer prizes who will be revealed closer to the launch date.
We will bring you more information on this event as soon as we can, but if you are interested in being the captain of your county please fill in the form so we can get the ball rolling on bringing this plan into action.A Washington Times editorial falsely claimed that under president Obama's 2011 budget, "people currently in the 10 percent, 25 percent, 28 percent, 33 percent and 36 percent personal income tax rates will all face higher tax rates." In fact, Obama's budget proposes allowing the top two income tax rates to return to their pre-Bush tax cut levels -- affecting only income that exceeds $200,000 for individuals and $250,000 for families -- and leaving the other three income tax rates at their current levels.
From a February 2 Washington Times editorial:
Next year, despite Mr. Obama's frequent campaign promises not to raise taxes on those making less than $250,000, people currently in the 10 percent, 25 percent, 28 percent, 33 percent and 36 percent personal income tax rates will all face higher tax rates. This is not the first time that Mr. Obama has broken or tried to break this promise, but higher marginal income tax rates will completely obliterate yet another Obama promise.
Fact: Only top two income tax rates will increase under Obama's budget
Budget proposal extends Bush tax cuts for "98 percent of all households." The budget proposal states that "the President supports allowing those tax cuts that affect families earning more than $250,000 a year to expire and committing these resources to reducing the deficit instead. This step will have no effect on the 98 percent of all households who make less than $250,000." The budget includes $135 billion in fiscal 2011 and $3.097 trillion for 2011-2020 to "[c]ontinue the 2001 and 2003 tax cuts," but lists several "Upper-Income Tax Provisions" that would roll back the Bush tax cuts for individuals with income greater than $200,000 and families with income greater than $250,000.
CNN: Under Obama's budget "today's rates on income tax" would "remain the same" for everyone making less than $200,000. From a February 2 CNNMoney.com article, "Obama's budget: Impact on your taxes":IT’S not that cult golfer Andrew “Beef” Johnston has a beef with PETA, he just doesn’t want to change his name to “Tofu”.
And no way was the gift of a few vegan “steak” burgers from the People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals’ UK branch going to swing the affable 27-year-old Englishman from ditching one of the sport’s coolest nicknames.
“Beef”, the man with the generous steel-wool beard and one of the toothiest and gummiest smiles in sport, has gained cult status on the tour in the past few months, after he had his first European tour victory and said he was going to celebrate by “getting hammered”.
By the time he’d finished sixth at this year’s British Open, with the cries of “BEEF” ringing out from the crowd every time he lined up at a tee, he’d picked up sponsorship from US food chain Arby’s, famous for its beef and his Twitter handle @BeefGolf was doing plenty of business with its 58,000-plus followers.
So when PETA came calling, “Beef” — much-loved for the fact he’ll chat with any fan and rarely wave away a request for a fan picture or autograph — had to tell them it just wasn’t going to happen, Golf Digest reports.
😂😂😂. It's my name basically so won't change https://t.co/JlatdyrELX — Andrew'BEEF'Johnston (@BeefGolf) August 2, 2016
PETA’s letter asking him to become a vegan said: “Like many others, we’ve been enthusiastically following your career, and we thought we’d send you a gift of delicious vegan steaks and burgers in the hope that you’ll consider adopting a kinder, healthier vegan lifestyle, which would pave the way for a new nickname: Andrew ‘Tofu’ Johnston.”
“Your new nickname would also raise awareness of the urgent need to move towards a cruelty-free lifestyle to offset the worst effects of climate change. According to the United Nations, animal agriculture is “one of the top two or three most significant contributors to the most serious environmental problems, at every scale from local to global.”
“Beef’ has politely revealed that despite the fact he’s partial to a Porterhouse, his nickname is actually about his hair.
As a kid, he was nicknamed “Beefhead” and the “Beef” part stuck.
Rather than tell PETA “tofu off” as one of his fans suggested, he opted for a succinct reply, complete with crying-laughing emoticons: “It’s my name basically, so won’t change”.
And let’s face it, Andrew “Tofu” Johnson hasn’t got the same ring to it.
It might have paid PETA to take a look at Beef’s newest wedge — which is branded with nine different cuts of cow: rib eye, brisket, sirloin, T-bone. Tri-tip, flank, filet mignon, Porterhouse and skirt.In the summer of 1977, I saw Star Wars forty times. I was small and crafty, so I was able to sneak in to my local cinema more than I paid. I was also obsessed. It’s why I love fandom in general: I get to see people express the same affection in other ways—not just by camping out in theater for hours on end, eating nothing but popcorn. (It was the '70s. We were all free-range kids then.)
When it comes to the Star Wars Theory videos, I’m also a little obsessed. This series breaks down theories and nagging questions into bite-sized chunks of awesome, just for Star Wars fans like me. They're good enough to make you think that you’ve wasted your life on work and relationships, when you could be spending it watching Star Wars, reading Star Wars books, and living on a Star Wars-based commune.
The vlogger (a 26-year-old Canadian, name unknown)’s knowledge is comprehensive. He hasn’t just watched the movies. He references George Lucas’ original screenplays, comic books and books I’ve never heard of, cherry-picking the best details, which means I don’t have to be caught buying a pre-YA book “for my niece.”
Want to know the real reason Anakin killed the younglings? If you think it’s because Anakin wanted to prevent them from returning and seeking justice (not revenge—please, that’s for the Sith), think again. Want to know why Chewbacca's bowcaster didn't kill Kylo Ren? This video does the freakin' math.
Also, these videos aren't all-work-and-no-play-makes-Jack-a-dull-Jedi academic. One of the more lighthearted topics is “What if Obi Wan DID Buy the Deathsticks?” which presents an alternative Star Wars universe. A happier one. Without Obi-Wan.
Star Wars Theory is for every fan who ever asked, “How was it that Obi-Wan was able to beat the legs off of Vader?"As scientists continue their exploration of the thousands of organisms that live inside our body, a new study is showing just how much one “good” bacteria can be exploited to its host’s advantage. Scientists were able to engineer this bacteria to find and attack a harmful pathogen in mice and worms, preventing and halting infections in the process.
The thousands of bacteria and fungi that live inside us are called the microbiome, and the “good” bacteria and yeast are often referred to as a probiotic. Because mice and worms are different from people — and their microbiomes are accordingly different — it’s too early to know if this lab-made bacteria will work in humans. But the study, published today in the journal Nature Communications, is a good example of how we might be able to reprogram the body’s microorganisms to precisely attack pathogens. The hope is that these genetically engineered probiotics could one day help us prevent infections, or even provide an alternative to antibiotics, which can lead to resistance in bacteria.
it’s tough to know how it will perform in people
“From the animal studies it appears viable,” study co-author John March, a professor in the Department of Biological and Environmental Engineering at Cornell University, writes in an email to The Verge. But “since we can’t test this in people yet, it’s tough to know how it will perform.”
The probiotic used in the study is called Escherichia coli Nissle 1917. You might know E. coli for causing diarrhea, UTIs, and pneumonia, but most strains are actually harmless, and E. coli Nissle 1917 is one of them. It was first isolated from the poop of one lucky World War I soldier who, unlike the others in his trench, wasn’t affected by an outbreak of heavy, bloody diarrhea, caused by bacterial dysentery. The probiotic strain has been shown to have beneficial effects on some gut disorders, and today, it’s often taken as the supplement Mutaflor.
Researchers had previously reprogrammed a strain of E. coli to detect and kill the pathogen Pseudomonas aeruginosa. This bacteria is widely known for causing serious infections in hospital patients and people with a weakened immune system. In that study, however, the pathogen was killed in the lab, not inside an animal, so it was unclear if the system would actually work in a living being.
In today’s study, the researchers engineered the probiotic E. coli Nissle 1917 to attack the same pathogen, P. aeruginosa, in two animal models. The microorganism was engineered to destabilize the sticky, mat-like colonies that allow the P. aeruginosa bacteria to cooperate with each other, called biofilms. These biofilms make it hard for the immune system or antibiotics to fight P. aeruginosa infections. The probiotic was basically reprogrammed to detect the pathogen, break open its protective barrier, and kill it, says March. In roundworms and mice, the engineered E. coli Nissle 1917 was able to thwart the activity of P. aeruginosa during gut infection. The probiotic was especially efficient in preventing the onset of an infection rather than fighting a preestablished one, the study says.
today’s finding is more than a curiosity
In mouse intestines, for example, the E. coli strain stuck around for up to three weeks. That suggests that a single dose of the engineered antibiotic could provide protection from P. aeruginosa infections for several weeks. So in the future, it could be used to prevent infections in at-risk patients, says lead author Matthew Chang at the National University of Singapore. Or it could be even used as an alternative to antibiotics. Inevitably, of course, bacteria adapt to our antibiotics, becoming resistant — something that’s been seen since the very first drug, penicillin. No new classes of antibiotics have been introduced since the 1980s, so we’re starting to run out of the lifesaving drugs that most modern medicine relies on. That makes today’s finding more than a curiosity: anything that can help keep antibiotics in reserve might help slow the resistance crisis.
“Resistance to antibiotics is something that will always exist, I expect,” says March. But this organism may prove more effective than a standard antibiotic, since it’s attacking along several lines of resistance, he says.
For now, however, the lab-made probiotic was only tested in animals, so it’s unclear whether it would work in people. And a host of things could go wrong when the engineered microorganism is tried in humans. “One can imagine that the host won't accept the probiotic, although this is pretty rare,” say March. “The host could have an allergic reaction much in the same way that could happen with any drug.”
So there’s still lots of work ahead — but today’s findings suggest the enormous potential hidden in our microbiome.UPDATE: It’s abundantly clear that there are still imbalances to be fixed here. We are listening to all the feedback and will be incorporating updates as soon as possible. Truly appreciate your patience (and passion!).
Today we are changing the way we calculate points for lifting activities on Fitocracy. Previously, the formula we used was based on the estimated 1 Rep Max (1RM). However, it turned out this disproportionately awarded points to sets to the very first rep in any given set and as a result, some users began exploiting this to maximize their points by splitting up their workouts into many 1 rep sets.
Philosophically, we believe that the largest benefit from lifting occurs within a certain rep range. For example, one cannot expect to optimally progress if they are bench pressing 30 reps on every set. While this stance can often be controversial, we feel that it’s safe to say that the optimal benefit occurs somewhere between 3 and 20 reps. This works nicely as a solution to the 1-rep exploit, because we can create a new formula that shifts points away from the 1st rep and then distributes them more evenly across the subsequent reps. Here's a graph comparing the old (straight line) and new (curved line) formulas.
The trade-off of this new formula is that lifting your true 1RM will earn fewer points than previously. We have added a slightly exponential feature to the weight input to compensate, so that doubling the weight will more than double the points. We will also likely add bonuses for hitting new personal records in the near future.
TL;DR: New lifting formula that decreases points for first few reps of a set.The idea that each man kills the thing he loves has been interpreted by manyfrom Oscar Wilde to Paulo Coelhobut it’s always had a particular resonance in the environmental movement, where every hiking trail and ecofriendly resort inevitably destroys or alters nature in the name of love. For 69-year-old activist Ric O’Barry, the paradox is an apt expression for his cause: the preservation of dolphins.
Everybody loves them, right? he asks. But be careful with the word love.
To O’Barry, even activities as seemingly benign as paying to see dolphins perform at SeaWorld or swimming with them in captivity constitutes abuse. We love dolphins like they’re our familyI hear that a lot. Really? You lock your family up in a room and force them to do tricks before they eat their dinner? O’Barry says. The dolphin is a sonic creature; its primary sense is sound. You put one in a bare concrete box with music blaring and people shouting, of course it’s stressful! If people could see them in the wild, they’d never buy a ticket to a dolphin show.
O’Barry is sitting in a midtown bar, his scuffed sailor shoes and messy shock of white hair, bleached by years of sun and saltwater, endearingly out of joint with the city. He’s in town to promote The Cove (opening July 31), a white-knuckle chronicle of his attempts to expose the slaughter of dolphins in Taiji, Japan, where 2,000 a year are killed, legally, in a hidden lagoon. Funded by Netscape co-founder Jim Clark, the documentary plays like a behind-enemy-lines thriller. Largely shot in jittery handheld and frantic night vision, the at-times gruesome footagedolphins spasming in death while impaled on spears, blood spurting until the entire cove turns redcan be hard to watch, which is the point. O’Barry wants to shock viewers into activism, doing for dolphins what Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth did for global warming. Like Gore’s, O’Barry’s cause is deeply personal. Only he feels he is to blame.
Christmas, 1955. A teenage Richard Barry O’Feldman (he would later change his name) was released by the Navy for a fourteen-day leave. To celebrate, he took his mother and brothers to the newfangled Miami Seaquarium. It was only the third dolphinarium in the world, and it was the best one, he says. Dolphins everywhere. I saw a guy in the tank, with all these creatures, and I said, When I get out of the Navy, I’m coming back to get that job!’ Five years later, I did.
O’Barry spent the sixties in the water, training dolphins and the Seaquarium’s famous killer whale. In 1964, SeaWorld opened in San Diego and welcomed over 400,000 visitors in its first year. Soon, O’Barry was training five dolphinsSusie, Patty, Kathy, Scotty, and Squirtfor a new TV show based in Florida.
For a generation of kids, Flipper provided a popular answer to the question What do you want to be when you grow up? Marine biologist! The hit show, which aired from 1964 to 1967, took place in an idyllic marine preserve and posited Flipper as a smarter Rin Tin Tinand a proxy parent to the show’s two motherless children. In episodes like Flipper and the Fugitive, the dolphin saved lives, apprehended criminals, and performed the famous tail-walking trick choreographed by O’Barry. That dock in the show, where the kids would meet Flipper? I lived in that house that whole time, says O’Barry, who thrived in the sunny, hippie heyday of Coconut Grove, with neighbors like Tennessee Williams and David Crosby. O’Barry was good friends with Woodstock co-founder Michael Lang, who says he has a snapshot of Ric riding a killer whale playing a wooden flute. Another pal, Joni Mitchell, sang to the dolphins.
Then, in 1970, just as all sorts of idyllic promises were wilting (Kent State, Manson, Vietnam troops returning home), O’Barry had a life-altering experience. After a spiritual trip to India, he visited Kathy, who by then was retired and living alone in a tank in Florida. She was noticeably anxious (something he now calls captive-dolphin depression syndrome). On the day that changed everything, she swam into his arms and ceased breathing, sinking to the bottom of the tank. O’Barry emphasizes that, unlike humans, dolphins are not automatic breathers; they can choose to stop. He’s convinced Kathy did just that, in essence committing suicide.
Two days later, O’Barry was jailed for trying to free another dolphin. After his release, he stopped training dolphins and began fighting full time. For the next 30-odd years, with little organizational support, he would battle the dolphin- entertainment industry he had helped launch, springing dolphins from captivity and fighting the Navy’s use of them for mine detection (all chronicled in his 1988 memoir, Behind the Dolphin Smile). O’Barry says he’d be running his own politically correct dolphin sanctuary and making two or three million dollars a year if it hadn’t been for Kathy. Instead, he’s singularly focused on places like Taiji, where fishermenafter capturing and selling the cuter femalesslaughter thousands of dolphins to sell as food.It may be the most widely debated and commented upon newspaper slogan since... well, has there ever been a widely debated newspaper slogan?
The Washington Post added a new phrase beneath its online masthead this week — “Democracy Dies in Darkness” — and the commentary flowed immediately. The slogan quickly trended on Twitter, drawing tweets even from the People’s Daily newspaper in China. It was fodder for a few late-night cracks from Stephen Colbert, who suggested some of the rejected phrases included “No, You Shut Up,” “Come at Me, Bro” and “We Took Down Nixon — Who Wants Next?”
Others called it “ominous,” “awesome,” and “heavy-handed.” Slate offered an alternative list: “15 Metal Albums Whose Titles Are Less Dark Than The Washington Post’s New Motto.”
The addition of the dramatic and alliterative phrase was generally misinterpreted as an indirect reply to President Trump’s phrasemaking about the news media (“dishonest,” “the enemy of the American people,” etc.). But that’s not the case.
The Post decided to come up with a slogan nearly a year ago, long before Trump was the Republican presidential nominee, senior executives said. The paper hasn’t had an official slogan in its 140-year existence, although it did get some mileage with a long-running advertising tagline, “If you don’t get it, you don’t get it.”
At a forum last year, Washington Post Executive Editor Martin Baron, left, interviews Amazon.com founder and Post owner Jeff Bezos, who said at one point, “I think a lot of us believe this, that democracy dies in darkness.” (April Greer/For The Washington Post)
[The Washington Post airs its first Super Bowl ad, voiced by Tom Hanks]
The paper’s owner, Amazon.com founder Jeffrey P. Bezos, used the phrase in an interview with The Post’s executive editor, Martin Baron, at a tech forum at The Post last May. “I think a lot of us believe this, that democracy dies in darkness, that certain institutions have a very important role in making sure that there is light,” he said at the time, speaking of his reasons for buying the paper.
Bezos apparently heard the phrase from legendary investigative reporter Bob Woodward, a Post associate editor. Woodward said he referenced it during a presentation at a conference that Bezos attended in 2015 in which Woodward talked about “The Last of the President’s Men,” his most recent book about the Watergate scandal.
But Woodward, who has used the phrase in reference to President Nixon for years, said he didn’t coin it; he read it some years earlier in a judicial opinion in a First Amendment case. He couldn’t recall the specifics of the case or the name of the judge who wrote the opinion.
“It goes way back,” he said. “It’s definitely not directed at Trump. It’s about the dangers of secrecy in government, which is what I worry about most. The judge who said it got it right.”
Woodward’s source appears to be Judge Damon J. Keith, of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 6th Circuit, who ruled in a pre-Watergate era case that the government couldn’t wiretap individuals without a warrant. In his decision, Keith apparently coined a variation on The Post’s motto, writing that “Democracy dies in the dark.”
In any case, the phrase was at the center of discussions when a small group of Post employees, including Baron and Publisher Fred Ryan, began meeting last year to develop a slogan. One planning document for the group suggested finding a “positive” variation on the early contender “Democracy Dies in Darkness.”
The goal of the paper’s slogan, the document said, would be to communicate that The Post “has a long-standing reputation for providing news and information with unparalleled analysis and insight.... Our position must be conveyed ‘disruptively’ so we can shake consumers out of their news-as-commodity mindset.”
It added that any slogan “must be memorable and may be slightly uncomfortable for us at first.” It also had to be “lofty, positive [and] not bossy” and pithy enough to fit on a T-shirt.
The group brainstormed more than 500 would-be slogans. The choices ranged from the heroic (“Dauntless Defenders of the Truth”) to the clunky (“American democracy lives down the street. No one keeps closer watch.”) to the Zen-like (“Yes. Know.”).
The group ultimately ended up where it started — with “Democracy Dies in Darkness.”
Which means that the slogan, which will be added to print copies of the paper next week, could be among the most famous four words that Woodward has ever contributed to The Post. In time, the phrase might even rival “All the President’s Men,” the memorable title of the bestseller Woodward wrote with Carl Bernstein about Nixon’s fall.
“Well,” Woodward said, “it’s better than ‘Follow the money,’ ” the famous movie line that Woodward’s character got from his anonymous Watergate source, Deep Throat.At that very moment, Barack Obama was on a stage in Cincinnati, in the first town-hall meeting of his campaign, trying to persuade the people of Hamilton County, a historically Republican county that voted for him last time around, that he was the one responsible for rescuing Ohio. He talked about the tax cuts — $3,600 per household, by the administration’s reckoning — that accrued to middle-class families as part of the 2009 Reinvestment and Recovery Act, the so-called stimulus package, and a 2011 reduction in the payroll tax. More important, given the fact that Ohio makes more cars and auto parts than any state outside of Michigan, Obama reminded the crowd of his tough decision to save and restructure General Motors and Chrysler.
“When the auto industry was on the brink of collapse, and Governor Romney said, ‘Let’s let Detroit go bankrupt,’ I said, ‘No, one out of eight jobs in Ohio depends on the auto industry,’ ” Obama told the cheering crowd at Cincinnati’s music hall. “ ‘A million jobs across the Midwest are at stake.’ ”
These competing theories of progress in Ohio, waged 250 miles apart at the same moment, illustrate what may be the most important and confounding dynamic in this election. While most of the debate nationally still revolves around why the economy remains so pathetic, there are several pivotal states — Ohio, Florida, Nevada, Virginia — where things are slowly turning around. In these states, the real issue may not be who deserves blame for economic ruin but rather who deserves credit for a rebound, and what really causes jobs to come back after they’ve been lost. Republican governors are saying that unemployment rates have plummeted because of their pro-business policies. The president is saying that the hard decisions he made earlier in his term are finally starting to pay off. And then there’s Mitt Romney, a congenital optimist who finds himself in the uncomfortable position of having to be a total downer, arguing that there really isn’t a recovery at all. “Trust Me: You’re Still Miserable”could be Romney’s bumper sticker in Ohio.
In the years between the abrupt slowdown of 2001 and the collapse of the financial markets in 2008, much of America, buoyed by housing prices, saw their fortunes rise. Ohioans were not among them. The nation’s third-largest manufacturing state, Ohio got crushed between late 2001 and the onset of the next recession in 2007. The national foreclosure rate shot up after 2007, but even then it never reached the steadily rising level of foreclosures in Ohio. By early 2009, when Obama took office, tens of thousands of jobs were disappearing in Ohio from one month to the next.
Kasich, you may recall, had been a young Republican to watch as a congressman in his 30s, the brash son of a mail carrier who later fell in with Newt Gingrich and became one of his party’s leading voices for fiscal austerity during the Clinton years. After a brief and calamitous presidential campaign, he left Congress in 2001, at age 48, and reinvented himself as a Fox News host (“From the Heartland With John Kasich”) and a banker for Lehman Brothers. When Kasich ran for governor in 2010, the Democratic incumbent, Ted Strickland, ran almost entirely on the premise that it was really Kasich, in his role as a Lehman banker, who had wrecked the market and thus indirectly decimated Ohio. It was a dubious premise in a nightmare year for Democrats, and Kasich eked out a win.
He came into office planning to arrest the state’s free fall by doing two things. First, he had to close a projected $8 billion hole in the budget left by dwindling tax returns and the loss of one-time federal aid, which he did by slashing aid to municipalities and by slowing the growth in Medicaid spending. Second, he intended to stop bleeding jobs, mainly by changing the way the state interacted with businesses looking to relocate or invest elsewhere.
Going back to his days in Congress, Kasich has always been deeply skeptical of anything undertaken by the public sector. It was this instinct that led him, during his first months in office, to embrace the Legislature’s plan to curb collective-bargaining rights for public employees — a proposition Ohio voters soundly rejected in a referendum, and which most likely explains Kasich’s dismal approval ratings during much of his first term. (“I don’t want to talk about it,” Kasich told me when I asked him about that particular debacle.) And he was acting on the same disdain for government programs when he zeroed in on the state’s economic-development department, which was the main agency charged with retaining and recruiting employers. “People for years didn’t know what they were doing,” he told me. “They couldn’t even answer the phone.” The agency, Kasich believed, couldn’t be fixed from the inside — you wouldn’t be able to pay the salaries needed to lure top talent, and you wouldn’t be able to fire all the bureaucrats who had internalized the public-sector culture of the place. So instead he came up with a novel way to effectively outsource the agency’s chief responsibilities.
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Kasich created JobsOhio, a private entity whose president is Mark Kvamme, a venture capitalist from Silicon Valley. In order to finance this nonstate agency with state money, he came up with a scheme so creative and convoluted it would make the Medellín cartel envious. JobsOhio would issue bonds to raise $500 million, which it would then turn over to the state. In exchange, the state would lease JobsOhio the rights to all state-run liquor sales for the next 25 years. Using the booze money, and given the authority to recommend tax incentives and state loan guarantees for approval by the Legislature, Kvamme and his team would move quickly and nimbly to keep Ohio companies in the state and lure new ones. In most of these cases, the goal would be to make sure that the state’s investment is repaid within a year.
The funding scheme has been the subject of litigation from a crusading civic group, and so far, no bonds have been issued; JobsOhio is still operating on corporate seed money. But when you walk into its light-filled office suite in a tower across the street from the Statehouse, you feel the high-tech start-up vibe all around you: pale cork floors and glass-walled meeting rooms, ergonomic furniture arranged bullpen style, giant HD monitors displaying relevant facts about the state and each of its eight major urban areas. JobsOhio is maniacal about metrics. In the second quarter of 2012, its team claimed to have helped land 77 new projects and 15,904 new jobs.
If JobsOhio is the administration’s principal negotiator with the corporate world, then Kasich sees himself as its closer. All governors do some amount of business outreach, but Kasich seems to relish it more than any other part of the job; he has little passion for state agencies and legislators, but nothing animates him more than recounting his lobbying efforts with executives. He talks up his state with the same combination of exuberance and competitiveness that has always made him a hero to some and intensely irritating to others. “We have a lot of great cities,” he told me at one point. “I mean, if you think of Indiana, you’ve got Indianapolis, and then what?” He threw up his hands. “Terre Haute?”
One of the first things Kasich did in the days after his election was to drive the two and a half hours to the town of Brooklyn, just outside Cleveland, so he could implore executives from American Greetings not to move to Chicago. (With financial help from the state, the company is now building a new headquarters a few towns over.) He personally intervened with Bob Evans, an iconic Ohio restaurant and food company, to keep it from moving to Texas, and he helped persuade Abbott Laboratories, one of the world’s largest pharmaceutical companies, to undertake a $270 million expansion near Dayton. “I was really stalking the C.E.O. there,” Kasich said.
You’d have to think that all of this is having some positive impact. It’s just hard to know how much. Kasich has been in office for only 19 months, which isn’t a lot of time to engineer an economic turnaround, and for all of that time JobsOhio has operated in a half-empty office suite waiting for the financing that will enable it to fully staff up. According to federal data compiled by the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities in Washington, Ohio, like other states, actually began adding jobs in the middle of 2010, when Strickland was still governor. In other words, the positive trend line has accelerated during Kasich’s time in office, but it definitely didn’t start there.
In the past year, Strickland has emerged as his successor’s most persistent public critic, probably in part because Kasich routinely trashes just about everything Strickland did as governor. “There is a glaring lack of transparency associated with JobsOhio,” Strickland told me when we met at his office near the Capitol. “Any time you have massive sums of money and a lack of transparency, you open yourself up to the potential for cronyism and corruption.” Companies like American Greetings and Bob Evans were making empty threats to leave the state, Strickland said, and Kasich’s deals with them amounted to “shakedowns” that benefited no one. He said he really doesn’t think Kasich has had anything to do with growth in Ohio.
“I don’t want to be ungracious to my successor,” Strickland told me at one point.
I said I doubted that was true.
“Yeah,” he said with a shrug, “I was being dishonest.”
Gracious or not, it seems fair to suggest that Kasich is like a guy furiously paddling a canoe downstream — no one can take issue with his effort, but it would be more impressive if the current weren’t already working in his favor. For one thing, Kasich has lucked into the sudden boom around shale oil in the eastern part of the state, where only in the last few years have energy companies figured out how to extract oil and natural gas buried more than 5,000 feet below the ground. The Appalachian region of Ohio, which just a decade ago seemed to have been left behind with the closing of coal mines and steel mills, may now be the modern era’s equivalent of Sutter’s Mill in 1850. Corporate speculators and their engineers are packing the once-deserted hotels; stories abound of energy executives walking up to the doors of unsuspecting farmers whose homes were thought to be valueless and offering them seven-figure sums for the leasing rights.
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Then there’s the sudden national uptick in manufacturing, a sector that accounts for roughly 1 in 10 Ohio jobs — and, more specifically, the resurgence of the auto industry, whose supply chain reaches into 80 or so of the state’s 88 counties. In Lordstown, a factory that three years ago seemed on the brink of closure (along with most of the rest of General Motors) is now operating three shifts around the clock, churning out the Chevy Cruze. In Toledo, where Chrysler builds Jeep Wranglers and Libertys, a second shift with 1,100 new workers will come online next year. Honda, which makes the Accord in Marysville, just invested $98 million in its engine plant in Anna, in the central part of the state.
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When I suggested to Kasich, aboard his plane, that Obama’s auto bailout must have played some significant role in turning |
they are about excluding people from voting or participating in other procedures of representative democracy. Then, given the historical entrenchment of economic disparities between the races, a free-market political economy can easily fulfill the goals of apartheid–albeit in a more invisible, and less political, fashion. The people who had economically gained the most from apartheid–wealthy White bourgeoisie–can continue to leverage their monopolization of economic assets, and influence politics such that their assets are protected, and even subsidized. There might also be the creation of a new Black bourgeoisie, who participate alongside old-money White elites in the governance of the new state of affairs. But meanwhile, the Black masses–thrust into a free-market economy with little to no assets–can do little else but remain in their position of political and economic servitude, lacking the economic resources to truly engage in South African society (even if explicit barriers to their participation have been removed).
In other words, capitalism creates a feedback cycle with respect to power; the powerful can leverage their power to increase their power even more, while the poor must suffer increasing repression, poverty, and marginalization (insofar as they respect the institutions and rules of the powerful). The clear alternative, then, is a redistribution of wealth and property to the historically disenfranchised–for, as argued above, the redistribution of wealth doubles as a redistribution of power.
Parallel Perspectives from MLK and the Black Panthers
The inability of capitalist political economy with racial emancipation was also noted by Black radicals in the United States, during the era of the Civil Rights Movement. Martin Luther King, Jr., the darling of White establishment liberals, was starting to make the elites nervous with his astute remarks on how political emancipation would not be enough to truly liberate Blacks–or any other oppressed group, for that matter. Note the following passage from a speech King gave in 1967:
I want to say to you as I move to my conclusion, as we talk about “Where do we go from here?” that we must honestly face the fact that the movement must address itself to the question of restructuring the whole of American society. There are forty million poor people here, and one day we must ask the question, “Why are there forty million poor people in America?” And when you begin to ask that question, you are raising a question about the economic system, about a broader distribution of wealth. When you ask that question, you begin to question the capitalistic economy. And I’m simply saying that more and more, we’ve got to begin to ask questions about the whole society. We are called upon to help the discouraged beggars in life’s marketplace. But one day we must come to see that an edifice which produces beggars needs restructuring. It means that questions must be raised. And you see, my friends, when you deal with this you begin to ask the question, “Who owns the oil?” You begin to ask the question, “Who owns the iron ore?” You begin to ask the question, “Why is it that people have to pay water bills in a world that’s two-thirds water?”
This paradigm shift, of moving from political emancipation to emancipation along economic lines, was fully realized in the rise of Black communist militancy and organizations like the Black Panther Party. Their program, which sought to end racism and exploitation via an overthrow of not just racist laws but capitalism itself, is perhaps best summed up by the following quote from a speech by Fred Hampton in 1969:
We’ve got to face the fact that some people say you fight fire best with fire, but we say you put fire out best with water. We say you don’t fight racism with racism. We’re gonna fight racism with solidarity. We say you don’t fight capitalism with no black capitalism; you fight capitalism with socialism.
The need to fight these deeper structural issues resonated with American Blacks, and as a consequence the Black Panther Party exploded in popularity and people-power–hitting a peak in 1969, before falling apart due to internal squabbles and violent repression by the State (Fred Hampton was killed by government agents in December 1969, shot in the head as he slept in his apartment). But nonetheless, the fact that Black militancy exploded after the supposed gains made by the liberal-oriented Civil Rights Movement is evidence that simple political emancipation was not nearly enough to truly raise Black people up from their position of marginalization and oppression. And even today, America’s racial disparities mimic the trend of South Africa.
Reviving Mandela’s Communism
But to say that Mandela did not foresee the need to challenge capitalism would be an insult to the man. He was, after all, an outright communist for much of his political career, and a friend to Fidel Casto until the very end.
More likely than not, is that given the context of the ’90s, Mandela saw no choice except to accept the hegemony of world capitalism. This was, after all, a period that just saw the collapse of the Soviet Union–which, for all its major faults, had assisted South Africans (and numerous other colonized people) fight against apartheid. Its collapse meant that the socialist route, or really any route that did not respect the sanctity of private property, would not be supported by any world power–and thus, could easily lead into bloodshed, chaos, and the roll-back of what little gains were made by ending apartheid.
Or, as put by Zizek in an excellent piece on Mandela via The Guardian:
South Africa in this respect is just one version of the recurrent story of the contemporary left. A leader or party is elected with universal enthusiasm, promising a “new world” – but then, sooner or later, they stumble upon the key dilemma: does one dare to touch the capitalist mechanisms, or does one decide to “play the game”? If one disturbs these mechanisms, one is very swiftly “punished” by market perturbations, economic chaos and the rest. This is why it is all too simple to criticise Mandela for abandoning the socialist perspective after the end of apartheid: did he really have a choice? Was the move towards socialism a real option?
But of course, the unstable nature of revolutionary changes is no reason to shy away from fighting for such changes. And clearly, given the growing unrest of the South African masses, it would be hasty to bury the radical roots of Nelson Mandela, and concede the liberal ideal of a peaceful reconciliation with capitalism and the monopolization of the means of production.
Even if the ’90s were one of the apparent victory of liberal capitalism over all alternatives, we are today clearly living in a time of new horizons and prospects for radical and revolutionary movements. As Zizek concludes:
If we want to remain faithful to Mandela’s legacy, we should thus forget about celebratory crocodile tears and focus on the unfulfilled promises his leadership gave rise to.
It is thus in the mines and factories of South Africa, and in radical organizations like Zabalaza, that Nelson Mandela’s legacy is truly carried forward.
AdvertisementsMiami Heat star Dwyane Wade, UFC fighter Conor McGregor, Super Bowl MVP Von Miller and Chicago Cubs pitcher Jake Arrieta are among the athletes who will shed their clothes to appear in ESPN The Magazine's annual Body Issue.
2016 Body Issue athletes Nathan Adrian, Olympics/swimming
Jake Arrieta, MLB
Antonio Brown, NFL
Emma Coburn, Olympics/steeplechase
Courtney Conlogue, surfing
Elena Delle Donne, WNBA
Ryan Dungey, motocross
Adeline Gray, Olympics/wrestling
Greg Louganis, Olympics/diving
Conor McGregor, MMA
Von Miller, NFL
Chris Mosier, duathlon
Nzingha Prescod, Olympics/fencing
Christen Press, soccer
April Ross, Olympics/beach volleyball
Allysa Seely, paratriathlete
Claressa Shields, Olympics/boxing
Dwyane Wade, NBA
Vince Wilfork, NFL
Ten men and nine women will appear in the magazine, which announced the athlete list for the eighth annual Body Issue on Tuesday. The featured participants include Team USA duathlete Chris Mosier, who will be the first transgender athlete to pose.
Wade, 34, said he was taking a leap outside his comfort zone after refusing to swim without his shirt on as a child.
"It was uncharted water for me," the 13-year NBA veteran said. "It was one of those moments where it's good to overcome a fear of something.
"It's bigger than me showing my body off. That's not as important to me as telling a story of overcoming a fear. It hopefully gives someone confidence to really be their authentic self."
Wade had turned down the magazine for seven years before agreeing to pose in 2016.
U.S. women's national soccer team forward Christen Press said she has "always wanted a more perfect body" but realized that was partially an effect of comparing herself to her teammates.
"I've spent a lot of time being insecure about my body, but it's done so much for me. It's my tool, my vessel for my job," Press said. "I'm very grateful for the way that I feel when I play. I feel very powerful, I feel fast, I feel unstoppable, and that's because of my body."
Editor's Picks Dwyane Wade: 'I've got some good years left' Three-time NBA champ Dwyane Wade isn't intimidated by much -- but stripping down for the Body Issue wasn't easy. He sat down with ESPN's Morty Ain to talk about overcoming his body insecurities.
BODY 2016: Fully Exposed See our entire portfolio of Body Issue athletes, from Nathan Adrian to Vince Wilfork, here on ESPN.com. And pick up an issue on newsstands starting July 8. 1 Related
A set of Olympic athletes will be featured in the issue, Houston Texans defensive tackle Vince Wilfork will show off all of his 325 pounds, and retired diver Greg Louganis will be the oldest athlete at age 56.
"When I look around at my contemporaries, I'd say I'm probably in better shape than most of them," Louganis said. "It's all about making healthy choices. I think HIV has helped motivate me mentally and physically. I look at working out and doing something physically active every day as being as important as taking my meds.
"HIV taught me that I'm a lot stronger than I ever believed I was. I didn't think I would see 30, and here I am at 56."
The Body Issue will be available online July 6 and on newsstands July 8.For the third night in a row, Dan Uggla and B.J. Upton are sitting on the bench when there are big implications on not only the NL East chase, but more importantly, home field advantage in the playoffs.
Dan and B.J. are the two highest paid players on the roster. They have also been two of the worst players in baseball this season, according to Baseball-Reference's WAR numbers. They've been awful lately, even with B.J. showing a few signs of life since coming off the disabled list.
As Mark Bowman wrote yesterday, the Braves cannot afford to keep Jordan Schafer out of the lineup right now with Jason Heyward still recovering from a broken jaw. Schafer has cooled down since the All-Star Break, but he's still the club's best option at leadoff right now.
Fredi Gonzalez tried to slot B.J. into the leadoff spot against the Phillies and went 0-for-14 with seven strikeouts and no walks. And with Evan Gattis looking a lot more like Evan Gattis from April and May lately, it's really tough to keep him out of the lineup.
Uggla, on the other hand, is hitting.085/.290/.085 in his last 93 plate appearances and continues to be a liability in the field. Elliot Johnson hasn't been a world-changer since coming over last month, but given the upgrade he provides with his glove, his excellent work on the base paths and the ability to have his bat make contact with the baseball every once in a while, it only makes sense to play him.
All of this leads to the bigger debate of who plays in the playoffs. If the NLDS started tomorrow and Jason Heyward was healthy, I'd have to think it would be J-Hey in center field and Gattis in left, with Johnson starting at second.
Just as we saw with David Ross and Brian McCann in the one-game playoff last year, Fredi won't hesitate to play the guy who's playing better at the moment.
In a perfect world, B.J. and Dan hit like they have over the past five seasons and the Braves have the best lineup in baseball. That's not the case, though, and if the last six months are any kind of indication, hoping for them to suddenly turn it around seems improbable.
Here's tonight's lineup:
Schafer 8
J. Upton 9
Freeman 3
Gattis 7
McCann 2
C. Johnson 5
Simmons 6
E. Johnson 4
Minor 1Hadmut
Blanke, nackte Panik.
Wenn ich mir anschau, was in Politik, Presse, Fernsehen in den letzten Wochen so los ist: Blanke Panik. Dass Wähler was anderes wählen könnten, dass Leser die Zeitung nicht mehr kaufen könnten.
Ich frage mich, von welcher geistigen Verfassung man sein muss, um in eine solche Lage zu geraten: Jahrelang dreschen die wie die Bekloppten auf breite Teile der Bevölkerung, alles Normale, alles, was nicht Randgruppe ist, ein. Sie stellen alles Normale als bösartig, verachtungswürdig, kaputt und zu entsorgen dar, bringen jede erdenkliche Quote dagegen in Stellung, machen rund um die Uhr nichts anderes, als den breiten Kern der Bevölkerung abzumelken, zu beschimpfen, mit der Schuld an allem zu belegen, jede Meinungsäußerung zu unterdrücken und abzusägen.
Und dann schieben die plötzlich Panik, dass die, die sie mit aller Macht in die Flucht geschlagen haben, die Flucht antreten könnten.
Wie sind diese Leute drauf?It’s a red letter day for the media industry. Disney just took control of 21st Century Fox’s media empire, and the Federal Communications Commission voted to repeal net neutrality regulations that prevent internet providers from discriminatory behavior. These two industry-shaking events will set media companies on a dramatic collision course with ISPs. It is the conflict that threatens the internet.
The death of net neutrality will not look like an apocalypse
This week you might have seen lots of talk about fast and slow lanes, blocked websites, and the end of the internet. But the death of net neutrality is not going to look like a sudden apocalypse. It’s going to look more like things we’ve already seen: data caps, “free” data for apps, and service bundling, like an AT&T mobile plan that comes with HBO. These schemes will change the internet slowly, and they might even seem boring.
the most unsettling thing to me about net neutrality news is that now i'm probably not gonna know it right away if something fucked up happens because it'll be complicated sounding and opaque and probably boring — Charlie Warzel (@cwarzel) December 14, 2017
More and more of these little schemes will add up over time as ISPs merge with more media companies and own more content. These mergers will create huge conflicts of interest, because companies that own access to the internet will be tempted to rig it in favor of their own shows and services. Some of these schemes will show up on an internet bill, while others will be decided in backroom corporate warfare that leaves customers stuck in the middle and in the dark. The next Comcast versus Netflix might be Comcast versus Disney.
So let’s talk about Disney. Combined with Fox, it now has massive leverage over the content industry. It can use that leverage to compete with Comcast, AT&T, and Verizon, because, like Disney, those ISPs are trying to sell people their own video services. Because Disney now owns so much content, other media companies have greater incentive to consolidate to improve their bargaining positions. And ISPs have greater incentive to merge with media companies so they can reap profit from the content that travels on their networks. It’s an escalating cycle of consolidation.
Here are some obvious conflicts that have already resulted from the Disney merger:
Disney now has a controlling stake in Hulu
Hulu was jointly owned by Disney (30%), Fox (30%), Comcast (30%) and Time Warner(10%) to compete with YouTube; now Disney owns more than both Comcast and Time Warner combined
Comcast owns NBCUniversal, which broadcasts shows on Hulu
Time Warner is about to be owned by AT&T, which is a competitor of Comcast
Time Warner is a competitor of both NBC and Disney
Comcast and AT&T control the network that people use to watch content from Disney, Time Warner, and NBC
(This is just a fun place to put this disclosure: Comcast’s NBCU division is a minority investor in Vox Media, which owns The Verge.)
If this all sounds confusing to you, that’s because it’s confusing. In this world of mergers and overlapping conglomerates, the internet will be a pawn between companies that want to sell you television.
Net neutrality regulations kept ISPs from the worst possible discriminatory behaviors, including paid prioritization, throttling traffic, and blocking websites or services completely. But ISPs quickly pushed these limits after the 2015 Open Internet Order went into effect, and they faced no consequences. The Republican FCC that just killed net neutrality said that all of this represented “hypothetical harm,” which is a lie, because there’s real evidence that ISPs are already trying to do these things.
T-Mobile discriminated between types of content by giving customers unlimited access to music, and then video, from huge media brands. It even throttled video traffic and misled consumers about it, calling the practice “optimization.” AT&T zero-rated DirecTV data, discriminating against other video distributors. Verizon similarly zero-rated its Go90 video service. A report under Chairman Tom Wheeler’s FCC said AT&T and Verizon’s zero-rating programs violated net neutrality, but that inquiry was dropped by current FCC chairman Ajit Pai.
ISP conglomerates have massive conflicts of interest
Compounding the problem is that most people have terrible choices for internet service in America, if they even have a choice at all. That means a lot of customers are trapped by their ISP: if Comcast makes a deal you don’t like, and it’s your only choice for ISP, there’s nothing you can do about it. This gives the ISPs a ton of leverage against competitors, because they can’t send their content through other providers to reach their customers. The reason Comcast had so much leverage against Netflix is because many of Comcast’s customers couldn’t get Netflix from anyone else.
Vertically integrated ISPs like Comcast and Verizon have huge incentives to make up for the decline in cable television revenue by making the internet more like cable, and they are already working on that by bundling video services with internet plans. (ISPs are also buying internet companies to compete with Google and Facebook, creating even more conflicts of interest.) Think about it: why wouldn’t you privilege the media companies you own if your customers have few or no choices about where to buy their internet service?
US regulators have publicly recognized the threat of consolidation with their actions, even if they still allow these hugely problematic mergers to occur. A consequence of Comcast buying NBCUniversal was that Comcast had to enter a consent decree that enforced net neutrality rules to make sure it didn’t put NBC’s competitors at a disadvantage. But that decree ends in 2018 — just as the FCC’s net neutrality regulations are also eliminated. Comcast has promised it won’t behave badly, but without regulation all we have is trust. Comcast has not earned that trust.
The net neutrality discussion is fundamentally about how speech ought to be treated in a free society. The vision that was given the force of law in the FCC’s Open Internet Order required ISPs to play fairly: to treat all traffic the same and let their customers decide what to say and where to go without coercion from the operators of the utility.
So this is the threat to the internet: media companies and ISPs are consolidating at an alarming scale, these arrangements create massive conflicts of interest, and these conflicts of interest threaten the integrity of the internet without vital fairness regulations. We can’t talk about net neutrality anymore without talking about Mickey Mouse.
Correction: A previous version of this story implied Hulu was originally a joint venture of Comcast and Time Warner. It was a joint venture of Disney, Fox, and Comcast.Update (6/24): Nintendo reached out to Game Informer to clarify their story. It’s not 100 employees from Monolith Soft working on the game – just confirmed to be 100 from Nintendo in general.
Original (6/17): We already knew that Xenoblade Chronicles developer Monolith Soft was involved with Zelda: Breath of the Wild, but now we have further confirmation of that. Shigeru Miyamoto told Game Informer that more than 100 staffers from the company are working on the project.
He said:
“Yes they are involved in this Zelda. People from Tokyo and Kyoto are working together on this. There is a team of over 100 [from Monolith] helping work on this project, and their work has really been helpful.”
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PocketViewpoint: New Clues as to Why Boyajian’s Star is Dimming
Steinn Sigurðsson, 525 Davey Laboratory, Department of Astronomy, The Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PA 16802, USA
A statistical analysis links a star’s mysterious brightness fluctuations to internal nonequilibrium phenomena, rather than structures orbiting around the star.
Infrared: IPAC/NASA; Ultraviolet: STScI (NASA) Figure 1: Image of the star KIC 8462852 (Boyajian’s Star) at infrared (left) and ultraviolet (right) wavelengths.
Infrared: IPAC/NASA; Ultraviolet: STScI (NASA) Figure 1: Image of the star KIC 8462852 (Boyajian’s Star) at infrared (left) and ultraviolet (right) wavelengths. ×
Planet Hunters (https://www.planethunters.org) is a citizen science effort to search for planets by analyzing publicly available data from NASA’s Kepler mission. Launched in 2009, Kepler detects planets by monitoring the slight decrease in a star’s light flux as an orbiting planet transits in the line of sight. In September 2015, the Planet Hunters announced an unusually pronounced and long dimming event associated with the star KIC 8462852, also named Boyajian’s star for the lead author of the report (Fig. 1) [1]. A transiting planet couldn’t have caused the dimming; most explanations instead involved other larger objects orbiting around the star. Some researchers even speculated that these bodies could be alien megastructures like energy-harvesting solar panels. None of these ideas, however, have satisfactorily explained the observed dimming, which remains a major astronomical mystery.
Now, a useful clue towards solving this puzzle has been offered by Mohammed Sheikh, Richard Weaver, and Karin Dahmen from the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign [2]. The researchers analyzed the spectrum of fluctuations in the flux from Boyajian’s star over four years, finding that it followed a universal power-law characteristic of systems close to the critical point of a phase transition. While this result does not reveal the physical processes driving the brightness variations, it suggests that they might be associated with nonequilibrium phenomena occurring within the star, rather than with external orbiting structures.
Boyajian’s star has a 0.88-day rotation period [3], is several hundred million years old, and is about 400 parsecs from Earth [4]. The star has no close companions and appears to be an apparently normal F3V “main sequence” star [1] with no spectral variability or excesses in the infrared spectrum. F3 stars are slightly more massive and hotter than the Sun, mostly radiative, and have a shallow convective layer. Boyajian’s first dimming event was not consistent with a planet transit, and might have been interpreted simply as an unexplained data blip, typical of the early stages of a mission. Then, a couple of years later, the star suddenly dimmed by an extraordinary 15%. This lasted for days, an unusually long time for the dimming of a star. Two years later, it dimmed again by 20%, and the dimming was accompanied by large dips in brightness that had a complex structure (Fig. 2) [1].
The large brightness variations cannot be explained with simple astrophysical models. Normal middle-aged main sequence stars do not exhibit large spontaneous brightness variations. While other stars have been seen to dim by comparable amounts and durations, they were all much younger—in or near the star-forming phase. Boyajian’s star would be a one-in-a-million anomaly. If what blocked the star’s light was an orbiting body, it would have to be comparable in size to the star itself. This rules out planets, whose radius is limited to 50,000 km. Stars can also be excluded because Boyajian’s star has no nearby companion. A diffuse structure, like a disk of dust and debris around the star, could also cause dimming. But such a structure would cause a characteristic infrared emission, which hasn’t been observed [5].
et al. [1] T. S. Boyajian Figure 2: et al. conclude that they are suggestive of nonequilibrium phenomena occurring within the star [ Measurements by the Kepler observatory over a four-year period show unusual fluctuations in the flux from Boyajian’s star. Analyzing the statistical properties of such fluctuations, Sheikhconclude that they are suggestive of nonequilibrium phenomena occurring within the star [ 2 ]. Measurements by the Kepler observatory over a four-year period show unusual fluctuations in the flux from Boyajian’s star. Analyzing the statistical properties of such fluctuations, Sheikh et al. conclude that they are suggestive of nonequilibrium ph... Show more
et al. [1] T. S. Boyajian Figure 2: Measurements by the Kepler observatory over a four-year period show unusual fluctuations in the flux from Boyajian’s star. Analyzing the statistical properties of such fluctuations, Sheikh et al. conclude that they are suggestive of nonequilibrium phenomena occurring within the star [2]. ×
A number of alternative scenarios have been conjectured; Jason Wright and I have classified them in Ref. [6]. One of the scenarios favored by astronomers is a swarm of unusually large comets. This may be plausible as a unique chance occurrence, but fitting the light-flux curves has proved problematic. What’s more, the large number of required comets would release a lot of dust, in tension with the absence of thermal emission from dust. Before the discovery of Boyajian’s star, researchers had postulated that precisely such anomalous dimmings could signal alien megastructures [7]. This is a falsifiable hypothesis and thus scientifically valid. But it remains an implausible explanation, disfavored by Ockham’s razor, if nothing else.
Here, Sheikh et al. consider the sequence of dimming events as a series of local signals, independent of their astrophysical nature. The authors calculate a number of statistical parameters of the dimming, such as the deviation in brightness from the median, the spectrum of fluctuations, and the slope of the log-log distribution of the duration and size of the dimming events. These parameters can be accurately fit with power laws. The analysis suggests that the flux dips are reminiscent of avalanches—sudden changes of a system under an external force. Avalanche statistics are observed in nonequilibrium systems undergoing internal dynamics near the critical point of a phase transition. This occurs, for example, in a ferromagnet close to its ordering temperature and in a magnetic field: when a spin flips to align with the field, it can trigger an avalanche of spin flips that causes a jump in the macroscopic magnetization. Avalanche statistics have been found in astrophysical phenomena, from stellar flares to gamma-ray bursts, and in many critical phenomena in biology and physics. Avalanche models predict a universal behavior for statistical parameters that relate the amplitude, duration, and probability of avalanches, such as the power spectral density function and the time profile of the avalanches. This is exactly what the authors find in the distribution of dimming dips.
The findings of Sheikh et al. are potentially important, as they may provide insight into the nature of the process that is driving the brightness fluctuations, even without revealing exactly what the process is. The authors conjecture that the avalanche statistics indicate an internal stellar process. They further suggest that this behavior may be due to the star approaching the critical point of a magnetic transition. Finding a new process that can drive strong variability in normal main sequence stars would be interesting and surprising, particularly on the time scales of these events, as the duration and interval between the dips are not on time scales natural to F stars.
In the meantime, the situation has been made even more complex by a recent—albeit disputed [8]—finding: archival data have suggested that in addition to the transient variability, the star has undergone dimming on decadal time scales [9]. This progressive dimming of the star is unusual and hard to reconcile with models involving an internal stellar process such as that proposed by Sheikh et al. Likely, the process causing the long-term decreases in brightness is the same physical process causing the large short-term variations in brightness.
Explaining the dimming of Boyajian’s star may not be feasible with Kepler, which only did wideband photometry. Fortunately, there are multiple ongoing efforts to monitor Boyajian’s star from the ground, in the hope of seeing large-scale dimming events at multiple wavelengths and in real time. Such observations could test many of the postulated scenarios. For instance, models postulating foreground dust obscuration from comets or the interstellar medium predict a wavelength-dependent dimming. Finally, further theoretical work should investigate whether the statistics of the brightness fluctuations found by Sheikh et al. could be explained by any process that occurs outside of the star, for example, in the interstellar medium.
This research is published in Physical Review Letters.
About the Author Steinn Sigurðsson is a Professor in the Department of Astronomy & Astrophysics at The Pennsylvania State University. He received his Ph.D. in 1992 from the California Institute of Technology and completed postdoctoral fellowships at the University of California at Santa Cruz and Cambridge University. He does research in theoretical astrophysics. He is a Science Editor of The Astrophysical Journal.DUBAI — Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei told Iranian officials on Wednesday to stop bickering over mounting economic woes as Tehran grapples with Western-imposed sanctions, voicing concern heightened by the collapse of the rial currency.
His comments touched on divisions between Iranian government agencies and political factions exacerbated by the rial’s fall over the past several weeks, fanning an atmosphere of crisis in the world’s No. 5 oil-exporting state.
“The country’s officials should know and accept their responsibilities and not blame each other,” Khamenei said in a televised speech in the northeastern city of Bojnourd. “They should be united and sympathize with each other.”
The rial plunged some 35% in the free market to a record low against the U.S. dollar over the 10 days to October 2, reflecting a decline in Iran’s oil income wrought by tightened sanctions imposed over its disputed nuclear program.
[np-related]
Iranian savers have rushed to convert their rials into hard currency, and riot police briefly clashed with crowds protesting against the rial’s slide near Tehran’s Grand Bazaar last week.
By selling its remaining petrodollars to importers of basic goods at state-controlled rates, the government could succeed in preventing the currency crisis from crippling the economy.
But the rial’s depreciation has hurt the government’s credibility and threatens to aggravate inflation, which is already officially estimated at around 25% and believed by private economists to be cresting much higher.
The debacle has fed criticism of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad by political enemies eager to pin Iran’s economic difficulties on his administration. Parliament speaker Ali Larijani, seen as a possible presidential candidate in elections next year, has been trading barbs with Ahmadinejad.
Senior clerical figures close to Khamenei were fiercely critical of Ahmadinejad’s economic management in sermons delivered at last week’s Friday prayers, Iranian media reported.
In his speech on Wednesday, Khamenei said: “The illogical sanctions of the West are barbaric,” and he acknowledged that inflation and unemployment were pressing problems.
IRAN CAN WITHSTAND SANCTIONS, KHAMENEI SAYS
But he insisted Iran could withstand the sanctions and brushed off last week’s street protests, saying they consisted of a few people setting trash cans on fire.
He added that Tehran’s merchants, who as a class were instrumental in the 1979 Islamic Revolution, should be praised for distancing themselves from the demonstrations.
Khamenei also denounced Western officials who thought the rial’s plunge showed Iranian weakness. U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said last week that the depreciation arose from decisions by the Iranian government, an allusion to Tehran’s refusal to curb its nuclear program.
“Are we worse off or you? In the streets of major European countries there are demonstrations day and night … The problems of the West are much more complicated than ours,” Khamenei said, alluding to Europe’s debt crisis.
“The West’s economy is frozen. You are worse off and you are moving towards collapse and recession. These problems cannot bring the Islamic Republic to its knees.”
Legislators announced on Wednesday that they had collected 102 signatures in favor of questioning Ahmadinejad in parliament and presented the motion to the deputy speaker. But there was no word on when this might happen.
Political infighting is not new in Iran’s ungainly multipolar power structure and there is no sign that the discontent poses a threat to Khamenei, who is Iran’s highest authority but has avoided blame for economic problems.
However, there are signs that government agencies are taking aim at each other over the crisis and this could backfire badly if it restricts Tehran’s ability to respond to economic issues.
Armed forces chief Hassan Firouzabadi said this week the central bank was primarily responsible for the currency crunch.
“The problems in the last few days were caused because some in the banking system did not pay attention and the central bank took some issues lightly,” Firouzabadi said on Monday, according to the Fars news agency.
Intelligence Minister Heydar Moslehi was quoted as blaming the rial’s descent on poor coordination between government bodies and a government failure to heed predictions made by his ministry as long ago as April 2011, Mehr news agency said.Drew Magary’s Thursday Afternoon NFL Dick Joke Jamboroo runs every Thursday during the NFL season. Email Drew here. Buy his book here.
Earlier this week ESPN cancelled Barstool Van Talk after just one episode, apparently because network president John Skipper was belatedly alerted to the fact that Barstool is Barstool. Now this is the part where I disclose that I am friends with co-host PFTCommenter, and I enjoyed his show, and I was sad for him even while I hope Barstool founder Dave Portnoy drowns in a frozen river.
We didn’t post much about Barstool here in the past, just as we rarely post about former Deadspin editor and current After-Shave Rights Advocate Clay Travis, the reasoning being that both Travis and Portnoy are deeply shitty men who crave attention any way they can get it, usually by race-baiting or screaming BOOBS in a crowded theater. Don’t feed the trolls, etc. But as much as I’d like to ignore both men, there is the harsh truth that they are good, in a sense, at marshaling a very specific and damaging niche of the Internet for their own personal branding and enrichment. They are catering, quite effectively, not just to white dudes, but to the white dudes who feel, wrongly, as if the greater Internet has left them behind. And I know this breed of fella quite well because, in some ways, I am one.
I have written for this site for a decade, and if you dip into my back archive, you’ll find posts that are just as shitty as some of the posts that Portnoy had thrown in his face after his ESPN deal surfaced. One time I wrote a post called “In Defense of Female Objectification,” which featured the standard frat bro logic of, “Don’t blame men for being horny! That’s just the way we are!” I also joined in the comments on a post that goofed on high school football player Holley Mangold (sister of former Jets center Nick) for her size and appearance. She was 16 at the time. And, of course, I wrote a post calling LeBron James a cocksucker. Three posts, actually. When GLAAD got angry about the first post, I remember going to my old boss and being like, “Why are they mad? Cocksucker just means asshole!” I considered only my definition of the slur to be valid, conveniently overruling the definition of people who rightfully take the term literally.
There’s more. I started my blogging career with a Blogspot site called FKS, with the motto “Now 10% less gay than other blogs!” I also co-founded Kissing Suzy Kolber, and if you find it objectionable to jokingly name a site after an incident where a drunken ex-quarterback hit on a woman and made her horribly uncomfortable live on national television, I can’t blame you. The first thing I wrote at KSK that really took off was “Fuck It, I’m Throwing It Downfield,” featuring then-Bears QB Rex Grossman getting hornier and hornier with each successive long incompletion (hence the little throwgasm thingies you see in the game write-ups below). That post is LITTERED with gay jokes. I remember a friend Gchatting me and telling me, “Drew man, you shouldn’t call things gay,” and I remember, again, only caring about my own definition of the word. “But to me, it just means lame!” That was my defense.
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I would top posts with pictures of boobs and butts because I knew that would drive up the page views. Even if the subject of the post was unrelated, I’d find a way to connect them. “Here’s a post about fantasy football. Speaking of fantasies, how about these BOOBS?” One time we lost a bet to a women’s sports site and they got to run KSK for a day, and I was livid. I was like, “OH MY GOD, THERE ARE GIRLS ON OUR SITE!” Back at Deadspin, |
the standing of conservative Christians would be far higher. Now I am off to see if Lawrence Hiller is still around and if he can tell me how to block nasty emails. How times change.
National PostHere’s another huge title to throw more speculation on the latest battlefield in gaming: frames per second. No longer content to argue over the differences between 1080p and 900p, gamers have taken to 30fps and 60fps as the next point to vent frustrations over where gaming is going. We’ve heard opinions from both sides, and another high profile developer has just thrown its thoughts out there.
Dark Souls developer From Software prefers 30fps for its upcoming PlayStation 4 action game, Bloodborne. Speaking with PlayStation Lifestyle, Producer Masaaki Yamagiwa stated that they “haven’t made an official announcement yet but they will probably go for 30fps since that’s what they found to be the best fps (frames-per-second) to play action games.”
He added “from the beginning, they weren’t targeting 60fps because it’s not first-person-shooter, it’s an action game.”
How about it? Between Tango Gameworks and From Software, would seem that the biggest supporters of 30fps still reside in Japan. All I know is that I went hands-on with Bloodborne at Tokyo Game Show 2014, and thought it looked amazing. If they know how to make a slower frame rate work as a positive for the game, more power to them.
Bloodborne will be released on February 6th exclusively for the PlayStation 4.Duke Energy’s 800,000 customers in Indiana will see their electrical bills rise over the next five years to pay for more than $1 billion in upgrades to the company’s statewide energy grid.
The Indiana Utility Regulatory Commission on Wednesday approved the company’s settlement with several consumer groups over how to pay for improvements for substations, utility poles, power lines and transformers.
Customers will pick up $1.4 billion of the price tag, down from the $1.8 billion that Duke Energy had originally sought.
The money will be raised through a special fee or “tracker” on customer bills. Customers will see a “gradual rate increase” averaging 0.75 percent per year between 2017 and 2022, Duke Energy said.
“We have an aging energy grid—some equipment that is decades old—and our work will focus on replacing some older infrastructure to reduce power outages,” said Melody Birmingham-Byrd, president of Duke Energy Indiana.
Part of the cost reduction is due to Duke Energy’s decision to drop part of the plan that would have charged customers $192 million for new advanced digital metering. The company said it retains the ability to pursue the meters and defer their costs for consideration in a future rate case, rather than through a monthly bill tracker.
The company said it also will be building a “smarter energy structure” with line sensors that will enable the company to provide customers more information about power outages affecting them and estimated restoration times.
The new plan also gives Duke Energy a slightly lower return on equity for the investments: 10 percent, compared with the original proposal of 10.5 percent.
Duke Energy filed its plan under provisions of a state law enacted in 2013 aimed at improving utility infrastructure, allowing the companies to recover up to 80 percent of the cost through bill trackers. The remaining 20 percent would be deferred for review until the utility’s next base rate case goes before the Indiana Utility Regulatory Commission.
In addition to getting the blessing of the Utility Consumer Counselor, the revised plan has been approved by the Indiana Municipal Power Agency, the Hoosier Energy Electric Cooperative, the Wabash Valley Power Association and the Environmental Defense Fund, along with a large group of industrial customers and steel mills.
One group that didn’t agree to the terms was Citizens Action Coalition of Indiana, which has opposed adding more trackers to customer’s monthly bills, and has criticized the law for allowing utilities to “shift risk” to customers.A motorist who was naked from the waist down when he stopped to ask a female pedestrian for directions, has been fined €600.
Robert Szlapa (35), Apartment 1, Gallop View, Cregmore, pleaded guilty before Galway District Court this week to breaching the peace by engaging in threatening, abusive and insulting words or behaviour at Bohermore on August 19 last year.
Inspector Brendan Carroll said Szlapa saw a female walking on the footpath towards him as he was driving his car on the Bohermore Road at 6.30a.m. on August 19 last.
He stopped the car, let down the front passenger’s window and asked the woman for directions to the Tuam Road.
She noticed he had his trousers pulled down below his knees and was fully exposing himself. He then drove off, Insp Carroll explained.
The woman made a complaint to Gardai and they contacted Szlapa.
He went to the Garda station and made full admissions there.
Defence solicitor, Olivia Traynor said her client had no previous convictions and was ashamed.
She said he lived with his partner and had not told her yet about this incident.
He had been living in Ireland for almost five years and was employed, she added.
Judge Fahy said the court would usually be given a psychological report and she asked if Szlapa had any underlying problems, such as problems at work or family issues.
Ms Traynor said she had asked him with the aid of a Polish interpreter as his English was not good, and he had replied he did not have any underlying problems.
“He knows what he did was very stupid,” she said.
Ms Traynor said a conviction would have serious consequences for her client because he was holding down a job and worked with people of his own nationality.
Judge Fahy suggested Szlapa might need some sort of counselling and she suspected he may have been under some sort of pressure at the time.
Ms Traynor said he was highly ashamed and felt totally stupid. “The lady said his hands were on the steering wheel,” she added.
Judge Fahy asked the interpreter to again ask Szlapa if there was something bothering him that he was not telling Ms Traynor, perhaps, he was under pressure at work.
He replied he had not been under any pressure at the time.
Judge Fahy said she had to mark a conviction so that the man would now come under the Garda “radar”, but she said she felt a custodial sentence would be of no benefit as he would lose his job and his relationship with his partner.
The judge said she felt his remorse was genuine. “I tried to go down the route of getting a psychological report but he doesn’t want that,” she said.
Ms Traynor explained he just wanted the matter dealt with.
Judge Fahy convicted and fined him €600, giving him five months to pay.Prepare for the Obamacare cliff.
Congressional Republicans are setting up their own, self-imposed deadline to make good on their vow to replace the Affordable Care Act. With buy-in from Donald Trump’s transition team, GOP leaders on both sides of the Capitol are coalescing around a plan to vote to repeal the law in early 2017 — but delay the effective date for that repeal for as long as three years.
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They’re crossing their fingers that the delay will help them get their own house in order, as well as pressure a handful of Senate Democrats — who would likely be needed to pass replacement legislation — to come onboard before the clock runs out and 20 million Americans lose their health insurance. The idea is to satisfy conservative critics who want President Barack Obama’s signature initiative gone now, but reassure Americans that Republicans won’t upend the entire health care system without a viable alternative that preserves the law’s popular provisions.
“We’re talking about a three-year transition now that we actually have a president who’s likely to sign the repeal into the law. People are being, understandably cautious, to make sure nobody’s dropped through the cracks,” said Senate Majority Whip John Cornyn (R-Texas).
The tentative strategy is reminiscent of Capitol Hill’s infamous “fiscal cliff” days, when Congress imposed simultaneous deadlines to raise the debt ceiling, extend expiring tax cuts and fund the government. The hope was that it would create irresistible political pressure to get behind a bipartisan mega-fiscal deal.
This time, however, it’s access to health care for tens of millions of people that’s on the line.
“I think once it’s repealed, you will have hopefully fewer people playing politics and [instead] coming together to try to find the best policy,” House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) said Tuesday. He added that when there is “a date certain that something’s going away … you know you have to have something done.”
The strategy presents significant risks. The fight over a replacement is guaranteed to be messier than the cathartic repeal vote. Giving themselves as many as three years to figure it out shows that Republicans are well aware of how tough it will be.
Trump has made the GOP’s task harder by saying he wants to preserve elements of the the law that protect people with pre-existing conditions and allow young people to remain on their parent’s health insurance until they turn 26 years old, pricey provisions that will complicate Republican efforts to merely gut the law. Plus, there are millions of people now relying on Obamacare’s Medicaid expansion that the GOP will be loath to cast off the insurance rolls.
And following a repeal vote, insurance companies could bail on Obamacare immediately, even if there is a three-year grace period, leaving people with no health plans.
“The flaws in Obamacare are obvious to me. The solutions are much harder,” said Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.).
Moreover, there is already some intraparty turmoil over the repeal timeline, starting with Lamar Alexander, chairman of the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pension Committee. He’s pressing to have a replacement plan ready before tackling repeal, which could significantly delay things, given that Republicans are far from a consensus on what kind of replacement they want.
The Tennessee Republican has notably began swapping the words “repeal and replace,” used by Republicans for years, to “replace and repeal.”
“There’s an eagerness to address it, so I think there’s no doubt we’ll start immediately to replace and repeal Obamacare, but the president-elect has said that the replacement and the repeal need to be done simultaneously, and that means to me that we need to figure out how to replace it before we repeal it,” he said.
Most Republicans, particularly in the House, want to repeal as soon as possible and deal with the replacement later. Rep. Tom McClintock (R-Calif.), a staunch conservative, said the party must “take no chances; do it now.” And House leadership has heard those demands clearly.
“This law, you have to remember, is hurting families in America,” said Speaker Paul Ryan during a news conference on Wednesday. “So we have to bring Obamacare relief as fast as we possibly can in 2017.”
The Obamacare repeal road map Republicans are sketching out is complicated. They are already eyeing passage of a fiscal 2017 budget as soon as January to unlock a fast-track tool that would allow the Senate to clear a repeal by a simple majority. Republican aides predicted the entire repeal, done through so-called reconciliation, will be finished in the first 100 days of Trump’s presidency — though that timeline is fluid.
Top Republicans are keen to show voters they’re working to immediately deliver on their campaign pledge to curb the health law. After campaigning against Obamacare for more than six years, the party could face a major backlash from its base if it stalls.
If the GOP wants to take rapid action, its best bet is to stick close to the playbook it used to pass a 2015 repeal bill that Obama vetoed. That measure included a two-year delay, and it cleared many of the parliamentary hurdles and whip counting required to pass major pieces of legislation.
“That stuff was all vetted,” said South Dakota Sen. John Thune, the chamber’s No. 3 Republican leader. “The repeal piece will be very similar.”
House conservatives are largely on the same page on repeal.
“When you look at how long it took with the insurance companies and the health care industry to re-engineer for all the changes that came out of Obamacare, you need to give them a couple years,” said Republican Study Committee Chairman Bill Flores of Texas, defending a two-year repeal delay.
McConnell says GOP will quickly repeal Obamacare Mitch McConnell talks about Obamacare on Wednesday. poster="http://v.politico.com/images/1155968404/201611/646/1155968404_5203927859001_5203873992001-vs.jpg?pubId=1155968404" true
Replacement is the far tougher task. The replacement plan is likely to be brand new, using principles laid out in Ryan’s “better way” agenda as a guide, sources said. Republicans have largely coalesced around Ryan’s plan, but there are still outstanding and controversial policy details to be ironed out, such as how — or if — people should get assistance to buy insurance.
Senate Republicans are talking about avoiding a massive bill and moving the replacement legislation in chunks: One that tackles purchasing insurance over state lines; another that deals with pre-existing conditions; another establishing new insurance plans for small businesses. That would take a long time and could bog down the process, but GOP leaders are eager to avoid the appearance of jamming a huge bill through Congress after criticizing Democrats for doing the same.
“We’re not going to pass another 2000-page bill like the Democrats have,” Cornyn said. “The way to realistically address this is to go step by step, to build consensus, get 60 votes and pass those various pieces.”
Democratic Sen. Patty Murray says of GOP plans to repeal and replace Obamacare: “They break it, they buy it.” | AP Photo
Gathering those 60 votes will prove difficult, so the GOP hopes the transition period and end-date on Obamacare will also give Republican lawmakers leverage with Democrats by forcing them to come off the sidelines and participate in rebuilding the health care system, even after opposing GOP efforts to tear it apart.
“The blame will fall on the people who didn’t want to do anything,” McCarthy said, foreshadowing a likely GOP talking point should Democrats block a replacement plan.
But Democrats said the GOP plan to put the onus on the minority party won’t work.
“They break it, they buy it,” said Sen. Patty Murray (D-Wash.), a Democratic leader.
The time frame leaders choose will undoubtedly affect their leverage with Senate Democrats. Ten Senate Democrats in red or purple states that went for Donald Trump are up for reelection in 2018. The pressure on those Democrats to negotiate could increase if chaos from the expiring Obamacare system occurs just as they’re trying to keep their seats.
“You might have one line of thinking to at least go along with the Republicans to see where you can work together with some fixes,” said Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.)
If Republicans choose to wait until 2019 or 2020, however, they could find themselves with a larger majority, picking up seats in the 2018 election — though it’s not likely they’d win the nine needed to get to 60 votes and avoid having to work with Democrats.
Jennifer Haberkorn contributed to this report.There are a number of collections that are like this — collections that aim to demonstrate science concepts in a way that is easily digestible. Each is unique in its own way, and I really encourage you to spend some time Google-ing about and finding all the various lists, as many of them are terribly informative.
Here, full disclosure, we tried to trace down the original source. This means that, if we found something on Reddit, we did a reverse image search to trace down the original creator and original appearance (and listed the credits as such).
Anyways, we hope you enjoy the show.
1) This is a Reuleaux Triangle
There are curves of constant width besides circles and spheres. It’s a convex planar shape whose width is the same regardless of the orientation of the curve.Is the top BJP leadership convinced about the authenticity of the documents related with corruption charges against Prime Minister Narendra Modi, first made public by editor, Economic and Political Weekly (EPW), Paranjoy Guha Thakurta, and in possession of Supreme Court advocate Prashant Bhushan, Delhi chief minister Arvind Kejriwal and Congress vice-resident Rahul Gandhi? If would seem so, if a recent tweet by Rajya Sabha member of Parliament (MP), Subramaniam Swamy, is any indication. Retweeted by as many as 3,200 persons, Swamy’s tweet asks Jaitley to “order an inquiry as to how Buddhu (the term Swamy is known to use to identify Congress vice-president) got Income Tax raid documents”.Gone virtually unnoticed, the tweet, which has received 4,375 likes, and is dated November 21, the day Gandhi addressed his rally in Mehsana, further wondered how could the documents, “kept” in the Union finance Ministry’s “secret vaults” come out in the open, insisting, “We must know who gave” these documents to “Buddhu”.Thakurta, who first broke the story in EPW on November 19, is a member of the governing council of Common Cause, the NGO which has petitioned to the Supreme Court against Modi through advocate Prashant Bhushan. He insisted in the EPW article, “Documents seized by the Income Tax Department in private corporations imply pay-offs were made to the PM and leading politicians.”Thakurta’s EPW article had said, “At least five central agencies or commissions in New Delhi were sitting on a tranche of documents that allegedly indicated that Modi had accepted bribes in excess of Rs 55 crore, or eight million dollars.”Pointing out that documents relate to the period when Modi was Gujarat chief minister, Thakurta added, “In the documents, there appears to be a repetition of four specific transactions, which took place between October 30, 2013 and November 29, 2013 and have been accounted for under two separate headings”.Thakurta said, EPW emailed and wrote letters on November 17 to Modi and others who were “recipient” of funds (Shivraj Singh Chouhan, Raman Singh and Shiela Dikshit), “seeking their responses to the information contained in the documents which the income tax department seized during a raid it conducted on various premises of the Sahara India Group in the national capital region on November 22, 2014.”However, it regretted, “At the time of publication, no responses had been received.”While the Supreme court has set aside the documents saying they do not suggest that there is “prima facie” evidence of wrongdoing, Ashish Khetan, a senior functionary of the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) and the Delhi government, in an article in “The Wire” (December 23) regrets, “Unfortunately, the court proceedings until now have not laid out the full breadth of the evidence of possible bribery and corruption in high places contained in the Birla and Sahara papers.”Says Khetan, “The Income Tax Appraisal Report dated February 27, 2014 issued by the deputy director of Income-Tax (Inv.), Unit-V (3) Delhi in the Birla matter contains hundreds of seized emails, hand written notes, SMSs, blackberry messages and statements that reveal entries of regular payments made to people bearing names strikingly similar to the then union ministers and ministers in state governments.”“These entries and emails were meant for internal consumption. It is by pure chance that these entries have become public. However, it is in both the Congress and the BJP’s interests that these records are not investigated”, Khetan says.A dolphin army with special knives or pistols fixed to their heads is not on the loose in European waters, a Ukrainian newspaper said on Wednesday.
A report in Ria Novosti made the outrageous claim Tuesday that trained dolphins from the Ukrainian Navy -- specially outfitted with weaponry -- had swam away from their handlers in February, probably hunting for mates.
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“Control over dolphins was quite common in the 1980's,” Yury Plyachenko, a former Soviet naval anti-sabotage officer, told Ria Novosti. “If a male dolphin saw a female dolphin during the mating season, then he would immediately set off after her. But they came back in a week or so.”
The report was a fraud, however, according to Anatoly Gobachev, director of the Ukrainian State Oceanarium.
In a newspaper article from New Sebastol, Gorbachev explained that the Oceanarium was closed on the day the “deadly” dolphins made a break for it, as well as several days before that. And while there are six dolphins at the facility, they are all still safely in their cages.
The hoax nevertheless appeared to have taken in several news agencies including Huffington Post and The Atlantic, which published an apology for the error on Wednesday.
Ria Novosti has not altered its story, however, which still states that a military source in Sevastopol told the agency last year that the Ukrainian navy had restarted training dolphins to attack enemy combat swimmers and detect mines. The agency has reported in the past on the existence of the dolphins army, which is trained to attack enemy combat swimmers using special knives or pistols fixed to their heads.
There is at least a germ of truth to the story: Militaries have been known to train sea animals for a variety of purposes, including the U.S. Navy.
“Mammal systems” such as dolphins and sea lions have supported the U.S. Navy for more than 40 years. They were useful during the Vietnam War and Operation Iraqi Freedom, and they have engaged in counter-terrorist missions.
The U.S. Navy’s Explosives Ordinance Disposal team locates, identifies and disposes of mines from 30,000 feet in the air to 300 feet below the sea. It considers sea lions and dolphins superior to UUVs (underwater unmanned vehicles) for some of those missions.
Dolphin mine hunters cleared the entrance, waters and harbor of Umm Qasr, Iraq, to support the humanitarian aid mission in the Spring of 2003.Israel struck an area near Damascus early Sunday morning, Syrian state television reported, the second such airstrike in 48 hours.
The Syrian report claimed Israeli rockets hit a military research site on the outskirts of the capital at about 2 a.m., and smoke could be seen rising from the area. An unnamed Israeli official told AFP the target was a shipment of Iranian made Fateh-110 missiles that were on their way from Syria to Hezbollah terrorists.
Uzi Rubin, a missile expert and former Defense Ministry official, told the Associated Press that if the target was a consignment of Fateh-110 missiles, then such weaponry did constitute a “game-changer”: Fired from Syria or south Lebanon, these missiles, he said, could reach almost anywhere in Israel with high accuracy.
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Rubin emphasized that he was speaking as a rocket expert and had no details about the reported strikes.
“If fired from southern Lebanon, they can reach Tel Aviv and even [the southern city of] Beersheba,” Rubin said. He said the rockets are much five times more accurate than the Scud missiles that Hezbollah has fired in the past. “It is a game-changer because they are a threat to Israel’s infrastructure and military installations,” he said.
Syrian state-run news agency SANA said explosions went off at the Jamraya research center near Damascus, causing casualties and blackouts. “Initial reports point to these explosions being a result of Israeli missiles that targeted the research center in Jamraya,” SANA said.
The Jamraya site was the same one reportedly hit by Israeli planes in January.
An unnamed American official confirmed to NBC News that Israeli planes hit the facility, though a Pentagon spokeswoman said she had no information relating to the report. It wasn’t clear whether Israel alerted the US before the attack.
A Syrian activist group, the Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, also reported large explosions in the area of Jamraya. It was not clear if this report, and various other reports of several more explosions in the area, were part of the same Israeli strike, or part of the ongoing civil war in Syria between regime and rebel forces.
Other activists, for instance, reported that a blast that hit an ammunition depot in the Qassiyoun mountains near the city. According to a Syrian official who spoke to Al Arabiya, the Syrian regime uses its bases on the mountain to fire missiles at rebel targets in Damascus.
“The mountain is a very strategic site that oversees all of Damascus,” said the source. “There is a heavy presence of the Assad forces in the mountain because they are always on-call to launch any possible attack towards the people of the city.”
Reuters quoted activists who said they saw jets in the sky over Damascus and that a missile brigade and troop battalions loyal to Assad had been hit.
Loud explosions shook the city and video put online claiming to be from the incident shows a series of large fireballs rising into the sky.
“Everything was quiet and suddenly we saw this bright orange light in the sky followed by a very loud explosion,” Tarek Hillnawi told the Al-Arabiya satellite television station. “I felt that it was over for us, that all of Damascus is set on fire.”
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s2TV1–TeRw
A spokesperson for the Free Syrian Army, speaking from Istanbul, told Al-Arabiya that six sites around Damascus had been hit.
Hezbollah’s al-Manar TV claimed an Israeli plane had been shot down over Damascus. There was no confirmation or evidence for the claim.
The Israel Defense Forces declined to comment on the reports and no special activity was recorded on Israel’s northern borders.
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was set to deapart for a historic visit to China Sunday.
Former IDF chief of staff, Kadima MK Shaul Mofaz, declined to comment on Sunday’s attack, but said he supported Israel’s policy of preventing weapons from reaching Hezbollah.
“One thing is clear, Syria is falling apart before our eyes. Iran and Hezbollah are deeply involved in the Syrian civil war and the transfer of weapons may be the regime’s way of thanking Hezbollah for siding with it in its fight against rebel groups,” Mofaz told Israel Radio.
On Saturday, unnamed Israeli officials confirmed Israel Air Force planes had carried out a strike against Syrian targets early Friday. The New York Times reported that advanced missiles from Iran en route to Shiite terror group Hezbollah were destroyed in that attack.
In late January, the IAF reportedly struck targets near the Scientific Studies and Research Center in Jamraya, outside Damascus. Last week the Wall Street Journal revealed that the attacking aircraft in that incident did not enter Syrian airspace. The same maneuver was reportedly used in the early Friday incident.
The missiles targeted on Friday were believed to be m600s, a Syrian version of Iran’s Fateh-110 missile, an extremely accurate guided missile capable of traveling roughly 300 kilometers (190 miles) with a half-ton warhead, an Israeli official said.
President Barack Obama said Saturday that he wouldn’t comment on the Israeli airstrike against Syria. He said it was up to Israel to confirm or deny any strikes, but that the US coordinates very closely with Israel.
“The Israelis, justifiably, have to guard against the transfer of advanced weaponry to terrorist organizations like Hezbollah,” Obama told the Spanish-language TV station Telemundo.
Fighting has repeatedly spilled across Syria’s borders into Turkey, Lebanon, Iraq, Jordan and the Israeli-annexed Golan Heights during more than two years of conflict, while more than 1 million Syrians have sought refuge in neighboring countries.
The airstrikes came as Washington considers how to respond to indications that the Syrian regime may have used chemical weapons in its civil war. Obama has described the use of such weapons as a “red line,” and the administration is weighing its options — including possible military action.
Israel has said it wants to stay out of the brutal Syria war, but could inadvertently be drawn in as it tries to bolster its deterrence and prevent sophisticated weapons from flowing from Syria to Hezbollah or other extremist groups.
Amos Gilad, an Israeli defense official, would not confirm or deny Friday’s airstrike, but played down cross-border tensions.
Hezbollah has not obtained any of Syria’s large chemical weapons arsenal and is not interested in such weapons, Gilad said. Instead, the militia is “enthusiastic about other weapons systems and rockets that reach here (Israel),” he said Saturday in a speech in southern Israel.
Assad “is not provoking Israel and the incidents along the border (between Syria and the Israeli-controlled Golan) are coincidental,” Gilad said.
After Hezbollah’s military infrastructure was badly hit during the 2006 war, the group was rearmed by Iran and Syria — with Tehran sending the weapons and Damascus providing the overland supply route to Lebanon.
“This is a very sophisticated network of Iranian arms, Syrian collection, storage, distribution and transportation to Hezbollah,” said Salman Shaikh, director of The Brookings Doha Center and in 2007 involved in U.N. weapons monitoring in Lebanon.
Shaikh said Israel had detailed knowledge of weapons shipments to Hezbollah at the time and most likely has good intelligence now. “The Israelis are watching like hawks to see what happens to these weapons,” he said.
With Israel apparently enforcing its red lines, much now depends on the response from Hezbollah and Syria, analysts said.
Israeli officials have long feared that Assad may try to draw Israel into the civil war in hopes of diverting attention and perhaps rallying Arab support behind him.
But retaliation for Israeli airstrikes would come at a high price, said Moshe Maoz, an Israeli expert on Syria.
“Bashar has his own problems and he knows that conflict with Israel would cause the collapse of his regime,” Maoz said. “He could have done that long ago, but he knows he will fall if Israel gets involved.”
Hezbollah, which is fighting alongside Assad’s troops, appears to have linked its fate to the survival of the Syrian regime. Nasrallah, the Hezbollah chief, said this week that Syria’s allies “will not allow Syria to fall into the hands of America or Israel.”
On the other hand, Hezbollah could endanger its position as Lebanon’s main political and military force if it confronts Israel, and it’s not clear if the militia is willing to take that risk.
Hezbollah isn’t Israel’s only concern. Israeli officials believe it is only a matter of time before Assad’s government collapse, and they fear that some of the Islamic extremist groups battling him will turn their attention toward Israel once Assad is gone.
Reflecting Israel’s anxiety, the Israeli military called up several thousand reservists earlier this week for what it called a “surprise” military exercise on its border with Lebanon.
Obama has said the use of chemical weapons would have “enormous consequences,” but has also said he needed more definitive proof before making a decision about how to respond.Vikas Gowda gave India its first athletics gold medal of the 20th Commonwealth Games by winning the men's discus throw competition in Glasgow on Thursday.
The 31- year- old US- based Indian pocketed the gold with an effort of 63.64m, way below his personal best of 66.28m, under incessant rain at Hampden Park.
The silver went to Apostolos Parellis of Cyprus who registered an effort of 63.32m, while the bronze was bagged by Jason Morgan of Jamaica with an effort of 62.34m. The gold medallist at the 2010 Delhi Commonwealth Games Benn Harradine of Australia finished fourth with a below- par effort of 61.91m.
Gowda ended India's 56- year gold medal drought in men's athletics at the Commonwealth Games. The last and only male Indian athlete to claim a gold medal in athletics was Milkha Singh who won the men's 440 yards at the Cardiff 1958 Games.
The incessant rain on Thursday did not help the athletes' cause in any way as the throwers had difficulty in gripping the discus and were continuously seen rubbing it with a towel.
Gowda, who won a silver medal at the 2010 Delhi Games, registered his best effort in his third attempt, and though he failed to improve upon it in his subsequent three efforts, he had done enough to seal the yellow metal.
The 63.64m effort was some way below his season's best effort of 65.62m. Gowda had been considered the favourite for the gold medal after he topped the qualification round on Wednesday with an effort of 64.32m in his only throw.
Meanwhile, India's Tintu Luka failed to qualify for the finals of the women's 800m after finishing seventh in the eight-contestant first semi-final with a timing of 2: 03.35s.Surgeons discover 5-inch sex toy in woman’s vagina that had been there for 10 YEARS
38-year-old went to hospital complaining of severe weight loss and lethargy
Doctors found strange foreign body protruding into bladder from her vagina
T oy had caused her potentially life-threatening internal damage
Woman admitted she was under influence of alcohol when she used the toy
Other similar cases include woman who had foreign body for 35 years
A Scottish woman walked around with a five-inch sex toy inside her for 10 years without realising, doctors have reported.
The 38-year-old woman arrived at hospital c omplaining of severe weight loss, shaking and lethargy.
She had also experienced mild incontinence for 'a few weeks'.
On further examination, doctors were shocked to discover a strange foreign body protruding into her bladder from her vagina.
The 38-year-old woman admitted she was under the influence of alcohol when she used the toy (circled) and claimed she couldn't remember removing it or not
Surgical removal of the item at Aberdeen Royal Infirmary revealed it to be a five inch (11cm)-long sex toy.
Medical staff were even more taken back when the woman revealed she had used the sex toy with her partner ten years ago.
She also admitted she was under the influence of alcohol at the time - and claimed she couldn't remember removing it or not.
The woman had a normal IQ, no signs of depression or psychosis and had not been subject to any abuse, according to the case report.
But the sex toy had caused her potentially life-threatening damage.
The woman was suffering from a rare'vesicovaginal fistula' – an abnormal tract which allows urine to flow into the vagina.
She also had an obstructive uropathy, where a blockage in the bladder causes urine to back up into the kidneys.
After removing the sex toy, doctors managed to repair the damage and the woman was later discharged.
One doctor at the hospital, who was not willing to comment on the patient's specific case, confirmed it was highly unusual for such a large foreign object to go unnoticed in the majority of instances - by patients or their partners.
This is because the vagina is full of nerve endings and is extremely sensitive, he says.
The patient’s case - r eported in The Journal of Sexual Medicine - is the first time a sex toy has been left inside a woman for as long as a decade.
A previous case report from 2009 describes how doctors discovered a 3 x 5 cm foreign body in a 72-year-old woman's vagina - but she and the doctors were unable to work out what is was
However it’s not the longest time an object has remained hidden in a woman’s vagina.
A review of similar cases uncovered a report of a woman who'd had a foreign object lodged in her vagina for 35 years.
Other bizarre items that have been discovered include a hairspray cap, a cylindrical tin container, a plastic cup and a child’s toy.
One case study from 2009 even describes how doctors discovered a 3x5 cm foreign body in a 72-year-old woman’s vagina - but she and the doctors were unable to work out what is was.
Doctors say people usually deny knowledge of the existence or origin of such items when they are initially discovered, due to embarrassment or fear of recrimination.
The practice is common in patients suffered from Münchausen syndrome – a psychiatric condition where the person feigns symptoms in order to gain attention or sympathy.Sen. Susan Collins, R-Maine, apologized to Rep. Blake Farenthold, R-Texas, after she was caught on a hot mic making derogatory comments about Farenthold at the end of a Senate hearing Tuesday.
"Neither weapons nor inappropriate words are the right way to resolve legislative debates," Collins said in a statement Tuesday to CNN. "I received a handwritten apology from Rep. Farenthold late this morning. I accept his apology, and I offer him mine."
In a statement to the Washington Examiner earlier Tuesday, Farenthold had no comment on Collins' statements.
Collins issued her apology after she was heard telling Sen. Jack Reed, D-R.I., that Farenthold is "so unattractive it's unbelievable" after a Senate Appropriations subcommittee hearing Tuesday.
"Well, fat guy. He's huge," Collins told Reed. "He's so … he's so unattractive, it's unbelievable. Did you see the picture of him in his pajamas next to this bunny, this Playboy bunny?"
Collins and Reed were discussing comments Farenthold made in an interview with a Texas radio station, during which Farenthold blamed the Senate's failure to pass a bill repealing and replacing Obamacare on "some female senators from the Northeast" and said he would've challenged any opposing senators to a duel had they been men from his home state of Texas.
Click for more from The Washington Examiner.During Pres. Obama’s eight-year administration 141,91 illegal aliens were given citizenship and work permits through the U Visa program, despite the 10,000 per year cap. During Obama’s first term 63,000 U visa requests were approved and 78,637 were approved during his second term which means that they approved around 62,000 additional U visas over the cap limit.
The U visa was created to help illegal alien victims to could come forward and testify against their abusers. The visa was part of the Battered Immigrant Women Protection Act within the Victims of Trafficking and Violence Protection Act of 2000.
U visa holders are granted work permits and legal status and after several years can apply for a green card and become a citizen. Originally the visa was supposed to be capped at 10,000 per year but under the Obama administration’s lax-enforcement the visa program was expanded.
Once a witness is approved for a U visa or U-1 visa their spouse can get a U-2 visa and children can receive a U-3 visa to live and work in the U.S. If the victim is a child under 18 their parents can receive a U-4 visa. None of these other U visa categories count against the 10,000 U visa cap.
The visa was supposed to help encourage illegal aliens who had suffered physical or mental abuse – especially battered woman – to testify in court without the fear of deportation. However, under the Obama administration the list of qualifying crimes for |
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